Evolving Truth

I am a full on Catholic; like don't eat meat on Fridays, church every Sunday (after sobering up from Saturday) believe in purgatory Catholic. So do I think humans started with Adam and Eve, and that angels came down from heaven and made love to the "daughters of Eve" to create human/angel hybrids, and that God walked the Earth and placed a giant, flaming, rotating sword at the base of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Common sense tells me these things never happened. Course I don't know for sure; I wasn't there. Jesus taught His disciples using parables i.e. stories that didn't actually happen but that have valuable lessons none the less. I think some of the Old Testament if not all of it was parables from God. They may never have actually happened, but that doesn't make their lessons any less valuable.

Although I'm really hoping the whole confession absolves your sins stuff is for real.

\However if when I die I learn the truth that all things actually happened in the most literal sense, my reaction will simply be, "oh." Because one thing I agree with people who take the Bible to be literal is that it is the word of God. It is the spirit of the word of God that matters so much more than the details. I don't care whether or not it really happened . The point is to learn the lessons God is trying to teach, and to implement them in our lives.

That's the problem with people who take the Bible literally. They say "all I need to be saved is faith in Christ, because that's literally what He said." But spirit of every story He taught was that it is important to act Christian and that being Christian in name only is meaningless.

Otherwise religion becomes a silly game of who guessed right..

So when people ask me if I think evolution is real, I answer, "hell if I know."  I ain't smart enough to verify or falsify all the science shit behind it. But I DO know that if it turns out it is all true my faith is no more shaken than if I find out that the Genesis is literal and actually happened.

So with this longass intro in mind, my anthropology professor tried to trap me in a corner by asking me if the Theory of Evolution came into conflict with my religion. But yeah, homie don't play that. This was my response:

      "To me, the Theory of Evolution does not come into conflict with my faith and my belief in God. If anything, I find it more amazing that the creation of man stretches all the way back to the beginning of time through a very long, complex string of events rather than just direct intervention some several thousand years ago.  That took way more “intelligence.”

   I think that some “fundamentalist” see evolution as an affront to God in part because it implies that the creation of man was pretty much an accident since it started with a few elements on the planet coming together to form the beginning of life.

    It makes me think of how people in the Middle Ages called the forest “desert” and thought of it as just a vast, chaotic wasteland. We now know that the forest is in fact a highly organized, delicately balanced ecosystem.

    And yet the attitude that people in the Middle Ages had towards the forest seems to be the very same one we have towards space. We think of it as some vast, chaotic wasteland.

    Thus, if we say that our origins come from elements formed in space then we are saying that our existence is random and could just as well not have happened. Space is in fact a highly organized environment. There is nothing random about it.

    There are atoms, and protons, and neutrons, waves, stars, planets – all of which follow very strict, and complex rules that can only be understood using the highest forms of math and quantum physics. As we discover these rules we start to understand the organization of space.

    We were no accident, even if we were a product of evolution. It just means that the planning and organization goes back way farther than we can possibly conceive."

One day we will all evolve into giant cell phone heads...

*Don't forget to check out my book, Moby Brick!