The making of a thinking Creationist part two - Bye Bye Babylon
PS - The Arsenic Bacteria hullabaloo is a tempest in a teapot.
As usual, Darwinists make a big deal of a finding that they do not yet completely understand and wind up making claims they cannot defend. Stay tuned and see.
When last we left Radar...
"Was I going to charge through life and grab all the gusto I could, or was there some purpose and plan and force behind the material world, an unseen ideal or eternal truth that was like a magnet pulling on me to align myself in one particular way?"
I didn't know
At age 24 going on 25, the decision was tending towards hedonism. Fortunately I was not a sociopath, I did detect intrinsic value in other people. I mostly avoided the bad dudes and the bad bosses, spend as much time as possible with friends and non-ugly chicks, played a lot of sports and went to college classes part-time...and I was lucky. Oh man, was I ever lucky. When I drove drunk I never killed anyone including myself but a couple of times it was amazing I got home in one piece. When I got stopped by cops I always managed to hide the drugs in the right place and never was stopped by one with a drug dog.
One girl was a problem. I had promised I would come back for her someday assuming I grew up. I even planned on giving it a try. Take a shot at true love? But a close family member stole a large amount of my money and I couldn't afford to try to pick up, move back to California and take life on without money, a car or a job. That's when I saved enough to buy the Cruiser and settled back into college life. That's when I decided to let the idea of looking for the right girl hit the circular file.
Miraculously I never contracted an STD. I never got caught doing anything illegal even though I did all sorts of illegal activities. This just reinforced the idea I had that I could think or talk my way out of anything. Yeah, I was just going to keep on being a carefree hedonistic bachelor until at least age forty and then maybe I would possibly think about considering marriage? After all, the one girl I had wanted to marry, I had realized I was too wild and selfish to ruin her life by marrying her and I just didn't fall in love with anyone else and then circumstances had intervened. So why not just be draggin' the line?
Joseph, son of Jacob, was sold into slavery by jealous brothers as recorded in the Book of Genesis. He wound up in prison. I wound up enslaved, so to speak, within the military. Joseph later was imprisoned but was eventually released and was responsible for providing shelter and relief from a great famine for the rest of his family and all of Egypt and bringing the Jews to Egypt, where they were welcomed and accepted (until years later, when Joseph was dead and the memories of his exploits largely forgotten by the new Egyptian Pharoah). So many times, when something bad happened to Joseph, he could have given up all hope and not made an effort to keep up his mind and body and spirits. God allowed Joseph to endure apparently bad things in order to accomplish greater things.
SO SAD
Then one night I slept with a girl who was just a friend - one time - and got her pregnant...even though she was supposedly on the pill. No use majoring in minors but I did have a girlfriend at the time and she solemnly told me that, "You are the kind of guy who should never get married." Maybe that seemed true. I was a selfish immoral hound. I thought I was a lone wolf and suddenly I am considering getting a harness and pulling a dogsled? Moment in time - me sharing a joint with a guy who had just been drafted by the NBA (and got hurt his third year in) asking me if he thought he should marry his girlfriend (who I didn't like) and here I was marrying a friend that I didn't love? I didn't know what to tell myself, let alone him.
I was going to be a father. So I married my baby's future mother. She and I were the kind of people who went to bars and would sit around by candlelight and burn incense while getting stoned out on good pot and talk philosophy. But we were not the kind to kill babies. Oddly enough I realized I would rather give life with this particular girl a shot than be an absentee father sending support checks out every month.
My daughter was born prematurely. She was in an incubator, tiny, had not yet opened her eyes. I was standing there looking at her and asked permission to wash up and stick my hand in the incubator. I stuck in my right hand and her tiny little hand wrapped around my little finger and those eyes opened. The first thing Sara ever saw was me. I was absolutely and completely sure I was glad to be her daddy. I still am!
So now I am just another cog in the machine
I was also going to college, but we had a philosophy assignment for a final. We had to apply the teachings of B.F. Skinner to construct an Utopian society. I spent many hours working on the premise and trying to figure it out. But I finally came to the end of myself. Men need to set goals to accomplish things and they must be free to succeed or fail. But people are also selfish and, if you meet their needs, will sit on their butts and do nothing. Some parents do not instruct their kids, but if the state is in charge of the children, where is the love and nurture and what happens to individuals? Who rules this society? What are the consequences of failure? I had read too much Ayn Rand to believe in nanny states and I had known too many people too well to believe in man's humanity to man. As a Robin Trower song of the 70's asserted, "takers get the honey, givers sing the blues." I quit going to college. Yep. If man could not devise a Utopia and there was no God and there was no particular purpose to living, why bother? I knew I could make a lot of money at a factory in town where a family friend was a foreman and I decided to quit school for awhile and pile up some cash in the steel industry.
Too Rolling Stoned
About that same time my wife hit the post-partum depression skids and began making me absolutely miserable. I was working hard at a good job, making enough to support her and the baby and a cat and she wasn't working, but when I would come home from work I was getting attitude. It got so bad that sometimes I would just leave home and hang out with some of the guys...and the guys liked hanging out where there were girls. I began to consider maybe divorcing the mother of my child. I came thisclose to actually going home with another woman. Didn't do it, but I figured that if I was considering adultery I should just get divorced. I reached the Bridge of Signs.
But my wife went to church and "got saved." Suddenly she wasn't a harpy from hell, she was sweet and loving. I was a little weirded out. Just going to church had turned "The Taming of the Shrew" into "When Harry Met Sally?" But I quit thinking about divorce for the moment and stopped going to the bars with the guys and came home after work. At work I snuck vodka or gin in to pour into my cans of Pepsi and every break we would go out to the parking lot, drink beer and smoke pot. I had moved to night shift so I would work at night, come home to sleep and then be up in the afternoons. So I was still partying, but avoiding women and spending more time at home.
Because of Jesus
After my wife had been going to church for awhile, the church pastor came over to talk to me and explain what being a Christian meant, who Christ was and why my wife had changed overnight. I'd heard it all before...but on this night something was different. On the inside. All the teaching on the Bible with teachers that asserted that it was cobbled together by itinerant priests and shepherds and rewritten later...all the years of reading every philosopher and mystic I could find from classic Plato to modern Pirsig...all the years of living for myself and perfecting ways to sin efficiently and without legal consequences....all the lies...all the everything all meaningless as I realized that I could believe that Christ was who this pastor said He was and at that moment the entire world made sense. I completely gave up on my ability to save myself or understand life and I totally admitted to myself and God that I was a sinner who loved myself above anything else and I asked God to change me and save me from myself and my sin.
Kingdom Come
So I was a Christian. I quit the rock band I had joined. God changed me from the inside out and suddenly I wanted to read the Bible like a hungry man wants a meal. I quit smoking pot. It was illegal and I decided I should. Then I quit getting drunk. I didn't need it. I started going to church, taking notes on the sermons and then looking things up in the Bible later. I quit drinking and doping and going to bars with the guys. I quit smoking cigarettes because the smoke was bad for me and my family. I was just a new man! Not a perfect man, not one that looked any different (at first). But I shaved off my beard and cut my long hair because it seemed to me that I wanted to look like most Christians looked because I was glad to be a Christian and I didn't care if my old buddies didn't like it. Thank God for Robert Charles Wood, who had the guts to go try to explain the Bible to a very big and furry factory party animal because the guy's wife had become a Christian and hoped and prayed that lightning would strike her husband, too.
~~~~~~~
God become my strength and song
If all that above is too much information for you, oh well. Yes, I studied the Bible constantly and most particularly the New Testament so I understood how a Christian was expected to conduct himself and live day to day. To a lesser extent I read Proverbs for wisdom for my brain and Psalms for my heart. I rarely read anything else at first. I probably read the entire New Testament through three times in the first month I was saved (and I can read pretty fast, but I was absorbing it). I was a Christian, but I was a believer in evolution.
Nobody at church talked much about evolution. I had taken college classes and read and studied up on dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. The whole move up the evolution ladder didn't conflict with my new faith because the church I went to concentrated on day to day, rubber meets the road matters of loving others and loving God. So there was no conflict. This was in the 1970's, when there was one unified voice amongst scientists. Life evolved from simple life forms up to complex man. We had the Haeckel embryo charts, we had evidence of missing links being found in China and Africa, the horse evolution chart and, after all, the rocks of the Earth all stacked up neatly from Pre-Cambrian all the way up to Cenozoic and, well, it was SCIENCE and I was making the Holocene glow with a Jesus slant, man!
The Power of Love
So I figured that the Genesis story was allegorical, and that once I understood God and the Bible better I would figure out how all that worked together. I was busy learning principles of being a good husband and father and friend. I was throwing away lies and drugs and replacing them with truth and chewing gum. Yes, quitting drugs and drinking was easy because I had the peace of God within me and didn't have any need to self-medicate. I was not going to take psychedelic drugs to experience some kind of nirvana because they were illegal and I just didn't need that stuff. But quitting cigarettes was hard and so I would chew gum whenever I wanted a smoke. Needless to say I chewed cases worth of gum before I had the victory over the desire to have that Kool Filter King.
The Radarzoic Period
In 1977 I was a hard-drinking and drugging and living party animal who was born to run I was restarting my career as a rock singer. Then I got someone pregnant. Then I got married.
In 1978 I was ready to dump the wife and try something else. Then she got saved. Then she began praying for me. Then the pastor came to talk to me. Then I got saved. Then God began working on me.
In 1979 I was a Christian. I began talking with the pastor and assistant pastor and learning more. I began bringing kids and teens and some adults to church in a church bus. I began singing in choir.
By 1980 I was a pillar of the church, with lots of other young married couples as friends. I had become more successful at work and was moving from Union to management. We signed a land contract with friends to buy a house just three blocks from my work.
I was still a believer in long ages and macroevolution and the geological column and Uniformitarianism. Nothing I heard in church caused me to investigate whether that was true or not, but it was what I was taught in grade school and high school and college and by magazines and books and television and movies. The simple words of the beginning of the Book of Genesis seemed to be contrary to this, but I had put that on the back burner. There was bound to be a plausible explanation for the possible disagreement there...a misunderstanding, an interpretation, I didn't know or care. It had nothing to do at all with my daily life, my attempt to know God better, to be a better man, to succeed in life. I was ready to go back to college and use my GI Bill to finish up my degree while still working and providing for family. 1980.
Phil Keaggy playing in 1980
It's funny how 1980 seems like yesterday. Thirty years ago. I was 28 years old and weighed 195 pounds and could work the tubing machines at work or drive forklift or band up the tubes or load the flatbed trucks with forklift and overhead crane. I was strong as an ox and happy as a clam (although frankly why a clam would be happy kind of escapes me) and I was a Union steward but the front office was giving me some extra responsibility. I was pretty sure they were going to offer me a foreman's job (and in fact that did happen later).
Inevitably, just like everything else, God had a plan. Oh yes, I think that God has a plan for my life, a plan that is completely subordinate to His overall plan and a plan that is not about me being rich and famous. I believe in the Creator God of the Bible. That is my worldview. I admit it and clearly see it. Some of you have worldviews and don't know it or admit it. Hey, that is your problem. Naturalistic Materialism is a belief system just as Christianity is a belief system. Keep thinking about it and eventually you will get it...if you want to get it. But I digress...
God is not my alibi
There was this famous hydrologist, a guy who is now passed on, the late Dr. Henry Morris. He and a fellow named John Whitcomb had written a couple of books and recorded a few lectures and did some traveling around the country discusssing something they called "creation science." One of my friends at church gave me a tape to listen to by Henry Morris and, when I asked, he lent me the entire series. Henry Morris was a man who studied floods and how they worked and what they left behind. He claimed that the rock layers left behind, those layers with all the fossils that I used to hunt for? Yeah, those! He claimed that all those layers were left by the Noahic Flood and the aftermath thereof. He claimed that the actual evidence supported a literal interpretation of the Genesis account of both creation and the history of humanity. Well, I had to investigate that and find out if what Henry Morris had to say had any validity...
To be continued...
And no, I do not think rock music is "of the devil!"
I am a Holy Soldier
And my wife wants this played at her funeral....although all at once!
As usual, Darwinists make a big deal of a finding that they do not yet completely understand and wind up making claims they cannot defend. Stay tuned and see.
When last we left Radar...
"Was I going to charge through life and grab all the gusto I could, or was there some purpose and plan and force behind the material world, an unseen ideal or eternal truth that was like a magnet pulling on me to align myself in one particular way?"
I didn't know
At age 24 going on 25, the decision was tending towards hedonism. Fortunately I was not a sociopath, I did detect intrinsic value in other people. I mostly avoided the bad dudes and the bad bosses, spend as much time as possible with friends and non-ugly chicks, played a lot of sports and went to college classes part-time...and I was lucky. Oh man, was I ever lucky. When I drove drunk I never killed anyone including myself but a couple of times it was amazing I got home in one piece. When I got stopped by cops I always managed to hide the drugs in the right place and never was stopped by one with a drug dog.
One girl was a problem. I had promised I would come back for her someday assuming I grew up. I even planned on giving it a try. Take a shot at true love? But a close family member stole a large amount of my money and I couldn't afford to try to pick up, move back to California and take life on without money, a car or a job. That's when I saved enough to buy the Cruiser and settled back into college life. That's when I decided to let the idea of looking for the right girl hit the circular file.
Miraculously I never contracted an STD. I never got caught doing anything illegal even though I did all sorts of illegal activities. This just reinforced the idea I had that I could think or talk my way out of anything. Yeah, I was just going to keep on being a carefree hedonistic bachelor until at least age forty and then maybe I would possibly think about considering marriage? After all, the one girl I had wanted to marry, I had realized I was too wild and selfish to ruin her life by marrying her and I just didn't fall in love with anyone else and then circumstances had intervened. So why not just be draggin' the line?
Joseph, son of Jacob, was sold into slavery by jealous brothers as recorded in the Book of Genesis. He wound up in prison. I wound up enslaved, so to speak, within the military. Joseph later was imprisoned but was eventually released and was responsible for providing shelter and relief from a great famine for the rest of his family and all of Egypt and bringing the Jews to Egypt, where they were welcomed and accepted (until years later, when Joseph was dead and the memories of his exploits largely forgotten by the new Egyptian Pharoah). So many times, when something bad happened to Joseph, he could have given up all hope and not made an effort to keep up his mind and body and spirits. God allowed Joseph to endure apparently bad things in order to accomplish greater things.
SO SAD
Then one night I slept with a girl who was just a friend - one time - and got her pregnant...even though she was supposedly on the pill. No use majoring in minors but I did have a girlfriend at the time and she solemnly told me that, "You are the kind of guy who should never get married." Maybe that seemed true. I was a selfish immoral hound. I thought I was a lone wolf and suddenly I am considering getting a harness and pulling a dogsled? Moment in time - me sharing a joint with a guy who had just been drafted by the NBA (and got hurt his third year in) asking me if he thought he should marry his girlfriend (who I didn't like) and here I was marrying a friend that I didn't love? I didn't know what to tell myself, let alone him.
I was going to be a father. So I married my baby's future mother. She and I were the kind of people who went to bars and would sit around by candlelight and burn incense while getting stoned out on good pot and talk philosophy. But we were not the kind to kill babies. Oddly enough I realized I would rather give life with this particular girl a shot than be an absentee father sending support checks out every month.
My daughter was born prematurely. She was in an incubator, tiny, had not yet opened her eyes. I was standing there looking at her and asked permission to wash up and stick my hand in the incubator. I stuck in my right hand and her tiny little hand wrapped around my little finger and those eyes opened. The first thing Sara ever saw was me. I was absolutely and completely sure I was glad to be her daddy. I still am!
So now I am just another cog in the machine
I was also going to college, but we had a philosophy assignment for a final. We had to apply the teachings of B.F. Skinner to construct an Utopian society. I spent many hours working on the premise and trying to figure it out. But I finally came to the end of myself. Men need to set goals to accomplish things and they must be free to succeed or fail. But people are also selfish and, if you meet their needs, will sit on their butts and do nothing. Some parents do not instruct their kids, but if the state is in charge of the children, where is the love and nurture and what happens to individuals? Who rules this society? What are the consequences of failure? I had read too much Ayn Rand to believe in nanny states and I had known too many people too well to believe in man's humanity to man. As a Robin Trower song of the 70's asserted, "takers get the honey, givers sing the blues." I quit going to college. Yep. If man could not devise a Utopia and there was no God and there was no particular purpose to living, why bother? I knew I could make a lot of money at a factory in town where a family friend was a foreman and I decided to quit school for awhile and pile up some cash in the steel industry.
Too Rolling Stoned
About that same time my wife hit the post-partum depression skids and began making me absolutely miserable. I was working hard at a good job, making enough to support her and the baby and a cat and she wasn't working, but when I would come home from work I was getting attitude. It got so bad that sometimes I would just leave home and hang out with some of the guys...and the guys liked hanging out where there were girls. I began to consider maybe divorcing the mother of my child. I came thisclose to actually going home with another woman. Didn't do it, but I figured that if I was considering adultery I should just get divorced. I reached the Bridge of Signs.
But my wife went to church and "got saved." Suddenly she wasn't a harpy from hell, she was sweet and loving. I was a little weirded out. Just going to church had turned "The Taming of the Shrew" into "When Harry Met Sally?" But I quit thinking about divorce for the moment and stopped going to the bars with the guys and came home after work. At work I snuck vodka or gin in to pour into my cans of Pepsi and every break we would go out to the parking lot, drink beer and smoke pot. I had moved to night shift so I would work at night, come home to sleep and then be up in the afternoons. So I was still partying, but avoiding women and spending more time at home.
Because of Jesus
After my wife had been going to church for awhile, the church pastor came over to talk to me and explain what being a Christian meant, who Christ was and why my wife had changed overnight. I'd heard it all before...but on this night something was different. On the inside. All the teaching on the Bible with teachers that asserted that it was cobbled together by itinerant priests and shepherds and rewritten later...all the years of reading every philosopher and mystic I could find from classic Plato to modern Pirsig...all the years of living for myself and perfecting ways to sin efficiently and without legal consequences....all the lies...all the everything all meaningless as I realized that I could believe that Christ was who this pastor said He was and at that moment the entire world made sense. I completely gave up on my ability to save myself or understand life and I totally admitted to myself and God that I was a sinner who loved myself above anything else and I asked God to change me and save me from myself and my sin.
Kingdom Come
So I was a Christian. I quit the rock band I had joined. God changed me from the inside out and suddenly I wanted to read the Bible like a hungry man wants a meal. I quit smoking pot. It was illegal and I decided I should. Then I quit getting drunk. I didn't need it. I started going to church, taking notes on the sermons and then looking things up in the Bible later. I quit drinking and doping and going to bars with the guys. I quit smoking cigarettes because the smoke was bad for me and my family. I was just a new man! Not a perfect man, not one that looked any different (at first). But I shaved off my beard and cut my long hair because it seemed to me that I wanted to look like most Christians looked because I was glad to be a Christian and I didn't care if my old buddies didn't like it. Thank God for Robert Charles Wood, who had the guts to go try to explain the Bible to a very big and furry factory party animal because the guy's wife had become a Christian and hoped and prayed that lightning would strike her husband, too.
~~~~~~~
God become my strength and song
If all that above is too much information for you, oh well. Yes, I studied the Bible constantly and most particularly the New Testament so I understood how a Christian was expected to conduct himself and live day to day. To a lesser extent I read Proverbs for wisdom for my brain and Psalms for my heart. I rarely read anything else at first. I probably read the entire New Testament through three times in the first month I was saved (and I can read pretty fast, but I was absorbing it). I was a Christian, but I was a believer in evolution.
Nobody at church talked much about evolution. I had taken college classes and read and studied up on dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. The whole move up the evolution ladder didn't conflict with my new faith because the church I went to concentrated on day to day, rubber meets the road matters of loving others and loving God. So there was no conflict. This was in the 1970's, when there was one unified voice amongst scientists. Life evolved from simple life forms up to complex man. We had the Haeckel embryo charts, we had evidence of missing links being found in China and Africa, the horse evolution chart and, after all, the rocks of the Earth all stacked up neatly from Pre-Cambrian all the way up to Cenozoic and, well, it was SCIENCE and I was making the Holocene glow with a Jesus slant, man!
The Power of Love
So I figured that the Genesis story was allegorical, and that once I understood God and the Bible better I would figure out how all that worked together. I was busy learning principles of being a good husband and father and friend. I was throwing away lies and drugs and replacing them with truth and chewing gum. Yes, quitting drugs and drinking was easy because I had the peace of God within me and didn't have any need to self-medicate. I was not going to take psychedelic drugs to experience some kind of nirvana because they were illegal and I just didn't need that stuff. But quitting cigarettes was hard and so I would chew gum whenever I wanted a smoke. Needless to say I chewed cases worth of gum before I had the victory over the desire to have that Kool Filter King.
The Radarzoic Period
In 1977 I was a hard-drinking and drugging and living party animal who was born to run I was restarting my career as a rock singer. Then I got someone pregnant. Then I got married.
In 1978 I was ready to dump the wife and try something else. Then she got saved. Then she began praying for me. Then the pastor came to talk to me. Then I got saved. Then God began working on me.
In 1979 I was a Christian. I began talking with the pastor and assistant pastor and learning more. I began bringing kids and teens and some adults to church in a church bus. I began singing in choir.
By 1980 I was a pillar of the church, with lots of other young married couples as friends. I had become more successful at work and was moving from Union to management. We signed a land contract with friends to buy a house just three blocks from my work.
I was still a believer in long ages and macroevolution and the geological column and Uniformitarianism. Nothing I heard in church caused me to investigate whether that was true or not, but it was what I was taught in grade school and high school and college and by magazines and books and television and movies. The simple words of the beginning of the Book of Genesis seemed to be contrary to this, but I had put that on the back burner. There was bound to be a plausible explanation for the possible disagreement there...a misunderstanding, an interpretation, I didn't know or care. It had nothing to do at all with my daily life, my attempt to know God better, to be a better man, to succeed in life. I was ready to go back to college and use my GI Bill to finish up my degree while still working and providing for family. 1980.
Phil Keaggy playing in 1980
It's funny how 1980 seems like yesterday. Thirty years ago. I was 28 years old and weighed 195 pounds and could work the tubing machines at work or drive forklift or band up the tubes or load the flatbed trucks with forklift and overhead crane. I was strong as an ox and happy as a clam (although frankly why a clam would be happy kind of escapes me) and I was a Union steward but the front office was giving me some extra responsibility. I was pretty sure they were going to offer me a foreman's job (and in fact that did happen later).
Inevitably, just like everything else, God had a plan. Oh yes, I think that God has a plan for my life, a plan that is completely subordinate to His overall plan and a plan that is not about me being rich and famous. I believe in the Creator God of the Bible. That is my worldview. I admit it and clearly see it. Some of you have worldviews and don't know it or admit it. Hey, that is your problem. Naturalistic Materialism is a belief system just as Christianity is a belief system. Keep thinking about it and eventually you will get it...if you want to get it. But I digress...
God is not my alibi
There was this famous hydrologist, a guy who is now passed on, the late Dr. Henry Morris. He and a fellow named John Whitcomb had written a couple of books and recorded a few lectures and did some traveling around the country discusssing something they called "creation science." One of my friends at church gave me a tape to listen to by Henry Morris and, when I asked, he lent me the entire series. Henry Morris was a man who studied floods and how they worked and what they left behind. He claimed that the rock layers left behind, those layers with all the fossils that I used to hunt for? Yeah, those! He claimed that all those layers were left by the Noahic Flood and the aftermath thereof. He claimed that the actual evidence supported a literal interpretation of the Genesis account of both creation and the history of humanity. Well, I had to investigate that and find out if what Henry Morris had to say had any validity...
To be continued...
And no, I do not think rock music is "of the devil!"
I am a Holy Soldier
And my wife wants this played at her funeral....although all at once!