Shall the fundamentalists win?

This sermon with its assertive title was given in 1922 – three years before the Scopes trial – as relevant now as ever.   It speaks to the dangers of intolerance and closing the mind to reality.  The sermon was republished by John D. Rockefeller at his own expense and distributed in the thousands, under the more cautious title, “The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith.”  The preacher’s points about intolerance and fundamentalism (as opposed to conservatism) are worth considering, even though we disagree with many parts of his position.  The whole sermon is reproduced in the interests of transparency rather than his work to fit our preferences.

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We are all adam

The focus on Adam in Genesis largely misses the point that we are all adam.  Scripture clearly aligns all humanity with the first couple in its language.   Rather than obsess over biology, we should rather take the point of the demonstration of human failure and divine grace which Gen 2-3 portrays.  We can chose to be in Adam or in Christ.  Focussing on the later would be healthy.  Following is a brief exploration of the way scripture links us to Adam…

The 3 billion character tweet

[a contribution from a regular follower]

“Roboam begat Abia,” says the King James version at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, and in 1 Kings 14:31 we learn that Rehoboam’s mother was Naamah the Ammonitess. This means that we are left with the intriguing possibility that the Lord Jesus was descended from Lot on account of his younger daughter’s misguided attempt to save the world.

If the earthly Jesus of Nazareth were alive today it could be confirmed by a simple test. The truth of it, or otherwise, was written inside almost every cell of his body. Our cells include a large protein molecule full of information – think of it as a three billion character tweet – which tells the story of our ancestors. For Jesus, if the technology had been available, it would have confirmed those “begats” in his genealogy and told him if he had an ancestor among the ancient Ammonites.

Three billion characters makes a big tweet! It’s about the size of three King James Bibles. But that’s how much information is used to set out the biochemical specification of a new human being. By comparing it with “tweets” from other people – and other living things, actually – a remarkably full story can be found out. This is because each person in each generation has one to two hundred non-lethal mutations, allowing the family tree to be inferred. Recently a criminal was tracked down by comparing his genetic information with a public genealogical data base, and finding his relatives. (https://theconversation.com/how-cops-used-a-public-genealog…)

For a relatively small amount of money you can have your own tweet read, if you want. There might be a chance that you too are descended from an Ammonite! A human Ammonite, that is, from the first or second millennium BC. Fossilised Ammonites are a story for another day.

Delicious dinosaurs and creationist mistakes

As more evidence comes to light the work of so called “creation scientists” trying to promote their alternative reality becomes more difficult.  One and definitely two centuries ago literal creation was the dominant paradigm but the weight of evidence – accumulating at increasing rates, makes that paradigm impossible to sustain.  Old earth creationism – as accepted by our early community – was interpretation driven by science (geology).  Even so called creation scientists make remarkable admissions occasionally about the reliability of evolutionary science and its predictions.

Stonehenge – monument to ancient man

Stonehenge is one of the best known ancient sites in Britain.  The remains of significant construction at what is now the bluestone henge on Salisbury plain date back to around 3,000 BC.  Prior to the existing stones, archaeologists have found evidence of older circular structures as well as the remains of people buried at the site.  Some of the human activity in the site date back as far as 8,000 BC.  Fascinatingly, chemical analysis proves the cremated remains of non-locals were carried in leather bags to the site and interred.  The Stonehenge (past and present) doesn’t reconcile with either a global flood or the literalist creation 6,000 years ago.

A Plain Man looks at Evolution

Bro Ken Drage was a member at Watford when the evolution controversy broke in the 1960s.  He has written an open letter addressing evolution and some of the history from the debate which centred around Bro Lovelock.  The impact of emotion and pressure from others is noteworthy – as is his observation that the 1960’s discussion were civilised though highly charged (such civility is lacking today!).  Bro Ken’s letter is reproduced in full below – it should be mandatory reading, so over to Ken…

Dinosaurs and people

Every so often people (including Christadelphians despite our old earth creation heritage) claim dinosaurs and humans co-existed.  The source material for their argument usually comes uncritically from American evangelicals.  One of the claimed pieces of evidence is a carving in a Cambodian temple.  Why carve things which didn’t exist goes the argument?