Irreverent Vosper ...

I had some mail from Progressing Spirit in my mail. Those are the guys and also gals (like Gretta Vosper, styled "Rev" despite being a woman) who are along with the non-bishop (of Newark, formerly, and also as to orders) John Shelby Spong. Here is one of them (named Gretta Vosper), whom I will be adressing:

If I understand you correctly, you are attempting to pull the limited perspective you believe progressive Christians hold with respect to the concerns of conservative Christians back to see a broader picture; namely, that it is naïve to think problems evangelicals have with evolution flow simply from the anti-evolution perspective taken from a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

That is exactly like I read the Q on this Q & A newsletter, yes.

And thanks for "problems evangelicals have with evolution" as if it were we Creationists who were having a problem and as if all of us were Evangelicals.

It's a bit as if I had written "water is wet" and you had verified before going into your answer that I really meant "water is wet" as opposed to "water is dry" or "alcohol is wet".

You are arguing that their beliefs are grounded not only in the creation myths of the Hebrew Scriptures, but also in their belief in the ongoing manifestation of the works undertaken by the god called God throughout the entirety of the Bible.

Thank you. Here is a real bit of clarification. The Q argued that OT has as premiss that God does stuff on earth and your A argues that this is true for the whole Bible.

It's not just for Genesis 1:1 to 2:4 that Bergoglio* could say that some people (in fact getting their ideas from the Bible) could imagine "God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything."

Your Questioner and yourself were more lucid than he when introducing this with "When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining" - it's really not just the creation account of Genesis or the rest of Genesis, it's not even all of the OT, it is indeed all of the Bible.

Recognizing that there have been a lot of hiccups along the way from then to now, many of them creating havoc in the lives or extinctions of various species on Earth – including humans – you note the challenges inherent in giving up the belief that all of that proceeds forth from God’s hands.

It takes some faith and patience to believe the hiccups in one's own life proceed from God's hands. Especially doing so without blaspheming God with one's lips, which Job managed for forty years.

But yes, with it comes the comfort of believing God can end all problems tomorrow - if one believe's it in one's heart. I will at least not give up believing it with my mind.

Citing the Q:

The notion that the messes we create on earth are not part of God's plan and that God is not going to intervene and fix them is a scary thought.

Answering:

That is a scary thought, indeed, if it is one that challenges your worldview; that is, if you have sincerely believed the biblical premise, “Good and bad each happen at the command of God Most High,” (Lamentations 3:38 CEV) and then lose faith in that premise, well, you’re not going to feel comfortable for a long, long time. If E.V.E.R.

In a sense you are outlining what happens in Hell to apostates.

But in another sense, you are simply saying that contradicting the Bible is realism, and this realism is needed even if it will give you psychological problems. So, you are basically dooming everyone who ever actually believed the Bible to a life under shrinks - either to shrinks looking after one's delusions, if they still believe, or shrinks looking after one's issues of post-apostasy trauma.

Here is a little suggestion : how about stopping to promote shrinks? How about stopping to promote a view of fellow humans as desperately needing shrinks? How about allowing a faith which has been normality for near two millennia to still count as normality?

But of course, as a Protestant you have a stake in this, and I mean specially Protestant of the Porvoo communion, since Lutherans and Anglicans** both started out with a clergy acting as more or less shrinks to a recalcitrant populace which wanted in many cases to keep the Catholic faith which had counted as normal for a millennium nearly among Anglo-Saxons and their descendants and for half a millennium among Swedes and Geats and their descendants. And both had people like Gustav Wasa and Charles of Suthermanland, usurping his cousin Sigismund's Swedish throne, and Henry VIII and Elisabeth Boleyn, legitimated "Tudor" on exaggerated grounds and usurping her cousin Mary's English claim on their side.

In France, there is a law against "harcèlement sectaire" - and I would argue it can apply to people not just wanting someone to get into a specific group he's not into, but also wanting him to get out of one he is into. But of course, there is also the privilege of shrinks, who can destroy life after life on pretending a religious position is "in fact" a pathological delusion. There is also a great pride in Enlightenment, and in believing Heliocentrism, directly inherited from Enlightenment era, and Evolution, inherited from second or third generation heirs of Enlightenment. There is also a Catholic Episcopacy, or what passes for such, that has accepted Evolution longer than any other. People who compete with Karl Keating in poopooing the comment of Reverend (really such!) George Leo Haydock*** at the end of his Genesis 3 comments, and in pretending Creationism is part of the more conservative party in a split of US Calvinists. A split which on top of that happened decades after Haydock died and where the best known of the more conservatives can be demonised as "pro-slavery". So, if and when things clear up for me, it will probably seem like a miracle, and right now it seems like waiting for one.

Now, some people like to pretend, even so, that Creationism has to be fought. And you seem to be among them:

Convincing a conservative Christian that it is we, all of humanity, who have the “whole wide world in our hands”, is about as likely to happen as convincing a seaside village to head for the hills when those who most skilled at predicting tsunamis see absolutely no sign of one on its way. Or, tragically, convincing a government that a new virus has the potential to trigger a global catastrophe, a pandemic. Dr. Li Wenliang, 34, died trying.

It is a bit ironic, that the government who ignored the warnings of Li Wenliang Med. Dr. were in fact Communists who have Evolution belief and Creation Denial or if you prefer Denial of Theism as a State Religion.

It is also ironic that one can believe all of humanity collectively has the whole wide world in "our" hands, when no single man has the whole of his life in his hands. We each decide what we try to do, God decides who succeeds.

"I know, O Lord, that the way of a man is not his: neither is it in a man to walk, and to direct his steps."
Jeremias (Jeremiah) 10:23

"The heart of man disposeth his way: but the Lord must direct his steps."
Proverbs 16:9

Mankind cannot work together as one single collective, though smaller collectives can work together and can pretend to represent the collectivity of mankind, and collectives cannot be as intelligent as even a single man. Don't get me wrong, a collectivity can have passively hoarded more knowledge, more know how than a man, easily, but activating what one knows in an intelligent decision, well, collectives are inferior to individual men, not superior. A collective can only decide from what it agrees on, or if it decides by a majority vote, from what the smaller collective called "majority" agrees on against and with the even smaller collective called "minority". The bigger a collective, the less it agrees on.

So, you are proposing a recipe for disaster, for a collective panic against Creationism and Climate Scepticism. You get your fair share or more of it of applause, you are not getting any from me.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Saint-Maur des fossés
Sts Perpetua and Felicitas
6.III.2020

PS, in above, due to "extreme" fatigue of being thrown out of a bank space at 10 or 20 past midnight and woken up twice after that this morning, as opposed to waking up, I made a historic blunder. Charles of Suthermanland was not the cousin of King Sigismund, he was his uncle, it was his son Gustavus Adolphus who was cousin to the King whose Swedish throne he continued to usurp. So, Charles was related to Sigismund as Miraz to Caspian X./HGL

PPS, forgot to mention why I put "extreme" in citation marks. I have been exposed to more extreme fatigue than that some other nights./HGL

* An antipope known by his adherents as "Pope Francis". ** If not Methodists, third party in the Porvoo Communion, and if not Moravians either, I think these are also a party to it. *** Cited latest in Disagreed Mr. Greenblatt!, but more than once before.