Post by creationist on Sept 26, 2008 0:38:39 GMT -5
I skimmed through a book on how evolution is the perfect combination of religion and science and will revolutionize the human race. The story behind that was that someone wanted to convince me to stop being a creationist and sent me the book by email, figuring that a religious argument would convince me. (I'll write him back and make it clear that it DOES NOT convince me!)The manifesto I typed is posted below, and you probably won't be able to handle it all in one sitting. I found it very interesting to study. It made it clear to me that Darwinism ultimately can lead to pantheism, the one world government religion. From pantheism, it's a short step to the occult/Satanism.
I'm posting it here because I think everyone should know where things are heading with the Christian foundations of the West, with people trying to twist Christianity into an evolutionary, humanistic religion. False teachers like Robert Schuller and Billy Graham state that people are "born again" without being aware of it, because of their good heart that is improving all the time. (Evolution is the basis for such thought.)
Thank God for Evolution! By Michael Dowd
1. The well-tested and well-proven theory of evolution helps people understand structure and order in universal laws of “things working out”. The universe and process of evolution are very orderly. That concept is synonymous with “God”, and personifying the concept by calling it "God" helps us see meaning in it.
2. Trust a benevolent universe to make good evolve out of disasters. A planet emerges out of a supernova’s ?stardust? explosion!
3. Thinking must evolve as life did; mythology, when proven false, must be cast aside like unnecessary gills as a fish becomes a reptile.
4. We are all CONNECTED; humans, animals, and plants are all equal. In a biocracy, the future political system, humans will consider the health of the planet as well as themselves; that is the natural evolutionary direction.
5. Science disproves mythology and is more reliable because it is more updated and is based on more than one person’s beliefs; it is tested instead of being a futile effort to explain things in supernatural terms.
6. We are stardust evolved to the point of being able to think about ourselves, and also every other life form!!
7. Death is a part of creation (the evolution story); as Stephen Crane wrote, “Do not weep, for death is kind”. Page 241: “Crises call forth creativity. Breakdowns catalyze breakthrough. Emergencies evoke emergence.” Also on page 241, using “night language” (religious metaphors which attempt to explain the world from an uneducated standpoint, without scientific knowledge): “Christ will vanquish Satan (and indeed already has!). Good Fridays are followed by Easter Sundays. Crucifixion comes before Resurrection.”
8. It is not as simple as one explanation to explain the world; you must SYNTHESIZE a host of explanations to form a complete reality. (In other words, the Bible alone is insufficient.)
9. Evolution is the factual blueprint of life; religion supplements the facts and makes meaning out of it. If every person agrees on the evolutionary aspect, the “reality”, then they can all get along together and form different interpretations on Who God is and what makes life enriching.
10. All life, not just man, was made in the image of God through evolution. Thus humans must look to the rest of the universe to define God and their ideals.
11. God is Reality; God did not create reality. Connect with your own reality to find your own God/gods. God is a benevolent universe, not above the universe. Page 114 says: “We are no more isolated from God than a tree is isolated from the ground upon which it grows.” The notion of “God” is nothing more than a term for the universe that we adopt, to make the abstract more real and personal to us. Page 156: “the human brain was not designed by an all-knowing, otherworldly engineer God. It was evolved by the living immanent, omnipresent God, and the world of today is a far cry from the world of our prehuman ancestors.”
12. Evolution is the only philosophy to follow if we want to survive as a species. To think of a God outside the universe, who made man in His image, is to view yourself as opposed to the rest of the universe. God and you are estranged, and your hate and exploitation of other life forms will destroy the human race, because you see God as smaller than the universe and become aggressive due to your insecurity. The solution is to adopt a universalistic view, where all people are children of the universe. Every concept, such as marriage or the universe, must become a personal being, such as “Gaia”.
13. The universe birthed us; this world IS our home. The people are subservient to the planet. Pages 284-285: “We are Earth becoming conscious of itself.”
14. There are multiple realities and multiple dimensions. Embrace the WHOLE. The gravest sin is to be so narrow-minded as to carry out what Hitler or the Inquisition did, or neglect the health of the planet. As John Lennon prophesied, traditional differences such as religion will disappear, and war will be no more.
15. Bad things about humans are due to the inability to evolve into a new era, the conflict between the mode of the past and the way of the present and future. When we do evil, we are reverting to our animalistic instinct, which Freud knew as the “Id” and many call the “Devil”. It is because people consider the problem a result of the Devil that they do not overcome their licentiousness. Accept licentiousness as an instinct coming from your animal ancestors, and you will be free to internally “evolve”, finding ways to stay in moderation. The evilness is inside of us, but our spirits are detached from it. We are fundamentally good, but faced with an imperfect universe and animalistic instincts. “Salvation” is the sum total of good feelings we experience. We should look to Jesus for “salvation” because doing good deeds as Jesus instructed will bring us into wonderful feelings and a wonderful world. Serve the “Whole of Reality” by helping others in a global community.
16. Ethics and morality must evolve. Narrow-mindedness indicates an unwillingness to evolve.
17. All behavior has been good at some period of evolutionary history; it just might not be in the current era. For instance, the urge to kill helped our ancestors to survive, and in the present era we must “evolve” into more peaceful people to create world peace. What used to be called “sexual deviation” was misnamed, since our ancestors obviously benefited from those behaviors.
18. The Genesis account should not be taken literally. Our ancestors were trying to make sense of the world without the current scientific knowledge. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil indeed means the evolution of the frontal lobes, which make decisions.
19. Baptism is the community helping a fellow traveler through life, to overcome the animalistic instinct (so far as it has been outdated).
20. Evolution is the only creed all must believe. Beyond that, we must trust our gut feelings and the scientific updates that occur, for those are the ways God reveals our reality (AKA destiny) to us.
21. Everything that happens is in line with the process of evolution; expect things to get better, not worse, because evolution is in effect! The Gospel is the essence, or sum total, of everything good; it’s that simple. It has nothing to do with the supernatural. “The way, the truth, and the life” means to take Jesus’s good instructions about loving your neighbor, etc., to benefit the Whole (Universe/larger holons of existence).
22. We must live together as one brotherhood/sisterhood, doing nothing that would be out of step with the group we’re part of. Abraham Maslow said the goal is “a social order in which the individual by the same act and at the same time serves his or her advantage and that of the group.”
23. Everything in the universe is dependent on everything else.
24. Salvation is the improvement of the Creation on all levels, from small to large holons. A holon is something that exists individually and as part of a group simultaneously (an individual dependent on the group). Sin is anything that interferes with the health of the body (group) as a whole. Thus we must resist our animalistic instinct by using self-help methods, so that we do not sin against the larger entity (the Universe). We have evolved to the point where we can improve ourselves without resorting to superstition!
25. Rely on your own understanding about what is good and evil.
26. Don’t worry about the afterlife; cherish each eternal moment here on earth.
27. Globalization is beneficial because it makes us more aware about environmental risks, with the speedy communication and knowledge. We will buy time for the human race if the whole world cooperates to save our planet.
28. The self-interest of individuals must be the self-interest of the group. The self-interest of all of humanity (the largest holon) must be the self-interest of the planet as a whole, and even of the universe as a whole, if we are going to survive as a species.
29. From page 247: “Any individual or institution that makes evolutionary integrity their top priority—their number one commitment—is part of the body of Christ.”
30. Everything good is a result of evolution.
31. Good always prevails because that is the natural order of things. Good things can come out of death, and violent revolutions are temporary evolutionary stages to prepare for a better order/way of running things.
32. We depend on each other for our very survival. We do not need to all agree about everything, but CELEBRATE DIVERSITY AND MULTICULTURALISM, and work together AMID our differences!
33. The evolutionary process has taken us from molecules working together, to people working together, to all the nations of the world working together to save our planet! It is the new world order, the promising way of future bliss.
34. We are getting to know the Universe that created us. This corresponds to a change in mindset from viewing ourselves as the lords of creation to seeing that we are the servants of creation.
35. Humans have been acting like cancer to the universe. They should become like the immune system, ridding the universe of problems and protecting the universe. That will be a new world order. Just as humans would not ordinarily cut off their own legs, they also will learn to not harm nature one iota because they are offshoots of it, through the evolutionary process. They need to discover that “Great Story” and see why caring for the universe is our all-encompassing purpose and the thing that brings together disparate peoples and cultures. This will be the way to ensure morality; self-interest means caring for the planet and doing nothing to harm the larger holons of existence.
36. From page 280: “We should pause, too, for reflecting on our tour of deep history: Let us recall that the primary driver of evolutionary creativity and transformation is chaos. Paradoxically, from an evolutionary perspective, bad news is often a good thing—a blessing in disguise.”
37. Author Ray Kurzweil estimates that by 2045, computers will be involved in the evolutionary process.
38. Globalization and all the technology it entails ensure that governments cannot accomplish treacherous deeds in secret. Communication and openness are increasing, leading to a growing brotherhood of humanity. We also will be able to make more educated decisions on behalf of the Universe because we will be more quickly and readily aware of perils. Knowledge increases responsibility.
39. An evolutionary worldview brings all religions together and gives people greater meaning than they’d ever felt before.
40. Don’t go down the paths of the creationists or Richard Dawkins; unite religion with science in a pantheist, universalistic way. Take the good things from the past and let the rest go; tradition is only valuable as long as it still applies to our generation. We can look forward to the day in which new scriptures will be written that reflect the progress of humanity/humankind. We need a better foundation to build on than the mythology in the Bible. Written scriptures are fallible because humans created them; first-hand observation of the Universe is by far superior! Scripture should be anything that helps us grow in evolutionary integrity, i.e. that helps me align self-interest with that of the Universe.
41. The God of the Bible is not real, because God cannot be good and, at the same time, destroy the world in a Flood, license ethnic cleansing on Canaan, and perform judgments in Revelation. That God, as early man imagined “Him” to be, was worse than Islamic radicals. The Bible contains stories about God’s judgment so that humanity could justify brutality in the period before we had evolved into more civilized beings. Getting people to fear God successfully accomplished the unification of ancient cultures of animalistic humans, by uniting them under one religion through fear.
42. Morality One-Liners on page 307: Mosaic morality is “Obey the Lord, or die!”; early Christian morality (as opposed to evolutionary Christianity) is “Believe in Jesus, or fry!”; personal Evo-morality is “Live in integrity, or cry!”; and species Evo-morality is “Align self-interest & Earth-interest, or ‘bye bye’!” The reality is that morality is part of our human nature, and it only grows with time as we evolve!
43. Good is something that helps the larger holons of existence. Bad is something that places an individual above the needs of the whole. Sometimes there are necessary evils like population control to save the larger species.
44. Good always comes out of bad with evolution! Don’t despair! The new world order will be the “second coming of Christ”, to use night language (cryptic, that is) of the past. To use day language (scientific and updated), it will be when all people together work for the benefit of the Whole, thus exemplifying righteousness/uprightness and “reincarnating Christ-like values at all levels of society” (pg. 317). People are doing the work of the “Anti-Christ” when they generate and propagate negative feelings in the world. Jesus desired that we model our lives after him, not that we worship “Him”. Being “born again” is growing in evolutionary integrity!
45. There is no afterlife. The worst “hell” is a life of misery. The best “heaven” is a joyful life of serving the Whole entity in the Universe.
46. “God” is Reality, the Universe, and Life, not an actual person. It helps to imagine “God” as living because the Universe is living and worthy of our devotion.
47. The supposed resurrection of Jesus was a way for the early Christians to peddle Christianity to the populace. The other religions’ followers expected a resurrection to be part of the new religion of Christianity, because their religions had such stories.
I'm posting it here because I think everyone should know where things are heading with the Christian foundations of the West, with people trying to twist Christianity into an evolutionary, humanistic religion. False teachers like Robert Schuller and Billy Graham state that people are "born again" without being aware of it, because of their good heart that is improving all the time. (Evolution is the basis for such thought.)
Thank God for Evolution! By Michael Dowd
1. The well-tested and well-proven theory of evolution helps people understand structure and order in universal laws of “things working out”. The universe and process of evolution are very orderly. That concept is synonymous with “God”, and personifying the concept by calling it "God" helps us see meaning in it.
2. Trust a benevolent universe to make good evolve out of disasters. A planet emerges out of a supernova’s ?stardust? explosion!
3. Thinking must evolve as life did; mythology, when proven false, must be cast aside like unnecessary gills as a fish becomes a reptile.
4. We are all CONNECTED; humans, animals, and plants are all equal. In a biocracy, the future political system, humans will consider the health of the planet as well as themselves; that is the natural evolutionary direction.
5. Science disproves mythology and is more reliable because it is more updated and is based on more than one person’s beliefs; it is tested instead of being a futile effort to explain things in supernatural terms.
6. We are stardust evolved to the point of being able to think about ourselves, and also every other life form!!
7. Death is a part of creation (the evolution story); as Stephen Crane wrote, “Do not weep, for death is kind”. Page 241: “Crises call forth creativity. Breakdowns catalyze breakthrough. Emergencies evoke emergence.” Also on page 241, using “night language” (religious metaphors which attempt to explain the world from an uneducated standpoint, without scientific knowledge): “Christ will vanquish Satan (and indeed already has!). Good Fridays are followed by Easter Sundays. Crucifixion comes before Resurrection.”
8. It is not as simple as one explanation to explain the world; you must SYNTHESIZE a host of explanations to form a complete reality. (In other words, the Bible alone is insufficient.)
9. Evolution is the factual blueprint of life; religion supplements the facts and makes meaning out of it. If every person agrees on the evolutionary aspect, the “reality”, then they can all get along together and form different interpretations on Who God is and what makes life enriching.
10. All life, not just man, was made in the image of God through evolution. Thus humans must look to the rest of the universe to define God and their ideals.
11. God is Reality; God did not create reality. Connect with your own reality to find your own God/gods. God is a benevolent universe, not above the universe. Page 114 says: “We are no more isolated from God than a tree is isolated from the ground upon which it grows.” The notion of “God” is nothing more than a term for the universe that we adopt, to make the abstract more real and personal to us. Page 156: “the human brain was not designed by an all-knowing, otherworldly engineer God. It was evolved by the living immanent, omnipresent God, and the world of today is a far cry from the world of our prehuman ancestors.”
12. Evolution is the only philosophy to follow if we want to survive as a species. To think of a God outside the universe, who made man in His image, is to view yourself as opposed to the rest of the universe. God and you are estranged, and your hate and exploitation of other life forms will destroy the human race, because you see God as smaller than the universe and become aggressive due to your insecurity. The solution is to adopt a universalistic view, where all people are children of the universe. Every concept, such as marriage or the universe, must become a personal being, such as “Gaia”.
13. The universe birthed us; this world IS our home. The people are subservient to the planet. Pages 284-285: “We are Earth becoming conscious of itself.”
14. There are multiple realities and multiple dimensions. Embrace the WHOLE. The gravest sin is to be so narrow-minded as to carry out what Hitler or the Inquisition did, or neglect the health of the planet. As John Lennon prophesied, traditional differences such as religion will disappear, and war will be no more.
15. Bad things about humans are due to the inability to evolve into a new era, the conflict between the mode of the past and the way of the present and future. When we do evil, we are reverting to our animalistic instinct, which Freud knew as the “Id” and many call the “Devil”. It is because people consider the problem a result of the Devil that they do not overcome their licentiousness. Accept licentiousness as an instinct coming from your animal ancestors, and you will be free to internally “evolve”, finding ways to stay in moderation. The evilness is inside of us, but our spirits are detached from it. We are fundamentally good, but faced with an imperfect universe and animalistic instincts. “Salvation” is the sum total of good feelings we experience. We should look to Jesus for “salvation” because doing good deeds as Jesus instructed will bring us into wonderful feelings and a wonderful world. Serve the “Whole of Reality” by helping others in a global community.
16. Ethics and morality must evolve. Narrow-mindedness indicates an unwillingness to evolve.
17. All behavior has been good at some period of evolutionary history; it just might not be in the current era. For instance, the urge to kill helped our ancestors to survive, and in the present era we must “evolve” into more peaceful people to create world peace. What used to be called “sexual deviation” was misnamed, since our ancestors obviously benefited from those behaviors.
18. The Genesis account should not be taken literally. Our ancestors were trying to make sense of the world without the current scientific knowledge. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil indeed means the evolution of the frontal lobes, which make decisions.
19. Baptism is the community helping a fellow traveler through life, to overcome the animalistic instinct (so far as it has been outdated).
20. Evolution is the only creed all must believe. Beyond that, we must trust our gut feelings and the scientific updates that occur, for those are the ways God reveals our reality (AKA destiny) to us.
21. Everything that happens is in line with the process of evolution; expect things to get better, not worse, because evolution is in effect! The Gospel is the essence, or sum total, of everything good; it’s that simple. It has nothing to do with the supernatural. “The way, the truth, and the life” means to take Jesus’s good instructions about loving your neighbor, etc., to benefit the Whole (Universe/larger holons of existence).
22. We must live together as one brotherhood/sisterhood, doing nothing that would be out of step with the group we’re part of. Abraham Maslow said the goal is “a social order in which the individual by the same act and at the same time serves his or her advantage and that of the group.”
23. Everything in the universe is dependent on everything else.
24. Salvation is the improvement of the Creation on all levels, from small to large holons. A holon is something that exists individually and as part of a group simultaneously (an individual dependent on the group). Sin is anything that interferes with the health of the body (group) as a whole. Thus we must resist our animalistic instinct by using self-help methods, so that we do not sin against the larger entity (the Universe). We have evolved to the point where we can improve ourselves without resorting to superstition!
25. Rely on your own understanding about what is good and evil.
26. Don’t worry about the afterlife; cherish each eternal moment here on earth.
27. Globalization is beneficial because it makes us more aware about environmental risks, with the speedy communication and knowledge. We will buy time for the human race if the whole world cooperates to save our planet.
28. The self-interest of individuals must be the self-interest of the group. The self-interest of all of humanity (the largest holon) must be the self-interest of the planet as a whole, and even of the universe as a whole, if we are going to survive as a species.
29. From page 247: “Any individual or institution that makes evolutionary integrity their top priority—their number one commitment—is part of the body of Christ.”
30. Everything good is a result of evolution.
31. Good always prevails because that is the natural order of things. Good things can come out of death, and violent revolutions are temporary evolutionary stages to prepare for a better order/way of running things.
32. We depend on each other for our very survival. We do not need to all agree about everything, but CELEBRATE DIVERSITY AND MULTICULTURALISM, and work together AMID our differences!
33. The evolutionary process has taken us from molecules working together, to people working together, to all the nations of the world working together to save our planet! It is the new world order, the promising way of future bliss.
34. We are getting to know the Universe that created us. This corresponds to a change in mindset from viewing ourselves as the lords of creation to seeing that we are the servants of creation.
35. Humans have been acting like cancer to the universe. They should become like the immune system, ridding the universe of problems and protecting the universe. That will be a new world order. Just as humans would not ordinarily cut off their own legs, they also will learn to not harm nature one iota because they are offshoots of it, through the evolutionary process. They need to discover that “Great Story” and see why caring for the universe is our all-encompassing purpose and the thing that brings together disparate peoples and cultures. This will be the way to ensure morality; self-interest means caring for the planet and doing nothing to harm the larger holons of existence.
36. From page 280: “We should pause, too, for reflecting on our tour of deep history: Let us recall that the primary driver of evolutionary creativity and transformation is chaos. Paradoxically, from an evolutionary perspective, bad news is often a good thing—a blessing in disguise.”
37. Author Ray Kurzweil estimates that by 2045, computers will be involved in the evolutionary process.
38. Globalization and all the technology it entails ensure that governments cannot accomplish treacherous deeds in secret. Communication and openness are increasing, leading to a growing brotherhood of humanity. We also will be able to make more educated decisions on behalf of the Universe because we will be more quickly and readily aware of perils. Knowledge increases responsibility.
39. An evolutionary worldview brings all religions together and gives people greater meaning than they’d ever felt before.
40. Don’t go down the paths of the creationists or Richard Dawkins; unite religion with science in a pantheist, universalistic way. Take the good things from the past and let the rest go; tradition is only valuable as long as it still applies to our generation. We can look forward to the day in which new scriptures will be written that reflect the progress of humanity/humankind. We need a better foundation to build on than the mythology in the Bible. Written scriptures are fallible because humans created them; first-hand observation of the Universe is by far superior! Scripture should be anything that helps us grow in evolutionary integrity, i.e. that helps me align self-interest with that of the Universe.
41. The God of the Bible is not real, because God cannot be good and, at the same time, destroy the world in a Flood, license ethnic cleansing on Canaan, and perform judgments in Revelation. That God, as early man imagined “Him” to be, was worse than Islamic radicals. The Bible contains stories about God’s judgment so that humanity could justify brutality in the period before we had evolved into more civilized beings. Getting people to fear God successfully accomplished the unification of ancient cultures of animalistic humans, by uniting them under one religion through fear.
42. Morality One-Liners on page 307: Mosaic morality is “Obey the Lord, or die!”; early Christian morality (as opposed to evolutionary Christianity) is “Believe in Jesus, or fry!”; personal Evo-morality is “Live in integrity, or cry!”; and species Evo-morality is “Align self-interest & Earth-interest, or ‘bye bye’!” The reality is that morality is part of our human nature, and it only grows with time as we evolve!
43. Good is something that helps the larger holons of existence. Bad is something that places an individual above the needs of the whole. Sometimes there are necessary evils like population control to save the larger species.
44. Good always comes out of bad with evolution! Don’t despair! The new world order will be the “second coming of Christ”, to use night language (cryptic, that is) of the past. To use day language (scientific and updated), it will be when all people together work for the benefit of the Whole, thus exemplifying righteousness/uprightness and “reincarnating Christ-like values at all levels of society” (pg. 317). People are doing the work of the “Anti-Christ” when they generate and propagate negative feelings in the world. Jesus desired that we model our lives after him, not that we worship “Him”. Being “born again” is growing in evolutionary integrity!
45. There is no afterlife. The worst “hell” is a life of misery. The best “heaven” is a joyful life of serving the Whole entity in the Universe.
46. “God” is Reality, the Universe, and Life, not an actual person. It helps to imagine “God” as living because the Universe is living and worthy of our devotion.
47. The supposed resurrection of Jesus was a way for the early Christians to peddle Christianity to the populace. The other religions’ followers expected a resurrection to be part of the new religion of Christianity, because their religions had such stories.
