I came across a section of the Detroit Free Press at lunch today and saw this column by Leonard Pitts, Jr.:
In the process, I noted "we all have questions" for Palin. Among them: "Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth?"
Which unleashed a flood of e-mails from people angry that I had demoted the Christian creation story to the status of parable and suggested by implication that anyone who believes it is, as one reader put it, is a "fool."
Which brings us to those seldom-used words:
You're right. I apologize.
These aren't the loonies; these are normal Americans insisting that homo sapiens originated at one time, with one fully human, talking couple who themselves had no ancestors. I don't meant to imply that anyone who believes this is a fool. I mean to say it outright, in no uncertain terms: anyone who believes in a literal Adam and Eve is a moron. There's no excuse for it. In light of modern knowledge, there is no more excuse for believing this than there is for believing the moon is made of green cheese.* It's not cheese and that's just a fact. Any geologist will tell you there was no global flood and that's just a fact. There couldn't have been an Adam and Eve and that's just a fact. You shouldn't have to apologize to anyone for saying so.
* And thank goodness that isn't claimed in the Bible, or ... well, poor Neil Armstrong.
2 comments:
Religulous sounds like a spell from Harry Potter. I can just hear Severus Snape sneering it. Perhaps it makes people fall down on their knees and babble in tongues.
I stopped my newspaper subscription a year ago partly because the Cleveland Plain Dealer seemed to kowtow to the religious. Human interest stories ended with the victim asking for God's mercy. Scientists were relegated to "others", as if they were a foreign, elite, and untrustworthy group. I have since gotten the impression it is not only the Plain Dealer, but most major publications (that are not explicitly scientific)that believe they must not offend their primarily Christian readership. When will they realize their purpose is to inform and educate, not to pander? And that they lose their educated readership when they publish not the news and not the truth but what they think their Christian readership wants to read?
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