Posts tagged ‘creation’
Where Do Babies Come From?
For most people, this is a simple enough question. We know how babies are conceived but if you believe in a soul, then the questions becomes a lot more complicated. This question lies at the root of many pro-life/pro-choice debates as well as the many different religious stances on sexuality, birth control, AIDS, and homosexuality. Your take on this question informs your belief in humanity and the essence which separates us from all other creations.
If you’re Mormon, it’s even more complicated. The Mormons believe in the premortal existence. A place where all the little souls of all the babies to be born are hanging out with God. (In the strictest sense, most religions believe in a pre-existence of the soul before it enters human form but surprise, surprise, nobody has made it as weird and convoluted as the Mormons). They also believe in three composite aspects of the human form; spirit, body and intelligence. Intelligence is a common human essence that is put into a spirit body which is then turned into a physical body. So, souls are not just souls, they are spirit bodies with their own intelligence. Still with me?
Unlike so many other religions that just let non-sensical doctrine stand, Mormons take the bold step of trying to explain this one step further. This is where they lead us into crazy land. So, the Mormons believe that since all these spirit body’s are around, they too must have been created. And how did they get created? Why, the same way physical bodies are conceived. So, now we have the Heavenly Father up in the sky with the Heavenly Mother and their infinite spirit body offspring. This is one of those things that makes non-Mormons go “Whu!?” because it is so against what many other Christian religions teach. The introduction of a heavenly mother who co-created each of us is viewed as blasphemous by many and another example of how the Mormons are not truly Christians.
“Jesus, however, is the firstborn among all the sons of God—the first begotten in the spirit, and the only begotten in the flesh. He is our elder brother, and we, like Him, are in the image of God. All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.” MFP 4:203.
(As a point of interest, the Mormons also believe that there are spiritual tests and challenges in the pre-mortal existence that will inform your later position in life. These learning opportunities are discussed in “councils in heaven” – a sort of department meeting between uncountable spirit bodies and the big honcho, Daddy God. Up until fairly recently (1978) Mormons believed that people were marked with dark skin for being fence-sitters in the pre-mortal existence, in the War in Heaven. Religion is like the Rabbit Hole in Alice in Wonderland – the deeper you go, the weirder it gets.)
The idea of the Heavenly Mother is part of the doctrine of eternal progression. Ooooh, you’re going to love this one. So, the church basically believes that the Heavenly Mother and Father were themselves once spirit children who received a physical body and were then rewarded for their good behaviour by being given a universe of their own. They were begotten from a Heavenly Mother and Father, who also had their own universe. And so on, and so on. This one (obviously) gets murky and the church has made great efforts to distance themselves from this, at least publicly. This is true for many reasons, the most obvious being because the whole idea is insane. It also goes directly against the teachings of the Bible by implying that there is not one God by many Gods and that each of us (if you are a man of course!) can one day hope to be rewarded with a planet and Godhood. It destroys its own basic principle of the eternal family (hard to all be hanging out together when each male is off being a God to his own universe) and leaves the church out there in the same realm as Scientologists and Raeliens. Even some Mormons seem unaware of this doctrine, despite it being a fundamental plank in their Plan of Salvation.
Deciding how many children you want to have is a personal and sometimes difficult decision. My husband and I talk about it a lot and neither one of us is ure how many we want. There are so many factors to consider – the kind of family you want to have, how much money you have, how easy/hard pregnancy is on your body and how hard baby’s are on your marriage. As a Mormon, a third party enters the debate. God. Yup, you have to pray and reflect on whether there are more babies already destined for your family, hanging out in spirit land just waiting for this one chance to receive a physical body and realize their eternal destiny. No pressure there. My SIL has gone against the direct advice of Doctors and had more babies – all because she had received a revelation that there were more spirit babies waiting for her. (Her pregnancies make her sick, sick, sick for the entire nine months and risk her life every time. She has nearly died with three out of four births and I’m not convinced she’s finished.)
So there you have it in a nutshell. Where babies come from. That is, if you are part of a very weird religion. Everyone else just has sex.
Evolution…
I recently read “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” by Richard Dawkins. Being a neuroscientist, I obviously believe in evolution and need no convincing of its reality (or splendour for that matter) but I was curious to read how Dawkins would present it. It was an incredible book and if anyone you know has doubts about evolution or questions about the theory, I would recommend they read this book. Dawkins did a good job of staying away from the whole “angry atheist” persona he displays so beautifully in some of his other works, which is probably a good thing. For a believer it can be intimidating and it wasn’t the point of the book. The book outlines hundreds upon hundreds of sound scientific reasons why evolution is true and creationism or intelligent design theory is not. I’m not going to get into them here because Dawkins does it so much better.
However, I will venture to say that the growing trend of religions claiming that evolution and faith are not mutually exclusive is really starting to tick me off. The Catholics tolerate and now largely accept evolution, or as they call it, “theistic evolution” and according to my sister-in-law who is currently studying at BYU Idaho, she has been taught that evolution is true. The Mormon church, as far as I know, has not taken an official stance of the subject (they know not to touch this one with a ten foot pole) but there does seem to be an increasing tolerance towards evolution, at least anecdotally.
Faced with the overwhelming evidence for evolution, many churches are being forced to do back flips and have come up with all kinds of compromises to somehow allow for evolution within a religious framework; God used evolution as a tool, the belief of inner-species evolution but not inter-species evolution, and the general “evolution lite” that allows for some natural selection among lower vertebrates and invertebrates but denies any real connection between humans and any other species.
I’m going to say this plainly so that there is no room for confusion. One cannot be a believing Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jew, etc. and believe in evolution. Despite what ill-informed religious scholars and terrified atheists will tell you, faith and evolution are mutually exclusive.
I could get into all the scriptural inconsistencies, the carbon dating, the age of the earth, the problems with genesis and other creation myths and the fossil record but I won’t. The thing is, it is much simpler than that.
In order for religion to exist and to hold any power over the human spirit and consciousness, it must place us as separate and unique among all creatures. There is no religion that treats humans the same as dogs. In every religion, humans are precious, created by God in his image and chosen above all other living creatures.If this wasn’t the case, people would never have bought into it in the first place. We like to be prized.
Since evolution maintains that humans are in no way special, and despite our grandest of hopes, not the final outcome of the evolutionary processes, it is incompatible with any religious faith. There is no clear line between humans and those that preceded us. There is gradual change over time so that no scientist could ever pinpoint the one point or line in the fossil record where say, Home Erectus became Homo Sapiens as we know it today. So, if that is true (and to believe in evolution you must accept this as truth), did God love Home Erectus in the same way he loved us? How about the neanderthals? They were more human-like than the early Homo Sapiens were in many ways. Were they created in God’s image? What about their ancestors? It really all just starts to fall apart when you realize that we are living fossils on a continuum of life that goes back a very long time and (God willing – ha!) will continue for a very long time.
When things like this get too tough and believers are faced with having to make a rational jump into the abyss of non-belief or stay safely quaking on the ledge of faith, they usually sputter that “There are things that have not yet been revealed”, “Only God knows the truth”. And then we come all the way back to the beginning.
Much like the neanderthals that preceded us, believers are being faced with a changing world and more information than their brains can handle.
irreconcilable differences
One of the reasons I became an atheist and continue to feel so strongly about it is because I don’t like fence-sitting. There are times and situations in life that call for indecision – you don’t know enough about the subject at hand or there simply isn’t enough reliable information to go on. When it comes to most things however, you need to decide what you believe and then take that decision to its logical conclusion. It is a matter or integrity and morality with me and although I try not to be judgemental, I don’t have a lot of respect for that type of behaviour. I know a lot of people who don’t “really believe” in the church but who stay, serve their ward and baptize their kids. Inauthentic and deceitful are the nicest nice terms I can think of to describe that.
When applying the same approach to science and evolution I can’t help but become frustrated and the new washed down version of Christian-Evolution. I have heard this argument made by many Catholics (mostly because that’s what the Dope Pope has suggested happened) and more recently, by Mormons. (The church used to be staunchly anti-evolution but in the face of overwhelming evidence, seems to be softening on this point as of late.) So the story goes something like this: “Sure, evolution happened, but it was God who orchestrated it. Why wouldn’t He, in his infinite wisdom, use natural laws to create and expand life?” It’s a great approach since it allows for the obvious evidence of evolution while holding tightly to the paradoxical theory of creation. (Its biggest flaw from a strictly religious standpoint is that it allows for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis…) Its biggest flaw from a general perspective is that it’s stupid.
This kind of approach shows a huge misunderstanding of evolution and how it all works. Evolution is built on a foundation of random mutation (along with drift, natural selection etc.). There was no goal to evolution, no end point. Had one or two minute things gone differently, humans wouldn’t exist and another species would be taking our place in the hierarchy of life. Religious people cannot, no matter how much they protest to, believe in two mutually exclusive theories. They would have to believe that humans are not chosen, special, created in God’s image or the ultimate purpose for the world. It would throw any religion into turmoil to suggest that we are loved merely because we are the end result of a random experiment as opposed to being created with purpose. Working backwards it is easy to see why some people would assume we are the natural and obvious result of a long line of ancestors. Then, you retroactively apply the theory of evolution and voila!…it was all leading to us. The most divine of creatures. Except that evolution isn’t finished yet – not even close. And like I already said, we ended up here by beating out our competitors in the race of life – no more, and no less.
Religious people fight atheism fiercely because they are afraid of what it represents. They are afraid of being un-important and without purpose. They are terrified that they are alone in a universe that has no stake in their individual life. What they don`t yet realize, is that by embracing the Christian evolutionist stance they are accepting the very things they claim to reject. Welcome to the dark side.
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