What Now?
Announcing The End of Christianity as You Know It!
23-JUL-2002
The primary message of The Bible, outside of the "Jesus stuff" is that God created everything. This can be seen in a wide variety of scriptures and is reiterated many times in different ways throughout the Old and New Testaments. The fact that God created everything is the one thing, outside of Jesus, on which the entire Christian religion is based. Even taking Jesus into account, if there were solid proof one way or the other that God did or didn't create everything, the entire existence of the Christian religion could be justified or repudiated.
That proof has come. On 11 July, 2002, my 42nd birthday, it was announced that scientists had fabricated an entirely viable polio virus , using a relatively simple chemical process, out of bits of easily obtainable, but entirely non-living DNA which they purchased on internet. This isn't "shake-and-bake" chemistry, definitely not something you do in an afternoon in your kitchen at home, but the very real concern is that if relatively benign scientists could do it, then so could terrorists. But the implications of this discovery are even more profound if you take into consideration the aspects of this discovery that touch the Christian religion, and deistic religion in general.
If human beings are able to create a "living" virus - note that there has been no obvious decision, or even discussion, on whether this created virus is even to be considered a "living" thing, or whether there should be any distinction drawn between a created virus and an allegedly identical "wild" virus - that fact, by itself, easily, simply and logically disproves the "christian" contention that God created all life, and goes a long way towards justifying the arguments of the "evolutionists" who, for so many years, have been arguing that all life on earth is the result of complex chemical processes and the passage of huge quantities of time.
And yet the "christians", in all their self-righteous vehemence, continue to maintain, without a shred of scientifically accepted evidence, that evolution is still an "unproven theory". Not surprisingly, a search for "polio virus" at the web site of The Institute for Creation Research returns absolutely no results whatsoever, in spite of their unsupported claims that their position is "the truth".
From a logical point of view, if The Bible claims that God created all living things, and human beings have recently succeeded in "creating" a "living" thing, then either the human beings are deluding themselves (an entirely likely possibility, human beings are notorious for that sort of thing), or The Bible is wrong. The latter of these two conclusions is probably shockingly inconsiderable by most "christians", but there have been so many things about The Bible that have been proven wrong that they should be used to it by now. And yet, they continue to whine. My impression is that if it's plainly obvious that the battle has been lost, continuing to fight does nothing more than demonstrate the weakness of your arguments to begin with. Under such circumstances, the intelligent person is a lot more likely to examine their beliefs with the intent of possibly changing them if they are discovered to be wrong in some way.
At the same time, The Bible does say that God created everything, and it's difficult to argue with God's word. That being the case, it becomes necessary to examine standard "christian" rhetoric to determine how they could have gotten the words right but the message wrong.
I have discussed the concepts of an "ambivalent" God, who exists in Changeless, Eternal Omnipotence, a God whose changelessness precludes the existence of emotion or attachment to a goal, and also precludes any Divine preference based on our own behaviour, but whose omnipotence is the underlying cause for all that we perceive as existence. It seems entirely likely that such a God could have created everything, "set the ball rolling" so to speak, and then sat back, relaxed, and watched to see what happened next, much like a stereotypical "couch potato" watching Monday Night Football. A prominent Hindu tradition describes our lives in this existence as "karma lila" or "The Play of Action", and frequently Hinduism refers to physical existence as "The Play of God", as though God created everything for His personal amusement and enjoyment.
It's a little difficult to imagine how our screwed up world could possibly be considered amusing or enjoyable, but then, it should be remembered that amusement and enjoyment are merely aspects of physical existence which lose their meaning once the duality of physical existence is removed. Taking these things into consideration, it is very easy to see how, in spite of the fact that The Bible says that God created everything, human beings could be capable of creating life on their own, without God's assistance. It's too bad there's no reliable way to communicate that fact to either the "christian" creationists, or the "muslim" terrorists, because it is the entire, mistaken conception that God created everything which is the fundamental motivation for all of the awfulness that the world is currently experiencing.
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