I have finished my series on the dereligionization of Jesus of Galilee. I have found many great writers, podcasters, and others communicating about the honest and straightforward teachings of Jesus, as juxtaposed against the religious interpretation as we see in the present political world in America. However, there are a few topics that I don’t hear a lot of discussion. Looking forward, I want to address these unaddressed topics.

I think a healthy church would have Sunday school classes on evolution because the discussion, or lack of it, impacts many people, some of whom will eventually leave Christianity for good. The only debate you would hear in a church about evolution is within the conservative churches, condemning the idea of evolution as straight from Satan and must be opposed at every opportunity. However, how we address this critical topic has enormous ramifications.

Before I start this series, I want to make a few crucial points. Consistent with my nature, I will strive to be painfully honest.

The first point, which I think is crucial, is Thomas Aquinas’s “Two Books” of God concept. He lived in the thirteenth century and wrote that God has communicated in two books, the scriptures and nature (or reality). If there is ever a disagreement between the two, he wrote, you must reconcile the difference by reinterpreting one or both. This should be a no-brainer, but it’s not.

For example, if the written book, the Bible, says that it never rains on a Sunday, but the other book, the book of nature/reality is clear that it does sometimes rain on Sunday, just like any other day of the week, then either the Bible’s statement was not meant to be taken literally OR, when you see rain falling on a Sunday, you are delusional. Of course, there is a third option, and that is, in this case, your own eyes and experience reveal the truth to you that it does rain on Sundays, so the Bible was mistaken. If the Bible makes mistakes, then surely it was not inspired by God.

I cannot overstate the importance of this principle.

In case you are a “drive-by” reader and don’t know my history, I will describe my experiences once again. I was born to a typical Bible-belt conservative Christian family, and then at age eighteen, I made a personal commitment to evangelicalism. I spent the next seventeen years as part of an evangelical discipleship group. I was so committed to this paradigm that I gave up my worldly possessions and moved to the Middle East to be a missionary, to convert Muslims to Christianity. There, I became disillusioned with my brand of Christianity, the pretentiousness of it, and left. I returned to the US and studied intensively for twenty years.  During that time, I tried to re-enter the evangelical church, but all my efforts to do so were frustrated.

Yes, I am a Christian, believing that Jesus is the Messiah of the creator of the cosmos. I think that Christianity is straightforward, following Jesus’ simple teaching of loving others as yourself. Full stop. I am often in conflict with Christian-religious people, who believe that because I don’t conform to the American Christian culture, as they see it, or the plethora of their essential beliefs, I am therefore the enemy of God.

In this first post, I want to describe what I was taught about evolution during my 35 years of being an evangelical. I don’t agree with these views now.

1. Charles Darwin proposed evolution because he was a moral degenerate and wanted to create a worldview that did not have a creator, so that we would not have to obey a creator. Satan empowered him.
2. There is no evidence for evolution, but it is made up by secular scientists who, like Darwin, are either too stupid to see that God has created the cosmos and humans, just the way we are… or they are moral degenerates. The man, Tom, who recruited me into the discipleship group at age 18, told me, “Evolutionists made it all up so they don’t have to obey a god. Without God, they are free to have sex with their girlfriends.”
3. There are no fossil records of creatures that are between apes and humans. The claims for such fossils were all made up by evolutionists who want to promote their worldview for the above reasons.
4. The evidence for a six-thousand-year-old Earth, a worldwide flood, and the creation of humans from scratch, fully formed, is clear. So, it takes an idiot or an immoral person to believe or promote such things.
5. The Bible is perfect just as we have it. It is to be taken literally in all cases, unless it clearly says it is a metaphor.
6. Christians have always believed that the Bible is perfect and literal, but it is only due to the rise of secularization in the past two hundred years that those ideas have been challenged.
7. You cannot be a Christian and believe in evolution or an earth older than six thousand years. To think otherwise is such a moral problem that you cannot be among the true Christians.
8. Many essential Christian doctrines rest on the idea of the six-thousand-year-old earth, the creation of man from nothing, before other life, and the worldwide flood. For example, it is required that humans were created first and then sinned, before there was any death on earth. This is taken from such passages as Romans 5:12; Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—   So, there could not have been creatures that lived before humans and then died.
9. Since believing in evolution is a moral problem, you don’t discuss it, just attack the character of the person who says they believe it.

Respectfully, Mike