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As I was talking with my RA the other night, he was explaining about a girl that he had arguments with over the JBU forums. Myself, I am a forum junkie. I even serve as the moderator of the politics forum. Naturally, the forums interest me, so I wanted to know more.

The topic of the forum was over the age of the earth and the existance of dinosaurs. His view was that the world is older than six thousand years. At my American high school, such thought would have been condemned as heretical. Their view was that if one didn't accept the view of a litteral Genesis, his reasoning was in error, and therefore, as Genesis is supposedly the foundation of all biblical thought, their entire understanding of the Bible must be in error and bad things will come. The school's view was that a belief in a nonliteral Genesis led to attrocities. That's bullhonkey. The greatest attrocities in the world were comitted with biblical inspiration. According to them, racism is caused by evolutional thought because evolution teaches that some form of man are higher than other forms of man. Simply knowing that the greatest racist acts that come to my mind (slavery in America and raunching of Jews in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition) were biblically inspired and existed long before evolutional thought was commonplace debunks that idea.

I'm starting to ramble, so I'll get to my point. Take Revelation: there is some pretty crazy stuff in Revelation such as creatures with eyes all over them, beasts with seven heads, creatures with a congregation of body parts from various different species. There is no one that I know who believes that the events that are described in Revelation will happen litterally. Most believe that the book is symbolic in its descriptions. Why? If you were trying to explain to someone in the first century about events occuring today (and I'm not trying to imply that the end times are occuring today), would you use words like car, computer or lightbulb or would you dumb the vocabulary down and use words like horse, mind and lamp. When we try to describe something outside of someone's understanding, we'd probably dumb the vocabulary down. Would that be the same for Genesis? How can God create something from nothing? That is beyond my understanding. Let's assume that he took billions of years to create the earth. He's God; He could do it. How would you describe that to a primative society that doesn't have a linear view of time? Personally, I do believe that God created the world in six days, but if someone doesn't hold that view, is their foundation for logic gone? I have to say that if it's because someone doesn't believe that God can do it in six days, there's a problem. God has infinite power. If someone doesn't have enough faith to believe that God could do it, how can he please God? If it's simply that he believes the verses to be symbolic, then I don't see how someone's biblical logic is messed. Personally, I believe that someone's biblical logic is screwed up the moment he believes that the King James Version is an advanced revelation from God (like Maranatha American Center).