Electric Pickle

Are you saying that you were harmed by "indoctrination" when you were a child?

Jesus was considered radical by the religious leaders of his day, because he taught us that God loves everyone, even tax collectors and sinners. The Bible and the teachings of Jesus do not present a political view, but a moral view. Jesus showed us the importance of every human life. Jesus said that from the beginning God ordained marriage as between one man and one woman. He taught that those in power should not take advantage of the weak. That is the kind of world I would like to live in.

In Leviticus 11 God gives a list of animals (including sea creatures without fins or scales) which the Israelites were not to eat, and which would not have been healthy eating in that day. Many of them are not healthy foods today, but the New Testament takes away those restrictions. In Lev 18 God forbids a list of sexual acts (including homosexual sex) that are still considered immoral today. Sexual immorality (including homosexual) is condemned in the NT and HIV/AIDS has shown it is unhealthy.

"God killed innocent babies all the time in the Bible" shows you don't know much about what is in the Bible. Jesus did say it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, but then he said,"With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Jesus did say to pay taxes, but he also condemned those in power who mistreated the poor and used their power for financial gain.

Actually it was the French mathematician Emile Borel in 1913 who first used the million monkeys with typewriters illustration to illustrate the extreme unlikelihood of certain events. Richard Dawkins now uses it to illustrate the likelihood that random processes CAN produce information. Dawkins is an outstanding biologist. As a mathematician he may not be so strong and as a theologian he is out of his department. "Alternative realities" are unproven and unprovable and therefore not scientific.

Darwinian evolution is defined as natural selection acting on random variations to produce all living things. Of course hitting an "infinite number of typewriter keys at the same time" (or an infinite number of random variations at the same time) is impossible in the real world. Also there have been a number of mass extinctions which might require starting from scratch. Experiments have shown the universe isn't big or old enough to hold enough monkeys to type even one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

You are right "evolution is evolution." Also, I should add that E. Coli which can metabolize citrate is still E. Coli.

Could you suggest to me a museum or a book where I might see the "transitional stages for many, many creatures" you are telling me about? I don't want to be "willfully ignorant."

A "lesson"? It's actually not teaching anything outside of propaganda. As a kid growing up I always felt offended by people trying to tell me that "oh if you life your life like a christian you'll get to see the world so much brighter etc etc..." I could not stand it. I read the bible, i studied it, then i read the Torah and the Vulgate. I did so because of all these positive messages I'd been told as a child growing up. For a while I experienced severe depression because it didn't work for me.

I find it very interesting that you read the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible by Jerome in the 4th century. Did you read the Torah in Hebrew also? How about the New Testament in Greek? I can see how you might have gotten bogged down and not been able to find the "positive messages." I would suggest starting out by reading John's gospel in a modern English translation like the NIV.