Friday, April 10, 2009

Tracks

This article on Talk Origins is about purported evidence of dinosaur/human footprints. The evidence that any of the tracks are human is the sort of thing only a mother could love.

Religion thrives on interpreting ambiguous evidence favorably, unfortunately - a habit so ingrained that we hardly notice it. The January 15th accident in New York this year, where 150 people miraculously survived an emergency landing in the Hudson River was viewed as a miracle by some (downplaying unjustly, I would argue, the competency of the pilot) while a similar accident a month later, resulting in the death of 49 people on board and one extremely unlucky person on the ground, is left, like most "random events", outside the purview of God, at least in common rhetoric.

This occurs at all levels - Jesus walks around Palestine, purportedly performing miracles and preaching moral lessons and people take this and reports of his resurrection from the dead as evidence of his Divinity (not that it constitutes evidence of that in any way). Yet the bizarre reality that a God synonymous with Love and Justice would leave the requisite concepts of salvation (faith in Jesus Christ) materially unknown to whole swaths of humans living on other continents and philosophically unknown to those adhering to philosophies which assert that the whole universe, Jesus and Yahweh included, are a flickering illusion is, basically, ignored. At least God's motives for using this particular conveyance, word of mouth, for the substance of what must be the most important thing He has ever done with respect to Humanity, is left as a Mystery - as are so many of the essential elements of Christianity.

That these things might all be True alone is not the point. You never know anything for sure in this universe, as far as I can tell. But the profound ambiguity of Christianity is itself evidence against it. it is utterly bizarre that the universe is such that a reasonable person might as easily disbelieve as believe in God's most important work. Or maybe that, too, is a mystery.

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