Thanks for the thoughtful answer to my question. Your discussion of Origen and the School of Alexandria was exactly the type of response I was hoping for, although of course I was interested in your personal take as well.
As for "is it possible that you’re obsessing over this stuff just to 'trigger the libs' or 'annoy the fundies' or whatever?"....I'm not sure whether this was directed at me or was sort of a rhetorical question to the keyboard-warrior types who like to beat the Those Stupid Fundies drum, but I assure you that's not me. I find that kind of thing insufferable even when I am otherwise on the speaker's "side".
You mentioned intelligent design--I don't think it belongs in public school science classes, but I've commented elsewhere that it is revealing to see how intelligent design never comes up when my liberal friends are bemoaning "book banning." Intelligent design textbooks were "banned" in a much more literal sense than the "I don't think Gender Queer is age-appropriate for middle schools" type challenges that make up a significant percentage of the so-called "bans", but somehow the American Library Association isn't clamoring to get Of Pandas and People back into the classroom. When it comes to stuff like ID, suddenly people understand the distinction between "banning" and "I don't think this is appropriate for taxpayer-funded middle-school libraries" just fine.
The only place where I care about the debate is, well, when it destroys people's faith in things I care about. And mostly that means I'm just trying to say "evolution is probably true, this isn't denying the Bible," and move on.
I'm sill haunted by a conversation--with a person of deeper faith, kindness, integrity, etc. than I--about why they don't get vaxxes or wear masks. For this person, at the end of the day, it really boiled down to, "look, these people are lying to us about evolution in order to destroy our faith, so why should I trust them when they tell me to stick strange chemicals into my body." That's like ... the sort of reasoning that can Make Polio Great Again.
And of course, there's the more common flip side of that coin--people who take Darwinian evolution not as some magnifier of the problem of evil (how can a good God create a world that seems to rely for its progress on death on the massive scale--and all that before Adam came along to sin?), but rather as a de-facto, literalist "I can't believe this faith anymore because the Bible says that creation happened less than 10,000 years ago." The second sort of hand-wringing drives, I think, an entirely unnecessary wedge between faith and honest engagement with scientific evidence, for many people.
On the other hand, I believe in the efficacy of Baptism and the pacifism of the early Church, and most of the Christians I know outside my small church or online communities are specifically training with handguns so they can kill progressives when the time comes. So, maybe it really is important to get early training in separating your faith / mystical experiences of God from obviously-verifiable empirical phenomenon.
Great comment with an absolutely jaw-dropping last paragraph. "So they can kill progressives when the time comes"--seriously?!? Like in a "If they come to get us, we'll be ready to defend ourselves" sense, or a "We're going to hunt down and murder progressives as soon as they give us an excuse" sense? Neither is good, but the first option would be part of a larger paranoia-and-siloing trend that affects both left and right (some of my lefty family members have said equally florid things about Trump supporters). Whereas the second option is....well, it's so insane that I could only pray you're trolling.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer to my question. Your discussion of Origen and the School of Alexandria was exactly the type of response I was hoping for, although of course I was interested in your personal take as well.
As for "is it possible that you’re obsessing over this stuff just to 'trigger the libs' or 'annoy the fundies' or whatever?"....I'm not sure whether this was directed at me or was sort of a rhetorical question to the keyboard-warrior types who like to beat the Those Stupid Fundies drum, but I assure you that's not me. I find that kind of thing insufferable even when I am otherwise on the speaker's "side".
You mentioned intelligent design--I don't think it belongs in public school science classes, but I've commented elsewhere that it is revealing to see how intelligent design never comes up when my liberal friends are bemoaning "book banning." Intelligent design textbooks were "banned" in a much more literal sense than the "I don't think Gender Queer is age-appropriate for middle schools" type challenges that make up a significant percentage of the so-called "bans", but somehow the American Library Association isn't clamoring to get Of Pandas and People back into the classroom. When it comes to stuff like ID, suddenly people understand the distinction between "banning" and "I don't think this is appropriate for taxpayer-funded middle-school libraries" just fine.
The only place where I care about the debate is, well, when it destroys people's faith in things I care about. And mostly that means I'm just trying to say "evolution is probably true, this isn't denying the Bible," and move on.
I'm sill haunted by a conversation--with a person of deeper faith, kindness, integrity, etc. than I--about why they don't get vaxxes or wear masks. For this person, at the end of the day, it really boiled down to, "look, these people are lying to us about evolution in order to destroy our faith, so why should I trust them when they tell me to stick strange chemicals into my body." That's like ... the sort of reasoning that can Make Polio Great Again.
And of course, there's the more common flip side of that coin--people who take Darwinian evolution not as some magnifier of the problem of evil (how can a good God create a world that seems to rely for its progress on death on the massive scale--and all that before Adam came along to sin?), but rather as a de-facto, literalist "I can't believe this faith anymore because the Bible says that creation happened less than 10,000 years ago." The second sort of hand-wringing drives, I think, an entirely unnecessary wedge between faith and honest engagement with scientific evidence, for many people.
On the other hand, I believe in the efficacy of Baptism and the pacifism of the early Church, and most of the Christians I know outside my small church or online communities are specifically training with handguns so they can kill progressives when the time comes. So, maybe it really is important to get early training in separating your faith / mystical experiences of God from obviously-verifiable empirical phenomenon.
Great comment with an absolutely jaw-dropping last paragraph. "So they can kill progressives when the time comes"--seriously?!? Like in a "If they come to get us, we'll be ready to defend ourselves" sense, or a "We're going to hunt down and murder progressives as soon as they give us an excuse" sense? Neither is good, but the first option would be part of a larger paranoia-and-siloing trend that affects both left and right (some of my lefty family members have said equally florid things about Trump supporters). Whereas the second option is....well, it's so insane that I could only pray you're trolling.