Saturday, 7 February 2009

God created the dinosaurs on purpose.

I've always been into science. As a child, I never really understood religion. When I heard that some people didn't believe that the dinosaurs existed, or even that evolution was possible, I was perplexed. I didn't really think any more about it and just put it down to some people being a little strange. Quite a few years later, the subject arose in a conversation, in a restaurant, with my father. I asked him why people couldn't believe in creationism and dionsaurs. This is when the Christian creation story was explained to me in detail. He told me about how God supposedly created man in His image and how we were supposed to be above all other creatures and all that. Sure, I knew that some people took the Bible literally but this sort of explained why the rest of them couldn't accept the theory of evolution: we were supposed to look like God.

Venturing back to my childhood again, slightly, I should tell you that I've always been described as awkward. If I could find a way to argue a point, I would. So, there I was, sitting eating chinese with my father and noting down any points that I found to be interesting, illogical or important to debunking the dinosaurs were a myth theory:
- We were created in His image.
- He created all creatures.
- We are above all other animals.

That night, I retrieved the napkin that I had been making notes on and started to write about each point at length. I was trying to find as many logical connections between Creationism and science as I could, so that I could present my findings to my father the next day. It did not occur to me that this behaviour was at least a little strange for a ten year old for many years.

One day, when I was probably around fourteen or fifteen, I came across my napkin and decided to look into the issue further. Eventually, I tried to actually put my ideas into words; explaining things has never been one of my strong points. At the bottom of the napkin, I had written one thing: Aesop. I wasn't quite sure what it meant at first, by the time I had reached the bottom of the napkin, years before, I had been almost asleep. I'm still not very coherent when I am tired. After a while, I realised what I had meant. Aesop's fables (which I only remember because of Clefable) were about lessons learned through certain circumstances. It made sense to me that evolution could be one way of learning lessons. After all, it would go against most other things that we are taught (the fact that, in life, we get nothing for free and are expected to work our way up in the world - although with the benefit system in the UK, this rarely happens... but that's another story and I'm sure it'll make an interesting post) if we were just given leadership above all other animals, without having to do anything.

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