If the high priests can make you accept a falsehood in place of proven natural laws, they can make you accept and do anything.

Maybe you have issues or someone you love does - but all you have to do is pretend to beleive the party line - you dont have to actually advocate it as truth.

I know a lot of devout Christians, they're not evangelicals, that know the earth is about 4Billions years old. They accept the geology and physics that state the Jurasic ended 65 million years ago.

I also remeber a movie, "Spartacus" with Kirk Douglas. There was a scene where Charles Laughton (his character, a senator of rome) gave ohms to a peasant and said, in effect, "god be with you", and then returned to a conversation with an elitist lambasting the mythology of the times. The elitist asked:"How can you say "god bless" to the peasant, and then lambast the myhology?"

Laugtons character responds, "The mythology is simply a means of controlling the rabble and the mob."


>>As for the age of the earth, I don't know how old it is, I wasn't around. As for it being (in my best Carl Pagan voice) Billions of years old, I don't know about that. If you want me to get into Christian apologetics, I can do that. . . but don't hold me up as the example because I'll fail each and every time!
>>
>>You could google it like the mouse shadow question!
>>
>Well, you know, just call me a skeptic. If you stacked all the books end to end that have had their 'FACTS' disproven, you could probably touch the moon. At one time conventional wisdom was that the world was flat. People laughed at anyone who believed otherwise. (I could just see you with your pen and scroll rapidly caligraphying a letter to some Christian simpleton.) It was the recommended treatment to bleed people with leeches at one time. I could go on and on with what was conventional wisdom before some technology or an archaelogical discovery upset that theory. I don't pretend to be a scientist, but I have read quite a bit of stuff on the varying arguments and I don't agree with the notion of an earth that is billions of year old. Here's a link where you might want to see what some "creationist" scientists think: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c012.html
>
>Either way, it doesn't shake my faith. If the earth is a gazillion years old, I still believe God created it. I also don't agree with the popular stances on global warming. As late as the '60s the scientists were screaming global cooling. Now they are yelling warming. It's really all about the benjamins in my estimation. If scientists can create a panic, they can get funding and funding is all scientists are about. Something about publishing. . . .