What About the Dinosaurs?

One of the things I have been asked to explain, as a person who believes that God created the heavens and the earth, is dinosaurs, the fossil record, all that time, etc. I believe that the Bible is true, the inspired Word of God - but it is not a legal document, nor a technical one. It isn't even literature, exactly - the universe is His literature - but I think the rules of literary criticism can apply to it. God is an artist and this is his artist's statement about himself and his work. I hadn't thought much about what the creation story says for a long time, but looking at it now, I find there is more room for dinosaurs than I ever thought.

I am not a Creationist, in that I have not made a religion out of believing in creation vs evolution. I do believe that verse one of Genesis is unequivocal, that God created the heavens and the earth. He did it, that's what counts for me, and the rest of the account is just details. Very interesting and poetic details. The more carefully you look at this passage, the more difficult it is to be dogmatic about how to interpret it. So I have always been vague about it in my own mind, accepting the vagueness of the language as being that way on purpose. On the other hand, I have never been able to accept the mechanism of evolution, even before I became a Christian. It has never seemed capable of producing the progression of changes evolution talks about, and the more time you give it, the less likely it is to produce any change at all. I could be wrong, but instead of progressive change, what I see in this world is an artistic repetition of idea, and a brilliant symphonic complexity. It is a work of artistic composition, but it has a performance aspect too.

The Problem with Health Insurance

Maybe a lot of what I've said is considered more to the right politically than other Obama supporters, but on this issue, my Christianity pushes me to the left. The idea of insurance comes from different historical sources, but one of them is the Church.

In Acts 4, it says " And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any [of them] that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common."

And when Paul first met with James, Peter, and John, after his conversion, he reports that "... they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was forward to do." (Gal 2:10)

From the earliest history of the church, they were coming together, sharing with each other and the poor people of their communities. So I think it's fair to say that the idea of a community coming together to try to help out those in need, which became insurance, is a Christian one, if not exclusively so.

So here's the problem: profit. Just as the Corporation has perverted the profit motive of entrepreneurial capitalism (see my post on debt), so Insurance For Profit has perverted the charitable nature of its roots.