[tw]

Originally Posted by Lady Sidhe

Ok...not sure if this will cause the globe to wobble on its axis, but I agree with Sycamore. I believe in a creator, by whatever name one chooses to call him, her, or it, and I think that if that creator chose to create the world through evolution, who's to say no?

One of the best issued of The Economist is after they have taken a week off to eat well. In the 1 Jan 2005 issue is this stunning piece entitled "It ain't necessarily so".

Why people of the book have such trouble with language, truth, and logic
Whatever meaning this well-known version of the Christmas story may have, it does not seem to be very accurate history. Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a distinguished biblical scholar, lists the difficulties he sees. First, it is said elsewhere in the New Testament - and this is central to the story that Jesus was born in the last days of his would-be persecutor King Herod, who died in 4 BC. (The Christian system for dating Christ's birth was established at least three centuries later, so an error of a few years is not surprising.) But according to Josephus, a secular historian, the big census around that time (and the start of Cyrenius's governorship) took place in what Christians would call the "year of our Lord" 6 or, as today's secular historians now prefer, 6 CE (common era).

The problems do not stop there. For example, when the Romans counted their people, they insisted that everyone had to stay put, so a last-minute dash from one city to another seems unlikely. And as a protectorate under Herod, Palestine would not automatically have been included in an imperial census.

As a Dominican monk, whose views on some things, such as the virgin birth of Christ, are conservative, Father Jerome is unfazed by these contradictions. "The Gospels should be read spiritually, but with critical intelligence", he believes. Given that the two main accounts of Christ's birth - those of Matthew and Luke - are inconsistent, he prefers to rely mainly on the first, which moves from Christ's origins in Bethlehem to his upbringing, after an interlude in Egypt, in Nazareth. Moreover, in all the biblical material about Christ's beginnings, Father Jerome and other scholars see a deeper meaning: Christ is both a blue-blooded monarch from the royal city of Bethlehem, and a poor boy from the hardscrabble town of Nazareth from which nobody expected anything good. Even under the watchful eye of Pope John Paul II, who has reaffirmed the unchangeability of the truths maintained by the church, and the church's role as interpreter of the Bible, such bold readings of the New Testament are permissible. "What the church insists on is the spiritual message of the Bible, not its literal truth", says Father Jerome. If ordinary literal-minded worshippers said he was undermining their faith, he would conclude they were the victims of "bad preaching" and point out the impossibility of believing every word of an internally inconsistent text.