Anyone else taught Young Earth Creationism growing up?
It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize it was total bullshit and start to really understand evolution. it also stunted my development of critical thinking skills. I love science and the natural world so much, I still don't know if I can forgive my folks for doing that.
Shoutout to AromRa on YouTube for his creationism/evolution videos.
I was in high school during the whole Kent vs Kansas Board of Education thing. My parents definitely tried and I got into many arguments. I was lucky and had a good-ol-boy science teacher who didn't seem to want the trouble of teaching two things. He brought it up in class and said his job was to teach earth science, not religion. Online, I fell into the Skepticism, debunking, new atheist stuff so that helped too.
It wasn't really taught in my school aside from one dickhead substitute teacher, but a lot of my classmates were Christian and it was more or less universally accepted among them that YEC was the only valid way to interpret the Bible (including the class valedictorian) and your choices were
As an early teen, I chose 2. In hindsight, it was a very Reddit-esque oversimplification, but I was also a child with minimal knowledge of any religion except Biblical literalist evangelism. I have a much more nuanced understanding of religion now than I did as a kid (I understand that YEC is a relatively recent invention and interpret religion in general through the lens of Marxist–Leninist atheism), but to this day I can't seriously entertain the prospect of being anything other than an atheist, and I think my childhood experiences are largely responsible for that.
Oh yeah, me too. If you’re an American (and you probably are, as YEC seems to be a predominantly American thing) I cannot recommend highly enough that you go to Chicago sometime and check out their Natural History Museum; specifically their exhibit on the history of earth. I spent hours in it - the point my gf at the time was like “alright you stay here I’m gonna go walk around Michigan Ave till you’re done”. You start billions of years ago and literally walk through the history of how life on earth evolved. I was completely mesmerized.
My parents didn't really teach me anything like that, but I was taught it in elementary school and in highschool my chemistry and physics teacher would play Kent Hovind videos in class.
Was he the one who claimed the grand canyon was carved in five minutes by a global flood
I remember him as the one who thinks a banana fits perfectly in the hand and that's proof of god (the banana has been selectively bred by humans for generations)
But yea he does think the flood carved the grand canyon rapidly, I don't remember if its five minutes specifically.
Was he the one who claimed the grand canyon was carved in five minutes by a global flood
casually creating enough heat friction to destroy the planet
Most young earthers do tbf
Yeah, but that's not even anywhere near the craziest thing. He thought before the "fall of man" all dinosaurs were herbivores and lived alongside people, blamed the trail of tears on Darwin, and also that modern lizards and dinosaurs are the same thing but lizards in the past just lived longer so they got really big. He also believes in tax evasion and domestic violence.
My mom gave me some book of his and I went through it page by page, correcting all the bullshit, which was every other sentence. Gave up after the first couple pages.
Yes, I was taught yec and that evolution was false. Homeschooled and taught essentially all of those types of beliefs-a worldwide flood 4000~ years ago, dinosaurs lived with humans for the few thousand years before then, climate science denial, etc.
I also love nature and animals and learning the truth about evolution has been very cool, seeing all the things science has found about our history. I broke away from the church at 15/16 and accepted evolution shortly after. Heartbreaking to me how many people don't see through it.
Me! I was raised in a sometimes fundamentalist Baptist environment, went to a Baptist school from kindergarten-11th grade. I’m now an Episcopal priest and very much on board with evolutionary science (mostly thanks to a talk I heard from Fr. Coyen, who was a Jesuit and the director of the Vatican’s observatory in Arizona). For me now, there’s no disconnect. The evolutionary process is how we perceive God’s creative work. I’ve found this to be both beautiful AND a catalyst for deepening my faith.
we have an entire episcopal priest here!?
Not partial. Not half. Whole. draws circle with hands
I was fully evangelical as a kid so this was what I was taught, eventually it became way too obvious that fossils and stuff disprove this so there's a thing called the 'gap theory' where there's millions of years between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 where god made the world with dinosaurs and maybe prototype humans. How clearly they were scrambling to make a unified field theory on how the earth has fossils but also is only 6000 years wasn't what made me stop believing but afterwards I did realize why it's so important to the literalists: If we evolved when did the original sin happen?
Most people don't believe in a literal Adam and Eve any more but if they never existed then who did the first sin? Can Australopithecus sin, too? Does Jesus's self sacrifice cover Neanderthals' sins? When does a gorilla stop being an animal mind and need to start making burnt offerings to god or they go to hell?
If it was the 1500s all of these questions would be hotly debated by 500 monks over the course of a century and end in a minor schism but we don't have time for that we're trying to make a sale here: You, in this religion, today.
I don't think Evangelicals care about the specifics of original sin. I'm not even sure they believe in sin, really. The point of literalism is demanding compliance, not real belief. It's an exercise in force.
I mean in Catholic teaching of Felix Culpa the sin is deliberately baked in to allow humanity to become more than it could be without it. To have a soul is to have the capacity to defy god, and the knowledge of lost communion with the divine when you do. Jesus' redemption thus allows a recommunion with god, but as fully realised beings.
I went to Catholic school growing up, so they weren't the young-earth type. They had a more balanced approach of, talk about the biblical origins of earth in religion class, but still teach the scientific origins of life in science class. The Catholic teaching is that when the bible says the earth was created in seven days, it's not literally seven days, God experiences time at a different scale than humans, so one day for him could actually be millions of years. Interesting how the different denominations get to pick and choose which bible passages are literal and which are figurative.
While I was in high school, a public school near me had a big trial and lawsuits about teaching intelligent design in biology class. Ironic that the Catholic school had a more science-based biology curriculum than the public schools.
In college I had a classmate who was very Christian. He was studying physics and wanted to work in aerospace engineering at NASA, and he did not believe in evolution. That blew my mind when I found out, that he was into science and fully educated on the subject but was just like "no, I don't believe that macroevolution is a valid theory". Like he's read Darwin but just thinks that he was incorrect.
My sister fell into it but I was pretty completely innoculated by both Reddit atheism and a Left wing Catholic upbringing.
Dear youngsters, is creationism still a major issue or has it been supplanted with trans panic? I want to know if it was just a Bush era obsession or if I just grew out of the environment.
No, but I once worked with someone who had just escaped hyper controlling fundy parents and was only learning about things like evolution in her 20's. It was real weird having to explain stars to her in the same way I would a toddler.
IDK y but most Christians in my childhood area didn't make a big stink of that debate like they do now.
Yes, but nowadays my dad doesnt want to debate it anymore.
Yeah, that was what was taught in my home school ""history"" class
My parents still believe in the shit
The nonsense of that is a big part of what drove me to becoming an atheist. That and being trans and bi, the bible is very clear about what it thinks should happen to LGBTQ people and it frustrates me so much when people try to pretend that Christianity isn't inherently bigoted and homophobic
The queerphobia is honestly just the tip of the awful shit that book justifies. Deeply evil religion and god, right from the start.
Honestly it's kind of surprising to me that we have a Christianity comm on this site. Like it's a irredeemable religion full of so much heinous shit anyone who calls themself a leftist should be opposed to it
Extremely relatable, also had this kind of home school classes. The average person who just likes the selected pieces of Jesus's dialogue they've heard doesn't grasp how shitty the Abrahamic religions are in the source material. I have more leeway with the people who just never cared and think of themselves as part of a religion because that's how they were raised, IDK how a person exists like that but it seems to be the majority.
Anyone who converts to a monotheism as an adult is a major major red flag, though. 'Returning' to the religion you were raised creates the worst people. Adult converts to a different flavour of your original religion, like protestant to orthodox, are the weirdest people. All of them are taking fundamentally anti-materialist views on the world as well as choosing to ignore the racism, sexism, homophobia, genocide, etc.