Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Dinosaurs. Fact or Fiction?

Now that I live in the Yukon...okay its only Lynnwood, I spend more time commuting then previous living arrangements. My commute allows for ample time to listen to the radio morning shows. This morning I was a bit amused by one of the morning shows. Apparently the Seattle Mariners have this new DH (designated hitter for you non baseball types), Carl Everett. Carl apparently does not believe that dinosaurs were real. That they aren't represented in the Bible, therefore could not have existed.

I know y'all are thinking the same thing I am, then, um, how is it we've found bones...and then this other thing called fossil fuel? So the morning show had people calling in with their thoughts. One woman called in to defend Carl Everett and emphatically said that God PUT the bones there for use to find. After all, Noah, she says, didn't bring Dinosaurs on the arc...

My initial reaction was what a nutcase. And then I thought about that theory and whether a God I see as super intelligent would "put" bones around the world for us to find and later call dinosaurs. I decided that wasn't a probability. Instead, I believe that the dinosaurs were around LONG before Noah and his arc (which I'm sure Noah really lived in the Seattle area). After all, couldn't the dinosaurs have been extinct before the whole arc thing?

And then I remembered a contemporary religion class that FORCED us to think outside the box (of course this class was in high school which was LONG before the phrase "outside the box existed"). Our instructor asked all of us to think around the religions instead of just taking them as fact. As the class progressed we learned that, historically, we only have proof of some items from the arc forward. Which meant that the first part of the Bible could be, in fact, just stories - folklore. A way to teach good morale behavior. And so that's what I have chosen to believe.

In a nut shell: the dinosaurs existed. Noah didn't take them on an arc because they were already dead. And the Bible is a reference book. Which, I am sure is blasphemous to even say.

1 comments:

Ken La Salle said...

Here's a little more blasphemy to add to your book: what if the story of Noah was a metaphor?

Flood stories litter mythologies from around the world. Odds are they aren't all true so why pick Noah from the group as the true one?

Put in a mythological/metaphorical context, maybe you can find more meaning in the story than just a nautical theme. I could give you some ideas floating around out there but it would take up too much room. Better just to plant the seed.