Palin and Creationism
John Schwenkler September 19th, 2008
I had come across this quote before, actually, and naturally I find it pretty unsettling. Obviously there are others of Palin’s views that are a much, much bigger deal than this one, and I still stand by my objections to a certain sort of sneering condescension toward old-timey religion, but yeah … if Sarah Palin really does think (as she may or may not; this particular anecdote is not necessarily the final word) that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together 7,000 years ago, then that is indeed less than reassuring. Yeesh.
[UPDATE: A commenter points out that the source for that story may be less than trustworthy, and in any case has clearly got a strongly anti-Palin agenda.]
Filed under: politics, religion, science/tech
From the same place that called her an islamist dominatrix… I wouldn’t put much stock in hearsay about palin….
Here’s the guy’s blog that made that quote…
progressivealaska.blogspot.com
Do you trust that?
Thanks for the heads-up – I should have gone ahead and done some looking around myself.
Everything she’s said on the record, and pushed for when she has power, has been reasonable. That’s what’s most important, although if there were significant evidence of this that would be somewhat relevant I suppose.
[...] Literalism, Faith, and Sarah Palin Jump to Comments Via John Schwenkler, I see that Palin may be a “Young Earth Creationist.” Young Earth Creationists evidently [...]
This may say more about my own ignorance of religion than it does about modern Christianity, but I’m struck by the logical consistency of Biblical literalists. I mean, if the Bible is the Word of God, shouldn’t you accept the legitimacy of the entire thing? Why do modern believers get to determine the correctness of individual Biblical passages? How does the Catholic Church justify adhering to certain Biblical injunctions while ignoring others? I don’t mean to criticize or inflame, but I am curious to learn how Christians who aren’t literalists approach the questions of Biblical legitimacy.
I think the best answer to your question is that every Christian understands Scripture by means of some (or several) interpretive tradition(s): it just happens that certain Christians (e.g. Catholics) are more conscious of this than others. And this is as it should be: for one thing, the Bible didn’t just fall out of the sky (and indeed there is some controversy over exactly which books should be included in it); for another, it’s impossible to understand any text in an interpretive vacuum. And so even the professed literalist isn’t properly so-called, because there is no single “literal” interpretation of Scripture, but rather countless different ways to approach it depending on the interpretive community of which you’re a part. The question of how any such community “justifies” certain interpretations at the expense of others is of course a challenging one, and the answer will naturally vary from case to case: usually, though, some sort of appeal to divine guidance and/or the privileged status of a certain body of tradition will end up figuring in the answer.