http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/mar04.html
Awake for the First Time
Post of the Month: March 2004
by thelodger
Subject: you've changed my life. thanks, I think.
Date: 31 March 2004
I have had a most extraordinary last two weeks and I owe much of it to this group, or more accurately, the talkorigins.org website and I'm writing to say thanks.
I have been raised my whole life as a Jehovah's Witness and (therefore) an old-Earth creationist. I'll be the first to admit that I've not always been the world's best JW, but I had always felt that when I was being good I was at least standing on relatively firm ground. My upbringing and books like "Life - How Did it Get Here, By Evolution or Creation?" taught me the complete absurdity and hopelessness of the evolutionist, secular humanist view of how we got here. The arguments presented seemed to make sense and I was satisfied that my questions were being answered honestly and meaningfully. It's so strange then what has happened over the last few weeks.
It started simply enough. My wife and I were discussing the Flood and the promised Paradise Earth and we wound up postulating some rather difficult questions for ourselves. Questions like, "If all the animals were originally herbivores (as the Bible says they were before the flood and would again be in the future), wouldn't that have disastrous environmental consequences?" "Wouldn't one-celled life and insects continue to have a role to play in the food chain? If so, wouldn't at least some of it be carnivorous or parasitic?" Once I started thinking of questions I couldn't stop (and more importantly, I couldn't think of any rational answers). A few days later some friends came over and we all got to talking about the Ark and the Flood and pondering some of the same questions. Now, these friends are JW's and I have no reason to believe they have abandoned "The Truth" (as it's referred to in the organization) but one of them sent me a link to a document on TalkOrigins about the flood a few days later saying that he thought it was interesting. Interesting didn't even begin to describe it. I was blown away.
Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person. I am a 30-year-old professional software developer with a 142 IQ. I read a lot. I consider myself educated, open-minded and capable of recognizing fact versus fiction and yet there I found myself realizing for the very first time that I had been blindly accepting as a fact something that was completely impossible. Perhaps some sort of flood happened in pre-history, but a global flood, the Biblical flood of Noah as described by Jehovah's Witnesses, could not have happened the way they say. It was so obvious when all the issues were laid out in one document and yet I had never noticed it before. For once, I felt stupid. I felt like I had been believing in Santa Claus (JW's don't do the Christmas thing, BTW, so it's the closest I've ever come TO believing in Santa Claus). I could have left it at that, but I didn't. If the "logic" given to me to explain the flood was wrong, I had to know what else was wrong too. Oh boy.
I went back to the beginning. In Genesis 3:15 is the first Messianic prophecy. Everything Jehovah's Witness teach about why we are here, the purpose of life, the reason Jesus came to Earth, the hope for the future... all of it, is rooted in the Garden of Eden, the Genesis account. I decided to re-examine, with an actual open mind, the question of Creation vs. Evolution (as I pictured it, rather naively). Could the chronology of the Bible, the location of Eden, the Genesis creation account, any of it, be reconciled with science? Did any of it, in fact, happen?
Now, chronology is vitally important to Jehovah's Witnesses. It's how they calculate the "end times" and why they are sure we are living in them. If the entire basis for all Bible chronology was based on a fictional story, everything started to go out the window. It all broke down. I dug out my "Creation" book and dug in and what I discovered made me sick to my stomach. The last time I read it I was 15 and it was incredibly convincing. This time I did the actual research. I looked up the references. I checked the quotations and examined the lines of reasoning and found... pseudo-science. Fallacies. Misquotes. Deliberately misleading re-writes of quotes. Argument through incredulity. Appeals to authority. Ignorance of evidence. Selective presentation of facts. Outdated information. This was worse than determining that the flood story was impossible. This was evidence that the religion I have been raised in was actually resorting to outright deception and taking quotes out of context and presenting as science something that is really just propaganda... and that I'd fallen for it.
See, JW's pay a lot of lip-service to examining the scriptures, researching your faith, PROVING that it's THE TRUTH, keeping an open-mind. At the same time (and I'm not making this up) they have a song that has the following words:
"We must act together as one
independance wisely we shun
harmony and one-ness of mind
bring peace of rarest kind"
I never felt right singing those words. Regardless, I always believed that my religious beliefs would stand up to scrutiny. I took comfort in that. I thought I HAD scrutinized them. That is what we are supposed to do. This is supposed to be a religion based on reasons for faith. To see that book for what it really was... that hurt.
Anyhow, after being basically crushed over the empty shell that is the Creation book I decided to take a serious look at evolution for the first time in my life outside of the writings of Jehovah's Witnesses. Oh. My. God. I never knew. I just never knew. I have spent the last week absorbing everything I can. I have downloaded the entire TalkOrigins.org website onto my laptop to read offline. I stayed up all night watching the Discovery Science channel the night before last because of a program on hominid evolution and I just kept watching every show afterwards. I bought The Blind Watchmaker and I'm almost done reading it. I have researched radioactive dating methods, transitional fossils, creationist arguments, abiogenesis theories and lots more and over and over and over again I have found a mountain of evidence, a mountain of evidence I had been informed didn't exist. I have found intelligent people who think for themselves, who (yes) argue and change positions and interpret things differently but who are firmly grounded in reality. The actual study of the actual world as it is, not the study of how a book says it should be and an obsession with trying to make the world appear to fit that model.
I don't know what this means for me. I know this... I am now, and on some level have always been, a secular humanist. I am suddenly comfortable in my own skin, like my mind is clear for the first time. I no longer know what role, if any, the concept of God plays in my life. It's certainly not the role that was there two weeks ago. Now that I actually understand the theory of evolution to some extent I realize it's not just a bunch of wishful-thinking atheists working on some quack theory and calling it a fact. I have developed a whole new awe and appreciation for the world I see around me, like I'm really seeing it for the first time. The geese outside my office looked like little dinosaurs to me and I got the chills. I'm 30 years old, my entire family, my wife and all my friends are Jehovah's Witnesses. If they knew for even a minute that I've conclusively disproved (for myself) all the fundamental teachings that underlay their (and my former) theology, that I had come to realize the fact of evolution (still hard for me to type that sentence...) and rejected the chronology of the Bible as impossible... they would probably never speak to me again. I don't like the position I'm in now. I'm scared. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea how to proceed. I feel like I just opened my eyes for the first time and I don't know what the next step is.
I do, however, want to thank all you long-suffering rational folks out in Talk.Origins land. You've put together a resource that has radically changed my life in the blink of an eye and I am grateful.
lodger
