Do some religions teach backward ideas? Yes & No. They are backward simply because they were written so long ago. Read a book published say in 1950 - for example I am reading Earl Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. These guys are always running after pay phones trying to make calls, in these days of cell phones, that seems silly.
If we go back a few thousand years and speculate what it was like to live in those times. Just like today we may wonder if there was a god. In early primitive times, when man heard thunder and lightning, he must have thought god was angry. Sure enough, fire and floods followed. Hence a fear of god developed. This idea seeped into the later abrahamic religions. The earth is flat, of course it is, don't you have eyes? That little ball of fire that rises in the east and sets in the west, obviously it is circuling the earth. What did they know about carbon-dating of rocks? Earth a few thousands years old? sounds like a fair number. Of course they had no way of knowing about evolution and the dinosaurs. What happens when we die? It would be nice if there was some nice place where we could all go to, wouldn't it?
It is not these books or the writers that were backward, they must have seemed pretty forward for those times, but what is really backward and frightening is when people of today stupidly regurge the same thoughts! I hear there is actually a flat-earth society, people who don't believe that the earth is round! Trying to disprove evolution and denying the existence of dinosaurs, even with all the skeletal evidence.
Actually there is another reason why people fear evolution. Remember god made us in his image? 5,000 years ago man looked presentable, but if you keep going back the picture changes. Now if we go back to the neanderthal times, man looks horrible. Bad teeth, bad hair, smelly, disgusting, unwashed, grunting like an ape! This is god! Keep going back, now god is an ape!
If we go back a few thousand years and speculate what it was like to live in those times. Just like today we may wonder if there was a god. In early primitive times, when man heard thunder and lightning, he must have thought god was angry. Sure enough, fire and floods followed. Hence a fear of god developed. This idea seeped into the later abrahamic religions. The earth is flat, of course it is, don't you have eyes? That little ball of fire that rises in the east and sets in the west, obviously it is circuling the earth. What did they know about carbon-dating of rocks? Earth a few thousands years old? sounds like a fair number. Of course they had no way of knowing about evolution and the dinosaurs. What happens when we die? It would be nice if there was some nice place where we could all go to, wouldn't it?
It is not these books or the writers that were backward, they must have seemed pretty forward for those times, but what is really backward and frightening is when people of today stupidly regurge the same thoughts! I hear there is actually a flat-earth society, people who don't believe that the earth is round! Trying to disprove evolution and denying the existence of dinosaurs, even with all the skeletal evidence.
Actually there is another reason why people fear evolution. Remember god made us in his image? 5,000 years ago man looked presentable, but if you keep going back the picture changes. Now if we go back to the neanderthal times, man looks horrible. Bad teeth, bad hair, smelly, disgusting, unwashed, grunting like an ape! This is god! Keep going back, now god is an ape!
