My son wrote the following, which stands on it on, so I won't waste time with much introduction... but may I say that it makes me a tad bit proud?...
“He said he made it all up!”
When I was younger, during one of my many weeks of summer bible camp, I experienced something which I now look back on with distain. It was the final day and we were in chapel. The speaker was firing away at the finale of his anti-evolutionary speeches, and we were all listening intently; after all, this was one of my favorite topics. We were passing around a chart of the theoretical evolutionary chain when the speaker said something like: “and after all his years of saying that this was fact, on his deathbed Darwin told everyone that he had actually made it all up…” Wow! Proof that evolution is completely untrue! Or at least it was to 11 year old me, and all of my friends at the time. However, looking back on this now I am very disheartened about certain things.
In my years of growing up since that time in my life I have discovered a great many things, and fortunately one of them has been to think for my self. Unlike many of the children there that day I have a father who inherently seeks the deeper truth in matters that might seem granted to everyone else. One of these matters just so happened to be the origin of life, and in recent years he devoted a good amount of time towards studying that and the thoughts of those who might have previously done the same. My father’s new insights into the workings of the biological world and man’s progressive understanding of it were shared daily with me and my brothers, and we began to open our minds.
The knowledge that he imparted to me drew forth many other thoughts of my own. I learned how Charles Darwin first theorized about the connections between species, and their ancestry. I learned about the dynamics of heredity, and the structure of a variation of a species. And I learned that Charles Darwin was a brilliant man, despite what Mr. Preacher told me back in the 5th grade. Although I am not persuaded towards the evolutionary point of view as of yet, I do have respect for this method of thinking, which is more than I can say for most of the Christian parents and teachers today.
Firstly, Charles Darwin never said on his death bed that he made it all up, that is absurd, and anyone who even knew there was a book called The Origin of Species would not have said such a thing as that. Charles Darwin put forth his best and most sincere efforts to understand life as we know it, and how it got here. His discoveries and his theories were one of the greatest contributions to science, he didn’t just happen to “make it up”. But here I am, about 11 years old, and I have just been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Charles Darwin and his ramblings are completely lunatic. What is wrong with this picture?
When you are a parent, or a teacher, you are given a responsibility. That responsibility is your child or pupil. You are not raising a zombie, or a religious zealot; that’s what the radical Muslims are doing. No, you are raising a conscious adult, and just the way you would teach him or her to write different words you would teach him or her to think different thoughts. You are not creating a one minded soldier out of your child, you are making tomorrow’s diplomat in the world of free thought and knowledge. I was mercifully saved by my father from that very point of view; but my question to you is this: how far will you go before you realize the dogmatic hole you’ve dug your self Into? At what point will you realize that your offspring don’t actually know why people believe the way they do, only that it is a belief different from his or her own?
You, as a mentor, are obligated to the pursuit of true and complete teaching. And if it is not your goal to be the most informative and unbiased teacher to your son or daughter or student then you should not open your mouth except to tell them that you love them. The world demands people to think and to understand, not to stand for something that they have no knowledge about. Hopefully you will realize that before it is too late.
Josiah Ross.
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