While I am reluctant to link to Answers in Genesis given its advocacy of pseudoscience and flawed theology, this recent post by Ken Ham needs exposure, if only to show how their mendacity poisons the minds of the young:
Recently I spoke at Great Hills Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, where I met a remarkable young boy named Reuben. He and his father met me after my talk, and his father proudly showed me his seven-year-old son’s notes from the session. They were incredibly detailed!I thought it would be encouraging to show you Reuben’s notes. It’s apparent that he was listening carefully to what I had to say—which is evidence that our young people are paying attention to what we teach. It’s so important that we teach apologetics and doctrine founded firmly on the Word of God.
Here's what the young child took from Ham's presentation. It's simultaneously depressing and frightening:
Stunting the minds of the young in the name of dogma is beneath contempt. More to the point, it harms Christianity in two ways. Not only does it produce a generation of intellectually stunted people incapable of honestly defending their faith, it also sows the seeds for deconversion. I've cited the example of Gordon Hudson before; it's particularly relevant here:
It's time to reclaim our faith from the fundamentalists.My own faith was shipwrecked by this issue because I had been told time and again that belief in a young earth and creation of the species as they currently are without evolution was essential to being a proper, soundly converted, bible believing Christian. When I started to doubt creationism I also began to question all the other things I had been told about God. I felt lied to, and ultimately I found I no longer believed in God. In hindsight if I had been in an environment where it was possible to believe in the Gospel message without having to accept creationism I would probably still be a Christian, or at least have some level of faith in God. Although its unlikely that this level of faith would have made me acceptable to evangelicals as a “real Christian”
HT: Hemant Mehta
