Letter I sent to 'A Just Cause'
Dear Scott
I am studying your booklet Boundless Plains to Share? with my home group and must thank you for your work in this topic.
It was all going smoothly until I came to the phrase 'the creation stories'. I wondered what this could imply. Generally the word 'story' is used in lieu of the word 'account' to impute some lack of factuality in the subject text. If this is the case here, then the usage undoes all the good that your book seeks.
If the creation passage (I disagree that there are two accounts) is not directly connected to the world we inhabit, and is not sufficiently explanatory of events to allow us to invest in it, then we must go elsewhere to develop an understanding and appreciation of our world, ourselves and, indeed, of who God is and what he represents to us.
Indeed, if the account is best described as a 'story' then it is not obvious that it provides a basis for anything in fact because what is finally real is elsewhere.
The basis in fact would only come from what is really factual, and this, if the creation account is set aside, defaults to the dogma of organic evolution.
A basic premise of this dogma is that the world is constituted as a field of competition and destruction (and this is basic to the world and not the result of the fall) where inevitably the strong will outdo the weak. This puts the 'real' world in direct conflict with how God calls us to think and act.
Of course, in evolutionary terms, those who seek our help (or access to our wealth and freedom) are weaker than us and it is our vital duty to outdo them; because reality is that way, and the strong will do this. There is a grand determinism that is inescapable.
Better, I think, to take the scriptures as directly congruent with the world and factually related to it, setting aside materialist stories as pagan obfuscation.
The dogma also takes us back to the ideas of eugenics and to race selection doctrine: that some people and some 'races' are inferior. Arguably those 'races' that have produced repellent cultures are inferior to those that have produced attractive cultures, and it can only be 'right' (that is, congruent with how things really are) to oppose benefiting them.
On the other hand, of course, maybe your use of the word 'story' in connection with God's revelation of the actual setting between him and us is not meant to diminish the content of the Genesis account and detach it from the world we live in.
If so, it seems odd that you would use the deprecating term 'story' when if there is a 'story' it is the materialist story of evolution that sets us in a pagan world of a random and depersonalised universe.
