Jackie+K’s+OpEd+Article

=**"A Plead for Fair Judgment" **=

By Jackie K.
media type="file" key="jackiek-muckraker-0910.mp3" ===What’s so wrong with religion? I don’t understand. It seems that ever since Steve Jobs became famous and Bill Gates, a hero, since scientology became a “religion” and atheism, a new fad, society has shifted away from religion and if not into a collective mindset of religious reaction, anti-spiritual, for lack of a better word, then at least into overwhelming materialism. And now I precede to the deeper, underlying issue: evolution/the big bang vs. creationism. I admit that although the immensity of this issue exceeds my high school level education, I will and can provide information, not necessarily on the theory itself, but on the nature of the argument over this matter. ===

===Science, and therefore, support of the theory of evolution, seems to overwhelm creationism and any little existence of religion in society. Yes, there have been scientific discoveries that may have //hinted// at the transformation of humans from prehistoric and seemingly primitive beings to the Homo sapiens we are now, but what good is that? What good is a maybe? What happened before the first existence of life on Earth then? How did life even begin in the first place?! Science and evolution fail to provide a clear answer. I’m not ordering any believers of evolution to switch their views and manifest all of their support into creationism; nor saying that religion always provides clear answers. After all, I won’t deny the large probability that evolution is indeed a valid theory. The truth of the matter is this: that the religious belief of creationism, that God created the earth, the sky, the trees, the air, the mountains, the waters, and LIFE, gets an exceedingly larger amount of criticism. It should be treated with as much validity as any science theory. A //USA Today// report by Cathy Grossman showed that since 1990, the percentage of American adults who claimed no religious affiliation (agnostic and atheistic included) has nearly doubled from 8% to 15% in 2008. It’s no wonder why the general American train of thought has become increasingly more secular. ===

===A most utter annoyance I’ve witnessed during discussions over this highly controversial argument is a closed mind. I’ve even seen it in some particular classmates. Not only do these standoffish arguments prove annoying and ridiculous but they develop into illogical attempts to prove the sole theory of evolution...through logic! It makes no sense at all. Logic, which I, in the past, have deemed very reasonable and typically unbiased, is transformed into its antonym in these closed-minded arguments. Now, let’s be honest here: does evolution explain the whole story? Absolutely not! It stops short, leaving a dead end, or really, a dead beginning. I guarantee that all will agree to the fact that you can’t create life without an event, without a force. Either it had to have come from some//where//, or some//thing// had to create it. This is where religion and creationism come in. The book of Genesis, written long before the years were recorded in sequentially-increasing order, explains this phenomena, this incomplete “Once upon a time..” with God creating life, light, and the fundamentals of the world that still exist today. I don’t think I’m underestimating the level of science during those times when I say that I HIGHLY doubt there was any proof of evolution discovered back then. ===

===To all you atheists, you agnostics, you unbelievers, are you claiming that all the pious, scholarly writers of the Bible were liars? That they made up the whole thing? If so, please treat religion with at least one tiny, micro-drop of sincerity, and at give these authors some credit for good story telling. I beg you to at least realize your harshness. Be fair in your questioning of some of God’s miracles that remain unexplained. If science explained everything, than I deem you the greatest of all bragging rights among any substance of this topic that exists elsewhere. But that is not the case. Science, like religion, leaves weighty questions unanswered all the time. After all, it’s just one big theory with only some hundred instances that have actually been established as scientific LAW...yet to be proven otherwise, of course. I believe that both religion and science can exist simultaneously. It is just up to the closed-minded to realize this, or to at least treat others beliefs as they do their own and make this argument fair. ===