The Southern Baptist Creed

I have talked to a number of good, dedicated Southern Baptists in the past couple of years and one question I always ask them is if they have read the Baptist creed. Surprisingly I have yet to find one who has actually read it.

Here is the definition of "creed".

1. A formal summary of the principles of the Christian faith.

2. a set of religious beliefs

3. any set of beliefs or principles

The immediate question that comes to mind is how can someone claim to adhere to a belief or a set of principles if they have no clue as to what those beliefs or set of principles are? I took the time to read the Baptist creed which is easily accessible on the Internet. Below is a portion of it. Emphasis is mine.

III. Man
Man was created by the special act of God, in His own image, and is the crowning work of His creation.

We are the crowning work of His creation ?

Let's examine that preposterous claim. Where shall we start?

Here's a great idea. Why not start with facts?

We have evolved from lower life forms. Deny it if you will but the unvarnished truth is that we are primates and we got here through the process of evolution. There is nothing particularly special about us other than the fact that, using a brain weight/body weight ratio, our brains are larger than other warm blooded animals.

The crowning work of his creation? Then God must have been an underachiever. Here are only a few examples of his "crowning" work.

1. Unlike chameleons, we can't change our color. Except for blushing.

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." Mark Twain

2. How come god allowed sharks to grow new sets of teeth but denied us that ability? Does God love sharks more than us? We could pay off the national debt on the money saved on dental bills if we could grow new teeth.

3. Each year in the U.S. alone, 3200 people die of choking, half of which are children under three. Porpoises don't have this problem. Why? Because they breathe and eat through different holes. How come if we are the crowning work of God's creation, literally hundreds of thousands of innocent youngsters have died a horrible death from suffocating because god refused to design us at least as well as porpoises? Here's the proof right out of Genesis: "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good." And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. So god created porpoises on the fifth day and was careful to design them so that the windpipe could not be obstructed with food causing them to choke, demonstrating that he knew how to do this. Twenty four hours later on the 6th day, he created us and somehow overlooked the "no choking" option which he awarded the porpoise. That little commotion in the garden (the forbidden fruit thing) had not even broken out yet and already God has assigned millions of us to a horrible death over a design flaw. The world population is 22 times as large as the U.S. population. We can safely infer that worldwide, 22 times as many people perish each year as do those in the U.S. Worldwide that's 70 thousand each year, half of them innocent little children. There are reports that as many as 19 deaths in Toyota vehicles may have been caused by floor mats jamming accelerators to full throttle. Toyota just sent out recall notices to as many as four million owners. God's design failure has caused the deaths of millions and not one recall notice. Go figure.

4. We humans all have a blind spot. Why? Because the rods and cones ("photocells") are installed backwards, away from the brain. As a consequence the image collected and carried by the retinal "wiring" has to pass through a hole at the back of the retina in order to reach the occipital lobe in the brain The hole causes the blind spot. Squid and octopus don't have a blind spot. Their eyes are designed better.

5. Here is one of my favorites. Did you know salamanders can grow new limbs? Yep. You whack off a salamander's tail or limb and the thing will grow right back. How come we can't do that? Since salamanders were made one day before us, we know god had the ability to do it and we are, as the Baptist creed states the crowning work of his creation. Surely god loves us as much as he does a slimy salamander. The bible says, Matthew 18:19 "Again I say to you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven." I will bet my last penny and give you ten to one odds that if all the Christians in the world got together (that would be around two billion) and prayed for a human arm or leg to grow back it wouldn't happen. That's 1 billion 999 million 999 thousand, 998 more requests than the bible requires. It still won't happen. That is why you see a huge assortment of crutches hanging on the wall at the Catholic shrine of El Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico, but not one glass eye, or wooden leg. If god loves us so much that he sacrificed his only begotten son, it seems reasonable we should at least be designed as well as a salamander. And again, not to belabor the point but he already had experience at this since salamanders were created one day before us.

6. The plumbing for men is a terrible mess. The urethra runs right between the two lobes of the prostrate gland which enlarges as men grow older. This squeezes the urethra nearly shut and makes it difficult and sometimes even impossible for men to urinate. Plus the thing becomes cancerous in 65 % of men over 70. Some design.

7. Then there is the rather indelicate business of sex. What civil engineer in his right mind would build a playground right next to a waste disposal plant?

According to Genesis 2:28 we are to "have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Tell that to an aids victim. These things are so tiny you could hold a thousand of them in the palm of your hand wouldn't be able to see them. After decades of research we still haven't figured out how to beat it. Let me explain what I think happened.

As Bart Ehrman, a leading scholar on the bible has pointed out, we don't have an original copy of the bible. We don't even have an original copy of a copy. What we have are copies of copies of copies and so on. Since all this copying was going on several hundred years before the printing press was invented, everything in it was subject to the mistakes, oversight and the whims of scribes who laboriously copied everything by hand. Once a mistake was made, it got replicated...kinda like a virus. The Baptist creed tells us that God knows everything so we know he knew about the aids virus. With this information in hand there is only one logical conclusion we can draw. That is, a scribe inadvertently left out part of a sentence. Genesis 2:28 should have read, "have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth, except for the aids virus."

Lets level with ourselves. We don't really have dominion over much of anything. As Neal deGrasse Tyson has pointed out, drop any one of us buck naked on almost any place on this planet and see how long we survive.

What a pity we squander our only real gift, our large brains, on fairy tales, when we need to be involved in some serious thinking about how our children and grandchildren are going to survive this mess we have gotten ourselves into.

Of course, if after 2000 years of waiting for the big event, you are absolutely positive that Jesus is coming down out of the clouds go ahead and teach that to your children, just as it was taught to you. But kids are curious. Some of the brighter ones may start to wonder, if man is made in God's image, why did God have a penis and a belly button?

Be prepared to answer that...even if you have to make it up.