The current Catholic Church actively discourages a "literal" interpretation of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. It regards creationism and creationists as an embarrassment and for this reason doesn't proselytize in rural America. In fact, the official paper of my own diocese (I did tell you I used to be Catholic, correct?) once ran an article saying the Catholic Church would let the Fundamentalist churches have the creationists. So much for being a "universal" church. Meanwhile, totem poles are okay.
The Church does not reject science either, and what you are trying to link as hypocrisy is actually the Church adhering to her both/and theology. It is not impossible that the creation of the world created a Big Bang, though there is no doubt in the Church that the creator of that band is God.
And I said nothing that implied a rejection of science, unless you insist on maintaining that the world could not possibly have been created as narrated in Genesis because "that isn't how the world works."
Genesis says it took six days to create the world.
Indeed it does . . . not just in Genesis 1, but in several other places as well.
The New Testament tells us that one day is like a thousand years to God and vice versa.
I suggest you go back and read that passage (which is a quotation from the Hebrew Bible) again. It says nothing about the length or process of creation, but merely that G-d dwells outside time and what seems like "slackness" in the delay of the "second coming" isn't really slackness at all.
The Kolbe Center recently posted this article by Hugh Owen dealing with this very passage. Why don't you read it?
Therefore, you are relying on a false understanding of what the Church teaches to paint me personally as a hypocrite. Please do not make it personal.
Here you are 100% correct. I do not know you at all, and I took the hypocrisy of the teachings of the Catholic Church and applied them to you personally when I don't even know where in the Catholic spectrum you fit. I was wrong to do this. I attacked you personally, just as I have on occasion been attacked personally. I treated you exactly as I would not want to be treated. This is a great wrong I have committed against you, and I ask your forgiveness and pray G-d will grant me strength to restrain my emotions in the future.
Forgiven:)
I don’t agree with you obviously, but I think you take too seriously what some Catholics feel towards the “fundies” that believe the earth is only a few thousand years old.
I go by official Church teaching when considering all that is put before me, even by Catholic scholars and theologians.
The Church does not say that one must believe or discount as fantasy the first eleven books of the Bible. It is open to the science of the big bang, though closed as to the author of the universe and of life.
I don’t make a judgment actually. I don’t know. I stand by my original statement that it is a mystery that I can live without fully knowing unless and until God chooses to confirm or correct what is said in Genesis. He created everything from nothing. I accept that in faith and it is enough for me.