So what? What does any of this have to do with Banned HWA and the processing of the WCG experience that it serves? Because, to me and in my own life, the not so deep time perspective of the Bible kept me off course in that which perhaps I should more have done with my life personally. I and it kept me from following my real curiosities about it all. I was too easily satisfied with the myths and tales woven by people I never met and who's world view was not one that most would take seriously today. Except I did until I couldn't any longer.
Since time was short in the 1960's and it was all going to end, my budding interests in dinosaurs, fossils and all that I would later come to understand as Paleontology, mattered not a bit. Having grown up very conservatively Dutch Reformed Calvinist, I was already blind to the concept that there was more, much more to life and the history of it all. The lenses and filters I viewed everything with and through was "Bible Time", which is a very limited view of all that actually was the real history of our planet and life on it including ourselves.
It is too late for me to follow my bliss as they say. I will never be the Paleontologist I now know lay just under the surface of my young life. Whether I "wasted" my life in becoming versed in the story of Bugs Bunny, which I might as well have studied, or not depends on how I view it. I learned a lot and sometimes learning what you don't believe is just as helpful as what you do now believe with more evidence and based on less faith in the unbelievable.
But perhaps just one young person, male or female, might catch their own vision of wanting to do what they actually love and not be sidetracked by the pettiness and limited views of those piously convicted but marginally informed as I was when younger.
Having been a pastor for over 1/3 of what I suspect my lifetime to be, I get to share here my experience and conclusions just as all other do. Just because they don't lead me into another splinter of WCG or back full circle to my Presbyterian Dutch Reformed Roots, as it did my parents who were both Elder and Deaconess in WCG, My sister and son now somewhat Evangelical with another in Catholic mode, does not mean I have no right to share my own experience and conclusions.
It may not help most No doubt it will piss off a few here that I no longer see as they see or am as they are, but it might help one follow their passion for learning instead of getting stuck in the Bronze and Iron Age views of others real or imagined.
The Wonder of it all...