This is the Inaugural Essay of Logotech. In it, I introduce the core ideas that inform and drive the most important content of this website. Please note that there are links to go to a specific page, and to the next and previous pages.
I apologize for its length and unusual style, which is not typical of a religiously oriented website. The style is more like a science article after the sytle of "Connections" or of Issac Asimov's popular science articles. The format to pose a question or puzzle, pursue it, and pursue any resulting rabbit trails. The goal is actually at the end of what looks like a rabbit trail, but turns out to be really important. The point of the style is to teach that appearances are deceiving, and to explore all avenues and angles.
A Celebration of Science and Humanity?
"A celebration of Science and Humanity" is how Darwin Day, February 12, is being promoted by the Secular Materialists as a holiday. It got started in 2004, and the linked website serves as a central registry for celebration events being planned and as an archive of past celebrations. The fact that the word "evolution" is being used in place of "life cycle" so as to permit an unwitting conflation of well accepted and undisputed concepts like stellar and galactic evolution with biological evolution by natural selection should give you an idea of the motivations behind the holiday. The wrapping of the whole of science about a specific theory of origins whose original proponent was flat-out wrong on every major prediction he made is equalled by Marxism's marketing of itself as a "scientific" uber-discipline encompassing history, sociology, and economics. Most intolerable is the deliberate association of Abraham Lincoln with Darwin Day, based solely on the fact that the date is also Lincoln's Birthday! Lincoln was the clearest, most explicit, and relentless expositor and advocate of an American brand of Civil Religion that urged a worship of the Judaeo-Christian God under the guise of Providence. In this, Lincoln was definitely a theist, because the answer to the question of whether God interacts with creation defines the difference between Theism and Deism, and the record is full of accounts of him petitioning Providence during the Civil War, and urging his fellow citizens to do the same. Indeed, if religion is to be tolerated during Darwin Day (and in a society urged to carry the spirit of Darwin Day into all other days), it would be of the Deistic persuasion. The effects of Lincoln's work in this area continue to this day, in which the citizens of the United States are consistently polled as one of the most religious populations in earth.
Holidays and Holy Days
How should the Theistic branch of the Christian Church respond to the establishment and promotion of Darwin Day? There are a multitude of ways to do so, and a complete reponse would require pursuing more than one avenue. The response I am proposing here is to take an existing celebration of some event in the Christian calendar and promote it as the Christian equivalent of "Darwin Day". This would require some re-interpretation of the event behind the "holy day".
The main problem with promoting the most appropriate event, Creation, is that it lacks a traditional and accepted date. Some wags would suggest that we use Lord Usser's date for creation, but I would tend to go with the Ancient Hebrews in this regard. Unfortunately, while each of the appointed feast days of the Jews had a specific purpose, such as celebrating the outcome of a specific event in history, or a religious exercise that prophetically pointed to a future event, none of them can be plausibly said to celebrate the act of Creation itself. There's the feast of First Fruits, which is a celebration-in-advance in the Spring of the promise of the harvest, which is celebrated as the feast of Trumpets in the Fall. However, those feasts would be the Jewish and Christian holy days that would best correspond to April 22, Earth Day, than Darwin Day. Even then, the correspondence is a bit forced between Trumpets and Earth Day, since Thanksgiving is the counterpart to Trumpets. (The highest "holy day" of Lincoln's Civil Religion would be Thanksgiving.)
Holy Days and the Right Reasons for Them
Another problem for picking a day that the Christian Church is going to put up against Darwin Day is that we've got to pick the day based on Christian criteria, not the world's. This means picking a day on which a significant event occurred that contributed significantly either to doctrine or practice. To illustrate this, let's look at the two most prominent days of the Christian Calendar: Christmas and Easter, after we define some terminology.
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