The dark ages?

Are we still living in the dark ages? I mean this kind of stuff can't still be going on? Can it?

This type of religious thought just makes no sense to me. Maybe it's my rational mind. Maybe it's that I've stopped hoping (or praying) for miracles. Maybe it's that I think of God more and more in the tradition of the deists as that of the "Great Watchmaker," who has set things in motion and receded.

Then again, I guess what is one person's miracle might be another person's stroke of luck.

When my parents were diagnosed with lung cancer, I prayed (and still do) every day. But did I vainly expect a miracle? Of course not. Today lung cancer is the equivalent of consumption or tuberculosis from the 19th century. It's a death sentence. I knew that. Yet, I am forever grateful for those extra few months - maybe a year - that chemo therapy and radiation gave my parents.

Would I have ever not wanted them to seek that option, hoping instead for a miracle? Never.

Why is it so hard for some believers to accept scientific facts or aid?

I like what Pope John Paul II wrote regarding the Catholic Church's take on evolution (remember Paul II was a well read scholar who did - albeit several centuries later - acquitted Galileo for his heretical views) and the need to reconcile opposing views, "truth cannot contradict truth." Of course, Genesis can allow for a very liberal reading that could quite possibly account for the billions of years of evolution.

This I can understand.

I cannot, though, understand ludicrous interpretations of scientific facts and doctrine, ala the creationism promoted by such places as Liberty university (check out this book for an interesting read) where a question on a religious history test read as follows - True or False, Noah's ark was large enough to hold dinosaurs.

I'm not making that up.

As entertaining as that possibility is, I just have one question, why didn't Noah send out a pterodactyl as opposed to a dove?