View Single Post
Old 07-12-2014, 11:37 PM   #54
jallanite
Shade of Carn Dûm
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Toronto
Posts: 479
jallanite is a guest of Tom Bombadil.
The three examples I found of anti-Tolkien preaching by Christians are rather odd. All three authors claim that they only noticed what they say are discrepancies between what Tolkien’s writing tells and what their religion supposedly teaches recently. This suggests to me that all three writers do not know what their faith officially teaches, or they are deliberately lying.

That the Earth revolves around the Sun, not the reverse, was supposedly first proved by Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BCE), but only persisted as a minor theory. Then it was revised by Copernicus and supported and his version first fully published in 1543, the year of his death. Galileo Galliei using the newly invented telescope found that observations of planetary bodies fully supported the Copernican system. Arguments ensued, and Galileo was forced unwillingly to recant his theories by Rome in 1633. The Pope and the Magisterium were in the event shown to be utterly wrong in their condemnation of these theories. But not until 1753 did the Church cease to make fools of themselves by no longer listing any works supporting the then generally accepted Copernican theory in The Index of Forbidden Books. Pope Pius VII approved a decree in 1822 by the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition to allow the printing of Copernican books in Rome.

Since the Galileo fiasco, the Roman Catholic Church has been very careful about making pronouncements on findings of scientists. For what is taught by the Roman Catholic Church, see http://www.catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution or http://americamagazine.org/issue/786...ntal-challenge. The three authors’ insistence that the account of creation in Genesis is to be considered to be complete and to be taken literally is not part of current official Roman Catholic teaching. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi..._and_evolution .

These authors pounce on Tolkien’s avowed fiction rather than on the numerous purportedly factual writers who have proven that the Earth was created long before 6,000 BCE and have proven the theory of evolution, as much as anything can be proven. The Roman Catholic Church no longer denies this officially. These writers are cranks who are pushing an agenda of Biblical inerrancy which not supported by their own church.

Nor, as one of the authors claims without providing support, is Tolkien’s creation story particularly Gnostic. The author does not bother to indicate which of the many Gnostic texts he finds to be similar to Tolkien’s creation story. I think he is just making this up.

They claim that nothing in the Bible is a myth is a least arguably untrue. These author state that position, but don’t bother to provide support for that position, I presume is because they prefer not to get into the doubts which many Roman Catholic theologians have put forth, as well as those that non-Roman Catholics have put forth. It’s much easier to just pronounce your sources as entirely true without looking at any evidence, and then blame Tolkien for not following completely a creation story which the Roman Catholic church itself no longer officially believes to be necessarily fully true.

Last edited by jallanite; 07-17-2014 at 06:13 PM.
jallanite is offline   Reply With Quote