"Eohippus Encyclopedia Dream" found-object sculpture

Growing up, I was constantly picked on at school, so I spent most of my free time in the school library flipping through books and encyclopedias.  I would browse through all subjects, but mainly I read geology, natural history, the history of science, etc.  

Now I sometimes notice fundamentalist experts on television explaining all the "undisputable" holes and contradictions in the theory of evolution.  They seem to places a big emphasis on color charts and use of important sounding technical jargon, but they rarely bother to get basic facts right or take into account major scientific breakthroughs.  Usually they seem content to argue with Darwin's original text of over 150 years ago and ignore more recent work such as genetic mapping, which can be used to show how and when species diverged.  Usually they present arguments that could be debunked using only what I had read by the time I was in junior high.

When sloppy and incomplete information is presented as definitive and beyond contradiction, how can it be anything other than a lie?  

Does God really need us to lie for Him?  Is our faith in Jesus so shallow that we need to believe that the world started 6000 years ago just to prop it up?  If God wanted us to interpret the Bible literally for political purposes, why did Jesus continually speak in parables?  Is our faith in God or in our creed?  Is there a contradiction between the Gospels and evolutionary science, or rather is the contradiction between our creed and evolutionary science?

It was only a few hundred years ago that Christians argued that the world could not be round because it didn't say so in the Bible.  Those Christians are directly responsible for reasonable people losing their faith and Western culture becoming even more secular.  Are contemporary fundamentalists fighting a culture war or unintentionally discrediting religion?

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