A Heretic of Sorts

I am a born-again believer in Jesus Christ with a guarantee of an afterlife in heaven. I believe that Jesus has paid the penalty for my sins on the cross and no power on heaven or earth can negate this.

My beliefs are not in lock-step with other believers, however. I believe in the Big Bang theory of the dawn of the physical universe. I believe this beginning was 13.5 billion years ago. I do not believe in a six-day creation. Each day in the Genesis account could be any time interval, say 2.25 billion years. God certainly could have created the entire physical universe in six days but the scientific evidence makes this unlikely. The red-shift in the most distant objects detected in the universe indicates they are moving away from us and calculations determine that their light would have to travel 13.5 million years to the lens of the Hubbel Telescope, as defined by the velocity of light.

There is nothing blasphemous about this. It is merely the observation of science. The "Young Earth Society" , those who espouse the literal six-day creation refute this as a blasphemous assault on the tenets of conservative Christianity. This is not surprising since Roman Catholicism considered the science of Copernicus and Galileo heresy against God and the church. Galileo lived his later years under house arrest even though he recanted his theory of the heliocentric solar system which is now a basic truth of astronomy.

I stand in awe as I look to the heavens on a clear, still night, seeing myriads of stars that look small and cold - mere points of light. In reality each star is maybe a hundred times the size of our sun and may have a million times more mass. Each star is a sphere of white-hot gas, kept hot by an inferno in the bowels of that star, called nuclear fusion. I believe that God created each star with skill and craftsmanship. He created a universe full of stars. He just did not do it in six days, since He is not subject to the constraints of time.

Since I do not march with the evangelicals in lock-step in this respect I am a heretic of sorts.

Friday Nights


Girls flirted outside the Pinball Palace,
Outside the din of Rock and Roll
And clouds of pungent cigarette smoke,
 With stern-faced boys in tight white t-shirts
Tucked inside their tight blue jeans
Proclaimed their manliness.


Pedestrians crossed the hot blacktop,
Wary of the evening ruckus,
Wary of the aggregation,
They went about their business urgent,
 In the heat, the heat, the inescapable, clinging heat.
The payday cavalcade went slowly, 
Cars as far as eye could see
Crawled, inched past traffic cops
In the payday parade.


The boys and girls,
The luster and bluster
The hubris and the boasting
The laughter and the smoking
Soon became a throng
As some boys sat on car fenders
And their black engineer boots swung
Back and forth, back and forth.



G. robert Nordling