If you claim to be an adherent to a particular denomination but don’t actually subscribe entirely to its dogma, then no you’re not technically an adherent. But that’s not the only way to be religious. It’s absolute fact that the Bible has been modified by humans even if the details of that are contested, and you can hold whatever belief you like about the exact degree to which it is the absolute word of God. You can get outcast and bullied by the bigwig conformists, but your personal faith is no less valid from an objective standpoint. And if you want to be less evil in your beliefs, then I can only see that as a good thing.
Splat, I take two massive objections to your statements about macro-evolution. Firstly, there are many, many transitional fossils. Secondly, because of the incredibly biased nature of fossilization, it’s not true that the abundance of ‘transitional’ organisms throughout history would automatically result in the abundance of transitional forms in the fossil record.
But everyone knows BM is going to jump in here with the best arguments. That’s such a turn off to putting together a fuller argument.
As for splitting the thread, I don’t think that’s necessary, and I’m not sure it will be, or can be. Although in theory this topic comes with two components (Religion versus Science in describing the nature of reality; and Doctrine versus Not in describing the nature of temptation and sin), they are so highly involved in each other that for either to lose the other dramatically limits the valid points that can be made. We’ll see, but I’m not in favour of splitting.
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