Ship Sets Sail With Ease, Carrying Cargos of Cheese

My first post...I have to admit that this is not quite the same as the feeling one gets opening a brand-new spiral notebook, which hasn't yet been written in, and feels one's hand over the fresh paper, wondering exatcly what is going to go from mind to pen(cil) to paper. But it is exciting nonetheless. (This part, and others, have been added a few minutes after the initial post. I suppose the initial post should have some length, but this one already has plenty, and I'm not sure how much I can add still.)

I suppose for this to make sense I should drop two random details about myself: I am a fairly strongly orthodox Christian (think Apostles' Creed, not Eastern Rite) and I am a believer Darwin's theory of evolution insofar as it is taken along with a dose of theism.

It has often been thought that Christianity and Darwin's theory of evolution are incompatible. I have often wondered about this. I first wrestled with the issue in my 10th grade biology class, where evolution was more than just a passing subject. I was forced to think about whether the six-day creation story of Genesis, and just how well it worked. My teacher, Brother Dan (this was and still is a Catholic high school this took place in, but the teacher has sadly moved on), opened my eyes to the possibility that perhaps evolution had taken place along Darwinian lines or similar, but that God had been an integral part of the process. Not until talking with Brother Dan did I learn that Darwin never actually rejected God. Darwin's God was simply less directly involved with the process of creation.

It might be worth pointing out that some of the imagery used in Genesis could almost be seen as a poetic counterpart to Darwin's theory, and the general order of creation (earth - animal - man) is maintained. The best parallel in my opinion is between the statement "the earth was formless and empty" and the thought of a very early earth (let us say 4 billion years ago, approximately) which was covered with magma and randomly shifting rocks in such a way that it might have been called "formless." "Empty" may be another matter, for technically it wasn't so. But the thought that "the earth was formless and empty" combined with that image of magma and random shifts of rock seems to me to be a very beautiful one.

I suppose I should try and give people somewhat of an idea of what sort of blog to expect. The Ongoing Saga will not be a political blog--but neither will it be apolitical. It will not be a blog focused necessarily upon themes of religion, philosophy, theology, or any combination of the three, but those subjects have as much of a chance of coming to mind as any. Frankly, Sharp Cheddar Cheese: The Ongoing Saga should be expected to be about a lot of things: My transition from high school to college and my life in college afterwards, religion, morality, life, God, politics, and anything else that comes to mind. It will also likely serve as a creative outlet for creative writings and drawings and whatnot. So, really, Sharp Cheddar Cheese will be about just about anything that goes from mind to keyboard to weblog, just as when one writes in a notebook, one often writes about whatever can make its way from mind to pen(cil) to paper. And so we see that perhaps the two new starts are not so disparate after all.