A Dialogue with Augustine

I wrote this for my Augustinian Culture Seminar Class (ACS) and was amazed by my work.

Augustine:
“Well, I do have some things to say about you. I will save the obvious one for last. I like your ideas on education; I feel that you have the right idea about how education should not be forced upon people. There is no use for bombarding the student with information. Secondly, I also agree that people need to be as productive as possible. Even though you believe that people need to be productive in manners other than religion, it is good that you see that people these days are extremely unproductive. I also agree that evil needs to be punished whenever possible, especially when people start trending towards evil. Now even though I agreed with you on the previous topics, I have to strongly disagree with your viewpoint on religion. I am, of course, a devoted catholic, as should you be. God is the greatest being in all of the heavens, and the fact that you question His existence is appalling. How can you deny the fact that all that you see before you was created by God, and His good work? The world was created in seven days because it says so in the bible. The Earth is the center of the universe, as it says so in the bible. All you people ever want are facts, and refuse to ever take anything on faith. The bible is the word of God and needs to be treated as such. To read it as you would any book is blasphemy!”
Me:
“I am in fact much like you. On nearly all topics, we will agree, all topics except religion. When you were my age, you were far worse off than I am now. You believed in a religion similar to that of paganism, and yet you have become a saint! I must first make myself clear when I say where I stand on the topic of religion. If there is a God, he created the universe, created the laws of physics, and that is it. Even if he does exist, he has no role in our universe anymore. There are countless things in the bible, whether it is about our creation or otherwise, that have been proven completely false by the scientific method. The Earth was not created in seven days; it was made over the course of hundreds of thousands of years by the compiling of debris leftover from a super-massive star that exploded, leaving the elements that we have on Earth. The Earth is also not the center of the universe, as your little buddy Galileo started to point out. He and the pope never really got along after that. We are nowhere special in the universe, we are near the edge of our own galaxy, around one of the most average stars imaginable, and yet your precious bible claims that we are the center of the universe! That is an extremely ignorant thing to believe. We have the evidence that proves you wrong, it is your turn to come up with a rebuttal, but you find that you cannot, as your bible cannot answer these questions. It will only spit out memorable sayings, whether they are accurate or not. Yes, it is a bit more romantic to say that the Earth was created in seven days, and on the seventh day God placed his greatest creation, man, on Earth. We have evolved from the single cell organisms from the bottom of the seas. Those cells grew into aquatic life, which eventually moved onto land, and created mammals, which eventually mutated in the Cro-Magnon species. They eventually evolved into Homo-Erectus, us. We were not placed here by the hand of God; we were bombarded by genetic altering solar radiation until we had thumbs and a brain large enough to know how to use them. The bible was not written by God, it was written by his supposed followers. You cannot confirm that the people writing this were even sane! For someone to believe such nonsense is amazing to me. There is no way that I believe that a band of Jews were able to escape the Egyptians by parting the Red Sea, and then survived the wrath of the desert for decades. For all that matters, Moses could have been a schizophrenic maniac that wanted to paint the doors of the city with animal blood! If someone were to do this today, they would be sent to a mental institution immediately, and indefinitely. The bible is a fun story, but that’s it, a story, and nothing more than that.”