//Colorado is a fairly large state with regard to land mass, and though there are larger cities in it, much of Colorado is spacious and good for enjoying the outdoors. (Don't have to travel far to go camping).//

Sounds a lot like Australia.

//There's a mountian range that goes through Colorado that gives it a good number of ski and snowboard parks around the mountian range//

Except for the mountains and the snow.

//making the housing market unaffordable.//

Sounds even more like Australia.

//I haven't been to a Pentecostal service but someday I mean to.//

I have. Once, out of curiosity. And it will only be the once.

It was scary, so I terminated that line of research post haste... rocking back and forth, muttering in gibberish, suffering fits... it's the same sort of behaviour that makes junkies creepy. I felt like I'd accidentally walked into a cult meeting... their theology may or may not be broadly similar, but their method of worship is so confronting that I could never accept it.

//The critism I hear is some Pentecostal churches are growing a fake kind of showiness to them//

Growing? I think you use the wrong tense there, mate. The phrase should be 'have grown'.

But they're not alone... I was raised Catholic, and typically those guys do love a bit of fake showiness. But not always... I've heard Mass said by a Catholic priest with no vestments, no church building, the only physical trappings being two twigs square-lashed to form a rudimentary cross and the communion wafers.

"For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

And the rest is just vanity (i.e. the sin of pride).

//However the bible is still authoritive.//

Really? On everything?

Nah, you've lost me there.

//When the bible says something though I would put it under a lot of consideration. Including the genology that paints mankind's history as a lot shorter on earth.//

I hope you give equal consideration to all the other evidence beyond the Bible which indicates otherwise.

//Having a younger Earth isn't the hardest concept to swallow though.//

But a 6,000 year old universe opens up a bigger can of worms than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

How can we see so many stars? Light travels at the speed of light, hence the name. If the light has only had 6,000 years to reach us, then we can only see stars that are a maximum of 6,000 light years away. But if all the stars we can see had to be packed into a 6,000ly radius sphere, we'd have to seriously re-work the laws of gravity. And if we did that, then apples wouldn't fall off trees in the manner in which they are routinely observed to do by simple apple farmers who don't give a toss about physics.

As above, so below.

Sir Isaac Newton, devout Christian and third greatest physicist ever, understood that. It was an essential part of his theological beliefs that God's Law was universal... the law that governed the apple falling from the tree applied to all of creation. A devout Christian and a great scientist all the way… and he's not alone.

In fact, if I had to do a quick who's who of important scientists who were devout Christians… turns out to be most of them. But they didn't get that way by deciding that everything you ever need to know is conveniently written in their Bible. They took a view that if the Scriptures were a creation of God, to be read, understood and appreciated by men of faith, so too was the world and universe around them: to their way of thinking, the greater their depth of understanding of the world, the closer they came to God.

I'll quote from one of my favourite philosophers, Baruch Spinoza:

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved. ”

Do you really think God gave us such a wondrous creation, and such marvellous brains to wonder about it with, in order that we might sit and stare at in astonishment like fools? That almost seems sacrilegious to me.

//Nor that God created it all.//

Nah, that's fine. The guy that invented the idea of the Big Bang was a Catholic priest by name of Georges Lemaitre:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

I think he was quite happy with the idea of God as the creator.

//There are a decent number of explainations to these ideas to counter the ideas that the earth is older//

All right, let's hear 'em then.

//(or at least man's history in it is younger)//

And them.

//The harder element to swallow is the ORDER of which the earth was formed, not the age.//

The order? What, like dinosaurs before chickens?

I don't see the theological issue here: the Lord works in mysterious ways. If He wants to 'waste' a few millenia of His eternity redesigning T-rex into KFC for the nutritional convenience of his chosen creation, then Praise the Lord!

//I still trust the bible as authoritive even without an explaination.//

Why?

//Thanks for the reference, but they tell me there are a variety of beliefs in pantheism.//

Yes, of course.

//Including a view that God is mostly nature (much like nature worshiping religions)//

No, It is all Nature. Entirely unlike nature worshipping religions, which are usually just congregations of sad old hippies who've adopted some form of neopaganism. Nature and nature are not necessarily the same thing.

//Your beliefs though are what I'm asking about.//

I find this an adequate summation:

"In the impersonal form, pantheism is taken as meaning that the universe itself fits the description of what God should be perfectly, so rather than inventing a character, it is best to refer to the universe as God. This belief distances itself from the world of dogmatic religion, but allows pantheists to use the vivid language of spirituality to express experiences of wonder, awe, and connectedness in the face of Nature."

Not_Now.Soon,

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for a young Earth. I know what evidence you're going to cite to Toni Lavis, as I was well versed in it all myself when I was a Christian. However, all the so-called evidence ignores the inconvenient facts which debunk them.

Take the one about the Moon's recession from Earth, for example: it ignores the fact that the Moon's recession is speeding up due to the decrease in tidal friction which has resulted from the break up of Gondwana. Or the one about the human population, which assumes that the rate of population growth has always remained static.

All creationist claims are debunked at http://www.talkorigins.org.

An extensive list of the most common creationist claims can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html.

I'd look your evidence up there before citing it.

http://www.pickle-publishing.com/papers/triple-crown-marcellus-ii.htm
If you need to be convinced that God does not exist you should read and digest this book "The Triple Crown" by Valerie Pirie. It goes to show what a shonky lot aspired to the papal throne. A real God would have had nothing to do with any of them.

David