Bigfoot And God

Last night (and into the morning), I read with interest your article “I Found Bigfoot” (Cover Story, January 14). I believe you! “Things” did roam California early on. When I was a girl playing in a Sierras forest, I came upon a 12-foot granite rock that had the head of a crocodile and an oval back, with a broken-off tail. Whatever legs it once had were melted away, but the curve of a shoulder showed near its short neck. A baby snuggled alongside. I conjecture that it was a concretion of an ancient saurid. When I told my mother, she listened attentively, then declared that it was probably just a big rock. But ever since, I have kept the picture of it in my memory.

As a child, I dug a lovely clamshell out of a cliff off Fairmount Avenue Extension, south of Mission Valley. Later, I visited a museum at the Mission de San Diego de Alcalá in town. Behold! A mastodon or mammoth tooth on display, dug up near there. Whalebones have appeared in Florida Canyon. At the north end of San Diego High School stadium, down by the 32nd Street Naval Station, and in La Mesa are lesser fossils of shellfish in the dirt. Something lived on earth before us.

I am an armchair scientist but purposeful student of religion, with a couple of predoctoral ancient-language classes taken at SDSU. I studied world religions under the tutelage of Orson Penoyer Jones Sr. and his wife Frances. They agreed that even before our Genesis era, God was rearranging things on our planet from time to time, though they disbelieved in the theory of evolution. My science classes at college did not change my concept of their perspectives. I am not an evolutionist, though I do agree that some few things change in accord with their environment. I am a creationist, I suppose, though I don’t think that all things in the universe were designed before the first half of the first verse of Genesis. What we know about our current environment could have been prepared after the middle of the verse.

Being naturally inquisitive, I have been considering evolution versus creationism all my long life and have connected some of the dots: from time to time, the Magnificent Mind designed marvelous changes here, redone into a “new” Earth numerous times. The first day after the middle of the first verse, a white-hot “light” dissolved water-ice glaciers from the revolving Earth’s surface, so God could redesign it. Along came Adam and Eve, and the serpent. I believe that our current Earth-generation needs now to look to God, through His prophet Jesus, for redemption from the conspiracy of the serpent. According to the Scriptures, another Earth — an eternal one — is in the offing. I am a Christian and look forward to that.

• Sara Brown
• Guatay

Look Out For The Big One

I am not on WIC, but my children are on Healthy Families. I feel for Elizabeth Salaam (“I Never Thought I’d Become a Welfare Queen,” Cover Story, January 7). Why are most county or city employees very cruel, rude, and mean? Public service is supposed to be a noble job. They should be happy that they still have a job, serving the public even if they could no longer afford the toys and luxuries they used to enjoy at the boom of the economy/market. They ought to be thankful that they still have pensions and paid sick days and paid vacation days. My husband and I do not have any of the above. If we get sick, then we are doomed, for we do not have health insurance. If my husband loses his job, then we will be homeless.

Please print an E. Salaam column every now and then; maybe these county/city employees will one day realize that people need people. The Big One — earthquake — may hit San Diego, and people who have gone through so much sorrow and pain are usually the ones who can survive and thus can help.

• Name Withheld
• by Request

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