Mike Huckabee doesn’t want to discuss the sermons he gave while he served as an evangelical pastor. Why not? Is he embarrasssed? Tim Grieve of Salon.com’s  “War Room” writes about the evolution of Huckabee’s “explanation” about how people came to exist on Earth.   In one of Huckabee’s early documented sermons he proclaimed:

“It doesn’t embarrass me one bit to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people.”

As we noted the other day, it does seem to “embarrass” Huckabee the candidate to say that now. Over the past six months, Huckabee has gone from saying that he doesn’t believe in evolution, to saying that he doesn’t think he evolved from apes, to saying that evolution is “not a yes or no question” and that he thinks “there was a God behind” the creation of man, to saying that while he believes God created man, he doesn’t know “how he did it, in the intricate manner.” “I think some people get all wrapped up [in] ‘OK, was it, did he take the rib out of Adam? Did he make it like’ — I have no reason to believe he didn’t. But I don’t know.”

Is that the same thing as saying that you’re not embarrassed to declare that “Adam and Eve were real people”? Huckabee told reporters back in October that if there’s a conflict between science and what he believes of God, he’ll stick with God because science changes and God doesn’t. Maybe that’s right. But the question is, has Huckabee changed? Is what he said as a pastor different from what he says as a candidate? Which one represents the “real” Huckabee? If a man says that his faith drives the decisions he makes, aren’t voters entitled to ask those questions and expect that they’ll be answered?

Tim Grieve raises another good question regarding all of these deeply religious people who don’t want to talk about their specific religious beliefs.  What if Huckabes believes that the world is going to end in three years (it’s not clear what he believes in that regard)?  Wouldn’t that affect the sorts of policies he would promote as president?  You’d think so.

Here’s my take.   Here’s the reason these guys (Romney and Huckabee) resist freely talking about their specific beliefs in front of a big general audience (not just their fellow believers hunkering down inside of a church).  They know that they’ll look silly because their beliefs are silly.  When I say “silly” I mean unsupported by any credible evidence.  

Not that people who make far-fetched supernatural claims are trying to be silly.  In my opinion, there is a serious need believers are trying to address, but it has nothing to do with anything supernatural.  For more on why people really proclaim the oxymoronic sorts of things they proclaim in churches, see this post.