This was a post to an evolution vs. creationism forum hosted by Amazon.com:
Actually I put it to you that it's impossible to be a Creationist and a Christian. They're diametrically opposed theologies. Creationism is to Christianity what hominy grits is to fresh steamed corn on the cob. Grits takes corn and removes everything that's nourishing and healthy about it, then serves up what's left in bacon fat, usually.
That is, trying to shrink the Bible into a mere historical record--a thing of facts and dates--takes one's focus away from its purpose: to convey purpose, meaning, to make things luminous. That's exactly what Christ accused the Pharisees of doing--of focusing on the Letter, to the neglect of the Spirit. But the Letter without the Spirit is an empty chalice.
The theologian Karen Armstrong discusses this in her book The Battle For God (http://www.amazon.com/Battle-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0345391691/ref=pd_bbs_sr_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200212661&sr=8-4)
It's a history of fundamentalism in all three Abrahamic religions, and though she's pretty opinionated, most of what she says is factual and should be readable by both the faithful and the faithless (so to speak).
Her thesis is that fundamentalism purports to restore each religion to what it was before the modern secular world, ah, evolved--but that they're actually modern reactions to secular empiricism that seek to co-opt secular analytic tools. But in doing so they destroy both religion and secular thought.
I can't prove what I'm about to say but I've got a strong hunch that them as wrote the Bible never imagined it would be treated as a big book of facts--that it was always about the whys of existence, not the whats.
But even if they did think it so, millions of Christians certainly think otherwise, including the two thirds of all American scientists who say they're Christians.
We insult the Discovery Institute because it's a perversion of both religion and science. I find it genuinely painful to watch its "documentaries" or try to read its writings. But I do agree that even if we mock something it crosses the line to stoop to childish namecalling and vulgarities. That always says more about the speaker than the spoken to.
I'm in the interesting position of being a pure empiricist (as opposed to, say, a theist or an atheist) who's been happily married to a devout Christian for decades, and with whom I attend church every Sunday. The reglious part means exactly nothing to me but I find the music inspiring, as well as the sense of community I perceive among the congregation, which, this being a college town, includes a number of PhDs, MDs, LLds etc. Also, curiously enough, my spouse belongs to a Christian religion that takes no stand on evolution one way or another--it simply stays out of it. And as for the Bible, it says that it is true "insofar as it has been correctly translated." I know both science accepters and science deniers in the congregation, though I generally associate more with the former than the latter, of course.
Science is not your enemy. Science only affirms and denies that which can be described and predicted quantitatively. So theology lies outside of science. That's why no scientist can be an atheist. An atheist denies the existence of god. A scientist, at most, should only reply to the question "Do you believe in God?" by saying "Sorry, I don't understand the question." Because in scientific terms God can only be described tautologically. That's not a knock on faith--I'm just saying faith isn't a scientific something. It's something else. Religious people can be studied anthropologically and psychologically but not the religion itself.
If you want an enemy, try our current President. He is the direct cause of more Christians being killed and ethnically "cleansed" than any single person in the last 50 years or more. You see, when we invaded and occupied Iraq, we did it with too few people to maintain civil order, as you can see from the guidelines in the Army's new counterinsurgency manual. In the absence of civil order, the only institution Saddam hadn't demolished was the religious institutions, and out of the Muslim ones came fanatical militias intent on, among other things, getting rid of the Christian subculture that had been in Iraq for nearly 2,000 years. So many Christians have been murdered and churches bombed that Iraq's million or so remaining Christians are mostly in Syria and Jordan. Iraq did the same thing to its Jews back around the time of Israel's establishment, BTW. I guess it's what Muslims do. But they wouldn't have done it if we'd invaded properly instead of violating every principle of war that Von Clausewitz had laid down, or not invaded at all and focused on the country that actually attacked us.
So Bush is the greatest enemy of Christianity on Earth today, along with the Republican Party poo-bahs that backed him up every moronic step of the way.
Do something about him if you want to defend Christianity. Even now you could be working to let those Christians come to America. We owe them, unlike the Mexicans who are actually coming over. Instead we have refused to let any but a handful of Iraqis immigrate, because to do so would be to admit the enormity of our blunders. Right now--today--literally a million Christians are huddled in refugee camps and cheap flats, running out of money, knowing not where they can turn. A majority are women and children and oldsters, because the Sunni and Shiite militias have killed so many of the able-bodied men.
Doesn't worrying about evolution's theoretical dissonance with what some imagine to be Christianity seem to be kind of...wrongly prioritizing things?
That is, trying to shrink the Bible into a mere historical record--a thing of facts and dates--takes one's focus away from its purpose: to convey purpose, meaning, to make things luminous. That's exactly what Christ accused the Pharisees of doing--of focusing on the Letter, to the neglect of the Spirit. But the Letter without the Spirit is an empty chalice.
The theologian Karen Armstrong discusses this in her book The Battle For God (http://www.amazon.com/Battle-God-Karen-A
It's a history of fundamentalism in all three Abrahamic religions, and though she's pretty opinionated, most of what she says is factual and should be readable by both the faithful and the faithless (so to speak).
Her thesis is that fundamentalism purports to restore each religion to what it was before the modern secular world, ah, evolved--but that they're actually modern reactions to secular empiricism that seek to co-opt secular analytic tools. But in doing so they destroy both religion and secular thought.
I can't prove what I'm about to say but I've got a strong hunch that them as wrote the Bible never imagined it would be treated as a big book of facts--that it was always about the whys of existence, not the whats.
But even if they did think it so, millions of Christians certainly think otherwise, including the two thirds of all American scientists who say they're Christians.
We insult the Discovery Institute because it's a perversion of both religion and science. I find it genuinely painful to watch its "documentaries" or try to read its writings. But I do agree that even if we mock something it crosses the line to stoop to childish namecalling and vulgarities. That always says more about the speaker than the spoken to.
I'm in the interesting position of being a pure empiricist (as opposed to, say, a theist or an atheist) who's been happily married to a devout Christian for decades, and with whom I attend church every Sunday. The reglious part means exactly nothing to me but I find the music inspiring, as well as the sense of community I perceive among the congregation, which, this being a college town, includes a number of PhDs, MDs, LLds etc. Also, curiously enough, my spouse belongs to a Christian religion that takes no stand on evolution one way or another--it simply stays out of it. And as for the Bible, it says that it is true "insofar as it has been correctly translated." I know both science accepters and science deniers in the congregation, though I generally associate more with the former than the latter, of course.
Science is not your enemy. Science only affirms and denies that which can be described and predicted quantitatively. So theology lies outside of science. That's why no scientist can be an atheist. An atheist denies the existence of god. A scientist, at most, should only reply to the question "Do you believe in God?" by saying "Sorry, I don't understand the question." Because in scientific terms God can only be described tautologically. That's not a knock on faith--I'm just saying faith isn't a scientific something. It's something else. Religious people can be studied anthropologically and psychologically but not the religion itself.
If you want an enemy, try our current President. He is the direct cause of more Christians being killed and ethnically "cleansed" than any single person in the last 50 years or more. You see, when we invaded and occupied Iraq, we did it with too few people to maintain civil order, as you can see from the guidelines in the Army's new counterinsurgency manual. In the absence of civil order, the only institution Saddam hadn't demolished was the religious institutions, and out of the Muslim ones came fanatical militias intent on, among other things, getting rid of the Christian subculture that had been in Iraq for nearly 2,000 years. So many Christians have been murdered and churches bombed that Iraq's million or so remaining Christians are mostly in Syria and Jordan. Iraq did the same thing to its Jews back around the time of Israel's establishment, BTW. I guess it's what Muslims do. But they wouldn't have done it if we'd invaded properly instead of violating every principle of war that Von Clausewitz had laid down, or not invaded at all and focused on the country that actually attacked us.
So Bush is the greatest enemy of Christianity on Earth today, along with the Republican Party poo-bahs that backed him up every moronic step of the way.
Do something about him if you want to defend Christianity. Even now you could be working to let those Christians come to America. We owe them, unlike the Mexicans who are actually coming over. Instead we have refused to let any but a handful of Iraqis immigrate, because to do so would be to admit the enormity of our blunders. Right now--today--literally a million Christians are huddled in refugee camps and cheap flats, running out of money, knowing not where they can turn. A majority are women and children and oldsters, because the Sunni and Shiite militias have killed so many of the able-bodied men.
Doesn't worrying about evolution's theoretical dissonance with what some imagine to be Christianity seem to be kind of...wrongly prioritizing things?
1 comment:
If you’re interested in Karen Armstrong, you might want to look at her latest interview on Pakistan, Islam and secularism in the Reuters religion blog FaithWorld.
Post a Comment