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Thoughts from a faith-head
Jan. 27th, 2010 09:06 pmI cannot now remember where I first encountered the idea that two people of equal intelligence, given the same facts, can in complete good faith reach different conclusions. It's a simple truth about the enormously complex process of trying to make sense of an enormously complicated world. I'm not just talking about opinions shaped by experience, training, prejudice, or habit: even scientists, whose basic tools are facts and logic, often disagree, sometimes spectacularly, and it takes a great deal more fact-finding and logical thinking to show which of them was right.
Which is why it's infuriating when a scientists insists on telling people what their religious beliefs are. Quoth Dawkins, re Pat Robertson, re Haiti: "Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition."
I actually share Dawkins' view that linking catastrophe to human behaviour is a dubious, hazardous theology. We behave messily because we live in a messy universe, and not the other way around. But how the heck we're supposed to get from "the Bible describes Jesus casting out demons" to "Haiti made a pact with the Devil" I have no idea. Presumably the idea is that having accepted one supernatural event, you then accept them all. And you wondered why there has never been any controversy over theological opinions! How is this illogic any different to insisting that accepting evolution must inevitably lead to, for example, eugenics?
"Just read your own Bible," chides Dawkins. The Southern Baptist he disparages uses the Bible as a direct riposte to Robertson: "Is the judgment of God something we can claim to understand in this sense... No... Jesus himself warned his disciples against this kind of presumption." (I assume he's referring to Matthew 7, but my theology's very slender. Help?)
This is what I'm referring to when I say that militant atheists and fundamentalists have, in a sense, the same beliefs. Or, to borrow from Alan Watts, nobody believes in God like an atheist. ;)
Which is why it's infuriating when a scientists insists on telling people what their religious beliefs are. Quoth Dawkins, re Pat Robertson, re Haiti: "Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition."
I actually share Dawkins' view that linking catastrophe to human behaviour is a dubious, hazardous theology. We behave messily because we live in a messy universe, and not the other way around. But how the heck we're supposed to get from "the Bible describes Jesus casting out demons" to "Haiti made a pact with the Devil" I have no idea. Presumably the idea is that having accepted one supernatural event, you then accept them all. And you wondered why there has never been any controversy over theological opinions! How is this illogic any different to insisting that accepting evolution must inevitably lead to, for example, eugenics?
"Just read your own Bible," chides Dawkins. The Southern Baptist he disparages uses the Bible as a direct riposte to Robertson: "Is the judgment of God something we can claim to understand in this sense... No... Jesus himself warned his disciples against this kind of presumption." (I assume he's referring to Matthew 7, but my theology's very slender. Help?)
This is what I'm referring to when I say that militant atheists and fundamentalists have, in a sense, the same beliefs. Or, to borrow from Alan Watts, nobody believes in God like an atheist. ;)
