Atheists’ God

My quotation of the week is from Michael Ruse  The evolution-creation struggle. Harvard UP, 2006  p274:

“For a start, atheists like [Richard] Dawkins and [Jerry] Coyne might consider taking a serious look at contemporary Christian theology(or the theology of other faiths, for that matter), rather than simply parroting the simplistic schoolboy travesties of religion* on which their critiques are founded.  Conversely, Christians like [Keith] Ward or [Holmes] Rolston might be encouraged to dig more deeply into modern, professional evolutionary biology and to start to get some understanding of its strengths and triumphs before they cast around for alternatives like self-organization.”

*These are described sympathetically but critically in the first part of Marcus J Borg  The God we never knew: beyond dogmatic religion to a more authentic contemporary faith.  HarperOne, 1998.

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Go to church or pay up

Watching American politics can sometimes be a dispiriting experience.  Here’s a chap in a preacher’s robe saying that any American not attending church, for their own well-being, should be penalised through the tax system.  He doesn’t mention Christianity as such, but one has to assume that this is what he means when he talks about mandatory attendance at church; in which case, where does that leave Buddhists, say, or …um… Mormons?  (Acknowledgement to the People for the American Way,via YouTube).

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Papal succession

Pius XI

A Sunday afternoon’s triviality about all the Popes since before the First World War seems to show that whilst any one of them is on the Throne of St Peter, no fewer than six of his immediate successors are all already living.  This holds true for the three consecutive ones, Pius X (died 1914), Benedict XV (died 1922) and Pius XI (died 1939), who reigned in the first years of the twentieth century.

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Fundamentalists’ fears

Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Let fundamentalists believe what they want.  They must allow the rest of us to exercise our rights, too, and not be adversely affected by their convictions which, it looks evident, are mainly based on fear.

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