Though some Christians may pretend that conservative religious faith has remained somewhat constant through the centuries, what even the most conservative literalist believes today varies in significant ways from the world view of the early church. As late as the 1500s, it was assumed that angels and demons controlled the most mundane aspects of life. The vast territory that we now call the natural world did not exist in the minds of most people until very recently. Christian Europe believed that demonic forces directly and regularly caused things like illness, death, wasting of crops, barrenness, etc. that are now understood to have more "natural" causes.
This mindset lives on today. As quoted in the Times of India, "Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said on Tuesday."
This is not to say that religion is unimportant. One of the themes I have been trying to develop on this blog is that we need to come to new understandings about the interplay of science and religion. Belief is bound up in what it means to be human, it would seem. Faith is an integral part of how we go about our lives. At the same time, much of our traditional religious frameworks are bound up in cosmologies and understandings of cause and effect that we no longer share with our spiritual fore bearers. We have a largely naturalistic view of the world, but our spiritual framework is defined by people who saw even the most mundane occurrences as fraught with supernatural agency.
Rather than argue that faith requires us to believe absurd things, we need to work out how to maintain faith in light of the massive shift in worldview that has overtaken us as the result of our study of the natural world.
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2 comments:
The only thing more dangerous is atheistic faith.
If the Atheita take over, we will be enslaved.
You have probably heard of Bill Tammeus, the religion editor of the star. He has a blog called Faith matters.
Look at what the local atheist groups in KC have been doing to it since December first. (Heartland Humanists, Community of Reason)
Bill allows an unresticted blog, as you do, and unlike JACK KREBS.
On Bills blog, they give you an idea of what they have in store for us. Of course, history should teach us what any offically atheistic would, AND STILL DOES, do.
They must never be allowed to take control.
NEVER
By the way, scienctific theory involves some pretty weird things.
The "Big Bang", of which nothing can be known of the event itself or what, if anything, preceded it.
The spontaneous rise of life from non life.
The ability of supposedly mindlessly evolved organic brains to apprehend the true nature of reality.
The existence of any kind of free will, in a brains which obeys the "laws" of chemistry and physics.
etc.
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