07.11.09
Posted in Current Events, Religion at 10:37 pm by Karl
I’ve been struck by reactions in segments of the American press to President Obama’s recent nomination of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. After what comes across as a perfunctory acknowledgement of Dr. Collins’ qualifications for the job, the reporter/commentator invariably spends the bulk of the article talking about Collins’ evangelical Christian identity. There’s the subtle implication that notwithstanding Collins’ widely-acknowledged accomplishments as a genetic scientist, his association with evangelical Christianity negates the qualifications and renders Collins suspect as a respectable scientist. That someone is able to hold a religious outlook as well as a scientific worldview is seen to be a logical impossibility.
Against this atheistic fundamentalism is the position taken by perhaps the most eminent scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. To be sure, Einstein did not believe in a personal God; I suppose, like several of America’s Founding Fathers, he could be accurately described as a deist. He was not an atheist–indeed, according to Walter Isaacson, he “tended to denigrate atheists”. In one episode cited in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Einstein: His Life & Universe, Einstein and his wife were at a dinner party in Berlin when a guest disparaged religion. Einstein is said to have replied, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”
Einstein coined the famous saying about science and religion, “The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” [Karl]
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07.03.09
Posted in Current Events, Religion at 9:14 pm by Karl
Martin Wolf begins his March 8, 2009 Financial Times article, “Seeds of its own destruction,” with the intriguing opening line: “Another ideological god has failed.” Wolf’s thesis, for those of you who’ve not read the article, is that the Anglo-American led economic liberalization of the past 30 years contained the seeds of the financial meltdown (i.e., the current recession) that we’ve been witness to and ‘victim’ of since December 2007. Reduced to simple terms the liberalization practiced over the last 30 years basically says, the free market knows best, government should have as small or non-existent a footprint as possible with respect to the operation of a country’s economy.
I’m not an economist, so that’s as far as I’ll go. Sufficed to say, I commend Wolf’s article as a well-argued, cogent and clear explication of the causes of the recession and resulting economic dislocations the world is experiencing.
But the thing I find most intriguing about the article was the juxtaposition of the two terms: “ideological” and “god”. So I’ve been thinking about the two concepts: ideology and dogma. They seem to me connotatively similar, though ideology is used primarily in economic and political contexts whilst dogma is more generally applied in a religious one.
A question I’ve been turning over in my mind is whether one lesson that current events hold for Christian practice is to beware ideas and beliefs become too hardened into dogmatic stances with unanticipated consequences. A quote attributed to Deepak Chopra that I recently came across plays into my ruminations as well, not that I buy his idea. Chopra is reputed to have declaimed, “Religion is confining and imprisoning and toxic because it is based on ideology and dogma. But spirituality is redeeming and universal.”
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01.18.09
Posted in Current Events, Religion at 2:41 pm by Chris
We are on the cusp on a new presidential era, an era where new hope is given birth. One of the key ingredients of this new political moment is the choosing of a cabinet of officers to carry out the mandate of the election. The people’s voice is expressed through its senators who hold hearings to give advice and consent. As solid citizens, we do pay attention to these hearings, and let our voices be heard should the judgments made be out of plumb with our value system.
One of our class members brought to our attention a key ethical issue that needs serious consideration. It has to do with the office of the treasury, with the evaluation of Timothy Geithner.
Mr. Geithner comes with a stellar resume of competence, however, he has exhibited a somewhat cavalier attitude towards paying taxes.
Are these honest mistakes that we need to overlook given the need for solid leadership in a critical position or a character issue?
Trust is invested in those who have both character and competence covered.
How should we as Christians work through this issue?
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