The friend was unable to get custody of the children and take them out of that house because the courts said it was a freedom of religion issue. Like stoning adulterers? Why won’t the corrupt secular courts let good Christians practice their biblically guaranteed right to stone adulterers to death? I am suggesting that they assert this as a freedom of religion issue. It’s too late to get to Jim Bakker and Strom Thurmond, but they could still get Bill Clinton and they seem to have a thousand reasons to want to do that.

Apart from adultery, there is an enormous problem with pornography in the Christian community. According to one survey , “37% of pastors said porn was a struggle for them.” Over half said it was a temptation. Other surveys indicate that over 50% of men attending a Promise Keepers stadium event had viewed porn in the previous week. One Christian, sure that it couldn’t be that 50% of the men in his parish were into porn, suggested a survey. He was right: in his parish it was 61% and he suspects underreporting. It’s a serious issue.

It’s so serious, in fact, that as part of my modest plea for biblical literalism, I would suggest that the biblical literalists among that 61%, please go pluck your eyes out (Mathew18:9). And if you don’t feel like plucking your eye out just right now, please consider being more tolerant of those who don’t fit in with those few areas of Old Testament morality that you choose to enforce (fear of gays seems to be tops on the list these days) and, dare I say it, just a little less tolerant of some of those areas where we all come up short of a New Testament morality (like helping the poor and turning the other cheek)?

By the way, yes this is a sarcastic article, but the Crosswalk article I link to is really interesting (that’s the one about the 61%). I’m certainly not meaning to attack people like that author.

Yup, as the proposed ordinance says:

“In order to provide for the emergency management of the city, and further in order to provide for and protect the safety, security and general welfare of the city and its inhabitants,” the proposal says, “it is recommended that every head of household residing in the city limits maintain a firearm, together with ammunition”

Apart from the typical American mentality towards the glory and wisdom of toting a gun, what I find really interesting is the “head of household” designation. Who is that? The man and, in absence of a real head of household, the single mom? (Full Article).

Tax Breaks to Churches

Apparently clergy, because they are poorly paid, need tax breaks, but underpaid day-care workers do not get the same consideration. Meanwhile, religious groups start housing developments and obtain exemption from real-estate taxes. Faculty at religious schools get tax-exempt housing, but faculty at other schools do not.
Poor clergy article
Housing development article

Voting Rights Case in Mississippi – This Time for Discrimination against Whites

An interesting case from Mississippi – the tactics used by Ike Brown, local head of the Democratic party, undisputed part boss (and twice-convicted felon), have prompted the Justice Department to bring a case under the Voting Rights Act, the first time it’s been used in Mississippi on behalf of whites. Full article

Even for sympathetic observers, one thing is certain: ID practitioners are not scientifically rigorous. The Templeton Foundation would normally be a natural ally of the intelligent design crowd. It’s mission is, after all,

to stimulate a high standard of excellence in scholarly understanding which can serve to encourage further worldwide explorations of the moral and spiritual dimensions of the Universe and of the human potential within its ultimate purpose.

And yet, when it comes down to it, Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, explained that the Templeton Foundation sponsored few ID projects because “From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review” (NYT).

A History Lesson: Heliocentrism and Evolution.

There is a relatively obvious analog to the debate on evolution, and that is the condemnation of heliocentrism in the sixteenth century.  When Copernicus published de Revolutionibus in 1543, it didn’t make much a of stir at first  and only with time, as in the condemnation of Galileo (1564-1642) did his teachings become problematic. Martin Luther famously condemned the theory, though his most famous disciple, Melanchthon seems to have integrated it in his astrology/astronomy teachings (Melanchthon was a committed devotee of astrology, as were most intellectuals of the time, Luther and Calvin being exceptions).  I want to focus, however, on John Calvin (1509-1564). Calvin, it appears, had heard about the theory of heliocentrism, though it isn’t fully clear what he though of it. An oft-cited condemnation was, in fact, invented in the nineteenth century. In any case, it appears that part of the reason Calvin didn’t take on the issue is because he did not consider it an important matter for the Faith.  Calvin subscribed to theological and exegetical position known as accommodation.  In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin’s great work, he states it thus:

For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us? (IRC I:13:1)

Calvin believed that the Bible was the word of God, but that the infinite creator spoke to finite man in a language that man could understand. Furthermore, Calvin believed that all of material creation was accommodated for man’s understanding, as it were. Thus, the fact that the Bible would say in Joshua that God stopped the sun, rather than saying that stopped the earth from spinning, would not have been problematic to Calvin.  Even we heliocentrists think in terms of the sun moving across the sky, the sun rising, the sun setting.  It’s a convenient way to understand the phenomena, and Calvin’s lisping God might easily have chosen to express an astronomical reality in those terms for man’s easier understanding.

All of this gets me to contemplate what Calvin would say about evolution.  It seems that in a Calvinist world view it is quite simple to integrate the idea that the biblical explanation of the processes that created the wide variety of life forms was rather simplified by God to make understanding clear to man. There is, then, no fundamental threat to the faith in the idea that it took not six days to make the universe, but perhaps billions of years.  Furthermore, the intelligent hand behind evolution is a matter of faith, not science.  Science deals with the mechanism, but surely an infinite God who stands outside of time itself can direct evolution in any way he wants, through instant creation of incremental change via natural selection. To assert that natural selection somehow contradicts the belief in an all-powerful Creator is, in fact, to suggest that God’s power is limited, that God could not create “random” processes that work themselves out in time while God himself is outside of time.  Since time is a physical concept, which has no bearing on God, the random interplay of events over time also has nothing to say about God’s involvement. To say otherwise is to suggest that God did not have the freedom to choose the means by which he would create the world.  This simply makes no sense at all unless one is beholden to an absolute literal interpretation of the Bible without recourse to the idea of accommodation. 

[Addendum: After I wrote this, I came across this from Alister McGrath, one of the leading experts on the history of the Reformation, Reformation theology, and John Calvin, says in his book A Life of John Calvin: A Study in Shaping of Western Culture, p. 257, "Yet for Calvin, even the idea of the 'six days of creation' was a divine accommodation to human cognitive abilities; it was not to be taken as literally true" (see also ibid., p. xiv).]

Intelligent Design deals not with science, but with matters of faith, pure and simple.  It has no business in the science classroom.  The science classroom should be a place where one freely investigates the mechanism of evolution, not whether that mechanism is directed by the hand of God or not.  The Intelligent Design smokescreen and publicity stunt is this.  The ID people recognize that they can’t win the debate saying that there has been no change since the six days of creation, so they quibble with the idea that evolution was directed in utter absence of God in the universe, but this idea is not inherent in the concept of evolution.  The publicity stunt, then, consists of getting religion taught in the science classroom.  It is tantamount to demanding that Buddhist teachings on suffering be part of the biology curriculum because animals are known to suffer.

Eventually, Intelligent Design will blow over because it cannot satisfy either the hardcore creationists or the hardcore evolutionists.  Those two groups have unshakable underpinnings: the weight of evidence rests with the evolutionists unless you have a priori beliefs that the Bible trumps all science, in which case it rests with the creationists.  Left out of that are the proponents of ID.  I predict that once their ill-informed publicity stunt fails, they will disappear.

Creationism will, I think, persist longer.  ID tries to be the thinking man’s creationism, but since creationism is so poorly supported on the evidence, there isn’t much future in the thinking man’s creationism.  There are always people who will put Holy Writ before any scientific evidence.  There are, believe or not, still many geocentrists ([link] [link]) and even a handful of Bible-based flat earthers (refuted not only by science, but also by Christian Answers). These folks will persist in the face of any and all evidence, along with their Creationist brethren.

[Addendum 2: the guy over at Prosthesis has a nice discussion of the prevalence of the apocryphal Calvin quote against Copernicanism]

Further Reading

• Intelligent Design Debate, an extensive collection of links to articles and surveys.
• Intelligent Design, from the Skeptic’s Dictionary.  This long article gives a clear explanation of the intellectual shortcomings of Intelligent Design.
• Intelligent Design, Wikipedia

Sources

• Mission Statement, Templeton Foundation.
• Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker, by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, December 4, 2005.
• God’s Accommodation — A Nurse’s Baby Talk, Robert J. Olson, Reformed Theological Seminary.
• Interpreting John Calvin, by Ford Lewis Battles (with articles on accommodation by one of the premier American scholars of Calvin’s thought).
• The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition, by Richard Muller (who teaches at Calvin College, where Battles once taught). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• A Life of John Calvin: A Study in Shaping of Western Culture, Alister McGrath (Blackwell, 1993).
• Calvin and the Astronomical Revolution, by Matthew F. Dowd, University of Notre Dame.

All of that is neither here nor there and it has been said a million times. More surprising to many Christians and atheists alike is that the great-grandfather of religious fundamentalism, John Calvin, was himself a soldier in the war against Christmas. Like most educated Christians, Calvin knew that the birth of Jesus did not correspond in any meaningful way to December 25th, and that it was in essence a pagan holiday that had been absorbed and coopted by early Christians. Calvin, however, went the next step in believing that only holidays specifically mentioned in the Bible should be celebrated. Essentially, this boiled down to holidays of the Easter cycle (Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, et cetera) as well as Sundays.

The war on Christmas was joined in 1537, when, under the influence of John Calvin, Christmas passed without celebration. Unfortunately, Geneva’s allies, the Bernese insisted on celebrating Christmas, Circumcision, Annunciation and a few other holidays and demanded the Genevans do the same. Calvin, refusing to give into Bernese demands, was exiled from Geneva and the celebration of Christmas reinstated. When Calvin came back to Geneva in 1541 after a period of exile, he began militating for the abolition of the non-Biblical holidays. In 1545, he achieved limited success in seeing the feasts of the Circumcision and Annunciation suppressed, but the war on Christmas was a tougher fight. Finally, in 1550, Calvin managed to get the Genevan authorities to outlaw Christmas and to mandate that communion would be celebrated only on Sundays, and not on “superstitious” pagan dates like December 25. Indeed, on Devember 25, 1550, the city council sat for business as usual, the courts were in session and businesses were all open under penalty of fine. Calvin, as usual, gave his weekday sermon on a book of the Old Testament and noticed something that upset him: there were more people in church than on a typical weekday. A committed soldier in the war on Christmas, Calvin boomed from the pulpit:

I see more people than usual at sermon today. And why? It’ s Christmas day. And who told you? It seems so [to be a holy day] to poor beasts. There’ s the fitting label for all who came to sermon today in honor of the feast… But if you think that Jesus Christ was born today, you are beasts, indeed, rabid beasts.

Once again, I am compelled to agree with Calvin and declare that Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and John Gibson are, indeed, rabid beasts. As such, I join Calvin in the war on Christmas. Amen!

Sources

• War on Christmas (20th century version)
  • What War on Christmas? by Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, December 10, 2005, p. A 21.
  • O’Reilly: “War” on Christmas part of “secular progressive agenda”, interview with O’Reilly and Gibson.
  • How the secular humanist grinch didn’t steal Christmas, by Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com, November 21, 2005.
• War on Christmas (Calvinist version)
  • The quote is from Supplementa Calviniana, volume 5, sermons on Micah, p. 172, lines 20ff, translated from French by The Ranter.
  • On the general context, Preaching, Praying and Policing the Reform in Sixtheenth-Century Geneva, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Thomas A. Lambert, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998.