Shadow Minister,
I agree that Christian faith need not be in conflict with reason.

However, I’d challenge the opening line in your post. Many Christians and atheists are agreed (though speaking from different sides of the fence) when they say that if the Bible is unreliable when it speaks of history, then why should it be trusted when speaking about faith, ethics, and morality?

Compare this with what Jesus himself said (in John 3:12.)

Relda,
Sells was mocked and pilloried when he suggested that imagination was a key ingredient in understanding the Bible. Let’s see if the same knives come out for you after your explanation of the role of imagination involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. However, I kind of agree. The river of imagination must flow freely when transforming the microbe into the microbiologist.

If imagination is such a key, where can we squeeze some in along the continuum from contamination, to education, indoctrination, and brain-washing?

david f,
Thanks for the link to Bishop Spong’s homepage. It is an interesting reading. I did not know about this link, though of course I knew of the maverick bishop long before the internet. There are tens of Christian denominations and perhaps thousands of scholars (and would-be scholars) who explain the bible this way or that way, or just explain it away. I am not an exegete, but my first impression was that the good bishop belonged to the latter.

In my earlier post I wrote

"there are many manifestations of Islam that I do not like, to say the least, but I have to accept that there must be something more to Islam than just these negative things, since it attracted a billion adherents. And that “more” might not be that much different from something that is already part of my world-view. There are non-Christians (let me now add “including Jews”) who think similarly about Christianity."

Indeed, there are Jews who can think of Christianity in terms of what Judaism and Christianity have in common, leaving aside Christian extensions of ancient Judaism that they cannot accept or understand. And there are Jews who prefer to see it the other way around. Your last post shows that you obviously belong to the second group.

>>she is uncontaminated by Christianity ... She is uncontaminated by religious belief.<<
I have a niece (in California) who married a Jew and converted to Judaism. My brother (her father) tried to understand her, I did not have the opportunity to talk to her. But it never occurred to me, nor to my brother, to think of her Judaic faith as contamination!

Dan,
In our ancestral environment it didn’t cost anything to have a false positive, to assume there's a force behind lightning or a spirit in a rock – it actually didn’t require much imagination to continue believing in this. The science that broke not only religious tradition, but scientific tradition also, came at a cost – for a time, as with Copernicus, Darwin was ostracized by many because, from a grounded knowledge, he dared to imagine. The widespread belief in alchemy, and its supposed transformative process, stood to be corrected by something seemingly quite natural.

If you wish to better understand the natural world, you need to know evolution – not believing this certainly doesn’t take you out of the gene pool. However, there’s a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject one of the most well supported theories currently in science.

Dear George,

You expressed fellowship for people of different faiths and, for that, I am grateful.

Religion has comforted the oppressed but has also been an instrument of control and oppression. In using the locution, contaminated, I think of the sentence in Gibbon's DAFOTRE.

"The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people."

Whether religion has done more harm than good in the course of human events I cannot say. However, I feel that, at this time, religion is a source of much more harm than good. It has in many cases encouraged a sense of righteousness justifying atrocity. I would go farther and say that faith in unprovable propositions also justifies atrocity even though the faith is in a secular ideology.

The killing fields of Cambodia and the other instances of Marxist mass murder are the outcome of a utopian faith. The horrors of the twentieth century were to a great extent a consequence of wars of ideology. However, I will confine my further remarks to Christianity.

I believe the ascendancy of Christianity has blighted humanity.

Christianity destroyed the spirit of enquiry in the classical world and brought on the Dark Ages. "The Closing of the Western Mind" by Charles Freeman tells about the process after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

"The Conversion of Europe from Paganism to Christianity: 371-1386" by Richard Fletcher. In 371 Christianity became the official Roman religion. In 1386 Lithuania was Christianised. Except for Ireland the process was an ugly and violent one.

"Constantine’s Sword" by James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, tells how the intolerance promoted by Christianity led to the twentieth century display of applied Christianity, the Holocaust.

Possibly the greatest tragedy in history is the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

I will respond more to you in future remarks.

david f,
Thank you for your essay which does not tell me much about Christianity that I have not heard already (I went through Communist schools, where all sorts of arguments against Christianity and religion in general were on the daily menu). However, it tells me something about you. If I were a psychologist, which I am certainly not, I would probably understand your posts better, but even then I would not call your zeal “contamination“.

I know, you are not the only one who blames Christianity for almost everything that is, or was, bad in our civilisatiojn, like there are those who blame Jews for all sorts of evils, and there are even people who blame theoretical physicists for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You can prove that this or that ingredient gives a bad taste to the dish somebody cooked by preparing the same dish again leaving out only the suspect ingredient. You cannot do that with history and its “ingredient” that you wish to blame.

Dear George,

The logic behind your last post seems to be:

Some people blame Jews and some blame theoretical physicists falsely for various wrongs. I have blamed Christianity for many of humanity’s ills. Therefore I must be blaming Christianity falsely.

However, that does not really speak to my contention.

I cite several historical happenings – the conversion of Europe to Christianity by violence, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Wars of the Reformation and the Holocaust. These events are a matter of historical record.

While Christianity was not solely responsible for these horrors it is my contention that Christianity was prominent in bringing about all of them.

These were all complex events. For any or all of them why do you think they happened?