Whole Reason

Here’s my list of resources for those inter­ested in the his­tory of reli­gion and sci­ence, both pro and anti-religious.

THEIST

For the Glory of God: How Monothe­ism Led to Refor­ma­tions, Sci­ence, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slav­ery by Rod­ney Stark

Stark argues that faith in God encour­aged Chris­tians to invent sci­ence. Hav­ing read other books mak­ing the same claim, I think Stark’s approach to this ques­tion is one of the best. Not only does he go over the devel­op­ment of tech­nol­ogy in the so-called “Dark Ages,” and show how the “Enlight­en­ment” pic­ture of Coper­ni­can era sci­ence is a myth, he stud­ies 52 key early sci­en­tists, and shows that more than 60 % were “devout,” while only 2 were skep­tics. The critic below who asks why Chris­tian­ity did not pro­duce sci­ence in Rus­sia did not read atten­tively: Stark argues that faith in God was a nec­es­sary, but not suf­fi­cient, cause of the rise of sci­ence. Other fac­tors were also involved. ~ From this excel­lent review

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I wrote this essay back in 2001 dur­ing my period of away from Chris­tian­ity, while I was explor­ing Vipas­sana Bud­dhist Med­i­ta­tion.

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Although it has been a few weeks since I did the 10 day course, it is still worth­while to try and remem­ber. In ret­ro­spect, I find Vipas­sana a pre­mium tool for self-knowledge and con­trol, though not com­pre­hen­sive as a spiritual/emotional tool for heal­ing and growth. In addi­tion to yoga, devo­tional study, and prayer, it fills out (almost) a com­plete set of inner spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines (don’t for­get the outer ones of ser­vice, etc.)

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A good friend of mine has wan­dered full force into the pos­i­tive think­ing, human­is­tic, Dale Carnegie type of suc­cess train­ing that is pop­u­lar in pro­fes­sional cir­cles these days.  Now, I don’t nec­es­sar­ily dis­par­age it, and there is a lot of good stuff to learn.  But some­times, the overly sim­plis­tic, boiled down talk­ing points lack sophis­ti­ca­tion, and give an unbal­anced idea of what is good and bad.

Case in point? Change Your Ques­tions, Change Your Life: 10 Pow­er­ful Tools for Life and Work, which lists the char­ac­ter­is­tics of Judgers (bad) vs. Learn­ers (good). Now granted, I only skimmed the book, but the charts below reveal what I think is our culture’s buy-in into sub­jec­tivism, and our rejec­tion of any objec­tive morals or truths.

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I just dis­cov­ered (via the Sec­u­lar Nation pod­cast, one of the many atheist/anti-theist/secularist pod­casts I fol­low) Mar­garet Downey’s answer to the Christ­mas Tree, the Tree of Knowl­edge — that is, an athe­ists’ sub­sti­tute for the reli­gious cel­e­bra­tion of Christ. 

Downey has a long read­ing list that rep­re­sents per­haps the best (?) that skep­tics of faith have to offer.  I have repro­duced the list below. 

Downey is a true despiser of reli­gion — she even hates when peo­ple exclaim “Oh God!” but you can bet she’s not con­cerned about tak­ing God’s name in vain.

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One of the most annoy­ing voices on con­ser­v­a­tive talk radio is Mark Levin, author of the best­selling Lib­erty and Tyranny: A Con­ser­v­a­tive Man­i­festo.  How­ever, it’s all I’ve got some days, and once in a while, he has an inter­est­ing guest rather than the low­brow callers that fre­quent the more rant-ridden types of shows. 

Today, he had Nor­man Pod­horetz, author of the con­tro­ver­sial new book Why Are Jews Liberals?

You can lis­ten to the 10 minute inter­view I’ve excerpted from the Levin archive. But the main inter­est­ing points I got from the inter­view were:

1. In the mid 19th cen­tury, it was lib­er­al­ism that defended Judaism from the threats of fascism.
2. In 1967, a great shift occurred in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.  The left became increas­ingly anti-Zionist to the point of being anti-Semitic, while the right, esp. the Chris­t­ian right, began seri­ously tak­ing up the cause of Israel.
3. How­ever, Jews did not become con­ser­v­a­tive because

(a) Con­vert­ing or turn­ing to con­ser­vatism in Jew­ish cul­ture is as objec­tion­able as con­vert­ing to Chris­tian­ity, and most Jews abhor both.

(b) Lib­er­al­ism has replaced the val­ues of the Torah for most Jews — where the two dis­agree, most Jews now side with lib­er­al­ism and NOT the Torah.  That is, lib­er­al­ism is now the pre­dom­i­nant reli­gious stance of most Jews.

There’s much more great con­tent in the inter­view, includ­ing Jews’ sup­port for Obama.  Enjoy.

Pod­horetz inter­view on Mark Levin

Athe­ists and sec­u­lar­ists are fond of quot­ing the artic­u­late Thomas Paine, author of the free-thinkers creed Age of Rea­son.  Few know, how­ever, that a found­ing father wrote a rebut­tal in 1801, which Amer­i­can Vision has reprinted. Elias Boudinot’s book The Age of Rev­e­la­tion was seen as a pow­er­ful rebut­tal.  And now you can read it too.  Below is the blurb about the book from Amer­i­can Vision.

How many times have you
heard some skep­tic claim that this or that non-Christian was a Found­ing
Father of Amer­ica? Thomas Jef­fer­son is one of their patron saints, and

course, Jef­fer­son was the pri­mary author of the Dec­la­ra­tion of
Inde­pen­dence which states emphat­i­cally that God is the Cre­ator and the
Judge of the world. The ACLU plays down these words. Ben­jamin Franklin
is another one skep­tics love to trot out as an anti-religious Found­ing
Father. But it was Franklin who stood up at the Con­sti­tu­tional
Con­ven­tion and quoted Psalm 127:1 as a warn­ing to the del­e­gates:

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What is it in us that likes to poke at the mon­key in the cage?  Inse­cu­rity, play­ful­ness, orig­i­nal sin?  The mon­key I love to tor­ment is the evo­lu­tion­ary believer — why?  Because I once was one.  As a trained Bio­chemist, I found cre­ation­ists mad­den­ingly igno­rant — until I started read­ing up on the facts (or lack thereof) and real­ized that it was *I* who had been brain­washed (See On Leav­ing Evo­lu­tion and Conned by Evo­lu­tion or even Mass Delu­sion)

Books like this new one, The Dar­win Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Dar­win, are aimed squarely at uncrit­i­cal believ­ers, eval­u­at­ing Dar­win­ism not only from the sci­en­tific per­spec­tive, but the soci­o­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal as well.  Here’s a lit­tle of the descrip­tion from the pub­lish­ers, Amer­i­can Vision:

In The Dar­win Myth, Wiker reveals:

• Why Dar­win didn’t “dis­cover” evolution
• How Dar­win set out to cre­ate a god­less ver­sion of evolution
• Why many of his best friends and allies crit­i­cized Darwin’s the­ory, and how he never refuted their objections
• How “social Dar­win­ism” is not a mis­ap­pli­ca­tion of Dar­win­ism, but is Darwinism
• Why Darwin’s the­ory sup­ported nat­ural slav­ery, an insti­tu­tion he abhorred
• How much of what we know about Dar­win comes from his Autobiography–which at key points is down­right misleading
• How Dar­win helped make ide­o­log­i­cal athe­ism the bat­tle cry of science

Instruc­tive and illu­mi­nat­ing, The Dar­win Myth casts aside
Darwinism’s polit­i­cally cor­rect veneer and offers a crit­i­cal,
sci­en­tific analy­sis of Darwin’s life and his history-changing theory.

The Seven C’s of the Chris­t­ian World­View of History

These Seven C’s are nicely described at .

I won’t go into detail, and you can pur­chase the book at right, but here they are:

• Cre­ation - the cre­ation of the uni­verse by God
• Cor­rup­tion - the sin of Adam and Eve
• Cat­a­stro­phe - the flood of Noah
• Con­fu­sion - the con­fu­sion of lan­guages at Babel
• Christ - the birth of Christ
• Cru­ci­fix­ion - the sub­sti­tu­tion­ary death of Christ
• Con­sum­ma­tion - the return of Christ

This doesn’t really con­trast with the 6 C’s of Athe­ism, since this is a his­tor­i­cal out­line, not a list of the virtues of the Chris­t­ian world view.  But I thought that another list of C’s was interesting.

I am explor­ing the mys­tery of why peo­ple leave faith for my upcom­ing book, and am also doing some great research by read­ing the following:

• Walk­ing Away from Faith: Unrav­el­ing the Mys­tery of Belief and Unbelief
• Quit­ting Church: Why the Faith­ful are Flee­ing and What to Do about It
• unChris­t­ian: What a New Gen­er­a­tion Really Thinks about Chris­tian­ity… and Why It Matters
• They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerg­ing Generations

How­ever, in response to a pretty good athe­ist pod­cast at Rea­son­able Doubts (Explicit), I was asked to con­sider this ques­tion:  “When a Chris­t­ian becomes an ‘apos­tate,’ (unbe­liever), how do Chris­tians explain it?”  

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Takeyya (noun) — the Islamic prin­ci­ple of lying for the greater good of the progress of Islam.  Or as Mohammed wrote:

He is not a false per­son who through al-tekeyya set­tles con­cil­i­a­tion among peo­ple, sup­ports good or says what is good.

While lying to the Nazis to pro­tect the Jews your are hid­ing might fall into this cat­e­gory, unfor­tu­nately, in this case, the Nazi-like aggres­sors are the fol­low­ers of Islam, and they lie to gain the trust of unsus­pect­ing mul­ti­cu­tu­ral­ists so that we can all live under Sharia Law and con­vert, pay the jizzya, or die.

And no one does it bet­ter than the Coun­cil for Amer­i­can Islamic Rela­tions (CAIR).  Good thing that brave peo­ple are infil­trat­ing cor­rupt orga­ni­za­tions like Acorn, Planned Par­ent­hood, and now, CAIR.  Chris Gaubat, after work­ing for six months inside of CAIR’s Wash­ing­ton D.C. office, con­tributed to Mus­lim Mafia: Inside the Secret Under­world that’s Con­spir­ing to Islamize Amer­ica.

You can read a review at jewkey.com.  And as a bonus, there’s some bonus CAIR video after the jump.

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