Anglican Mainstream

By Mollie Hemingway, Get Religion

Yesterday there was big news related to the Higgs boson. That’s the theoretical particle that some scientists believe plays a role in the fabric of the universe. But the story really caught my attention because almost every article referred to it as the “God particle.” So, for instance, here’s the Washington Post:

Search for ‘God particle’ Higgs Boson narrowing, scientists say

Scentists find sign of ‘God particle’ – Brian Greene explains breakthrough

Has science found the ‘God particle’?

Light shines on ‘God particle’

“We don’t call it the ‘God particle’, it’s just the media that do that,” a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday.

“Well, I am the from the media and I’m going to continue calling it that,” said the journalist – and continued to do so.

 

The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix.

 

By Matthew O'Brien, Witherspoon Institute

by Jon A Shields, Claremont Institute

A review of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, by Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, has written a provocative, exasperating new book on making religion safe for democracy. "When reflecting on the problems of religion and democracy," Buruma writes, "the main issue is how to stop irrational passions from turning violent." For Buruma religion is an inherently irrational passion. As a result, defending the tolerance and pluralism of modern secular democracies requires finding ways to pacify religion and keep it politically benign.

In search of guidance, Buruma examines centuries of religious-secular conflict in Japan, China, Europe, and America. Rather than showing the best ways of "taming the gods," however, the wide scope of Buruma's inquiry makes clear only that reconciling religious ardor and political order is extremely difficult. Worse, it suggests that his project is fundamentally misbegotten.

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HT:  Suzanne Fernandez 

Abridged Mother Teresa Rule: Folks are unreasonable & selfish. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, you may be accused of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.  If you succeed, you'll win some unfaithful friends & real enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you; be honest anyway. Give your best.  It's never enough; give your best anyway. It's between you & God. It was never between you & them anyway.

By R R Reno, First Things

What makes life worth living? For the most part Western society has settled on an individualistic answer: whatever I decide or desire. It’s judgmental—an act of cultural imperialism, as we’re taught to say at fancy colleges—to suggest that there’s a right answer to this question. Rather, we are told, people should be able to organize their lives around what they feel or think best. We’re happiest, the present-day liberal presumes, when we can make up our own minds about what makes life worth living—or even if life is worth living.

The commitment to freedom seems complete, yet paradoxically this liberalism tends toward an anti-democratic authoritarianism. The promise of freedom stems from the fact that we’re not to be constrained by objective moral truths. It’s a form of freedom that comes with a very strong disciplinary warning—you are not to impose your view of moral truth on anyone. Thus the paradox: the dictatorship of relativism.

The abortion license stems directly from this view of freedom. If I think that the satisfactions of sexual intimacy are what make life worth living, and if I don’t wish to intermix these satisfactions with the complex realities of children, then my liberty is threatened by a legal regime that prohibits abortion.

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By Albert Mohler

The third great movement in the Christian metanarrative begins with the affirmation that God’s purpose from the beginning was to redeem a people through the blood of his Son – and that he does this in order to show the excellence of his name throughout eternity. The God of the Bible is not a divine strategist, ready with a new plan in the event his original plan fails. The God of the Bible is sovereign and completely able to accomplish his purposes. Thus, when we come to the great act of God for our redemption we come to the very heart of God’s self-revelation.

Beyond this, an adequate understanding of human sin brings us to the inescapable conclusion that there is absolutely nothing that the human creature can do to rescue himself from his plight. We find ourselves in an insoluble situation and are brought face to face with our own finitude. What is worse, all our efforts to solve the problem on our own lead only into an even deeper complex of sin. We are rebels to the core, and our attempts to justify ourselves lead only into deeper levels of sinfulness.

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By Wesley J Smith, First Things

This isn’t a blog about religion, but among its many threads, we do discuss what it means to be human.  And part of that is the yearning for transcendence.

By Jenny Taylor, Lapido Media

STEPHEN PROTHERO'S new book is a brilliant, audacious but ultimately flawed attempt to dismantle multiculturalism's core tenet - that all religions are the same. Flawed because comparing religions from a non-theological point of view is an academic non-starter. As the former head of the Study of Religions Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London used to say: ‘We have an epistemological problem’. How do you know what another religion is like if you are not a member of it? How do you evaluate the ‘biases’ that inform and shape cultures, without having a bias to one yourself? What is your standpoint therefore? If you pretend you don’t need a standpoint that is openly disclosed and carefully referenced throughout the text, you become part of the general obfuscation you are seeking to penetrate – and that’s what happens, perhaps involuntarily, in Stephen Prothero’s latest book.

Someone was bound to attempt this now; a sort of Golden Bough for our post-9/11 times, which is often dazzling, and certainly audacious. But the title’s promise, and indeed the Introduction, are not fulfilled. It’s as if Prothero has submitted a manuscript drafted before 9/11 – his PhD thesis maybe – and had it gone over and shaped up by an editor with an eye to an obvious new market. One is bound to welcome the initial polemic against what he calls ‘theological groupthink – or Godthink’ that has it that all religions are essentially the same, since there can be no doubt this ‘has made the world more dangerous’. But his introductory riposte to what he calls ‘the dogma that all religions are one’ peters out quite early into the book.

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By Robert J. Sanders Ph.D, Virtueonline

Where are we, as a country and as Christian churches, headed? There are, of course, many answers to that question, but for my part, I recently read Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer's address entitled "A Christian Manifesto," and feel compelled to comment on it and the present religious and political situation.(1) Among other things, I will describe what I consider ominous trends in our society, trends that Schaeffer and other religious conservatives have not addressed.

The primary strength of Dr. Schaeffer address is his recognition that we now live in an age in which the Judeo-Christian world view has given way to a humanistic world view based on the belief that ultimate reality is matter which by chance gave rise to present life forms through evolution.

By humanism, Schaeffer means the notion that human beings are the measure of all things. Once God is denied and the materialistic doctrine is accepted, there is no source of understanding beyond human beings themselves, so that, logically, humans become the judge of all things. One corollary is that human beings decide right and wrong as they see fit.

The result of that is that there is nothing to protect the vulnerable among us, the unborn, the old, the unfit, and the useless. Therefore, he expects, unless something is done about it, Western Civilization will continue to erode, arriving at a condition, not unlike that of Nazi Germany, where certain races and groups are exterminated. This is Schaeffer's primary conclusion and it makes a great deal of sense with one caveat which will be given later.

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By Professor John Lennox, Mailonline

There's no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe.

According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.'

Unfortunately, while Hawking's argument is being hailed as controversial and ground-breaking, it is hardly new.

For years, other scientists have made similar claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to physical laws such as gravity.

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By Regis Nicholl, Breakpoint

By R R Reno, First Things

For a long time as a young teacher, I believed the danger of prostituting their minds by believing falsehoods was the preeminent, or even singular, intellectual danger my students faced. So I challenged them and tried to teach them always to be self-critical, questioning, skeptical. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where’s your evidence? Why do you believe that?

I thought I was helping my students by training them to think critically. And no doubt I was. However, reading John Henry Newman has helped me see another danger, perhaps a graver one: to be so afraid of being wrong that we fail to believe as true that which is true. He worried about the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error, rather than finding truth, were the great goal of life.

Like Plato and St. Augustine, Newman presumed that human beings fundamentally seek to know the truth. Our hearts are restless, not with fear of error, but a desire to rest in God, who is the fullness of all truth. The fulfilling activity of intellectual life is to affirm truth rather than recoil from falsehood.

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by Janie Cheaney for World Magazine

"Should This Be the Last Generation?" asks the headline of a recent New York Times column. The author is Peter Singer—always a reliable source for provocative questions.

Singer was an ethics professor of middling reputation when Animal Liberation made him an icon of the animal rights movement in 1975. … Practical Ethics was his next major work, a broader application of his views to the human species. Practical Ethics serves up Singer's version of utilitarianism, in which the ultimate good is "happiness." Anything that deprives an individual of a reasonable degree of comfort and satisfaction is therefore not good. The thing that deprives is often life itself: If physical or social circumstances are likely to doom a child to pain and suffering, it's immoral to insist that he live. Abortion can be merciful, but Singer went further: Infanticide can also be merciful, if in the first months of life it becomes evident that the child will be severely limited. And if an adult reaches a state of non-sentience and is no longer self-aware, the kindest act for everyone concerned might be to ease him gently into that good night.

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By Bill Muehlenberg

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. Unfortunately in the secular West, the rejection of God – which was meant to bring freedom – has simply resulted in bondage: bondage to bad ideas, bad thinking and bad worldviews.

A reigning worldview in much of the West – at least on most university campuses – is postmodernism. Along with its half-sister, deconstructionism, it has had a very strong, and negative, impact. A major casualty of pomo and decon is the very concept of truth.

The concept of objective, universal and unchanging truth is now more or less rejected, and in its place are simply ‘truths’. We all have our own truth, and no one’s truth is better than another’s. You have your story, I have mine, and that is all there is.

Metanarratives, or grand, overarching stories which are universally true, have been rejected for individual or cultural stories. We are told to be suspicious of such mega-stories, and of all claims at having the correct interpretation of things.

Indeed, deconstructionists insist that there is no one correct interpretation of a text (which can be anything: an idea, a book, a work of art, or a piece of music). Meaning is given to the text by the reader – there is no objective meaning to the text. Readers define and create textual meaning.

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By Albert Mohler

By Wesley J Smith, First Things

At the New York Times blog, Peter Singer favorably discusses a book that I haven’t read–Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence–that illuminates the profound danger of Singer’s utilitarian philosophy and the growing nihilism among the intellectual set.   From Singer’s post:

Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents?

 

For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. Most of those who consider that question probably do so because they have some reason to fear that the child’s life would be especially difficult — for example, if they have a family history of a devastating illness, physical or mental, that cannot yet be detected prenatally.

 

[...] Singer, it seems, finally falls foul of the problem which affects many atheists, that they just do not want to act like one. A world without human beings is, for Singer (if you’ll pardon the pun) inconceivable, even if the only justification for its continuation is the blind hope that “things can only get better”.

by Marvin Olasky WORLD magazine

One of the Bible's great statements about courage comes in chapter 5 of Esther. The Jewish queen of Persia has told Uncle Mordecai that she can't go before the king: If she does, she'll probably die. Mordecai responds with admonition—you won't escape by hiding—and then a line that has sent chills down my spine: "Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Today's three great cultural flashpoints are abortion, same-sex marriage, and evolution. We can hedge on them and justify our hedging: Playing it cool here will help me gain for Christ people who would otherwise walk away.

Over the past 15 years I've tried to explain some of the problems of Darwinism. Last year I raised questions about the "theistic evolution" that Francis Collins espouses, but didn't offer answers—and several WORLD readers have pressed me for more. OK. Read more

By Melanie Phillips in The Australian

In Britain, the benefits of diversity are apparently boundless. Now that the Pagan Police Association has received government recognition, police officers can take a string of pagan festivals as official holidays.

These include celebrating the festival of lactating sheep, and drinking mead and dancing naked to celebrate the harvest. In court, pagan officers will be allowed to pledge to tell the truth not before God but by what ‘they hold sacred’, including, presumably, the Sun God or Kriss Kringle, the Germanic god of yule.

In Australia, as historian Keith Windschuttle has chronicled in his new book The Stolen Generations – volume three of his tireless evisceration of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History — the allegedly monstrous theft of 100,000 Aboriginal children by Australian officials just because they were Aboriginal never actually happened.

In the US, when a car bomb was planted recently in New York’s Times Square by a man later revealed to be a Muslim trained in bomb-making in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, there was an initial stampede to declare the attempted atrocity was unconnected to Islamic terrorism.

It was said to be most likely the work of a Tea Party member, right-wing militiaman or lone nut. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg even suggested the bomb could have been placed by ’somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the healthcare bill or something’.

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In other words, some say this, and some say that, and who is to say who is wrong? Yet this is not a recipe for unity but for disaster. Bishop Jones needs to read Richard John Neuhaus on ‘The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy’, and to look at what the revisionist lobby is saying. The midway position on this topic is not one that can be sustained, not least because it is not one that the key protagonists wish to hold.  John Richardson