the burning or…

Simple Marriage is has become one of my all time favorite blogs on the internet for its simple, yet wise insights on relationships and life.  Though the name includes the word ‘marriage,’ it really is much more about just living and most marriage advice applies to relationships in general.

Today there is a wonderful post on adequacy, reminding us, that though the world, and the internet in particular, is caught up in a whirlwind of superlatives and potential growth, we do not have to.  Sometimes, success means getting to the point where you are just content, rather than constantly striving for more.

via Simple Marriage.

By now the Conservapedia project is relatively old news on the internet. Someone decided that Wikipedia was too ‘liberal’ (whatever that means) and decided an open encyclopedia based on conservative values should be created.  More recently the projects creators have set their eyes on a much older and more venerated source of knowledge: The Bible.  Apparently that is also too liberal (or at least English translations going back to King James are).  They aim to create a translation of the Bible that conforms to explicitly conservative values.  The aims of the project are listed on their webpage.

I will not even bother to waste my time rebutting such a project other than to point out the somewhat hilarious irony of a religious movement with a worldview supposedly based upon literal adherence to the Bible, re-interpreting the Bible to fit with said worldview. The rotations per minute of such circular reasoning are off the charts.

What is more interesting to me is the way that such fringe groups color the perspective of more mainstream groups.  One sees this in liberal as well as conservative groups that such fringe groups (Greenpeace, PETA, Conservapedia, Timothy McVeigh) are used by people to establish their ‘moderate’ credentials.  On the reverse side, members of the opposite group point to such extremes as indicative of the character of the group as a whole.  So while one side looks at such fringe groups as indicative of the validity of their non-extremist beliefs, the other looks on those same groups as representative.

Frankly, we should be less concerned with the ‘extremism’ of the beliefs (which is really just a measure of their deviation form the norm) and more on whether they make sense, stand up to logical scrutiny and real world experience.

I was perusing old posts on Faith and Theology the other day and came across this quote by Karl Barth evolution and theology:

[One] can as little compare the biblical creation story and a scientific theory like that of evolution as one can compare, shall we say, an organ and a vacuum-cleaner – that there can be as little question of harmony between them as of contradiction?… The creation story deals only with the becoming of all things, and therefore with the revelation of God, which is inaccessible to science as such. The theory of evolution deals with what has become, as it appears to human observation and research and as it invites human interpretation”

The brilliance of this quote is the way that it captures the subtlety of the distinction between science and theology.  A vacuum cleaner and an organ operate according to the same physical principles of pressure and suction.  Yet their role and significance in human life is rather different from one another.  So, it is not the case (as it is often argued) that science and religion are totally distinct epistemological categories.  Rather, starting from the same world, they diverge to accomplish different epistemological goals.  In Kantian language, we could say that, starting with the same noumena, theology and science apply different manifolds of perception to reality, thereby arriving at different perceptions of the phenomena while remaining both ‘true.’

Theology derives its significance as more-than-myth by virtue of being based on fact.  The creation story as theology would bear no significance were it not based on the fact that the world did in fact come into being.  We need not look at the Bible as a science textbook, but we need not relegate its truth to the realm of merely aesthetics.  As Barth says, “…[One] should distinguish what is to be distinguished and not shut [oneself] off completely from either side.”

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