One of the main assumptions of "religious studies" is that God has little or no language skills. With all the contradictory, mutually exclusive religious “truths” and “faith stories” that are part of human experience, if He/she/it exists at all, “God” is not as good as humans are at getting a message across – a profoundly insulting and archaic assessment of the facts.
With the discovery of DNA modern science now knows that amino acids in living things don't organize themselves, but follow the orders given by means of genetic information.
Scientist and Author Dean Kenyon formerly thought in terms of mindless forces of attraction driving amino acids to form protean shapes constructed into the tiny machines we see functioning within living cells. He and all other scientists have now renounced "Chemical Predestination" and now know that the many various types of amino acids are like letters of the alphabet. Their sequences determine communication. Astoundingly, it would take many large volumes to contain that information used by even the simplest one-celled living thing.
An “information-rich system” such as we see in living things suggests both language and the Intelligence that is responsible for language. The evidence literally “speaks for itself”!
Yet many a lecturer in religious studies implies that God doesn’t have the language skills or the interest in human beings to get a clear message to us. Instead God has left human beings, the most complex objects in the universe and His crowning achievement in creation, to fumble about with the cerebral “wiring” to contemplate God, but no reliable information nor anything that is absolutely true.
Would God have made us as we are but failed to tell us the truth about Himself? Is it even logical that God would fail to give us the evidence we need to decide which of the innumerable religious claims out there is really the true one? Is it wrong to assume that a God who claims to love us would actually speak the truth to us?
Some biased scientists may look at DNA and refuse to see Intelligent Design - in fact ceasing to be scientists – but what is the religious studies teacher’s excuse for not seeing that God has spoken in love and revealed His truth to His human creation?
As they “compare” religions, don’t they see the huge “spike” in the data when they come to Judeo-Christianity? How can they see the historical basis of the biblical Faith and then refuse to distinguish it from all the myth-based religions? How can they teach that all religions are human-based and very much the same, when the message of the Bible has features in it which put it in an entirely different category from all other religions?
How can they accuse God of failing to offer His truth distinctly and unmistakably and unambiguously – when they know how unique on the religious horizon Jesus Christ is?
They are either:
A. Ignorant of the unique spike that Christianity makes amid all the religious data they have.
Or
B. They are deliberately concealing the spike in order to spare the feelings of people of other religions with whom they want to live in harmony.
If you are ignorant of the facts, then do your homework and you will see that it is simply inaccurate and wrong to place all religions on the same level of credibility. Myth and history are not interchangeable. Truth and feelings are not the same thing. Also consider that human beings are created with an eternal soul – and the destiny of their souls is at stake.
If you are covering up the truth – sacrificing it on the altar of human feelings – then you should know that you are not doing any favors for the human beings involved. God revealed His truth for a reason. He intervened in human history at great cost to Himself because He loves us and He knows that He must banish from His presence forever, those who do not receive His offer of mercy and forgiveness and are left in their sins, contaminated and condemned.
“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”— NIV John 1:12
“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son”. NIV John 3:18
There is far more at stake in religious studies than many are prepared to admit.
3 comments:
According to Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, the "liberal arts" education in the developed world is dominated by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This is why "educated" people will not take God seriously.
One of Britain’s most influential experts on faith describes herself as an unbeliever for whom religion is a “specific set of unverifiable concepts for which people have been tortured and killed for centuries”.
How did she develop such a Nietzschean view of religious faith? She says it was when comparative religions began to be taught in school. “Everything shifted for devoutly held faith when schools began teaching comparative religion. From then on, the game was up. If each religion, it was now taught, has its own legitimacy, its own beliefs and concept of the divine, what is to say whether one is any better than another? It only took a smattering of scholarship to discover that the most significant historical event for Christianity was its adoption as the imperial religion by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century; that the creed was finalised by quarrelling clerics at Nicea in 787; and that Anglicanism itself took off because of the lusty rather than devout intent of Henry VIII” (Joan Bakewell, BBC religious broadcaster in an interview in the GUARDIAN in 2004).
One wonders why she was only exposed to the "smattering of scholarship" that undermined her faith, rather than the genuine scholarship that establishes the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the best documented event in ancient times and catapults Christianity into an entirely different catagory from the myth-based religions that Nietzschean religious education teaches have a legitimacy equal to that of Christianity.
Jesus pictures a dire fate in store for teachers who cause little ones who believe to lose their faith (Matthew 18.6).
It is tragic that such a teacher caused Joan Bakewell and countless others like her to not only lose their faith, but fasten a millstone round their own necks by turning them into corrupters of other little ones.
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