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Biblical proportions
Sheesh. I blog about the Bible and the next thing you know the northeast is hit with rains of Biblical proportions. It's rained all day today and weather.com tells me to expect showers tomorrow and Tuesday, followed by "few showers" on Wednesday and Thursday. They might as well put an ark graphic on their forecast page.
In other vaguely-religion-related news, it's amazing what kind of position teaching can put you in sometimes. In English class, we were considering what to make of certain passages in Cat's Cradle about what it would mean to believe in a religion that you knew was "a pack of foma [lies]" and one of my students put forth the opinion that, in essence, only very stupid people could actually believe that religion is true. Stories like Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus and his miracles were just patently false, he or she asserted. None of his classmtes seemed inclined to challenge the position. Of course, there's a part of me that agrees with this student's basic conclusions, but as a teacher I felt a duty to challenge the ease with which this student seemed to have arrived at this position.
Thus, I found myself defending at least the possibility of religion being true or, to put it another way, that there might be good reasons for intelligent people to be believers. As should be clear from reading past entries, I don't put any stock in the supernatural explanations religions offer, but at the same time 1) I recognize that an arrogant, dismissive attitude toward believers--especially in a country like ours that is largely religious but also has so many different viewpoints--is not a great way to proceed through life (although I have been known to challenge these viewpoints myself, I favor a civil discourse over contempt) and 2) I recognize that the world is large enough and complex enough that any simplistic claims to absolute certainty make me uncomfortable. I've made such statements in the past both as a believer and as an atheist, but I've grown less strident in my old age (that is, my late 20s and now 30).
Wise Mr. Sherck, to know that "arrogant and dismissive" are rarely the best
path. The fact is that it wasn't so long ago that we didn't know that radio
waves or x-rays existed, because we couldn't see them. None of us can
possibly know that which we cannot see but I think it's fairly safe to
assume, given what we *do* know, that there are forces we cannot see. Nice
post.
This reminds me of the old Star Trek episode, "Who Watches the Watchers",
where a primitive civilization that accidentally witnessed some of the
Enterprise crew's technology mistakenly took the technology for "miracles"
and Picard to be a god. This was because their technology was so far
beyond anything of their understanding that this was the only logical
explanation they could come up with. This episode made me wonder if the
same could have happened in ancient Earth's history and this is where our
Bible stories of miracles come from. Would be interesting if it were so.