The tug of war between religion and science was settled 1,600 years ago by a North African Bishop. As always, those who do learn from history are doomed to repeat its worst mistakes.
The path to sainthood was a meandering one for Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (Augustine of Hippo). Born in 354 in Tagaste, a city in what was then Roman North Africa (now Souk Ahras, Algeria), Augustine was the product of a "mixed" marriage: a devoutly Christian mother and an incorrigibly promiscuous pagan father. After some youthful hooliganism and sexual adventurism (probably exaggerated), Augustine settled in with a concubine and began searching for the truth. He preferred Latin over Greek, Cicero and Virgil to Aristotle. He was smart -- a cocky, snot-nosed kind of smart that irritated his elders. To his mother's distress, he found the Christian scriptures far too humble to be of much value. His intellect wandered along with his romantic interests, ranging over Manichaeism, skepticism and Platonism, but nothing satisfied. Then to Milan and a mentor, Ambrose, who could challenge and chastise with equal aplomb. Finally a voice -- "take and read" -- and Christianity claimed her most formidable intellectual prize.
As with most converts, Augustine took passionately to the new faith but the passion was tempered by an outsider's critical eye. For him, Christianity could not be just a simple, comforting faith -- too boring! Instead, it must be the culmination of man's unceasing search for wisdom. Now the cleric-scholar, Augustine wrote voluminously, becoming the leading intellect of his age and earning the respect of even modern-day atheist philosophers. Bertrand Russell, who did not think much of Aquinas, held Augustine in high regard.
In our time, some religious folks have chosen a distinctly anti-intellectualist route. Creationists, "intelligent-designers," and Biblical literalists seem hell-bent on wearing ignorance as a badge of piety. History repeats itself. In Augustine's time, the great issue was not religion and science or religion and evolution, but Christianity and the corpus of classical learning. With the Roman Empire crumbling, increasingly it was left to the Christian Church to either incorporate or abandon the great Classical intellectual tradition. Centuries before Augustine, some church fathers had already chosen ignorance. Tertullian famously proclaimed: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church? ... We have no need for curiosity since Jesus Christ, nor for inquiry since the Evangel."
Augustine would have none of this. With fist-pounding certainty he argued that reason was as critical to faith as revelation. Alarmed by his stance, a fellow Bishop, Consentius, wrote to remind Augustine that "God is not to be sought after by reason but followed through authority." Setting collegiality aside, Augustine's response was unusually blunt:
You say that truth is to be grasped more by faith than by reason ... Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not believe if we did not have rational souls.
Reason was essential to a correct understanding of the Bible. Yes, the Bible should be taken literally where it makes sense to do so, Augustine would instruct. But where it obviously contradicts our everyday experience, we must search for other meanings. In The City of God (16.7), for example, Augustine discusses Noah's Ark and how it was that animals were present on distant islands so soon after the great flood:
[I]t is asked how they [various wild animals] could be found in the islands after the deluge ... It might, indeed, be said that they crossed to the islands by swimming, but this could only be true of those very near the mainland; whereas there are some so distant that we fancy no animal could swim to them ... they were produced out of the earth as at their first creation ... this makes it more evident that all kinds of animals were preserved in the ark, not so much for the sake of renewing the stock, as of prefiguring the various nations that were to be saved in the Church.
Wait a minute, St. Augustine, do that again. Noah didn't literally save all the earth's animals on the ark? (How could a good Catholic Bishop have never heard the Irish Rovers' unicorn song?) It's representational, you say, the Church saving the nations of the earth? But we've got Ark museums now that show us how Noah did it. They found the actual Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey, didn't they? Five hundred years before any European thought of using a fork for dinner, Augustine already understood that the Bible required critical interpretation, not a mere wide-eyed scan. What must he be thinking about some Christians today?
Actually, we don't need to ask. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis (1.19), Augustine is pretty clear about what he thinks of stupid Christians. After reminding Christians that many non- believers are well-versed in such areas as astronomy, biology, and geology, he admonishes them against blithely using scriptures as a basis for lecturing intelligent non-believers on these topics:
Now, it is a disgraceful and a dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
If a Christian shows himself to be ignorant and foolish, then can the religion and its scriptures be any less so?
If they [non-believers] find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
To be sure, Augustine's views on religious tolerance, sin, and sexuality can offend modern sensibilities. He did not always transcend his times (few do). But his instance that reason was as much God's gift as revelation provided the foundation for the "Truth (of reason) cannot contradict Truth (of revelation)" dictum later championed so vigorously by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The best of the Christian intellectual tradition offers no comfort or cover to today's foolish Christians who ignore science and reason in a misguided effort to guard the faith. Their timidity and intellectual cowardice soil the proud edifice great Christian thinkers of the past toiled so hard to erect.
Christian philosophy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Just look at all the people of fear in so many churches these days still shivering and shaking over 9/11 - nine years later. Sodom had its angel incident 15-25 years after its 9/11.
"... But the writer who was destined to consolidate the whole system of persecution, to furnish the arguments of all its later defenders, and to give to it the sanction of a name that long silenced every pleading of mercy, and became the glory and the watchword of every persecutor, was unquestionably Augustine, on whom more than any other theologian—more perhaps even than on Dominic and Innocent—rests the responsibility of this fearful curse." -- THE HISTORY AND RISE AND INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT OF RATIONALISM IN EUROPE
I believe he gets the credit for postulating that the theology of the church must stand on both faith and reason. He felt that God was the ultimate scientist as well as the ultimate philosopher.
As I think that "faith," properly understood, is in the context of God the same as in the context of other humans, I have faith in God in the same way I have faith in my friends. I do not KNOW what they might do, what they might think, or if their motives are good, even if I exeprience them for a lifetime, because what is in their minds and sould is forever private. God is the same, and so I must have "faith" in God, believing the best until given proof otherwise. This is the highest act of charity.
Augustine believed God capable of making an unjust and arbitrary rule by which people might gain salvation. This "salvation by luck" is blasphemy, believing God does an unjust thing. It is, in fact, the opposite of faith. Far from a model of intelligent faith, I think Augustine never had faith.
Chris Henderson
politguard.com
I have faith in Peter Pan/Santa/Easter Bunny/Spongebob the same as I do my friends... see how ridiculous that is? You replace the word 'god' with anything else and you can see the light XD
You are locked in the definition of faith put forward by dogmatically religious groups. I have faith in my friends in the sense that I cannot prove that they are good, have good intentions, seek good things, or even that they like me. All of this is in their minds, and I have only the access to their minds that they allow me to have. Thus, I choose to believe the best of them, even though my evidence is purely circumstantial. This is what it means to have faith in a person. It is not without evidence, per se, but it is highly suspect evidence.
To see whether or not this is a better definition that the mystical nonsense put forth by religious dogmatists, you must first imagine that God exists, of course, but as David Hume pointed out, you don't even have conclusive evidence that your friends exist as anything but a collection of tissues that doesn't even think. You only know for sure, as Descartes said, that you think.
Faith is only "based on nothing" if we forget how we use the word when we apply it to our other relationships. I don't see why I should forget that useful definition and replace it with mystical nonsense just because some religion wants to justify "belief without evidence."
Chris Henderson
politguard.com
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his
Easy enough for Augustine to say back in the day, increasingly difficult for today's Right Wing Religious, who can only see Christian interpretation pretty much eaten up and swallowed by the "precedence" of modern science.
"Augustine did see the works as entered into the pit. He had, however endeavored to cecede to his own will making therefore, hallowed the sorceries that had been placed in his path. Headlong into his thesis were stature willed opponents Credited with the many Creeds, he had availed the monogamus source instead of Divinity. Treading over deep waters in spite of the trowel placed for him. Clipped onto the hemline were examples of cleaving to the once popular enigma of satan. At one time the rational had attained a high degree of stability. Exciting happenings prevailed upon this, therefore, by making an inept staid of him.Disclosed amidst the stature minded, enabled his skepticism to warrant a release. However,the move produced a scorn of utmost priority. Still in the course of his study, there allowed an opening wide enough to avoid complete disaster. Temple of arts ensued, yet Divine Power yet there. Until the time of the raising of ecclesiastical power there had not been a mental disarrangement. However, because of the man who exploited the creed, there arose the dead works of the flesh.God's children have been prisoners of these dead works ever since that time. . (Continued)
In the meantime, why discard his entire corpus, for some brackish entries?
Having said that, boorish people have often conquered the world -- the Romans, the English, the Americans ...
Also, which form of reason are you talking about? The Age of Pericles? Plato? Aristotle? We're still ante-dating the conquests of Alexander. How about the post-Alexandrian world -- why don't you go pick up Fritz Graf and then talk about how "reasonable" the Greek world was. Maybe there is some Buddhism coming in, but those philosophies that you name gained currency by being picked up, processed, and carried by the Romans.
My main gut response, however, is LAY OFF MY ROMANS.
Father was pagan, Mother Christian, got his sense from his father obviously.
He believed sex to be the greatest evil and to his credit at least tried to reconcile Christianity in his mind to at least try to follow some resemblance of factual reality and did what he could to get others to stop taking ALL of the bible literally.
Although he still took many parts of the bible that are obviously just Astrological Allegories and believed them to be literal anyway.
Such as the "Virgin Birth" etc
Sadly this was another "could have been" a great mind, destroyed by the mind plague that is religion.
ALL of the SUN god religions begin with a "Virgin Birth" there are about 20 I believe beginning with the Ancient Egyptians.
Others are Nana, Eve, Istar, Demeter, Hecate, Themis, Hera, Astraea, Diana, Cybele, Fortuna, Erigone, Sibylla, and there are several others that I cant recall at this moment.
The virgin is always the constellation of "Virgo" the allegorical character changes from religion to religion, culture to culture.
in the case of Egypt Virgo the Virgin was Isis.
In the case of Christianity Virgo was played by "Mary".
This is why in many early depictions of Mary she was Black, was seated and was nursing the sun god in the exact same pose of those usually found depicting Isis.
Here are a couple of decent links that explain it better than I can here.
http://www.usbible.com/Astrology/when_was_jesus_born.htm
http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/solarmyth/solarmyth14.html
ALL of the SUN god religions begin with a "Vir.gin Birth" there are about 20 I believe beginning with the Ancient Egyptians.
Others are Nana, Eve, Istar, Demeter, Hecate, Themis, Hera, Astraea, Diana, Cybele, Fortuna, Erigone, Sibylla, and there are several others that I cant recall at this moment.
The vir.gin is always the constellation of "Vir.go" the allegorical character changes from religion to reli.gion, culture to culture.
in the case of Egypt Virgo the Virgin was Isis.
In the case of Chri.stianity Virgo was played by "Mary".
This is why in many early depictions of Mary she was Bla.ck, was seated and was nursing the sun god in the exact same pose of those usually found depicting Isis.
Here are a couple of decent links that explain it better than I can here.
http://www.usbible.com/Astrology/when_was_jesus_born.htm
http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/solarmyth/solarmyth14.html
It is also worth noting that Augustine was in charge of a large and troubled congregation, and, by addressing its needs, he actually proves more practical and liberal than others, like St. Jerome. Augustine actually carves a place for marriage -- granted, as a lesser evil than fornication -- but at least he establishes a place for normal people to live their lives, have children, and still be a part of the church.
I could go on -- wrote a paper on this 2 years ago.
"Love yourself and love your (generic) neighbor". All the rest is secondary.