If the war against religion is real, as Republicans constantly assert, then I am one of its generals.
I am, after all, the founder and executive director of a 14,000 member organization that has as one of its primary goals the desire to ensure that evolutionary biology -- and only evolutionary biology rather than creationism in any and all of its guises -- is taught in public school science classrooms and laboratories.
As an organization, we are outspoken and clear about our intent. We believe that those who want to substitute their reading of the Bible for science lessons are mistaken and must be stopped at the doors of our public schools. We believe that those who disingenuously cast doubt on basic biological principles in an attempt to promote their religious worldview are doing great damage to our educational system. We believe that those who disparage virtually every professional biologist in the world and disagree with virtually every professional scientific society in the world in their attempt to force their religious beliefs into scientific lesson plans will, if they remain unchecked, march us into a dark age of scientific illiteracy.
We are relentlessly attacked as being anti-religious because those making such a claim make two loud but completely baseless assertions. On one hand they claim that teaching evolutionary biology in science classes turns students into atheists and thus is a direct assault on religious belief. On the other hand, they claim that evolutionary theory itself is a religion, the religion of secular humanism. (Let's ignore the inherent contradiction that if evolutionary theory is a religion that we're promoting, we certainly can't be waging a war against religion. Indeed, if evolutionary biology is a religion, which most assuredly it is not, then we would simply be promoting one religion over another -- which is dramatically different from being opposed to religion in general.)
As an organization, we are also outspoken and clear about another important point. We believe that the text of the First Amendment to the US Constitution dealing with religion is unambiguous: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." We fully support Thomas Jefferson when he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association on Jan. 1, 1802 that the first amendment meant "building a wall of separation between church and State." In addition to Jefferson's opinion, we wholeheartedly support the decisions of the US Supreme Court and numerous federal district courts that have repeatedly ruled that all attempts to teach creationism, whether those attempts include young earth creationism, "creation science," or intelligent design, are unconstitutional. Court after court and judge after judge, typically conservative judges, have consistently concluded that promoting any of these items in public schools is equivalent to the government promoting one particular religion -- something the First Amendment specifically prohibits.
Demanding that evolutionary theory be taught in public schools, fighting to dislodge creationism whenever it gains a foothold in those same schools, and respecting the language and intent of the First Amendment are viewed as acts of war in today's society. These are our tactics and we are not shy about them.
But are we waging a war on religion? Not a chance!
Our organization, after all, is called The Clergy Letter Project and we are a collection of religious leaders from many faiths. Almost 13,000 Christian clergy members have signed our Christian Clergy Letter. This simple two paragraph letter includes the following powerful statement:
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.
The men and women who comprise The Clergy Letter Project, religious leaders representing scores of religions and denominations, are not opposed to religion. What they are opposed to, though, is the belief that there is only one "right" religion and that American society must reflect the narrow position promoted by those who espouse that one view.
The women and men who comprise The Clergy Letter Project are certainly in favor of religion. But more than that, they are in favor of religious freedom, religious diversity and religious respect. They are willing to fight for their right to not have their religious beliefs marginalized because some claim they are not "pure" enough. And they do not feel threatened by those who adopt religious beliefs different from theirs.
These are not soldiers in a war on religion.
The real threat to religious freedom in America comes not from these people but from those who demand that religion must take only one form. The claim by Republicans that there is a war on religion turns reality on its head and attempts to make victims out of perpetrators.
The hate mail and death threats I've received over the years for leading The Clergy Letter Project speaks volumes about what the fight is really about: intolerance of religious difference by the narrow minded.
Follow Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mzclergyletter
Religious war - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
French Wars of Religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pr Chris
PS: I am one of those signatories
Dr. Zimmerman -- Your argument posits that religious zealots what Creationism and the Bible taught in science class. This is not the truth. What people of faith (it is a different discussion to lump a unitarian universalist as a person of faith) desire is for common ancestry (which is not scientifically proven) to be taught as fact.
It would do you well to conduct a little more research on your subject before you publish the position of a group of people you obviously know little about.
We who have signed Dr Zimmerman's Clergy Letter project argue strongly that the truth of the Bible is religious truth, and that scientific method produces its own understanding of the natural world which is the best explanation we can make of the processes of the created world, however it is defined. We understand that "theory" does not argue against "fact" but are connected, that "theory", in science is the best explanation for the observed facts currently known. The creationists have a presupposition that actually limit's God's power and desires. To take the Bible, a document of 4000 years ago in part, and expect it to accurately state scientific process is to mis-understand the truth of the Bible. To pit science and faith against each other on the basis of Scripture is to mis-understand both.
Pr Chris
Secondly, Creationists do NOT pit science and faith against each other. Macro-evolution / common ancestry is NOT science. You can spout until you are blue in the face that most scientists believe this. My response is true science is NOT a popularity contest. Scientific revolutions happen because of the minority view not the majority.
In your article your quote from the Clergy Letter Project: "We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist."
Could you please provide examples of "timeless truths of the Bible?"
Also, as I stated in earlier posts, both the Christian Letter and the UU Letter (but not the Rabbi letter) state, “We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”
In an effort to better understand this assertion could you, as founder of the CLP, please provide a few examples of "biblical truths" in contradistinction to "scientific truths?"
Cheers and Regards,
DF Batchelder
God is the Creator of heaven and earth.
God created human beings to know him and to love him.
God is eternal; human beings are not.
Human beings are granted stewardship over the earth.
One definition of "sin" is broken relationships, and death itself.
******************
However, timeless truths of the Bible do NOT include:
That there is any necessarily defined time-line between the "beginning" of creation, when darkness was separated from light, and earth was created, and the present day
That the "days" of creation is any defined length.
That the creation can know God in all his power and glory, and that human beings are in any way equal to God.
That human beings can save themselves by their own efforts.
That every word is to be taken literally in every case; there is poetry and metaphor throughout the Bible. [Genesis 1-2 is remarkable responsive reading...and is even more amazing when it is taken as such; in comparison to attempting to cram a literal understanding of it into some concept of science.]
I could go on and on. Understanding what the Bible is saying--and what it is not-- is the key to keeping both science, as a description of the created world and its order and processes, and faith, which is the who and the why our our existence in their proper relationship, and which yields knowledge in both areas.
Pr Chris
Thanks for your response to my post.
My questions in the post are germane to the Clergy Letter Project (CLP). Accordingly, are you a signatory to the CLP?
Cheers, DF Batchelder
One idea is Gen 1-2 as responsive reading:
A: G-d said: Let there be [X]
B: And [X] came to be (description of how X came to be)
A: G-d saw, and said "it is good"
B. Evening and morning, day [whatever]
A: G-d,
B: narrato/ people.
This reading gets us out of the argument of dates and times and how many hours in a day, etc, and gets us back to a statement of WHY G-d created our universe, and us with it.
I hope the day comes when we begin to understand that one can be a scientist, and a faithful believer in G-d at the same time. They are NOT in conflict. But it is frustrating to deal with. Hang in there. There are very many of us, on both sides of the religion/science "divide" who are working to bring the two sides back together!
Shalom!
Pr Chris
For support on say, the abortion issue? See my Facebook site, and more than that my Wordpress site, Brettongarcia's blog. Outlining 200 points in favor of Christian/Catholic theological support, for abortion. The main idea being that after all, what makes us a human person, is not our DNA, but our more intelligent mind or "rational soul" as Aquinas put it. While? An embryo, according to Psalm 139, is not "form"ed enough, its brain is not large enough, to sustain the mind, the intelligence that after all, makes us human.
As a scientist and medical professional, I am baffled by the idea held by so many that everything we as a species will ever need to know was already known 2000 years ago. Of course, this belief doesn't stop fundamentalists from hypocritically seeking state-of-the-art care when they or their loved ones fall ill. I don't care what anyone else is up to in their free time, as long as it's taking place between consenting adults and is harming no one else, but I can't do my job when people keep trying to place religiously-dictated limitations on my work. That kind of shortsightedness hurts all of us, and has damning implications for the future of humankind.
By now, there is a huge divide between the denominations with a classically trained clergy, and those denominations with a more immediate understanding of "Call" to ministry, and, unfortunately, given our national history and the role of "The Fundamentals" in our religious history, esp. in the South, we are now stuck in this needless and counterproductive "war" on Evolution.
The good news is that there are a lot of people like you who understand this issue--and its importance.
Pr Chrsi
Pr Chris
And creationism, in all its forms, fails the number one rule of science, which is that theories must fit and explain facts, not the other way around!