Woo. He actually said flat-out that Cause & Effect do not exist. That “God Willed my fist to snap forward into your face, then God Willed your nose to bleed and hurt. No Connection Whatsoever.” Utter Predestination.

I’ve heard historians place the start of Islamic stagnation and decline to when al-Ghazali’s theology became dominant in Islam, after the trauma of the Mongol Incursions. (Unconfirmed: al-Ghazali was patronized and his theology enforced by a Caliph who had just usurped the position and was looking desperately to justify his coup as Divine Right.)

At al-Ghazali’s time, Islamic medicine was the most advanced in the world. Nowadays “Islamic Medicine” means something more like “Recite the Koran over the patient while beating him with rods to drive out the Jinn possessing his belly.” Imagine how that would have worked with my perforated diverticulitis (turned peritoniitis) three years ago, with failure explained as “Inshal’lah…”

Utter Predestination means never having to take responsibility for anything. I keep saying that “al_Ghazali set Islam down that path 800 years ago. Look where it got them.”

Humble, missionary Christianity, buried alive in scholasticism.

…until we were leaving and we happened to walk past this fairly large anti-evolution poster board. And thinking about it more as I drove home I got rather angry, because it was quite possible that this brand of anti-scientific Christianity is all that many of these students have heard.

To be fair, and speaking as a more conservative member of the clergy in a mainline/oldline tradition, I can say that this is as much a function of the failure of the old mainline as anything else. I’m convinced that a faithful mainline tradition is the natural home of many now-secular americans, and that it would balance against some of the elements exemplified in this post. Unfortunately, faithfulness is sometimes very hard to find.

It’s taking the rules of a universal scale and applying them to a specific situation—kinda how, from the opposite perspective, the New Agers take quantum theory and apply it to how we should perceive the universe. It’s taking science out of context.

Yes, I compared Christians to New Agers. Pseudoscience is pseudoscience.

I mentioned that I didn’t think science and Buddhism were incompatable, but something else came up in the parade and we changed the subject (and then got into a conversation about how the only things that American students learn about China are bad… hahaha) But later that week we all met at a church for their traditional culture night (for international students and their host parents, my roomate’s host parents couldn’t make it so I went with her instead) which was a great time until we were leaving and we happened to walk past this fairly large anti-evolution poster board. And thinking about it more as I drove home I got rather angry, because it was quite possible that this brand of anti-scientific Christianity is all that many of these students have heard.

I have a neighbor who is a hard-core Young Earth Creationist (I’m pretty sure she has purchased their entire gift-shop worth of books and movies from the Creation Museum) and in the past I’ve simply tried to overlook her insistance in YEC, especially when she berated me when I was still on the fence between YEC and “the evil other of evolution” (I have since moved towards that “evil other”… not quite 100% accepting, but I do outright reject YEC) (and then proceeded to have a series of questions/answers with her daughter to “show” me what the “right” answers look like). But more and more recently I’ve been thinking about what effect this sort of behavior can have on people outside of the Church. If we can’t even give them a place to ask questions, let alone to not agree with a scientific reading of Genesis, why does anyone think they would come flocking to us? I realize that many Christians are comforted by the thought that the Bible really does have “all the answers”… but I think that is just not true at all! It has some answers, yes. And important answers to important questions, but it does not have all the answers and I think some people really need to just get used to it. :/