A Lesson From Zimbawe

Alright, I confess. Santa brought me an iPad 2. I’m guilty of high-techery and my punishment is that I have become the reincarnation of Sisyphus. The more this gadget opens me up to the newspapers of the world, the more I go up the hill of learning, only to find that the crushing boulder of so much global information pushes me back down to re-open that iTunes app called Newseum the next day to selectively scan the front pages of 800 newspapers from almost 80 countries.

Google News is another resource that one can get lost in. I happened across an article from Zimbawe, in lower Africa.  That’s right…Zimbawe…whose president is the infamous Robert Mugabe who has held power since the country’s independence from the British crown colony, the former Southern Rhodesia, in 1980.

The country is predominately Christian, belonging to Anglican, Methodist, and Catholic Churches.

The newspaper is The Standard, the country’s leading Sunday paper. The article which got my attention was “Time for a ’Christian Spring’ to revamp religion”. Author: “Rational Believer.” http://www.thestandard.co.zw/opinion/33307-sunday-view-time-for-a-christian-spring-to-revamp-religion.html.

The lead paragraphs say it so well.

As a Christian, it hurts me to see how ignorant and gullible many fellow-Christians can be. Many Christians believe virtually anything that merely sounds spiritual. In the process: They throw away the credibility of Christianity.

They give many non-Christians, some of whom DO think rationally about things, all the necessary ammunition to blast holes in Christianity.More specifically, ignorant and gullible fellow-Christians are the ones who contribute to Christianity as a religion having a bad name among Atheists and Agnostics.

I continuously search for the harmony between the Bible and science. I cannot understand how any person is able to live a dualistic life where he or she believes one thing in the tried-and-proven world of science and maths, but has to switch off part of his/her mind in order to believe in the Bible and God, and vice versa.

God is not the proper object of contemporary empirical science, i.e. God cannot be perceived with instrumentation. Nonetheless, that does not mean that empirical scientists should deny realities which are not directly perceivable. There is nothing intrinsic to contemporary empirical science which closes it off from another science which is beyond physics, i.e. metaphysics.

I might interject here what I remember about Rhodesia…the country practiced apartheid…separation of the races, with overt implications of racial inequality. This observation segues into to following from The Standard’s article:

For example, it was not long ago when apartheid was being preached from the pulpit. But that “gospel truth” has since been found to be wrong — and we changed our mind about it (or I hope all did!). Similarly, only a few centuries ago, it was believed that the earth was the centre of the universe — based on Bible scriptures. Now it is common knowledge that the earth is a planet in a solar system filled with more, in a galaxy with billions of stars, in a universe with billions of galaxies. It was found that the scripture was interpreted too narrowly.

The one thing we Christians have to learn is to not become fundamentalist in our mindset about what we think we know about the Bible; about how we understand God, and what we believe. Instead, we have to grow.

Oh, and how we need to grow as Christians. We need to understand how the Bible was written, when it was assembled, the midrashic elements in it, the poetry and parables that it contains. We need to learn both about science and its changing frontiers as well as the evolution of thought away from a fundamentalist approach to understanding the Bible.

New Year’s resolution for Christians: Get thee to a bible study group that explores the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible and toss away the fundamentalist approach which can only cause severe rifts with science…