Listing abortion, God, creationism, and every other thing secularists hate about religious ideas, the author saves his worst grievance for last with this remark, the one that makes us all gasp with horror at the audacity of Palin’s views:

The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so.

There it is – a private faith is the highest virtue and must not be touched at all costs. Making faith public is worse that even stopping science and abortions. Quite an assertion.

I recommend you read this article, not because it is helpful, but because it is an example of how unreasonable secular ‘reason’ has become. Not only does this author equivocate between Palin’s views and fundamentalist Islam, but he also blows it out of proportion. What is even worse is that this author believes what he is saying.

Teaching creationism alongside evolution (and other views) in the public school classroom is not the same as banning it (which is what his Islamic examples did). And there are people who are non-religious who also think abortion should be radically limited from it’s abuses today.

But as for private vs. public faith, the author of this story has certainly made his faith public. He’s pushes it on the reader. It’s amazing how easy it is to play the hypocrite. Every single politician that has ever taken office has used his faith in something (be it God, the human spirit, or whatever) to push through laws and regulate the people. The Founding Fathers did the same (even the Declaration of Independence makes the audacious claim that the “Creator” endowed humans with rights).

For an intelligent discussion on religion in the public square, I recommend this dialog between two preeminent philospohers, Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff: Religion in the Public Square.

Palin thinks everyone needs to have a heart right with God. This is different than the comparison that the author makes that Khamenei, only replacing “God” with “Islam.” At least in American you have the freedom to say which God you believe in. When Palin says such things, it is speaking the language of her audience but is also a call to weed out corruption. For Khamenei, he’s speaking from a context outside of freedom of conscience and refers to a specific religion. What is more, if God does exist, I would think he would want us to use our resources wisely and make us less dependent on those who don’t. Is the author against that virtue as well? On this accounts (as well as his several other points), the parallel just cannot be made. Some people may not like Palin’s remarks, but to equate them with fundamentalist Islam (which is just shy of using the word ‘terrorist’) shows he’s out of touch and stretching concepts to fit his prejudice.

Makes me also wonder what the author thinks of Obama’s “faith.”

Would this author enjoy being called a fundamentalist Christian because he shares the idea that caring for the poor is important? Or would he like it if he agreed with Christains that humans should be treated fairly and with dignity? We can all find things we have in common and wedge in assumptions that do not fit. Just because serial killers breath oxygen doesn’t mean everyone who breathes oxygen is a serial killer.

A thoughtful reader will get this. And articles like this are written to stir up the religiously uneducated and fearful. One encouraging thing to me is that while much of the secular media says evangelicals are out of touch, well, the statement can be volleyed as a return of favor. Wow, how’s that for two movements with something in common!

It should be required reading every year for those in journalism to read the Society of Professional Jouralists’ Code of Ethics, including “Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.”

I agree with the whimsical assessment of this article. And it is written in a way that average people can understand. Here’s a taste:

[After citing a string of negative adjectives Dawkin's writes about God, Snow says...] Such invective clings like chewing gum to atheist polemics and raises the question of why these people are so worked up about a creator they don’t believe exists.

Darwinists may be able to describe how older bees, wasps, ants, and termites help their younger siblings, but they can’t explain why Raoul Wallenberg became a martyr for captive Jews.

Atheism fails as a creed because it lacks humanity. It destroys the wall of sanctity that defends the weak from the strong. It spawned history’s most savage movements—from the French Terror to the Stalinist purges. None of the atheistic alternatives has survived because reason just doesn’t make a satisfying god.

Those are just a few lines you’ll enjoy in this article, “New Atheists Are Not Great.”

The John Templeton Foundation will be spending $4 million to answer this question:

Is there “evidence about whether belief in God confers an evolutionary advantage to humankind”?

You’ll find this in a recent British article published by Ekklesia, “Oxford centre to conduct scientific study of religious belief.”

While it will be interesting to see what $4m will produce to answer these questions, the very question is a speed bump.

The study will not determine if God exists, what God would be like, nor even if there are soulish capacities in humans that hungers for God. Rather the study will focus on the biological makeup of the human species to see if there is a biological survival-advantage for believing in God.

Can you see how motivated this is on the side of the atheistic scientist? If they can show that believing in God is biologically disadvantageous, the general public would be gullible enough to believe them despite so many other evidences about the truthfulness of God and religious experience.

This, on my view, is good waste of money because they are asking an uninteresting question. The study assumes, if I’m reading the article correctly, that “philosophical naturalism” is the starting point (This view says that all that exists is the physical universe and all our experience is a result of what can be explained through physics, chemistry, and biology. In other words, there is nothing spiritual in existence.) What exactly do they expect to find?

Science cannot thoroughly explain beliefs, thoughts, ideas, beauty, love, emotions (they can find correlations in the brain, but not the emotion itself), meaning or anything that pertains to the soul. This study is putting science to the task of evaluating unscientific things. What if belief in God does not produce scientific ‘survival’ or ‘advantage’ in this study? Does that render God untrue? Or what if God gives us ‘survival’ or ‘advantage’ that is outside physical processes? Can science measure that?

Suppose we asked this question, “Does beauty (e.g. flowers, sunsets, rainbows, art, people, etc) give us evolutionary advantage?” Science would find little evidence for it. Beauty in this world appears superfluous. That we have a wide variety of sensual pleasures from taste to sight to hearing to touch cannot be explained as ‘evolutionary advantagous’ to our ‘survival.’ Yet, we’d lose a lot of meaning in this world if it wasn’t for the aroma of sizzling bacon or the sound of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.

Or make a comparison with marriage. It is biologically advantageous for men to be with woman to procreate through marriage. This allows the species to survive. Yet, someone may argue we don’t need marriage for that as we can all just sleep around and impregnate each other. Ah, but the social scientist says that broken homes or reckless parenting does not allow the children to have advantage. So we need intimate bonds to produce that. And then, of course, children are our future and they get to repeat the process.

So marriage on this view has nothing to do with real promises, covenants, love, or even a content quality of life (unless those qualities keep you from depression or disease which would extend your life). It only has to do with ‘evolutionary advantage’ or the outcome for physical survival. The real meaning of marriage disappears.

Expect with the Templeton study that the real meaning of religion disappears too.

Such is the plight of a civilization that only allows knowledge through natural science, and natural science only done a certain way. It leaves a lot of important elements out.

Regardless of what information this scientific study reveals about the physical aspects of religion in a persons ‘evolutionary advantage,’ I will predict that it will be far less meaningful than the evidence we already having showing there is a God who benevolently created all humans, showed up among us, and then rose from the dead. In fact, the ‘resurrection of the dead’ gives us advantage beyond anything science can conjure up, yet it cannot be explained scientifically so it doesn’t count. See how quickly faith alone in science alone becomes narrow-minded?

When Solomon said that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, he was onto something. He knew real human meaning in this world comes through physical AND spiritual processes, experience, and relationships.

I’d be glad to accept $4m from the Templeton Foundation to tell them that…. of course, I’d share it with my faithful readers! ;o)

When we open ourselves up to others, whether present in person or present in print, we risk confrontation. Dillard caught me carelessly unguarded when she finished her chapter with an unexpected flare of words.

The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

I have a penetrating fear, deep down, that if I share some of my deeper passions and ideas, the things I have mistakenly tied up with my identity, things brewing in me for my next book project, that they will be taken or exploited. I have a fear that what is bubbling out of me will be stolen. It isn’t irrational, because I’ve seen it before–in my life, in others’.

The love that Jesus poured out flowed all the way to the cross. His love allowed exploitation. He reached for people to give them sight, knowledge, the Way to the Father.

My fear keeps that love from flowing.

A friend at church raise a question the other day, “What is the opposite of love?” he asked. I don’t think ‘hate.’ Hate is too passionate to be the opposite; the question required a less obvious answer.

“What do you think?” I responded.

“Fear,” he said.

Then another friend, a retired public school teacher, said something to me as I left the church house. “If you want to get someone done, don’t expect to take credit for it.”

Do you think God whispers through community? You betcha. Drop your guard and he’ll stare your fear in the face.