On Thursday, August 14, under the title “A married dad is no great ‘catch,’” the “Ask Amy” advice column (Amy Dickinson’s syndicated column) had a query from “D” in which her husband’s sister is having an affair with a married man dubbed “Jimmy.”

D’s husband’s sister has two young children produced from two failed relationships. She says her husband’s parents think Jimmy is a real “catch” because he has money and a great job.

D and her husband agree that Jimmy is a scoundrel because he lives with his wife and two children who “says he can’t divorce his wife because he is a Catholic and Catholics don’t believe in divorce.”

D complains that “D’s” family is bad-mouthing Jimmy’s wife because she wants to keep her husband. They want D and her husband to welcome Jimmy at family events. They say D and her husband should like Jimmy because he is “a man of such integrity.”

D says, “We don’t have it in us [to encourage Jimmy]. We can’t but empathize with his wife and the four young children who are being hurt.

Then D says, “Amy, are we being judgmental? Should we just act as if all is well and go on?

This is oh, so sad on oh, so many levels. At least D and her husband empathize with Jimmy’s wife and the four chidlren who will be impacted; and they seem to have a problem with Jimmy’s behavior. However…

1. Even though D and her husband have made a moral judgment about Jimmy’s behavior (he’s a “scoundrel” in their eyes) — D is actually having second thoughts about it! (”Are we being judgmental?”)
2. Jimmy’s ridiculous reason for continuing in his fornication and not divorcing his wife — that he’s Catholic and Catholics don’t believe in divorce (adultery is okay as long as it doesn’t lead to divorce!).
3. D is quick to make a moral judgment about Jimmy, but reluctant to make a moral judgment about her husband’s sister’s behavior — who’s trying to break up a family, fornicating with a man who has a child and two kids and she doesn’t care what consequences that has on her own two children or the children of Jimmy and Jimmy’s wife. If D had a problem with her husband’s sister’s behavior, she’d be calling her a “scoundrel,” too.
4. D’s husband’s parents and family think two-timing Jimmy, who’s cheating on his wife and kids, is a “catch” just because he has money and a good job.

This situation demonstrates several truths:

• The moral bankruptcy of moral relativism and “tolerance.” Look at all the terrible behavior and consequences being tolerated here.
• The tyranny of non-judgmentalism. The “absolute rule” of non-judgmentalism acts snuffs out what little moral judgment D and her husband have about the situation.
• The harmful consequences of sin. When we sin, we hurt others. That’s one of the main reasons God calls sin wrong.
• A society that rejects the biblical worldview idea of sin falls into all kinds of ridiculous foolishness — that ends up damaging relationships.
• Heaping shame and disapprobation on foolish, harmful and destructive behavior is not wrong!
• Everybody makes moral judgments all the time (including those who insist we should always be non-judgmental). Therefore…
• The questions should be: Are we making wise moral judgments? Are we holding others to double standards? And how well are we holding to our own moral standards?

A few days ago, Fred Schruers wrote a book review of Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right and the Culture Wars by Thomas R. Lindlof.

Martin Scorsese directed the 1988 film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” an adaptation of the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. I haven’t ever read the book or seen the film, but (spoiler warning immediately follows!) in the climactic scene the character of Jesus imagines himself in a domestic scene married to Mary Magdalene.

Schruers says Scorsese intended the film to explore Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels: “fully divine, fully human in one entity” — a theologically orthodox motive, but an unorthodox way of portraying it. As a result, “The Last Temptation” caused an uproar among a large sector of Christians. People protested and boycotted the film. Lindlof shows that Universal studios representatives, perhaps hoping to make more money on the film, tried to amp up the crisis and leverage it to make the protesters look bad.

The film barely broke even (making only about $8 million) and Hollywood took this message from the experience: “Do not make controversial movies about Jesus.”

Now if you’re schooled in worldviews, it’s easy to see that Lindlof and Schruers pushing their own worldview agendas. For one thing, Schruer’s account ignores the Catholic side of the protest, which doesn’t fit his narrative that “the Religious Right” is defined mainly as violent-prone fundamentalists and evangelicals.

For another, Lindlof and Schruer tar “the Religious Right” with an overly-broad brush, likening “The Last Temptation of Christ” to the furor in the Islamic world over Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” In their narrative, Christian and Islamic “fundamentalists” are like peas in a pod. But the differences are immense: Rushdie was slapped with a death fatwa and had to go into hiding for decades. There was no Christian death fatwa against Scorsese and Scorsese was not forced to go into hiding.

Third, Schruer implies that the Religious Right’s political base is kissing cousins with the Ku Klux Klan.

Overall, however, Scorsese’s film managed to excite the very base that ideologues were only too happy to bring to protest rallies. Many [protests] were well-meaning, but there are inevitably disturbing snapshots, such as the day in Chattanooga, Tenn., when the Lookout Mountain Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were warmly greeted by local ministers.

Obviously the Ku Klux Klan is an evil, racist, violent group. Whoever those local ministers were, they never have allowed that meeting to take place, they should have immediately publicly confessed their sin for allowing it to happen, and they should be forever ashamed of themselves for partnering in any way the the KKK. With their Klan sympathies, they brought undying discredit to themselves and the gospel.

All Christian believers should take this story as strong medicine — we need to look in the mirror honestly, and we need to look at our history honestly.

My main point, though, and the point of this blog, is to alert you to worldview agendas! Many social and political commentators (like Lindlof) and many in the mainstream media (like Schruer) have their own “last temptation.” They can’t stop themselves from believing that people in “the Religious Right” (conservative Christians, evangelicals and fundamentalists) are predisposed to follow a script of thinly-veiled racism and violence, little different the KKK or from Islamic fundamentalists.

In Sunday, July 20, 2008’s “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times, David Rieff has written a very thoughtful article about Darfur called “Where justice is the enemy of peace.”

Darfur activists view Bashir as an arch-villian, like Hitler or Pol Pot. They say it is immortal not to indict Bashir in a war crimes tribunal for his support of the janjaweed militias that have killed 200,000 and displaced millions.

Reiff argues — against many Darfur activists — that bringing Sudan’s President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir to trial in the International Criminal Court on crimes against humanity might be a feel-good move, but would not advance peace in the country.

Reiff’s thesis for opposing the Darfur activists is that their underlying assumptions that peace and justice are always compatible goals, and the rare cases when they are not justice should be served, are deeply flawed.

His reasons:

• In the real world, you can’t get perfect justice. Example: South Africa’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission, which understood that establishing peace for the new nation demanded that, in exchange for confessions, the perpetrators of the horrors of apartheid should be let off the hook.
• Even though under settled international law that Bashir is a war criminal, who’s going to arrest him? The “international community” isn’t going to do it because the “international community” lacks the will or the unity to take such an action. (Sudan’s biggest supporter is China.)
• The Darfur war, like all wars, can end in only one of two ways: total victory, as in World War II; or a negotiated settlement. As evil as Bashir might be, no group — not the U.S., the U.N., NATO, nor the African Union — the stomach for all-out war with the goal of all-out regime change in Sudan. Therefore, a negotiated settlement will be required.
• The price the people in Darfur would pay (in revenge by Bashir and his henchmen) for this symbolic move would be more than anyone else in the International Criminal Court or the “international community” would pay.

Therefore, Reiff argues, the insistance to bring Bashir to justice is not about bringing peace to Darfur as much as it is about imposing a political vision on the world in which human rights is the categorical political and moral imperative that wipes out all others.

Reiff calls this motive “human rights triumphalism,” and he sees it as the enemy of real-world peace prospects in the region. The conflict does not fit the Western “human rightist” morality play in which Bashir is the whole problem.

And here we come to the worldview observation. Reiff is saying of indulging our fantasies of the wicked getting their full comeuppance, “Things do not work that way in our fallen world, and it is pure self-indulgence to act as if they did.”

I don’t know if Reiff is working from the biblical worldview perspective, but that  phrase “fallen world” and that last sentence is a zinger that lines up well with what God says in the Bible. Human rights are important, but we can’t expect full justice or full peace in this world because of human sin — full justice and full peace are only possible in the hereafter. Even though it sticks in our craw, we must leave some things in the hands of a righteous and just Gode.

And sometimes in this imperfect world, if we want to be peacemakers we just have to grit our teeth and accept less-than-perfect approximations of peace and less-than-optimal compromises and less-than-satisfactory negotiated settlements with people who are unworthy and whom can’t ever fully be trusted.

God calls each of us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our minds].” (Romans 12:1-2) We’re called both to radical dissent from the system that opposes God and a radical re-formation of our thinking processes.

This is hard because so many things pull us from God. So we need to be mindful of the things that can point us back to God and deeper into our relationship with Christ.

To that end, scripture reading and prayer are essential. But the Bible is a big book — where to start? And prayer — if we haven’t grown up in a church (and sometimes even if we have), we barely have a vocabulary for it.

What to do? I’d like to share a plan that I’ve been using on and off for the past several years. This plan bathes your mind in God’s Word (the Bible) every day and over time helps you develop your prayer life.

The website is http://missionstclare.com. Now let me tell you what makes this such a great website.

1. It makes use of The Book of Common Prayer (BCP). This book of worship has been used in the Anglican and Episcopal tradition for close to 500 years. It’s a rich and deep spiritual treasure-chest.
2. The BCP has prayers for morning and evening, so you can be reminded of God regularly. It only takes a few minutes each time, so you’re not being asked to make up a whole program on your own, and you’re not being asked to spend hours and hours each day. It’s manageable.
3. If you follow the morning and evening prayers, you’ll work your way through the entire book of Psalms every several weeks. The Psalms are the most beloved book in the Bible because they express to God the gamut of human emotions. Twice a day you’ll be saturating your mind with praise, laments, cries for help, and shouts of confidence and joy. Familiarity with the Psalms will make all your prayer times more fruitful. You won’t be at a loss for words anymore because you’ll have developed a vocabulary for praise.
4. Each day the prayer book also gives you readings from the Old and New Testaments. In the space of two years you work your way just about through the whole Bible (some of the most repetitious or gruesome sections are omitted). As a result, over time you become more and more familiar with the major themes of the Bible and how the whole Bible fits together.
5. The BCP laces the readings from the Psalms, Old and New Testament with special prayers and petitions based upon scripture, as well as a confession of sin, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer of St. Francis and Chrysostom’s prayer. It also has prayers for days of the week and seasons of the year, such as Advent (leading up to Christmas), Lent and Holy Week (leading up to Easter) and Pentecost. A person who uses the BCP is praying along with God’s people worldwide during these themed periods of the year.
6. Mission St. Clare has some other nice bells and whistles.
   • If you don’t have a match and candle handy, you can strike a virtual match and light a virtual candle. (This might seem silly, and I think this feature plays kind of tongue-in-cheek — but there’s something to be said for setting a contemplative tone for prayer.)
   • There are hymns that have music files attached; if you don’t know the hymns you can learn them by clicking and singing along. (Singing softly along to computer tones isn’t quite the same as joining a organ and a congregation in soul-stirring singing — but there’s something to be said for learning the great songs of the church. Not all of them are great, some might even be a little sappy, but some are really, really good.)
   • There’s a missionary prayer each day for a country of the world.
   • There’s a prayer each day for a Christian denomination.
   • One of my favorite features — and something that makes Mission St. Clare’s saint list totally unique — is that, unlike other saints’ catalogues that trace only one Christian tradition, Mission St. Clare’s recognizes the great saints and martyrs from all the Christian traditions: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican. It recognizes stand-bys like Felicity and Perpetua, the Cappadocian fathers and the great popes, but also reminds us of Calvin, Luther, Anabaptists, Baptists, missionaries, the first Christians in African and Asian countries, and even people like Dante, John Milton, John Bunyan and Chief Seattle. It’s broadly ecumenical in the best sense. By learning about these saints who have gone before us, we gain appreciation not only for what Christ did through them, but for what Christ can do through us if we allow the Holy Spirit to take over our lives. It also helps us enter into the communion of the saints, emphasizing that we are part of a cross-generational, cross-cultural people of God.
7. There are two quibbles I have with the website about which I feel I should inform you.
   • Sometimes the denominations listed in the daily prayer for denominations will have prayers for “our brothers and sisters” in denominations which are founded on principles in strong conflict with the biblical worldview. Two that I remember are the Swedenborgian church and the Unitarian-Universalists. I’m not begrudging prayer for these groups; I just think it’s presumptuous to say without qualification that they are “our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
   • I’m not sure what to make of some of the Eastern Orthodox biographies. To my mind they seem to excessively glorify asceticism (as if this material world is unimportant and almost to be despised, thrown off in favor of purely spirutal concerns). There are also strange stories of the bones or graves of martyrs having the power to heal or bring people back from the dead. Now, I’m not saying that God isn’t in the business of miracles (I believe in the resurrection!), and maybe it’s my lack of faith — but some of these stories really stretch my credulity.

A 6/22/2008 article in the Los Angeles Times by Ching-Ching Ni entitled “Bibles are big business in China” contains some fine worldview ironies.

The world’s largest officially-atheist nation might also be the world’s largest publisher of… Bibles! The Amity plant in Nanking can churn out 12 million copies a year.

The world’s largest Marxist nation is making good capitalist profit from selling Bibles!

Don’t you just love that?

In the October 23, 2006 issue of Maclean’s magazine, the cover story was “Why the Future Belongs to Islam” by Mark Steyn. Excerpted from his book America Alone, it argues provocatively that resurgent Islam threatens Western values. Steyn’s outline is this:

The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.

I recommend you read it thoughtfully, because on November 30, 2006, the non-profit Canadian Muslim Congress brought two human rights complaints against Maclean’s, charging that the article “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt.” They were claiming the article was hate speech.

This week, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal is hearing final arguments from both sides. It’s an important case to watch, because if the Muslim plaintiffs win and Maclean’s loses, it will have a chilling effect on free speech in general and speech critical of Islam in particular.

Maybe the impact will be more in Canada than in the United States. If you want to get some context, you should read Adam Liptak’s article “Hate speech or free speech? What most of the West bans is protected in U.S.” (International Herald Tribune, June 11, 2008). Liptak’s article is a good comparison and contrast, but he never tells you what the Steyn article actually said that was supposed to be so terrible. That’s why you need to read the original article to see it for yourself.

Here’s an example: In his article, Steyn takes note of what Muslim leaders are saying about the West. Here’s a quote from Colonel Qadaffi (other spellings areGadhafi and Khadafy), the leader of Libya:

There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.

Is this not something that should be reported and commented upon? Should this kind of quoting and commentary following be disallowed?

As it happens, Canada and some other Western countries have a different attitude toward free speech than the U.S., which has a very robust First Ammendment. For example, in the U.S. Nazis were allowed to have a parade in Skokie, Illinois, where many Jewish people live (parodied in The Blues Brothers film). However, Canada and some other Western countries seek to promote social harmony by restricting speech that offends certain recognized groups.

Liptak says the U.S.’s idiosyncratic free speech laws have many causes, among them:

• an individualistic view of the world (i.e., worldview!)
• fear of allowing the government to decide what speech is acceptable and what is not
• our history.

On that worldview comment, it’s true that the U.S. values the individual and individual rights, perhaps more than other Western countries. That valuation comes straight out of the biblical view of humanity, in which each of us is created in God’s image. On the “fear” comment, is there no reason to be concerned about “thought police” who want to squash our freedoms? What’s the whole “political correctness” thing about, anyway? And regarding our history — sure, we have a little thing called the Constitution that has something to do with it.
Many U.S. college campuses have followed the Canadian and European lead, unconstitutionally enacting “speech codes” that muzzle speech deemed inappropriate by whoever has the power in the school administrations. Fortunately, groups like The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are battling these speech codes and winning significant cases.

Going back to the original issue, here’s part of the problem: In many Muslim countries, free speech is non-existent. Anti-blasphemy laws say that if you criticize Islam or Muhammad, you could be dragged before the courts, suffer beatings, confiscation of property and family and be legally condemned to death. In Muslim countries (like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) they’re very serious about this stuff. It seems that Muslim interest groups here in the West (like the Canadian Muslim Congress) want to make criticizing Islam or Muhammad off-limits.

So it’s okay for Muslims to vociferously criticize the infidel Jews and Christians in the West, maybe even to call the U.S. the Great Satan and Israel the Little Satan. But criticizing Islam and Islam’s prophet anywhere is out.

Does that sound like a double standard to you?

An advertisement covering two full pages of the Los Angeles Times came out Thursday, June 5 with the title “Battling for America’s Soul: How Homosexual ‘Marriage’ Threatens Our Nation and Faith…”

The ad came out in response to the May 15, 2008 decision of the California Supreme Court to strike down as unconstitutional Proposition 22, a proposition that came out in 2000 which defined marriage as between one man and one woman and was approved by 61% of California voters. Essentially the justices have imposed homosexual “marriage” on our state.

The ad was paid for by a Catholic group called The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP). The American TFP “promotes the pernnial values of Christian civilization.” Their website is www.TFP.org.

Here’s a group that’s not afraid to talk about the culture wars in worldview terms:

Secularism’s profound divergence from a Chrisian worldview anchored in reality lies at the rrot of this clash…

Few issues illustrate the divergence between the secularist and the Christain worldviews as does today’s cultural battle over marriage…

Rejection of the Christian worldview is secularism’s negative, destructive aspect. Its “positive” aspect is the utopia of a society without moral restraints in which marriage and the family have been redefined…

Left unchecked, this anti-Christian trend will become an unprecendented assult on the First Amendment and our American way of life that we do not hesitate to call persecution…

The article then procedes to make the case that:

• approval of homosexuality goes against Divine Revelation and against Natural Law
• the Church has consistently taught against homosexual practice
• same-sex marriage harms the common good
• legalization of homosexual unions weakens private and public morality
• homosexual unions undermine marriage and the family
• legalizing homosexual unions goes against reason.

Therefore, “TPF Calls for Lawwful, Conscientious Resistance to Same Sex ‘Marriage’ and the Homosexual Movement” because “the natural moral law binds all people, in all times. No State is above its precepts.”

Further, the statement says that “A Catholic who accepts the practice of homosexuality and same-sex ‘marriage’ as good renounces natural moral law principles confirmed by Divine Revelation and thus breaks the vow of fidelity made to Our Lord Jesus Christ at baptism.”

In winding up for the two-page ad’s conclusion, the article says,

It is clear, therefore, that the battle for marriage in America is the clash of two worldviews. On the one hand, those Americans who still defend a moral law. On the other, the homosexual revolution and its secularist allies.

The stakes are also clear. This is a battle for the soul fo America. The so-called Cultural War is gradually becoming a Religious War…

Finally, as we might expect from a Catholic organization, the ad asks for “Our Lady” (that would be the Blessed Virgin Mary) to help Catholics do their duty to resist the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts.

You can get free reprints of the entire add by writing to tfp@TFP.org.

Thought questions:

1. I recommend reading the whole article at the least as an exercise in putting together a persuasive argument. What do you think of overall core thinking in the article?
2. Many Christians are trying to find a way that shuns the language of cultural and religious war. They want to get away from “us” versus “them” mentality and always find common ground, to never put themselves in a position where they are making judgments on others’ beliefs and practices. Is this always possible? Aren’t there some times when you have to draw lines?
3. In your opinion, is this one of those places?

The May 29, 2008 AFP story begins:

Hollywood star Sharon Stone has apologised for suggesting China’s earthquake was bad “karma” for its handling of Tibet, but Christian Dior on Thursday dropped her from its local ads amid a public uproar.”

Stone made the comments at the Cannes Film Festival last week. The fuller context of her remarks, according to news video available on YouTube, was this:

I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else, And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma — when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?

What does Stone have to apologize for? This is the karmic worldview!

Sure, it might seem insensitive and callous to anybody who’s going through a major earthquake trauma and aftermath, like the Chinese are right now with 88,000 dead and counting.

But this is exactly what the twin doctrines of karma and reincarnation teach: Nothing ever happens by accident. Everybody gets exactly what they deserve, directly decreed from their past lives’ karma. This worldview is most noticeably expressed in forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.

If Stone really wanted to apologize, she’d have to turn her back on the worldview behind karma and reincarnation.

So the real, moral objections to what Stone said are based in different moral outlooks that come from different worldviews — worldviews that acknowledge that sometimes people don’t get what they deserve.

One of those worldviews in naturalism. According to this worldview, what happens happens; there are no metaphysical or theological reasons to explain what happened. The earth moved; people died. It’s sad. Do something to help if you want. End of story.

A different response is the biblical worldview. In the biblical worldview, natural disasters have absolutely nothing to do with karma and reincarnation, which is a metaphysical argument that goes directly against a core biblical teaching — that we have but one life to live, and after that comes judgment before God (Hebrews 9:27).

However, Christians sometimes pose inadequate answers to problems like natural disaster.

• Using a few select scriptures (but not the whole counsel of scripture), some Christians teach that everything is pre-determined. including these kinds of natural disasters. However, what the Bible actually teaches is more complex than that.
• Looking at things almost magically, almost like karma, other Christians teach that these kinds of disasters happen because the people aggregately brought the disaster upon themselves.

Neither of these weak explanations sufficiently answers takes into account what the Bible teaches about Nature, namely:

• Nature is good. It is created by God.
• It follows, then, that the tectonic plates underneath the crust of the Earth occasionally shift to relieve pressure.
• Similarly, the Earth’s surface is 2/3 covered by water; the Earth is tilted at 23% toward the sun and orbits the sun, creating seasons, but also creating unstable weather patterns that lead to hurricanes, floods and so on.
• Gravity creates pressure on unstable ice and snow to break loose from mountains and form avalanches, which sometimes wipe out skiers or towns.
• So the Earth and the physical laws that govern the universe are good creations of God. But that doesn’t mean the world is perfectly safe — like we might want it to be.
• And it’s possible for there ot be innocent suffering in the world.
• But God is not aloof from our suffering. He is very present spiritually to us, but his care gets very concrete: in Jesus Christ he even became a man himself and lived among us, personally partaking in our suffering.
• Not only that, but according to Jesus and the Bible, this physical life is not the whole story. Jesus taught and the Bible promise that there is a heaven, where every tear will be wiped away and there will be no more pain and suffering — like we want things to be.

According to Breitbart.com*, in a private 1954 letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, Albert Einstein wrote (in German):

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

Other excerpts are:

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.

As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

These statements to Gutkind seem to conflict with other well-known Einsteinisms such as “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” (against randomness in sub-atomic particles) and “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” (against the irreconciliability of science and faith).

There’s no doubt that in the Gutkind letter Einstein is expressing deep skepticism about at least two essential elements of the biblical worldview, namely: (a) that a personal, infinite God created the heavens and the earth and (b) that this God is capable of revealing himself to humanity in ways we can understand.

Traditional theology calls (a) and (b) above “revealed religion.” God reveals himself and his will through the Word of God itself (in this case, the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament). And a core part of the Bible’s narrative is that God has a special purpose for the Jewish people in history. (Incidentally, from the quote above Einstein is also rejecting the idea that the Jewish people are better than other racial religious groups — an inflated claim that the Word of God itself rejects!)

If Einstein were merely rejecting revealed religion, then he might have left some room for other ideas about God, like pantheism or panentheism.

But here he is unequivocal. To repeat, he says, “For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions (italics mine).” This is the totalistic claim of the worldview of naturalism (also, atheism), which lays claim to the Unrelativistic, Absolute Truth that the natural, physical, material world is all there is — all religions and spiritualities are mere “childish superstition.”

What shall we make of these apparent contradicitons? Here are some possibilities:

1. Like all people, Einstein was a person created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26) and had a God-shaped vaccuum in his heart — whether he admitted that or not.

2. Like a lot of people, Einstein was not not always consistent in his statements about God and religion. Despite his great brilliance, he waffled, holding mutually dissonant ideas in his mind.

3. Einstein was clear about one thing: he had difficulty believing in revealed religion and in the biblical worldview.
4. Like a lot of people, Einstein might have changed his opinions over his lifetime.

5. Perhaps Einstein thought it to his advantage to have a public persona that was friendly toward religion, but a private persona against it. In terms of worldviews, he was a closet naturalist.

Can you think of any others?

* http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080513122249.m3ds3b6j&show_article=1

Susan Jacoby recently had an article in the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times entitled “Talking to ourselves: Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views” (April 20, 2008).

She leads with this story: Afew years ago at Eastern Kentucky University, she was giving a lecture on the history of American secularism to about 150 students. Meanwhile, “the Campus Crusade for Christ” put on a counter-lecture by a converted pedophile that drew more people.

Jacoby then says, “It is safe to say that almost no one who attended either lecture on the Kentucky campus that night was exposed to a new or disturbing idea.”

The rest of the article about “American’s echo chamber” has example after example of little-mindedness and narrow-mindedness. But here’s the interesting thing: Every one of her examples puts political and religious conservatives in a bad light. Not once does she take American secularism to task for its own little-mindedness, narrow-mindedness or unwillingness to listen to other points of view.

Hmm. I wonder if worldview bias is at play here!

One of the riddles Blah, Blah, Blah tries to crack is this: In a politically polarized society,  how to you actually get people to think outside their box? If someone as talented as Jacoby couldn’t break out of her box for even a moment and look with empathy at one convervative viewpoint, what hope do the rest of us have?

I think a simple, active awareness of worldviews can be a huge help. It’s one of the big reasons I wrote Blah, Blah, Blah.