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ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 30.2 In this second extract from the concluding section to his manuscript, Tom Lee explores some of the challenges the established churches face in our contemporary world…  The
Future of Christianity and the Papacy Science has its "Mysteries" too: Communication beyond the speed of light… In 1982 an experiment was conducted by a team led by French physicist Alain Aspect. They found that under certain circumstances sub-atomic particles such as electrons are able to simultaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them, whether an inch, ten feet or a billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seemed to know what the other was doing. This eerie occurrence violated Einstein's speed limit, the linchpin of his theory of relativity. The late American physicist David Bohm believed the reason sub-atomic particles can communicate instantaneously regardless of distance apart is because their separateness is an illusion. At some basic level, such particles are not individual entities but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. Bohm's student, Michael Talbot explained: "Fasterthan-light communication by sub-atomic particles is telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we're not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own. We view particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate 'parts' but facets of a deeper, more underlying unity that is ultimately holographic, indivisible." Neutrinos are invisible particles, ghostly bits of mass, crossing the universe, some traveling at the speed of light since the dawn of time, only to dash themselves against the earth. Categorize and subdivide as we will; all of nature is ultimately a seamless web. Everything interpenetrates everything else, and somewhere, Nikola Tesla may be laughing. He declared: "When science begins the study of non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of existence." Religion — something done in private between consenting adults… Harvard biologist Edward 0. Wilson has blown the whistle about the disappearance of the songbirds; decimated by development and forest clearing, so that we are edging closer to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Wilson calls this decline in biodiversity the "pauperization" of the earth. "Each species," he says, "is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius." He urges a truce between science and religion, "the two most powerful forces in society," and then a meeting on common ground from which together they can save creation. Colman McCarthy wrote in NCR: "Isn't religion, too, about perceptions — hunches that a God, or gods, exists? With more than 10,000 organized religions now in operation on a planet that Alfred North Whitehead called a third-rate rock spinning around a second-rate sun, we have little more than a jumble of hunches on what may or may not be divine." Political philosopher Peter Viereck in his retirement lecture at Mount Holyoke stated: "I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts: attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away." Friedrich Hayek's 1945 free-market manifesto, The Use of Knowledge in Society, argues that a person's knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom. In the early 21st Century, the Web, with its infinite capacity and practically nonexistent barriers to entry, has potentially made this possible. Unfortunately it has freed the forces of unreason to propagate their fantasies as well. Political ideology proves especially destructive when wedded to rigid religious theology in such an open forum. As Protestant sociologist and theologian Peter L. Berger, speaking about the secularization of society opined; for many people, religion has become "something done in private by consenting adults". Questions that were unknown to previous generations… Our age faces ultimate questions that were unknown to previous generations, challenging conservative theologies that already cherry-pick which Bible passages will be held as sacred dogma and which will be considered antiquated rules of a bygone culture. The Bible offers no internal guidance to tell the difference. Declaring homosexual relationships sinful that are more about emotional bonding and commitment ought to be as morally outmoded as the Biblical prescription to keep slaves (Lev.25:44-46) or to stone your wife on your wedding night if she is not a virgin (Deut.22:20-21). Many people think that the Church needs to redefine the essentials of faith in a time when old ways and formulas no longer serve. It needs to update its dogmas in light of scientific discoveries that seem to leave no room for such esoteric nonsense as the Original Sin of a mythical Adam, which makes us all guilty before we start, so that Christians are not free to do anything but choose their own misery outside of Christianity, or a guiltridden indignity within it. It is not easy to believe in a God that expelled mankind from Paradise for making love, but readmitted us to eligibility when we brutally crucified his son. Nowadays there are few innocents in regard to what Yeats called "the sensual music of the lusting world," and the church needs to face the reality of latter-day problems, including misguided gay men who married a woman, believing it to be the right thing to do and are now desperately trying to hold onto their frayed integrity while keeping up the alimony payments that finance their former wife's spiritual improvement classes. Conversely, many gay priests have claimed that as youths, confessors convinced them that their lack of attraction to women was a sure sign that they had a vocation to the religious life; advice that has spawned enormous problems and lack of credibility for the church. The church approaches teen promiscuity from the wrong perspective. The root problem is a clash between biology and sociology, and biology seems to be winning. It's not just the raging of teen hormones, but a change in when hormones kick in. Improved nutrition in most countries has made puberty come on much earlier than it used to. In the 1830s the average age of puberty was seventeen to eighteen. Today it is twelve to thirteen, when youngster's befuddled innocence is challenged by the irrevocable changes in their body. Thus it's perfectly natural that the rate of teen promiscuity and pregnancy have risen. A greater percentage of the teen population than ever before has the ability to spawn children, if not the maturity to raise them. For them desire has nothing to do with a longing for fulfillment or the dream of a future together with their initiator. It is a state of arousal linked only to the hope of remaining aroused while experimenting with other partners. In the 60s musical Bye, Bye Birdie, Paul Lynde as the father sang "What's the matter with kids today?" The song contains the wistful line "I didn't know what puberty was until I'd almost passed it." The problem is that the church and society's view of adulthood differs from Nature's… Sex has always been a passage into human adulthood. The problem is that the church and society's view of adulthood differs from Nature's. Biology is out of step with societal needs and adolescence is strictly a human concept. It's an economic larval stage during which the average teen waits to enter into full participation in adult life. However, Nature doesn't care about adolescence. Children become fully functional sexual beings overnight, tumbling about the verges of lecherous innocence. There's virtually no halfway point and this is corroborated from an unlikely source, the annual reports of toy companies. Industry analysts say youngsters are discarding traditional toys at a-younger age and girls seem to be growing out of toys earlier than boys are.
Adults try to counsel teens that they're not emotionally or economically ready for the possible consequences of sex — from babies to AIDS to damnation, dependent on their point of view. But the length of the wait for the teen who chooses sexual abstinence from puberty (at about thirteen years old and falling) until marriage or another significant relationship (at twentyfour years old and rising), has become longer than ever and much more difficult to sustain. Biology isn't going to conform to the churches' or society's wishes, and if society continues to fight Nature, it is pretty obvious which one is most likely to win. Italian biological scientist Umberto Veronessi, in August 2007, in an interview with the Italian media, declared that the world will develop into a "unique model" in which bisexuality will prevail in three generations time. "The differences between men and women will reduce. Man has no longer to fight for survival and, as a consequence, produces less androgen hormones. Women live a social revolution that gives them every day new roles, which makes them produce fewer estrogens." Sex will become a "gesture of affection but not a way to reproduction." If true, it will not be important whether we choose one sex or the other any more. The result? A growing reality of the unique bisexual model. We will have less virile men and more manly women — perhaps nature's answer to over-population of the planet. Who can know what the future holds? I confess that I get exasperated with the posturing of hollowly righteous do-it-yourself Savanarola's who think they have veto power over anything they dislike, and sometimes pine for the bad old days of the Legion of Decency, whose quaint habit of viewing every movie before sticking it on the proscribed list seems downright sportsmanlike in hindsight. Free-market Christianity… We cannot overlook the astonishing growth of Pentecostal and Evangelical forms of free-market Christianity. A recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimates 500 million "'revivalists" in the world, including members of stand-alone Pentecostal and Evangelical denominations as well as charismatics within established denominations. Revivalists now represent one-quarter of the total Christian population of two billion, compared with just six percent of the Christian total thirty years ago. The "Pentecostal wave" is the world's fastest-growing religious movement, making especially strong inroads in the global south. In Brazil alone, the world's largest Catholic country, almost half of the population describes itself as "charismatic," with profound consequences for how the faith is taught, preached, and lived. In the late 1990s, a study commissioned by the Latin American Catholic bishops' conference, found that 8,000 Latin Americans were deserting the Catholic Church for Evangelical Protestantism every day. In 1992, John Paul II used the phrase "ravenous wolves" to refer to Pentecostal and Evangelical "sects" in Latin America. Fundamentalism and consumerism both challenge reasonable faith. Some mega churches seem to have sold out to banal consumerism and gross greed. Rigid fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, demonstrate the kind of blinkered self-assurance that castigates any contrary view of the world, regarding those good people who question their certitude as ineffectual, or even worse, a nuisance and irrelevant. There is always a risk when either liberal or conservative Christians think that their answer to the question "What would Jesus do?" is the only answer. With a fierce pride created as much by ignorance as by anger, they believe, contrary to all evidence and reason, that the Bible is historically and scientifically true in every detail, and refuse to accept rational criticism and scrutiny of the extravagance of their claims and the paucity of their evidence. The Bible is not sufficient justification for Christian's beliefs, given the nonexistent standards of evidence prevailing at the time of its composition. As Christopher Hitchens has declared: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Modern evangelism impresses guilt upon people quite savagely, so that it may then graciously offer them the free gift of salvation, if in some way they take the trouble to buy it. The trick has been copied by advertisers — frighten you with bad breath or acid reflux for which the product offered is the only reliable cure. It must be comforting to be innocent of long-term anxiety; to be certain where you're headed, to know you are saved, and expect to be caught up in the Rapture sometime soon. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, described by some as propheteers, have sold 42 million books by fictionalizing the Biblical End Times in the Left Behind series, with the premise that born-again Christians will be "raptured" into heaven while those "left behind" will face the antiChrist during the Apocalypse. LaHaye was not amused when his publisher, Tyndale, asked him to debate his new competition, Christian-radio host Hank Hanegraaf, as a promotion for his novel The Last Disciple, in which, holding to orthodox belief, he argues that the Book of Revelation describes the persecution of first century Christians under Nero, not some future tribulation of nonbelievers. Hanegraaf thinks the Left Behind books are part of a trend toward sensationalism and "script torture" of the Bible. "There is a lot of hysteria because of the Left Behind books," he says. As Ludwig Feuerback said: "One of the important functions of religion is to give people something to do with their lunacy."  ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 30.2 PHOTO CREDITS: The "Earth Rising" image we are using for this segment of the serialisation of Tom Lee's book has been adapted from a NASA photograph taken by the Apollo 8 Astronauts of the Earth Rising over the Lunar landscape. The original image can be found at: www.nasa.gov/lb/vision/earth/features/bm_gallery_4_prt.htm Clicking on the other images will take you to the original source of the image.
What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum. ©2009 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409 |
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Visions of the Future Breathtaking and confronting BBC Channel 4 series with American theoretical physicist Michio Kaku examining life in the future. The series raises big ethical and moral questions that collectively humankind needs to face and answer. Some of these questions are perhaps more morally difficult than anything we have faced in the past. A "must view" series for anyone interested in the discussions on morality and ethics discussed on the Catholica Forum. Part 1: The Intelligence Revolution 58m34s. Part 2: The Biotech Revolution 58m41s. Part 3: The Quantum Revolution. 18 YouTube segments total 175m54s total. [Catholica Discussion String 26Aug10] | [WATCH THE VIDEO]
Docos 019: 03 Sep 2010
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