Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
19 November 2010
Fundamentalism under Attack
Evangelical Christians sometimes portray themselves as a spiritual minority under assault from the dark forces of secularism. There are the ads appearing on buses saying “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” And, there are plenty of books giving the same
Recent bestsellers include The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens; and, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, among others.
As self-
Fundamentalist Beliefs Challenged
Richard Dawkins, for example, takes issue with the fundamentalist Christian view that the Earth, as set out in Genesis, is only 6,000 years old. He declares the notion “completely childish and insane,” in a Globe and Mail interview (with John Allemang, June 23, 2007).
The author was astonished that a Canadian cabinet minister (Stockwell Day) would hold such a belief and contend that humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth together as well. “His belief is equivalent to believing that the width of North America, from shall we say New York to San Francisco, is 7.8 yards – that’s the scale of the error he’s buying into.”
Canadacow
According to an Angus Reid poll in 2007, 42 percent of Canadians believe that dinosaurs roamed the Earth along with humans in recent history, as depicted above in a display at the Creation Museum in Kentucky: scientific research has pegged the extinction of dinosaurs, along with 70 percent of other species on Earth, at 65 million years ago.
Some of the most enthusiastic critics tend to focus on fundamentalist Christians. These are the people who believe in a literal reading of the Bible, a book whose origin is a bit suspect.
Creation Museum
To hold that the Bible cannot be faulted creates some problems: it’s a complicated
text full of symbolism and contradictions. But, that didn’t stop the folks in Petersburg,
Kentucky from opening a Creation Museum in 2007 depicting dinosaurs co-
According to The Economist (June 2007) thousands of donors contributed $27 million to build the museum, which the magazine describes as the triumph of faith over experience. The faithful continue to tussle with evolution and Genesis which suggests that the Universe was created around 4000 BCE.
But the Creation Museum isn’t bothered by science. It explains, for example, that Noah must have taken smaller young dinosaurs onto the ark, and that most of them were killed in the flood. And, it says that “the descendants of those Noah saved survived until quite recently, which is why legends of dragons pop up in so many cultures.”
Canada has its own Creation Science Museum in Big Valley, Alberta. Its operators say it was “Built from the foundations up, for the glory of the Creator, to display the evidence of his handiwork and refute the lie of evolution.”
Fundamentalist Beliefs Defended
Non-
One of the problems Michael Ruse has with many of the recent books attacking spirituality is that “the critics refuse to concede religion any good points.”
In a Globe and Mail article (June 2007) Professor Ruse, who teaches philosophy at
Florida State University, says “This is absurd. Without the Quakers of the 18th century
and the evangelicals of the 19th, we would still be slave-
As a more balanced argument, he suggests reading British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s book Why I am Not a Christian.
While Dr. Russell demolished the arguments for God’s existence, he also thought religion had “earned the intellectual and moral right to be treated seriously.” Professor Ruse also recommends David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, as “one of the wittiest and most devastating critiques of religion ever penned.”
A more recent offering (2008) is Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists. He says the popular atheists are as unyielding as the religious zealots they ridicule.
Television producer and host Carolyn Weaver explains that the author sees fundamentalism as a mindset that is dangerous whether it’s religious or secular. “It sees the world as good and evil,” she writes (Globe and Mail, April 2008).
“There are only two categories and everyone must be slotted into one or the other. Those who do not see the world as the fundamentalists do are demonized or branded as unsophisticated and unevolved.”
And, Ms. Weaver points out that Chris Hedges provides some balance. “(He) exposed
the Christian fundamentalist threat in his last best-
Not that atheist movements are necessarily a bad thing: Mr. Hedges says they’ve been important in challenging the hypocrisy of religious institutions.
Updating Religion
Reverend Gretta Vosper is a divinity grad from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She was ordained in 1992 as a United Church minister and she wrote a book that was published in 2008 called, With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe.
She thinks it’s time the Christian church dropped its myths, doctrines, and dogmas that she says are no longer credible.
As columnist Michael Valpy explained in The Globe and Mail (March 2008) Reverend Vosper is among many scholars who concluded long ago that the Bible is not the authoritative word of God.
They see it as a human project that isn’t entirely accurate. “She wants salvation
redefined to mean new life through removing the causes of suffering in the world,”
writes Mr. Valpy. “She wants the church to define resurrection as ‘starting over,’
‘new changes.’ She wants an end to the image of God as an intervening all-
Source
“Taking Christ out of Christianity.” Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail, March 22, 2008.
© Canada and the World, March 2009
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BIBLE SOCIETIES AND OTHER HOLY BOOKS
According to a December 2007 article in The Economist, there is an interlinked global network of 140 national or regional Bible societies. The members pool resources with the aim of putting a bible in the hands of every man, woman, and child on the planet. The American Bible Society, the biggest of the lot, has published more than 50 million Bibles in atheist China. At the same time, Saudi Arabia gives away about 30 million Korans a year, distributing them through a large network of mosques, Islamic societies, and even embassies.
But, while both faiths are spreading the books, they may not be actually spreading the word: according to a Gallup poll, fewer than half of Americans know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible, many think that Billy Graham delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and a quarter don’t know why Easter is celebrated. As well, many (40 percent) don’t know half of the Ten Commandments, and 12 percent think Noah was married to Joan of Arc.
And, while Muslims like to read the Koran in the original Arabic, only 20 percent
of them speak Arabic as their first language. As well the Arab world has one of the
highest illiteracy rates in the world, with a fifth of men and two-
“Faith does not stop exploration. Dogma does.
This difference is crucial. Faith, by its nature, is
secure enough to handle questions. Dogma…is
threatened by questions. By definition, dogma
is rigid, brittle, often brutal, and therefore
deserves to be threatened by questions.”
Irshad Manji, senior fellow with the European
Foundation for Democracy and creator of
the documentary Faith Without Fear,
Globe and Mail, November 2007
DEFINITION
Dogma: A set of rules and beliefs issued by an authority such as a church that does not require proof only obedience to.