What a load of bunkum! Last year I was invited to lead students of evolutionary biology on a trip around North Wales to look at some Darwin sites. The staff and students were typical of a secular university and there was no antichristian approach.
But then one does not expect Freerepublic to have any truth content.
Consider also how the Religious Right, ID and YEC has caused anti-Christian feelings, due to their abominable behaviour. And no thanks for exporting it to Britain.
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: Janice Matchett
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2006 5:42 PM
Subject: Harvard's intellectual culture discourages identification with Christianity
Some may find this of interest. ~ Janice
Harvard's intellectual culture discourages identification with Christianity
The Harvard University Crimson ^ | Monday, April 17, 2006 1:34 AM | LUCY M. CALDWELL
Posted on 04/17/2006 10:37:11 AM EDT by rface
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1616428/posts
[article snipped - click link to read it]
My two replies #12 and #13 follow:
"... it is Christianity that has been pushed to the wayside. The religion is seen as backward, nonintellectual, and extreme." ~ LUCY M. CALDWELL
In times of need, however... (Note the date of this article below) :)
Faith does breed charity We atheists have to accept that most believers are better human beings - by Roy Hattersley
Monday September 12, 2005 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1567604,00.html
Hurricane Katrina did not stay on the front pages for long. Yesterday's Red Cross appeal for an extra 40,000 volunteer workers was virtually ignored.
The disaster will return to the headlines when one sort of newspaper reports a particularly gruesome discovery or another finds additional evidence of President Bush's negligence. But month after month of unremitting suffering is not news. Nor is the monotonous performance of the unpleasant tasks that relieve the pain and anguish of the old, the sick and the homeless - the tasks in which the Salvation Army specialise.
The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.
Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.
The arguments against religion are well known and persuasive. Faith schools, as they are now called, have left sectarian scars on Northern Ireland. Stem-cell research is forbidden because an imaginary God - who is not enough of a philosopher to realise that the ingenuity of a scientist is just as natural as the instinct of Rousseau's noble savage - condemns what he does not understand and the churches that follow his teaching forbid their members to pursue cures for lethal diseases.
Yet men and women who believe that the Pope is the devil incarnate, or (conversely) regard his ex cathedra pronouncements as holy writ, are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others. Last week a middle-ranking officer of the Salvation Army, who gave up a well-paid job to devote his life to the poor, attempted to convince me that homosexuality is a mortal sin.
Late at night, on the streets of one of our great cities, that man offers friendship as well as help to the most degraded and (to those of a censorious turn of mind) degenerate human beings who exist just outside the boundaries of our society. And he does what he believes to be his Christian duty without the slightest suggestion of disapproval. Yet, for much of his time, he is meeting needs that result from conduct he regards as intrinsically wicked.
Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and - probably most difficult of all - argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.
The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand. The close relationship may have something to do with the belief that we are all God's children, or it may be the result of a primitive conviction that, although helping others is no guarantee of salvation, it is prudent to be recorded in a book of gold, like James Leigh Hunt's Abu Ben Adam, as "one who loves his fellow men". Whatever the reason, believers answer the call, and not just the Salvation Army. When I was a local councillor, the Little Sisters of the Poor - right at the other end of the theological spectrum - did the weekly washing for women in back-to-back houses who were too ill to scrub for themselves.
It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity à la carte. The Bible is so full of contradictions that we can accept or reject its moral advice according to taste. Yet men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles do not go out with the Salvation Army at night.
The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.
· comment@guardian.co.uk
12 posted on 04/17/2006 12:23:59 PM EDT by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1616428/posts?page=12#12
Marvin O'Lasky comments on Roy Hattersley's article in the Guardian:
Unheralded Persons of the Year --- Dec 22, 2005 --- by Marvin Olasky
Time did well in selecting Bono plus Bill and Melinda Gates as its charitable Persons of the Year, but I wish it had also put a non-celebrity -- maybe a volunteer Katrina relief worker -- on its cover.
It would have been good to honor one of the 9,000 Southern Baptists from 41 states who volunteered 120,000 days during the two months after the hurricane hit. During that time, they served 10 million meals and pushed forward cleanup and recovery efforts.
Or how about someone from the Salvation Army: Those folks served nearly 5 million hot meals and over 6.5 million sandwiches, snacks and drinks from 178 mobile feeding units and 11 field kitchens, with each kitchen able to produce 20,000 hot meals per day.
Big numbers, and those were just two of the active groups. Many others also delivered food and supplies in a much more flexible style than the bureaucratic FEMA. Ronnie Harris, mayor of the New Orleans suburb of Gretna, flat-out said: "Church workers were the first volunteers on the ground. It is churches that have made the difference in Hurricane Katrina recovery."
Many others concur, but some Christians worry that such church activity is the "social gospel" revisited, at the expense of evangelism. There's reason for concern, because we are all prone to wander spiritually and to focus on what the world praises than on what it misunderstands or even abhors. And yet, evangelism is often most successful, in God's timing, when those hostile to Christ look up in surprise at what Christians are doing.
For example, after Katrina, an atheist asked in the British left-wing Guardian Weekly why Christians "are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others." You can almost see the synapses sparking in the writer's brain: "It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity a la carte. Yet ... it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand."
He's right, and add evangelism to the mix: Faith leads to works, and works lead people to ask questions about faith. As the works of the faithful diminish the pride of the faithless -- the British writer concluded that Christians are "morally superior to atheists like me" -- Christian charity ploughs the ground for an evangelistic response: no, not morally superior, just touched by One who was.
Even hardcore U.S. anti-Christian publications couldn't help noticing the difference Christian belief made during the post-Katrina days. The New York Times story described how church groups were doing better than government agencies, and didn't even object (this one time) when those who "finish clearing debris or doing temporary repairs on damaged houses ... give the homeowners a signed Bible and say a prayer with them."
On Christmas, we might remember how a long time ago another nation faced a disaster even greater than Katrina. Enemy soldiers occupied the land and imposed toady officials on a resentful populace. It seemed that God had been quiet for centuries, and some said He would never speak again. Then the ultimate act of Christian charity transformed every aspect of life. That deed began the transformation of everything around us.
God is always transforming old into new: hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, the former sites of abortion businesses into pro-life counseling centers, maybe even the disaster of Katrina into something positive for those who have broken away from poverty and despair in New Orleans and found new opportunities elsewhere.
Effective evangelism conveys that good news, starting with Christ's birth and the way that millions of people gain rebirth through God's grace. Evangelism is particularly effective when it combines words and deeds, as it did when the herald angels sang 2,000 years ago, and as it did once again when the unheralded deliverers of post-Katrina compassion sacrificed for others.
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/marvinolasky/2005/12/22/180065.html
13 posted on 04/17/2006 12:30:03 PM EDT by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1616428/posts?page=13#13
Received on Mon Apr 17 13:15:02 2006
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