Science and religion are not incompatible. One needs only to read Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” to know the connection. Ms. Taylor is a renowned neuro-anatomist. Charles Darwin wrote, “I cannot think of the world, as we see it,is the result of chance, and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design.” Einstein wrote. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” These people could see beyond the dogma and imagine the mysterious. Imagination is the prime mover behind scientific discoveries.
I often wonder why well-educated people turn to Manichean responses . I think it is fear. Fear of the unknown pushes us to black and white answers. Living with tension is difficult, yet, living with tension is to be fully human, truly alive.
This dismissive attitude toward religion by Justin Trottier exposes a lack of knowledge about religion.I don’t know how many times atheists need to be told that more people have been massacred in the name of secular leaders than in the name of religion.It is a refusal to accept facts as truth.
And yet, here he is at 29, the new guru, with his own pulpit, leader of a group of 1000 followers, teaching us about the horrors of religion. He, like so many others has no understanding of the gift of revelation. He is the recipient of these gifts. His free-speech, his judicial system, his concept of social justice comes from 3500 years of ethical evolution. He is so imbedded in it that unless someone tells him, he will never realize the gift religion has given to him.
