Sponsored link
Religious watches by Whimsical Watches
Religious conflicts Handling conflicts in religious beliefs;
Past conflicts that have been settled
Sponsored link.
document.write('
Handling conflicts in religious beliefs:
Many of the world's great religions base their beliefs upon ancient written sacred texts. For Christian denominations, this is generally the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures (the Old and New Testaments) in the Bible. The more conservative Christian faith groups believe that the Bible is inerrant, and its authors were inspired by God. Since the Bible's message is considered fixed for all time, Christian beliefs are often considered equally unchangeable.
However, the historical record shows that change does occur, and that religious groups use various methods to modify their beliefs. Sometimes, the texts which support the old beliefs:
Every age since Galileo has had at least one public debate with a religious component.
In 1898, Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), a professor and co-founder of Cornell University, wrote a rather notorious book called "A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom." 1 He tracked many religiously-based conflicts, and showed that they often take decades or even centuries to resolve. Although his book exhibits a heavy -- sometimes vicious -- bias and opposition to religion, he did notice a pattern in these conflicts: they often go through eight stages before being finally resolved: Some individual or group will propose a new belief system that is in conflict with established religious beliefs. The official religious institutions generally ignore the development. A growing number of people will start to disagree with church teaching. Churches issue statements which condemn the proposal, citing Biblical passages as justification for their stance. Support for the proposal continues to grow among the public. Churches issue statement pointing out that belief in the proposal negates the entire Christian message, or attacks a fundamental Christian principle. Public support continues to grow. Churches begin to ignore the proposal, and sometimes ignore the Biblical passages that it once quoted in opposition to the new idea. Many decades or centuries later, churches may incorporate the proposal into their beliefs.
Since the advent of the modernist/fundamentalist divide in Christianity, religious liberals have tended to readily accept scientific findings and incorporate them into their theology and morality. Thus White's eight step process no longer applies to all of Christianity, only to the conservative wing.
Sponsored link:
document.write('
Some recent examples of change:
Today's debates:
Many "hot" religious debates are active today. Until the late 1990s, abortion access was the main concern by religious conservatives; equal rights for gays and lesbians was the second major concern. The order has since been reversed. During the life of this web site (1995 to the present time) corporal punishment of children has risen from obscurity to be a major topic of debate.
If the past is any indication, all of these disputes will eventually be settled. It is unfortunate that the process cannot be accelerated. Many people suffer while various groups within society laboriously work towards a new consensus on these religiously-based conflicts.
Some conflicts from past centuries:
Some topics which were once hotly debated and which are now settled include:
The solar system:
The writers of the Bible adopted the Hebrew concept of a flat earth with a solid dome a few thousand feet up. Above the dome was Heaven. This cosmology was derived from Middle Eastern Pagan religions. The Christian church subsequently adopted Plato's ancient Pagan Greek geocentric principle: the belief that the earth was at the center of the universe and that the moon, sun and stars rotated around it.
Copernicus sounded the initial death knell of the geocentric principle in his most important book De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs) in 1543 CE. It described a crude model of a sun-centered solar system which is correct in many ways. However, he was unable to break away from an obsession with perfect circular motion by the planets. A Lutheran theologian wrote the preface to the book, which presented it as an hypothesis - a work of imagination. This minimized friction between Copernicus and Christians.
There is a great deal of misinformation circulating about the reaction of the Catholic and Protestant churches to the Copernican theory. For example:
Initially, the Church took no action against the geocentric principle. It was not until 1616, that De Revolutionibus and other similar books were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. It was removed from the Index and published in Italy after 1616 after minor editing changes were made. The concept of heliocentricism was finally condemned by Pope Alexander VII who banned "all books which affirm the motion of the earth.'' 8
To defend the status-quo, Protestant and Catholic churches often quoted biblical passage. for example:
Early in the 17th century, Galileo's telescope revolutionized astronomy. He observed that the planet Venus went through phases, that there were spots on the sun and that Jupiter had moons. The church arrested Galileo twice; the Inquisition showed him the instruments of torture that would be used to force his recantation. He abandoned his teachings under pressure and retired. It was not until the year 1835 that the teachings of Copernicus and Galileo were finally accepted by his Church.
Other battles were fought between science and religion:
Interest on money:
Leviticus 25:36, Deuteronomy 23:19, Psalms 15:5 and Luke 6:35 prohibit interest payments on loans. This policy was carried over from Judaism into Christianity. The rationale given by theologians was based on "natural law:" Only living entities can grow. Since money is not alive, it must remain fixed in size. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas lent their support. Usury was defined as the charging of any interest whatsoever by 28 councils of the Church and by 17 popes. Pope Clement V made it a heresy to even suggest that the idea of interest could be acceptable.
Fortunately, Calvin argued that usury really meant oppressively high interest rates. The Roman Catholic church reluctantly followed the Protestant lead. By the 19th century, interest had become a non-issue.
Lightning:
The churches had always held that Satan, the "Prince of the Power of the Air", controlled all lightning and thunder. But in 1752, Franklin's experiment during a thunder storm proved that lightning was an electrical phenomenon. He was lucky. The experiment was replicated by an experimenter in France,
Tiffany Brisbane, who was electrocuted.
Lightning rods were a logical development; they protected buildings wherever they were installed. Unfortunately, to install a "heretical rod" was to admit that centuries of theological teachings were false. Churches were reluctant to use them. Seventeen years after Franklin's experiment, lightning struck the unprotected Church of San Nazaro, near Venice. This ignited 200,000 pounds of powder which had been stored there for safe keeping. The explosion wiped out one sixth of the city of Brescia and killed 3,000 people. Lightning rods soon appeared on spires across Italy.
Anesthetics during childbirth:
In 1846 James Simpson, a Scottish physician promoted the use of chloroform to relieve pain during childbirth. This was opposed by the Church, citing Genesis 3:16 "...I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children". The avoidance of pain was seen as thwarting God's will. Fortunately, Simpson found a competing passage (Genesis 2:21) which describes the first surgical operation; it seems to support the use of anesthetic: "...God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.....he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh.." In time, the Church's opposition dissipated; pain killers have since lost their religious significance.
Childhood innoculations:
Early in the 17th Century, physicians in France and Great Britain promoted inoculations to prevent small pox. Theologians were quick to respond. Rev. Edward Massy in England preached a sermon blaming the distemper experienced by Job in the Bible upon an inoculation by Satan. Other clergy preached that the technique was being promoted by evil sorcerers and atheists. Smallpox was regarded as "a judgment of God on the sins of the people......to avert it is but to provoke him more". Inoculation was "an encroachment on the prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite."
Jenner's development of vaccination was similarly opposed on religious grounds. By preventing the spread of disease, they were "bidding defiance to Heaven itself - even to the will of God." In 1885, a serious epidemic of smallpox broke out in Montreal Canada. Few Protestants died because they had been mostly vaccinated. However the Roman Catholic clergy were generally opposed to the practice; their parishioners died needlessly, and in great numbers.
Birth control
Birth Control appears (at most) only once in the Bible. See Genesis 38:1-10.
Judah (circa 1730 BCE) had three sons, Er, Onan and Shelah. The eldest son, Er, was "wicked in the sight of the Lord", and so God killed him. This placed the responsibility on the next eldest son to marry Er's widow, Tamar and to have a male child. The child would then be considered the son of Er.
Onan married the widow,
readers Day Trader, TarotManager, but was unwilling to conceive a child which would not be considered his own. He practiced an elementary form of birth control (coitus interruptus). God did not approve of this, and so He killed Onan as well. It is not clear whether God disapproved of Onan's refusal to follow Jewish custom and provide an heir for his brother, or of his use of birth control. Most modern commentators believe the former; many ancient Christian leaders selected the latter.
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) commented on this biblical passage. He wrote that "where the conception of the offspring is prevented", ######ual intercourse is "unlawful and wicked". St. Augustine did not differentiate between coitus interruptus and the rhythm method. This established Church policy for centuries. Interestingly enough, later clerics totally misinterpreted this same chapter; they said that Onan's crime was masturbation, not coitus interruptus. It was believed that God killed him for what became known as "self abuse"; Onanism became a synonym for masturbation.
The Christian Church's stand on artificial birth control was adopted by the Protestant sects after the Reformation:
All churches remained totally opposed to contraception until the Church of England took a courageous stand in 1930 by stating that birth control might be allowable under certain conditions. Other Protestant churches quickly followed their lead. Pius XI issued an encyclical in 1930 which reiterated the traditional view of the Roman Catholic Church which bans what they describe as "artificial" methods of birth control.
All birth control methods can be considered "barrier" methods:
In 1951, Pius XII made the first break with tradition. He said that the so-called "safe period" or "rhythm method" was lawful under certain circumstances; however other techniques remained forbidden. Pope John later set up advisory committee of specialists to study the legality of "the pill". Although the committee was stacked with individuals opposed to birth control,
Tiffany Engagement, the majority altered their opinion during the life of the committee, after they had learned of the worldwide necessity for some means of lowering the birth rate in order to prevent unbearable levels of suffering. In 1968, Pope Paul VI ignored the majority recommendation of the panel and ruled against all "artificial" methods of birth control in his encyclical Humanae Vitae. 11
Pope Paul's decision was met with widespread criticism from many within and without the Church. The laity in North America has generally ignored the encyclical and is now widely practicing birth control. It has proven difficult for the Church to maintain control over its flock in a multi-faith, and highly secularized culture. The family size of Protestants now differs very little from that of Roman Catholics.
This conflict is different from those described previously, because it is still an active concern within the Roman Catholic Church - at least among the leadership.
Shape of the Earth:
This is a special conflict between religion and science which we include here because:
There is massive documentary evidence that the Medieval Christian Church generally accepted Pagan cosmology developed by ancient Greeks which taught that the earth was spherical. However, an opposing belief that the church taught a flat earth began in the early 19th century, became near universal, and is only slowly dissipating today. The "Historical Society of Britain some years back listed [this belief] as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions." 2 Some sources of the hoax were:
This hoax became imbedded in school books as early as the 1860's. It continues in some texts to the present day. Author Daniel Boorstin, wrote, as late as 1985: "A Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia...afflicted the continent from...300 to at least 1300 [CE]. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers." 5
The hoax continues, in ever diminishing strength. More details
References: A.D. White "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom." Thoemmes Press, (Reprinted 1993) Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store Jeffry B. Russell, "The myth of the flat Earth," American Scientific Affiliation Conference, 1997-AUG-4. at: "Who invented the flat Earth?," ChristianAnswers.net, at: "The Form of the Earth," an excerpt from A.D. White's "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom." D. Appleton and Company, (1898). Online at: Daniel Boorstin, "The Discoverers: A history of man's search to know his world and himself," Random House, (1985). Read reviews or order this book "The scientific revolution in the seventeenth century," Modern Europe Syllabus,
Tiffany Verlobungsring, at: "Great theosophists: Giordano Bruno," Theosophy, Volume 26, #8, 1938-JUNE. See: "The folly of Giordano Bruno," SETI League, at: "The Significance of Johannes Kepler for the Beginning of the Modern Physico-Astronomical World View in the 17th Century seen from the Angle of Physics," Europäisches Bildungsprojekt, at: H. P. Blavatsky,
Pandora Jewellery Stockists, "The Number Seven," at: Pope Paul VI,
Tiffany Deutschland, "Humanae Vitae. Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the regulation of birth," 1968-JUL-25, at: "Pluto loses status as a planet," BBC News, 2006-AUG-24, at:
Copyright © 1996 to 2007 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2007-AUG-03
Author: B.A. Robinson
document.write('
document.write('
Tiffany Verlobungsring 16 "
Linear Mode
