Three Links (Vol. 13)

November 22, 2008, 1:30 pm; posted by
Filed under Bwog, Featured, Steve  | 1 Comment

Halftime of the Villa/Man U game…

— The thing I’ve noticed about the weird Levi’s commercials, with people backflipping into jeans and filling their pants up with helium, is the lack of a disclaimer at the bottom advising us against “trying this at home.” Does this mean they think these things are perfectly safe, or that they think it’s obvious that the commercials are fake?

This poor guy drove all the way from upstate New York to Montana, worked one 10-hour shift, then got fired. Meanwhile, down in North Carolina, a couple fishermen a mile out to sea used a lasso to land a golden retriever.

— Last story’s a sad one. Six weeks ago, a 22-year-old Army reservist and Jefferson CC student named Jesse Kilgore walked into the woods near his home and shot himself. Now, in an interview with the questionable WorldNetDaily site, his father links his suicide to Richard Dawkins’s atheist snoozer, The God Delusion.

His death is a terrible tragedy no matter what its cause, but if these claims are true — that a book and “science classes” turned this young man’s faith into despair — the real problem is not with literature or science. The problem is not even a college that allegedly “undermin[ed] every moral and spiritual value” he had (which has not been the experience of the many JCC students I know). God created the world that biology explores and studies. When our faith in Him cannot stand up to a full, impartial consideration of reality, when we feel “we must shut up one of God’s books to read the other” (Noll), then it is we who are to blame: not God, and not science.

We cannot simply demonize learning and rely on this sort of mushy, meaningless answer: “I told [Jesse] it was my relationship with God, not my knowledge of Him that brought me back to my faith. No one convinced me with facts . . . it was a matter of the heart.” Heart or no heart, facts exist whether we ignore them or accept them. Part of the reason the university culture is so dismissive of faith is that so many people of faith are reflexively distrustful of education. Where teaching is openly anti-Christian, that’s understandable. But rather than disengaging from society, we’d be a lot better off teaching young Christians how science and philosophy are blessings, not threats.


Comments

1 Comment to “Three Links (Vol. 13)”

  1. Steve on November 22nd, 2008 2:26 pm

    Hmm, this time I saw a “Do Not Attempt” on the jeans backflip, but I still think there’s nothing on the helium-filled pants…

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