Eeyores News with a view

The Evangelical Founding Fathers
Much attention has been paid to the idea that evangelical Christians are, politically, in motion. Only 29 percent of "born-again" Christians now say they support Republicans, compared to 62 percent in 2004, according to Barna Research. Among those who participated in the Republican primaries, many went for John McCain, who once called certain Christian leaders "agents of intolerance." Many younger evangelicals are stressing issues like the environment and poverty, and, as Christianity Today readers know better than most, a new generation of evangelical leaders has emphasized different styles and modes of worship.
But while many Christians re-assess current alliances, practices, and beliefs, one characteristic relatively unchanged: their sense of history. A recent Beliefnet survey found that more than 70 percent of conservative evangelicals believe the Constitution created a Christian state. Whether it's prayer in schools or the Ten Commandments in courthouses, many evangelicals still believe that being a good Christian means advocating for a stronger government role in promoting religion.
I'd like to respectfully suggest that the important dialogue within the evangelical community would be enriched if it were to more boldly re-examine its historical roots. What it would find is that evangelicals of the founding era had very different attitudes about the separation of church and state than many of their modern counterparts. In fact, we would not have religious freedom or the separation of church and state without a key alliance between heroic evangelicals and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
In 1784, Virginia's leading politician, Patrick Henry, proposed taxing citizens to sustain and support churches. This was a liberal bill, as these things went. The proceeds of the "assessment" could benefit any church, not just the dominant church. But a young James Madison opposed the idea — which he called an "establishment" — on the grounds that it would, by entangling the state with the church, actually harm religion. Madison eventually won, in large part because of support from Virginia's Baptists. Even though tax support was non-coercive and could directly benefit the Baptists, one Baptist petition stated that the measure "departed from the Spirit of the Gospel and from the bill of Rights." Responding to the argument that the assessment would help battle the spread of heretical views like deism, the petition declared that virtuous religions would win in a marketplace of faith: "Let their Doctrines be scriptural and their lives Holy, then shall Religion beam forth as the sun and Deism shall be put to open shame."
The Baptists further argued that Henry's approach ignored an important lesson from Christian history: that the greatest flowering of Christianity occurs without government support. During its first few hundred years, Christianity was oppressed, yet "the Excellent Purity of its Precepts and the unblamable behaviour of its Ministers made its way thro all opposition," one petition declared. After Constantine endorsed Christianity, persecution subsided but "how soon was the Church Over run with Error and Immorality." Another Baptist treatise projected how seemingly beneficial government support could lead to constraint: because money would be collected through the tax system, the "Sheriffs, County Courts and public Treasury are all to be employed in the management of money levied for the express purpose of supporting Teachers of the Christian Religion." In all, some 28 counties sent in petitions arguing that the gospel required rejection of the assessment.
The alliance between evangelicals and Madison and Jefferson reappeared at critical junctures. When Madison ran for Congress in the first elections, against the charismatic war hero James Monroe, it was the Baptists who rallied to him because of his support for the separation of church and state. It was the evangelicals who prodded Madison into proposing a Bill of Rights that guaranteed religious freedom and limited the government role in religion.
The most pungent illustration of the alliance rolled toward the White House on New Year's Day in 1802. Standing at the door of the new presidential mansion in Washington, President Thomas Jefferson saw two horses pulling a dray carrying a 1,235-pound cheese with an inscription: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." The cheese was a gift from evangelical activist the Rev. John Leland of western Massachusetts — a "thank you" for Jefferson's support of the separation of church and state.
It is commonly assumed that Baptists supported the separation of church and state to avoid persecution. That was certainly partly true. The Baptists of Virginia suffered a wave of persecution at that time. But the evangelical passion for keeping church and state separate had theological roots, too. Christians were to render unto Caesar what was his — the religious and political spheres were meant, by Jesus, to be separate. Just as important, both the Baptists and the philosophers believed in the primacy of individual freedom. For Madison and Jefferson, individual liberty trumped the rights of kings or governments; for evangelicals, an individual's personal relationship with God was more important than church and clerical authority. Let's remember who will provide the final assessment of a life well lived, Leland wrote: "If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free."
If alive today, 18th-century evangelicals might well agree with their theological descendants that the nation needs more religion. But they would disagree that it requires more state support or advocacy for religion. It was the evangelicals who worked with Madison to shape the true "founding faith," which was not Christianity or secularism. It was religious liberty — a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.
Steven Waldman, editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, is the author of Founding Faith: Providence, Politics and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, published by Random House.
"This article first appeared in an issue of Christianity Today. Used by permission of Christianity Today International, Carol Stream, IL 60188."

Guess what, i don't agree with the following two articles. Apologize? Not in my life time. The boy was a racist and when you follow evolution to it's logical conclusion, it is racist. I believe in a very limited evolution, or actually de-evolution would be closer to the truth. Man is getting worse all the time, he is devising more ways to sin and abuse people, then in any other time in recorded history. He is getting stupider all the time, he thinks he is getting smarter, but that is what is making him stupider. The men that built the pyramids are the smart ones, we have not even approached their intellect yet.
That alone disproves evolution.

Anglican clergyman: Church owes Darwin an apology
LONDON (AP) — The Church of England owes Charles Darwin an apology for its hostile 19th-century reaction to the naturalist's theory of evolution, a cleric wrote on an Anglican website launched Monday.
The Rev. Malcolm Brown, who heads the church's public affairs department, issued the statement to mark Darwin's bicentenary and the 150th anniversary of the seminal work On the Origin of Species, both of which fall next year.
Brown said the Church of England should say it is sorry for misunderstanding him at the time he released his findings and, "by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand (Darwin) still."
The Church of England said Brown's statement reflected its position on Darwin but did not constitute an official apology.
The church's stance sets it apart from fundamentalist Christians, who believe evolutionary theory is incompatible with the biblical story of the Earth's creation.
Darwin was born into the Church of England, educated at a church boarding school and trained to become an Anglican priest.
However, his theory that species evolve over generations through a process of natural selection brought him into conflict with the church.
The Church of England did not take an official stance against Darwin's theories, but many senior Anglicans reacted with hostility to his ideas, arguing against them at public debates.
At an Oxford University debate in 1860, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, famously asked scientist Thomas Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed to be descended from a monkey. Critics included the Rev. John Stevens Henslow and Adam Sedgwick, both scientists who had taught Darwin at Cambridge. Sedgwick wrote that he found some of Darwin's ideas "utterly false and grievously mischievous."
Brown said that from a modern perspective, it was hard to avoid the thought that the reaction against Darwin was based on what would now be called the "yuck factor ... when he proposed a lineage from apes to humans."
Brown called for a "rapprochement" between Christianity and Darwinism.
The bishop of Swindon, Lee Rayfield, who also is an immunologist, said religion and science were not mutually exclusive.
He said he opposed Christians for whom "evolution is equated with atheism" as well as Darwinists who felt ideas about evolution "completely undermine any kind of credibility for God."
"That's completely wrong," he told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "It's a false polarization."
This is not the first time a cleric or a church has been pressed to apologize for past actions. In 1992, Pope John Paul II said the Roman Catholic Church was wrong to condemn astronomer Galileo Galilei for maintaining that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
The Church of England said sorry two years ago for its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Still, a descendant of Darwin's said the Anglicans' latest bout of soul-searching served little purpose.
"Why bother?" the scientist's great-great-grandson Andrew Darwin was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail newspaper. "When an apology is made after 200 years, it's not so much to right a wrong, but to make the person or organization making the apology feel better."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-09-15-anglican-darwin_N.htm

Vatican: Guess what, Darwin? Evolution is OK
Catholic Church says theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible
VATICAN CITY - The Vatican said on Tuesday the theory of evolution was compatible with the Bible but planned no posthumous apology to Charles Darwin for the cold reception it gave him 150 years ago.
Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's culture minister, was speaking at the announcement of a Rome conference of scientists, theologians and philosophers to be held next March marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's "The Origin of Species."
Christian churches were long hostile to Darwin because his theory conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation.
Earlier this week, a leading Anglican churchman, Rev. Malcolm Brown, said the Church of England owed Darwin an apology for the way his ideas were received by Anglicans in Britain.
Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans in 1950 and Pope John Paul reiterated that in 1996. But Ravasi said the Vatican had no intention of apologizing for earlier negative view.
"Maybe we should abandon the idea of issuing apologies as if history was a court eternally in session," he said, adding that Darwin's theories were "never condemned by the Catholic Church nor was his book ever banned;" ...
Professor Philip Sloan of Notre Dame University, which is jointly holding next year's conference with Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, said the gathering would be an important contribution to explaining the Catholic stand on evolution.

Touched by an angel? Most say they've been protected
A new survey of the USA's religious beliefs and practices finds 55% of all adults — including one in five of those who say they have no religion — believe they have been protected from harm by a guardian angel.
"I would never have expected these numbers. It was the biggest surprise to me in our findings," says sociologist Christopher Bader of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Baylor today will release results of its second national survey on religion.
The survey, based on interviews with nearly 1,700 adults in fall 2007, updates Baylor's 2006 findings on religious affiliation and views of God by adding new questions on topics such as gender and politics, the environment and beliefs about evil.
Members of almost every major religious group sensed angels running heavenly interference: evangelical Protestant, 66%; black Protestant, 81%; mainline Protestant, 55%; Catholic, 57%; Jewish, 10%; other religions, 49%; no religion, 20%.
"People's sense of the divine is remarkably widespread and tangible, even if they don't call it God. Clearly, there's a sense of the sacred prevalent throughout society," says Matthew Gilbert of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif., which studies subjective experiences using scientific techniques.
Just as people have many different images of God, so they have different ways of interpreting "guardian angels" or God's voice, says Kenneth Pargament, a psychology professor at Bowling Green (Ohio) State University who has written on spirituality and the psyche. When people think of being protected, "they may not be envisioning an angel with wings so much as a loved one who has gone before them and is looking after their well-being," Pargament says.
Many respondents said they have "heard the voice of God" or "felt God speaking to me." That too can be an internal spiritual sense, not literally words in their ear, says Pargament.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-09-18-baylor-angel_N.htm