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right to bear machine guns and the intrinsically venal sinfulness of a man’s
commitment in love of another man. Was the clustering of these apparently diverse
concerns the accidental result of a sociopolitical-religious short circuit, a class-
resentment-driven spiritual split in geographic, socioeconomic and educational
class? Tim LeHay is selling millions of books, whole tables full at Wal-Mart’s, which
come packaged with these assumptions.
Surely higher-level theists would make today’s evil more subtle, abstract and
pervasive, perhaps involving inner life themes of envy, vengeance and aggression;
goodness implicating empathically made moral choices involving interpersonal
kindness and evidence of caring about the well being of others. My contact with
some English academicians taught me that even the mathematics of hard science
can be viewed as a gift of grace and belief in the possibility of a continually
emerging, Christ-centered, evolutionary process. Protestant philosopher
mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in his 1926 Religion in the Making, Catholic
anthropologist priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his The Phenomenon of Man
and the more modern process theologists of New York’s Union Theological
Seminary do not exclude Christ's involvement in evolving science and other new
knowledge. They see Him participating in a spiritual evolutionary progress which
does not gather the barnacles of irrational ideas about the murder of less than
hundred-cell blastula or the psychoneurohormonally determined sexual partner
preference. They know about the ever-changing cultural and political appearances
of faux and real evil. Nonetheless, what | learned from my Christian and Jewish
friends at the mathematics institute was that, though the definitions of evil may
change, evil as a construct and spiritual mechanism is an apparently essential
component of the Christian experience. On Rosh Hashanah, even the reformed
Jews commit themselves to Teshuvah, making up for past evil deeds. The good
versus evil dichotomous view of man’s existence is true in the lives of Assembly of
God Fundamentalists of Georgia as well as the sophisticated Readers, Professors
and Dons of the high Episcopal churches and university chapels of Oxford and
Cambridge.
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