Science, faith, and theists

[Michael]

A further rant/rantette.

Walking to diff equ class today I encountered this lovely gem of a preacher. I have video of him I am thinking of uploading. At he's standing in the middle of the campus between the library and the classroom building with a huge sign yelling at students that their education is empty and meaningless and that they need Jesus. No one is paying attention, and I'm the only one stopped.

This sort of attitude is rather distressing. The anti-intellectualism, the discounting of education, the spreading of woo, all while standing in front of the library. I do support his right to free speech, and since he's not selling anything he is permitted on campus, but the fact he's doing it on the grounds of the library, that he's using that spot to say that the education is useless and meaningless, bothers me.

You might want to remind him that the world's finest universities were nearly all started by Christians, and as Christian colleges of prayer and study. Colleges were usually started by monks (frequently Benedicitnes ), who had preserved knowledge through the 'dark ages'. And they didn't just preserve Christian thought; for example they preserved the writings of the Greek philosophers and poets, and collected and preserved the writings of Islamic mathematicians. A large part of the reason for the development of these libraries is that the Benedictine rule prevents individual ownership, but allows communal ownership. Books were therefore kept in common rather than in an individual's room (his 'cell'). This rule provided the seed of the monastic library and several monasteries became famous for their libraries (if you want to read some excellent fiction based on this then I can thoroughly recommend The Name of the Rose, a rather gruesome murder-mystery; made into an excellent film with Sean Connery)

It was also Christian scholars who gave this preacher his English bible. The King James Bible did not, contrary to some people's views, fall out of the sky leather-bound and with a thumb-index. It depended on a large number of scholars, particularly the great humanist Erasmus, who compiled the Greek text for the New Testament that would form the basis of Tyndale's translation into English (which makes up the large part of the KJV).

Mind you he might well be a person who doesn't think Benedictines and other great Christian scholars were/are real Christians, so perhaps it's not that good an idea.