Belief vs Reason

I am continually amazed at how belief seems to abhor reason. Can we not have faith and be rational at the same time. God gave us brains as well as a heart, we ought to use them! Many people think our country was founded on Christian values. This is not true, although the constitution does give a date in the conventional manner of the time as “the year of our Lord, ..” This small mention of God hardly constitutes the basis for a faith-based document. Other people think the “moral values” that gave Bush the presidency are based on “biblical Christianity”. This completely ignores what is known to be historical fact, which is that the Bible was written by human beings and human beings chose to put certain books in the Bible and left others out for political reasons. This for me, does not lessen the power of some of the teachings of the Bible. Surely we may appreciate and learn from these books, while understanding that they are imperfect human understandings of God’s will, and that our understanding of these ancient words is necessarily flawed by the fact that the bible has been translated and re-translated numerous times and that all of the writers wrote in the context of the historical times in which they lived. This historical context means that we may not be able to understand what they were referring to and that we may not be able to solve modern problems that were not written about in biblical times.

“By their fruits ye shall know them.” This is from the bible. Perhaps those “Biblical Christians” who feel the need to take the bible literally may learn from those words. We are directed by the bible not to be taken in by false words, but to judge people by the results of their actions. Put your hands over your ears to block the words of Bush and his administration and look at the fruits. The fruits of the Iraq war are rotted and laying on the ground for all to see. This is what I see: I see an invasion of Iraq where we were told that Osama Bin Laden and terrorists were in Iraq. This was a lie. Now more than 2500 U.S. soldiers are dead and more than 15,000 are wounded. The Iraqi civilian casualties are in the tens of thousands. We have lost the good will of much of the rest of the world that our previous presidents, both republican and democratic, worked so hard to forge in the past.