From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: God and Science:  The Ramblings of The Nightstalker
Date: 11 Nov 1992 20:52:47 GMT
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Distribution: world
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol1.gps.caltech.edu

In article <OLSON.92Nov10235519@husc8.harvard.edu>, olson@husc8.harvard.edu (Chip Olson@somewhere.out.there) writes:
>>I was going to let his post go without comment until I ran across this example
>>of his bigotry:
>>	Secondly, on a simple level, what relevance are the great discoveries of
>>	science on a day to day personal level.  When a woman is being pack
>>	raped, does it matter that elctrons repel one another?
>>Once again we see the implication that some Christians are so fond of:  That
>>Christians have a lock on morality.  I couldn't let a post with something like
>>that in it go unanswered.
>
>Huh? I utterly fail to grasp the connection between the cited passage and
>the inference you draw from it.  The article is centered around Judeo-
>Christian religion, to be certain, but that's because it's *about* Western
>science vis-a-vis Judeo-Christianity.  The fact that it does not address,
>for the most part, other religions and scientific traditions does *not*
>imply bigotry on the part of the author.  

Perhaps I misunderstood him.  I took that paragraph to mean that he thought
Christianity somehow reduced the incidence of rape (a claim for which I see no
evidence) and that if all people were Christians the situation would never
occur (after all, since he was trying to refute the claim [which he attributes
to Peter Atkins] that
	"Religion claims total understanding, but fails to deliver anything but
	sweet words; science claims cautious progress, and is able to deliver
	success at every stage."
it would've been a non-sequitur for him to point out something which science
doesn't address [and doesn't even CLAIM to address] unless he was implicitly
claiming that religion DOES address it;  on the other hand, maybe I should
treat most of what he writes as non-sequiturs).  Perhaps he was claiming that
Christianity somehow gave comfort to the victim after the rape had occurred.
Well, it strikes me that there are two ways it could do this:
	1)  By claiming that the rape was "God's will."  Hence the victim was
	    not responsible in any way.  Unfortunately, this same position can
	    be and frequently has been used for cases of negligence as well.
	    E.g., the various churches that oppose medical treatment and which
	    claim when a child dies because of religion-inspired neglect that
	    the death was "God's will."  Admittedly, that's an extreme case,
	    but I've seen it happen, and I've heard the "it was God's will"
	    excuse used many times to justify less severe negligence.  So if
	    this was what he meant, then I don't see this as being an argument
	    in favor of the efficacy of religion.
	2)  By allowing the victim to be forgiven for the sin of having been
	    raped.  Again, there may be relatively few churches that take the
	    position (at least officialy) that being raped is a sin, but there
	    are some, and if you add in the ones that don't actively discourage
	    their members from holding such a belief, you've got a fair number
	    of churches.