Some Christian religious have a penchant for swaggering in the name of Jesus without concern for the feelings or rights of others (or for prudence), and without regard for how it makes their own or all religious look...sometimes such religious are part of a dualistic philosophy so they can remain clergy but appease public policies requiring Christianity to be portrayed as a mere epigenetic, anthropomorphized Darwinian projection.
Actually, there are a number of Christian clergy who hold religious and secular metaphysical titles, and have no problem for presenting cases specifically meant to be their singling out Christianity (and by extension Judaism and Islam) as the only faith which is utter scientific “nonsense”.
But are their a priori pronouncements mere personal opinions or solid logic?
As example, Keith Ward is an author selected by Templeton Foundation Press for promotion; said TFP’s byline is: “Templeton Foundation Press helps intellectual leaders and others learn about science research on aspects of realities, invisible and intangible”.
Mr. Ward as a fellow of the British Academy, the Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Oxford, an ordained priest of the Church of England, member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and then author of over twenty secularly acclaimed books interested in comparative theology and the interplay between science and faith, in 2008 via TFP published “The Big Questions in Science and Religion”.
Surely this is a priest out to advance freedom of religion and be counterpoint to anti-Christianity interests...or is he?
In the said “Big Questions”, p. 14, paragraph two, Ward writes of the Abrahamic God: “Talk of possibilities somehow existing, or even worse, existing in some disembodied consciousness, is nonsense”. Yet on p.17, paragraphs four and five, first sentences of each, of the Hindu Brahman Ward writes: “This scheme is that there is one Supreme Reality of intelligent and blissful consciousness”, “This sort of religious explanation is not vacuous”.
Only Ward and his admirers can see how the concept of an Absolute of which all and everything are attached is different from the concept of an Absolute to which all and everything are attached. I find such salient circularities all the time in Ward’s and related genres, despite their criticism that it’s “bad metaphysics” to make such notice.
Maybe with big downturns of interest in government-guided traditional religions, some traditionalists pull stunts hoping for donors, or write books hoping to raise cash selling to the vast “unchurched”; who knows?
But when a Pope says God can change values of His goodness or promises, or an Anglican calls Christian faith nonsense, such are opinions not necessarily arrived at by Aristotelian logic nor basis for reducing all religion to “psychology”...but from them, one understands a rise in transculturation (ala December 2009 Pew report) or rise in the “unchurched”; when Baptists “on call of Jesus” just swoop in to order lives, this makes ALL Christians look loopy (q.v., e.g., Toledo Law School Emeritus Kaplan at his Religion Clause blog, comments about Christians from readers re Baptists in Haiti, at
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12206391&postID=1268260404249663252&isPopup=true )...and explains why some are afraid to even express religious beliefs.
