Monday, March 01, 2004

Jesus as a great moral teacher?

A quote from one of the greatest thinkers of the last century..

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." | C.S.Lewis (Mere Christianity [New York: Touchstone, 1996] 56).

Religious belief amongst scientists

"A recent survey of religious belief amongst scientists in the United States (published in..Nature) showed that forty percent of scientists asserted a personal belief in a personal God-almost exactly the same percentage as when a similar survey was published in 1916." | Kirsten Birkett, Unnatural Enemies - An Introduction to science and christianity. ISBN 1 876326 01 8