historical texts and cannonical texts are fascinating--as texts of a given time...there is no such thing as revealled truth
Reader comment on article: The Vatican Confronts Islam
in response to reader comment: To Interpret or Not to Interpret

Submitted by MA Rubinstein (United States), Sep 16, 2006 at 05:07

Many of the threads in response to Prof. Pipes comments reflect "inerrant "readings of the major western religious texts and core interpretive texts of the three Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith systems. However one must stand outside these traditions, as I do.. They are not universal and for all time. They are based on the core illogic of a divine presence. Marx and other "free thinkers" had it right--God was created by man as a way of providing some "logic" or point of belief in a chaotic world that was the product of evolutionary physical and biolgical processess that began 14 billion years ago (more or less).

However, as a host of theoretical physicists --the real theologians of our time--have shown us, creation is not a product of divine will, it is a product of primordial chaos itself. The logic of the Big Bang (or the many big bangs) and all susquent creation is the product of the internal logic of quantum mechanics--read Dr. Steven Weinberg on this--he is my favorite "theologian."

What we are seeing in the present day religious/political conflicts is the work of mankind and its religious and secular leaders. It is not the word of God. God is not dead---he/she never was--there was, if we accept the ideas of the MIT physicist, Alan Guth, only a bubble in the primordial quantum foam. In all of this discussion of theology and fundamental religious truth let the real truth of "chaos" and the ultimate result or the product of that natural process human beings and their ideas prevail.

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