From: Lyle Burkhead (LYBRHED@delphi.com)
Date: Sat Nov 30 1996 - 14:43:09 MST
I wrote,
>The true church is the church that will make the Apocalypse happen,
>and create the New Jerusalem, as described in Revelation 21.
>
>Once THAT meme gets started, there is no stopping it.
to which Chris Hind replied,
> Are you explaining how they think of it or do you actually believe it
> yourself?
There is no "they," at least not yet. I don't know of any Christians
who think in such terms. But now that the idea has been proposed,
somebody will pick up on it, inevitably. A new church will appear,
with the explicit aim of making the Apocalypse happen. They will
declare themselves to be the only true church, and they will regard
anti-scientific "Christians" like your parents as clueless and irrelevant.
One of the cliches that permeates modern culture is the idea that
Christianity is inherently anti-scientific. Nothing could be more
absurd. Out of all the cultures that have existed on this planet, only one
created modern science. Science appeared in Europe, at a time when
virtually all Europeans were Christian. Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Euler,
Cauchy, and Riemann were all Christians -- and not just nominal
Christians. They took it seriously. Show me six atheists with
comparable mathematical achievement. Show me an atheistic culture
that has produced any non-trivial scientific ideas. Even Galileo,
who was arrested by the Inquisition, remained a Christian all his life;
his quarrel was with the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, not with the church
per se.
What we call the "singularity" (for lack of a better term) will not
happen by accident. It will be brought about by someone who intends
to bring it about, and that person will be fully aware that the very idea
of the "singularity" has its roots in the Bible.
Lyle
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