Question Marx

Dr. Bernard E. Johnson alternates with a number of local churchfolk in writing the Spiritually Speaking column in The Eden Prairie News. Johnson demonstrates his elevated humility this week--urging us to embrace life's question marks. How wonderful it is that religious people maintain such modesty--freely admitting they just don't know much. Shucks!

Perhaps it will occur to the moralist that a below-the-belt, fact-free attack on an unpopular philosophical minority might buttress his thesis:

"Richard Swenson is a medical doctor and respected scientist who had written about the amazing reality of the human being and its equally amazing limitations. He is especially interested in those who confidently rule out the possibility of God based on the revelations of science. Such people have rejected question marks and, in Swenson’s opinion, been blinded by a thimbleful of knowledge. Here is a person with a three pound brain sitting in judgment on God! Whatever else atheism is, it is too small."

Who's Swenson, you ask? He's Menomonie, Wisconsin's leading creationist yarn-spinner, pumping out a superstition-promoting book every several years. His own bio doesn't include the word scientist; his academic stature hasn't yet earned him a Nobel (nor even a Wikipedia entry). In his More Than Meets The Eye: Fascinating Glimpses of God's Power and Design, the 'futurist' reveals the following about Jesus: 'Without a doubt, he shed at least one red blood cell for every human who ever lived' (as Publishers Weekly noted as it panned). No non-creationist could conceivably find Swenson's opinion of any interest whatever.

Thousands of cosmological maps have been proposed over the millennia--and immense change has occurred within individual religions over time. To commit oneself to a specific faith in its particular temporal guise is to reject nearly as many alternatives as does Richard Dawkins. To choose one religion to believe in--among the thousands that humans have described--requires one to reject a slew of subpar claimants. If we judge it a capital offense to employ one's three-pounder to reject gods, we should buy our crucifixion lumber in bulk.