Science and religion are in harmony – to a degree. From the top of my head, the Vatican relies on the latest and state-of-the art scientific technology to keep their vaults safe. Apparently, trusting God alone to keep it secured isn’t enough since He has this knack of saying something like “Help yourself first and I will help you.”
Science produces the light they need to read up and broadcast the Holy Scriptures. Speaking of broadcasting, religion didn’t’ shunt from it by far. It was embraced whole-heartedly instead. Religion took full advantage of radio and TV broadcasting capabilities. There’s so much more evidence of the harmonious mesh between religion and science. There’s the HVAC system, for instance, used in the churches, convents and other religious establishments. Oh and let’s not forget the omnipresent microphone and audio visual system too. Whoever says that religion and science is like trying to mix oil with water, hasn’t stopped to look around yet.
For starters, religion generally states that our world, or sometimes interpreted as our universe, was created by the Supreme One in 7 days. Science counters with the Big Bang theory. Both views require some degree of faith to have credence.
Next, still in the creation stage, religion describes Eden and the earliest homo sap… er … human beings, Adam and Eve. Everything was pure bliss with peace and harmony reigning. Apparently it was when naïve Adam was tempted by Eve to take a bite out of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, the science of making clothes and erecting a shelter was discovered. There’s also the science of procreation wherein the first children, Cain and Abel, were born. But that’s beside the point here. Science, on the other hand, got busy and started discovering fossils of dinosaurs and other huge discoveries like the matching rock types and age of the shorelines of two continents separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The biggest earth shaking event in the scriptures was about the Deluge and definitely no mention of gigantic reptiles as well. Science also provided the theory, and the hard evidence, of evolution. Trust me, religion did not kosher to the idea of human beings, which were made in His likeness, actually coming from apes. Charles Darwin definitely had to be protected then but more on that later.
You see, religion has a lot of loopholes in their writings. Just recently, a documentary was made regarding the Holy Scriptures of Christianity. Allegedly, it showed that the scriptures were not presented in its complete form. Somewhere during the early ages of Christianity, the powers-that-be decided to edit the Bible and only selected writings that would help them in their cause. Those rejected were called the Nostic verses. Needless to say, it stirred up a lot of controversy.
Another not-so-talked-about writing is Christianity’s Old Testament. Have you wondered why we only talk about Genesis and after that everything is based on the New Testament? Well, considering that God in the Old Testament is someone we can actually relate to in our daily lives could have something to do with it. For instance, in the Old Testament, He gets angry more than once. He also gets jealous. That part also carried over to the present with the 10 commandments. He is also vengeful and actually exacts His revenge in extreme ways, turning someone into a salt statue just for looking back at a city being destroyed by a rain of fire (which He actually delivered but science deduce this to be a meteor shower of sorts ). This actually makes us better understand the phrase priests like to use often – God is within us all.
The destruction didn’t end there. In the name of Christianity, Crusaders were sent out by the Church to cleanse the undesirables. ‘In the name of God’, they exterminated countless settlements and no one was spared. Children, women and the elderly were given the same treatment that the men who defended already got before them – death. Quite naturally, no Christian church will tell of those stories today. At present, we have nothing to fear from Crusaders anymore. We do, however, have Jihadists to contend with and they are not delivering their cleansing through a broad sword. They have much bigger and more powerful tools to mete out their single-minded purpose in life.
Considering all that, it’s little wonder why the monks had to edit the Holy Bible. However, that doesn’t mean that the New Testament is perfect as well. For instance, what happened in Jesus’ adolescent years? Isn’t this an important stage in everyone’s life? This is where all those strange hormones start coming out, changing our physique, altering our voices and oftentimes leaves us wondering about our sexual orientations. Shouldn’t the life of Jesus at this stage serve as a role model? Or is there an underlying reason why they left this ‘seemingly unimportant’ part out?
Well, there you have it. Faith versus facts. Religion versus science. Maybe that explains why there’s a fire and brimstone delivery in religion while science calmly presents irrefutable facts. In fairness to religion, science isn’t perfect as well. Up to now, they’re still trying to put a finger on the unexplained. A couple of prime examples to this are paranormal events and UFOs. A few million people claiming these to be true cannot be overlooked offhandedly. Yet, in this case, religion seems to calmly handle it – and with apparently positive results.
With all these things considered (and there’s a lot more!), it really all boils down to us, individuals, to deal with it. Both religion and science have proven time and again that they are important and cannot be denied in our existence whether as children of God or as homo sapiens.
The legendary John Lennon may have had a strong point when he composed ‘Imagine’. Well, science actually cheated a bit here since at that time, LSD and Mary Jane were really making a big hit everywhere.