{"id":2259,"date":"2005-09-19T21:19:53","date_gmt":"2005-09-19T21:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/finding-my-religion-1.html"},"modified":"2005-09-19T21:19:53","modified_gmt":"2005-09-19T21:19:53","slug":"finding-my-religion-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/finding-my-religion-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Finding My Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part of the SF Gate series, this week featuring Huston Smith, who introduced scads of us to world religions…<\/a><\/p>\n

He’s 86 now, God bless him, still a member of the Methodist denomination into which he was born (as the son of Methodist missionaries in China) and has some interesting tidbits:<\/p>\n

\n
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One of the many hot-button issues dividing scientists and religious people is the debate over evolution and so-called intelligent design. What’s your take on this controversy?<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Julius Caesar isn’t known as a great philosopher, but he said one thing that was right on. He said, "People believe what they want to believe." And I think to a very large extent that is true. People in the media want to believe that science has all the answers about how we got here. It doesn’t. I want to believe in science, too, but I also want to believe in religion. I think both have something to contribute on this subject. <\/p>\n

What does each have to contribute, in your view?<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Science has given us the fossil record, which shows that it took three and a half billion years for life to evolve to our level. The writer George Will — I don’t agree with his politics, but he said something that was right on. He said that six-day creationism is not only nonsense — it’s nonsense on stilts! <\/p>\n

However, you are never going to explain in a laboratory what it is we call the divine spark, which every religion has described. You will never get a sense of our divinity, of the image of God. These things cannot be explained by natural selection or chance mutations. For that you need to turn to religion. <\/p>\n

"Intelligent design" has been criticized as another way of simply promoting creationism in its literal sense.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

That’s wrong. That’s a canard! That’s a deviation. That’s an excuse for not facing the real criticism of science. Excuse me for raising my voice, but these are serious issues and these are serious times. There needs to be a more meaningful discussion about this. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of the SF Gate series, this week featuring Huston Smith, who introduced scads of us to world religions… He’s 86 now, God bless him, still a member of the Methodist denomination into which he was born (as the son of Methodist missionaries in China) and has some interesting tidbits: One of the many hot-button…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFinding My Religion - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/finding-my-religion-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Finding My Religion - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Part of the SF Gate series, this week featuring Huston Smith, who introduced scads of us to world religions… He’s 86 now, God bless him, still a member of the Methodist denomination into which he was born (as the son of Methodist missionaries in China) and has some interesting tidbits: One of the many hot-button…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/finding-my-religion-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-09-19T21:19:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Finding My Religion - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/finding-my-religion-1.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Finding My Religion - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}