Ben Gilmore, a regular contributor to the Op/Ed page in the
Morgan Hill Times whose religious devotion seems beyond credential,
betrays bigotry in the name of a Scripture
EDITOR:
Ben Gilmore, a regular contributor to the Op/Ed page in the Morgan Hill Times whose religious devotion seems beyond credential, betrays bigotry in the name of a Scripture, not of a nonexistent God, but of writings revised and edited over centuries by a theocracy whose interest was political, not ecumenical.
I have no fascination with homosexuality, but I do know that what transpires in bedrooms other than mine is none of my business. I do have an interest in someone who is published in my local newspaper, proposing to be an expert on the evolution of the universe and misrepresenting science in terms of Scripture and logic in terms of dogma.
It is not “Intuitively Obvious” that some divine being created anything. The evidence we have for our current models, referring to the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, the evolution of life, is built on Copernican philosophy. In science, we correlate our measurements with theory and other relevant data, consistent with other theory that makes a sensible, coherent probability.
It is an evidentiary exercise, based on an empirical process, that does not rely on ancient story tales and conjectures into the mythological, but rather the work of people dedicated to discovery.
We learned the stars were not pinholes in a dark curtain arrayed around us but are enormous nuclear furnaces within the vast void of space that create the very elements from which we ourselves are formed. The world is not supported on the back of a great turtle or the shoulders of Atlas.
We learned the Earth was approximately a sphere, not flat. We learned the Earth was the third planet in a solar system of an ordinary star on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, not the center of the universe. There are no unicorns, no elves, no wraiths, no gnomes or trolls, no demons or devils or angels or gods. Just life. And that ought to be sufficient, sufficient for principle, the cause to care, to be charitable, to embrace compassion and love, not with the sanction of invisible and absent deity, but because we choose it, demand it and make it happen for common purpose.
It ought to be sufficient because the universe is so much more complex, fascinating, comprised of splendors waiting to discerned, that to dwell on such triviality as someone’s sexual orientation is a waste of time. And if discovery is not enough, then the weight of matters such as war, famine, the destruction of Earth’s ecosystem, the decimation of species, present a more clear and present concern than the judgments of which derive from a book not written by God, but by human beings. Human beings who created a compendium of metaphor and symbology designed to guide behavior in accordance with their views in their time. Some of those rules handed down from as long as 3000 (if not more) years ago remain sensible. Others are absurd. None of them are divine.
Charles Callahan,
Morgan Hill
