Individual Salvation

Reading this article, I began to realize how many more interesting stories must be out there, waiting to be told, and how the work of scientific discovery proliferate eternally, in ways we are only now starting to imagine.

Matthew Chapman managed to attend Pennsylvania’s recent Dover Panda Trail which resulted in a ruling that deeply tossed intelligent design from biology classrooms. That explained, it is not actually the evolution “debate” I want to get into here. To a certain extent, there’s a small piece of Chapman’s article which I want to pull out of context.

Somewhere in the middle of the article give details filming for an interview with a local preacher, being videotaped while doing so and having part of that video where Chapman explains being an atheist played the priest’s church-going public.

“When I upbraided Groves about this –he had not told me I was to be used in this way -he shrugged off my objections and told me it had been “educational.” He and his flock concluded that I had a different understanding of Christianity. Coming from Europe, mine was “more socialistic,” while his was more concerned with “individual salvation.” (p.170)

Emphasis added there because it sent me off on something of a mental departure from the subject after I read it. Other than to say that I have been pondering the piece that any system which proves to focus on individual salvation is a system ripe for abuse by those seeking power over people’s lives. It is not to say that everyone who is concerned with their individual salvation also entirely disregards the social contract.

I think that if the main concern is with getting an official stamp of approval on one’s soul in order to pass through the mythical gates one day, understanding anything about the way our world in the here and now actually functions, siding in other words, with the importance of scientific principles and the method that comes with them.