Religion forum: Religion, politics go together

Many say politics and religion are not related, but I believe they are related because both involve the management of people, and dealing with good and evil.

The Old Testament of the Bible defines laws and prescribes punishment for those who violate the laws. That is the same thing a government does. In America, Congress defines laws and the judicial system carries out punishment. The best laws for America are laws that are consistent with the Bible.

A major difference with the Christian religion is the introduction of the concept of personal responsibility. In addition to the observance of government law and God’s law of the Old Testament, the law of love as described in the New Testament, which defines the Christian lifestyle that can maintain a society.

Neither the Old Testament nor government can make people good by punishing them. The only benefit of punishment is to prevent evil from overcoming good.

The worst possible thing that a government can do is to legalize evil. I define evil as anything that is defined as evil in the Bible and that physical reality shows leads to disease, death and destruction.

The only way Christians can bring America back to using the Bible to establishing what is normal in society is for Christians to prepare Christians for elected offices and elect Christians to elected offices.

A government controlled by Christians is the best government for both Christians and atheists. Proverbs 29:2 says, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

CLIFFORD D. RUSSELL
Forest

Charles Darwin was a visionary, letter was not
While I would normally not address the illogical arguments of the evolution letter in the Feb. 7 edition, the 150th anniversary of one of science’s greatest works compels me to do so.

First, the Big Bang, the theory of which is attributed to Edwin Hubble, did occur approximately 15 billion years ago with the physical evidence accepted by scientists who often disagree about many of the details. But, no one knows what happened prior to, during and just after this cataclysmic event. The age of Earth has been determined, and refined, since the early 1900s. All of these data show an age for both Earth and the solar system of 4.5 billion years with an uncertainty of less than 1 percent.

The discourse on Darwin presented last week is incorrect. Readers should know that Darwin was a Cambridge-trained clergyman, who struggled with the implications of his observations. “The Origin of Species” took 20 years for Darwin to develop, write and revise. While it is true that Darwin did not discuss species origination in “Origin,” he did realize the similarities between the great apes and humans in his book “The Descent of Man.”

The startling thing about the theory of evolution is not the lack of evidence for it, but the thousands and thousands of scientific studies conducted since 1859 that support the theory at the molecular, cellular, organismal, and community levels. Yes, some of Darwin’s original ideas have been shown to be incorrect. That is the beauty of science. But when one pauses and realizes what Darwin didn’t know when he wrote “Origin,” the work is even more remarkable.

Darwin did not know about DNA or RNA, genetics or molecular biology. He did not know that the genetic code is universal for all life, from the simplest bacterium to Homo sapiens, and that this suggests that life arose from matter only once. He did not know that Homo sapiens’ DNA contains about 21,000 genes — about the same as a mouse. He did not know that evolution can proceed in a rapid manner as described by Eldredge and Gould.

The finding of a significant fossil is a low-probability event! But many transitional fossils have been documented including transitions from fish to bony fish up to reptiles to mammals as well as first birds. And there are many specimens that show the rise of Homo sapiens, an organism that still possesses gill slits early in its development and the demise of our ancestors.

The comment about Pasteur is appalling. Yes, the quote can be attributed to Pasteur, but it was given in the context of bacteriology to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation and has absolutely nothing to do with evolution.

Having graduated from a Mennonite college that taught me evolution and belonging to a religion whose Pope has publicly supported the tenets of evolution, I see no great schism between science and religion. Neither do many others. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, a majority of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Catholics and mainline Protestants agree that evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on Earth. Evangelical Protestants, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses all had 24 percent or less agreeing with that statement.

The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” as well as “It is ludicrous to mistake the Bible and the Koran for primers of natural science. They treat of matters even more important: the meaning of man and his relations to God.”

DAVID ORVOS
Amherst