Check out Texas Freedom Network’s recap of the regular session of the 2009 Texas Legislature. Our recap includes a list of bills on which TFN focused its efforts and notes on how those bills fared during the session.
Check out Texas Freedom Network’s recap of the regular session of the 2009 Texas Legislature. Our recap includes a list of bills on which TFN focused its efforts and notes on how those bills fared during the session.
Speaking of legislation, let’s begin the day by firing a dart of truth at the Religious Right and their allies with regard to their persistent opposition to protecting the environment. This one goes all the way back to the early days of the Christian faith in the Mddle East. Here you go boys and girls:
Oh God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with
all living things, our brothers the animals to whom
Thou gavest the earth in common with us. We
remember with shame that in the past we have
exercised the dominion of man with ruthless cruelty
so that the voice of the earth, which should have
gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.
Saint Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, circa 375 A.D.
Not only is the Religious Right (RR) opposed to caring for the earth, they are also opposed to St. Augustine on interpreting the Bible literally.
From a website:
One of the many lies told by creationists is that the theory of evolution is some sort of deliberate attempt to undermine the Bible by positing that the creation myths in Genesis are not true stories. In reality evolution says nothing about religion except indirectly, in that a scientific explanation of how things are will always be more attractive to people who can think than will superstition and legend. When creationists claim that acceptance of evolution necessarily leads to total rejection of Christian teachings they are merely exhibiting their own lack of faith. Their insistence on the literal truth of the Bible invites ridicule of their religion, and, by extension, rejection of the worthwhile teachings and principles of Christianity. Creationists like to demonise Charles Darwin as if all this heresy started with him, but the following words were written some years before the publication of The Origin of Species.
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field in which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
(from St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, translation by John Hammond Taylor)