Allow me to Vent!

I know I should probably write my thoughts on both Greg's and Chuch's thoughts pertaining to "Saints and the Prosperity Gospel" below, but this something that I've been angry about all day.

It started last night while I was watching the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's basically like the Daily Show, a half hour show of witty satire that takes shameless jabs at the political right and the news media. I must preface this by saying that I'm not one to take offense at much, in fact I love it when people tell religious jokes that make fun of the flaws in the church. I love to watch the Simpsons, read Larknews.com, and browse through to shipoffools.com. All of these things poke much fun at the church, and to be honest they make good points and if the church was truly following Christ and not allowing our own agenda's to get in the way they wouldn't have anything to make fun of us for.

Now I'm not angry about any religious joke that they told or anything like that. What I'm angry about is what the guest on the show said. The guest was an astrophysicist who attended an Ivy League school. I missed his name because I was flipping back and forth between this and the world series, however when I found out the guest was an astrophysicist I stayed on comedy central, because astrophysics is interesting.

Ok on to the anger. During the interview the host, Stephen Colbert, asked a few questions and then brought up the topic of intelligent design. After a bit of talking the guest made the statement that intelligent design was "intillectual laziness."

It didn't really bother me last night, but as I thought about it today I kept getting angry, hence the need to vent - and what better place to vent than a blog!

Intellectual laziness?! I'm fine with people disagreeing with intelligent design, and I really don't care if Christians posit theistic evolution or creationism, but to call intelligent design intellectual laziness, just makes me angry.

I don't care how many stinking letters this guy has after his name (PhD...etc) or where he went to school, I would love to see him or any scholar (including Stephen Hawking) go up against the great minds of Christian History (ie: the saints of the Church - to relate to the last post). I would certainly not call Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, on top of many others intellectually lazy.

Maybe I'm just upset because I'm striving to be an academic right now and to be told that one of my views is completely unintellectual is no fun, but I don't think that's at the heart of it. I mean, shoot, I hold a lot of ideas that many people (even some Christians) think are intellectually absurd. To name some examples: I don't believe in the source hyposthesis for the Penteteuch, I don't hold to the Q source as a development for the gospel theory, I believe in a literal Adam, I believe that all of the charism are still to be used in the church today, and the list could continue. So I don't think that I'm taking this as a personal attack. Rather it's almost as if this man has attacked all of the Christian thinkers throughout the ages and declared them to be morons. I take offense to this, the Christian thinkers through the ages were certainly no slouches and I doubt that one could hardly describe them as intellectually lazy.

So enough with the ranting. I really didn't formulate a coherent defense, so maybe I am intellectually lazy, but the great thinkers of church history such as Aquinas, Augustine, Lewis, Anselm, Abelard, Calvin, et al. were certainly not intellectually inferior to the secular minds of their day, or of any day for that matter.