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right to bear machine guns and the intrinsically venal sinfulness of a man’s commitment in love of another man. Was the clustering of these apparently diverse concerns the accidental result of a sociopolitical-religious short circuit, a class-resentment-driven spiritual split in geographic, socioeconomic and educational class? Tim LeHay is selling millions of books, whole tables full at Wal-Mart’s, which come packaged with these assumptions.

Surely higher-level theists would make today’s evil more subtle, abstract and pervasive, perhaps involving inner life themes of envy, vengeance and aggression; goodness implicating empathically made moral choices involving interpersonal kindness and evidence of caring about the well being of others. My contact with some English academicians taught me that even the mathematics of hard science can be viewed as a gift of grace and belief in the possibility of a continually emerging, Christ-centered, evolutionary process. Protestant philosopher mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in his 1926 Religion in the Making, Catholic anthropologist priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his The Phenomenon of Man and the more modern process theologians of New York’s Union Theological Seminary do not exclude Christ’s involvement in evolving science and other new knowledge. They see Him participating in a spiritual evolutionary progress which does not gather the barnacles of irrational ideas about the murder of less than hundred-cell blastula or the psychoneurohormonally determined sexual partner preference. They know about the ever-changing cultural and political appearances of faux and real evil. Nonetheless, what I learned from my Christian and Jewish friends at the mathematics institute was that, though the definitions of evil may change, evil as a construct and spiritual mechanism is an apparently essential component of the Christian experience. On Rosh Hashanah, even the reformed Jews commit themselves to Teshuvah, making up for past evil deeds. The good versus evil dichotomous view of man’s existence is true in the lives of Assembly of God Fundamentalists of Georgia as well as the sophisticated Readers, Professors and Dons of the high Episcopal churches and university chapels of Oxford and Cambridge.

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