I used to teach a world religion class and used a book written by Michael Molloy: these notes summarize and expand on the last chapter in that work. This is a skeleton version/outline of the lecture I would give for that section of the book.
Religion and the Advent of Contemporary Technology:
1) Advent of current technology that includes the Internet
2) Advent of telephones
3) Scientific Revolution with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton
4) Advent of Multiculturalism
5) Women's Rights Movement
6) The Reassessment of Human Sexuality
7) Einstein developed special and general relativity in 1905 and
1915-1916
8) The proliferation of secularism/globalism
9) Environmental Challenges
10) Religion and War
11) The cosmos evidently is finite in age but enormous. It could be approximately 13.7 billion years old, and there are some 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way alone.
12) Speed of light is 300,000 km/sec or 9.5 trillion km/year
13) Milky Way-100,000 years to cross its 600 quadrillion miles in diameter
Why so enormous? We could ask the same about other celestial phenomena.
14) Billions and billions of galaxies
15) Clusters and Superclusters
16) Evolution and the Diversity of Life?
17) Four Basic Forces, proteins and amino acids
18) Quantum Physics/Mechanics/Particle Physics-Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac. Particle physicist Stephen Barr (professor emeritus, University of Delaware).
One interesting question, which I still find vague, is how does one define religion? I mean in what sense did the ancient cults have something in common with something like Christianity of Islam, is Zen Buddhism a religion?
ReplyDeleteAnother question is what scientific claims actually conflict with Christianity writ large (not just specific interpretations and doctrines of Christianity) Alvin Plantinga claims it's evolutionary psychology, and not much else, but I'm not sure.
The myth that technology can create energy, laughable.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/we-used-to-worry-about-peak-oil-then-the-technological-revolution-happened/
https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/middle-ages-1000-1536/j-r-r-tolkien/the-ring/
ReplyDeleteThe story can be seen as a direct model for Tolkien’s story of the ring. Myths also abound about rings dating right back to the Old Testament and the legend of King Solomon’s ring, which enabled him to control demons.
My last comment should have been in the Solomon 5:11 thread.
ReplyDeleteRoman, Molloy spends part of chapter 1 reviewing theories of religion, and his book has chapters on the major religions of the world including Buddhism. Molloy is a religion scholar, so he covers scientific controversies to an extent. However, when it comes to religion and science potentially conflicting see Alan Padgett. I love his book about religion and science being colleagues.
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind, my summary is only for the last chapter of Molloy's book.
ReplyDeleteDuncan, a lot of stories are told about Solomon and the queen of Sheba, but they did not become canonical.
Presumably it accompanies this - https://www.mheducation.co.uk/scriptures-of-the-world-s-religions-ise-9781265833237-emea-group
ReplyDeleteMolloy's book:
ReplyDeletewww.mheducation.co.uk/ise-experiencing-the-world-s-religions-9781260570687-emea-group#configurable-product