What Bothers Me Most About Christianity by Ed Gungor

Author:Ed Gungor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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People from all different faith backgrounds have been shamefully reticent about accepting advances in science.

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When it comes to the general advancement of science, Christians have historically hidden behind the Bible and claimed special knowledge whenever new information violated the way they read the Bible. Sadly, Christian folks tend to hunker down into unexamined beliefs—which are often a blend of some good and bad theology—and guard them with a passion. Then they jam these slanted and one-sided views into their understanding of the Christian faith like members of Congress jam their parochial concerns into critical pieces of legislation. Christians are guilty of shoving biases and opinions smack into what they believe the Bible teaches. Here’s just one example.

Up until the late 1800s people believed disease was spontaneously generated either by God (or the gods), by devils, or by personal sin. When the idea that disease was instead generated by the reproduction of microorganisms, it was met with strong opposition, especially by those in the church. During the nineteenth century, women in childbirth were dying at alarming rates in Europe and the United States. Up to 25 percent of women who delivered their babies in hospitals died from what was called childbed fever. In the late 1840s, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who worked in the maternity wards of a Vienna hospital, observed that the mortality rate in a delivery room staffed by medical students was up to three times higher than in a delivery room staffed by midwives. In fact, the midwives were terrified of the room staffed by the medical students. Dr. Semmelweis noticed that the students were coming directly from their lessons in the autopsy room to the delivery room. He postulated that they might be carrying the infection from their dissections to birthing mothers. So he ordered doctors and medical students to wash their hands with a chlorinated solution before examining women in labor. This was a completely new idea! When the students followed through, the mortality rate in his maternity wards dropped from 25 percent to less than 1 percent!

Despite the remarkable results, Semmelweis’s colleagues greeted his findings with hostility. It was too fantastical. Too ridiculous. Kind of voodooish. (New Agey?) Some believed that trying to fix the mortality problem among mothers and babies was an intrusion on the sovereignty of God. Dr. Semmelweis eventually resigned his position. Later, he had similar dramatic results with hand washing in another maternity clinic, but to no avail. When he died in 1865, his views were still largely ridiculed. Why? Because humans tend to ridicule any new way of looking at things. We fear that embracing a new idea proves we have been wrong (God forbid), and we are too proud for that. This is especially true for those of us in the church.

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