David Harsanyi Quotes
Whether you're a believer or not, a flawed biblical epic is going to be more entertaining than a remake of a Paul Verhoeven movie or some third-rate sci-fi flick.
Harsanyi, David. "Hollywood's Biblical Epiphany." The Denver Post, 28 Mar. 2014.
In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds. He felt that literal interpretations of the Bible harmed religions as it made a mockery of God to claim His truths were the anachronistic and demonstrable falsehoods of the Book of Genesis. Today most Christians and Jews do not take the Old Testament Literally and in this sense Washburn was one of the early religious reformers of America. There is still a significant number of fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews who still believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible.
This quotation is noteworthy because although there are some scientists who are sympathetic to the religious fundamentalist view of the origin of the universe, they are almost always second class scientists. In this case, the scientist is a first class scientist, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. So his quotation has more weight than of most others and is used more often by many fundamentalists who support the Biblical Genesis version of creation rather than the Big Bang scientific explanations and evolution. There are however many great scientists who also are people of faith in a God. They may be religious, but like most religious Americans, interpret the Bible metaphorically and symbolically rather than literally as the fundamentalists do.
This statement be the world’s greatest scientist persuaded many fundamentalist religious people to try and protect their children from science and it anti-religious influence. Many other religious thinkers would argue that the science experience of youth was not anti-religious but threatened literal interpretations of the Bible which for many has little to do with religion.
David Harsanyi is an American conservative writer, opinion columnist, and author.
