Sometime between Constantine and Charlemagne the Church became so influential to western life that history was written with church a major factor in the following centuries in the west. A king stood in the snow until he received forgiveness of his actions by the Pope. Artists and writers were supported by the church and churchmen. An army of scribes not only copied Scripture, but wrote on other subjects as well. The thirteenth century beginning of the Renaissance slowly changed contexts and outsiders joined in. Scripture earned priority when the printing press was first used during emerging accumulations of a humanistic social world context. In the Western World the new was greatly influenced by the history and ideas of ancient Greece and Rome. The Eastern World had settled down into a preservation period. Its social and creative life had remained static for centuries, and the idea of preservation held with a force of holding, evading change, so to preserve what had become acceptable. Creativity was muted by the time the Western World had discovered the whole world during the Renaissance. Idea competition was introduced and grew. Easterners had slowed to near stop relative to dynamics and change, but change was forced on them in the 20th century. In various ways, some nations challenged fixed cultures to change.
One current problem relates to the emergence of science as priority in cultivating an educational process. The attitude has fairly well settled that in science (an orderly methodology) mankind has found an ideal. Life is to be defined by its processes. Faith (except in science) is given short shrift. In secularism the east has joined with its own interpretations. Religion is presumed to rest in tolerance. Science has gained near universal acceptance for the educational world. To preserve this approach, the distortion of the ancient east to resist change, or missing approved venue, is seen as debilitating. Any challenge is taken as emanating from ignorance, or misunderstanding, or superstition, in backward people. The matter was amended by the Russian attempt to order circumstances during the Stalinist years, and the Nazi approach to use science for the body politic during the Hitlerian years. Part of the success of rigid science schooling comes from the capitulation of other contexts to what must be acknowledged as an attractive way to address the search for nature knowledge. For some reason the search for knowledge has tended to assume, from various theories of the universe that God is a stumbling block to proper understanding of the forces of the universe, which forces presume to account for whatever is available to mankind. In that rejection, moral (spiritual) values are diluted or lost. Christians may resist the exclusiveness of secularism’s science.
Many persons challenge that exclusiveness. Informed voices may be getting stronger by proving that other forces (including human beings) change the results of studies. With mankind there is flux and change, making one statement or conduct, founded on careful research, to be changed by other facts and cultures that emerge in the variety of conducts and humanity’s eras. Since mankind is, by virtually all accounts, flawed in some way or ways, the influences can change even science, and just about everything else, for better or worse. Persons can interfere – God or no God. So it is discovered that mankind may become an arbitrary (human) demi-god. With or without Deity, we can disrupt results for the firm scientifically oriented scholar. God banished in human thought may or may not interrupt and change the course of research, study and application. Nature can offer persuasive conclusions, if science is followed in careful experimenting to be replicated from time to time. When we apply the rigidity of the natural sciences to social sciences we are uncertain. The connections may not hold, even if amended. What is the process for life in one era is abandoned, even made evil for another era. My mother’s discipline of her children would today be taken as abuse. We three children knew our mother loved us, even when applying her skills with the razor strop. She felt compelled, at the time, to do what she did. It was secular theory likely assisted by Scripture. The use of rod in Scripture does not necessarily mean the child is physically struck. Variety in ways the word is used in the Bible, even for God’s legitimate actions, shows that Scripture points to discipline, not to a tree switch. Effectiveness and humaneness in a culture is the point. That is beyond science, and gains practice and meaning because of values – God’s gifts. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020