#30 Oh Good Lord!

What a stretch! What a lack of understanding!

“There is an age-old conflict between intellectual leadership and civil authority. How old, how bitter, came home to me when I came up from Jericho on the road that Jesus took, and saw the first glimpse of Jerusalem on the skyline as he saw it going to his certain death. Death, because Jesus was then the intellectual and moral leader of his people, but he was facing an establishment in which religion was simply an arm of government. And that is a crisis of choice that leaders have faced over and over again: Socrates in Athens; Jonathan Swift in Ireland, torn between pity and ambition; Mahatma Gandhi in India; and Albert Einstein, when he refused the presidency of Israel.” from “He who pays the piper,” by Don Doig, Cato Policy Analysis No. 22, March 17, 1983.

But it’s my own fault. This quote is in one of the papers I was using on federal funding of research in the previous (#29) web log entry. Mr. Doig needs to go back and reread the Gospel of John. Jesus did not institute any new intellectual or moral principles--Judaism already had (and still has) the finest. Through the six “I AM” statements, he declared he was equal with God and is God. That’s what got the folks so riled up. If you bring religion into research, at least get it right!