Putting things in Perspective

The other day I had the crazy idea of showing a year 7 or 8 Scripture class some of the writings of St Thomas Aquinas to show them the level of detailed thinking that was done 800 years ago. I don't know much about Aquinas myself, but I do know that he puts most of today's "thinkers" to shame with his intellectual honesty.
As a fairly simple example, I thought of showing the article TA wrote on flattery:
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3115.htm
but I think they might find it a little confusing because of the language he uses, even if the ideas are simple enough.
A more basic article by TA is on the existence of God..
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3
It is interesting to see his arguments against the existence of God as much as his arguments for. Thomas always starts with arguments against the proposition he is putting, and then, after stating his case, he replies to each of these objections. Normally, he tries to think of at least 3 or 4 objections, but in the case of the existence of God, he can only think of 2, namely
- the existence of evil and
- "Occam's razor", or why believe in God if you can explain nature without believing in God.
These are exactly the arguments used today by the "new" atheists, although St Thomas puts the argument for atheism more neatly and logically than most atheists. Really, there is nothing new under the sun.
In March this year, there will be an Atheist Convention in Melbourne (http://www.atheistconvention.org.au/) and I assume we will hear these arguments, once they stop saying that believing is God is like believing in Santa Claus (which is an embarrassingly irrational comparison), that religious people do evil things (which has already been said by every religious person) or that all Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago (which is of course not true)
(By the way, I will be interested to check the personalities involved in the Atheists Convention. The stars of these shows are usually white Anglo-Saxon males in their 60's, like Richard Dawkins, plus a few professional comedians, like Catherine Deveney. We shall see who turns up.)
No doubt, a claim of the Atheist Convention will be that religion is withering and dying, so it is interesting that last year a book called "God is Back" was published, written by 2 journalists for the Economist magazine, at least one of whom is an agnostic. An extract from this book is at
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nations-prosper-with-god-on-their-side/story-0-1225737842159
The writers have looked at countries around the world and the history of atheism and concluded that religion is rising, not withering. Some of the examples of religion are not too inspiring, but overall it shows why atheists feel the need to put on a convention in Melbourne. They are afraid their cause is being lost. To quote from the article above:

"Another indication of religion's reappearance in the public sphere has been the outcry among secular intellectuals, many of whom hold that the real "clash of civilisations" is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A hit parade of recent books has torn into religion: Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The authors have crisscrossed the US, debating religious leaders, even in the Bible Belt, in front of megachurch-sized audiences. Dawkins has set up an organisation to empower atheists. Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. What if a central tenet of the French Enlightenment - that modernity would kill religion - is proving to be an ancien canard? Statistics about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that the global drift towards secularism has been halted and quite a few show religion to be on the increase. One estimate suggests that the proportion of people attached to the world's four biggest religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism - rose from 67 per cent in 1900 to 73 per cent in 2005 and may reach 80 per cent by 2050. Even if this number is padded by people moving from tribal religions to bigger ones, we are hardly seeing decline; and in terms of intensity - a harder to measure phenomenon - there seems to have been a considerable increase in most places outside Europe during the past half century."

We live in interesting times.