Religious Opposition Quotes
The Messenger is Muhammed, founder of Islam. The Hadith are his sayings which have been compiled but are not in the Koran.
Religious Fundamentalists had made the sale, use and/or information about contraception illegal in many states until 1963 when the Supreme Court found that a state could not jail a pharmacist for filling a prescription for a woman who would die if she became pregnant again. The contraception issue seemed settled in America but the culture wars of the late 20th century and early 21st century brought it to the forefront again. Many fundamentalists who oppose both contraception and abortion chose to concentrate only on the abortion issue as so many American women used contraception. But many of the anti abortion groups also oppose legal contraception and see it as enabling sexual promiscuity—the position that Santorum held as is illustrated by this quotation.
This is an important quotation for several reasons. First, it demonstrates the extreme diversity of religion in America. To Swaggart, Evolution is a “Satanic Theory”. However, to most American religious leaders, Evolution, per se, is not problematic. The Roman Catholic Church has no trouble with Evolution; Catholic Universities teach Evolution as a basic part of their science curricula. Jews have no theological problems with Evolution. None of the main-line Protestant Churches have any theological opposition to Evolution per se. Yet there are other Protestant denominations who find that Evolution is in contradiction to a literal interpretation of the Bible and hence do not accept it. Second, it shows the extreme level of vituperation and disrespect that is given differing points of view by some of the extreme fundamentalists who do not have the traditional American religious tolerance for differing belief structures. Here Swaggart accuses the hundreds of millions of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist and other clerics and laypeople who see Evolution as a well-established explanation of much of science, of being not only atheists but atheists in league with the Devil. A third factor is that this quotation is an example of a Minister telling people what is or is not science and scientifically demonstrated. If a scientist without any religious training of study were ever to render judgments on theology, most of us would laugh and see it as ridiculous. However when a cleric like Swaggert, untutored and ignorant of even basic science, makes scientific pronouncements, he (and many other fundamentalists) find that reasonable.
