Running The Asylum

A co-worker emailed me the following story. I'm glad he did, because I most likely wouldn't have found it in a million years. Steve Deace wrote this article for CycloneNation.com about new ISU football coach Gene Chizik wanting to hire a full-time chaplain as part of his football staff. This move is meeting resistance from Dr. Hector Avalos, the atheist religion professor at ISU. In case you missed that or thought that was a typo, I'll repeat it: Avalos is an atheist professor of religion.

What Mr. Avalos, and others like him, really fear is that Coach Chizik’s plan for a team chaplain may inspire a generation of young men wearing the Cyclone uniform to reconsider their eternal destiny, which will cause them to reconsider how to live their temporal lives on this planet. If they do that they may not vote the way folks like Mr. Avalos prefer, nor will they likely live the way folks like Mr. Avalos do. And when you’re of the mindset of a Mr. Avalos and are convinced that this life is all there is, you will fight to the grave for it.

This isn't an isolated crusade for Dr. Avalos. My friend Noah shared the story of Guillermo Gonzalez, an ISU science professor who was denied tenure. Gonzalez is an "Intelligent Design" advocate, having published a "pro-ID book The Privileged Planet," but does not teach ID in any of his classes. Still, after his book was published, Avalos called on ISU faculty to "denounce ID as non-science."

The two questions I can't get out of my head are: 1) Why is an athiest teaching religion, including courses about the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament? 2) Why are so many so-called "open-minded" and "tolerant" people so intolerant and closed-minded when it comes to matters of the gospel and those who put their faith in the risen Christ?