God in America #4

In the later 1800's and early 1900's, the old ideas, beliefs, and practices of many religions were challenged by their followers. As consequence of new scientific discoveries, ideas set forth in the bible were found to be incorrect. Also, investigation into the biblical works found that there were errors in the bible itself. These notions set forth the idea that the old practices were wrong and that the faiths must be reformed to evolve with the changing world. This conflict of the religiously fundamentalist, who took the biblical scripts literally and believed god and the bible were completely correct, vs. the religiously liberal, who believed there were errors in the scriptures and the religion must be reformed to make sense, brought attention to the idea of whether or not laws should be made that are influenced by old religious principles, as seen in the Scopes vs. Tennessee case. This case was a major victory to the modernists and to democracy because although Scopes was found guilty, it showed the absurdity of following old practices and staying stubborn to the fundamentals of the bible which inhibited the ability of religious practices to interfere with American laws and interfere with democracy. This can be seen by the fact that, according to the documentary, by the late 1800's, 90% of synagogues had adopted the new reforms to their religion. This conflict also brought up the argument of whether or not someone could be religious and believe in science, since it appeared that the ideas in religion and scientific discoveries contradicted each other. This argument is still controversial to this day.