Christianity

[attofishpi]

I wish people would make the effort to hold down the <shift> key for the g of God, even the atheists.

I can't answer for others, but I have enough respect that if I am talking about God, I will knock myself out and hold down the shift key, but I'm not going to bother for just some god.

That's interesting, what form of this entity gets to have the big 'G' ...by your definition of it?

[attofishpi]

I wish people would make the effort to hold down the <shift> key for the g of God, even the atheists.

I think the 'E' in Evolution should be capitalised since it's conceptually valid to think of Evolution as god in slow-motion.

I don't know what you mean by god.

[Dubious]

I wish people would make the effort to hold down the <shift> key for the g of God, even the atheists.

I think the 'E' in Evolution should be capitalised since it's conceptually valid to think of Evolution as god in slow-motion.

I don't know what you mean by god.

God is the most malleable, configurable entity ever devised by humans...a ceaseless variable which begs for context to be effective, and not least, a nice story here and there to make God more presentable to the adult children of the planet.

[attofishpi]

I think the 'E' in Evolution should be capitalised since it's conceptually valid to think of Evolution as god in slow-motion.

I don't know what you mean by god.

God is the most malleable, configurable entity ever devised by humans...a ceaseless variable which begs for context to be effective, and not least, a nice story here and there to make God more presentable to the adult children of the planet.

So you think that any conceivable entity that may be responsible for what you perceive as reality is made up (as fictional) by humans, and not plausible to exist as an intelligence seperate (although possibly part of their being) of said humans?

[Alexis Jacobi]

I think most readers would have recognised it as such, without being told.

I'm ever on the alert and ever-cautious about those who would not recognize it without being directly told.

[phyllo]

Paths that go around the obstacle. There are many levels and techniques, so it's difficult to give you some kind of definitive ultimate answer. It takes observation to see what works in each moment and situation. In other words, it's not a robotic black or white response. It's dynamic.

Whether I need to fight, or operate under the radar, or go around the obstacle, or patiently wait for the extremist to burn themselves out, I will do what seems appropriate. And in the meantime, I will live my life the way I want to, and support others in doing the same, and support broader ways of thinking. It appears to me that nature has a way of naturally seeking balance (through many means)... and it works best for those who do the same.

Okay.

Extremists live in the hellishness of extremism.

Not true as far as I see.

Some people may be have been sucked into it against their will but I don't think the true believers suffer at all.

I don't think they have much clarity, as their rabid intoxication limits and deteriorates the capacity of their mind.

They operate under certain assumptions and with certain reasoning. That's limiting but then who isn't limited?

They will pursue that to its disastrous results if they cannot choose to seek more balance.

The result isn't clear. It may be disastrous (or not) but for who?

My path is to avoid, circumvent, or outlast their toxicity... if reasoning and balance are not an option. Simply having more calm clarity in the face of another's mindless fury can reveal effective insights about the paths to take.

And this is the best way to deal with it?

Not sure about that.

But since no specific extremism is being presented as an example case, there won't be any specific path presented as a solution. It's a vague general 'solution' to vague general 'extremism'.

[tillingborn]

I think most readers would have recognised it as such, without being told.

I'm ever on the alert and ever-cautious about those who would not recognize it without being directly told.

I suppose you can't be too careful.

[tillingborn]

I wish people would make the effort to hold down the <shift> key for the g of God, even the atheists.

I can't answer for others, but I have enough respect that if I am talking about God, I will knock myself out and hold down the shift key, but I'm not going to bother for just some god.

That's interesting, what form of this entity gets to have the big 'G' ...by your definition of it?

The character God in the bible gets the big G. He is one of many gods that have been written about. If there is an entity responsible for this universe, I have no idea what its name is, but I'd put money on Glenda. With a big G, obviously.

[attofishpi]

The Church of England, the Anglican denomination that dates to the 16th century, has issued an apology of sorts to Charles Darwin, the British naturalist famous for having advanced the theory of evolution.

In an essay published on the C of E’s Web site, “Good Religion Needs Good Science,” the Rev. Malcolm Brown, the church’s director of mission and public affairs, says that the church, in opposing Darwin’s ideas, has at times been guilty of distorting them and wrongly assuming that they contradict Christian beliefs. The idea that God created humans is consistent with evolution, Brown writes. Evolution simply provides a greater understanding of the exact processes through which humans came to be.

The church’s new point of view, which has been greeted with a mixture of curiosity and derision by the British press, was published with a series of documents about Darwin on the church’s Web site. The publications coincide with the approaching bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809 and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.

---------------

The Church of England's governing body on Friday approved a motion that emphasizes the compatibility of belief in both God and science.
Dr. Peter Capon, a former computer science lecturer, introduced the motion arguing that "rejecting much mainstream science does nothing to support those Christians who are scientists ... or strengthen the Christian voice in the scientific area."

He urged Christians to take scientific evidence seriously and avoid prejudging science for theological reasons.

The vote comes as more than 850 congregations throughout the globe are celebrating Evolution Weekend with the aim of demonstrating that evolution poses no problems for their faith.

Religion and science are not adversaries, they say. Rather, the two fields should be seen as complementary, they maintain.

Evolution Weekend, which kicked off Friday, is supported by those of various faith traditions including Christians, Jews, Muslims and Unitarian Universalists.

"Religious leaders around the world are coming together to elevate the quality of the discussion about this important topic. They are demonstrating to their congregations that people can accept all that modern science has learned while retaining their faith," said Michael Zimmerman, founder of Evolution Weekend and professor of Biology at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Thanks Harbal. This is news to me - the RED bit was well said...overdue.

..but this next passage...is idiocy typical religious backtracking.

Since 2004 more than 12,400 Christian clergypersons from various denominations in the United States have signed "The Clergy Letter," expressing their belief "that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist."

Ya, right - God whispered everything into existence is a 'truth' and can coexist with science - what a ridiculous notion!!

[Alexis Jacobi]

I dedicate the following turgidity to Belinda....

1. Judaism does consider the coming of the Messiah as a person, an 'annointed one', consideration of this entity as God incarnated in person form is irrelevant. (Jesus is not entirely considered God incarnate by many Christians, and I don't think he ever stated he was in the Gospels...not beyond probably saying something like the Father is in me, cas in certainly is in all of us GOD).

Jesus is considered god incarnate by Christianity generally. If there are exceptions they are irrelevant. Other proposals were considered heretic. The moshiach will also be a man but not an incarnation of god.

Attofish: 2. Perhaps Jesus opposed elements of what Judaism had become, I doubt he opposed ALL of its 'construct'. That Orthodox Jews believe that Judaism 'construct' at the time was PERFECT, and would not be criticised in any way by their Messiah is rather short sighted.

I'd suggest that Jesus can be seen in a few different ways. One, similar to a fictional figure in a novel. In the novel (the Story) the incarnated god of the Jews comes down and expresses near-total dissatisfaction with what his flock had achieved. In the Story he comes meekly. Because he is (apparently) weak he is easily destroyed. Ah but god is more tricky than those devilish ones imagined! Killing him does a number of mysterious and magical things. One, the temple constructed by god's instruction is struck with an expression of divine wrath:

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

Typically, this rending of the cloth is interpreted as indicating that with Jesus' 'perfect sacrifice' that now there is no cloth or veil separating man from atonement -- no mediators are now required. God took back (I guess one would say) the power of mediation that had been given to his servants who were obviously found to be not only inadequate but fundamentally opposed to 'god's plans'.

And therefore with this action taken by god himself Judean religious authority was overturned. God himself overturned it. The implications are extensive. Note that E Michael Jones (a radical Catholic) says that it was 'at the foot of the cross' when Jews thereby became eternal rebels. The (novelistic) logic is easy to see: if you opposed god's entry into the world to recover the lost sheep and restore the Earth (i.e. the Jewish mission), then it stands to reason that you are out of communion with god and, in fact, god's enemy.

What I am trying to explain is not *reality* necessarily but Story and Story's implications. There are further implications: the Exile.

Jesus is said to have said: As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

Jesus predicted it 37 years before it happened. Herod Agrippa II and his sister Bernice, who heard Paul’s testimony at Caesarea (Acts 26), tried hard to prevent it, as did the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (our main source of first-century information). But the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple in A.D. 70 happened nevertheless, and it was a catastrophe with almost unparalleled consequences for Jews, Christians, and, indeed, all of subsequent history. It compelled a whole new vector for synagogue (not Temple) Judaism, it submerged the Jewish homeland for the next 19 centuries under foreign domination, it helped foster the split between church and synagogue, and it set the stage for rampant prophetic speculation about the End Times that continues to the present day. Few episodes in history have had that sort of impact.

In a novel you have to follow *implications*. Who burned the Temple? Who is the author of the Exile? But everything hinges on *who* is doing the interpreting. Here for example is the Jewish version (according to Chabad.org)

The Roman Empire brought the final blow for Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the final exile for the Jews, one that has lasted for nearly 2,000 years and has not yet ended.

The Jewish people during that time were split into four factions: the Pharisees, Sadducees, Sicarii and Zealots. Some of these groups began rebelling against the mighty empire.

The Emperor Nero saw this as treason and sent his best general, Vespasian, along with his son, Titus, and 60,000 Roman soldiers to quell the revolt.

Finally, in the year 3829 (69 CE), an oppression that started with heavy taxes ended with mass murder. The Jewish people were butchered and slaughtered, their homes ransacked and the Holy Temple burnt to the ground. And since then, the Jewish people have been persecuted and exiled.

Here is the Jewish definition of Moshaich:

The Messianic Era will be ushered in by a Jewish leader generally referred to as the Moshiach (messiah: Hebrew for "the anointed one"), a righteous scion of King David. He will rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and gather the Jewish people from all corners of the earth and return them to the Promised Land.

Atto writes: So Orthodox Jews believe any Messiah from God (who created ALL men) would be exclusive to them.

You need (we need) to see things as those who define the interpretation of these prophetic visions see them. To do this we have to step aside. If you define a god who is the creator of everything and the owner of everything, and if that god gives *authority* to a specific people for a specific mission, you then have to define what that mission is and what the end result is supposed to be, right? Is there an alternative? The implication is that god ownes destiny. Fate is god's possession. Again the implications are extensive.

Atto writes

: 3. So let me get this right. Jesus, considered Christ and forming predominantly Christian nations, one of which assisted the Jews by assuring them a place to live, establishing Israel...and now these Jews ARE able to reconstruct the temple are still not satisfied that Jesus was the Messiah! Perhaps they were impatient and thought the Messiah was going to start laying stones and mortar (again, rather short sighted of them).

Here you enter difficult territory. You are referring to Zionism and the ways and means that the Zionist project led to the reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. To understand Jewish Zionism it is necessary to understand Christian Zionism which, in certain senses, predated it. In the simplest terms the storyline goes like this: If man (people) take 'push to shove' and precipitate the Return of the exiled Jews to Israel, that will (to put it vulgarly) jumpstart the process of god's reclaiming of the Earth and establishing a 'holy kingdom' with its political center in Jerusalem.

All of these things were 'predicted' in prophetic scripture.

Atto writes: Hang on! What's the "Jewish mission"?

This is precisely what I have just been talking about.

So what I say is: to understand Immanuel Can here in this thread, he who defines himself as the ultra-true and the really-true Christian, you really have no choice in the matter but to understand the *structure of belief* that is inherent in Judaism.

Now what is interesting is to consider the following: If one 'believes' in the core tenets of Judaism, and if one sees these re-expressed or perhaps clarified is the term (?) in Christianity, then it is not hard to understand that one is, through one's belief, actually a participant in the creation of the Story. And to create the Story is to engineer the fate through a sort of participatory enactment.

Now let's consider -- in contrast -- those who do not believe. One has to consider the 'plank' (the platform) of those who have arrived at non-belief. No god. No overseeing intelligence at least not the Christian one. A very different unfolding therefore of world history. The catastrophic Jewish and Christian 'vision' is thereby opposed -- but what replaces it? Is it actually even possible to eject oneself from this Vision? Is it possible to extricate oneself (that is Occidental man and all who are brought into the fold of belief which means 'the global south') from the consequences of prophetic unfolding?

See how strange and interesting this becomes?

[phyllo]

The Christian Clergy Letter:

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

https://www.theclergyletterproject.org/

[Immanuel Can]

Creationists, such as yourself, have created a myth that evolution implies that the fossils of missing links should be under every stone, and that the bulk of humanity should have fully formed adaptations, wings or gills for example, because anything less than fully formed organs confer no advantage.

It has nothing to do with Creationism, actually. It's what Evolutionism would itself imply. Even were there no such thing as Creationism, it would remain Evolutionism's problem.

Theories about evolution are questioned all the time.

Yes, they are. But that fact is suppressed in the public media, and denied by Evolutionists.

What is not questioned is that living organisms adapt to their environment,

I don't question it either.

But that's what's sometimes called "micro-evolution," because it only involves one species morphing in non-fundamental ways, within a particular species. But it involves no change whatsoever of species.

What Evolution itself poses as, is a theory of "the origin of species" itself. That is, it proposes not that moths get lighter or darker, but that moths can transform something else...that fish become frogs become apes become man. That's what Evolutionism has to show, and what it's utterly failed at showing.

Our most extensive experiment in cross-breeding is what we've done with dogs. There are now tall and short ones, ones with big mouths and small, ones with long legs and short, all colours, a wide variety of propensities (hunting, guarding, alerting, retrieving...) but all dogs remain dogs...in one species, all interfertile, and not interfertile with non-canines. No dog becomes a cat, a rabbit, an emu or an ibex. And no ape becomes a man...as we now know, genetically, since even Evolutionists have abandoned the ape-to-man theory, retreating into a common-ancestor approach after the follies of the ape to man theory became to pressing, in spite of all efforts to protect it from criticism.

So there isn't a single demonstration of what Evolutionism requires...and by now, after billions of years, there ought to be an innumerable variety of these "transitional forms," far more than there are species. Yet we see not one.

So yes, "anti-scientific" is exactly the right descriptor from the way Evolutionism has claimed infallibility, been believed without sufficient warrant, been denied the opportunity of scientific critique, and then sold to the public as "settled". That's not just unfriendly to Creationism, but to the principled doing of science, as well.

[Alexis Jacobi]

...that is not what I said and not what I meant...

What you said was: "People have *ideas* and they have *values* and, as a result of defining them, and believing in them, they are then compelled to put their beliefs into action. And there is a special word for that! It's called morality."

That's your definition of "morality," apparently. No "word-twisting," unless your original words were themselves "twisted," which would be your doing, none of mine.

If you meant something other than what you said, then maybe you should explain now.

First, I object to your color choice. And I fixed that straight away.

In order to understand why you oppose my (sound) definition, one must understand what informs your understanding. That is, a specific god (Yahweh) who set down the rules that are defined as morality. You do not say however 'Christian morality' (or 'Jewish morality') and you skip that defining step.

Morality is, for you, Jewish morality and Christian morality. And that is fine as far as it goes. But the statement that I made is based in a broader perspective. But wait! You not only do not but you cannot accept 'broader perspective'. There is no broader perspective! There is just one (true and legitimate) perspective and it is the one that you manage. You respnd: "Not I it's manager; God is its manager!" By that you mean Yahweh of course.

Again, all this is understood.

But my perspective is wider. I see Jewish and Christian ethics and morality as one facet of a far larger picture and that picture is 'the world' and also the world of ideas. I have stepped outside of the rigid perimeter that you exist intellectually and conceptually in.

Verily, verily I say unto you, I am a rogue!

So what I wrote stands. It hardly needs to be defended. I am wonderful. You are far less wonderful Immanuel. And I think you are actually losing wonderfulness points!

Look to it man!

[Immanuel Can]

...that is not what I said and not what I meant...

What you said was: "People have *ideas* and they have *values* and, as a result of defining them, and believing in them, they are then compelled to put their beliefs into action. And there is a special word for that! It's called morality."

That's your definition of "morality," apparently. No "word-twisting," unless your original words were themselves "twisted," which would be your doing, none of mine.

If you meant something other than what you said, then maybe you should explain now.

First, I object to your color choice. And I fixed that straight away.

In order to understand why you oppose my (sound) definition,

Heh.

It's not "sound," unless you mean, "nothing but a bunch of sounds." With that, I could agree. You've substituted the definition for "action" for the definition of "moral," making out that every action is moral.

Morality is, for you, Jewish morality and Christian morality.

Irrelevant to this conversation. This is about your definition, none of mine.

A Nihilist, a Pragmatist, a Communist...or even a person who doesn't even believe in morality at all could see the logical outcome of your "definition."

...you cannot accept 'broader perspective'.

It has nothing to do with me or my perspective, whatever you may think it is. It has to do with what you actually said, and what it implies.

Try to stay on topic, if you can. Your continual wandering into the ad hominem and the irrelevant is really tedious, and my estimation of your philosophical abilities is taking quite a beating on the basis of your intransigent inability to see what anybody else can see...that your definition is nonsense, and conduces to nothing but amorality.

Now, a skilled and confident philosopher would simply say, "You're right: I misspoke. Let me revise my definition, and make it work." But somebody who's only concerned about appearances, and fears to be wrong even a little, will retrench and defend the indefensible.

So let's see which you are.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Note in relation to the on-going evolution debate. I've had many dreams where I remember my former existence as a very very early Ctenophora.

Make of it what you will . . .