Did you know that 'Republican' means 'Slavery'? Yep, it's true. The Republican party was established on March 20, 1854. That's 154 years of unbridled racism aimed primarily at blacks, but more recently toward Hispanics and Muslims.
I bet you didn't know that. I mean, I was taught something entirely different in school. I mean, I was told that the Republican party was established as an abolitionist movement, to tear down the foundations of American slavery and bring the negro out of bondage. The war between the states was fought, ostensibly, because the South resented the North demanding changes that would cripple the South's economy. After all, should the slaves be freed, cheap labor would be a thing of the past, and the riches would not so quickly fill their coffers.
But apparently, this is not the case. I have been fed a lie. I have spent my entire adult life believing that the Republican party-- that grand old party --stood for freedom. But it took the vandalism of some unknown freedom fighter with an unassuming can of spray paint to tear a hole in the roof of my intellect and shine some light on the truth that...
I always thought it was the other way around... that 'Democrat' meant slavery. Someone... and I don't know who... is guilty of propagating revisionist history.
But if this 'artist' is right then the Republicans must be stopped.
OH! And did you know Columbus was a Republican? Yes, it's true! He's responsible for bringing disease and genocide to native peoples in East India... the New World. Because of Columbus many tribes of natives have ceased to be! Which is why we celebrate Columbus Day... to remind of us the horrors perpetrated on innocent natives by greedy Europeans. This is a day to reflect and rededicate ourselves to the promise, "Never Again"
Never Again. And yet we have dropped the ball in Iraq. We have allowed the evil Republicans to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. The Republicans must be stopped.
Obama will show us the way. He will part the seas, give us bread in the wilderness, make water spring forth from barren rock. He will feed us, clothe us, and be our spiritual guide. And, in time, he will lead us, with the help of a democratically controlled house and senate, into the promised land.
A vote for Barack is a vote for Freedom-- Freedom from tyranny and slavery. He will heal the world and our planet. A vote for Barack is a vote for a new Golden Age. An age of justice, wisdom, and peace in our time.
There are more poor people than rich.
People are generally poor because they are uneducated.
uneducated people will believe anything.
convince the uneducated, win the election.
the most uneducated among us choose the President.
By the time it comes for the President to prove himself the poor voter wont even remember why they voted for him.
Is that true for the millions of po' folk who'll vote for McCain, too?
If on the other hand you are poor and vote republican, you're hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, American. You also become god-fearing and country-lovin'. Don't ask me why.
That is so true. BTW, I have a pig that flies.
You don't have to be poor and vote Democratic to be uneducated, you just have to vote Democratic. IF you think voting Dem is the way to go, you haven't studied enough.
And if you vote Republican, it's because you're a hard-working, salt of the earth, God worshipping, country loving American.
Glad I could clarify that for you.
However, it remains true that political science is a field whose details aren't always self-evident, and there are some very sensible Americans who, lacking any real interest in politics, don't have enough working knowledge of American politics to have an informed opinion.
This is partially the result of a concerted effort to destroy the traditional, classically liberal education on which this country's civic institutions have historically depended. The Left is so busy denigrating this country and its Founders as racist, sexist imperialists, that our students rarely get around to learning the Constitution's intentions for the structure and functions of our government.
The Left now hides in the ignorance they helped create. It is, for instance, beyond any persuasive debate that our Founding Fathers intended the federal government to be limited to those specific powers that were enumerated in the Constitution. Unwilling and unable to argue the facts of the matter, Leftists will sometimes say that "the People" disagree, invoking general ignorance to justify their specific self-deception.
But long before radicals were trying to use schools to advance the Revolution rather than teach things like civics, math, and science -- and this is another subject that brings us back to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and other inconvenient topics -- it's probably the case that quite a few Americans didn't understand concepts like federalism and the separation of powers, and how the U.S. Constitution puts those concepts in practice.
(It's yet another good reason the importance of elections should be limited by the strict, Constitutional limits that are placed on those who win.)
Because an understanding of civics isn't automatic and universal, I personally wouldn't be opposed to more rigorous requirements for voting. A voter shouldn't just be a living, non-felonious citizen and resident of the district in which he's voting. (For systematically undermining even those requirements, we have ACORN to thank.) I think the voter should be required to pass at least the same basic civics test that immigrants take before becoming citizens.
It cannot be reasonably argued that the decisions of the electorate are more legitimate, to say nothing of their being more prudent, if the franchise includes those who don't really know anything about the subjects on which they're voting. Those who fetishize an ever expanding franchise, to include felons in some cases, are either idiots themselves or craven in their belief that ignorant voters will help them put into office the empty suits who are running primarily on gas about Hope and Change.
But if they really want to stand against elitism, they should put their money where their populist mouths are, AND SUPPORT A TRULY FREE MARKET.
If the People are so wise and prudent that even the most ignorant and apathetic pothead should be encouraged to vote just because he has a pulse, and the process isn't harmed and is even helped by his participation, then SURELY people can be trusted with the issues about which they really care, more broadly and more deeply: namely, the running of their own lives.
This sounds to me like an unfounded assertion. In what way are academics insulated? Some with tenure have better job security that that is only a small percentage of those working in the education field. Do they not experience pop culture? Do they have a separate economy?
"I cannot think of another section of society that would so easily tolerate people who remained quite proud of building pipe bombs and placing them in government buildings,..."
I am often amazed at the lack of opprobrium that the business class ladles on those who are poor stewards of the economy and the environment. We should do what the puritans did and have offenders sew large red letters to their clothes.
Bubba goes on from this very poor opening paragraph to lay all sorts of conspiracy theories, generalizations and unfounded assertions. Very dull stuff.
It'd be more interesting if he'd tried to create logical structures. Why is a lack constitutional history leading to a lack of interest in politics? Is there a lack of constitutional education? Or maybe even a debate on the value of federal government against state's powers. But that would require that he actually explain the assumptions his political views take for granted.
Oh well. Maybe I can find interesting discussion elsewhere....
Because an understanding of civics isn't automatic and universal, I personally wouldn't be opposed to more rigorous requirements for voting.
Hmmm, I'd probably oppose this line of thinking. But, considering that it may actually hurt more conservative candidates*, are you sure you'd support this line of thinking?
* The more educated the population of a state, (as measured by the percentage of the population with a Bachelor's degree or higher), the less likely that state was to vote for George W. Bush in the 2000 Presidential Election.
[ Study on education and voting patterns]
[ie, some studies suggest that the less educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican... So, it may not be in Republicans' best interests to try to place some educational limits on voting.]
You could offer substance of your own. It has been a while, after all.
If you look at CNN's detailed exit polls for the 2004 election, for instance, you'll see that college graduates split evenly between the two candidates, 49-49, and those with no college degree supported Bush 53-47. THAT substantiates your theory more than aggregate correlations of decisions that were made individually.
But, unfortunately for your argument, CNN breaks the information down further.
The first number, in parentheses, is the total percentage of the respondents. The second is the number for those who voted for Bush, the third for Kerry. I've put the winner in bold for emphasis.
No High School (4%) 49% 50%
H.S. Graduate (22%) 52% 47%
Some College (32%) 54% 46%
College Graduate (26%) 52% 46%
Postgrad Study (16%) 44% 55%
You write, "some studies suggest that the less educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican," but I think the study you cited misses a key detail.
It may be more accurate to say that you're more likely to vote Republican if you finish high school but don't stay in acedemia so long that you attend graduate school.
Or, to put it another way, it may be more accurate to say, you're more likely to vote Dem if you attended grad school or if you're a high-school drop-out.
But let's ignore all that to focus on the reason you invoked that study in the first place:
But, considering that it may actually hurt more conservative candidates*, are you sure you'd support this line of thinking?
In a word, ABSOLUTELY.
There's an argument that amnesty for illegal immigrants would help Democrats because they're blue-collar minorities who might be open to the promises of welfare entitlements. There's another argument that amnest would help Republicans because those illegals who have come here tend to be socially conservative and hard-working, and they see opportunity rather than social welfare as the American dream.
I'm not sure which argument is more persuasive, but it doesn't matter: though I believe we should be open to immigration, and though I believe that a strong cultural identity would help assimiliate even large numbers of immigrants, I am steadfastly opposed to amnesty, both as an affront to the bedrock principle of the rule of law and as an inducement to further law-breaking.
Likewise, I believe that the country would be better served if voters had to ask the same sort of simple questions that immigrants have to answer to be given U.S. citizenship -- I'd be interested to know why you disagree -- and it doesn't bother me at all if such requirements benefited Democrats more than Republicans.
See, Dan, my political positions aren't tailored to what would help my political party. Some people in this world actually try to live by their principles even if doing so is politically inconvenient.
You should try it sometime. It is, in a way, very confining as you have to strive for consistency: I think even you would be stunned by how many arguments you would have to abandon if you ever tried to be honest about your first principles and extrapolate from those principles.
But, on the other hand, it's very liberating to be able to look in the mirror, and to recognize and like what you see.
Not all graduates of higher institutions are intelligent, just as not all intelligent people are College educated.
For instance, I think Geoffrey has a college education, and apparently has studied creative writing to some extent, because his writing is very verbose, and his vocabulary is impressive and extensive.
But he is the stupidest person I have ever seen, with the failure to grasp even the most simple of common sense concepts.
I once hired a woman to work on the phone who had both a bachelors degree and a graduate studies degree in education, yet she couldn't figure out how to use the 6 buttons on a six line phone.
On the other hand, I have met many highly intelligent individuals who didn't possess College degrees for one reason or another. My father, had a degree in English Literature but was hired by Boeing aircraft as an engineer. He didn't have a degree in engineering. He was just intelligent, which Boeing Aircraft considered as important (possibly more) as a degree in those days.
You should try it sometime.
You will note that I was opposed to that position (that there ought to be some sort of civic literacy testing) regardless of the facts. That would be my principle, whether or not the facts support the candidates I would like to see win.
Honesty. You should try it sometime.
And yet, for the second time in as many blog threads over at your place, you've indulged in religious bigotry -- against another group of your own professed religion, affirmations of our being Christian "brothers" notwithstanding -- just to sneer at Sarah Palin. In a rather artless haiku, you're now accsuing her of believing in young-earth creationism, only to imply that this belief nullifies her expertise in energy.
(For all your earlier bitching about McCain's lying, you also regurgitate Obama's dishonesty regarding McCain's "hundred years" comment, and you attack Palin's experience, once again begging the question, what in the world has Obama ever done to qualify himself for the Presidency?)
You're attacking Palin the way any God-hating atheist would, which is yet another indication that your true, guiding philosophy isn't grounded in your Christian faith: it's grounded in the radicalism of the Left.
I'm not going to ignore this -- and your whitewashing of Acorn's voter fraud and Ayer's murderous past, to say nothing of your ephemeral admiration for the Founding Fathers and even the Bible -- just to shower you with accolades for not rejecting what's politically convenient vis-a-vis an issue that is entirely moot at the present time.
I will admit only this:
You seem quite willing to take a principled stand when the benefits of doing otherwise are entirely theoretical.
Whoop-dee-doo.
If you believe that oil can be generated in a few thousand years, that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic scientific principles related to energy and that, my brother, does tend to nullify her expertise in energy (setting aside the reality that her "expertise" on energy is entirely based on LAST century's energy solutions - this century we'll be forced to move in some other directions).
So, that wasn't really an implication on my part. It was an outright statement: If she thinks the world is ~6000 years old, she is not especially qualified to be an "energy expert."
Have not.
You're attacking Palin the way any God-hating atheist would
1. Most atheists, I would posit, are NOT - by definition - god-hating. They don't believe in any gods so they have nothing to hate.
2. Your implication that atheists would engage in attacks at a greater rate than Christians would engage in attacks seems unfounded.
3. My disagreeing with her political or scientific positions does not rise to the level of attacks. My engaging in a bit of sophomoric humor to do so only means I've engaged in sophomoric humor, not an attack.
Or do you think any time one makes a joke about a public official it is an "attack?"
Who knew that Obama could actually run to the RIGHT of the current administration? Amazing times we live in.
1) My experience is that atheists aren't generally very rational and consistent in their atheism: they rail against this unjust world, when the concept of justice is meaningless without God, and they seek to be fully rational, when human rationality cannot be accounted for without God. They do in fact hate God, generally, and their denial of God is a manifestation of their hatred, a way to "kill" God, as it were.
In Romans 1, Paul wrote that sinners have no excuse before God because His existence is evident to all of us. It's still sad, but not the least bit surprising, that you apparently reject what Paul taught about God to give your atheist friends more credit than is probably deserved.
2) I didn't imply that atheists attack more than Christians. I wasn't saying that you were attacking Palin with the same frequency as atheists do, but with the same attacks. Christians generally don't sneer at the unusual beliefs of other Christians; atheists do.
3) If you want to defend your behavior as "sophomoric humor," it still demonstrates that your interest in civility and concern for religious tolerance are matters of convenience.
Now, about the specifics of what I believe is an attack, and what you claim is a joke:
I will be absolutely clear in that I do not believe that even an affirmation of the Bible's inerrant authority requires a belief in a young Earth, but I absolutely reject the notion that that belief disqualifies a person as an expert energy. You accept the notion.
Okay, then.
Do you also think that orthodox Christians are unqualified for the medical profession, Dan?
After all, a belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus "demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic scientific principles" related to biology, right?
You wouldn't want a surgeon operating on you if he actually believes that God sometimes intervenes to bring people back from the dead, would you? Why, that would give the doctor less incentive in being careful, if he thinks God might let him take a mulligan!
So, that wasn't really an implication on my part. It was an outright statement: If she thinks the world is ~6000 years old, she is not especially qualified to be an "energy expert."
Take this position to its logical conclusion, if you're really such a principled individual.
If the belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old disqualifies a person as an expert on geology and geologically-based energy sources, logically the belief that Jesus rose from the dead also disqualifies a person as an expert on medical issues, and these positions cannot be the result of anti-Christian bigotry.
Go ahead, affirm that if you can: tell us that those who affirm the Nicene Creed have no business taking the Hippocratic Oath.
Or, if there's a difference between young-earth creationism and Christianity's central historical claim -- in that the belief in the former disqualifies you from geological expertise but the belief in the latter does not disqualify you from medical expertise -- I invite you to EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCE.
Do you have no idea of the irony of you saying this to me? Our whole beloved relationship has been one of you repeatedly sneering at my (to you) unusual beliefs as a Christian. Sneering, mocking, rejecting, belittling, demonizing, rinse and repeat.
Irony, thy name is Bubba.
After all, a belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus "demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic scientific principles" related to biology, right?
You make a decent point here, Bubba. All I can say is that there does seem to be a profound difference to me. I'm willing to believe God set aside the normal laws of biology and anatomy in the case of Jesus and as an exception to the rule.
With the case of a resurrected Jesus, that is an acknowledged exception to the generally accepted laws of science, which remain intact.
With the case of a 6,000 year old earth, that seems to me to be an outright rejection of the laws of science, period. That position requires a rejection of the laws of science, whereas the notion of a miracle (Jesus' resurrection) still acknowledges science as we understand it and instead makes the claim of an exception.
Call me hypocritical on that point if you wish, but that seems like a big difference to me.
So, to more fully respond: I wouldn't mind having a doctor operate on me even if that doctor, like me, believe in miracles.
However, I would want that doctor to believe in the basics of science.
That is, I don't mind if that doctor believes that Jesus raised from the dead in a miracle contrary to the known laws of science.
I would mind greatly if that doctor thought that the reason Jesus was able to raise from the dead was due to special "Liferinos" - elements that are in the blood cells of everyone, but were especially high in Jesus due to his divine nature.
I don't mind that the young earth believers - who perhaps might be geologists working for oil companies - think that God created the world in a Miraculous Big Bang all at a wish from God. I do mind if they think that, contrary to science as we know it, it all happened 6,000 years ago on a Sunday morning and that the dinosaurs were created the next Wednesday and that Adam named them the next day ("You're a brontosaurus, you're a chimp, you're a T Rex...") then the dinosaurs died at Noah's ark (at about, let's say, 5500 years ago) and the remains of organic material from that time period then "cooked" for about 4,500 years and voila! we get fossil fuel! It's fun and easy! Thanks, Reverend Science!
Does that make sense to you? One rejects science as we know it, the other accepts science but says there could be exceptions.
It makes sense to me.
Beyond that, I think you often risk over-emphasizing Christ's ethical teachings -- or, rather, a subset of those teachings that can be abused by Progressives; you never have put much emphasis on Christ's teaching about why we were made male and female -- in comparison to His teachings about who He is and, more importantly, the salvation from sin and the gift of eternal life that He purchased on the cross. If this isn't strictly heretical in the sense of directly defying the Nicene Creed, your emphasis on Jesus' Way still seems to miss the point of Christianity.
I've been critical of these beliefs, but I unequivocally reject the idea that I've been "sneering" about these beliefs.
I've taken your religious beliefs very seriously, just as I would heretical beliefs like gnosticism and the denial of Jesus' humanity, or beliefs that aren't strictly heretical but are nevertheless problematic, like the "prosperity gospel."
My criticism of your religious beliefs have been serious, but respectful. Regarding those beliefs at least, I have NOT engaged in the sneering condescension of the militant atheist who ridicules Christians for believing in a "sky daddy", and that's exactly the sort of condescension you come very, very, VERY close to reaching in your self-described "sophomoric humor" regarding Sarah Palin.
If that "humor" had been directed at Catholics, Jews, Hindus, or Muslims, rather than charismatic evangelicals, you would see it as the bigotry that it is.
What I've been mocking -- increasingly, as civil discourse has been proven to be impossible with you -- is your personal hypocrisy. THAT, I mock, because it's worthy or mockery. I ridicule it because it's ridiculous.
More, in a moment.
With the case of a 6,000 year old earth, that seems to me to be an outright rejection of the laws of science, period. That position requires a rejection of the laws of science, whereas the notion of a miracle (Jesus' resurrection) still acknowledges science as we understand it and instead makes the claim of an exception.
I'm personally rather ambivalent about how one should interpret the first couple of chapters of Genesis to understand how the universe, life, and humanity were all literally brought into being. I definitely affirm these chapters as authoritative -- Christ Himself implied that the early chapters were authoritative, e.g., in Matthew 19 -- but I'm not sure it's possible to reconcile science with these passages of Scripture. In order to draw conclusions, science must make assumptions about the predictability of the universe, and the Bible is quite clear that God can intervene and disrupt that predictability as He sees fit.
But, even if Genesis 1-2 is meant to be taken word-for-word literally, with six 24-hour periods for creation, it doesn't mean that this process "requires a rejection of the laws of science." It can be just as much of an "exception" as the Resurrection: it was just a little longer (six days instead of three) and far more expansive in terms of location, occurring throughout the cosmos rather than a single tomb on the outskirts of first-century Jerusalem.
Once the process of creation was complete, there's no difficulty in believing that the laws of nature then "took over" and became the rule for the universe, with the occasional miraculous exception, like the plagues of Egypt or the raising of Lazarus.
There is, in fact, a passage in Genesis that could easily be seen as signifying the transition from direct miraculous intervention on a cosmic scale to the running processes of creation's normal laws: the seventh day, when God rested.
I don't mind that the young earth believers - who perhaps might be geologists working for oil companies - think that God created the world in a Miraculous Big Bang all at a wish from God. I do mind if they think that, contrary to science as we know it, it all happened 6,000 years ago on a Sunday morning and that the dinosaurs were created the next Wednesday and that Adam named them the next day ("You're a brontosaurus, you're a chimp, you're a T Rex...") then the dinosaurs died at Noah's ark (at about, let's say, 5500 years ago) and the remains of organic material from that time period then "cooked" for about 4,500 years and voila! we get fossil fuel! It's fun and easy! Thanks, Reverend Science!
As with your very strange analogy of "Liferinos", you're inserting details that need not apply to young-Earth creationists. It's not necessary to believe, for instance, that petroleum came from decaying organic matter over the 4-6 thousand years since Creation. It's possible that oil was part of what was created in the six-day period. It is only a theory that "fossil fuels" came from fossils, a theory made perhaps subconsciously more credible only by that term.
I mean, look, there appears to be hydrocarbons on one of Saturn's moons, so it's entirely possible that -- regardless of whether creation took six days or not, and whether petroleum was created then or not -- petroleum isn't the product of organic matter.
In comparing the Resurrection and young-Earth creationism, you write, "One rejects science as we know it, the other accepts science but says there could be exceptions."
But both could be "exceptions," and both require a transcending beyond "science as we know it."
I don't see why one can be accepted as perfectly reasonable while the other must be ridiculed.
I repeat an earlier question:
Do you think any time one makes a joke about a public official it is an "attack?"
To which I add:
Do you think that all humor about a specific belief is bigotry?
I thought conservatives rejected political correct-ness.
An Amish drive by shooting.
How can you tell if a Mennonite boy is getting in trouble?
In his sock drawer, you find pictures of women without bonnets.
"Energy Expert"
Just 6000 years
The age of our old planet
or so says Palin
Bigotry? Really?
Gee, why I would I think that?
So, that wasn't really an implication on my part. It was an outright statement: If she thinks the world is ~6000 years old, she is not especially qualified to be an "energy expert."
After defending your comment as serious, you then posted two additional, lengthy comments about the supposed differences between the belief in the Resurrection and young-Earth creationism.
If you want to insist that your little haiku was intended only as humor, comparable to jokes about gang-banging Amish, feel free to do so.
Or, if you want to defend the haiku as being rooted in a serious criticism of young-Earth creationism, that it "rejects science as we know it" and is " an outright rejection of the laws of science, period," you could do that instead.
But it's absurd for you to try to do both simultaneously.
It is transparently absurd.
I frankly would prefer that whichever defense you stick with actually corresponds with reality, but, regardless, it would be a great improvement if you simply stopped trying to appeal to mutually exclusive defenses of your rhetoric.
(Just thought I'd try it...)
Whether or not the earth is 6,000 years or 6,000,000,000 years old makes no difference.
1) Science's belief on how oil is formed is not scientific fact, it is what science believes because of it's molecular make-up-- it sounds plausible and therefore is accepted.
The same with the belief "peak oil". It is not a fact, it is merely accepted by a faction. It is not universally accepted because it is not undeniable fact.
[And no, the earth is not flat.]
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the earth is NOT much more than 6,000 years old: ocean salinity, and electromagnetic levels, to name but two. Nevertheless, there are many who reject these 'evidences' because the idea of an old earth makes far too much sense to them to ever question their belief.
Either way, there is nothing in the Bible to suggest the world ISN'T more than 6 or so thousand years old. If you study the Hebrew more closely the act of 'letting there be light' is not a creation event... but rather a restorative event. But beyond that, no one-- not me, Dan, Bubba, nor even the wisest biblical scholar and geologist know anything for sure. They are "accepted" beliefs based on data that appears to show whatever it is that speaks to us individually.
Secondly, Dan, your recent 'Haiku' post may have actually been 'all in good fun' in your mind-- I don't pretend to know what you think. But it was an acceptance, in spirit, of a Haiku contest with specific parameters (which butchers a fine Japanese art), those being, to mock and denigrate Sarah Palin. Jesus said they [the world] would know us by our love for one another. It is not 'love' to mock a fellow Christian-- especially joining in with unbelievers to mock a brother or sister in Christ.
Whatever your intent, you should not have taken part in it. And you sure shouldn't have butchered the Haiku. The ones I wrote on the spot are far better expressions of Haiku despite being pale mockeries of the traditional form.
I'm not gonna pass judgment on you Dan. But I do think you should apologize on your site, on that particular post.
Please note also that I did not once criticize you OR Alan for your poor Christian showing. I merely graded your Haiku performances. Believe it or not I am trying to change the way I 'deal' with those who claim the name of Christ.
Or, if you want to defend the haiku as being rooted in a serious criticism of young-Earth creationism... you could do that instead.
But it's absurd for you to try to do both simultaneously.
Gentlemen, allow me to introduce into your apparently small world a quaint new development: Satire.
Sometimes, by the use of hopefully clever satire, one can simultaneously joke about (ie, not be entirely serious) a position with which one disagrees (ie, in all sobriety).
By the use of this modern day miracle - satire - one can, believe it or not, simultaneously make a joke about a point one has a serious position upon. Amazing, I know, and yet true.
Heated minds and tongues clamor
Reason's heart lies slain
You gotta be kidding. For what? Because I disagree with another Christian - one who happens to be running for one of the highest offices in the world - and made a satirical point about it?
You JUST POSTED a supposedly satirical post criticizing a whole group of people! Do you now believe satire to be wrong?
Please note also that I did not once criticize you OR Alan for your poor Christian showing... Believe it or not I am trying to change the way I 'deal' with those who claim the name of Christ.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Me, too.
Your satire abused another Christian.
From the haiku contest's sponsor, the purpose of the contest is to:
* Connect Sarah Palin and/or John McCain to the Far Right or to what's at stake this election, OR
* Make the connection between the 2008 Election and the future of the Supreme Court
I would suppose that you would think connecting McC/P to the far right and making the connection to the future of the supreme court a good thing?
Can we not disagree with other believers? Especially if we find their positions extremely troubling? Lord knows, you have disagreed with me over the years (and I, you).
I have a great fondness of satire and think it a very useful tool in political discourse. I find nothing unchristian about its use, as long as one recognizes the difference between satire and an actual conversation.
It should be noted that every place that has a high school drop out rate over 50% is ruled by democrats. Even Obama's old neighborhood where he was an organizer.
I would challenge anyone to find a place that is and has been run by republicans for the last 10+ years and has a high school drop out rate over 50%.
You just satirized millions of other Christians!
And my satire did not abuse another Christian. It abused this notion that Christians must believe in a 6,000 year old world against what our own senses would tell us. It abused the notion of blaming the media for asking legitimate questions and striving to create strife. It abused the notion of Peace through War.
These are notions that we OUGHT to be abusing - the notions, not the people.
You will note that I did not question Palin's nor McCain's Christianity - not in the least. I questioned their judgment on some specific issues on which I disagree and this we ought to do.
So, I would ask again: For what ought I apologize?
Her expertise in energy comes from her personal knowledge of oil fields, pipelines, oil wells, drills, oil field workers, what types of wildlife is effected or not effected by the production of oil, and where the oil can be found.
I daresay, if Dan would bend that gascone(sp?) pride of his long enought to listen to what knowledgeble folks like Sarah Palin have to say about oil exploration and drilling and recovery and it's supposed effect on the environment, possibly Dan would be educated.
But alas, Dan is much too pigheaded to listen to anyone but Libetral nutjobs.
If you want to insist that your little haiku was intended only as humor, comparable to jokes about gang-banging Amish, feel free to do so.
If you want to insist that your little haiku was intended only as humor, comparable to jokes about gang-banging Amish, feel free to do so.
Or, if you want to defend the haiku as being rooted in a serious criticism of young-Earth creationism, that it "rejects science as we know it" and is " an outright rejection of the laws of science, period," you could do that instead.
But it's absurd for you to try to do both simultaneously.
Again, the operable adverb is "ONLY."
If you're not changing your position yet again, you're guilty of some pretty sloppy writing, because the comparable jokes you mentioned -- e.g., about Amish drive-by shootings -- are hardly examples of biting satire.
I don't think your writing is that sloppy, so I think you're just bouncing from position to position hoping that you'll find one that's actually defensible. First, you wrote at length defending your position that young-Earth creationism disqualifies a person from geological expertise, then you imply your little poem was as innocuous as a knock-knock joke, now you're saying it's satire.
Well, if it's satire, it's certainly not immune from the possibility that it's bigoted satire.
You continue to defend this joke/satire/serious poem in quite ridiculous ways:
And my satire did not abuse another Christian. It abused this notion that Christians must believe in a 6,000 year old world against what our own senses would tell us.
A whole bunch of questions arise.
1) What particular sensory experiences tells you that the world cannot possibly be only 6,000 years old? If young-Earth creationism rejects what "our own senses would tell us," what is it -- SPECIFICALLY -- that our senses say, that repudiate the belief?
2) Your suggestion that our own senses reject young-Earth creationism: how is this different from the suggestion that Jesus rose from the dead? None of us witnessed the creation of this planet, but most of us are, tragically, all too familiar with death, and it's doubtful that any of us have seen the dead come back to life; wouldn't this mean that "our own senses" are much, much louder and clearer in repudiating the Resurrection than they are in repudiating a young Earth?
3) As a Baptist, I personally reject the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and I don't believe that the bread and the wine become the literal body and blood of Christ, ahem, against what our own senses would tell us.
Suppose that I wrote a haiku, um, satirizing the Democratic vice-presidential nominee's qualifications based on his religious beliefs.
"Judgment"
Grape juice and crackers
The Incarnate Deity
Or so says Biden
It was difficult for me to write something comparable to your little artistic endeavor, but I think that such a supposed "satire" would clearly be indulging anti-Catholic bigotry. Do you really disagree?
If I were to invoke Biden's Catholic belief in transubstantiation in even a satirical criticism of his prudence and judgment -- in a manner that is incredibly similar to your invoking Palin's supposed belief in young-Earth creationism -- you really wouldn't think that my doing so is tasteless and prejudiced?
I find it easier and easier to believe that you would say anything if you think that it would score you rhetorical points, but I don't think any truly decent and thoughtful person would find it easy to deny the quite evident bigotry in my hypothetical poem or the poem you thought was worth publishing on your blog and which you continue to defend, to your own discredit.
Do you think that all humor about a specific belief is bigotry?
My answers are No, and No.
You are free to disagree. I think you'd be in the wrong.
Sarah Palin doesn't have to know how long it takes for the earth to make oil out of dinosaur bones or whatever. the process is irrelevant.
1. Oil doesn't come from dinosaurs.
2. The process is very relevant.
3. If one thinks oil can be created in 6,000 years then one might be inclined to think it is a geologically short process to create oil, thereby thinking that, "well, there's always more oil cooking from them dinosaurs here a few years back, we'll have plenty of oil to last us indefinitely! woo hoo."
4. The process is very relevant.
5. The realization that science shows us that oil is likely peaking now or in the coming years is very important to energy policy. If one thinks, contrary to science, that there will be plenty of cheap oil for many centuries to come, that might lead to one set of energy policies different than if one realizes that we are or will be shortly peaking on cheap oil supplies.
6. The process is very relevant.
Let me first try to answer your questions before addressing their meaning.
Do you think any time one makes a joke about a public official it is an "attack?"
Do you think that all humor about a specific belief is bigotry?
Like you, my answers are, no and no, but those answers aren't nearly as useful to you as you think they are.
No, I don't believe every joke at a politician's expense is an attack, but your haiku was. To suggest that a politician's religious beliefs disqualify her from having geological expertise IS an attack.
No, I don't believe every joke that's aimed at a faith's specific beliefs is necessarily bigoted, but your haiku was. Suggesting that Palin's religious beliefs disqualify her from having particular expertise, is not only an attack on her, it's an attack rooted in bigotry, just as much as it would be to suggest that Biden's belief in transubstantiation calls into question his judgment.
Now I see that you're once again defending your criticism as "humor," but -- again -- you vacillate and immediately defend the substance of your criticism:
If one thinks oil can be created in 6,000 years then one might be inclined to think it is a geologically short process to create oil, thereby thinking that, "well, there's always more oil cooking from them dinosaurs here a few years back, we'll have plenty of oil to last us indefinitely! woo hoo."
Well, which is it? Was your comment such innocuous humor that it cannot possibly be an attack on Palin, much less a bigoted one? Or was it a serious enough point that you feel validated in defending it?
It cannot be both, and if you think the point is worth defending, it's certainly substantive enough to criticize, too.
Ever since I brought up that poem in this thread, you have been completely incapable of settling on an firm idea on what that poem was, and you continue to defend it by invoking mutually exclusive ideas.
You defended it in "an outright statement," writing, "If she thinks the world is ~6000 years old, she is not especially qualified to be an 'energy expert.'" (2:03 pm on Oct 14th)
You then immediately dismissed the same poem as mere "sophomoric humor" that doesn't rise to the level of an attack.
(2:09 pm)
You then ignored your comment about the poem's being humor, by defending its central claim at length, writing (unpersuasively) that young-Earth creationism "seems to me to be an outright rejection of the laws of science, period," and then putting forth half-backed comparisons to something like "liferinos" and lamely trying to explain how a belief in a literal six-day creation is an offense to science while a belief in the Resurrection isn't. (2:56 pm, 3:27 pm)
You then went back to suggesting that the comment was mere "humor" that (somehow) cannot rise to a level of an attack on Palin, and then compared it to jokes about Amish gang-bangers and brought up your Anabaptist heritage. (7:08 pm, 7:12 pm, 7:13 pm)
You then decided to start defending your poem as satire, even though that renders irrelevant your joke about Amish gang-banging and admits that your joke was an attempt to make a substantive point, a point which is itself open to criticism. Sticking with this position for the rest of the evening, you again criticized young-Earth creationism, this time as a rejection of "what our own senses would tell us." (8:43 pm, 9:02 pm)
Morning has broken, and you're back to defending your criticism as mere "humor" (4:57 am)
But then, you once again defended the substance of your criticism. (5:17 am)
By my counts, you have switched positions on the meaning of your poem SEVEN TIMES in less than 24 hours.
You shouldn't wonder why some of us wish you were more consistent.
Dan,
I don't know where oil comes from.
So what?
I did add the word "whatever", didn't I?
Dan, the point is, you are irrelevant.
Now, it seems strange to me that you would say it's impossible for God to make the Earth 6000 years ago and then say you believe the resurrection is possible because both defy logic.
It seems to me if God, who is omnipotent, wants to create the Earth 6,000 years ago and create a process which re-creates oil in that much time, He can. Just as if God wants to bring His Son (or Lazurus) back from the dead, He can do that, too.
It also seems to me that you are comfortable with an omnipotent God when that position suits you, but when it comes to the age of the Earth which God created, which doesn't fit your position, you tend to want to put an infinite God into your finite little man-made box.
Dan, What part of "Nothing is impossible with God" don't you understand?
In the scene where March is being grilled on the stand, March makes the statement, "If God wants to make a sponge that can think, then a sponge will think" or something like that.
Anyway, that statement was intended, by the filmmaker, to make March's character look silly and supersticious. And I guess, to the athiest, or any Christian who wants to pick and choose which parts of the Bible are relevant, the idea that a thinking sponge, or a young earth would seem quite silly.
I don't know a lot about Dan's concept of The Almighty, but I prefer to believe My God is bigger than all that.
Remember, all God had to do was speak the word, and the universe lept into existence. I don't discount the possibility that he created a Eart 6,000 years ago.
If God can make an earth that can produce oil in less than 6,000 years, he can.
I don't think young-Earth creationism necessarily undermines theories about peak oil, but Dan certainly does, and we can't have that.
Because he thinks young-Earth creationism undermines peak oil and the massive social restructuring that he supports in light of peak oil, he rejects young-Earth creationism as preposterous.
Just as Dan's pacifism is what informs his decision to accept some OT passages as wildly important and reject others as atrocity that borders on blasphemy, his politics continues to dictate the parameters of what religious beliefs are acceptible.
And I would add one more thing: his defending his haiku as humor is absurd because it's not humorous. There's no joke and no comedy, no pun and no play on words, and the essense of satire -- exaggeration to make a point -- is wholly missing.
All he did was take a point that he expressed in prose, elsewhere in this thread...
If [Palin] thinks the world is ~6000 years old, she is not especially qualified to be an "energy expert."
...and shoehorn into the haiku format:
"Energy Expert"
Just 6000 years
The age of our old planet
or so says Palin
Cramming a point that is meant to be taken seriously into the structure of a haiku doesn't automatically add humor to the thing, and that's all Dan did. Whatever humor to be found in this situation is the unintentional variety, found in Dan's protestations that the haiku is humorous, though it lacks any actual humor; that it's satire without being satirical; and that he still defends the poem's central claim as completely reasonable.
Unlike the limerick, the haiku isn't a form that lends itself to humor. This is the best I can come up with on short notice:
Wrote puns, half a score,
Hoping one would cause laughter.
No pun in ten did.
It's a old, not-very-funny joke, that wasn't improved upon by being put in haiku form.
It's possible to make haikus that are both humorous and political. Here's one at the candidate I, somewhat grudgingly, support:
The lone Maverick
Seeks the rarest of prizes
Honor in defeat
And two for his opponent:
He chose Chicago
And chose his friends and allies:
Just putting on Ayers?
Hope and Change means
Even poems will be taxed.
Feed the meter!
Notice that, in each case, there's an actual joke. Not a great one, maybe, but the joke is there.
The same cannot be said about Dan's poem. It's supposed to elicit laughter from it's reader, not because of any real joke or humor in the poem, but because of a shared flippancy towards evangelical Christianity that the poem's writer is supposed to share with its readers.
Screwtape wrote about how such flippancy is the best sort of humor for his literally diabolical purposes:
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.
"Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made."
Dan didn't actually make a joke in his little poem, so there are at least two problems with his appealing to humor as a defense:
1) Even if the poem was humorous or more specifically satirical, that doesn't exempt its central point from being criticized: not all jokes involving politicians are attacks, and not all jokes involving religion are bigoted, but it's entirely possible that this one is both. Saying "it's a joke" doesn't preclude or even address the possibility that it's a mean-spirited and prejudiced joke.
2) The poem wasn't even an actual joke.
The "it's a joke" defense is not only weaker than Dan think it is, it doesn't even apply in this case.
I bow to your omnipotent funny bones.
As it is, your petulant sarcasm is a poor substitute for a substantive response, just as your bigotry against evangelicals is hardly humorous just because you put it in a haiku.
I have demonstrated an inability to explain things in a way that you have been able to understand.
That being the case, I'll pass on trying to explain why some of us would find my little joke humorous.
"I find it easier and easier to believe that you would say anything if you think that it would score you rhetorical points, but I don't think any truly decent and thoughtful person would find it easy to deny the quite evident bigotry in my hypothetical poem or the poem you thought was worth publishing on your blog and which you continue to defend, to your own discredit."
I wrote this, in part, to make clear that I have no illusions that you'll actually answer my questions honestly.
I want to note that you're not exactly proving me wrong by punting, but I also want to highlight this simple fact:
Even though I think you lack the honor and integrity to answer these serious questions in good faith, I still asked these questions.
I did so because they're worth asking. They highlight the stupidity of your position if you never answer them. I didn't let my skepticism at your willingness to answer dictate whether I put forth the substance of my position.
You could do the same.
You could explain your position despite my supposed difficulties in reading comprehension, and let the chips fall where they may.
At the very least, your doing so would demonstrate that you're not invoking my supposed incompetence as a convenient excuse not to answer difficult questions.
What to Barak and Osama have in common?
They both have freinds who bombed the pentagon.
They say the best humor is based in the truth.
BTW Bubba, Dan doesn't answer questions, he asks them. Which is actually really postmodern.
Bubba, finally you have come to the conclusion I reached months ago:
Dan's comments are stupid.
You have admire EL's ability to tolerate them so far.
Q: How are Obama and McCain different?
A: When McCain spent years in the company of violent Marxists, it was against his will.
Q: Why did Obama cross the road?
A: You're a racist for asking.
Humor requires context, and there's just not enough room to maneuver within the confines of a haiku to establish context. The beauty of the haiku is in its ability to encapsulate "truth in beauty" in as few words as possible... namely, seventeen syllables.
Dan may well have sought to inject humor into his haikus but it clearly didn't work. Where is the humor in "Energy Expert"? Seriously.
Here's another haiku:
Help me, please! Someone!
I was born funny-boneless!
Bereft of Context!
But all of this talk of haikus misses the point of the post. That being, education in America is in such shambles that for all the money thrown at educators the "artist" should have been able to create a more truthful piece of graffiti:
"Democrat" Means Slavery
In a nutshell, Democratic policies more accurately describe themselves as the "Purveyors of the Soft-Bigotry of Low Expectation."
If you want to live and think as though your brain were poured by a cement mixer, fine! Knock yourself out! But for me, I'm at least willing to look beyond the "accepted." That is how new discovers are made, no? People choosing to keep their minds free of the cement mixer?
---
Q: Why did Obama order the Chateau Ste. Michelle 1991 Sauvignon Blanc?
A: Oh, My G-d! You're a RACIST!!!!!
"The main problem is that it's not biblical." I got a much bigger laugh from that than his haiku.
Bubba
Man! I could SWEAR I've read just about the same thing about Dan.
Oh yeah! I WROTE it. MANY times.
Y'all spend more time talking about Dan and what he believes (according to you, not him) and doesn't believe and so little time talking about actual issues.
Don't you find that fascinating and a bit bizarre?
Don't get me wrong. It's flattering to receive all this attention, but fellas, I have a wife and frankly, I just don't swing that way. You need to get over this mancrush you have on me and move on with yer lives, bros.
It's not you. It's me.
If you'll note, I didn't go off the topic of the American people and voting patterns until "October 14, 2008 2:03 PM" when Bubba (and then later, Mark and you) brought up and kept bringing up an unrelated topic from my blog.
When I try to refrain from commenting on off-topic red herrings that y'all bring up, then I am repeatedly accused of dodging questions.
A little consistency on the (admittedly VERY busy) blog manager's part would help me stay on topic. But if it's okay for y'all to make up stuff that I don't believe and that is off topic and attach my name to it, it would seem reasonable to me that I would respond to it.
But, your blog, your call. If you want me to ignore off topic attacks, lies, slander and other typical modern Republican behavior, I shall.
Uh...excuse me...But I don't visit your blog. I have better things to do with my time than to inflict that kind of punishment on myself.
You never actually explained why you're reluctant to agree with that position, and -- other than pointing out a study that strains to show that the more educated vote Democratic -- you didn't add anything of substance to the discussion about Edwin's belief that the politically under-educated have too much influence on the outcome of presidential elections.
I digressed by bringing up your flippant and bigoted haiku only after you first implied that I would abandon my positions if it would help the GOP and then started crowing, quite ridiculously, about your own honesty.
When you assert that you're honest, you invite criticism because it's blatantly obvious that you are a remarkably dishonest individual. It might be convenient for you if people never brought up things you write in other contexts and in other places, but just because your history is inconvenient, it doesn't mean that reminding you of that history is an attack, much less a slanderous one.
And your latest comments show just how dishonest you are about your being interested in focusing on the issues.
Not for the first time, you've decided to make comments that would, were they ever to come from a political conservative, be denounced as homophobic. However sarcastically and insincerely, you've decided to question the sexual orientation of those with whom you disagree.
Don't get me wrong. It's flattering to receive all this attention, but fellas, I have a wife and frankly, I just don't swing that way. You need to get over this mancrush you have on me and move on with yer lives, bros.
Even much more so than suggesting that it's ELAshley's fault you can't focus on the issues, this is an incredibly juvenile comment.
Are we really supposed to believe you want to avoid personal criticisms, when you're not above implying that your critics are gay?
Is making comments about our private sex lives really more above-board than the criticisms we have about what you choose to write in public forums online?
Or is it simply the case that you have no standards for your own comments?
What is it that we can learn about you, just from what you've written the past week?
You think it's okay to call into question a Republican politician's qualifications based on her religious beliefs.
You now apparently think it's okay to question the sexual orientation of those who are critical of what you write.
But what you don't think is okay, is being strongly critical of what you write. That, you dismiss and denigrate as "off topic attacks, lies, slander and other typical modern Republican behavior."
In all this you confirm that you're not decent, honorable, honest, consistent, principled, or even mature.
Discussions of creation in the framework of the modern understanding of rationality, of occasions of miracles, of the resurrection, of dinosaurs, of oil development processes -- once moral concerns return to a long arid venture of debate, the history and currency of the suffering of millions deeply trouble any solution.
We are left with either a God who has the power to act outside of the natural forces of reality and refuses to do so or a God who has the desire to do so but not the power, either actually or via abdication according to some moral law which God set in motion (and thus we are back to a God whose power is limited).
If the passion of Christ is proposed as a "make up" for all the millennia of human suffering, the nature of the God that is so revealed is deeply disturbing.
These matters disturbed Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and many others seeking to explain God. They disturb me and I do not have answers.
But I am not about to romanticize my lack of answers with a shrug that it is just a mystery. All the blood, all the crushed bones, the terror from earthquakes, flood, famine, war, slavery and race killing of all kinds, rape, pedophilia, chains, whips, the rack, and lives lost in dungeons.
Jesus means the most to me, and I believe that God suffers through him, but faith is not relieved. Humility, profound humility with a bowed head is my only response. And eternal hope. These bring me to a social vision for all. Not via the most recent successful economic structure of capitalism, not via the most current and perhaps most benevolent super power. What are the sources of this benevolence? Not patronizing. Not the benefit of the capricious market. Human feeling for all, intention to aid as many as possible given our damnable limits.
I hear such things, partially, in Barack Obama because he is a Christian Democrat. I hear it, but less so, in John McCain, because he is strong value laden tradition defending Republican. It is this less so that is making this election when so many are hurting or fear that hurt is knocking.
It sounds like the problem of pain has lead you first to deny the existence of miracles, and then to question either God's power or His goodness or both. Dissatisfied with Christian doctrine, and with economic freedom and with American society, you're placing your hope in "a social vision for all" and feel drawn to supporting Barack Obama because of his apparent good intentions for helping people.
Is that an accurate summary?
If it is, I must say I disagree strongly with pretty much everything you've written.
I find Gethsemane and Golgotha to be a sufficient response to the problem of pain: it does not answer why we must endure pain -- limited as we are, we must trust that God has a very good reason for all He does, for all He doesn't do, and for all He allows -- but it tells us that we do not suffer alone. The human soul doesn't yearn for omniscient understanding half as much as it yearns for true empathy from its Creator.
It is not the God of Good Friday that I find "deeply disturbing," but rather the ease with which some people abandon Him to place their hopes in earthly political programs. That act lays the foundation for the sort of all-encompassing religion of the state, in which the state itself is worshipped, that often leads to the horrors of despotism.
The history of Christian thought has been to make faith intelligible in a compelling and persuasive way as would seem appropriate to a faith whose central message is love.
In frustration, many movements opted for an emotional increase, like the Great Awakening, then the Second Great Awakening (causing immediate doubt about how great either one was), In frustration, Kierkegaard, made an existential moment out of a "leap of faith." Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism are the same more or less resignations in the effort of intelligibility by moving toward exclusivism and ostracization.
Christian doctrine is dissatisfying. That is why it continues to be worried over and made interpretatively new for new times, new understandings, new ways in which human beings understand themselves. The endlessness of it is witness to its insufficiency. Thus the paralyzing feature of arguing scripture with an intellectual make up that has changed several times in the millennia since the earliest Hebrew scriptures were written. How does Genesis speak to contemporary desires to defend creationism or evolution? These were not its concerns.
And the debate, and the movements, fail over time because they do not address the core revelation of God as a prodigal lover of his creation. So much so he gave his son. But the giving has not stopped the horrors. The horrors of nature, the horrors of human perpetration, horrors of which I am not responsible nor able to stem.
To lodge our "trust" in the future wrapping up of all suffering by God in some kind of ultimate justice leaves open the accusation that God is willing to judge all horrors but will not prevent them. This is a problem for Christian theology because it puts us in the service of an awfully limited divinity. Such a position has never been attractive over the long term except during homogenous societies rigidly ruled by the powers that be or at times of great privilege experienced by some who deny seeing the absolute absence of divine favor for the millions left out. This vision of being a favored nation American has read out the Old Testament as prophecy about itself. The self-serving nature of such a reading raises questions, the lack of compassion, or "empathy" as you say, is stark.
Surely we cannot say that any economic system is divinely inspired, can we? Jesus did not institute capitalism and yet he was sufficient, was he not? We can say that free market capitalism has been the heretofore best process for bring good to the most while still respecting freedom and protecting the rights of all.
And yet, something within a society still yearns for more even as we yearn for more than sufficient but intellectually short-lived theological explanations of suffering.
If the end times and judgment are a callous answer to current brotherhood of all, then the best I can do is to follow II Peter 1:4 and try to participate in the divine nature, which is to suffer with and to love the least, and to try to use our gifts of intelligence to eliminate wrong and hunger and lack of health care and loss of housing and hoarding and hunkering down in some privatized privilege.
Is faith dependent upon full understanding of God's methods? Is it even possible to gain such during our earthly existence? It is too easy to look at God's actions and inactions and judge Him, His worthiness of our devotion, as if demanding of Him some satisfaction for all that troubles us about the way of the world. It is fairly presumptuous to have expectations of the Creator as if He's just another dude. It is also clearly a waste of time to ever presume it's possible to fully know His Mind. His ways are His ways and it's enough that He has revealed of Himself to the extent that he has. We know what is expected of us by Him and that's what truly matters. And at the top of the list is that you, Feodor, and I help the needy as best we can. We can do that through our personal efforts every day and at election time by voting for he who is most likely to enable prosperity for all. Obama is most likely to stifle prosperity and those who will feel it the most are those who are already in need.
Even before the faith solidified as an institution. The New Testament is precisely a set of documents exhibiting the most challenging and complex effort of interpreting the message and figure of Jesus Christ.
Even after the Councils defined what belonged in the Canon - an often contentious argument engaging the best of minds and faith - Christian theology picked up immediately the task of interpreting the new scriptures for the church.
So the New Testament is not only a set of documents where the writers demanding the best of their own reflection - why else call on the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit? - but was made as it is with not one more, not one less book in it due to prolonged argumentation - again calling on the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Then for millennia, the best minds of the church tried their best to interpret the implications of the gospel for all believers.
Only on these shores, only on these shores, and only really in the last two hundred years has there been a sustained effort to disparage this history, and in the last one hundred years to actually deny this history.
The church has never before asked itself to stop thinking about God's grace and the meaning of the incarnation and passion. Never before asked itself to stop making faith intelligible for and to its times.
The paranoia I see in so much of American Christianity is the result. Paranoia on all sides. I think it is due to a deep anxiety that Christian feeling is not up to the onrushing world. And the truth is, it is not up to it - without deep thought and renewed thinking. American fundamentalism has been an influential force not forward looking but backward moving. No wonder we are anxious.
This is what I read in so many of the comments above.
Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, from whom all forms of American protestantism descend where among the best minds of their time. Not the best in just one ideological sector, among the best in Europe. And they thought new things and did new things. The founders of, still, the major theological platforms of the character of this country did not return to some pristine but incapturable time.
They moved on with the times, trying to satisfy the mind of faith by by combining the new era with risen Christ.
"Do not be anxious," he says toward the end of John's gospel. "I will be with you till the end of days."
I think he calls us to enjoy the days as they come with the best of what we have -- and by we, I mean the whole of created humanity and the cosmos. Any excessive glee of acceptance I have for Buddhists or Muslims, or homosexuals or a larger compassion for the good of the whole and a concomitant willingness to do away with inherited privilege (and the gaps sure to occur in my hold on what is immoral) can be forgiven, I am sure, by the God of love. Any restrictions on my love or on the toleration I exhibit, I find equal surety in the gospels, will be harshly judged.
This is sorta fancy talk for someone like me, but I was wondering if that could possibly be an accusation that we fundamentalists who happen to believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life and the Only Way to God, are not loving all peoples. I think that can not be known by another person, because God is the only one Who knows the heart and what is in there. I STILL believe that Jesus is the only way, because I believe the Word and think that it is such Good News that I want every one, regardless of race or color to know Him as well. mom2
Whatever differences we may have in how we think about our faith and from our faith, when you say, "because God is the only one Who knows the heart and what is in there," I feel tied to you in commonality around love and humility.
Holding fast to Biblical truths is not movig backward. Indeed it is moving forward toward the only goal with real worth. It is NOT forward looking (or moving) to use that which is of the world to reshape our views regarding the nature of God and His Will for us if that reshaping moves us further from Biblical truth, which is HIS truth revealed to us.
We can accept all people as children of God, be they Hindu, Muslim, homosexual, murderer, or anything else. But if we decline to remind them of the Truth and by doing so enable them in their error, then we have done nothing for them and in fact, become guilty of the same wrongs they commit.
God calls us to love, honor and serve Him on His terms, not ours, and to love one another. Loving one another includes rejecting behaviors and/or beliefs contrary to Biblical teaching.
Much of what passes for Christianity these days is not "Christian" at all. There is but a small-- and when I say 'small' I mean VERY small --segment of those who call themselves Christian who really ARE Christian.
I don't discount the influence of men like Luther-- he was one of the greatest thinkers of his time --but Luther didn't change Christianity in so much as he pointed BACKWARD to what Christianity is supposed to be. We need such a reformation today.
You are right, however. Many Christians do live in abject fear of the future-- to say nothing of the present. I can see in current events the embryonic stages of prophecy being fulfilled. And though I warn people here of what's to come, and quote men like Beck who also sees the potentials of current events, shouldn't be construed to mean I myself am fearful of what's coming. It's hard to NOT look at current events and see the seeds of prophecy... for me at least. But I'm not one of those who sees these events as an opportunity to cringe of give up the ghost, so to speak. I see it as an opportunity to warn as many as i can of what's coming.
There is too much fear of what lies ahead. And way too much looking backward. The only exception I see to the latter is in doing what Martin Luther did. He looked backward to the truth, to expose the present lie. A few Christians today are doing the very same thing, but many misunderstand what they're doing. A call to repentance is a call to turn back to ones first love, namely Jesus Christ. That requires looking back to the days wherein men worshiped him in spirit and in truth. Much of what we see on TBN and INSP are not representative of genuine worship.
If it appears, therefore, that I and others are retreating to the past instead of taking current and future events head on, please understand that we are returning to a position of strength-- a position where nothing can break through unless we give in to fear. And there is nothing to fear in Christ.
So who, Marshall, do you propose should judge whether our reshaping "move us further from Biblical truth"? How does one know whether our interpretation as modern people moves forward or not? How do parse the "if"?
Almost all of the New Testament writers knew and used Greek philosophy and the Hebrew scriptures in an effort to understand and make understood their experience of Jesus and his resurrection. "In the beginning was the logos," logos having a thick history in Greek thought.
Augustine was not only stepped in Roman philosophy, he was a professor in it.
Luther, whom ELAshley praises, was renewed by nominalist philosophy which set him on a path to see God's grace in the Epistle to the Romans in a way never understood before. So much for Luther's looking backward. He wrote things so new and fresh it remade Europe, but only because he also had the new instrument of a printing press and the new phenomenon of an increasingly literate public. It may be that "Biblical truth" only became a reality with the printing press and literate readers. Sorry, Marshal Art, but people only knew the rough outlines of Jesus life and death. St. Paul was not that big in the domestic home.
ELAshley your thinking is utterly surreal for being so precisely like the Pharisees of Jesus time. You are indeed backward looking. Backward to before the time of Jesus' good news but not so far as to return to the prophet's political liberalism.
Even fundamentalism is a movement that owes its existance to the Enlightenment and notions of reason and literal reading. Before the seventeenth century no one read anything literally -- they were always looking for signs and codes of other things, hidden messages to help with how to live life. Allegory, metaphor, legend, pre-figurement, etc.
And so on and so on, and so who is to determine "if" something modern, or really in both your cases, something really old leads us astray? And astray from what?
Marshal Art, ultimately the divide between is this question:
How in the hell do you take a New Testament whose sole self-declared mission is to witness and point to the incarnate risen Jesus as the self-revelation of God and put it itself in his place?
Biblical teaching is not God's revelation. Any one of the gospel's portrayal of Jesus Chris'st birth, death, and resurrection is not God's revelation. The living Christ is, so those documents say.
In the three hundred years before the New Testament was fully acknowledged, were Christians it the wilderness? And after that were illiterate ones without Biblical truth? The deaf? How does a deaf mute person receive Biblical truth, the whole of it? Only after a laborious sharing via hand held sign language of the whole text?
"I am the Way," he said, not the thing you hold in your hand, Marshall Art. Jesus can be modern because he lives. Not because he is in ink.
Take him in you mouth and heart and teach him that way. The parchments say so. The ink is an aid.
(For those of you what will vote Obama: 1984 is a book by George Orwell about an oppressive liberal government)
Big Brothers motto was:
"war is peace, freedom is slavery"
This is actually just another example of hyper-educated liberal youth. They view Republicans as freedom and freedom is scary because one person might prove he is more productive than another. The less productive or "lazy" person will "feel" like a slave.
a=b=c, a=c
republicans = freedom
freedom = slavery
republicans = slavery
The real problems here is since we were in school the department of education and the teacher union have turned the nations youth into artistic, well-read, mathematicians.
very clever indeed.
Simple objective reasoning devoid of personal agenda or preference. Honest people have no trouble in coming together to compare what is being put forth to what has gone before in Scripture.
"How does one know whether our interpretation as modern people moves forward or not?"
What difference does it make the period of time? Are you suggesting that Scripture changes based on the people who read it? This is not how it should be. We should be making sure we are conforming to Scripture, not the other way around. Human nature has not changed since the dawn of time. Our level of intelligence or accumulation of knowledge has nothing to do with the application of Biblical teaching.
. . . Ignorance is Power
The very existence of the Democrat party proves this to be true.
I've heard this said before regarding Greek philosophy, but despite the fact that some of them may have such a background, it has nothing to do with their desire to understand and make understood JESUS, not their experience of Him. Using Hebrew Scripture was appropriate since it contained the prophesies fulfilled by Christ's life. Plus, to them, they were still Jews and "Christianity" was the same as the faith they learned as children, with the natural progression of Christ added to it. Indeed, they were not looking to see if their version of modern times aligned with their knowledge of Christ, but to conform their lives to the teachings of their Lord and Savior.
In the same way, Luthor was looking to bring back the church to where it was before corruption had distorted it. He wasn't making things new and fresh as much as returning to a more accurate interpretation.
Biblical truth is unchanged through time despite the peoples' ability to access it. That they knew only what they were told is a result of those who told them. Their actions as a result were based on a limited knowledge and sometimes a corrupted knowledge. The printing press allowed for more to learn first hand what the Bible always held ready for them.
I don't doubt that history has always included those who sought to find what doesn't reside in Scripture. There have always been those who were well aware of what is metaphor and what is to be taken literally. There have always been disputes as to which is which. So what?
"Biblical teaching is not God's revelation. Any one of the gospel's portrayal of Jesus Chris'st birth, death, and resurrection is not God's revelation. The living Christ is, so those documents say."
This is merely playing word games. Christ is the fulfillment of the Law. But where do we learn of the Law but in Scripture? Scripture teaches us of the nature of God as far as He was willing to reveal. Even NT epistles give us insight as the writers are those who have the best insights due to their associations with the Lord or His disciples.
In the three hundred years before the New Testament was fully acknowledged, Christians were learning directly from other believers. The letters we read in the NT were being sent out and shared from there. They survived by direct action of the early believers. The teachings of Christ are imparted to each of us from other Christians.
""I am the Way," he said, not the thing you hold in your hand, Marshall Art."
Sounds like ER accusing me of idol worship for my respect and devotion to Biblical teaching. Nonsense. There's no confusion on my part between the text and the Lord. Nice try.
If you put Christ back in stone, you'll have no chance to talk as a Christian about DNA, organ growing, cloning, fetus engineering, euthanasia, space colonization, the social construction of sex, the origins of mental illness, the globalization of the market, the fading of national boundaries via the internet and legal redefinitions of the origin of civil rights, and on and on and on...
I want the Church there in the center of things, but it cannot do it screaming from a holler, afraid of the world's educated men and women working for the world's survival.
You've bound the Holy Spirit in English between calfskin covers.
"you are all the letter we need, a letter written on our heart; anyone can see it for what it is and read it for himself. And as for you, it is plain that you are a letter that has come from Christ, given to us to deliver, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the pages of the human heart."
Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:1-3, interpreting from Jer. 31:33 and Ezk. 36:26 (his holy scripture but changing things along the way).
Luther was a monk and a professor of Hebrew scripture. But if you ever do read Luther, read him on Paul's letter to the Romans. Don't be guessing and BSing.
We reason with our whole selves and terribly, fallibly try to approach some ballpark near the ballpark of objectivity.
Honest Christians have had increasing trouble coming together since 1054. Grape juice or wine? Bishops or elders or presbyters? Speak in tounges or no? Total depravity or something else? Corporate confession or private? Ordained priests as an order of recognized ministers of the gospel as only a member of the priesthood of all believers? Women in leadership positions? Homosexuality?
Who are you kidding? And what is the Biblical truth on these things? You have your slate I am sure, but that is your reasoning not mine.
"What difference does it make the period of time? Are you suggesting that Scripture changes based on the people who read it? This is not how it should be. We should be making sure we are conforming to Scripture, not the other way around. Human nature has not changed since the dawn of time. Our level of intelligence or accumulation of knowledge has nothing to do with the application of Biblical teaching."
Tell me what the Bible says about the birth control pill.
Tell me what the Bible says Islam.
Tell me what the Bible says about internet porn, or, since you think that one is probably easy, what does the Bible say about you surfing the net for Sports Illustrated pictures of women in bikinis and cheerleaders?
What does the Bible say about arresting the sovereign leader of another country for crimes he is not accused of in that country but is in the World Court in the Hague?
And then tell me what you think the Bible says if that sovereign leader is the U.S. President. Hypothetically.
We interpret the Bible. And we have to do it in ways Paul never did. You're on your own with the text. I have the living Christ and the mediating presence of the Holy Spirit speaking in new ways for new times. I may not hear them clearly, but it is the only way forward.
You, like others, hear what you want to hear and then say it is the Holy Spirit. Funny how the Spirit says one thing to such as yourself, and another to me. But take my approach and match it up with the only source we have for determining just what God's Will for us might be, and it aligns fairly well. That's because I start with the only source we have and go forward, conforming to the best of my ability. OH WAIT! I'm hearing something! Yes, I believe it's the Holy Spirit telling me I can play with myself! You presume way too much to pretend that you are given special insights that cannot be confirmed by Scripture. Hopefully, for your own sake, that which you think you hear does conform. "Speaking in new ways for new times" my ass.
"Tell me what the Bible says about the birth control pill."
It says we are to be holy because God is holy. What kind of pill do you prefer? One that prevents conception only, or one that might cause the body to flush an embryo? Jesus says to choose life. The Bible provides for sex between a man and his wife for pleasure. If I can prevent conception, no third party is at risk, than any pill that can assuredly provide for that end would be just fine. Do I make assumptions here? Perhaps. Can God find fault with my reasoning? Perhaps. Can you? Doubt it. The Bible guides my actions easily in this situation.
"Tell me what the Bible says Islam."
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through Me."
"Tell me what the Bible says about internet porn..."
We are to be holy because God is holy. What does the Bible say about you pretending to know what I do on the internet? The Bible says that there's no greater love that one might have than to lay down his life for another. This covers going after scumbag despots who are terrorizing their neighbors and their own citizens. The real question is what the Bible says about jerks who would let such terror continue under the guise of national interest or bowing to sovereignty. Such cowards need to stand aside while men of honor take care of business.
We interpret the Bible. We do it in ways honorable and honest men have always done: by putting God's Will first as best we can. We have His Will within the pages of Scripture to the extent that He has chosen to reveal Himself. You've got your imaginings and fantasies that you laughingly and presumptuously pretend are whispers of the Holy Spirit. You hear what you want to hear.
You are right to be suspicious of an individual claim to guidance by the Holy Spirit and I did not full spell out my approach to living today with the living Christ. Interpretation always has to be done in community with fellow believers in order to protect against demagoguery. Interpretation within the church for new times is key... as long as that church community does not filter minds at the door. Minds are a gift of God. But enslaving them to past interpretations leaves one atrophied.
A community of thoughtful Christians dedicated to honoring God's creation as is and utilizing the resources of Scripture, the best thinking of Christian tradition (because the nature of Christ was not spelled out in the NT but only by well trained theologians in a Greco-Roman milieu who came after), and the God given resource of our own best thinking... these are the keys.
Until you can answer the question of women as co-equal in full participation within Christ's body (which is an extra-Biblical revelation), the moral wrong of slavery (an extra-Biblical revelation) like you answered the birth control pill question, you will be like the Amish, but without their enobling stand of pacification.
By the way, your reasoning regarding the birth control pill is exactly the model I would suggest. The difference between you and official Catholic teaching is that you have used a part of Biblical teaching you value above other parts and interpreted a new stance.
Congratulations.
We interpret the Bible. We do it in ways honorable and honest men have always done: by putting God's Will first as best we can. We have His Will within the pages of Scripture to the extent that He has chosen to reveal Himself. You've got your imaginings and fantasies that you laughingly and presumptuously pretend are whispers of the Holy Spirit. You hear what you want to hear.
Marshall, do you realize how this comes across? "We," you say, "try to discern God's will as best we can." "YOU," you say, "pretend to hear God's Spirit whispering."
You DO realize, don't you, that we all are striving to find God's Will as best we can? I have no doubt that is what you wish to do. It certainly sounds like that's Feodor's wish, as well, and I know it's mine.
But what too often happens is, as you seem to present here, that we think that WE (whoever "we" are) are the ones who are TRULY seeking God's will, while THEY (whoever "they" are) are just trying to make God fit in their little box.
You note rightly that we strive for God's will the best we can. But daggone it, the "best we can" simply misses the mark sometimes. Sometimes, much to my dismay, I am wrong!
And Marshall, sometimes you are wrong, too.
Shall we strive to find God's will together, or at least our best guess at it? Or do you think it's God's will to demonize those who don't end up agreeing with you?
What does this mean? That there is something different about the nature of man in the 12st century than there was in the 1st? I reject this completely as there is no difference whatsoever. Mankind is lured by all of the same temptations. God's Will is not affected by human advances in technology or understanding. Unless archeology uncovers some new information concerning the workings of the church, some forgotten cave unearthed containing a new set of urns filled with parchment signed by Christ Himeself, or Moses, or some other Biblical figure that adds to or overturns what we already know, unless there is some new info that alters our understanding of ancient languages that sheds new understanding of manuscripts we now have, there is nothing about "new times" that changes Scripture and the message contained therein. If we allow liberal thought to change meanings of words, perhaps then we can arrive at interpretations for "new times", but they would be lies, since changing the meanings of words is to lie.
(BTW, we know enough of Christ's nature since we are schooled about the nature of God in the OT. The Son, the Father, both God.)
I don't feel compelled to answer questions to satisfy YOUR criteria, but if there are specific aspects regarding women and slavery you find particularly troubling, ask away and I'll seek to answer, if Eric has no trouble with the digression.
As to the pill question, I have used whatever Biblical teaching applies to the issue, not based on what I value higher. The question regards specific behaviors, all of which already have proper Biblical applications. What makes you think there's anything so complex about it? It's a sex question. We are told not to refuse our spouses except for times of prayer. That plainly suggests that within a marriage, sex for pleasure is allowed. But to be holy, we would not base our actions upon our desires for sex. If there exists a birth control pill that does not risk the life of another person, that is, an embryo, then to use a pill to prevent conception is no different than using the rythm method, and thus is not problematic. The new technology of the pill does not change how we interpret life, sexuality, holiness.
The new pic, like Geoffrey's, is creepy. I much prefer the pretentious Walden Pond type pic you've always used.
Regarding your comment, I don't give much due to notions of "prayerful meditation" when the results so clearly contradict Scripture. I find far less mystery in Scripture than it appears you do. So when I say "WE", I refer not simply to me and the frog in my pocket, but to others who read fairly well and have little trouble understanding plain English. "We" are those who study without preconceived notions and act accordingly. It's hard to be wrong when one isn't trying to be clever with Scripture, but simply reading that which is meant for each of us and not just scholars. Have I missed the mark? Have I been wrong? I doubt it. I don't see much that is so difficult to understand.
You have a frog in your pocket?
Should slaves obey their master?
Everything about your faith is an interpretation or an existence in the places where Biblical teaching is silent. No pill in the Bible so you must extrapolate.
You also missed the entire American Christian debate from 1930 (when the Episcopal church allowed its use) up to now.
Translation is an interpretation. The way the Bible is printed is a sentimental attachment to a modern interpretive style of what feels or looks sacred.
The physical architecture in which you worship is a contemporary interpretation of what feels and looks sacred.
The manner in which you get yourself to church (if you drive) lies in Biblical silence, and the Amish believe you are going down a dangerous extra-Biblical road by driving a machine.
The nature of the incarnate Jesus and the co-equal three in one of the Trinity became Christian understanding after two hundred years of hashing it out councils of learned Bishops who drew upon, again, a fascinating tradition of Greek and Roman philosophy and theology along with very carefully handled doses of gnosticism.
And if archeology uncovers -- more than they already have -- texts counted as scripture by man Christians, they to will have same quality about them that the approved texts do: products of their time which may serve as inspiration only because they have analogies and penetrating spiritual dynamics that are best elucidated by a full community of committed Christians living in devotion to the living Christ from whom comes fresh things for us.
Daniel 12:4:
"But as for you, Daniel, conceal these words and seal up the book until the end of time; many will go back and forth, and knowledge will increase."
(ribbid!)
Should slaves obey their master?
The Apostle Paul, writer of two thirds of the New Testament, says yes to these questions, inferring along the way that slavery, at least as he knew it, was ordinary, in his mind. Perhaps he disagreed with it, but if so he found no scriptural argument against it.
How do you escape these Biblical teachings?... or do you?
Shall we strive to find God's will together, or at least our best guess at it? Or do you think it's God's will to demonize those who don't end up agreeing with you?
I wonder if you think it's God's will to question the sexual orientation of those who criticize you, but even beyond that, this comment's hilarious coming from you.
Let's go back to the blog post, here, that started a very lengthy conversation about the supposed "atrocities" contained in the Old Testament.
Your position about the Bible is untenable. Late in this thread, you write this:
My main argument - as noted repeatedly - against saying God sometimes tells people to kill children is that that notion is contradicted by the Bible. [emphasis in original]
But you never actually got around to pointing out which passages contradict the OT passages you so despise, much less argue why the supposedly contradictory passages cannot possibly be reconciled.
In fact, earlier, you punted by implying that those problematic OT passages, which you think cannot be interpreted literally, aren't contradicted by the Bible itself, but by your own conscience:
God’s word written on our hearts cries out against such actions. Our God-given reasoning would tell us of the horror of those actions. They are purely and simply wrong in every situation and circumstance of which I can conceive.
The really stunning thing is that, in the original post, you not only call into question those passages where God issued commands you don't like or understand, you even question those passages like Numbers 16, where God "Has the earth open and swallow whole families and homes (children included) as a punishment for worshiping other gods."
In questioning Numbers 16, you call into question every act of judgment on God's part, from the Deluge to Sodom to THE PASSOVER ITSELF, the central miracle of the Old Testament and all of Judaism, and the key event in the Old Testament by which we understand the key events of the New Testament, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
You never addressed that particular point, so far as I know.
But what's more relevant to this discussion isn't your position on the Bible, it's your estimation of those with whom you disagree. In your original entry, you went out of your way to make yourself quite clear.
Let me be clear about what I think: IF you think God orders (or has ordered in the past) these sorts of actions, then you believe in an atrocious god. One that commits or commands atrocities. That the actions happen by a god’s word does not make it less an atrocity.
And, later on, you invoke the word blasphemy.
I believe that some things are simply wrong and to attribute such horrible atrocities to the work of God is just a little short of blasphemy, in my view.
You make it abundantly clear that you think those who disagree with you on the Bible are nearly blasphemous and worship an "atrocious" deity.
But only now do you wonder aloud about whether it's God's will "to demonize those who don't end up agreeing with you."
I've never seen you retract those comments, much less apologize for them, and your belief seems sincerely held, that theologically conservative Christians approach committing blasphemy for a conception of God that you find atrocious.
Your problem is manifestly NOT with criticizing the religious beliefs of others and doing so in the harshest possible terms.
It's only when your beliefs are scrutinized that you become suddenly sensitive about the need for courtesy and charity for one's fellow Christian brothers.
I've never taken the time to study the issue of women being silent and don't find it compelling enough to do so. Not what I'd call an essential element of the faith.
Slavery, however, was far different than what most Americans think of when the subject comes up. It was often a means by which debt was relieved. Many willingly subjected themselves to slavery in order to have debts forgiven and even to provide for their own sustainance. But whether Paul was referring to only these forms of it, or even to slaves taken after battles, the point was to illustrate how one should act with regard to slaves and how slaves should act with regard to their masters. That is, even under those conditions, there was a "Christian" way in which to act.
We look upon any form of slavery as unChristian because of both how slavery was manifested in American history and because of the belief that all men are created equal. For some, it would be easy to extrapolate this and see a degree of slavery even in employment (an exreme to be sure).
So to be sure, slavery in Paul's time had a far different look than it did in early America, but as in our early days, it was a part of their economic system and not necessarily seen as an evil. But the point of Paul's message is acting in a particular manner that would be pleasing to God no matter what one's circumstances.
"Christian doctrine is dissatisfying. That is why it continues to be worried over and made interpretatively new for new times, new understandings..."
Sounds like you're from the ER school of biblical thought. Sounds like you've also taken God out of the box. Allow me to let you in on a little secret... God has never been in a box. If God has ever been in a box he was put there by thinkers like yourself you deliberately put Him there just so you could, in spectacular fashion, pull Him out and declare yourselves free thinkers with the ability to hear the new voice of God. the one who is still speaking.
The problem is, however, God said all He intended to say, and closed the canon of Scripture.
God is not still speaking, in terms of new interpretations for new times. The scriptures say what they say where they say it, and they can easily be applied to any modern (new) situation... a new interpretation if you will. In terms of new prophets speaking new words from God to be codified in new books of scripture... no. That's not happening.
Here's the problem with thinking new interpretations are needed:
--No one bothers to look at what the bible says, in the times and languages in which they were said, and translated.
Take the King James for instance. In 1 Timothy 4:12 Paul is instructing Timothy...
""Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity."
Please note the word I've bolded. What does conversation mean? Today, it means a back a forth verbal exchange of information between two or more people. But what did "conversation" mean in King James time? It meant one's public life... how one carried himself in public.
My point is this: The Bible says what it says; where it says it, how it says it. There is no room for new interpretations. That, indeed, is putting God in a box on ones own making.
Marshall has it right with Slavery. The point is not that the bible mentions slavery, or that slavery was not universally condemned by early Christians. Slavery was a fact of life, and the point was one's attitude toward his/her master. Scripture says we are to do everything as unto the Lord.
Slavery today is a huge issue. It is so polluted with negative connotations that modern society can't help but view it as an evil. ESPECIALLY in America, where our founding documents declare that ALL men are created equal.
There is no slavery in America, therefore texts that declare how slaves and masters should related to one another has no meaning for us. Unless, as Marshall pointed out, you want to extrapolate the meaning of slavery to employment and taxation.
Women keeping silent in Church? Consider the times. Women held subordinate roles in the early church but they were not veritable slaves to their husbands. Paul repeatedly praises women for their work and service to the church.
What of Deborah? She was a judge over all Israel. Anna the prophetess? What!? You mean God used a woman as prophet!?
Paul's reasoning was that it was Woman who was deceived, not Adam. Women, therefore, were (in Paul's mind at least) more susceptible to deception, and this is borne out in many women who preach and teach on TBN. But there is nothing wrong with women teaching. Women at my church are called on to pray before the congregation. So what? We are all members of the body of Christ.
But there is nothing new in this... no new interpretation for a new time.
Birth control? No one should be having sex outside marriage anyway. And married couples have no need of birth control. If they choose not to have more than one or two children (or whenever they decide to stop), there are methods that greatly reduce pregnancy without killing the embryo.
What about homosexuality? That has always been wrong.
We've covered all these issues here before, and I'm not particularly opening those discussion up again. Feel free to peruse the following links: One Two
There are more, but I'll let you dig them out. I have to get ready for the news, which means I don't even have time to proof read this post. It'll have to be what it is.
Many willingly subjected themselves to slavery in order to have debts forgiven and even to provide for their own sustainance...
it was a part of their economic system and not necessarily seen as an evil.
Just a quick clarification: Marshall is right that slavery was different in those days and rather as he described it - that is, usually being a debt slave. However, that does not mean that it was not an evil.
The means by which people found themselves in this indebtedness was very often due to corrupt systems and practices and is repeatedly condemned in the Bible.
Also, it's most likely at least partially what Jesus was referring to when he began his ministry where he said he'd come to...
preach good news to the poor, God has sent Me to heal the broken hearted, To preach deliverance to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
Freedom to those captive to oppressive and corrupt systems, the "acceptable year of the Lord," I'm told, is a reference to the day of Jubilee - the day when debt slaves are freed. Radical stuff, that, and no wonder those in power found him threatening.
So, yes, Marshall and Eric, it was a slightly different flavor of slavery, but still, it remained corrupt and evil.
God is not still speaking, in terms of new interpretations for new times.
I'd have to ask, Eric, on what basis do you make this claim? Does it say so in the Bible? If not, why do you say that God is not still speaking? Not giving new interpretations for new times?
Precisely, Marshall. What was once Biblical teaching and 1800 years or more of church understanding of what was felt to be the divine way to order the faith community has been passed by because we understand ourselves and our gifts differently.
The ordering of the sexes seemed extremely important to Paul in ways that are not now essential to our understanding of ourselves. Of course, we think we “know better.” But the judgment is anachronistic, as you may agree.
My point is that things have changed. We are different. A widow is not given to the next brother. The first son is not given to religious professions and the subsequent ones work for the family or given in apprenticeship. A woman can divorce an abusive or refusing husband and provide for herself economically because she has gained the same civil rights of individuality. But neither do we take in our widowed mothers or widower-ed fathers as a matter of course.
We get our self-understanding as individuals, as men and women, and as families from the last four hundred years of Western Enlightenment expansions of value and rights. Much of it seems better in terms of loving our fellow human beings. Some of it, the intense privatization and loss of community, is deeply disturbing.
[The tradition-slaying effects of modernity are developments that have given rise to the intense hatred and religious based violence of radical Islam. The third world is still much more like the communities with which the epistles are so concerned.]
Biblical teaching can be a source for understanding gender roles only obliquely, with more sophisticated interpretation than direct application because we are two thousand years down the road. We do think differently about ourselves.
We are different in a way not reflected directly in some instances by Biblical teaching. Primarily in the area of rights and the ethic of value. Women are not economic commodities nearly as much, at least not in the Western world. We have to filter this aspect of Biblical teaching, adjusting as best we can for ourselves.
This is part of the function of Christ’s body: to serve as the interpretive forum of scripture with the gospel of Jesus Christ as the lens.
I am a lot more queasy with your amelioration of the horrors of slavery in the first century. Other Christians in those early centuries railed against the practice. Christian communities served as asylums for victim-slaves of war (many were women serving as concubines) and pooled monies to pay debts for those on the verge of being signed into slavery.
Paul, to my mind, is more culpable here. Slave labor also often meant ownership of sexual mastery (of both sexes) and Christians knew it. That is why Paul is pleading for Masters to be good little Massers.
What you propose is that there were Biblical norms for the behavior of the Masters while normatively remaining Masters. The dynamic was sanctioned but only in a context of respect.
So why do we now so vehemently oppost slavery? And contrary to you both, slavery is alive and well in the world. Diamond mines, sweat shops, sexual slavery and power domination -- here in the U.S. as well.
So what makes slavery so wrong now that, I would hope you would agree, the enslaved person should oppose it, run away, and that everyone has an obligation to destroy the system if given a chance?
I suppose your answer could be that times have changed – which is the argument I have been putting forward so far. But Paul was writing Biblical scripture, right? Is now not scripture but relic? Has some of it passed away? And again, who gets to say which parts have passed away?
That Christians disagree in so many ways goes to my point the we ALL interpret the Bible for our times in our, usually, communal ways.
In the case of slavery, I have a bigger problem that you may be even less inclined to swallow. I think Paul got it wrong, really wrong. He put himself too much in the center of trying keep his far-flung circuit of city churches in line. The difficulty was that being a Christian was, depending on the year and the place, already to risk martyrdom. To be a group arguing against slavery would have added to the risk of life.
The early church ease was very tormented by risking martyrdom. Most did not do it and were shamed by the dedication of those who did.
Paul came down squarely on a kind of compromise for survival’s sake.
For me, it is too slick for contemporary Christian’s to make excuses and say, well, slavery was a different part of their society than for us. That is just you taking a soft liberal interpretive stance while claiming that elsewhere you are literalists.
Or, are these parts of Corinthians, Ephesians, etc. not really Biblical Teaching but the instructions of an Apostle to specific communities? If so, again, who is charged with telling the rest of us which parts to leave behind?
Whether Paul was wrong here or speaking so specifically as to not be scripture or this scripture has passed away, Paul did not connect the dots to the fuller implications of where he got it right: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
I would say to the church, as well, there is no old time, no new time. Everyone must interpret Biblical teaching throughout one’s life. And actually, everyone already does. It's just that not everyone has been honestly taught that they already use some kind of framework in doing it and so do not recognize they are doing it.
"God is not still speaking, in terms of new interpretations for new times."
I'm confused. If an omniscient, omnipotent God is not speaking beyond scripture (whether by choice or necessity [if necessity what kind of God is this?]) then it looks to me like God is in a box (even if he put himself there).
Again, Scripture itself does not make an absolute claim to being the revelation of God. They do, however, witness Jesus making that claim. And as he is living, I think he is available to help with new things AS WE ARE ABLE.
You say, "God said all He intended to say, and closed the canon of Scripture."
You will not find this understanding scripture itself. Scripture itself only became a canon much later after much argument about what should be in it. This is in fact part of the councils of the church catholic that is not Biblical Teaching but part of the authority of the Church Fathers that the Church has respected -- most of it anyway -- until those later wings of protestantism that said we should wipe the deck clean and go back to just the New Testament church. Problem is the New Testament church's scripture was the Hebrew Bible.
He doesn't speak to us audibly as He did with Moses, and Noah, and Paul, etc, but He still speaks to us. His word, though, is unchanging and still relevant.
Although it's difficult to understand what Mr. Dosteovsky's point is, through his meandering, nonsensical style, I think he's trying to say he doesn't believe the truths of God are still relevant in todays modern world, and we should be trying to re-interpret His Word depending on what we want it to say, according to each individual.
It's like trying to read the original Feodor. I couldn't get through the first chapter of "Crime and Punishment". Bored to sleep.
The means by which people found themselves in this indebtedness was very often due to corrupt systems and practices and is repeatedly condemned in the Bible.
Also, it's most likely at least partially what Jesus was referring to when he began his ministry where he said he'd come to...
"preach good news to the poor, God has sent Me to heal the broken hearted, To preach deliverance to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
Freedom to those captive to oppressive and corrupt systems, the "acceptable year of the Lord," I'm told, is a reference to the day of Jubilee - the day when debt slaves are freed. Radical stuff, that, and no wonder those in power found him threatening.
The problem is, Pilate was the person who had the most power in that first-century Roman backwater, and he found no guilt in Jesus. Treason, sedition, revolution, agitation: none of these crimes were leveled at Jesus by Pilate. Pilate gave up Jesus to crucifixion at the demands of the Jewish authorities, and he literally washed his hands to signify that he wanted no part in the shedding of innocent blood.
Those Jewish authorities found Jesus threatening, NOT because Jesus was undermining the "corrupt systems and practices" of the day, but because He claimed to have authority that superceded the Pharisees. What enraged them wasn't His command to feed the poor, but His claim to be God: "Before Abraham was, I am."
Even in the passage you cite, from Luke 4, the audience "spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth" (4:22) and didn't try to kill Him until after He reminded them, in 4:24-27, that God's prophets occasionally helped foreigners while spurning God's chosen people. If there was revolutionary stuff in citing that passage, those who heard it must have missed it.
And, beyond all that, the Bible doesn't record that Jesus reformed any political or economic systems. So far as the Gospels record, He didn't free a single prisoner or a solitary slave.
If it is true that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of delivering captives and bringing liberty to the oppressed, it is most likely that He did so by purchasing the forgiveness of sin.
What did Jesus actually do to deliver people from the institutions of slavery or usury? Nothing -- at least, nothing that is recorded in the Gospels.
What did Jesus actually do to deliver people from their sin and the judgment that comes with it? He died on the cross.
I believe that, once again, you betray an effort to see Jesus as a political Messiah and reformer, and to distort Scripture to make it fit the Social Gospel rather than let it speak for itself.
Mark acts as if he can't understand me but I don't believe him. I think it's his way out of really working on a response.
Much of the time I have been prodding Marshall and ELAshley regarding what I feel are the inconsistencies of their positions. I have tacked on my own positions but Mark wants them in one place in order to have an easier target.
So here is summary for him:
I agree with Mark.
1. God still speaks to us. (God is unchanging and infinitely ungraspable, so we continue to make gains on old understandings - and lose some ground as well, like the treatment of the old and the extended family, greed for goods against the sharing of them - that is why God still speaks; we are not done yet getting what we can from the good news. When we are, if not before, heaven will arrive).
2. He (a Biblical and cultural box for God who is infinite but I wont get into that) speaks through his word (as in the risen Jesus Christ - not a book, though I come to know Jesus in part by reading scripture).
3. He speaks through his people (as they gather as a worshipping and thinking community and meet the risen Christ "where two or more are gathered I will be with you).
4.He speaks through Nature. (Yes, by the awe we feel at a waterfall, at the ladybug, the duckbill platypus, and at the current ways we understand how we came to be via weird and getting weirder cosmic laws, particle physics, natural selection and adaptation. This is why Mark and I agree on a separate way in which God speaks to us still from the Bible way, since Genesis is not about science but something else more narratively based for the stories we need to understand ourselves before we had science and still because science does not fully satisfy.)
5. He doesn't speak to us audibly as He did with Moses, and Noah, and Paul, etc, but He still speaks to us. (But not Paul. In fact no one except the writer of the Book of Revelation claimed God spoke to him or her and that was in a dream. Paul never claimed that God spoke to him. He does claim that that the risen Jesus appeared to him. That was a necessary part of his argument that he was an Apostle like those who knew him when he was on earth, and so just as authoritative.)
6. His word, though, is unchanging and still relevant. (OK, if now we mean the Bible, it certainly is unchanging and still relevant -- but not all parts as I have labored to make clear. We are different. It is unchanging, but since we are, some parts no longer hold and other parts have new meaning for us. And that is just fine since the Apostles themselves and the other New Testament writers treated their scriptures with the same understanding. "Meat is now fine at all times, stone tablets of laws need to be transformed into hearts written on with the Word, Jesus, but goddamn it, take care of the poor, widows and orphans, and keep the Sabbath except on a different day, honor your family, your neighbor, keep sex under control even if it might, perhaps, we are not yet sure, be a good thing.")
Finally, the whole of scripture and the whole of Christian tradition (which I believe are absolutely essential to the foundations of Christian belief) speak only because God and his Son live through them by the Holy Spirit for a devoted community and live in the world through that devoted community. But they live more fully when that devoted community is prayerful and thoughtful, not dogmatic and afraid of thought. Otherwise, we do what the Pharisees did: Jesus is put back into the abyss trying to liberate the dead or put back in Heaven wanting to carry out the will of the Father.)
Paul was speaking of the Pharisees and the Jews committed to the bound scrolls of their scriptures in Romans 10:
"But the righteousness that comes from faith says, "Do not say in your heart, "Who will ascend into heaven?' " (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 "or "Who will descend into the abyss?' " (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? "The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart"
Now I will leave you guys alone. I'm sure you guys are tired of me; I know Mark is. I will not post anymore unless specifically asked to clarify something I wrote. I've got to go worry over the last 14 days of this election and help spread democracy and freedom a little more within without getting into stupid wars. I rush to say that I do not feel that my reading your comments and posting my own are in any way a stupid war. I have gotten a lot out of it, and come to feel connected in that cyber way of remote conversation. Thank you for letting me join in, and I wish you all
mark
bubba
elashley
marshall art
dan
all the best.
2 Peter 1
May grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
Oh Really? Perhaps you can favor us poor mortals with your Godly wisdom, as to what parts are no longer relevant, your Majesty?
Geeeez, talk about arrogant!
That's why they sprinkled blood on the mercy seat in the O.T.. So that when God looked down from where he rested (the Shekinah Glory that hovered above the mercy seat) he could not (figuratively) see the Law that condemns man (the tablets given to Moses inside the Ark of the Covenant) because of the blood of sacrifice.
Christ's blood now covers the altar of God in heaven. Our sins are paid for.
No need any longer for animal sacrifice.
The only people who will be judged by the Law now are those who refuse the sacrifice of the Son of God. The Law is very much in effect for them.
Most of us do not follow Paul's preference that Christians remain celibate and have sex only if they really have to.
Many do not have wine, or communion at all.
Many do not structure their communities with the presbyter/deacon structure that Paul dictates to Timothy.
You want more Mark? Arrogant is not knowing what is in there but acting as if one does, no?
Your sins are forgiven, what do you do now? Go to Disneyland in an SUV? That's fine.
But according to Biblical teaching you can also participate in the divine nature and sell all you have and feed the poor, care for widows and orphans, liberate the indebted from the scheming credit predators. After all, you’re the literalist.
What has the Cross brought you with forgiveness? An offer of discipleship.
The whole of the Bible is relevant, in context. Don't we have to know why the sacrifice of animals was done in the first place to appreciate the sacrifice of The Lamb?
I do agree that a maturing Christian accepts His ethical duties to God and his fellow man, but I'm not sure your list is entirely accurate.
But according to Biblical teaching you can also participate in the divine nature and sell all you have and feed the poor, care for widows and orphans, liberate the indebted from the scheming credit predators. After all, you’re the literalist.
I welcome you to point out where the Bible teaches that Christians have a duty to sell literally all their possessions, and where it teaches us to work against predatory lending.
But, to address your concern, I do believe that one reason God saves us is so that we can serve Him, that Christ's salvation of us should lead to our becoming His disciples.
One way that we can serve and obey Him faithfully is to follow His lead on the authority of Scripture. When Christ was both tempted by Satan and questioned by the Pharisees, He appealed to Scripture as the final authority. He treated it as if it really is God's revealed message to man.
Look at the repentant thief on the cross. I'm quite sure he didn't understand that the man hanging next to him was a literal LAMB upon the altar of God for his sin. I doubt there were many at all who understood that at the time. All the thief asked was to be remembered, and Jesus went above and beyond in saying "This day you'll be with me in paradise"
That being said, the parts of scripture that relate the hows and wherefores of animal sacrifice have no bearing on our salvation. They do make an interesting study into the mind of God and the detail to which He insisted sacrifices be made-- in that those details mirror much of what Jesus did, was and IS.
But we do not sacrifice animals anymore.
Thanks for straightening me out. That sounds very much like where I am as well, with the one caveat that the socio-political is also part of God's creation and is wrapped up fully in the good news of salvation from sin, belonging to God, and full communion with Christ and each other.
Towards all these we should work.
As for the wilderness passage, I think that the New Testament presents Jesus' relationship with his scriptures in a variety of ways. Part of scripture he has done away with by his appearing. Part he fulfills and sums up. Part he follows as a model for being a good Jew. The writers were very concerned that for all his non-traditional teaching, he should also be seen as a good Jew.
I don't know of what inconsistencies you speak. I'm quite consistent in my position that we are to conform our lives to Scriptural teaching, as opposed to suggesting that "an understanding" would be shaped by modernity. Your statements suggest we are to be of the world. And whatever we think we hear from God, we must lay it against Scripture before proceeding. If it conflicts, it is likely not from God.
In my example regarding the Pill question, I used an understanding of Scipture to arrive at a decision. To clarify, as I'm unaware of any birth control pill that does NOT risk a flushing of an embryo, I totally reject the use to them. But were there any such pills that do not run that risk, they would be perfectly acceptable for a married couple to use, as Scripture clearly suggests that sex for pleasure is acceptable, even if not the ideal, within a marriage.
"Most of us do not follow Paul's preference that Christians remain celibate and have sex only if they really have to."
That is an example of our human natures more than a reinterpretation for the 21st century. All sex outside the traditional marriage arrangement is still forbidden. But even within a marriage we are not to be consumed with sex. That we don't follow this practice is just us being imperfect. To suggest that something about our time in history renders those traits to be old fashioned or not in vogue is to lie.
"I thought we also covered... slaves obeying the system of slavery."
Not obeying the system, but obeying the idea of acting like a Christian whether a slave or slave owner.
"It is unchanging, but since we are, some parts no longer hold and other parts have new meaning for us."
I reject this wholeheartedly. Both the notion that Scripture has new meaning, as well as the idea that we are changing. I insist to you that human nature is exactly what it was back in Biblical times. Nothing whatsoever has changed in that regard. The fact that we have better toys is meaningless in the fact of what is expected of us as Christians. Nor is there anything about our accumulated knowledge that has changed anything either. Nothing in what Scripture teaches us is impacted in the least by our times or our things. To say otherwise is to provide ourselves with excuses for rebellion.
Paul does not say this in 1 Corinthians, he does say that it is better to marry than to burn in passion. This makes total sense, one reason for marriage is to have a healthy monogamous sex life that is in-line with Gods Commandments.
The writer of Hebrews, in particular, highlighted the fact that old-covenant sacrifices were a shadow of what Christ accomplished on the cross, and there is a clear break between the old covenant and the new covenant, but the break is a matter of to whom the covenant is extended: both are upheld as fully authoritative revelations from God.
And, I agree that our being Christians impacts every aspect of our lives: not just our roles in the church or family but also our roles in the state, be they citizen, soldier, or judge.
But Christianity does NOT have a clear political platform: its mission is too eternal for that, and its scope is too broad for that.
My concern is that too many try to assert that their personal political opinions are ordained by God. As a result, they embrace a religion of the state that subordinates Christianity at best, and altogether replaces Christianity at worst.
Their all-encompassing utopian vision of bringing about God's kingdom on earth -- a clear case of immanentizing the eschaton -- is a recipe for a tyrannical despotism, and it is to the detriment of the church's real mission.
"Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency. But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn."
--1 Corinthians 7:1-9
By permission, not commandment. It IS better to be celibate. But not everyone has, as Paul puts it, the same "gift." Besides which, God knows who is and who is not suited to celibacy. Men aren't born fully mature Christians, we come to the faith already thoroughly steeped in sin; specifically the desires of the flesh. God knows who can remain celibate and live a healthy productive life with, at the very least, a modicum of joy. He also knows who will stumble constantly with his desires and live a defeated life. Paul recognized this, and accepted it... with conditions of course.
Not only that, but it is as much a picture of what the church became just prior that propelled it toward the Crusades as any I've read. It reeks of spiritual arrogance.
But Christianity does NOT have a clear political platform: its mission is too eternal for that, and its scope is too broad for that.
My concern is that too many try to assert that their personal political opinions are ordained by God.
AMEN! With this, I absolutely agree.
Their all-encompassing utopian vision of bringing about God's kingdom on earth -- a clear case of immanentizing the eschaton -- is a recipe for a tyrannical despotism
However, I'm not sure what Bubba means here. We ARE to be working for God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. If Bubba is merely warning of the dangers of trying to implement that kingdom by force and by violence, I would agree with this, too.
But then, that would be contrary to "God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven...", so you'd think people would be aware. But then, we have that whole problem of people confusing what we THINK with what God wants.
In no particular order, but saving Marshall for last, Eric (may I call you that instead of ELAshley? By the way, my name is Eric as well) brings up a fabulous point with the Crusades. Perhaps the absolute worst moment for the Church and such a cover for slaughtering everyone, Muslims, probably more Christians than Muslims, and so many in between, taking down a wonderful model of a Christian lead, multi-cultural Byzantine civilization (though the throne was frequently corrupt).
Identifying God's kingdom with a political position is a perversion. Influencing one's political position with Christian ethics while respecting the limitations is a right effort (Reinhold Nieburh's Christian realism is the best American model yet.
Paul preferred celibacy because he was almost certain that Christ was returning soon. He felt it was urgent to order the Christian community toward an all out effort to get the good news to the vast Gentile world and wasn't sure he would have any more generations to do it in.
So to turn celibacy into a lesson on moderation or "gifts," is to have a post-Pauline interpretation. This developed in the community as Christians had children, and their children had children and Christ had not come yet. It was a new understanding of a longer horizon in which Christ's kingdom existed.
For the same reason, infant baptism and later confirmation developed later in the Church. At first, they didn't count on having generations born while waiting for Jesus return. "I am coming soon."
What also changed was the understanding of the eschaton. Since it was near, the New Testament message, especially in Paul who wrote the earliest documents of the New Testament, was that everyone should be on their best behavior (this, in fact, probably corrects my criticism of Paul regarding slavery). Thus Paul was about claiming salvation and confessing faith in the one crucified. One can see in the later writings that the eschaton served as more of an example of what people should be working toward, since who knew when Jesus would come again. Thus James and Peter's emphasis on doing good works as a living out of faith.
Every one of them, I want to point out, suggested acting as if the eschaton was imminent. They had absolutely no expectation that 2K years would go by.
In the end, I wouldn't think you guys would so disagree with the Christian take within the Democratic Party so much as the Humanistic take.
Finally, for Marshall Art, I've given my response to Paul above, but I remain really interested in how you find Biblical teaching to present the clear cut case that a fetus is a human life. I know I am fearfully and wonderfully made, but the Psalms say a cataract is almost equally so. Paul says God called him from his mother's womb, but I take that as his providing a defense for his holding Apostolic Authority.
I'm asking for a non-interpretive biblical source that the fetus is such a human life that it has rights over against the mother. Not to say that I am not pro-life, but I am not pro-life because the Bible tells me so in so many words.
Thanks again for all your wonderful prodding. It is really making me think.
Chapter 3:
"Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses' face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory! Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory! Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit."
This freedom in Christ to read the scriptures anew drives Paul even further to say that those who know Christ as risen, know a freedom that even those who Jesus in person did not have. Chapter 5:
"From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation..."
More importantly, you write, "We ARE to be working for God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven."
Pardon my ignorance, but where exactly does the Bible teach that?
In Matthew 6, Christ teaches that we are to PRAY that God's kingdom come and that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
And, certainly, in that tiny slice of repsonsibility that each of us have, each Christian is to obey Christ's teachings.
But where does it say that we are to work to achieve God's kingdom on earth? To say that we are to pray that God establishes His kingdom, does not logically entail our establishing His kingdom for Him, so what passage of Scripture justifies this leap that you're making?
I would note that I did not say that we will achieve God's kingdom (ie, we won't have a perfect model of God's kingdom here), but that nonetheless, we are to work towards that end.
Praying "Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven," and not working towards a more Godly life/kingdom in our own lives would be akin to praying "Deliver us from evil," when we have no plan to do our part to be delivered from evil.
If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well," but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?
So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
At our church, we pray, "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven," and then we go do our part to follow in Jesus' steps and to "give them the necessities of the body" and so work towards God's kingdom on earth.
Surely we don't disagree on this?
But we are God's hands
We are God's voice
We are the ones who must
make the choice
And if it isn't now,
tell me when?
If it isn't you, then tell me
who will save the children?
First, on your last comment, I don't think that is a confirmation of reading Scripture in a new way or that the meaning of Scripture can mean something different because of the present. It seems to me to be simply a distinction between pre- and post-Christ understanding as He is part of the message that went before. That is, He continues the theme and clarifies what was there to begin with. It is even as Christ had stated that laws about murder extend to even nasty thoughts of our neighbor, that it is the same. In addition, that the law is not changed because of Christ, but incomlete without Him. So any "new way" to view Scripture began and ended with Christ, not that today's circumstances changes anything in Scripture. I defer to Eric and/or Bubba for a more articulate explanation.
Regarding: "but I remain really interested in how you find Biblical teaching to present the clear cut case that a fetus is a human life."
I don't, but equally true is that there is nothing to say otherwise. There are plenty of verses that indicate that what grows within a woman is human life, but more importantly are things like honesty. There is no doubt about the function of the human sex organs. Their purpose is primarily for procreation. The pleasure experienced is a function of design, and without the pleasure, the species would have died out long ago. Who would engage in it without the pleasure except by force, either by the self or otherwise? The pleasure is such that most desire the activity for the pleasure alone, but, again, pleasure is not the purpose of the action, whether we've made it so or not. So since the purpose is procreation, there can be no other possible explanation for what is likely to occur given the right circumstances, and that occurance is the creation of another human being. It can be no other "thing" for there is no possible alternative that can be produced by the action. To say that what is produced is something other than human, or that at the point of conception it might not YET be human, is totally dishonest and based on what people would prefer was true, rather than what is true. The preference is that people can engage in the activity without concern of having to care for another child. Well, let's make it easy and say that it isn't a child yet, so what we do with it doesn't matter. That's dishonest to a most pathetic degree. We cannot be holy when we are dishonest, when we so "need" to have sex that we ignore the reality of what we are doing, when we pretend what we know to be true isn't true.
"...a non-interpretive biblical source that the fetus is such a human life that it has rights over against the mother."
You're not likely to find one particular verse that gives the fetus rights that supersede those of the mother. But I offer you these.
Psalm 139:15-16
"My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."
'in thy book' says the psalmist. We know God has books in which various and sundry things are recorded from the Revelation. It is a fair assumption that we are likewise recorded in his 'to do' 'book of conceptions.' To add weight to this claim we can look at Jeremiah 1:5
"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."
Jeremiah, according to the Lord Himself, was known and ordained to specific purpose BEFORE he was formed in his mother's womb.
Knowing God to be omniscient it's another fair assumption to say that God knows everything that will happen before it happens. In point of fact (I venture to say), God knew everything that was going to happen before ever He created the universe, and man upon a tiny mote of earth within it. Ergo He knew Adam would sin, knew that His preincarnate self would become carnate and die for the sins of all mankind; knew that Abraham would doubt His promise of a son and take Sarah's handmaid; knew that Israel would need Jeremiah; knew that Eric Ashley would one day believe the testimony of men 1900 years in the grave...
Knowing all this, Exodus 20:13 give the unborn as much protection as God deems necessary.
But man, whose heart is desperately wicked, and deceitful above all things [Jeremiah 17:9], is lost without the saving grace of God. As are many millions of aborted children from the abomination of Roe v Wade to present... lost. But not to God.
Does the mother's life take precedence? That's a moral question I leave to the family. Personally, however, I say no... BOTH are equally important.
I'm not sure why Mark thought your new pic was... whatever he said it looked like. I think its much better than the hiding under the snow tree thing. The new pic reminds me of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.
Mine? I just stuck my face in a scanner. Makes me look (according to the Lone Ranger) like a serial killer. I admit that kinda hurt my feelings at the time, but I'm not inclined to change it at present.
As I wrote before, Christians should indeed be obedient to Christ, but it doesn't seem to me that the Bible itself instructs us to bring about God's kingdom. What it does, is instructs us to pray to God for its coming, which is a whole different matter.
"When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life."
Woman worth more than fetus.
Exodus 22: 18- 19
"You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live. Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death."
Where is the campaign to nominate Supreme Court justices who will carry out these instructions?
Exodus 22:20-27
"Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction. You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans. If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them. If you take your neighbor's cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your neighbor's only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate."
How do we not pick and choose what we like and keep and what we do not like and do not keep?
And if we are ready to pick and choose, how do we know which ones Jesus has done away with or satisfied or simply is making us wait for that great getting up mornin'?
To be clear, I am not clear. Viability of the fetus apart from the mother is a factor for me. But since viability is a gray area, I am in a gray area. Conception does not, for me, invest proprietary rights of the embryo over the mother.
The area between these two points is very troubling. And I am most confident with the part of the argument that wants to work toward drastic reductions of unwanted pregnancies. The incidence of accidental conception while on birth control is miniscule compared to miscarriages, and, no, I don't think God is calling little Jimmy home in miscarriage. It is a tragedy and the later in pregnancy the more tragic the experience. But not as tragic as the death of a birthed child or pedophilia. Miscarriages rarely destroy marriages, but infant/child death often do because the psychological devastation is that much more vast. That tells me something.
But I am in a gray area because I do find certitude in Biblical texts and instead rely on a combination of resources from the human sciences, religious ethics, scripture and prayer.
I have not seen anyone do it on scripture alone. Something else is always their starting point, even if their first step is toward scripture. And that something else is their inescapable formation in the context of whatever time they live. I think God ordains it this way. And the trust of faith is in God, not in the multivalent scripture which reveals God.
As I wrote in response to Mark, scripture is a powerful help, but not the only help, and never has been the only help. Christian thinking of the past (their minds together applied to scripture), our own minds, and communities of faith are necessary ingredients.
Even then, in humility, things are not certain.
Paul is trying to contain the disordering consequences of what he calls lustful passion (I Thess. 4) before the Lord comes quickly, or in I Corinthians 7 "because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband" giving each other conjugal rights, and this, Paul says, is merely his concession to what is apparently for him a maddeningly instinctive drive.
Sorry, Marshall, to goad you with the evolution bit, but the bottom line is the claim that "the pleasure of sex is a secondary function serving procreation," is a post-biblical, post-medieval new Christian interpretation of what God has given us in sex. (And probably a post-biblical, modern new experience for women.)
By the way, in two denominational instances, your order of what sex is for were reversed in the last fifty years. The Catholic catechism now says that the first understanding of the sexes as created by God is that man and woman are made for each other; secondarily, as "one flesh," they can procreate and transmit life, thereby cooperating in God's work. This is a reversal coming from Vatican II.
In the Anglican 1979 prayer book catechism, union of husband and wife is intended for mutual joy and comfort, and then, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children.
Any psychologist will surely agree that this is by far the healthier understanding.
You're confusing things. I put forth the reality of sexuality, that being that the pleasure is a function of it's design, to ensure that it takes place at all. This is the same reason why there would be Biblical instruction regarding sex. The pleasure of sex is an all consuming lure for many people. The results of giving in to this lure has been mostly negative for society. The Biblical restrictions make sense in light of what can and has occurred when people put too much emphasis on engaging in sex. It becomes like a god as people let their lives revolve around their next encounter.
As to the sanctity of the life of the fertilized ovum, any decision to feel otherwise is not based on the facts of the situation. It is based soley on the desires of people to engage in sexual activity. Of freakin' course it's a human being. There is nothing that trumps that fact but human subjectivity and convenience. As I said before, to suggest otherwise is lying. All it is is people unwilling to discipline themselves to control their urges.
If sexual pleasure for you is a burden of lust threatening you with the burning fires of hell and damnation, then you really are extremely close follower of Paul and Augustine. I confess I have no idea what it's like to live as if the 1st century was last week.
I don't think you do either. While we disagree, one of my points is that we disagree about the conclusions we draw from science. You speak of "fertilized ovum" only because you are of your time. We are science informed people and when you turn to scripture to write of the sanctity of life, you do so with "fertilized ovum" and the whole zygote to embryo to fetus development in mind. No Apostle, no Church father, no writer of biblical texts, no Christian - no one, in fact - did so until the last hundred odd years.
As for the facts of the situation, I offer the following short list of things the human embryo shares with all four footed animals:
At the fourth week: the head and tail folding brings about an incorporation of a portion of the primitive yolk sac into the embryo.
At the fifth week: embryonic pharyngeal arches, the invaginations between the gill pouches or pharyngeal pouches, open the pharynx to the outside. Gill pouches appear in all tetrapod animal embryos. In mammals (including humans), the first gill bar (in the first gill pouch) develops into the lower jaw. In a later stage, all gill slits close, with only the ear opening remaining open.
At the sixth week: the heart begins to beat.
If you feel, Marshall, that all the above which proceeds exactly the same for human and animal embryos is sanctified, then you have to begin battling a "freakin" lot more veterinary offices and not just clinics.
Get busy.
Notice the jutting jaw of an arrogant stubborn personality. Hitler had such a jutting jaw.
Note the Neanderthal appearance of his forehead.
Note the Down's Syndrome style haircut.
I'm not saying Dan is a Neanderthal Down's Syndrome Hitler.
I'm just saying he resembles one. LOL!
You wont see me. I'm no fool.
You're no fool? It's good to have a positive self-image. Good for you.
However, as for your "facts", you ignore the most salient: those others will only be animals, and the human one is a person. Any scientist in the field would fail to be confused by those similarities upon which you put so much value. There is no science that supports the notion that personhood arrives at some later point in human development than conception.
As to whether or not I'm "burdened" by sexual temptation, I would say no more or less than any other man. But your comments suggest you are not. That can mean one of two things:
1) You lost 'em in the war, or
2) You're a slut with no regard for God's clear Will on the subject of sexuality.
Oh, and one more thing: There have been many from very early in church history to have written against abortion. It was even a bit further back than 100 years. In fact, it may have been not much more than about 100AD. It may have been Eric or Neil at 4Simpsons blog that listed at least half a dozen or so, with quotes. They didn't, apparently, need the scientific proof of fetal development to understand that what grew inside a woman was another person. Honorable people know it intuitively. Less honorable people pretend science gives them an out.
If I had to give Dan a hobbit name... he'd be a crotchety gaffer for sure, so...
Gaffer Danby Fernrill
"Surely something will break, and the sun will once more shine through."
How the darkness will break never crosses his mind. He doesn't realize that many will die or be ensorcelled by some undreamt of dark lord.
And should the sun truly reappear, he'll just sigh, and say, "See? Nothing amiss at all. We just had a dark spell, but now all is right with the world. Now we can put to trial all those beastly troublemakers in Hobbiton."
It was Marshall who made the comment and neither Mark nor Marshall's comments about my photo bother me, but thanks for the defense just the same.
My only problem with Mark's remarks were that they belittle our Down Syndrome's friends and that's just, well, let me say that my Down Syndrome brothers and sisters would know better than to mock someone because of their looks or disability.
On the other hand, if I look like a hobbit in my original photo, maybe I'll have to go back to it - I dig them hobbits.
Gaffer Fernrill's problem then is that he sees the darkness spreading from Mordor as little more than an opportunity to sell more candles and lamp oil, all the while denying that the world is not coming to an end.
Of much more concern than childish remarks about my looks, I find Christians slandering other Christians and misrepresenting their positions to be of much greater concern.
Needless to say, you misunderstand and misrepresent my position in your Hobbit remarks. But let's write that off to your just trying to joke around.
LOLOL! Just poking a little fun!
"The new pic, like Geoffrey's, is creepy. I much prefer the pretentious Walden Pond type pic you've always used."
Hmmm. Looks better than when I wrote it.
This is the second time in recent weeks that you've attributed a comment of mine to Mark. Must be the common "Mar" part of our names. Get some rest, my friend.
Exodus 21:22,23. How do you deal with it in a literal way and if Jesus’ appearance did not make it pass away?
And this passage comes after Ex. 20:13, which, Eric claims, gives “the unborn as much protection as God deems necessary.”
Mark, by the way, this would be an example of staying on topic.
Marshal reveals himself unconsciously when he says, “those others will only be animals…” Note the “dishonorable intuition” of “will… be”. I don’t think we do intuit a zygote or embryo as an actual, rights invested human life. The Bible certainly does not find the fetus to be more than property, at least by the literal command of Ex. 21:22,23.
Yes, for us, the scientists in the field, the doctors in the field, and judges and legal experts in the field, and the rest of us dishonorable people in the field of the 21st century, the zygote and the embryo is potential human life in development.
But a human life invested with legal rights is set, at the moment, at viability – which is itself vague. The law of the land and medical ethics have made it so. Those of us here with reasonable minds understand that the legal framework is partly made from the majority of medical, ethical, and scientific findings. We may reasonably and strongly disagree with the majority, but to deny that the law, the science, and the ethics exist and is built on the whole (wobbly) structure of Western Enlightenment is to be a lot more than just pissy.
As for personhood, when one reads books instead of blogs, one learns that personhood is a tricky concept but definitely built at least on consciousness and retained experiences. Conception is consciousness, Marshall? Not even for those conceiving, or just barely, at that moment. Pershonhood is more vague than the beginning of a human life wherever we place that beginning.
As for my sexual pleasure, Marshall, it is my honor and glory, a kind of communion similar to the one with God. I revel in it. (This would be Biblical language by the way, Marshall).
And if “Eric or Neil” can show us a quote of your “fertilized ovum” from “further back than 100 AD,” I’ll tell you who I do it with and post pictures.
Ex. 21:22,23, Mr. Biblical Teaching, how do you deal with it? And if you can’t, you’re whole house of cards is done.
That bit of Exodus. How does it support your pathetic position? To whom is the serious injury done in that example? Does it speak to the woman's health or the child given birth after the woman is hit? It seems to me that it is speaking of injury after birth, thus to the child. Likely it is to either mother or child. Thus, if the child died, the eye or eye thing comes into play. Mere property would not justify such a sentence.
I exposed myself as a person with common sense. The animal zygote has no apples to apples connection with the human zygote. Similarities exist between man and ape, but except for yourself, similarities mean nothing. One is an ape and the other a man. End of story.
It doesn't matter what the law says regarding viability. Laws are man made and not God's Word written in stone. THERE IS NOTHING IS SCIENCE THAT SUPPORTS THE NOTION THAT A HUMAN ZYGOTE IS NOT A PERSON All you've done is repeat the same old subjective arguments regarding consciousness and self-awareness. Personhood is NOT tricky in the least to honorable men. It is endowed in the same manner as its DNA, from the parents, and can only be taken from it by cretins like yourself. Make that FREAKIN' cretins.
I didn't think you would be able to take the excitement of pictures. So I guess no ancient quote of "fertilized ovum," is forthcoming?
Your usual blind-in-one-eye missed the word, miscarriage, I'm thinking?
Hard to have an injury after birth if a miscarriage occurred before there could be a birth. Kind of the way time and history work, although you are a respecter of neither, it seems to me.
The eye for eye, therefore, applies to any further injury suffered by... the woman. The unborn child can be compensated by money. Injuries to the woman must be compensated by the infliction of similar loss.
Oddly, at least for you, a fetus born without a brain has the parent's DNA but is not a person. A child adopted at birth has DNA from people who will not impact that child's personhood in any significant way.
Eventually, unless I am giving you too much credit, you will realize that we talking about two different things and that you are using the wrong word for what you want to talk about.
Exodus 21:22,23:
"When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life."
I'm not asking you to consider abortion or even to merely approve of it for others. I'm asking you how does one read scripture and find an unambiguous biblical directive that clarifies where a rights-invested human life begins.
I'm suggesting that there is no honest way to do so and Pro-life arguments are honorably built on modern moral reasoning sometimes undergirded by scriptural interpretation and a partial use of science.
I also suggesting that pro-choice arguments are not justified solely via scripture (I really do NOT think Ex. 21:22,23 justifies abortion for modern day Christians unless one reads the Bible without discernment and thought). Pro-choice as well is built on modern moral reasoning (thought differently chosen moral concerns) sometimes undergirded by scriptural interpretation and a partial use of science.
And, Mom2, not to let you off the hook, the Christian church has always refused to ask its members to live as "ordinary citizens with a trusting heart" until the frontier protestantism of nineteenth century America (which itself can't agree on much at all).
Paul is very difficult in long parts of Romans, Colossians, Thessalonians, etc. Early century Christians, medieval Christians, and modern Christians work hard to interpret the faith for themselves and the world. That is what discipleship is about.
Russia and back again?
Try this Mom2:
In the dictionary, look up:
1. metaphor
2. poetry
I have at least one of the four corners of wisdom. But you're down the street a few blocks and refusing to walk my way.
In an ironic twist (you should look up "irony," too) the Psalms are part of what is called Wisdom Literature: a genre steeped in the use of poetic metaphor.
My Bible does not use the word "miscarriage". So perhaps it is YOU who is misinterpreting. Also, it must be considered that such word, if you wish to declare it is a more precise translation, might not carry the same exact meaning that the word holds today. I know you obviously want to pretend that for whatever reason, a fetus, or zygote, or embryo might not qualify for the status of a human being fully endowed with the same right to life as even pathetic souls such as yourself, but human definitions and interpretations won't cut it. An honorable man would assume the personhood of the very first stage of human development. Could it be that you hold an orgasm to be more important than the life of another? Could it be that you don't possess the discipline and restraint a man of honor holds to deny one's self such pleasures for the sake of the life of another? Spin it any way you like. It's a person, a human being, another worthy of protection and respect.
No honest way to do so? I submit that there is no honest way to do otherwise. You could spend your life and not find a reasonable interpretation to support abortion or the notion that we are not completely human worthy of the unalienable right to life from the moment of conception. Nor could you find science that supports it either. I've been through this debate before. One of the first posts at my blog fairly exhausted the exercise without one opponent able to present anything that wasn't subjectively tinged. Not one bit of science that could be put forth as evidence. I doubt you could do better. Feel free to try if Eric doesn't mind any further digression. For my part, I'm always up for the challenge.
You do know, don't you, that even though it says King James Bible that does not mean that it was written by the Lord's own brother?
In 1611, the committee that drafted the KJV improved upon the various English translations that had been done the previous eighty or so years.
But there was an awful lot they did not know.
You keep asking about my sex life. It makes me think you do want to see pictures. Why so curious? You're not thinking of swinging another way are you?
I hear Chicago is full of commie boys.
I'm thinkin' it's because you're less than honorable. And it's that that concerns me when referring to your attitudes regarding sexuality. Personally, I don't much care what you do in the barnyard. But to try and pretend your self-gratifying manifestations have any basis in science or Scripture is the least honorable spin of all.
I can work with, "so that her fruit depart from her..."
But can you?
Asked and answered already, dude. You lost.
"My Bible does not use the word "miscarriage". So perhaps it is YOU who is misinterpreting. Also, it must be considered that such word, if you wish to declare it is a more precise translation, might not carry the same exact meaning that the word holds today."
What is an evasion:
"My Bible does not use the word "miscarriage". So perhaps it is YOU who is misinterpreting. Also, it must be considered that such word, if you wish to declare it is a more precise translation, might not carry the same exact meaning that the word holds today."
The loss is your mind.
22"If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely, but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever thewoman's husband demands and the court allows. 23But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for ey, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
And down at the bottom, where the Biblical scholars who put this Bible together explain things it says this:
"21:23serious injury.Either to mother or to child."
Forgive me if I take the word of the compilers and translaters of this particular Bible. You're free to believe whatever Stan Lee version you like.
In fact, try all of them and see the preponderance of evidence.
KJV is much better with OT than NT.
I'll be happy to teach on online class if you guys are ready. After the election how are you going to fill your time with so much hate?
It'd be better to improve yourself in some way.
Feodor and I agree on something!
The King James IS superior.
But the KJV is of its time and loses a lot of sense simply because the ancient Greek and Hebrew languages are much better understood now.
The NIV, on the other hand, faces a welter of criticism for being too loosely attentive to the original languages in order to bolster Calvinist readings. The committees of translation and editing were predominately Baptist and Presbyterian.
Committees on other translations were much more diverse, coming from a wider geographic representation.
I'm reminded of the story of the Texas farmer sixty years ago when the Revised Standard Version was being talked up by academics who drove out to the Western badlands on Sundays. He thought King James Version meant it was written by the brother of Jesus. He, of course, could not be faulted too much since he was kind of off the grid of such matters.
By the way, EL and MA, you who decry scholarship like it's a land shark, that thing you read between leather covers and red ink for Jesus?
You would not have it except for a two thousand year history of intense scholarship. Translation is difficult business and only approximate.
So you are dependent on scholarship, EL on outdated but sturdy scholarship, MA on less than competent scholarship.
AND you read only approximate parallels to the original text. Again, like I have always said, you first Christian thinking step is a modern one (seventeenth century modern for EL).
I think you're both making assumptions that can't be truly proven, that being, that the scholars involved with NIV couldn't be the better ones. Having more denominations represented in the research only means consensus is achieved, but not necessarily accuracy. I don't think the NIV people just fell off the turnip truck.
That being said, I wouldn't say I'm married to the NIV. It's simply that here at the mansion, it's the book I have at hand for most of my blog related discussions. I have others that are more cumbersome in physical size, and at my church, there are several more.
Still, one would have to explain why the translation and understanding of the NIV, particularly Ex 21:22,23 is wrong. Merely dismissing it because it's NIV won't cut it.
Oh, and BTW Feo, there's no hate here except for bad behavior.
I used the NIV in college, where I also learned Biblical Hebrew and Greek, but just two years of each.
When I went to graduate school and needed to do much more in depth research into the syntax and idioms of the text, it becomes clear that no version is perfect. One language simply cannot be substituted for another and clearly deliver the same meaning with the exact same nuance. In many cases, it is not certain which of two or three possibilities of the Greek or Hebrew really was meant.
But in no case where the NIV had its own unique take not found in the others did that take seem cautiously correct.
That was experience for all of us who came to graduate school from backgrounds that used the NIV.
But it's obviously your life. If one wants to be moved by the music and grandeur, few are better than the KJV.
If wants a little more clarity and straightforwardness, I tend to go back and forth from the New Revised Standard and the New English Bible.
But if one wants to get into accuracy, its either learn the original language or read commentaries on each book of the Bible by well respected scholars. And then one is back to the question of who one trusts.
I'm following the standard set in the blogs here, except with logic.
Nice dodge, wussie.
Regarding your last comment, true logic would dictate requesting elaboration on the comment:
"He is a liar. He is a Murderer. He is a Marxist. He is racist. He does not respect the Constitution. He does not believe in genuine free speech."
Here's an obvious one just for you: When Barry answered questions about his relationship to Bill Ayers, he responded lamely with answers like, "He's a guy in the neighborhood." Since we know that Ayers was much more to Barry than that, he is lying.
Here's another: As Barry is cool with letting babies who have survived an abortion attempt die, he is complicit in their unjustified deaths. As a getaway driver is guilty of theft for transporting the actual thieves, Barry is guilty of killing those babies.
You may disagree with these opinions, thereby exposing your lack of intelligence, but they are not lies.
Slander begets slander, civility begets civility. Isn't that what you really meant to say? Or do you shift personalities between between articles?
So I gave a couple of examples illustrating why those comments are "lies". You're free to attempt to rebut. To expect that we, personally must take steps to arrest him is goofiness. We're debating why the jerk is unworthy of the presidency and there are no laws that would enable us to have him arrested. Because abortion is legal, it doesn't mean the unborn haven't been murdered under the definition of the word. And because Obumfart hasn't personally assisted in an abortion, doesn't mean he isn't complicit by his support, which makes him guilty as well. No law will jail him for that at this time.