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It is as though the Christian faith enjoys a special status not shared by other perspectives: to reject Christianity, we must obtain a doctorate in theology and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it is untrue, but to accept Christianity, all we need is the faith of a little child, with no prior sympathetic or systematic study of other religious and nonreligious alternatives.
He gives up the hope of ascertaining first or final causes, of comprehending the supernatural, or of conceiving of an infinite personality.
Through which twigs in this great bush of life can we draw a line between creatures that end their lives in the grave and those that continue through eternity?
it is common for Christians to maintain that, like a dog undergoing a painful medical procedure, we cannot understand God's purposes in all that happens; we must simply trust that God knows what he is doing. This may be the case, but if so, how can anyone be held accountable for thinking like the dog, for failing to grasp that the purposes of God, if he exists, are good? We do not blame the dog for its reaction to the medical procedure.
If God is infinite and the universe is finite,
But the universe IS infinite.
I cannot doubt that Mormons and members of other faiths experience this same phenomenon when they talk about a "burning in the bosom" as a way of authenticating their faith. Given this reality, I don't think it's unwarranted to ask for more than a sense of God's presence,
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises ... in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate
It was not often as a Christian that I studied the writings of non-Christian philosophers, but whenever I ran across a confident nonbeliever, I was able to dismiss his confidence as the ill-begotten fruit of an unregenerate mind. Eventually I came to see this position as circular: we cannot hope to know the truth unless we are sanctified, but we cannot be sanctified unless we know the truth. Before questioning this tenet, I was generally impervious to arguments unbelievers might lay at the feet of my faith, knowing that these skeptics were by definition depraved, even at the level of the
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The message from the Bible is clear: human reason, unsupported by a commitment to God, is worse than useless; it is irredeemably deceptive. Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5). See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ (Colossians 2:8).
One tactic I deplore on both sides of the divide is the use of ad hominem, attacking one's opponents rather than their arguments.
These minor concessions gave me a sense that I had hammered out what I believed personally, rather than blindly inheriting what others had taught me.
Given that the followers of so many divergent sects believe themselves to be closer to the apostolic ideal than others, I began to suspect that chances were slim that my particular brand of Christianity hit the mark.
My questions have centered around orthodox Christianity and whether it is closer to 1st century Christianity than the brand practiced in North America.
Was I accepting an evolved interpretation of these texts rather than the authors' original intentions?
I see Christianity as a square peg and reality a round hole. The square peg doesn't fit in the round hole, so we start whittling and sandpapering the corners, trying to make it fit. The tools we use for whittling and sandpapering are collectively known as "Bible commentary." We find, for example, that the earth is very ancient, not a few thousand years old, that there are biological bases for illnesses like schizophrenia, not merely demon possession, that the Bible had a lot of editing as it was put together and doesn't appear error free. We incorporate these and other items into our Christian
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If the Holy Spirit is indeed active in the lives of true Christians, why must apologists like Baldwin even have to exhort them to live according to the precepts of their faith?
it is not obvious to me that their good deeds necessarily spring from a supernatural source.
God is always to be credited for Christians' good works but cannot be blamed for their failures.
this did not mean their understanding of reality was more informed or correct than ours.
if thousands, millions, or billions embrace such ideas, they are more readily considered worthy of respect, not because the ideas are inherently more reasonable, but simply because many have held them for so long.
The beginning stages will be the most difficult: some of what is said to and about you will create a tight knot in your stomach. Over time, however, the confrontations will decrease in frequency and intensity, and you will be able to get on with life in a more or less stable relationship with your family and friends, provided you don't live up to their expectations of an apostate and become a jaded, angry, licentious fool.
it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics;
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Instead of regularly developing testable hypotheses for peer review and scientific publication (whether in friendly creationist journals or in mainstream evolutionary journals), creationists often tend instead to write books or present conferences directly to the majority of the populace that already rejects the shared ancestry of humans and apes. I am disturbed by the flippant disregard and disdain on the part of many creationists for the patient investigation and analysis that have led most scientists in the past century to accept evolution. While a lay creationist, I refused to consider
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"Why would God allow so much apparent evidence for evolution to exist in the first place? Did he plant this evidence as a means of giving unbelievers a ready excuse for rejecting God? Is God deceitful, or is there in fact not even any apparent evidence for evolution?"
What matters for the credibility of the creation model is that there exist intermediate features that creationists had earlier predicted not to exist, and that these erroneous predictions require explaining away. This is not to deny that significant gaps do still exist, but it does not change the reality that many previously unknown, morphologically intermediate forms have been found since the time Darwin advanced his theory.
I actually am quite heartbroken to see the way in which many churches have embraced Intelligent Design because they felt they had to have something to defend against evolutionary atheism, and yet they've attached themselves to a perspective that is headed for trouble, and in the process, I fear that the churches will be demoralized, and faith will be made to look foolish, all of which is totally unnecessary (Collins 2007).
it is a double standard to apply Sherlock's Principle regularly in one's quotidian life but to refuse to allow scientists to apply it to a domain such as evolution that threatens one's religious preconceptions regarding origins.
Men think [a disease] divine merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things
We have a naturalistic program in operation that simply works. Why not press it to its limits in the biological domain and see how far we can get?
why look outside of nature, to something of which we can have no empirical knowledge, to explain the biological species?
The reluctance to admit supernatural causation into science has far more to do with the impressive success and productivity of naturalistic science compared to the failure of supernaturalism to yield any significant testable claims, let alone any successfully tested claims.
if the designer (God) himself is complex, an even more complex superdesigner (Super-God) is required to have designed God,
This is not a given; I disagree with most of his analysis.
"Ideology, like halitosis ... is what the other person has"
Jesus called us to be his witnesses, not his experts in comparative religion. We cannot prove that Jesus is the world's one Savior and Lord, or that the Bible is alone the Word of God written. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do that
reason is the very thing we short-circuit when we admit that God's ways are higher than our ways.
There are naturalists who are happy to allow religion to flourish because of its usefulness in keeping the masses in line
Evolution does not oblige us to change the oil any more than it obliges us to treat others as we would like to be treated. But if we wish our engines to remain in good health, or if we wish to remain respected members of our society, or if we value our own self-respect, we have to make the effort to change the oil or treat others with kindness, as the case may be. It's not something we need to be told by a cosmic Lawgiver.
Very many people are not interested in maintaining their car; it's too expensive or too much trouble. Likewise, people are not interested in maintaining moral or civil rules simply because it is good for them or for society. These people are better suited for a higher authority to provide that motivation.
It is commendable to spend our weekends or vacations volunteering at a homeless shelter, but all our efforts to alleviate the suffering of the homeless pale in comparison to the development of political systems, antibiotics, vaccinations, telecommunications, modern transportation systems, air conditioning, entertainment, and agricultural advances that have lifted the bulk of even the lower classes of today above the lot of kings in past centuries.
Charity is always good and will always be necessary, but historically Christians have been long on [charity] and short on [structural justice]. One reason is that charity never offends; a passion for justice often does. To paraphrase Roman Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara from Brazil: "When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint; when I asked why there were so many poor, they called me a communist"
The Bible is silent or ambiguous concerning some of the most vexing moral issues of the day, leading sometimes to bitter disagreement among Christians.
If we insist that a passage such as the above has to be interpreted correctly (meaning other than at face value), then we demonstrate that we, and not the text, are the final arbiter of what is right and wrong. We decide it's unreasonable to interpret it according to its apparent meaning, so we search for other possible texts to mitigate its implications and settle on an alternative ethic we consider to be both biblical and reasonable. But in so doing, we have violated the unambiguous teachings of Jesus; we have cherry picked the texts we prefer, and we might as well have based our decision in
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Our perception that things are "going down the tubes" is fueled in part by a barrage of media coverage that makes us aware of crimes we might have been ignorant of in previous generations.
In 1999 Christian pollster George Barna released the results of a survey of 3,854 individuals, finding that 25 percent of the interviewees had been divorced at least once. The religious group with the highest divorce rate was nondenominational evangelicals and fundamentalists (34 percent), followed by Baptists (29 percent). On the lower end of the scale were Catholics, Lutherans, atheists, and agnostics, each at 21 percent
For those who chafe at the prospect of our mortality, I offer this assurance from Jennifer Michael Hecht: "You will never know that you are dead, so, as far as you're concerned you will always be alive"
The traditionalist should pause to consider (a) that we have no evidence of these prophetic manuscripts prior to 167 BCE and (b) that the prophecies correspond in minute detail to events leading up to 167 BCE but not afterward.
But when the only reference to the Josiah prophecy is contained in a book that also documents its fulfillment, it is a smokescreen to complain of skeptics' bias against the supernatural. Those who will not entertain the possibility of a natural explanation for the purported prophecy in the book of Kings, simply because the story finds itself in their holy book, may fairly be charged with bias against the natural.
Arthur Pink's
Not the most competent interpreter....
It occurs in the past tense as a reference to the Exodus. But even more damning for the establishment of any parallel between "my son" in Hosea and "my son" in Matthew is the unflattering attributions to "my son" Israel in the original passage. Did Jesus flee from God? Did he sacrifice to the Baals and burn incense to images? Matthew was clearly grasping at straws. His credibility, not to mention his status as a divinely inspired author, should be roundly challenged. Let's call a spade a spade.
It is a cornerstone of Protestant hermeneutics to compare scripture with scripture when the meaning of one passage is in doubt. The intent of this approach is to enable us to grasp more clearly the meaning of the ambiguous passage (assuming it is truly ambiguous and not merely inconvenient; in the present case, "inconvenient" would be more appropriate than "ambiguous").
if the transfiguration followed on the heels of Jesus' prediction, what could have been the purpose of including the clause, "there are some of those who are standing here who shall not taste death until ..."? Though there is wiggle room for interpreting Jesus' meaning, this is not language ordinarily used to describe an event that is to take place in short order.
