peteinmn wrote:....having had one-sided conversations with God for many, many years, I have lots more questions than answers. God could clear it all up with a visit and an update. Just a suggestion.
Wow. Ain't it the truth?
I have lots of moments like this: Yesterday, I was watching the news and they showed video of those conjoined twins that were separated recently. The video showed them still conjoined at the top of their heads. As much as I can talk about the Problem of Evil and, you know, Mysterious Ways, etc., at times like when watching that video I think, "you know, put somebody in charge who knows what he's doing."
That's this week's Chiff & Fipple Undisputed Confession (A registered trademark).
The Weekenders wrote:Just part of the semi-weekly crypto-Marxist attack on institutions important to the status-quo; the Presidency, the country, the flag, (etc., etc.)
I got it: questioning the letter of the bible is crypto-marxism.
Questioning status-quo generally is crypto-marxism. Ergo, anything non-conservative is crypto-marxist. Q.E.D.
I love that "crypto-Marxism". I thought, like "Pinko", this applied to anything left of mainstream Alabama Democrats, like Greens? On the other side, they had "Lewd Capitalist Vipers"--don't forget capitalizing, it's essential to these highly elaborate mystical debates :roll:
Week's (not to be confused with them pinko semi-weeks, of course), since you mentioned Cran's age, you fall for yours being questioned... How old are you? I mean, did you really take part in electing Mc Carthy? Or is it just nostalgia, and you were too young to volunteer for 'Nam?
Paul---harpo-Marxist (grouchy at times, too).
Last edited by Zubivka on Mon Oct 20, 2003 3:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ridseard wrote:Biblical literalism, when it conflicts with science, is not necessarily benign. In fact, it's scary. It was precisely this issue which got Galileo in some serious trouble.
B does not follow from A. It was not precisely. It was, in fact, not at all the issue.
The issue was a church in sin, fallen from God and ignorant of Scripture. Instead, Galileo's predicament was the result of NOT taking it literally. Scripture agrees with Galileo. It was man that did not agree and instead desired mastery and esteem. A church that thought best of subjecting the masses rather than freeing them.
Like Walden, I take a literal view of scripture. Where it claims to be history, it is history. Where it claims to be science, it is science and where it claims to free the soul, it does.
Erik
Last edited by ErikT on Mon Oct 20, 2003 3:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
More about Galileo: if he was a hero, he was a Catholic
hero, always a faithful Catholic, who accepted the
Copernican view at least partly for religious reasons.
There is no indication that he rejected the inerrancy
of scripture; indeed, as mentioned above, he thought
the Copernican view made sense of literal scripture.
About the Church: it was friendly to science and without the
Church there would probably have been very little
science. The scientists tended to be Jesuists or to
belong to other religious orders. The Church accepted
the view that if there was scientific proof of a hypothesis,
then it must be consistent with scripture--even if this
meant that scripture needed to be reinterpreted.
One of the problems with the Copernican view
was that there was no proof of it. The Church's
declaration that the Copernican view was
contrary to scripture was a mistake--if a proven view
can't be contrary to scripture, then it's imprudent to declare
a view contrary to scripture before all the
evidence is in. Galileo thought there one day
would be proof and then the Church would look
foolish--which was one of the chief reasons he
tried to persuade the Inquisition not to
make the declaration. He was proven right
and the Church learned a lesson.
The Inquisition was made up of
learned men who were basically friendly to
science. Galileo and they spoke a common
language and they all had similar concerns.
Even when the Copernican view was declared
contrary to scripture, Copernicus's book was not
banned--some passages were edited. The
Inquisition acknowledged that the Copernican hypothesis
was a powerful predictive tool and did not object
to its being used hypothetically. Galileo's mistake
was to write, 15 or so years later, a dialogue in
which one side defended Copernicus. He did this
in part because there was a new Pope, an old
friend of his, who was especially friendly to science.
Galileo, speaking to the Pope, thought he was given
permission to write as he did. The Pope did not
understand that and felt betrayed when he learned
that Galileo, 15 or so years earlier, had been
explicitly told by the Inquisition not to defend
Copernicanism.
What emerges is not science vs religion,
but an unfortunate mistake within a tradition
that was nurturing science. All of the participants
were religious, including Galileo. This particular
period of the Church was rather a rough patch,
because the Chruch was threatened by the
Protestant reformation and tended toward
censorship. But if there had been
no Church, we probably would not have
modern science. Best
You know Walden, before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, there was a passage in the book of Habbakuk that no one ever really understood. I forget the exact wording but it was something about as silly as someone making love to a grape. After finding a copy of the book in the scrolls...an older, more accurate version, they finally realized that the new word made much more sense of the text. So that's proof that you have to be careful with metaphors, parallels, alegories--whatever. In the late 1940's the Revised Standard Version corrected the text in several places in Habbakuk. Yes, you who rely on older versions and other versions of the bible will have the wrong context. You will have gotten taken for a well meaning, yet wild goose chase.
Dana, isn't there a difference between being able to actually examine "the life of his son Jesus" and examining the story...which is all we have right? The story needs to be validated. Christ is only validated within the story, by the various accounts. Why is most of the last chapter of Mark nowhere to be found in my bible...because it never belonged there in the first place? Scholars agree, it was added later by someone else. And such is the case in the NT with about 15 entire texts and a couple dozen 1/2 texts...they are completely missing from my best bible, the NRSV.
I know I have mentioned this before (not to beat your sleeping mule) but there are many conflicting "words" in the bible, all the way from god ordering Israel to kill their neighbors (yet to save the young girls for themselves), to describing a proper time to spend tithe money on SHEKAR (Heb. for liquor-"intensly alcoholic" - Deut 14:26). If you want an interesting project, try to figure out why King James and gang used two words for one here..."strong drink." It certainly sounds better, right? Esp. for the young people, since the bible has no age restrictions on alcohol consumption, not even in Proverbs 31:6,7. Also, check out other versions. Some skip right over the word, others use a midler form of alcohol, such as "wine" of "beer." (you often never really know what the writers actually meant after the story if filtered down through the translators and versionaries)
BTW, I've read that the church disagreed with Galelio by saying, "our bible says 'as the sun riseth in the East.'" That what caused them to reject Galelio's claim that the world turned.
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Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
He was a former Dominican Friar (later
excommunicated by the Calvinists and
the Lutherans after joining them) who taught
'many heresies and blasphemies.' Cardinal Bellarmino
presided at the Inquisition trial of Bruno. The Cardinal
later knew and respected Galileo, had studied
astronomy, looked through Galileo's telescope.
The only fault he could find with Galileo was
that he took Copernicanism to be literally
true.
According to the Catholic Encyclopeia:
Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.
At this point the Church hadn't declared Copenicanism
heretical or contrary to the Bible. In 1616 it was
declared contrary to the Bible but was not declared
heretical.
jim stone wrote: What emerges is not science vs religion,
but an unfortunate mistake within a tradition
that was nurturing science. All of the participants
were religious, including Galileo. This particular
period of the Church was rather a rough patch,
because the Chruch was threatened by the
Protestant reformation and tended toward
censorship. But if there had been
no Church, we probably would not have
modern science. Best
This strikes me as remarkably shallow and skewed. The enormous revolution that is crystalized in the work of Gallileo (and Hobbes, incidentally) does not concern the movement of the stars primarily. The departure is from the Aristotelian metaphysical view of the world, a view in which there was a cosmic order to things and in which every thing, creature, and person had its natural place. Everything had its essence and its reason for being what and where it was. There was no separation between natural and social order, because like a tree grew up and water fell down, so the peasant tilled the land and the nobleman waged war and hunted his demesne.
The revolution we see culminating in Gallileo is one of methodology. Mathematics is being extended to all fields of natural science. But mathematics cannot give reasons for what is (only describe it's quality) and it cannot grasp the essence of a thing. Gallileo wrote in the 1630s "The present time does not seem to be the proper time to explore the causes for acceleration in natural movement, different philosophers have voiced different views on this head already.... [And it is not worth to investigate the different explanations.] Presently our author [that is, Gallileo] is pursuing only the end to investigate a few of the characteristics of accelerated movement and to prove them (whatever the cause for this acceleration may be)." Gallileo is saying that you can understand the universe without recourse to God. You can ask about nature first, and about God second. That means, for the first time in the Christian occident there is a difference between understanding nature and biblical exegesis. Without Gallileo or Hobbes a conflict between a "biblical" and "scientific" view wasn't possible.
What is happening here is not a quibble over celestial bodies, and not a misunderstanding between Gallileo and his buddy the Pope with whom he just had had tea, but a re-definition of the world, and therefore of the social order. There is a straight line from Gallileo to burning churches in Paris in the 1790s. I'd say that none of the various views expressed in this thread could have been conceived before Gallileo & Hobbes.
And to say that there would be no modern science without the Church is like saying that without Leonid Breznev the Berlin Wall wouldn't have come down.
Hi Zoob: 47. I missed the Vietnam draft by one year. My brother came up 10th on the lottery but somehow they never got him. My first chance to vote was the year AFTER McGovern ran. I remember being at the local McGovern headquarters as a worker even though I couldn't vote. Boy, did he get creamed. Sorta like Howard Dean will if he gets the nomination. Whenever I see the losers party on Election Night, I go back to that experience. Standing around with a half filled cup of punch wonderin' what to say.
I am not sure why you ask but I reject your qed ergo stuff as well as your decision to buttonhole me into being gungho to serve in the military and a McCarthy supporter. I used the term crypto-Marxist very intentionally, not Marxist, because as I said, I don't think people even know whose agenda they are serving. Laugh all you want. The hip people are on your side so you are safe. I know, I used to be one. But Clinton and his Cabinet, right about 93 or so, pushed me out of the Demo party probably for good (I voted Dem in every election up to 92).
Marxism Lite is very different than all that ol running dog stuff. Its a veil of environmentalism, carefully allowed corporate domination with symbolic "controls", UN soveriegnty above individual countries, apology for the sins of colonialism and ultra-tolerance for those who would kill or dominate us. I sense that this struggle is going on in France over Islam as well, despite American perceptions that you might read about. What I fear about this is that Nature abhors a vacuum and the notion of World Govt is very unpleasant to consider, especially when you look at some of the UN committees and the member nations. .
If I, under a different moniker, were to express some very extreme leftist views including calling Bush Hitler, it is catalogued as the diversity of opinions because no one would dare call it communist, right? And nobody here would mention Trotsky or Lenin or those fellas, even though the various opinions here could be buttonholed as such. That is too uncool and embarassing and would sound MEAN.. But if I make the observations that I did, Joe McCarthy's name is invoked and I must be "one of those."
Hey, I would have been a Democrat in those days, seeing how I do respect a lot of things that straitjacketed folk do not. That is why I think so many artists and musicians are on the Left side of things, because they seek inner truth for the sake of expression and don't find black and white on the inside. But the Left has gone too much in the direction of collectivism and Marxism for my taste. I no longer believe that every American Democrat politician still basically believes in the Constitution or US sovereignty, at least based on their speeches and stands.
Remember that I am near Berkeley, where Mayor Gus Newport and Rep. Ron Dellums had open exchanges with Cuban officials, including being referred to as Comrades all through the 80s. I can't always tell if its pure ideology or just demagoguery in other places but I don't care for what current Democrats propose and I watch as many of the recent debates as I can stomach. I am still looking for good and wondering if I am missing something in evaluating my stands on the Right and the Left. One thing I notice for sure, is that many idealogues on either side are disinclined (or perhaps too lazy) to challenge their own belief systems when confronted with new information/ events, like 9/11. Too much sounds automatically partisan, even as my words seem to you, perhaps, even though I know what is inside my heart and head. Dale might ask God, but I ask myself, "Is what I perceive even close to some kind of truth?" Do you ask that Zoob or do you have it all figured out?
I always thought Hubert Humphrey was odd. But I miss the kind of Democrat that Hubert Humphrey represented. I think he was a very patriotic American man, and as usual, part of the WW2 generation, who experienced national pain and sacrifice, as well as a major attack on their homeland, which shaped basic perceptions. At least, that was how he seemed to me.
I believe that the soldiers who return home will be both patriotic as well as somewhat disillusioned, but I pray that my country will not be so against Bush and his war that they treat them the way many Vietnam Vets were treated. I feel the same set of resentments building up, though Johnson acted very differently than Bush. He was reviled, not quite as much as Nixon by the cool folk, no matter how strong he stood on civil rights and other traditional Democrat values. I will never forget the scorn placed on him, Nixon later, Reagan somewhat less and now Bush.
If it spills onto our returning soldiers, this is one heart that will bleed, because I still am a bleeding-heart liberal inside but I also believe in this country and its Constitution and see absolutes with the likes of Osama etc.
As for mentioning age, I was trying to make the point that if you live long enough, you start to compare the media "buzz" that surrounds the various Administrations.The new guy comes in, with his Cabinet, and the scribes start up, depending on how they all interact and agree or disagree. There is a flavor to each Admin. I remember Carter's being very distinct, for example, with the New South designation and somewhat of an emphasis on Christian religion.
jim stone wrote:Galileo tried to persuade the Inquisition that
the Copernican view is compatible with a
literal interpretation of scripture, and failed.
Apparently he argued that some texts, which
the Church thought indicated that the sun moved
around the earth, were not only compatible
with the earth moving around the sun--they
made better sense taken literally on the
Copernican view. Galileo, as he was involved
in these discussions, was a literalist.
If you want to redefine 'literalist,' okay, but it doesn't change the fact that Galileo got into trouble by promoting the Copernican model after having been forbidden by the Inquisition to do so, on the basis that it contradicted the literal meaning of the Holy Scriptures. I hate to say this, but some of your arguments are tainted with sophistry, Jim.
