Posted on 05/12/2006 12:13:47 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
In his op-ed "Evolution's bottom line," published in The New York Times (May 12, 2006), Holden Thorp emphasizes the practical applications of evolution, writing, "creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does," and citing several specific examples.
In places where evolution education is undermined, he argues, it isn't only students who will be the poorer for it: "Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?" He concludes, "Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school."
Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.
He sent many to concentration camps where they were killed, and yes it was known. See Edith Stein and Maximillian Kolbe. He also ordered the confiscation of a good deal of Church property, and that was also known.
Was it illegal? If a church property is forfitted in in the US because it was used to distribute marijuana, does that mean George Bush is excommunicated?
I have to agree at this point. It's too bad the Discovery Institute doesn't share your good sense.
I would think so. In the Netherlands, he just up and took Church property in retaliation for what the Dutch Bishops said. No cause or due process. I'm not a Canon Lawyer though, so I'll check with one I know to be sure.
Ditto with his arbitrarily shipping off Dutch priests and nuns of Jewish descent to concentration camps, without trial and without cause.
If a church property is forfitted in in the US because it was used to distribute marijuana, does that mean George Bush is excommunicated?
Obviously not, if it is done with due process and the like.
If George Bush just up and declared without cause that a piece of Church property was hereby Government property, then yes.
An even clearer case is Hitler's publicly professed membership in some secret societies, another latae sententiae excommunication, which was known with the publication of Mein Kampf.
Okay. We ended the discussion on Catholic persecution of Jews. Now I'm ending our discussion about Hitler's excommunication. I have nothing further to say on the second topic. As before, you can have the last word. Good night.
Sure, especially since accepting God did not require him to renounce his theory.
The concepts of good and evil are no more difficult to understand than your opinion verses mine or Valvoline vs. Quaker state. They are options on the table that can be chosen from. The worth of those options is in what they produce.
..After all, the Devil can quote what is written also (Matthew 4:1-11) to suit his own needs..
Correction. The devil misquoted the scriptures to get what he wanted by misrepresentation. Christ corrected him. The misrepresentation that Satan was making in 4:6 is that it is ok to tempt God. Christ corrected him. So Satan can twist scripture; but, he isn't using scripture itself (truth) for his own ends. He perverts it and uses the perversion to his own end so that he uses evil to his end where Christ uses Good to his.
To get specific here as to dilution of truth with evil being evil, one only need understand that putting poison in a volume of water poisons the volume as a whole, not in part. Pure water will not kill you unless you breath it rather than drink it. But add deadly poison and it will kill you. So in corrupting part you corrupt the whole.. but only if you accept the corruption. You have to drink it before it is deadly. With scripture, you have to both be ignorant of what is actually there or neglect what you know is there and willingly accept the corrupted version.
The principles are quite simple. The complexity is in the perversion.
It's obvious, at least to me, that Christ and the Devil know who each other are.
Indeed. Christ made Satan. That is made clear in the Old testament scripture. So, they most certainly know each other. They also know who is in authority over who. In your own citation of Matthew 4, you'll note that Satan doesn't command Christ, he suggests or asks. Christ does command Satan and Satan has to obey. Satan leaves when commanded to. This does not show that Good automatically triumphs over evil, though. What it does show is that the Creator has the ultimate authority. The Creator is also purely righteous, truthful and *good*, so when invoking Christ's authority, those inate attributes of God prevail for us in a given situation. Good prevails when the Authority and will of God are behind it. That is of course a general statement; but, true.
If belief alone is the only qualifier, then how does that explain the Devil
I'm not sure what you're asking here. Mankind is God's prized creation. Satan, of pride, didn't care much for this idea and to take vengeance on God, Satan works to destroy the prized creation.
Now, to understand the significance you have to understand how we got to a faith only approach. The old covenant approach was to offer sacrifices through the priesthood as a payment to God for sin. If you disobeyed, you had to make a sin offering to get a covering for your sin before God lest his vengeance or the result of the sin be upon the person. People often don't realize there are spiritual and physical consequences to sin that they carry with them until it is dealt with and sometimes long after forgiveness has been achieved. That aside, going through a priest had some rather considerable and predictable problems.
By the time Christ took human form as Jesus, the priesthood of the old covenant had devolved to selling sacrificial animals to people. Supply and demand is obviously going to dictate the price as much as the greed of the men involved. Can't pay their price - no sin offering. And if memory serves, after paying their price, you also payed for the offering to be made. So, what God had intended to be a matter of freedom had been so perverted as to put men's souls in the balance over money. That is evil and that is what freedom of choice will get you when men of no ethical, moral or Godly inhibitions are involved. You'd say, "But they're priests". Right. They're also men.
Christ entered the scene and turned the old sacrificial system on its ear and threw it out the window. Gone. He offered himself once to do away with the priesthood's continual sacrifices and thereby the reliance on the priesthood and the extortion that was involved. If there is a single offering by a single priest, no priesthood can hold your sins for ransom via the coinpurse. Conversely, the rich cannot merely buy their way into righteousness by affording the offering. By making the offering a matter of faith - believing it and accepting it, the ultimate responsibility without exception then lays with the individual. There is no way to say, "But, the offering cost too much." This one cost nothing, it's a free gift from God as the scriptures plainly teach.
With the cost issue and priesthood out of the way and responsibility put squarely into the court of the individual, the attack plan has to change. And the attacks are, again, predictable. Salvation through Christ hangs on a number of things. One, you have to understand and believe that Christ is God in the form of Man. Two, Christ established a system that has no ongoing blood sacrifice and sealed it into existance with a single sacrifice that mooted any such need all by itself. Three, With no blood sacrifice, there is also no established priesthood needed for such a sacrifice. Four, Christ is the singular head of the covenant and church. Five, The sacrifice he made is a free gift. Six, salvation, according to the apostles and Christ is accepted as a gift by believing and confessing the Gospel message. You simply choose to believe it, then confess that you do and you are saved. These are the big and obvious points.
The place where Satan enters into this is to pervert the above truths. So, groups calling themselves christian develope priesthoods and claim you are subject to the priests who offer a perpetuated sacrifice (sometimes for money). Some deny that Christ is God and relegate him to prophet only status. Some attempt to claim headship over the Body of christ in Christ's place - a Vicar. Many hold that you cannot read the scriptures for yourself and must subjugate your mind to their 'magisterium' or elective body who has sole right to tell you what you believe and what your scriptures say. Etc.. In most cases, these things are not found as independant, single agents. They are usually seen as groups of attacks within any given cultic sect. Denying the faith alone approach is an attempt to remove individual answerability and subjugate the person, once again, to the priesthood - a model Christ destroyed.
and how, if such belief only yields good, does that explain the subsequent initial manifestation of evil by him.
Who said that belief alone only manifests Good? You aren't operating in a vacuum. Belief alone manifests the end goal of salvation in the person; but, externally, it turns the person into a target. I think that answers your question. If it doesn't, then please clarify.
He personally did this? In defiance of nazi law? Hitler had a grand plan to replace both the catholic and lutheran church with a combined church of his own devising. Pacelli the Silent would have no doubt kept his peace until the new Teutonic-Catholic church was a fai accompli, all perfectly legal under nazi law. I still don't see any obvious reason to think that he was excommunicated, in any effective sense, nor would have expected to be.
RFLOL. That's a good one. You really overestimate the temporal power of the Holy See.
Yea, that must be why ex-communication was treated with such contempt by european monarchs for 1000 years. Your have your speculative alternate history, and I have mine.
Why would SSmen have cared, given that most left the Church (see Speer, p. 142)?
Did their wives? Did their grocers?
If the pope had declared the excommunication, Hitler would have confiscated every piece of Church property in Germany and disbanded every Catholic school, seminarary, nunnery, and the like, just like he did in the Netherlands when the Dutch Bishops condemned the Nazi party.
As if they weren't his to begin with, for all practical purposes. And, in fact, just as he started doing regardless. But I forget myself. Of course the job of the Holy See is to protect church property and privilege, not to be the moral voice of jesus.
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