Posted on 02/02/2005 7:47:16 AM PST by Lando Lincoln
And there is where you are mistaken. If they are fringe, why do they make up the official governments of: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, northern Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, PLO and many other states while counting in the majority in Algeria, Pakistan, growing in Turkey, Libya, etc. While supporting islamic insurgencies in: Russia, Yugoslavia, northern Greece, Makedonia, India, Phillipines, Malaysia, China, Israel, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and a dozen other states?
If they are such a fringe, why do we not see anti-Fringe demonstrations? If you say it is out of fear, then obviously they aren't such a fringe and wield great power.
If you are a Christian, then your main doctrine is the New Testament, the OT is there to show that the prophecies of the Messiah were true, and to give us an idea of where the roots of our religion come from.
Comparing Samuel to Patrick is illogical, they lived in very different times. Why not compare a scientist of the 1st century to a scientist of the 20th century: they are both scientists, but theories and scientific method are very different.
You stated:And God *is* an angry and vengeful God, whether you are comfortable with that thought or not.
If that is your belief, I feel sorry for you, my God sent his only begotten son to die for us; not very angry and vengeful, is it?
"Islam is criticized as being evil because of the use by fringe elements of death in ways that shock us in the west, and they openly advocate death to those who they percieve as threatening their faith.
And because there is little to no hue and cry against it by "mainstram Islam", the silence if the Imam's and Ayatollahs is seen as tacit approval. BTW: aren't the Ayatollahs and Imams the ones who issue the FATWAS, religious edicts that order the death of people, and groups of people, seen as enemies/blasphemers?
And yet our Christian Bible tells us God commanded people at various times to utterly destroy man, woman and child different tribes; the Caananites and the Amalekites, for example. So for someone to make this argument puts them in a position of indirectly acusing our God of being evil. That is wrong and howver so gentle, it is blasphemous."
OK, now you have me somewhat confused as to what point you are trying to make her. First, there's that old OT hangup again; Second, as I said in my previous post, God's "command" is heard by one person, usually, and is interpreted as to what action to take. Why would God tell man to destroy other men (collectively) when God can easily do it without Man's help. He did just fine with Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot went in to try and save the people.
You seem to be painting the OT God as somewhat wicked with his orders for the destruction of innocents.
Perhaps you are taking the OT too literally. It was not written to be read by ALL, it was written to read by the priests and TOLD to the followers. It has also been translated many times and has changed that way: "Thou shalt not KILL." should read "Thou shalt not MURDER." but a translation changed that.
The lives of the prophets and their actions were written by others, and interpreted by many others. Since Man is a fallible creature, who knows what kind of bias may have crept in over the years.
I seem to recall that Slavery in the US was seen as acceptable because it was in the Bible...do we still feel that way?
So Samuel was evil in telling King Saul to kill the Amalekites and then to strip the kingship away from him because Saul failed to kill all the royal family as well as all the commoner Amalekites?
I can not say if Samuel was evil since I do not kow his motivation, nor do I know if the translation is exact. Again, the OT hang-up, and again, trying to compare it to modern morals and ethics. Saul and Samuel were "products of their times", as were the Amalekites and the Canaanites. Given the choice, neither would have hesitated to destroy the Israelites, because a destroyed enemy can not attack you again: it was COMMON PRACTICE at that point in history.
That's why the cities had big walls around them, and when a city was attacked, ALL able-bodied people helped to defend and support the defenders since they knew they would die if the city fell.
Oliver Cromwell, Puritan, massacred the Catholic citizens of Drogheda and Wexford (Ireland) in 1649, at the behest of his beliefs to destroy Catholics.
People's place in history depends on who writes the history books.
God is presented in the OT similar to the God you say you believe in: angry and vengeful. This is because an "angry and vengeful" God is one that keeps the people under control.
All prayers and requests have to go through the chosen intermediary: priests, imams, etc.
My God, the New Testament God, is not that way, because we are encouraged to read the words of the Lord, and to interpret ourselves, the language is easier to understand than the OT language.
Your comments and comparisons about "Slavery and Subjugation of women" are a bit beyond the pale and they really do not compare.
As for the sex industry in Thailand, it is a Bhuddist country and not Western, regardless of Westerners going there, along with reps from every other race and religion.
In the Islamic world women's status allows them to be raped and treated as sex toys, especially non-Islamic women.
Why go to Thailand when you can be a part of an Islamic rape-gang in Sydney, or Malmo, or Amsterdam.
But it is GOD who is the SOURCE of those laws and moral systems, right?
God is the source of the 10 Commandments, man is the source of the punishments for breaking those commandments, saying that they are "speaking" for God; God is also the source of the "Greatest Commandment": "That you love one another, as I have loved you." The punisment for breaking that one is not going to Heaven.
Has GOD evolved in your opinion?
God cannot evolve, God IS.
Our views of God have evolved, our perceptions of what is expected of us. It is MAN that needs to evolve.
Words fail me, FD. You do our Lord proud.
Lando - that was excellent. Thanks for the post. I never heard of this author but he is certainly very thorough and I like how the links were added for further resources. If you get stuff like this in the future, please ping me if you can. Thanks.
Of course! These laws and moral systems are a fundamental part of the Old Testament.
God, the Father, could not look upon sin, and the punishment for sin in Deuteronomy and Leviticus was death without redemption.
God, the Father, didn't leave us hanging on the limb of eternal death, however. He gave us the Gift of His Son so that all might be saved.
Jesus said that the Law would not be changed, not one jot nor tittle, and it hasn't. The punishment for sin without the Redemption of His Son is eternal death in the fires of hell.
Mankind always has a choice. The Amalekites, the Caananites and the Philistines had a choice. They chose to serve a false god, and their punishment was eternal damnation.
The Law is a fundamental part of the Old Testament, but it is not the foundation of the Old Testament.
The foundation is the Promise which is prevalent throughout the OT.
The promise was fulfilled with the coming of Jesus Christ, and salvation is offered to all who believe.
Christians are obligated to spread the Gospel about the Redemption, but there is no order to kill those who refuse it.
Paul said that in the face of rejection to dust the dirt from the shoes and travel on.
Compare that with this quote from the Quran:
Quran: 033.061
YUSUFALI: "They shall have a curse on them: whenever they are found, they shall be seized and slain (without mercy)."
The poster was trying to point out that our scriptures are not all full of sweetness, light, and fluffy kittens either. Condemning the Koran for its violent attitudes whilst ignoring the same in the Old Testament is rather hypocritical.
#182
Best post I've ever seen. Great job!!!
Not really, we have stepped away from the violent past, they still embrace it in Islamist states that have Sharia Law.
Nice one TC.
Nicely done, Jan.
Thanks.
Bump!
First, you are wasting your time trying to "talk" to those who refuse to see.
Totally agree, and it's one of the reasons why I have not bothered wasting my day on this.
They choose to pick out Scriptures out of context and somehow justify the actions of Islam.
It seems that's all it's about. How anyone can defend Islam with it's bigoted core beliefs of gender and religious apartheid is beyond me.
Their energy would be better spent on the Islamic forums trying to convince the Islamofascists there to see the light and understanding their mentality than wasting time baiting folks here (who have not chosen to be their enemies) into a never ending argument.
Thanks, USF.
ONLY HALF IGNORED!
Wow, that's a BIG improvement.
Most of these guys don't want to learn anything, they already know it all.
I see a fatwa coming. The author has stones.
Remember that several cardinals were funding Copernicus' research into heliocentrism at the same time? Probably not, since that part of the story is always left out.
A fallible Church tribunal put Galileo under house arrest for his repeated demands that the Church teach heliocentrism dogmatically. Scientific teaching is outside the Church's sphere of competence. Additionally, the theory was unproven at the time, and the evidence that Galileo presented was faulty. Nevertheless, several other cardinals were funding Copernicus' research.
Finally, the birth of Western science followed on the Church's pronouncement of the dogma of "creation from nothing" as Stanley Jaki so brilliantly explains in The Savior of Science.
The Origin of ScienceHow is it that science became a self-sustaining enterprise only in the Christian West?
...as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. This is not to say that the Bible is a science textbook that contains raw scientific truths, as some evangelical Christians would have us believe. The Christian faith contains deeper truths-- truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind's exploration of nature: man's place in God's creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.
In large part, the modern mind thinks little of these notions in much the same way that the last thing on a fish's mind is the water it breathes. It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.
The following selection summarizes the most notable work of Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science and Templeton Prize laureate.
How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science? In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:
1. "Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."2. "The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
3. "Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
4. "At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."
But what about the other monotheistic religions? Jaki notes that before Christ the Jews never formed a very large community (priv. comm.). In later times, the Jews lacked the Christian notion that Jesus was the monogenes or unigenitus, the only-begotten of God. Pantheists like the Greeks tended to identify the monogenes or unigenitus with the universe itself, or with the heavens. Jaki writes:
Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a patheist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle's works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle's works in Latin
As we will see below, the break-through that began science was a Christian commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo (On the Heavens).
So how did it all happen? Or fail to happen?
Fr. Paul Haffner writes:
Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.
....The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.
Buridan's vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea [in De Caelo] of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle's approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan's work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton's first law of motion.
The doctrine that God created the universe out of nothing and that the universe had a beginning was later to be reiterated at the First Vatican Council, against the errors of materialism and pantheism which enjoyed a new vogue at that time. In addition, Vatican I stated the absolute freedom of God to create, and made clear (against fideism) the possibility of arriving at God's existence through a rational reflection upon creation. As Jaki states: ``The Council, in line with a tradition almost two millenia old, could but insist on the very foundation of that relation which is man's ability to see the reasonability of revelation, which in turn is inconceivable if man is not able to infer from the world surrounding him the existence of its Creator.
It is precisely the inability of many scientists to trace the grandeur of the Creator in His works that Jaki opposes with great skill. He challenges the atheistic positions of R. Dawkins in the biological sphere and of Stephen Hawking in physics. He shows that the best way to unmask the thought of non-believing scientists is to show how the basis for their reasoning cannot be proven scientifically. In an unjustified way they leave the realm of their own scientific disciplines and make a priori philosophical deductions against Christian belief. Again, one example of this is the pervasive ``chance'' or ``chaos'' ideology used to ``explain'' the coming into being of the material universe, of life and of the human person. Stanley Jaki has also refuted such approaches to the cosmos and creation in his masterly work, The Purpose of It All, published in 1990.
The originality of Jaki's thought also lies in the link which he describes between the dogmas of the Creation and the Incarnation. He shows how the development of the doctrine of creation out of nothing was ``connected with the conceptual refinements of the doctrine of the Incarnation around which raged the great inner debates of the early Church.'' Jaki then discusses how the Jewish position on creation underwent a change during the first few centuries of Christianity. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, tried to interpret the first chapter of Genesis, but his view ``showed him closer to Greek eternalism than to Biblical creationism.'' The earliest midrashim ``showed that Jewish theologians were no longer willing to uphold the doctrine of the complete submission of matter to the Maker of all.'' In the Mutazalite tradition of Islam there was also a tendency to slide towards emanationism and pantheism, as a result of endorsing the pantheistic necessitarianism of Aristotle.
Jaki clearly affirms that in Christianity, a slide into pantheism was prevented because the doctrine of the creation was bolstered up by faith in the Incarnation. Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world. The dogmas of the Creation and Incarnation mean ``an absolute and most revolutionary break with a past steeped in paganism,'' and the enunciation of these dogmas and their historical impact is ``an uphill fight never to be completed.'' ...
But the cosmos and all the specific laws which govern it do not form a self-explanatory system; they point beyond science and call for a metaphysical foundation in the Christian doctrine of creation. It is precisely this Christian doctrine of creation which, according to Jaki, was the stimulus for the unique viable birth of science. The Christian doctrine of creation finds its expression within the Church.
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