Posted on 07/05/2003 4:20:08 PM PDT by betty boop
So what's better than poetry and music to consummate a marriage of Soul and Spirit? In my mind and heart, the Holy Scriptures capture both perfectly, in both frames of reference....
Other theories are current these days, however.
Oh there's so much more you wrote, cornelis. I'm so glad to hear from you. But the challenge you lay down cannot be "dispatched" in the next 30 miniutes or so (by far). And thus I plead for a continuance, until tomorrow, meanwhile to catch some needed ZZZZZZs....
So for now: Good night old friend.
unspun in post 655 ... That would certainly be one dreadful sin. I believe forgiveness for even this is offered, however.
And with that, I'll add to my post 656 that ...
Unspun's statement in post 655 is philosophically profound for a much more important reason than that mentioned in post 656 ...
No religion, to my knowledge, holds the intentional avoidance of reason to be sinful.
The fact of the matter is that volitional belief in religious absurdities entails the intentional avoidance of reason.
The Bible speaks of sins in words interpreted as sin (missing the mark), iniquity (willing evil), and rebellion (pre-meditated strategy and tactics agaist God). All are called sin. This includes any failure to:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'[ 12:30 Deut. 6:4,5]
(Whole Chapter: In context: )
The fact of the matter is that volitional belief in religious absurdities entails the intentional avoidance of reason.
Whether intentional or by mistake, one shouldn't believe absurdities of any kind.
thinktwice and Hank Kerchief (cc: Admin Moderator): I don't believe that FreeRepublic.com is a forum intended for railing against the tenets of belief in Jesus Christ. Please correct me if I'm wrong. It would be a shame (surely not for Christians) for this thread to be further abused by libelous (unfounded and malicious) attacks upon people's reasonable and faithful respect for such things as in the Trinity as related by the Bible, for sin and the universal need of salvation, etc. While you may believe what you may, I don't believe it is necessary to respond to further antiChrist calumny here, nor do I see any room for that in a forum that stands for upholding the intentions of the founders of the US Constitution, signed "in the year of our Lord," 1787 and which affectively reaffirms and is based upon the self-evident truth that we are endowed with our natural rights by our Creator.
betty boop: Thank you again for this thought provoking examination of Integrative Science. I do believe you are doing well to explore the overwhelming inferences of nature regarding its structure and design, including the subtle mathematics of intention, (though theorists will tend to zealously extend their theories).
Free Republic, as far as I have been informed, is a forum based on the same principles the Republic, which is the United States, is based, the free uncoerced exchange of ideas. So long as no one is intentionally abusive or abrasive, and the basic principle of individual responsibility, decency, and honesty are honored, however much we dislike what someone else says (or writes) they ought to be free to write it. If everyone only writes what everyone else already agrees with, there would be no discussion at all.
If you are offended by anything I have written, be assured, offense was not the purpose. We do not agree on some things. All that I have written is directed at ideas, not people. There is something essentially wrong with protecting one's views and God by attempting to prevent other's from saying what you disagree with.
If it is sarcasm you object to, "...forgive me this wrong." (2 Cor. 12:13) If we believe those who die expect to wake in another world will only, like the 180 thousand Assyrians who, "when they arose early in the morning ... they were all dead corpses," (2 Kings 19:35, Isaiah 37:36), wake up dead, it is only our ignorance. Can we help it if we believe what the writer of Kings, and Isaiah wrote?
But no doubt, "ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." (Job 12:1)
You need to spend some time on the religion threads where Roman Catholics are regularly verbally flayed and mormons practically burned at the stake with vituperative. None of those threads are pulled, because they are only words, and some of us learned the truth of the children's poem, "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words (names) will never hurt me."
Is your faith so weak that it is in danger of being overthrown by a few words spoken by someone you disagree with? Can your belief and your religion only be protected by silencing those who believe differently? Is your God offended by the words and opinions of mere mortals? My God "that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." (Psalms 2:4)
Good grief!
Hank
Dear Hank and thinktwice --
You are free to write whatever you want to, provided it's on-topic. This thread is not the place for Christian baiting. Kindly desist. Thank you!
Erdos said his job as a mathematician was to read God's Book of Theorems. If he saw a proof he liked, he would say, "It's straight from The Book." [Alas, he also referred to God as 'The Supreme Fascist', but I think he was joking.]
Georg Cantor, the discoverer of the transfinite numbers (numbers 'greater than' infinity) explicitly identified the 'ultimate infinity' (which he called "Omega") with the Godhead. He proved a theorem about Omega which neatly parallels a theological "proof". It has been a while but I believe it boiled down to:
Cantor: "Omega has properties that cannot be described by appealing to the properties of lesser orders of infinity."
Theologians: "God has properties which cannot be described by appealing to the properties of lesser beings." Or something like that.
"Music also involves sound, harmonics (logical structures), breath. These have mathematical properties; or at least, they can be described by us in such terms."
Some cloth-eared idiot once disparaged Bach in these terms: "It's all music by rules and numbers--no creativity there."
"Who do you think invented the rules and numbers?" I asked him.
--Boris
Did you know it has words?...
"This is the symphony/that Schubert wrote but never finished/Yes, it's the symphony..."
--Boris
"Which you see in the cosmos, is only the Goettlichen Abglanz: In the Olympier crowd the eternal number thronet."
Which is less than illuminating, at least for me.
--Boris
Since the majority of conservatives are believers of one type or another, it is particularly troubling to allow a tiny group of anti-Christs to disruptively hound the majority interest.
This thread opens with a quotation from Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin that says ...
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute….
In other words, matter in its motions is assumed to be (against all reason, if need be) the ultimate basis of Reality.
---
The above is a framework setup to attack reason -- the untimate enemy to mysticists.
I am not "Christian baiting." I am using reason to defend reason.
Dear thinktwice, if you sincerely believe that this is what you're doing, then I suggest you reflect on the excerpt from Prof. Lewontin. Try to see how it is he who is making an attack on reason, not Christians. In the interest of defending materialist science, he rules reason entirely out of the question: He point-blank states he is prepared to accept "the patent absurdity of some of [scientific materialism's] constructs," just so long as he can keep preserve his doctrine intact.
If you cannot grasp how irrational, anti-rational such a position is, then I wonder about the state of your own "reasonableness," or rationality.
Meanwhile, I repeat: Kindly desist from Christian baiting/bashing. Don't deny you do this: You do it here on my thread, and anywhere else you go at FR, and it is simply disingenuous of you to deny what is patently obvious to just about everyone else.
Theologians: "God has properties which cannot be described by appealing to the properties of lesser beings." Or something like that.
boris -- this, and the quote from Erdos, are such striking ideas, and so very on-point. Thank you so much for posting them here.
Indeed, on the one hand some of the evolutionists have declared creationists to be an embarrassment to conservatism and more specifically, Republicans.
And on the other hand, some creationists have declared the evolutionists to be closet Marxists and thus an embarrassment to conservatism and more specifically, Republicans.
The reaction from both sides is righteously indignant, much as we would expect if any gender, age, ethnicity or sexual preference were likewise told they are an embarrassment to conservatism and more specifically, Republicans.
What you have said about false information and misstatements is true. But likewise is the following of the target, from thread to thread, as a group, day after day, year after year – ridiculing and besmirching the person or group in perpetuity. Curiously, on the political threads, such conduct if personal would not be tolerated. The consequence is that some on the creationist side became fed up with it and are now using the hounding technique in retaliation, i.e. meeting fire with fire.
Truly, I wish everyone would stand down, recognize the right of the other to be here, that we share common goals, that there are no “second-class conservatives" and apologize to one another, agreeing to try earnestly to avoid besmirching one another individually or collectively.
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