Posted on 07/25/2010 1:37:12 PM PDT by betty boop
I would like to add that even though everything is one NOW to God it does not change this by God fixing a time within that NOW of creating souls and bodies together at the conception of each human since God is not bound by time.
This is difficult for our finite minds to comprehend but it’s my best humble explanation. :)
This runs counter to the pagan Platonic beliefs or Gnostic heresy regarding the souls, as both profess that human souls can exist naturally without a body, making both man and angels ontologically indistinguishable, save for the purpose (angels being obligate servants).
The Gnostic teaching is that bodies are "prisons" of the souls, inherently evil, and that some souls are "trapped" inside the body as "punishment" for looking at, or desiring, the corrupt world created by the demiurge.
It is truly amazing that such pagan and occult heresies still subsist in otherwise catechized individuals. There must be some unspoken appeal that helped these beliefs survive the millennia in order for them to emerge, from time to time, as faux Christianity.
I agree with Kolo that this phenomenon is by far more common among Protestant sects and cults then among those formally baptized and raised in the Church.
Excellent post SFA.
Please do remember that the Church Fathers (up to Augustine) taught traducianism, not creationism, and that the Eastern Church still holds to that doctrine which basically states that God gave life (synonymous with spirit, i.e that which quickens) and breathed it into Adam's nostrils. Adam then passed on this life to Eve and through them to all humanity.
The early Church did not believe in Platonic souls, as sui generis entities, or "complete species," although much of Platonic influence was present in other aspects of the early Church. Rather, the soul is seen as a force that quickens bodies in the tradition of Judaism, and is present in all living creatures.
The difference between animals and human souls is in the nous (mind, reason), the wisdom given to angelic as well as human creatures (which is why we speak of noëtic beings), and what connects both angels and humans to God (remember, the angles are also called the sons of God in the Old Testament).
not being punished = now being punished
And in rare instances among individuals baptized and raised in the Church. The problem is that much of the early Christian heterodoxy, as you mention, believed it (it was popular), and is also part of Talmudic Judaism.
This makes exposure to such this heresy very likely to a casual reader of classical Greek philosophy and early Christian apologetics such as Origen and others.
Which is why the Church insists on the staying the course in the life of the Church, rather than wondering off into heterodxy where anything goes.
Good point,thank you. I can see how we can get into trouble in our opinions and how they come across sometimes
At this point, it is not them who are expected to assimilate but those who have been here all along. Native Americans may get vicarious satisfaction observing that what goes around comes around, that the very people who once cleansed this continent of the Natives are now being pushed out themselves by a new wave of newcomers and may end up living in reservations of their own, or completely disappeare as another culutre vanquished and relagated to the dusbins of history.
The majority face of America will boil down to which culture will influence the other and to what extent a culture will withdraw to preserve itself. When the culture is rooted in Judeo/Christian faith, it prevails.
Mathematically, considering the small numbers and the wide dispersion, the survival of the Jewish culture much less the rebirth of the nation of Israel was "impossible."
Mathematically, should the Orthodox have survived the many oppressions?
Rome was sacked, but Catholicism survived.
And the Amish, mathematically, should not be here in the United States.
So I am confident that those Americans who love God surpassingly above all else will preserve the principles of the founding fathers in their cultures despite whatever else might be happening around them because those principles were rooted in the Creator.
God always keeps a remnant.
Indeed since God is "Ο ΩΝ". There is no way this can be over stressed!
"This is difficult for our finite minds to comprehend but it’s my best humble explanation. :)"
When it comes to The Faith, humble explanations are almost always the best!
“The problem is that much of the early Christian heterodoxy, as you mention, believed it (it was popular), and is also part of Talmudic Judaism.”
Indeed much of Christian heterodoxy did believe it, and it has been argued, with a basis, that +Gregory of Nyssa, a giant of Christian Orthodoxy, believed it and in a sort of universal salvation (universalism), at least for awhile (for example, “On the Soul and Resurrection” http://mb-soft.com/believe/txuc/gregor42.htm).
“This makes exposure to such this heresy very likely to a casual reader of classical Greek philosophy and early Christian apologetics such as Origen and others.”
That’s why “proof texting” the Fathers is almost always dangerous without a firm grasp of the consensus patrum.
He was so open minded that he was accused even of being atheist.
What you cannot abide, what you gag on, is that Jefferson declared himself a Christian (“I am a Christian”), swearing fealty to “the pure gospel” of Jesus Christ above all else, and spoke in the language of Christianity.
The only one who is gagging is you. Jefferson rewrote the New Testament and rejected Paul. he even declared "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
“I return your kind prayers with supplications to the same Almighty Being for your future welfare and that of our beloved country.”
He believed in God. That doesn't make him a Christian.
“Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.”
Yes and he called that morality a philosophy of Jesus. You refuse to admit that he rejected Paul and that he rejected Jesus as divine. Maybe you do too, but somehow you consider yourself a "Christian."
On this one, Jefferson really pins your ears back. In religion you see nothing but sectarian dogma
Not really. I can appreciate Jesus' morality and Christian values without being a Christian.
Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself
Jesus never said that.
Jefferson believed in God. No doubt about that. He appreciated what Jesus taught. He called it a philosophy. He was a deist and deism is not Christianity. He denied the divinity of Jesus. Is Jesus the same God to you as the Father and the Spirit?
Explain the time warp.
Is there any evidence that he changed his mind?
I need no lectures on graciousness
I was being saecastic and generous.
There is nothing “simple” about your purported fact. I have demonstrated that its status is very much in doubt and I could not possibly ... blah, blah, blah
Blowing smoke. I asked you to show me where in the Document there is reference to anything biblical or where in the Bible anything mentioned in the Document can be found. So far you have shown me nothing.
I’m simply pointing out that if you choose to adopt Paine’s attack on the Revolutionary Act, you can expect the same reaction he received and will richly merit it.
What attack? What is your problem? I have simply stated a fact that there is nothing biblical or explicitly or implicitly Christian in the Declaration.
Are you infallible? You seem to believe that you are, and that any dispute with your decrees is presumptuous because you are, after all, you.
Oh so now we are mind reading? What makes you think I "seem" to think I am infallible? How pathetic?
Is it against the law to dispute your interpretations?
This is not about me but about Jefferson & others. You are making it about me.
You come across the same way (that having a different opinion from your opinion is treason if not blasphemy).
I never accused anyone of blasphemy or "treason" for disagreeing with me. What's the matter? Running out of stuff to write so now we going to make this about me? No, we are not.
Shut up!
You are telling me to shut up? Get lost, troll! Who are you to tell me to shut up? If you have nothing to bring to the table but throw insults and make this personal, then you are on the wrong forum.
You don’t have the gravitas or the temperament to play the alpha male on this lash-up.
LOL! Try me.
Thank you kosta. "IF" takes us out of the laws of logic in a certain way. Rather it points us to the laws of causation. For every "IF" implies a "THEN."
Logic is timeless. "IF" is creation-bound — that is, firmly in the process of Time.
Or so it seems to me FWIW.
Maybe an act of God is needed....
Prove that I look to disqualify Adams' thoughts. You give yourself an awful lot of freedom to judge and mind read and make personal attacks simply because you don't like someone's opinion. Like I said, pipe down your emotions and either engage in civil discussion of get lost, troll!
Now, as to your ridiculous and unfounded accusation: I do say that Unitarists are not Christians and if he was a Unitarists, someone who denied the divinity of Christ, then he was no Christian. That's not seeking to disqualify Adams' thoughts, just set the record straight.
By the same token, then, why should we accept anything you’ve to say on the subject, since you’ve declared yourself unable to find God (Christian or otherwise)?
I think you are mixing apples and oranges. As I said, perhaps you need to calm down because your thinking seems irrational. You should accept or reject what I say depending on whether it has any basis in fact. If I say that there is nothing biblical in the Declaration that is a fact and you have no reason to disagree with that regardless if I found God, Christian or otherwise.
Besides, I never said I wasn't able to "find" God (now you are making things up!), but that I don't know what God is! That still doesn't change the fact that there is nothing explicitly or implicitly Christian or biblical in the text of the Declaration.
One thing is certain: rejecting a fact simply because I am an agnostic is neither logical nor warranted. It has nothing to do with what I believe! Now, do I seek to disqualify the text of the Declaration? Not at all! Heaven forbid! I agree with the Declaration 100% just the way it is written!
There were times when I wasn’t sure I was entitled to my opinion.
Oh, poor baby. And who or what made you believe that?
You provide a dishonest answer.
I am sorry I will have to report this as an ad homem. I have given you plenty of slack but accusing a FReeper of dishonesty is flaming. You need to stop trolling around, and stick to to subject matter rater than personal judgments.
You know perfectly well
Mind reading. How about reviewing Religion Forum rules?
before Christianity became a state religion, death was the Roman penalty for being Christian.
So? What's the point.
But, you lack the intellectual fortitude to admit the fact.
Another ad hominem. You are outdoing yourself.
The reason for your coyness is easy to see: Roman might did not prevail over Christian perseverance. Your evasion is a tacit admission of that fact.
Ignoring your colorful language the plan truth is that the Romans really did not go after Christians in any organized fashion to stamp out the sect. To prevail does not mean to extinguish or to eliminate or to eradicate, expunge, annihilate, etc. Only someone very naive or not very bright might thing it does. There is no question who called the shots.
Both. Prevail is less judgmental. But the side that prevails gets its way and says what is right.
despite Roman littering of the landscape with crispy critters and broken bodies.
Too many Hollywood movies.
The overwhelming might of an Imperial Japanese naval fleet could not prevail over a small band of very much undergunned, but very much determined American sailors and airmen
Might is measured by outcome, not sheer force. A small band of Spartans stopped an entire Persian army. The there is David and the Goliath. Obviously might is not in always/only in numbers or size.
“No, actually it's Jesus who says "do not resist the evil." (Mat 5:39).”
You misread Christ (by design we must believe).
Why must you believe that? And, no I did not misread Christ. What he says is very unambiguous.
I’ve never heard of Christ proposing abject surrender to evil.
Have you heard of him proposing to resist evil to the death?
The aforementioned crispy critters and broken bodies have not been solely the work of Romans.
The crispy "critters and broken bodies" is Hollywood; besides Romans did not really discriminate in the way they killed unruly population according to religion, but if you were a Roman citizen or not.
Similarly, you seek to negate Rand by disqualification
How can I negate Rand? You mean negate her proposition? There is nothing to negate. Let's see, water, poison, where is the compromise? There is no choice.
You say that there is no choice in Rand’s observation that there is no compromise between a glass of water and a vial of poison
You think there is?
Well . . . yes. Necessarily so. That was rather her point, we must think.
Yes of course, but in the real world we do have choices (usually) and necessity forces us to makes compromises with a relatively lesser evil (such as Stalin) in order to defeat a relatively greater evil (such as Hitler).
“Nay, we have heard it said that there is not a Quaker or a Baptist, a Presbyterian or an Episcopalian, a Catholic or a Protestant in heaven; that, on entering that gate, we leave those badges of schism behind, and find ourselves united in those principles only in which God has united us all.” (Thomas Jefferson, letter to Miles King, September 26, 1814, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh, Editor, Vol 14, pg197
Fascinating. And how does he know that?
There is an objective difference between one who has knowledge and one who does not possess knowledge. It seems agreeable to all parties that knowledge could be defined as warranted true belief. So the naturalist needs to explain ontologically how they possess knowledge. Natualism, physicalism, materialism, is a form of monism, yet the naturalist is bereft of explaining how it came to be. Now, knowledge is simply a belief which is acquired a certain way which is reliable. If a belief is not reliable then it ceases to be warranted or justified and therefore is not knowledge of true beliefs. So where in the atomic theory of everything does knowledge belong in a naturalist, physicalist world. So knowledge seems to be effectively defined as the mental capacity to represent a respective subject matter as it is, on a appropriate basis of truth and/or experience. IT is a mental representative of what actually is. The truth of a belief is not created, but is discovered by verification and warrant, whether it is deduced epistemelogically, cosmologically, logically, or theologically or scientifically. If acquiring truth to describe a belief is not preeminent in the process of believing, I do not see how one can obtain warranted belief. With the ontological belief of the committed physicalist that the nonmaterial does not exist then they must honestly admit knowledge is not acquirable because it cannot exist. This leaves us to examine 'truth', a prerequisit of knowledge, and the same conclusion the honest materialist must state that truth does not exist. This brings the theist to the point asking the materialist, 'is your assertion that truth cannot exist true'? Circular reasoning is their only resort, lest they should admit the obvious....that we are spirit, body, and soul. Thought itself seems deniable by the materialist, or get honest with themselves and recognize the duality of man and thus the universe. For how else can a brute material universe give rise to consciousness. As atheist, materialist Collin McGinn asked, "How did the the water of biological water give rise to the wine of consciousness?"
Statistical analysis carries a confidence factor, a probability. Right now, the demographic and cultural changes in America are pretty much on a set course, and have been for the last 45 years with predictable results.
The majority face of America will boil down to which culture will influence the other and to what extent a culture will withdraw to preserve itself. When the culture is rooted in Judeo/Christian faith, it prevails.
Is that inevitable? Europe has all but abandoned its Christian roots. The groups which will become dominant if the current trend continues are Christian in a broad sense of the word, but their culture is very much unlike the culture from which the Founding Fathers drew their values.
Mathematically, considering the small numbers and the wide dispersion, the survival of the Jewish culture much less the rebirth of the nation of Israel was "impossible."
Jews were not systematically sought and killed. Sure, they suffered and were often demonized, but there was no organized effort to stamp out Jews from the face of the earth in any large numbers (at least not until Hitler). Many a Jew served on the highest courts of Europe and were an important element in the urban culture of European cities. Also, homogenous groups tend to survive.
But this is not about extinction or annihilation; rather it is about one culture predominating over another. The Latino culture has very little in common with the tradition of the 17th and 18th century English Enlightenment so it is unreasonable to expect that the founding principles of the Fathers will necessarily thrive under a predominantly Latino culture. When the US becomes a predominantly Latino country it will adopt the language, the values and the way of life similar to other Latino countries.
Mathematically, should the Orthodox have survived the many oppressions?
Orthodoxy, like Judaism, is too much of a way of life to be stamped out. Much of revival in the Orthodox lands is die to a "rebound effect." Statistics show that only about 3 to 6% of the people in Russia actually go to Church even though 80% declare themselves as Russian Orthodox. Further studies show that a vast majority does not know anything about the faith or the divine liturgy.
But, again, there was no effort (because it's impossible) to stamp out Orthodoxy. There was an effort and a successful one to reduce the influence of the Church. The same state that suppressed Christians in Rome and in the Soviet Union turned around and took Christianity under its wings. In either case, the might of the state prevailed and determined what is "right" for the culture.
Rome was sacked, but Catholicism survived.
Christianity was all but wiped out by Islam in Egypt and pretty much in all of North Africa where it once was a dominant faith. No such specific effort occurred in sacking of Rome.
And the Amish, mathematically, should not be here in the United States.
Why? They are all inbred (polydactily etc) but there is no concerted effort to annihilate that group.
So I am confident that those Americans who love God surpassingly above all else will preserve the principles of the founding fathers in their cultures despite whatever else might be happening around them because those principles were rooted in the Creator.
I hope so too. But I don't see it happening. I think America will turn into another Latino country, most likely another Mexico, which is hardly a fertile ground for the preservation of the Founding Fathers .
God always keeps a remnant.
It's not about the remnant; it's about prevalence.
He was a student of Origen's and indeed did share this Gnostic belief for a while. Fortunately, he came to see its fallacy and return to orthodoxy, just as +Augustine did, before it was too late (as with Origen and Tertullian).
If I'm beating a dead horse here somebody please stop me, but if morality is merely conventional and determined by society I can't see how your statement above is consistent with or logically follows from the premise. Under normative ethical relativism the lesser or greater evil of Hitler vs. Stalin is in the same category as the greater or lesser evil of the conventional rules of Russian vs. German grammar.
Cordially
Evil is threat, and relative evil is the degree of threat. Russian and German grammars represent about the same level of threat which is equal to zero. When it came to Hitler vs Stalin, the choice was very clear as to which was a greater threat.
To Stalin, likewise, there was no dilemma. Capitalism was his arch enemy, but Hitler was an imminent threat, sufficiently dangerous to make cooperation with the "evil" capitalist adversaries tolerable, and even desirable in order to survive.
...For if the soul had a species of itself it would have something still more in common with the angels. But, as the form of the body, it belongs to the animal genus, as a formal principle.
St. Thomas' Aristotelianism is showing here. For Aristotle regarded soul as the form of the body, as its formal principle, which is immanent to the body. Thus bodies and souls "necessarily" must be created together.
I don't think we can ever use the words "necessarily" or "must" in regard to God.
Platonism, on the other hand, although also recognizing soul as form of the body, sees the world of Forms as transcendent to material nature. Or to put it another way, as subsisting in a different time order than that of the material world. The necessity of soul and body having to be created together falls apart on this presupposition. For the material world is the world in time, while the world of forms, being transcendent to the material world, exists in timelessness, or eternity.
Once again the problem boils down to our understanding of time, as you point out, stfassisi. You wrote:
I would like to add that even though everything is one NOW to God it does not change this by God fixing a time within that NOW of creating souls and bodies together at the conception of each human since God is not bound by time.I understand, stfassisi. I think your explanation is on the mark. God's eternal Now "looks" from the human perspective like a temporal process. But still it seems to me that recognizing this does not address the question of whether God "necessarily" creates souls at the same time He creates bodies.This is difficult for our finite minds to comprehend but it’s my best humble explanation. :)
It seems to me that God's Word, His eternal Logos, contains the full specification of all existents and events that unfold in His creation. He has perfect foreknowledge — because He knows what's in His Logos, and He knows that it governs the world of creation from Alpha to Omega, from First to Last and everything in between.
If this reasoning is sound, then it follows that individual souls — as specifications or formal principles for individual human beings who do not yet exist — may be specified already in the Logos of Creation.
It's just something I've been thinking about lately. I don't know whether it's necessarily true. Then again, I don't see that it's necessarily false. There's an analogy here, to the singularity at the beginning of the physical universe, which also seems to be a complete specification "from the beginning" of the laws and principles, or "guides to the system," of the elements and evolution of the physical universe.
It is a very ancient observation that man stands at the intersection of Time and Timelessness. He's got a foot in both time orders, so to speak. It seems to me that Plato's analysis of this situation (transcendent rather than immanent formative principles) speaks directly to this understanding. With Aristotle, however, essentially the focus is on the natural world which subsists in Time. Transcendence is generally not part of Aristotle's picture. He is mainly interested in particulars, not in universals. It's simply a matter of where he's directing his main attention.
But Aquinas evidently places great confidence in Aristotle's view of the matter. Which ends up with God having to make special acts of creation of soul and body simultaneously throughout the course of Time as humans understand it. Of course, for God, this is "no sweat" — He is omnipotent.
But one wonders whether an omniscient God would have preferred a more efficient way of working. Which to me would involve the full specification of His entire creation and all its denizens from the very Beginning. In God's Eternal Now, the Creation is already fully completed. We humans, on the other hand, see it as an evolution in Time....
Of course, I do not know "how" God chooses to work! But then, I strongly doubt that any human being can know this. I can recognize, however, that the creation He made involves things that do not change, and things that are capable of changing. I suspect that souls are in the first category, and bodies in the second.... In this way we can say that man lives at the intersection of Time and Timelessness — he is suspended "in between" two temporal orders, or realms.
By the way, the above is a cosmological speculation, not a dogmatic religious statement.
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear brother in Christ — and for the tremendously valuable links!
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