[pnh102]

... but John Paul II and Benedict XVI are distinguished and honorable men by any reasonable secular standard.

The funny part about that is "any reasonable secular standard" in the Western world inevitably is borrowed from Judeo-Christian teachings about what is good and what is not good. :)

[Tax-chick]

That’s true - excellent point.

[PieterCasparzen]

The funny part about that is "any reasonable secular standard" in the Western world inevitably is borrowed from Judeo-Christian teachings about what is good and what is not good. :)

IMHO..

Brings up a nice fundamental concept: the revealed word of God. Judeo-Christian doctrine relies on the revealed word, not anything that comes out of the mind of man. So when Judeo-Christian teachings are borrowed from, the Western world is maintaining that it is not so arrogant as to believe that humans can correctly design morality, or what is right and what is wrong.

It's remarkable that the secular posit that mankind can perfectly or even adequately determine what is right and wrong. Of course, they must deny the divine inspiration of Scripture. I have thought about that quite a bit and done some studying, and it gets very difficult to explain away the elegant logical, historical, symbolic and ethical harmony contained in the Bible considering the circumstances and time span of it's writing and transmission down through history. Especially when we have such a fantastic example of a document with similar very high and worthy goals, the U.S. Constitution, constructed by a group of very highly capable men, working together, with all sorts of alleged conspiracy theories about their desires to "control", etc., and it is getting all contorted out of shape in it's interpretation. And it's only been around for the last two hundred years and we have plenty of contemporaneous writings to assist us in interpreting it. It makes it seem highly unlikely that a group of men conspired to write the Bible over hundreds of years and have it all theologically agree all for some purpose, either good or bad, depending on the particular conspiracy theorist's view, and get transmitted and analyzed by thousands of highly educated people for thousands of years, and one can still dig a little and get right to the original meanings, which, again, are all internally harmonized. The claim of divine inspiration is made within the text of the Bible: so those who say that the Bible is not divinely inspired are actually proposing that all of the men who wrote it were either knowingly or unknowingly lying.

It's simply amazing that a well-trained pastor can point to a Biblical viewpoint on any literally difficulty one could possibly have in one's life - I know of no other text which provides this capability all the while being largely historical in nature.

If one patiently and honestly studies the Bible, it's quite difficult to miss the magnitude of it's beauty, even the design of the system of ethics and morality it describes.