Posted on 02/19/2011 12:01:04 PM PST by Jim Robinson
Dear Darwin Central,
Thank you very much for the nifty Darwin Central coffee mug we received in the mail from you. Sheila uses it every morning for her tea. She loves evolution. Says it's one of our awesome God's greatest creations. It's kinda like his autopilot.
I don't know about that, but do believe that God works in mysterious ways.
Isaiah 55:8 (KJV)
55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
55:10 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:
55:11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.
55:12 For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
55:13 Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
Keep the Faith!
May God bless you always,
Jim & Sheila
At the link "The Children of Light vs. the Communist Maninfestation," I found this delight:
Quoting Eric Hoffer's "The Ordeal of Change".Oh, so very true! A main problem is so many of these "intellectuals" are Darwinists of the metaphysical materialist type. As such, they don't "do" science; they do voodoo....
"To the intellectual the struggle for freedom is more vital than the actuality of a free society. He would rather work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it. The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning — from minding other people's business — and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated society is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual."
But they want to run things, to direct our personal and social lives in ever-increasing detail!!!
Doesn't look like a good idea to me. :^)
Plus I just loved this: "one must know the truth in order to lie about it."
And I gather that is what's so absurd about atheists....
Wow. What a one-sided view of things! Evidently you do not see the Life....
Socrates tells us that death is the separation of the soul from the body, and nothing more. The body perishes; the imperishable soul does not.
Christianity tells us the same thing.
The problem is that if the universe consists only of what you can "see" — here defined as what you directly observe through sense perception — then the problem of the soul surviving death cannot ever become meaningful for you.
And so raygunfan, your evident "angst" is most understandable.
One of many reasons why I use the notion of a dimesnion from which life in individual organisms originates. A separate dimesnion makes the soul a timeless ‘thingy’ thus when detached from the physical body which is time bound, the soul exists in a timeless state. And the spirit is defined similarly, sourced in a separate nother dimension beyond even space, time, life, so not bound by time though it can be ‘mixed’ with variables of dimension time and dimension space so that events can occur. ... But to discuss such things with a determined to be anti-god mind is a fruitless exercise. ... As Monk would say, “I may be wrong now ... but I don’t think so.”
They’re still around, eh?
Shirley? ... Who’s that? ... Sorry, Jim & Sheila, I meant to write Sheila but typed Shirley. My bad ... bad old fingers, sticky old brain!
Thank you very much!
“You missed the brilliance of Shirley’s statement. What you’re trying to poopoo because it does not fit with the way your human mind considers the complexities is in fact the construction methodology God chose to use to arrive at the Maybach 62. And what makes you think God didn’t use your inferred methodology when making the Angels? He may have made them without using a process of ‘evolution’, going right to the final model He planned for. Why can’t God enjoy the process as it unfolds? Who are you to instruct God? You don’t even know if the life force of every living thing terminates at death. What if it only gets loosened fromt he bonds of the anatomy and physiology?”
Whew!
To answer all your questions, if those were questions, God says he did it in six days.
Knowing therefore that God doesn’t lie, and men do, I’ll go with His account.
“You missed the brilliance of Shirley’s statement. What you’re trying to poopoo because it does not fit with the way your human mind considers the complexities is in fact the construction methodology God chose to use to arrive at the Maybach 62. And what makes you think God didn’t use your inferred methodology when making the Angels? He may have made them without using a process of ‘evolution’, going right to the final model He planned for. Why can’t God enjoy the process as it unfolds? Who are you to instruct God? You don’t even know if the life force of every living thing terminates at death. What if it only gets loosened fromt he bonds of the anatomy and physiology?”
Whew!
To answer all your questions, if those were questions, God says he did it in six days.
Knowing therefore that God doesn’t lie, and men do, I’ll go with His account.
“You missed the brilliance of Shirley’s statement. What you’re trying to poopoo because it does not fit with the way your human mind considers the complexities is in fact the construction methodology God chose to use to arrive at the Maybach 62. And what makes you think God didn’t use your inferred methodology when making the Angels? He may have made them without using a process of ‘evolution’, going right to the final model He planned for. Why can’t God enjoy the process as it unfolds? Who are you to instruct God? You don’t even know if the life force of every living thing terminates at death. What if it only gets loosened fromt he bonds of the anatomy and physiology?”
Whew!
To answer all your questions, if those were questions, God says he did it in six days.
Knowing therefore that God doesn’t lie, and men do, I’ll go with His account.
LOL BTTT
Yes He does. And He also says this:
"For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." Isaiah 55:12 (KJV)
Get a clue.
“”God says he did it in six days. Knowing therefore that God doesn’t lie, and men do, I’ll go with His account”
Yes He does. And He also says this:
“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Isaiah 55:12 (KJV)
Get a clue.”
I don’t know whether you’re saying that God lies (it sounds like it, but maybe that’s just a grammatical quirk) but I’ll still go with Him, including “the trees clap(ping) their hands!” I certainly don’t need “clues” when I have the actual word of the Creator.
"... the most profound truths must be entered into imaginatively -- they are participatory, as in artistic or musical truth...
"...The human being is faced with two, and only two, metaphysical choices between a wholly secular and ultimately horizontal world view or a vertical and ultimately religious one. In the final analysis, despite all of the apparent variety, this is the only philosophical choice before you. On the one side, atheism, materialism, existentialism, rationalism, what have you. And on the other side, any form of transcendental realism. Now, importantly, if you choose the former, then the latter is excluded a priori. In other words, if there is only the horizontal world, then the vertical does not and cannot exist. However, if you choose the latter, it is obviously no problem fitting horizontality into the picture as a necessary consequence of the very nature of the Absolute. I have no beef whatsoever with science, whereas the scientistic mind of a Xi can only stare at religion with uncomprehending bovine eyes and ask, "where's the beef?" ...
"..Even more generally, time is not just mere duration, but the transforming mode of being. It has cycles and archetypal qualities, which is why we can even speak of “growth” or “evolution.” In this scheme, evolution is a necessary consequence of the Absolute manifesting in time. Ironically, progressive evolution (as opposed to mere change) is something that cannot be explained (because it is inherently vertical) by any purely horizontal metaphysics, which is why so-called “creationists” -- I mean the literal kind -- are even more materialistic than materialists. It is always a mistake to try to reduce metaphysical truth -- those truths which must be true because of the nature of things -- to your narrow creed. Rather, your task is to understand how these timeless truths are reflected in your creed. God did not give you an intellect only to ignore its most lofty capabilities. Please. ...
It is not so much a matter of knowing as perceiving. We begin by transforming our vision and developing a spiritual way of “seeing.” As a matter of fact, this is something we routinely do. For example, when you read the words on a page, you actually make the letters “invisible” by looking through and beyond them to the words they spell. Likewise, the words become equally invisible, because you look through them to the meaning they are pointing at. You could undertake a chemical analysis of the ink with which the words are printed, but that would take you no closer to their meaning. Rather, it would take you far in the opposite direction, completely destroying their meaning. Do you get what I'm saying? Good. You just proved the point. Xi, you missed again. ...
"..Since God is transcendent, there is no way to see him by simply looking in a conventional way at material or empirical reality. That’s going to take you far away in the wrong direction, that is, unless you somehow look through and beyond the world in a manner analogous to the way we see through words and letters to their higher meaning. This is again why religious fundamentalists are neither religious nor fundamentalist. Rather, they are materialists, in that they act as if the literal words and events of the Bible are more real than that to which they point.
"Also -- equally ironically -- there is no philosophy more abstract than atheism, for it superimposes its sterile and dogmatic abstractions over the mystery of being. No one has more fixed opinions about the unknown than proud Horizontal Man, who is half-correct in believing that some things are “too good to be true.” But he neglects the fact that there are necessarily things that are not good enough to be True, atheism among them. And as we all know, some things are just far too beautiful to be untrue.
"Imagine if you were a trained meteorologist. Instead of seeing a cloud as an unambiguous white patch against a blue backdrop, you might begin to see the visible cloud as a mere “ripple” against the background of a much more encompassing meteorological process that is largely invisible to the senses. Similarly, before the days of MRI’s and high speed CT scans, an experienced cardiologist could place a stethoscope against your chest, and simply by listening to the sounds, visualize the nature of the problem.
"Imagination, in its positive, active sense, is the membrane that makes contact with the higher world. It is dangerous to try to merely understand religious truths, because it reduces them to the known (k) and undermines their function of bypassing the ego and vaulting us out of our conventional way of knowing. Religious truths cannot be comprehended through dogma or through irreligious skepticism, but only through an imaginative engagement with their world. (To be clear: dogma is critical in that it preserves or memorializes these worlds, but it is still our task to imaginatively engage them.)
"In short, you must, through your imagination, raise yourself up to religion, not lower religion down to your ego, or you will merely be worshipping your ego. ...
"...there is only one story. It is the story of an evolving cosmos awakening to itself and becoming conscious. Who could argue with that? It happened. And it is happyning. First there was matter. Then one fine day, life. Then just a short while back, self-consciousness. And most recently, the recognition of, and identification with, Spirit.
"Matterlifemindspirit. You can insert an arbitrary line dividing one from the other, but at least recognize that you are the one who is creating the abstract dualism. The underlying Oneness of existence knows no such intrinsic demarcations, neither in space nor in time.
"Which is to say that matterlifemindspirit is simply the mirror image of Spiritmindlifematter. As above, so below. ..." bttt
Part four http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAdDwLXO4Xg
Part five http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17zJhnWJOOU&feature=related
“Gerald Schroeder’s scheme for matching up the days of Genesis doesn’t work. He has to invent the idea that “waters above the heavens” is when the Milky Way formed, but the earth wasn’t even around at the time so the text is pretty meaningless if his interpretation is correct.
Also, he says that “let there be light” on Day 1 is when the cosmic background radiation thermally separated from the primordial plasma. However, the problem with that is the Bible describes the period before that event as having darkness on the surface of the earth’s waters, whereas the primordial plasma was intensely bright before the light decoupled thermally from it.
Just because the light had a very short mean free path (wasn’t yet statistically decoupled) doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there. The light in the primordial plasma was many times brighter than under a noon day sun on Earth today.
So again, if Schroeder’s interpretation is correct, then the Bible text makes no sense. Bottom line: he is really stretching to make his scheme work.” ~ Phil Metzger
Get thee behind me, Satan.
Hmmm, that should read ‘15.75 billion years have passed’ ...and in Schroeder’s explanation it was at the end of the inflationary period that ‘time grabs hold’ and we read ‘morning and evening, day one’.
I stand in awe of the cognitive firepower you employ to refute theological arguments with which you disagree.
"You must understand that the scientific literalist [Darwinist] is a simple person of faith. Don't ask for his faith to be complete. Like the religious literalist, his faith is consistent, but at the price of completeness. It must exclude much truth in order to maintain its consistency." ~ Robert W. Godwin, Ph.D (aka Gagdad Bob)
"...Christianity, for example, is a obviously a complete religion. Nor will I argue with someone who believes it is the "best" religion. Nevertheless, it is obviously the case that the greatest Christian thinkers -- true theologians such as Meister Eckhart, Origen, or Denys the Areopagite -- exist only at the margins of contemporary Christianity, which is often sadly atheological -- either that, or couched in a ridiculous theology that makes religion itself look ridiculous -- a terrible sin by the way, for it amounts to taking the name of the Lord in vain. At the moment I am thinking of a genial dolt named "Osteen" that I caught on Larry King for a few moments, but it could be anyone. .." ~ The Absurdity of Absolute Relativity
<>
"..Some people are just not intellectually, or spiritually, or aesthetically, or linguistically gifted, so their minds will only take them so far. Their mental horizons are only so wide and not a millimeter wider. Nevertheless, almost everyone has some "point of entry" to the eternal, whether it is through music, or parenting, or a craft, something which either "dissolves" the ego or allows it to break through and connect with the wider world. ......... scripture and revelation can be thought of as a reflection of the eternal within time. The genius of scripture -- something which no human could have accomplished, at least without divine assistance -- is that it speaks to men of all gifts and capacities, at whatever level. ....... Religion must meet a man where he is. ...
"...I certainly relate to a simple person of faith much more than I do to a sophisticated yahoo such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, who actually have far more soul-deadening limits than those they mock. They truly "don't get it," but are nevertheless enormously proud of their spiritual autism -- technically known as Assburger's Syndrome. .........
"... In dealing with someone, there is a sort of instantaneous -- and oppressive -- intuition of the exact limits of their horizons. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with education. More often than not [they have] internalized an officially sanctioned set of limits, beyond which their minds cannot venture. They are hemmed in by their education [religious and otherwise] , not liberated by it.
"....incredibly narrow limits masquerading as sophistication.
"This also has nothing to do with basic intelligence. ...
"Often they will take something I wrote and merely fit it into their existing framework -- in other words, they place me within their own limits.
".... the people who most agree with me are the ones who are probably the most fiercely independent, and who have spent their lives winning their personal insights from the formless infinite void in a world that was either indifferent or even hostile to them. "
Take it to the Limitless One More Time
bttt
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