Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22).
“And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1)
In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who,
"Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the powers of hell against the churches of Christ."
John identifies antichrists, in this case clergy who serve the devil rather than Christ, sequentially. First, like Bultmann, Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Funk, Paul Tillich, and John Shelby Spong, they specifically deny the living, personal Holy Trinity in favor of Gnostic pagan, immanent or Eastern pantheist conceptions. Though God the Father Almighty in three Persons upholds the souls of men and maintains life and creation, His substance is not within nature (space-time dimension) as pantheism maintains, but outside of it. Sinful men live within nature and are burdened by time and mortality; God is not.
Second, the specific denial of the Father logically negates Jesus the Christ, the Word who was in the beginning (John 1), was with God, and is God from the creation of all things (1 John 1). In a pre-incarnate theophany, Jesus is the Angel who spoke “mouth to mouth” to Moses (Num. 12:6-9; John 9:20) and at sundry times and in many ways “spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all…” (Hebrews 1:1) Jesus the Christ is the incarnate Son of God who is the life and light of men, who by His shed blood on the Cross died for the remission of all sins and bestowed the privilege of adoption on all who put their faith in Him.
Therefore, to deny the Holy Father is to logically deny the deity of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, hence,
“…every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist . . . and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).
According to Peter (2 Peter 2:1), falling stars will work among the faithful, teaching damnable heresies that deny the Lord, cause the fall of men into unbelief, and bring destruction upon themselves:
“The natural parents of modern unbelief turn out to have been the guardians of belief.” Many thinking people came at last “to realize that it was religion, not science or social change that gave birth to unbelief. Having made God more and more like man---intellectually, morally, emotionally---the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man.” (James Turner of the University of Michigan in “American Babylon,” Richard John Neuhaus, p. 95)
Falling Stars and Damnable Heresy
Almost thirty years ago, two well-respected social science scholars, William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark found themselves alarmed by what they saw as a rising tide of irrationalism, superstition and occultism---channeling cults, spirit familiars, necromancers, Wiccans, Satanists, Luciferians, goddess worshippers, 'gay' shamans, Hermetic magicians and other occult madness at every level of society, particularly within the most influential--- Hollywood, academia and the highest corridors of political power.
Like many scientists, they were equally concerned by Christian opposition to naturalistic evolution. As is common in the science community, they assumed the cause of these social pathologies was somehow due to fundamentalism, their term for authentic Christian theism as opposed to liberalized Christianity. Yet to their credit, the research they undertook to discover the cause was conducted both scientifically and with great integrity. What they found was so startling it caused them to re-evaluate their attitude toward authentic Christian theism. Their findings led them to say:
"It would be a mistake to conclude that fundamentalists oppose all science (when in reality they but oppose) a single theory (that) directly contradicts the bible. But it would be an equally great mistake to conclude that religious liberals and the irreligious possess superior minds of great rationality, to see them as modern personalities who have no need of the supernatural or any propensity to believe unscientific superstitions. On the contrary...they are much more likely to accept the new superstitions. It is the fundamentalists who appear most virtuous according to scientific standards when we examine the cults and pseudo-sciences proliferating in our society today." ("Superstitions, Old and New," The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. IV, No. 4; summer, 1980)
In more detail they observed that authentic ‘born again’ Christians are far less likely to accept cults and pseudoscientific beliefs while the irreligious and liberalized Christians (i.e., progressive Catholics, Protestant emergent, NAR, word faith, prosperity gospel) are open to unscientific notions. In fact, these two groups are most disposed toward occultism.
As Bainbridge and Stark admitted, evolution directly contradicts the Bible, beginning with the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo. This means that evolution is the antithesis of the Genesis account. For this reason, discerning Christians refuse to submit to the evolutionary thinking that has swept Western and American society. Nor do they accept the evolutionary theism brought into the whole body of the Church by weak, tepid, indecisive, or apostate clergy.
Over eighty years ago, Rev. C. Leopold Clarke wrote that priests who embrace evolution (evolutionary theists) are apostates from the ‘Truth as it is in Jesus.’ (1 John2:2) Rev. Clarke, a lecturer at a London Bible college, discerned that evolution is the antithesis to the Revelation of God in the Deity of Jesus Christ, thus it is the greatest and most active agent of moral and spiritual disintegration:
“It is a battering-ram of unbelief---a sapping and mining operation that intends to blow Religion sky-high. The one thing which the human mind demands in its conception of God, is that, being Almighty, He works sovereignly and miraculously---and this is the thing with which Evolution dispenses….Already a tremendous effect, on a wide scale has been produced by the impact of this teaching---an effect which can only be likened to the…collapse of foundations…” (Evolution and the Break-Up of Christendom, Philip Bell, creation.com, Nov. 27, 2012)
The faith of the Christian Church and of the average Christian has had, and still has, its foundation as much in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis, the book of beginnings revealed ‘mouth to mouth’ by the Angel to Moses, as in that of the person and deity of Jesus Christ. But how horrible a travesty of the sacred office of the Christian Ministry to see church leaders more eager to be abreast of the times, than earnestly contending for the Faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3). It is high time, said Rev. Clarke, that the Church,
“…. separated herself from the humiliating entanglement attending her desire to be thought up to date…What, after all, have custodians of Divine Revelation to do making terms with speculative Biology, which has….no message of comfort or help to the soul?” (ibid)
The primary tactic employed by priests eager to accommodate themselves and the Church to modern science and evolutionary thinking is predictable. It is the argument that evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible when we see Genesis, especially the first three chapters, in a non-literal, non-historical context. This is the argument embraced and advanced by mega-church pastor Timothy J. Keller.
With a position paper Keller published with the theistic evolutionary organization Bio Logos he joined the ranks of falling stars (Catholic and Protestant priests) stretching back to the Renaissance. Their slippery-slide into apostasy began when they gave into the temptation to embrace a non-literal, non-historical view of Genesis. (A response to Timothy Keller’s ‘Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople,” Lita Cosner, Sept. 9, 2010, creation.com)
This is not a heresy unique to modern times. The early Church Fathers dealt with this damnable heresy as well, counting it among the heretical tendencies of the Origenists. Fourth-century Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and Ephraim the Syrian, all of whom wrote commentaries on Genesis, specifically warned against treating Genesis as an unhistorical myth or allegory. John Chrysostom strongly warned against paying heed to these heretics,
“…let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas.” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 31)
As St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote, higher theological, spiritual meaning is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (ibid, Seraphim Rose, p. 40)
In the integral worldview teachings of the Fathers, neither the literal nor historical meaning of the Revelations of the pre-incarnate Jesus, the Angel who spoke to Moses, can be regarded as expendable. There are at least four critically important reasons why. First, to reduce the Revelation of God to allegory and myth is to contradict and usurp the authority of God, ultimately deny the deity of Jesus Christ; twist, distort, add to and subtract from the entire Bible and finally, to imperil the salvation of believers.
Scenarios commonly proposed by modern Origenists posit a cleverly disguised pantheist/immanent nature deity subject to the space-time dimension and forces of evolution. But as noted previously, it is sinful man who carries the burden of time, not God. This is a crucial point, for when evolutionary theists add millions and billions of zeros (time) to God they have transferred their own limitations onto Him. They have ‘limited’ God and made Him over in their own image. This is not only idolatrous but satanic.
Additionally, evolution inverts creation. In place of God’s good creation from which men fell there is an evolutionary escalator starting at the bottom with matter, then progressing upward toward life, then up and through the life and death of millions of evolved creatures that preceded humans by millions of years until at long last an apish humanoid emerges into which a deity that is always in a state of becoming (evolving) places a soul.
Evolution amputates the entire historical precedent from the Gospel and makes Jesus Christ unnecessary as the atheist Frank Zindler enthusiastically points out:
“The most devastating thing that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a saviour. And I submit that puts Jesus…into the ranks of the unemployed. I think evolution absolutely is the death knell of Christianity.” (“Atheism vs. Christianity,” 1996, Lita Cosner, creation.com, June 13, 2013)
None of this was lost on Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1985). Huxley was thoroughly familiar with the Bible, thus he understood that if Genesis is not the authoritative Word of God, is not historical and literal despite its’ symbolic and poetic elements, then the entirety of Scripture becomes a collection of fairytales resulting in tragic downward spiraling consequences as the Catholic Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation makes clear in part:
“By denying the historical truth of the first chapters of Genesis, theistic evolutionism has fostered a preoccupation with natural causes almost to the exclusion of supernatural ones. By denying the several supernatural creative acts of God in Genesis, and by downplaying the importance of the supernatural activity of Satan, theistic evolutionists slip into a naturalistic mentality which seeks to explain everything in terms of natural causes. Once this mentality takes hold, it is easy for men to regard the concept of spiritual warfare as a holdover from the days of primitive superstition. Diabolical activity is reduced to material or psychological causes. The devil and his demons come to be seen as irrelevant. Soon ‘hell’ joins the devil and his demons in the category of antiquated concepts. And the theistic evolutionist easily makes the fatal mistake of thinking that he has nothing more to fear from the devil and his angels. According to Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of Rome, there is a tremendous increase in diabolical activity and influence in the formerly Christian world. And yet most of the bishops of Europe no longer believe in the existence of evil spirits….To the Fathers of the Church who believed in the truth of Genesis, this would be incredible. But in view of the almost universal acceptance of theistic evolution, it is hardly surprising.” (The Difference it makes: The Importance of the Traditional Doctrine of Creation, Hugh Owen, kolbecenter.org)
Huxley had ‘zero’ respect for modern Origenists and received enormous pleasure from heaping piles of hot coals and burning contempt upon them, thereby exposing their shallow-reasoning, hypocrisy, timidity, fear of non-acceptance, and unfaithfulness. With sarcasm dripping from his words he quipped,
“I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value unless they possess the historical character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh; if the “ten words” were not written by God’s hand on the stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus; the story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall a legend; and that of the creation the dream of a seer; if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more value as history than have the stories of the regal period of Rome—what is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, which is so much less clearly enunciated? And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the New Testament, who, on this theory, have not merely accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksands?” (Darwin’s Bulldog---Thomas Huxley, Russell Grigg, creation.com, Oct. 14, 2008)
Pouring more contempt on them he asked,
“When Jesus spoke, as of a matter of fact, that "the Flood came and destroyed them all," did he believe that the Deluge really took place, or not? It seems to me that, as the narrative mentions Noah’s wife, and his sons’ wives, there is good scriptural warranty for the statement that the antediluvians married and were given in marriage; and I should have thought that their eating and drinking might be assumed by the firmest believer in the literal truth of the story. Moreover, I venture to ask what sort of value, as an illustration of God’s methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened? If no Flood swept the careless people away, how is the warning of more worth than the cry of “Wolf” when there is no wolf? If Jonah’s three days’ residence in the whale is not an “admitted reality,” how could it “warrant belief” in the “coming resurrection?” … Suppose that a Conservative orator warns his hearers to beware of great political and social changes, lest they end, as in France, in the domination of a Robespierre; what becomes, not only of his argument, but of his veracity, if he, personally, does not believe that Robespierre existed and did the deeds attributed to him?” (ibid)
Concerning Matthew 19:5:
“If divine authority is not here claimed for the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, what is the value of language? And again, I ask, if one may play fast and loose with the story of the Fall as a “type” or “allegory,” what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology?” (ibid)
And concerning Cor. 15:21-22:
“If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive “type,” comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul’s dialectic?” (ibid)
After much thought, C.S. Lewis concluded that evolution is the central, most radical lie at the center of a vast network of lies within which modern Westerners are entangled while Rev. Clarke identifies the central lie as the Gospel of another Spirit. The fiendish aim of this Spirit is to help men lose God, not find Him, and by contradicting the Divine Redeemer, compromising Priests are serving this Spirit and its’ diabolical purposes. To contradict the Divine Redeemer is the very essence of unfaithfulness, and that it should be done while reverence is professed,
“…. is an illustration of the intellectual and moral topsy-turvydom of Modernism…’He whom God hath sent speaketh the Words of God,’ claimed Christ of Himself (John 3:34), and no assumption of error can hold water in the face of that declaration, without blasphemy.” Evolutionary theists are serving the devil, therefore “no considerations of Christian charity, of tolerance, of policy, can exonerate Christian leaders or Churches who fail to condemn and to sever themselves from compromising, cowardly, shilly-shallying priests”---the falling stars who “challenge the Divine Authority of Jesus Christ.” (ibid)
The rebuttals, warnings and counsels of the Fathers against listening to Origenists (and their modern evolutionary counterparts) indicates that the spirit of antichrist operating through modern rationalistic criticism of the Revelation of God is not a heresy unique to our times but was inveighed against by early Church Fathers.
From the scholarly writings of the Eastern Orthodox priest, Fr. Seraphim Rose, to the incisive analysis, rebuttals and warnings of the Catholic Kolbe Center, creation.com, Creation Research Institute, Rev. Clarke, and many other stalwart defenders of the faith once delivered, all are a clear, compelling call to the whole body of the Church to hold fast to the traditional doctrine of creation as it was handed down from the Apostles, for as God spoke and Jesus is the Living Word incarnate, it is incumbent upon the faithful to submit their wills to the Divine Will and Authority of God rather than to the damnable heresy proffered by falling stars eager to embrace naturalistic science and the devil's antithesis--- evolution. But if it seem evil to you to serve the Lord,
“…you have your choice: choose this day that which pleases you, whom you would rather serve….but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15
Thank you Dear Sister in Christ, for yet another insightful — and right to the point — essay-post!!
Dear brother in Christ, as you know Satan's greatest triumph consists in convincing people that he does not exist.
But he does. He tempts us to sin for he knows that will divide us from Christ — Who is Logos Alpha to Omega, our Savior and final Judge.
He is the jealous, implacable enemy of mankind. He seeks the destruction of souls. And judging from the present state of affairs in our culture, he is awesomely good at it.
The second great lie he tells is that there is no such thing as sin. And yet the entire Creation is groaning under its weight....
Pusillanimous pastors take note: Is revenue more important than saving souls? Isn't that the Church's job? If so, you'd better be talking about SIN from your pulpits. "Cafeteria Christians" might not like it; but faithful Christians will.
Thank you so much for writing, dear TXnMA — and for your very kind words.
Outstanding observation, dear CityCenter! And oh so true.
Thank you so very much for writing!
Evidently, "mocking" must be in the eye of the beholder. For I don't see anything in what C. S. Lewis wrote here that "mocks" science. I think he's seeing things from a much bigger "picture" than you are.
I'm a Christian. I don't "mock" science. Rather I think science is one of the most glorious human activities in the world. I don't even "mock" Darwinism. To critique it for its shortcomings is not to "mock" it; it is to take it seriously.
FWIW.
The former pastor of my church recently did the opening remarks for an all-city church prayer meeting. He is someone who doesn’t shy away from calling a sin a sin and presenting the all but forgotten concept of personal holiness to Christians. Was somewhat sad and amusing to see the reaction he got.
Seems that the more there appear to be sides taken in the debate, the more each side tries to freeze the image to what they want to reject. The little jibes get tossed in as efforts to marginalize and thus ignore anything that might, MIGHT, point to a more complex explanation of what the whole Universe is really like. It is far easier to criticize a narrowly framed image than to consider what might be plausible in the larger image being rejected.
And just to be open here, I am one who believes that the true dimensional reality of the Universe God has created is from one perspective much more complex than 4D spacetime, while from another perspective far more elegant in process than we have yet to discover. As an example, I would point to the notion that gravity in our 4D continuum may be a shadow effect of a force manifesting in a fifth or sixth dimensional continuum. The deposition of certain crystalline structures hints at this 'higher dimensions effecting' (kind of like a precipitant) our 4D spacetime.
The point that information (Shannon, successful communication) is the difference between life and non-life/death in nature was underscored by Wimmer's creating the polio virus in the laboratory.
He began with the information content (genome sequence available even on the internet) which he merely facilitated the communication of via physico-chemical synthesis.
And it reminds me, too, of the joke about the scientists who tell God they can now create life, and God tells them to get their own dirt ... kind of saying the processing system is built into the background state to which information streams for processing. I sometimes use the analogy of radio waves carrying information but needing a radio receiver to process the encoded information so that it can then be further processed by a 'listener'.
Electromagnetic waves are an elegant carrier, but receivers and 'decoders' are required to realize the created/intended encoded messages.
The natural-science of evolution: is evolution a valid theory which accurately describes how life on earth has come to be what we see today?
The philosophy (or call it "metaphysics", "ontology" or "atheism") of materialism: is the material natural universe all there is, or is there a super-natural, spiritual realm within or beyond it? Those of us here defending science (aka "methodological naturalism") are generally not interested in defending atheism (aka "metaphysical naturalism"), and yet that is the issue on which many attack "Darwinism". Atheistic-"Darwinism" is said to cause and result from every socialistic wickedness known and therefore should be rejected in favor of... of... of... well, why not go all the way and say: young earth creationism?
My original question in this (still unanswered) is "why is this News/Activism?"
The disagreement over literal interpretion of the Book of Genesis is older that Darwin himself, much less ToE. There's nothing remotely "new" about it. As far as being a subject of political activism, even the Founders had theological disagreements. Thomas Paine particulary had some unkind things to say about the Bible, and I imagine he and John Adams would have some serious difference of opinion on the matter. But you won't find those debates in the records of the Continental Congress or the Constitutal Convention. Trying to make it a criteria for drawing political lines is something that not only avoided, but specfically warned against.
Ah, but there's the rub, dear brother in Christ: It seems to me that Darwin's theory requires the rejection of the "larger image." If Darwin's theory is seen as premised in methodological naturalism, the "larger image" cannot be captured by the methods that mindset or predisposition imposes: the presupposition that all causes in Nature are natural causes (i.e., material and/or physical, local causes whose instantaneous results are susceptible of observation, technically augmented as necessary).
Also final causes are banished from methodological naturalism, because they appear to act "from the future," and this cannot be.
And yet a biological function really cannot be described without reference to an end, purpose, or goal — that is, a final cause.
Aristotle further clarified that the final cause is the cause for which all the other causes in Nature — formal, material, efficient — exist in the first place. It is a peras, a Limit, without which nothing could be as it is, or reason even be possible.
But I disgress. To get back to the main point, if, on the other hand, Darwinism is seen as premised in metaphysical naturalism, it seems to me it turns Nature into the "god." The Judeo-Christian God is simply banished. This is definitely a religious attitude, though a rather perverted one, to my way of thinking.
Why one would assume that God must be evicted in order for science to be conducted properly flies in the face of human historical reality. Such great scientists as Newton and Einstein (among many others) were motivated by ideas of the divine, of the transcendent; and many great scientists were even in religious orders — e.g., Gregor Mandel ("father" of genetics) and Georges LeMaitre (who "discovered" the Singularity).
I believe you are surely right, dear brother in Christ, to point out that our concepts respecting time dimensionality are still very crude:
...the true dimensional reality of the Universe God has created is from one perspective much more complex than 4D spacetime, while from another perspective far more elegant in process than we have yet to discover. As an example, I would point to the notion that gravity in our 4D continuum may be a shadow effect of a force manifesting in a fifth or sixth dimensional continuum. The deposition of certain crystalline structures hints at this 'higher dimensions effecting' (kind of like a precipitant) our 4D spacetime.Along those lines, I think you'll enjoy this article: Time as an Illusion, by Paul. S. Wesson. It's one of the most thought-provocative scientific papers I've read in recent times.
Thank you so much for writing, MHGinTN!
What do you think needs to be done to correct that? Do we reject any scientific theory that can't be reconciled to everyone's theology, or do we choose an "official" religion of science, and declare that all theories must be consistent with those religious beliefs and doctrines?
As an example, it is still possible to navigate the earth with Ptolemaic geocentricity. But to navigate the solar system one requires Newtonian physics and heliocentricity. And to leave the solar system, one needs Einstein's General Relativity.
Those who cling to Darwin's explanation as dogma are like those ancient navigators. That an explanation worked in a limited scope does not mean it is informed, accurate, transportable or applicable to a greater scope.
Darwin had no knowledge of modern physics or mathematics. Information theory, grounded on Shannon's mathematical theory of communications, is a branch of Math and not a Science discipline. Shannon's theory dates to the mid-1940's but information theory did not expand and prosper for two decades. The expansion now is exponential.
In their 1953 abiogenesis experiment, Miller and Urey did not have the benefit of Shannon's insights or even the insights of Crick and Watson whose structure of DNA discovery also dates to 1953.
And neither team had yet to understand the full relevance of the encoding of the information content, i.e. DNA/RNA. Indeed, the exploration of genomic information continues.
Truly, when the mathematicians and physicists were brought to the microbiology table they had much to say and a different methodology, e.g. "the absence of evidence is evidence of absence" v "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." And of course the emphasis for them is on the theory whereas the emphasis for the biologists was on the data, i.e. observations (Pattee, et al)
Because of these fundamental differences, there has been significant resistance to their observations (Rosen, Yockey, et al). But the mathematicians and physicists prevail and will continue to prevail.
At the root they have raised the importance of information (successful communication, Shannon) and autonomy and function.
Those who cling to Darwin's explanation bend like pretzels to ignore the obvious existence of biological function - probably because it suggests purpose or design whereas the century old dogma requires everything happen by blind chance. And yet, mathematically, function cannot be ignored (Rosen et al.)
Nor will those outside the math and physics discipline address the rise of autonomy in nature. Indeed, the very existence of the encoding suggests a necessary toggling between autonomy and non-autonomy to gather and extend even the most rudimentary information content (Rocha, Pattee, et al).
Also perhaps feeding the resistance to their observations, there is no known natural origin for information (successful communication), autonomy, function or even inertia.
Bottom line, to me the ones who treat Darwin's theory like dogma are exactly like those who still cling to a geocentric model of the "universe."
Thank God there are very few of the latter and hopefully that fact means the number of the former will also diminish.
(And I do love the 'dirt' joke!)
If humans don't act within the confines of their instincts, then communism and pacifism should work, right?
Not that I am, FRiend.
My comment refers back to post #134 where YHAOS copies & pastes a listing of 27 quotes from FReepers allegedly "mocking" Christians, with YHAOS special emphasis on the words "demonic possession".
I merely pointed out that if those quotes were seriously "mocking" Christians, then the quote about CS Lewis you refer to even more seriously mocks science.
Indeed, let's look at that quote again:
The quote goes on to equate these "lies" with the "fiendish aim" of "another spirit" for which "compromising priests" are serving its "diabolical purposes".
I'd call that a mocking of science far greater than any mild chiding of certain Christian beliefs by posters on Free Republic.
betty boop: "I'm a Christian. I don't "mock" science.
Rather I think science is one of the most glorious human activities in the world.
I don't even "mock" Darwinism.
To critique it for its shortcomings is not to "mock" it; it is to take it seriously."
So, does that mean you disavow the use of CS Lewis' words in the article here?
If so, then I commend you, FRiend.
One of the reasons this disagreement is so ancient is because there are two creation stories in Genesis with two very different names for the creator. In fact, one name is plural, the other is singular.
Regardless of the reasons, the history of attempts at a political solution to that disagreement have proven to be bloody, destructive, and unsuccessful.
I regret and apologize for using the word "non-traditionalists" since it misrepresents what and who we're talking about.
I almost posted an immediate retraction, but then thought, well, let's just see what response it gets.
Your response, MHGinTN, is pretty mild...
I absolutely despise that word "fundamentalist".
It drives me crazy when I hear news reporter-idiots talking about suicide bombers as "Muslim fundamentalists", and then in the next sentence about "Christian fundamentalists" opposing abortion, or evolution.
So I was looking for another word, and "traditionalists" works pretty well, I think, as being both accurate and non-pejorative.
So, now, if "traditionalists" deny, say, evolution, what does that make those who agree with it, non-traditionalists?
So that was the word I chose, and now regret.
The reason is that in one sense not one of us is a real traditionalist, but in another sense all of us are.
Genuine traditionalists, people who seriously live their tradition 24/7-365 from birth to death are my wonderful Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors -- old order Amish and Mennonites.
For them, tradition is reality, and all the rest of us are modern, in their word: English.
So, if you're sitting at a computer or smart-phone reading this, then you are not "traditional" in their sense.
In another sense, we are all traditionalists, since we refuse to buy into the Madonna anthem: "we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl."
So I have to conclude that it's not a matter of "traditionalist" versus "non-traditionalist", but rather of more-traditional versus less-traditional.
Or, you might even think of it the way I do my Amish neighbors, among whom there are no "new order" Amish.
There are, however, what I call Old-Order, Older-Order and Oldest-Order, who do, by the way, get along well with each other, and amongst whom families sometimes move and change identification.
Bottom line: "non-traditional" in today's usage means Madonna's "material girl", and that's not who I intended.
I intended to mean "less-traditional", or perhaps even Older-Order as opposed to our Oldest-Order Young Earth Creationists.
And no, they don't mock each other.
;-)
I really don't care if someone wants to call me "fundamentalist" for loving God, believing Him and trusting Him. If that's how they meant it, I take it as a badge of honor.
As to my personal understanding of God's words in Genesis, I see that God is the only observer of Creation and is speaking from the inception perspective. For that reason, I very strongly agree with Jewish Physicist Gerald Schroeder in pointing out that - when one considers the big bang and inflationary theory (General Relativity) - that approximately 15 billion years from our space/time perspective is equal to approximately one week in equivalent earth days from the inception space/time perspective.
There is, of course, much more that I could/would say on the subject - the only part relevant to this discussion is that the observer perspective of Scripture changes to Adamic time (space/time coordinates) at the top of Genesis 4 when Adam is banished to mortality.
By 141 years Jefferson anticipates the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation signaling the beginning of the universe. Amazing!
He continues: “On the contrary, I hold, (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. . The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration into new and other forms.”
. . . . . Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, in 19 volumes, Memorial Edition, edited by Albert Ellery Burgh, Vol 15, pg 425
Thanks for your comeback, and thanks for the scientific data and the support you offer. Most appreciated.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.