Falling Stars, Damnable Heresy, and the Spirit of Evolution

“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)

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)

“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)

“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)

“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

GarySpFc: "First, I am not your friend." Reading comprehension is important on Free Republic, don't you know? The word "FRiend" is a term of respect from a fellow FReeper. We are, after all, on the same political team, this is a News/Activism thread, and that's what "FRiend" is intended to remind you of. If you reject such FRiendship, you also reject a large number of fellow FReepers, at which point the difficulty of winning in politics only grows.

Thank you, but serving the Lord is far more important to me than winning in politics. Do not call me friend.

GarySpFc: "Secondly, I disagree with almost everything you have written. That the Founding Fathers were in the main deeply committed Christians, and not Deists or theistic rationalists I have no doubt, after having spent many years studying their lives and collecting their quotes. That said, it is your views which we find to be anti-Christian, and the Funding Fathers are not on trial here. ***Posts several quotes to prove point*** "

And yet, since my views are quite similar to many Founders, all the condemnations you heap on yours truly, BroJoeK, also apply to them, and all the Christianity you've discovered in Founders' beliefs also applies to me.
That's why your Founding Father quotes confirm what I've been saying here all-along, and also reflect my personal beliefs.
And yet, our Founders -- in your mind -- are faithful Christians, while I -- in your mind -- am a "God Damned Heretic".
So, there seems to me a problem going on inside your mind, dear FRiend.

The Founding Fathers were not Deists, and certainly not atheists, skeptics, or Aryans. Benjamin Franklin, as but one example, might have been a Deist in his early life. He quotes from one Deist book, and said he agreed with it, however that was when Franklin was in his twenties. However, by the time of America's founding he clearly wasn't theist. I quote, "I have lived, sir, a longtime, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth--God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without his aid?" "Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain to build it. I firmly believe this." Benjamin Franklin, June 28, 1787 Constitutional Convention. Clearly, Franklin was not a Christian. However, he clearly was not a Deist.

redleghunter: "You only commented on the 2nd Great Awakening.
The 1st Great Awakening which I posted twice started in the 1730s and was the key element which caused the Enlightenment movement to be of little effect on colonial America."

Benjamin Franklin, the oldest of our Founders was in his late 20s to early 30s, during the 1730s -- so if any Founder was influenced by that Awakening, it would surely be Franklin.
And yet, Franklin went the other way -- he sponsored Deist Thomas Paine's move to America, was a high official amongst Freemasons, was notably impious and on his death bequeathed money to every church in Philadelphia, including its Synagogue.

Washington and Adams were both born in in 1730s, so it's hard to suppose what influence the Awakening had on them.
Both were considerably more religious than old Franklin, but Adams was Unitarian, and Freemason Washington never expressed an interest in Trinitarian doctrines.

But let me say, if I may, that you seem to have a very different, and more negative, view of the term "Enlightenment" than I do.
In America the sometimes anti-Christian "Enlightenment" was transformed into a tolerance for all religions, as expressed in our First Amendment.
That's why, in my view the term "Enlightenment" expresses the very best in our Founders, not as this thread intends their "Damnable Heresy".

If you look up each individual in the "top tier" of our Founders -- Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamiltion -- you'll find that all of them were, as I've said here before, to a more-or-less degree influenced by Enlightenment Age ideas on theism/deism, Unitarian and/or Freemasonry.
All of those men are considered Christians, yet none (so far as I know) ever expressed a belief in full-blown Trinitarian theology.

Firstly, you argument from silence is invalid. Indeed, a mud puddle has more depth.

Secondly, maybe this will refresh your memory.

Franklin was responsible for bringing France into the Revolutionary War on the side of the Colonies, which proved to be of vital importance to cause of independence. He also went to Paris in August 1781 to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which ended the War with the British on September 3, 1783. The terms of this treaty were described as “so advantageous to the Colonies that it has been called the greatest achievement in the history of American diplomacy.”500

In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, … and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences.… Done at Paris, this third day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three.

D. Hartley
John Adams
B. Franklin
John Jay

BJK to betty: Your frequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, my own views correspond closely with those of most "top tier" founders, including Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison & Hamilton. Spirited: Either BJK has the memory of a brick or something underhanded is going on. My vote is for the latter. BJK claims his views correspond closely to most "top tier" founders. Well unless their views were a hybrid-mixture of physical and psychic evolutionary naturalism as BJK's is, then his claim is completely bogus. In post# 360 BRK lays out his evolutionary cosmogony: 1.G*d creates the Universe ex nihilo according to His Grand Plan -- think of it as a computer program. 2.The Natural-Universe unfolds....according to G*d's plan. 3.G*d may or may not intervene at critical points to apply what we today might call "mid course corrections" -- aka "miracles". But we can't know what we weren't there to witness, and the whole idea is problematic because it implies that G*d's Universe was less than He intended from the Beginning. The Bible tells us unequivocally that G*d considers His Creation "good". It also clearly describes G*d as working to create the Earth, and resting when done. It tells us nothing about how He did it. 4.Life on Earth first arose by some process we don't (yet) understand. Nor do we know whether G*d intervened directly (miracle) to make it happen, or if His Plan was adequate from the Beginning to allow "interesting organic chemistry" to grow slowly, slowly more complex until it looked like "primitive life". 5.Once life exists on Earth, then evolution (descent with modifications and natural selection) can operate. But what science calls "random" is in no sense really random. Instead, the process is controlled by: ◦first, G*d's original Plan, ◦second, any "mid-course corrections" G*d made along the way, and ◦third, any day-to-day interventions G*d thinks necessary for His purposes. 6.....biologically modern man appeared in the fossil record many thousands of years before a Soul, as we understand it, was breathed into Adam. So, the Garden of Eden records the moment when our ancestors' new Souls first recognized their Creator G*d and their own fallen sinfulness. Spirited: BJK's cosmogony presents us with a "god" of his own invention---an obviously limited, impersonal deity incapable of thinking/speaking/creating simultaneously that bears a striking similarity to an impersonal divine creative substance, so it becomes necessary to set a computer program in motion according to which the universe of matter unfolds as a continuous process. As BJK rejects the Revealed Word perspective, it is not possible for us to know how life arose according to the computer program or if the impersonal creative force (psychic energy) intervened at any time or even if the computer program was adequate to allow for life to emerge from nonlife (#4) All of this arrogant pomposity is by the "Word" of BJK, of course. However, though it is impossible for the posters to this thread to know if life emerged from nonlife (#4) it turns out that it is “entirely possible” for the little 'g' god-man BJK to authoritatively assert that life did after all emerge from non-life since evolution (#5) has become operable----according to BJK's computer program of course. Moving on with BJK’s gnostic-pagan narrative, after thousands or maybe millions of years of evolution the computer program finally produces a biological man (Gollum) followed in due course by a Soul (capitalized because so very divine?)after many more millions of years? (only BJK knows). This strange Soul seemingly recognizes its’ “Creator G*d” according to BJK's script, though it would make more sense if it recognized the “computer program” instead.

Sorry that the previous post is a mess---my mistake! Let's try it again: BJK to betty: Your frequent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, my own views correspond closely with those of most "top tier" founders, including Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison & Hamilton.

Spirited: Either BJK has the memory of a brick or something underhanded is going on. My vote is for the latter.

BJK claims his views correspond closely to most "top tier" founders. Well unless their views were a hybrid-mixture of physical and psychic evolutionary naturalism as BJK's is, then his claim is completely bogus.

In post# 360 BRK lays out his evolutionary cosmogony:

1.G*d creates the Universe ex nihilo according to His Grand Plan -- think of it as a computer program.

2.The Natural-Universe unfolds....according to G*d's plan.

3.G*d may or may not intervene at critical points to apply what we today might call "mid course corrections" -- aka "miracles". But we can't know what we weren't there to witness, and the whole idea is problematic because it implies that G*d's Universe was less than He intended from the Beginning.

The Bible tells us unequivocally that G*d considers His Creation "good". It also clearly describes G*d as working to create the Earth, and resting when done. It tells us nothing about how He did it.

4.Life on Earth first arose by some process we don't (yet) understand.

Nor do we know whether G*d intervened directly (miracle) to make it happen, or if His Plan was adequate from the Beginning to allow "interesting organic chemistry" to grow slowly, slowly more complex until it looked like "primitive life".

5.Once life exists on Earth, then evolution (descent with modifications and natural selection) can operate.

But what science calls "random" is in no sense really random. Instead, the process is controlled by:

◦first, G*d's original Plan, ◦second, any "mid-course corrections" G*d made along the way, and ◦third, any day-to-day interventions G*d thinks necessary for His purposes.

6.....biologically modern man appeared in the fossil record many thousands of years before a Soul, as we understand it, was breathed into Adam. So, the Garden of Eden records the moment when our ancestors' new Souls first recognized their Creator G*d and their own fallen sinfulness.

Spirited: BJK's cosmogony presents us with a "god" of his own invention---an obviously limited, rather pathetic, impersonal deity incapable of thinking/speaking/creating simultaneously.

Since BJK's invention bears a striking similarity to an impersonal divine creative substance, it becomes necessary to set a computer program in motion according to which the universe of matter unfolds as a continuous process.

As BJK rejects the Revealed Word perspective, it is not possible for us to know how life arose according to the computer program or if the impersonal creative force (psychic energy) intervened at any time or even if the computer program was adequate to allow for life to emerge from nonlife (#4) All of this arrogant pomposity is by the "Word" of BJK, of course.

However, though it is impossible for the posters to this thread to know if life emerged from nonlife (#4) it turns out that it is “entirely possible” for the little 'g' god-man BJK to authoritatively assert that life did after all emerge from non-life since evolution (#5) has become operable----according to BJK's computer program of course.

Moving on with BJK’s gnostic-pagan narrative, after thousands or maybe millions of years of evolution the computer program finally produces a biological man (Gollum) followed in due course by a Soul (capitalized because so very divine?)after many more millions of years? (only BJK knows).

This strange Soul seemingly recognizes its’ “Creator G*d” according to BJK's script, though it would make more sense if it recognized the “computer program” instead.

III. In the unity of the Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

Thank you for posting that excerpt from the Westminster Confession. I believe it succinctly defines what ALL genuine Christians believe about who Jesus Christ truly is and what His relationship to the Godhead comprises. Those such as BroJoeK and those with whom he claims common ground (the 50 million worldwide compared to the BILLION+ Trinitarian Christians), deny this historical AND Biblical doctrine because they have determined to know God and Jesus Christ on their own terms, with their own ways of defining Him whether or not it comports with the Divinely revealed truth of God's word.

I liken this abstinence to the do-it-yourselfer (DIYer) who buys a car and summarily tosses out the owners manual. Instead of following the manufacturer's detailed instructions - designed to allow the consumer the ability to get the best benefits from his purchase - the DIYer ignores best practices and presumes he knows better and rejects being told what to do, anyway. Instead of using the correct weight oil, for example, he decides to use maple syrup. Instead of the right grade of gasoline, he uses cheap vodka. Instead of the proper PSI for the tires, he kinda likes the idea of helium. Now imagine what happens when he starts up his car?

Almighty God has revealed what is truth to His creation. He did so through creation (Romans 1) as well as through His prophets - speaking the words HE told them to write down. The truth is what God says is the truth. He demands obedience and promises judgment on those who reject the truth. Truth is not relative, but absolute. He designed us, He knows what is best for us, He rewards obedience and judges disobedience. He didn't just leave it up to us to figure it all out on our own - that's why He preserved His word. If someone chooses to go it alone (or with a group of other "loners") he/they will answer to God for it.

Christians didn't invent the Trinity - they saw it for themselves through the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles along with the leading of the Holy Spirit. It is a revealed truth and something God expects us to believe (have faith) whether or not we understand it. Don't expect Almighty God to honor or respect or forbear disobedience. He won't. He judges it AS error - else He wouldn't have bothered giving us the Owner's Manual.

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.