Replies

betty boop: "Now it seems to me the problem spirited irish and BroJoeK have been having on this thread is that the two do not stand on the same Ground of Being.
What to BJK is a party game, a divertissement, an exercise in word-play is to spirited irish finally a matter of life and death."

BJK response: As always when you try to get inside my head, Ms boop, you get wrong -- most often exactly the opposite of truth.
In this case, I am here defending, amongst others, our Founders' religious beliefs against Ms irish's charge of "Damnable Heresy" and Kevmo's of being "God Damned Heretics".
If you think that is mere "divertissement" then you clearly don't yet "grasp" what's going on here.

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.
Yes, others had more traditional religious views, notably John Jay, but Ms irish's charge of "Damnable Heresy" she lays specifically at Enlightenment Age thinkers -- and that necessarily includes our Founders.

betty boop: "So he has been working overtime to depict spirited as an object of ridicule."

So now Ms irish, the charger of "Damnable Heresy", is the object of ridicule?
No, boop, she is the originator or ridicule.
If anything, she is only receiving back, in the mildest possible form, what she first dished out.

betty boop: "Doesn't seem very "Christian" to me..."

So calling yours truly, BroJoeK a "God Damned Heretic": that's 100% Christian, while reporting how ridiculous that is: that's not?
So who, pray tell us, has the most warped idea of what exactly "Christian" means?

betty boop: "For my part, I see very clearly the reasons for spirited's alarm.
I share her concerns."

Sure, in effect, you and Ms irish are reporting a multi-alarm fire, but when you throw in the Enlightenment Age thinking of our Founders, then you are giving the Fire Department the fire's wrong address.

Metaphorically, your alarm is putting out a fire that's not there, while the real fire burns-on unhindered.

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.