Posted on 10/06/2002 8:16:21 AM PDT by hispanarepublicana
Professor rigid on evolution </MCC HEAD>
By SEBASTIAN KITCHEN </MCC BYLINE1>
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL </MCC BYLINE2>
• Criteria for letters of recommendation: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/ letters.htm
• Michael Dini's Web page:
http://www2.tltc.ttu. edu/dini/
On the Net
Micah Spradling was OK with learning about evolution in college, but his family drew the line when his belief in the theory became a prerequisite for continuing his education.
Tim Spradling said his son left Texas Tech this semester and enrolled in Lubbock Christian University after en countering the policy of one associate professor in biological sciences.
Professor Michael Dini's Web site states that a student must "truthfully and forthrightly" believe in human evolution to receive a letter of recommendation from him.
"How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology?" Dini's site reads.
Dini says on the site that it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the "evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions."
He declined to speak with The Avalanche-Journal. His response to an e-mail from The A-J said: "This semester, I have 500 students to contend with, and my schedule in no way permits me to participate in such a debate."
A Tech spokeswoman said Chancellor David Smith and other Tech officials also did not want to comment on the story.
At least two Lubbock doctors and a medical ethicist said they have a problem with the criterion, and the ethicist said Dini "could be a real ingrate."
Tim Spradling, who owns The Brace Place, said his son wanted to follow in his footsteps and needed a letter from a biology professor to apply for a program at Southwestern University's medical school.
Spradling is not the only medical professional in Lub bock shocked by Dini's policy. Doctors Patrick Edwards and Gaylon Seay said they learned evolution in college but were never forced to believe it.
"I learned what they taught," Edwards said. "I had to. I wanted to make good grades, but it didn't change my basic beliefs."
Seay said his primary problem is Dini "trying to force someone to pledge allegiance to his way of thinking."
Seay, a Tech graduate who has practiced medicine since 1977, said a large amount of literature exists against the theory.
"He is asking people to compromise their religious be liefs," Seay said. "It is a shame for a professor to use that as a criteria."
Dini's site also states: "So much physical evidence supports" evolution that it can be referred to as fact even if all the details are not known.
"One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one's understanding of science and of the method of science," Dini states on the Web site.
Edwards said Dini admits in the statement that the details are not all known.
Dini is in a position of authority and "can injure someone's career," and the criteria is the "most prejudice thing I have ever read," Seay said.
"It is appalling," he said.
Both doctors said their beliefs in creationism have never negatively affected their practices, and Seay said he is a more compassionate doctor because of his beliefs.
"I do not believe evolution has anything to do with the ability to make clinical decisions — pro or con," Seay said.
Academic freedom should be extended to students, Edwards said.
"A student may learn about a subject, but that does not mean that everything must be accepted as fact, just because the professor or an incomplete body of evidence says so," Edwards said.
"Skepticism is also a very basic part of scientific study," he said.
The letter of recommendation should not be contingent on Dini's beliefs, Edwards said.
"That would be like Texas Tech telling him he had to be a Christian to teach biology," Edwards said.
Harold Vanderpool, professor in history and philosophy of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said he has a problem with Dini's policy.
"I think this professor could be a real ingrate," Vanderpool said. "I have a problem with a colleague who has enjoyed all the academic freedoms we have, which are extensive, and yet denies that to our students."
Vanderpool, who has served on, advised or chaired committees for the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, said the situation would be like a government professor requiring a student to be "sufficiently patriotic" to receive a letter.
"It seems to me that this professor is walking a pretty thin line between the protection of his right to do what he wants to do, his own academic freedom, and a level of discrimination toward a student," he said.
"It is reaching into an area of discrimination. That could be a legal problem. If not, it is a moral problem," Vanderpool said.
Instead of a recommendation resting on character and academic performance, "you've got this ideological litmus test you are using," he said. "To me, that is problematic, if not outright wrong."
William F. May, a medical ethicist who was appointed to President Bush's Council on Bioethics, said he cannot remember establishing a criterion on the question of belief with a student on exams or with letters of recommendation.
"I taught at five institutions and have always felt you should grade papers and offer judgments on the quality of arguments rather than a position on which they arrived."
Professors "enjoy the protection of academic freedom" and Dini "seems to be profoundly ungrateful" for the freedom, Vanderpool said.
He said a teacher cannot be forced to write a letter of recommendation for a student, which he believes is good because the letters are personal and have "to do with the professor's assessment of students' work habits, character, grades, persistence and so on."
A policy such as Dini's needs to be in the written materials and should be stated in front of the class so the student is not surprised by the policy and can drop the class, Vanderpool said.
Dini's site states that an individual who denies the evidence commits malpractice in the method of science because "good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs."
People throw out information be cause "it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs," Dini's site reads. A physician who ignores data cannot remain a physician for long, it states.
Dini's site lists him as an exceptional faculty member at Texas Tech in 1995 and says he was named "Teacher of the Year" in 1998-99 by the Honors College at Texas Tech.
Edwards said he does not see any evidence on Dini's vita that he attended medical school or treated patients.
"Dr. Dini is a nonmedical person trying to impose his ideas on medicine," Edwards said. "There is little in common between teaching biology classes and treating sick people. ... How dare someone who has never treated a sick person purport to impose his feelings about evolution on someone who aspires to treat such people?"
On his Web site, Dini questions how someone who does not believe in the theory of evolution can ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist.
May, who taught at multiple prestigious universities, including Yale, during his 50 years in academia, said he did not want to judge Dini and qualified his statements because he did not know all of the specifics.
He said the doctors may be viewing Dini's policy as a roadblock, but the professor may be warning them in advance of his policy so students are not dismayed later.
"I have never seen it done and am surprised to hear it, but he may find creationist aggressive in the class and does not want to have to cope with that," May said. "He is at least giving people the courtesy of warning them in advance."
The policy seems unusual, May said, but Dini should not be "gang-tackled and punished for his policy."
The criterion may have been viewed as a roadblock for Micah Spradling at Tech, but it opened a door for him at LCU.
Classes at LCU were full, Tim Spradling said, but school officials made room for his son after he showed them Dini's policy.
skitchen@lubbockonline.com 766-8753
You may have seen something about that, but you didn't see that. The narrative is false. Mesonychus was not called into question by any old-news molecular studies. It was a paleontological find. Meso isn't out of the picture, either. It may just have lost, through evolution, a certain type of ankle bone.
But that's more than you wanted to hear.
Scientific American, May 2002
Making Waves THE FOSSILS UNCOVERED during the 1980s and 1990s advanced researchers’ understanding of whale evolution by leaps and bounds, but all morphological signs still pointed to a mesonychid origin. An alternative view of cetacean roots was taking wing in genetics laboratories in the U.S., Belgium and Japan, however. Molecular biologists, having developed sophisticated techniques for analyzing the DNA of living creatures, took Boyden’s 1960s immunology-based conclusions a step further. Not only were whales more closely related to artiodactyls than to any other living mammals, they asserted, but in fact whales were themselves artiodactyls, one of many twigs on that branch of the mammalian family tree. Moreover, a number of these studies pointed to an especially close relationship between whales and hippopotamuses. Particularly strong evidence for this idea came in 1999 from analyses of snippets of noncoding DNA called SINES (short interspersed elements), conducted by Norihiro Okada and his colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The whale-hippo connection did not sit well with paleontologists. “I thought they were nuts,” Gingerich recollects. “Everything we’d found was consistent with a mesonychid origin. I was happy with that and happy with a connection through mesonychids to artiodactyls.” Whereas mesonychids appeared at the right time, in the right place and in the right form to be considered whale progenitors, the fossil record did not seem to contain a temporally, geographically and morphologically plausible artiodactyl ancestor for whales, never mind one linking whales and hippos specifically. Thewissen, too, had largely dismissed the DNA findings. But “I stopped rejecting it when Okada’s SINE work came out,” he says. It seemed the only way to resolve the controversy was to find, of all things, an ancient whale anklebone. Morphologists have traditionally defined artiodactyls on the basis of certain features in one of their anklebones, the astragalus, that enhance mobility. Specifically, the unique artiodactyl astragalus has two grooved, pulleylike joint surfaces. One connects to the tibia, or shinbone; the other articulates with more distal anklebones. If whales descended from artiodactyls, researchers reasoned, those that had not yet fully adapted to life in the seas should exhibit this double-pulleyed astragalus. That piece of the puzzle fell into place last fall, when Gingerich and Thewissen both announced discoveries of new primitive whale fossils. In the eastern part of Baluchistan Province, Gingerich’s team had found partially articulated skeletons of Rodhocetus balochistanensis and a new protocetid genus, Artiocetus. Thewissen and his colleagues recovered from a bone bed in the Kala Chitta Hills of Punjab, Pakistan, much of the long-sought postcranial skeleton of Pakicetus, as well as that of a smaller member of the pakicetid family, Ichthyolestes. Each came with an astragalus bearing the distinctive artiodactyl characteristics. The anklebones convinced both longtime proponents of the mesonychid hypothesis that whales instead evolved from artiodactyls. Gingerich has even embraced the hippo idea. Although hippos themselves arose long after whales, their purported ancestors —dog- to horse-size, swamp-dwelling beasts called anthracotheres —date back to at least the middle Eocene and may thus have a forebear in common with the cetaceans. In fact, Gingerich notes that Rodhocetus and anthracotheres share features in their hands and wrists not seen in any other later artiodactyls. Thewissen agrees that the hippo hypothesis holds much more appeal than it once did. But he cautions that the morphological data do not yet point to a particular artiodactyl, such as the hippo, being the whale’s closest relative, or sister group. “We don’t have the resolution yet to get them there,” he remarks, “but I think that will come.” What of the evidence that seemed to tie early whales to mesonychids? In light of the new ankle data, most workers now suspect that those similarities probably reflect convergent evolution rather than shared ancestry and that mesonychids represent an evolutionary dead end. But not everyone is convinced. |
It appears as if the only blue up to this point comes from Scientific American. As to sh!tstorm, apparently any word contradicting Vade's world view is considered a storm.
Exodus 19 3 Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 4 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now
you obey me fully and keep my covenant,
out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you [1] will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites." --NIV, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED; EMPHASIS ADDED.
Footnotes
19:5,6 Or possession, for the whole earth is mine. 6 You
© Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society All rights reserved worldwide
AND IN Ex. 20:5, we find:
Exodus 20
2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
[HELLO, "SLAVERY" as in pretty awful 9-5 and then some! . . . that they were warned about from the beginning--particularly with Abraham and many points therefrom.]
3 "You shall have
other gods before [1] me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God
[In the NLT: I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God who will not share your affection with any other god!; CEV: I am the LORD your God, and I demand all your love.; Young's Literal Trans. nor serve them: for I, Jehovah thy God, [am] a zealous God, charging iniquity of fathers on sons, on the third [generation], and on the fourth, of those hating Me,],
punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Footnotes
EZEKIEL 18: NIV:
Ezekiel 18 :: New International Version (NIV)
The Soul Who Sins Will Die
1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 "What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
" 'The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge'?
3 "As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD , you
quote this proverb in Israel. 4 For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son-both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.
5 "Suppose there is a righteous man who does what is just and right.
6 He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel. He does not defile his neighbor's wife or lie with a woman during her period.
7 He does not oppress anyone, but returns what he took in pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked.
8 He does not lend at usury or take excessive interest. [1] He withholds his hand from doing wrong and judges fairly between man and man.
9 He follows my decrees and faithfully keeps my laws. That man is righteous; he will surely live, declares the Sovereign LORD .
10 "Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things [2] 11 (though the father has done none of them):
"He eats at the mountain shrines. He defiles his neighbor's wife.
12 He oppresses the poor and needy. He commits robbery.
He does not return what he took in pledge. He looks to the idols.
He does detestable things.
13 He lends at usury and takes excessive interest.
Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he will surely be put to death and his blood will be on his own head.
14 "But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:
15 "He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel. He does not defile his neighbor's wife.
16 He does not oppress anyone or require a pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked.
17 He withholds his hand from sin [3] and takes no usury or excessive interest. He keeps my laws and follows my decrees.
He will not die for his father's sin; he will surely live. 18 But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people.
19 "Yet you ask, 'Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?' Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live.
20 The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.
21 "But if a wicked man turns away from all the sins he has committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, he will surely live; he will not die.
22 None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him. Because of the righteous things he has done, he will live.
23 Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD . Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?
24 "But if a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked man does, will he live? None of the righteous things he has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness he is guilty of and because of the sins he has committed, he will die.
25 "Yet you say, 'The way of the Lord is not just.' Hear, O house of Israel: Is my way unjust? Is it not your ways that are unjust? 26 If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it; because of the sin he has committed he will die.
27 But
a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he will save his life.
he will not die.
29 Yet the house of Israel says, 'The way of the Lord is not just.' Are my ways unjust, O house of Israel? Is it not your ways that are unjust?
30 "Therefore, O house of Israel, I will judge you, each one according to his ways, declares the Sovereign LORD . Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall.
31 Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, O house of Israel? 32 For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!
Footnotes
18:8 Or take interest; similarly in verses 13 and 17 18:10 Or things to a brother 18:17 Septuagint (see also verse 8); Hebrew from the poor
I don't really think the above should require any comment from a layman or anyone else. Nevertheless--to every man an answer . . .
The Bible is a complex collection of 66 books. God speaks to a myriad of complex life situations as well as an infinite complexity of individuals and individual choices. It is relatively easy to construe at face value some contradictions here and there. Our perspective is also finite compared to God's.
Communication is an art that requires some art on the part of the listener as well as sender. It is difficult for us to put ourselves in God's place and even remotely sanely pretend to have His perspective. Nevertheless, He makes it relatively easy to understand the gist, at least, of what He's getting at.
Then there's the fact that GOD SAYS that the soul that does not know Him CANNOT understand--certainly not well--those things written from the heart of God to the hearts of those who Love and earnestly follow Him.
But most of these straw dogs those hostile to God like to brandy about are as substantive as a morning fog--or less so.
Comparing Exodous and Ezekiel above, we CAN see--IF--we wish to see--that initially, GOD IS MAKING A VERY BIG POINT THAT HE IS SUPREME, ULTIMATE ETC.
He goes to GREAT LENGTHS to impress on an essentially illiterate people that they need to live with that focus, value, perspective--engrained on their psyche's, souls, hearts, minds--their whole being--OTHERWISE, they'll get into ALL KINDS OF TROUBLES.
Interestingly, He chose a people who, as He describes them--are rather obstinate, rebellious, etc. at least as much as any other people and often quite a bit more so. In a sense, they are a vivid set of object lessons for the rest of creation--both in what NOT to do and in what to do vis a vis in relationship to God and life and each other.
Right after giving Moses the Exodous exhortation, Moses goes down to find them in all manner of debauchery as well as worshipping a golden calf.
Now in our own era we can observe the following which I've taken the libertay to use as an illustration from PHILIP YANCEY'S WHAT'S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE? [Zondervan ISBN 0-310-21862-4]
p75
"In 1898 Daisy was born into a working-class Chicago family, the eighth child of ten. The father barely earned enough to feed them all, and after he took up drinking, money got much scarcer. Daisy, closing in on her hundredth birthday as I write this, shudders when she talks about those days. Her father was a 'mean drunk,' she says. Daisy used to cower in the corner, sobbing, as he kicked her baby brother and sister across the linoleum floor. She hated him with all her heart."
"One day the father declared that he wanted his wife out of the house by noon. All ten kids crowded around their mother, clinging to her skirt and crying, 'No, don't go!' But their father did not back down. Holding on to her brothers and sisters for support, Daisy watched through the bay window as her mother walked down the sidewalk, shoulders adroop, a suitcase in each hand, growing smaller and smaller until finally she disappeared from view."
"Some of the children eventually rejoined their mother, and some went to live with other relatives. It fell to Daisy to stay with her father. She grew up with a hard knot of bitterness inside her, a tumor of hatred over what he had done to the family. All the kids dropped out of school early in order to take jobs or join the Army, and then one by one they moved away to other towns. They got married, started families, and tried to put the past behind them. The father vanished--no one knew where and no one cared."
"Many years later, to everyone's surprise, the father resurfaced. He had guttered out, he said. Drunk and cold, he had wandered into a Salvation Army rescue mission one night. To earn a meal ticket he first had to attend a worship service. When the speaker asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus, he thought it only polite to go forward along with some of the other drunks. He was more surprised than anybody when the 'sinner's prayer' actually worked. The demons inside him quieted down. He sobered up. He began studying the Bible and praying. For the first time in his life he felt loved and accepted. He felt clean."
"And now, he told his children, he was looking them up one by one to ask for forgiveness. He couldn't defend anything that had happened. He couldn't make it right. But he was sorry, more sorry than they could possibly imagine."
"The children, now middle-aged and with families of their own, were initially skeptical. Some doubted his sincerity, expecting him to fall off the wagon at any moment. Others figured he would soon ask for money. Neither happened, and in time the father won them over, all except Daisy."
"Long ago Daisy had vowed never to speak to her father--'that man' she called him--again. Her father's reappearance rattled her badly, and old memories of his drunken rages came flooding back as she lay in bed at night. 'He can't undo all that just by saying'I'm sorry,'' Daisy insisted. She wanted no part of him."
The father may have given up drinking, but alcohol had damaged his liver beyond repair. He got very sick, and for the last five years of his life he lived with one of his daughters, Daisy's sister. They lived, in fact, eight houses down the street from Daisy on the very same row-house block. Keeping her vow, Daisy never once stopped in to visit her dying father, even though she passed by his house whenever she went grocery shopping or caught a bus."
"Daisy did consent to let her own children visit their grandfather. Nearing the end, the father saw a little girl come to his door and step inside. 'Oh, Daisy, Daisy, you've come to me at last,' he cried, gathering her in his arms. The adults in the room didn't have the heart to tell him the girl was not Daisy, but her daughter Margaret. He was hallucinating grace."
"All her life Daisy determined to be unlike her father, and indeed she never touched a drop of alcohol. Yet she ruled her own family with amilder form of the tyranny she had grown up under. She would lie on a couch with a rubber ice pack on her head and scream at the kids to 'Shut up!'"
"'Why did I every have you stupid kids anyway?' she would yell. 'You've ruined my life!' The Great Depression had hit, and each child was one more mouth to feed. She had six in all, rearing them in the two bedroom row house she lives in to this day. In such close quarters, they seemed always underfoot. Some nights she gave them all whippings just to make a point: she knew they'd done wrong even if she hadn't caught them.
"Hard as steel, DAisy never apologized and never forgave. Her daughter Margaret remembers as a child coming in tears to apologize for something she'd done. Daisy responded with a parental Catch-22: 'You can't possibly be sorry! If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it in the first place.'"
"I have heard many such stories of ungrace from Margaret, whom I know well. All her life she determined to be different from her mother, Daisy. But Margaret's life had its own tragedies, some large and some small, and as her four children entered their teenage years she felt she was losing control of them. She too wanted to lie on the couch with an ice pack and scream, 'Shut up!' She too wanted to whip them just to make a point or maybe to release some of the tension coiled inside her."
"Her son Michael, who turned sixteen in the 1960s, especially got under her skin. He listened to rock and roll, wore 'granny glasses,' let his hair grow long. Margaret kicked him out of the house when she caught him smoking pot, and he moved into a hippie commune. She continued to threaten and scold him. She reported him to a judge. She wrote him out ofher will. She tried everything she could think of, and nothing got through to Michael. The words she flung up against him fell back, useless until finally one day in a fit of anger she said, 'I never want to see you again as long as I live.' That was twenty-six years ago and she has not seen him since."
"Michael is also my close friend. Several times during those twenty-six years I have attempted some sort of reconciliation between the two, and each time I confront again the terrible power of ungrace. When I asked Margaret if she regretted anything she had said to her son, if she'd like to take anything back, she turned on me in a flash of hot rage as if I were Michael himself, 'I don't know why God didn't take him long ago, for all the things he's done!' she said, with a wild, scary look in her eye."
"Her brazen fury caught me off guard. I stared at her for a minute: her hands clenched, her face florid, tiny muscles twitching around her eyes. 'Do you mean you wish your own son was dead?' I asked at last. She never answered."
"Michael emerged from the sixties mellower, his mind dulled by LSD. He moved to Hawaii, lived with a woman, left her, tried another, left her, and then got married. 'Sue is the real thing,' he told me when I visited him once. 'This one will last.'"
"It did not last. I remember a phone conversation with Michael, interrupted by the annoying technological feature known as 'call waiting.' The line clicked and Michael said, 'Excuse me a secong,' then left me holding a silent phone receiver for at least four minutes. He apologized when he came back on. His mood had darkened. 'It was Sue,' he said. 'We're settling some of the last financial issues of the divorce.'"
"'I didn't know you still had contact with Sue,' I said, making conversation."
"'I don't!' he cut in, using almost the same tone I had heard from his mother, Margaret. 'I hope I never see her again as long as I live!'"
"We both stayed silent for a long time. We had just been talking about Margaret, and although I said nothing it seemed to me that Michael had recognized in his own voice the tone of his mother, which was actually the tone of her mother, tracing all the way back to what happened in a Chicago row house nearly a century ago."
"Like a spiritual defect encoded in the family DNA, ungrace gets passed on in an unbroken chain."
"Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation."
[emphases added by Q]
"Margaret is a devout Christian who studies the Bible every day, and once I spoke to her about the parable of the Prodigal Son. 'What do you do with that parable?' I asked. 'Do you hear it's message of forgiveness?'"
"She had obviously thought about the matter for without hesitation she replied that the parable appears in Luke 15 as the third in a series of three: lost coin, lost sheep, lost son. She said the whole point of the Prodigal Son is to demonstrate how human beings differ from inanimate objects (coins) and from animals (sheep). 'People have free will,' she said. 'They have to be morally responsible. That boy had to come crawling back on his knees. He had to repent. That was Jesus' point.'"
"That was not Jesus' point, Margaret. All three stories emphasize the finder's joy. True, the prodigal returned home of his own free will, but clearly the central focus of the story is the father's outrageous love: 'But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.' When the son tries to repent, the father interrupts his prepared speech in order to get the celebration under way." [emphasis w blue added].
"A missionary in Lebanon once read this parable to a group of villagers who lived in a culture very similar to the one Jesus described and who had never heard the story. 'What do you notice?' he asked."
"Two details of the story stood out to the villagers. First, by claiming his inheritance early, the son was saying to his father, 'I wish you were dead!' The villagers could not imagine a patriarch taking such an insult or agreeing to the son's demand. Second, they noticed that the father ran to greet his long-lost son. In the Middle East, a man of stature walks with slow and stately dignity; never does he run. In Jesus' story the father runs, and Jesus' audience no doubt gasped at this detail."
"Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it. It is unreasonable to expect a woman to forgive the terrible things her father did to her just because he apologizes many years later, and totally unfair to ask that a mother overlook the many offenses her teenage son committed. Grace, however, is not about fairness."
"What is true of families is true also of tribes, races, and nations."
[Q: The book is wonderful and a great blessing to me at this point in my life. I encourage all hurting people and those who know hurting people to read it. He touches with many quoted great thinkers on serious crux issues of grace from our modern history. And, of course, he writes with his solidly practical, candid and yet searing prose.]
Most of us know ample stories similar to the one Yancy shares. Exodous describes a kind of universal law. We reap what we sow. And whether it is by genetics; a kind of spiritual genetics; a kind of emotional genetics and/or a kind of emotional/psychological genetics and/or conditioning--our offspring will reap what we sow as well. And the reaping can extend horrible distances down the line.
I believe that in Ezekiel, God is describing more a focus on the issue of eternal life. He is saying that IF WE WILL LISTEN, COME TO HIM; REPENT, HUMBLE OURSELVES BEFORE HIM; PUT HIM FIRST--THERE IS ANOTHER WAY. When it comes to eternal life and the age of Grace--a later era in the sequence of spiritual eras--EACH MAN WILL BEAR HIS OWN ETERNAL WEIGHT.
Yes, if we choose to live on the plane of the fruit of the tree of knowledge--then we reap what we sow and set our children and progeny up to reap what we have sown.
But if we choose God's grace and to live according to His mercy and will, then we can AT LEAST have eternal life. Each individual will bear their own burden or choose their own destiny by their choices and actions vis a vis God's Salvation--choose death or choose life.
IF you insist on stubborn rebellion--then horrible results will accrue to you and those who follow in your line. IF you choose God's Grace at least in this life there is some respite--a different inheritance through Christ's Blood and mercy even here--but more crucially--you need not suffer eternal death. You will bear the result of your own choice when it comes to eternal life. None of this tumbling your eternal choice on your descendants.
So, the two passages deal basically with two different contingencies. (A) The individual chooses stubborn rebellion and the generations after him bear the fruit of those choices in their daily lives in this time/space dimension. (B) With respect to eternal life--each person is responsible for their own choice.
It is perhaps possible also to say, God may be describing a transition in His major way of dealing with man in terms of God's focus. He is describing more of the style of relationship Christ died that we might be returned, reconciled to God through His Grace--that we might return to God and authentically have access at least at some eternal point to the walking-in-the-garden-face-to-face sort of relationship with God. Exodous is THE LAW based relationship. Ezekiel at least is pointing toward the Grace provided potential relationship.
Ezekiel writes many things particularly for our era. Christ affords in our era MUCH provision for turning our lives around. His Blood can slice right across the generational sins; the personal sins; the destinies demonic forces through the ages have tried to deposit to our accounts and daily lives. Christ with our cooperation is eager to take The Sword of The Spirit to such horrid destinies . . . and to offer us a NEW ONE secure in Him, in His cleansing Blood by the power of HIS SPIRIT. But the choice is ours. We can choose under the law--with it's rather strict reaping and sowing. Or, we can, as Ezekiel says--NO LONGER--live slaves to such reaping--we can choose eternal life and reap better results now AND in eternity--ETERNAL LIFE--ruling and reigning with Christ. What a deal!
I think you might have arrived at such conclusions had you studied the chapters out more thoroughly on your own.
GRACE TO YOU AND YOURS.
Okay - I'm hooked. Fill me in - just remember tomorrow is a workday.
Thanks for your great post.
You and others might be interested in a wonderful list of forgiveness stories at:
http://website.lineone.net/~andrewhdknock/Stories.htm
BLESSINGS,
When God says He knows whenever a sparrow falls--BUT OF HOW MUCH GREATER WORTH ARE ONE OF WE . . . perhaps we should pay attention to Him!
When THE BOSS declares essentially by the cost of Christ's life/Blood--that one human is worth the entire animal population of the whole world, perhaps THE BOSS is serious.
Genesis says before Adam,
THE WORLD WAS VOID AND WITHOUT FORM
There could have been talking trees and stationary dinasaurs and Winnie The Poohs everywhere for all any of US know. This old globe could have been recycled by an Almighty God an unknowable number of times from our perspective. Some residue might have been left around to humor the heavens as we scratch our heads.
I don't know that it matters a great deal to anything we have to make crucial decisions about whether the beginning of Adam was 6,000 or 60,000 years ago. I'm inclined to think it was likely significantly longer ago than 6,000 years as we know them. But then if light has been slowing down--all kinds of standards don't look quite as rigid as we've tended to construe them.
Just my 2NT$ worth.
We don't know WHAT THE THIS GLOBE WAS BEFORE IT WAS "VOID AND WITHOUT FORM."
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