Posted on 07/22/2007 7:40:38 PM PDT by xzins
Me too, dear 'pipe! Me, too.... It's an interesting analogy at least.
Try this scheme: (1)The union of soil and God's breath makes man a living soul.
(2)Man rejects the source of the life-giving breath. (3)Consequently the "integrity" of the union is fatally compromised and the body (aka "the flesh") manifests its disintegrative tendency, the tendency to, as we technically say, "croak".
(4)The neshemah, the Divine Flatus (no I'm not kidding, somebody really said that) is yielded back.
(5)In other words, human life as we come upon it empirically tends toward death, or 'title' to 'breath' is illegitimate and we cannot maintain possession. (Am I mixing enough metaphors here?
(6)Jesus also dies, gives up his ghost, and, IN PLACE of that former spirit which we sinners qua sinners never seemed to want anyway, gives us HIS spirit.
(7) Therefore St Paul says, You have died and your life is hid with Christ. Therefore he says, the Spirit prays within us. Therefore we are now a new body, Christ's body vivified with Christ's spirit.
So when St. Paul says nasty things about "the flesh" he is not being all gnostic and dualist and Platonic. Rather he is talking about what the flesh does, where it tends, when it isn't vivified with God's breath. It tends toward death. The "works if the flesh" tend toward death, etc.
In Christ, that tendency is accomplished. It's worked out all the way to its end. He gives up the ghost.
And if we join in a death like His we will join in His life. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. And, Christ being raised from the dead, will never die again, Death no longer has dominion over Him. For in that He died, he died to Sin once for all, but in that He lives, He lives unto God, So also you must consider yourselves dead unto sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ our lord.
And so also, the poor in spirit, those of us who have been given to see that we have zip, and such spirit as we have we already refused "in Adam", are blessed because he gives us His Spirit. And so We say, "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.
I tend to like Sundays. They get me goin' ....
You can’t hear it, but your post got lots of applause.
Nonsense. You "do science" by the light of that absolute belief.
The greatest truth is not science, which is basically exponential conjecture. The greatest truth is God's will, at least for those given eyes to see and ears to hear.
All others pay cash.
"Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ." -- John Calvin
Amen. Which is just a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 3:15...
"That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been"
You continue to misstate the reformed position, Kosta.
A person's "innocence" has nothing to do with his salvation. All men are fallen and none deserves redemption. We are saved by God's unmerited mercy alone through the innocence, obedience and sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
See post 5,196.
I like Butterflys.. What a metaphor?..
LoL....
Yet many of the evos have stated that everything is consistent and has to be assumed to be for science to be properly done; that if there had been a change in laws, it would make doing science impossible.
Scripture clearly states that that HAS been a change in condition of the world; one time at the Fall when corruption set in, another time after the Flood, when conditions on the Earth changed.
Here we have another situation where scientists propose something that was addressed in Scripture thousands of years ago yet when it's in the Bible, it's scorned, but when they think of it, it's the latest in scientific progress.
Kind of like extra-terrestrials- very likely to exist (to the point of actually spending money on searching for them); angels and demons- mythology.
Alternate dimensions-the latest in cosmology; heaven and hell-propaganda designed for the manipulating of the ignorant unwashed masses but unscrupulous churchmen.
It seems to be a matter of who's proposing these concepts and what they're called as to whether the scientific community gives them any credibility.
That doesn't ring any bells as something I would say. :) And, from my readings of all the other posts, I can't think of anyone who has said that. Is this a paraphrase of something I said?
It departs from the Gospels and from much of the Bible, though, to discard the greatest of His creations - man - to roast in hellfire forever for His pleasure.
The Bible says that those who do not believe go to hell. That is God's justice, and those people get what they want. God's pleasure is to keep His justice pure. The alternative would be for Him to violate His own nature. It will never happen. It is inapplicable for anyone to suggest that anyone around here thinks that God somehow derives "jollies" when people go to hell.
There are other opinions:
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
I think there are many legitimate ways to frame the issue. This is one of them. I disagree with the Apostolic position on free will because it supposes that we are good enough or qualified enough to make the important decisions all on our own, with no more than an arm's length offer from God plus a nudge that is given to everybody. I never would have accepted that offer if that's all it was.
If our intended purpose [is] to freely worship God for ever, then we can’t do it if we are robot slaves.
Robots are not sentient beings, we are, so the analogy does not fit. I think the term "robot" is used by many who are uncomfortable with the idea of God being in control. People like to feel in control. ...... As to being slaves, the Bible says that before we were saved were slaves to sin, but after, we are slaves to righteousness. I think that is a wonderful idea, and want to forever be God's slave.
What? Of course they used the institution of the Church to do their evil. That's how they got the access. Of course they were not representing true Catholicism, however, they WERE using their positions of authority within the institution. Based on your theme (below), when you say that these clergy created their own religion, I surely hope you are not implying that the Reformers are to blame for the recent scandals in your Church. Please tell me that isn't the case.
I am saying that the Reformation made it possible to create religion to do evil and that the Reformers will have to answer to that.
How did the Reformation "make it possible" to create religion to do evil? The Reformation simply identified what the Christian faith was at the beginning verses what it had turned into. We aren't the ones who created any new religion. Plus, there were plenty of abuses and "evil" being done in the Latin Church long before the Reformation ever came along.
Nah, He has the model HG333 ETERNAL flame. Totally waterproof. :)
Thank you for pointing out the most glaring flaw of this man centered theology about who binds and loosens my FRiend.
Amen!
Who other than God creates something from nothing?
D-fendr: IIRC, it's along the lines of: where in the biological material process do we assign the creation non-material soul - in the sperm, DNA, sperm-egg union..?
Who is assigning creation? The soul is already created. It is merely being passed on. It's simple: life begets life. Living things give life to living things. There is no contradiction in the traducianist view.
The "organic process" issue seems, rather, to apply to the creationist belief, as it implies that somehow the body (actually the haploid cells and their DNA information), and not the soul, suffers the consequences of Adam's fall and, in a retrograde fashion, corrupts the pristine soul God gives to each newborn at the moment of conception.
The Church teaches that Adam suffered spiritual death, which in turn caused physical (somatic) death. It is the soul that quickens the body, not the other way around. The body of a spiritually pure human being will be reined in. Only a fallen, defective soul lets the body take over. God intended us to be moral creatures. The body does not move by morality, but by necessity. Obviously, in individuals where the "animal" predominates the soul is deeply wounded, defective.
I spoke unclearly. Not that it was the soul has parts, but that the causation of fallen nature was transmitted through the parent. Inherited in a sense.
It was not the body that fell, but the soul. A fallen soul left the body to follow necessity and not morality. Once a bus driver becomes sick, the bus "takes over" and the consequences are predictable. There is no chance the bus will stay on course or stop for pedestrians. Only a "rejuvenated" (healed) bus driver will prevent a certain tragedy. But at no time can one blame the bus. Our bodies cannot be blamed. They are simply how they were created. It is our soul that is ill and in need of healing. Surely, God wouldn't give us defective souls; our defective soul is that begotten from Adam.
It is not in our body that we differ from animals but in our soul. The body did not fall. How can the body be responsible for our fall? How can the body carry Adam's sin? How can DNA "receive" grace (ability to repent) or fall from it? The parents do not transmit just the body but the life that is in them, the fallen soul, which we all received through Adam.
The issue with the Immaculate Conception is, as you noted, related very much. To the Orthodox, the divine intervention that took away the effect of ancetral sin we all suffer (defective soul) also removed in her any concupiscence and therefore her immaculate obedience was achieved through no effort of her own, but through divine intervention. With her will restored (healed) she could resist temptation and remain ever-obedient.
Her immaculate self, which remains completely transparent,becomes meaningful only if she was born like any one of us, with ancestral sin, and through free choice despite tendencies to the contrary, remained perfectly obedient. This elevates her to her rightful place of being the highest of all saints and closest to God.
Immaculate Conception also implies that she was baptized in Spirit before she accepted Christ.
I forgot about the séances allegation! What a riot! The situation reminds me of the old story, the emperor's new clothes - because it is clearly obvious to most Lurkers that people only throw spit wads when they have no ammunition. LOL!
Your observation (paraphrasing) that biology is playing catch-up with quantum field theory (and geometric physics in general) is spot-on.
Those whose concept of reality is "matter in all its motions" - or that which can be observed from telescope to microscope - have bet their collective farms on something which has not yet either been observed or created, namely the Higgs field/boson which the Standard Model posits to explain ordinary matter (5% of the critical density of the universe.) So far neither Fermilab nor CERN have met with success but perhaps CERN's next test will. We'll see...
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