About last night:Reasonable Faith, Discovery Institute...and kindness issue (?)

Faith & Science Conversation
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I thank you for your feedback about my last posts about love.

I have been pointing a friend to CS Lewis’s Four Loves.

Last night at the Univ of Texas at Dallas, Professor Robert Marks spoke on behalf of the Discovery Institute and for an organization called Reasonable Faith.

A few hours before I spoke to a Watermark church apologist about his gracious attitude. His name is Mark Rose. A thoughtful person.

Watermark has a connection to Discovery.

The staff of Discovery got an email from me before the Marks talk about some things.

  1. The student being caught between Crusade staff and biology professor at Yale in the 1990s

  2. Dawkins’s comment that anyone who questioned evolutionary naturalism is insane or evil in the 1980s, and the birth of the ID movement in response to that type of comment from a science popularizer of global reputation.

  3. The devastation at Baylor and in the Dover neighborhood after ID came to both places

Discovery Institute staff Rob Crowther in Seattle quickly responded to a comment I made about the institute’s endorsement of Trump and said fellows have the right to make any comments they want but the Institute takes no position on any politician.

Then I met the local rep for Discovery in Dallas, Pam Bailey. She mentioned the sense of persecution fellows had experienced from the scientific establishment, that evolutionary creationism was just naturalism in disguise, and that Discovery fellows were the humblest people she ever met.

Discovery seems to have two faces. A kind face toward those who support it, and a culture war face toward those who oppose it.

Pam has been educated by Liberty Univ., and Dallas Theol Seminary, both culture war schools in my estimation.

She is a kind person.

I told her I experienced kindness from both atheist journalist Lauri Lebo in Dover and Falwell friend Elmer Towns during the dissertation.

How did we get to this place, that kindness and culture war suspicion and hatred are commingled on a national scale between Christians, and between the saved and the lost.

My main relationship will be with Mark.

But I need to tell Discovery people something about apology making and the kingdom of God extending in the secular world.before the conference they will be doing at Watermark in October.

Your thoughts about this kindness issue and the issue of making amends?

I believe we need more students involved and speaking out.

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An interesting and important question, one that has probably plagued Christians since the earliest years of Christianity. We all have the potential for kindness, because traits such as kindness, empathy, love, and forgiveness arise from within the part of the self that poets call the Heart (and that neuroscientists who espouse Dual Process Theory call System 1). Dualistic traits such as culture war suspicion and hatred arise, alas, from within the part of the self that poets call the Mind (otherwise known as System 2 in Dual Process Theory). So a person can have both Heart and Mind traits at the same time because our biology allows for both networks to operate in parallel within the brain.

We can choose to give precedence to Heart traits, but many people don’t want to do this because there’s a particular type of addiction that the Mind is drawn to: status addiction. Status addiction is fed by choices such as dualistic us-versus-them thinking, the “right to be right,” and hierarchies of salvation.

The whole point of Jesus’ teachings was to help people move away from the suffering caused by the Mind’s status addiction, and to choose instead the empathy, forgiveness, and healing of the Heart. But, as ongoing experience shows us, that doesn’t always work out very well.

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Behe compared himself to Isaac Newton…

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Very sadly many churches teach dualism between the world and the saved. Jesus taught us that this is false. He told the parable of the wheat and the tares/weeds. Matthew 13:24-30 (NIV2011)*
24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field.
25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.
26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
28 “ ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
29 “ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them.
30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’ ”

Jesus said that weeds and the grain should not be separated until the harvest, or the judgement, not min the church, and then will the weeds be burne4d. It should be noted that these weeds closely resemble wheat until harvest.

You say that Pam is a very kind person, and I am not here to doubt this, On the other hand you say that she claims that "evolutionary creationism was just naturalism in disguise " She might believe this to be true, but what she is doing is judging the salvation of those who do not share her belief that YEC is required for salvation.

Jesus said, Judge not others, lest you be judged. Salvation is based on belief in Jesus Christ, and not belief in YEC. When we question other people’s salvation based on their scientific views or political views or their ethnic background, we are in deep trouble as you have noted

We need to stop judging others. We have stop being legalists and allowing legalists to judge others. It might make us feel good to think that we are saved because vote the right way and think the right way, but God wants us to be in right relationship with all people, not just the people we believe to be saved.

Leave the judging to God, That is God responsibility and only God is able to rightly carry it out, not Pam, or me or you or BioLogos.

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