Your Input is appreciated as well
I have sat with an audience of hundreds of academics and others all spellbound by John Polkinghorne at Northampton University. I could listen to him all day even though I disagree with him on every apologetic argument he makes. As for McGrath, he doesnât have Polkinghorneâs charm. Heâs defensive, passively aggressive with Dawkins in debate. That looks weak.
Neither of these guys or any other apologist I know is actually ever truly apologetic, vulnerable, naked. Honest.
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Not at you Redblade.
Educated people have come to Christianity fully aware of everything Pearce says from the beginning. The likes of you and I were brainwashed by folk Christianity pre-empting our state education. Thatâs why it hurts. De-programming - loss - is painful.
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What brought you to Christianity if you do not mind me asking? and who you recommend for speakers on this issue?
No, which is why even God the Killer rails against its absence through the Prophets. Which is why He nuked the five Cities of the Plain. For the sin of Sodom.
You can ask anything of me Redblade. Auschwitz and Hiroshima. At age 10. Puberty. James Michenerâs The Source. Everything in my febrile little life up to 15 when I came under cultic eschatological influence - Armstrongism - that deconstructed itself in to orthodoxy a quarter of a century later. Iâve been catching up on my education for the 15 years since and that has fed in to my understanding of Christianity. The pace accelerated or accumulated; I encountered the emerging Church in Rob Bell and Brian McLaren. But I kept on thinking. Here we are.
I see it best and in fact only corporately exemplified by the Steve Chalke led Oasis in Waterloo, London. No other fellowship in 50 years comes close. No other corporate ethos comes close. Close to aspiring to righteousness.
I see it specified in Jesusâ first sermon. itâs actually in the DNA of Christianity.
Have you read Jesusâ parable of the talents?
What do you think?
I cant debate Klax with you. You claim a christian yet you are gnostic. [quote=âKlax, post:45, topic:43508â]
Which is why He nuked the five Cities of the Plain. For the sin of Sodom.
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Both cities were sining. Let the sin be and you get a so much messed up world that you even whould have been disgusted
My foreign history professor sees the dichotomy between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome as a very American way of thinking. Like her I see both concepts as highly interrelated.
Martin Luther King, Jr. also did not concern himself with this distinction. King related the journey of life to the road to Jericho and spoke of the need to collectively transform the road âso that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on lifeâs highwayâ. (1) A well-off man has the means to protect himself on the road or find a more convenient way to his destination and so will his son. A less fortunate man has fewer choices and so will his son. Kingâs point is that we should dignify and empower people by working together through God.
Americans today think very individualistically, but people back then lived their lives more corporatively/socially. Like fiery Old Testament prophets, radical Christian anti-slavery activists spoke in terms of social justice. Even as late as the early 20th century, very conservative Christians did not have a problem with the basic idea of social justice, though they may apply it more parochially than universally.
(1) Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Fixing the Jericho Road â Peace & Conflict Studies Blog
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what is the difference between âsocial justiceâ and âjusticeâ? what does the qualifier add? I have seen the term a lot and google says it means an equal distribution of wealth and opportunities in society
It is the difference between liberty and tyranny. As communism has demonstrated, striving for an equality of outcome can only succeed in making everyone equally impoverished. Equality of outcome is not so poorly defined as it is simply undesirable in practice.
This goes for spiritual outcomes as much as it does the physical. Equality of opportunity is Christ dying for all and equality of outcome is universalism â the offer of salvation to all as opposed to forcing it on everyone.
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Evolution and the Kalam Cosmicological argument are on my mind. I am certainly reading The Language of Science and Faith by Giberson and Collins. But the what are the the strengths and weaknessess of Kalam and if the weaknesses of the argument outweigh the strengths are there better alternatives? I heard different arguments of cosmology by Aquinas and Plato or was it Aristotle?
Kalam is annihilated by eternity.
For me that falls within the lines of god of the gaps and god of the unlikely possibilities. Itâs philosophical, and I believe correct based off of reasoning with what we know, but itâs not scientific.
I say God of the gaps because it turns into the whole well of it exists then it had to be created. Which again I do agree. I do place part of my faith in god of the gaps and when one door is closed there will probably be another opened. But thatâs what I place my faith in, and not a scientific argument. We may very well in a hundred years, or even in 10 years have a good guess on how the very first energy started. Or maybe it will link to a multiverse and then we will have to work on getting to the first one of those and ectâŚ
Itâs also more along the lines of a god of the unlikely possibilities. By that I mean the chances of everything coming together personally seems to good to be true. You can also place faith in assumptions of how many other earth like planets there are that may contain life ( I believe itâs 1 out of every 1,000 galaxies statistically Should have a planet that is the right size with the right stuff near the right start at the right time where evolution took place leading to life. One planet out of every 1,000 galaxies should result in this. The number could be 1/100 and not 1/1000. Not sure. It was from notes on a cosmology blog by American natural history I believe. Iâll have to see if I can find it.
So if you end up on one of those planets it can seem designed. However ultimately we donât know if that true. So for me thatâs where part of my faith kicks in.
They are typically used as socio-economic terms, and I use them as such. I just find it not useful to separate both concepts because the outcomes of one generation greatly affect the opportunities of the next generation. For example, inhabitants of âghettoâ communities that are socially isolated from the rest of American society due to historical segregation experience less opportunities and have fewer choices than families that retain economic stability or affluence for several generations. Martin Luther King, Jr. came from a relatively affluent background and recognized the advantages that it confer onto his family compared to most black families. This led him to argue for transforming âJericho Roadâ.
It is justice that is social, pertaining to society. The coining of the term is often credited to 19th century Catholic social teaching, (1) but I believe the basic idea originated from ANE Jewish ethical monotheism because Old Testament prophets often criticized conditions in society and demanded justice for the less fortunate. One verse that comes to my mind is this:
Your rulers are rebels,
partners with thieves;
they all love bribes
and chase after gifts.
They do not defend the cause of the fatherless;
the widowâs case does not come before them.
(Isaiah 1:23)
(There are many other examples in Isaiah, Amos, and Micah.)
Many people from ancient times to modern times expected their kings to deliver justice on behalf of their subjects, to create and maintain a just order in their realms. It helped that people thought in more corporative and social terms before the latter half of the 20th century. In the 19th century, Catholics (and some Protestants) read 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 and saw society as an organic body with every individual as its cells rather than a mass of atomized individuals. Today, there are many different conceptions of social justice, and a reader on the internet may encounter many of them. But Christians draw theirs from the Bible because God is like an imperial sovereign ruler but one who faithfully ensures justice when his human vassal rulers fail.
(1) Historian Explores Origins of Modern Catholic Social Thoug
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The crucial premise of the Kalaam cosmological argument is whether an infinite past makes sense. Craig argues a real infinite past does not make sense. That premise is where I see most debate and have my own doubts. But it is hard to think of a counter argument that makes sense.
More ancientlt, there is Duns Scotus who argued for the existence of God granting an infinite past. Aquinas has five methods of arguing for Godâs existence that donât depend on the age of the earth. In one part of the Summa he in general dismisses all age based arguments because he doesnât think we can reliably say anything about the age of the universe based on present observations.
A fascinating argument is Anselmâs ontological argument which is entirely independent of the external world and depends just on our thoughts. This argument type repeated by Descartes in his Meditations, and more recently by famous mathematician Goedel.
Plato has an unmoved mover argument for God in Laws, but it is not a major part of his work. He is more interested in the fact we seem to access a realm beyond the physical world through our minds, which if true does have implications for the existence of a being that can turn the forms into reality.
Aristotle has a different sort of argument for God, that the must be a being that is self thinking thought, which is also related to his concept of the soul as the form that can contain all other forms, i.e. through reason and imagination.
Anyways, the existence of God is a very common theme throughout the history of philosophy, as philosophy itself points to a more perfect reality beyond our own.
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Yes, that is true. The primary thing God punishes Israel for in the OT is the injustice towards the vulnerable of society. And Jesus says the greater shall serve the lesser.
I would not personally call this a special kind of justice, i.e. social or otherwise. It is merely justice itself, treating everyone as being made in the image of God, with inherent worth, and not the means to an end. It is actually more the ancient concept of justice, which was based on a moral order to the entirity of the cosmos, society, and individuals in relationship to God. Justice is the following of this order, and injustice the violation.
And finally, to put in an ID plug, ID is a very important component to reclaiming this ancient concept of justice where the cosmos is an organic whole, taking it back from modern reductionism and scientism.
The Kalam is an irrelevant argument to me. Because I think an argument can be made that god is the best explanation of universe even if itâs eternal. So I favor contingency type arguments. And I think you can doubt P1 and P2 of the kalam anyway.
I like this work by Parfit: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n02/derek-parfit/why-anything-why-this