It was a figure of speech based on how the cosmic background puts the ‘center’ at about 17 million light years from our current position.
It is utterly fascinating this ‘nearness’ is supposed to hold true for any position in the universe. What’s even more perplexing, that in a block universe, an observer can also appear to be at the center of time.
Not that anyone asked but my criticism has nothing to do with the fantastic claims which appear to conflict with science. Any gestalt of reality has got to have some such.
For me it is the insistence on a unique, explicit and exclusive truth where the sacred element of reality is concerned. If Christianity ever decided its way can be entirely adequate without insisting on those things it would be more interesting to an outsider. But those are like flashing red lights that warn of something amiss. Doesn’t mean Christian belief can’t be entirely useful to its practitioners. But it does mean it can’t truly be a good neighbor or be a part of community that includes everyone.
I like that!
I should add that when you’re doing cross-referencing via English concordance you’re doomed from the start. In a couple of Greek courses we actually got assignments to do “word studies” using the concordances from various translations, with each of us getting a different translation to use. I wish I could remember what words we worked with, but all I recall is how horrifyingly different the conclusions were!
Then of course we did it over but with a Greek word – and learned that no one not able to read Koine Greek (and I mean being handed a random piece of writing in Koine and being able to read it) should not be trying to do theology!
“Frankenstein” indeed!!
No “perhaps”, as I’ve been blessed to be there for a few and talked them through it. It’s both awe-making and humbling to see the light come back on when it clicks for someone that the foundation is the Incarnation, so if Jesus rose from the dead then (and I even sang the next line) “nothing else matters!”§, and then the relief that they can still love science.
That is such an awesome thought.
There’s an XKCD cartoon based on that . . .
found it:
§ once when doing that I got told that Metallica is “of the devil”. I replied, “So I’m taking all things captive!”
This makes me think of a pet peeve concerning people who go “Bible only!”: they fail to comprehend that if God is Creator then chunks of His truth can’t help but pop up here and there and often in strange places. Sure, the core of Christianity is true and thus exclusive, but if indeed Christ is “firstborn” and thus the ‘pattern’ for all Creation, at least some people are going to stumble over truth and treasure it.
It occurs to me that such people have always been strong advocates for Augustinian “original sin”, and I’d guess they fall into the error of “total depravity” as well – that way they don’t have to think about how other folks and even nature can have things to teach us; they just declare it all ruined and thus forget it.
Which isn’t what it was supposed to mean, so far as I can tell. Given word meaning shifts it was much more intended as “All human actions are sufficiently tainted by sin that none of them can earn us salvation; and it is only through God’s action in a person that they can do anything but sin.”
It is called a horizon for a reason.
Imagine that you are out at sea away from any land. What will you see? You will see that the edge of the horizon, the furthest you can see, is equally distant in all directions. You will be at the center of that horizon. You may even see other ships, and they will be somewhere between you and that horizon. However, the other ships will see the exact same thing you see. They will also see a horizon that is equally distant in all directions with them at the center and you off at a distant somewhere between them and the edge of the horizon.
appsandorgs: The topic of this thread is “nones” citing science to reject the possibility of a spiritual reality.
T_aquaticus: I think the trend goes in the opposite direction, at least for some “nones”. They are told that you can’t accept certain scientific conclusions if you are going to be a Christian.
You paint the image of theists tossing their fellow theists off the cliff. I am sure that is part of the mix. But I wonder about the absolute certainty (that ‘spiritual beliefs are false’) which has been held and promoted by cultural and educational authorities for decades on end. Surely you don’t lay that undemonstrated conclusion at the feet of the believers.
Shown by whom?
An open-ended self-replicator has to be able to specify itself among alternatives. This was predicted to require a system of tokens, referents, and constraints — where the spatial arrangement of objects within a sequence structure would be used to distinguish one referent from another and would serve as the means to accomplish that specification. The necessary relationships between the tokens and referents would then be established from memory. Such an organization would materially enable the specification of the self-replicator and would allow open-ended (Darwinian) evolution to occur.
This prediction was wholly confirmed in the 1950s and 60s, when every component of the system was discovered inside the living cell, doing exactly what it had to do to demonstrate its semiotic nature. Moreover, the use of rate-independent tokens and non-holonomic constraints is a physically identifiable organization, and can only be identified in two instances; one of those is in the gene system and the other in is the use of written language and mathematics (i.e. a universal correlate of intelligence).
Now who do you suggest carries the responsibility of communicating this documented (unequivocal) history of science to the “nones”? Would you require it as a burden of the world’s spiritual authorities, or it up to the authorities in science to acknowledge their own recorded literature — perhaps mentioning it somewhere between the lectures on empiricism and the self-correcting nature of their craft?
That assumes that the scientist moves in the right circles. Personally I have never had a problem with science because I have never looked to the Bible for scientific data. It is only a certain percentage of Christianity that has a problem at all, but, as is the way with minorities, they can be very vocal. In truth probably 90% of Christians don’t give it any thought at all.
It is all to easy to “blame” others for a lack or loss of faith, but it is down to the individual and what criteria(s) they have for belief or nonbelief. The usual reason for nonbelief is the lack of tangible evidence. They want to see or touch or prove which is the antipthy of faith.
The traditional metaphor is of a parachute. You can understand it, you can even build it yourself but it only matters when you put it on and jump out of the plane. At that point you have faith. The difference being that the faith will be proven or denied by what happens next. There is no concrete proof for 99% of spiritual faith.
My own faith is 100% secure but I could not show you why and anything I do say relies on secondhand belief. You have to believe me as well and accept my interpretation/understanding of whatever evidence I provide. In truth, you cannot teach faith, or instill faith, argue faith, or prove it.
There is no one to blame for lack of faith other than yourself. But, you cannot just force it upon yourself, just as it cannot be forced upon you by others. Eventually you will know one way or the other what you believe. Wanting it is not enough, and neither is Pascal’s wager.
Richard
An apparent junction?
I lay it at the feet of believers when they are operating on the same false foundation that the atheists use, namely reading scripture as though it was written with a modern worldview in mind, specifically the worldview of scientific materialism. When they read and teach on that basis they set up other believers to fail the moment they find out that the claim that the Bible teaches science is false: those believers follow the logic they have been taught and conclude that nothing in the Bible can be trusted.
By anyone capable of showing why the idea that the Bible teaches science is wrong, and explain the actual foundation of Christianity: the Incarnation, especially the Resurrection.
None of that is relevant because it is not founded on Christ. It does not show that the Bible teaches science, it does not show that scriptures even care about science.
Who would I suggest should communicate this? Any Christian capable of showing from the scriptures that the foundation is Christ, not some human-invented standard of truth.
tell me what makes him the son of God. Does the word becoming flesh mean to you “abracadabra” or “love thy neighbour like your own”?
The interpretation of the scripture I present is coherent with observed reality and what is said in the text. it emphasises that Jesus is resurrected in his followers that he lives in them and not as a separate self and that in our death we want to give up on our self to avoid that what the fall is all about, the temptation by the devil to be like God as our self thus to remain separate from him. The whole point of Jesus death was to become alive in all of us by giving up his “self” instead of being the ultimate eternal self.
unless that ship is in exactly the same position as your ship it will exactly not see the same thing that you see. In fact the ship you see will obscure your view of the horizon - unless:
https://www.vsnb.com/hovering-ships-are-they-real-or-simply-optical-illusion
you might even see ships "looming " beyond the horizon 
No analogy is perfect. 
"I know that my redeemer lives, He lives withi my heart?
The resurrection must be more than an abstract or metaphore, as Paul says
9Cor 15:17ff
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
If you are going to call it an Abracadabra then we have nothing to discuss.
Richard
The Word becoming flesh means exactly what it says: the eternal Logos actually became an embryo in the virgin’s womb.
Anything else is not Christianity.
No, it isn’t, it changes and mangles the text.
That’s a nice story if you like it, but it is not what the text says.
Humanistic philosophy, not the text of scripture. You’re making the error that false teachers have made down through the centuries: forcing the scriptures to fit a personal worldview.
The point of Jesus’ death was to end the reign of sin, defeat death, and end the enmity of man for God, along with showing us just Who God is by dying as a man.
If he wants to call it an Abracadabra then he is not talking about Christianity.
it is those who claim the word to be abracadabra, e.g. the magic spell to create parthenogenesis in a human. They think the son of God should be unnaturally conceived, e.g. by magic, probably because they believe the sin to come into humans with the act of sexual intercourse. So for Jesus to be free of sin requires for them that he came to exist unnaturally, rather than by natural process. Also it would demonstrate the power of God.
To me the word of God is that on which hang all the law and the prophets, “to love thy neighbour like thyself” e.g. thy own, those for which ne would lay down ones life. this command to give up ones “selfness” is the fundamental condition for existence in harmony with one another. anything that doesn’t collapses sooner or later.
So how do we overcome our demand for an unnatural Jesus, how can we understand his divine nature and him being free of sin? Would he become divine due to his birth to come about unnatural or supernatural, as by the will of God?
It helps to have some understanding of the concept of sin and how it came about. Considering the emphasis of the problem of nakedness and shame, as a youngster I thought the sin part was the bit about sex. Only when my kids went through puberty I started to understand the story of the fall from the point of the father and saw the fall as a poetic description of puberty - and only recently the question of God looking for them in the Garden “where are you” as the rhetorical question it is. After all, he perfectly knew where they were. The rejection of the authority of the father and becoming a self, separating from the father, sets you in conflict with that what is the authority with the interest of all life in mind. Mary’s giving birth against the will of man who does not want that life explains why this child had to be a “bastard” and not a celebrity child one would want to have just for the celebrity status accompanied by it for coming about by magic, but in submission to the will of God to declare the sanctity of life.
"And if Christ has not been raised inside you your faith is futile, you are still in your sins! "
Are we to think the atonement was about changing Gods mind about humans and sin and he now thinks “It does not matter any more because God provided the ultimate sacrifice to me” or that the atonement is about changing the attitude of humans to God to think "I have to sacrifice my “self” and change by letting God live in me instead of killing my most valuable possession and carry on regardless?.
If the resurrection is a physical event and does not change us and our wishes to be like God our self instead of being part of God as in “the father and I are one” our faith is futile. It is what the snake offered to Adam and Eve in the garden - wanting to be like God instead of remaining to be part of God. Eating from the tree of realisation of good and evil to emulate God in making our own moral judgements is one thing. wanting to have our own eternal life is yet another. Eating the fruit from the tree of life, e.g. taking the sacrament is to learn to gain eternal life by giving up the self in Jesus, not by becoming an eternal self.
I am sorry but you have got it all wrong. it is not about magic, or anything unnatural, And it is certainly nothing t do with an immaculate conception.
it is about dominion. God has dominion and so an do whatever he wishes whether it is within what we consider to be “normality” or breaks every human scientific “law” in existence.
Jesus was God in human form with all the ambiguities and impossibilities intact. Trying to rectify Christ to any concept of Naturalism or science is just a waste of time. Theology does not need science or scientific approval when dealing with God. That is not to say that science is irrelevant or bogus, only that Jesus was the exception that proves the rule(s)
Is not the right question
No it does not. Especially as your view of sin is contrived and based on a creation Myth.
The Gospel does not revolve or even evolve from the Garden of Eden. Sin is not something invented by Adam or passed along like some sort of pandemic disease. And God is not so incompetent that a single man can overturn all of His “good” creation.
Man was never meant to be perfect, or sinless, or eternal. Man was created with free will and with that comes sin. It is as simple as that. No need for apples and "magical trees and all the other paraphenalia of Original Sin. It is utter codswallop. Jesus was not the last resort or some sort of desperate compensation for humanity’s corruption. The whole thing was pre-ordained.
Christianity is about living this life not some sort of rite of passage to the next. Forgiveness is about living this life not a passport to Heaven.
Richard
But you make up your own word to replace the word of God, and have thus fallen into an ancient heresym a form of Gnosticism.
Supernatural is not unnatural unless you think that God is unnatural.
Jesus was/is divine because He was/is God from before the foundation of the world – the Logos by whom all things were made.
To compare His conception to magic is evidence of a total failure to understand the scriptures.
Nice demonstration of the Gnostic penchant to alter the scripture to make them mean what you wish.
And yet He died so we could be eternal selves united with Him.
I talk about those who insist in a magic origin of Jesus, e.g. an unnatural birth instead of a supernatural reason for him to be alive they are the ones who claim the word of God to be abracadabra, and you are right, it is not Christianity as in believing Christ to be the son of God but belief in Santa, as in wishful thinking
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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