That is an extreme oversimplification! Selfishness can’t class as a personality disorder because all such disorders have different spectra of symptoms, one of which might be selfishness. An interesting illustration can be made with Tolkien’s character Gollum: there a huge difference between having a favorite piece of jewelry one wants to keep and having a “precious” one is willing to kill in order to keep or regain.
But that’s a false dichotomy. I’ve worked with people who have violated moral standards not because they chose to ignore those standards but because prior mental trauma left them not in control of their own behavior – not as in justifying immoral behavior but as in opposing it with all their will even as their bodies engaged in said behavior, effectively becoming passengers in their own bodies with the ability to observe but not change course.
And when brain scans of different types can actually show physical differences in brains of people in such straits, dismissing it as “not a health battle” is just badly uninformed.
I think it was an article in Christianity Today this last year that referred to this as a modern type of gnosticism.
A psychologist I knew stated one day that out of ten people you meet on the street, four are fighting mental health problems . . . and half of the rest have given up fighting.
Given he had multiple PhD-level degrees, I don’t think it was just him having a cynical day; either way it’s a frightening thought/observation.
Yeah. My first thought was about PTSD flashbacks; I can’t think of anything related anywhere in the scriptures.
A friend the year before last, going through some serious issues, one day said to me, “I know I’m probably wrong, but I just don’t have the energy to think about it”.
Thanks to what I’ve been dealing with for the last two years, I can now understand that concept.
They are in different domains in a very important sense because science is “view from below” by necessity and cannot be otherwise, while the Bible endeavors to communicate the view from above.
They’re also in different domains because they operate with different definitions of truth, and that not just because of the difference between VFA and VFB; science is propositional in nature whereas the scriptures quite frequently are not – parable, allegory, temple dedication, royal chronicle, teaching by contradiction, and more have very little overlap with propositional assertions [my favorite example, as people here probably already know, being how Jesus so frequently asserted His identity as being YHWH without ever quite stating it as a proposition].
Excellent clarification!
One of these days I have to revisit it. That was a topic that a number of my grad school professors were very uncomfortable with despite how important it is, some of them because it borders on the topic of the limitation of human language in the first place for describing anything transcendental.
how can it drift offtopic…the topic is that YEC are mental case conspiracy theorists who are indoctrinating unsuspecting individuals with lies.
Everything i have said above is addressing that false claim.I am not the one who decided to introduce a question with such a broad range of ontopic responses…whoever posted the question should have thought more carefully before posting it in the first place!
Let me add, the reason why i have generally have long answers in posts on forums is because i like to cross link my theology…its not one of “sliced and diced” unrelated snippets from all over the place that are in constant conflict.
Uh, by getting into esoteric arguments about whether or not satan can create things, or how much he knows about science?
Therein lies the problem, because that is a recipe for drifting off topic.
To be fair, Adam, some of the points that you make do have some merit, but you do need to remain focused. You may think you’re viewing theology as an integrated whole, but to the rest of us, your arguments come across as disjointed and rambling—a hodgepodge of theological claims whose relevance to the topic at hand and even to each other is unclear at best. It sounds more like you’re just trying to throw as much as possible at the wall in the hope of finding something that sticks than anything else. Or like you believe that you can win an argument by shouting and throwing accusations around.
I’m not saying this to attack you or anything here, I’m saying this to try to help you. If you want people to take you seriously—especially scientifically educated people—one of the most important things you need is clear communication. You can’t expect people to understand you properly, let alone agree with you, if your posts aren’t clear, focused, coherent, and straight to the point.
I think we’re still being shown examples of why the OP asked useful questions.
For example–
Exactly – though you’re more polite where I would tend to be blunt, but then I have a hard time thinking about YECism due to all the people I knew in my university days who abandoned their faith because they followed the YEC logic just as Ehrman did, and while I managed to help a few through the crisis I can’t help but wonder if I could have helped more.
Sometimes an image can contain more than one picture. Or how some images trick the eye into seeing one thing, when something else is there. Which one is real? Aquinas said something about how the Bible helps guide our understanding. That in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And when science looks at the world and sees an eternal universe, we can rest assured that science is seeing something incorrectly. For on this issue, there is no way around it.
Ironically, science may be looking at the world as I once looked at philosophy. That’d be something, and a real hard one to admit. How could we appear to be at the center of the universe, and that it can’t be confirmed or denied?
Something that I just read in Waltom’s book Wisdom for Faithful Reading might apply to how we are to read Job as well as other scripture. He is speaking of how the writer is showing us a literary view or veiled view of an event or topic, and writes:
“We cannot see the events or the characters; we can only see the veil. Furthermore, and most importantly, the veil represents the interpretation of events offered by the narrator, which we believe has been given him by God. That means the veil is what is inspired- not the events themselves. To understand the message from God, we need to understand the veil - not reconstruct the events.”
Wendy Widder has some good commentary in her book on Daniel that touches on this. Sometimes the veil is pulled back a little and we get a brief glimpse of what is on the other side.
I liked Walton a lot more before I heard about his handling of angels and demons. Granted this is technically second hand information, I think it was judiciously handled by Heiser. I still like Walton’s 4 hour introduction to the OT, but something just doesn’t sit well with me now about his reading of the Bible. Maybe I’m overreacting, but Heiser did express a real concern for the disconnect he was seeing.
It’s been a while since I heard it, and someone may be able to correct me on this, but it sounded to me like it was as bad as Walton saying demons and angels are not real are neither confirmed nor denied in the Bible. There was real concern from Heiser and genuine academic disbelief from a scholar who wrote a published review for the book.
Edit: By the way, Heiser was interacting with this academic review:
@Christy admits that the OP is political, but defends it nevertheless on the grounds that it is not partisan.
As if that matters.
You find that the OP is not partisan and conclude that it is, therefore, not political. Which is, of course, nonsense.
Please note that we do not host discussions that are primarily political in nature.
The OP is primarily political. It is admittedly not apolitical. It advocates a particular political viewpoint. It’s not a religious viewpoint, and it’s not a scientific viewpoint. It doesn’t address the intersection of science and faith on the topic. A post which sought to introduce science into the discussion was deleted. Because, politics.
Sorry, I don’t follow you. The OP was about exploring how Christian culture in general and AIG in particular facilitate conspiracy theories. Actually seems in the middle of the science-faith discussion to me. Yes, it may have political overtones, but believe me, neither the left or right groups have the patent on pseudo-science and false propositions.
As to the OP, I think that people of faith tend to be more susceptible to both little things like scammers and false Facebook posts to forward, and to the big stuff like conspiracy theories as we are taught to trust one another. When our leaders and even our fellow parishioners fall short of being trustworthy, whether it be by selling Amway or advocating secret societies running the world, they find a ready audience.
That is, “nearly every geologist” would admit that the scientific evidence favors a young earth shaped by a cataclysmic flood about 4500 years ago…if it weren’t for the fact that they would then have to align themselves with all you bible-totin’ Christian yahoo’s. So it must be that those same geologists have conspired to therefore reject the obvious evidence…and instead peddle that “millions of years” nonsense.
Also, an excerpt from one of Mr. Ham’s blog posts a couple years back, titled “Why Don’t More Scientists Believe in Creation?”…
“Sadly, many people are blinded to the truth of the history recorded in God’s Word because they are actively suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, as Romans 1 makes clear. It’s not that they need more evidence—they have all the evidence they need, but they suppress it. In 2 Peter 3:5 we are told that people willingly (or deliberately) reject the truth of Creation, the Flood, and the coming judgment. And there are examples in Scripture, like those leaders who wanted to kill Lazarus after Jesus raised him from the dead, so they could get rid of the evidence ([John 12:10]!”
So, you see…those scientists who reject YEC scientific claims are analogous to those members of the Sanhedrin who wanted to murder Lazarus after Jesus had raised him from the dead…because, you know, you gotta conspire to cover up that evidence, too.
exactly!