Agreed, he was certainly not renouncing responsibility for his sin! All the more reason to confess and have hopeful anticipation of future sanctification here and confident anticipation of complete removal of the presence of sin later.
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I think there is room for both a top down and a bottom approach, combining what we glean from each. I would fully agree that a reductionist approach alone is probably going to fail.
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Till we have faces… I keep wanting to try reading the book again. I picked it up as a very young believer and couldn’t connect with it. Although that may be where I remember reading Lewis pull back the mask on his shameful experience in boarding school.
Till we can see one another face to face
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Absolutely!!Aye aye aye… No telling what will pop out of that box
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I didn’t make it through that title either on my first try. But I remember finding it more rewarding on my subsequent attempt many years later. I think it may have something to do with just being in a season of my own life where I finally had a bit more wherewithal to connect to that style of literature. That … And forewarned is forearmed probably helped a lot too.
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Part of the essence of God’s image in us is personhood.
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There is no middle ground between being aware and unaware of your action.
How it happens is an open question, that I’m open to learning about, but there’s something (sinfully) wrong with an observer that concludes we are absolutely incapable of independently acting.
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…or are capable of acting wrongly without responsibility.
That’s a good way to say it!
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Just opened my Kindle app to this:
And thus we mourn when we see the sin remaining in us and its outworking – for all to see… or not.
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What do you think of the exceptions we make for those who are mentally handicapped or whose actions are detrimentally affected by mental illness?
I’m not that familiar with regulatory policies for individuals who are mentally incapable of acting responsibly. And I don’t see how that’s relevant to whether a (mentally capable) person can act.
That’s the thing isn’t it?
My conscious ability to act without being acted upon.
I heard a discussion with the author of a new book that might help with this question called:
Ways of being : animals, plants, machines : the search for a planetary intelligence (2022)by Bridle, James Here is the description from my library where I am number 8 on wait list:
Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence–plant, animal, human, artificial–and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos.
What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings–beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But as it approaches, it also gets weirder: rather than a friend or helpmate, AI increasingly appears as something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us. At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others–the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics, to live better and more equitably with one another and the non-human world? Artist and maverick thinker James Bridle drawn on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy, to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being which are becoming evident in the present, and which are essential for our survival.
When my turn comes if I come across anything interesting and I can find this thread again I’ll try to post something here. @mitchellmckain
I am talking about the basic ethics and morality of how we treat people, not regulations and policies. I think it is completely relevant to point out that we don’t hold everyone responsible for what they do. We have exceptions, and it has to do with how their brain works.
That’s your thing.
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Back to say: don’t hold your breath. The book plummeted through the wait list to me and I’ve just read the first few pages of the intro and I can see there won’t be much to see here. She is one more person who has gone from a certainty that what she staked her faith in as a believer to someone with an equal conviction that there is no meaning, no answers and probably no more self than there is any God. The only constant is her unwavering conviction that she is in position to rule on all such matters. Of course I don’t think she had the truth when she held it firmly as a Christian and I don’t think she has a clue as a soulless materialist. Poor thing. I’ll be posting some quotes in the Pithy Quotes thread soon.
Oops: wrong book! I should have known I couldn’t get that book so quickly. The one I just picked up is by another author and I don’t remember now what what brought it to my attention. This one is called: Technology, Metaphor and the Search For Meaning: God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O’Bieblyn. Certainly an ambitious title. I can’t imagine this will draw me in but I’ll skim it a little. Maybe it’ll surprise me.
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Max Planck the great physicist of the late 19th century discovered the fact that heat radiation is delivered in packets of energy that he labeled quanta. He was also very interested in human consciousness. He stated that, “Science can never get behind consciousness.” If all that exists comes from the elements of the Periodic Table, and we are made up mostly of carbon, how improbable is it that carbon speaks. What draws words out of carbon is the great mystery of our existence.
It is as though the physical universe and consciousness are interdependent. The universe would have no meaning or form, just electromagnetic mass, without consciousness of it. In fact, the James Webb Telescope making possible observations of the universe in its very early stages will for the first time bestow form on it as it is observed by cosmologists.
James Wade
Why are they so sure the beginning is what is being observed, and not the edge of its expansion?
Because I’d be willing to bet that the closer they look, the more they will find.