bbbbbbb said:

I think we have beaten this poor horse to death.

Click to expand...

RestoreTheJoy said:

But Cohen is a convicted perjurer. The FEC already declined this one. And Bragg has zero authority to try federal cases.

Click to expand...

Hammster said:

You are having two different categories. There’s a difference between eternal punishment and temporal discipline.

Click to expand...

Hammster said:

Plus, it never says that Noah sinned.

Click to expand...

Valletta said:

You need to brush up on the law. As I correctly stated: "It is a hate crime to, based on religion, interfere with a student's right to go to classes." That's what has happened.

Click to expand...

Gary K said:

So love supersedes good behavior?

Click to expand...

Gary K said:

Seems to me love and treating others badly are the antithesis of each other

Click to expand...

Gary K said:

. Very odd comment.

Click to expand...

Gary K said:

And only Jews need treat people honestly, kindly, and love God with all their heart, mind and strength? Your comments get weirder all the time.

Click to expand...

Bradskii said:

All decisions we make are determined by existing and prior influences. There has been an effectively infinite chain of events which has resulted in me sitting here writing this sentence. They have all led to this point. From the major events - I was born at a specific time and place, to the minor ones - it's raining today, to the seemingly inconsequential - I broke a string on my guitar last night.

There is no way that existence cannot be described other than determined.

The question is then not whether we make decisions that affect the trajectory of future events - I obviously decided to do this rather than something else. But if free will is defined as the ability to make decisions that are not determined by prior events and we could rerun the last hour exactly as it happened and make a different decision, then something actually needs to be different. But rerunning it exactly as it happened means that nothing is different.

So free will cannot be compatible with determinism. And if existence is deterministic then free will is an illusion.

Click to expand...

essentialsaltes said:

No, but they do have the right to flap their gums, as long they are not inspiring some imminent lawless action.


It would help if you understood what a hate crime is.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines a hate crime as a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. Hate itself is not a hate crime but committing a crime motivated by bias against one or more of the social groups listed above, or by bias against their derivatives constitutes a hate crime.

Click to expand...

Aaron112 said:

Is there anyone who does not know that age can be put in something, without time passing ?

Click to expand...

Thousand of antiques, for example, have been made to look old, when they might be manufactured only a year ago. And that's simply by a man, not by the Creator of the Whole Universe...

Click to expand...

seeking.IAM said:

Somedays it seems like we have arrived at a point where any criticism of the nation of Israel is labeled as antisemitism and a hate crime. Have they become above reproach?

Click to expand...

tonychanyt said:

God blessed Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:

Click to expand...

oikonomia said:

Prayer with a openess and willingness to be changed by God is how I overcame this.
God never grows old. He is fresh every morning. He is divine and eternal life - uncreated and never aging.

He gave us evidence of His ability to have transcendent knowing of time.
The life of Joseph in Genesis is one of the best places in the Torah to see this.

Joseph's brothers hated him because of his dream from God. Even his father Jacob was annoyed.
It was that very enmity that his brothers held which caused the fulfillment of the dream to come true.

How sovereign and transcendent God was in fulfilling His purpose have Joseph ruler over Egypt and save
the very lives of his family. Are you familiar with the account of Joseph's betrayal, imprisonment, and rising to
save the world then and his family? It all started with their resentment for his words about his dream.

I think it is a prophetic window into what would happen to the Messiah, hated by His brothers for His teaching.
Time will tell.

You may know that the Jews contemporary to Jesus's earthly ministry were asked who they thought He was.
To some He sounded like Jeremiah.
To others He sounded like one of the prophets of centuries gone by.

He asked His disciples, saying, Who do men say that the Son of Man is?
And they said, Some, John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. (Matt. 16:15b,16)

I know you don't care what Jesus said. But it is interesting that those who heard Him say He sounded not different from
one of the great prophets. So many of the things the New Testament Gospels taught from the mouth of Jesus
were reminiscient of major prophets. Mind you they were not always welcomed warmly.

Click to expand...

oikonomia said:

This is an issue with timing. The Isrealites were expecting Moses to immediately lead them out of Egypt.
They grumbled vehemently when Pharoah didn't respond right away. After ten plagues the promise
was actualized.

It could be that some of the fulfillments you expect come not as soon as you wished like the skeptical initial doubtors
of Moses.

And they came upon Moses and Aaron, who were standing there to meet them when they came forth from Pharaoh.
And they said to them, Jehovah look upon you and judge, because you have made us odious in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants so as to put a sword in their hand to kill us. (Exodus 5:20-21)

Latter they complained that Moses brought them into the wilderness to die of thirst.
Latter they doubted again that Moses had not yet brought them into a promised land.
Latter they grew bored of God's appearing on Mt. Sinai and wondered what happened to Moses.
Latter they replaced thier faith in Yahweh for a golden calf idol.
Latter they did not trust God to defeat the Canaanites and wanted to turn back.

The history if Israel testifies that often they expected something prematurely and rebelled.

From the original multitude that were saved out of Egypt only Joshua and Caleb remained.
Those who witnessed so much of God's miraculous deliverance died wandering in the wilderness for forty years.
Even Moses himself was disciplined and allowed only to see the land yet not enter in.

So sometimes Jews gave out because they inwardly were not ready for God to complete His promise.

I am reminded of Isaiah's prophecy of what Israel will eventually rejoice in with the world.

And on this mountain He will swallow up / The covering that covers up all the peoples, / Even the veil that veils all the nations.

He will swallow up death forever; / And the Lord Jehovah will wipe away the tears from all faces; / And the reproach of His people He will remove from all the earth; / For Jehovah has spoken.

And it will be said in that day, / Here, this is our God, / For whom we have waited that He may save us. / This is Jehovah, for whom we have waited; / Let us be glad and rejoice in His salvation. (Isaiah 25:7-9)

Click to expand...

oikonomia said:

Before I study this #5 I would ask Slibhin of her thoughts in a question about this prophecy of Isaiah.

Isaiah 25;7,8 -

And on this mountain He will swallow up / The covering that covers up all the peoples, / Even the veil that veils all the nations.
He will swallow up death forever; / And the Lord Jehovah will wipe away the tears from all faces; / And the reproach of His people He will remove from all the earth; / For Jehovah has spoken.

When Jewish Messiah does come what do you think He will do to demonstrate that He has the power and authority to
"swallow up death forever?"

"Human sacrifice" that it is an abomination to God. (Deut. 12:31; Jer. 19:4-5)

Then the theory that Israel is the suffering servant who bore the chastizement for the sins of anyone you must not believe?

Isaiah 53:5-7

But He was wounded because of our transgressions; / He was crushed because of our iniquities; / The chastening for our peace was upon Him, / And by His stripes we have been healed.
We all like sheep have gone astray; / Each of us has turned to his own way, / And Jehovah has caused the iniquity of us all / To fall on Him.
He was oppressed, and it was He who was afflicted, / Yet He did not open His mouth; / Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter / And like a sheep that is dumb before its shearers, / So He did not open His mouth.

I have heard Jews say Isaiah's Suffering Servant refers to the nation of Israel who has so sorely suffered.
But would this be an abominable interpretation that Israel "caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him?"

This Suffering Servant made Himself an offering for sin.
No one offered this Suffering Servant as an sacrifice. Rather He willingly offered Himself.
When He makes Himself an offering for sin, (v. 10b)

Also rather than this Servant making Himself an offering for sin being abominable to God, God was pleased and vindicated
the act.

But Jehovah was pleased to crush Him, to afflict Him with grief. / When He makes Himself an offering for sin, / He will see a seed, He will extend His days, / And the pleasure of Jehovah will prosper in His hand.
He will see the fruit of the travail of His soul, / And He will be satisfied; / By the knowledge of Him, the righteous One, My Servant, will make the many righteous, / And He will bear their iniquities. (vs. 10,11)

Slibhin, So you would utterly reject the interpretation that the Suffering Servant who made Himself an offering for sin
was possibly pleasing to God and could not possibly refer to the nation of Israel ?

Then who do you think the prophecy of the Suffering Servant lead as a dumb lamb to the slaughter to make intercession for
sinners is? Is He as Person to come in the future perhaps?

Because He poured out His life unto death / And was numbered with the transgressors, / Yet He alone bore the sin of many / And interceded for the transgressors. (vs. 12b)

Jesus from the cross however made intercession - (do not shut your eyes now)

And when they came to the place called The Skull, there they crucified Him and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left.
And Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. And dividing His garments, they cast lots. Lk 23:33,34

Click to expand...

Vambram said:

In my opinion, Joe Biden is the most corrupt and the most immoral President in my lifetime.

Click to expand...

Hank77 said:

What are the multiple moral flaws of Joe Biden that you speak of?

Click to expand...

Simon_Templar said:

I'm sure I am. One of the basic realities of human nature is that it is impossible to escape bias. The closest we can come is to be aware of our biases and to try to remind ourselves of them.

The most biased people in the world, are those who think they are not biased.
This has actually become my biggest pet peeve when talking to many Protestants. The extremely common attitude that they just take their view of scripture as simply what scripture means. There is no question of bias or interpretation. They are just right and everything they believe comes right from the Bible.




The break down of late antiquity was real, caused by plague, endemic war, leading to mass migration and resulting collapse of Roman administrative and economic infrastructure. However the change in philosophy and worldview was nothing remotely like the change that happens going from Medieval to Modern.

It is true that many of the sources of classical knowledge were lost, particularly Aristotle, but not all. The Medieval mind was still extremely heavily based on the surviving Platonic documents, even though some of these were only fragments that were preserved in commentary from other authors etc.

If you want a good overview of this, I would recommend C.S. Lewis' book The Discarded Image. It is based off of the lectures that he gave to his Medieval Literature students preparing them to read medieval literature by giving them a crash course in Medieval thought, cosmology, and worldview.

I don't mean to say that the Medievals were exactly like the Ancients. There obviously was development and change. The Medieval Mind was not exactly the same as the Ancient Mind, but there was a basic continuity of thought and belief. They had the same fundamental beliefs about the world and the nature of reality, and those formed the basis of everything else.

The Aristotelian works were rediscovered in the 13th century through contact with the Islamic world, particularly Averroes in Spain. This produced an immediate reaction in the Scholastic community (the Christian universities of Europe). This reaction included not only those who wanted to redefine Christianity based on Aristotle, but also a strain of Islamic influence that creeps in as well.

Thomas Aquinas basically refuted those scholars who were too heavily influenced by Averroes and he reconciled Aristotle and Plato with Christian doctrine, producing what is, to this day, viewed by many as almost definitive Catholic thought. this isn't quite right because Catholic thought is much broader and multifaceted, but absolutely Thomas was and is a central figure in Catholic thought.

The destruction of medieval thought began within a generation of Thomas Aquinas' death. By the mid to late 1300's William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, and their fellows introduced the ideas that would pave the way of Modernism, and destroy medieval and ancient thought.

One of the changes that usually goes unnoticed in this process was the change in how language was taught at the universities. Prior to this time Metaphysics had been the dominant branch of philosophy and language was taught based on metaphysical thought. The idea being that words are properly related to things, that words are almost incarnational. The thing is present in the word. This relates to Platonic/Aristotelian/Thomistic concepts of how the Forms are present in the intellect etc.

Around this time, Logic began to supplant Metaphysics as the dominant or foundational discipline in philosophy, especially at Oxford. This began to change how language was taught. Instead of thinking that words are directly tied to things, words began to be viewed as essentially logical tokens which were either validly used or invalidly used.

This, together with Nominalism, which lead to words being viewed as only labels that are applied to things only by human convention degraded our whole concept of language and though mostly overlooked, was absolutely foundational to the change of thought that happened.

The influence of Islam also showed up in the rise of Voluntarism. Basically resulting in the view that God's sovereignty means that his decisions, including what is good and what is evil, are totally arbitrary, simply resulting from whatever God happened to choose.

William of Ockham, for instance taught that God could have made murder good, and could have made martyrdom sinful. He could have made us hate a virtue instead of love, and could have ordered us to hate him. This idea, in particular radically changed views on how salvation worked.

It would probably not be correct to say that most of these ideas had never existed before, but they had never been the mainstream before for certain. They radically changed how the world was viewed. Keep in mind that this was in the 1300's Before the Renaissance really got rolling and certainly before the switchover to modernity. But they laid the foundation. They essentially destroyed what went before.

For example, Luther considered himself to be a devoted student of William of Ockham and even referred to Ockham as his master.

Nominalism and Voluntarism alone were earth-shattering. But you also have the origin of the modern conflict between science and religion. Both William and Marsilius promoted the idea of duplex veritas "two truths". They argued that there could be religious truths of faith, which contradicted the truths of natural philosophy known by reason and observation, and that both could be believed simultaneously.

This was the beginning which would eventually lead to the secularist dismissal of the supernatural as "superstition".

The renaissance was a further nail in the coffin, because of its obsession with elegance and style over substance. As you mention the scholars of the renaissance, fell in love with the Latin style of Cicero and the other classical era writers. They loved the poetics, etc. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it lead them to mock and dismiss the intellectual work of the medieval scholars simply because the Latin was clunky and inelegant. In education they tended to replace philosophy with poetics and the like.

By the time you get to the 1500's you have large movements going on in the Universities of Europe that don't resemble orthodox Catholicism at all.

For example, most people don't realize that the doctrine of salvation that Luther reacted against, wasn't even what the Church taught. It was a new idea, born out of Voluntarism and the Via Moderna, which was being taught in the universities, and had particular control over the university where Luther was educated.

This view taught that it was impossible for man to bride the gap between God and man due to sin. So, because God could arbitrarily do whatever he wanted, they taught that God had put in place an economy of salvation that required man to "do his best" and then God would make up the difference, because man could never do enough.

This places all the emphasis on Man's action. It also puts you in an impossible quandary because any person really ever say "I did my best". Could you have prayed 1 minute more? Could you have given one more penny to charity? and so on. This is why Luther struggled so badly with scrupulosity and feared so much for his salvation.

His eventual break with this doctrine produced an overreaction that caused a break with the Church. Luther also, following his master Ockham also rejected Aristotle and Plato, which put him at odds with a variety of things, most importantly the Eucharist.

there would never have been a Luther, without Nominalism, Voluntarism, Duplex Veritas, Caesero-Papism, etc. These had nothing to do with the Bible, except in the sense that they influence how you understand it.




I would admit that I overstated the case deliberately for effect. I grew up Protestant, and my subsequent study showed me that I was basically lied to. Not literally, in that the people who taught me didn't realize that what they were teaching was unntrue. However, it is accurate to say that he Protestant version of these events is heavily augmented by myth. The way protestants tell it is not accurate.

In reality both sides were arguing from scripture. The point I am attempting to get across, admittedly using some exaggeration is that the common notion that the Protestants just returned to the Bible and the Catholic teachings were all just accretions that ignored and contradicted the Bible is false.

There were, of course, legitimate complaints against the Church at the time. Even the Catholics of the time admitted this.

One of the things that ultimately was most influential in my returning to the Catholic Church was that I saw how much sense Catholic Teaching made biblically. It fit so much better with and made so much more sense of the Bible. One of the reason I had begun to look towards leaving my church tradition that I grew up in was because I began to run into questions about things that I was reading in the bible that no one could answer and that just made no sense in the context of our doctrines. I began to see things that our doctrines just dismissed and ignored, that Catholic teaching made sense of.

As a result I am passionate about the fact that Catholic teaching IS biblical and is biblically accurate. Thus it has become a pet peeve that I constantly get the attitude from Protestants that Catholicism is just unbiblical and Catholics don't believe the bible and don't know the bible and if they did they'd just become Protestant.

I do tend to hold a similar view myself, originally stated by John Newman "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant". It is one thing to know historical facts and timelines. It is another to begin to put yourself into the thought and mind of historical cultures and try to see the world through their eyes. I am convinced that Protestantism can only exist because of our modern, and now post-modern worldview.




This is beside the point of the political conversation here, but one of the problems with Protestantism is that it makes ever person their own Pope. Catholics have one Pope. Protestants have a hundred million. My point being, why is Wycliffe or Hus right about what the Bible says? When I was a Protestant I literally spent years arguing with other Protestants and all of us were convinced that we had the correct understanding of scripture?

I have a high view of reason, but your own reason is not sufficient to understand scripture. Perhaps ironically the Bible itself showed me this. If you go through and look in the New Testament at all the cases where it says that OT prophecies were fulfilled and how they were fulfilled, I am 100% convinced that no human intellect would EVER have come up with those interpretations or properly understood those scriptures.

I was also raised Charismatic, so of course we believed that the Holy Spirit would give us understanding, and speak to us individually, etc. The problem there was that in my own church, which was tiny, we routinely had people conflicting, claiming that the Holy Spirit had told them completely opposite things... so who is the Spirit speaking to? any of them?

The Biblical answer to this conundrum is that the Church is imbued with authority to interpret, to teach, and to judge in such matters and the Holy Spirit leads the Church.

Regarding this history you point out and its bearing on my previous argument. I'm sure the Reformers were influenced by Hus and Wycliffe. But using Luther as an example... did he read Hus's letter before, or after he was taught at university? Was that letter formative on his entire worldview for years? or did it come after his worldview had already been formed?

I would submit that it is just as possible that he only agreed with Hus, because he had already had the foundation laid in his worldview.
But this, ultimately is exactly what I'm getting at. Protestants like to think that the Reformers were just drawing from forerunners like Wycliffe and Hus. In reality the ideas of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua had greater influence and more far reaching effects.

This is they mythology of the Reformation.

Of course, it is foolish to think that anything in history has one and only one cause. People and ideas are complex, there almost always many factors involved.




I think I just showed that this notion is more true than you previously admitted.

CONTINIUED in another post, because I got too long winded...

Click to expand...

Mark Quayle said:

Painting?? Mankind is at enmity with God.

But, no, the unregenerated cannot truly confess, because their confession would be false

Click to expand...

Mark Quayle said:

—whatsoever is not of faith is sin! Without faith it is impossible to please God. Apart from Him you can do nothing.

Click to expand...

Mark Quayle said:

The Spirit of God knows the depth of the horror that sin is, and the height of the mercy of God. We don't. The unregenerate certainly do not, having "the mind of the flesh".

Click to expand...

Mark Quayle said:

I don't remember the numbers, but there is a mathematical possibility of thousands of people above twenty years old at that time.

Click to expand...

Aaron112 said:

You probably don't want all of God's Word ....

Click to expand...

God Says who not to give an answer to, and different ways to answer different people.

Click to expand...

Jesus did not always give an answer to those who questioned Him.
And Jesus is Always Perfect.

Click to expand...

eleos1954 said:

Models

A scientific model is a physical and/or mathematical and/or conceptual representation of a system of ideas, events or processes.

Ideas ... not fact ... conceptual

Click to expand...