Knowledge is good
Posted on 09/10/2005 4:56:18 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
No. it was old Al. The musicologists I talked to about it said it was "pretty good", but without a lot of enthusiasm.
Good post. :-)
It was foreordained months previously that my mother would give birth. Several of my uncles predicted a boy. The ladies Dad sang at choir with, some of whom had angelic voices, congratulated Dad. I could go on. There was a lot of stuff like that.
Knowledge is good
"Belief in the Resurrection is not something that requires faith. It is a historical event better documented than anything in Ancient History"
Outside of the Bible, show me this vast documentation.
The documented persecution of Christians during the first century is legion. Why do you think the persecution took place? These people were celebrating the Resurrection of the Lord, Jesus Christ and refused to bow their knee to any other authority. How much more evidence is needed to satisfy your skepticism? To answer your other question: These early Christians must appear to you as deluded psychos. How could they not within the context of your worldview?
"Islam was propagated by individuals that could rape and pillage as reward for their faith, and we don't question the existence, words and doings of Mohammad of which was far less documented than Christ's life 800 years before him."
You don't? Why not? How do you reconcile that with your belief in Christianity?
The evidence for the methods of Islam is the Taliban. The evidence for Christianity is a free society based on personal responsibility ie. USA. (Liberals want to tear that down with the Amoral relativism, which equals personal irresponsibility, to the extent of supporting the Taliban over a Judeo/ Christian America).
"Liberals are deluded by their revisionist view of reality and we can spot them by their fruits. Whereas most Christians aspire to a higher set of standards upon which personal responsibility is a key to the success of a free society."
This has WHAT to do with this discussion?
Everything. Traveling down the path of Scientism leads to Amoral Chaos. When the chips fall, followers of Scientism cherish retaining their own authority, over being told what is right and wrong. Each man's ethics is based solely on their own perception at the time. Or the man with the biggest gun makes the rules.
"Scientism is a belief system that bases reality on a purely materialistic worldview. Anything supernatural can be considered superstition."
Science (not your bogey-man *Scientism*) has no choice but to base it's theories on natural, material causes and lines of evidence. It is not because use of supernatural causes is *superstition* that scientists shun the supernatural; it's because there is no objective way to test or verify any supernatural cause or line of evidence. That was Galileo's method. That was Newton's.
The outgrowth of Scientism is materialitic relativism. If it feels good and doesn't directly hurt someone else, do it. This is why privacy is so much more important to the followers of Scientism. They rail against the "Moralist" who they see are trying to infringe on their privacy (Liberals are not followers of Scientism, for they could not adhere to a desire for truth for more than two minutes).
Followers of creationism hate that the Founders did NOT say anything about the Resurrection or Christ in the Declaration of Independence. Saying that we are endowed by our Creator with certain attributes is another way of saying those attributes are there naturally. It is our nature as people to have them. Very in line with a more or less Deistic world view.
"Unalienable rights are derived from the Creator, not the conceptions of mankind."
That is one view.
If you don't believe the Founders were making a direct assault on the Sovereignty of Man via the Monarchy in England, you may want to follow my link above and brush up on what the Founders were saying to one another at the time. After your research you will know the view they intended.
Point well made
Little known fact: the Frankenstein vs. Einstein debate at Princeton in the late 30s. Frankenstein was coming off a few hit horror films with Dracula and bought his way into Princeton. The high point was a debate at the student union hall where Einstein said, "pi r2" and Frankenstein rebutted with, "No! Pie are round!" Anyway, it caused a big stir and they chased Frankenstein back to the dorm with pitchforks and torches.
CarolinaGuitarman That is evidence for the goodness of Constitutional government based on individual rights. Christian states (Ones with a predominantly Christian population) had existed for over a thousand years before the formation of the USA. The percentage of them one would consider free states is exceedingly low. By your logic then, the conclusion would be that Christian states produce tyranny as most states with predominantly Christian populations have been unfree.
Thank you, CarolinaGuitarman, for making this vital point, I am in strong accord with you on this one. While I have an unshakeable belief in our constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship (including the freedom from worship), and come from a very strong Christian background (I'm still something of a recovering Born Again), I have grown very, very dubious about the political agenda of some American Christians.
[1] In the first place, as you note, for something like 1200 years, the dominant political power in Europe was the Church; much of this era is rightly characterised as the Dark Ages. The Protestant Reformation, while seeking to address some of the corruption that had arisen within the Church, also led to the theocratic nightmare of Calvin's Geneva and a few centuries of devastating wars of religion. The modern agenda of some Christians--to re-introduce Church authority into national political institutions--ignores the fact that Christendom has already been there (with disasterous results), and that other established religions (Islam the most obvious example) that do wield a political role (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan) have also resulted in appalling regimes. I think the lesson is pretty unambiguous: secular power in the hands of anyone who also claims divine authority is a fast path to the most dreadful tyranny.
And I hold it is demonstrable that our Founding Fathers, to whom the wretched carnage of the European religious wars (among competing Christian sects) of the 17th century were still vivid, were hugely concerned to build a 'wall of separation' between Church and State precisely to protect the new republic from such theocratic tyranny. This is not at all a matter of trying to second guess the religious beliefs of the Founders (they varied enormously: John Adams was devout to the point of reluctance to travel on the Sabbath, while Jefferson appears very close to being a Freethinker), but it is a pointless exercise to selective 'quote mine' to establish religious views of any of them, it's all beside the point. The point is, they framed a Constitution designed to protect the new republic from, inter alia, religious tyranny. That, I believe, is the intent behind the motto novo ordo seclorum ('In God We Trust' didn't come in until the crisis of the Civil War, and 'under God' was slipped into the flag salute during the McCarthy era).
And it is my own belief (to which I welcome challenges) that conservative politcal principles are both sound and worthy on rational grounds and simply do not need any further appeal to divine or other authority to be true. For example, I hold that abortion is repugnant, for it gives rise both to dreadful personal tragedies and also severe social ills--the statistics alone on this one make the case. My belief here strictly informs for whom I can vote, and if you have a petition to sign on this one or are engaged in other legitimate forms of political activity on this issue, please send me an invitation to help, I'd be glad to. But if you ask me to help you bomb a medical clinic in the name of 'God's higher law'--sorry, but I'm calling the cops to bust you.
Now, I have been jumped on and beaten up on my point here--that rational grounds are sufficient for conservative principles--by religious-minded folks who appear to misunderstand this as affirming something along the lines of 'rational principles are sufficient for securing personal salvation,' or something. I am NOT asserting this! That is a religious question to which each individual must find his own answer. Please keep the matter separate (as the framers of the Constitution went to such pains to keep separate) from political issues!
Well said.
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