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Discussion on matters of general mainstream evangelical Christian theology that do not fit within Theology 201. Have some spiritual gifts ceased today? Is the KJV the only viable translation for the church today? In what sense are the books of the bible inspired and what are those books? Church government? Modern day prophets and apostles?

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The Extents of Faith

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  • Draco Dei
    replied
    New realization:
    I guess I will also throw out there that I don't think that treating addictions with medication is necessarily a bad thing. It shouldn't be the only treatment in any particular case, but what works, works*. I would say that I see nothing counter-biblical about a conclusion of "illness, with a character fault as a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition". I could be convinced, but not easily.

    I'm certain you didn't mean this, but it may still be useful to point out that if one were to take your argument to an extreme, it could indicate that drugs should not be used to treat diseases acquired through sexual promiscuity.

    *I'll also point out that the Bible says that temptation is common to man and that God is faithful to provide (Christians?) with a way of escape... it never says that the ways of escape are equally common (and some people are vulnerable to some pretty obscure temptations).
    Last edited by Draco Dei; 10-04-2014, 06:44 PM.

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  • Draco Dei
    replied
    footwasher: Nope. The only thing that is even close is that I would consider the question "What is sex anyway?" to be a valid one, although the answer I would give as my working hypothesis right now would be something I think most people here would agree with. I'd type something out here about how I would define "sex", but I don't want to get distracted. I will say that even if (and let me repeat if) there is such a thing as a hard-wired homosexual nature at the genetic level that that would not negate one whit of the Bible's truth. The two options I can come up with off the top of my head (for individuals in such situations) are that:
    1.) Such persons have the option to not engage in sex at all.
    2.) Such persons may marry with full disclosure reached in appropriate stages throughout the courtship, and probably rely only on physical sensation (if male) or approach sex as an act of service (if female).
    ... but there I go allowing myself to get distracted. I'd refine the above statement, but, again, "distraction".

    One thing that I will say is that a true and precise answer is a true and precise answer, and I'm trying to take a new approach to something that I've had issues with in the past by focusing in on a piece where I think the underlying problem may lie. Thus, while I can perhaps give more concrete examples of what I'm talking about here, they won't be examples with any applicability to my own life. As such, any questions along the line of "Are you trying to <concrete issue>?" are to be avoided. However, "Would this be applicable to <concrete issue>?" would be an acceptable substitute. Examples are only useful for improving understanding of the underlying principles.

    In other words, in your responses I expect general kindness and mercy, as well as tolerence for my communications disability*, but any attempt to be helpful to me on the personal level rather than by working towards a highly robust theoretical understanding is to be avoided.

    *Asperger's... but don't believe everything either the media or the medical community says.

    Also: If I have my definitions correct then: Dogmatism is no excuse for trying to support a conclusion you know to be true based on arguments other than dogmatism.
    <EDIT>Let me try to say that a bit clearer: Knowing something is true based on dogmatism may be acceptable (depends on how you are defining dogmatism? I'd look up the dictionary definition, but I wouldn't be sure it would be the one you use.). However, once one knows something is true based on dogmatism, then IMHO someone needs to try to prove it on grounds other than dogmatism... or conclusively prove that it can not be conclusively proved. Which actually gets back to the question I was trying to ask in the first post of this thread! I think that one way of saying it is "How small is it possible to get the list of things that can not be derived from other, more logically fundimental, principles and especially the list of things it can be proved can't be proved?"</EDIT>

    More to come later, when I can find it in my heart to put aside what a rocky road this has been so far. There have been some good things said, but picking out which things is an emotionally difficult process for me.
    Last edited by Draco Dei; 10-04-2014, 10:13 PM.

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  • footwasher
    replied
    Addicts are being treated with medication, indicating addiction isn't a character fault but rather an illness. Contra the Bible.


    A fundamental understanding in the Bible was that gay relationships are sinful. This is not so fundamental today, with science positing that some people are genetically predisposed to gay sexual orientation. Some churches are not dogmatic about biblical stances and are considering whether sin is present in a gay relationships, since those involved seem not able to conquer their orientation.

    Premarital sex also figures in some controversies, since a famous figure claimed not to have had sex with "that" woman. What constitutes sex?

    Mebbe you think churches aren't rethinking these issues, putting a big chunk of believers into the sinful category.

    Dat true?

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  • Draco Dei
    replied
    Paprika: Yes, knowledge is important in this case because it is part of my particular life-mission from God. Also: "Come, let us reason together says The Lord". It is vital to have Love, but having knowledge too is a desirable bonus if one can acheive it.

    footwasher: Nothing to do with genetic disposition or chemical imbalances in the brain. I'm actually mildly curious why that would even occur to you to ask.

    General: I'm very sorry I have been forgetting to post here. I have to go to bed now, so the above two statements will have to do for the moment, rather than working towards another try at a more detailed explaination of the theory-level question I'm trying to ask.
    Last edited by Draco Dei; 10-04-2014, 10:13 PM.

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  • footwasher
    replied
    Are you looking to negate general principles that seem to ignore how science has moved on in terms of describing what constitutes sin with regard to genetic disposition or chemical imbalances in the brain?
    Last edited by footwasher; 10-03-2014, 10:07 PM.

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  • Paprika
    replied
    Is knowledge so important?

    Knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God....

    Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres...

    When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

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  • Draco Dei
    replied
    My sincere appologies for the long absence.

    There as RL stuff.

    Then I utterly could not remember my password, and the reset didn't seem to work at all. I thought the e-mail was just delayed due to needing human intervention as another anti-spam measure, but nothing ever arrived.

    And now I'm in the middle of packing things up to move into storage preparatory to going from splitting my living arrangements between two places to only living in one place.

    So I can't really do much with this at the moment, I will do a little now though.

    All I can say is that almost every time someone has made a statement in this thread it has not been very helpful, nor was the attempt at gathering information about myself (for reasons I've already explained).

    What I think would help is if we focused only on trying to improve the communication of the question. I believe that only when that is crystal clear can we move forward towards an answer without it feeling like the mistakes of the past years in which I've tried to get some help with the practical moral issue (which is NOT contained within the question and which it would be HIGHLY unproductive to try to tackle at this time) are being repeated. This caused me GREAT GREAT pain in the past.

    tl;dr Ask questions about the question. Don't try to answer it yet.
    Last edited by Draco Dei; 09-25-2014, 02:00 AM.

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  • 37818
    replied
    Originally posted by Draco Dei View Post
    I'm going to take another "nibble" out of this large meal of explanation that is necessary.


    Ok, so maybe I'm using the word "Faith" differently than it is meant Biblically. This, very surprisingly doesn't change much at this point in the discussion.

    There is believing something because it was proven based on other things one believes, and there is believing something because you simply accept it(what I have prior to now been calling "Faith"). Actually, there is probably a whole spectrum in between the two, but that doesn't change the fact that every chain of reasoning has to come back to things that one can't actually prove from a purely logical POV. My central question concerns how large the set of such "unproven basics" MUST be for Christian Morality in all of its complexity (so NOT just the basics) and IF it must be larger than some relatively* simple set of foundational theological principles, PLUS the ability to observe the physical world scientifically.

    *Accepting the Bible as the inerrant word of God still qualifies as "simple", although we will get to some caveats dealing with the tone of the Bible LATER. Basically comes down to, yes, it is spot on, but it is spot on in casual language (which is a very good thing since it is meant to be understood by even simpletons).

    I'm going to stop here for the moment, to take things slowly, and because of I have some other work I should be doing for The Kingdom of God right now.
    Well then it seems to come down to how we know what we know.

    1) First is personal experience and personal observations and experiment.

    2) Second, has to do with the witness of others. Expert witnesses. It is here where one personally does not have the evidence for faith. Some one else has that first hand evidence. This can be understood to include the testimony of the writers of those documents we call holy scripture. In science, history and news reports this is a very common condition of beliefs without first hand evidence for most of us.

    3) Thirdly is deductive reasoning. Where from prior believed truth we draw conclusions or new or more understandings of what is true. From which we draw truth from a purely logical POV.

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  • Draco Dei
    replied
    I may not be responding at all over the next 4 days to 2 weeks (then again I might). This issue is important enough I want to do it right, but without getting bogged into immobility down by fear of making more errors rather than less. Therefore, since I am attending DragonCon which officially starts today, and afterward will have some time sensitive follow-up to do, I may have to postpone this discussion, which is more important in the final analysis, but also less time sensitive.

    Originally posted by Jedidiah View Post
    I would be glad to try to help, but I do not seem to be able to even understand what is going on.
    Not an uncommon situation...

    We'll all work on it.
    Originally posted by Paula View Post
    I think it's valuable to first get at what you're trying to understand.

    1) Is your question related to epistemology, how do we know what we know (really about anything) but particularly in this case about God and what He wants? ---(This also relates to how we know anything at all. Cats self-groom is a particular fact about felines that I happen to know based on what is reported in books/the internet/other secondary resources, what other people say, and my own observations of my cat making sure he's looking his best. Of course, to understand this I have to have some concept of hygiene, what is a cat?, why spit from a cat's mouth applied to their fur would qualify as such, what motions I see with my eyes would correspond to such an activity, success versus failure, and whether its present in all cats and whether this latter matter is important, and so on).

    2)Is your question about the degrees to which we are counted as saved based on propositional statements that we internalize (and act on) and how we can go about rationally getting these statements. ---(keep in mind these "propositional statements" are also necessary for other relationships. While my relationships with lets say a friend are based largely on activities that we undertake together and conversation, if I were to report it to others (or think about it to myself) I would first have to convey their name, what they are like, and such. So you could in a roundabout way say my friendship is based on knowing certain propositional statements about them since if my friend's name is Bob and he works in a factory making airplanes but I think "her" name is Alice and she is a female race horse that usually comes in third place...yeah, something went wrong there. So knowledge about other people does matter in relationships. It's about correctly matching what we think (and how we act) with what really exists).

    3)Does it relate to how we come to know God--do we observe the world and make a logical conclusion, do we research history and philosophy and other such subjects and come to a conclusion, do we take a blind leap in the dark and hope we hit something. Is it some combination there of and if it is what is the exact mix? --(this one is related to option one, but its more about the specific method than the philosophy behind it).

    4)Or is it something else that I haven't touched on?
    Number 3 seems closest, at least at first glance, but replace "how we come to know" with "how MUST we come to know, and WHY". In other words, trying to cover more bases rather than less. This, in turn, may push things more in the direction of number 1. I'm also not ruling out number 2.

    I have one more thing to say, but first I need to clarify something:
    I believe in absolute morality, there is sin, there is righteousness, there are, PERHAPS, things that aren't inherently either. There are actions that can be sin for one person while not for another, but those stem from differences in personality and circumstances, NOT from any flexibility or fuzziness in the inherent nature of morality.

    So what I wanted to say was to once again emphasize that we aren't talking about "the basics" here. We are talking about advanced fine points, and that sometimes involves REJECTING statements that are considered to be fundamental to someone who knows only "the basics". Any middle-schooler can tell you that 1+1=2. It takes a more advanced understanding to realize that 1+1 sometimes is 0. Again, this isn't a matter of moral relativism (which I reject), but rather nuances, oddball corner cases, and so on.
    Last edited by Draco Dei; 08-29-2014, 10:17 AM.

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  • Scrawly
    replied
    I actually really like swiss cheese. I honestly have absolutely no idea why I don't eat more of it. I think one possibility might be that I rarely come across the genuine article, and I simply will not settle for a processed version.

    Leave a comment:


  • Paula
    replied
    I think it's valuable to first get at what you're trying to understand.

    1) Is your question related to epistemology, how do we know what we know (really about anything) but particularly in this case about God and what He wants? ---(This also relates to how we know anything at all. Cats self-groom is a particular fact about felines that I happen to know based on what is reported in books/the internet/other secondary resources, what other people say, and my own observations of my cat making sure he's looking his best. Of course, to understand this I have to have some concept of hygiene, what is a cat?, why spit from a cat's mouth applied to their fur would qualify as such, what motions I see with my eyes would correspond to such an activity, success versus failure, and whether its present in all cats and whether this latter matter is important, and so on).

    2)Is your question about the degrees to which we are counted as saved based on propositional statements that we internalize (and act on) and how we can go about rationally getting these statements. ---(keep in mind these "propositional statements" are also necessary for other relationships. While my relationships with lets say a friend are based largely on activities that we undertake together and conversation, if I were to report it to others (or think about it to myself) I would first have to convey their name, what they are like, and such. So you could in a roundabout way say my friendship is based on knowing certain propositional statements about them since if my friend's name is Bob and he works in a factory making airplanes but I think "her" name is Alice and she is a female race horse that usually comes in third place...yeah, something went wrong there. So knowledge about other people does matter in relationships. It's about correctly matching what we think (and how we act) with what really exists).

    3)Does it relate to how we come to know God--do we observe the world and make a logical conclusion, do we research history and philosophy and other such subjects and come to a conclusion, do we take a blind leap in the dark and hope we hit something. Is it some combination there of and if it is what is the exact mix? --(this one is related to option one, but its more about the specific method than the philosophy behind it).

    4)Or is it something else that I haven't touched on?

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  • Jedidiah
    replied
    I would be glad to try to help, but I do not seem to be able to even understand what is going on.

    Leave a comment:


  • Draco Dei
    replied
    I'm going to take another "nibble" out of this large meal of explanation that is necessary.

    Originally posted by 37818 View Post
    Faith as I use the term in general means to "believe or trust in a truth." For that matter as I use the term, it is essential to having knowledge. One cannot know what one does not believe.
    Ok, so maybe I'm using the word "Faith" differently than it is meant Biblically. This, very surprisingly doesn't change much at this point in the discussion.

    There is believing something because it was proven based on other things one believes, and there is believing something because you simply accept it(what I have prior to now been calling "Faith"). Actually, there is probably a whole spectrum in between the two, but that doesn't change the fact that every chain of reasoning has to come back to things that one can't actually prove from a purely logical POV. My central question concerns how large the set of such "unproven basics" MUST be for Christian Morality in all of its complexity (so NOT just the basics) and IF it must be larger than some relatively* simple set of foundational theological principles, PLUS the ability to observe the physical world scientifically.

    *Accepting the Bible as the inerrant word of God still qualifies as "simple", although we will get to some caveats dealing with the tone of the Bible LATER. Basically comes down to, yes, it is spot on, but it is spot on in casual language (which is a very good thing since it is meant to be understood by even simpletons).

    I'm going to stop here for the moment, to take things slowly, and because of I have some other work I should be doing for The Kingdom of God right now.

    Originally posted by tabibito View Post
    I'm having some trouble working out the direction here, so I've addressed what seem to be the basic issues. So - if I'm not understanding properly so far, maybe more questions would help clarify.
    Well, I've offered some clarifications above and below in this same post. How are those helping you?

    On thing to remember is that the "Why aren't there angels standing on every street-corner?" question IS NOT my question. Let me repeat that: I DON'T CARE about the lack of what most people would consider Forceful, In Your Face evidence for the existence and basic nature of God... except if it is useful to explore to answer my central question. As such, I would appreciate it if people would drop it until we get a clear understanding of that central question of mine across.

    Sorry, I don't have the time to try to restate it yet again right now (although I did do so above, to an extent).

    ...I really should try to come up with a Board-Safe example of the sort of thing I'm talking about to give people something concrete to latch onto, but the only examples that come to mind right now are either dumb or would get me banned for sexual content... we may need to settle for "dumb" in the end, but I'd like to try to avoid it.
    Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
    Hmmm.... I thought it was a rather important diagnostic question. However, not trying to antagonize, I shall withdraw!
    Withdrawing the question(until later) is fine, however I'd prefer you to stick around in the conversation.

    It was an EXCELLENT question actually. In fact, that sort of thing is part of the "small set of things taken on faith". You simply had no way of knowing that certain circumstances rendered the TIMING all wrong. Said circumstances include, but are not limited to, that I have a much-preferred way of answering that question* in any sort of detail and it is... not the simplest Statement of Faith** that you will ever see. It says a lot about ME in the particular tone it takes. I could leave all that out and give a simpler Statement of Faith, but I'd find the re-write onerous, and it wouldn't tell you nearly as much about some aspects of my personality that are relevant to the overall discussion.

    *"Where are you on the basics? For example, is there any doubt in your mind that Jesus was who He said He was, and did, indeed, rise from the dead?"
    **I do hope I am using that term in sufficiently precise way.

    But for right now, it seems that people are mostly to entirely missing out on understanding the question I'm trying to hard to make clear. It is only when I am sure that that question is clearly understood that I would be really comfortable moving forward into "So what do you actually believe that someone could use as a starting point for trying to prove moral fine points with you?"... which is one way of looking at the question you asked me. Until then, I'd like to keep trying to laser-focus on communicating the actual question I'm trying to ask. Perhaps this laser focus will not prove possible, but I'd like to at least give it a try.
    Last edited by Draco Dei; 08-26-2014, 03:17 PM.

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  • Cow Poke
    replied
    Originally posted by Draco Dei View Post
    I'd really rather not have to make such a detour
    Hmmm.... I thought it was a rather important diagnostic question. However, not trying to antagonize, I shall withdraw!

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  • tabibito
    replied
    I'm having some trouble working out the direction here, so I've addressed what seem to be the basic issues. So - if I'm not understanding properly so far, maybe more questions would help clarify.

    "Why does God make Faith so necessary instead of, say, having angels standing on every street corner proclaiming his existence and will or something similarly intense?"
    It would seem that for reasons unknown, God does not interact directly with the world, but through ambassadors. Where suitably qualified ambassadors are unavailable, God does not act. (in the ordinary course, that is.)

    how much of God’s will is going to HAVE to always remain a matter of Faith until the second coming, and how much can be verified by examining our world scientifically and combining it with our ‘small faith pool’?”
    In the presence of suitably qualified ambassadors, it would seem that precious little - the faith for a future resurrection from death and (in time of distress) his working all things together for the good of those who believe is about all that is left to belief. Everything else should be pretty much a matter of real and present witness.

    [It should be noted, mere belief, or faith will never make what is not true to become true.]
    This is so, belief and faithfulness in Koine Greek are the same word in ordinary circumstances. It is difficult to determine which is meant by individual passages.

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