Moderators: jochanaan, MatthewNeal, jimmy, natman, Senior Moderator, Moderators
ezduzit wrote:Good example of an antichrist............
Ez
Bare_Truth wrote:ezduzit wrote:Good example of an antichrist............
Ez
Well so long as you said "an antichrist". because I think he is not good enough to merit "the". But he has turned against the religion of his youth and training and is a distroyer of the faith of others. My atheistic agnostic son urged me to read one of his books and it was pretty obvious where the book was going. However it is arguable that he is not of another religion unless you count atheistic humanism as a religion. But what is disturbing is that last I heard he was still a professor of religion. I cannot think of a job he is less suited for. ..... Well, outside of the soviet system where they had an office of superstitions in their bureaucracy.
Petros wrote:I do tend to consider antitheism a religion. It is not clear whether the gentleman is strictly antitheist or just counterchristian - but many do not bother to oppose nonChristian theisms.
As for being professor of religion, in my experience Comp Lit tends not to mention Christianity and there is a big attitude gulf between Black Studies / Women's Studies which describe positively and Holocaust Studies / Religious Studies which describe deploring.
I expect he would fit just fine into most Religious Studies Departments outside seminaries and Bible colleges.
bn2bnude wrote:So much of Christianity is based upon certainty. We need to make room for doubt.
I agree, but I would substitute "questioning" for "doubt." There are questions that lead us to a deeper and more personal understanding of God, ourselves and humanity; there are also "smart-aleck" questions that, while outwardly scornful, may mask a hunger for the deep truths that "religion" can only hint at. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not a full life, or something of the sort; I would add a parallel statement that an unquestioned faith is hardly faith at all. True faith welcomes questions, for questions are a sign of and vehicle for growth.bn2bnude wrote:...So much of Christianity is based upon certainty. We need to make room for doubt.
jochanaan wrote:I agree, but I would substitute "questioning" for "doubt." There are questions that lead us to a deeper and more personal understanding of God, ourselves and humanity; ....bn2bnude wrote:...So much of Christianity is based upon certainty. We need to make room for doubt.
Bare_Truth wrote:Your meaning might be clearer if you chose some other word, not likely to be misinterpreted, to express your meaning.
Bare_Truth wrote:bn2bnude wrote:So much of Christianity is based upon certainty. We need to make room for doubt.
I have tried to select the scriptures above on the basis of some form of the word doubt being used as the antithesis of faith. Ephesians 2:8 shows( For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:) faith is an indispensible element of salvation and is in itself a gift from God. Peter walking on the water was undone when he let doubt displace his faith. Nor can we forget "doubting Thomas" whom our Master commanded to "be not faithless, but believing." (John 20:27). Doubt in this sense is the undoing of faith. Also it was the Serpent's tool when, in Eden, he supplanted Adam and Eve's trust in God to get them to doubt that God was being honest with them, and thus seduced them into disobedience.
So when you say we must leave room for doubt, I think you are likely to be misunderstood unless youcan clarify what aspect of doubt is useful and not the "destroyer of faith" which is the gift of God. Clearly one of the meanings of doubt is that it is the antithesis of faith. Your meaning might be clearer if you chose some other word, not likely to be misinterpreted, to express your meaning.
The word “faith” is a much misunderstood term. In contemporary discourse it often means the act of believing in something that lacks empirical evidence, something that one affirms through intuition, the interpretation of a particular personal experience or the interpretation of a publicly observable phenomenon. However the term, in its more theological sense, has much more in common with a particular way of living.
It could be said to be an act of protest against the type of philosophy that Paul condemned in the Bible. The philosophical wisdom tradition has always been deeply marked by the idea that life simply is and that we should not impose meaning on it. While we tend to experience certain people as special and invest particular activities with significance (e.g. eating with someone we love) such a view claims that people are just people, that the meaning we see in the world is something we impose upon it and that the universe is simply made up of uniform particles (or vibrations etc.) occupying locations in space and time.
To speak of faith is to refer to a protest against such wisdom. What is important to bear in mind however is that this protest does not necessarily disagree with such a position any more than it agrees with it. To live in faith is to live as though the world has meaning, as if matter is special, as if what we do is significant. It has then nothing to do with belief, doubt or certainty but rather with a particular mode of living as-if.
Some theologians thus use the word “faithing” rather than “believing” to get to the heart of what Paul meant when he spoke of how we approach the divine. In this reading we are not believers but rather faithers. The notion of believers or unbelievers thus falls away in light of the question as to whether we are faithers or unfaithers. In other words, whether we engage with the world as infused with meaning, wonder, enchantment, mystery, divinity and beauty, or whether we don’t. It refers to a way of participating with reality in a different way, not believing an alternative mythology.
Faith thus exists in a different register to the categories of belief, doubt and certainty. It exposes the implicit impotence of these categories when applied to the event of Christ. To have faith is to see differently. Indeed the word “mystic” might be appropriate here as the term suggests closing ones eyes in order to see. The person of faith metaphorically closes their eyes to the wisdom that sees the world as without significance in order to see it as saturated with significance.
This is not however something we can muster up; we can’t simply tell ourselves to see the world in this way, it requires being taken up in love. To grasp this take a moment to think about how those who love the world cant help but experience it as meaningful even if they believe that it is not. Just as those who do not love cannot help but experience the world as meaningless even if they believe that it is in fact meaningful.
Faith then is the experience of being taken up in the experience of meaning, of feeling the world to be wonderful, the other as sublime and our neighbour as worth dying for. We cannot will such a way of engaging with the world into being, at best we can invite it, hope for it, wait for it, pray and weep for it.
If the cited text and the video are a better explanation then I think it a lost cause. There are formulas for assessing a "fog factor" in such things based on the number of syllables per word and the frequency of words with many syllables and the number of jargon words specific to a particular viewpoint. I do not have any of these formulas at hand at the moment but both cited sources cited would surely qualify for high fog factors. The fact that the speaker in the video speaks as fast as a used car salesman and layered on top of that is his thick Irish brogue merely makes matter worse. Both the sources are the sort of thing that one can read or listen to and come away with about any understanding that they want, because the whole lot of it is baffle gab. So if that is the better explanation I suppose I will just have to give it a shrug and move on. To quote a movie line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate".bn2bnude wrote:I'll let someone else explain better than I could...
Bare_Truth wrote:If the cited text and the video are a better explanation then I think it a lost cause. There are formulas for assessing a "fog factor" in such things based on the number of syllables per word and the frequency of words with many syllables and the number of jargon words specific to a particular viewpoint. I do not have any of these formulas at hand at the moment but both cited sources cited would surely qualify for high fog factors. The fact that the speaker in the video speaks as fast as a used car salesman and layered on top of that is his thick Irish brogue merely makes matter worse. Both the sources are the sort of thing that one can read or listen to and come away with about any understanding that they want, because the whole lot of it is baffle gab. So if that is the better explanation I suppose I will just have to give it a shrug and move on. To quote a movie line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate".bn2bnude wrote:I'll let someone else explain better than I could...
Proverbs 26:4-5 wrote:4 Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.
5 Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.
Return to Christianity and other religions
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests