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  1. Mediaeval

    Justice as per Christianity!

    Love works this way: the innocent loves even the person who misunderstands and wrongs him.
  2. Mediaeval

    Doubting salvation again; is it OCD or am I not submitting to Christ?

    The catalyst for the Reformation was a scrupulous monk named Martin Luther. He famously found relief by looking away from his imperfect self and deeds and looking to the objective message of the Gospel. God is your heavenly Father, you are His beloved child, Christ is your Savior.
  3. Mediaeval

    Justice as per Christianity!

    Christians who hold to the penal substitution theory of the Atonement (PSA) say something like that, and it is a fair question whether it is justice. I am not sure what Christians usually say since there are various views of the Atonement. Saint Isaac the Syrian explained our Lord's sacrifice as...
  4. Mediaeval

    Who was the last king of Judah?

    Who said there was no evidence? And what good is evidence to an atheist? Unless you can say something to motivate me, I am not especially interested in pursuing this discussion.
  5. Mediaeval

    Who was the last king of Judah?

    The same reason why we should believe anything--the veracity of God.
  6. Mediaeval

    Who was the last king of Judah?

    I would affirm with Tree of Life the inerrancy of Scripture, recognizing, as perhaps he does too, that the extant manuscripts are fallible, so that, as a practical matter, God is still conveying to us His infallible truth through fallible means, including our own fallible intellects. If the...
  7. Mediaeval

    Who was the last king of Judah?

    A year or two ago, you had reasoned that, in view of the Shallum-Zedekiah age discrepancy, it must have been a different Zedekiah who became king, the one listed as Jehoiakim's son in 1 Chron 3:16. One can only add conjecture to conjecture, but perhaps Josiah's agreeing to include his...
  8. Mediaeval

    Who was the last king of Judah?

    Greetings, NV. Since hearing your clever solution to the problem some time ago, I came upon another thinking out of the box: there was one Zedekiah, who was related to Josiah in two ways: 1) as a son of Jehoiakim through an illicit affair with Josiah's wife Hamutal and 2) as therefore also a...
  9. Mediaeval

    Can anyone explain the concept of "election"

    George MacDonald put it this way: “Election: a doctrine which in the Bible asserts the fact of God’s choosing certain persons for the specific purpose of receiving first, and so communicating the gifts of his grace to the whole world.”
  10. Mediaeval

    The Didache; very likely what was handed out in ACTS 16

    In context the decrees mentioned in Acts 16:4 refer to the decrees mentioned in Acts 15:29.
  11. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    Getting at first principles is necessarily reductionistic. The main implication I had in mind was God as the foundation of knowledge--though not as if faith needed philosophy to tell it that.
  12. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    What we see in humans and across the various species is a level of intelligence that a creationist or theistic evolutionary model could justify, but not a model where atheistic materialism (AM) is assumed, and that for the reason already belabored in previous posts. Other reasons why AM could...
  13. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    I don’t know how it would measure on a scale of “ifs,” but it seems there is no other alternative available. We cannot justify our knowledge on an atheistic basis, so we are led to justify it on a theistic basis, if we care to justify it at all. Either non-intelligence produced our intelligence...
  14. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    Harsh, bro. But you raise an interesting issue. That which is self-evident and basal cannot be demonstrated, otherwise it would not be basal. If it is self-evident, the mind knows it is true immediately, and proof is both unnecessary and superfluous. Actually, I agree with you that trust in our...
  15. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    Not semantics, but logical sequence. Self-evident truth is necessarily first and basal. It does not derive its validity secondhand from assumptions about the cognitive process. Rather, it establishes the validity of that process.
  16. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    You are using what is not a basal axiom, much less a self-evident truth, as if it were a basal axiom. What you have argued amounts to a double-hypothesis: a trustworthy brain is needed for all knowledge, and we possess a brain that is trustworthy as long as it is not deceiving us. Passing over...
  17. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    If we are reduced to the position that we must trust our brains because we must, then it is hard to imagine a more circular position. A trustworthy brain may be one of those “psychological expectations” that Prof. Bowne referred to (post #74). But, of course, needing a trustworthy brain does not...
  18. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    Not every worldview can justify trust in our power to know. Under atheism trusting in things that are demonstrated by brains not intelligently designed, not to mention brains fallible and finite in knowledge, is indeed question-begging, circular reasoning from possibly deceptive experience to...
  19. Mediaeval

    Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

    Trusting “conclusions that come from brains because of experience” is a kind of arbitrary and gratuitous question-begging if our presuppositions cannot justify that trust. FrumiousBandersnatch remarked that our brain is “not a trustworthy calculator because, more often than not, it gives the...