The Stumbling Block

[grmorton]

i think you're bitter due to your word/phrase choices

before you lay into those who you believe aren't as wise or knowledgable of the observations as yourself, check below for some truth that matters, or continue as you will. as always, it's your choice.

1 Corinthians 13:1-31 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

verse 2 seems to jump out and scream your name because as you can see i've been having a fine discourse with folks who are definitely not saying 'yes' to me.

It is amazing to me that the thing which started this with Fineous was a statement I made. Lets review and then think about charity.

did some searching and found nothing more than about 45,000 layers (on a pro-evolution site) so would you mind giving a reference for the 100,000 layers (other than your own site)?

The only thing that could have possibly been offensive in my reply to this tender young man was when I said:

I am always amazed at how sloppy YEC research is. Why don't you actually go to the original article. You know, it is a scholarly thing to do--you know--actually read the original article.

To which he replied:

thanks for the reference but please keep the ad homs to yourself. speaking of research, anyone know who it was that said "slinging mud only gets you dirty and causes you to lose ground"? i've lost a bit of ground in this thread due to it and it's my intent to cease. if it continues from 'the other side' then i reckon that shows something.

For telling him the truth, that he does sloppy research, he then mistakenly calls it an ad hominem. When I correct that, he then talks about anything BUT the fact that there are 100,000 layers in Lake Suigetsu—100,000 years worth of algal blooms which we see happening today, which have happened throughout recorded history and the deposits of said lake show no differences as we go back in time.



I am sorry, but I have not been either 1. engaging in ad hominems, 2. slinging mud (unless one thinks the guy actually did do excellent research). Or 3. bitter and attacking.


As to charity, 2 years ago, I got cancer. The doctor took out a big knife and cut me up, which required a month of recuperation. He hurt me. But, he was quite charitable. Charity doesn't always mean being fluffy and girly. Is it charitable to keep giving a person a subsistence worth of food each day when you could teach him to farm so that he could have an abundance of food? Of course to teach the guy to farm you have to get him off his rear end so that he can do some HARD work. Similarly with scholarly research. In order to do it well one can't do a cursory google and expect to know the issue. One must get off one's virtual rear end and find the original articles and read and do the hard work of thinking. And besides this, I can want the best for you even if I have to tell you some ugly truths to make you think about what you are doing. You do sloppy research. THat isn't an ad hom. The fact is you didn't follow through to even go look at the original article on Suigetsu so you changed the subject to my nasty personality and lack of charity. So what if I am nasty and brutish. I can get over that, but you will still do sloppy research if you dont' get off your virtual rear end and actually read some science articles rather than web pages.


Now, my dear Fineous, please explain how in a 6000 year old earth, we could have 100,000 years worth of algal blooms. Please deal with the facts, not my personality, not my perceived nastiness, but just the facts.

 

[Fineous_Reese]

Maybe, but I do find it really odd that telling someone that they do sloppy research is a major social faux pas. His response that it is an ad hominem was not quite on target either. Let's try this: Fineous, you do less than optimal research.

Somehow I doubt it will get his attention like the other, but ok, have it your way.

the morning i posted asking about the 100,000 layers i had read through about three articles and none had mentioned more than 45,000 layers. one even linked multiple times to your entouch site however it stated the japanese lake was showing 45k layers ie 45k years, no mention of 100,000 anything when it would have been a simple inference, as you've made in this thread, that if one layer = one year and the lake has 100,000 layers... but it didn't. :shrug:

i had a site bookmarked with definitions of logical fallacies, here's what it had for ad hominem:

ad hominem: rejecting or dismissing another personճ statement by attacking the person rather than by disproving the statement

since it was possible to disprove my statement by simply providing the document that verified the 100,000 layers there was no need to go the extra mile and make personal accusations about my research abilities. yet for reasons unknown to me, although they appear to be that you are bitter, you went that extra mile on more than one occasion. perhaps in your mind you think that you have to cut into some one to help them heal. i'm sorry that you've gone through cancer. it's been the death of more than a few in my family and i'm glad you survived the ordeal.

now as two of the sites i read through were YEC sites, and they did mention 45,000 layers (one was John Woodmorappe with whom i believe you are at least acquainted?) and as i've never said the earth is only 6,000 years old, i'm not sure what you're hunting for in your last question. please clarify, my dear grmorton. (see how the snide little remarks slip in?)

 

[shernren]

Teehee. Why isn't SBG complaining any more that nobody is answering the OP?

Jesus encountered a stumbling block by the way He phrased what He said to the people. Should Jesus have changed His message so that more could have accepted this?

Let me be frank. Do all the YECs here believe that when they have communion, they are literally eating the muscle and visceral tissue of Jesus, and they are literally drinking the same fluid with haemocytes and lymphocytes that once pumped through Jesus' heart?
Do you dig out your eyes when you stumble across a lingerie ad?
Do you chop off your hands every time you feel like slapping someone?
Do you check if there are any tree trunks in your eye before you go on to ChristianForums to battle "those heretical TEs"?

What was hard about Jesus' message? Were they arguing because they thought Jesus was asking them to be cannibals and vampires? No, look carefully at the context:

41At this the Jews began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

It began because they did not accept the character of Christ and His Messiahship. No TEs protest the character of Christ and His Messiahship.

47I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. 50But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Jesus does not respond directly. He continues to expound on His claims and message.

52Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

The Jews don't get the point of His message: that they must accept Him and depend completely on Him. So they misconstrue His message and use it as an excuse to reject Him.

53Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. 57Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.”

Jesus continues in the same vein. When His disciples protest:

60On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

He actually waters it down!

Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit[c] and they are life. 64Yet there are some of you who do not believe.”

Analysis:
v62: "If you think I'm offending you now, wait till I come again!" Jesus chastises their unbelief, because He doesn't want them to think that just because He is accommodating them means they are right.
v63: Note how He now says "The Spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing." But wasn't He saying a little earlier that they had to eat His flesh? What Jesus is doing now is unpacking what He said, i.e. : "You guys have got Me all wrong." which is reinforced by how He continues: "The words I have spoken to you are eternal life", and thus He shows what He really meant: that it was His words, His teaching that were important (since at that point He had not yet went to the cross).
v64: Maybe the "yet" means: "Even though I show you what I really mean, you will still be offended. It is not the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood you really care about: it is Me and who I am, for even when I have showed you the meaning behind the flesh and blood you are still offended."

Note that all this is purely speculation on my behalf and may or may not be concrete theology: it does, however, make a lot of sense to me.

Now, to SBG's question:

Should Jesus have changed His message so that more could have accepted this?

My answer is: to me, it looks like Jesus did. Why? Partly because we, as people (slightly) more mature in faith, gain so much more from what Jesus said about flesh and blood. When you eat something, it is completely and fully integrated into your body: you trust that it is pure and will not kill you: it builds and strengthens. Additionally this may also be related to the eating of the sin sacrifice in the Old Testament. This is lacking from simply understanding "My words are life": it is so much more beautiful, striking, and ultimately life-changing when we truly understand the depths of what Jesus meant by "partake of Me, the bread of life".

But Jesus was able to divorce the core of His teaching from the wrapping He was using to communicate it. He perceives that the people think it hard, and so He shows them the truth behind it. Not that it is any less hard! We are still struggling to do what Jesus commands here, and not simply because we are disgusted by the image of biting Jesus! When Jesus unpacked it, He left us both a clue to how to interpret the preceeding, and also a warning: "When you disbelieve Me, it is not because what I am teaching is hard: even when I make it easy you still disbelieve because you are hard!"

Now, this seems to show precisely what is wrong with YEC theology: it refuses to unpack the core truth (that God created a good and orderly world) from its wrappings (that He did it in six days, 6000 years ago). Jesus was willing to unpack His teachings: if the Author has done it, who are we to say that it is wrong?

Again note that my analysis of that passage is purely speculation on my behalf and may or may not be concrete theology: it does, however, make a lot of sense to me.

 

[Remus]

Let me be frank. Do all the YECs here believe that when they have communion, they are literally eating the muscle and visceral tissue of Jesus, and they are literally drinking the same fluid with haemocytes and lymphocytes that once pumped through Jesus' heart?
Do you dig out your eyes when you stumble across a lingerie ad?
Do you chop off your hands every time you feel like slapping someone?
Do you check if there are any tree trunks in your eye before you go on to ChristianForums to battle "those heretical TEs"?

Did you believe this when you were YEC?

Analysis:
v62: "If you think I'm offending you now, wait till I come again!" Jesus chastises their unbelief, because He doesn't want them to think that just because He is accommodating them means they are right.
v63: Note how He now says "The Spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing." But wasn't He saying a little earlier that they had to eat His flesh? What Jesus is doing now is unpacking what He said, i.e. : "You guys have got Me all wrong." which is reinforced by how He continues: "The words I have spoken to you are eternal life", and thus He shows what He really meant: that it was His words, His teaching that were important (since at that point He had not yet went to the cross).
v64: Maybe the "yet" means: "Even though I show you what I really mean, you will still be offended. It is not the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood you really care about: it is Me and who I am, for even when I have showed you the meaning behind the flesh and blood you are still offended."

Note that all this is purely speculation on my behalf and may or may not be concrete theology: it does, however, make a lot of sense to me.

Why did you end there? You stopped before getting to the part where the disciples stopped following him. If he watered it down, why didn't he water it down more so they wouldn't leave him?

 

[shernren]

Did you believe this when you were YEC?

No. Come to think of it I didn't really get my point across. I was directly answering SBG's OP. His question was "didn't Jesus have a right to teach hard teachings that no-one would follow?" and to that my question was "do you follow these hard teachings as-is just because Jesus said them that way? or do you try to find the meaning behind what He said?" I don't know if my point's clear yet.

Why did you end there? You stopped before getting to the part where the disciples stopped following him. If he watered it down, why didn't he water it down more so they wouldn't leave him?

It wasn't exactly "watering down". What Jesus did was to take away the connotation of eating flesh and drinking blood from the idea of following His words whole-heartedly. He was still adhering to the core of what He was teaching, namely that to follow His words was Life.

Jesus was willing to strip off what He was saying right to the core to win people. But at the same time He knew that the people were going to leave Him anyway, not because of the dressing, but because of the core itself. He would not go so far as to tamper with the core of His message. I believe that was why He said "Yet you still don't believe!" - "I've gone as far as I can to show you something you can believe in. So it's not because I'm teaching error: it's because you all are stubborn."

I'm seeing the YEC-TE struggle being mirrored here ...
To the TE, the 6 days and 6000 years are just wrapping. The core of it is that God created, God did it with order, and what God created should never be worshiped as creator. If by taking away the wrapping, we can convince people of the core, so much the better! (Who knows if Jesus really did convince a few disciples by what He said?)

To the YEC however, since the 6 days and 6000 years are the core of the message (a case of misplaced priorities, if you ask me), it is "watering down the message" to take that off the Creation story.

Anyway...do you think my "exegesis" (whatchamacallit) was right? Very curious. I have never seen the orthodox analysis of the passage before that post, so it should be interesting to compare notes.

 

[Fineous_Reese]

My answer is: to me, it looks like Jesus did. Why? Partly because we, as people (slightly) more mature in faith, gain so much more from what Jesus said about flesh and blood. When you eat something, it is completely and fully integrated into your body: you trust that it is pure and will not kill you: it builds and strengthens. Additionally this may also be related to the eating of the sin sacrifice in the Old Testament. This is lacking from simply understanding "My words are life": it is so much more beautiful, striking, and ultimately life-changing when we truly understand the depths of what Jesus meant by "partake of Me, the bread of life".

this sounds well and good except that the way Jesus made out bodies we do not completely and fully integrate food into our body, we take the bits we can use and pass on the rest as waste. sadly too many folks do this with the Scripture. they take the bits they want and pass on the rest. if Scripture does not comport with observations of the cursed earth made by imperfect (and often biased) humans then we change the meaning of Scripture to fit what we want, and pass on the rest.

Now, this seems to show precisely what is wrong with YEC theology: it refuses to unpack the core truth (that God created a good and orderly world) from its wrappings (that He did it in six days, 6000 years ago). Jesus was willing to unpack His teachings: if the Author has done it, who are we to say that it is wrong?

it would appear one of the main differences between YEC's and TE's is the definition of a "good and orderly world". i personally can't understand death, disease and violence being either "good" or "orderly" in a pre-Fall world.

 

[SBG]

I'm seeing the YEC-TE struggle being mirrored here ...
To the TE, the 6 days and 6000 years are just wrapping. The core of it is that God created, God did it with order, and what God created should never be worshiped as creator. If by taking away the wrapping, we can convince people of the core, so much the better! (Who knows if Jesus really did convince a few disciples by what He said?)

To the YEC however, since the 6 days and 6000 years are the core of the message (a case of misplaced priorities, if you ask me), it is "watering down the message" to take that off the Creation story.

Anyway...do you think my "exegesis" (whatchamacallit) was right? Very curious. I have never seen the orthodox analysis of the passage before that post, so it should be interesting to compare notes.

YECs do not look to Genesis and say all we need to know is 6 day creation. We not only say it was a six day creation, God created, God is the creator, Adam sinned, he fell from grace which explains our circumstance today. YECs say that God originally created everything as good, where death wasn't part of life, were we weren't meant for pain and experience sorrow. That God created us as a special creation for companionship with Him. That man used to be able to see God face to face, until he sinned. That Jesus Christ came to bring back what we lost due to our sinfulness, and He will complete this upon His return, the second time.

TEs forget that they confuse the fall, by saying it isn't literal, attribute death, pain and sorrow to God as His original intention for creation.

 

[shernren]

Eh SBG: do you think my analysis of the passage you quoted is right? Then you will understand what I'm saying. YECs and TEs agree on the core: that God is the creator, that we should not worship the created (actually, YECism waters this down by attributing actual physical objects instead of the ideological constructs, since the created attributes mentioned - day, night, water, land, sky, sun, moon, stars, birds, sea creatures, beasts, man (hehe.) - were worshiped as gods and one purpose is to show their created-ness), that God creates with order and fills life with purpose. YECs and TEs agree. What YECs and TEs dispute on is whether accepting the truth of the 6-day 6000-year ago creation process as literally described, is necessary to accepting the truth of the ideas in the Creation story.

I agree, YECs don't say we only need the 6-day creation. What I mean is YECs say only if we have the 6-day creation do we have the truth of the creation idea. TEs believe otherwise. We believe that we can have the truth of the creation idea without the literal 6-day creation.

As for Adam et. al., I personally believe in a literal Adam and Eve and Garden, though the creation of these might not have been exactly as literally described in the Bible. That one's for others to fight out.

Okay, now for the common misunderstanding of "sin before the Fall in TEism".

it would appear one of the main differences between YEC's and TE's is the definition of a "good and orderly world". i personally can't understand death, disease and violence being either "good" or "orderly" in a pre-Fall world.

Firstly, why "orderly"? God only said "good", right? Are you being non-literal?
But I get what you mean. I know that the idea of animal death is repulsive to some. But biological death is a natural part of the world. As has been said before, God Himself killed animals right after the Fall - would God being the source of morality perform an action which is immoral? Did God (per impossibile!) fall as well? No! I believe that it would be a small hint at the idea that there was biological death pre-Fall.
Furthermore, how would animal populations be controlled in a non-Fall world? Nobody has answered that yet. While we're at it, decay (and therefore corpses) are necessary for the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle. If these processes were not present, life would run out of chemical supplies, Fall or not.

And show me an example of a natural and pristine ecosystem that is "chaotic" or "not orderly", with your qualification of why you believe that it is not orderly. Because if these pristine ecosystems are examples of the pre-Fall ecosystem, and they are orderly, the pre-Fall ecosystem would have been even more orderly before man's actions that destabilize the environment.

TEs forget that they confuse the fall, by saying it isn't literal, attribute death, pain and sorrow to God as His original intention for creation.

Does death, pain and sorrow have a moral component for animals? Is it wrong for a lion to eat a lamb, and who should be punished and how?
I, even being a TE, don't believe that death, pain and sorrow were God's original intention for man. I think that man, being uniquely sentient, would have a physical growth rate that would decay exponentially (and therefore come to an asymptote) but a "spiritual growth" that would keep going on and on. But I'll leave that, again, to TEs who believe that there was no literal Garden, since this is more their fight than mine.

 

[grmorton]

i had a site bookmarked with definitions of logical fallacies, here's what it had for ad hominem:



since it was possible to disprove my statement by simply providing the document that verified the 100,000 layers there was no need to go the extra mile and make personal accusations about my research abilities. yet for reasons unknown to me, although they appear to be that you are bitter, you went that extra mile on more than one occasion. perhaps in your mind you think that you have to cut into some one to help them heal. i'm sorry that you've gone through cancer. it's been the death of more than a few in my family and i'm glad you survived the ordeal.

Look, I am quite tired of people who think they should be given an easy pass on hard work just because they are, well, err, them. You are no more deserving of a special exemption from research than anyone else. As to an ad hominem, you apparently still seem to think that anything said critical of you constitutes an ad hominem. I can assure you it doesn't. But then, you haven't apparently done enough research to come to the correct conclusion.

A person who is weird can state a truth. But that doesn't mean that the person isn't weird. So if someone says, 'Hey, you are weird but you said the truth', that isn't an ad hominem. An ad hominem is saying 'you are wierd, therefore you are wrong." This latter is a logical fallacy.

But, equally saying 'hey you are weird but you are also wrong because of this or that data,' that isn't an ad hominem. It is a comment on the personality but the data is why the person is wrong. Please understand what an ad hominem is before you try to discuss it.


now as two of the sites i read through were YEC sites, and they did mention 45,000 layers (one was John Woodmorappe with whom i believe you are at least acquainted?) and as i've never said the earth is only 6,000 years old, i'm not sure what you're hunting for in your last question. please clarify, my dear grmorton. (see how the snide little remarks slip in?)[/QUOTE]