A Tale of Two Judges

This is the tale of two judges and their judgments.

A certain man steals an item of food and hurts no one in the process. Before he can eat or get rid ofthe food he is caught and brought in before two judges. The first judge has only the testimony of the witnesses and the evidence that the man had the food in his possessions. The second judge, on the other hand, knows every detail about the event and knows every detail about the entirety of the man’s life, including what led him to steal in the first place.

Based on what the first judge knows the man is sentenced to 1 year in prison to be fed with only bread and water. Even though the second judge knows that the man stole the bread to feed a friend he never the less decides to sentence the man to prison for the rest of his life and to be tortured until death.

We would rightly recognize that even though the first judge’s verdict is harsh, it is not extreme and we could say that his judgment fits the crime. For the second judge, we would have to conclude that the judge is insane since he knew why the man stole the food and that his judgment does not fit the severity of the crime and certainly doesn’t take into account the motive.

The first judge is the human judge. He is limited in both knowledge of the situation and his punishment is no better than a guess. Does it provide recourse? We can only guess. Is it punishment? Prisons are full of those seeking no more than food and shelter.

It is imperfect judgment.

The second judge is modern Christianity’s idea of how a perfect God will judge mankind. Even though he has all evidence before him, he will judge all sins the same…by torture for eternity.

Does this sound like a perfect judge? Of course not! A perfect judge could meet out judgment in the most perfect way. Each sentence would fit the crime perfectly and all of those done wrong would be perfectly conpensated.

We assume that man is rational…that he can think logically. That when presented with a choice to do right and to his long term benefit he will act in his best interest, but we have 6000 years of history to document otherwise.

The scriptures to support this is everywhere from most simplest verses (John 3:16) to the most complex. When you’ve been taught otherwise since childhood it is very hard to see, but study it out for yourself because when you really see it…you won’t be able to see anything else.

God is perfect. He will judge perfectly.

The Obsolete Church

I read this post today:

Once the Bible became available to everyone, religion became by-and-large obsolete, except for those too lazy to read it.

I noticed that church was becoming more and more obsolete around my 5th year. I began to realize that my relationship with church wasn’t my relationship with God. One doesn’t need the church organization. We should be able to get everything we need from studying the Bible and prayer. Spending time with other Christians doesn’t mean that you have to do so  at church.

Needless to say, I’ll be in attendance at church tomorrow, but what I expect to get from it is fellowship with the brethren.

Legalism

I was recently discussing children with a friend of mine and he mentioned that even though he brought his kids to every function and service that the church held, they still drifted away from the church easily once they finished high school…then it hit me. The parents bring their child to everything and the children get little more than the idea that they supposed to attend everything no matter if it’s good or not. Like the idea that a college degree confers intelligence, the mere act of attending church magically strengthens their relationship with God.

The hard truth is that attending church, when it isn’t for a purpose, will likely hurt your relationship with Christ more than it will help. I know this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but take a moment to digest this thought. It is a standard, a rule, that a person must attend as much as possible. Only in that way can you stay on the straight and narrow.

But, why go to that Wednesday night service when the topic is off-the-cuff and not well researched? It is the equivalent of day care for adults. It is the extension of American schooling. Come in, sit down, shut up and listen for the next hour. You’re not expected to do much except sing a couple of songs, clap your hands, and read along when required. It easy is to see why church leadership can get away with such mediocrity. It is modern schooling for adults.

This kind of church attendance has become legalism. Attending church for attendance sake.

I understand that we typically attend on Sundays to reverence and worship God and we should gather together with other Christians. I’m not necessarily talking about that. I’m speaking of all the extra services, programs, projects and other events that can take up every moment of our time. Time which would be better spent focusing directly on our children, family and friends.

For example, our church has a fireworks stand. Why do need one? Because we purchased too much building. Who is we? The church leadership. Why is this the fault of the laity who had little say? It’s not and you shouldn’t waste your time. (Anyway, it’s important that leadership learn that people will not bailout their poorly thought out decisions.)

It is good to question. I find that regretful fools say otherwise. How does this event benefit you and your family? This is not a selfish question. This is following a direct order from God. You and your family come before the church building, the pastor, and anyone else…or you are no better than a heretic.

Choose the way you spend your time carefully. Just because there is a cross on the door doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to go every chance you get.

Well, it’s about time

Won’t anyone think of the watch companies!

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

Time is nothing more than the measure of movement between atoms (being the smallest thing I can think of). There is no such thing as a time line.  One cannot go back in time. However, if it were possible to keep in memory the arrangement of atoms at a specific moment, then it would be possible to “go back in time” by recreating that arrangement of atoms.

The Spaghetti Monster Squeeks

Splinters of Silver brings the newspaper in, but its all wet:

According to the Dallas Morning News, “An atheist couple whose children attend a Carrollton-Farmers Branch elementary school have filed a complaint in federal district court arguing that the state’s mandated moment of silence in public schools is unconstitutional.”

…

What I find most interesting is, atheists claim they do not believe God exist and do not believe prayer does a single thing, then why such a fight against a moment of silence whereby the student is free to ponder any thoughts they seem right in their own eyes?

The solution to such ridiculousness is easy to solve if parents really cared enough to do so. The fact is they do not care about their children. The answer to fighting such silliness  and similar conflicts such as school prayer lies in another story about one school’s threat to jail parents if they don’t get their kids immunized.

“AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons) also pointed out a blatant conflict of interest, highlighting the fact that the school district is set to lose a windfall in state funding unless students comply with the vaccine order.”

The schools get money for each kid it incarcerates. No kids, no money. If each parent would pull their kid out, then the government would have two choices. Either allow prayer and whatever else or show their true colors and use force to bring the kids into the detention centers. Either way, we win.

Making Pastors Responsible

Should Christians support a church that supports abortion? Should Christians support murder? Should Christians support forced charity and slavery through high taxation?

I’m firmly believe that tithing for New Testament Christians is not biblical. I am also against to all forms of forced charity, that is, anytime money is taken from one person through taxation or any other means in order to give to it someone else who is deemed less fortunate .

Now, here is where this should upset pastors in particular. I’m going to start cutting back (perhaps altogether) my monetary donations to church if my pastor and those in leadership refuse to support presidential and local candidates who would not lower taxes or even better, abolish them altogether. A vote Romney, Obama, Huckabee, Clinto, Guiliani, Thompson or any of the others excepting Ron Paul will be considered a vote FOR taxation.

It’s simple, if the government wasn’t forcing me to give, then I would have more to give to those people and causes which I support.

Now, saying that pastors are not responsible for teaching the tenements of freedom is not acceptable. They absolutely are! Where do we suppose these freedoms we enjoyed in the past came from? They are all based on the principles espoused in the New Testament, which were taught by pastors at the beginning of the American Revolution.

The choice is simple. We need to make pastors responsible for what they are teaching and whom they are supporting. If they refuse to see reason and do the research than they are not deserving of their position. It all comes down to see this, if they don’t see how taxation and forced charity is slavery, then how can they truly understand the freedom that Christ taught?

The Wheel of Fortune

Povertarians reach point at everyone else with their gold, bony fingers:

“The Archbishop of Canterbury told the faithful on Christmas Day that unless human beings abandon our greed, we will be responsible for the death of the planet.

Hmm. I’m not sure that I can take a lecture on greed from a man who heads one of the western world’s richest institutions. As we huddle under a patio heater to stay warm while having a cigarette in the rain, his bishops are living in palatial splendour with banqueting halls, wondering where to invest the next billion.”

As the world economy faces the coming economic downturn I expected that the church aristocracy would begin to preach poverty, but I hadn’t expected them to use the environment to make their point.

Of course, this is nothing new. We can expect that priests and preachers will begin to start lecturing us on how poor Jesus was, instead of the rich man he was supposed to be during the Prosperity give-us-a-hundred-so-that-God-will-give-you-a-thousand trend.

AI in the Bible

This guy is either reading into certain Biblical passages way to much or is on to something:

The true meaning of the churches will come as a shock to many, especially to members of  the scientific community. As incredible as it may sound,  the message of the seven churches is a symbolic description of the principles that govern the operation of the brain! Each church represents a major cell assembly or subnetwork in the central nervous system, each with its own unique function and operating principle. The following table lists the corresponding function and cell assembly (or network) of each church

He’s also got something to say about Darwin as well:

Darwinian evolution is by necessity a blind incremental process. In other words, it does not anticipate. Most intelligence researchers (e.g., Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab) base their work on evolutionarily plausible scenarios. In their view, intelligence evolved gradually over the years as new behaviors are built on top of previously evolved behaviors (this is the basis (PDF] of Brooks’ subsumption architecture). The end result, we are told, is that the more recent members of a species are smarter than their ancestors. But this overlooks an important consideration. Humans are born with almost no behavioral skills.

This is the kind of thinking I like: don’t presume that those before you were correct, use current knowledge in order to re-look at what we thought we knew, and just plain think outside the box.

Trinity and Evolution

Monsieurturtle comes in  from the cold:

“Well, we are. God is one being; that is, The Being, the Existing One, the One that Is (all these being various possible translations of the Greek rendering of “I AM”). God is one God, as is proclaimed throughout scripture, but the distinction lies in the fact that He is revealed to us in three persons, or to use a more accurate term (given that English attaches multiple meanings to that term) would be “prosopa”, or “faces/masks/elements”.”

Indeed, when the words behind the words are examined the point becomes even clearer. God is revealed to us through many faces (wrestling with Jeremiah) and masks (the talking donkey), and elements (the burning bush). Yet, we have created no more “persons” in which to express God.

“No, I don’t believe any Trinitarian theologian would believe that God has revealed Himself fully. Indeed, we can only see what has been revealed, but again, what was revealed was done so by God’s own determination, and therefore what we do know of Him must indeed be held precious.”

The problem is that at the basic premise of Trinitarianism is that we have received the full revelation of God, but by your own admission we understand that God has revealed only what he has chosen to reveal. Therefore, any fixed and unchangeable formulation of how God exists is incorrect and hence Trinitarianism is incorrect.

While I consider your troubles with Trinitarian theology valid and worthy of discussion, I find the above statement to be an indicator that you may be doubting a doctrine based on a genuine ounce of doubt and about a pound of misinformation into the matter. That is to say, your consternation with the doctrine is understandable and expected, but the concepts to which you reach for support are based on a non-existent foundation.

I disagree, as the history of the church and the ideas which shaped it are very well documented. Many of the “greatest” men of early church were products of conversion and not born into it (Origen, Justin Martyr, and Turtullian come to mind.) It is quite easy to demonstrate through early church writings how the idea of Trinity was formed over several centuries.

When Man is short on knowledge, the most consistent theories are the simplest. Trinitarianism fails because it relies on an unprovable “mystery”. Trinitarianism relies on a “mystery” so that it can overcome the contradictory gaps. It is the same kind of “mystery” or “missing link” which evolutionists trot out when faced with problems in their theory.

Realization

I just realized that I had set the comment moderation on without realizing it with the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. To those who have responded I apologize.