Awesome site, man!
Rex
Rex B13
JoinedPosts by Rex B13
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Bible Research in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek +++
by Celtic infor any of you interested in translation issues from the original hebrew, aramaic and greek, plus other languages have a look at this fully searchable database from:.
hope it proves to be of benefit.. peace.
celtic.
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Rex B13
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Religious repression - Western style
by expatbrit inan interesting article on why we shouldn't get too smug and self-righteous about our supposed liberal and free western society.
the disease of fundamentalist religion still manifests symptoms in so-called "free" west:.
body and mind: religious repression - western style: appliance of science: the row over embryonic stem cell research shows that plenty of minds in the 'secular' west are still happy to suppress science, warns thomas barlow .
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Rex B13
Hi Extra-brit,
Why do you insist on tying all of real Christianity to cultic groups like J'dubs, calling them 'fundamentalists' when they do not fit that term by any stretch of the imagination? Like other cults, they DENY the fundamental foundation of Christianity and merely use Christian terms with their own, couched meanings.
Your selected subject just 'blew up in your face'. Progenating babies for the sole purpose of killing them to make life 'better' for this selfish generation is rather brutal and barbaric, is it not?
Have your atheistic, naturalistic surgeons (picture Auschwitz) slicing open some poor woman's belly (after the pro-abortionists convince her it isn't really murder) then killing her infant is your idea of morality, eh?
The end justifies the means, right?
The stem cells that George W. okayed for research were already dead and would never be babies anyway. That is the only reason it was allowed. As far as some researchers heading for greener pastures, that's quite alright with those of us (the majority) in this country who still value human life.Hey, you could always go to China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. Those societies are the atheistic dreamland right to the very core. Oops, perhaps not. People with big mouths don't have a history of lasting long, unlike in the west, where are they are FREE to voice their opinions. Free-Democracy-Republic-Belief in a Higher Power all go hand in hand. I believe the terms I need to use now are...point, set, game, match.
Cheerio!
Rex -
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Mere Christianity: logical reasoning
by Rex B13 inmere christianity: excerpt.
chapter one.
every one has heard people quarrelling.
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Rex B13
>In the earliest days of humanity, it became obvious which actions helped the individual and the group, and which actions caused harm to the individual or the group. Those actions that caused harm became taboo to one degree or another. Now, many thousands of years later, our collective experience as humans has led to certain moral standards that are mostly followed by all.
What? That explains the inborn conscience present in most humans?
A supposition that is only used to deny the very conscience that checks the actions of fallen and depraved mankind. In evolutionary theory, it calls for survival of the fittest: the one who can kick the most butt or outhink that one is the ruler of the tribe. If, evolution was true, that is.
If man is nothing more than a 'bright animal', then there is absolutely no reason for man to have developed beyond the hunter-gatherer stage and the 'rule of the jungle' would be in force now.
Rex -
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Mere Christianity: logical reasoning
by Rex B13 inmere christianity: excerpt.
chapter one.
every one has heard people quarrelling.
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Rex B13
Thanks D,
Isn't it amazing how our rank amateurs pretend to contend with Lewis? Old sixty-nine even dismisses it before he reads it, Oh well, eating crow is not for some people. Why try to keep 'saving face' when you've lost your a..?
Rex -
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"Miracles", excerpt from book
by Rex B13 inmiracles, by c. s. lewis .
chapter one .
the scope of this book .
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Rex B13
Hi Rem,
Your rule is a made up rule that is constantly used to discount actual evidence, saying it is not enough. You are simply promoting a forgone conclusion. There is never enough evidence.
Similiar rules:
A prophecy cannot happen, therefore, we must redate the prophecy.
Miracles cannot happen, therefore, any evidence regarding actual miracles must be false.
Rex -
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Mere Christianity: logical reasoning
by Rex B13 inmere christianity: excerpt.
chapter one.
every one has heard people quarrelling.
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Rex B13
Hi Rem,
>Also, ther ARE large differences in how other cultures now and in history have treated their fellow human beings. Morality and ethics are relative. Today we (most, not all in modern society) think Slavery is barbaric, mistreatment of women primitive, and killing of unwanted infants (already born) as unthinkable.
So, killing of the most defenseless is OK? The woman's comfort is more important than a life? If the little body is at the canal we can kill it but if it emerges we can't (oops, partial birth abortions are ok now)? 'Slavery' built the Roman Empire and it was often like employment is today. The 'terrible' Biblical standard was a genuine improvement in women's rights over the previous age.
>Even today people have vastly different views on abortion, capital punishment, sex before marriage, extramarital sex, homosexuality, stealing, murder, war, etc. These issues are not black and white. There is no one standard that all human beings can agree on.
There is one standard regarding truth inherent in scripture. By your own viewpoint then one could justify any act with 'moral relativism'; adults molesting children (where is the cut off date for this, 16, 14, 12 or even 10?); ritual sacrifice; killing all undesirables (like Jews, or do you think the germans and arabs don't really know any better?); blacks killing whites who take a wrong turn into the wrong neighborhood, etc!
YOU who go by this philosophy have not one leg to stand on. You can't really condemn any act.>C. S. Lewis was writing in his own little world. He wasn't taking into account how things really happen today and in history.
Oh come on! LOL The man was a intellectual from the early days of WW2 and faced more of the 'real world' than any of us here. Have you ever read the book (or any of his books) or do you just ignore anything spiritual in your 'own little world'.
What a weak statement.
Rex -
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Why some ex'dubs just don't get it
by Rex B13 inthe screwtape letters: ( a book that presents situations that seem to fit many of the refugees of the watchtower society).
my dear wormwood, .
i note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend.
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Rex B13
The Screwtape Letters: ( A book that presents situations that seem to fit many of the refugees of the Watchtower Society)
My dear Wormwood,I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïve? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous -- that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said 'Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,' the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added 'Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind,' he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of 'real life' (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all 'that sort of thing' just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about 'that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic'. He is now safe in Our Father's house.
You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable 'real life'. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is 'the results of modern investigation'. Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape
From the immortal, C. S. Lewis -
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Mere Christianity: logical reasoning
by Rex B13 inmere christianity: excerpt.
chapter one.
every one has heard people quarrelling.
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Rex B13
Mere Christianity: excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
THE LAW OF HUMAN NATURE
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' -- 'That's my seat, I was there first' -- 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' -- 'Why should you shove in first?' -- 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' -- 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law-with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to-whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked. -
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"Miracles", excerpt from book
by Rex B13 inmiracles, by c. s. lewis .
chapter one .
the scope of this book .
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Rex B13
Miracles, by C. S. Lewis
Chapter One
The Scope of This BookThose who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, II, (III), I.
In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.
For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.
If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence 'according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry'. But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. For if they are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us: and since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred. The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on the philosophical views which we have been holding before we even began to look at the evidence. This philosophical question must therefore come first.
Here is an example of the sort of thing that happens if we omit the preliminary philosophical task, and rush on to the historical. In a popular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion of the date at which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must have been written after the execution of St Peter, because, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St Peter. 'A book', thinks the author, 'cannot be written before events which it refers to'. Of course it cannot -- unless real predictions ever occur. If they do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author has not discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes it for granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he is right: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by historical inquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historical work, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historical conclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have been reached at all. His work is therefore quite useless to a person who wants to know whetber predictions occur. The author gets to work only after he has already answered that question in the negative, and on grounds which he never communicates to us.
This book is intended as a preliminary to historical inquiry. I am not a trained historian and I shall not examine the historical evidence for the Christian miracles. My effort is to put my readers in a position to do so. It is no use going to the texts until we have some idea about the possibility or probability of the miraculous. Those who assume that miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by looking into the texts: we know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question.
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I want a family to celebrate Christmas with
by puppylove ini want a "normal" family.
i want to go to my mom's home on christmas.
i want to fight with my husband about whose house we are going to this year - his mom's or mine.
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Rex B13
This invitation is open to any who are willing to arrive in my area and come my house anytime over the holidays. We live about 30 miles due west of Pittsburgh, near the Pa-WV-Ohio state lines. E-mail me for times and directions.
I'm serious.
Rex