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Morality!

This is getting good.

Identifying somebody as a liberal is name calling?

Jeff knows he's to the left of the majority of folks here on the campfire. Thus, he is in fact, more liberal than most here. This is nothing new, and nothing even remotely akin to name calling. It's no more name calling than saying somebody that turns wrenches on a car for a living is a mechanic....

the physicist frijoh capra does postulate in his book, the Web of Life, that in the beginning, on earth, there were only one-celled life-beings. through "evolution" uploading additional DNA information, space dust, whatever the one-celled life beings continued to become more complex. i paraphrase of course.

through time, the plants took off in one direction to meet survival needs, and all other life forms took off in other directions, then further bifurcated. again, i paraphrase.

much later, like today, we have the plant kingdom and the rest of us kingdom, all interdependent upon each other down here on the Earth. the Earth was called Gaia much later. as was Mother Earth and Father Sun, or Great Creator. to further clarify, trees breathe out oxygen, breathe in CO2. we are their mirror image in terms of cooperative co-habitation.

others suggest that the plant kingdom is our mirror opposites. the trees are much more adaptable than us, they can live in the worst of conditions, and still re=leaf to bear fruit the next year. we humans have to move around in order to find suitable shelter, if we are to survive the winter onslaughts.

none of that even begins to indicate where life itself first came from. if "man" ever does manage to create life in a terrarium (the Earth) then katy bar the door, because we'll be on our way to a likely great awakening.

You need to define your terms a little more for me to give you an honest answer.

I do believe it is Logos, and always accompanied with Rhema.

I will draw some flack from Christians here for this next bit, but it's just how I understand things, to date.

"Let those who have ears to hear, hear!" Tells me that His Word is a mystery to those who do not follow Him. I'd go so far that some things are a mystery to us who do. I believe that there is a reason for it. We have a natural curiosity, that He gave us, and mysteries drive us to delve deeper. Every lover desires to be pursued, why would the lover of our souls be any different?

"The wisdom of God is foolishness to men." Applies to most who have argued in this thread.

"My sheep hear my voice, and they follow it." Applies to the other half, at least some of the time.

I'm not "a liberal"; that's a straw man thrown up for beatin' on.

That said, SOME of my beliefs differ from that of the modern American "conservative". BUT, I gotta tell you HAJ, the American political spectrum is an absolute bitch's brew of contradiction and hypocrisy. There's no shortage of "conservative" positions that are essentially leftist, for instance.

As to the name calling, I didn't take it as such; you are polite that way and I appreciate that. With that being said, I've grown pretty thick skin (scars? Lol) around here and you or anyone else can call me anything you want. It doesn't touch me.

But we digress. I'm asking if you believe the Bible is the literal word of God, every word of it?

Morality is the heart of the issue. With the theory of evolution you have the "survival of the fittest" passing their genetics onto the next generation. It doesn't matter whether it's done morally or not, all that matters is that the genetic code is passed on to the next generation, morality be damned in regards to how it gets done.

At least with a belief in God comes some sort of moral foundation to govern human behavior, with evolution not so much. Do we want to live in world that is governed by the rules of survival of the fittest? Or a world in which has rules and governs morality? The rules to what is moral and what is not are a whole different debate. Personally I would much rather live in a world where most of us are motivated in some way to be honest and treat each each other with dignity that a world if which it's every man for himself.

I think Katy can stay at the bar and finish her drink. In my Good-Little-Methodist-Boy worldview, if humans find a way to synthesize life in a test tube, it still does not answer the greater question of how something as bizarre as Life ever came to exist in this Universe. We can perhaps recreate the works of the Great Unseen Hand, but we cannot begin to pierce Why.

I think it's kind of funny: Eukarotes (all animals including humans) have only the most distant link with plants, but our closest cousins are fungi. There are a lot of folks on this forum ( not necessarily in this thread) that reaffirm this link with every posting they make.

The problem with fungus is that it is so close to us that it makes it so darn hard to kill. Anything that can kill fungus can kill a human. As a result, simple Athelete's Foot is almost impossible to cure.

As much of a good Methodist boy that I am, I still have to wonder why God caused that to be. He must have been having an off day. I'm willing to spot him that one, but it still leaves me scratching my head ( and my toes.)

The problem is with your understanding of the word "gradually." Gradually on the geological scale of time is different from gradually on the historical scale of time. Same with "sudden," such as the "sudden" appearance of millions of new species at the dawn of the Cambrian period, called the Cambrian Explosion. It's only "sudden" on the geological scale of time. In normal terms, it was amazingly slow and gradual. Your confusion about these terms stems from your not entering the minds of scientists to understand what they mean by them.

i love it when we humans, on the internet, gets into these kinds of arguments and debates.

so are practictioners of socialism closer to the law of the jungle, or is practitioners of capitalism more close to the law of the jungle?

in other words, if it's ok to manage wildlife, why is it oh so wrong to manage humans? i like the concept of morality in so far as it fits my morality. when it begins to diverge away, i might begin to argue a bit.

i think it's perfectly ok to catch at least a few fish with a barbed hook. if morality requires me to use barbless hooks in all conditions, i might whimper out a bit of dissonance.

When people took Darwin's theory's and used "survival of the fittest" to justify their domination and impoverishment of others, Darwin's reply was very interesting, in essence he said the fittest is not the most aggressive or strongest but the fittest were those species that are most able to adapt to change.

"In the past we have measured success by material wealth and power. Adaptable to change means we include in success not just abundance of material things, but health, love, friendship, peace of mind and joy. Being adaptable means understanding that with these as criteria we serve ourselves and the planet."

One funny portion of Scripture for me is found in the famous 23rd Psalm:

"Your rod and your staff comfort me."

Most people just assume that they are comforting to sheep in the same manner that the 2nd Amendment is comforting to us.

What cracks me up is that there was another very serious use for those instruments.

The best way for a shephard to keep his sheep safe was to keep them in a hurd. Keep them together. Obviously, sheep are wild, and curious so they like to wander off. This is very dangerous because when they wander off they become easy pickings for predators.

Well, if you have a problem sheep that keeps doing this, there is one surefire way to keep it in the fold. The shephard would take the rod, usually a 12" piece of acacia or other hard wood, and break a hind leg on the problem sheep. That doesn't sound too comforting does it!?

The comforting part is what happens next. All of us have seen old paintings of shephards with a sheep over his shoulders being carried about. More than likely what you are seeing is one of these problem sheep. Since that sheep is no longer mobile, the shepard has the responsibility to hand care for that sheep. To feed it and take it to water. While nursing this sheep back to health it forms a bond with that shephard. By the time it is fully healed, and allowed to walk freely, that sheep will usually be found always right neer the shepard.

That security, bond, and love are the comforting part in the 23rd Psalm.


I say all this because in my previous post I said:



The last part of that applies to me more often than not. I often find myself having wandered away from the herd, out there where I cannot hear the voice of the Shephard. This usually results in a "broken leg" of sorts.

The difference between me and most other sheep is that I'm a much slower learner.

I say this only to say, don't lump me in with other Christians. More often than not, I do not deserve to carry the name of Christ as a lable on my life. IMO, if you want to see a Christian, then study the person of Jesus. Everyone else is just second rate scum.

Would you prefer the term Natural Law?

I WISH I could find a YouTube of that thing I saw once many years ago- with the scientist in the Porsche driving 100 mph down a timeline of the Earth, etc.

It was the most effective demonstration I've ever seen for demonstrating the disconnect between "human" time and time on the scale of life on earth.

It's easy to think that say the Egyptians building pyramids, or cavemen in France, or (fill in the blank involving humans) were a long time ago. They were not. They were the merest hint of a blink of an eye ago.

Very true.

This doesn't SUCK but it's still not as good as Porsche-dude.

Good point about the pyramids, and where we are today.

we have traveled at near breakneck speed in the last 2500 years ago, or so.

from stone pyramids to walking on the moon, and post that adventure to sending space walkers to mars, etc.

rapidly forward, the Civil War, WWII and the bomb, the cold war, and now computers, transistors, the internet, and Obama the Muslim in the Whitehouse.

change is with us. wonder what's going to happen next? the evolutionary history of the human race has carried us through a lot of adventures. i've always thought the "great adventure" is just ahead of us.

What's interesting is that they say we aren't any smarter than those dudes & dudettes doing the "walk like an Egyptian" on the pyramid-era murals... not genetically speaking at least.

We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants, beneficiaries of an inverse pyramid of knowledge that has often been in spite of (impeded by) religious entities.

And so it is with evolution. Whether our understanding of it is exact or complete (very unlikely), it does represent entire lifetimes and careers of very smart people working very hard to suss out what happened and when. It is only because their findings are in contradiction to the literal word of fundamentalist religions that there's even this debate. For religion to acknowledge evolution is to admit that their tomes are not actually holy as written. As some have ably illustrated here, that's not a problem for, let's call them "modern" interpretations of religious books. But it IS a problem, a big one, for the fundies.

Luckily, the views of the various fundies of the world are becoming more and more marginalized. It's only through the political process that they are able to assert their kookery into school textbooks and the like. In other words, only when they can play the might makes right card.

That's pretty ridiculous.

not rediculous at all. he was being very honest, at the Soul level.

if we were bred and developed to mine gold on the Earth as slaves for the extraterrestrials, that's fine.

but, i've grown past the desire or need to mine gold to feed the needs of the folks who want streets paved with pure gold.

that's over. technology is the third leg of the stool that will either save us, or cause our demise.

as we destroy trees, en masse, we think it's fine. but, it's not. we have to reconsider.