Since the posts come and go, I’m putting this page here for comments and discussions. Please post your comments below. I’ve posted the comments from previous posts below.
May the Spirit of God be with you!
IMAGE: Benjamin D. Esham / Public domain
Discussion board
(FROM Christadelphians)
Jesus for sure had real brothers and sisters but took himself also spiritual brothers and sisters, of which all his followers should be united with Christ, being one with him as a brother or sister in Christ, being children of Jesus his heavenly Father, Who should be also our heavenly Father.
Concerning Christianity it looks like you are confusing Christianity with Christendom where there are people who take Mary (Maria/Myriam/Miriam) as the mother of God,(though God has never had a mother). For those of Christianity Jesus is not God but the son of God. For those of Christianity Jesus is the son of man, namely the son of the earthly parents Joseph and Mary (Miriam), being a human being of flesh and blood, whilst God is a Spirit Being no man can see.
Jesus could be seen by many and was really tempted, bullied, tortured and killed (all things which can not happen to God) and though first lower than angels was made higher by his heavenly Father, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah. When walking around on this earth Jesus invited all to become followers of him who proclaimed the way to God and to become partakers of his body. Today the invitation to become a brother or sister in Christ still counts and therefore we call others (by following up the task Jesus has given to his disciples) to become a Brother or sister in Christ (or becoming a Christadelphian).
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(MY REPLY TO Christadelphians)
Hi — Thanks for your comment. It looks like you and I share a lot of the same ideas. Don’t mix up what I am commenting on with what I believe — the point of the post was to comment on the fairly common beliefs about Mary the mother of Jesus. Thanks and keep reading!
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(REPLY TO MY REPLY TO Christadelphians)
Having encountered your blog already more than once, we too have the impression we might share more points of belief.
Lots of success with proclaiming the Word of God and reaching people worldwide.
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(COMMENT BY GREG DOYLE)
In regards to your closing sentence about views of reality. Have you had occasion to read Steven C. Hayes and his various works on “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy”? This is part of Relational Frame Theory. Of particular interest to me are the various clinical studies on religions and cognitive fusion. This is one way the human mind “mixes up being certain and being right”.
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(REPLY TO GREG DOYLE)
Hi Gregg — Thanks for posting a comment! I haven’t yet read Hayes, although I am fairly familiar with cognitive therapy. Can you suggest the best of his works so I can read it? Thanks.
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(FROM GREG DOYLE)
Coincidentally interesting that you just posted “Why Wittgenstien”. It appears that most of Hayes early studies are built upon the application of Wittgenstien’s rational to the field of psychology. Hayes work uses real research data resulting in “empirical progress toward a central concern, namely, psychological flexibility.” I am currently working my way through the 2nd edition of, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, published by The Guilford Press. Much of the references and proofs found in the first edition have been removed in order to make the 2nd edition a practical tool for practitioners and researchers. From my reading of your recent writing, I believe you would enjoy it. Please excuse my grammar, I am a design engineer who took the minimal amount of English classes and passed by the skin of my teeth.
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(REPLY FROM ME TO GREG DOYLE)
Hi Gregg– I will order a copy of that book; look for a review or discussion of it in the future!
NOTE: I did and then wrote a blog post on the topic.
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Thank you for your courage. Bucking the Christian system and the Christian Party-Line is indeed formidable.
Consider what Paul had to say about Jesus in Romans 1:1-4. He “descended from David according to the flesh, but established as Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness through resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Paul believed and taught that Jesus was human but became Son of God at his resurrection.
I have long believed that Son of God and Messiah (or Christ) were just different ways to say the same thing, synonyms. If that is correct, then Paul believed that Jesus was made Christ at His resurrection.
…so there are other understandings than the orthodox one!
Thomas David Rothbauer
author of We Should Be One: United in the Word of God
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(REPLY FROM GREG DOYLE)
Glad you found this book interesting. Your use of the word mystic is interesting because it is used often in a book titled “The Naked Now” (Learing to See as the Mystics See) by Richard Rohr. In this book, he looks at these same quandaries from a spiritual/mystical aspect. Mr. Rohr states on page 50 “Words and thoughts are invariably dualistic, but pure experience is always nondualistic.”. Mr. Rohr is a Franciscan Monk who has some great insights on what happens when religion loses it’s mystical roots and becomes words fused with cognizant understanding and conformity.
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(COMMENT FROM GREG DOYLE)
Jesus words are too radical and subversive for most organized religions. It is written many times that Jesus tells us that his words are His father’s words. No other new testament writer claims this yet everything is treated as equal by the professionals. I have realized that if you base your religion on Jesus words, then Paul’s writings fall in place. However if you treat them with equal authority you run into problems. If like many denominations Paul’s words are your foundation, then Jesus’s words lose their meaning and power. Sadly the more I read Jesus’s words the more off base the western church appears.
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COMMENT FROM SALLY:
A good reminder to stop trying to put God in a box defined by our earthly human experience.
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COMMENT FROM JOHN ISLIP
Despite the protection of free speech in most western (Christian?) societies, people are at risk of verbal attack, or condemnation even, for asking even the mildest question about any long-accepted piece of Christian theology. This is a great hindrance to the process of discovering God, the subject of the first commandment, I would argue.
The mob is still out to get anyone who digresses from orthodoxy.
One piece of evidence for this is a great concern about whether or not one is a “real Christian”.
Googling phrases such as “real Christian” or “true Christian” reveals that there are millions of web pages containing such phrases. Go ahead and try it! So, there are a lot of people out there concerned about this.
(For your information, it was while submitting such Google searches that I first stumbled on your web site. You must have done some pretty effective SEO!)
Very many of these web pages also contain a quiz or questionnaire about the searchers’ beliefs.
Interestingly, none of these questions concern behaviour, just beliefs; I assume that’s because the quiz compiler is a protestant. Protestants display much nervousness regarding good works, but that’s another subject!
The offer on many such web sites is to tell the inquirer whether or not they are a real Christian: just complete a short check-box exercise. The wrong answers will return a verdict of heresy. Simples!
I got interested in this because some of my mostly rather fundamentalist Christian friends are keen to tell me the right answers, many of which I find unpersuasive.
Also because some less convinced Christians engage in the following kind of soul-searching:
“I’m not sure about all this stuff I’m supposed to believe in. Some of it looks a bit dubious, and a lot of it is hard to understand.
Therefore I am not a real Christian.
Therefore I am a hypocrite for going to church.
Therefore I will stop going.”
What a horrible muddle!
I say this to them:
You only need two reasons for going into a church:
1) You think that there may be more to life than the four Fs: feeding, flighting, fleeing and reproduction.
2) You think that maybe the bible and the church have something useful and interesting to say about this.
To put it another way, stop worrying about believing IN Jesus in the right way; just BELIEVE him and be a follower of the way.
Keep up the good work!
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COMMENT FROM SALLY:
God has had a good laugh over many of my plans, I’m sure!
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COMMENT FROM TIM MORRISON:
There’s a flaw in your last syllogism that ought to be obvious. The implied meaning of the word “nothing” changes from the first premise to the second premise. That is why the logic breaks down. It’s not that logic fails, but that there’s an intended deception in the argument.
To clarify, reword the premises in this way:
1. There is nothing in existence that is better than eternal happiness.
2. Owning a dollar is better than owning nothing.
3. Therefore owning a dollar is better than eternal happiness.
It’s quite obvious now that the conclusion (3) does not follow from the two premises (1 and 2).
But anyone with a smattering of common sense could spot that logical fallacy in an instant, which is why that example is used as a humorous joke and not intended as a serious logical proof.
The real breakdown of this article occurs in the initial statement, “Logic is concerned with the form of an argument.” Actually, logic is the art and science of reasoning correctly. The study of logic does involve studying forms of argumentation, however there is much more to logic than merely the form in which an argument is presented. Logic, when handled correctly, does not have “its own set of paradoxes.” The paradoxes occur when people employ logical fallacies, that is, false statements that mimic the form of a logical argument yet are not truly logical.
In the Bible, the Pharisees attempt to use logical fallacies to trap Jesus, but Jesus uses logic to reveal the error in the Pharisees’ argument and to stump them at their own game.
Thus, a proper understanding of logic CAN help you. Just because an argument seems logical doesn’t mean that it is logical.
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MY RESPONSE TO TIM MORRISON:
Hi Tim, and thanks for reading!
Firstly, let me say that I often write posts somewhat tongue-in-cheek with the express purpose of pushing people out of their regular thinking habits. That said, there is an important point to my post, which I will elaborate below, using your comments as a structure:
You: “There’s a flaw in your last syllogism that ought to be obvious. The implied meaning of the word “nothing” changes from the first premise to the second premise. That is why the logic breaks down.”
Me: Yes, that’s stated in the post as: Hint: It has to do with the definition of “nothing”. I’m quite aware of this, and of course your clarification does just that (clarify). However, the bigger picture issue is that language is inherently approximate and therefore these types of false conclusions happen every day. (For more on language being approximate, keep an eye out for some of my posts on Wittgenstein.)
You: “ ‘Logic is concerned with the form of an argument.’ Actually, logic is the art and science of reasoning correctly.”
Me: I’m sorry to disagree with you. I can assure you that logic is based on syllogisms and that those syllogisms which — while guaranteeing correctness and completeness — do not add any information. Thus, “logic will not help you” is correct because without actual information, logic just shuffles the information around, creating usually unsurprising results such as:
If P then Q
P
therefore Q
(modus ponens)
and
If P then Q
not Q
therefore not P
(modus tollens)
For more examples of valid inference rules of logic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rules_of_inference#Rules_of_classical_predicate_calculus
For more on the correctness and completeness of first-order predicate logic, I suggest this book which I had to fully digest and memorize in graduate school:
What logic does not allow is “stuff” that rational people do every day, such as abductive reasoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning) and generalizing from a single data point:
Joe ate one of those berries and then died.
I will not eat one of those berries because I will probably die.
This last example is probably one of the reasons homo sapiens survived. But it is not deductively valid; in fact, it is not really even inductively valid. Yet it has survival value. This is what I mean by “logic will not help you.”
You: “Logic, when handled correctly, does not have ‘its own set of paradoxes.’ ”
Me: I’m sorry to disagree with you again. I draw your attention to:
Zeno’s paradoxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes
Russell’s paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
Godel’s incompleteness theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
Tarski’s undefinability theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem
(I include references to Wikipedia for general information; of course there is more detailed information available on all of these.)
In the end, I agree that logic can be somewhat useful but, as is discussed in my other posts, logic cannot help one to determine answers to the biggest questions in life. (Right now I only have a rotating window of three posts showing on the site, but keep an eye out if you are new to the site.)
Thanks again for your comment and please keep reading!
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FROM BR. DEL:
All I have to say to you is God Bless You.
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MY RESPONSE TO BR. DEL:
Thanks! You too!
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FURTHER COMMENT FROM ME RE: LOGIC:
I’ve updated the original post both here and in the book to add some explanation about the nature of logic. I’ve spent a fair portion of my academic life studying logic and I’m confident of my take on it. However, the reader should look into this him/her-self by looking at the sources in the Reading List.
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FROM GREG DOYLE:
Could you please send me a link to your essay “Original Lord of Light”? I could not find it on your website. Thanks.
(NOTE: I SENT THE TEXT OF THE ESSAY.)
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