Neon Genesis

 

 

Learning to discern intent is important in child development and in our criminal justice system. Table grace in a restaurant and %^@ on a T-shirt deliberately worn anywhere is provoke negative reaction are so far apart in the nature of the intention. I thought this might be the logical fallacy of "argument of force" but I learned that it is a logical boobytrap to stop reasoning.

 

Whatever the case - %^@ ends the discussion for me.

 

Dutch

They're not exactly the same but the point remains that both could offend others and both are freedoms we enjoy the right to but that doesn't mean that they're appropriate behavior to engage in. And many Christians react very violently when their ritual's privileged place in society are challenged, so it's not as innocent as you make it out to be.

Cherry picking the teachings of Jesus and twisting his words to make it fit your already preconceived beliefs-sounds like Fundamentalism to me.

How would any person know the intentions of a person's behavior? Not by the behavior alone.

I've known many evangelical Christians who see praying in public as an evangelizing tool to save the lost poor souls. My Sunday school teacher said that the reason they pray in public at restaurants is on the off-chance that some poor lost soul will see them doing it and that somehow their actions will lead them to Christ. After all, as we all know, if you're working at a restaurant on Sunday morning instead of being at church, you must be a wicked heathen damned to hell or something.

My mother's family considers grace such an integral part of the meal that it would be like eating part of the meal in the car if they didn't say grace when the meal was about to be served or was served.

 

 

I understand this to refer to a particular kind of public prayer not any public prayer.

 

Dutch

Jesus doesn't say anywhere here that it's with a specific type of public prayer. He very clearly says to go into your closet and pray in secret and God will reward you for it. I don't see how my suggestion is any more offensive than anything Jesus says in the gospels about praying in public. I'm not suggesting a separate but equal situation because I'm not proposing any laws to ban prayer in public or anything that extreme. I merely think it is inappropriate behavior in a public secular place that's supposed to be welcoming to everyone like a restaurant to turn it into your own private church. It would be like if I went to your church wearing a Marilyn Manson tshirt that had lots of foul language on it. I could say it's my freedom of speech to wear a tshirt with cuss words to your church and you have no right to tell me not to wear it to your church but that doesn't mean I'm not being a jerk if I were to wear a tshirt with cuss words to your church.

Why don't you eat your appetizer and have your drink in the car?

I don't even know what this has to do with the conversation. Why don't you go to church if you want to pray in front of others so badly?

What does it matter?

 

In all honesty, I find some of these comments a little condescending. I understand that for some folks here, prayer/God etc are simply archaic, backwards, without meaning, but to assume that people who pray out loud do it to antagonize/show off/one-up is a bit hostile. For some, eating without giving thanks is not an option, even in public. Praying together as a family or group of friends can be a beautiful thing. They aren't hurting anyone. And considering the table manners a lot of people seem to lack these days, I can think of worse things to witness at a restaurant.

This seems like a good reason to me:

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And some - I never know which ones unless it is everyone on my mothers side of the family - would think that not saying grace is like not preparing the food. Saying grace for them, wherever it is, just happens - it always has.

 

In my experience few, if any, have made a public statement, with their table grace. Just as I don't think the orthodox Jews walking to synagogue are making a public statement or that the Muslim woman wearing an hijab is making a public statement. If you have heard someone praying for the sinners in the restaurant - well that's different.

 

 

Dutch

So why don't they just do it in the car before they walk into the restaurant? You know if a Muslim family got up and started praying around the table in a restaurant that most of the same Christians praying at their own tables would be outraged about how offensive it was to them.

I don't know if this is is off topic or should be split off, but one thing I never understood about Christian prayer was why do some Christians always feel the need to pray in public in the most visible way possible? Like sometimes when we're eating out at the restaurant, we'll see someone praying in the table and everyone at the table will get up and hold hands to pray and stuff. What do they think they're accomplishing by praying like that? Do they think they're going to convert any heathens that happen to be in the restaurant at the same time to Christianity? I don't know why they can't just pray in private like Jesus commanded in Matthew chapter five. It just seems like an extravagant way of saying "Look at how holy we are! See how devoted we are in our prayer?!"

Weren't the Gnostics the ones who started that whole thing about how Jesus didn't really die on the cross?

I trust the Daily Mail about as far as I can throw it.

I believe that omnipotence should be defined as having unlimited power rather than the ability to do anything. Since God has unlimited power, He cannot have any weaknesses. Since God doesn't have any weaknesses, He cannot do evil.

 

Just because someone cannot do a certain task does not mean that he is lacking in power. For example, no one can make a square circle. Not being able to do this task does not mean he is lacking in power. He cannot do it because the task is logically contradictory.

That just seems like a distinction without a difference to me and not even a biblical one. Though Christians claim god is all-powerful, the book of Judges portrays God as losing a battle against an enemy tribe just because they happened to have iron chariots.

Interventionist prayer seems to be the most popular form of prayer in Christianity but there is a tradition of centering prayer in Christianity you might be interested in, Norm: http://www.centeringprayer.com/

 

 

The weakness of both pantheism and panentheism, in my opinion, is that they both have to embrace the suffering and evil in our world as somehow part of God. If God is truly here with us, then it seems that God is not much concerned in using God’s omnipotence to change our world for the better. It seems that God has left that job up to us.

 

 

Another solution would be to say that good and evil don't really exist and are just human-made illusions we have created but that opens up a whole nother can of worms.

Does he explicity pray for victory? Please cite evidence.

 

George

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=dw-wetzel_broncos_tim_tebow_playoffs_112711

“That was a huge play,” Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow said. Yes, there was the rookie linebacker making a clutch, overtime tackle of San Diego Chargers running back

Mike Tolbert

for a four-yard loss. The play forced the Chargers into a just-too-long 53-yard overtime field goal attempt that wound up off course.

Not that Tebow saw either play.

“I can’t say I saw too much of it,” Tebow said. “I was praying.”

Praying for a miss?

“I might have said that,” Tebow laughed. “Or maybe a block. Maybe all of it.”

People don’t usually ask to win competitive contests or that their opponent perform poorly. In games, players often ask that they perform to the best of their ability, avoid injury, etc. (hoping that it will result in victory), but not explicitly asking for victory per se.

Tim Tebowism seems rather popular in football circles right now though.

Yes, I guess I was not clear. I am referring to "supernatural theism," i.e. the belief that an omnipotent God intervenes in affairs of this world and at the request of people who ask.

 

If one really believes this, why not ask to be made younger? a different size? more intelligent? a different race?

 

George

When I still believed in supernatural theism, I didn't make these kinds of prayers because they were considered to be selfish and self-serving. It was like with the Pharisee and the tax collector where the Pharisee was praying to God about all these selfish motivations but the tax collector wouldn't even lift his eyes up to heaven and we were supposed to be emulating the tax collector with our prayers. So it would have been acceptable to pray to God to help give you strength to do your best on an exam or something but it was selfish if you prayed to God to give you an A and didn't do any studying on your own and just expected to God to give you an A on a silver platter without any part on your end.

There has been scholarly debate over whether or not The Secret Gospel of Mark currently available is the genuine Secret Gospel or if it's a modern day forgery that Huston Smith made. Personally, I think there's stronger evidence that David and Jonathan were gay lovers over Jesus being gay.

I recently started reading Leo Tolstoy's book, "The Kingdom of God is Within You," in which he argues that true Christians should practice total non-violent resistance and he argues for a form of Christian anarchism. While I highly respect Tolstoy and I find his views to be more respectable than the warmongering fundamentalists, I think there are some theological and moral problems with Tolstoy's arguments. The main crux of Tolstoy's argument rests on his interpretation of the word "evil" when Jesus says in the gospels not to resist evil with evil. Tolstoy takes this to mean that Jesus was a total pacifist and that Christians should be pacifists as well and he points to an account in the gospels where Jesus chides Peter for physically attacking a Roman soldier but elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus tells the apostles to sell their staffs and take up swords to protect themselves from persecution and Jesus acts in less than pacifist ways when he uses a whip to drive out the money changers in the Temple, so as with most theological issues, it seems like you could come away with both moral beliefs depending on your interpretation of Jesus' teachings. Tolstoy's main objection against the argument of self-defense from danger is that what we consider to be a dangerous threat is subjective and can be abused to justify needless violence.

 

Tolstoy points to instances where the church justified the Salem witch trials by claiming that witchcraft was a dangerous threat that they needed to defend against and I think there is some merit to Tolstoy's concerns about the abuse of what is considered a threat, such as the controversial stand your ground laws and the Trevon Martin case that's been in the news recently. But I think Tolstoy was taking his condemnation of self-defense to an unrealistic extreme and I think there are some clear issues where self-defense is justified that Tolstoy ignored. Like what if you're a battered wife being abused by your husband and the only way out of your abusive situation is to fight back to escape? These situations might be rare but they are real and I think it would be unrealistic and dangerous even to tell someone being abused that it's wrong for them to fight back to escape from a dangerous situation out of some political/religious ideology.

Hi Dutch,

 

I'm curious: according to this view, how do you interpret Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53? The process view of an open future makes a lot of sense, but how does it explain predictions and prophecies?

 

Phil

As with most theological issues, the bible seems to have conflicting views on the omniscient nature of God. As the bible's mythology continued to be developed, God's powers kept getting beefed up by the writers and there are passages like the prophecy verses which seem to hint that God has all-knowing powers. But then there are other verses like in the story of Adam and Eve's fall where God doesn't know where Adam and Eve are and is calling for them in the garden or in Noah's Ark where God actually forgets about Noah at one point.

Of course this thread wouldn't be complete without some Lady Gaga thrown in:

I've also heard another argument that Judas Iscariot was a literary invention that symbolizes the conflict between the Pauline Christian school of thought and the followers of Peter and the gospels' condemnation of Judas is symbolic of their support for Peter's Jewish Christianity over Paul's Gentile Christianity. If I'm not mistaken, Bishop Spong makes this argument in one of his books.

I agree Hollis we have come a long way and we do look back with rose tinted glasses. Having said that, progress isn't all smooth sailing by any stretch either. We still have a patriarchal society even in this modern age where men are paid more than women for the same work, there is an elite class of wealthy and then the rest of us, the same can be said of an elite class of countries as well, holding power and influence over countries who are unable to break the chains holding them in poverty. The vast worldwide boom in population has meant a greater pressure on resources and as the new god called "Capitalism" is worshipped with consumerism, more and more pressure is placed upon the Earth Mother we walk on. I think we have lost some of our ancient spirituality, our connection with nature and the planet. We are currently obsessed with the "he who dies with the most stuff wins" mentality, all about self.

 

 

While I agree there's a problem in society with too much consumerism, it's not really a new problem that's only came into existence because of technology and science. The god of capitalism has always been worshiped but in ancient times, native tribes slaughtered each other over land or the right to control the food population in their local area, so I don't think it's fair to blame it all on technology and I think we who are dissappointed in modern society have a tendency to over-romaniticisize the "Noble Savage."

I think I would much rather live in our modern society with all of our problems than go back to ancient times where we sacrified children to the gods because people thought that would give us better harvests.

It seems to me that thinking of God as only feminine is just as wrong as thinking of God as only masculine.

 

 

 

Spong is right that we tend to view divine through our own eyes.

 

Steve

I don't think it's wrong to think of God as either exclusively feminine or exclusively macsuline as long as it is understood that these are only symbols of God and not truth claims.

FWIW, I am convinced that the Jews in biblical times thought of god in anthropomorphic terms and as male. God is often portrayed in male/masculine roles: father, warrior, king, etc. However, I don't think we are obligated to continue to think in these terms.

 

George

There is actually archealogical evidence that the ancient Israelites were originally polytheiststic pagans from Canaan who worshiped both male and female deities. Biblical archealogicalists have found pottery of the ancient goddess Asheraha that belonged to the Israelites and this pottery indicates the Israelites saw Asherah as Yahweh's wife. Even in the final version of the OT, evidence still survives in the scriptures themselves that the Israelites worshiped Asherah and various scriptures refer to her as the Queen of Heaven. So the ancient Israelites may have believed Yahweh had masculine attributes, but there's also a great deal of evidence showing they worshiped female deities and belief in a single male deity was a later development in their history. Karen Armstrong discusses this in her book, A History of God.