Persnickety

"Science, in other words, thrives on anomaly, inconsistency, controversy, and doubt. Certainty kills it." Hans Christian Von Baeyer, Discover , Mar.'96

"Give up your good Christian life and follow Jesus." --Garrison Keillor                                                                 "The only container for truth is a lie."--JM Lloyd  My position is that the Holy Bible is not holy, nor inerrant, nor consistent, nor is it God’s purpose that we view it as if it were an idol, as if it were perfect. It is the greatest work of literature ever written down, but is similar to how the Greeks viewed Homer’s epics, how the Romans viewed the Aeneid, or the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh or the Hindu Vedas. It is how a people came to view their history and how they answered certain ontological and epistemological questions. To put it in that company does not degrade the Bible; it elevates it. It is how humans have recorded our search for meaning and truth, for God. The Bibl...

After some deliberation, when I wondered if I actually meant The Poetry of Religion, I've settled on things as they currently rest. "The Poetry of Religion" would emphasize the endpoint of religion, presumably with its different categorizes of doctrine and spiritual subjectivity, even myth. It states that poetry is a way of seeing religion, a way of describing it, experiencing it. That isn't the way that I think religion works at all. Rather, it is the poetry that we experience, not the religion. It is more correct to say that we form our religions out of poetry, not the poetry from the our religion. Poetry has, at least within the English-speaking world where I reside, hit upon tough times. Virtually no one reads poetry anymore, other than a few serious practitioners (it is true, though, that many do write poetry but few of them take it so seriously as to study it, revere it, and take it into themselves as mental food). It isn't strange then to conclude that fe...

In the early part of the twentieth century protestantism came up with a declaration of sorts, actually a twelve volume work titled The Fundamentals, the core of which was a statement of beliefs centering around five key positions that have since come to be considered the tenets of fundamentalism (the Christian variety, of course). These are: The inerrancy (and literal interpretation) and full authority of the Bible; The virgin birth and full divinity of Christ The bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead; Christ's atonement, through his sacrifice, for our sins; The second coming of Christ. I am not a fundamentalist Christian, merely a Christian. The five fundamentals have within them either non-rational ideas (point 1) or ideas that may be considered as problematic (points 3-5), agreed upon or not; and disagreement with these five points do not necessarily discard one's allegiance to Christ in the least. It can be debated whether point 2 belongs i...