Face it Michael, such stuff is literalistic nonsense

On a recent piece of tortured, evasive prose by the Archbishop's son, the chief whip for the SADs, wrote, “The word ‘literal’ refers to the Protestant preference for a way of reading the texts of Scripture on their own terms. The ‘literal’ - or better ‘plain’ - reading is an attempt to read the text in terms of its original context and genre and so on, and by recognising metaphor, symbolism and other literary devices in the text. For the literal or plain reader, a text may describe historical events in a variety of ways and still be validly historical. It is not interested in pursuing the kind of allegorical readings that were popular in the Middle Ages.

"Put simply: a literal reading of a metaphor reads it as a metaphor.

"On the hand, a ‘literalistic’ reader reads without (or with a deficient) awareness of metaphor, symbolism, genre, literary style, inexact numbers, and so on, and in fact may deny the presence of these things entirely. The literalistic reader sees the relation of the text to historical events as necessarily very exact."

One reader, Andrew Mackinnon, quite rightly asks, “Does a literal reading of Genesis 5:29-32 interpret Noah as being a real, historical man who lived on the earth?”

The Son of the Archbishop responds in his inimitable manner, one characteristic of a cerebrally extended personality, “It might do. It would depend what kind of literature we were talking about and what kind of relationship the ancient people understood to pertain between their texts and history.”

Andrew, seeking clarification from such noble blood as the Archbishop's son, reiterates his sensible question, “Michael, in reference to your comment, the kind of literature I'm talking about is the book of Genesis in the Bible. I'm interested in your response to the following question:

"Does a literal reading of Genesis 5:29-32 interpret Noah as being a real, historical man who lived on the earth?

"Your response of, "it might do", is, in my opinion, a non-response.”

HRH Jensen, son of, replies with ever-expanding perspicuity: “it isn't a non-answer. It's a refusal to be drawn into a rather petty either-or. And a refusal to avoid the actual work of listening to the text itself. That isn't the end point of hermeneutics mind you; there's still more to do to put the text in the context of the whole Bible, too.”

Get that folks: It isn't a non-answer when you refuse to be drawn into self-assessed pettiness and simultaneously throw an implicit ad hominem at your inquirer by claiming that he's refused to examine the text the way that Moore academics properly and responsibly examine it. Holy deja vu: the priestly caste doing their Gnostic thing once again i.e. Maybe we understand, maybe we don't - but we aren't going to tell you in any case. How unevangelical! How Romanist!

Luke Stevens, in an ephemeral moment of self-parody, experiences a flash of enlightenment by sensing the transparent vacuity of the SADs' attempt to extricate themselves from their pseudo-intellectualism (“highsounding nonsense”, as Paul labels it!): “Ah, the old literal-but-not-literalistic chestnut...it is a bit ironic that we try and redefine "literal" to say "We don't mean 'literal' (in a popular sense)"! Only Sydney Anglicanism could use a non-literal meaning of 'literal' to mean 'not literal'...Nevertheless, I guess the device is useful to describe a difference between more fundamentalist readings, but it does seem a bit self-serving. 'We read it in the correct sense, yay for us...', as though avoiding fundamentalism and basic errors of comprehension deserves a gold star. This is unfortunate as it masks the big problems with how we read the bible.”

I think I got that, mate. However, sorry to be a pedant Luke, but the problem lies with you guys, and you guys alone...as well as your bedfellow Spong and his gang of liberals

For the whole useless navel-gazing flakery see

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/life/culture/literal_or_literalistic_whats_the_difference/

Yep, see all the familiar faces: Dave in all his inter-galatic cosmic rayness, Martin Shields, who can't even begin to see the forest for the trees (or maybe because of his alter-ego Enkidu can't even see the trees for the Mesopotamian forest) and a reference to a thread by Mark "Badass" Badeley who presents a straw man regarding the creationist position on death before the fall.

My last words on Noah and Flood are these: “Jesus began his ministry at about 30 years of age being....the son of Shem, the son of Noah...the son of Adam, the son of God.” (Luke 3); and “People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.” (Luke 17:27) [Is that literal-but-not-literalistic drink and food Michael?]; and “For God spared not the ancient world, but preserved Noah with seven others, a preacher of righteousness, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.” (2 Peter 2:5); and lastly “Beloved... that you may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior, knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts... For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” (2 Peter 3)

Hey anybody, can you spare a Bible? (With apologies to Frank Zappa.)

A friend had a stand at the Eastwood Granny Smith Festival this weekend. On one of his walks around the festival my friend came across a Baha’i outreach and began talking to lady there. Having read much of the original documentation of this religion, as well as a considerable amount of its commentary, my friend felt at ease discussing this woman’s faith and contrasting it with his own.

She was first asked what proves prophethood. She replied that it was the message. He replied that many people can talk persuasively, gently and even beguilingly, mentioning, as an historical example, how Plato recognised and castigated the Sophists for teaching the Athenian politicians how to mesmerise an audience by keeping truth to a minimum. “No,” my friend stressed, "there must be a more objective, external way of seeing whether someone really was from God.”

He pointed out that Jesus used miracles to set himself apart from anyone else, with raising the dead chief among them all. She had never read the Gospels before and would accept one as a gift, so, remembering he’d left all his giveaways at home, he walked to a nearby Anglican stand to ask for a Bible to give to this young woman. Well, what a surprise – there was none. However, they did have The Essential Jesus, but not a single Bible at their “outreach”. When the minister pressed the point about accepting this pared down, adroitly expurgated version of God’s Word (“We’re just giving a more manageable Jesus.”), my friend informed them that he wasn’t happy about page 1 where the author has replaced the real McCoy with his own insipid and jaundiced interpretation of Genesis 1.

The minister sarcastically replied, “Oh, I guess you want a more creationist version of that story!”
“Not really,” came the response. “I wanted a biblical one!”

Walking off and still holding out that a Bible would be delivered to him, my friend made it only 3 more stalls when he saw that the atheists had a stand selling second-hand books. He asked them if they had a Bible.

“Yes, we do,” and pulling a box from underneath the stand, the man drew out, not one, but two Bibles. My friend bought a complete Bible for 2 bucks, decided against going back to the Anglicans to burst all their stupid and puerile balloons they were giving out as evangelical tools (apparently no face painting this year – seems like Peter’s belt-tightening has hit hard!), and raced off to the Baha’i woman and presented her with, not The Essential Jesus, but all of Jesus.

Atheists to the rescue by drawing a non-believer closer to God and Anglicans, once again, making great sausage dog balloon shapes.

By the way, what is the essential Jesus? Are the Anglicans saying that the 4 Gospels need a makeover? Why is Jesus not recognised as the Creator in their “Essential” Jesus? And finally, why do they take 2 balloons to make a cute sausage dog when they could save money and do it with one?

Stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths

I had two rather interesting tales passed to me the other day. The concluding remark in one of these, if it weren’t true, might have quite easily served as a joke’s entertaining punchline. It concerned Moore College and its final spiritual and philosophical decrepitude. From without, and put simply, it clearly tips Moore over to the liberal side of the theological divide. More of both these stories later, but first a revisit to ancient Israel.

‘Thus says the LORD:
“Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths,
where the good way is,
And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

“And they have caused themselves to
stumble in their ways,
From the ancient paths,
To walk in pathways
And not on a highway.” (Jeremiah 6:16;18:15)

From the present’s obvious vantage point of being able to peer backwards to the distant past, I’ve often wondered why Israel found it so difficult to appropriately respond to God. Israel did believe in a “God”, of sorts. They understood that the world was created. The people understood that it wasn’t eternal or that it hadn’t just popped into existence from and because of nothing. That much is clear. But why did Israel, time and time again, take the wrong paths?

“How can you say, ‘We are wise,
And the law of the Lord is with us’?
Look, the false pen of the scribe
Certainly works falsehood.” (Jeremiah 8:8)

The prophets, repeatedly, spelled out the solution. It was clearly a product of leadership and these “God-appointed” men giving the wrong information. This specious knowledge didn’t suddenly appear one day, causeless, whole, a take-it-or-leave-it package, but incrementally worked its way into the general consciousness of the people through, and what was generally regarded as innocuous, alterations in revelation. I can almost hear the priests discussing it to the lay person: “Look, trust us. Aren’t we Kohenim, God’s elect. What’s it matter if you believe this? After all, isn’t the main focus of our nation to be on the fact that Moses rescued us from the yoke of the Egyptians? As long as you believe that God saved us, then the rest is secondary. Be reassured that the writers of sacred Scripture never meant that it should be taken so dogmatically as you suggest it should. A little bit of give between the text and reader is to be expected in our enlightened age. I wouldn’t have spent all those years studying at Jerusalem to be wrong on this.” Yes, I can very well imagine such self-serving justification.

Their fundamental error was to replace God and His revelation with themselves as the epistemological nub of their spirituality:

“For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns – broken
cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)

Once you substitute God as foundational for knowledge, anything and everything is up for grabs. We should be entirely faithful to God when His Spirit has spoken and we should intellectually honestly deal with that information. Too often people obstinately ignore God’s revelation and turn to another in order to form their understanding of the world.

“Why then has this people slidden back,
Jerusalem, in a perpetual backsliding?
They hold fast to deceit,
They refuse to return.
I listened and heard,
But they do not speak aright.
No man repented of his wickedness,
Saying, ‘What have I done?’
Everyone turned to his own course,
As the horse rushes into the battle.” (Jeremiah 8:5,6)

The other morning an acquaintance visited a local Anglican church. The minister and he had previously spoken by phone about Disconnect ’09 and conversation had immediately turned to the great miracle of creation. Some time later he had walked into the church to pass on an article about the genre of Genesis 1. The minister wasn’t there but his assistant was. Again, rather quickly, they began discussing Genesis 1. My friend pointed out to the young and recently graduated Moorite that he had misidentified historical prose as ahistorical poetry. The young man believed, among other things, that if a piece of writing contains repetition then necessarily it can’t be historical narrative. It was pointed out that on the contrary there is plenty of well-known ancient “secular” historiography containing this literary device. His reply was perhaps the most astounding my friend, or indeed I, have ever heard from a Moorite: “You are arrogant because you ignore the findings of postmodernism’s critique of modernism.”

There you have it: the words of wisdom from 4 years of what I can only label ‘brainwashing’ from an institution that is supposedly serving as Australia’s theological flagship. That this represents the zenith of critical thinking is hardly reassuring. Apparently, the best they can offer is to argue that my friend should throw away his personal relationship with God, in which he attentively allows God, the author of Scripture, to speak to his mind, and instead substitute his own intellect to be the basis for and interpreter of truth. The postmodern project says that the author is dead, allowing the reader to puts his meaning - or any other sinner’s or fool’s for that matter - into the text because the author can no longer speak.

And this is why these Moore graduates can look you in the face and tell you that 6 days does not mean 6 days because God’s intended meaning, if indeed He ever had one, has a shelf-life that has long expired. God, in as much as He is the author of His Word, is silent. If He is silent, then it follows that it is up to us to “discover” what happened at the very beginning.

“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
And makes flesh his strength,
Whose mind departs from the LORD.” (Jeremiah 17:5)

What in fact is happening is that these people are replacing God at the epistemological centre of the search for truth with an ersatz, with an idol of the mind. These people – and first-hand experience bears this out - are no longer approachable by reason because they have forsaken reason and committed adultery with another nation’s gods. Gods do not have to be a physical representation but are more likely to be, and considerably more harmful if they are, the way we think and whom we intellectually rely on.

“For it is the land of carved images,
And they are insane with their idols.” (Jeremiah 50:38)

The other story occurred at a University of NSW New College function. The speaker, a neo-natal expert from Britain and ostensibly a conservative, presented a lecture on ethics, abortion and biogenetic manipulation. In conversation afterwards he explained how he had complete faith in the scientific project, God’s revelation wasn’t perspicuous and that he was free to hold to a long age view of origins. It was pointed out to him that all of the miracles of the Bible were done in no time and perfectly, yet the biggest miracle, creation, according to his own view, was exceedingly slow and error-ridden. Ignoring all reason that instantaneity and perfection are how our minds recognise God’s miraculous working in nature, he shrugged his shoulders, smiled politely, and excused himself.

Clearly, all his mind’s thoughts had not been made captive to Christ and is a perfect example of a Christian’s outlook being directed by a foreign idol, in this case, the secular Enlightenment project. This philosophical approach splits up the things of faith and the things of science, thereby, in the case of the latter, promoting an independent, God-free epistemology in which the Lord is not all in all.

In August’s Southern Cross Moore College’s principal John Woodhouse makes an extraordinary sales pitch for the college. His first supporting argument is the “godliness” of its teachers. Until I read John’s comments I’d never realised in my nearly 30 years of being Christian that it was another man’s “godliness” that we are to set our sights upon, particularly upon those same men, whom John held up as paradigms of virtue, who would also read John’s article. I’d always thought that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” and that it was Christ’s holiness that we are to be subject to. Maybe I’ve missed something from these teachers of God’s law.

But even more alarming (is that possible?!) is John’s outrageous hypocrisy. Quite incredibly he delusionally argues that Moore has a “worldwide reputation for teaching how the whole Bible and all of its parts bear witness to Christ.” John’s italics here serve as a comedic self-parody. If John actually believed that, he would understand the Gospel and Christ’s first office of Creator; but he doesn’t. Christ clearly tells us in Exodus 31 that He “made the heavens and the earth in 6 days”, and John just doesn’t believe this. John believes that the world is old, very old, and that, quite obviously, Jesus didn’t really mean this when he said this 3,500 years ago to Moses. No, despite the disciple John’s and the apostle Paul’s unequivocal statements that in Christ “all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made”, despite Christ Himself revealing exactly how long he took to bring the earth into existence, the principal of Moore College, on the contrary, believes that this is just not true. John’s training is in geology and I can only guess that that is where he finds his “intellectual” crutch in order to theologically reinterpret Jesus’ own words to Moses.

I shouldn’t be too severe on John. He does manage, however, to take Jesus’ words seriously, somewhat. At the end of his emphatic statement that the whole Bible serves to witness to Christ, he inserts the textual support for this claim. Bizarrely it’s John 5:39, augmented with an even more emphatic exclamation mark. This verse, as you recall, is Jesus’ own supporting argument to His claim He is from God, namely, that the Old Testament does indeed testify to this. But what is conveniently, and ironically, missing from John Woodhouse’s argument is that Jesus goes on to claim that it was Moses who wrote about Him. Furthermore, Jesus claims that if you don’t believe Moses’ words about Jesus, you won’t believe Jesus’ words about Himself. So, Moses said, after speaking with, in all likelihood, the Creator Jesus, that Jesus took 6 days to create the earth. Moore College argues that this is not what Moses meant. It then goes out into the world (weren’t they spotted standing almost inside St Andrew’s the other week trying to “evangelise”?) and argues with non-believers that it doesn’t really matter what you believe about Moses’ meaning here because you should just believe Jesus died for you.

It’s a very simple formula Jesus put forward: If you don’t believe Moses, you’ll find it incredibly difficult to believe that Jesus said, and meant, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Teach people a pagan, atheistic philosophy that God incomprehensibly used chance, death and time to create, and then expect them to believe that out of His complete love for us, He died for us, they’ll think you’re fools. And rightly so!

God’s judgement is now upon the Sydney Anglican Diocese. Not only has its leaders committed adultery, but it even has allowed itself to follow the vilest principles of secularism by borrowing money to play the stock exchange. It has lost millions. But it doesn’t end there. Taking its lead from the cold brutality of the corporate business world, it sacks people while its clergy continue on the same salary. Yet it expects to “Connect” with the lost!

“This says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Behold, I will bring on this city and on all her towns all the doom that I have pronounced against it, because they have stiffened their necks that they might not hear my words.” (Jeremiah 19:15)

Watchtower Society’s founder Charles T. Russell finds much common ground with Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen

(or Why did Andrew Katay say he was giving his audience a red pill when it was actually the blue one?)

A few days ago I stopped to chat with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve discussed the Watchtower’s heretical theology with its representatives (face-to-face and through correspondence) and I prefer these days, when asked what “brand” of Christianity I uphold, to just state immediately that I’m a Trinitarian. This avoids the unfruitful and highly irrelevant task of responding to their well-rehearsed doctrinaire training of passing judgement on the implied deficiencies of your denominational preference. It also allows me to point the conversation in the direction where I want it to go.

These two were no different and this allowed me to quickly show them 2 verses in John’s Gospel where Jesus is called ‘The God’ (20:28) and the Holy Spirit is called by the masculine pronoun (16:13). I point out at the same time that a universal rule (i.e. Jesus is never called The God and God’s spirit is just a thing) is no longer sound if just 1 counter-example can be raised.

The woman’s final response to all of this was to ask what being a Trinitarian can give me over what she, an Arian, has obtained. I said that it was all a matter of truth for truth’s sake. There is something cleansing, edifying and proper about chasing after truthful knowledge. If hers is a false representation then it’s akin to a libellous editorial or a gossip magazine’s invention about some celebrity’s person life. If Jesus really is God, then her substandard portrait just plainly misses the mark.

This later got me to thinking about The Watchtower’s creation theology. Witnesses present Jesus as merely a god and although they admit he is a creator, of sorts, they understate and misunderstand the meaning of the ‘through’ in Colossians’ “all things were created through him”, thus approximating him to a Gnostic or neo-platonic demiurge. This creator is not co-eternal with the Father and merely serves as an organiser of matter, making the real creator one step removed from the cosmos.

It was somewhat ironic that last week the SAD minister Andrew Katay was also giving a talk at Sydney University’s EU titled, ‘Wake Up!: Seeing the World God’s Way’. On the poster was a blown-up picture of Keanu Reeves reflected in Morpheus’ glasses reaching out for one of the two pills on offer. (By the way, I wonder if EU had corporate permission to use this still from The Matrix.) Andrew, for those who are unfamiliar with him, toes the party line on creation quite faithfully. This was rather efficiently evinced in his debate with Sydney University philosopher Adrian Heathcote when Andrew rather proudly announced at its conclusion that he “had no problems with Big Bangs and 18 billion years”, thus guaranteeing that the preponderantly young audience that lunchtime dined on a generous portion of Gnostic theology.

SAD theology introduces a foreign element or principle to Christianity. Not persuaded by appeals to pellucid Scripture passages which unanimously declare the world young, the Sydney Diocese turns to an understanding of the cosmos which injects time as the operative principle. Time allows God to step back and permits things to just unfold, very, very slowly. In fact, God, when you think about his role in their heresy, does little. Sure, he’s God so he must do something, but exactly what and how remain vacuous when SADs are questioned. Unbelievably they frequently try to drag you into their nescience by answering with the presumptuous, “We don’t know and you certainly don’t!”

At least the pagans have an excuse. Their gods are feckless and invisible, in the immediate sense of things that is, and so pagan religions have to have something to get things happening. The most logical is ‘time’ - well, ‘Time’, to be more accurate. If there is one thing certain in this world, both empirically and deductively, it is this: the more time one has, the more things happen. So what better ‘demiurge’ is there than Chronos? If “magic”, as Polkinghorne puts it in his polemic attack on the miracles of the Bible, is ruled out, then the slow, relentless hand of time will accomplish everything…and anything. As C.S. Lewis mentioned, paganism’s (and Islam’s) “miracles” are pointless and incredulous, so to explain why there is something rather than a zero, time serves its cause rather well.

Christianity, on the other hand, has no use of time as a means to bring forth the wonders and riches of creation. Solomon quite rightly writes that, “not without these, wisdom and discernment, the Lord based earth, the Lord framed heaven; not without skill of his did the waters well up from beneath us”.

We at this blog ask our heretical friends just how you propose that these triune attributes of God can come to bear as creative energies when the huge amounts of time you put forward cancel out their effectiveness. Wisdom, discernment and skill are not seen when something is occurring at a snail’s pace but when order is brought from chaos quickly. God, as the Bible tells us, has no need for another partner. He does things quickly because he is supremely intelligent and intelligent beings, by definition, don’t waste time putting their plans into reality.

“Wisdom is the Lord’s gift; only by his word spoken comes true knowledge, true discernment.”

Serendipity & Wine

Talk to any wine buff and a point sure to pop up will be the supreme joy of purchasing a bottle of some relatively cheap plonk, made by some unfamiliar vintner, setting it down in your cellar, and after a few years uncorking it to discover that it has been transformed into a well tasty, underpriced gem (as an aside, note no miracle here!). This is what I’m hoping for with one of my latest acquisitions, the label of which is eponymously named Johnny Q.

This 2006 Shiraz from Tharbogang NSW (no idea!) also has another drawcard: its rather entertaining blurb on its rear label. Let me quote from it.

‘In the beginning, there was the wine creator…a sumptuous Shiraz created with your enjoyment in mind. For 6 days and 6 nights the fruit was harvested, crushed and left macerating on skins to develop a long lasting deep colour, intense bouquet and delicious taste. On the 7th day Johnny Q rested.’

Now, I’ve been known to drink a fair bit of this stuff, and I even once tried to ingratiate myself with the housekeeper at Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux in order to obtain a grape-picking job at vintage, but I really know very little about wine production. And so I’m quite happy to accept Mr Q’s oenological account as history, its platitudinous and self-praising aspects notwithstanding.

From the language used - the tight but sufficiently informative details of the passage, as well as its commonsense and everyday usage - it seems entirely the case that Johnny isn’t lying or expecting the reader to access some extra-textual code obtained from some sort of sacerdotal “expert” that unlocks the occult meaning and event sequence of Johnny’s wine-making “week”. It just seems to be, well, saying what it means and meaning what it is saying.

And you know what? I can’t imagine Peter Jensen, Rob Forsyth, Gordon Cheng or any other of the Sydney Anglican Heretics, for one moment, questioning the veracity of Johnny Q’s little history. Yet – and here it comes, guys – while they would whole-heartedly believe this guy, they obstinately deny God’s historical blurb on the first page of the Bible. Think about it: They would take at face-value the word of, in all likelihood, an alcoholic, yet torture and eviscerate the very words of God’s Spirit. Talk about the overturning of commonsense!

I think I need a drink!

Mad about death

It just came back to me. One of the maddest things I'd heard about death, creaton and the Bible, in years.

I was at a talk given by a Christian academic who, when asked about the significance of death in his theolgy (his idea was that God 'created' using evolution), pooh-poohed the notion of there being no death before Adam, by saying something along the lines of:

"Of course there was death before Adam, eukaryote cells were dying all the time, that's how organisms work".

How he betrayed his minor knowledge of Genesis, and his willingness to challenge scripture to maintain his argument. A not even careful reading will reveal that 'death' refers to those creatures with 'soulish' life, not cells!

Cheng an Embarrassment

Gordon, our old sparring partner, wrote somewhat recently in praise of Michael Ruse (see 'Dawkins an Embarrassment', Media Watch, The Briefing, 7th June 2007). Gordon reports that Ruse is convinced that many evolutionists are just as “religiously ridiculous in their zeal as the most swivel-eyed creationist could ever be.” Whether these are Ruse’s or Gordon’s exact words is irrelevant because Gordon obviously sympathises fully with the sentiment behind them. Nothing new here.

What should be embarrassing and cause for concern for the Sydney Diocese is that one of their ministers would then go on to misrepresent his supposed brothers and sisters in Christ by manufacturing an outright lie against them. If this isn’t in itself a travesty of what it means to be a leader in the Church then think about the flow-on effect for those who, as a result of reading his mendacious piffle, are drawn away from the historically orthodox truth. (Hopefully, Gordon has become so obnoxious that very few people would bother and that it’s only the sycophantic tare of the diocese who champion his miscreant ravings. Maybe little or no harm done!) What did our Lord say about a millstone, brother?

The offending paragraph is the following:
“Most creationists and evolutionists tend to distract themselves away from considering the man Jesus Christ, the only son of God, by turning to debate minutiae of sub-amoebic proportions. Small things are not unimportant, but when they stop us thinking about the gospel, they start to matter out of proportion to their size.”
First thing that needs pointing out is Gordon’s hyper-hubristic and omnisciently use of “most”. Well, even I, a now very much long-in-the-tooth creationist, have not met or read “most creationists”, and so I cannot conclude that Gordon would have super-humanly managed the impossible.

But what makes Gordon’s words so foolish is that every – let me repeat – every, creationist I’ve met or read, at some time, somewhere, will over and over again raise the absolute importance of the Gospel and the world’s need for Christ.

London to a brick, Gordon would never have heard of A.E. Wilder-Smith’s pioneering work, let alone read any of it. Wilder-Smith was quite arguably more instrumental for putting the creationist project on firm footing than any other person before or after. Contrary to Gordon’s insane libel, this triple awarded PhD scientist (sorry, Gordon, how many scientific PhDs have you earned?) never stopped talking or writing about the need for all men and women to know about the redemptive work of Christ’s death on the cross and his resurrection.

But if Gordon were an honest man and had wanted to know what creationists actually believed he would have at least browsed the world’s leading creationist magazine (published here in Oz!) and seen that creationists do raise the issue of the Gospel even in an ostensibly scientific publication.

Gordon is manifestly a liar or a fool, but not both. His own article clearly demonstrates this.

Connect 3009? Hmmm...Maybe?

Odd day yesterday. Called into my union office to drop off some papers for an upcoming court case against my employer and then rode past the Town Hall and saw some people handing our pamphlets to the lunch-time crowd outside that building next door. At first I wasn’t going to stop but the subject matter drew my attention: human rights for children. Something wasn’t right and I smelt Scientology at work.

I began my discussion by asking affable Nigel on what basis children should have rights. It was fairly promptly brought to my attention that they were indeed scientologists. This inevitably and quickly led to a discussion of comparing, I mean, contrasting, L. Ron Hubbard with Jesus. As it turned out Nigel was an ex-Anglican and was quite familiar with Jesus’ character and perfect nature. We talked for about 40 minutes and at our conversation's conclusion I encouraged him to take up C.S. Lewis’ challenge of liar, lunatic or Lord.

The glaring surreal irony of it all. Here I was, blogmaster for Sydney Anglican Heretics, standing outside St Andrew’s Cathedral and St Andrew’s House, the powerhouse of planning for Connect 09, evangelising an ex-Anglican and not a SADist in sight conversing with these poaching Scientologists or the lunch-time crowd.

Connect 2009? Yeh, right!

Legal Poet

I came across this clip the other day. I thought I'd post it as, in a minor way, it is a modern example of poetry in law! The judge's poem contains factual material, and is part of his judgement, and so is part of the law.

Not that Genesis 1 (part of Torah, or the law for Israel) is poetry (see post on von Rad and Weeks' article), but even if it was, that would not prevent it from being factually accurate: poetry is used as part of the law to convey factual information today!!

The clip is from the Sydney Morning Herald, p. 15, 28 November, 2004.

Genesis: True Myth?

Readers might like to hop over to the Open Source Theology thread on Genesis as 'true myth'.

Not saying I agree, not saying I disagree, but one of the questions in there is the place of contemporary scientific discourse in our understanding of this ancient text.

I think there is at least an implicit suggestion that "science" is having a bit of a leg pull if 'it' thinks that it can talk credibly about events a putative multiple billions of years ago. That's as weird as trying to build wealth on the stock exchange using 'technical analysis'. (Now, I'll bet someone who has used this has been 'radomized' to fabulous wealth and they'll come on and pretend to demolish my comparison).

Stories from the Nerve Bible

I mentioned some work by Laurie Anderson in my previous post. The 'lyrics' (I'm never sure what to call the words LA uses) I was thinking of are set out below:

"The first really strange stories I heard were Bible stories and these stories were completely amazing: about parting oceans and talking snakes and people seemed to really believe these stories, and I'm talking about adults who mainly did the most mundane things imaginable, mowing their lawns, throwing pot luck parties; they all believed in these wild stories and they would sit around and discuss them in the most matter of fact way. So in a way I was introduced to a special local form of surrealism at an early age; so there was always a question in my mind about what is actually true and what is just an artform.

And so as an artist I always thought that my main job was to be a spy and use my eyes and ears and find some of the answers. . ."

FLASH DAVE & HIS MUTATION RAY GUN

My dear old friend Matt, who is about the same age as I (50 this spring), reckons he has an idea or two about how it’s done. He swears by this as an intellectual way around the problem that has plagued Christendom ever since Charles Darwin first proved that we came from pond scum. The problem for Christians was of course, if it all looks like one long naturalistic process, where can we slip God in so as to keep God, God, and which will simultaneously intelligently and spiritually equip ourselves to speak the Gospel in order to maintain the rage against those silly atheists, like Richard Dawkins, who want to claim evolution for themselves? I don’t know why I didn’t see Matt’s solution long before. He reckons, once a year, God’s spirit enters every 10th or so person’s chimney and surreptitiously alters their genetic alphabet. He also, on a number of different days of the year, inserts himself down burrows, into nests, hives and the like, to cut and paste other life forms’ DNA with extra bits of information.

Of course, I don’t wholly subscribe to Matt’s theory – I’m merely positing it for consideration, demonstrating that one can solve this problem without resorting to the demonic and parasitic solutions expressed by us creationists.

OK, I know Matt’s theory sounds a bit way out there but don’t prematurely judge it. At least give him a chance by putting the latest Anglo solution beside it and see how his fairs.

Dave Lankshear (You do recall him on this site? He’s the guy who ducks and weaves, avoids all the important questions, slags off creationists with more earned scientific postgraduate degrees than he could obtain in 20 lifetimes, and who considers he’s grasped this whole creationist thing by reading just 2 books, one a biography and the other a rather outdated outline of the ideas) has now decided to take his football home with him to his mummy and hide behind her skirt. However, previous to his tantrum, for our intellectual consideration no less, he had tossed into the ring his dear old medical doctor and missionary father-in-law’s solution. Dave’s relative (he can console himself that it’s by marriage only!) likes to ruminate that God periodically uses cosmic rays projected from a far-flung star(s) to target every life form, these non-randomly hitting specific bases on their DNA rung, which will then transform that form into another, pushing it further along the evolutionary journey toward man, possibly even, and finally to, the Omega Man. To quote him exactly,

“See, the God I believe in is powerful enough to co-ordinate one star going supernova 300 million years ago to send out a cosmic ray that streams all the way to earth to hit a genetic marker just so, and then another genetic mutation to occur for other reasons just so, and for this to add up to new information.”

Dave then goes onto to give a “credible” 2 bob each-way support for his rel’s just so story:

“My point is not that we can see this happening in the small timeframes since we’ve started studying whether or not this process can even happen, my point is that Christian evolutionists don’t believe any of it is by accident. OK?”

No, Dave, it isn’t OK. Far from it, pal.

Come on Dave, man, ‘fess up, son: you’ve been smokin’ some of that whacky weed, sneakin’ in a few baker’s dozen midnight tokes of Mullumbimby Madness or was it that really rare (at least nowadays) stash, the almost mythical sticky, black Afghani hash, haven’t you boy?

I know their apologetics and understanding of God’s revelation seem topsy-turvy to us: there was no water above our firmament as Genesis 1 describes; a universal flood is an impossibility because ‘all land’ does not mean ‘all land but only ‘some land’; a short creation period is out of the question because a day is never a day and the real time frame is just so huuuuuuuge and those Jews were so uneducated that God had to use metaphorical language because their primitive minds would never comprehend this huuuuuuuuuuuge passage of time; and the first 11 chapters of Genesis lacks historicity, despite the inclusion of extended genealogical sequences that connect up the father-son dots in both Torah and Luke’s Gospel; but now, what could truly cement the whole biblical story together, is that God was not a master craftsman but a celebrated cosmic ray-gun wielder from star Zarkon.

And this is the problem with unseen cosmic rays and the like causing mutations to create life and usher forth newer and more complex life forms: it belies Paul’s words that the “whole” creation points to God’s handiwork. If undetected and/or undetectable (i.e. a process that can be mistaken for no process or a random, material, naturalistic process) then men have an intellectual excuse for disbelieving in God.

Furthermore, Dave’s father-in-law’s idea is unbiblical for other reasons:

1. It must argue that God continues to work and has not rested. In other words Genesis 1 is wrong when it states that God’s creation WAS finished and WAS perfect at the end of the 6th day.
2. That God is the author of death
3. That death-causing mutations are a very good thing
4. It reeks of ad hockery and ignores the demands of Ockham’s Razor
5. It’s spooky and should have instead formed an episode of The Twilight Zone rather than pretend to serve as the potential object of scientific investigation

But arguably the most vacuous thing about Dave’s idea is that he actually thinks he’s put God back in the driver’s seat by merely saying, “Look, you asinine creationists, if God directs cosmic rays from Zarkon, it can’t be construed as an accident. So there!” That’s just bloody word magic, pal. As someone once called it, voodoo formulas.

It’s odd that Dave and his hopeless gang of theistic evolutionists deny God the power to speak the whole creation into existence quickly, but is quick to delegate power to himself by saying he can make God do anything.

He now says that God wilfully brought genetic illness to His perfect creation. What blasphemous ravings of blind men. There’s no denying it: heretics you are! Your God is far too small for Christianity. You are an embarrassment to the Gospel, the very Gospel that says our Lord came to cure the whole creation of these ills. And worst of all, your mysticism offers zero solace to people who are suffering.

Without unnecessarily multiplying causes and effects as such highly preposterous explanations do, it is far better to understand mutations from a biblical perspective. Notwithstanding the small number of environmentally advantageous mutations, the existence of this evil can actually evince the creationist argument, prove a lot about God and the biblical explanation for origins, and goes a long way to foster a perfect theodicy. It not only is a clear reminder of a real Fall, but forms the backbone for the very reasonable arguments suggested by the orthodox Jew and now retired John Hopkins University scientist, Lee Spetner, and the revived Haldane’s Dilemma as proposed by Walter Remine. Both these men, in different ways, have shown that,

(i) there is no evidence of mutations actually adding novel information that moves life forms along an evolutionary path
(ii) there is insufficient time for evolution to occur
(iii) if genetic mutations are sped up, then genetic death will occur

In a nutshell, the existence of mutations and their relatively small number actually demonstrate a young earth, not the anti-God old age worldview that the Anglos love to get into bed with. Dave’s proposal furthermore increasingly resembles a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ remedy and is incommensurate with the scientific endeavour.

Of course, all of this will probably be wasted on Dave and his theistic evolutionary coterie. Since Dave and co. are unpersuaded by our pleas to let God speak for himself rather than forcing their bias onto Scripture, being tied down by formal rules of logic is merely an inconvenience to be sidestepped.

One last thing.

Dave’s dishonesty knows no limits. In a recent posting he has proffered up “geology, ice core samples, cosmology, the age of light reaching the earth, continental drift, and a dozen other scientific disciplines” as evidence for an old age earth. If Dave were actually seeking wisdom, swallowed his pride, and bothered to check out what the scientific arguments and evidence are against these, he would demonstrate a sense of Christian humility by really understanding his imagined enemy’s case. But instead, he refuses to examine the other, stronger proof for a young earth and has decided to run with the atheist philosophy that says if we replace God with lots of time then we have no need of that hypothesis.

Ships Passing

Last weekend brought two items together to give a fascinating insight
into Sydney Diocese.

In my parish bulletin there was a promotion for Lord Peter's address
at Abbotsleigh Girls School (for those not in Sydney, this
prestigious school is part of the Anglican campaign to remove
Christians from the general community, and pander to the wealthy who
like to impress themselves). The topic was "Why I am Protestant,
Reformed and Evangelical". Great. Bring to the 21st Century the
concerns of the 16th!

In the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum section, I noticed that
Dawkins' "The God Delusion" is a top selling book.

What this says to me is that Lord Peter has missed the point about
what is at issue in the contemporary religious scene; therefore he is
not evangelical. I will leave my doubts about his being reformed or
protestant to another time.

Found a review of Dawkins' The God Delusion at:

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4900