On Apr 7, 2005, at 11:47 PM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
At 12:10 AM Friday 4/8/2005, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
And the epistles of Paul, while effective at establishing and maintaining the infant cult of Iasus, read like a lot of hard-right propaganda, which to me is more or less what they are.
Revelation is also hooey.
You say that like someone who has the sure word of God on that issue . . .
Nope, just healthy (lay) biblical scholarship.
It is interesting that you are much more likely to state things as absolutes than most people I know who do claim to have the sure word of God on issues.
Well, when arguing facts, I tend to do that. I'm just as certain of gravity, Earth's rough sphericity and the heliocentric solar system. I could be wrong, of course, but I don't think it's very likely.
As a scientist, I tend to make statements which allow for the possibility that I might be wrong, even though the claim I am making in the statement seems pretty certain in light of our current understanding. Of course, that can lead to misunderstandings, frex the different meanings that a scientist and a lay person assume for the word "theory" in the expression "theory of evolution." And like I tell students when the topic comes up in class (usually when we're discussing Galileo, if not before): I've got pieces of paper which allow me to claim credentials in both science and religion, so one might naively think I can give an answer to the questions of how to reconcile their apparent disparities, but all I can say is that the more that I study both, the less I can say that I know for certain about either . . .
John, when he wrote Revelation,
Actually, I read your original comment as being dismissive of revelation in general (with the capitalization being due to its initial placement in the sentence), not the last book of the Bible in particular, hence the response I made.
was using cryptic symbology that didn't make the book look like a polemic against the contemporary institutions of power, but that's what it was intended to be. He wasn't writing of events in either the year 1000 or 2000; he was writing about the world he lived in right then, ~70 AD, and how he hoped things would turn out in his lifetime.
Perhaps, but who could sell a miniseries to NBC based on _that_?
Unlike Them At Least You Spelled It Right Maru
--Ronn! :)
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