Just one comment about the article below :
The CS Lewis argument about Jesus is repeated so often, by
so many,
that it deserves explicit refutation. Basically, said
Lewis, either Jesus was
the Son of God or he was either a lunatic or a liar.
This kind of reasoning is ludicrous and false on the face
of it.
Does it exhaust the possibilities ? Not nearly.
Maybe what Jesus said was a case of error but nonetheless
based on such things
as sense of mission or awareness of Biblical prophecies.
Maybe Jesus never said that but was interpreted to have
said that by the Gospel authors.
Maybe he meant his words to be taken allegorically.
And so forth.
These omissions are so obvious that Lewis' argument cannot
be taken seriously.
If I am not mistaken, even though Lewis did not present
his argument in syllogistic form,
this is a case of fallacy known as "undistributed middle,"
viz , a necessarily false syllogism.
To use this argument is a really bad idea. You are far
better off with Aquinas
even if there are some problems with his syllogisms, too.
Billy
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Christian Post
>
Opinion|Thu,
Sep. 08 2011 09:29 AM EDT
Are You a Theocrat?
Secular Scare Tactics
I want you to guess which prominent American public figure
said the following: “I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an
unjust law is no law at all.’” He added that what makes a law
“just” is that it “squares with the moral law or the law of
God,” conversely “unjust” laws are those that are “out of
harmony with the moral law.”
Well, we just unveiled a statue of him on the National
Mall.
Yes, Martin Luther King penned those famous words in his
1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Those words and the
convictions that prompted them changed America. But today,
they would cause the great civil rights leader to be labeled
a “theocrat.”
“Theocrat,” and related words like “Dominionist” and
“Christianist,” are the latest in a series of epithets
directed at Christians who insist that their faith is not
merely a private matter. Suggesting Christians want to
impose biblical law on civil society is an attempt to make a
comparison between us and people like the Mullahs in Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Case in point: a recent column in the Washington Post by
Dana Millbank that called governor Perry of Texas a “theocrat.” Given
that Perry has been elected governor of the second-largest
state twice, that’s an extraordinary claim that ought to
require extraordinary proof.
Millbank provides no such proof. Instead, he points to
Perry’s belief that “the truth of Christ’s death,
resurrection, and power over sin is absolute . . .”
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Now, if you’re thinking, “I believe the same thing, does
that make me a ‘theocrat?’”, well, that’s exactly the point:
by Millbank’s uninformed reasoning every orthodox Christian
is a “theocrat.”
Millbank fumes that “Perry has no use for those who ‘want
to recognize Jesus as a good teacher, but nothing more.’ Of
those non-Christians, Perry asks, ‘why call him good if he
has lied about his claims of deity and misled two millennia
of followers?’”
I take it Millbank didn’t realize that Perry was using
Oxford Professor C. S. Lewis’s classic argument for the
divinity of Christ. If Jesus was not who He said He was,
Lewis wrote, he was either “a lunatic-on a level with the
man who says he is a poached egg”-or a liar.
That’s called theology, not theocracy.
Now, there are such things as Christian theocrats, usually
called “theonomists,” but they’re a tiny fringe. The people
being labeled “theocrats” and “Dominionists” by the press
today don’t want the United States governed by a Christian
equivalent of sharia law. Like, Dr. King, they simply
believe that their religious positions and moral convictions
don’t disqualify them from the public square.
The irony is that if this standard had been applied in the
past, much of what is worth celebrating in our history would
never have happened. Many of the great social reforms such
abolitionism grew out of specifically Christian convictions
like those of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, Perry’s
own tradition.
Then, as now, there were those who decried what they deemed
the “imposition” of religious views in public life. If they
had prevailed, America would be a far less just, decent, and
civilized place.
It would be an America where the newest statue on the
National Mall would be given the same demolition treatment
that the Taliban gave the giant statutes of the Buddha in
Afghanistan.
I guess it’s the Taliban and the secular elite who are
alike in one way; that is, they believe some ideas are too
dangerous to express in public
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