Religion or Science - How do they compare?

Sure, but science should influence our theology. I see science as a natural theology. Science starts with belief and then you try and prove it empirically. Philosophy or theology start with belief but can't be examined or proven empirically but that does not on it's own make it wrong. ..and that is your belief. I agree that they aren't at all synonyms, but you often treat it as such with your view that evolution explains everything about our existence. I see evolution as having been created. Of course evolution is changed by random events. So what. That tells us nothing about why we have intelligent life with an understanding of morality. I can say I don’t believe in unicorns or I could say that I don’t believe that unicorns exist. You don’t believe that any deity exists or you could say that you believe that no deity exists. It’s belief.You have observational evidence that culture affects our morality. What evidence do you have that God doesn’t also impact our morality. It isn't testable scientifically so it is a matter of belief.

Thank you so much for that reply. I hadn't heard the sermon by Bishop Curry and I am so glad that you caused me to go and listen to it. Yes, it was a brilliant sermon that nailed the message that Jesus had for us. It is all about the power of love to change the world. I know that you want a tough God that is going to really punish the wrong doers but Jesus brought a message of love of God, of neighbour and of our enemies.He brought this message to a people who were being brutally run by the Romans. He preached a message of the power of love and forgiveness as the way to defeat them The way they could be defeated was through the power of love.So yes I did very much approve of that sermon. I know it doesn't fit with an inerrant reading of the bible, but it does fit with the message that Jesus brought to the world. Of course, the message that Jesus brought doesn't agree with an inerrant reading of the Bible, so it makes sense.

Not really Faith. You have chosen to worship a deity based on a specific way of understanding of how God wants us to use the Bible. I have chosen a God based on the concept that God's nature, wisdom or Word was perfectly embodied by Jesus. As a result we have come to very different conclusions about the narure of God. Yes, the message that Jesus brought is mostly in the OT but so is a lot of other stuff that He repudiated.I recently read a 600 page book by Flemming Rutledge called simply "Crucifixion". Believe me I don't trivialize what Jesus did. I'd suggest that you trivialize Jesus when you give priority to ancient writings over and above what He said and did even when that which He said was not of God.

Firstly science was started by theists and partly because they were theists they assumed that the universe was orderly and so could be discovered. And again, you confuse process with agency. I have never said it was mindless. I have agreed that there is a great deal of randomness as part of the process. Again, process and agency What I don't believe is that all of the processes needed to bring about the world as we know could have occured from mindless origins. You, however believe that they could have.

Hmm.. so you are persuaded by what a group of guys said about what a group guys wrote thousands of years earlier and are saying that it is straight from God. It is making a false idol out of the Bible, at the expense of what God has done in and through Jesus of Nazareth.

.. even when He rejects and/or corrects what is in the OT. So the point is you are careful not to read a book by someone who disagrees with your views.

It sure does keep you from learning anything new though.

There are a great number of Christians that view your understanding of the Scriptures and for that matter of God to be heretical. You adhere to an OT version of God in order to try and twist the Bible into a shape that isn't intended, distorting a great deal of what Jesus taught and died for, and what God resurrected Him for.Edited by GDR, : a to an

If you have a subscription to Christianity Today here is a link to an interview of Rutledge that would anser your questions. If you don't have a subscription you can subscribe to an outline subscription. Flemming Rutledge Interview

OK. This is from the interview in Christianity Today.

quote:

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Why is there so little preaching and teaching on the Crucifixion today?

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It’s complex, but I identify two reasons. The first is an almost wholesale retreat from the penal substitution theory, which was an unfortunate development in late 18th- and early 19th-century Protestantism. It held the field for a while, especially in evangelical circles. It was overwrought and overly rationalized and taught in a way that sabotaged the unity of the Trinity [as if the Son were placating the wrath of the Father]. It is not in the spirit of the Passion narratives.

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Second, people don’t want to hear about sin, suffering, evil, or judgment. The African American church has something to teach us here. They’re not afraid to talk about judgment. People who have suffered under tyrannical, cruel, brutal regimes understand the need for judgment.

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American Christianity, as Richard Niebuhr pointed out long ago, has tended to preach a gospel without judgment and a Christ without a cross. This is an old problem. We want to be happy. We want to be positive. We want to overlook the almost unbelievable problems we face today. Yet this is not the case for the poorest of the poor. They know there’s a need for judgment and for a heavenly deliverer.

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You downplay penal substitution but not substitutionary atonement altogether. Why?

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You’re correct about substitution. I certainly argue that the theme of Jesus substituting himself, the innocent one, for us the guilty must not be allowed to be lost.

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Does judgment involve punishment? Well, maybe. We certainly think of it that way in our courtrooms. But I don’t hear much in the Old Testament about punishment. I hear a great deal about judgment. In Isaiah, we read that the chastisement was laid upon him, yes. It’s imaginative, though. We’re not asked to imagine punishment. We’re asked to imagine this miraculous thing that is happening in the gift of the Servant, who is being put to death. I argue that the horrible death envisioned for the Suffering Servant and the horrific death suffered by Jesus Christ respond to the gravity of sin. Sin must be judged by a righteous God. That is our hope.

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What greater hope is there than to know that God will judge and redeem? He will judge us for all that we have done that is wrong, and he will redeem us from it. Who really wants to deny that there is something wrong with us and with the world that needs to be put right? That is the theme, not punishment per se. It’s the need for redemption out of all that is wrong.

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That’s why the word justification is so important, because justification, or rectification as some prefer now, means God is setting right all that has been wrong.

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I thing that struck me about Rutledge's book was not about correct doctrine at all. All Christians come to their own conclusions about the nature of God and what it means to our lives and how we should live them. Doctrine is interesting but what is primary is how we allow whatever doctrine we choose to shape our hearts and through that our lives.What really struck me about the book was the answer to a question somebody asked recently at a study which was 'why does Paul go on about not being ashamed to preach a crucified messiah'. This book very much painted a picture of not only the horrendous suffering involved in dying in that manner, but the the humiliation and shame of it.One of the reasons for crucifixion was to absolutely shame and humiliate the person being crucified. A Roman citizen could not being crucified and it was only done to the lowest members of society. The individual would be stripped naked, nailed or hung on a cross, and would be subject to having both stones and taunts thrown at them. It was designed to dehumanize people. The idea of a crucified messiah was absolutely scandalous to Jews and ridiculous to Gentiles. In spite of this Paul goes on at great personal cost to himself preaching a crucified messiah.It obviously took something very powerful to convince the early Christians, (even before they were called that), that there was a reason to claim that Jesus really was the Messiah even though He had been thoroughly discredited by the fact that He had been crucified. Their claim was that the reason was the resurrection, and from what I read that is the only sensible explanation for the rise of the Christian faith.

Firstly that wasn't the point of my statement. The idea that a crucified would be dreamed up by any Jew at the time, let alone Paul, is ridiculous. It was so shameful that Paul has to address the issue by starting off saying that he wasn't ashamed to preach a crucified messiah.You will no doubt argue against this but there are so many things in the NT that it makes no sense for us now to believe that the writers didn't believe the accounts to be true. No Jew would concoct a story about a crucified messiah.In addition to that we have people sacrificing their lives for this belief right from the beginning. Paul himself spent the bulk of the rest of his life suffering long stretches of imprisonment, numerous beatings and eventually death to support his beliefs.You can say that they were somehow mistaken as to what happened but it is nonsense to contend that they just made the whole thing up. Sure there are inconsistencies in the story and no doubt there are embellishments and biases influencing their accounts but obviously they believed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

That wasn't my point. My point was that they believed it to be true which does not make it true. Whether it is actually true or not is a different discussion. .. and obviously they also believed in what they died for.

Of course it's relevant.If they didn't believe it and they knew it to be fiction then there is no reason to pay any attention to it. If they believe it then we can come to our own conclusions about whether it is true or not.

There were numerous messianic movements over roughly a 200 year period. In virtually all, if not all, cases the messianic leaders were put to death and that was the end of the movement. In many of the cases the messianic figures actually had varying degrees of success in that they actually held some degree of power.One example is the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 AD. They even has three where they minted coinswith the years 1,2 and3 on them. A very prominent Rabbi at the time Rabbi Akiva claimed that Bar Kokhba was the messiah. After they were put to deat, as was usual, the movement ended and as usual Bar Kokhba was simply considered another failed messiah.Here was a messianic figure who achieved nothing of what was expected of a messiah and was put to death in the most shameful way possible, with his followers all bailing out and yet they come back and dedicate their lives to following him. Something happened to cause this turn around and they have given an account of what that something was. Sure, but there was something that caused him to leave his life persecuting the early Christians to being one their foremost leaders. We draw our own conclusions.