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The Forum > Article Comments > A new heaven and a new earth > Comments

A new heaven and a new earth : Comments

By Peter Sellick, published 2/2/2017

Secular society largely rejects the division between mortal body and immortal soul and has called the Church's bluff on what happens after death.

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The great escape from "Calvinism" is not yet over apparently!
Your liberal theological philosophy has really very little to offer mankind in term of hope Sells.
It is a downward spiral into humanism which culminates in a NGO competition of market forces.
It's sad that Christ is now isolated in " Heaven" , seated at the right hand of the Father!
I guess not only is God dead, but so is Christianity itself with your view!
Posted by diver dan, Thursday, 2 February 2017 9:13:54 AM
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Um, Sells, Paul's writing in I Corinthians 15: 12 - 57 strongly refutes you. e.g.
12. But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
13. If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
14. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
. . .
17. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.
18. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.
19. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.
Posted by JP, Thursday, 2 February 2017 10:27:48 AM
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I've heard there's nothing new under the sun? Not in heaven or on earth!

Nonetheless as someone who briefly saw my dead mother three days after she died as a glowing being of effulgent light, moonlight shining on silver. I can't begin to tell you how much comfort that gave me!

I'm here also to tell you there is an afterlife! And as someone who opened death's door, and had a bo peep, I'm here to tell you as an eyewitness, there is a hell and far more terrifying than any depiction in fable or by mortal man! So as you sow, so also shall you reap!

And while that remains unchanged, the fictions (false witness) promulgated by those who purport to know the mind of the creator, change with the whim and caprice of the "CONTROLLING" oft times, self appointed elders, or their appointee?

[If it was not a sin to be born homosexual in Christ's day, (was an unmarried, extraordinary kind and gentle Jesus one of them?) it is not one now! And if church Leaders could be women or married men? What has changed since?]

And never really ever was, except in the flawed minds of stone throwing finger pointing, proofless loony tunes!

So as you do to the least among you, you also you do unto me. Quote unquote.

At the end of the day, the only one able to judge you truly, is the man or the woman in the mirror! Make him or her proud and let ultimate justice reflect just that!

Remember, we leave as we came and only able to take our memories with us!

Try and create some good ones, the best being the joy you create on the faces and in the lives of others! What other possible purpose of granted wealth and power can there be?

i.e., Here lies D.T. the richest man in the graveyard! And arguably, the most reviled? What an epitaph? What a waste of an enormously privileged life!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 2 February 2017 12:10:51 PM
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Jeez - Sells has written some nonsense in his time!
He is of course acquainted with these references which are very much about what we are as human beings, how to consciously participate in the death-and-dying Process, and what happens to "soul" when it passes from the body.
http://www.aboutadidam.org/dying_death_and_beyond/index.html
http://www.easydeathbook.com
Plus this essay too:
http://www.beezone.com/da_publications/tiorlgd.html

This essay on the delusions about what we are as human beings created by "Paul"
http://www.aboutadidam.org/articles/secret_identity/sacrifice.html

The nature of the "kingdom" and how to Realize It.
http://www.dabase.org/up-5-3.htm

Does the world need any more "theological education". There is now more "theology" available on every possible topic than ever before, and NONE of it has not made any real difference to anything - can not make any real difference to anything. It is all and extension of narcissus-at-the-pond whose business Is death
http://www.beezone.com/narcissus.html
Posted by Daffy Duck, Thursday, 2 February 2017 5:55:01 PM
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As the author clearly explained, "we all give ourselves to something". Our illness is our separation from God because we give ourselves to other things, or "idols". Once we give up all our addictions, especially to the world and its pleasures, then we are left with... God!

Healing is through subtraction, not through addition, but occasionally one first needs to add something smaller in order to eliminate something bigger. For example, 17-9=8, where in order to get rid of the 10's, the 7 had to become an 8.

So if for example one needs to believe in heaven-after-earth in order to stop murdering babies or robbing the innocent, then it is a good thing, whether or not such a heaven actually exists. Similarly, if in order to rid oneself of one's self-centeredness, one needs to believe that life on earth has a purpose and actively dedicate themselves to save the future-generations' environment, so that they distract themselves and starve that particular addiction, then this too is a good thing, regardless of the objective truth that life on earth is temporary and serves no real purpose.

Religion is here as the doctor, to offer different medicines for different illnesses that separate us from God. Religion is not measured by the objective "correctness" of its teachings, but rather by their effectiveness in cleansing its adherents' character from the various obstacles which stand in their way to God.

As our particular addictions vary in many ways, there is no single magic cure for all. Religion should adjust itself to the common maladies of the age, including in offering appropriate theologies to believe in. This does not make former theologies wrong - only outdated.
Posted by Yuyutsu, Friday, 3 February 2017 6:14:15 AM
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Sellick writes: "The burning of heretics was excused because the earthly flames to which they were subjected were thought to be nothing compared to the agonies they will suffer in the flames of hell for all eternity. The modern version of this, that I think came to our attention in the Vietnam War, was: " kill them all and let God sort them out.""

From Helen Ellerbe's THE DARK SIDE OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY, it appears comparison with the Vietnam war is singularly inappropriate. This was almost entirely about political ideology and connected to the events that followed from WW2. The conflict conducted by the Roman Catholic papacy against the wide spread heretical sects that proliferated principally through southern France to the Balkans and north into Germany was seen as as a fight for survival firstly. The economically depressed northern France especially, with the help of the church's supporters in the aristocracy, saw an opportunity to enrich themselves by conquest and plunder.........all with papal authority. Those regions of southern France by contrast harboured immense wealth, erudition with a high degree of literacy and well developed industries such as paper making.

It all disappeared in decades of slaughter and blood-letting unprecedented in subsequent history.

Caesarius of Heisterbach records in Dialogus Miraculorum that, when, at the first large town, Béziers, soldiers asked the Papal legate [Arnold] in charge of the crusade how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Abbot of Citeaux famously answered: "Show mercy neither to order, nor to age, nor to sex… Cathar or Catholic, kill them all… God will know his own (…caedite eos… novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius).
Arnold himself reported to the pope they had indeed spared neither rank, age nor sex and had massacred 20,000 people. Some have put the figure at 40,000. 6000 were said to have sheltered in the Catholic Church of S Madeleine, and were probably therefore mainly Catholics. All were murdered. As each town was taken, the inhabitants were put to the sword without distinction of age or sex. Clergymen in the army distinguished themselves by their ferocity
Posted by Pogi, Tuesday, 14 February 2017 6:30:02 AM
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A new heaven and a new earth : Comments
By Peter Sellick, published 2/2/2017

Yuyutsu quotes Sellick: As the author clearly explained, "we all give ourselves to something" and in doing so perpetuates his mistaken presumption that all humans are theists of one kind or another. I'll wager it would be at long odds if a message of his could be found without such an admonition. It seems to infuse into him a frisson of glee that he has a penetrating insight denied the atheist that pertains to the latter's lamentable spiritual deficiency. The author has clearly explained nothing.

That he presumes to speak for those who rejoice in religious faithlessness reveals an immature presumption of smug patronage and simultaneously disrespects their conviction that the supernatural and the spiritual realms are constructs of a timid human imagination more inclined to obsequiousness than to self-assured intellectual independence.

As theists face the charge from theists of having no way to "prove" they reject the concept of supernatural beings, so Yuyutsu has no way to "prove" he has no secret hebephilic inclinations. If he feels outrage at such a suggestion then he has some idea of how the atheist feels when advised he has secret, unacknowledged yearnings for godliness. It is most unlikely he suffers such affliction. I use the analogy as a demonstration of the situation and in retort to: "So if for example one needs to believe in heaven-after-earth in order to stop murdering babies or robbing the innocent, then it is a good thing, whether or not such a heaven actually exists."

Yuyutsu further writes: "This does not make former theologies wrong - only outdated." Such glib convenience deserves censure. The choice of words clearly indicates that theologies change as dress fashion changes, are flexible as a feather for interpretation's purpose and to raise the immutability of god's eternal and omniscient word is anathema when raised at inconvenient juncture.
Posted by Pogi, Tuesday, 14 February 2017 10:10:01 PM
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A new heaven and a new earth. This title is a precise indicator of how the self-absorbed can be meticulous in their fantasy life yet exhibit a disturbing lack of respect for convention in the real world.

Sellick grandiloquently accords respect to his fantasy world with punctilious capitalisation, yet sees it as beneath him to accord the same courtesy to the planet that is his home, has made his birth possible and has nurtured him to now dispassionately but with spectacular success. His family since time immemorial rejoiced in that provisioning and nurturing, all his friends, colleagues and pets. Nothing of humankind [and we include Peter Sellick in that lowly station despite his protests to the contrary] would exist without its home, Planet Earth. No other member of our solar system has accomplished this astounding feat, yet we capitaise the names of every one of them. This respet we extend to every feature of the Cosmos, except for the tiny ark that we provisionally inhabit.

But it's par for the course among Sellick and his ilk that meticulous attention to the theological niceties is more likely to ensure a first-class ticket on the Glory Train than acknowledging one or two secular niceties.

I was raised in an age when there was no truer statement than "Manners maketh the man" [and woman now presumably]. Uncapitalised "earth" is the name of the unconsolidated covering of our planet's land surface. Earth is our home, more than our nation, more the than the biosphere that parasitises it, more than the deposits of di-Hydrogen oxide that fill its dimpled surface.

“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." Carl Sagan.
Posted by Pogi, Wednesday, 15 February 2017 12:55:23 AM
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