Interesting article.
Sounded like a good painting so i checked it out. You can actually see it at www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au (in Australian Art category).

Gotta love art that inspires deep thought.

Personally, i never liked the Adam and Eve expulsion scandal. To me it was unfair. By denying Adam and Eve knowledge, God set them up for the fall because without the knowledge of good and evil, Eve and then Adam were unable to tell that Mr Snake the devil was evil so they quite easily fell into his trap. Knowledge is the way to freedom. Ignorance only leads to slavery.
The life of Frederick Douglass is testimony to that fact.

As for the resurrection, I don't see how a Christian would not hold to the belief that it was a historical fact.
The tendency of those that dispute it is to apply a 20th/21st century mentality to something that allegedly occurred 2000 years ago. This assumes that the current view of the world, which is exceedingly materialistic, can be applied to the world as it was then. So because they do not see resurrections occuring today, they therefore assume that it was impossible 2000 years ago.

Fide mae
I wrote this article to sort out what “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” means. One meaning could be that in the creation God saw that everything that he created was good and thus to call something evil was to deny the goodness of creation. My interpretation, which may not be the only one, takes this forbidden knowledge to take the form of judgment of others. This seems to be correct when you look at how the creation narrative unfolds in the killing of Abel. Certainly ideologies, religions, should be placed under critical examination. This has been suffocated by the notion that all culture is good and all religious culture is beyond criticism. This followed from the pathetic notion that all religion was a personal affair and we all have the right to believe any damn thing we want. You may like to look at an essay on my home page on this: http://petersellick.nationalforum.com.au/articles45.html

My my, I seem to have hit a nerve with this one. It is usual for the secularists to insist that they and they alone have the only true story of the world. This story is more mythological than the Christian story because it relies on entirely unhistorical presuppositions: that of the nobility of the self created individual, endless material progress and radical cynicism to name a few. These are indeed playpen fairy tales. But the worst fairy tale of all is that we must each become human without any insight from previous generations of experience. “I did it my way” must be the slogan of this deranged movement.

We really must think more deeply about judgment and salvation. The connection between judgment and death is that at death a life is ended and we may see the whole of it. Salvation is about getting the theology right so that we are held in life against the powers of death. See my article above.

Sells, you are incorrigible.

You had me scrabbling around my dictionary of rhetorical devices in order to find the one that said:

"Sellophony: a device used to discredit another's position by stating it as the exact opposite to that which it is"

Strangely, it wasn't there.

Which is a pity, because it would have been extremely useful in handling this little throwaway line:

>>It is usual for the secularists to insist that they and they alone have the only true story of the world.<<

How little you know, and how much less you appear to wish to discover, about us secularists, Sells.

A quick glance through the responses to any religious pontificator on this thread will show you that we actually claim to be certain about very little. But we consistently refuse to accept the simplistic churnings of those who have "found the light".

It could almost be said that we are united in one aspect only: our acceptance that there can be no single, "true story of the world".

Sometimes it may seem that we take aim specifically at yours, but we don't. It is just that you represent a group of people who think they are singularly gifted with the true insight into life, the universe and everything, and rarely tire of telling us so.

Some folk envy the appearance of certitude that you religious people display. However, I find it very sad that you deny yourself the constant delight of exercising the brain at a broader level than simply counting those angels on pinheads. By any definition, drawing conclusions from the "existence" of Adam and Eve comes into this category. An utter waste of time, except to those who have already set themselves the same task.

It spills over into the real world at the point where you use these fallacious arguments to insult perfectly nice "peace-lovers". We have feelings too, you know.

I simply cannot imagine how stultifying it might be to have such a narrow outlook on life that you use ancient mythology to define and circumscribe the parameters of your thought processes.

Pericles, Christianity - though one would say that Catholicism has been the greatest driver - has created the greatest works of art that our world has. A religious faith has inspired artists, thinkers and authors to create paintings, buildings, poems, plays, musical works, novels, rituals and ceremonies that are rightly seen as the foundation-stone of our culture. Christianity acted like a sieve to sift out the worst of the pagan Greek and Roman cultures, to resist Barbaranianism, and made Europe the most peaceful continent of all (though, of course, not as peaceful as we would have liked it - but discounting the worst of the killers: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and so forth (none Christian) - but still an admirable achievement), and also the most prosperous and happy. We are forunate now that the spiritual capital we have inherited in tradition, philosophy, law and culture from Christian Europe, to soften the blows we are landing against our own tradition.

Christianity has suprisingly little to its message. That's not saying that it's simplistic, or unsubstantial. What I mean is that, having described how we should strive to be better people, we are asked to do our best and to wonder at the mystery of cretion. The scope offered by this is simply incredible, and it explains why - of all the places of secondary education in Australia - it has been the Christian schools, and those grammar schools deeply in a Christian tradition - that have sought to maintain higher learning and studies, as opposed to a secular, public sector which seeks to place boudaries on thought in the form of critical theories, and ideologies. The irony is, the small amount "freedom" removed by belief in God actually gives to the flock a true Freedom which the man-forged manicles of the mind seek to control in other situations. That is not to say that there are not closed-minded Christians for whom the mystery is only explained in that book that was finalised in the 5th century AD, but a visit to Rome would show their smallness.

Peter, there is an obvious directness in my response to your genuine but tragic examination of this playpen fairy-tale. There is no radical cynicism, nor nobility nor some self created individualism nor an ignorance of previous generations of experience. Just look at what IS, and you'll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.

If I may indulge myself in some small way it may provide an explanation of sorts. e.g. When I was eight years old I decided to leave Sunday School much to my mother's displeasure, because I found it unpleasant to be rote learning in wrong order little pieces of the biblical story and to receive a pretty colored stamp to put in a book as a reward. What I wanted to do on a Sunday, and with my time, was to play in the bush, gullies and hills that surrounded our home. My parents trusted my motives and in some ways it echoes the Arthur Boyd painting. These experiences in the bush aroused great curiosity about life that could be beautiful and chaotic, ancient and new, peaceful and cruel in the extreme as well as forever changing. It is not surprising that I believe that the universe is infinite, was never created and far from anthropocentric.

Rather than a selfish and ignorant preoccupation with saving one's "soul" on what some call judgment day there resides in many people a will to truth driven by a curiosity as well as an altruism. This is the true spirit that vested interests like religious playpens and others do their best to poison. e.g. Teddy cheerleaders think nothing of belief stamping babies.

On another level, can anyone believe that we still have the majority of scientists promoting the "Big Bang" origin of the universe? This is a complete nonsense but demonstrates how religious notions can influence science.

Keiran
Alas, negative experiences of the church are common and regrettable. My church school experience made me an atheist, a crusader against religion and the desire to be a scientist. It is a natural response to turn to nature when disillusioned with poor religious culture. My curiosity about nature still abides. I agree that the idea that God created the material world is absurd. As I have said many times in these pages, God did not create a thing but a history. Like you I reject the idea of an anthropocentric universe, see http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2907

The challenge is to look past the common understandings of Christianity. You may discover that we have more in common than you think.

Boaz David.
I am not wishy washy about the resurrection. The proclamation that God raised Jesus from the dead is central and irreducible. However, to make the resurrection a resuscitation does reduces its significance. Resurrection also means vindication, the turning of the tables on humanity as I pointed out in the article. It is the event that projects the presence of Jesus into the future as a living presence at each Eucharist and in each sermon. It can never be just a conjuring trick with bones.