David, I commentend about control, as I was asked about it. To my knowledge I had actually not mentioned it on this thread.

Regarding your posts, at your age you should know, that the heart,
which you mention so much, is no more then a pump. If David's heart packed it in, we could shove a pig's heart in there to do the job,
you would keep ticking and keep posting nonsence no doubt :)

If you want to impress people David, you will have to move forward a few hundred years in science and knowledge. People used to think that where the heart is, was in fact the brain, but we have learnt a bit since then. Perhaps you should catch up with the real world

I am constantly amused by the writers to this forum who are afraid that the church is going to force its view of things on others. Have you had a look at the church lately? Is it conceivable that it could force anything on anyone? Why is it that when Christians seek to explain their faith it is interpreted as forcing their ideas on someone but when secularists write blatant propaganda it is all in the spirit of free speech and honest enquiry? The gospel cannot be forced down anyone’s throat, it lives by argument and persuasion like anything else.

The other thing that amuses my is this preciousness about culture. Cultures come and go, some leaving little trace of themselves except for some foundations. It has always been thus. Evolution has something to say about this, the fittest survive. Those cultures that nurture life, that have a good hold on reality survive. Those that practice human sacrifice are crippled by grief. Is it not a good thing that cannibalism is not almost extinct because of Christian missionaries? There are native cultures that are centred around scaring woman and children. We must remember that the culture of classical Greece was the native culture of the time of the rise of Christianity and that it failed because it was already tottering. Its mythology of the pantheon of gods was already a laughing stock and its philosophy, while being the ground of much Western thought did not address the meaning and purpose of life. Just so Roman religious culture.

Cultures fail for a reason, and mostly that reason is theological. They fail because they get the theology wrong, they misunderstand the nature of the world and the place of human beings in it.

Sells are you being serious when you when you claim to be amused by writers complaining about religious doctrine being forced upon them?

It is when Coach threatens with hell and damnation for not believing exactly as he does.

It is BD constantly exhorting one to 'come into Jesus' (a bit homo-erotic that one) and who claims that non christians don't have any sense of right or wrong.

It is Philo telling me that I have no sovereignty over my fertility - I am a woman apparently that makes me a baby machine.

And then there are the christian holy rollers who come knocking, uninvited at my door - no other religion does that. I tell I am happy to discuss their beliefs provided they give me their address and I can just lob in anytime unannounced. Thus far, no-one has given me their address - a bit one sided don't you think?

I could go on, but I hope you are getting the message.

Strange how one never see groups of athiests wandering the suburbs, leaflets in hand ready to spout an nauseum about their beliefs.

Also, Sells, I would like to apologise for the absence of theology in my post - I know how much you do enjoy a theological discussion, which makes me wonder why you don't stick to theist websites. OLO embraces all people not just the extremist christian. This could explain why you receive so much scepticism.

Oh and like or not, Sells, we owe a great deal to the Greeks and Romans for philosophy, politics, art, science and much more.

Besides we don't even know that JC ever actually existed. There is nothing that really substantiates in historical tetxt - only the word of gospels that were written 70 odd years after christ was supposed to have existed.

I think it is this shaky foundation that makes some christians so defensive, what if JC never existed at all? What a house of cards is christianity.

Peter thinks that there are two fundamental (but, in his opinion, silly) questions: Does God exist? & Is one religious or not? But they are not so silly really because if the answer to the first question is that the existence of God (and a supernatural realm in which He and various other beings exist) is both unproven and unprovable then the answer to the second question reduces to asking how and why such beliefs came into human brains and why they hold such sway?

Those questions require extensive research into the development of human society. Undoubtedly much of that has been done and, when understood, the answer is that the content of our brains is strictly determined by the chemical structure of our bodies and its interaction with the physical world around us.

The spirit world, like that of the fairies and hobgoblins, is a creation of the dreamworld of our minds. The sooner we recognise that our lives are determined by the physical world, over which we might exercise some control, the sooner we can effectively solve the problems we face.

On "silly questions" or otherwise that "asks if there is a God or not", there is this relativism that says there would not be a non-theist without the belief that there is a teddy (god) of some sort (even if just a figment of one's imagination). From Popes to Pells to Peters we have these Xtians who are hard wired to have only the absolutes. However, this is relativism once again anyway because in order to have absolutes there needs to be non absolutes.

If the postmodern from the late 1950s represented learning as a move from the centre, a move to deny a centre, a move from the grand narrative, a move from the linear ...........AND to consider the relativism of culture, identity, environment, etc then it says that learning is inherently nomadic rather than homogenous, ....... that learning relies on relevance and curiosity far more than memory or the system.

e.g.
When quite young, I can remember looking at modern art where it was said literally that form was the content. This gave us, through the system of reductionism, the object. e.g. Ad Reinhart with his black square on black paintings. It was at that time that my thoughts were more with an environment than a system hence artists like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys offered relevance and curiosity beyond the lineal. Mostly I considered this post-object rather than the ubiquity of the lateral ‘postmodern’ that floats free and seemingly today is appropriated to stand in for everything and anything. From 1995, with the birth proper of the www it now makes sense that "postmodern" has mutated the modern to reflect a change into the movement it always wanted to be ...... i.e. a hyperlink to the 360 degrees of an infinite meta-narrative with its global network of moderators and always connected. (lateral plus lineal and neither a system but an environment)

Problem is that most of the time people find some relative truth, but many believe and act as if it is the TOTAL truth.

Oh dear, pour Scout is pestered by the odd roving SDA, Mormon or J Witness. I agree that they are pesky but they are hardly proof that the church seeks to control what we think and force belief down our throats.

My point about the existence or non-existence of God is that the present debate, determined as it is by natural science, can only ask after the existence of God in the category of being. It is rather the case that the God referred to in the Judeo/Christian tradition is understood as belonging to the category of event. This necessarily involves history. Nor is this a case of a supernatural agent causing an event but the truth that that event draws attention to. This is the why the history of Israel is important and why theology can be judged by its fruits, its outcomes and also why this tradition cannot be tied to other theistic traditions. So we can answer, yes God exists but not in the category of being.

John Warren is right about our minds being attracted to certain constructs and that this goes some way towards explaining some religious ideation. However the result is nativist religion that is similar to untutored theology that we find in common belief but a far cry from the developed Christian position. I have an essay on my OLO home page whose link is broken at the moment. I will restore it tonight