From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]: Covenant: 3. (Theol.) The promises of God as revealed in the Scriptures, conditioned on certain terms on the part of man, as obedience, repentance, faith, etc. [1913 Webster] I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for … [Read more…]
The web-site of New Scientist magazine has an interesting article on parasites and children with auto-immune diseases, but you can understand this blog-entry without reading that article. Investigations of third-world children with auto-immune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, have indicated that they sometimes do better against their diseases if they are infected with parasites. As … [Read more…]
It sounds strange to speak of God creating truths — even God, but I have two lines of reasoning that lead to this conclusion that God has created the truths of our universe, mathematical and metaphysical, as well as the things of our universe. I discuss this claim in my book To See a World … [Read more…]
In my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I used the term ‘universe’ to mean pretty much the Einsteinian universe: all that is bound by the same gravitational field as each mortal man, the Sun, the others stars in the Milky Way, the other observable galaxies, and so forth. This is … [Read more…]
Darwin is no problem to Christian thought. The facts gathered by biologists — including evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and brain-scientists — are themselves no problem. Certain thinkers, evolutionary biologists and so-called philosophers, have interpreted those facts in terms of a skepticism of a sort charitably described as reductionistic materialism. Such thinkers, as well as more rational … [Read more…]
I’ll speak of negative theology in a specific context — that of the form of Thomistic Existentialism which I’ve been struggling to develop. This sort of God-centered existentialism begins with the negative-theological insight that God is not This, where This can be any sort of thing or living creature. Some who try to read the … [Read more…]
I’m taking up a series of entries after several months… Hold on for a wild trip. I’ll speak mostly about some pagan ideas which have affected Christian thought, sometimes being adopted for valid reasons at the time. After all, the pagans knew many truths and gave them to us. It takes time, contemplation, and exploration … [Read more…]
In most of my posts, I’ve certainly seemed a pessimist, targeting the great problems of our age: moral decay and profound illiteracy in particular. As I’ve presented matters, modern men have the moral sensibilities of either self-righteous twelve year-olds or perverse twelve year-olds. Not options which are particularly attractive. Reading skills have decayed to the … [Read more…]
We are all liberals and individualists nowadays, even those who pretend otherwise (forget the Amish for a few minutes, please). Our views of self and society lead us lead us to act according to a cowardly form of prudence. Let me take a quote from the 1913 Webster as found in the Collaborative International Dictionary … [Read more…]
In “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, I noted that Melville thought Emerson and Thoreau to be morally insane — Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. agreed. Melville noted in one place that the morality of those Cambridge sages was a spiritualized materialism that masked a total lack of charity, a total lack … [Read more…]