Comment on Academic Freedom Strikes Again! by wesley kime.
@george: Our dear friend George,
For quite a few years now I have followed your posts on this site. Yours in cowpoke lingo I have read with more than passing amusement, generating from me responses comparable in style, perhaps too much style, and hopefully in conviviality. It’s been fun, perhaps more fun than informative. Cowpoke lingo, the essence of which is simplicity and a curious frankness and a commensurate dearth of empathy, can go where learned polemics cannot, but cannot take us beyond the shoot-out, which leaves us both rather devoid of life. Something else – what? — is necessary to take us both where we so long to go.
So it is with special interest that I’ve read your most recent exchanges with Sean which have been considerably more revealing and informative of your personality and thinking than yours and mine in ersatz cow-talk, stuck in a rut a-chasin’ that same ole tumble weed on this-ear ontological badlands. And as you have seemed to include me in your conversations with Sean, may I presume to insert some thoughts expressed in the way I speak at home? And at uncharacteristic length. It’s a break from our cow-shtick, which I depart from with some regret and, I hope, only temporarily.
One sentence directed to both of us (July 21, 2017 at 3:36 pm) especially caught my attention: You see Christians as WANTING to believe God and in Him. Indeed we do. I would like to think we do, and pray to. Perhaps not always sufficiently ardently as we would, yes, want. Frankly, and proudly, our goal – mine certainly – is to wholeheartedly believe in Him. That desire, so far merely another unique human sentiment, is crucial, crucial, but must be only the beginning of the process. Thus invited – His essence is to put our free will first, and so we must very ardently WANT Him and invite Him – He sends a preternatural power, His own power, to take over for us. “Without me ye can do nothing,” Christ said. And with Him “all things are possible.” Now that’s totally opaque to the “natural man,” who see it only as “foolishness,” to use St. Paul’s KJV word. But simple to Christians, those who chose His path, which is not the majority of Christians, alas, better termed hypocrites, and recognized and rightly flaunted as such to grateful disbelievers.
Next you caught my attention by putting first on your list of Christian proclivities that “they interpret the presence of God through feelings, observations and scripture.” May I, with tongue in cheek and a bit of a pang in my heart, remind you that this whole site, Sean’s focus certainly, has been to promote evidence, not merely (while emphasizing) faith, belief, feelings, scripture? As is my wont a scripture comes to mind, perhaps ironically for just having promoted evidence, but it nicely encapsulates the way I see it: “I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also. 1 Corinthians 14:15 NASB.
It isn’t as though you have not recognized that evidence is important to all of us, in varying degrees, with Sean strongly. What I am hoping is that you personally recognize that to some of us evidence is high, not low, on the list. It is, in fact, crucial. It is the God-assigned moiety, supplementing and when necessary superseding our “feelings,” which we cherish but which do go flat, as God Himself has warned.
Thus my backlit clouds and Sean’s flagella. They are, I submit, evidence, not simply chair-born emanations of platonic logic, which availeth little. So articulate and loud is this evidence that we have no choice but to believe. That is the vector: evidence leading to faith.
So articulate and loud evidences are they that God’s own voice can be heard in them – discerned, if you prefer that He use other neural circuits than the one that specifically involves the tympanic membrane, the 8th nerve, and sundry central processors, a complex system which itself is, yes, evidence. That sound-perception circuit is just one among the many receptor circuits for receiving His messages that God his equipped our brains with. A God resourceful enough to create those brains in the first place would be expected to install a generous array of communion systems.
Accessible, alas, also to Satan and thus serial killers. Which brings us to the crux of it all, all our beliefs, and where the evidence leads: the Great Controversy and the existence not only of God but also of Satan in, for the present, total and deadly conflict, with us as collateral damage. Which set me to dancing with the idea of asking you a facetious-Socratic question, not in cowtalk, does your agnostic questioning of God’s existence also encompass Satan’s existence? I wouldn’t be surprised – this seems almost the universal mode, not just among agnostics but too many Christians – that whereas you do have an honest question about God’s existence, even a nagging suspicion that he does, you descend into belly laughs at the very idea of a Satan, Flip Wilson (“the devil made me do it”) notwithstanding. But with only God, and without Satan, the whole picture just disintegrates into fluttering pixels, food for doubt indeed.
Which easily and instantly explains another monumental roadblock to your “journey” – the apparent cruelty and, as some gleefully proclaim, actual evilness of God Himself, as so honestly, but not gleefully, disclosed in the Bible. But the same Bible’s main message is of a God who “so loved the world that He gave His own Son that whosever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That God is loving comes through blazingly clear in the bible, in the life and atoning sacrifice of Jesus, comes through so overwhelmingly that the Satan-inspired misdeeds, we call them sins, are lost in glory. I love this one, love the way it’s put: “Behold, I have caused your iniquities to pass from you.” And this one, “Note then the kindness and the severity of God.” Romans 11:22 ESV. O that kindness, without which we are naught but ephemeral and pointless quarks; O that severity, without which the Great Controversy could never end. But it will.
But – to go back to the crux – all this works only in the context of a Great Controversy. If the Great Controversy cannot be perceived, what we see around us in the sky and under the microscope, and in Washington and hospitals and morgues, all that evidence, will remain but fodder for doubt, lots of it, unremitting, open to multiple interpretations.
Look, George, you’re a good man. Somehow, ole pard, I’ve developed a curious affection for you, yew ole rascal! Not as a target for shoot ’em up evangelism but for a hug. Carry on! Hope to see you at the Grand Roundup!
wesley kime Also Commented
Academic Freedom Strikes Again!
@george: Dear ole pard, For giving offense I don’t feel compelled to apologize, as the pop culture requires. For imposing confusion, I do, with pleading hands and furrowed sweating brow. I apologize! Meanwhile Sean, for whom we’re so grateful, is all no-nonsense and clear. When in doubt, consult him.
Carry on, friend!
Academic Freedom Strikes Again!
@george: Dear ole pard George: I am in receipt of your latest set of Georgian questions: First: Embedded in the answer (no religious person has ever answered yes) is “Has God ever actually spoken to you?” Second: Ergo, “Kind of leaves us on our own to use our own faculties doesn’t it?”
Of course and with relish I’ll take the bait, as has been my pleasure and privilege for, as you say, like 8 years or more. However this time in more, though not wholly, the style of dialectic than dialect a la Rick O-Shay or Will Rogers. BTW Rogers elevated his dialect beyond dialectic, even, and so do we, don’t we?
So you’ve been asking (as is your egg-nostic wont, may I insert, winking) religious people for years and years and never yet heard anybody answer that God has actually talked to them? Not surprised. You wouldn’t in the legalist and Laodicean circles you’ve been socializing in (or, ahem, in them badlands circles ya’ll been goin’ roun’ ‘n roun’ in – couldn’t resist that hoop trope, you know me), which excludes serial killers, who hear some god without letup bugging them to do ungodly things, as they zealously witness in court. Hmmm… I hear an ear-splitting egg-nosticogeorgian question popping out of that one!
But He does, really. At the beginning He did routinely, in pleasant evening walks in the woods with the two new humans He’d just created. But, having been created with free will as well as ears, they decided they’d rather hear Satan and his serially ungodly shtick. You cannot serve – certainly not talk to – God and Satan. A sound-proof curtain fell between man and God, a total barrier, a wall, a great wall (Trump’s wall should be so lucky) between man and God, a communication barrier plus radio interference plus electromagnetic wave cosmic hacking. No more casual, pleasant God-to-man chats while strolling in the woods. A situation requiring salvation and the intervention of God in the form of Man, who did speak and talk directly to man. And His coming, and talking, made it possible for eventual restoration of those face-to-face evening chats in the woods of whispering pines of which we are not speaking loudly or urgently enough. For God did not simply shrug us off and retreat to some alternate more appreciative universe, to start to answer your second question. Can’t wait to work it further.
He Himself has actually talked directly to people, I’ll say it again. And if you had asked your question to Matthew or Peter or John you would have heard a resounding, shouting, ringing YES! And over history He has singled a certain few to talk to if less directly, like my best friends Isaiah and Paul (whom I enjoy hearing at least as much as you, for different reasons, dear pard), on condition they relay the message to the rest of us, which is why we have the Bible, to which EG White constantly directs us, thanks to His talking to her too.
But you know all that, you’ve heard tell as long as you’ve been hanging around this here corral, even while you’ve been asking us whether God has ever talked to us. Your ears have heard only “no’s” and not our “Yes we have, through the Bible, through creation, through the Royal Law of Love, and certainly through backlit clouds and babbling brooks and whispering pines.” Having heard only “no’s,” you ergo yourself right on to: “kind of leaves us on our own faculties, doesn’t it?” He that hath ears, let him hear, like the Man said, loud and clear.
Well, OK, if you must. Yup, we do of course have faculties, God-given you are reminded, and of course He expects, requires, us to use them – He that hath ears let him hear, like the Man says. And we’d be left only with those frail resources if indeed, as not a few Christians would zealously tell you (the ones who honestly answer no to your “have you actually…” question), that God, assuming He exists, set the Evo wheel to spinning and then yawned and stretched (not rested) and moseyed away. But would our God really abandon us like that? He would not, has not. He has promised, promised sworn and covenanted, to be with us always, and to talk with us through the bible and whispering pines and in other mysterious ways, adding, “without Me ye can do nothing.” So much for faculties. Glad you asked!
Academic Freedom Strikes Again!
@David Morris: Oh indeed, indeed! I concur, and I add my thanks to Sean.
Recent Comments by wesley kime
Beyond the Creation Story – Why the Controversy Matters
@Ken: Ken, re. yours of May 31, 15 12:42 pm: … those standing up for FB28 have every right to do so…until they [presumably the FBs, not the communicants, although either could be changed in a twinkling of any eye] are democratically changed.”
FB28? What’s that? You probably know better than I. Genesis 1 I can quote; FB28 I can’t. And won’t bother to check. I couldn’t even tell you where to find those FBs. I read what you say more assiduously than the FBs. (What’s FB? FaceBook?)
In the first place I think you’ve got Adventism wrong, or at least Adventism as I know it. Well, maybe you haven’t, the postmodernist kind anyway. I’m pre-catechistic, ergo prehistoric, alas. I’m that old.
FB28 or whatever it is, if it WERE changed, democratically or otherwise, dramatically or creepingly, by evolution or edict, even if expunged and expurgated in the interest of big-tent accord, which seemed on the verge of happening pre-T. Wilson, and may yet, I wouldn’t even know it until I saw it here. You’d know before I would.
With or without and despite FB28 or whatever, or EduTruth, I’d still honor Genesis 1. I’d honor it, A, by faith, because the Bible, i.e. God, says so. A validated faith validated by B, The evidence, good scientific falsifiable evidence. And C, the consummate cosmic multi-vectored syllogism. Everything fits.
Seriously, though, discussion has to start somewhere and be referenced by something, for convenience if not citizenship. But I’d prefer to start, if granted “every right,” with Genesis 1, at the beginning.
Dr. Ariel Roth’s Creation Lectures for Teachers
@Ken: “something Dr. Kime said struck a very strange chord in me: that a Chair in ID at Harvard would be a quantum leap (forward – my edit) while such a Chair would be a step backward at LSU. I’ m very sorry Wes, but for me to honestly investigate reality, such double standard is not acceptable. …[therefore] I think I’m coming to the end of my Adventist journey.”
I can, of course, dear friend, understand why, and respect that, you would see the two directions of leaping, forward and backward, by Harvard and LSU, as a double standard.
But might it also be seen as simple Einsteinian Relativity? It all depends on from whence you’re starting or observing. Two venues, Harvard vs. LSU, two vectors, not two standards. At any rate, a parting of our ways. The Chair did it. A very unlucky ill-omened Chair, from the start.
Parting — that indeed is sad, especially this parting. I grieve too. In sadness we are agreed. That’s not double speak; only you could I say that to.
For these several years you, and your courteous ways, even your questions, have been most fascinating, even endearing, inspiring to both poetic and, I now regret, rasping response. I’ve so much enjoyed your postings, always looked for them first, and appreciated your uncommon patience and politeness, and our camaraderie in the bomb shelter and on the grandstand. Too bad the Chair, our double bed, didn’t work out.
As benediction, maybe we can all get together again, somewhere. Meanwhile, the Mizpah, which I think I should be the one to deliver, seeing it was, you say, my one-liner that was the last straw, for which I’ll get heck all around, and rightly so: “The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.” Genesis 31:49.
What the heck, have some popcorn for the road. And don’t forget your cyber plaque. You will be remembered, appreciated, thought about, prayed for. Do come back soon.
Until then, your jousting friend, W
Strumming the Attached Strings
@Phillip Brantley: Excellent! I shall quote you: “learn something from Sean Pitman.” Indeed, indeed — there’s so much to learn from that man.
Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
@Bill Sorensen: “I don’t know if anyone has really been able to follow your thinking…”
A tad, a smidgeon, just slightly overstated maybe? Just a tad, just a smidgeon, at the cost of not a few dislikes? Well, I for one do follow it. And with great admiration. Great.
What does it take to be a true Seventh-day Adventist?
@Ervin Taylor: Out of purely poetic symmetry of rhetoric, Ervin, your trademark whimsical “…I guess someone who rejects…” is asking for — I was waiting for it! — a Pitman’s “I guess someone who accepts…” Lovely diptych, ping and pong.
