@george: Thanks for addressing your very informative and cordial post …

Comment on The Creator of Time by wesley kime.

@george: Thanks for addressing your very informative and cordial post to both of us. My personal instant response is that the first sentence of your last paragraph, though lacking a shred of standard theological arguments, is the most arresting of your whole post, and perhaps the unwitting essence and core of how you as an agnostic and we as serious Christians differ, and I’ll belabor it. As to your issues, they do need addressing – again, – as I see that Sean has already done in his no-nonsense, quiet, thorough, thoroughly scientific, and effective way.

So flipping to the last paragraph, you murmured, “Gentlemen,…I hope I have not personally offended you.”

That you would entertain such a concern is ingratiating, polite, and politically correct, and, alas, rooted in your inevitable experience with too often un-born-again Christians so prone to indeed take offense, and worse (Duck! Dive for the bomb shelter! Where’s the soap!). Possibly to your chagrin and denial, your concern, however, even smacks of true, not our too feeble version of, Christ-like-ness.

But seriously, I’m speaking for myself as well as, I venture, Sean, your addressees, how could we possibly be personally offended?! We’re not. Surprise! Oh, maybe I’m offended that you see us as offended – I say, tongue in cheek and hopefully born again heart.

But to get back to seriousness, not offended but grieved we may be in behalf of our God and the glorious things you are forfeiting, and disappointed at some of your familiar analogies and conclusions, and that, as I have put it in cow-talk, for years we seem to have gone in circles, but in no way are we personally offended.

Quite the opposite. Truth to tell, in many ways perhaps inexplicable, I have, as I said in a response to a recent post you directed to me, somehow developed a personal affection for you, you old rascal. Hardly from ideological harmony, it is improbably based on your professionalism and, as is easily inferred, your extraordinary education, which happens to be in agnosticism (any undertaking, even one antithetical to mine, so studiously honed over a lifetime gets an A for effort). More likely, you struck a certain cord in me that is vanishingly rare in the general population, amusement by your disarming comic cowpoke way of expressing cosmic issues.

Well, pard, if at age 12 you got the boot from Sunday School for your impudence, you’re welcome here, as long as YOU have the patience to go in, and be in our, circles.

wesley kime Also Commented

The Creator of Time
@george: At the risk of seeming to celebrate your leaving more avidly and perhaps graciously than your familiar presence and participation, I always feel disposed, when one of our agnostics finally grows weary of going in circles and drawing everybody else into the dreary orbit and decides to move on to other ontological badlands, to bow my head and recite the mizpah, a Biblical farewell peculiarly apt because it was recited at a departure reconciliation of two individuals one of whom had just conned the other in a peculiarly stressful way, whereupon he had reacted in an especially objectionable way. (Genesis 31:49). “The LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.” I’d put it in cowtalk, ole pard, but somehow the KJV sounds more poetic. Hope to see you again, friend. Beware of all those tumbleweeds, which, if you squint your eyes, look strangely like busts of Plato rolling and tumbling over each other.
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The Creator of Time
@George: I perceive that your familiar and heretofore endearing agnostic proclamations are being proclaimed with, to my senses, less and less bonhomie and more and more iron-toned ex cathedralese, even while Sean, with preternatural but perhaps with a hint of waning patience, continues to respond with no-nonsense point by point rebuttals.

Accordingly, I have less inclination to respond by repartee, even in cow-talk. Instead of again grappling with their content, I now turn my attention to the existential phenomenon of your proclamations, yours and so many others, constituting, as Old Line SDAs have always expected, a gathering hailstorm of systematic agnosticism-atheism, a strong sign of the end. As our resident ever more refractory agnostic, you are on the winning side of the hailstorm, until the end. Congratulations, pard! I cite for your delectation this web news, a report (in the form of an artificially intelligent novel, such as Voltaire was wont to offer) that your proclamation that there is no need for God is now being technically empowered by artificial intelligence (Link).

But seriously, friend, have a festive artificially Godless day.


The Creator of Time
@george: While you offer Kant and Hume to Sean, you flipped Jiminy Cricket to your pard, and I’ll take what I can get, especially if it detours me down Disney Lane. I forgot to mention Joshua Meador in Walt’s personal stable of artists. OK, back to Hume and Kant, throw in Hegel and now you gone from Disney Lane with me to Didactic Lane for you and Sean, and Lindley. Welcome, Lindley!


Recent Comments by wesley kime

Dr. Walter Veith and the anti-vaccine arguments of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche
Informative and stimulating, but proceeding into more confusion. A veteran of Moderna vaccinations, I trust, hope, they are effective, at least until otherwise. The whole business, being part of End Times, is in the hands of God, not humans expert and as degreed as they may be.


Brilliant and Beautiful, but Wrong
Brilliant, beautiful, and so right! Speaking of your presentation at LLU recently. Great to see you and your family (especially my namesake, Wes. God bless! WK


Complex Organisms are Degenerating – Rapidly
@Bob Helm: Dr. Sanford is very familiar to most of us. He was invited to speak at LLU several years ago and I and a great many were privileged to hear him.


Evolution from Space?
Hats off yet again to Sean for pursuing this topic as a scientist should, no nonsense, and in it’s proper setting — as a revival of one of the ancient ideas recently upgraded as a desperate alternative to the increasingly compelling intelligent design data. I had occasion to review panspermia a few years ago and as is my wont I found it more amusing than scientific. If you would like what was intended to be a satirical response to panspermia and other related curiosities you could check out: http://www.iessaythere.com/black-hole-humor.html
Meantime, Sean’s article is of far more cogent worth.


The Sabbath and the Covenants (Old vs. New)
As he has done on this site many times, Sean in his line-by-line-item response to C. White (not EG or EB) has, to my mind, clearly enunciated the issue and resolution.

When all the hermeneutics, quoting, and arguing and inordinately judgmental riposte are over, it comes down, as I understand it, to two things: 1) Whether the 7th day Sabbath (whether enunciated in the famous 10 commandments or otherwise) is still valid, and 2) Does the grace obtained by the vicarious sacrifice by the shedding of Christ’s blood or other divine process too deep for us to understand in this life, cover every sin automatically and without ado, altogether passively on our part, or is it only on condition that we first totally and deeply accept it? Other details always hassled forever are distractions.

I accept that I must accept it, wholly, actively, even with agony, with my whole being.