May I presume to leapfrog speculation of the unknowable details …

Comment on The Creator of Time by wesley kime.

May I presume to leapfrog speculation of the unknowable details and try to summarize, as I read it, your uniquely comprehensive doctorate-level treatment (for which you have my eternal gratitude):

To empower human freewill by denying God’s foreknowledge is to deny God’s omniscience, thus His omnipotence, yea, thus His Godhood, thus even our salvation. It is to put man before God just as Satan, who himself wanted to be before God, invited mankind in the Garden of Eden to do likewise and is now inviting us into the Rice paddy.

wesley kime Also Commented

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: 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: @george: George, wonderful of you to include, just for me, Jiminy Cricket! (and oh, that luminous female goddess, of uncertain moral but of high morals). Brought back old memories! I’m so old I remember seeing the original first run in full if not mega screen when the nitrate film was fresh and not blotchy, and being delighted with the Disney art, if not his morals, which I admit, I didn’t pay as much attention to as you did. Or even to the goddess – I was that young.

As to Disney art, you no doubt know that he had a stable of really fine artists, who otherwise for livelihood would have had to resort to the WPA. Disney seemed to have a special interest in supporting artists, notably Peter Ellenshaw. I remember once, as a young man, meandering S Lake Street in old Pasadena and happening upon a smallish private gallery displaying 10-20 oil paintings by Peter Ellenshaw, all seascapes that were a-burst with laser sparkles, such as no other seascapist I had ever known had ever thought of much less tried. Most went for coarse rocks and breakers, fog, no sparkle. And nobody since has come close, though, aping him, I’ve tried. Breathtaking! And Charlie Chaplin’s personal pet artist (he was given his own trailer and would accompany Chaplin on location) was Grandville Redmond (incidentally a deaf mute), who, while Chaplin was playing hobos or Hitler, painted poppy-strewn southern California fields when there were only poppies, not freeways. (I’ve never tried to emulate Redmond.)

For art and comedy, Disney of Yore was the best, even better than Wile Coyote and Road Runner; for morals, I was more drawn to Sabbath School felt boards and illustrations of the Ten commandments and Jonah and the whale. Alas, New Generation Disney no longer goes for such morals. He’s got new award-winning ones, such morals as would startle Sartre and de Sade! But, alas again, nowadays it’s precisely the new Disney and ilk, their stables of artists long gone and long dead, that so many, even in sermons, seem to be resorting to for morals, if indeed they bother with such outdated stuff at all. But they retain the New Disney clips. Glad to see you still extract your morals from Old Disney. Me, I’ve advanced, and returned, to the KJV, also the New Living Bible, and the ESV, and of course EGW, and EducateTruth, and CS Lewis, and Plato for kicks – I have acquired a stable of revered resources, like Disney and Chaplin did artists.


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.