Disqus - Latest Comments for dtatusko

Re: revised statement of faith

dtatusko — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:26:13 -0000

wow. thanks. i will need to re-read this a few times to soak it all in brother. a lot of wisdom here from you and angela for which i am very grateful. peace.

Re: revised statement of faith

dtatusko — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:08:27 -0000

this is my last stop on a very long train ride. i need closure... it's where my calling began, i need to persist to see if it's where it needs to continue. but if i don't keep at it now, i will always wonder and that would be another shackle you know?

but don't apologize for the challenge. it means a lot to me. seriously. keep pushing.

peace.

Re: god is revealed where god is hidden

dtatusko — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:26:24 -0000

actually not a rev., but working on it ;-)

i think that the idea of sola scriptura is good, but with severe qualification:

1) put the phrase in context. this was a way for the reformers to separate themselves from the papacy by subscribing to an alternative authority structure. of course even then it became colored by the various traditions that popped up out of the reformation. i don't for a second subscribe to it as an absolute to govern the church due to its origins or its inherent fallibility. nonetheless i think it's a good idea to check against our authority structures.

2) it is never scripture alone, but scripture as legitimated through a given traditional authoritative interpretation of it. sola scriptura is always through the medium of a tradition which is why we will always have disputes and have had them since the reformation. by critiquing the social boundaries of tradition i am, by default, critiquing the way that sola scriptura actually has reinforced traditional boundaries. either one of them is right and the rest are damned, or all of them are flawed. evidence points to the latter and if so, god is revealed in far more places than "the church."

general revelation can be salvific, but does not do much if one has no clue what it is. then again, i am not sure many christians understand what it really means. baptism should be followed by teaching for this reason.

Re: god is revealed where god is hidden

dtatusko — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:47:27 -0000

i think that there are places where other see god but i cannot - yet. i have seen that in people in other religious traditions. but that does not mean that i now belong in a buddhist community or a pentecostal community. my point is that our spiritual home is part of a journey as we develop in our faith. we cannot lock the door to our religious homes, but have to keep them unlocked and get out to explore as we are able. home is where you can put your feet up, but that does not mean that you will never move if god calls you somewhere else.

Re: dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution

dtatusko — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:57:56 -0000

the strawman is that you are assuming these are must haves for evolutionary theories to have muster. they are not! evolution is the theory that populations naturally select genes and mutate over time. that it. that's all that it is. the notion of human origins argues that homo sapiens shared common ancestry in a POPULATION with other primates and the gene pool we share simply won out and THEN adapted over time. that's why all of your confusion with cosmology here is a strawman. you want evolutionary biology to be what ken miller is NOT arguing and thus you are reaching wrong conclusions.

moreover, the "assertions" to which you refer are actually called "hypotheses" that when tested either confirm phenomena or disconfirm pheonomena. when confirmed over time, these hypotheses become theories due to their power to explain and predict phenomena. that's the fricking scientific method! you almost equate evolution to the search for aliens or alien abductions which bear no predictabilty, are not the BEST explanations for phenomena, and cannot be dublicated with various sources of evidence other than personal narratives. that's why it is an ethnographic interest in anthropology, not a scientific matter!

Also, saying "e. somehow amino acids got formed;" just shows how little you clearly understand the theories that are used to describe how amino acids form. for instance, we can create these acids in labs in a water base under specific conditions. we know what the conditions were like on earth when these acids developed over a very very long time with intense heat, base chemicals, and glass-like surfaces at the boiling hot bottom of crater wells. university scientists at institutions like oregon, harvard, and others are studying these pheonomenon that CAN be replicated with a compelling argument that the origin of human life is of alien origin. that would explain in part how the base chemicals got on this planet and makes sense if you think about how raw the planet was in its first few millenia.

some physicists are convinced that string theory works. others are not. it's up for debate. why is it up for debate? no none has observed the phenomenon! it was only decades after special relativity that it the theory was confirmed again and again which is why it is the basis of physics today. likewise it was only decades after bohr that it was confirmed he was right about quantum fluctuations and einstein was wrong.

arguing about whether evolution is true or not is like arguing with a physicist is gravity is real or not. just because you do not "See" them in the academic field arguing different evolutionary models to explain observed phenonena does not mean that they do! regularly. they present papers, which pass through peer-review, which get presented at conferences etc...

Re: dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution

dtatusko — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:06:04 -0000

"evolutionists" i am assuming you mean evolutionary biolgists lest we confuse science with ideology, make no assertions about the origin of matter, only its change in populations over time - and that includes bacteria. cosmology and evolutionary biology make two very different sets of arguments about matter and you cannot confuse the two. so you claim here is again, a strawman.

Re: dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution

dtatusko — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:07:14 -0000

einstein was wrong, dead wrong about particle physics. his formulae to harmonize relativity with complementarity don't work. bohr's do as further tests concluded over the decades since. it's not faith in a worldview that makes nuclear fission work. it's mathematical proof. the irrationality here is that you can predict the unpredictable. but maybe you should talk about this with an evolutionary biologist and a particle physicist who can far more adequately demonstrate these basic principles and even more.

i think evolutionists know what problems they are working with including miller. to tell him that he does not understand his science is just stupid. it's like dawkins telling me i don't understand theology. you have a pretty impressive straw-man a-brewing here.

Re: dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution

dtatusko — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:59:06 -0000

there are countless mathematical proof that demonstrate this phenomenon from the formation of crystals to the quantum mechanics on which that hard drive operates in your computer. bohr was right and einstein was wrong. einstein argued that order must come from order. bohr, a christian by the way, argued that quantum mechanics predicts a far more irrational and disordered basis for the order we perceive. what's fantastic is that even that disordered and chaotic sub-atomic "world" is still mathematically predictable. pretty much axiomatic in physics for the past 50 or so years.

Re: euthanizing the word "unbibllical"

dtatusko — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:49:41 -0000

Always engaging John :-)

Actually I posted a statement of faith a while ago here: http://notes-from-offcenter.com/2009/03/25/stat.... But I have never been one to feel the need to clarify or justify my creeds to anyone since they are always subject to change.

I think you are getting caught up in how I am using the world probability here. Statistically, all numbers are probabilities and can be very high probabilities and very low probabilities. For any probability there is a degree of error behind it and also a variance to account for other possibilities. For example, to whom was Paul really addressing Romans? Big debate. Was the Torah written by Moses, are the source critics right, or is it a combo of them, etc.

Despite these probabilities that govern one's reading of the text, and despite the fact that we can be horribly wrong about much of it even now, it can still inspire worship - which I think we can both agree is the primary function scripture ought to have in any community of faith. That we can be wrong in a specific interpretation and still be inspired to worship the God for whom it is a witness.

For you, your expression Jesus is Lord is still a probability. Surely there are more ways than one to understand that statement not just among communities of faith today, but throughout Christian history beginning with the communities represented in scripture. If I am wrong and there is only one way to understand these things, then you are right and saying that these are probabilities is wrong. But then with all of the conflicting opinions throughout the history of the church, who is the most correct?

to answer that question requires an assumed frame of reference, and that's my entire point with this post.

Re: euthanizing the word "unbibllical"

dtatusko — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:56:43 -0000

it is probabalistic. any historical criticism or theological proposition is. some propositions are more likely to be true that others. not sure calling that "gobbledygook" is correct or helpful.

if you happened to be in the same spot as the events of the scriptures with those who were writing, then your comparison to you wife makes sense. i don't take on faith that my wife loves me, i can see it and ask her of that every day. however, my belief that peter denied christ three times, that god is triune, etc. are rooted in something qualitatively different.

but i am less traditionalist that you. traditions are only media for the kingdom of god being revealed, and flawed media at that. the same goes with doctrine and the development of how the bible has been interpreted and used within various communities of faith through time. that lamp unto the feet of the people of god has not been the same. origen and athanasius, for example, would not even recognize what american christianity is.

none of this means i discount scripture at all. it just means that we are responsible to study it harder and not rely on tradition to mediate our understanding unless we interrogate the assumptions of those traditions in the process. if exegesis were not a probablistic enterprise we would not have libraries full of commentaries with well-reasoned, but often contradictory conclusions about most, if not all, of the passages in the bible.

i am not giving fundamentalists the terms inerrant or infallible either. i frankly don't care who "owns" them. they both point to a very ideologically misguided reading.

when you say "what Christianity once affirmed" it sounds gain like you are assuming that Christianity was at one time a homogenous set of beliefs to which all people who called themselves Christians consented. There have been many different, often radically different, expressions of Christianity. again, this is due to traditionally mediated probabilities of what one tradition believes to be more likely true than another. as a methodist you have to be aware of this whenever you talk to a reformed christian about "TULIP"! yet in spite of all of this, i still recite the apostles creed on sundays and believe it, i can read the 2nd helevetic confession and buy it, etc. but doctrine must adapt or it becomes idolatry. adaptation is always a function of what it more or less likely to be true given one's socio-historical conditions and functional knowledge of scripture - none of which is ever static or homogenous.

Re: dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution

dtatusko — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:36:47 -0000

"How do you know there's no evidence that everything was spoken into existence?"

If we don't know if something is there or not, it is not evidence.

I am not claiming a faith in science at all, simply what science can know and what it cannot. Similarly what theology can explain, and what it cannot.

The idea that science only does well with what is empirically "in front of it" betrays the nature of hypothesizing and theory. In Baconian science only what was empirical was acceptable, hypothesizing was not. Science is about making predictions about reality as much as a reality that is immediately present to the senses. Because of this, that computer you are using to debate this is possible. No one could actually "see" quanta until they were predicted to be there.

It just seems that your expectations of science and your expectations of what the bible reasonable tells us are confused and therefore make no sense.

Re: dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution

dtatusko — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:04:06 -0000

there is no evidence that god spoke anything into existence, at all. what we have is a narrative that one ought to take on faith. that does nothing to offer a counterfactual to miller's claims at all. the best evidence suggests that the genesis creation narratives are to illustrate the ordering activity of god, not the creation out of nothing. this is not unlike the ordering of the temple to suggest that the cosmos was ordered to inspire worship. reading it like a science (or history) text not only betrays the scripture itself, but renders an unlikely and i would say very wrong reading of it.

in short, if you can present evidence from another source that god actually spoke anything into existence then it might work. however, we cannot get that from any other source than religious texts and so, it is incompatible with any scientific hypothetical construct.

Re: euthanizing the word "unbibllical"

dtatusko — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:44:44 -0000

john i am not sure where you are getting the four points you present here, but if anything they illustrate the other side of what i think is a false set of assumptions that are not helpful.

by invoking the term "lower" it is an assumption to a qualitatively higher or "better" or "more orthodox" understanding of scripture. but even here it is reliant on a set of assumptions. i think we have more reasonable hermeneutics than others based on the level of probabilities we can confer to certain arguments, but nothing more. i favor a hermeneutic that sticks to more likely and less likely depending on the focus of exegesis and nothing more. to confer a degree of biblicism is an ideological assertion i think presents us with more harm than good and that is my argument here.

as you are well aware, i think inerrancy and infallibility are themselves absurd assertions that should be jettisoned at all costs, but that is for yet another post which i have done before and may do again.

anything can be an epiphenomenon. forms of liberalism (depending on how you use the term - i use the term only in the classical sense of a way of thinking that is adaptable to new evidence as it is presented) as well as forms of conservatism (including fundamentalism which clearly is a reaction to liberalism as i define it) can both be epiphenomenal. yet liberalism has persisted in its form from fosdick and movements before that (like the social gospel movement) to current forms today. this suggests a much deeper movement that has deeper roots than any empiphenomenal movement would have (since such would be reliant on something else for which it is a response).

the point here is that if i understand something like the creation narrative to suggest something other than creatio ex nihilo, some will say this is "low" biblicism depending on the anchor value they set for what "high" or even "moderate" biblicism is. it's about your frame of reference and that frame of reference to those who scream that someone is being "unbiblical" especially in reaction to a reading of the bible itself, tends to the idological and it results in lame name calling rather than a constructive hermeneutic.

Re: go where god is, not where you believe god ought to be.

dtatusko — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:00:42 -0000

i can't really do bell all that well. very choppy stuff. if god is contained in human religious structures, then god is not real. god truly is dead because we killed god. what i have found to my delight is that this is not true. religions clip the wings off of the divine hoping that the bird will stay caged like a pet. fortunately this bird keeps growing the wings back and escaping from our grasp.

Re: go where god is, not where you believe god ought to be.

dtatusko — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:58:27 -0000

i don't think we become post-religious as much as differently religious. peter berger uses the term "plausibility structure" to describe a social structure in which certain kinds of belief and expressions of belief are more plausible than in other structures. what many post denominational or ex-churched christians are looking for is a religion that is a better plausibility structure for the reception of revelation as they have experienced it. it is what defines the post boomer generations. we deeply yearn for traditions that do not seem to exist. i think we are in the process of creating them and building our own plausibility structures now hence the ambiguity and sense of disconnectedness.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:30:10 -0000

that's not a circle, it's really just a very simple question.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:29:26 -0000

how are you studying it? it's not how long you spend on it, but how you spend that time that matters. i am not being smug, just asking specific questions about your methods.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:13:35 -0000

i think i respond to silva to engage in conversations like these which i think are instructive and helpful. as most people in the US do share a more literalistic reading of the bible, it is important to be able to understand from where these views originate and then how to educate people to a better knowledge. as i said in the first sentence, this is an opportunity to learn what not to do, and then to reconstruct what we ought to do in kind.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:10:43 -0000

well, we don't know if god even "thinks" since in god there is no time at all. so from god's "view" whatever that means, what we know of god is how the historically relative media of revelation comes to us. your understanding of god looks absolutely nothing like that of origen who was central to the history of the church in the first few centuries. was he also "wrong" in his rendering of scripture?

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:08:14 -0000

it's not that it's just subject to interpretation, it is in its very presentation already interpreted. if you take the bible seriously and study it beyond the words you see (which are translations of other words) you will understand why. but i have my doubts that you want to study it in its depths. and that is the problem here. as tracy indicates above this is an act of faith, not one of propositional logic.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:06:12 -0000

so, jesus said that the 66 books to which you refer are "the bible"? you evaded the question.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:12:05 -0000

where in scripture does it say "in these 66 books and no other". who closed the canon? again, i am not saying that the canon of scriptures is unimportant, but that you are overstating what they actually are and how we got the 66 books we have. you know that catholics include the intertestamental literature right?

does god reveal god's self in preaching? how about in theological texts and commentary on the bible? you want it to be "either obey some abstract idea of infallible scripture" or "believe whatever you want". that's a false polarization of what we actually do when we read any text and that is interpret it in light of our current culture, language, psychology, tradition, etc.

by the way God did not literally write anything down. that what muslims believe, but not christians. for muslims the word is the qu-ran, for christians the word is the resurrected Christ. that is about as basic a component of what makes Christian faith unique that to miss that is to miss it all.

finally, when you make the judgment of whether or not something agrees with scripture you are making that judgment not on the text, but in how you understand that text. this is interpretation. preaching is interpretation. reading is interpretation. the manuscript that you read is already interpreted since it is a translation. if you think you are standing on a rock with the mythic understanding of scripture you desire, then something is wrong. the rock is the risen christ, not the bible alone.

Re: confronting the slippery slope against homosexuality

dtatusko — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:01:21 -0000

thanks for judging my heart. kind of how the pharisees behaved towards jesus. as you remember jesus did not get along very well with them for this reason. but thanks for judging me anyway, as jesus also commanded you to do. or, could admit the obvious slippery slope here that has no merit on it's own.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:07:05 -0000

you are assuming that god used paul as nothing other than a tool to write his letters. there is nothing in scripture to give us that idea other than a poorly rendered exegesis of one word, theopneustos. inspiration is animation and order, it is life. scripture in this sense is a sacrament, a means to the mystery of god that can never be confused with the very being of god. look at how the spirit is consistently used throughout the corpus of scripture and you have your answer. inerrancy betrays this to advance a harmful and incorrect understanding of how scripture functions as a witness to god's work among people, and not as an infallible source of truth.

Re: ken silva's reading problem

dtatusko — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:50:03 -0000

muslims work from muhammad backwards to the torah in the same way. it is a deep tradition in christianity to start with the gospels, work through the pauline letters, and then torah, prophets, writings, in that order. this is why in catholic and orthodox mass we stand for the gospel reading to symbolize is centrality for all. moreover, the core of the gospel is the divine mystery that inspires our understanding of it which then filters through the rest of the canon. fundamentalists have it all backwards and tend to start with the law, then paul's statements on the law, then the apocalyptic texts that speak on the outcomes of impurity (again the law), then focus on the sayings of jesus that are related to the law. hence, jesus had to die in our place to ward off god's wrath (more rule of law). so the law is central to fundamentalism, not the resurrected christ who fulfilled that same law. this is especially odd since paul and jesus are clear about their radical re-structuring of the law in terms of god's grace and mercy that gives us freedom to do as jesus did.