The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

[JackButler]

But

To a non believer, yes it would.

People who don’t know Christ are looking for a certainty before they place their faith in him. That’s not the way it works. The commitment has to be made first. Then comes the certainty.


That goes for eating a delicious steak to certifying your eternal existence. You first recognize God. Then you chose to pursue him or set back and wait on him. Ones a sure road to eternity in heaven and ones a sure road to never developing a relationship with him.

Free will. It has its perks and it has its responsibilities. The choice is each of ours to make. That’s the way God intended it.

But they ARE believers. They just believe in something slightly different than you. “Proof of Mohammed is found in the hearts of worshipping Muslims.” Is just as legitimate.

 

[JackButler]

I've seen a lot of scientists questioning the theory of evolution lately. There's even a video of someone asking the new version of Gronk AI what the odds are that life created itself out of random elements. According to Elon, Gronk is the most advanced AI to date. Gronk replied the odds were similar to taking all of the atoms in the entire universe and picking one specific atom, on the first try, blind folded. They then asked, what were the odds of one species evolving into another. Like dinosaurs into birds for instance. The odds of that were like picking a single grain of sand out of all of the sand on earth blind folded on the first try. Gronk came to the conclusion that not believing in creation was foolish. I agree. The first single celled organisms still have DNA. Think of the complexity of DNA. Do you really think that created itself in a puddle of goo?

I believe in adaptation, like wolves to poodles by breeding for specific traits or a specific bird who's beak shortened over thousands of years because it was able to find food more easily.

Elon and Gronk have both been wrong…a lot. For all I know Christianity may be the one true religion, but I don’t think Elon or his AI are proof of that.

 

[Texasbuckeye]

As far as I could read, Elon, nor Gronk, were trying to prove Christianity. It appears from my reading in the post that they were asked a question about evolution...and answered in a similar fashion any legitimate scientist would answer. The odds of life springing from the pool of primordial soup is next to zero.

Now science has the ultimate kick back to that odds ratio...well, we are here, therefore it isn't zero.

But they are forgetting to acknowledge other possibilities. It is much more likely we are descendants from aliens, the space seed theory is a much more likely theory to be correct than the big bang primordial soup theory. But we are also forgetting another possibility....creation. Something created us. We call that something God. And we believe His story is told in the Bible.

Do't get me wrong, there are a lot of other theories about how life origniated on earth. None have a bow so neatly tied around it as the God creation story though. Yes, some of the stuff is hard to swallow,. But when you get into the nitty gritty of the biochemistry that surrounds life, it isn't as far fetched as saying that came from nothing.

 

[Texasbuckeye]

But

But they ARE believers. They just believe in something slightly different than you. “Proof of Mohammed is found in the hearts of worshipping Muslims.” Is just as legitimate.

I touched on this in another post, but will re-state it for emphasis....

Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet, and that is all.

Jesus claimed he was God. He preached for three years he was God. He behaved like he was God. Not a prophet of God.

So either Jesus is right, or he is wrong. If he was right, and is God, then saying he is just a prophet is blasphemy and incorrect. If he was not God, and was just a prophet, then he was a terrible prophet and should not be elevated to the level of a prophet for another religion because he was coo-coo for cocopuffs.

So is faith in David Koresh or jim Jones on the same level as a muslim's faith in Mohammed, misdirected and incorrect? As a person who believes Jesus was divine, my answer is 100% yes.

And there is nothing contradictory about the Bible like we find about the Islamic teaching about Jesus. So you are comparing apples to grapes.

 

[Billinsd]

Islam works for over a billion…

Lots of followers for sure!!

 

[nagibson1]

I don't quite understand how being forced to fear a celestial dictator leads to love for my fellow man. Surely I don't need the former to be able to incorporate the latter.

I'm sure this has started a pissing match further down, but this is an old Christopher hithchens meme that has had some really good responses/rebuttals. Youtube will supply if one is interested. Hitchens was obsessed with Orwell, and smelled a dictator and a "ministry of love" (1984) even where it did not exist. Consequently he was strong on the libertarian principle, but really poor on the "just authority" principle. He lacked considerable nuance in discerning how hierarchy was just- what amounted to tyranny, servility, rebellion, and remissness. The right integration of these is wisdom- not advocating either without their right relations.

Considering the "argument" in this:
First, Dictators don't create, sustain, reveal to, redeem, or resurrect what they rule.
Second, dictaors don't rule in accordance with true justice. The Biblical claim is not that God makes arbitrary demands. It is that we create arbitrary values and moralities, and call them just, while suppressing our deep knowledge of true justice. God calls this "idolatry". His 'dictatorship' is that he dictates true justice- both deliberative and distributive. We claim he is hidden or should not allow suffering because his process seems to re-establish justivce WHILE simultaniously offering mercy to the very rebels that deserve just punishment. This makes an indescribable mess that could not be otherwise. (God's omnipotence doesn't mean he can do what is logically impossible- like make a 4 sided triangle or a married bachelor). Thus something you can "imagine" may not be logically possible, and God would not be obligated to do it, even if it met the other criteria for a good action.
Third, the Classical and Christian definition of Love is to "commit oneself to the true good of another." Thus in classical thougth and Christian, one needs to start with a view of human nature and human flourishing in order to know what love is. It starts instinctively with "loving your neighbor as yourself", but the non-hypocricy principle is only the baseline. The Golden rule "do to others as you would have them do to you", is universal, but it is not righteousness, justice, or moral maturity. Since, if I like a particular action that is wrong, I may encourage another to do it, or facilitate it, and be "obeying the Golden rule".
Fourth, thus, the scriptural statements being criticiszed above are part of a library of books (bible) that explains wisdom, since wisdom is the practical knowledge of what really amounts to love- the act that is truly in another's deep, everlasting interest. If this is true, then the "fear of the Lord" is the first step in attaining that body of understanding. To "fear the Lord" means to have a sense of the moral gravity of his being, presence and reality- so that you find humility and attentiveness to what he is trying to tell us (see Is a 66:1-3). Anyone that doesn't start with that insight and sense of divine "weightiness" won't see the everlasting timeline, our relation to our creator, our self-justifying tendencies, the real costs and reverbirations of our wrong acts and so on. Such an outlook, according to scripture, cannot assemble a body of wisdom with true structural integrity.

Thus, the christian claim may be wrong (maybe such a God doesn't exist), but it is not contradictory or incoherent. The God that rules what he creates and orders is not a dictator any more than a father or a business owner is inherently a dictator because he rules what he has created and is responsible for. We struggle with this because we have no right of "migration". We can't leave the 'country' God rules and get away from him. We feel our life is "ours", and so we should have that right. But this is a failure to have the fear of the Lord- where could you go form his presence? Everywhere, he is there.

Sorry if this got me tweaked. Theological philosophy is my field. I hate to see really smart guys miss the goodness of God because of sayings that sound clever, but as moral philosophy, are 20 inch groups.