S.C.Carlson

Interestingly, there's recent buzz in science reporting that fruit flies display free will.

Stephen

Layman

You sure do spend a lot of time attacking people's supposed style. It's like the Wooden Dialogue Generator except its the Demagogic Post Generator.

If the Moderators think I was being over the top and attacking Kirby, they can intervene. Kirby could protest too for that matter. Or, someone--preferably Kirby--could have answered the questions or attempted to explain just what "table" he was talking about, if not journals and forums devoted to the study of Christian origins. You certainly have done nothing to demonstrate that my questions were beyond the pale of Kirby's proposal.

Here, I'll reset the sequence for you: click. Go!

andrewcriddle

IIUC Godel's theorems limit the degree to which Mathematics can be rigorously proven to be consistent.

Again IIUC this has real implications in the mathematics of infinite sets.

Andrew Criddle

Gamera

I think the proof's in the pudding -- fulsome apologists produce fulsome research which can be identified as such. I agree it's easy enough to tell bad research produced by those who are naive and have an axe to grind, but of course that applies to both apologists and skeptics.

Gamera

yes, it's called a straw man argument. Needless to say, I didn't make these assertions. Research stands on its own, whether from a biased source or not.

Curiousity is an agenda in itself, which leads to certain kinds of research and not others. But if you want to wallow in the myth of the aloof, unbiased scholar, be my guest. It's naive but that's OK with me.

Riverwind

Thanks for the specific reference.

Sauron? I'm sure you are more intelligent that Godel. Do you care to expose his flaws and evasion of "your truth"?

Toto

This thread starts off on an unfortunately phrased question which allows Christians to claim persecution and discrimination and unfairness in general.

Obviously, there is no one "table." There is an intellectual community spread out over geography and ideology, but there is no czar with the power to exclude anyone.

The relevant discussion needs to take into account Alan Wolfe's article, "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind" (October 2001, Atlantic), which used to be available freely online, but is now only available to subscribers. (Wolfe has a new article The Evangelical Mind Revisited which updates that 2001 article.)

Wolfe discussed evangelical Christians in higher education relatively sympathetically. He also made the point that it would be difficult to exclude evangelicals when the modern University managed to include post-structuralist, neo-marxist eco-feminists who also reject the Enlightenment.

Since I am somewhat older than many of you (and I had to walk two miles in the snow to the computer lab to use a keypunch machine to write FORTRAN code - oops, sorry, wrong place for that rant) I never had to grapple with Derrida or deconstruction. I did take courses from intellectuals committed to ideologies which are now considered passé or just wrong - small m marxists, Capital M Marxists, Freudians, socialists of various stripes, Liberation theologists, economists who believed in the regulation of business. Doctrinal Christians who support George Bush rather than Gandhi or Che Guevara are just a new flavor of ideologue, somewhat less interesting in many ways.

And everyone had a place at the table, or at the food fight. The problem is not so much the ideology, as a rigid adherence to the ideology in the face of evidence. Christians might be more resistant to change than, say, eco-feminists, but then again Christians have a long history of reshaping their doctrine to fit their needs.

mountainman

There are many tables, and it is almost appropriate
to see these tables as the separate fields or disciplines
of academic study.

We have the table of the mathematicians.
The table for meteorologists.
The table for geneticists.
The table of the ancient historians.
The table of the ecclesiatical historians.
etc
etc
etc

Riverwind

And this is followed up by:

Why is that Evangelicals must be the ones to have their minds "opened"? This is part of the bias that some never acknowledge. People say that everyone is welcome at the table and then the evangelical intellectuals are belittled.

I think it would be good if those who are always criticizing evangelicals would take a deeper look at the inconsistency in their own beliefs.

Again, what is "evidence"? These kinds of statements always make me think of Pilate's "What is truth"?

Here, Christians are belittled yet again with not even a tinge of introspection.

How can one merely accuse Christians when secular scholars can't even entertain the possibility (let alone the probability) that the gospels were written pre-70 A.D. without simply dissmissing the idea with a bit of hand waving due to a naturalistic bias that says "predictions" can't come true (never mind that even a naturalistic scholars could simply say these "predictions" were vague enough to have been a keen insight on the part of Jesus). There are plenty of other such secular biases found in interpretations of data.

It simply is not fair, and is a part of the problem in this thread, that Christians are the ones constantly receiving the majority of blame for problems that iare, in truth, shared by all of us.

So, yeah, you could say, as you did, that this "allows Christians to claim persecution and discrimination and unfairness" only with a little less sarcasm and a little more seriousness.

youngalexander

I feel that I must endorse these sentiments. Religious discrimination is surely a curse of modern society. Perhaps we should have more faith.

Hey, lighten up.