@GratefulDisciple My latest musings are mostly on the topic of St Joseph, what with how little citation he has in Scripture but (when one studies the arc of Jesus' earthly life and ministry, and the Early Church) who is a profound case of the strong silent type turned up to eleven. 😎
Dall-e woodcuts in the style of Fritz Eichenberg are the latest liturgical invention that I will delightfully abuse Hi Korvin - you are correct. I'll check the queue when I get the red indicator, but otherwise I more or less ignore it (there's a more in-your-face mod queue we attend to)
^^ that's for the bulletin on our priests last day next month :)
@Matthew One of these days I'd like to write a utility to do intelligent automatic ping that can do that through reading the chat transcript and seeing the last message timestamp (instead of through SE Data Explorer, if it's even possible).
I wonder what I can do with ChatGPT API service to act as my secretary in SE chat rooms, NOT to write my response though, just to monitor.
@Matthew If you like C.S. Lewis as I do, we'll do well do know more of his medieval mind, and the recent 2022 book by Jason Baxter The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind is just the ticket. Joel Anderson is starting a multi-part summary / review of the book here.
Re: creationist debate, this is the main reason I'm not hung up on insisting Gen 1 needs to be historical. Nor that holding uniformitarianism means either denying miraculous creation or denying God's involvement in the world (i.e. materialism). It's the high medieval era that gave birth to modern science while PROMINENTLY holding the view of God as the ground, the sustainer, and the telos of the whole cosmos.
This is the medieval view of the cosmos and is STILL relevant today (after excising the Aristotelian speculative science), with C.S. Lewis as the 20th century example showing how 21st century can both be Biblically faithful (although may not to your standard) and see perfect harmony between faith and reason.
@GratefulDisciple The irony of uniformitarianism is that it's utterly debunked. Lyell told us Earth had to be hundreds of thousands of years old, but his evidence for that is thoroughly discredited these days. Atheists, however, (and Darwin in particular) have taken the idea and run with it in order to tell a quasi-plausible story about how life doesn't need God.
That reasoning, however, is almost entirely some combination of a) circular reasoning or b) building on top of foundations that no longer exist. (With a healthy dose of "how can we paint God out of the picture?", of course.)
(To be clear, I'm using "uniformitarianism" in the preceding comment in it's "no such thing as catastrophism" sense, not in the more usual sense of implying billions of years.)
@冥王Hades Yes, he does :-). BTW, this Nick Spencer (author of Darwin's Religious Beliefs), is also director of Theos which sponsors an annual lecture series. The 2022 is by historian Tom Holland called Humanism: a Christian heresy, Video and transcript here.
This is a challenge for you in that Tom Holland exposes a major unaccounted assumption by humanists who want to champion some kind of human rights, saying that without religion, there is no proper basis and in fact, can be misused as in Nazi Germany. Concluding paragraph:
> “There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words – with which I opened my talk – were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was unwarrantable conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide. He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity.
> Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption.
> It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism – “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” – finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated.
> The well–spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence–based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.
So, unless you don't want to believe in a "dog-eat-dog" world, you got to give it to Christianity as the guardian of a civilized world. What do you think?
