Church of Sense and Reason 3: Science Being Compatible With Christinaity

I’m not sure if this blog will be as long as the previous two but I hope it is found to be interesting. This blog is about, of course, science and religion. Can science and religion be compatible. Are they mutually exclusive? Let’s look at some of the main arguments.

Let’s start at the beginning: The creation of the earth Bible says seven days, science say millions of years. Well this is easily and quickly fixed if you are one of those people who interpret the Bible as metaphorical. Even if you take it as literal, still seven days is a bit tricky. It clearly can be allegorical for the days of the week and it makes sense to order things in such a way. But what is a day to God? I mean this is predating the earth and the other planets here. Therefore, there was no such thing as a day defined as a 24 hour period in which the earth revolves around the sun. There was no earth, no sun, and no concept of “hour”. I suppose one could argue that after the first day, there were such things as the earth and the sun. However, God is, as defined by Judeo-Christian-Islamic doctrine: omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent which means all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere simultaneously, respectively. God is also described as being the Alpha and the Omega, which means the beginning and the end. Basically predated existence and existing outside of the known universe while still being to a degree transcendental (knowable in the world).

Now, if God is all these things, then what is a day to God? I mean the average life span would be a blink of an eye to a perpetually existing force or being. There is even a joke about it:

Well a man says to God “What’s a million years to you?” God said “A minute.” And the man said to God “What’s a million dollars to you?” God said “A penny” So the man said to God “Well can you give me a penny?” And God said to him “Yes I will…in a minute.”

Point being we do not know the mind of God and it is pretentious and presumptuous to try to work it out or assume that we already do.

What is my point? My point, if we go by the scale of the joke, (which is silly but run with it), then the Earth would be even older than scientists say it is. Point is a day is an arbitrary term to God. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say, mostly any concept is arbitrary and in flux to God.

Big issue: Creationism Vs. Evolution. I believe and accept both concepts as being accurate. How can I do this? Am I not contradicting myself? Well no. Let’s look at Genesis 1 (the one where man and woman are created equal). The account of creation is very similar to the progression of evolution. Evolution roughly states that basically, we were single celled nothings, then creatures of the sea, then lizard things, then mammals, then human beings we are now. What is the order in  Gen 1? Let’s see: First the ocean is filled with life, then the sky with birds, then the lizards, bugs, then mammals, and finally? Humans! So what exactly is the problem here? I mean honestly. I accept the foundations of biology, psychology, chemistry, physics, etc, and I also believe in God, an after-life, Jesus, etc. Is that so wrong? I don’t find it hypocritical at all.

Church of Sense and Reason 2: Socratic Argument of Christianity Advocating Gay Rights.

Disclaimer: This blog is not intened to insult or offend anyone. It's purpose is not to say anyone is right or wrong. I am not here to start a new branch of Christianity. The focus of the Church of Sense and Reason is to put the Christ back into Christianity. An exegesis approach to determining the meanings of Christianinty; going back to the beginning.

This argument is based on the belief of Jesus (and thus God) as being peacful, loving, forgiving, understanding and against being judgmental. This is what I have learned from going to church for so many years when I was younger and from how I interpret the teachings of Jesus. If you personally don't believe these things about Jesus and God to be true, the arguement pretty much falls apart. However, personally that is the God i want to worship and if God is not any of hte things listed above and mentioned in the argument I don't want to worship God anyway if God damns people for simply being different.



Socrates: Do you agree that God is forgiving, loving, compassionate, and understanding as described in the New Testament?

Glaucon: Yes, this is true.

Socrates: And do you also agree that as human being we are imperfect and are all sinners but also all children of and created by God.

Glaucon: The Bible does say this frequently so yes.

Socrates: And Jesus, did he advocate for the nonjudgmental, indiscriminant, and tolerant was of life? Saying that all of us sin and therefore none of us are fit to judge and thus punish another?

Glaucon: It is true there is an entire passage in which Jesus does stop a mob from stoning an adulterous woman and says "ye without sin throw the first stone" and Jesus also says "do not judge lest ye be judged"

Socrates: Not only did Jesus not want us to judge but did he not also want us to forgive those who have trespassed against us and love our neighbor as well as our enemies and persecutors? To love all our neighbors?

Glaucon: Yes.

Socrates: And so if Jesus wanted us to love the ones who actively and intentionally hurt us and "love the sinner, hate the sin" as it were, wouldn't that mean he would certainly want us to love those sinners who have not even done anything to hurt us?

Glaucon: Again Socrates, this makes sense.

Socrates: So you accept this as an accurate description of your God and your savior?

Glaucon: It does indeed.

Socrates: Very well then? Does it not also say in the Bible that a man shall not lay with a man the way a man lays with a woman?

Glaucon: You know as well as I do, Socrates, that the Bible does indeed say that about three times but it is in the Tanakh.

Socrates: Are you saying we should not follow the Tanakh?

Glaucon: Not as such, no.

Socrates: should you hate, fear, judge, attack, and lynch someone simply for being different from you?

Glaucon: Of course not Socrates. That contradicts everything we have said about God.

Socrates: How can God be loving, forgiving, and understanding and create all of us in God's image if some of us are to be damned for simply being born differently?

Glaucon: That is indeed a paradox...perhaps it is a person's choice to be gay?

Socrates: If that were true, why would they knowingly put themselves thru the persecution, the hatred, the indifference, possibly be denied a job, if you are a teenager, then possibly beaten and/or kicked out fo your house onto the street by your very own parents, and suffer all forms of evils upon them if it were a choice?

Glaucon: Well no, of course not Socrates. That would not make sense. Perhaps it is a mental disorder?

Socrates: You know the APA declared that nonsense decades ago and removed the diagnosis form the DSM for lack of conclusive evidence and not finding and real mental causes. Furthermore, do you choose to be heterosexual?

Glaucon: No. I just know I am heterosexual.

Socrates: Then surely, the same could very well be said of anyone who is gay?

Glaucon: It does seem to reason...

Socrates: Exactly. Now supposing it actually was a sin to be gay for the sake of argument: would it then be any worse a sin than adultery, murder, theft, a disregard for ones parents, etc?

Glaucon: Well, as you said, we are all sinners and shouldn’t just another anyway, however, it certainly is less of a sin than murder.

Socrates: Well to God a sin is a sin. However, yes, logic dictates that killing someone is worse than falling in love with someone of the same sex. And isn't society riddled with adulterers for example?

Glaucon: Yes.

Socrates: We do not openly hate them at all, do we Glaucon? We don't rally against them, lynch them, or think them subhuman do we?

Glaucon: Certainly not Socrates. In fact, it is as you say a very common occurrence in our society.

Socrates: So then, if it is a sin to be gay, are gay people any less equal to anyone else? Esp. since they have not actually hurt anyone?

Glaucon: No.

Socrates: Agreed. We have established at the very least that if it is a sin to be gay, it is no worse than cursing, masturbating, cheating on one's wife, desiring useless and unimportant material goods that others have and we wished we want, etc. So is it a sin to be gay Glaucon?

Glaucon: Well it does say it in the Bible, and the Bible after all is God's word.

Socrates: Yes but if that is true, God told people what to write, isn't that so? The Bible is told thru prophets, disciples, etc.?

Glaucon: This is true. The Bible itself in full did not come right from the heavens.

Socrates: Right. Moreover, isn't man fallible?

Glaucon: Of course, we just established that everyone sins. Even Plato, with his own interpretation of God and Heaven would agree that as physical human beings we are imperfect. However, I am not sure what you are getting at Socrates...

Socrates: Well, logically, if God "spoke" divine words to all the writers of the Bible is not it possible they got it wrong, or decided to write it differently because they thought God was wrong?

Glaucon: Who would say that God is wrong!?

Socrates: Well, the only real people who would say God is wrong are Atheists and that is because they believe God does not exist. In every other situation, for every religion and belief out there, no one ever says God is wrong, they say that a person's idea or interpretation of God is wrong and that their own idea of God is right. In addition, since God is infallible it is hard to debate this and thus very bloody violent wars, massacres, and attacks are waged in God's name: the God of peace. This is beside the point, isn't there a chance that Man would do such a thing?

Glaucon: I suppose it is possible but it is a stretch. Some say that many, many different people of several groups of thought wrote the Bible.

Socrates: This is also true. In addition, there is a group of thinking that the Bible is to be taken metaphorically rather than literally. That is just a different school of thought.

Glaucon: I can accept that theory.

Socrates: Yes but we are arguing the point from the perspective of those who take it literally. If you want to take it metaphorically, one could take it back into context rather than out of context as so many people are so often apt to do, and suggest that those passages are not about being gay per se but more about the common practice held not only in Rome but also in our home empire of Greece.

Glaucon: Which is?

Socrates: The practice of older Greek and Roman soldiers having sex with young Greek and Roman boys in bath houses as a rite of passage that Judaism frowned upon. So you see? Those passages are more about pedophilia than about being gay.

Glaucon: I see. However, we are digressing.

Socrates: I suppose we are. As I was saying, the few times it is actually mentioned in the Tanakh that being gay is a 'sin' are all actually written by Mosses.

Glaucon:  Well I thought the belief was that Mosses wrote all of the Tanakh, from his experiences and from what God told him.

Socrates: This is true: the community of the school of thought that follows the Bible as being literal say that Moses did record everything for God. However, I am referring to the fact that when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and he returned with them to the people, the people said they needed/wanted more guidelines and so Mosses went back up the mountain to talk to God and told God of this situation. To roughly explain the events that followed, basically, God said to Mosses ‘ok. I trust you. You and your people come up with more laws/rules and I will accept them’. Now although God accepts the laws written by actual fallible human beings, God never actually wrote, said, dictated, or anything else, on the subject of being gay.

Glaucon: Really? So then why did they decide it was a sin to be gay?

Socrates: Other than the bathhouse example? Well the people decided to use their logic and look at the natural world to see what was natural and unnatural. In the world and they saw that the way of nature is that man and woman are together in order to have children which appears to be the natural order of things. Therefore, logically, man with man and woman with woman is unnatural. That was their thinking on the matter. It had little to do with morality but more to do with biology.

Glaucon: I see. This is quite enlightening.

Socrates: So do you believe that God damns everyone who is gay?

Glaucon: Logically I must say no.

Socrates: Do homosexuals as a group hurt and attack the rest of us?

Glaucon: Well I have certainly never heard of an instance of such an occurrence.

Socrates: As a Christian, should one judge and harass someone for being gay? Or go to the extremes of attacking them?

Glaucon: As a non-judging, sinning Christian who forgives and loves, of course not. Moreover, if one is going to do such things to someone who is gay, they should do the exact same things to one who has cheated on their spouse, taken God's name in vain, disrespected their parents, etc.

Socrates: Do gay people even need forgiveness?

Glaucon: Only in the context of it being a sin.

Socrates: So we can conclude from our argument that gay people are human beings and thus deserve the same rights as everyone deserves?

Glaucon: Yes, I agree, Socrates.

Music & Philosophy Blog 2

Ok, so I've been thinking about how to go about defining concepts that are a bit harder than simply dog or chair like art, music, etc. and here's what i've come up with, i touched briefly on how i feel about defining things in my extended Philosophy of Art paper which you can view at My papers/essays link on my main blog page. This blog may seem irrevevant at times or just a big tangent but bear with me.

To start with God: now in most cultures, God (or god or gods/goddesses) typically are simply summed up with three terms: omnipotent (all powerful), omniscent (all knowing), and omnipresent (everywhere simultaniously). Now, logically what this means is the God in most cases (esp in Judeo/Christan/Islamic terms) is infinite and limitless. Now there is a problem with defininf infinite concepts because language is finite and therefore no matter what, when you try to describe an infinite concept with finite language you are essentially limiting it and therefore the true message will not get across. for example refering to God as He, he, She, or she. Such is the problem with language: we don't always have the right words. This can also be said of absract concepts such as truth, beauty, freedom, justice, etc. The problem with refering to God comes into play with these terms because for the most part they are all subjective and have different meanings for different people and unless you are a Kantian and/or a Platonist/Neo-Plantonist,  there really is no objective concept of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, or Justice. and even if you do follow Kant or Plato, both of them still agree that as a single physical person, one will not truly know the full nature and objective meaning of these concepts. Therefore it can be difficult to define things like Music, Art, Dance, Literature, etc. You will end up limiting them and not taking into account all possibilites that exist or that may one day come along.

That being said, I also don't think it is a good idea to not have any base definition for these things either. I don't like the idea of opening floodgates so that anything can be anything. Definitons are important to an extent. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not one of thsoe people who needs a label and classification for all things to feel safer and more comfortable with the world. This is something we all do to an extent as to not feel like we live in a world of chaos and uncertainties. However as I said, definitons are useful and helpful and they do weed out certain ridiculous or bad examples of a concept to be classified as such. For example. an iguana is not a cow. In the first place, an iguana isn't even a mammal so it fails even at the basic neccesities for being a cow.

Which bring me to my next point, once again, tangetn alert. I'm about to use zombies as a way to explain how to define music, Art, or art in general.:

Now at it's core a zombie follows certain things. Even before the days of George Romero who set the standard for the modern zombie, zombies were almost always previously dead things. I admit at times there were movies and books that had zombies as simply living people under hypnosis who did the bidding of the "zombie king" , the one who did the voodoo. But even if they were dead this figure was refered to as the zombie king. One, could look at these people in a trance as metaphorical zombies. the same way when parents say their kids are zombies in the morning. These parents do not actually mean their kids are zombies, undead, or being controlled by anyone. They know full well their kids are not among the walking dead.
So at our basis, zombies are dead that are somehow acting not dead. This is clear if we look at the synomyms for zombies: the living dead, the undead, the walking dead. See? Dead. Dead, dead, dead. Zombies are dead. More this, only the brain is typically functional. This means zombies don't need any of thewir other organs, which is why if you shoot or stab them in the chest or stomach they are not phased. it is the brain that still drives them and the only way to kill a zombie is to damage or remove the brain. now we all agree on this. But many many people have a tendency to label movies like 28 days later, evil dead, or i am legend as zombie movies. this is false. you can argue it anyway you want but in the end it comes down to whether they are dead or not. not only that but the writers of these movies usually clearly state their creatures are not zombies. out of those three films i listed, the only one that comes close to being zombies is the evil dead becuase in fact, the creatures are dead. but i nwill be going into a deeper argument about this in another post on debunking pseudozombie movies pretty much unrelated to this post but will recap and continue the specific discussion on the nature of zombies.

Anyway my point is if we don't somewhat close off definitons to at least not let in some things i feel we may be in trouble or else vampires could technically be zombies, cell phones could be works of art, computer system sounds of a laptop booting up could be music, etc.