Dinner Doodle - What Do You Believe?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Point 8 is overly simplistic.

how so?  >95% (if not 99%) of abortions are due to "convenience" alone

Cite.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Point 8 is overly simplistic.

how so?  >95% (if not 99%) of abortions are due to "convenience" alone

Cite.

there you go again, playing dumb to justify your position:  the abortion issue is NOT about woman's health, rather it is about having "the right" to kill someone based on convenience:

I wasn't playing dumb. I genuinely wanted a citation. Why do you automatically assume bad faith of anybody who disagrees with your sophomoric 'Christianity' like a complete paranoid? You do know that the placemat tells you not to do things like that, right? Why do you even assume I'm in favor of abortion?

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Thank you for citing your claim.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I wasn't playing dumb. I genuinely wanted a citation. Why do you automatically assume bad faith of anybody who disagrees with your sophomoric 'Christianity' like a complete paranoid? You do know that the placemat tells you not to do things like that, right? Why do you even assume I'm in favor of abortion?

you have a repeated history of playing dumb, Nathan.  If you want others to take you seriously, than you need to first be honest with yourself.

The funny thing is that I don't have a history of playing dumb, whereas you do have one of automatically assuming bad faith of anybody who disagrees with you. Stop that. The placemat told you to.

Why do you even assume I'm in favor of abortion?

your church teaches that abortion, at least in the case of convenience, is immoral?

There's no clear doctrine on this particular subject, but abortion on demand is certainly something a lot of us, including me, aren't immensely comfortable with.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The funny thing is that I don't have a history of playing dumb

Is “dodging” a better description?! 

Not really.

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That is not true, for I have even admitted when I am wrong, either by misreading someone’s post, or when I am simply wrong about something in the bible:

Is there a single case in the entire bible that a marriage between a man and a woman was not recognized, regardless if they sinned by entering into the marriage?

Ezra forcing the mixed-marriage couples of the post-diaspora era to break up?

wow, thanks, forgot about that.  guess i need to reread...I stand corrected.

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All right, I stand corrected as well. You don't do it all the time, but you do have a history of doing it.

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your church teaches that abortion, at least in the case of convenience, is immoral?
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There's no clear doctrine on this particular subject, but abortion on demand is certainly something a lot of us, including me, aren't immensely comfortable with.
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How noble

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It's what you get when you're in a liturgical church that sees in terms of generations. It's not immensely noble but there's no great shame in it either.

Your definition of a goat in this context is pretty good, and I'd agree with it (we all have our preferences but we need to prioritize sometimes), but I'm not sure I'd agree that Ernest qualifies.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's what you get when you're in a liturgical church that sees in terms of generations. It's not immensely noble but there's no great shame in it either.

is the rewriting of your church's doctrine timed to the change of every generational wind?

No, that's not the sort of seeing in terms of generations that I meant.  I meant that liturgical churches typically see on an incredibly large time frame and hence attract all sorts of people with disparate political and social beliefs and even some pretty different interpretations of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition, as opposed to snake-belly-low churches which are liable to get caught up in some obsessive moment (hint: Not the Christ Event, which is the only moment worth obsessing over) and never let it go.

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be patient, goats are very restless and will not follow, they are never content and hate to be confined.  He'll be back, trying to find a gap in the doodle to exploit.
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This doodle is a lot better designed than the other ones. I actually don't see much wrong with it, personally, since a lot of what Ernest would have wanted in it seems to follow logically from the points that are there; then again, maybe this isn't so logical to some people.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's what you get when you're in a liturgical church that sees in terms of generations. It's not immensely noble but there's no great shame in it either.

is the rewriting of your church's doctrine timed to the change of every generational wind?

No, that's not the sort of seeing in terms of generations that I meant.  I meant that liturgical churches typically see on an incredibly large time frame and hence attract all sorts of people with disparate political and social beliefs and even some pretty different interpretations of Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition

what are saying, are you saying they're so caught up in rituals that they never really say anything, therefore no one is offended?  I mean, what exactly is stopping them from speaking clearly in regard to substantive matters?

We do that. It's called 'liturgy'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Not that I have a real problem with a church not getting involved in an issue as divisive and touchy as abortion (mine basically does the same, I've never heard it mentioned a single time), but I don't see how liturgy exactly acts as a substitute for taking solid positions.

It's the way of taking solid theological positions. To take solid political positions would be to make the Episcopal Church (or even the Anglican Communion) a Magisterium, which the Pope would very much like it to be but which most Anglicans outside continental Africa and a certain South American province very much do not.

There are of course issues where the political becomes theological, and that's where the flash-points and debates happen. Abortion might or might not be one of these in some places. It probably is. The idea is still to make such things subjects of argument, not hand down proclamations from on high.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Now, see what happens when you roughhouse?  With all your contention, you’re going to cause Nathan to accuse me, once again, of bullying your stupidty and not obeying the Doodle.

No, neither of you are bullying each other. Your argument style, jmfcst, has many flaws, but that's not one of them.

These are good. Some really good messages in these that in a better society would be pretty uncontroversial.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've been spoken to constructively of the righteousness of God before. I assure you that without those conversations I wouldn't be remotely as tolerable a human being as I am now. I'm not sure whether or not Ernest could use that but I understand your frustration, although I still think you're going about it the wrong way.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've been spoken to constructively of the righteousness of God before.

but yet you refuse to acknowledge what the bible is saying point blank about homosexuality.  There is no righteousness of God without first turning to God and accepting his word.

It's you who refuses to acknowledge that people's interpretations of the Bible other than your own may perhaps be motivated by things other than stupidity or malice, which you seem to believe are the only bases on which a Christian can disagree with the interpretive and theological praxis of the mighty You-sama. This starts with your idolatrous obsession with the sola scriptura concept (coupled with a profoundly ahistorical and, worse, supercilious understanding of even that) and just goes on and on from there. You do realize that you're about as heretical from my perspective as I am from yours, for reasons unrelated to any sexual or romantic relationships that Christians who are not either of us may or may not have?

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well, even as I seek to be justified in Christ, if it becomes evident that I myself am a sinner, that still doesn't mean the scripture promotes sin.
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Clearly.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

[There was something more or less substantive here but it was bad for my blood pressure to write and not especially charitable so I'd like to retract it in favor of a generic 'No you'.]

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What on Earth do you think you're demonstrating with this post?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That wasn't what I was asking at all, but you were demanding Scriptural evidence against the idea of sola scriptura, which you will surely understand defeats the entire purpose of not adhering to sola scriptura. If you want to mount a Scriptural case for sola scriptura I'll be sure to read it with interest, but just as that case ends up just being a circular argument, any argument against sola scriptura that I could make would end up bringing things other than the Bible into consider by nature of what the position of opposing sola scriptura entails. Is that fair?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Nathan, you're making my head spin, for I don't know why you brought up sola scriptura in the first place...so let's retract and do a sanity check to see if we agree:

If, hypothetically, BOTH the OT and NT condemn the wearing of red shoes, yet allow and even encourage the wearing of blue shoes...is there any logical argument a Christian can make for the wearing of red shoes, regardless if he adheres to sola scriptura or not?

Is the condemnation sufficiently clear that every Church Father up until St John Chrysostom, including St Augustine and St Clement, did not interpret the NT passages in question as referring to something different but similar?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Nathan, you're making my head spin, for I don't know why you brought up sola scriptura in the first place...so let's retract and do a sanity check to see if we agree:

If, hypothetically, BOTH the OT and NT condemn the wearing of red shoes, yet allow and even encourage the wearing of blue shoes...is there any logical argument a Christian can make for the wearing of red shoes, regardless if he adheres to sola scriptura or not?

Is the condemnation sufficiently clear that every Church Father up until St John Chrysostom, including St Augustine and St Clement, did not interpret the NT passages in question as referring to something different but similar?

the hypothetical is purely a sanity check, it does NOT include matters of differences of interpretation of even language translation…consider the hypothetical to point blank…

so, again I ask…

If, hypothetically, BOTH the OT and NT condemn the wearing of red shoes, yet allow and even encourage the wearing of blue shoes...is there any logical argument a Christian can make for the wearing of red shoes, regardless if he adheres to sola scriptura or not?

Purely in terms of the hypothetical, purely from the information presented, no, there's no argument there.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If, hypothetically, BOTH the OT and NT condemn the wearing of red shoes, yet allow and even encourage the wearing of blue shoes...is there any logical argument a Christian can make for the wearing of red shoes, regardless if he adheres to sola scriptura or not?

Purely in terms of the hypothetical, purely from the information presented, no, there's no argument there.

so, following sola scriptura or not, has absolutely nothing to do with it, right - it's merely a matter of the information presented in scripture?

Within the information that you presented, that particular doctrinal question indeed doesn't seem relevant, but there are other hypotheticals that I can think of in which it would become relevant. Obviously we have a difference on which set of hypotheticals is closer to the situation at hand.

I'm actually busy for the rest of this evening and don't anticipate becoming un-busy again until I'm done with my finals, so do you mind if we drop this for the time being, now that we've had this sanity check?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Ernest, I'm not sure the precocious crush used by the Dinner Doodle as an example of love is necessary the best level to criticize it on; the situation as described isn't one that I find 'creepy', although I'm not entirely certain why the Dinner Doodle chose to use it as its example.

(I'll get to the Genesis question in a little while, I promise.)