Morality and Value Systems

Axiology has a plethora of products. Yet if morality describes what people actually do regarding behavioral norms, wicked behavior counts as much as ideal systems designed by philosophers. The first civilization mentioned in Genesis was destroyed for the wicked ways of the people. Humans had pretty bad morals 10 or 20 thousand years ago. A non-battle site at a village excavated in the Middle East found that about 80% of the people had died from crushed skulls. Police weren't about for a few thousand years.

God is a light in the darkness for humanity. The God of Abraham and His Son Jesus Christ have reached a billion people with the word and some element of faith at least nominally, yet it would be an over reach to say that human morality is primarily based on divine inspiration. It may be so that the world’s major religions have shaped at least nominally the majority of the systems of 8 billion living people. I don’t believe there is any sort of pro forma adherence to the morality of major religious systems that govern day to day life of a majority though, as if they were strict Jews in the Temple era before God with the Lord brought a new covenant as promised.

The sort of morality people of the west have today probably has a fiscal basis reflecting permissible behavior in regard to a political economy rather than Christian ethics or perhaps those of some other religious system.

Secular humanism’s practical focus isn’t much different from the humanism that even Christians have accepted. I attended one theology school where there seemed to be agreement that asceticism isn’t popular today. I suppose most commercial Christians sleep on mattresses and take baths instead of sleeping on the ground and get a shower every few months. They probably use worldly medical care generally. It didn’t seem like Jesus would eschew common goods; it’s just the value one fixes them with that matter. If one focuses on God and His will the Lord said He would provide. He mentioned that a human is worth many sparrows, and sparrows are provided for. https://www.udio.com/songs/wKdkBuPCwuTayHZ8RWiBtp

When Scientists Attack Christianity

 Everyone is learning. Honest inquires aren’t stupid. Science means knowledge. Materials science has a lot of investments and is monetarily rewarding and protected and defended like any vested business. It is those scientists and minions, that full of themselves, venture unscientific opinions or crackpot opinions regarding philosophical and spiritual affairs beyond their ken. Some scientists have the problem of being experts in one field they feel themselves authorities to extend their beneficence over all realms, making themselves seem like arrogant idiots.

https://www.udio.com/songs/nQVh9JMkP97bQArhTwmLTs

I like science a lot having grown up in an era where Linus Pauling, Albert Einstein, Watson and Crick et al were making ground breaking discoveries routinely and/or their ideas like special and general relativity were being popularized. Yet the anti-Christian crowd of the post-deconstruction era have poisoned the atmosphere of the public toward a Godless lifestyle they hold dear. There is no question that they have created a civil divide that is lasting.

Scientific knowledge is itself challenging to keep up with. New expensive hardware brings new insights and opportunities to test theories. I like cosmology and computer science and have little time for biology. Long ago I was quite interested in it and all fields reading such scientific publications that were easily available in libraries and over the counter like Scientific American (before it was bought by the Dutch). I watched Attenborough’s Life in Earth series when it was new in the early 80s yet by then I had learned of evolution at least 20 years before. I am also Christian and learned a lot about Biblical composition and history. Philosophical history and linguistic, analytic philosophy and logic reading let me more readily understand how the indeterminacy of translation applies in all fields. W.V.O. Quine left a book that was a series of Tarner Lectures named ‘Ontological Relativity’ wherein he explained that different ontology exists for various languages and fields each with their own unique and untranslatable lexicon. Knowing that word means have different values in different lexicon or a different ontology as a set of meanings, concepts and ideas lets one assemble meanings from the Bible better. Even deictic references such as occur with Urartu/Ararat, geology and the prehistorical researches and discoveries supporting the Bible and prehistorical and early human settlements such as the 10th millennium B.C. Gobeki Tepe in Anatolia may be combined with historical climate change for increased understanding.

It is quantum mechanics today that lets one better understand the nature of reality. It is a paradoxical key to enter the realm of uncertainty and a Higgs Field entangling massless two-dimensional wave fluctuation that observed appear as particles. Philosophical considerations of the nature of mind and object, as well as language reveal that physicalism also known as materialism or matter is founded almost upon nothing with a very mysterious foundation premise of a field made of the unknowable presently without time except within itself as it is manifest. Time is then a relative condition of location in the space-time field.

Nothing is stupid except to make assertions about noumenon or operative noumena (i.e. extra-terrestrials cannot exist in this Universe) that cannot be supported. That applies to atheist assertions regarding God. Christians know what they believe and why. It is a faith after all and one that all the scientists that fit on the metaphorical head of a pin in a star trek transporter room when shrunk and on the way to some place beyond the Universe because it has no distance scale when not enmeshed in it, could controvert.

Post-Tribulation End TImes With Jesus and YHWH

 A Baptist minister said to me once that The Revelation was like a newspaper written for Christians of the time of John of Patmos. It needed to be slightly coded because Nero probably would have had John executed instead of just exiled if John had described Nero as the Beast. I like the partial preterist interpretation of John with the apocalypse occurring in the first century A.D. with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the terrible persecutions by the world government of the region that was Imperial Rome. 

Post-tribulation interpretations differ from pre-tribulation interpretations popularized by Charles Ryrie. Remember that end times pre-tribbers have existed since the first century and they tend to be wrong- except for the one that Jesus said would occur and that did within that generation. Jesus will return some time yet it will be different from the pre-tribber version that some Christians have, comparable to that of Muslim Shi'ite 12ers that believe the hidden imam will return before Armageddon and Jesus will lead the Muslim troops. One might read He Shall Have Dominion by Kenneth Gentry to learn about post-millennialism.

I enjoy being reminded of Christian themes amid all the clutter. I took a two year graduate course in reformed theology on-line in theology and my mentor lost my work. I published my papers in three volumes free to download at my web page. I read people like Thomas Brooks and Shaff’s multi-volume History of the Christian Church (free to download at several sites) https://ccel.org/ccel/s/schaff/hcc8/cache/hcc8.pdf

The post on the meaning of the tetragrammaton was a timely and good topic that led me to learn a little more about it. I found an article on it at The Torah.com with a quote from that below. https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-original-arabic-meaning-of-the-name#:~:text=God%20reveals%20his%20name%20to,%2C%20desire%2C%20or%20passion.%E2%80%9D 

“God reveals his name to Moses as “I am,” from the Hebrew root ה.ו.י, “being.” The name YHWH, however, originates in Midian, and derives from the Arabic term for “love, desire, or passion.”

שמות ו:ב וַיְדַבֵּר אֱלֹהִים אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אֲנִי יְ־הוָה. ו:ג וָאֵרָא אֶל אַבְרָהָם אֶל יִצְחָק וְאֶל יַעֲקֹב בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי וּשְׁמִי יְ־הוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם.

Exod 6:2 God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. 6:3 I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name YHWH.

On the Kingdom of God

Christan values and ethics comprise a theonomy in-the-world looking past the world. Anti-Christians sometimes don’t know that Biblical ethics are for believers, and are instructions on how to act in a world of original sin, so they want to attack those ethics and extirpate belief. Yet faith in God is a personal concern that harms no one. Worldly harm is done by those that don’t understand the Word of God.

There won’t be a perfect world political order until the Second Coming. Worldly systems are made by sinful humans and they eventually fail.

I like to write on a variety of philosophical issues yet sometimes feel a response to attacks on Christians is warranted, especially since they usually aren’t erudite or scholarly in nature and can use a modicum of edification.