Kevin's Watch

Fist and Faith wrote:Hey rus, got any ice? Never heard of this before. Heh

Well, it's true that there is no tradition of putting ice in drinks, and climate has a lot to do with it. Most of the year our (enclosed) balcony serves as a refrigerator; and for a couple of months we have to remove stuff that we don't want flat-out frozen.

I'm going on vacation; I'll get to responses that I think might be helpful when I can.

The one thing I'll say now is that there is a difference between 'will' and 'can' as modal verbs. I agree that as things stand, we WILL not choose differently. But I do not agree that we CAN not. We are capable. The capability depends on our will, and is not affected by circumstances. I am/we are capable of acts of horrific evil. But our will (hopefully) rejects them, even should temptation, or even fantasy about them, arise. But CAN I choose to do something that I think bad or wrong or unwise or crazy, or to believe in something that I have no 'proof' of - do I have the ability? Of course. And if circumstances change, I might see my way to doing the crazy thing or accepting the unproven belief - or abandoning it. If we CANNOT do something, then there is no possibility of our doing it at all. If we WILL not, then the possibility remains, even though we reject it. So you reject belief by will, as I reject unbelief by will. But I could (ability) apostatize, just as you could come to faith - something that many people of faith and of unbelief have respectively done.

Nor am I suggesting that you would ignore an experience - only that you might decide that whatever it is has a natural explanation - or not - depending on your will. That's what choice is - a matter of will - and we CAN (ability) choose against what natural forces or impulses urge us to do or believe.

Teaching grammar to people who do not even know the language forces one to learn rather precisely what words mean. Not to sound like "Professor Wikipedia" (a college humor vid on YouTube that gave me a few good laughs), but the modal verb 'can' expresses ability, request or permission ('can't' can also be a negative logical assumption, and 'could' can express possibility, request, past ability or conditional ability.)

So we 'can' (ability) always choose. Whether we 'will' is another matter.

You can't get ice in a lot of place in Italy, either. They believe it's bad for you. Seriously. We had a lecture about it from a cultural representative before our ship changed its home port to Gaeta.

[Syl] wrote:You can't get ice in a lot of place in Italy, either. They believe it's bad for you. Seriously. We had a lecture about it from a cultural representative before our ship changed its home port to Gaeta.

It's a good outlet for stress, but I hear it can give you a root canal or mess up your teeth.

[Syl] wrote:You can't get ice in a lot of place in Italy, either. They believe it's bad for you. Seriously. We had a lecture about it from a cultural representative before our ship changed its home port to Gaeta.

When I was in Germany, many places you could get ice on request...but mostly places accustomed to tourists/GI's. I don't know what they believed about it, but it sure wasn't common/standard to use it. [maybe Vader will look in and explain it]

[Syl] wrote:You can't get ice in a lot of place in Italy, either. They believe it's bad for you. Seriously. We had a lecture about it from a cultural representative before our ship changed its home port to Gaeta.

You were in the Navy in Italy? Ha! Me too. In the 80's. Vivevo la per due anni in Sardegna. Ice was not brought up as a point of cultural conflict, but then, the base was the major part of the tiny local economy, so I guess they knew who they were catering to.

aliantha wrote:

rusmeister wrote:

aliantha wrote:dw, I think Fist's point is that rus, personally, cannot choose not to believe. I almost made the same point in a response earlier today, but bailed out of it.

I think some people have an innate need to believe that there's Something Out There. Whether it's hardwired by nature or nurture (a point that can -- and has! -- been debated), if you're primed for it, you can't just say "screw this!" and walk away an atheist. There will always be something nagging at you that your atheistic worldview is not quite right. Eventually, if you're true to yourself, you will come back to religion.

Fist apparently doesn't have that internal nag hardwired in. Or he does, and that's why he keeps up the search for a religion that resonates with him, if any there be.

Rus did, in fact, say "screw this!" and walk away once -- but his hardwiring drew him back eventually, albeit to a different faith than the one he grew up in.

Hi, Ali,
I know what Fist is saying. And I'm saying he's... (the 'w' word ).
The thing you do not consider here is that I might have died between the time I was 19 and the time I was 38. If I had - and some people do, so it's no good pointing out that I didn't - then there would be no talk of my 'having been drawn back'. It would be solid evidence of my ability to walk away. There was nothing inevitable about my conversion. It was not 'fated' - unless you are a determinist and believe we have no free will at all, in which case there's no point in ever getting upset at anything anyone ever does. I, or the people around me could have made different choices. And the very word "choice" implies free will.
So yes I CAN walk away. I see my ability to really do that now, just as you could leave your spouse if only you had any motivation to do so. As long as the motivation is absent, sure, it is improbable. But if circumstances change, he suddenly beats you or she spends your life savings or whatever, you might make that choice. If one of my children died, God forbid, I would be tested to the limit. Many people DO break under such tests. But Job did not. Abraham did not. The martyrs, in ancient Rome and Communist Russia did not ( a fascinating study, the New Martyrs). We ARE free to choose, even the more difficult path, against our "hardwiring" that you seem to believe prevents us from making such choices and sticking to them. The Iron Giant carries that lesson wonderfully and it is the best modern children's film I have seen, period.

PS - this is from my iPad, which periodically betrays me, and I am on a bouncy bus on my weekly commute to Moscow, that big stone city, so I'll wrap up for now. I apologize for not being able to keep up with everyone's comments.

Holsety's right -- nobody holds you to the impossible standard of answering everybody's comments, except you yourself. Just sayin'.

As for free will v. determinism: I realize that's a hot, huge debate for Christians. For me, as a Neopagan, it's a non sequitur. We have no omnipotent, omniscient god who is either orchestrating our lives or allowing us to choose (or -- cue the "Twilight Zone" theme -- making us believe that we can choose when in fact the ending is already determined!). To me, it makes perfect sense that a person can have an innate inclination to do A but be led astray to do B for awhile (maybe even by a god!). That doesn't change the person's innate inclination. An imperfect analogy: If a guy puts on makeup and heels to go to a Halloween party, and is hit by a bus and killed, it doesn't mean he was a woman when he died. If his life had continued on, presumably he would have gone home and gone back to being a guy.

That analogy simply does not work for a person who completely abandons belief for twenty years and means it, Ali. Your masquerader knows it is only a masquerade and that the dressing up is temporary - for one evening, just for fun. So suggesting that I may have really been a closet believer all the time is simply false. It's an attempt to use hindsight to draw a line that is not there - and as I said, I need only point to the thousands of people who DO abandon faith on reaching adulthood and die before they are forty or whatever without returning to faith, which, if circumstances had turned out differently in my life, I would not have returned to. I can say that because I know what I was motivated BY - the circumstances that led me - through my choices - back. But circumstances can vary, and we are not our circumstances. It does not do to confuse the two (not that you are, just sayin'). We choose in the face of our circumstances. To suggest that we do NOT choose can be refuted by simply walking up to you and smacking you and saying that I was fated to do that; that I had no choice. (After, you, in anger because I DO have the power of choice, beat the c**p out of me...
If I had no choice, there would be no point in being angry.)

We may be inclined to do things, but we can certainly choose against our inclinations, and it is mere lack of thought that says that anything we do is what we happen to be inclined to do. The Christian martyr, who decidedly does not want to be ripped from his family, imprisoned, tortured and killed - who has a STRONG 'inclination' against these things nevertheless chooses to accept them because his (her) faith is stronger than his inclinations.
A local saint, martyred in 1938:
bogorodsk-blago.ru/content/prepodobnomuchenitsa-aleksandra-dyachkova
(Translation link removed as it makes the entire thread page unreadable for me)

rusmeister wrote:Well, it's true that there is no tradition of putting ice in drinks, and climate has a lot to do with it. Most of the year our (enclosed) balcony serves as a refrigerator; and for a couple of months we have to remove stuff that we don't want flat-out frozen.

Yeah, my guess would have been climate.

rusmeister wrote:The one thing I'll say now is that there is a difference between 'will' and 'can' as modal verbs. I agree that as things stand, we WILL not choose differently. But I do not agree that we CAN not. We are capable.

I disagree. Of course, neither of us can prove it. You won't be choosing to not believe. As I've said, although that doesn't prove you can't, it surely doesn't prove you can. And if I ever choose to believe, it will be because I have found some new information that changes things so that I can't not choose to believe.

rusmeister wrote:The capability depends on our will, and is not affected by circumstances. I am/we are capable of acts of horrific evil. But our will (hopefully) rejects them, even should temptation, or even fantasy about them, arise. But CAN I choose to do something that I think bad or wrong or unwise or crazy, or to believe in something that I have no 'proof' of - do I have the ability? Of course. And if circumstances change, I might see my way to doing the crazy thing or accepting the unproven belief - or abandoning it.

I could choose to become a Nazi and commit atrocities if my children were being held hostage and would be killed if I didn't. I could not choose to believe killing Jews in the most horrific ways imaginable was good, or anything less than evil.

rusmeister wrote:If we CANNOT do something, then there is no possibility of our doing it at all. If we WILL not, then the possibility remains, even though we reject it.

And how am I to tell which is the case with you? You say you can, but won't. I don't believe you can. Am I to take your word for it? You certainly don't take mine when it comes to me. (Not about this; not about meaninglessness; not about anything.) And this conversation started because, once again, you declared my lack of belief a choice that I (plural) could change if I wanted to. If you stopped making these grand, superior proclomations, we wouldn't be arguing all the freakin' time.

rusmeister wrote:So you reject belief by will, as I reject unbelief by will. But I could (ability) apostatize, just as you could come to faith - something that many people of faith and of unbelief have respectively done.

I don't reject belief in God, or anything supernatural, any more than I reject that spaghetti monster thing. I simply have no reason to accept it. There's a difference between rejecting and not accepting.

rusmeister wrote:Nor am I suggesting that you would ignore an experience - only that you might decide that whatever it is has a natural explanation - or not - depending on your will. That's what choice is - a matter of will - and we CAN (ability) choose against what natural forces or impulses urge us to do or believe.

Certainly, we accept different categories of evidence in regards to evidence of the supernatural, as well as other topics. Just as ali and I apparently do. I could certainly think what you and ali consider a miracle is simply extremely improbable. But there are certainly things I would consider proof that the supernatural exists.

rusmeister wrote:Teaching grammar to people who do not even know the language forces one to learn rather precisely what words mean. Not to sound like "Professor Wikipedia" (a college humor vid on YouTube that gave me a few good laughs), but the modal verb 'can' expresses ability, request or permission ('can't' can also be a negative logical assumption, and 'could' can express possibility, request, past ability or conditional ability.)

So we 'can' (ability) always choose. Whether we 'will' is another matter.

I've never been confused by the distinction. Elementary school teachers began teaching us that when we asked, "Can I go to the bathroom?" "I don't know. Can you?" I say whether or not you will choose unbelief is not applicable, because you can't.

rusmeister wrote:That analogy simply does not work for a person who completely abandons belief for twenty years and means it, Ali.

But it works perfectly for the person who only thought it needed to be rejected entirely, because that person did not know the objectionable parts could be separated from the acceptable parts. You simply didn't know. But you could not stamp out the part of you that wanted the good beliefs that were offered. That part forced you to try alternatives. Which failed spectacularly. Eventually, that part forced you to find a way to accept faith. Which you did by discarding the aspects you had been taught that were false.

rusmeister wrote:We choose in the face of our circumstances.

YES! We do. If circumstances change - if something new is learned - we could very well have reason - and ability - to choose otherwise. If circumstances do not change, we do not choose otherwise. If there is no stimulus, there is no response.

Fist and Faith wrote:And if I ever choose to believe, it will be because I have found some new information that changes things so that I can't not choose to believe.

This makes it sound like you are simply a computer that tabulates data, with a binary belief/nonbelief toggle. And some day the right (or wrong) piece of data will flip the switch.
I don't think most of us work that way.

dw

DukkhaWaynhim wrote:

Fist and Faith wrote:And if I ever choose to believe, it will be because I have found some new information that changes things so that I can't not choose to believe.

This makes it sound like you are simply a computer that tabulates data, with a binary belief/nonbelief toggle. And some day the right (or wrong) piece of data will flip the switch.
I don't think most of us work that way.

dw

I think I do. Every so often, a piece of data comes my way that says "everyone is controlling my life with intent" and then I go a little bit crazy.

DukkhaWaynhim wrote:

Fist and Faith wrote:And if I ever choose to believe, it will be because I have found some new information that changes things so that I can't not choose to believe.

This makes it sound like you are simply a computer that tabulates data, with a binary belief/nonbelief toggle. And some day the right (or wrong) piece of data will flip the switch.
I don't think most of us work that way.

Do you think you can choose the opposite of what you currently believe? By default, I do not believe. And I know I cannot choose to believe. I see certain things working in certain ways. I see certain requirements need to be met to have actual knowledge/facts. I need solid logic, evidence, or direct experience to believe in anything. I am unable to change how I feel about those things, and that's what would be required for me to choose to believe under current circumstances.

I'm positive rus cannot choose to not believe, regardless of what he says. He says he could if he wanted to. Fine. But that just adds another step that makes no difference.* He cannot want to choose unbelief.

How does it work with you?


*Same situation as saying the cause & effect system we live in cannot, itself, be uncaused; so adding God. But that simply makes God a part of that same system, the first step. And if that system needs a cause, then God needs a cause.)

I need solid logic, evidence, or direct experience to believe in anything.

Hmmm

I guess I would say that my belief came to me from a moment of looking back at one's life and seeing persistent patterns, patterns too persistent when, considered altogether, to be believed. It is almost as though there is surely some equation, more ordered than one might ever expect, governing my life. This might be referred to as, in the words of Anthony Powell if not earlier thinkers, one's "personal myth." Except that it is something slightly more than that. It is something like the recognition of the everyman in me.

It surprises me that others go through life without realizing/buying into a personal myth when from what I know, I begin to construct such myths for others. Though of course I try and mostly succeed not to share those myths.

rusmeister wrote:That analogy simply does not work for a person who completely abandons belief for twenty years and means it, Ali. Your masquerader knows it is only a masquerade and that the dressing up is temporary - for one evening, just for fun. So suggesting that I may have really been a closet believer all the time is simply false.

Well, I *said* it was an imperfect analogy...

I'm not suggesting you were a closet believer the whole time. I believe you when you say you were sincere in your atheism. But the hedonistic lifestyle didn't sit right with you; it was morally corrupt, etc. So you turned back (eventually) to religion. Am I correct so far?

Okay. Now. I'd like to stipulate that atheism does not equal hedonism. They are two different things. There are folks who claim to be spiritual or religious but who believe it's okay to have multiple sex partners, or multiple spouses; some religious traditions require the ingestion of hallucinogens; and so on. (I understand that you, rus, believe that these folks have strayed far, far from The Path -- you don't need to preach at me about how wrong they are. I'm just saying that different spiritual traditions from yours don't have a problem with behavior that you consider immoral or hedonistic.)

And there are atheists who go to work every day, keep out of trouble, love their wives and children, and generally lead a quiet, moral existence.

So okay, clearly it's possible to divorce atheism from hedonism. But you didn't do that. You rejected them *both together*. For that matter, you didn't *start out* being the sort of atheist who simply disbelieves in God but lives (the Christian definition of) a morally upstanding life -- you went whole hog. Why?

I was gonna supply you with *my* answer. But I think it might benefit you to do a little introspection on my questions first.

I want to post the obvious answer to that question, but I feel like I can expect Rus to know it. That being said, I do believe that a belief in an afterlife and a divine, omnipotent presence does strengthen one's will to do good beyond the good one already does, rather than merely do what is actually acceptable in society.

Assuming, of course, that what that divine, omnipotent presence wants you to do is good.

Fist and Faith wrote:

rusmeister wrote:Well, it's true that there is no tradition of putting ice in drinks, and climate has a lot to do with it. Most of the year our (enclosed) balcony serves as a refrigerator; and for a couple of months we have to remove stuff that we don't want flat-out frozen.

Yeah, my guess would have been climate.

rusmeister wrote:The one thing I'll say now is that there is a difference between 'will' and 'can' as modal verbs. I agree that as things stand, we WILL not choose differently. But I do not agree that we CAN not. We are capable.

I disagree. Of course, neither of us can prove it. You won't be choosing to not believe. As I've said, although that doesn't prove you can't, it surely doesn't prove you can. And if I ever choose to believe, it will be because I have found some new information that changes things so that I can't not choose to believe.

rusmeister wrote:The capability depends on our will, and is not affected by circumstances. I am/we are capable of acts of horrific evil. But our will (hopefully) rejects them, even should temptation, or even fantasy about them, arise. But CAN I choose to do something that I think bad or wrong or unwise or crazy, or to believe in something that I have no 'proof' of - do I have the ability? Of course. And if circumstances change, I might see my way to doing the crazy thing or accepting the unproven belief - or abandoning it.

I could choose to become a Nazi and commit atrocities if my children were being held hostage and would be killed if I didn't. I could not choose to believe killing Jews in the most horrific ways imaginable was good, or anything less than evil.

rusmeister wrote:If we CANNOT do something, then there is no possibility of our doing it at all. If we WILL not, then the possibility remains, even though we reject it.

And how am I to tell which is the case with you? You say you can, but won't. I don't believe you can. Am I to take your word for it? You certainly don't take mine when it comes to me. (Not about this; not about meaninglessness; not about anything.) And this conversation started because, once again, you declared my lack of belief a choice that I (plural) could change if I wanted to. If you stopped making these grand, superior proclomations, we wouldn't be arguing all the freakin' time.

rusmeister wrote:So you reject belief by will, as I reject unbelief by will. But I could (ability) apostatize, just as you could come to faith - something that many people of faith and of unbelief have respectively done.

I don't reject belief in God, or anything supernatural, any more than I reject that spaghetti monster thing. I simply have no reason to accept it. There's a difference between rejecting and not accepting.

rusmeister wrote:Nor am I suggesting that you would ignore an experience - only that you might decide that whatever it is has a natural explanation - or not - depending on your will. That's what choice is - a matter of will - and we CAN (ability) choose against what natural forces or impulses urge us to do or believe.

Certainly, we accept different categories of evidence in regards to evidence of the supernatural, as well as other topics. Just as ali and I apparently do. I could certainly think what you and ali consider a miracle is simply extremely improbable. But there are certainly things I would consider proof that the supernatural exists.

rusmeister wrote:Teaching grammar to people who do not even know the language forces one to learn rather precisely what words mean. Not to sound like "Professor Wikipedia" (a college humor vid on YouTube that gave me a few good laughs), but the modal verb 'can' expresses ability, request or permission ('can't' can also be a negative logical assumption, and 'could' can express possibility, request, past ability or conditional ability.)

So we 'can' (ability) always choose. Whether we 'will' is another matter.

I've never been confused by the distinction. Elementary school teachers began teaching us that when we asked, "Can I go to the bathroom?" "I don't know. Can you?" I say whether or not you will choose unbelief is not applicable, because you can't.

It comes down to my saying that you are CAPABLE of a great many things that you are unlikely to do. You COULD do them if you so chose; without motivation you are unlikely to. The rest is bandying semantics. You say 'I can't" which I interpret as "I won't". The only point I am trying to make is that you DO have the power to choose to do something desperate/unusual/crazy, even though you see no reason why you should. You may come to see that reason. If you did, you would suddenly discover that you had been capable all along - that you merely lacked motivation. That you won't without motivation is given.

(In my worldview that is one of the purposes of pain and suffering in this world.)

CS Lewis wrote:God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world

The Problem of Pain

aliantha wrote:

rusmeister wrote:That analogy simply does not work for a person who completely abandons belief for twenty years and means it, Ali. Your masquerader knows it is only a masquerade and that the dressing up is temporary - for one evening, just for fun. So suggesting that I may have really been a closet believer all the time is simply false.

Well, I *said* it was an imperfect analogy...

I'm not suggesting you were a closet believer the whole time. I believe you when you say you were sincere in your atheism. But the hedonistic lifestyle didn't sit right with you; it was morally corrupt, etc. So you turned back (eventually) to religion. Am I correct so far?

Okay. Now. I'd like to stipulate that atheism does not equal hedonism. They are two different things. There are folks who claim to be spiritual or religious but who believe it's okay to have multiple sex partners, or multiple spouses; some religious traditions require the ingestion of hallucinogens; and so on. (I understand that you, rus, believe that these folks have strayed far, far from The Path -- you don't need to preach at me about how wrong they are. I'm just saying that different spiritual traditions from yours don't have a problem with behavior that you consider immoral or hedonistic.)

And there are atheists who go to work every day, keep out of trouble, love their wives and children, and generally lead a quiet, moral existence.

So okay, clearly it's possible to divorce atheism from hedonism. But you didn't do that. You rejected them *both together*. For that matter, you didn't *start out* being the sort of atheist who simply disbelieves in God but lives (the Christian definition of) a morally upstanding life -- you went whole hog. Why?

I was gonna supply you with *my* answer. But I think it might benefit you to do a little introspection on my questions first.

Hi Ali,
I'm quite clear on the difference. The reason I rejected them both together is because I became aware of a definite struggle, essentially spiritual, while I was agnostic. I was exposed to what I would call the best of hedonism with its logical conclusions gradually playing out - I met the kindest people who would give me a place to stay for the night and the shirt off their back; at the same time I saw what effective enforced agnosticism came to be de facto atheism under a formal cover of pluralist agnosticism. In reading Lewis, I became convinced of what the nature of that struggle was - and I was rather chagrined to realize that it led me back in the direction I had come from. I had no desire to worship God; I really liked my Sunday morning breakfasts at the local equivalent of Denny's; I didn't want to rearrange my life.

But there was a definite force that I was especially able to perceive in the environment of public education that didn't seem to much care whether you were a moral agnostic (as I was) or a hedonist, but that there was one thing it was definitely bent on rooting out and eliminating was the tradition of faith that I always knew our country was built on. What I was doing was really beginning to think for the first time in my life. And the thing at school that was driving out morality, allowing teens to bring inflatable sex dolls to school dances and handing out condoms and telling them to go have sex, demanding that God not be discussed in the classroom and preventing the actual learning that it purported to offer was hand in hand with the hedonism exploding out of Berkeley, raging through SF, and spreading through the country like a disease, and the common thread was that it was all about man becoming his own god, and the thing that that has to stamp out is a commonly acknowledged God over us all. So I eventually came to the (then gloomy) conclusion that I would have to become a Christian again. What it definitely was not was a hidden inclination toward faith that I always had. It was the events of the several years leading up to my conversion, in which I went to very nearly the end of my rope, and which, prior to that, I had no conception of at all. Not only had I been homeless; I also had climbed out of it and was building a successful life in material terms on the left coast. Nevertheless I became aware of a spiritual war, and that there are no neutrals in that war. It came back to choosing a side - something I refused to do until the war was brought home to me - the events of the last few months before my conversion. Until that point I thought that I could keep doing what I had been doing and that everything would 'work out somehow'. Still, I struggled to find excuses to not convert, and in the end was left with objections to things like confession before a priest, which proved to be mere and of my own making.

Not sure how well that answers your question. I'll sum up with GKC's summation about the English Liberal Party and the prelude to the Spanish Civil War. The whole chapter ought to be read (ch 6: The Case of Spain); I'll refrain from saying that the whole book ought to be read - OK, just said it, but it would illuminate the short quote:

Now that is a small and purely political point.
But to me it was very awakening. It showed me quite clearly
the fundamental truth of the modern world. And that is this:
there are no Fascists; there are no Socialists;
there are no Liberals; there are no Parliamentarians.
There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating
institution in the world; and there are its enemies.
Its enemies are ready to be for violence or against violence,
for liberty or against liberty, for representation or
against representation; and even for peace or against peace.
It gave me an entirely new certainty, even in the practical
and political sense, that I had chosen well.

www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Well ... allows.txt

rusmeister wrote:It comes down to my saying that you are CAPABLE of a great many things that you are unlikely to do. You COULD do them if you so chose; without motivation you are unlikely to.

"Motivation" means new information, whether physical evidence, personal experience, whatever.

rusmeister wrote:The rest is bandying semantics. You say 'I can't" which I interpret as "I won't".

I don't mean "You won't." I mean "You can't." As things stand now, it is not possible for you to choose to no longer believe. And it is not possible for me to choose to believe. There is no belief switch that can be thrown. We have mental/emotional characteristics, much as we have physical ones. We cannot choose to ignore them on a whim.

rusmeister wrote:The only point I am trying to make is that you DO have the power to choose to do something desperate/unusual/crazy, even though you see no reason why you should. You may come to see that reason. If you did, you would suddenly discover that you had been capable all along - that you merely lacked motivation. That you won't without motivation is given.

I agree with this. But it is not what you've been saying for years. You've been saying there is, mataphorically speaking, a "belief switch" that we can switch any time we want, and that I am choosing not to throw it. It is not a choice to not throw it. There needs to be a reason to do so. Motivation. New information that changes things.

rusmeister wrote:The main thing is how we share the news. The western - and mainly American - concept of 'door-to-door evangelism', aka "soulwinning" is absent. We find standing on a hilltop preaching to be largely ineffective - relationship has everything to do with evangelism, so it is just as much how we live as what we say.

I think it depends upon the context.

Interestingly, I think that this approach you speak of is far more the kind of approach appropriate in a post-modern context.
Of course, that could just be because it's appropriate in many contexts.
(wheras the hilltop preaching is appropriate in only a few.)

(You and I have had discussions before about the Western church "discovering" a valuable tradition the OC has heard all along, yadda-yadda.)

I think it's interesting what it says on the other forum about how the man who brought the Orthodox Church to AK "acquired a peaceful spirit"... I can see how that would tend to interest people!

Especially when coupled with the whole idea that our actions do show what we really believe.

Holsety wrote:One of the important aspects of the story is that it shortly follows, perhaps immediately follows, IIRC, the story of the sacrifice of the ram (which of course one can't help but link to the sacrifice of Jesus). Abraham is perfectly willing to give back to god the gift of laughter.

Laughter!

But he isn't willing to let two cities of bad men be destroyed on account of a relatively small portion of good being destroyed. This MAY have to do with Lot being in the city of Soodom. But even if so, this is still something, since Lot is a relative who IIRC dealt with Abraham in "bad faith" at some point over the course of genesis (doesn't Lot get the better end of a herd-splitting deal?).

I love to think about context in those narratives.
These pieces of context really make the contrast more and more startling.
I should go look that up.

The piece of context that often gets me is... what it says God "said to Himself" just before the discussion.
(in quotes... since it is an anthropomorphism. Unfortunately, the most familiar kind of anthropomorphism ascribes human traits to the sub-human.)

My suggestion is, at times, to try and respond to a few bite-sized portions, if not the "whole meal." That's what I do when the "whole" is a little too tough to try and deal with.

useful, that.