Wednesday 16 October 2013

Faith antithesis of rationality

03.365 (02.08.2009) Faith
03.365 (02.08.2009) Faith (Photo credit: hannahclark)
People may find it not important how 'the belief' is first acquired.

Many Christians may be persuaded by arguments of some theological writers or some popular figures like C. S. Lewis, or in certain circles much spoken off people like William Lane Craig, or Alvin Plantinga.

The problem for someone first persuaded by these conjurers of religious apologetics arises when they become so convinced that they stop using reason and turn to faith as the final arbiter of what they believe.

Some people may go one way, than an other way and never become sure what to believe or having always doubts. Others may be strongly convinced of certain believes and would like to see others to take over their believes, but this more because than they can be confirmed in their believes.

In the world of so called religious people e can find many sorts adhering many denominations. Sceptics would say that once a person does resort to faith the reasoning capacity becomes limited, because faith is always supposed to override, surmount, be better than reason. Many religions rely on the fact that they have something to offer to the people living in this world. Some religions offer their followers a better life in an other stadium, be it returning again on this earth under an other form or be it going to live in a place called heaven.

You could call 'Faith' the antithesis of rationality, because it demands a believe in things we rationally can't declare. Faith is what you use when you want to believe something, or are otherwise driven to hold a belief. For some faith is the position to be in or the action to undertake when there is no reason or evidence to support the belief. And faith can result in belief in spite of counter evidence and reason. This makes it very difficult to get people to see certain things which could be otherwise than they assume.

Many would argue that there is no logical reason for supposing anything exists that we cannot experience directly or test for in some way. As human beings we can look around us and question the existence of all those things we can see, hear and feel. We can not escape being an element in space which has to undergo certain actions in this world. Some happenings we may steer, but others are totally out of our control. By all those things which happen around us we ask many questions. Several people may form good ideas and bring plausible solutions. By those who offer others their ideas, there are some who really want to impose their thinking to others without objection. Many Christian religious people do not want to allow arguments to come their way. Others evoke protest.

By the 41,000 denominations of Christianity in the world, only a few are known by the general public, and most people do assume that the bigger denominations are the only ones which are right. some like the Roman Catholic Church say that because they are the biggest denomination in Christendom this is also a proof that they are the only right Universal Church  of God. In the West it is Catholic tradition which formed the tradition of the people, which is often a mixture of heathen traditions with church teachings. Many people are proud of their Western roots of Judeo Christian values.

But by those who call themselves Christians, what should mean "Followers of Christ Jesus" the respect for other Christians does not show real brotherhood and often makes you even wonder if they are following the same Master Teacher. When we look at forums or look at the reactions on blogs we do find that there’s no shortage of mudslinging across the ideological divides of religion.

When you hear such persons who call them self saved by the Saviour you would think they will be pleased to live according to the teachings of that person and follow him in his ways. When that person in the early years of this common era  spoke about the way how to behave, you would think his followers would follow that advice this wise man gave. Jesus of Nazareth presented  a way of life. He gave us the study of action with respect to the good for humans, which is happiness. So you would think that once people got to study those teachings and came to understand them, they would follow those directions of ethics. You would think those people their eyes would be opened and that they would accept that all people were made in the image of God, so should all have elements of that God in them. You would also think they would become respectful for all those, who are allowed by the creator God to be here on this earth.

Why is it then that so many who call themselves Christian fight against other Christians, and call each other names, children's ears would better not hear?

Would they not prefer to live in a peaceful world? Would they not do everything to get all different people to live together in the best circumstances? Would they not want to become a more excellent, happier human being?

Please do find out more about it in:
  1. Caricaturing and disapproving sceptics, religious critics and figured out ethics
  2.  Catholicism, Anabaptism and Crisis of Christianity
  3. Morality, values and Developing right choices
  4. Are religious and secular ethicists climbing the same mountain
  5. Being religious has benefits even in this life
  6. History of Christianity  
  7. Christianity is a love affair
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Friday 11 October 2013

Whom Shall I Fear (God of Angel Armies) by Chris Tomlin

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Find also to read:
  1. 7000 to 20000 words spoken each day
  2. Darkness, light, burning fire, Truth and people in it
  3. Greatest single cause of atheism
  4. Breathing and growing with no heir
  5. Facing disaster fatigue
  6. Fear knocked at the door
  7. 8 fears caused by the fear of Man
  8. Walking alone?
  9. Fearing the right person
  10. Fear and protection
  11. Anxiety is the gap between the now and the later
  12. Vile language and behaviour plus little secrets
  13. Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #4 Mozaic and Noachide laws
  14. Condemnation of the World and Illustration of Justification
  15. Fear not tomorrow. God is already there
  16. Do not be afraid. Good news because a Saviour has been born
  17. Trusting, Faith, calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #2 Calling upon the Name of God
  18. Trusting, Faith, Calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #4 Transitoriness #1 Prosperity
  19. Trusting, Faith, Calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #4 Transitoriness #3 Rejoicing in the insistence
  20. Trusting, Faith, Calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #8 Prayer #6 Communication and manifestation
  21. I Only hope we find GOD again before it is too late !
  22. Look for your Refuge by God
  23. Praying For What We Want or Don’t Want
  24. Prophets making excuses
  25. Would You Run?
  26. Control and change
  27. When discouraged facing opposition
  28. Only the contrite self, sick of its pretensions, can find salvation
  29. Try driving forward instead of backwards
  30. Be strong and take courage
  31. A small trouble is like a pebble
  32. Look for today
  33. Rejoicing in the day
  34. Give your worries to God
  35. God is Positive
  36. God Feeds The Birds
  37. God become master of our passions
  38. No fear in love
  39. Joy: Foundation for a Positive Life
  40. Wondering
  41. Eternal Word that tells everything
  42. Power in the life of certain
  43. Being sure of their deliverance
  44. Jehovah's Witnesses not only group that preach the good news
  45. Focus on Jehovah's Witnesses
  46. Focus on Charles Taze Russell
  47. Charles Taze Russell never claimed to have found a new religion, or a new church.
  48. Bringing Good News into the world
  49. A small company of Jesus' footstep follower
  50. Follower of Jesus part of a cult or a Christian
  51. Those who call the Christadelphians a cult
  52. Breaking up with a cult
  53. Being religious has benefits even in this life
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Monday 7 October 2013

Xanga Toe Stepper made silent

'Stepping toes' was originally a Xanga website opened on the 28th of September 2011, but in the Summer 2013 Xanga changed its policy and the Christadelphians had to find a solution for recovering their texts on October 6 of 2013.
Image representing Xanga as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
The reason why the Christadelphians started a Xanga site was because they were confronted with a lot of wrong sayings on several Xanga sites about serious Bible Students, Jehovah Witnesses and Christadelphians or Brothers in Christ. Because they could not react to certain writings on Xanga, because  to reply the person had to be a member and some writings on the Xanga sites could use some reactions from outside the Christadelphians decided to put on their boots and join the community.

I and and the Christadelphians knew it would not be a place where many writings from our site would be placed on the net. We had our hands full already with other websites and other real life stuff, printing work and distribution of hard copy magazines.

Image representing Skype as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
In the recent previous years we saw many changes in the bloggers world. Also in the system of communicating with each other many changes came very quickly. I still remember to be one of the earlier messengusers having a @messengeruser.com account which later became the better know @hotmail.com account, which still many use today but also has been changed to @outlook.com accounts, and the messenger gave way to the more succesfull Skype.

The "Stepping toes" site got his name from the Dutch saying “Op de tenen stappen” or “Stepping on the toes” being the figuratively  “to thread on a person’s toes” or making that somebody carries a chip on the shoulder.

At the time we did hope that the visitors on that site would not be to quickly to take offence, but would be brought to think about serious and debatable matters. We knew that the matters which we brought forward on that site were texts which could cause commotion, hence the name.

It is our awareness that people like to hold fast on tradition and want to keep to certainties which are given from one generation onto the other. We know that certain ideas we share, are not favoured by so many. First of all do we love and honour only One God, who we want to address to with His Name. And that Name is one which frightens a lot of people. Once people do hear the Name of that Creator they also often of only one denomination in christianity, forgetting that there are (luckilly) more denominations which use that Sacred Name of God.

People are easily put out when they hear whom we adhere.
But we are also sure that the die is been cast and that we have come in a special time where it is more important to share our love to the whole world, like our Masterteacher Jesus/Jeshua, the Messiah did.

The man we do like to follow on this earth not only wanted that everybody knew his Father, he also proclaimed the Good News of the coming Kingdom of God and wanted that all his followers went out into the world to bring that Evangelion of good Tidings.
You could say that nobody can quarrel with such good news that Jesus of Nazareth brought, but as the world went against him so they were not pleased either with his followers.

At the time of going on the Xanga platform the Christadelphians wrote:
Now we pitch our own tents here also on this Xanga Group we do hope we shall find enough spirits eager to share their ideas and to welk along on the long road to … Tipperary and beyond. happy
Today they have to tell the readers:

From Monday 7 October we shall try to place the previous publicised articles from Xanga on some of our other websites.
Most of the Christadelphian writings you can find at our other web pages, to which we would like to invite you:

Our main site: Belgian Christadelphians
Christadelphian Ecclesia
Brethren in Christ – Broeders in Christus
Christadelphia
Hoop tot Leven | Redding door Christus Jezus
Hope to find you there also.heart

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Wednesday 2 October 2013

Has the Bible’s Garden of Eden been found — and restored

Despite ongoing violence in the region, NewScientist is reporting that the “‘Garden of Eden’ has been saved.” The country’s Council of Ministers recently approved its first national park, restoring Mesopotamian marshes in Iraqi’s southern region.

Biblical scholars say this massive oasis in the desert may have been the Garden of Eden. For more than five millennia, tribal groups of Marsh Arabs lived sustainably in this water world, using the dominant plant, a giant grass called Phragmites australis, for housing, animal feed, fuel, and commerce. Under their ministrations, the marshes teemed with life, serving as one of the world’s most important stopovers for migratory birds and as breeding habitat for Persian Gulf fisheries. 

After the Gulf war in 1991, Iraq's president, Saddam Hussain, used dykes, sluices and diversions to cut off the country's two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. This drained 93 per cent of the marshes, largely obliterating the largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East.

Please find more about it in:

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Jew refering to be religious or to be a people


Not only the Catholic church faces lots of people who do not want to be active in their 'faith' or who perhaps still take part in certain traditional feasts, like child-baptism, first and second communion, but really do not believe in any God or would ever read the Bible.

In Belgium we still do have a very active Jewish community but everywhere in the world we also notice people who call themselves Jew but have no interest in any god whatsoever.

In the United States the number of nonreligious Jews is rising. When you would go around and ask passers by how active they are in their religion, you probably would find many who are not religious at all. According to a new survey of the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project more than one in five so called Jews, saying they are not affiliated with a religion.

The size of the U.S. Jewish population has been a matter of lively debate among academic experts for more than a decade. Because the Pew Research survey involves a representative sample of Jews, rather than a census of all American Jews, it cannot definitively answer the question. However, data from the survey can be used to derive a rough estimate of the size of the U.S. Jewish population. Perhaps even more valuably, the survey illuminates the many different ways in which Americans self-identify as Jewish or partially Jewish, and it therefore provides a sense of how the size of the population varies depending on one’s definition of who is a Jew.

If Jewish refers only to people whose religion is Jewish (Jews by religion), then the survey indicates that the Jewish population currently stands at about 1.8% of the total U.S. adult population, or 4.2 million people. If one includes secular or cultural Jews – those who say they have no religion but who were raised Jewish or have a Jewish parent and who still consider themselves Jewish aside from religion – then the estimate grows to 2.2% of American adults, or about 5.3 million. For the purposes of the analysis in this report, these two groups make up the “net” Jewish population.

In traditional Jewish law (halakha), Jewish identity is passed down through matrilineal descent, and the survey finds that about 90% of Jews by religion and 64% of Jews of no religion – a total of about 4.4 million U.S. adults – say they have a Jewish mother. Additionally, about 1.3 million people who are not classified as Jews in this report (49% of non-Jews of Jewish background) say they have a Jewish mother.  {Since 1983, the Reform movement formally has embraced a more expansive definition of who is a Jew, accepting children born of either a Jewish father or a Jewish mother if the children are raised Jewish and engage in public acts of Jewish identification, such as acquiring a Hebrew name, studying Torah and having a bar or bat mitzvah. See the Reform movement’s March 15, 1983, Resolution on Patrilineal Descent.}

Jewish leaders say the new survey spotlights several unique obstacles for the future of their faith. You can wonder when even among religious Jews, most of them say it's not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish, and less than one in three say religion is very important to their lives. Like in Catholicism and protestantism in the Western World, the people living in a luxury world are more interested in material wealth than in spiritual richness.

Though Greg Smith, director of religious surveys for the Pew Research Center says:
"The fact that many Jews tell us that religion is not particularly important to them doesn't mean that being Jewish is not important to them."
The long-term decline in the Jewish by religion share of the population results partly from differences in the median age and fertility of Jews compared with the public at large. As early as 1957, Jews by religion were significantly older and had fewer children than the U.S. population as a whole. At that time, the median age of Jews older than age 14 was 44.5 years, compared with 40.4 years among the population as a whole, and Jewish women ages 15-44 had 1.2 children on average, compared with 1.7 children among this age group in the general public. {The 1957 Current Population Survey results were published in Goldstein, S. 1969. “Socioeconomic Differentials Among Religious Groups in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, volume 74, issue 6, pages 612-631, and Mueller, S. A., and Lane, A. V. 1972. “Tabulations from the 1957 Current Population Survey on Religion: A Contribution to the Demography of American Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, volume 11, issue 1, pages 76-98. Unfortunately, raw data from the 1957 survey were destroyed, so it is not possible to reanalyze them using the various age categories used in the new survey. In the 1957 survey, completed interviews were obtained for roughly 35,000 households.}

Today, Jews by religion still are considerably older than U.S. adults as a whole, although they are similar to the general public in the number of children ever born. (See discussion of median age and fertility in the Age and Fertility sections in Chapter 2.)

Since 2000, the share of American adults who say their religion is Jewish has generally ranged between 1.2% and 2% in national surveys. 
The estimate from the new Pew Research survey that there are approximately 5.3 million “net” Jewish adults and 1 million children who are being raised exclusively as Jewish (or 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish) falls roughly in the middle of these prior estimates – somewhat higher than DellaPergola’s numbers, somewhat lower than the Dashefsky-Sheskin figure and fairly close to the Saxe-Tighe estimates.

The estimate that Jews by religion make up 1.8% of U.S. adults also is consistent with the results of Pew Research surveys over the past five years and close to the findings of other recent national surveys (such as Gallup polls and the General Social Surveys conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago) that use similar, close-ended questions about religious affiliation. {A close-ended question provides the respondent with a list of possible responses to choose from. Pew Research’s typical wording is: “What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in particular.” Other studies, such as the National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS) and American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS) have used open-ended questions about religious affiliation – offering no specific response options – and the results therefore are not directly comparable. Open-ended questions about religious affiliation tend to find smaller numbers of Jews by religion. See, for example, Schulman, M. A., chair. NJPS 2000-2001 Review Committee. 2003. “National Jewish Population Survey 2000-2001: Study Review Memo;” and Tighe, E., Saxe, L., and Livert, D. 2006. “Research synthesis of national survey estimates of the U.S. Jewish population,” presented at the 61st Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.}


In aggregated Pew Research polling, the Jewish by religion share of the population has ranged in recent years between 1.5% (in 2009) and 1.9% (in 2010). GSS estimates have ranged from 1.5% (in 2012) to 1.7% (in 2008). Combining its own surveys conducted since 2008, Pew Research finds that a weighted average of 1.7% of U.S. adults identify as Jews by religion, while the GSS and Gallup find 1.6% identifying as Jews by religion.

According to the survey, a full 16 percent of Orthodox Jews “attend non-Jewish religious services at least a few times a year.” The proportion is identical for Modern Orthodox Jews and what the survey describes as “ultra-Orthodox Jews” — 15 percent for both sub-groups. Shockingly, that’s slightly higher than the proportions of Reform Jews (15 percent) and non-denominational Jews (12%) who report attending non-Jewish religious services with similar frequency.

Jane Eisner, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, said she is not surprised that the study found relatively low interest in Jewish religious beliefs.
"We are a people very much defined by what we do, rather than what we believe," she said.
But Eisner said she is concerned that millennials are less likely to donate to Jewish charities, care strongly about Israel or belong to Jewish groups.
"It's great that these non-religious Jews feel pride in being Jewish," Eisner said. "What worries me is their tenuous ties to the community."

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