A Return to Logic: Blake T Ostler among Mormon Theologians

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Other

While I didn't really pay attention to the presentor, I really liked Blake's response. He touches Heavenly Mother. He stated that Joseph Smith didn't mention or teach Heavenly Mother and that Eliza Snow "made it up". Whether he believes it, he didn't say.

This was just a good talk. I highly recommend it.

http://sunstonemagazine.com/audio/SL04225.mp3

Exploring Mormon Thought: The problems of Theism and the Love of God.

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Blake Ostler

Exploring Mormon Thought: The Problems of Theism and the Love of God.

I wish I could have the patience to write all my feelings and thoughts about the book. Aside from the fact that much of this book went over my head, I think the series contains some of the most important essays and studies of mormon ideologies I have ever encountered. That isn’t to say that I necessarily agree with the author in all respects either.

The first book in the series took on the nature of God and showed how logically, the theology of “orthodox Christianity” is not supportable by scripture nor logic. This book takes on such things as the nature of sin, soteriology and grace. This book has some pretty strong chapter headings: “The Implausibility of Original Sin”, “Self-Deception and Justification by Faith” and “The Problem of Grace”. While I don’t pretend to understand all his arguments, it certainly has made me look at things differently.

My favorite chapters deal with original sin (“Guilt cannot be imputed.”) and the atonement (“Guilt cannot be imputed.”). I will only focus on a few of his arguments on the atonement and the simple refutation of traditional explanations.

Ransom Theory
This is based on being slaves to sin and in captivity to the Devil. Jesus paid the price to get us out of this situation. (1Cor 6:20 and Mark 10:45). “..it fell out of favor because it assumed that God had to resort to trickery to free sinners. Worse, it assumed that God could not simply overpower Satan any time he wanted to.” Pg 261

Satisfaction Theory
This is along the lines that God’s honor has been wronged and needs to be repaired.
“The demand to repair God’s honor seems to be a snobbish self-centeredness that reflects God’s concern for himself and total disregard for our interests and well-being…It assumes that one can amass superogatory moral merit so that one has more moral ‘cash’ than one needs for one’s self. However, moral virtue is not like a bank account that can be saved up and spent. And finally, the notion that God makes a demand to satisfy his honor by punishing the only person who fully honored him is contrary even to the feudal code of honor because it is dishonorable to punish an innocent person to obtain satisfaction.” Pg 263.

Moral Influence Theory
This is based on an error in satisfaction theory, that God can’t commune because of his wounded honor, when it is really our sin that is causing the problem. It is correct in as far as it goes but does not explain how Christ bears our sins nor why Christ’s suffering makes forgiveness possible. Pg 264.

Governmental Theory
LDS might know this as the laws of Justice and Mercy. This is more like a precursor to that theory. Laws are violated and Jesus satisfied the Law while showing mercy.

Penal Substitution Theory.
Developed primarily by John Calvin. God set up laws and he can’t forgive us because his laws must be obeyed. Ostler set up 5 main arguments against this position

1) The penal theory posits a conflict between Father and Son. A loving forgiving Son must persuade the Father to turn away his wrath.
2) The penal theory erroneously assumes that guilt, or righteousness, can be transferred. Innocents being punished for the guilty is not acceptable in any legal system.
3) The penal theory is unjust. This view assumes that the humans who deserve to be punished escape it while the only person in the history of the world who does not deserve punishment is punished in our place.
4) The penal theory limits God’s power to forgive. It fails to explain why we can forgive each other but somehow God is incapable of doing it himself.
5) The penal theory entails a legal fiction as the basis for our reconciliation. It entails that God in fact overlooks our sinfulness and instead regards us as righteous because Christ is—even though it is not true that we are in fact righteous.

He calls his theory of atonement as the Compassion Theory of Atonement. That sin is real in that it separates us from God, from developing a loving relationship with him. Christ’s atonement is His pain in forgiving us. His need or desire to reestablish that relationship and the pain he feels in doing that.

I’m not necessarily sold on this yet, but it is intriguing. I can’t even say that I even have the ability to defend it. I still think it is dangerous that he uses philosophy to defend his views, in that most LDS view that as the prime reason for the departure of early Christianity from the Gospel.

http://www.christiansonline.cc/forum/comparing-notes/3675-atonement.html

Just when you thought Christianity was right for you.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/885008,CST-NWS-stab09.article#

A Waukegan mother claimed her 6-year-old daughter attacked her with a butcher knife because the petite kindergartner was possessed by a demon, Lake County authorities said Tuesday.

Nelly Vazquez-Salazar insisted to investigators that she was defending herself when she fatally slashed and stabbed her 51-pound daughter, Evelyn, whom she had grown concerned about in recent months because the girl had started sleepwalking, authorities said. Bloody knife found

The 25-year-old single mother was charged Tuesday with first degree-murder in the death of her only child, who was found slain early Monday in the Waukegan apartment they shared.

The youngster's throat was slashed and she had been stabbed 10 other times, including three times in the face, Lake County prosecutors said. A religious picture lying on the floor next to the girl also had been punctured by a knife, authorities said in court as they detailed the slaying and ripped Vazquez-Salazar's claims of how it occurred.

"She [Vazquez-Salazar] claimed the little girl was possessed by a demon," Assistant State's Attorney Stephen Scheller said, describing the child differently.

"She was an intelligent, vibrant, beautiful little girl. She was, in fact, an angel," Scheller said.

Vazquez-Salazar wept softly throughout the bond hearing but didn't speak. Her bond was set at $5 million and she remained under a suicide watch late Tuesday in the Lake County Jail.

The bizarre slaying shook even veteran police officers and prosecutors.

"A killing like this affects the whole community," said Waukegan Police Chief William Biang. "You never want to see a vibrant, active 6-year-old taken like this."

The little girl was found slain about 4:40 a.m. Monday after Vazquez-Salazar went to a neighbor's apartment and told them she thought she had killed her daughter.

A bloody butcher knife was found next to the girl, as was a framed religious picture that included St. Joseph, Mary and Jesus Christ, Scheller said. The faces of all three figures had been stabbed, he said.

 

This after I watched a program on PBS about the Myan script and how the Catholic Priest had all the myans who could write put to death and every Myan text burned....wonderful. Considering I have adopted two children with this in their history....wonderful.

An incredibly good article

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is one line: FINAL, and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it.

On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject. There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament .... the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive, The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery, the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children, the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero. We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin .... or Martin Mull or Fred Willard -- or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them. But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

What is Scientology

Rating:	★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	L. Ron Hubbard

Well, I finally read a few scientology books. One was Scientology, The Fundimentals of Thought. The other was the large tome called, What is Scientology. I wish I could offer some in-depth review but I found the fundimentals of the religion totally incomprehensible. Perhaps I am so twisted that my Thetans can't think properly, but I just can't buy it.

That isn't saying that I wouldn't mind investigating a bit more, but I don't want to fork over any $$.

http://www.xenu.net for more interesting readings.

A little bit of an update.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07m-IvvpK2E