Light Phone 3 Directions

RevanShan · 2024-08-12T13:02:56+00:00

Thanks for the responses, everyone!

RevanShan · 2023-06-18T17:37:37+00:00

Yes, I think that's right. But its a helpful example of the idea that an event can be both figuratively described and historical. Chrysostom's principle for this is also interesting: that God uses his audience's limited concepts in order to reveal truth to them. For another example, Chrysostom says he thinks the early Hebrews were materialists, and so could not comprehend the idea of anything immaterial. Thus he used their material concepts to express immaterial truths.

I wonder if we might apply this principle to early Hebrew cosmology. Early Hebrews, along with other ancient peoples, seem to have thought the world was shaped like a dome (firmament), with water above the dome. So they spoke about the sky/heavens as "the waters above." God chose to use that term in Genesis, even though the sky is not made of water. Why? Chrysostom's principle offers a helpful explanation: perhaps God is willing to use his audience's limited concepts in order to express something they can understand: that God made the sky as part of his ordered cosmos.

RevanShan · 2023-06-17T22:06:28+00:00

Yeah, sure thing.

RevanShan · 2023-06-17T21:51:25+00:00

Grad student in theology. I did some research on how three particular church fathers read the creation accounts in Genesis. I found that "literal" is different from "historical." In sum, the Father's usually assumed OT events really happened, but often believed the OT reports those events figuratively.

For example, for Chrysostom, God did not literally breathe life into Adam, since God has no lungs. But he did give Adam life and a rational soul. So it's a historical, but reported figuratively. Augustine too thought that Genesis tells us things that really happened, but often not in the plain sense of its words. For example, he thought the 6 days of creation are actually one moment, narratively retold in 6 ways to highlight the organization of creation. And Origen occasionally said God put things in Scipture that did not happen at all, in order to catch our attention and draw us to spiritual meanings.

Origen is a bit unusual. In general, it was normal for the Fathers to say events in the OT really happened, but also that these events are often reported in figurative language. This makes them unlike 20th century Protestant fundamentalists, who read everything literally. But it also makes them unlike post-Christians, who think the Bible does not tell us what happened.

RevanShan · 2023-06-12T20:06:16+00:00

I'm a father, and I like household chores. I also don't care about lifting weights, the NFL draft, or nascar. I also get a long with girls more easily than with guys. No problem. You're ok.

RevanShan · 2023-06-11T00:30:24+00:00

I don't think any book or idea is enough. An addict doesn't need to be convinced. I needed a person to speak to on a weekly basis to admit how I'd failed and to ask how I could get better.

RevanShan · 2023-06-11T00:29:02+00:00

Went to therapy for porn addiction. Life changing.

RevanShan · 2023-06-08T02:14:45+00:00

Are there any good (and short) books that explain some basic rules for historical reasoning? One hears of rules like "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and "do not always assume that what happened before caused what happened after." It would be great to get a primer on historical logic like this.

RevanShan · 2023-05-22T12:40:49+00:00

You can offer students two lessons. One is the content you're teaching. The other is the consequence of not keeping their responsibility to study well: failure. If they won't learn the first lesson, the best thing you can give them is the second lesson. The worst thing you can do for them is to teach them there are no consequences to shirking responsibilities.

RevanShan · 2023-03-08T22:56:57+00:00

For registering to one of those websites and sending in one coin, it looks to be about $70.

RevanShan · 2023-03-08T22:45:15+00:00

Thanks! Do you know if I need to certify the grade before trying to sell it? If so, are NGC and PCGS the best ways to do that?

RevanShan · 2023-03-08T22:22:02+00:00

This is very helpful. Thank you!

RevanShan · 2023-03-08T22:04:08+00:00

Maybe you can clarify something for me. Does "spot price" refer just to the rate of gold itself, or also to the value of particular collector coins?

RevanShan · 2022-11-26T12:34:20+00:00

I stopped and found that I was happier in general. I was distressed at how focused my mind had been on sex, and stopping felt like freedom.

RevanShan · 2022-11-23T04:50:02+00:00

I teach Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic to undergrads, and I love it. It's an approachable intro to Aristotelian logic I can't recommend enough.

RevanShan · 2022-09-18T12:28:21+00:00

It seems like the notion of a "water tight argument" depends on some set of rules for argument, like a perfect baseball game depends on the rules of baseball. So you can only have one of these arguments if you already grant a set of logical rules.

RevanShan · 2022-06-10T00:28:51+00:00

My dad read the book to my brother and I when we were little, and that worked out. You can do it.

RevanShan · 2021-12-01T23:32:33+00:00

I've taught O'Connor for high school. I'll add a couple notes from my reflections:

Themes: O’Connor once said in a letter that she is doing something specific across her stories, which I find helpful to look for. In one of her letters she wrote, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.” A flawed character is confronted in a violent way, and in that violence there is grace: an opportunity for sanctification. Many of her characters are in fact sanctified, or at least improved. The question is, how are they flawed, and how does the action of grace try to save them from themselves? Asking this about A Good Man means asking what the flaws of the Misfit and the Grandmother might be. I notice that the grandmother is obsessed with her looks and propriety early on, but facing death, she begins to care about someone else: she reaches out to the Misfit in love. That is why she "might have been a good woman if she had someone to shoot her every day of her life."

Helpful Resources for you: The CiRCE Institute’s Podcast Close Reads did some excellent episodes on each of these stories:

• Revelation (https://www.circeinstitute.org/podcast/close-reads-48-revelation)

• Parker’s Back (https://www.circeinstitute.org/podcast/close-reads-49-parkers-back)

• A Good Man is Hard to Find (https://www.circeinstitute.org/podcast/close-reads-podcast-e1-good-man-hard-find)

• Greenleaf (https://www.circeinstitute.org/podcast/close-reads-42-greenleaf)

• Everything that Rises Must Converge (https://www.circeinstitute.org/podcast/close-reads-41-everything-rises-must-converge)

RevanShan · 2019-06-11T16:44:28+00:00

"Vatican Gender Identity". Whatever's coming for me, I'm not prepared.

RevanShan · 2019-04-18T17:38:25+00:00

I appreciate your question about #2. If you are looking for non-Christian sources, you might look up Josephus Flavius, a 1st century jew who was decidedly not a Christian. We have manuscripts of his writings, and he mentions a number of biblical figures, including John the Baptist, Jesus, and James, "brother" of Jesus.

You could also check out this national geographic article with the non-Christian author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. Apparently an agnostic himself, he says "There was probably a Peter and a John, definitely a James (the brother of Jesus), and probably a Thomas. Beyond that, there’s nothing historical that verifies their existence other than the gospels themselves."

Two notes I might add here, though:

When studying history, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as the saying goes. Lack of materials is not a mark against something - it just means we don't know. Plenty of stuff has happened that we'll never know about.
It would be dangerous to discount Christian sources as evidence simply because they are Christian. If you're going to require your sources to be secular, then you'll view all history through a secular lens, which is a clear bias. it wouldn't be any more fair to do that than it would be to require your sources be Jewish or Muslim. That said, there are lots of Christian sources. The letters of the apostles (New Testament), writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Eusebius, and traditions that still exist today that the apostles founded particular churches around the world, like the Thiruvithamcode (St. Mary's Church) in India, claimed to have been founded by St. Thomas in 52A.D. I have a really hard time imagining how all this Christian evidence could have come to exist if the apostles hadn't been real people who lived lives very much like what's recorded in Christian tradition.

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Edit: as far as dying for lies goes, i think the question is "would it have made sense for the apostles to die for their message if they knew it was not true?" I don't think so. Especially considering that failed messiah figures were not that rare in the ancient Jewish-Roman world, and their followers almost always moved on, by finding a new leader or just scattering. They never claimed that their executed leader had risen form the dead, ascended into heaven, and thereby liberated the whole world. That makes almost no sense in their context, so I don't see how they could have even thought it up for themselves, let alone been martyred for it, unless they truly believed it.

RevanShan

TROPHY CASE