Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Should I or Shouldn't I?

One of our church friends gave my wife a video by the ICR and said "Jim should watch this." My wife, being the sensible person she is, promptly hid the video under several stacks of books in the kitchen. Not good enough!! "Hey, what's this? Ooooooohhhh, blog fodder," I exclaim. "Oh, please don't," she says. I understand her frustration. On the one side, she knows that most of her Christian friends have embraced this "flat earth" Christianity and doesn't want to rock the boat. On the other hand, she knows enough of the evidence, both from her father and then her husband, that the YEC perspective doesn't hold water. So she would just rather the whole thing went away. I, likely, should honor her request.


But that doesn't mean I can't watch it...


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Now playing: Yes - Roundabout
via FoxyTunes

6 comments:

  1. Wish I could join you for a viewing party! You could provide MST3K-style commentary, and I would learn a lot.

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  2. Maybe I will just provide it for you.

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  3. If I were you, I'd make a standing deal with folks at your church. You'll watch any video/read any book they recommend, but in return you get to make them watch a video or read a book of your choice.

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  4. AMW, that has occurred to me. The other option is to watch the video, make notes, and then give the video back with the notes. It presumes a lot of open-mindedness on her part, though.

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  5. Don't torture yourself. One thing I've noticed from interacting with viewers of my latest video series on YouTube is that there is a certain segment of the Church that doesn't care about the scientific merits of EC vs. YEC. It's all about what system keeps their theology safe. It's no different than the church leaders that Galileo invited up to his roof to view the moons of Jupiter through his telescope. As he invited them to directly observe the plain and unmistakable fact that not every heavenly body orbits the earth, they stood there and lectured him on the philosophical and theological soundness of Aristotle's cosmology - even saying that they would not trust Galileo's "instrument of the devil" and "if God had intended man to witness such things, then man would not have needed to create an instrument with which to see them."

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  6. Gordon, you are certainly correct in this matter. As this article noted, people arrive at their conclusions and decisions by alot of different routes, not all of them logical, but all of them internally consistent with their worldview. But if people ask me why I think the way I do, like my pastor did, I need to be informed about why they think the way they do and where the information that informed that conclusion came from. If it came from a video such as this, I can at least tell them why it is mistaken. It may not change the way they think but, ya never know...it just might.

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