THE NEW TOWER OF BABEL

We all know Babel (no, not the language learning company). It's in Genesis. The Biblical story about God making so many languages and dialects and (let's add) opinions that no one could understand each other or effectively communicate. One legacy of the triumph of digital technology and AI in every corner of our existence is that we've recreated this Babel. Let me try to unpack this, and bear with me if it seems I'm saying something derogatory about one belief or another — my aim is to avoid that game and try to explain the mechanism, the social and cultural story, by which our new Babel is ascendant, and the old ways of arguing and understanding each other are on the decline, if not on life support.
Start with an oldy but goody: the old war between scientific materialists and folks with traditional religious notions, like immaterial minds (think: souls) given or designed by a god, or more to the point, a Judeo-Christian God. That was an orienting debate for decades, nay, centuries. But we've Babel-ed it. We've Babel-ed it good. As we'll see, it's not just that debate either. More and more, it seems it's reasoned debate itself.
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Virtue, Happiness, and Purpose

Religion is not primarily morality. Morality is not primarily rules. These are two of the conclusions to draw from a new book about virtue by Fr. Basil Cole, published by the Catholic press TAN Books. Fr. Cole's book is essentially a simple and transparent exposition of Christian ethics. I'd wager, though, that many even among believers don't realize to what extent Christian ethics represents a very particular approach to the question of right action, one that differs from ways of thinking dominant in the modern world. Philosophers term the classic Christian approach "virtue ethics" and often contrast it with two other possible viewpoints, known respectively as consequentialism and deontology. Put simply, consequentialism says that what counts is the results of my action, while deontology (from the Greek deon, binding or obligation) says that what counts is following the right moral rules.

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Biblical Manuscripts

Great Isaiah Scroll, 202-107 B.C., facsimile :

The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947  and is the most complete of the DeadSea Scrolls found in the Qumran  Caves.  
The scroll was written on seventeen sheets of parchment, connected  into a scroll.  Differences between this scroll and the later Masoretic text  are mostly grammatical and spelling differences.
Both this scroll and the Codex Leningradensis are open to Isaiah 40:8: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our
God will stand forever." (ESV) Although the manuscripts were written over 1000  years apart, the Word of God had never changed.
Codex Leningradensis is the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament. This codex was found in Egypt and is
now at The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (formerly known as  Leningrad). 
The early Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowel pointings, chapters, or verses.   A group of scribes called the Masoretes, who
worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the 5th and 10th centuries, added vocalizations (vowels), accents, and a  textual apparatus to the Hebrew text.
 The version was finalized by Hebrew  scribe Aaron ben Asher in the early 10th ce.
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How Medievalists Are Restoring the Ancient Religious Text

A 1,750-year-old translation of Matthew's Gospel has yielded a new Bible chapter thanks to medievalist Grigory Kessel's work. According to IFLScience, the mysterious chapter was discovered using ultraviolet photography on manuscripts housed in the Vatican Library.

The remarkable discovery was made as part of the Sinai Palimpsests Project, a research initiative dedicated to recovering erased and overwritten texts from the 4th to 12th centuries CE.

Due to the scarcity of writing materials at the time, manuscripts were frequently repurposed, resulting in palimpsest manuscripts in which previous text was washed or scraped off before new content was added. 

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What can Virtue Ethics Teach Us About Modern Ethical Problems?

  The complexity of modern life makes ethics even more difficult. From new technologies like genome editing and artificial intelligence, to political turmoil and cultural conflict, knowing how to do the right thing is incredibly hard. Could it be that an ancient – indeed, arguably the very first – approach to ethics offers us a solution? This article will explore virtue ethics, its history, several of its key thinkers and its applicability to modern moral problems. Whether or not one becomes a virtue ethicist and believes in this way of doing ethics as a whole, virtue ethics offers a reconsideration of the implications of our character and the importance of developing it in the context of ethical theory.    

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Praying for Scientists and the Science of Prayer

The methods of science are not well-equipped to study prayer, but that doesn't mean that scientists don't pray or that prayer doesn't work. Ciara Reyes-Ton offers a short reflection on the challenges of studying prayer scientifically, followed by Dr. David Anderson's invitation to pray for scientists, healthcare workers, and researchers.
Prayer is a vital part of a Christian's life. It's one of the ways we communicate with God. Sometimes it might be saying a simple prayer of thanks before a meal, or praying with a friend. Other times it can be a more guttural and cathartic experience one on one with God, where we release our deepest pains and heaviest burdens. There's something about prayer that gives me peace when I'm anxious, and comfort when I'm troubled. Even when everything seems the same after I finish praying, I often feel relief after verbalizing my thoughts to a God who already knows them.
I admit that prayer is not always easy. It can take courage to buckle down and pray, especially when we feel disconnected from God, or feel like God isn't listening to us, because things aren't changing fast enough, or unfolding exactly the way we think they should. I think the words of Andrew Peterson's song, The Silence of God, captures these feelings best.
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The paradox of choice

Barry Schwartz the economic Psychologist found that having the freedom to choose between a variety of choices in the modern world was actually causing people to be less happy with their decisions. 

Consequently, instead of increasing decision satisfaction, having too many options made people less likely 
to be satisfied that they had  made the best decision. In the face of too many options, 
you may be paralyzed  making you feel worse. 
He used the words " MAXIMIZER" and "SATISFICER" to  explain these.

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en

The absurdity and necessity of rules during war

 

During the invasion of Ukraine, we have heard frequently terms like ‘war crime’ and ‘just war’. In a fight to the death, when your aim is the taking of the life of another human being, the idea of there even being such a thing as a ‘crime’ or ‘justice’ in that context is seemingly absurd. Furthermore, institutions like NATO are endlessly discussing the ‘rules of conflict’, while in the UN Security Council Russia absurdly has a veto ruling out action against its own aggression. Seeming absurdity on top of seeming absurdity. But the rules of war are necessary. Defining terms like ‘war crime’ and ‘just war’ do have a clear and important role to play, even in the face of the chaos, the heartache and the bloody killing of war.

Ukraine’s heroic struggle against Russia’s wanton aggression has elicited a lot of talk about the possibility of a ‘morally just’ war. At first, the very idea of such a war might seem absurd. After all, wars are horrific. They represent humanity at its worst, in which all our ingenuity, our energies, our capacities, are aimed at killing one another. “War is cruelty,” William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, “and you cannot refine it”. Any attempt to unearth moral principles for war seems not just foredoomed to failure but also morally perverse. On this view, there can no more be rules for war than there can be rules for murder or rape. Worse still, it might seem that ethicists and legal theorists, in discussing the very possibility of a just or legal war, or wars fought justly, serve only to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the politicians and plutocrats who, in their vaulting ambition, drive the machine of war at the expense of countless innocents ground up underneath. 

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Why Do We Argue?

 

From Eve’s exchange with the serpent, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring ultimatums, and the throes of Twitter, the desire to prevail with words has been not just a moral, but an existential compulsion. In Why Argument Matters, Professor Lee Siegel, who teaches in the writing program at the School of the Arts, says that the art of argument is the supreme expression of humanity’s longing for a better life, full of empathy and care for the world and those who inhabit it. 

Siegel plumbs the emotional and psychological sources of clashing words, weaving through his exploration the story of the role argument has played in societies throughout history. Each life, he believes, is an argument for that particular way of living. Argument is at the core of human existence, and language, at its most expressive, bends toward argument.

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What is walking meditation?

For Thich Nhat Hanh, the late Vietnamese monk who popularized mindfulness in the West, walking was not simply a way to get from one place to another, or an activity to be reserved for a perfect forest path. It could be a profound contemplative practice putting people in touch with their breath, their bodies, the Earth – and an awareness of what he called "interbeing."

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WHY NEUROSURGEON MIKE EGNOR STOPPED BEING A MATERIALIST ATHEIST

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor did another podcast with Arjuna Das at Theology Unleashed, "where Eastern theology meets Western skepticism." Among other things, Egnor talked about why he ceased to be an atheist as he learned more about science and its dependence on mathematics, which is not a material thing. A partial transcript follows, taking us down to 15 minutes, with notes (more in a further installment)

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Is Buddhism science?

One of the greatest twists in the recent history of nonfiction came at the end of Sam Harris's The End of Faith (2004). The book gave physical form to the message-board atheism of the early internet and launched a publishing boom for religious skeptics, but its final chapter struck a different note. Harris, it turned out, is a self-described mystical seeker with a long history of pilgrimages and discipleships under various Eastern gurus. He concluded the book by evangelizing on behalf of a scientifically filtered Buddhism that can awaken us to "the intrinsic freedom of consciousness" and help us grapple with "almost every problem we have" as a species.

Despite his infidel reputation, Harris belongs to the religious current that David McMahan calls "Buddhist modernism." This is a global assortment of Buddhist movements formed under creative pressure from the dominant Western trends of the past few centuries, such as rationalism, Protestant anti-clericalism, and Romanticism. All of them sought to counter the judgment of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that Buddhism is fundamentally pessimistic. At the same time, they accepted Schopenhauer's claim that Buddhism is "the finest of all religions," exceptional for its intellectual acuity and faithfulness to the human experience. In fact, a major strand of Buddhist modernism argues that Buddhism, properly understood, isn't even a religion but a uniquely empirical way of life based on meditation — "a first-person science," as Harris once phrased it.

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Christianity’s Role in An Increasingly Diverse America

When PACE launched our Faith In/And Democracy pooled funding and learning initiative, we wanted to better understand the ways faith and faith communities can support democracy and civic life and potentially ease the divisions that plague our society and politics.

Unfortunately, religion is often seen as a polarizing topic — one that brings about sharp political divides, deeply held beliefs, and sometimes unwavering opinions. America's demographics and religious affiliations are shifting, and as Sharif Azami reflected to us back in October, "What diversity means for an increasingly pluralistic America is a critical question that needs serious exploration." At PACE, we are interested in exploring whether there is a constructive role for faith to play in creating more productive understanding between groups with different identities and beliefs.

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Lumbini On Trial: Cunnigham and his frauds

There are compelling reasons for believing that the site of Lumbini is an extraordinary hoax. The details of its discovery in 1896 reveal a tale of deception and intrigue, which is now told for the first time.

At present, controversy continues to surround the location of Kapilavastu, the Buddha's native town, with both India and Nepal promoting bids for this historically significant site. The Indian claim is based on the finds made at Piprahwa, in Basti District, Uttar Pradesh; the Nepalese, by that of Tilaurakot and its surrounding sites, in the Western Tarai of Nepal. It is my intention in this paper, however, to demonstrate that neither of these claims can be considered as acceptable, and to show that equal doubt attaches to the present site of Lumbini also. I further propose to nominate what I consider to be the correct locations for these and other major Buddhist sites, and to give detailed evidence in support of these proposals.

An old French saying declares that to know a river you should know its source, and any attempt to assess the reliability of the present identifications should begin by taking a close look at the circumstances surrounding their discovery. Chief among the participants in those events - and in my view central to them all - was the notorious figure of Dr Alois Anton Fuhrer, a German archaeologist employed by the (British) Government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh between 1885-98, and co-discoverer of the present Lumbini site.

Modern Indologists, while aware of Fuhrer's unsavoury reputation, have neglected to conduct any really close scrutiny of his activities, fondly believing that these have long since been satisfactorily catalogued and assessed, and that Fuhrer may be safely consigned to oblivion in consequence. Unfortunately, this is far from being the case. Fuhrer, in fact, drove a coach and horses through critical areas of Indological research, and his deceptions continue to have far-reaching consequences for world history to this day. He was a prolific plagiarist and forger (who worked, alarmingly, on the first two volumes of the Epigraphia Indica) and I have good reason to believe that his deceptions were sometimes condoned, even exploited, by the Government of the day, for imperial reasons of their own. Following Fuhrer's resignation in 1898, the Secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces remarked, in a letter to central Government, that 'His Honor fears it must be admitted that no statement made by Dr Fuhrer on archaeological subjects, at all events, can be accepted until independently verified'. Unfortunately, this verification was by no means as rigorous as one might perhaps have wished, as we shall shortly see.

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How Could Jesus Be Both Divine and Human?

How can a person have a divine nature and a human nature at the same time in the way that we believe Jesus Christ did?

One of the great crises in evangelical Christianity today is a lack of understanding about the person of Christ. Almost every time I watch Christian television I hear one of the classical creeds of the Christian faith being denied blatantly, unknowingly, unwittingly. And of course, part of the reason is that it is so difficult for us to understand how one person can have two natures. You are asking me the question, 'How?' I don't know how; I know that Jesus is one person with two natures. How can that be? Long before there was a human nature there was a second person of the Trinity. Here the second person of the Trinity, very God of very God, God himself, was able to take upon himself a human nature. No human being could reverse the process and take upon himself a divine nature. I cannot add deity to my humanity. It's not as if Christ changed from deity into humanity. That's what I hear all the time. I hear that there was this great eternal God who suddenly stopped being God and became a man. That's not what the Bible teaches. The divine person took upon himself a human nature. We really can't understand the mystery of how this happened. But it is conceivable, certainly, that God, with his power, can add to himself a human nature and do it in such a way as to unite two natures in one person.

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Importance of Buddhist psychotherapy

Celebrated Psychologists like Carl Jung, William James and many others have understood the value of Buddhist philosophy and its positive impact on mental health. Their research programs have highlighted the importance of Buddhist psychotherapy in the treatment of depression, anxiety, factitious and addiction disorders, medically unexplained symptoms and various other psychological ailments. It is now increasingly used in psychotherapeutic practice in the western world.

Modern society has imposed many strains on human beings, and those in the psychological realm are perhaps among the most serious. As declared by the Buddha and emphasized by William James, the realities of the mind are more important than the realities of the body. Hence the significance of mental health and mental therapy as advocated in Buddhism has been recognised today by professionals.

Mindfulness

Historically, the Buddha was the first religious leader in the world to draw a distinction between physical and mental illness. According to the Buddha, it is hard to find a perfectly healthy person physically; it is harder still to find a person completely sound and healthy mentally.

Buddhist psychotherapy stresses the value of mindfulness and meditation. Instead of talking long hours about a mental problem with a psychotherapist until it virtually takes over one's consciousness, the Buddhist therapy tries to help the individual to awaken to his or her true nature, even if it means living outside of social convention. This is where Western and Buddhist psychotherapy differ.

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Meekness Is Not Weakness

Of all the Beatitudes, I'd guess that "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" is the most misunderstood, mistrusted, and neglected. I think the reason why is because we don't understand the virtue of meekness and tend to think it indicates weakness.

Certainly, meekness didn't fit in with the values of the Greco-Roman world of the first century, where humility wasn't generally lauded as a virtue. Nietzsche, a great admirer of the Greeks, thought meekness was exactly the sort of false virtue that the weak would applaud because, well, it's about the only virtue they could actually pull off. Since the weak can't win by the standard rules, they change the rules.

I think most of us are far more Nietzschean than we'd like to admit. At least I am. When I hear the word meek, it seems too insipid, too accommodating, too spineless to be a virtue.

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If You Want to Evangelize, Try Talking About the Weather

When I was at seminary two decades ago, "spiritual direction" was a new trend. Many of us thought that it was the greatest idea we'd ever hit upon, particularly for those who had grown up around very

Spiritual direction, we learned, was like midwifery: A midwife cannot create life or control it. She can only encourage it to fruition and be present to the miracle that is already happening in someone else. In the same way, spiritual directors facilitate growth but aren't responsible for it. Both the director and director are in a listening posture, waiting on the Spirit for discernment and attending to the life that God is growing within.

This midwife-to-mother relationship was located, we thought, in the upper atmosphere of spiritual maturity and sought after by believers who were really striving to attain deep faith. We were all talking about it, reading books about it, and wondering where on earth to find a highly trained spiritual director.

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Has Bible Prophecy Already Been Fulfilled?

A very interesting analysis critically examining preterist interpretations by Thomas D. Ice of Liberty University

FUTURISM IMPLICATIONS

If we could take the time to study the rest of the Old Testament we would find that it is an expansion, consistent with the early prophetic roadmap, of God's prophetic plan.

Dozens of passages predict a glorious future for Israel. If these texts are taken literally and historically then they have to have a future fulfillment. Jesus, in the Olivet Discourse and in the Revelation, in concert with the Old Testament, also expands upon, but is consistent with, that prophetic roadmap begun in Deuteronomy. Our Lord predicts a literal and thus future time of glory and blessing for Israel. Unless one just arbitrarily imports the theology of the church replacing Israel into many key texts, it is clear that hundreds of prophecies still speak of a literal and thus future fulfillment. 

I think it becomes clear that futurism is the only approach that makes sense of the Bible and its prophecies. While the Bible speaks of a wonderful past, we cannot hide the fact that the best is yet to come!

CONCLUSION

Like many of the arguments presented by preterists, they appear to have some initial merit when looked at by the biblically uneducated, but upon closer examination prove to be without merit. Preterists falsely built upon the misguided assumption, that they attempt to "prove" from various prooftexts, that Bible prophecy had to have its fulfillment within about 40 years of Christ's first advent.

There are many implications, both theological and practical, that would require a major adjustment to the Christian faith if they are right. Since their arguments are incorrect, so are the implications that flow from such thought. Because of the recent spread of Preterism, pastors and teachers need to be prepared to defend orthodox eschatology from this attack. Those who believe that Christ came in A.D. 70 will certainly not be found looking for our Lord's any moment  return when He does rapture the church without any signs or warning before this blessed event.

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Jesus, Take the Control Wheel: Southwest Pilot Saw Flying as Ministry

When members of First Baptist Church in Boerne, Texas, heard recordings of radio transmissions from a Southwest Airlines pilot who made a harrowing emergency landing this week in Philadelphia, they recognized the voice as one of their own.

Tammie Jo Shults—the pilot who guided Flight 1380 to the ground April 17 after a midflight engine failure shot debris through a window, killing one passenger—is a recognizable figure at the Texas Hill Country church, which averages 900 in worship. She has led the children's worship program at First Baptist and taught Sunday School for children, middle schoolers, high schoolers and adults, said Staci Thompson, a longtime friend and administrative assistant in the church office.

"When we heard the voice" in media replays of cockpit recordings, "it was just like talking on the phone. That's what she sounds like," Thompson told Baptist Press.

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