I have been absent for years and my return may not be all that welcome given the subjects of my former posts. I am trying to regain my faith but I don't think that will happen without some clarification regarding issues I consider to be fundamental to my reentering the flock. First, please forgive my modest grade twelve grammatic errors. I hung up my alter boy outfit when it became clear to me that prayers don't fix things, silly me, I was led to believe that prayers worked. First question...do you folks endorse actions taken by the Catholic church such a threatening to ostracize Galileo if he didn't renounce his remarks regarding how the sun and planets do their thing? Next question for those who subscribe to the Adam and Eve thing....that's not much of a gene pool and incest, which is forbidden, is the only way to procreate when starting with just a pair of gene donors. Do you agree with this observation.....If a deity created time, space, matter and life, that deity must have a hands off policy....OK I have created these little buggers, but they are on their own. If that was the case, then events such as the wholesale slaughter of Jews in WWII makes sense. If that's not the case, was God golfing, or otherwise distracted during WWII? If the only reply submitted is something like "God works in mysterious ways", I don't buy it...a rather coinvent blanket reply. Did the church endorse burning people at the stake? Where was the deity when they burned Joan? Oops, I forgot...hands off policy. Although you may view me as a troll, I don't see it that way. You will not get blind faith from me, I need answers. Thanks folks.
I will try to answer some these in order. First question...do you folks endorse actions taken by the Catholic church such a threatening to ostracize Galileo if he didn't renounce his remarks regarding how the sun and planets do their thing?........... This is kinda a myth on why Galileo got in trouble. It is a much more complex story But no I don't endorse what the Catholic Church did. Next question for those who subscribe to the Adam and Eve thing....that's not much of a gene pool and incest, which is forbidden, is the only way to procreate when starting with just a pair of gene donors.........The prohibition on incest actually came about later in the Bible after sin had taken its toll. When man was created it did not have the genetic problems we have now. That kind of drift had to happen over time so you originally would not have had genetic problems. Probably why they lived so long. You can also believe in evolution and be a Christian. I believe the story of Adam and Eve is factual and true but many other devout good Christians read it as an allegory that contains spiritual truths. I don't think we will know until we get to heaven. I do think that Bible makes it clear though that Adam and Eve were the first Humans though. Jesus and Paul talked about it.
https://www.catholic.com/tract/adam-eve-and-evolution Here is a catholic source but it is a good source and I see nothing in it that Anglicans should disagree with. Correct me if I am wrong anyone. Basically to sum up my position is this. Adam and Eve were the first humans. Did they arrive through some sort of God derived evolution maybe. Were they directly created maybe. I go with the latter. The fall was a real historical event. It really happened. It is what corrupted man kind. Nothing in science can contradict scripture but we all don't have to agree with the fundamentalist reading of it. That catholic article I linked is a good one. I will try to get to the other questions later.
they do, I have seen it in my own life and they don't work instantaneously or automatically either, that I have also seen --Expecting them to work instantaneously or automatically is a mistake I have found, one I too have committed Most definitely not I do not believe that Adam and Eve were the only people, as testified in Genesis itself where it is said that their children Cain and Abel went on to marry daughters of other families God is definitely not hands off, he just does not believe suffering is some sort of moral crime.... Yesterday I was watching a cooking show (Anthony Bourdain's no reservations), and they killed a pig and chopped it up on the spot into food that then fed an entire community... There was blood sploshing, the pig's pale bloodless head was put on a table as a trophy, whilst the people prepared cakes of brain, flour, wheat; sausages, burger patties... This is real life - blood, guts, suffering, despair, depression.. but also hope, endurance, triumph But life is full of suffering, and it is not some sort of flaw in the matrix for God to have made it that way, in fact in some parts of the Bible he himself is a source of pain... God does not reject suffering, and the ideal life he sees for us is not one of fat epicurean satiation of our senses.... In fact he is so agreeable to pain that he is expecting us his followers to cause ourselves pain as part of our adherence to him-- during the season of Lent we are in right now, he is expecting all of us to suffer and cause ourselves little bits of deprivation and pain, to prepare and steel our souls with endurance, so that we Christians are lean and healthy, while the atheists are fat in both body and mind I don't believe in blind faith... welcome here brother and we hope that you will find your way
As for the power of prayer. Sometimes prayers are answered and sometimes they are answered in ways we have not looked for. I have seen way to many answered prayers to doubt that they do not work. I will tell you a story. Once I was backpacking across Europe. There was one train connection that I was worried about. I had prayed about it. My mother was praying for the whole trip. The connection was a close call. I was talking with my travel companion on the train in Milan trying to figure out what stop to take. We did not speak Italian. The trains stops are not well labeled and not kept up well. As we decided upon the wrong stop to take, a guy spoke up behind us. He was from Utah but lived in Milan. He told us we were fixing to get off at the wrong stop and he told us to get off on another stop the right one. The odds of meeting a native speaker, from our own country, in Milan at just the right time are astronomically small but there is was.
Prayer = communication with God. Since God always hears our prayers (1 John 5:14), prayers work. And we will have what we ask for in prayer as long as we have asked for something that is in God's will to grant. We ask for a lot of things that are not God's will. Sometimes we think, "Well, I asked for a good and beneficial thing for someone else; surely that was in God's will," but in truth we are not God and don't know all the permutations and possible fallout from a given thing. We are in no position to judge the Creator on whether he's fair or not, because we are using human standards and incomplete information. God's ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9; see also Job 38 & 39). I'll never forget the time I accidentally hit a highway construction worker; his head cratered my windshield, leaving blood and strands of hair, before his body flew into the grassy median. As I stopped, I told God I needed him to help this man, and then I ran back to him. He was lying there crumpled up, groaning at high volume. I laid my hands on him and said, "In Jesus' name, be well. Be whole!" He kept groaning at the top of his lungs. But 30 seconds later he stood up and was all right! Said his leg hurt a little bit, was all. The cops and the ambulance came. They took him to the hospital, checked him out, gave him Tylenol for his leg (which had contacted my bumper) and sent him home. That time, it was God's will to heal a man supernaturally. Other times, it isn't. No, we are not "on our own." God has my back. I trust Him. Does that mean my life is guaranteed to be a bowl of cherries all the time? No, sometimes it isn't even a handful of pits. Doesn't mean He is not there with me. Why do I, or any of us, have to endure hardship, unpleasantness, evildoers, and tragedies? The reason is, the world is under a curse of imperfection and of openness to evil ever since Adam & Eve; we are stuck with thorns and thistles, horribly sinful people who hurt others, blood sweat and tears, and entropy (everything is running down and coming apart bit by bit). If humans never sinned, we'd have what God promises to eventually recreate in the new heavens & new earth: a world without rot or decay, where there is no injustice, no evil, no sadness, and no lack, a world in which everyone communes intimately with our loving Creator & with each other. I want to be there. Do you?
Before addressing your questions I have a question of my own. What has brought you to the conclusion that prayer doesn't work? Especially if you're still in grade twelve - how can you already be so certain? On Galileo I'm not sure that even Roman Catholics of the 17th Century supported the Inquisition declaring heliocentrism heretical. His works were extremely popular amongst mathematicians, physicists and astronomers - the majority of whom had theological backgrounds. As Anglicans we had already broken off from the Roman church by that point, and so never censured the works of Galileo. In many ways that's what lead to Newton speeding up British mathematics and beating the continental academies to the punch with his Principe Mathematica - because the British academies let in all the "suspect" academic works from Europe without any fuss. Anglicans often describe our Church has having three pillars. Scripture, Tradition and Reason. It's that third pillar that embraces scientific advances that also develop our understanding of theology, using observations in nature to correct misinterpretations of scripture. This is the historic approach of the Early Church - specifically detailed and defended by Saint Augustine. We don't endorse the Roman Catholic church persecuting Galileo. On Adam & Eve Well there's a few things to unpack here. I'll deal with the easier stuff first. 1) Incest was not forbidden in the time of Adam and Eve. 2) A sizable minority in the church hold that the Adam and Eve component of the Genesis narrative is a metaphor, and that Adam represents 'mankind', not a singular individual. Anglicans are permitted to hold that minority view, within reason. There are also some that hold God made more people after Eve, I've never bothered to look into if that fits within Anglican doctrine, but I also think the scriptural arguments for it are very weak. But let's deal with the meat of your question. Let's take the majority position that early Genesis is literal, and that Cain married his sister. Well this is how all animal populations start out, including humans. It's demonstrable mathematically and genetically. In fact, if you really dig into it, it's provable we all have the same most recent common ancestor far more recently than the start of human existence. It's pretty new (as in less the 6000 years for most of us) that humans have been able to avoid incest to keep the species alive. So there's really no alternative for you to accept. Become a Hindu, Shinto or Atheist - you've got to accept we're all a product of incest and a very limited gene pool, just like everything else on Earth, no matter what. If that thought discomforts you, there's an extra level of analysis that the Abrahamic faiths have access to that might bring you some comfort. Consider why was incest not originally prohibited? Well - why is incest wrong? I mean we know it's wrong morally, but suppose a time before it's morally wrong - why is incest a bad thing? Because our children might end up deformed. Well why do they end up deformed? Because their DNA is too similar and the code gets messed when two halves of the same DNA strand match together. But God made Adam and Eve. And if you're a hardcore full-on creationist, he actually made Adam and Eve with all the genetic variance humans can possibly have - all the code to be black, white, asian, hispanic, 7 foot, 4 foot, blue eyed, brown eyed, black haired, silver haired, flat footed, too much arch footed (?) - all in two people (because no evolution) - so they had more dissimilar DNA than any two partners have ever had. But even if you reject the more extreme brands of creationism, so evolution introduced additional genetic diversity, God could have still made Adam and Eve extremely dissimilar. That means their children, only sharing half of each others variant DNA, were still far more genetically dissimilar to any partner you might meet in Canada (whom you probabilistically will share ~80-90% variant DNA with), as would their children, and their children, and so on for many many generations. That means it would have taken some time before there would have been any real harms to incest. And that of course would be a sensible point for God to have outlawed incest - when it was both no longer necessary, and could start to create malignant mutations in their offspring. Has God Abandoned Us? No. What you're discussing is often referred to as "The Problem of Evil". It's a tough one, and one people have struggled with for thousands of years, and will continue to. You won't find a concrete answer you can accept immediately on a forum, or in a book, or in a lecture. You'll need to read widely, think on it deeply, and pray for wisdom for a long time before you're likely to be able to firmly hold to one explanation or another. This post is already quite long, so if you're looking for a few different explanations it came up recently in this thread. I personally hold to a fusion of what Irenaeus and Augustine wrote, which are the two most popular (in my experience) defences in the Anglican church. If you're just beginning this journey, and especially if you don't already have a strong foundation of faith, you will likely find their defences of evil (referred to as a theodicy in Christian-speak) unpersuasive in their entirety, but they might be a good starting point. If you need to reconcile the problem of evil on day one you're going to have a tough time, you likely need to be practicing your faith to get in the right headspace to start accepting some of life's toughest answers. Even then, it's a question that is supposed to bug you for a lifetime, like the meaning of life, or why no one has decided to fix the calendar and add a 13th month. I hope that helps