UnScriptured @UnScripturedPod

@1True_American_ You bet - "teach[ing] the world to sing in perfect harmony."

@DrFrankTurek The old "Santa Claus in the sky" / "Imaginary guy in the sky" / "god of the gaps" criticisms and their variants are the most common ones I come across. They can be very frustrating to lovingly counter.

@AndrewS76825037 @MattSmethurst Right, I think that was Beecher. Still a good quote, though!

Tithe if you want. There's nothing wrong with that. But to me, this kind of giving is personal, meaningful and moving in a way that's beyond compare. Bless you, Frank.

Frank Brown @FrankBr05713205

5 days ago

I teach high school auto shop and one of the biggest problems with my graduates who want to get into the field is having the ability to purchase tools. As most of you may know, mechanics must have their own set of tools and box and that’s a rather expensive purchase. Many simply

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Prophetic... "The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves." G. K. Chesterton

Etiam stultissima dicta sapientia sonant cum Latine dicuntur.

This is so sweet, and it makes me wand to add an electric train that would roll around the circle, ringing each bell in turn. Great job!!

Magnetic Norse @MagneticNorse

2 weeks ago

This is the kind of stuff old men make for their grandkids and the kids don’t know what to make of it cause it’s not high-speed, low-drag fun Then 30 years later, they look back and realize what a good man Grandpa was

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One "god of the gaps" argument goes: "inventing a Creator just because you can't explain the origin of life/the universe makes no sense." To me, if this argument sounds sensible, it's only because it's applied to the familiar. Things like stars, trees, birds and cats have been with us our entire history, so they occupy a cozy niche in our minds. They're understood, and if not entirely unthreatening, at least they're mentally dealt-with. But let's suppose you're walking through the desert and you come upon something novel - sleek and inorganic, all straight lines and acute angles with repetitive design elements, complex mechanisms that respond to each other and to you. Upon experimentation, you find it autonomously navigates terrain or flies through the air. You would immediately ask, "who made this?" An intelligent person doesn't shrug and say, "I guess it grew here accidentally," and wander off incuriously. He'd assume instinctively that it was created by an intelligent hand. He'd also know that if someone went to the trouble of creating it, they did so for a purpose, and that presents a survival question. Is its purpose benign or malign? Is the creator foe or ally? Are they nearby? Even animals have this instinct. So now imagine yourself as a creature existing outside the universe, in a complete void, suddenly stumbling upon a universe. There's space and there's time. There are matter and energy, each in their myriad forms, and they change over time, according to an orderly set observable rules. Oh, and look here - some of that matter appears to be self-aware and behaving according to a set of rules that exists only in the context of its own self-awareness! Let's call that Life. Perhaps none of those observations would lead you to the conclusion that this complex thing was created by an intelligent being for some purpose. But would you go so far as to consider the idea absurd? Would you denigrate another person who believed it was possible?

My point is not to distill the Bible's immense value down to a pittance. It's to show that there's value to be gained by reading it, whether you've grappled with "divine provenance" or not. In other words, faith isn't necessarily the starting point. Learning builds faith.

When someone asks why I, as a scientifically-minded guy, place such value on the Bible, this is what I tell them. Humans learn through trial and error. We have an idea, we test it, and if we get unexpected results, we come up with a different idea and try again. If we get partial results, we tweak our idea, our experiment, and see what happens. That's the scientific method simply stated. In every branch of human endeavor, we build new and better inventions, design new experiments based on the proofs established by others who lived before us and spent their own lives trial-and-erroring through some discipline. Nothing we do is purely our own. We wouldn't have 21st-century cell phones if Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hadn't invented the integrated circuit at Fairchild over 65 years ago in the late 1950's. Jack and Robert wouldn't have invented IC's if John Bardeen & Walter Brattain hadn't invented the transistor a decade earlier at Bell. The many radios in those cell phones - WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G - wouldn't exist without the pioneering work of Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi around the turn of the 19th century. Tesla and Marconi wouldn't have invented radio communication without James Clerk Maxwell's equations of the 1860's, who himself relied on Michael Faraday's discovery of electrical induction in the 1820's. Just under 200 years of smart men building each others' work brought us from simple induction - moving a wire through a magnetic field - to cell phones. If it does nothing else, the bible documents 2500-years of men and women building and testing their understanding of God. Like every scientist, they weren't always right. They weren't even always particularly scientific. But they tried, they failed and they learned, and they created a well-worn map to the mind of our Creator. It teaches us His language. It gives us a solid platform on which to begin building our own spiritual lives. By reading it, we learn how God speaks to us. While His message is personal to each of us, His language is well documented. We're not alone. We don't have to start from nothing. We can rely on those who came before us, learn from their mistakes and successes.

@PageauJonathan I can't know his heart any more than any man, but he left enough evidence of his belief that I have confidence. Nothing is greater than God's grace, and that fact that I could never presume to judge another man's possible salvation also applies to his possible damnation.

@fringedotcom @rossi_caio Gosh, what does that sound like?

@MeanOldPops @1True_American_ This is such a good take. We live in a reciprocity-based world. In and of itself, that's not all bad. But some have never received anything purely out of love and grace. Imagine the way your image of God would be damaged if your own parents tied strings to every gift.

@sarahsalviander I don't know how I've never heard of you, but this perfectly explains my feelings about nearly all Christian movies and music! Give me wonderment and inspiration, intricacy and integrity, invention, intellectual honestly THEN tell me you see it's from something greater than you

@MikeWingerii I used to go to Boulder for work periodically. I always make sure I had a pocket full of change As I walked the sidewalk, I'd watch for expiring/expired parking meters, and drop in change In Boulder, that was illegal. Also very satisfying 🤣