"The human mind hath a power of pronouncing, at first sight, an obvious truth, with a quickness, clearness, and indubitable certainty, similar, if not equal, to the information conveyed by the external organs of sense." Oswald
"We cannot proceed in a proof or process of reasoning, without having at every step a direct perception or intuitive view of truth."
--> Note Oswald's proposed method: "The obvious truth, therefore, with its opposite absurdity, must be set full in their view; it must be brought again and again into view, until the mind, being made familiarly acquainted with it, begins to feel its force."
--> Note Oswald's claim that Smithian sympathy in TMS could be usually substituted with 'common sense', because the latter is actually the foundation for Smith's best conclusions.
People deeply want to be loved, and they will bully, lie, cheat, steal, and sometimes even kill to get some semblance of it.
"Bigots, skeptics, enthusiasts, and all who take delight in false and fantastical ways of thinking, are fond of reasoning, but do not love to judge." Oswald
We find through Scripture a recognition that things themselves can be holy: holy ground, holy temple, holy implements, holy offerings, holy people.
We are not untied to the sins of others, even where we are not culpable for or even complicit in them, for humans have responsiblities for each other.
"...it must be observed that the force of the word *is* as expressing *representation* is derived from two sources; for one thing may represent another either on account of their natural resemblance, or because the first is authorized and intended to represent the second....So that we get two principles on which a thing may be said to represent another, either that of *likeness*, which derives its force from the judgment of the spectator or that of authority, which depends upon the intention of the author." Robert Isaac Wilberforce
"The Emperor Charlemagne may be said to be present *figuratively* or *symbolically*, throughout his vast empire, because justice was everywhere administered in his name: he was present throughout it *virtually*, for such was the energy of his character, that his influence was everywehere felt: but *really*, he was only present in his palace Aix-la-Chapelle."
The OT sacrifices call to mind sin (Hb 10:3) but the NT sacrifice calls to mind Christ (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25).
"The salt by which Christianity acts upon the world seems to be martyrdom and holy virginity." H. W. Wilberforce
We have clear evidence for the earliest primitive Church formally worshipping in
(1) the Temple
(2) Jewish synagogues
(3) house-churches under household sponsorship.
[The later parish churches and basilicas take inspiration from all three.]
At no point in history has the Church exercised all the authority it actually has.
Spiritual power and temporal power overlap in civil religion.
One does not become wise merely by erring, but who is not willing to risk going wrong will never be wise.
scientific fictions (e.g., center of gravity, centrifugal force, relativistic mass)
The human family, like the human person, naturally lives, all at once, in physical, moral, jural, and sacral terms.
mineral teleology in crystallization
iterative vs adaptive means to ends
If you sat by a lake or a sea on a very dark morning, you might well experience the order of Genesis 1: first a lightening of the sky, then a differentiation of basic horizon, then slowly great distinctions of land and vegetation as the sun begins to rise, then stirring first of fish and birds and then land animals, then humans going up and about their business.
It is a perpetual danger of academic theology to replace doctrine with paraphrases of doctrine, the latter not being made as a sort of halo or umbra around the doctrine but being inserted in place of it.
All of the NT epistles are about how we cohere as a Church.
sacrifices as ways to draw near to God
Aretas IV Philopatris, mentioned in 2 Cor 11:32-33, died about AD 40.
The province of Illyricum was dissolved into Dalmatia and Pannonia somewhere around the early reign of Vespasian (79-89); Paul mentions it in Rm. 15:19.
Claudius's decree in Acts 18:1-2 likely occurred in 49. Gallio, mentioned in Acts 18:18, became proconsul in Achaia in 51 (according to the Delphi inscription). The famine mentioned in Acts 11:28-30 is possibly the one that occurred 46-47, but Herod Agrippa, mentioned in Acts 12:20-25, probably died about 44 (based on Josephus and coins); there are, however, some indications that there may have been a Judean famine in 44-46.
Christians as tending to imagine Jesus with a synoptic plot but a Johannine theme (cp. Luke Timothy Johnson)
Acts 9 is underappreciated for how well it explains may Pauline theological themes.
Most evidence is not evidence by being a sample from a population, but on other grounds.
The unvierse always suggests more than it shows.
"To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion -- all in one." Ruskin
"The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by description." Newman
"Our whole business is to heal the eye of the heart, so that God might be seen." Augustine
the cosmos as a contingent intelligible order with internal history
The solution is the final cause of the problem.
All literary and worldbuilding involves taken the world as one understands it and varying it in reasoned ways.
the exercital responsibility of the laity
general levy and select levy aspects of militia
The poor are not, as such, saints. But insofar as they are poor they will be vindicated even if they are very much not saints. It is essential to the Christian tradition to recognize that divine vindication does not prescreen for perfection.
Conscience is the root of professional ethics.
fields of study as beings of reason
'trading zones' among distinct fields of study (Galison)
extensive use of metaphor -> aporiai -> dialectic
All morality is based on authority, whether of reason or something else.
Since neither reflection nor experience end, nothing in reflectively interpreted experience can be any kind of court of last appeal.
It is always important to remember that not all inconsistencies are real and not all consistencies are obvious.
Explanation does not usually mean bringing an instance under a general law, because most explanations do not themselves appeal to anything general at all (although their supporting reasons may).
The bare conditions for reasoning do not rule out any position whatsoever, even inconsistent ones; only the acceptance of reasons, or reasons actual and true, could.
Attempts to argue that fear or desire for gain cannot be moral motives, even when there is any argument at all, are almost universally bad. And the position is implausible on its face.
Assent and evidence are not commensurable things, and therefore cannot be put directly into an equation with each other.
In thinking, we seek many things more than knowledge.
If we only have indirect control over our beliefs, we only have indirect responsibility for them, and certainly not the precise kind of responsibility that requires direct control to exercise.
The claim that we an proportion particular belief to particular evidence requires that we have strong, direct control over those particular beliefs.
Reasoning often generates inconsistencies; it is in fact the most common source of inconsistencies. You don't eliminate inconsistencies by reasoning but by correct understanding.
Most human explanations outrun the evidence available.
Arguments and positions can be pleasing in many different ways, but one of these ways is intellectual, and it very much does have a bearing on truth.
While people are often naive realists, they are generally loose naive realists; they take themselves to perceive things themselves *more or less*, and are wholly unbothered by things like distortion or isolated illusion.
It is in myth that the mind learns to increase the length, breadth, and depth of its vision. Belief in themyth is perhaps not necessary, but practice in myth is. Take away muth and the mind becomes dull and stupid and clunkheadedly unimaginative.
(1) There are tryings.
(2) Trying implies alternative possibilities both as to the action itself and as to the result.
(1) the experiment causally construed
(2) the experimment semiotically construed
(3) the experiment abstractly construed
(4) experimentation as an act of free will
(5) experimentation as part of the pursuit of intelligibility
(6) experimentation as subcreation
(7) the experimenter as in the image of God (as person)
(8) the experiment as in community
spenta: furthering, strengthening, bounteous, holy
Yasna 31.11-12: As in the beginning, O wisdom, through thought, you fashioned for us bodies and senses and wits; as you gave embodied spirit, as also actionsa nd doctrines whereby one chooses at will, tehrefore one lifts up voice, false or true, knowing or unknowing, with heart and mind: over time, truth embodied deliberates in being, with opposition.
While there are things that can be identified as sacred scriptures for Buddhism, as a matter of history and practice Buddhism has always been more a religion of mnemonics than of scriptures.
"We have to accept the fact that, almost all the world over, the 'natural religions' are ceremonial and non-ethical." Charles Gore
"Religious experience shows that certain specific beliefs have permanently and greatly elevated human nature and augmented its capacity."
It is important for understanding Jesus' preaching that He is doing something more fundamental than ethics.
There is a nourishment of the soul, a means of life, without which even ethics is pointless.
Goodness divorced from truth and beauty is necessarily an ugly lie.
It is not wrong to say that God is in some sense above or beyond good and evil; the error is in thinking that good and evil are therefore equal with respect to or insofar as they are related to God, for evil is by its nature defective.
All other things being equal, doing what is good and right expands our options; doing what is bad and wrong boxes us in.
"Man's conscience is the lamp of the Eternal, flashing into his inmost soul." Pr 20:27 (Moffatt)
"The relation between individual and communal experiences is constitution, not summation." Stein
Human beings experience the world not merely individually, but as pluralities, in which one person's experience is intrinsically linked or even interlocked with another's, in integration rather than conflation.
Besides the evidence and argumentative support for a premise, one must also consider *how it enters the argument*. Is it a judgment from perception, received by testimony, an articulation of concept, not merely supported by but received from another argument? How a premises becomes available to use is distinct from reasons to use it.
The problem with Theodotus-style (or Paul-of-Samosata-style) adoptionism is that Luke quite clearly blocks it: the Holy Spirit is not just given to Him in Baptism; it is the reason He is born and His status is acknowledged by the prophetess and unborn prophet, long before Baptism. Jesus is the Son from the beginning; everything in Luke (including even the genealogy) makes this clear.
Progress is a brutal god.
"The gods seem to love the obscure and hate the obvious." Brihadarangara Upanishad 4:2
"By knowing God a man is from all fetter freed." Svetasvatera Upanishad 2:15
"In Christianity it is Baptism that corresponds to Nirvana -- the death of carnal man before his allotted time." Zaehner
"Would you see Christ transfigured? Climb this mountain, learn to know yourself." Richard of St. Victor
In most of life, people pay little attention to what are called identities; they come up to aid this or that other action, and little more.
Personhood is received but most also be cultivated.
To say that reflecting on a thing simply and refleting on it as existent are not different is implausible on the face of it, particularly in light of our ability to think of things modally and relatively. But saying suh does come close to recognizing being as a transcendental.
Liebniz's df. of perfection: a simple quality which is positive and absolute and expresses without any limits whatever it does express
--> Note that perfections are compossible both with each other and with other things, so their nonexistence cannot be required by incompossibility.
proof of nonexistence by
(1) intrinsic impossibility
(2) incompossibility with the existent
(3) negation by failure
