Draft


 * The Bible records history found nowhere else discovered in the 20th century. Ignore at your own peril but every knee will bow to Him.

The Bible records that Christ was born in the days of Herod the Great, who died, in 4 BCE, and also during the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and he began to rule in 6 CE. So the Bible can be dismissed as reliable history.


 * My eyes are open. Mark 16:9-20 NKJV has an asterisk next to it because it isn’t in the original manuscript. Someone else added it after the fact. To me, this refutes the entire Bible. A perfect God would have written a perfect book.

Mark 16:7 "But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee..."

Luke 24:34 (Still in Jerusalem): "The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon..."

PSYCH!


 * Christ paid a horrendous price on the cross of Calvary for the sake of our sins and eternity.

He got back up on Sunday morning though. So he lost half a weekend. Horrendous price!


 * Great story! And he said things like this: "Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy."

That's good, because I wouldn't want to worship a god that was just holy, or even one that was holy holy.


 * The responses are that Aquinas didn't ascribe divine immobility as an attribute to God, but rather the idea of immobility is part of His immutability. The reality is that you can't get there from here.

If all that exists is the Unmoved Mover and he creates something and sets it into motion, maybe the created thing is stationary and the Unmoved Mover is actually moving away from it. There's no way to say one way or the other. Galileo said.


 * Which scientific experiment debunked St. Thomas’s arguments?

The detection of muons created by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere, which take longer than their half-life of 2 microseconds to reach Earth, which proves Special Relativity, which in turn nullifies the claim that the order of cause and effect is absolute (same all observers).


 * The Bible says Satan will be loosed on earth for a season before the final day. In other words, it will be bad.

One time God was loosed on Earth for a season and everybody drowned except for eight folks. How much worse could it be under Satan?


 * Ok but in the end it doesn't matter if atheists claim to not believe in a holy triune God. He is real and so is everything in the bible. Living under the law in the old testament, was done away with (except the 10 commandments) when Jesus came and fulfilled the law perfectly.

Why did the 10 commandments stick around, couldn't Jesus fulfill those too?


 * You don’t know the Bible. The NT says there is a sin that deserves the death penalty (murder).


 * To not support the death penalty for murder would be tantamount to denying Gods law which is as bad as supporting the murder of children in the first place.

And here I thought Christ said, "It is finished" when he paid the penalty for sin with his own death. Now we find out that was only for most sins, and you still have to die for the sin of murder. Who knew?


 * You do know Jesus said “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”


 * It’s cringy watching people who don’t know the Bible try to use the Bible to win arguments against people that do. But it’s amazing how many people still think they can.

Galatians 5:4 Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.

Talk about cringe


 * I hope you know that grace is not an attribute. For Aquinas grace is different from God, grace is created

If grace is created, then God could not have possessed it from eternity. It is, then, a continent thing with no more divinity than flesh.


 * The concept of private property extended to things that are public goods - land especially  - is a big issue.


 * Related, and bigger, possibly, is wholesale failure to grasp the ontology of money, even amongst economists.

Fiat money has no ontology, only epistemology. A dollar does not have an inherent value. Rather, we can only say a dollar currently fetches so much gold, or so many pounds sterling.


 * It's just Schrödinger's equation without the additional nonsense, you can't cancel the ontology of the wavefunction

That's like saying the value of a home actually exists as a fact, in a range centered about the asking price, and this value "collapses" to a definite value when the sale closes. In truth, the value of a home only becomes a fact at closing, and then it is only momentarily real.


 * I like St. Thomas Aquinas's argument: 1. Knowledge involves the intellect grasping the forms of many things. 2. Material bodies can only have one form. 3. Therefore, the intellect is not a material body.

The intellect consists of memories and thoughts which in turn consists of the activity of material brain cells. If you say the intellect does not emerge from that activity, then what is the purpose of, for example, Broca's Area (the speech center) in the human brain?


 * He’s making a major mistake here. Yes, of course, we can tell what good is using our rational factualities without knowing God. He’s making a major mistake here. Yes, of course, we can tell what good is using our rational factualities without knowing God. What does that MEAN though? St. Thomas Aquinas is clear citing Aristotle “Goodness is what all desire.”

Aristotle saying goodness is what all desire is no more valid than Paul saying even unbelievers actually know of God's existence and divine nature from observing the world. It's a bare assertion of psychological data without even a poll to back it up. Given that goodness is what all rational men desire, and given that men desiring that which goes contrary to their nature are irrational, when you claim "goodness is what all desire" you are claiming in turn that no one is irrational.


 * Aquinas didn't follow Aristotle wholesale. Take the question of whether God knows future contingents.  Aristotle said they can't be known, since that rules out freedom.  Aquinas countered by saying they aren't future to God.

God's knowledge of the situation at Sodom was future knowledge to him:

Genesis 18:21 I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.


 * It's interesting to read which tribes grew or were decimated over the 40 yr period. The God in Numbers was more genocidal God than the God of Exodus when it came to His own cult followers. Did He kill millions? If the numbers are to be believed, yes.

In Samuel/Kings we read the LORD smote 50,000 here, David smote 40,000 footmen there, the Philistines fell 30,000 footmen of Israel in another place, and the best estimate by archaeologists gives us a population of about 300,000 folks in Samaria at the peak of their influence.


 * Actually, the death penalty isn't even an "evil" at all according to Saints Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas. Popes have condemned it since V2, but the Council of Trent endorses the death penalty.

Say, isn't this the same church that in 1252, in the Papal Bull Ad Extirpanda, authorized the use of torture to force heretics to confess their heterodoxy, provided they were not killed or seriously maimed in the process?