Transcendence?

October 31, 2010

People don’t talk about transcendency much. I must admit that I was looking for it for a long time and didn’t know what it was. Even the atheists are groping for it, as I once did.

An objectivist/atheist friend on Facebook pointed me to an article by Daniel Dennett, where Dennett was trying to promote the notion that "Goodness" is transcendent. Dennett had survived a serious heart malfunction and apparently needed to reach out beyond himself and the material world to thank somebody or something for his life. He decided to turn the whole episode into a public opportunity to mock Christ and encourage people to "Thank Goodness" whenever they are tempted to thank God. It was appalling, and it was really nothing but a diatribe for Pantheism. Dennett, as if he is a god, even went so far as to say that Christians who prayed for him had committed a sin in praying and that he needed to forgive them! So Daniel Dennett, one of the prominent, so-called, rationalists of our day, is a pantheist trending toward Panentheism.

The Pagan/Atheist notion of transcendence is always rooted in materialism. The Luciferian, Alice A. Bailey, even wrote a book entitled The Consciousness Of The Atom. She published that book under her publishing company, Lucifer Publishing.

What Bailey and Dennett have in common should already be obvious, but there is more to it. Both of them promote the idea that Christianity is founded on pagan religions. Keresy Graves was a hack writer with the same idea. He published a book entitled, Sixteen Crucified Saviors, where he tries to make the case that Christ is a myth borrowed from pagan religions and that there were many Christ-figures in those religions centuries before the rise of Christianity. He listed these sixteen false-Christs, and I took up the challenge to examine them. I ranked them according to ten criteria that Graves claimed that a Christ should meet. I gave them each a tenth of a point for each criteria that they met. I used the best sources I could access. I could not find a half of a Christ among them! I even gave one them credit for being a miracle worker because he was supposed to have 10,000 wives!

Now what I find particularly interesting about all of this is the thread of irrationality in godlessness. Dennett is a man who claims to have no religion, yet he wants to promote one. Bailey wants to worship Lucifer, but she claims that one can and should follow a false Christ. Graves, claiming to be a champion of reason, is so intellectually bankrupt that he makes bold assertions that he can’t support in order to "prove" that God doesn’t exist. The Bible teaches the person that says God doesn’t exist is a fool. The Bible gets it right, atheism is irrational.

Pantheism is an attempt to attribute deity to the material world, which is not transcendent. It is proposition to ascribe personality to that which cannot contain it. It’s personality without a person.

To reject God is to embrace insanity and nonsense. Isaiah 29 and Romans 11 talk about a stupor that God has decreed for a people who have the law and transcendent promises communicated to them and reject them while saying they believe. Not only that but the Word Of God says that such people will have understanding removed from them. Searching for something while rejecting it is irrational! It is stupidity.

The God of the Holy Bible is unique. He has many imitators. He is like none other in the way that He can redeem the human heart and make it whole. People sense a brokenness in their lives and the soul wants to reach out beyond the material world for a personality that has the power to save them from themselves and their circumstances. People relate to their world and each other in terms of personality. All other religions are feeble attempts to satisfy the need for a transcendent all-powerful personality.

There is one personality in all of human history that claims to transcend material existence and offer living hope beyond the material world. That person is the incarnation of the God of the Holy Bible, the Creator, Jesus Christ. He is the author of sanity. He is the Logos, the Word Made Flesh. Read! Test! Believe!


How quickly a year goes by!

October 10, 2010

I thought I would start blogging again well before now, but I was wrong.

I have spent way too much time in the last year on Facebook. I tried to use it as a witnessing tool. I can’t say that I had any success. Most Americans are too far steeped in Postmodernism, harboring a dialectic mentality with respect to fact and faith, to seriously think things through. Words are often meaningless to them because they’ve accepted the premises of postmodernism. Stoogery is the problem, not the solution.

I’m taking a break from Facebook. I’ve deactivated my account there.

My sabbatical from blogging has otherwise been spent doing volunteer work and self-directed study. My primary focus in study has been on history and philosophy.  My volunteer work has been in the area of firearms rights at the state level.

I was in the process of trying to formulate a response here to Brad Cecil’s Nine Pillars of the Emergent church. Cecil has since rebooted his blog and the post where he listed the “pillars” is vapor now. I was working on point #3, “Human concepts are limited”, when I decided that I need to to get a better grasp on where Postmodernism comes from. I was dis-educated in public school after all. My undergraduate degree is in Geology, so I had a lot of catching up to do.

I intend to pick up where I left off in the next week.  Now to catch up on some of my volunteer work before noon.


And then I realized that God just loved me the way I was

May 18, 2008

Jay Bakker says that God loves homosexuality. Jay is Emergent. He is a poster boy for what the lusts of the flesh can produce. He came to the conclusion that God told him that homosexuality is not sin. Jay is the pastor of a nightclub church in NYC, so he is well versed in scripture. But he’s not citing scripture as he defends homosexuality. It’s funny (sad) how that always seems to get left out when preachers justify sin.

Jay, brother, I have news for you. God hates homosexuality (Lev 18; Lev 20; Rom 1; 1Cor 6; 1Ti 1; and Jude). Read those passages, brother! The LORD puts homosexuality in the same category as infanticide, incest, beastiality, adultery, pornography, idolatry, witchcraft, covetousness, drunkenness, extortion, and theft.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. (Joh 3:10-21)

The love of God provided the blood of the lamb, which is given to redeem you from the curse of sin. But you’re one of those Red Letter Christians who ignores half of the red letters. Aren’t you, Jay?

HT: Apprising Ministries


…by definition following the error of the Pharisees

April 30, 2008

I’ve been neglecting this blog to study connections between Gnosticism in the early Church and modern pseudo-Christian movements. Meanwhile, Phil Johnson has an excellent post on Evangelical political failures at the TeamPryro blog.

The Church is to be led by the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. All other patterns lead to failure in the work of God, which is the business of the Church. Flesh fails but the Spirit will succeed.


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