The Cross Section - RMB Blog

  Plato & Aristotle According to Schaeffer, the breakdown of philosophy and science is a twofold breakdown.  Many of his chapters carry duality in them.  Chapter 8 is no different.  There are several duos to consider.  The first is the ongoing discussion of universals and particulars.  The other duos I noticed were optimism/pessimism, reason/emotion, Christianity/materialism, and science/philosophy. To review, universals are absolutes existing in reality that give meaning to life and bind particulars into a common purpose.  Particulars are the material things of everyday life.  In common speech, they are things made out of stuff.  In the picture above Plato points up emphasizing his world of forms where universals exist outside of normal life.  Aristotle points down, teaching that these forms or universals exist within particular objects.  Both gave important views on the basis of existence.  Both embraced the interrelation...

I recently read this article about the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.  It is a good bit of journalism showing how government health organizations like the WHO and pharmaceutical companies are tied together.  Experts work on both sides of the aisle in order to set definitions of what a pandemic is.  They also create plans about how to respond when they occur.  In those plans the types and amounts of medications which will be purchased are written.  That means companies that develop and sell new vaccines and anti-viral therapies have every incentive to be active in getting their products written into the plans. It should also be noted that health organizations are also the ones who communicate when a pandemic is occurring and what needs to be done about it.  In the US that organization is the CDC, but every country has something similar.  What happens when the people who dictate our health situation also are the ones making money on selling medical products to ...

                                                                                                                                                             - St. Paul Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment;  Science Many people today believe that science is the opposite of religion.  They believe that logic and faith oppose one another.  Thinkers within the Enlightenment, which I wrote about ( here ), believed the same thing.  They described their era as enlightened specifically because they were strippi...

Earlier this week I made a comment on another blog ( link here ) that was talking about how destructive utopian movements can be.  In them the people are trying to make the world a better place, even the best place.  However, they frequently turn to mass violence and oppression because they misunderstand and then violate human nature.  Human nature in this world is corrupted by sin, which exists in every person and there is no way to intellectually or scientifically remove it.  My comment is below: "Utopian movements in the West come out of Post-Millennialism. For some reason it was a widely held view within some groups of the Reformation. Once the idea was secularized in the Enlightenment, it lead to all this hell. The idea that humans can perfect themselves and the world is pure hubris. The key to me is that God has to make pure everyone who will enter into Paradise. It is a supernatural act. I can't understand how Post-Millennialism ever had adherents. It is very ...

Human Reason's Dead End Enlightenment Vs. Reformation This chapter focuses on the era known as the Enlightenment and the political revolutions which were influenced by the thinking it produced.  These revolutions are contrasted with others that were influenced by the thinking of the Reformation.  To be sure there is overlap.  Nothing in history is as simple as A caused B.  However, Schaeffer is correct to categorize them based on what the strongest influence was for each and how that explains the grossly different outcomes. The Enlightenment occurred in roughly the 17th and 18th Centuries.  It couldn't have happened without the Reformation but its approach to truth was diametrically opposed.  The Reformation led to the Scientific Revolution.  At a high level, the Enlightenment came out of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. The ideals of the Enlightenment were science, reason, humanism, and secularism.  It was named by those who participate...

I just had to share this.  I was given this video from my brother in Christ who is a computer science and data analyst expert.  The title is a quote from the video as they described the potential fraud.  It is a balanced, scientific, thoughtful analysis showing apparent fraud. I have seen a couple of similar analyses but this video is the most thorough.  Take a look.  Think.  Observe the character of the messengers. I don't know what to do next, but first we need to be certain of what is happening around us and to us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztu5Y5obWPk&feature=youtu.be

 If you aren't familiar with the premise of the X-Men story it is this, there is a certain group of people who develop special abilities when they go through puberty.  It is explicit that Mutants don't manifest powers in childhood except in very special cases.  Based on that the parallel of developing mutant abilities and sexual traits happen at the same point in life. The underlying message of the X-Men has been described by others as describing the fight of racial equality and acceptance of homosexuality.  Those are both reasonable metaphors when reading the stories.  Mutants are hated and feared by human kind.  In the comics, mutants are called homo superior in contrast to "normal" people being homo sapiens.  The X-Men stories can reasonably be applied to the plight of racial and sexual minorities.  In the year the books started, 1963, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing.  There were even violent backlashes against it.  Black ...

2nd Order Effects " Every action has a consequence, and each consequence has another consequence. These are called  Second-Order Effects . Every change you make to a system will have Second-Order Effects, which may affect the system’s functionality. Be careful when making changes, they may have the opposite effect of what you aimed for. " -  https://personalmba.com/second-order-effects/   Luther posted the 95 Theses for the purpose of challenging incorrect doctrine and church corruption.  Chapter 4 covers the effect the Reformation had on theology and church operation.  Things got better because they removed pagan influence which had crept in and taken root during the Renaissance.  But outside of reestablishing Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy, what did the Reformation cause? Schaeffer covers three 2nd order effects of the Reformation in the realm of politics, slavery or race relations and economics.  Most of the chapter attributes advances in politi...