The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

I'm currently reading a book on the Bible by Peter Kreeft. I'm only a couple of chapters into it but it is good. It goes book by book through the Bible and touches on the basics. I think it's important to always go back to the basics. Anyway, the quote I'm going to post, from the book, is talking about this following passage...

But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death. (Gen 2:17)

And from the book...

By the way, the word knowledge here means "experience". God wanted to keep us from the knowledge of good-and-evil that comes from experiencing and tasting it (thus the image of eating fruit), not from the knowledge that understands it. The same word is used in Genesis 4 for sexual intercourse: Adam "knew" Eve,and the result was not a book but a baby.(Peter Kreeft)

I always read the word knowledge in verse 17 as a mental understanding. I also got a chuckle out of how Kreeft explains it.

My Best Curt Jester Post Impression

B16: “You can’t slap my hands King Abdullah, I have cat like reflexes!”

King Abdullah: “Ah yes, but parochial school nuns with rulers have not prepared you for this smack down!”

G K Chesterton "A Ballade of Suicide"

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours on the wall
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall
I see a little cloud all pink and grey
Perhaps the rector's mother will NOT call
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way
I never read the works of Juvenal
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small
I think I will not hang myself to-day.(G K Chesterton "A Ballade of Suicide")

(Hat tip The Blue Boar)

What does this poem have to do with Catholic indirect apologetics?

Chesterton uses some humor in this poem to affirm that even a new way to cook mushrooms is a reason that life is worth living. Life is good. Modern man, with all his comforts and possessions seems to have a problem with suicide which is really a problem with finding meaning in life.

Baby Got Book

I got this from my sister and it’s funny.



We both like the part where it says, "and if you're Catholic there's even more"

If you're looking to read more about why Catholic’s have a bigger Bible go here

Mr. Incredible, Edna, and Christ

Yesterday in my confirmation class as part of our starting prayer I had them make a prayer intention. One of the students could not think of one. I told him that there was so much to pray for and what other opportunity would he have in asking his fellow students to pray for something he hoped for. He finally prayed that he would get a “million dollars”. All the students had a little giggle at this. I told him that he should be careful in what he asks for. I explained that like in Spider Man, “with great power comes great responsibility”. I asked him if he was planning on squandering this money on himself or was he wanting to do the hard work of putting this money towards something good. I told him that one day he would have to make an accounting of what he did with the gifts that he had been given and that a million dollars would be a great temptation. (I am really blessed to have this person in my class. He is a pain at times, but his questions and challenges really livens up the class)

We all do this. We really don’t know what to ask of Christ. We are not that creative to ask for something really great and beautiful. This situation reminds me of Edna and Mr. Incredible over his super hero outfit. Mr. Incredible just wants the same old. Edna wants him to ask the impossible. But with no Capes!



May we ask for the cloths of Christ. But no million dollars! You might get sucked up in a vortex or something.

The Probability of Religion

I read somewhere that 65.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot. I don’t remember where I read this because I only remember 37.3% of where quotes come from. I spent some time and researched this and the truth is that the number 65.4% applies to all statistics. But when referring to statistics that are present on the internet the number shoots up to 95.6% of all statistic which is significant. Now 7 out of 10 people who were willing to call themselves apologists agree that this statistic is important. And although I am not a huge fan of Donald Rumsfeld he said something very insightful in regards to this topic. He said:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Now I am no scientist or statistician, although I was involved in a science fair once and the judges did say that my volcano explosion was the largest, but this is nether here nor there. The process of science is very messy. Here is an explanation of Why Most Published Research Findings are False which is very interesting.

There are an infinite number of false hypothesis and because of this the odds are that any given hypothesis is going to be untrue. My two loyal readers stand at two deviations from the mean which means that they get this or they don’t get this. The real questions is that if the null hypothesis is more likely to be the bull hypothesis then what does this have to do in regards to Papal bulls.

This truly is the bottom line. If the easy questions are so hard to answer then what chance do we have in any religion being true? My answer is a lot like St. Peter’s, "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” The probability is not good but where shall we go. I have a relationship with Christ and I trust him. He is my starting point and with this data it makes all things new. If science were able to totally understand my Catholic faith and it was able to fit within the scientific box then I would reject it as untrue. Christ is my alpha and my omega. My morning star. He is the way the truth and the life. He is the logos and my firm foundation. What statistic do I have to prove this? I have none.

Colbert: Mother Teresa and the Dark Night

Serving is a Supreme Art

My wife and I love the movie, Life is Beautiful. I think it contains a host of truths. Here is just one example.




At the end the uncle says “God is the first servant. God serves men, but he’s not a servant to men!”

This reminds me of the passage...

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many. Mark 10:45

How is this related to Catholic Apologetics?

The world values power and not the servant. The truth is, you find the servant and you find the power.

The Matrix Maxim

I was watching The Matrix and that cool Latin maxim Temet Nosce (or Nosce te ipsu) came up. It means, “know thyself”. I figured that this sounded wise so I decide to get scientific about it. I went down, forked out a few bucks and got a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan of my brain. So here I am........in all my glory. I am a little embarrassed to be so exposed. The ladies out there must admit that my brain configuration is breathtaking. I think this will be the wave of the future in online dating. Why go through all the hassles of dating when you can just know someone with a PET scan. This is going to revolutionize online dating.

How is this related to Catholic Apologetics?

There are times when focusing on one part of the data means that you know less about other parts of the data. For example the more object knowledge we have the less subject knowledge we have, the more analysis the less syntheses, the more quality the less quantity. To know me, is not to know an object, I am a subject. There is a part of me that transcends the physical world.

The Bark of Peter

The Bark of Peter

Omelettes anyone?

Catholic Cartoon Blog

This is from a must see blog....Catholic Cartoon Blog


Hat tip to the Curt Jester

Adding complexity to the seven deadly sins

This is creative and kind of fun.



Link

Why So Many Jewish Comedians?

I think this gives some great insight into humor which can be very helpful in apologetics. Hat tip to Mark Shea.

"Why So Many Famous Comedians Grew Up In Religious Jewish Homes"

by Rabbi Daniel Lapin

The Jewish High Holy Days begin this Friday evening with two days of Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year and end 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Ancient Jewish wisdom teaches that what God thinks of us is far more important than what we think of God. Thus it follows that Rosh HaShana, literally the head of the year, is the time when God judges all humans. Rosh HaShana's solemn role of affirming that God indeed does judge us, makes one of its central themes, laughter, difficult to understand.

Is laughter indeed the motif of this most solemn day? Traditionally, we Jews search for the meaning of the day within the Torah portion designated for public reading on that day. On Rosh HaShana, Chapters 21 and 22 of Genesis are read; they chronicle the birth and early life of Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, history's first born Jew. Even from conception, laughter surrounds his life. In fact, out of the 13 Scriptural references to "laughter," nine occur in the context of Isaac's life. His name means "he shall laugh" and it is the name that God instructed Abraham and Sarah to give him after they had laughed about his birth. It must have seemed a comic thought to a 90-year-old woman that she and her 100-year-old husband would become first-time parents.

Ancient Jewish wisdom requires us to blow the shofar (ram's horn) 100 times on Rosh HaShana in a complex sequence of notes composed to sound just the way crying or laughing sounds. (From another room, deprived of visual clues, even mothers often fail to distinguish whether a child is crying or laughing.) With the laughter meaning of Isaac's name as well as the laughing sounds of the shofar all integrated by the day's reading of the Torah portion, Rosh HaShana is not only the day of judgment, it is clearly also the day of laughter. There must be some way of integrating our understanding of both the joy of laughter and the solemnity of judgment.

Laughter is one of the distinctions that humans enjoy over animals. What makes us laugh? People laugh at things that violate a sense of how things ought to be. A pompous mayor who slips on a banana peel is funny. A vagrant who falters and sprawls on the sidewalk just seems sad.

Likewise, a sexual innuendo that provokes howls of laughter among school boys and titters among stockbrokers, elicits yawns of indifference from hardened prison inmates. The dirty joke assaults notions of human refinement, thereby causing laughter. To the depraved, however, it is not a dirty joke, it is reality.

The only reason that we laugh at cartoons of talking animals is because of our underlying conviction that only humans were given the gift of speech. A joke can only be funny in the context of a fixed framework which it contradicts.

The paramount project of secular liberalism is to utterly obliterate most rules and fixed frameworks. In the absence of any system of inviolable, religiously based absolutes, there are no unthinkable acts to perform; there are few rules to violate. In a world in which everything floats, humor has nothing solid to thrust against.

To the dismay of secular parents raising Godless children, their offspring will probably find humor one day only in the absurdity of their parents' Godless lives.

The laughter and joyfulness that permeate the family life of religious Americans springs from the presence of Biblically inspired discipline and structure. Conversely, the grim seriousness with which the secular liberal seems to go about the business of life springs from the absence of absolute values. (One cannot help but recall the famous joke that reflected feminism's humorlessness: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: That's not funny).

Since jokes are only funny if they contradict a preconception, and all preconceptions are becoming banned, many genres of jokes are vanishing from our national repertoire. The political correctness doctrine banishes humor and laughter entirely because humor presupposes an existing standard. If nothing is absolutely good and nothing is unthinkably bad, nothing can be funny. Clearly one of the goals of secular liberalism is to eliminate most existing standards. The unintended consequence will be the dreary and somber atmosphere that was characteristic of life behind the old Iron Curtain. Secularism, and its sequel, socialism, work together to banish laughter from the world.

Jewish tradition has it that Abraham, through his renowned kindness, attracted thousands of devotees to Judaism. Yet, a full three generations later, by which time the world's Jewish population ought to have reached large numbers, the Bible (Genesis 46) indicates a total Jewish population of merely 70 souls.

The great transmitters of the Oral Torah explain that Abraham had focused on the Almighty's capacity for unrestrained love and compassion. Isaac, the icon of Rosh HaShana, introduced an awareness of God's firm hand into Jewish culture. Many of the disciples drawn by Abraham's gentle nature were later repelled by Isaac's unpopular emphasis on law, leaving a core following of only 70.

Yet it is precisely the structure of law that defines boundaries and allows humans to live among one another. Ancient Jewish wisdom in chapter three of Ethics of the Fathers, exhorts "Pray for the welfare of legal authority--without it, men would destroy each other." The origin of legal authority and its best validation is the model of Divine authority. For this reason, civil authorities like kings would often head the Church too. They were aware that their acceptance of God's authority made it more logical for citizens to accept their's.

In other words, my children are more likely to obey my rules and later, society's too, if they grow up watching me accept God's rules. Children of parents whose vehicles sport bumper stickers that read "Question Authority" will grow up doing just that. They will also become rather hard to live with.

We humans are by nature reluctant to submit ourselves to a higher authority. Showing how treasured human moments like laughter depend on that submission, helps persuade us that civilization depends upon allowing God to judge us. That is the paramount message of the High Holy Days and accounts for its laughter motif.

Arguement Clinic

This reminds me of some of the apologetic arguments that I have taken part in.

Terminator Meets Jesus

I found this from Jimmy Akin’s blog who found it from The Curt Jester. Very funny

Pray the Rosary

Pop Culture Needs a Diaper Change

A lot of popular music comes down to the equivalent of pornography for the ears. But when everyone follows the set program of degradation which sells, there comes a point when the only thing left that is radical is following Jesus. We have reached that point. The following is a song by Kanye West called Jesus Walks. Here is a line from the song;

The way Kathie Lee needed Regis / That's the way y'all need Jesus

No truer words have been said in a rap song. lol


Here is a video of the song. Warning: the N-word is used a couple of times. The song has a church militant feel to it which I like.

The Gideon Bible Card Trick

I thought that this might be a fun way to start a conversation about the Bible with a non-Christian.

One of my favorites is The Gideon Bible Card Trick, which you can perform the nest (sic) time you're staying at a hotel. You ask your friend, or the bellman, or anyone you want to trick, to shuffle a pack of cards and draw a one while you are across the room. Then you pull out the Gideon Bible that all hotels have in the bed table drawer. Ask your friend to turn to Revelation, chapter 17 ("which is all about abominations, and sounds for all the world like an invitation to hell"). Then you hand him a warm clothes iron and tell him to iron the page while keeping one hand on the card. What happens next is chilling:

Slowly, brownish bloodstains appear on three isolated words of text--

Link

(Click on the picture for enlargement) Now I just have to figure out how you get the person to pick the ten of hearts. The card trick is from the book Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic.

The Curt Jester

If you don't know about The Curt Jester blog you should. This guy is a comedic genius. Here is a taste of his latest spoof.

Extreme Makeover: Church Edition

Before

After

This blog just kills me. It is a perfect example of indirect apologetics. Link