Re: [asa] Letter to thinking Christians (and other theists)

Michael Roberts wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps English humour is not the same as American humor! (Dave
Siemens
> > is liable to make some rude comment here!!) I am afraid I see
Dembski et
> > al making such mockery of our faith that they make Dawkins seem
> > appealing. I have dealt with enough atheists who feel just that.
> >
> > You need to be less tolerant of the kind of misrepresentation and
folly
> > both YEC and ID go in for.
> >
> > We need diversity and a wide range of views but not this type of
thing ,
> > which does untold damage to the gospel
> >

Michael

Humor is something that is very culturally relative. Going to a small
school in Addis Ababa where of my close friends, two were Americians,
one was English and one was Anzac (ie one parent was Australian and the
other a New Zealander) we developed our own unique mixture of the humor
from the various cultures represented as well as that of the surrounding
National culture. I still sometimes read British humor like Punch, but
even so, I often do not get the point. I used to get the point more
when I read the Guardian Weekly regularly and thus understood more of
what was going on in England and the EU. Sarcasm is also something that
does not communicate well across cultures but also over email.

Even common words or expressions can cause similar problems. In Canada
as well as in England (I think) we refer to people who live in North
America, south of the Canadian border and north of the Rio Grande as
Yanks. One time some people I worked with were visiting Austin Texas
and referred to citizens of the USofA as Yankees. Well one or two
people came totally unglued asIt is well known that the
expression "knocking someone up" has a very very different connotations
in North America than on your side of the pond.

All on the list (to keep my count of posts today down)

Reflection on the interaction with UcD

On this list we often express concern about the damage being done to the
Christian position by YEC and others. We need to be sure that our way
of expressing things does not cause needless offense. My view is that
Denyse caused needless offense by the way she phrased things and that
Bill Dembski compounded it by endorsing what she said and removing
people's right to protest in a civil, respectful manner on their blog.
In this case the shoe was on our foot and people reacted! I find it very
hard to see that what was said does not violate, "You shall not bear
false witness against your neighbor" maybe the ID folks could explain
this to me.

Denise has fears of the dangers of Darwinism to ANY serious Christian
faith. She is right if Darwinism is taken to mean materialistic
evolution, which I do not think any one on this lists embrace. Her
assertion could even be true about TE. As a general statement even using
the reduced context I have strong doubts about her assertion, but it
certainly would be a possibility in some individual cases and I at least
would seriously consider such arguments and it is something that we need
to guard against. But conversely ID needs to hear and respectfully
engage in discussion with our fear that ID in some of its manifestations
can have the same result.

How does what has occurred match with:
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as

I have loved you, that you also love one another (NASB ©1995)"?

Francis Schaefer had a good way of putting it. If Christians do not
dwell together in love the world can legitimately take that as one more
argument that Christianity is not true. He did not mean that we
have to agree or even be organizationally one or that we could not have
strong disagreements. Unfortunately some of his later writings did not
demonstrate charity as much as they might have and some/many? considered
them harsh. Shortly after I graduated some of Schaefer's strong negative
statements about fundamentalism and also about his differences with CT
McIntyre were instrumental in keeping me within the church so saying
someone's thought is wrong is quite acceptable but saying they are
stupid, secretly aligned with evil etc gets us no where. The point is
to change minds not win the debate.

Dave W

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Received on Tue Apr 17 10:58:45 2007