Comments by "E B" (@eb2505) on "Charles Darwin's stolen journals returned two decades after they went missing" video.

I'm really not that concerned about preserving fiction.
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J I'll hold onto my bible. Do you want to see what our Christian based society will look like without its Christian moral underpinnings?
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J No, you misunderstood my comment. The bible has the moral superiority, I just choose to align myself with it.
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Matt I've never been more fulfilled in my life than when I have walked closely with the Lord Jesus Christ - ever. I have a peace that has seen me through the lockdowns and job loss when others were taking their lives, binging on alcohol and drugs etc. I feel sorry for those who don't know this type of peace.
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@jsmith9705 No worries, I appreciate your follow up.
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J No - I feel for people who don't know what it is like to have that peace in their lives - they can have it just like I have. I'm no better, I just said yes to Jesus when he called.
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J A shame you judge all people of the Christian faith by the select few you have come to know personally, but even then, that doesn't invalidate the claims of the bible.
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J You're
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J Actually it is. Our legal system is testament to that. Even Peter Costello who gave a talk in Melbourne about 20 years back said that our property laws derive from the mosaic law. The morals many hold to at the moment are an innovation with its attendant issues (teen pregnancy, abortion, drug and alcohol abuse etc.) - that is symptomatic of the decline in the influence of Christianity in our society.
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Matt There is a life of the soul, and there is a life of the spirit. Many Christians (myself included) grapple with the pull of the soul over the pull of the spirit. But, one leads to a deepening of your relationship with the Messiah, the other draws away from that.
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@jsmith9705 Yes - I would, I'll agree to that and such like, even though there are some particularly violent aspects to his works - I'd leave that to those who choose to self-censor where they desired to. For Darwin it is different because his work is essentially a direct assault upon Christian society, and by all accounts appears to be designed in that way, by a man embittered towards God over the death of his daughter. Nevertheless, I am expressing a personal view not a corporate one - bascially, I don't give 2 fig leaves about his works, since all I see from them is a worsening of society that has embraced the perspective that man has no maker and therefore no accountability before others which has led to so many evils.
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J As of 2020, one figure is 2.38 billion Christians worldwide. I think you have spoken to the minority. That doesn't invalidate your personal experience , but it doesn't permit you to extrapolate it. The teachings and life of Christ nevertheless represent the ideal of what a Christian ought to be modelling his or her life on - and they hold regardless of how imperfect an individual is.
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Matt You are incapable of proving otherwise. I shall live with my convictions, just as you will live with yours.
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@jsmith9705 'How you feel about something and whether it's had a negative or positive effect is irrelevant. ' We could extrapolate that statement to say any expression of individuality or sense of right and wrong in any form is irrelevant also. In which case we end up at first base with an amoral society, the kind of society that many of us would find intolerable due to an innate sense of fairness and goodness (I have never known anybody who ever thought it was fair to have their good stolen, for instance, who enjoyed being lied to - most of us are born with some moral compass).
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J What reality do you hold to?
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J Actually, I hope you realise you are being rather intolerant of those with whom you disagree.
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J J 9 minutes ago ' @E B The one with sane people in it, so your don't exist there.' Doesn't that statement above speak of intolerance? What is your definition? Should I post a dictionary definition for you?
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@jsmith9705 I would disagree (I'm sure that doesn't surprise you). How we feel about something is driven by our innate sense of morality - it also determines what laws get passed in parliament, what gets included in educational syllabuses and how we live our lives. I mentioned the property aspect as a way of demonstrating that we all have that innate sense of morality (which you kind of alluded to when talking about the responsibility of the individual). I believe it has to and does , determine what we permit and don't permit in society which is either to the benefit or detriment of society. Some people believe in no censorship at all, in which case we devolve to an amoral society which will ultimately be to the detriment of all.
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J I'm still here. If I can't take it , then I would have run away by now.
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J The truth is, you are angry, big or small in stature and you argue from a position of anger which causes you to throw around stupid names as away of expressing your anger.
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@jsmith9705 You do have a point. In honesty, I don't know how best to draw a dividing line between what we as a society should consider permissible and what should be proscribed other than as a Christian, to see whether it conforms or otherwise to a Christian standard of morality which at its core is loving God first and then your neighbour - everything else stems from that. But that standard is first of all personal. However, there are things that anyone can agree on corporately such as not stealing etc. I think what little I know of the US constitution shows they got it close to being right the first time.
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@jsmith9705 I know. When society was largely Christian, or gave its assent in that direction, conversations like the ones had here would not be meeting with this kind or resistance. Not that it bothers me on one level - Paul contended earnestly for the faith, and Jesus said to preach the gospel. The Christian faith is to be both lived and preached - the goal isn't always a productive outcome in the sense of what most people consider productive. I have never followed the view that you can make a society Christian - that only comes from the people who have to the freedom to choose the Christian faith. However, there are fundamental things that I think most cultures can agree on. But as I mentioned before, we all have our moral bias, and we all make decisions in life for ourselves and others from that, whether for the betterment of others, or to their detriment. Most of the disagreement expressed in the comments though come from people who dislike the Christian faith for one reason or another, and that is their point of contention. If I were to rewrite the property rules and take a non-biblical view, I might come up with something that approximates the communist manifesto where property is held in common and the state is all. If you think 'J' is angry now, wait till he no longer owns his house and no longer can walk around freely (remind anyone of the lockdowns?) - that might be what it takes to see what has given societies with a Christian foundation a lead in this world, and why people wish to live in those countries - even if they don't understand why those countries are so different. The problem is, most people aren't thinking that deep and it is very unfortunate that this doesn't get taught. I remember reading in a Victorian paper, perhaps 20 years ago, an atheist lamenting the decline in Christianity, saying how essential it was for the preservation of society and mentioning that it was only Christian charity functioning in some of the remotest places on earth that sought to alleviate the deprivation and suffering in those areas - nobody else was doing that ( I will say there is a Jewish lady working with one of the middle eastern groups as a result of her Jewish faith, that I have come to know of since that time, and there may well be others, but on the whole, that atheist is right).
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@jsmith9705 But he is a big man, from his own admission. I think we can have good conversations, even if we don't agree on some or a lot of things, and I think that is an important part of a well-functioning democracy.
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@jsmith9705 Yes , he confuses his physical stature with his mental stature. I actually don't like the term democracy in all honestly, it's just that is what we have in Australia, and I think we have seen just how tenuous are freedoms really are over the last 2 years. I'd much sooner have a constitutional republic like America where people have inalienable rights.
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@jsmith9705 You get the benefits of the inalienable rights, whether you believe in a creator or not. Some of the framers were actually deists anyway, so not exactly on the same page as the Christians in terms of their spiritual beliefs, but nevertheless stood for true freedom.
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@jsmith9705 I don't take it seriously. I knew you were joking.
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@jsmith9705 2 minutes ago @E B I would also add that how someone responds to what's written is the responsibility of that individual even if they do exactly what the writer says. Because each person is responsible for their own actions unless a child or mentally deficient. I completely agree. But I think we are diverging from my original statement. I never said I would set about the destroy the works of Darwin, or any other for that matter, or that I would censor them, but that I would not be interested in preserving them, so that if they were ever lost, as these appeared to be at one stage, then I could not care less if they were ever found again.
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