If you took it seriously, it might very well give "real" insight into the point of view of its authors and their culture. How they (you) experience the world. that subjectivity is also part of the world, and has some interest. In a sense that's what religious myth is. At least if it doesn't...
The article in the OP does seem to give some hint of what is probably meant, from the author of the paper.
"Psychology has begun to encompass and explore a number of exciting new topics — meditation, forgiveness, acceptance, gratitude, hope and love. Each of these phenomena has deep roots in...
I wouldn't expect non-scientific essays or philosophical reflections to be included in peer reviewed science journals which exist to publish science and not philosophy in any case.
Your question about "second-class" goes back to what I said earlier about the possibility of turning this...
No, I think scientific methodologies are by far the best methods of inquiry to determine objective truths, where objectivity is really a function of scientific criteria like repeatability of experiments, falsifiability of hypotheses, the parsimoniousness and conceptual clarity of theoretical...
I'm not sure what is meant by "requiring" scientific inquiry but I don't think the point is to get rid of it. The question is whether it alone is sufficient, not whether it's necessary. I think science is very necessary, and awesome, and cool and froody and other adjectives besides. And...
This sort of gets to the heart of the question, but the notion that only verifiable information about physical realities is valuable or meaningful is a philosophical position, and I think that's what 1137 is getting at when he says it raises this mode of inquiry to the pinnacle human endeavor...
I think "faith" is a symbol that might have more to it than your usage suggests, and I think all of the things you listed are good examples of the kind of "doing the will of my Father in heaven" that he seemed to have in mind. John's gospel simplified even further though, when it reports Jesus...
I've been very lazy about reading your post here with the amount of attention it deserved, but haven finally gotten around to it, I think you make a lot of really good points. Thanks for that.
Are you looking more for commentary or for an index of words? I'm used to concordances referring to the latter, i.e a way to lookup where certain topics or words occur in the Bible. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance is probably the most popular. If you're looking for commentary, there's one that I...
I don't know about "best", and if you're looking for systematic theology I haven't read many of them, but here's some books I've thought were worth the price of admission:
Christian Origins and the Question of God (5 volumes, N.T. Wright)
The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Pavel Florensky)
The...
Taken seriously by who? He seems worthy of being taken seriously by me anyway. Which isn't the same thing as saying he's the only person who is :P I confess I don't keep up with the bleeding edge of debate in philosophy so I couldn't speak to his reputation beyond that.
Episode 3 - The Mary's Room Thought Experiment
A good place to read more on this topic is at SEP: Qualia: The Knowledge Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In his 1992 book, Consciousness Explained, Dan Dennett discusses a version of this argument where Mary is replaced by a super...
There's been at least these 2 recent threads:
Can this be anything other than what it appears to be? | ReligiousForums.com
New Controversy Surrounds Alleged 'Jesus Family Tomb' | ReligiousForums.com
the first has a fair amount of discussion.
In at least some sense, the reduction of the commandments to "love one another" could be heard as a rebuttal to that image meme. Of course, loving is something you do as well as something which describes what you are "deep down inside".
I'm not sure you really understood what I was trying to say, or perhaps I didn't say it very well, but I was speaking about homosexuality as an orientation as a constitutive element of a person's very identity and self. As such, it's about a lot more than just sex. Just as being heterosexual, or...
maybe. I don't have any first hand experience. But I approach my understanding of it by imagining what it would be like for me if someone told me that heterosexual sex was always sinful, and the inclination towards it was evidence of an unnaturally sinful nature.
That would be very difficult...
The difference between being gay and being an alcoholic is that the former, as far as we can tell, is such a constitutive element of human identity that for a person so constituted to deny it is almost to deny his or her entire being. On the other hand, alcoholics, even accepting a genetic...