Post by The Ninevite on Jul 16, 2024 2:16:32 GMT -8
It is a well-known fact that the devil is employed full time as a union organizer. "A Union" mathematically speaking is the unit circle, which any beginning student of geometry can inscribe with a compass, and some people are inventive enough to make without one, using a pin, a pencil, and a piece of string.
Other than that, when speaking of a conspiracy or the occult in a religious context (and its meaningless outside of one), the devil has to come up eventually. the principle reason why conspiracy theorists and people who believe there to be a conspiracy are thought "crazy" or insane, at least on all the websites I visited in an informal statistical survey, is that the Non-Christian sites don't have any context for their ravings at all and are irreverent, and the self-proclaimed Christians who insert a conspiracy board into their sites are incomplete theologians who practice too narrow a denominational outlook on their devotions and proactive a Pollyanna policy of never discussing the devil.
Gnosticism is a heresy, and its blasphemous adherents believe that they will be saved by learning, or by their knowledge, which is false. The arithmeticians among us who in daily life as census takers or accountants or even as f-stop loving photographers know that for the purposes of secretarial science, and that good 'ol government record keeping, everything ultimately comes down to the individual's age. Arithmetic is numbers, the use of numbers. what do you do with numbers, you count. Theologians know that Satan is older than they are, and that because he has been alive since before the fall, even before the creation, he knows more than us, because he has millennia more years of experience. However, Satan will not be saved at the end of time after the last judgement.
Telling someone that Gnosticism is false and describing the reasons why that is requires you to be able to see knowledge as such for what it is, discern the several ways that it is obtained, and have the ability to analyze it and determine whether what an individual knows is true or false. Knowledge falls in to at least three categories, with pedagogical knowledge being obtained by a combination of listing to teachers and by life experience. Liberal knowledge is studied in books by oneself, you'd need to be able to write a proof paper to prove that you had it. technical knowledge is learned by physically doing something, most technical knowledge is gotten on the job, in a machine shop or on a farm. Besides learning from other people, work experience, and reading, there are inspiration and to the religious, spiritual insight including prophecy.
In your lifetime, human knowledge is understanding which you have committed to memory. There are only two ways to prove that you have memorized a fact, one is to recite it by speaking it out loud, and the other is to write it down. But for us first amendment scholars, it will have to be said that a prophecy of future events is not knowledge, knowledge is human, but prophecy is divine. You can't claim to know all of a civic news story, no matter how ell reported it has been thus far in your city paper, in spite of your city paper being duly professional and law abiding, if the outcome is still in process. The outcome of that senate impeachment won't be known as complete knowledge of a case until the gavel comes down in the supreme court, and the front-page homicide report isn't over until the police catch the criminal.
Spiritual discernment is known by a similar method, however. You don't have to avoid a church in the suburbs just because the pastor claims to know the Book of Obadiah, Obadiah is short, and he might be able to recite the whole thing out loud with his Bible closed from memory. The discernment when dealing with a gnostic evangelist, or if you are worried that you might be is in listening carefully to his pedagogy and paying attention to whether he is speaking of an Old Testament prophecy which has been fulfilled or which he believes has been, and carefully marking his statements about when and where the events which he thinks and claims to know from prayer, Bible reading and meditation about their fulfillment.
Other than that, when speaking of a conspiracy or the occult in a religious context (and its meaningless outside of one), the devil has to come up eventually. the principle reason why conspiracy theorists and people who believe there to be a conspiracy are thought "crazy" or insane, at least on all the websites I visited in an informal statistical survey, is that the Non-Christian sites don't have any context for their ravings at all and are irreverent, and the self-proclaimed Christians who insert a conspiracy board into their sites are incomplete theologians who practice too narrow a denominational outlook on their devotions and proactive a Pollyanna policy of never discussing the devil.
Gnosticism is a heresy, and its blasphemous adherents believe that they will be saved by learning, or by their knowledge, which is false. The arithmeticians among us who in daily life as census takers or accountants or even as f-stop loving photographers know that for the purposes of secretarial science, and that good 'ol government record keeping, everything ultimately comes down to the individual's age. Arithmetic is numbers, the use of numbers. what do you do with numbers, you count. Theologians know that Satan is older than they are, and that because he has been alive since before the fall, even before the creation, he knows more than us, because he has millennia more years of experience. However, Satan will not be saved at the end of time after the last judgement.
Telling someone that Gnosticism is false and describing the reasons why that is requires you to be able to see knowledge as such for what it is, discern the several ways that it is obtained, and have the ability to analyze it and determine whether what an individual knows is true or false. Knowledge falls in to at least three categories, with pedagogical knowledge being obtained by a combination of listing to teachers and by life experience. Liberal knowledge is studied in books by oneself, you'd need to be able to write a proof paper to prove that you had it. technical knowledge is learned by physically doing something, most technical knowledge is gotten on the job, in a machine shop or on a farm. Besides learning from other people, work experience, and reading, there are inspiration and to the religious, spiritual insight including prophecy.
In your lifetime, human knowledge is understanding which you have committed to memory. There are only two ways to prove that you have memorized a fact, one is to recite it by speaking it out loud, and the other is to write it down. But for us first amendment scholars, it will have to be said that a prophecy of future events is not knowledge, knowledge is human, but prophecy is divine. You can't claim to know all of a civic news story, no matter how ell reported it has been thus far in your city paper, in spite of your city paper being duly professional and law abiding, if the outcome is still in process. The outcome of that senate impeachment won't be known as complete knowledge of a case until the gavel comes down in the supreme court, and the front-page homicide report isn't over until the police catch the criminal.
Spiritual discernment is known by a similar method, however. You don't have to avoid a church in the suburbs just because the pastor claims to know the Book of Obadiah, Obadiah is short, and he might be able to recite the whole thing out loud with his Bible closed from memory. The discernment when dealing with a gnostic evangelist, or if you are worried that you might be is in listening carefully to his pedagogy and paying attention to whether he is speaking of an Old Testament prophecy which has been fulfilled or which he believes has been, and carefully marking his statements about when and where the events which he thinks and claims to know from prayer, Bible reading and meditation about their fulfillment.