Re: 25 Classic Books That Have Been Banned

On Mon, 26 May 2025 15:36:00 -0400, William Hyde
<wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Paul S Person wrote:

On 25 May 2025 17:09:01 GMT, ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
wrote:
 

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote or quoted:

This is after the creation of the New Heaven and New Earth. Who can
say what their physics may look like?

>
  From a philosophy angle, miracles are possible, since all the
  laws of nature come from stuff we have seen before and just
  describe what happened back then. We can only guess those same
  laws will hold up down the road, but we do not actually know for
  sure. But for now, we have to stick with Occam's razor;
  there is no real point in guessing about miracles happening later on.
  Science laws are called "laws" because they describe the past,
  not because they lay down rules for what has to happen next.
  Still, so far, betting that the old laws keep working has
  always paid off. Technically, the universe could just blink out
  of existence at any moment. That would not really bother anyone.

 
1. That is an intellectualist/atheist definition of "miracle",
intended to show that none exist. The actual meaning is "something
worth looking at". Or perhaps "something you don't see every day".

>
That is certainly not the way the word is used by  the religious people
I know.
>
I rather expect that the people down the road at the "Mountain of Fire
and Miracles Ministry" would also beg to differ.
>
So it is at the least an atheist/fundamentalist definition.

Or it was developed centuries before fundamentalism, as such, existed
and was adopted as traditional. Intellectuals, after all, existed from
long ago.

More assertions:
1. Jesus had something to say about those who sought "signs and
wonders". And it wasn't very nice.
2. This presupposes the existence of a "natural law" that, being
imposed by God, cannot be violated. As opposed to a "natural law"
derived from Science, which may have a few exceptions even if none
have been discovered yet.
3. Paul, in discussing the grafting of Christians onto Israel,
describes grafting wild olive branches to a cultivated olive as "an
unnatural act" (OK, maybe it's "an act against nature"). This is
almost a claim that God does unnatural acts. Good thing it's an
illustration.
4. During the referendum in Washington that established gay marriage
in that State (this was, of course, before the Supremes extended it
nationwide), it was argued that it was "against natural law". And
implied that all of Reality would curl up and die if it occurred. So
(from this viewpoint) every gay marriage is a violation of natural law
-- which means it is a miracle perfomed by God (who alone can break
natural law) by the definition under discussion.

(I voted for this, because I am able to distinguish between secular
marriage and religious marriage. Alternately, since Reality did not,
in fact, curl up and die as a result, it seems possible that God
simply does not recognize them as marriages. Since the statement
claimed as "God's definition of marriage" is clearly matrilocal [the
man leaves his mother, the woman goes nowhere] and so
multigenerational, it may be that /all/ nuclear marriages fail "God's
definition" and so may be equally offensive.)
N
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"