I am a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of North America. I pastor Living Stones CRC in Sacramento CA www.livingstonescrc.org/
You can find an audio version of this channel on paulvanderklay.podbean.com/ and ITunes at itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-vanderklays-podcast/id1394314333
I enjoy pastoring a small congregation because I enjoy the people. I also enjoy thinking through my faith and discussing it with others.
A word about comments. So far I have been very happily surprised about the quality of the comments in the comment section. My vision of a good comment section is one in which people can actually have a conversation. I don't mind negative comments as long as they are productive.
My church channel has sermons and Sunday School lesson if you're interested. ru-vid.com/show-UCh7bdktIALZ9Nq41oVCvW-A
Thank you for your talk :) Kind of like the serenity prayer, I try to live in a way to experience a peaceful disposition, rather than a sunny or cloudy one.. Again drawing from the serenity prayer, I think we are accountable to the extent that we can change :/? Which is quite a lot given compound effect..
Of course, he forgot to talk about "Original Sin". In the mythical "Garden" a mythical man "Adam" ate a mythical fruit from a "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" and what happened then? "We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men." Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. God and the State (p. 2). Kindle Edition.
1. All morally-obligated agents who willfully refuse to intervene (to stop a child from being tortured to death) are moral monsters. 2. God is a morally-obligated agent who willfully refused to intervene. 3. Therefore, god is a moral monster. Loftus, John W.; Slade, Darren M.; Johnson, David Kyle; Price, Robert M.; Eller, Jack David; Madison, David. God and Horrendous Suffering (p. 162). GCRR Press. Kindle Edition.
Correct, if you view G-d as anthropic. But G-d is a deity of nature, who creates volcanoes and tornadoes. Rather amoral and impersonal like the pagan gods of yore. God on the other hand, I take as both moral and personal. This is how I segment the theodicy question. If one fails to distinguish between the two usages, a clear ethical conundrum faces one.
God gives to innocent sufferers an unimaginable joy and glory in the next life, which more than consoles them for the harm he has allowed them to suffer at the hands of the evil one. We even find in this life a glimpse into this truth that even the most intense suffering is temporary, something we can look back on when we return to health. The Saviour, who suffered some of the worst cruelty, demonstrates that by his triumphant resurrection and ascension. He used the analogy of a woman suffering the pains of childbirth who then, for the joy of having the child, forgets her suffering. St Paul was able to say that the sufferings of the present are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us. All suffering is temporary, and unimaginable blessings and joy lie beyond it.
All Hitler had to do is repent and turn to Jesus and he would have been totally forgiven ditto Stalin ditto Mao. Hitler was never excommunicated by the Catholic Church. BTW Yahweh did zero to stop these atrocities. In Calvinism Yahweh "predestines whatsoever comes to pass". Who created Hitler? Who created Stalin? Who created Mao? Yahweh knew what they would do before Yahweh created them!!!! PVK cannot answer these questions neither can any other Theist.
Who created Churchill, FDR etc ... warmongers all. So easy to be self-righteous if one is anglophone ;-) The standard theological constructs seem inadequate.
You forget the Catholic doctrine that exemption from everlasting punishment does not mean exemption from temporal punishment for sins. That's why there is a purgatory.
Wow! Freddie and Paul this is actually tight and that’s right! I like your flows since I learned to just flow with them.The tangents are everything. Pastor if you were into hip hop you would’ve went went crazy around that moment the beat changed and you thought it was gone lol! So original! Thank you 😊
A Sunday sermon or topical? Do the Dutch Reform still hate the Catholics or vice versa? Moral progress? Contemporary people always virtue signal. It is BS. Liberals are so cringe ;-(
No, not responsible as a tribe or species. We are held responsible as individuals, day by day. My younger self isn't even responsible for the errors my older self makes. This is why justice is left to G-d.
It is safe on you tube to take the examples of evil political leaders and their crimes against humanity from decades ago. But they should make us think about our readiness to be complicit in, or approving of, those in our present day, whom we may not name here.
"MAGNUS SPEAKS LIGHT UPON THE QUAGMIRE • THE MOB MYTH OF JUSTICE IS NOT ONLY BLIND • SHE IS MINDLESS AND HEARTLESS • A CURSE UPON YOU SLEEPING WORLD • YOU WHO LET THE LAND DO YOUR KILLING FOR YOU • THE OUBLIETTE TO FORGET • DISHONEST AND UGLY • THE SWORD IS MORE HONEST AND LOVING • IN ANCIENT TIMES • A METEOR THREATENED A REGION OF PEOPLE • PRAETENTATUS RAISED UP HIS LEFT HAND • AND SUSPENDED THE METEOR ABOVE THE PEOPLE • OBSERVING FROM A SAFE DISTANCE • GEMINI ASKED HIM TWO QUESTIONS • DO WE FEEL BAD WHEN WE DO BAD THINGS • BECAUSE WE ARE GOOD • OR DO WE FEEL BAD ONLY BECAUSE WE ARE THREATENED • BY SOMETHING BIGGER THAN US • PRAETENTATUS ANSWERED • BY DROPPING THE METEOR ON HALF OF THE PEOPLE" Verse fragment from my book
The second option. We feel bad because we are social animals that cannot exist except for social bonds. We can all do things that destroy social bonds to a greater or lesser degree, and the bad feeling reminds us that that behavior is dangerous, so be careful with it. Did Gemini feel bad for distracting Preatertatus while he was in the middle of that tricky meteor-stopping procedure? I hope so. Why couldn't Gemini wait with the dopey questions until the meteor was safely sent away or vaporized or whatever? Gemini shows tremendously poor judgment here.
God could have made us less prone to evil. We didn’t choose to be made this way. We didn’t choose our biological desires that are often self seeking. We didn’t even choose to be here.
God intends that we should look to Jesus to get the grace and strength to overcome the proneness to evil. He gives us the means to fight the battle and to have the glory of being victorious with him. This life is a probation, and our opportunity to join with God in demonstrating the power of love and goodness over evil.
This kind of argument is like "It would have been better to make cow more tasty" when we have absolutely zero ability to make a cow from nothing and not a lot of skill or knowledge about what goes into taste or smell.
@@PaulVanderKlay Yet we are surely right to ask why it is that God has allowed us to be born with all these disadvantages that we have not chosen, the inheritance of our first parents' fall, and the further compounding that over the generations of our ancestors. Knowing what we know of God as he has revealed himself, it must be that he has allowed it because he also provides for us the way, in Christ, to overcome these things. God allows us to experience evil, ourselves being both the victims of it and at times complicit in it, while also providing the way to overcome it. We learn lessons that stand us in good stead for eternity as God in this present age demonstrates the horrible consequences of evil and the power of his goodness in overcoming it, even enabling us to join in the battle and share in his victory.
American is no angel. They can take you land whenever they want, because it was never your land. Eminent domain. And our soil was destroyed by science, but they get credit for fixing it? American got scientists before politicians. That's where the structure of government was derived from. Break it and get credit for fixing it. Science built the environment we are experiencing today. Jesus has to come twice to impregnate this world full of those who want him to come inside them. The woman tried to warn you that you were going on a mandate. But you could not fig.
There are some men (and they are almost exclusively men), especially those who were raised in Protestant cultures, who like the sense of connection to the ancient church while still being able to hate the Pope that the Eastern Orthodox Church offers them. Combine that with the aesthetics, the sense of 'white identity' (Eastern Orthodoxy is an exclusively white denomination), and the exoticism of it, and that's the basic appeal, I think. Westerners converting to Eastern Orthodoxy tend to be the right-wing equivalent of New Agers.
I would say not. If you think about those not knowing their transgressions(unconsciously) are pardoned, and even those that trespass against us are given ample time to repent. I would say that evil is an internal force designed to encourage our hand and see our tendency to anger(our favourite emotion to be stoked within the brain by science) and negativity(it is an designed for safety: The snake or the stick on the road). Can we see the evil we do, and others do, as way to wake us up to our true purpose: to overcome our hate and pettiness. To love, not in spite of our nature but because of it? 10:30 Like the Duality of Franz Haber- At once the creator of a life giving tech, but also responsible for great horrors. The vicissitudes of human experience. 25:45 - that indeed is Karma. Cause and effect. To be cursed, or be act unjustly to others or yourself. To love God With all your body mind and strength, to love thy neighbour as thyself. The cHesed of God, we are meant to try to embody that form of forgiveness and love no matter the transgression.
I paraphrase Jung on evil as: That the majority of evil in this world can be traced to people acting and thinking unconsciously. “The great danger is that of psychic infection-people falling into situations in which they unconsciously begin to think and act in ways dictated by collective forces rather than their own individual minds. The unconscious, when unrecognized, can act in ways that are not only irrational but also destructive.” "The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil. (Jung 1977: 436) This view of evil-that it is a judgment of consciousness, that it is a necessary category of thought, and that human consciousness depends upon having this category for its on-going functioning-generates many further important implications. One of them is that when this category of conscious discrimination is applied to the self, it creates a psychological entity that Jung named the ‘shadow.’ The shadow is a portion of the natural whole self that the ego calls bad, or evil, for reasons of shame, social pressure, family and societal attitudes about certain aspects of human nature, etc. Those aspects of the self that fall under this rubric are subjected to an ego-defensive operation that either suppresses them or represses them if suppression is unsuccessful. In short, one hides the shadow away and tries to become and remain unconscious of it. It is shameful and embarrassing. Jung provides a striking illustration of discovering a piece of his own shadow in his account of travelling to Tunisia for the first time. From this experience he extracts the observation that the rationalistic European finds much that is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realizing that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a more or less underground existence. (Jung 1961:245) In its early years, psychoanalysis had not yet sorted out the contents of the unconscious, nor had culture sorted out its view of what psychoanalysis was all about and what it was proposing. Would this novel medical technique lift the lid on a Pandora’s box of human pathology and release a new flood of misery into the world? Would it lead to sexual license in all social strata by analyzing away the inhibitions that keep fathers from raping their daughters and mothers from seducing their sons? Would returning Christ to a god of the vine, in the spirit of Dionysus, lead to a religion that encouraged drunkenness and accepted alcoholism as a fine feature of the godly? What could one expect if one delved deeply into the unconscious and unleashed the forces hidden away and trapped there? Perhaps this would turn out to be a major new contributor to the ghastly amount of evil already loose in the world rather than what it purported to be, a remedy for human ills. Such were some of the anxieties about psychoanalysis in its early days at the turn of the century. Is the unconscious good or evil? This was a basic question for the early psychoanalysts. Freud’s later theory proposed an answer to the question of the nature of the unconscious-good or evil?-by viewing it as fundamentally driven by two instincts, Eros and Thanatos, the pleasure drive and the death wish. These summarized all unconscious motives for Freud, and of these the second could be considered destructive and therefore evil. Melanie Klein would follow Freud in this two-instinct theory and assign such emotions as innate envy to the death instinct. Eros, on the other hand, was not seen as essentially destructive, even if the drive’s fulfillment might sometimes lead to destruction ‘accidentally,’ as in Romeo and Juliet for instance. From this Freudian theorizing it was not far to the over-simplification which holds that the id (i.e. the Freudian unconscious) is essentially made up of sex and aggression. Certainly from a Puritanical viewpoint this would look like a witch’s brew out of which nothing much but evil could possibly come. The id had to be repressed and sublimated in order to make life tolerable and civil life possible. Philip Rieff would (much later) extol the superego and the civic value of repression! (Jung 1975: 311)
Buddha overvalues mindfulness. The subconscious is the creative mediator between the conscious and unconscious. You can't be mindful of your intestines, unless you are terribly ill.
"My life is in this Tabernacle/Temple/Body". Also, a phrase from Jung: 'A greater freedom must always be preceded by constraint and enslavement' Reciprocal narrowing (like a river) before it opens out into the greater estuary waters. Thanks Paul!
"Wilberforce was motivated by religion to push for abolition" Yup. So was John Brown. Maher doesn't know that if it weren't for that Christian zealot who would push for abolition not just by imposing Christian morality via legislation but also imposing it by force (eventually we had that war that killed 700,000 Americans and wounded 500,000 more), Science would have insisted upon the maintenance of slavery of Africans -- or worse.
You know, a pool cue can leave a person in need of reconstructive surgery. Recuperating from that can leave a man with a good opportunity to reflect on how his soul needs to be reconstructed, too.
Maher: "Religions are supremecist" - PVK: "Of course they are, they have something that is highest" The irony (or hypocrisy) of Maher's position is, Maher believes that _his_ highest good needs to be imposed on the religious. Except that his highest good is apparently not imposing a highest good. It's incoherent.
Wall street are the modern prognosticators carrying on the old traditions. Bulls (Taurus) spring fertility and growth. Bears, winter hibernation and retreat. Suits and starch collars make their necks stiff.
I have a huge life, but everything I have would fit into a shot glass. No matter how much sober time we have we’re still the same distance from the ditch.
If he's doing his job every sermon would offend. To quote the great theologian Russell Brand: "To me, the Old Testament is like a dark room that Christ illuminated."
Paul its hard to listen for me when you are screaming so loudly .. It makes me think about why ..are you angry at the text ,tired about doing Sermons about it it ?.. And it doesnt help to lower the sound
How can you have "intimacy" with a woman when you think women are inferior, and silly little gossiping c*nts who just need to be guided by a husband to be able to think properly? "My wife is stupid, but she serves me, and now I have trained her well" WTF I don't get it. Ok, whatever.
Hi Paul, I think the answer to our culture must be techno political as well as psycho spiritual. Techno political is the top down aspect. Fix it at the top. New decrees, policies, theory. Psycho spiritual is the bottom up aspect. Fix it at the individual level with people becoming good in their personal lives I think to say the answer is ONLY relational is not recognizing the power of the Angelic over the Demonic. What do you think?
Paul reminds me of Tom Green (the comedian), especially with regards to being silly, being a pioneer, being amoung misfits, and being tech savvy :) They also look a little alike ^.^
I love you guys all (Jordans, John, Paul, Jonathan), TLC transformed me tremendously. I came very close to become a Christian, yet I miss a deeper embodiment, which only Jordan P is putting on the table, even if tangentially. The little ad you played was so interesting: I actually don't see the difference between a "purely" physiological depression and one caused by suffering triggered externally. They are the same, and one can only see this by going through the body. Christianity is still too Gnostic for me, and I felt very lonely with this feeling in TLC, till I found this guy: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Y8cuqy6y0fo.html. His Process and Event book had a huge effect on me, similar to Vervaeke's Awakening. Awakening is one half of the story, it is the map of the matrichal/feminine container. What's missing is the phallic/masculine content (not the "how we self-transcend?", but the "where do we go, into what do we self-transcend?") something that only Peterson represents, carefully but forcefully. Bard is way blunter, but not less deep than Vervaeke. If you are surprised why Peterson is reluctant to propositionally accept Christianity, why he keeps his distance, you should check out Bard, his explanation is dead on. My conversation with him is mostly on this one point, but if you want a broader overview of Process and Event, check out his 6-part seminar on Sweeney's Parallax channel: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lKEE9hZ3OoQ.html
