Welcome MarkD

Nice to meet you @MarkD .

Thank you. Nice to meet you as well, @swamidass. Iā€™d heard people refer to you and this website over at Biologos but I didnā€™t find my way here until you posted about this talk on the Celebrating Creation Facebook group.

I see you use the same platform as they do, which I like a lot. I wonder how your website is intended to be different from BioLogos. I suspect your ā€˜missionā€™ is similar though I havenā€™t checked carefully.

I find Iā€™m interested in religion as an aspect of humanity. Even though I donā€™t practice one I find it very easy to attach meaning to many Christian terms. I feel as though there are depths within us where wisdom can outstrip our best rational efforts in some domains. ā€œGodā€ as a unified, external agency seems very unlikely to me. A personal afterlife and the supernatural generally are the other Christian ideas for which I find no affinity. But all in all, I think religion as a culturally evolved system for pointing the individual to look for what is greater than oneself has value. For that reason I am pro-religion although Iā€™m also in favor of acquiring as much insight into ourselves and religion as possible.

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You can learn more about Peaceful Science here:

We have some overlap with BioLogos, but not much. This article from @sfmatheson might also help:

Of course, there is also the GAE:

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Those are helpful, thanks. I especially appreciated Stephen Mathesonā€™s:

Peaceful Scienceā€™s mission is explicitly humanistic: ā€œā€¦encouraging conversation around the grand question: what does it mean to be human? ā€

That is really what interests me. The science emphasis is probably a good balance for my humanities background.

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Thatā€™s great. Glad you found us and looking forward to the conversation with you.

Nice seeing you here, Mark. There are a few of us here who engage over at BioLogos, as well. The topics and directions of the discourses do differ on the two forums.

Could you tell us more about your background? We have quite a broad set of backgrounds and interests here and itā€™s always interesting to hear where people are ā€œcoming fromā€.

Iā€™m a science professor at a small Christian liberal arts university. I love having conversations with my humanities colleagues, both seeing the differences in approach and similarities.

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Thanks Michelle. Iā€™m noticing a more culturally open feel here. While Iā€™m most familiar with Christianity I am definitely more interested in how people can peacefully coexist and learn from each other in a pluralistic society. The segment of Christianity and Islam which obsess over cultural domination distress me no less than anti-theistic atheism.

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Sure. Iā€™m not that developed in any particular field. Iā€™m retired now from having taught middle school mathematics for 25 years. My first obsession when I was in middle school myself was everything to do with the diversity of animals and their behavior. After leaving college for a while I became interested in all things spiritual eventually becoming interested in psychology, especially Jung and Hillman. Back in college in my late twenties i majored in philosophy as an undergrad before getting into education. Since retiring five years ago Iā€™ve read many more wonderful novels than I had in all the rest of my life. I think it has taken me this long to become as interested in our humanity as I had started off being in other animals. But when I want to think hard some more about how we are now, I turn to Iain McGilchristā€™s The Master and His Emissary which I read between novels.

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Welcome MarkD. There is always an empty chair reserved for you :wink:

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That is what we are about, in a very central way. Have you seen this yet?

I see what you mean, a very similar direction. Started listening and things came up. Will come back for the rest soon.

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