lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.) (03/30/84)
Part of Ken Arndt's recent posting: >Have they looked EVERYWHERE? How do they know that God is not out of town >right now, or hiding from them? It seems obvious that Ken is feelingly rhetorically frisky here, but this touches on a problem I have with the whole God thing. Namely, that this conception has been so plastic through history. St. Paul, and all Christians for the next thousand years or so, held a cosmology that really had God in His Heaven, right over their heads. They really actually truly believed it. Paul expressed these beliefs in words. He described his expectation of being physically carried up to heaven in palpable terms. The Interpreters' Bible states matter-of-factly that, "the Bible identifies the stars as angels in many places [list of citations], and this was assumed by Paul." Now, nobody believes what Paul believed. Heaven isn't on Mars is it? Oh no! This is a childish and simplistic notion! Yet this is exactly the kind of notion that is being described in the New Testament. The point is, that people still use all these same words, which now mean something completely different (exactly what is hard to discern). and still claim to believe the same things. Some uneducated Christians do still identify Heaven with outer space, perhaps some Christian netters do also, but are embarrased to say so. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew