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This is very often repeated, and it's intuitively false... and actually one of the reasons why you don't find many college students in Church once they come back and hear this whopper Whether something "outside" dictating something doesn't necessitate something being true, right or wrong. It's actually fairly obvious if you think about it just a little bit. The reason why children seem to be confused in this article is precisely because of the confusing morality presented from the religious standpoint. I'll demonstrate a very simple example: Let's say we have a strong moral statement - "Chewing gum indoors is wrong". It obviously seems like an opinion rather than a moral law. Why? Because it seems like a preference that doesn't explain why, and doesn't get into any situational ethics and application of this particular "moral law". Without proper context, it doesn't make sense. A lot of religious morality is presented as morality that lacks context and background, and thus almost completely void of consequential evaluation that makes morality moral . Going back to the not chewing gum indoors. What's the difference between of the president of the US making it a law, and a God making it a law? Let's say there is some benefit for not chewing gum indoors. Let's say that the reason for this moral law is to make sure people don't accidentally spit it out and anger the owner. We can religiously cite the reason, but contextually it's lacking application when it comes to situational ethics that such sweeping moral law doesn't deal with at all. That's why we say that the morality is relative. Not because some things are not wrong, but because the context shifts and the "relative" part is about the context that the black and white "God says so" part doesn't address in the complexity of any given situation. Yes, cheating on a test is wrong... IN THE CONTEXT OF A CLASSROOM, or any other place where such institutional preference makes sense... in context of an agreement and mutual understanding. If students attempts to circumvent such understanding, there's a clear line drawn as to what's considered cheating and what's not. On our complex Calculus tests we were allowed to bring in textbooks to test. In other classes we weren't. In a country where I'm from, the teachers permitted some students to copy the test answers from the more advanced ones, because in their opinion, these students would still something than failing at the subject they are not there yet as far as understanding. So, there's no such thing as "Absolute Morality" when it comes to the complexity of the everyday scenarios. You may have "Don't have any God's before me" as an absolute moral, but "don't murder" is a very murky subject when it comes to what constitutes murder. If it's a form of intentional killing, then do mercy killing count? How about the war scenarios? How about self-preservation scenarios and where is the line there? It's not as simple as saying "this is murder, and this is not". The context makes a whole a lot of difference. That's why religious take on morality tends to be a joke. Adventists gobble up those cakes on Sabbath potluck, but shrimp... God forbid! It's a moral law! . There's no context. There's little understanding. And that's not how morality should be presented to children who we are preparing for navigating the complex world of reality.

one thing bothers me about the subject of this thread, "No one dies and goes to heaven" -- is it really of salvational importance? (maybe it is - I don't know).. the reason I ask is because so many people draw comfort from the idea that their deceased relatives are "watching over" them from heaven, and the idea that they are in a "better place"... is it really wrong, i.e., sinful, for those people to believe something that gives them so much comfort? Does it really behoove Adventists to take away that bit of comfort from someone?

Please give me a single example of a *positive* 'moral fact'. Not 'it is wrong to...', but 'it is right to...'. Moral absolutist arguments tend to be made only with extreme negative examples. The seeming impossibility of finding positive examples demonstrates a fatal logical flaw.

An interesting perspective on the Crusades that doesn't vilify Christians OR Muslims.. Yeah, Well, but What About the Crusades? By Kevin DeYoung We are coming up on a thousand years, and Christians still haven’t made up for the Crusades. No matter how many times Billy Graham makes the most admired list, we’ll still have the Crusades to deal with. When President Obama encouraged humility in denouncing ISIS today in light of the Crusades from close to a millennium ago, he may have been making a clumsy moral equivalence argument, but he was only voicing what many Americans (and many Christians) have articulated before. Remember the faux confessional booths from way back in the 2000s when Christians would apologize to non-Christians for the Crusades? If there is one thing in our collective history that we cannot apologize for enough, it is the history conjured up by pictures like the one in this post. Yet, for all the times we’ve lamented the Crusades, how many of us know more than two sentences about them? Isn’t it wise to know at least a little something about the Crusades before we borrow them to get an advanced degree in self-recrimination? A few years ago I picked up a copy of The New Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden, a history professor at Saint Louis University. It’s a fascinating book. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more, but not too much (it’s only 225 pages), about the Crusades. What Are We Talking About? The Crusades refer to a series of military expeditions over several centuries, beginning with the First Crusade in 1096 through the end of the Fifth Crusade in 1221, and continuing on in more sporadic fashion up until the Reformation. The term “Crusade” is not a medieval word. It is a modern word. It comes from crucesignati (“those signed by the cross”), a term used occasionally after the 12th century to refer to what we now call “crusaders.” Contrary to popular opinion, the Crusades did not begin as a holy war whose mission was to convert the heathen by the sword. In fact, very few of the crusaders saw their mission as an evangelistic one. The initial purpose of the Crusades, and the main military goal throughout the Middle Ages, was quite simply to reclaim Christian lands captured by Muslim armies. The popular conception of barbaric, ignorant, cruel and superstitious crusaders attacking peaceful, sophisticated Muslims comes largely from Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman (1825) and Sir Steven Runciman’s three-volume History of the Crusades (1951-54), the latter of which concludes with the famous summation now shared by most everyone: “The Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.” Scott and Runciman did much to shape the entirely negative view of the Crusades, but it isn’t as if they had no material to work with. The Crusades were often barbaric and often produced spectacular failures. Children died needlessly. Coalitions splintered endlessly. Jews were sometimes persecuted mercilessly. Ancient cities were ransacked foolishly. And on occasion (e.g., the Wendish Crusade), infidels were forced to convert or die, while the crusaders holding the swords were guaranteed immortality. In short, many of the Christians who went to war under the sign of the cross conducted themselves as if they knew nothing of the Christ of the cross. But that’s not the whole story. The Crusades is also the story of thousands of godly men, women and children who sacrificed time, money and health to reclaim holy lands in distant countries overrun by Muslims. The Christians of the East had suffered mightily at the hands of the Turks and Arabs. It was only right, it seemed to medieval Christians, to go and help their fellow Christians and reclaim their land and property. Not What You May Think Many crusaders were knights (and their families) who left lands and titles. They saw their journey to the Middle East as an act of piety, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the center of the earth and the center of their spiritual world. To be sure, the crusaders could be arrogant and savage, but they could also be pious, compassionate (e.g., the Hospitallers) and courageous. And they did not always fail. The First Crusade, unlike most of the others, actually worked. Against all odds, a fractious group of Christians made their way from Western Europe to the Middle East and conquered two of the best-defended cities in the world (Antioch and Jerusalem). Their triumph was nothing short of remarkable, and for the crusaders, it signaled nothing less than the hand of God restoring his city to his people. A popular poem of the 15th century captured the heartbeat of the crusading spirit: Fifteenth century/ Our faith was strong in th’ Orient/ It ruled in all of Asia/ In Moorish lands and Africa/ But now for us these lands are gone/ ‘Twould even grieve the hardest stone …We perish sleeping one and all/ The wolf has come into the stall/ And steals the Holy Church’s sheep/ The while the shepherd lies asleep/ Four sisters of our Church you find/ They’re of the patriarchic kind/ Constantinople, Alexandria/ Jerusalem, Antiochia/ But they’ve been forfeited and sacked/ And soon the head will be attacked. We are right to deplore the cruelty meted out by crusading Christians, but should not ignore their plight. Christian lands had been captured. Surely, they thought, this could not stand. For an American, it would have been as if Al-Qaeda sacked Washington D.C. following 9/11, set up shop for Bin Laden in the White House, and turned the Lincoln Memorial into a terrorist training center. It would be unthinkable, cowardly even, for no one to storm the city, liberate its captives and return our nation’s capital to its rightful owners. We should never excuse the atrocities that occurred under the banner of the cross during the Crusades, but we should, at least, take pause to understand why they set out on what seems to us to be a fool’s errand. We should also resist the temptation to blame present day Muslim extremism on the Crusades. This is not to say that the Crusades don’t loom large in the Islamic consciousness. It is to say that this was not always the case. The Crusades were always a big deal in the Christian West, but for Muslims, as late as the 17th century, it was just another futile attempt by the infidels to halt the inevitable expansion of Islam. From the time of the Prophet Mohammed through the Reformation, Muslims conquered three-fourths of Christian lands. Once the Muslims united under Saladin, the crusaders, themselves divided, were no match for the armies of Islam. The Crusades were not a major factor in shaping the Islamic world. The Crusades were just another unsuccessful attempt to thwart the spread of Islam. The term for the Crusades, harb-al-salib, was only introduced in the Arab language in the mid-19th century, and the first Arabic history of the Crusades was not written until 1899. Because the crusades were unsuccessful, they simply did not matter much to Muslims. But all this began to change when European nations colonized Muslim nations and brought their schools and textbooks, which hailed the gallant crusaders and heroic knights who tried to bring Christianity and civilization to the Middle East. Like sports, like war, like life—when you’re winning, you don’t care who’s losing; but when you’re losing, it matters a lot who’s beating you. A Little Caution Goes a Long Way The point of this article is not to make us fans of the Crusades, but to make us more careful in our denunciation of them. We fight for nation-states and democracy. They fought for religion and holy lands. Their reasons for war seem wrong to us, but no more than our reasons would seem wrong to them. Madden writes: It is easy enough for modern people to dismiss the crusades as morally repugnant and cynically evil. Such judgments, however, tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based on uniquely modern (and, therefore, Western) values. If, from the safety of our modern world, we are quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick to condemn us. Our infinitely more destructive wars waged for the sake of political and social ideologies would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the medieval and the modern, people fight for what is most dear to them. That is fact of human nature that is not so changeable. Maybe the crusaders can teach us something after all. Maybe their example can force us to examine what we hold most dear. In America this may be freedom, democracy and a hard fought peace in a world of terror. In the church, we will establish different priorities. We are in a battle, and the Master has called us to fight—not with the weapons of the world, but with the word of God and prayer; not against our neighbors, but against the world, the flesh and the devil. Some things are worth fighting for. Some things are worth dying for. Our land? Perhaps. Our Lord? Always. So let our struggle be valiant, our suffering be purposeful and our strategy be Christ’s, who triumphed over the enemy not by taking life, but by giving his own. http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/249789-yeah-well-crusades.html/3

Anthony, I appreciate that you have shared your story with us. My undergraduate degree from an Adventist school is in psych and I had every intention at one point to become a clinical psychologist. I worked for a time in one of our hospitals in the psychiatric unit and can confirm that the approach there was indeed a clinical/medical one. I studied under Dr. Cannon who had a great burden to bring Church thinking out of the dark ages on these matters. Bridging that gap for Adventists, he compiled a several volume set of EGW statements supporting the need for addressing mental health issues. Yes, it was obviously an Adventist thing, but it was with the intent to open the door to and support modern practice of psychology. I think most of our colleges and universities take a scientific/medical approach in educating future mental health professionals.

Rachel has overall posted some good comments which are of value. Just making some minor comments on post # 17. There are three (3) Important words that should be understood in this study: Apocrypha, Deuterocanonical & Pseudepigrapha. Deuterocanonical is a word that is more often used by Catholics to refer to what Protestants often call the Apocrypha. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in the beginning had some specific meanings. With the passage of time they have taken on a multiplicity of common usage meanings and are sometimes used to represent the same things. Apocrypha has often been used to represent the writings found in Bibles of Catholic background and often located between the Old Testament and the New Testament. But, even in these cases, parts of these writings may be integrated directly into OT books such as the Book of Daniel. As the meanings of these words have developed in common usage, there are multiple dozens of writings that may be described as part of the Apocrypha and/or Pseudepigrapha. In post # !7, Rachel is using the more classical meanings, which is what I prefer to do. But, I have had to come to the place where I have to recognize how in common usage, these words have expanded in meaning beyond how I like to use them.

Museum of the Bible: Ancient History Meets Modern Technology Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Articles/Museum-of-the-Bible-Ancient-History-Meets-Modern-Technology.aspx?p=1#7lBrAB9QPfM4bQD1.99

I believe that those whose names remain written in the book of life, had not tasted and will not taste death. The "death" people experience now is but "sleep" in the eyes of the Savior.

Abraham lived between Adam and Moses. Did he die the first death? NKJ John 11:26 "And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?"

We are in a rather disturbing climate of distrust. I will be blunt. Lack of trustworthiness fosters an attitude of distrust in an ever increasing downward spiral. Nobody beleives or trusts anyone else because it has become so common and regular to lie about everything. Truthfulness and forthrightness has become rare. Sadly, it spills over into every area of life. Showing distrust to others does nothing to make them more trustworthy either. In fact evidence would suggest it only makes it more likely that people become less trustworthy in a climate of distrust. They live up to the highest expectation placed on them. If you expect someone to be a liar, they are more apt to at least bend the truth to protect themselves. People who lie are much more likely to expect that others are also lying, and suspect them of not being truthful or forthcoming. On the point in question, that there was a perceived need to even start up a conservative news source was born of a serious level of distrust born of a belief that anyone not conservative was lying. Hmmmm.... See where this goes?

Oh for pity's sake. It's places like Fox News which engender and foment the mistrust and lack of collegiality between the Republicans and the Democrats, in Congress and at the state levels. Listening to Fox News just helps this antagonism grow. Why, oh why must everyone argue so much! Finding common ground would be so much more sophisticated and proper -- but the radical Right has taken over, it seems. It's not a sign of weakness to negotiate! And to come to a consensus on items of disagreement. But some don't seem to get it.

Not trying to silence anyone huh? Really? It seems to me that just because you don't like a source, Fox News, you dislike the message. Most of what makes it onto Fox can be found elsewhere, but Fox is a central, readily available, source for the conservative viewpoint. That said, I don't like some of their personalities or what those people have to say. But to throw out the baby with bathwater seems to me to pretty short-sighted. If not for Fox much of Obama and the far left does would go completely unreported on the major news sources and for that alone they are worthy of watching.

Every time I hear someone say something like that about Fox (e.g. that it's the only way to get the full story that the 'liberal media' leave out), I'm reminded of the advice: "If someone you know is a jerk, they're a jerk. If everyone you know is a jerk, you're the jerk." There are many many media sources, ranging from far right (nationalreview, wnd, Drudgereport, etc.) To left (alternet, dailyKOS, huffpo...). In between you have bigger things like Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left, but if you put all of the solid non-fox sources like economist, NY times, washingtonpost, financial times, csmonitor, etc. in the 'liberal' camp, then I think you're the one with the poorly Calibrated compass. If you're talking about just TV news, it's mostly sensationalized [censored] regardless of what station you're watching. Most of the seem more interested in entertaining than in providing anything resembling thoughtful, reasoned analysis regardless of what political party you prefer. I don't see CNN as liberal so much as just bad.

What a great message! I am impressed. It's a beautiful appeal for all readers here to resist prejudice against female gender. <Grin> why, it's almost romanticly written. BTW.... there has been no expression of misogyny by any male or female posters in this thread. Not in the least. Just alarm that the bible text became yet another alteration. The Clear Word has EGW text sprinkled here and there. Is that not an alteration?

Hurricane Katrina 2005 was the 3rd strongest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in the US. In New Orleans, the levees were designed for Category 3, but Katrina peaked at a Category 5 hurricane, with winds up to 175 mph. You saw on TV how New Orleans got flooded out, and over a thousand died by drowning. Mostly senior people. I hurt for the cows and horses shown drowned and bloated on pieces of ground. As the roads dried out and the reporters swarmed in to interview people combing through the refuse of their damaged homes, there were mostly to hear from the ones interviewed just despair and blaming God for the mess. What amazed me as I watched the newscast of one of the interviews from Louisiana, was the response of a woman scrounging around before her broken down house for anything salvable. The usual reporter questions were thrown at her on how she is now feeling, does she have somewhere to live, and what does she see for her future life. She heard them as she looked for stuff, then she stood up from bending over and turned directly into the camera level. Her testimony got me grinning from ear to ear as well as my eyes flooding over with tears of… well, you know, those type of tears that comes from identifying with a very holy special moment of truth. She spoke, and was firm as she said that her Lord Jesus Christ will provide for her and her family. He is it who will show her where to live and guide her to another job. The place of work was so completely ruined they would not open for buisness anymore. Then she said she will rent another house close to her new job. She slowly but sincerely smiled a smile of trustingly relaxing in her God whom she was giving glory to for taking care of her. And that’s what I saw on secular dirty sinful television… I am impressed with her and how God gets good press despite all the bad guys saying malicious blasphemies against the holy of Holies. She gave a glimpse of the Peace of God that passes understanding right there on the screen.