One day in Las vegas

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Philosophy - Part 22 - Orthodoxy and Heresy

Philosophy - Part 22 - Orthodoxy and Heresy - by P.K.Odendaal - September 2012 

This piece is also known as the forces of man, in contrast to my previous article on the forces of God - see part 8. The forces of man are orthodoxy, heresy, rationalism, empiricism, induction, determinism and materialism.

I will try to define them as well I can.

Rationalism - the explanation of things in terms of our reason or our worldview.

Empiricism - the explanation of things in terms of our experimentation results, without an accepted theory. It is the notion that similar experiments will yield similar results, even if we do not know what the reason for that is.

Induction - the explanation of things in terms of their outcome in previous similar circumstances and conditions and extrapolating them into unknown areas. If we say one plus one is two, then we can safely assume that two plus two is four.

One day in Rome

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Adult Sunday School - Part 10 - Gideon

Adult Sunday School - Part 10 - Gideon - by P.K.Odendaal - September 2012

How do you go from rejection, bitterness, accusations and humiliation to arrogant and steadfast faith? How can any man go from the one extreme to the other? Just ask Gideon. For me he is an example of what can be done if you are touched by God - more than once. Many of us are touched by God and it stays a touch - and even soon disappears.

Read the article by Annemie here :

http://what-a-friend-an.blogspot.com/2012/08/dont-let-your-encounter-with-god-leave.html

I have been touched by God many times, and it stays an anchor for my soul in times of abject depression, which fortunately are quite rare.

We start off with Gideon - himself, his family and his nation being rejected and forgotten by God, with no hope and no God.

One day in Messina

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Philosophy - Part 20 - A parody on friendship

Philosophy - Part 20 - A parody (well almost) on friendship - by P.K.Odendaal - September 2012 

In my own life, friendship is paramount. I will offer many oxen on the altar of friendship in the hope that one of them will come alive again one day. I am still waiting. I regard friendship as sacred and precious and enriching, and a special relationship that will add lustre and comfort and richness to my life. Still my life is void of this. Why should this be?

I may be part of the problem and not of the solution, but where did I miss the opportunity? What could it have added to my life? The friend in need and the friend indeed proposition never showed up. I was always supposed to be the fool as the friend indeed, and never found a friend in my need.

I had to reconsider my position, especially after a friend of mine asked me what the bounds of friendship were. I started to wonder. Was there indeed such a concept as friendship or is it some unattainable utopia we hope for.

Adult Sunday School - Part 9 - Revenge

Adult Sunday School - Part 9 - Revenge - by P.K.Odendaal - September 2012

 

We have seen that the law had to come, and that minimised but partly legitimised revenge, although it was not meant to. It was meant to give redress only.

But, despite this, mankind persisted in revenge on a grand scale, and we have only to look at Samson to see this. Samson is our type for revenge, because that is more or less what his life consisted of - and the sad part was that he was such a man of God called a Nazarite who was called to free his people from bondage by the Philistines. Instead he brought them into further bondage.

One day in Avignon

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One day in Alaska

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Philosophy - Part 17 - Induction

Philosophy - Part 17 - Induction - by P.K.Odendaal - August 2012 

It is probable that all we know, we know from a process called induction - a very powerful mathematical and scientific tool, greatly neglected by fields like philosophy, psychology and religion. Mathematical induction is a method of mathematical proof typically used to establish that a given statement is true for all natural numbers. In science and philosophy it is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates general propositions that are derived from specific examples.

One such an example is a statement by Goldbach, called the Goldbach conjecture. In 1742 he conjectured in a letter to Euler that every even number from 4 onwards is the sum of two prime numbers like in 12=5+7. No proof of this is known other than that Tomas Oliveira e Silva proved in 2008 that it is true for all whole numbers up to 10¹⁸.