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Before me lay a vast desert. How long it had been since that wilderness had last seen rain, I could not say. Three years perhaps, or four. Long fissures reached like fingers across the clay-baked expanse. A few sun-scorched crags were the jealous residents of that wasteland. Allowing no creatures, no living things to share their kingdom, they were disturbed only by a light sand, swept by a fiery wind.
Love is such a humbling thing
Like water, supple and soft
Quiet or talkative
Drink it in you’re sure to be refreshed
Become immersed and you will surely drown
Like love, water comforts as well as strikes
Either as a flood carrying off a mountain
Or slowly carving
Love can humble
But it is met with such opposition
We know we must practice it
But we don’t understand it at all
Subconsciously we resist it
And like the mountains
We are carved into
Just pray.
Love spoke. At first it whispered, its cursive echoing off the pages. Trembles of sound tickling the eardrum and giving life to the eyes. The crescendo of our united voices overcame me. I let it all go. Every fear, every strife. All worry, all hatred. Go. Leave only peace. And as we sang, we prayed.
Tags: Prayer
by Joe Schafer
Skepticism is the philosophy that casts doubt on everything. Skeptics may say that all religions are the same. But they do not think that all of them are true. They probably think that none are true. To them, religions are metaphors for some grand, overall truth, but what that truth is, they cannot say. They might say that they believe in God. But to them, God is vague and unknowable. Many skeptics claim to have faith. But their faith has no defined object. They place their faith in faith itself.
Tags: Modernism, Philosophy
When you hear the word faith, what comes to mind? The term is notoriously hard to define. All of my life I was told to believe in God. But I never could understand how to have faith. I saw it as blind action with no rhyme or reason. Like pushing all your poker chips into one big pot, hoping that your cards are better than the other guy’s.
Tags: Faith
Let the tear hit the ground
It’s done now, and there’s no going back
The only way up is kneeling down
Bow before guillotine
In those moments before death
What we call life
We just stare at the ground
Knowing it’s our fate
GroupThink, according to social psychologists, is an unwillingness to venture outside the box. Refusing to consider any idea that brings discomfort to you or your friends. GroupThink keeps group members content, but only for a while. When left unchecked, it leads to stagnation and persistent error. It blinds people to fatal flaws that may ultimately destroy the group.
A second kind of GroupThink, a cousin of the one we just described, is even more insidious. It happens when we dismiss an idea because it came from one of those people. “He’s just a gun-toting right-wing racist conservative nut-job.” “She’s just a tofu-eating left-wing eco-socialist feminazi.” Notice the insertion of the word just to convey dehumanization. The merits of the idea don’t matter. Whether those people even exist doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the perception that crazies are out there, that they do not deserve to be heard and ought to be marginalized.
Tags: Psychology
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What is a Bible-believing Christian?
April 22, 2009 in Commentary by admin
Christians of different denominations read different Bibles. The collection of texts known as the Bible has changed over time. The earliest Christians had the Old Testament, some letters from the apostles and oral tradition. A list of 22 books of the New Testament appeared in the Muratorian Canon around AD 180. In AD 365, Athanasius of Alexandria listed 27 books. A Latin edition of the Bible called the Vulgate appeared in AD 383 and became the standard for the Western world. In addition to the 66 books found in the current Protestant Bible, the Vulgate also had the so-called deuterocanonical books and apocrypha. Some differences persist today. For instance, the Ethiopian “narrow” canon includes 81 books.
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Tags: Church History, Scripture