Barrier to Faith

August 1, 2018

Year 3, Day 213 | No Comments

Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

There are common barriers to Christian faith advanced by humanists. These include the doctrines of depravity, hell and suffering. Some persons resist the call to faith claiming that a good God espoused by Christians would not permit the ongoing of depraved people, that he would be too loving to send recalcitrant persons to hell, and that there has been no satisfactory explanation for suffering, especially the suffering of children. From the limited purview of nature’s context in which we live, move and have being the points are fair and offered as reality. If held in emotional fury, they become threatening. If the humanist holds that understanding extends only to that available in nature, and the theist holds that faith projections… Read more

Confidence

July 26, 2018

Year 3, Day 207 | No Comments

Section of The Infant Jesus and St. John the Baptist, Guido Reni, n.d.

This Page needs to be read in tandem with the date for freshman and sophomore readers, so to find a mind set for what may seem like an ephemeral context for life. We are interested here with confidence. We see a great deal of braggadocio, gesturing, anger, feigned knowledge leading to stern criticism of those who are trying to do something to improve matters, but often stumbling, Who are our confidence leaders? Christians want to credit Christ in relationship with the Holy Spirit, in that no one has shown up in the intervening centuries to match them. God began from a perception that man (Adam, male and female – Genesis 1:27) was made primary in the earthly context. First things… Read more

Heaven’s Perceptions

July 22, 2018

Year 3, Day 203 | No Comments

We remember that there are two contexts for our lives – the physical (nature) and the spiritual (beyond nature). Even though they visit each other they are also contextual on their own. One is revealed in experience and the other in divine revelation. There is overlap to provide communication, influence, education, understanding, wisdom, application related to both contexts. In the origination of nature from the creative acts of God, and the value system that causes creation to function at high effectiveness when engaged – the spiritual context holds primacy. This primacy is further supported in the perpetuity (immortality) of that appearing in the spiritual context, and limitation (mortality) in the natural. In the natural state, thinking mankind works through concepts… Read more

Freedom

July 4, 2018

Year 3, Day 185 | No Comments

Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

Some nations, especially those using the English language as the standard for education and practice in making laws, education and daily life have found the greatest freedom context in what is called democracy. Democracy in simple perception is the election of government leaders through the ballots of the citizens of the identified country. In the third millennium Americans are discovering that process has produced messy government and social conduct, with a decline in the respect for government. That decline is not only the fault of politicizing government, but also the decline in the education to provide a government dedicated to freedom, justice and the pursuit of happiness. Some problems relate to freedom confusion. One of the departments of all this… Read more

Signifying

July 2, 2018

Year 3, Day 183 | No Comments

Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

My life has been touched with the highest joys we can know in natural life, and the deepest griefs. I have seen persons weeping and laughing in both contexts. Weeping can be for joy or sorrow. What triggers that response? The body can provide an answer based on biology, but that answer is quite secondary to the invisible switch that permits a tear to fall. A well worded article appearing in the New York Times told the story of the author’s grief related to the death of his father. Here are a few lines from the article, and I have read many similar articles with each seeming special in its own way even when they resolve their grief in a… Read more

Science And Complexity

June 24, 2018

Year 3, Day 175 | No Comments

The rugs are being pulled from under our intellectual/spiritual feet. Our distant forefathers appear to have believed in a context of nature. If nature was pleasant and the hunting good, then whatever gods there may be were gracious. If negative there was deep disappointment in life, and punishment followed in nature’s turmoil. Combinations of explanations were odd and fanciful, as the surviving concepts and practices of primordial man continue in parts of the world today. In all this, God appears to have been gracious. In one of his sermons the Apostle Paul referred to invented devices, and asserted: The times of this ignorance God winked at – Acts 17:30 (KJV). Then followed belief in God and gods, beliefs related to… Read more

Education

June 22, 2018

Year 3, Day 173 | No Comments

Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Students should choose the education/training they need, for both life and occupation. That ought to be done with counsel from those who have received formal education, and with insights from some who have not, especially from those gratified with choices they made. The first objective for the Christian student is, or ought to be, to glorify God, to develop as a thoughtful and cultivated person with conviction to serve society, and that most practically in beginning with his or her family. The large context is identified as a search for truth for life. Truth is an affirmed objective for both Christian and secular thinkers and doers, but the processes and conclusions may differ. Sincerity and respect for both contexts is… Read more

Atheism/Agnosticism

May 25, 2018

Year 3, Day 145 | No Comments

Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

Unbelief and ignorance are ancient, but they continue in modern contexts. Belief and knowledge are ancient, not modern, but they continue in modern contexts. They all function in the contexts mankind creates, prefers, inherits, and seeks to cultivate in current generations. It is clear that whatever we seek in our own context we feel we create or find. We tend to interpret our lives in the ways we prefer, without stern objectivity, and then move into the future with the baggage we take on. We may simply follow our feelings, from the way we comb our hair, to the sexual orientation we follow, to the management of mystery – and the list extends to everything affecting our lives. When the… Read more

Hellish Is Not Hell

April 25, 2018

Year 3, Day 115 | No Comments

Section of The Crucifixion, Pedro Orrente, ca. 1625–30

Today, October 13, 2012, I set aside my standard agenda for the afternoon and felt strongly that I should return to the theme of hell in my writing. It is, and has been for millennia, a nagging subject. Nearly every society that has left records offers opinions about hell as a flaming location, presumed by some to be in the bowels of the earth or sun, and the place of the damned from among earth’s population. Escape is thought virtually impossible, or if escaping there is a wandering about in the bowels of hell. Mythological persons have attempted to rescue beloved family members from hell, but failed – except for Christ who is seen as visiting hell (the place of… Read more

Time Never Again

April 6, 2018

Year 3, Day 96 | No Comments

Section of Noli me Tangere by Hans Holbein the Younger

I am a collector of thoughts cast in forms of poetic language, sometimes even in humorous bent. I am sometimes relieved in some of my disappointments with government bodies made up of intelligent persons who can’t solve man-made problems – when I remember Winston Churchill’s remark about Americans and problems. Churchill said: The Americans will do the right thing after they have tried everything else. My opinion is less humorous: They could if they would. Why do we not find ways to get around barriers to human problem-solving, especially related to those problems of our own making? This date in my several years of Pages has much to say about time, partly as mystery. I could not let go the… Read more

Category Archive: Faith