While science tends to negate “faith” as a religious notion, it holds fast to its own creed, with little beyond affirmation that its methodology will someday solve all the mysteries – even the ultimate ones. If that is not as great a religious faith as the Theist’s, I don’t know what is! But as to hope for something beyond the here and now, it will all be futile in the end.
Category Archives: End of the World
Cold Love, 4 – The Quality of Mercy
The Christian Story says that the Creator-God did not sit back and shrug. Instead, speaking anthropomorphically, (S)He is deeply grieved, even distressed, and even angry. However, God’s ultimate response is mercy rather than wrath, although wrath has been allowed to fall. If we are willing to face our rebellion and defiance of God, we must see that, just as with human offenders in human society, there is an inevitable day when judgment finds the unrepentant transgressor. This is called “natural consequences”, and it applies in both the physical and metaphysical realm. It also comes as a legal requirement.
Cold Love, 2
Hot zeal for God’s judgment to fall on sinners can be a shield protecting the zealot from actually having to practice the harder things such as agape-love (agape being the Greek word used for love in all of these citations) Jesus is talking about. As pointed out in Cold Love, 1, Jesus is talking about the highest form of love (agape) which governs all others. It is this kind of love which we need to live by, and this can only happen in constant relationship with its giver – Yahweh-Adonai, the Creator and Author of all that is.
Cold Love, 1
Jesus was not saying that people would stop falling in love, stop having sex, or stop caring about family and friends. However, if those other kinds of love are to truly reach their highest potential, they must be ruled by something yet higher – agape. That is what Jesus was predicting would “grow cold” for most people.
Elephant Hunting
Elephants can blend into forest almost seamlessly, camouflaged by their grey-brown colour and the propensity to mistake their legs for tree-trunks when glimpsed through the foliage. Suddenly, the rogue surged upon them bellowing and in full battle-array. The hunter fired both barrels of his .577 calibre gun. The elephant was still coming. Blinded by rage, it headed for his bearer. The hunter managed to scramble up a large tree, adrenalin carrying him quickly aloft among its huge limbs.
Loving the World
When I walk among the trees, down a path, over a field, through a garden; when I stand on a mountain- or hill-side, when I feel the gentle summer breeze and the cold snap of the winter wind on my face, when I plunge into the rushing water of the river or the rolling waves of the sea, when I gaze enrapt into the eyes of a newborn, or those of the one I specially love, when I stand awestruck under the starlit vault of the heavens, everywhere and in everything, from the least blade of grass to the most awesome, lofty white pine back of my home, from the weary face of the commuter on the bus to the happiest child with the best surprise in her hands, I see the Creator! (The Holy Spirit in both the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible is feminine, if you didn’t know!)
666 and all that, 2
We think the “burglar” in this little parable is the bad-guy and the householder is the good-guy, but the whole context turns that on its head. The “householder” is the strong-man (as he is called in a parallel passage) who invaded the house and usurped the property of the rightful owner. It is the Satan who has done this to the beautiful world God created. The “burglar” is the rightful owner coming back to claim his own. That is why Jesus says “he will come like a thief in the night”.
666 and all that, 1
The coming together of the Cosmic “evil one” and the human propensity to seek our own aggrandizement at the expense of everyone and everything else typically and periodically produce especially monstrous eruptions that leave the whole world reeling and the human race lying in a shambles. Shifting the blame, we point the finger at God as if the Deity is responsible for allowing us to behave demonically rather than exercising His omnipotence to prevent such horrors. The Accuser laughs all the while from behind the Oz-Curtain, and we fool ourselves that we are justified because God doesn’t just cut evil out of our hearts and kill the most monstrous perpetrators.
World.V.You 