Sunday, December 04, 2005

Vinet. --- “Religion finds the love of happiness and the principle of duty separated in us; and its mission --- its master-piece ---- is to reunite them.”


I really like this quote. So practical. Life is a complicated affair and our self love is so intense that we need continual direction toward our duties or our lives, and the lives of those we love can soon unravel. God's ways, His masterpiece, is balance.

Often we hear that religion is a crutch. Actually, I think atheism is a crutch of sorts. Jesus raises the bar of personal integrity so high that none can achieve it.
One cannot begin the journey of following Christ without knowing Heavenly help is necessary or achievment is impossible.
But the atheist lowers the moral bar so low that one can slither on their belly and cross over.
So which is the crutch? Reaching for the high ground and when our efforts are exhausted, calling on a higher power, or smashing the higher power "crutch" and lowering the bar to the floor?
Another good movie, "Smile" The story of how a 17 year old, brat, raised in Malibu with all the world at her feet, has an interest in a charity like Mercy ships sparked in her by a teacher.
The first 1/3 of movie is a waste but the last 2/3rds are great. Frank sexual conversation in the beginning, not good for kids. Pretty easy to skip over though.

Dim Ghosts

“They pass me like shadows, crowds on crowds,
Dim ghosts of men that hover to and fro,
Hugging their bodies round them like thin shrouds
Wherein their souls were buried long ago;
They trampled on their youth, and faith and love,
They cast their hope of human kind away,
With heaven’s clear messages they madly strove,
And conquered – and their spirits turned to clay;
Lo! How they wander round the world, their grave,
Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed,
Gibbering at the living men, and idly rave,
“we only, truly live, but ye are dead.”
Alas, poor fools, the anointed eye may trace
A dead souls epitaph in every face.”
Joseph Haven.


I like this description, but not all steeped in upbelief have "dead soul epitaphs" on their face.
It often takes a long time to see the needs in people, we have walls so high that first glances will never discover the hearts regrets. But some wear it loud.

Well said!

Thought, shivering in the Arctic winter night of unbelief; life, pining on the barren banks of secularism; society, festering in a corrupt use of sensationalism; agnosticism, turning its back to the sun, refusing to see anything but the blackness of its own shadow; materialism, substituting the dance of atoms for the processions of omnipotence, and reading its destiny in the dust of death and not in immortal progression—where is the cure for all this but in the men who know God with a knowledge that is power and life? The world is hungry for God, and is dying for the want of the spirit of truth and love.” Prof. L. J. Evans
"Make the most of what there is good in institutions, in opinions, in communities, in individuals. It is very easy to do the reverse of this, to make the worst of what there is of evil, absurd and erroneous. By so doing we shall have no difficulty in making estrangements more wide, and hatreds and strifes more abundant, and errors more extreme." Dean Stanley.

When I read this it made me think of something my cousin had said, how his inlaws didn't understand him. I thought, hmmm, which of us understands himself? How can we expect others to understand us when we continually go on sprees that confoundnd ourselves?
“By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we quote.” – Emerson
“Thought is the first faculty of man; to express it is one of his first desires; to spread it his dearest privilege.” Raynal.