When a man is getting better and worse - C.S Lewis

"When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that's left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less."

- C.S Lewis 

PBS making fun of other TV shows

‘Atheism is to theism as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’

‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives.

Stamp collecting can be funky too!

But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is comparable to child abuse. They do not place advertisements on buses proclaiming that stamp-collecting is a waste of time, and suggesting that those who abandon it will enjoy their lives more....

...Attempts have been made to answer this attack, the defence usually attracting far less notice than the prosecution. The offensive continues unresponsively, exactly as if no riposte has been offered. As Grayling says: ‘The theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field.’ Like almost all atheists, he tries (and fails) to show that his belief is not a belief, but an obligatory default position...

It is my suspicion that Christians and atheists share one very strong emotion — the fear that God exists. The difference is that Christians also want Him to exist. The truly interesting question, unexplored in this book, is why each side wants what it wants.

Peter Hitchen's review of The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism A.C. Grayling  - The Spectator via Justin Taylor

This painting sold for 44 million U.S dollars

Onement VI by Barnett Newman

Possible Gods and Goddesses - C.S Lewis

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which,if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilites, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - These are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

C.S Lewis 

"The Hard Lessons of Oscar Pistorius"

"(Michael) Jordan acknowledged that his self-esteem has always been "tied directly to the game." Hence the drive, the rage, the relentless pursuit of victory that led to astounding feats of skill and six championship rings in his dresser drawer. But Jordan also talked to Thompson about what the process of that pursuit does to a person. "You ask for these special powers to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can't. ... I drove myself so much that I'm still living with some of those drives. ... I don't know how to get rid of it...."

...But when we look for role models, why do we gloss over all the demons, flaws, and costs, and build these singular high achievers into all-around "10s" in our images and minds? I'm not sure, but I suspect it's because we want to believe the fairy tale. We want to believe that Prince Charming actually is a great guy, through and through. We want the simple, happy ending. And, perhaps we also want to believe that we, too, can focus on ourselves and achieve whatever we want without someone else bearing the cost that achievement requires."

- "The Hard Lessons of Oscar Pistorius", TheAtlantic.com

R.C Sproul on Church Membership

What happens is that people observe church members sinning. They reason within themselves, “That person professes to be a Christian.Christians aren’t supposed to sin. That person is sinning; therefore, he is a hypocrite.” The unspoken assumption is that a Christian is one who claims he does not sin. It reality just the opposite is the case. For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership. In one sense the church has fewer hypocrites than any institution because by definition the church is a haven for sinners. If the church claimed to be an organization of perfect people then her claim would be hypocritical. But no such claim is made by the church. There is no slander in the charge that the church is full of sinners. Such a statement would only compliment the church for fulfilling her divinely appointed task.

- R. C Sproul via Challies.com

Responding to shocking news

via Twentytwowords.com

When people are right and not right with God - John Newton

"When people are right with God, they are apt to be hard on themselves and easy on other people. But when they are not right with God, they are easy on themselves and hard on others."

- John Newton

Taste the Happy! Arrested Development returns after 7 years

The Irony of Richard Dawkins? - Stephen Pollard

"Last week’s court decision to ban prayers at the start of council meetings is all of a piece. The judge may or may not have got the law right – there will almost certainly be an appeal. But it is the National Secular Society which, in taking its case to court to have its views imposed on the rest of us, is responsible for the ban on Christians praying

As a Jewish schoolboy, I had to sit through Christian prayers at the end of every assembly. It would not have occurred to me or any other Jew I knew that we should try to stop them praying in front of us. We were a small minority at a school with a large majority of Christians. I simply sat silently, my mind wandering off to other things. 

The militant secularists, however, have only one modus operandi – attack. Respect for others’ views seems to be entirely missing from their moral calculus. 

They entirely miss the irony of their position. Religious leaders who focus solely on a sectarian appeal to their own followers, and who seek to raise their own standing by diminishing the views of others, end up on the margins of serious debate. And as their noise drowns out the quieter, less confrontational majority, they act against their own religion’s interest."...

- Stephen Pollard, an editor from "The Jewish Chronicles", quoted from The Telegraph Article, For once, Richard Dawkins is lost for words.

Clever Colgate Ad

What did you notice first?

The teeth or the extra hand?

To Dawkins' Worst Fans, I Say ... (from Cracked.com)

Personally, I don't care whether you believe in God or not. I change my mind on the subject daily. I don't care if you can quote The God Delusion cover to cover as if it were some holy book (although odds are that if you like name-dropping Dawkins every two seconds, you probably haven't even read it). Just do me one favor. If you do quote Dawkins, don't drop the mic and leave the stage like nothing more needs to be said, as if the possibility of the divine -- of some form of something beyond our limited conception -- has been obliterated because a highly educated Englishman has constructed something eloquent, reducing all faith to ignorance and fear. Bertrand Russell did that quite well a century before Dawkins, and millions of believers remain. Some of them have actually read Russell and Dawkins and still think there is much to consider and debate because, after all, we're only talking about a simple thing like the meaning of creation and existence.

From the often hilarious website, Cracked.com and article

Plus another interesting, edifying and amusing article from the same author "4 Things Both Atheists and Believers Need To Stop Saying". An excerpt below commenting on Christopher Hitchen's book "God is not Great":

And given how much we suck, why shut the door completely on the possibility of something in this universe being better, stronger and wiser? Something we could strive to be more like? It's always seemed to me that the most virulent atheists -- not mere nonbelievers, but those who claim to be positive about God's nonexistence and openly hostile to anyone who could think otherwise -- are incapable of believing there could ever be something greater than they. Not a lack of faith so much as humility. Certainly, that's not true for all atheists, but it doesn't help the atheist cause that the three most hostile atheists I can think of are also on the short-list for most overbearingly arrogant.

Dealing with Margaret Thatcher's death and funeral

From the Guardian

"...Today is the one day that I will not be demonstrating or turning my back. For Thatcher and I share that final description: both of us failed, both in need of forgiveness. Its the ultimate human solidarity. And while I recognise that many find the language of sin and judgment increasingly uncongenial, it is nonetheless for precisely this reason that it is such a theological mistake to use her funeral as an occasion for grand political theatre, inviting comparisons with Winston Churchill. As the Habsburg funerals recognised, none of that makes any difference in the ultimate scheme of things.

Without God, final judgment becomes the domain of the crowd and the newspapers. I once asked the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, what he really wanted to say to Robert Mugabe before his trip to Zimbabwe, back in 2010. The archbishop looked up from his drink, and dropped his voice: "There is no immunity from prosecution when you are dead," he said. And no, this column is not deliberately putting Margaret Thatcher in the company of thieves and dictators to make a political point. I'm putting us all in that company to make a theological one."

- From Giles Fraser, "How to bury Margaret Thatcher"

Two Corgis run on a treadmill