Twitter vs Easter - The Spectator

"...And it’s Easter, not Christmas, that makes Christianity such a radical religion. In a world where we are invited to worship strength and power, the symbol of churchgoers is a man on a cross: defeated, despised and rejected. The story of the Passion and Resurrection is one of pain as well as joy, the worst suffering before the greatest jubilation. If you’re not a believer, there’s no story which has more to say about the hope and despair of being human. If you are, it’s the most important event in history..."

 - The Spectator

Darkness cannot drive out darkness - Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

What to do if you pick your nose on tv?

Why Blasphemy Laws Are Wrong

"...this is because blasphemy laws and other uses of state power to enforce religious belief or worship are themselves a repudiation of the beliefs themselves. A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity. 

Christians should fight for the liberty of Muslims in America and around the world to be Muslims, to worship in mosques and to freely seek to persuade others that the Koran is a true revelation of God. This isn't because we believe in Islamic claims but precisely because we don't. If we really believe the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, we don't need bureaucrats to herd people into cowering before it. 

We don't just object to the Islamic persecution of Christians because we don't want to be persecuted ourselves. We ought to work with freedom-loving Muslims and with other people to see to it that no person is imprisoned or executed for religious belief or practice. That's not because we think all religions are relative or because we think religion doesn't really matter all that much. 

It's because we come before the state with the same kind of confidence Jesus did in the court of Pilate. Jesus knew where Pilate's authority was, and where it wasn't..."

- Russell Moore, the rest of the article here

Bring prespective through reading

The PSYining

Gangnam Style by Stanley Kubrick

Atheists vs Dawkins - From an Atheist

"...The more I listened to Dawkins and his colleagues, the more the nature of what has gone wrong with their argument seemed clear. Religion was portrayed as a force of unremitting awfulness, a poisoned root from which no good fruit could grow. It seems to me the work not of a thinker but of any balanced observer to notice that this is not the case. In their insistence to the contrary, a new — if mercifully non-violent — dogma has emerged. And the argument has stalled.

These new atheists remain incapable of getting beyond the question, ‘Is it true?’ They assume that by ‘true’ we agree them to mean ‘literally true’. They also assume that if the answer is ‘no’, then that closes everything. But it does not. Just because something is not literally true does not mean that there is no truth, or worth, in it..."

 Atheists vs Dawkins - Douglas Murray, The Spectator

Can we be truly free? - Philip Vander Est

We are accustomed, in ordinary conversation, to dismiss any argument if it can be shown to rely wholly on prejudice or some other irrational factor or premise. But if atheism is true, our minds are wholly dependent on our brains (because we have no souls) and our brains are only accidental by-products of the physical universe. This means that all our thoughts, beliefs and choices, are simply the inevitable result of a long chain of non-rational causes. How then can we have free will or attach any validity or importance to our reasoning processes? If we are bound to think or behave the way we do because of our internal biochemistry, how can we be free agents or know that we are in possession of objective truths about science, ethics, or politics?

If our perception and use of the rules of logic are merely the inevitable end product of a long chain of random and purposeless physical and chemical events, how can we know that our examination of facts and arguments yields real knowledge? Surely, if atheism is true, our thoughts and values have no more significance than the sound of waves on a seashore, as C.S. Lewis argued at length and so convincingly in his famous book, Miracles¹. Indeed, even some atheists have recognized the extent of the problem of knowledge for philosophical materialists. To quote one famous Marxist scientist of the 1940s, Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true...’ (Possible Worlds).

- Philip Vander Est

"I'm not sure man needs the help" - Hobbes (and Augustine)

"For it still seemed to me that it is not we ourselves who sin, but some other nature within us...I loved to exculpate myself and lay the blame on that something that was with me but not me. But it was all me. In my impiety I was divided against myself, and my sin was all the more incurable in that I did not consider myself a sinner."

- Saint Augustine, Confessions

Baby wakes up to to favorite song

Jesus during the Super Bowl

Definition of "Worldview"

"A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being"

- James W. Sire "The Universe Next Door"

What's your worldview?

A card to say "I miss you"

Why You Are A Fundamentalist - Adam Phillips

"One thing that the modern liberal and the fundamentalist may be said to share is what psychoanalysts after Freud call a resistance: each believes that there is something the other refuses to see what is considered to be true, or at least better. Were the other side capable of the requisite acknowledgment, both of them believe, the world would be as it should be. We would be living the lives we are required to live–required, that is, by God, or the relevant set of secular beliefs and authorities… here we come up against the real difficulty of changing people. It is, of course, a version of the feeling that most couples have at one time or another, that there is, as we say, no point in talking… The talking cure turned up to show us what talking cannot cure.

…There are now a lot of upbeat democratic and rather more low-key psychoanalytic accounts of why conflict is to be valued–as stimulating, as generative, as productive, as truthful, as inclusive, and so on. And fundamentalisms of whatever persuasion at best pay lip-service to value of conflict and at worst want to abolish it. The fundamentalist of Western capitalism, just like the more ostensibly religious fundamentalists that we hear more about, really believe that the only good life is one in which the enemy, the dissenters, the unpersuaded, are no longer part of the conversation; a world without communists, a world without Jews, a world without unbelievers, is the world as it should be. Those of us who are not drawn to what is loosely, and not so loosely, called fundamentalism; those of us who don’t want to be fundamentalist in a war against the fundamentalisms, have a very serious problem. What is the point, after all, of having respect for people who do not respect our respect for them? I don’t know what an answer to that question would be; but we are endangered by our optimism"

 - Adam Philips, a physoanalyst, "On Balance" via MockingBird's article

In order to be happy... - Blaise Pascal

"As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all."

- Blaise Pascal