Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Quotes.
"Modern atheism is in many instances the product not so much of antireligion as of religion’s replacement of the God of Abraham with the god of the philosophers, and the subsequent rejection of that ersatz god by other philosophers. "
"Absent our sin and God’s judgment and redemption, it is not surprising that people came to dismiss the idea of God, not because it is implausible but because it is superfluous and, yes, boring."
"There is indeed irony in the fact that some who think of themselves as theists eagerly embrace deconstruction’s operative atheism. The reason for this is that among other things that deconstruction deconstructs is an older form of Enlightenment rationalism that excluded religion from the company of rational discourse...[T]here is [an] atheism of putative theists who peddle religious truth claims that are true for you, if you find it useful to believe them true. "
"Eternal life is the fulfillment anticipated by all that is good, true, and beautiful in this life. . .[M]ost of us, and especially the great mystics more than most of us, have moments of encounters with the good, true, and beautiful in which we are moved to say, 'Ah, it must be something like this'... The Christian proposal is that in Jesus the unknown has made itself known in the finitude of space and time. "
- Richard John Neuhaus
"Human beings find the life they live unsatisfactory with uncanny consistency, even human beings who live in comfortable circumstances where there is little objective reason for them to complain. This satisfaction can take the form of an intuition that the world we know is transitional, and the people in it are on their way to somewhere else. "
"In this view, it seems to me, the moral calculus of the world is very like a complex logical system, of the sort that Kurt Gödel noted would necessarily produce undecidable sentences, statements whose truth value cannot be decided within the system but must refer to something outside. As several commentators have pointed, this is how Aquinas’s Five Proofs work: no "comprehensive account" of the world, either in physics or ethics, can explain itself. The books will never balance, in other words, if we look only within the world. It is the burden of American Babylon, and perhaps of Fr. Neuhaus’s ministry, that we can get quite a lot done in history precisely because we know there is a way out. "
- John J. Reilly
"Absent our sin and God’s judgment and redemption, it is not surprising that people came to dismiss the idea of God, not because it is implausible but because it is superfluous and, yes, boring."
"There is indeed irony in the fact that some who think of themselves as theists eagerly embrace deconstruction’s operative atheism. The reason for this is that among other things that deconstruction deconstructs is an older form of Enlightenment rationalism that excluded religion from the company of rational discourse...[T]here is [an] atheism of putative theists who peddle religious truth claims that are true for you, if you find it useful to believe them true. "
"Eternal life is the fulfillment anticipated by all that is good, true, and beautiful in this life. . .[M]ost of us, and especially the great mystics more than most of us, have moments of encounters with the good, true, and beautiful in which we are moved to say, 'Ah, it must be something like this'... The Christian proposal is that in Jesus the unknown has made itself known in the finitude of space and time. "
- Richard John Neuhaus
"Human beings find the life they live unsatisfactory with uncanny consistency, even human beings who live in comfortable circumstances where there is little objective reason for them to complain. This satisfaction can take the form of an intuition that the world we know is transitional, and the people in it are on their way to somewhere else. "
"In this view, it seems to me, the moral calculus of the world is very like a complex logical system, of the sort that Kurt Gödel noted would necessarily produce undecidable sentences, statements whose truth value cannot be decided within the system but must refer to something outside. As several commentators have pointed, this is how Aquinas’s Five Proofs work: no "comprehensive account" of the world, either in physics or ethics, can explain itself. The books will never balance, in other words, if we look only within the world. It is the burden of American Babylon, and perhaps of Fr. Neuhaus’s ministry, that we can get quite a lot done in history precisely because we know there is a way out. "
- John J. Reilly
The God is Powerful
He's like a flood. Everything. Every thought, atom, infinitesimal fragment of matter, quasar, galaxy, universes if more than one, limit of the time-space continuum, something is responsible for it all. God. Great God.
There is fire in these endless equations. Fire in every breath. Suffering is everywhere.
Vanity vanity. He raised the dead.
Oh God Where Are You Now?
In every breath. In all our strained breaths.
Psalm 77
The devil is hard on my face again. This will be a long battle.
Would the righteous to remain.
God, why this uncertain existence?
"As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything."
We are veiled.
Oh Lord, touch me now.
Long and ponderous into the mist. Is my reason everything? Can my mind so easily compass the universe? What a lie! What a lie!
Fiercely, fiercely deny the end. It is not so.
Let all things their creator bless. And worship Him in humbleness. Oh praise him, alleluia. Praise, praise the Father praise the Son. And praise the Spirit three in one. Oh praise Him, Oh praise him... Alleluia... Alleluia .... alleluia..
I'm a wretch! Turn away from me. Turn away from me. Turn away from me.
His clothing was aflame.
Turn away from me!
O Lord...
Then, there came a word, of what he should accomplish on the day then peter spoke to make of them a tabernacle place a cloud appeared in glory as an accolade, they fell on the ground a voice arrived the voice of God the face of God covered in a cloud....
Fire. Fire. Fire.
What he said to them, the voice of God, my most beloved son. Consider what he says to you. Consider what's to come. The prophecy was put to death and so will the son.
Lost in the cloud a sign: son of man, son of God!
My God, my God, my God, my God, My God almighty. You are my God. Apart from you, I want no other.
If you are false, reality is not real. My life, my vision, my sight, my world, my universe is tied to you.
I don't know what this world portends.
Shadow am I like a suspicion that's never confirmed but it's never denied.
More like the absence of something.
I can sense the void by the sound of the air rushing in.
Thou rushing wind that art so strong, ye clouds that sail in heaven along, O praise him, Alleluia!
Will it ever be on earth as it is in heaven?
Oh my God
Lord I believe, in mercy grant me grace. To know thee blessed savior more and more, I can do naught without thee, show thy face. Spirit help my unbelief.
Totus Tuus.
Amen. Forgive me, Lord. Amen.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
This is Me.
"Were you always interested in religion?"
"I can't remember when I wasn't. My sisters and I had to go to Sunday school and all that, and then we had to go to a church camp, a little Presbyterian church camp. In Pittsburgh the Presbyterians are real high-church -- it's a social thing -- and I despised it. But this was really low-church, Fundamentalist theology, and the first ideas I'd ever heard. It was metaphysics for children. It's the only metaphysics that people do teach children, and then you spend the rest of your life looking for something that good. You see undergraduates trying to study philosophy, and that's not it. Then they try psychology, and that's not it. They find it in literature, and they find it in poetry. I was going along happily without it, and then in college I hit theology and said: 'This is it. This is it.' " And so it has been.
-Annie Dillard
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