In looking over old posts, from my original blog, which ran from 2002 to Oct. 2007, I came across 13 "Draft" posts that for whatever reason, from incompleteness, to senility, & forgetfulness, on my part, had never made it onto the blog. ;-D
Only one of them was worth saving, and here it is, a post intended to appear on Nov. 30, 2006, after Thanksgiving, and as the Christmas Season was beginning (Only the Links have been updated since the originals no longer work.). ;-D
In my life I've read more than a few books of a religious natutre, from Oral Roberts, to a History of Christianity by an author I don't remember, though I do remember the book was quite lengthy.
I even took a Bible as Literature course in College, in the late 70's.
I also read the Bible, & watched Jerry Falwell on Sundays way back when. ;-D
This year I've bought 2 new Bibles, and begun to read again, after years of not having done so.
NIV Study Bible
The American Patriot's Bible
I've also read, this year...
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
What's So Great About Christianity? by Dinesh D'Souza
I've also bought, and plan to read the following...
CHRISTIANITY: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch (1161 pages!)
The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch (831 pages)
Here is the post I wrote, but never posted.
Your thoughts are welcome in the comments....
Does God Exist, and whose God is She anyway?
Those 2 questions have been at the center of so much in human history, from the 1st moment some Homo Sapien chap started worshiping that odd shaped rock at the top of a hill near his tribal cave, to our current concerns centering around the major religions of the Modern Age.
This I Believe
How Is It Possible to Believe in God?
William F. Buckley, Jr.
National Public Radio's Morning Edition, May 23, 2005
I've always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, "How is it possible to believe in God?" The imperishable answer was, "I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop."
That rhetorical bullet has everything -- wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious -- indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief -- how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration -- near infinite -- of natural impulses? Yet, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?
The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable -- you see? -- by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew's Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?
This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. As a child, I was struck by the short story. It told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right. But later in the evening, one man speaks an animadversion on a little principality in the Balkans and is met with the clenched fist of the man without a country, who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born.
So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country as a world without a creator.
I swear... Every damn time one turns around there is Buckley saying, or writing, something profound, and thought provoking.
When I 1st watched him on TV, decades ago, his distinctive voice annoyed the hell out of me!
I'm used to it now. ;-D
So is there a God?
Was the story of The Last Supper the fevered scribbling of some 1st century hack suffering from a bad case of the Munchies?
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