Most Americans Say It’s a 'Christian Nation' | |
F.B. Nyte User ID: 144284 United States 12/25/2006 01:33 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Merry Christmas Josie. Hope you got everything you wanted...........Under the tree. Just saw this and decieded to pass it along. How the "Left" Stole Christmas T'was the month before Christmas When all through our land, Not a Christian was praying Nor taking a stand. Why the Politically Correct Police had taken away, The reason for Christmas - no one could say. The children were told by their schools not to sing, About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things. It might hurt people's feelings, the teachers would say December 25th is just a "Holiday". Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it! CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-pod Something was changing, something quite odd! Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda. As Targets were hanging their trees upside down At Lowe's the word Christmas - was no where to be found. At K-Mart and Staples and Penny's and Sears You won't hear the word Christmas; it won't touch your ears. Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty Are words that were used to intimidate me. Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton! At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter. And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace. The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded The reason for the season, stopped before it started. So as you celebrate "Winter Break" under your "Dream Tree" Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me. Choose your words carefully, choose what you say Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS, not Happy Holiday! Seth in Kentucky |
Josie
(OP) User ID: 159914 United States 12/25/2006 02:12 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Thank you F.B. I hope your Christmas is Merry and filled with Love, Peace and Joy! Thank you too, for this Poem that speaks the truth and nothing but the truth! I posted this thread a while back that could be relative to this newest thread. [link to www.godlikeproductions.com] I worked retail for awhile and I can honestly say that everytime I attempted to say:"Happy Holidays" to customers...I got my butt reamed in public. Biggest percentage of customers cried out to me: "No not Happy Holidays! It's Merry Christmas!" Our Nation's Holiday traditions are slowly fading. I firmly believe that all beliefs should be free to celebrate as they believe. Not interfere with each others. This is a free country after all....so why do I and many others feel that we are slowly losing this freedom? You cannot change that what those who believe to be truth in their beliefs for centuries! Where there is a will, there is a way... |
Anonymous Coward User ID: 9237 United States 12/25/2006 02:20 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Josie
(OP) User ID: 159914 United States 12/25/2006 02:27 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Anonymous Coward User ID: 173602 South Korea 12/25/2006 02:46 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Faith in a world of good and evil By Frank Miele The Daily Interlake You have to admit that God did a pretty good job — at least I do. I mean, every day I wake up and I think to myself what a great world this is, and what a miracle it is to be alive. Even on my worst day, I have always been amazed by this place, this universe, and found that meditation on its complexities always led me inevitably to God, whatever you call him. Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people wake up and find themselves in the midst of war, disease, starvation. They may be victims of abuse or poverty. Such people often find it impossible to share my joy. I understand that, and I certainly won’t try to fault those people for their unbelief if they have it, but I don’t understand why other people — those who have good lives, good health, good friendships — would strive to prove to themselves and others that God doesn’t exist. First of all, it is a fool’s errand, and might be considered the atheistic equivalent of the ecclesiastical overreaching that claims to know the mind of God, but always proves itself wrong when it sets a date for the judgment day. You or I can’t prove anything at all about God, anymore than we can prove or disprove the existence of a seventh dimension. As the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, “Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.” But yet we do prate. And if you have had a glimmering of the glory that is God, why then it makes sense that you would want to talk about it, doesn’t it? If you had a glimpse of the interconnectness of all things, of the clockwork mechanism at the heart of existence, of the miracle that allows billions of lives to work out their destiny at the same time, each perfect and yet imperfect, each tainted and yet capable of grace, then you could not keep quiet, could you? It’s the kind of thing you would want to share, unless someone were threatening to kill you for your exuberance or for your certitude. So professions of faith will never go away. People who have had their lives changed by God, people like Saint Augustine or Saint Paul or C.S. Lewis or your next door neighbor who stopped drinking after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, such people will always want to “go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere.” They tell their stories (which in some ways are similar, but which in other ways are each unique — just as the DNA strand in every living being is unique) and those stories can inspire us to love God, to seek him, to praise him, but they also remind us that every experience of God is seen by us, as Paul said, “through a glass darkly.” And because God is by definition infinitely multi-faceted, even the glass we are looking through is but one small glimpse of a whole that can never be comprehended. Maybe that is why the rationalists, the so-called freethinkers, get frustrated with religion. If they can’t reduce it to an axiom, or a mathematical formula, they don’t necessarily see any reason to believe in it. Which is fine by me. I don’t see any reason to force them to believe it. Besides, let’s face it, human religion is not always the best possible advertisement for God. Through the ages, there has been plenty of evil done by churches or churchmen, whether it is in the form of torture, oppression or sex abuse. So if someone is against religion as an institution, they can probably make a pretty good case. But if someone is against God, against the prime cause, against the fundamental underpinning of the universe, then they may be on shakier ground — literally. Surely, they realize that it is humanly impossible to disprove the existence of God. So why do they even try? What exactly is the payoff for such people in their efforts to debunk God? Don’t they know that they cannot persuade anyone to turn against God unless they were never persuaded to be for him in the first place? And in place of God, these freethinkers provide what? Reason? Reason is a good thing if it is used well, but unfortunately, like God it can be hijacked for all sorts of unreasonable enterprises. Men have used reason to justify everything from murder to madness. In fact, reason is nothing more than another false idol, which if it is treated as the solution to the human condition will merely disappoint us. It is not the solution to the human condition; it is part of it. The same could be said of the concept of God, the idea of God, and perhaps it is this which the atheists correctly recognize as a danger. Everyone knows that much hatred and harm has been waged in the name of an idea of God, but we should be smart enough to realize that ideas about God are not God himself. No, say the atheists, because there is no God. Just look around you, they insist — where is your God? In the eyes of the starving child? In the heart of the serial killer? In the stench of the concentration camp ovens? No, of course not. God is in us when we look at the starving child, the serial killer and the concentration camp ovens and feel compassion, remorse, anger and knowledge that what we are seeing is not right. It is, after all, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which supposedly forced mankind out of innocence and into our current predicament. That knowledge, therefore, of absolute good and absolute evil has to be our way back to God also. We need to use it as a road map to comprehend the mind of God intuitively, and when we can say with Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” then we will be ready to make the leap from blaming God for our predicament to truly understanding it. The mystery of pain and suffering certainly doesn’t prove anything about God one way or the other. It raises lots of questions for philosophers, theologians and just plain folks, but the existence of pain doesn’t prove or disprove anything about the existence of God. For whatever reason, the world we live in is a world of opposites. Joy can’t exist without sorrow, and peace can’t exist without war. That’s why St. Paul talks about the “peace that surpasseth understanding.” That peace, the kind of ethereal peace that believers associate with heaven, can’t really exist in this world, because our human “understanding” of peace is based on a contrast with war, tension or strife. Human peace, therefore, is transient, conditional and partial. And human war doesn’t prove anything about the existence or nature of God except that the world as created is a world of light and dark, spirit and flesh, man and woman, just as it was described in Genesis. Our good friends the atheists believe that if there is evil in the world there can’t be a God. But that goes about the problem the wrong way. What we can say for sure is that if there were no evil, there would be no “world,” not the world we live in anyway. People who are naive enough to ask why bad things happen to good people just haven’t been paying attention. This time of year those of us who believe in God — and more particularly who believe in a God who IS paying attention — celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah or Jesus the Saviour or Jesus the King or just plain simply Jesus of Nazareth. Much has been written about this Jesus, and much has been said in his name, both blashemy and blessing. But most of us who believe in Jesus as a representative of God on earth don’t believe in him because of what someone else said about him. Rather, we believe because of what we ourselves have experienced of him, both in our understanding of his reported life on earth and often because of some personal moment of contact with his divine presence, one of those moments which make atheists call believers insane and which make believers shout hallelujah. Tomorrow, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus approximately 2,000 years ago, it is worth remembering that he brought into the world a gift for compassion and left it with a gift of suffering. His life is an eternal metaphor for the opportunities all of us face to give in to despair, doubt and death. And if people want to find a reason to doubt God, then the death of a man such as Jesus on the cross would be the ultimate evidence. But it is also the ultimate evidence for hope, and for the ability to transcend human suffering. Merry Christmas, and remember what a miracle it is to be alive. |
wing-ed
User ID: 152412 United States 12/25/2006 03:09 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | True, the Jews rules the Christians. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 9237Praise the Holy of Holy We each choose who rules our lives! We even choose as children to serve our parents or to be rebelious children!What nation your in makes no difference.Praise the Holy of Holy Praise The Lamb:amen Holy, holy,holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.Praise the one who gives you peace beyond all understanding Yes that scripture still sounds good ! |
Josie
(OP) User ID: 159914 United States 12/25/2006 04:04 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Faith in a world of good and evil Quoting: Anonymous Coward 173602By Frank Miele The Daily Interlake You have to admit that God did a pretty good job — at least I do. I mean, every day I wake up and I think to myself what a great world this is, and what a miracle it is to be alive. Even on my worst day, I have always been amazed by this place, this universe, and found that meditation on its complexities always led me inevitably to God, whatever you call him. Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people wake up and find themselves in the midst of war, disease, starvation. They may be victims of abuse or poverty. Such people often find it impossible to share my joy. I understand that, and I certainly won’t try to fault those people for their unbelief if they have it, but I don’t understand why other people — those who have good lives, good health, good friendships — would strive to prove to themselves and others that God doesn’t exist. First of all, it is a fool’s errand, and might be considered the atheistic equivalent of the ecclesiastical overreaching that claims to know the mind of God, but always proves itself wrong when it sets a date for the judgment day. You or I can’t prove anything at all about God, anymore than we can prove or disprove the existence of a seventh dimension. As the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, “Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.” But yet we do prate. And if you have had a glimmering of the glory that is God, why then it makes sense that you would want to talk about it, doesn’t it? If you had a glimpse of the interconnectness of all things, of the clockwork mechanism at the heart of existence, of the miracle that allows billions of lives to work out their destiny at the same time, each perfect and yet imperfect, each tainted and yet capable of grace, then you could not keep quiet, could you? It’s the kind of thing you would want to share, unless someone were threatening to kill you for your exuberance or for your certitude. So professions of faith will never go away. People who have had their lives changed by God, people like Saint Augustine or Saint Paul or C.S. Lewis or your next door neighbor who stopped drinking after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, such people will always want to “go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere.” They tell their stories (which in some ways are similar, but which in other ways are each unique — just as the DNA strand in every living being is unique) and those stories can inspire us to love God, to seek him, to praise him, but they also remind us that every experience of God is seen by us, as Paul said, “through a glass darkly.” And because God is by definition infinitely multi-faceted, even the glass we are looking through is but one small glimpse of a whole that can never be comprehended. Maybe that is why the rationalists, the so-called freethinkers, get frustrated with religion. If they can’t reduce it to an axiom, or a mathematical formula, they don’t necessarily see any reason to believe in it. Which is fine by me. I don’t see any reason to force them to believe it. Besides, let’s face it, human religion is not always the best possible advertisement for God. Through the ages, there has been plenty of evil done by churches or churchmen, whether it is in the form of torture, oppression or sex abuse. So if someone is against religion as an institution, they can probably make a pretty good case. But if someone is against God, against the prime cause, against the fundamental underpinning of the universe, then they may be on shakier ground — literally. Surely, they realize that it is humanly impossible to disprove the existence of God. So why do they even try? What exactly is the payoff for such people in their efforts to debunk God? Don’t they know that they cannot persuade anyone to turn against God unless they were never persuaded to be for him in the first place? And in place of God, these freethinkers provide what? Reason? Reason is a good thing if it is used well, but unfortunately, like God it can be hijacked for all sorts of unreasonable enterprises. Men have used reason to justify everything from murder to madness. In fact, reason is nothing more than another false idol, which if it is treated as the solution to the human condition will merely disappoint us. It is not the solution to the human condition; it is part of it. The same could be said of the concept of God, the idea of God, and perhaps it is this which the atheists correctly recognize as a danger. Everyone knows that much hatred and harm has been waged in the name of an idea of God, but we should be smart enough to realize that ideas about God are not God himself. No, say the atheists, because there is no God. Just look around you, they insist — where is your God? In the eyes of the starving child? In the heart of the serial killer? In the stench of the concentration camp ovens? No, of course not. God is in us when we look at the starving child, the serial killer and the concentration camp ovens and feel compassion, remorse, anger and knowledge that what we are seeing is not right. It is, after all, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which supposedly forced mankind out of innocence and into our current predicament. That knowledge, therefore, of absolute good and absolute evil has to be our way back to God also. We need to use it as a road map to comprehend the mind of God intuitively, and when we can say with Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” then we will be ready to make the leap from blaming God for our predicament to truly understanding it. The mystery of pain and suffering certainly doesn’t prove anything about God one way or the other. It raises lots of questions for philosophers, theologians and just plain folks, but the existence of pain doesn’t prove or disprove anything about the existence of God. For whatever reason, the world we live in is a world of opposites. Joy can’t exist without sorrow, and peace can’t exist without war. That’s why St. Paul talks about the “peace that surpasseth understanding.” That peace, the kind of ethereal peace that believers associate with heaven, can’t really exist in this world, because our human “understanding” of peace is based on a contrast with war, tension or strife. Human peace, therefore, is transient, conditional and partial. And human war doesn’t prove anything about the existence or nature of God except that the world as created is a world of light and dark, spirit and flesh, man and woman, just as it was described in Genesis. Our good friends the atheists believe that if there is evil in the world there can’t be a God. But that goes about the problem the wrong way. What we can say for sure is that if there were no evil, there would be no “world,” not the world we live in anyway. People who are naive enough to ask why bad things happen to good people just haven’t been paying attention. This time of year those of us who believe in God — and more particularly who believe in a God who IS paying attention — celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah or Jesus the Saviour or Jesus the King or just plain simply Jesus of Nazareth. Much has been written about this Jesus, and much has been said in his name, both blashemy and blessing. But most of us who believe in Jesus as a representative of God on earth don’t believe in him because of what someone else said about him. Rather, we believe because of what we ourselves have experienced of him, both in our understanding of his reported life on earth and often because of some personal moment of contact with his divine presence, one of those moments which make atheists call believers insane and which make believers shout hallelujah. Tomorrow, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus approximately 2,000 years ago, it is worth remembering that he brought into the world a gift for compassion and left it with a gift of suffering. His life is an eternal metaphor for the opportunities all of us face to give in to despair, doubt and death. And if people want to find a reason to doubt God, then the death of a man such as Jesus on the cross would be the ultimate evidence. But it is also the ultimate evidence for hope, and for the ability to transcend human suffering. Merry Christmas, and remember what a miracle it is to be alive. Thank you AC For this valuable piece of information. It is a miracle each and every day to be alive. Bless you! Where there is a will, there is a way... |
wing-ed
User ID: 152412 United States 12/25/2006 04:14 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Faith in a world of good and evil Quoting: JosieBy Frank Miele The Daily Interlake You have to admit that God did a pretty good job — at least I do. I mean, every day I wake up and I think to myself what a great world this is, and what a miracle it is to be alive. Even on my worst day, I have always been amazed by this place, this universe, and found that meditation on its complexities always led me inevitably to God, whatever you call him. Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people wake up and find themselves in the midst of war, disease, starvation. They may be victims of abuse or poverty. Such people often find it impossible to share my joy. I understand that, and I certainly won’t try to fault those people for their unbelief if they have it, but I don’t understand why other people — those who have good lives, good health, good friendships — would strive to prove to themselves and others that God doesn’t exist. First of all, it is a fool’s errand, and might be considered the atheistic equivalent of the ecclesiastical overreaching that claims to know the mind of God, but always proves itself wrong when it sets a date for the judgment day. You or I can’t prove anything at all about God, anymore than we can prove or disprove the existence of a seventh dimension. As the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, “Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.” But yet we do prate. And if you have had a glimmering of the glory that is God, why then it makes sense that you would want to talk about it, doesn’t it? If you had a glimpse of the interconnectness of all things, of the clockwork mechanism at the heart of existence, of the miracle that allows billions of lives to work out their destiny at the same time, each perfect and yet imperfect, each tainted and yet capable of grace, then you could not keep quiet, could you? It’s the kind of thing you would want to share, unless someone were threatening to kill you for your exuberance or for your certitude. So professions of faith will never go away. People who have had their lives changed by God, people like Saint Augustine or Saint Paul or C.S. Lewis or your next door neighbor who stopped drinking after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, such people will always want to “go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere.” They tell their stories (which in some ways are similar, but which in other ways are each unique — just as the DNA strand in every living being is unique) and those stories can inspire us to love God, to seek him, to praise him, but they also remind us that every experience of God is seen by us, as Paul said, “through a glass darkly.” And because God is by definition infinitely multi-faceted, even the glass we are looking through is but one small glimpse of a whole that can never be comprehended. Maybe that is why the rationalists, the so-called freethinkers, get frustrated with religion. If they can’t reduce it to an axiom, or a mathematical formula, they don’t necessarily see any reason to believe in it. Which is fine by me. I don’t see any reason to force them to believe it. Besides, let’s face it, human religion is not always the best possible advertisement for God. Through the ages, there has been plenty of evil done by churches or churchmen, whether it is in the form of torture, oppression or sex abuse. So if someone is against religion as an institution, they can probably make a pretty good case. But if someone is against God, against the prime cause, against the fundamental underpinning of the universe, then they may be on shakier ground — literally. Surely, they realize that it is humanly impossible to disprove the existence of God. So why do they even try? What exactly is the payoff for such people in their efforts to debunk God? Don’t they know that they cannot persuade anyone to turn against God unless they were never persuaded to be for him in the first place? And in place of God, these freethinkers provide what? Reason? Reason is a good thing if it is used well, but unfortunately, like God it can be hijacked for all sorts of unreasonable enterprises. Men have used reason to justify everything from murder to madness. In fact, reason is nothing more than another false idol, which if it is treated as the solution to the human condition will merely disappoint us. It is not the solution to the human condition; it is part of it. The same could be said of the concept of God, the idea of God, and perhaps it is this which the atheists correctly recognize as a danger. Everyone knows that much hatred and harm has been waged in the name of an idea of God, but we should be smart enough to realize that ideas about God are not God himself. No, say the atheists, because there is no God. Just look around you, they insist — where is your God? In the eyes of the starving child? In the heart of the serial killer? In the stench of the concentration camp ovens? No, of course not. God is in us when we look at the starving child, the serial killer and the concentration camp ovens and feel compassion, remorse, anger and knowledge that what we are seeing is not right. It is, after all, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which supposedly forced mankind out of innocence and into our current predicament. That knowledge, therefore, of absolute good and absolute evil has to be our way back to God also. We need to use it as a road map to comprehend the mind of God intuitively, and when we can say with Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” then we will be ready to make the leap from blaming God for our predicament to truly understanding it. The mystery of pain and suffering certainly doesn’t prove anything about God one way or the other. It raises lots of questions for philosophers, theologians and just plain folks, but the existence of pain doesn’t prove or disprove anything about the existence of God. For whatever reason, the world we live in is a world of opposites. Joy can’t exist without sorrow, and peace can’t exist without war. That’s why St. Paul talks about the “peace that surpasseth understanding.” That peace, the kind of ethereal peace that believers associate with heaven, can’t really exist in this world, because our human “understanding” of peace is based on a contrast with war, tension or strife. Human peace, therefore, is transient, conditional and partial. And human war doesn’t prove anything about the existence or nature of God except that the world as created is a world of light and dark, spirit and flesh, man and woman, just as it was described in Genesis. Our good friends the atheists believe that if there is evil in the world there can’t be a God. But that goes about the problem the wrong way. What we can say for sure is that if there were no evil, there would be no “world,” not the world we live in anyway. People who are naive enough to ask why bad things happen to good people just haven’t been paying attention. This time of year those of us who believe in God — and more particularly who believe in a God who IS paying attention — celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah or Jesus the Saviour or Jesus the King or just plain simply Jesus of Nazareth. Much has been written about this Jesus, and much has been said in his name, both blashemy and blessing. But most of us who believe in Jesus as a representative of God on earth don’t believe in him because of what someone else said about him. Rather, we believe because of what we ourselves have experienced of him, both in our understanding of his reported life on earth and often because of some personal moment of contact with his divine presence, one of those moments which make atheists call believers insane and which make believers shout hallelujah. Tomorrow, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus approximately 2,000 years ago, it is worth remembering that he brought into the world a gift for compassion and left it with a gift of suffering. His life is an eternal metaphor for the opportunities all of us face to give in to despair, doubt and death. And if people want to find a reason to doubt God, then the death of a man such as Jesus on the cross would be the ultimate evidence. But it is also the ultimate evidence for hope, and for the ability to transcend human suffering. Merry Christmas, and remember what a miracle it is to be alive. Thank you AC For this valuable piece of information. It is a miracle each and every day to be alive. Bless you! Praise the Holy of Holy : Merry CHRIST DAY :Praise the Holy of Holy :Praise the lamb :amen Holy, holy,holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.Praise the one who gives you peace beyond all understanding Yes that scripture still sounds good ! |