Category: religion
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Channing’s wager
So Pascal said just believe in God, its a safe bet, but also by following God: Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. – Pensées, §233 So let’s continue this. Here’s my wager – just do what Jesus told you.…
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Truth
Some things strike me immediately as making sense. What I know to be false, is that there is ‘the Truth’. You can get very close in maths and physics but they’re not nearly so messy as all of what mother nature cooked up. I’ve been reading through Bear Grylls’ “Soul Fuel”, as a way of…
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Life is a poem
Lewis says in Miracles, “we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concession to this point.” – Chose for the Unchosen – C.S. Lewis website This is what…
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No doubt Jesus laughed a lot
No doubt Jesus laughed a lot – Soul Fuel, ch. 21, Bear Grylls Can we keep it that simple please? Not wrap it up in happiness/joy/“really-fun-guy”. He laughed. I mean I like and understand the good intentions of happiness and Joy but then there’s lots of questions about what is happiness and joy. Laughing, is…
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The eternal law of the animals
Tolstoy explains beautifully as ever, the hypocrisy of Christians at war. “There are in Europe twenty-eight millions of men under arms,” says Wilson, “to decide disputes, not by discussion, but by murdering one another. That is the accepted method for deciding disputes among Christian nations.…either Christianity is a failure, or those who have undertaken to…
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Satan’s delusion
The greatest trick the devil pulled is not to convince people he didn’t exist, it’s to convince himself he didn’t exist. There’s an excellent UK comedy sketch from Miller and Webb of a Nazi asking his commander if maybe they’re the bad guys. The film Conspiracy too shows it. Its just a business meeting to…
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Secular Islamic countries
Too often when people think about Islamic countries they think of those involved in war. Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan. In all these countries, they have religious rulers. Religion rules the state. Europe used to have this too. We burned witches and heretics. We burned, tortured, punished and cleansed. But through things like the French revolution…
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The Dry Salvages – T. S. Eliot
(PDF Download) (The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks,with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.Groaner: a whistling buoy.) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,Patient to some degree,…
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God the mother
I’m becoming more firmly of the belief that Mother Nature is the closest rational approximation of God. Mother Nature isn’t the Earth alone, the rules of mama nature apply throughout the universe. So if Mother Nature is God, God is a woman. Only that which has the power to create life could be anything close…
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Paradise theory
Let’s assume that the earth is paradise (Heaven in other words). Its an oasis of life in the middle of billions of light years of death. So when we talk about global problems, we’re talking about paradise problems. Or indeed, trouble in paradise. Gaia theory says that paradise is alive. It maintains its temperature and…
Ian's Philosophy 