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Showing posts with the label faith and works

Predestination — Free Will from God's Point of View

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Samuel Clemens may have taken God seriously: but not his era's version of Christianity. His "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" include Huck's reactions to well-intentioned religious instruction by the Widow Douglas — and "pretty ornery preaching." " It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet. " ("Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Chapter XVIII , Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens (1885)) Called by God If I thought predestination meant that God had decided ahead of time whether I was heading for Heaven or Hell, I might feel hopeless or self-righteous. Robert Burns' Holy Willie dramatizes what can happen when

Mayaysia Airlines Flight MH17: Death and Life

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Nearly three hundred people died in Ukrainian airspace last Thursday. They were in an airliner on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Nearly two thirds of the passengers of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 were Dutch. They included folks on their way to a conference and families traveling. Some were "important," others not, by societal standards. News services have been focusing on those among the dead who were most likely to be of interest to their viewers and readers. That's understandable. Five days after this tragedy, we still don't know exactly why a Boeing 777-2H6ER fell out of the sky. Since it was in airspace over a war zone, it's very likely that the airliner was shot down.... ...I'll explain why I'm not ranting about these deaths being the fault of folks I don't like toward the end of this post. First, and no pressure: I suggest that praying for those who died on flight MH17, and everyone connected with the incident, couldn't hu

Strangers and Standing Orders

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(From NASA/Jim Grossmann, via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission.) (Some of America's new citizens at the Kennedy Space Center. July 1, 2010.) ...The Irish and Other 'Threats' Some of my ancestors were none too pleased when one of those Irishmen came sniffing around their daughter. When asked about her daughter's suitor, one of my foremothers said, "he doesn't have family: he's Irish." ( November 13, 2008 ) I can understand her attitude. Quite a few 'proper' folks were convinced that those Irish were violent, indolent, and chronic drinkers: hardly the sort one would want marrying into the family. The daughter of a decent family and that Irishman got married, anyway. I think we earned our reputation for being garrulous and charming, and that's another topic. When my father's father died, my father received a small inheritance from his maternal grandfather. My father figured that his grandfather didn't want 'that Ir