pointillistic: composed of many discrete details or parts
It’s a Lie
Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And you want to know the hell of it?? MARK TWAIN DIDN’T EVEN SAY THAT!!!
Moral Principles
Moral principles are absolute, but only love submitted to the will of God can direct us on how they apply in a particular situation.
Greg Boyd – Repenting of Religion
Misdirected love
..we need guidance to make sure that the things we love are ordered beneath our ultimate love of God. Christians have often described sin as misdirected love — loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/opinion/jerry-falwell-liberty.html
Clutter and mess
clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.
Anne Lamott
Tidiness
Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.
Anne Lamott
Perfectionism
I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Anne Lamont
peace-monger.
By that I mean a highly anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings than with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus, a “middler,” someone who is so incapable of taking well-defined stands that his “disability” seems to be genetic, someone who functions as if she had been filleted of her backbone, someone who treats conflict or anxiety like mustard gas– one whiff, on goes the emotional gas mask, and he flits. Such leaders are often “nice,” if not charming.” Edwin Friedman
A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, pg. 13-14
Can We be Good Without God?
The most compelling read this past week. Long but worthwhile. Here are several excerpts:
American Nationalism
…virtuous heroes kill bandits and lawless Indians.
This common model of life’s meaning is drastically irreligious, because it places reliance on good human beings and not on God. It has no room for the double insight that the evil are not beyond the reach of divine mercy nor the good beyond the need for it. It is thus antithetical to Christianity which maintains that human beings are justified by God alone, and that all are sacred and none are good.
Exalted Individual
If the concept of the exalted individual defines the highest value under God, the concept of the fallen individual defines the situation in which that value must be sought and defended.
Sin
Sin is ironic. Its intention is self-exaltation, its result is self debasement. In trying to ascend, we fall. The reason for this is not hard to understand. We are exalted by God; in declaring our independence from God, we cast ourselves down.
Original sin is the quiet determination, deep in everyone, to stay inside the world. Every sinful act is a violation of the personal being that continually, in freedom, vision, and love, threatens the world. The archetype of sin is the reduction of a person to the thing we call a corpse.
Destiny
Destiny is not the same as fate. The word refers not to anything terrible or even to anything inevitable, in the usual sense of the word, but to the temporal and free unfoldment of a person’s essential being. A destiny is a spiritual drama.
A destiny is never completely fulfilled in time, in the Christian vision, but leads onto the plane of eternity. It must be worked out in time, however, and everything that happens to a person in time enters into eternal selfhood and is there given meaning and justification. My destiny is what has often been referred to as my soul.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1989/12/can-we-be-good-without-god/306721/
Endangered species sighting this morning:
