blatham wrote:monte cargo said
Quote:Funny that when liberals are attacking God,
You'd think the Fellow would be able to take care of Himself. After all, if there is any characteristic that defines Him, it is "big".
We trust, too, in thinking about Him, that He's not the victim sort. Nor, we understand, does He lack self-confidence and certainty. Thus we don't seem to have good cause to worry that we might say something to hurt His feelings. God, as we conceive Him, surely isn't a pouter.
Thus it is a tad confusing when folks get to worrying for God and these "attacks" on Him. You know? Even the sneakiest of sneak attack will be as transparent to Him as any of those falling raindrops He manages.
But maybe it isn't Him you fret for. Maybe your frets are for the flocking side. Maybe you worry a sheep or two or millions will not Hear his plaintive, loving call there on the (metaphoric) bleak mountainside with bad weather moving in. Maybe the flock will die (or perhaps worse, head around the mountain drawn by the sound of a more compelling Shepard) and He'll be just sitting there reflecting on His next move and on what has all just happened. The compassionate among us will empathize here. We all, sometimes, experience that "Well, I wanted X but it looks like X isn't going to happen" and then we go on with "Win some, lose some" or the like.
And if He loses that flock, clearly it will be, in this universe designed by Him, for the best. How could it be otherwise?
It all could be - you have to think out of the box here - just what we ought to give Him, what we owe Him for all He's done for us. Stick with me now, monte.
We cannot, in good conscience and good consciousness, merely lay down in the sunny pasture and baaa lovingly upwards. We cannot, its a moral and a logical matter and He made morals and He made logic, do some wormhole shortcut through this Vale of Soulmaking and deliver ourselves to Him at the fruitful end of His Plan. It would make a mockery of His Plan. Do you see this? We must traverse the travail in full. We must risk turning away from Him. And He will be with us in this great eternal risk. He too must risk our turning away from Him.
Were it not so, we would be effectively putting Him on soul-making welfare.
We must attack Him. There's simply no other way. And he'll understand. He's a free enterpriser.
I realize I may be taking a great chance with this claim, but I'd have to say that I'm definitely detecting a note of contempt for the Great Godsby, old bean.
After all, you must consider God was big with the soldiers and officers fighting the Revolutionary War. They were hardly sheep. The wrath of several centuries of genocide by the Crusaders (not the funk band, Blatham) is still begrudged by greater Islam. They still haven't forgiven Europe or it's younger nephew, the United States of America.
Only 10-12% of the U.S. population are comprised of atheists, giving the atheists the benefit of the doubt, but this thread that mentions a Muslim draws 90% atheists, some stacking is definitely occurring. And like hating God is a fad among our leftmost, to me it's not different than the gas guzzling sport utility craze or "hip-hop" non-music that features nauseating repetition, mysogny, and words romanticizing prison life. One day all of these things are going to be looked back upon with as much nostalgia as the plague.
Like electricity, most people don't understand how it works but their lives are made much better because of it. Calorie-conscious people may not fully understand the process of photosynthesis but they eat salad anyway. People of faith also derive great benefit, courage and hope from prayer. Contrary to being "sheep", the undertakings of the greatest and riskiest magnitude are the times when most people invoke prayer and God.
Praeger's article may look melodramatic in parts, but the article makes a great point that unless we set some rules, U.S. traditions would be revokable by anyone who challenges them. The next thing you know, someone may remark that they are offended by the site of a church or temple, and demand to have it demolished simply because they are not religious, even if 90% of the neighborhood is. The balance is not railroading this Muslim because we live in a free country, but not allowing Muslims to override our traditions and customs. There is a line to walk.
I give your post an 87 for originality and because it honestly made me laugh, but some points have to be deducted for the obvious point you missed from all of those other Palestinian/Moslem threads we've been tossing messages on...In
their countries, you show a different religious book than the Koran in a public place that recognizes only the Koran, or you ridicule God, and you'll get your head cut off in those places. Look what happened to that Danish publishing company that printed that cartoon of Mohammed with a hat that looked like a bomb. All the Pope had to do was repeat someone who spoke several centuries ago that called Islam a violent religion, and there were cries to behead the Pope!
I'm going Dennis Miller on this issue. He said "in response to a question of why he has taken on a much more conservative philosophy since 9-11" and his answer was, "I'm not against gay marriage, and I'll defend to my death against anyone Moslem nation that commits an act of terror to break it up."
