Posted on 03/30/2002 7:53:37 PM PST by malakhi
| Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue. - John Adams |
or
These are two that I like for sipping neat.
Habakkuk 2:4 "See, he is puffed up; his desires are not upright - but the
righteous will live by his faith - [Or faithfulness]
chuck <truth@YeshuaHaMashiach>
He was talking to those people, back then. He was expressing his hope and confidence that they would not turn away from their newly chosen path, but warning them of the consequences if they did.
It may or may not have been his intent, but it was clearly the intent of the Holy Spirit, that we all, in any age, can look into these scriptures and see the conditions present today, and ourselves.
v.
Lol. I'll be ok Chuck. That moon vanishes about 10:30 pm evernight anyway when I'm looking at the back of my eyelids. :-)
Heb 10:39 But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.
I believe Paul was making a statement about all Christians, then and now.
It may or may not have been his intent, but it was clearly the intent of the Holy Spirit, that we all, in any age, can look into these scriptures and see the conditions present today, and ourselves.
And what we were like, hopefully past tense. Lol
JH :-)
You flunked, it was not what I asked for, but I'll try to be more spacific later, but tonight, JAG and "24" are on, and Dave [SD] and I are watching it, so my keyboard will sit vacant for a couple of hours.
Later, got to shower first. NO! it's not because of the threads. Lol
I think my TV viewing is pretty much restricted to "Blues Clues" and "Bob the Builder". Though I do like JAG (I tape it on my PVR occasionally), I've only seen 15min of (the last) 24hrs.
I don't even get the local channels.
I do have to confess to taping a couple episodes of "Stargate SG-1" each week and speaking them in early in the morning. But that's about the limit of "popular TV" watching. I suspect my pastor wouldn't even approve of that. But he doesn't make me go to confession. So I can get away with it.
Particularly partial to Pooh. But beggining to believe buying Blue'd be better.
The first point I will speak of is the part which the aesthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman's grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative requirement. When one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that "man in the bush with God may meet." What a pulverization and leveling of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.
It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a 'home' upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!
The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in Spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of 'childlike,'- innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other- their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter.
Adequate? You did a better job then I could have done describing why we believe in Eternal Security,= [ES].
In fact, forget my question to you, and let me see if I can figure out what your question is for me. Lol
are you ever going to get around to telling me why my "misunderstanding" of the OSAS aspects of the Prodigal son parable imply that I am a "works-based" Christian? Or is "salvation by works" a knee-jerk reaction to anything a Catholic says despite years of denials that our salvation rests on what we do for Him instead of what He did for us?
I believe that went back to P#52,943 and your post to CD, when you told her……..
IMR-OK. So no free will prior to salvation (you can't choose to be good since you are incurably wicked) and no free will after salvation since God won't allow you to reject Him once you've decided. You get one split second of free will when you choose Him (and none at all if you never do). Or is it no free will at all?
Anyway, that seems like years ago, so I’ll wait and get into more current topics, which goes better with my short term memory. (^g^)
JH :-)
v.
I can't decide if the Matrix is about saved people trying to overthrow the Maya of Satan or if its about reprobate demons trying to break Gods hold on the community of the saved and having to battle Gods Angels. Agent Smith as the Good Guy?
Clues? The "good" guys wear black, are cast out, kill innocent people indiscriminatly and have a home base "down there"
v.
Throw in HockeyTalk, bad jokes, and personal asides and let it run for 3 years.
Catholics and Baptists break off talks, we continue them here with some other denominations thrown in for good measure. Add our resident Jew, football, hockey, baseball, horse talk (and lifting), yo momma jokes and some greed and envy (in trying to be the one that posts the xx,000th post) and you've got the Neverending Story.
Welcome abord!
I had never thought of it that way before. I'm going to have to rethink it now...drat. :-)
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