Stop whatever you’re doing for a few seconds and think about the questions I am about to ask:
- Why are you doing what you were about to do before I interrupted you? Who would benefit from it? What’s the long term result?
- What is the purpose of all the stuff around you? Why do you have it? Can you afford it? Are you actually using it? Where’s it going to go when you get tired of it or don’t need it anymore?
- What did you eat today? Do you know what was in it? Do you know where it came from? Who prepared it? What effect did it have on you?
- How did you spend your time today? How did you spend your money? How did others spend your money? Is anyone better off because that time and money was spent?
- Who’s on your state’s ballots in May? In November? How did they get there? Do they represent you?
- What did your governments do today?
If you are like most people, including me, you probably had a hard time answering most of those questions. Now, one more:
What are you going to do about it?
We live in a time unlike any other, a time shot through with the good and the bad of thousands of years of human advancement. Yet, I believe, unlike most of our ancestors, we have reached the point where we have stopped thinking about most of the things that go on around us. Instead, we act compulsively and selfishly, guided by the principle that we can instead of the conscience of whether we should. We are surrounded by fabulous wealth and limitless possibility, yet we do very little useful with what we have.
Over the past several years, I have struggled to find my voice–the voice of Worldview–amidst all of the competing concerns of our frenetic age, and while that voice is still finding its song, I believe I have found my first note.
We live in an era that is a fragile facade behind which we hide the rapidly increasing dump of our excess. Now, the wind is blowing and threatens to bring the whole thing down into the muck.
Yes, there are many, wonderful blessings that have come with out amazing age of technology and connectedness, but with those blessings have come the curse of our failure to understand what we are doing to ourselves and each other by so fully immersing ourselves in the things we have and want.
Something has to change if we are going to survive the potential disasters that lie before us.
What we need is a revolution, and the irony is that this revolution does not require you to fire a single shot or move an inch from where you are now. What we need is a revolution in thought brought about by people who know better changing how they think about our age and what we are doing with it.
During the American Revolution, historians estimate that about 3 percent of the citizens of the colonies actively participated in the war against the British crown. In 2010, if even 1 percent of the population were to suddenly start doing anything different from what it already does, it would shake the nation from your living room to the Oval Office.
So here is where I stand, among the first of the new generation of revolutionaries, crying out to you that there is a better way, we just have to do it. That is my voice, and that will be the voice Worldview echoes going forward.
I hope that you will join me.
What are you going to do about it?
DLH
Hello again Dennis Hitzeman,
First off may I pass on to you my slogan of life???
Mankind’s ability to humbug itself is infinite.
Secondly, may I once again remind you of my friend’s web blog???
http://www.wallsofjericho.info
Walls of Jericho is a metaphor for the walls of ignorance built around people’s mind by the vested interest of institutionalized Christendom.
Dennis, we did exchange emails (on our differences over the doctrine of the “Virgin Birth” of Jesus of Nazareth), some years ago and it broke off when I couldn’t see us making any substantial agreement. We more or less agreed to differ.
I have decided to once again attempt to convince you of the error of this hollow pagan doctrine, which misrepresents everything that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died for.
However I continued to receive and enjoy your regular emails.
Your theme seems to be quite consistent:
MOST OF THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS ARE CAUSED BY MAN’S IRRESPONSIBLE AND SELFISH CONDUCT.
I say:
The very core of everything that Jesus of Nazareth exhorted of people was conduct your self ethically and compassionately toward the world.
Every instance where Jesus preached entry into the Kingdom of God was accompanied with an appeal to unselfish ethical conduct.
Probably the only belief Jesus asked of people was to believe that the Lord God was ONE. He did not spiel off a list of doctrines from a catechism, which were necessary for people to “believe” in order to be “saved.”
Jesus stood for “individual responsibility for individual conduct” and that is the underlying lesson of the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Equally Jesus manifested the theme of Job – INTEGRITY IN ADVERSITY.
The glaring difference between the crucifixion./ resurrection and the doctrine of “virgin birth” is quite simple.
Whereas the disciples unmistakably preached crucifixion / resurrection, they preached absolutely NOTHING about “virgin birth.”
(Leave aside the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke, which were written decades after Jesus was judicially murdered, and when read in the idiom in which they were written, are simply saying that Jesus was the son of a man whom his mother Mary did not marry.)
The crucifixion / resurrection was at the core of all the disciples preached. They demonstrated that it was totally unexpected (even by Jesus own followers) as an element of messianic criteria until after it had actually happened. They furthermore demonstrated that crucifixion / resurrection was a principle that all followers of Jesus of Nazareth must apply to themselves in the spirit in order to enter the Kingdom of God.
The principle of crucifixion / resurrection is integral – even innate, to the concept of repentance. It takes on a meaningful application when it is applied by people spiritually in their everyday social interaction.
Peter said:
Acts 3:18. “ … those things, which God had before showed by the mouth of
all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he has so fulfilled.”
Paul said:
Acts 26:22, 23. “ To this day I stand witnessing to both to small and great,
saying no other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say would come – That the Christ would suffer, that he would be the first to rise from the dead, and would proclaim light to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.“
Rom 6:3. “Know you not that so many of us as were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death?”
Rom 6:6. “ our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be
destroyed,”
Rom 8:14. “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons
of God.”
1Cor 1:23. “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling
block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”
Gal 2:20. “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; not yet I but Christ
lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
1Tim 1:16. “Jesus Christ might show all longsuffering as a pattern for all
those who are going to believe in him.”
Conversely, the doctrine of “virgin birth” was NEVER referred to by either Jesus or any of his disciples in their preaching. It is a hollow, sterile belief, derived from the pagan Greeks and it would be impossible to verify by any one if they were to meet Jesus face to face.
It also drives a wedge between Jesus and the rest of humanity, which was the absolute antithesis of what the disciples preached. Jesus was the example set up for the world to EMULATE.
Spiritual baptism into Jesus’ death and resurrection and arising as a new creature by the power and grace of God was at the heart of all that Paul and the disciples taught. It is about being “born of God” and our body becomes “a Temple of the Holy Spirit.”
When closely examined, the doctrine of “Virgin Birth” is found to be based on mistaken Bible translations and presuppositions and connotations which fly in the face of Bible idiom.
I ask one question of these people who insist that “virgin birth” is an essential messianic doctrine.
If you met Jesus face to face, please explain how you would demonstrate whether or not he was born of “virgin birth.”
Les Kelly,
Tasmania, Australia.
= = = = = = = = = =
Les,
You defeat yourself by using the very same kind of reasoning that you claim disproves the virgin birth in making your argument. You rely on your own rationality and understanding, clouded by human sinfulness and separation from God, and appeal to an understanding that makes sense to you rather than accepting, yes by faith, what God has clearly communicated to us through his word.
By denying the virgin birth, you also deny Christ’s divinity and his nature as part of the Trinity. You question the nature of his redemption because you question his own words. Further, you question the clear testimony of 2,000 years of orthodox Christians who know that Christ’s birth by the virgin Mary, his divinity, and his nature as the Triune God are fundamental to his nature as our savior.
For me, the saddest part of you rationale is that it puts your soul at risk. The Bible is a clear, irreducible whole. None of us can pick or choose the parts we want to believe. God communicated to us the nature of salvation by grace through faith in the fact that he sent his Son to be born of a virgin–that is, not by the will of a man, but the will of God–to live a life that perfectly kept God’s commands, to die as the final payment for all sin, to rise from death to defeat that curse of sin, and to return triumphantly to the Father to prepare a place for everyone who believes in him and in his redeeming work.
Christ did not come to be emulated: he came to save. Christ did not come to be a great moral teacher: he came do die. Christ did not come to reform humankind on this earth: he came to lead the faithful to heaven.
He did all of this, as I have already noted, in a very specific way, as testified to by the Bible and affirmed by believers from that time to this day.
I will pray for you that your human reason does not overwhelm your faith and rob you of the promise of heaven.
DLH