a common sense spirituality blog
At the heart of the Judgment Day belief is this divine question: Will Earth and every living thing that occupies it be destroyed by a sadistically punitive God who has no regard for the human life He created, and whose punishment exceeds all human crimes?
If a blood-thirsty posse approached the home of a guilty man, and his father pushed his innocent brother onto the porch, we'd be horrified. No doubt, many would declare that this father was pure evil. Why can't we see the parallel?
It's really not the circumstances surrounding Jesus's birth or death that matter, it's his dash. Most Christians disagree, some more vehemently than others.
If I remember correctly, Jesus was also quoted as saying, "Condemn not." The "I will be ashamed of you before my Father" verse certainly is a condemnation. Would Jesus really say something so un-Christlike?
Now we learn that Jesus of Nazareth grew up in a city that was a mere four acres in size, leading us to conclude that if the Messiah went missing, it would not have gone unnoticed and there would have been no 18-year gap in the record of Jesus’ life. There probably would have been a town-wide search party; residents in neighboring towns might have joined in, and the mushrooming posse would have been so unprecedented that one of the few literate citizens would have written about it.
Millions are waiting for the Anti-Christ to arrive, but it’s been here all along. It sits where we sit, stands where we stand, walks where we walk. And all too often, it speaks when we speak. It prods us to do and say things to others that we would not want done or said to us. It picks fights, fuels dissension, and causes us to choose angry force over peaceful power. It justifies righteous indignation over effective conflict resolution. It’s like a magnet, spinning our moral compass out of control.
Must Christians believe that God allowed Jesus to be brutally tortured and murdered three short years into his ministry, in lieu of satanically brutalizing the rest of us throughout all eternity?
Today we celebrate the greatest lesson demonstrated by perhaps the greatest teacher the world has ever known, a Jew named Yeshua. What he demonstrated more than 2,000 years ago was that there is no death. He reportedly revealed that even though the physical bodies we wear are lifeless and entombed, we are not dead. We... Continue Reading →
Humans are a lovely and loving lot—except when we forget we are. And that memory lapse scripts all human drama.From the missives in my e-mailbox, there’s many a beautiful soul out there who believes that it is his or her mission to save the rest of us from eternal damnation; and by golly, they’ll do... Continue Reading →
Loud Mouth in the Balcony 