tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51243155989182431032024-02-18T23:40:17.062-05:00On The Road to JerusalemON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM.
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For thus says the Lord:
I will spread prosperity over Jerusalem like a river,
and the wealth of the nations
like an overflowing torrent.
As a mother comforts her child,
so will I will comfort you; in Jerusalem you shall find your comfort.Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.comBlogger92125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-19255569870479364292013-08-24T16:11:00.000-04:002014-04-19T15:46:22.568-04:00ARRIVEDERCI!<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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I haven't posted for several weeks and I have come to the conclusion that I don't have the energy to<br />
write anymore (I'm into painting again). I know from the stats that I have several readers, to whom I want to say good-bye. This is a very long post, but is the last one. I apologize for the format. So long friends!</div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My son and I have been discussing the supernatural image of Jesus offered by the gospels, and in particular his resurrection. I told him that the belief that he was raised from the dead is based on a</span><br />
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">historical fact, namely the birth of the Church.<br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“That’s nonsense!” he exclaimed. “You can’t claim that </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">the only possible reason for the birth of <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Christianity was Jesus' resurrection. Martyrs always help their causes greatly. Look at Martin Luther <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">King. He became a myth after he died and the Black Rights Movement won. Why don’t you admit <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">that this is what happened with Jesus and Christianity?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“You don’t know what you are talking about.” I answered. “You can’t compare the two. Doctor <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">King was a political leader, whereas Jesus was thought to be the awaited Messiah and as such he<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">wasn’t supposed to die, especially by the hands of the Romans. In the eyes of the Jews his death</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">was not heroic, rather it was shameful. Yet what happened after his death was more <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">groundbreaking than everything else that ever happened in history, considering how powerful was the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Roman empire. Don’t forget what Christians went through and for how long. We are talking <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">about three hundred years of persecution!” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I understand what you’re saying. Yet the disciples’ faith, or even Jesus’ resurrection, don’t say <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">anything about the existence of a Creator.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I agree. But Jesus said that there is a God and I believe him.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">His father intervened in the conversation:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“If you have faith in Jesus,” He said, “that should exhaust your questions. Instead you keep<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> reading books about the historical Jesus". </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“That’s because I can't live by blind faith. I want to know who he was, why he did what he did, why he died<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">". </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“In other words you want to penetrate his mind!” He exclaimed. “The mind of someone who <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">is supposed to be God! That’s so presumptuous!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">A few days later my son and I went to a conference about the metaphysical origins of the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">universe. The speaker was the British theologian Professor Keith Ward. I had read <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">one of his books on comparative religions and I couldn’t wait to hear his thoughts on God and <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">creation. But my son, of course, was positive that the speech was going to be a waste of time, a <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">hour of talking about nothing. When we left the room after the conference, he said:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“This guy claims that God is outside of time, but seriously, what does that mean? We understand <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">the meaning of terms like “existence” in the context of space and time, yet<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he not only “knows” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">that there is a Creator but he also claims to know his location, which by the way we can’t figure<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> out because it has nothing to do with our universe! I just don't understand what's the point of writing books</span> about something that we can’t possibly know.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“You keep using the verb “to know”, that’s the problem.” I answered. “The knowledge of God <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">has a metaphysical nature. The religious person doesn’t know that God exists in the same way <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she knows that two plus two equal four. But it’s only natural to try to figure Him out, if one <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">believes in Him.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">And yet, Carl Gustav Jung said:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I don’t believe, I know".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This statement agrees with Hindu philosophy. In Hinduism the word “faith” doesn’t exist, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">because those who choose to practice yoga enter in direct contact with God and perceive Him as <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">a reality. Paradoxically, a reality impossible to observe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Nature is the link between God and us. Only once in my life I have experienced something I <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">could perhaps describe as God consciousness. I was a little girl and I was playing on the grass on <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">a sunny day. I would climb on the top of a small hill and then let myself roll down to the bottom. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Why that simple game stands out in my memory so bright? Because what I felt in those moments<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">was completely out of the ordinary, and this is so true that I can’t put it into words. Everything <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">around me was part of me: The sun was shining through my body and I was blowing in the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">wind down that hill. The feeling was one of incredible empowerment. On that sunny afternoon I <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">was transparent, immaterial. Today I know that the solidity of matter is an illusion. As incredible <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">as it sounds, 99% of our bodies is actually empty space. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">But what good does it do to know if I can’t feel anymore? I’ve never felt the sun shining through <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">my body again, nor have I blown in the wind. My intuition of the divine is so rare! I crave for the sacred, I long for Christ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I want to experience the mystical union, the cosmic consciousness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is among us. Why can’t I perceive it every minute of the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">day? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Sometimes I stare at the sky and my soul is filled with awe. The slow movement of the clouds <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">against the stillness of that immense expanse of blue is suggestive of infinite power and serenity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I wish I could go through the rest of my life with the same majestic calmness of a cloud. I’m <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">down here, so small, yet part of this eternal flow. Sometimes I feel all this, and it’s so pervasive! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This is what my son doesn’t understand: He thinks that to FEEL is meaningless and only to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">KNOW deserves respect. Sure, he says, you can feel one with the universe, but why jump to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">conclusions and believe in God? Because, I would say, when you truly feel one with the universe <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">you also feel a Presence, something above and beyond. Something unknown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My answer to atheism is that its derisive attitude towards the supra-natural stems from the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">illusion of being in control of oneself and the world. Atheists are convinced that religious people <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">believe because they are afraid of death and even of life. I say that nonbelievers reject religion <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">for fear of losing control. They can’t let go of their grip of what they think is reality. Their fear is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">also the product of their pride. They think they are too smart to be ignorant of their destiny. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Modern atheists picture themselves as an avant- guard movement, but they are still anchored in <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">the Enlightenment. On the contrary, twenty-first century thinkers are aware that rationality is a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">debatable subject and creativity is needed when revolutionary insights must be achieved. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Subtlety and a degree of daring are necessary even in science. We are not fully rational beings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">How could we then successfully abolish any “belief without evidence”? Do atheists truly think <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">that we would be mentally healthier if we went against our nature? Our self doesn’t rest on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> our consciousness, but goes beyond. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> The professional atheists are prosaically caught in self-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">awareness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I used to be afraid that the screen that my son has built around himself would some day be shattered and he <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">would be unprepared. But now he has a girlfriend and she's a believer. I'm sure that she's undermining his hard shell. But still, I’m afraid that he chose rationality because he saw first hand how much <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">irrationality damaged his parents. He knows we were driven by emotions. He needs to feel <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">superior to us to feel safe. But this sense of superiority goes against the basic values of tolerance, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">and if one isn’t tolerant of religious thought one might become intolerant of much more. </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Take for <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">example the fundamentalist movement. Its followers think they know the will of God, but their <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">message is misleading, for Christianity is about compassion, justice and reaching out to the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">weakest. Chris Edges writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Fundamentalism is a mind-set. The iconography and language it employs can be either religious <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">or secular or both, but because it dismisses all alternative viewpoints as inferior and unworthy of <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">consideration it is anti-thought. This is part of its attraction. It fills human desire for self-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">importance.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The professional atheists insist on the most prosaic aspects of a false Christianity to discredit <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus’ message. Christians who have a critical attitude rather than passive will inevitably be <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">faced with a lot of material about their religion that they will find unpleasant. I certainly find the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">way Christianity is advertised on American television extremely annoying. In Italy, religion isn’t<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">something to brag about on national TV. We don’t have blustering televangelists who ignite <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">enthusiasm among the crowds and we don’t advertise to talk people into sending their children to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Catholic schools. On Christmas we don’t put signs outside our churches to make sure people <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">know that we a re celebrating Jesus’ birth and at Lent we don’t use radio stations to remind them<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">that it’s time to go to confession and repent. All we do is to broadcast a solemn Mass every <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Sunday morning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I realize that a person who is considering investigating the problem of faith here in the United <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">States must bypass an irritating and laughable display of a religion that is not Christianity but <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">something created by the media. When I talk to my son, I wonder how many young people like <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>him refrain from learning about Jesus because they see only the façade that is presented to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">them.<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>To understand Jesus’ message is not the easiest thing to do. I don’t prompt <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">my son to read the gospels because I doubt that at this moment of his life he would be able to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">gain anything out of them. One has to open his mind to a new vision of the world. One has to go <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">for his personal search for the truth about Jesus and have the courage of giving credit to one’s <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">intuitions. Last but not least, one has to be willing to lose one’s identity to him. On the other<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">hand, we give it up to worthless causes all the time (wrong partners, impossible dreams, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">addictive behaviors).I can almost hear my son’s disdainful comment:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“How can you lose your identity to something that might not even exist, something outside of <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">yourself?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Not outside of myself, I would answer, rather above and deep within at the same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus of Nazareth unleashed with incredible force the major cultural and religious revolution in the history of the world. During the transition from agnosticism to Christianity I never asked myself if God exists or not. My central question was: Who was Jesus Christ? I knew that he was a Jewish prophet, but after many, many months of wondering I also knew that he was more than that. He drew me to himself and set me on the road which leads home, the road to Jerusalem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Since I believe in Jesus, I believe that our God is a God of love. He knows you and follows you<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">as if you were His only creature. He doesn’t have to take time off His busy schedule just for you, because he’s a-temporal. Your entire life is spread, so to speak, before His eyes, yet the events that take place in it are determined by you, your actions and your prayers. You can become aware of Him if you want. But maybe you think that you would find His presence an impediment to you freedom. Maybe you are a sinner and you want to go on sinning because you enjoy it, being still blind to the damage <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that you are doing to yourself. Or perhaps you ego is in your way and you don’t like interferences. It’s all OK, all of us have been one way or another at some point in our lives. But if one day you realize that you are tired of being on your own, that you are sick of the way you are living, start listening. You’ll hear Him, for He’s right next to you. Listen to Him when your problems seem to overwhelm you. Keep listening even when the news about the last crime or natural disaster are lauder that His voice, and don’t come to the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">conclusion that, if there was a God, He wouldn’t allow those terrible things to happen. You are made in His image, so He’s grieving just like you are. This is the world He made and He can’t change it. He can end it but He can’t change it, if not through us. He needs our help. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-58249759341416837672013-07-20T11:11:00.001-04:002013-07-20T11:17:26.500-04:00Opening Our Minds to God<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Last year in college, my son was taking classes that allowed him to study the relationship between<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> religion and some
aspects of reality. One of them was Theology and Science. Being an incurable optimist,
I was hoping that it would open his mind to something different than “empirical
evidence.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“How do you like
your class?” I asked him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I just love it,” he
answered. ”I’ve learned a lot. This class has reinforced my belief that most religious people are
unable to go logically from point A to point B in a discussion. They insist in making
claims about the universe based on nothing.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I’ve read your text
book, and you’re right, there are no claims to be made. Nevertheless, there are open
doors, possibilities to consider. For example, our universe started with the Big Bang. Did a
Creator will for this to happen? It’s possible. Did He arrange the perfect constants of the
Fine Tuning? It’s also possible.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“The Fine Tuning is
simply the result of an observation. It does nothing for both the religious and the
non religious sides of the debate. There is no reason to assume that it was caused by a Creator.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">‘We people of faith
like to make assumptions. We don’t like to stop at the evidence. That’s the
difference between you and me.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“You are like a
child, mom. You like fairy tales.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I call these tales
God’s consciousness.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Which means that
you are willing to explain reality with airy notions.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Reality is more
than you see, sweetheart. It needs room. It’s beyond our perception.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I’m not denying
that. What I’m saying is that there is no way for us to know the beyond.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I’m not denying
what you’re saying either, if you mean that to know implies to pin down the Unknown. But you
refuse to open your mind, preventing yourself from having an intuition of what it
could be.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I don’t believe
that you are opening your mind, mom. You are not really interested in discovering the
“truth”. I won’t build my life upon an intuition. It would mean wasting it.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“You are wrong. You
would gain so much.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I have gained a lot.
I wish I had found Christ earlier in my life. Looking back, I see how much pain I brought
upon myself because of my self-centeredness, how many wrong choices I made out
of egotism. I believed that I was brave, for I refused to compromise. I had the courage to
follow my instincts, to translate my impulses into reality. I was certain that this was the
right way to live. </span></div>
<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-66726616713664162782013-07-08T14:54:00.001-04:002013-07-08T14:54:40.216-04:00A Visit to the Church<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Last Saturday my son went to Mass with his girlfriend (just to make her happy, he said). This certainly is an improvement in respect to a few years ago! Back then he was </span>sort of
obsessed with the problem of faith. I remember that he chose religion as the subject of an essay for his writing class. The
students were supposed to write about “an interesting adventure”, and he made up an
afternoon<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>at Mass with me. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Now, what kind of an adventure was that for a twenty year old boy?
Furthermore, it never happened! </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">He started by asking me to describe to him the interior of the church,
which by the way is located right across the street from our home.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“What’s the problem?” I said. “Can’t you go and take a peak inside?”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Can’t you do what I’m asking you to do, just for once?” he retorted.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">So I wrote for him a brief description on a piece of paper. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“This isn’t good enough,” he commented. “Can’t you do any better?”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Listen, it’s Sunday and in one hour I’m going to Mass. Why don’t you
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Maybe. Let’s go for a walk first.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Along the way, he apparently pulled himself together enough to step
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“How do you like it?” I asked him once inside.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Kind of creepy,” he answered, scribbling in his note book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Maybe you should stay for Mass. How are you going to write about it if
you don’t know what’s going to happen?”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I’ll manage. Bye bye!”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">And he shot himself in the open air like a lightning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps he thought that the walls of that church would close on him and never set him free again!</span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-14688072411012059992013-06-30T16:20:00.004-04:002013-06-30T16:20:40.808-04:00EVIL<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">God created the world out of chaos, but some chaos still remains. It’s
the factor that transforms the beautiful waves of the ocean into a tsunami, it is why a monster is
born among many good people,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or a sick child among
the healthy ones. God can’t do anything to prevent this, but we can. Our technology will allow us to predict natural disasters and
genetic diseases, and I don’t think that a new Hitler could get away with another Holocaust today,
because the human race has been too deeply ashamed of it to let it happen again. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">We can make the
world a better place, but this is not going to happen automatically, thanks to “progress”.
Technology and democracy won’t protect us from evil. We must be able to recognize it, for Satan
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Other times, instead, evil is so evident that we are struck by the
impulse to act against it forcefully. This usually leads to more evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following Christ and his message of peace
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Evil often reaches its climax in the interaction between the two
contenders. Even the apostles had their moments of evil, including Peter, the head of the Church. Only
Jesus could unmask it and exhaust its power. He did not resist it and didn’t call to the Father
for vengeance, but the Father raised him from the dead, not as a reward or a statement about his
divinity, but as Satan’s final defeat. Jesus’ resurrection is the first step in the new creation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The prophet Isaiah predicted his sacrifice, as we can read in the
prophecy of the Suffering Servant. Jesus the Servant will save the world from within, for God is
grieving upon His creation gone wrong. But why doesn’t God deal with evil on His own? Perhaps He
can’t land in force to defeat it because, to say with C.S. Lewis, when the author walks on the
stage the play is over. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-83240505283078954702013-06-22T15:54:00.000-04:002013-06-22T16:03:24.548-04:00Is God Omnipotent?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">One of the arguments of the nonbelievers is the old refrain upon which
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“From a Hegelian point of view,“ he goes on, “God is not omnipotent in
the sense that God can choose to create absolutely any state we can imagine…God is omnipotent
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Modern science has discovered the elegant laws of nature. The Fine
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Earthquakes and tsunamis occur as a consequence of plate tectonics, the
giant plates that move under the surface of the earth and the ocean floor. Without them, the
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Is God watching us to see if we make it, as a scientist would observe
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</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-50137168128262540472013-06-09T17:14:00.000-04:002013-06-09T18:16:06.592-04:00Is Christianity an Utopia?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My son has been chatting on line with a guy who claims to be a Christian. </span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This individual told him that, in the afterlife, God will be my son's “worse </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">nightmare”. The man felt so sorry for the unbelievers. because they were</span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> going to burn in hell.
God, he insisted, is not all-loving, in fact He hates </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">people like my son.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I was deeply embarrassed. One thing is, for example, to maintain that </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">fundamentalists are wrong, because we know for a fact that the earth is </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">not six thousand years old. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">A different thing is to maintain that the guy on line is wrong on the ground </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">that I know the nature of God and he doesn't. It's hard to argue on the basis</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">of a
“modern” interpretation of Jesus' cryptic sayings. No wonder people </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">prefer to put religion
aside and think about something more concrete. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I sat next to my son and inverted our role at the computer: As a
religious </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">person, I wanted to chat with an atheist. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The first one who text-messaged me said that
Jesus was crazy, or <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">he </span></span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">wouldn't have claimed to be the Messiah. </span></span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I felt very tired. Once
again I could only argue according with my</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">understanding of Christ, but it would have been pointless.</span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The guy was too far behind. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I wanted to scream:” Please, Jesus, do
something! Come back riding on</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">clouds, if this is what it takes!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Instead, I left the computer to my son. I wasn’t going to argue with
people</span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> I don’t care about. But I do care a lot about my son, so I told him: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Your guy was a fundamentalist. Religious people are not all full of</span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> hatred like he is".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> “I know,” he said, “but you both share the same mindset. Once you </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">refrain from criticizing propositions without evidence, where do you </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">draw the
line? It’s a dangerous attitude, the same that can lead </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">to terrorism.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I think that morality comes before religion, “I answered.”The </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">terrorist lacks moral sense, that’s why he can embrace a belief that tells </span></div>
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">him to kill the infidels. If
Jesus had ever suggested anything of that kind,</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I wouldn’t believe in him.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Even Jesus made a few immoral statements of his own.” said my son, </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">annoying me quite a bit. "The very idea of hell is immoral". </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“We have been over this already. Find another one.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“To love your enemy is immoral.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Really? How so?”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“It certainly is, given the world we live in. If you love your enemy, </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">if you don’t defend he will destroy you". <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“So what? If I choose to be passive, that’s my own problem. Immorality</span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> is to hurt someone else.</span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">You may think that pacifism doesn’t work, but not that
it’s immoral.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Our moral sense is a product of evolution, mom. It’s a combination of </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">self-interest and of a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> genuine desire for the ones we love to be happy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">for the survival of our species. But we
can’t always live up to it, for</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">dire reasons. War should always be the last resort, but
sometimes one </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">must standup against injustice."</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“What you don’t understand is that Jesus had a vision of a world beyond </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">time,” I replied.”He saw that, in the long run, only peace will produce<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> stability. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I admit
that in today’s society his message seems impossible to realize. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">But in a thousand years, if we
don’t destroy ourselves </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">first, love will defeat evil.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Listen to you! You talk of love and evil and worlds beyond! I‘m </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">interested in this one! Where is your God when evil happens?" </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“He’s silent, but not absent,” I said. “We need the Christian utopia </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">for the human race to survive. It's as simple as that".</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-52965446039995668282013-06-03T16:02:00.002-04:002013-06-03T16:02:43.294-04:00A Fallacy in Sam Harris Argument <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Nobody wrote to me "Enough with talking about atheism!", so I'll go on.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">An atheist wouldn't believe
what is obvious to me, namely that Christ has changed me deeply. He
would think that I was changed by a delusion. But how could a delusion bring me so
much wisdom? </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">At best, he would think that I was changed by Jesus’ “philosophy”, but he would be wrong. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I’ve
tried to describe my conversion in the first pages of this book. Initially, the
gospels did not impress me at all, at least on a conscious level. My
personality was too tainted for me to be receptive to Jesus’ message. I had to
read the Sermon on the Mount many, many times before starting to absorb its
meaning. The question is, why did I keep reading it? Because what emerged from
the gospels was not a philosophy, but rather a person, and his presence turned
my life upside down. Had I heard his voice, I would say that he talked me into reading
the gospels a second time, then a third. Of course I didn’t hear it, but I felt
it in my soul. </span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Atheist can dismiss my spiritual experience as much as they want,
yet this is the best way to</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> describe it. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My son thinks that, if I were intellectually honest, I would question my
perception of</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> Jesus Presence and I would find a more
rational explanation for my shift in consciousness. Maybe, he says, I had
simply reached the bottom and I had no choice but to take a different path. But
I know that, had I questioned my feelings, I would have never, never changed.</span>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This makes me think of another fallacy in
Sam Harris’ thesis. In The Moral Landscape he argues that free will is an
illusion and that, and I quote, we are no more responsible for the things we
think (and therefore do) than we are for the fact that we were born into this
world. I believe that this assumption clashes with his crusade against
religion. If our thoughts emerge from the void, as he maintains, there must be
a psychological substrate that generates them. In most cases, religion helps us
grounding our inner life in goodness. Of course there are exceptions, as he
tirelessly points out referring to suicide bombers, but I’m convinced that
religion is a source of love a lot more than it is of hate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Harris thinks that we can be talked into
good behavior by scientific discoveries concerning our well being. But if free
will is an illusion, it follows that we are unable to make moral choices that
go against our impulses, even if the latter are self-destructive. We need
something that touches us at the core of our being, and that is the belief in a
higher power. It seems to me that Harris’ argument, paradoxically, leads to
this conclusion.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-35713538914938741642013-05-26T11:47:00.001-04:002013-05-26T11:47:02.124-04:00Are You Tired Of Reading About Atheism?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In I don’t believe in Atheists Chris Hedges writes:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“The cult of science is used, like the cult of religion, to provide
meaning and hope, to feed the illusion of moral superiority. … A belief in the limitless
possibilities of science, and the belief that science will save us from ourselves has replaced,
for many, faith in God.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Atheists claim that religious people are guided by irrationality,
therefore they are intrinsically dangerous. But emotions can lead to intuitions of enormous
importance, and the intuition of the transcendent, which is the domain of the religious
sense, is one of them. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In existing primal religions there is continuity between mind and
matter, imagination and reality, or even objects and individuals. Boundaries
are an illusion. A supersensory world can be discerned by those who achieve spiritual
awareness, and the shaman has this power. The spirits of the ancestors offer protection
and help to the living, like how saints are believed to do in Catholicism. We can’t dismiss the
common outcome of human imagination in different societies too easily, for it
may well give insight into something real. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Modern atheists maintain that our moral sense stemmed from evolution,
but this</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> theory doesn’t explain our benevolence towards our fellow human beings.
The struggle to</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> survive, in fact, is more severe among members of the same species,
because they fight</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> for the same type of resources. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In the ancient world it was custom to
fight the members</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> of a different tribe. We certainly are the children of evolution but, I
believe, of something</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> else too, or even better, of Someone else. Many of His creatures
vanished<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or mutated,</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> then we are inherently worth much more than any other inhabitant of
this planet. </span>
<br />
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Of course, modern intellectuals enjoy to place themselves on the same
level of, let’s say, a chicken. My son made me watch a video of a deceased American
comedian, may he rest in peace, who was actually wondering why we call the destruction of a
human fetus an “abortion” and the one of a chicken’s egg an “omelet”. Considering the
amount of omelets and the likes I’ve ingested during my lifetime, I don’t find
the comparison particularly funny. But how silly of me! Chickens don’t have
consciousness after all. How do I know? Well, I’ve never had a conversation with a chicken, so
I’m just guessing. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The moment I find out that chickens don’t want me to eat their eggs, I
won’t make omelets anymore, I swear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-88394565535552659732013-05-13T17:52:00.001-04:002013-05-13T17:56:00.737-04:00A Famous Atheist Who changed His Mind<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Let's see what some Christian philosophers had to say about faith. I.M.
Crombie wrote that theists, in order to express their belief, are bounded to use
paradoxical statements. Some trust their cognitive faculties when they affirm the existence of God. For
them, He is real and abstract at the same time, like memory. For others, He is something to speculate
about. </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">As we can read in There Is a God, Anthony Flew, the founder of the new atheists
“movement,” speculated long enough to change his mind about God. According to him, the fact that
nature obeys laws points directly to God, as it does the fact that we are conscious, purpose
driven beings. We are the product of billions of years of cumulative selection, or evolution, but
this can’t in any way explain consciousness. We have the capacity of thinking in concepts and
we are conscious of our ability to transcend matter, yet our brain is not very different
from the one of an animal. We perceive ourselves as “selves,” but we can’t analyze the self
because it’s not a mentalstate that can be observed or explained in scientific terms. </span><br />
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The philosopher R.A. Varghese writes that science does not discover the
self but the self discovers science, therefore<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>no
account of the history of the universe is coherent if it cannot explain the existence of the self. He thinks that the
supraphisical can only originate in a supraphisical source, and consciousness, thought and the
self are supraphisical. Matter cannot produce thought, not even in billion years,
and if this is what atheists believe, then theirs is an act of faith even more
hazardous than believing in God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The professional atheists maintain that the human species needed
religion to cope with a mysterious, frightening world. They think that modern science has ended our fears, explaining away all the things that we didn’t understand about nature,
therefore religion is</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> destined to die. True, we don’t believe anymore that lightning is the
manifestation of angry gods, but our incomprehension has only shifted. Modern science
has opened the door for us to unbelievable complexity and to the mystery of the
universe. Our position is not that different from the one of men in Jesus‘ time. They looked at
the sky, saw the stars and wondered. Today we know stars and planets but we wonder just
the same about the universe, how it works, how it came into existence and why. Science
still can’t answer our deepest questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-73100326915363716592013-05-06T14:57:00.001-04:002013-05-06T14:59:37.525-04:00A Family Discussion About Faith <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Unfortunately, the intellectual superiority
that Jesus displays in his exchanges with the Pharisee does not reflect the
dynamics that take place today in the debates between atheists and people of
faith. They argue about the existence of a Creator, so we shouldn’t be
surprised. The theologian Paul Tillich said:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Anyone who gets into a debate about the
existence of God has stacked the cards in favor of the atheist.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Existence”
is a word we can comprehend, for it refers to reality, whereas we can’t figure
out God. The two words are forced in the same sentence all the time, but they
don’t belong together. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My husband, as I see it, is a believer at heart
and an atheist intellectually, so he can function as a bridge between our son
and I.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Have you ever heard of the Aeropagite?” he
asked to our contemptuous son. He was a mysterious ancient mystic who, in his
attempt to define God, made use of what has been known by the philosophical
tradition as the ‘ via negativa’. According to him, no attributes as we know
them could be true of God, including the attribute of existence. Therefore, in
a very mystical sense, God does not even exists. By this he probably meant that
human mind cannot grasp</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>anything concerning God, who is above and
beyond our cognitive sphere.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“He certainly is,” I said, “but what people
of faith hold on to is the religious experience, which of course cannot be
grasped by someone who has never had such an experience. An atheist will talk
about faith like a blind man might talk of colors.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“You are so arrogant!” our son exclaimed.
“Religious people always pretend to know something that we nonbelievers don’t
know. However, twenty-first century atheists are not as much against religion
as they are against belief without evidence, because such beliefs caused the
most tragic<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>moments in history. For example, Hitler
killed millions of people on the basis of an unjustified belief, namely that
the Jews were an inferior race.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Evil was at the root of this false belief,”
I answered. “No one can deny that in the history of Christianity there have
been evil people also, but remember that the Church is a human creation. You
can’t condemn Christ for the wrong that was done in his name.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I’m not blaming religion only,” our son
replied, “but belief itself. I’m interested in truth and therefore in evidence.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Then what is your
opinion about Communism in Soviet Russia and China?” his father retorted. “This </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">ideology was as</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> dangerous as a
belief and produced massive violence against innocent people. We can only</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">conclude that violent impulses are deeply rooted in human beings, just like
their need to believe in something,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">it doesn’t matter if it is a religion or an
ideology. Both can be used to do either evil or good. If dogmas,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">along with
rational doctrines, can be used to arm people, then there is no claim that it
should be responsible </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">for the evil of this world. Evil always finds a way to manifest itself.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-6886537630729106292013-04-29T16:20:00.001-04:002013-04-29T16:21:22.255-04:00Message To My Son<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus is the one teacher who tells us very
little about what to do to achieve the kingdom. He<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>abolished rules and didn’t leave behind a
step by step road to enlightenment, but he said one thing that can bring us all
the way to God: Believe in me. The difference between eastern religions and
Christianity was evident to C.S. Lewis:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“We have not got to try to climb into
spiritual life by our own efforts…If we only lay ourselves open to the one Man
in whom it was fully present…He will do it for us".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">From the moment I met Jesus, all I had to do
was “ride the wave”. But waves lift you up and then let you down. It’s not so
easy to ride them, especially when there is no coast in sight. The religious
sense must be nourished, keeping in mind that we are not feeding an illusion
but something that was given to us by grace. I must look after my faith like I
looked after my son when he was a child. I wanted to relate to him, so I also
become like a child and we had a wonderful time together.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">When you were a child, you used to
get mad at me if I assumed that you couldn’t understand certain things because
you were too young. You thought that children were smart, sometimes smarter
than the adults, but now you have changed your mind. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Jesus said that only those who are like
children will enter the kingdom of heaven,” you said. “In fact, in order to
believe one has to shut down his logical thought. Actually, one has to stop
thinking!”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Maybe, if you try, you’ll be able to recall
the way you were just a few years ago and realize that there is no reason to
despise that little boy. In his naivete, he was aware of the deepest aspects of
reality. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I’m looking at you picture. You were eleven
years old, learning your first English words. Look at those eyes! Your gaze was as sharp as a
razor. It’s not like that anymore; you are a grown up now. Maybe you have lost
something in the process. Try to remember, try really hard. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-7713884603146328622013-04-22T17:10:00.000-04:002013-04-22T17:10:25.315-04:00Perspectives From Another World<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">By now you have certainly guessed that my
son is playing a big role in my writing. I want to put my thoughts on paper to
better defend my new born faith. I have said that I fell in love with Jesus
because the religious experience is very similar to the experience of falling
in love. When I said that to Andrea I got this in response:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“That’s disgusting! If you want to be a
moron, go ahead!”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
never fully understood where the “disgusting” part came from. When I’m in the
mood for flattering myself I think he was jealous. When I’m not, I concentrate
on the “moron” and Andrea’s deep contempt for the dissolution of my
intelligence in religious tales. But later he found out that even the famous
atheists he admires so much have stressed the similarities between falling in
love for a real person and for a supra-natural being. The two mental states
have in common feelings of exaltation and euphoria, of warmth and mutual
understanding. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Of course these feelings are emotionally fulfilling, and once
attained them one will be reluctant to let them go. Religion can certainly be
consoling: If we have a problem, it provides hope. If we are living a difficult
moment, it gives meaning to our suffering. And it’s beautiful to think that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we are somehow eternal. But this doesn’t
necessarily mean that we believe to keep our peace of mind, in fact other
trials may arise when we surrender to God. </span></div>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
never been afraid of dying. I’ve always been OK with the idea that my Self
could be over when my </span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">body gives up. We are such an infinitesimal part of the
universe, so limited by our human boundaries. But there have been moments when
I’ve had a perception of a hidden</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> reality, and those moments made me who I am
today, a believer in the afterlife.</span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I’m not ashamed of linking my faith with
this vague perception of another dimension, because if Jesus is alive, as I
feel he is, he inhabits a dimension that is not our own. I also have a feeling
that my father, who passed away a few years ago, is still there for me,
watching me from another world. He felt deeply his role of parent, not
as one who must function as a teacher of morals, but as one who is responsible
for the well being of his children. His tendency to rule our lives, at least
from a practical point of view, could become really overwhelming. I suspect
that he would have a hard time leaving us on our own, even now that he’s not
among us anymore. I bet he wouldn’t rest in peace until he knew that we were
safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was watching over me, trying to put me on
the right track.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">But I know that it was Jesus who showed
me the way. Only when I found my faith I realized that I was wasting my life . </span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-58090363914611753572013-04-14T18:59:00.001-04:002013-04-14T18:59:34.701-04:00The Humanity of Jesus <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My religious "awakening" has little to do
with buying into a belief system, but has everything to do with Jesus. I love everything about him,
even his bursts of anger, because they make him so deeply human.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In A World
Waiting To Be Born Dr. Scott Peck writes that he became a Christian after
twenty years of dabbling with Zen Buddhism. He maintains that, without this
training, he couldn’t have accepted the paradoxes of Christianity. Like me, he
read the gospels for the first time in the second half of his life and that was
it. Here is how he describes the effect they had on him:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">"I was absolutely thunderstruck by the
extraordinary reality of the man I found in the Gospels. I discovered a man who
was almost continually frustrated. His frustration leaps out of virtually every
page…I also discovered a man who was frequently sad and sometimes depressed, frequently
anxious and scared. A man who was prejudiced on one occasion, although he was
able to overcome that prejudice and transcend it in healing love. A man who was
terribly, terribly lonely, yet often desperately needed to be alone. I
discovered a man so incredibly real that no one could have made him up. “</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">No one would have made him so human, if the
purpose was to turn him into God. The evangelists were doing their best to
report accurately what they were told, even though they did not always
understand it. Those who let the gospels speak to their heart will literally
“meet” Jesus, this man who had so little peace of mind but so much wisdom, and
will fall in love with him. Christianity is all about falling in love with
Jesus, and for the atheist this is both despicable and inexplicable. I can
accept the latter, in fact it’s difficult to explain in rational terms the
reasons of faith, but I don’t see why it should be despicable. Love is what
makes the world a better place, it’s an innovating force. Political leaders
have been loved for their ideas, so why not a religious figure? A person who is
capable of falling in love with an abstraction (which will be perceived as real in time) is a person
capable of a higher level of spirituality, who can see beyond the material
world. Religion is not about believing in the supernatural, it’s about
experiencing something pure, transcendent, above our everyday concerns. Among
Christians one can meet people who take life seriously, who let go of their
shields and are open to one another. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I realize now that I’ve never taken my life
seriously, rather I’ve lived as if I was playing Russian<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roulette. Fun, that’s all I wanted. I never
asked myself if I was being the person I really wanted to be, if I was living
up to my potential. It was the encounter with Jesus that saved me from my stupidity.</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-4234509823522052802013-04-08T13:52:00.000-04:002013-04-08T13:52:27.746-04:00GRACE<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Encountering Jesus is like listening to a
beautiful song. The melody grows on us little by little<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and soon we can’t get it out of our head. It
becomes the sound-track of our best moments. It evokes our deepest emotions and
a longing that sometimes is painful because the object of our desire is
elusive. But other times the music is joyful and then we sing at the top of our
lungs. I listened intently, trying to discern every instrument and chord, and a
shift in my consciousness took place. I didn’t look for it or take
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">You are sitting in your living-room watching
TV. A friend, someone you knew when you were young, comes in and sits next to
you. You haven’t seen her in decades, so you don’t know how to relate to her.
You are polite, surprised to see her but quite indifferent to her presence.
After a few words you go back to your TV program. She talks once in a while,
trying to catch your attention. At first you listen just to be kind, but little
by little she involves you in the conversation. You ask her questions, but she
doesn’t respond to your curiosity. You feel that she wants you to find the
answers on your own. You are confused but you act on her suggestion. Soon
enough the room is filled with enthusiasm. You are literally on fire but you
don’t know why. Slowly but steadily, you start seeing things more clearly. By
the end of the day you trust her completely. You know that she came to help you
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This is what happened to me over a period of
months. That woman, the friend of my youth, was not a person or a voice in my
head, but was a presence nonetheless. I depicted her as a woman because she was
“grace”. My shift of consciousness came by grace, but of why she came to me I
have no idea, Thank God she gave me a try.</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-72182427135588331242013-03-31T15:45:00.001-04:002013-03-31T15:45:48.959-04:00Easter Thoughts<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I remember going to mass on a Sunday and
listening to the priest preaching about the gospel story of the Caananite
woman. In this passage, Jesus doesn’t seem willing to heal the woman’s
daughter. She’s a Gentile, and Jesus tells her that he has come “only to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The woman keeps begging him, and at the
sight of her faith Jesus changes his mind. While explaining this gospel story,
the priest used exactly these words: Jesus changed his mind. Then he added:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“He grew in the understanding of his
mission.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus was fully human. He changed, he grew,
and these are human prerogatives. Theology teaches that he’s God incarnated, yet
this doesn’t mean that he always possessed the infinite<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>wisdom of God. His vocation developed step
by step, until it reached its climax.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis after him,
wrote that if Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, then he was a lunatic, for only
lunatics call themselves Messiah. Some contemporary atheists love to take
advantage of this paradox to state that Jesus was, in fact, mentally ill.
Luckily, no modern thinker who deserves this qualification holds this opinion.
Wisdom is not a prerogative of a mad man. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">So what kind of man was Jesus? He called
himself Son of Man, and only at his trial he admitted his role of Messiah,
knowing that this would have led to his execution. Jesus’ actions were
spiritually subversive but also, indirectly, socially subversive. He healed the
disabled and then sent them to the temple to reclaim their place in Jewish
society. He shared meals with the outcasts. He had women disciples. He extended
his benevolence to the Samaritans, to the Gentiles, he even healed the son of a
Roman soldier. Why? Because he believed that Israel’s God was the one true God,
the God of all people. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus challenged the social structure of Judaism, therefore
he was bound to incur hostility and he knew it. He cast suspicion on
religious wisdom, he subverted the usual way of looking
at the world. When he died, the early Christians behaved in an unprecedented
manner, which can be explained only with the metaphysical event that raised
this crucified Jew to the role of Son of God. They did not adhere to the Mosaic
code, did not circumcise male children or observe the Sabbath, did not defend
their territory or themselves. Jesus changed their culture and their religious
beliefs. In time, the same happened to the Romans, and in their case it meant
the end of the cruel games in the Coliseum and of the prostitution of children.
This is the most beautiful interpretation of Jesus’ death: He chose to die to
show the world the power of goodness and peace. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King have won seemingly lost wars following his principle of
non-violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I believe that Jesus was struck by his call
to surrender to God. He was scared, but he faced his destiny because he knew he
had to fight evil with self-sacrifice. He was an eschatological prophet, not a
meek moral teacher or a political revolutionary. He fully took up his role when
he found himself capable of healing those who had faith in him, as we can read
in his words:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“If I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has
come upon you.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The same message is revealed to John the
Baptist’s disciples when they ask him if he was the one who was awaited:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Go and tell John what you hear and see: The blind regain their sight,
the lame walk, lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised…”. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus preached perfection, the kind of
perfection that men can’t achieve. Yet it’s only aiming at it that we can hope
to raise above our weaknesses. He preached the morality of another world, and
for this reason his teachings are difficult to follow today as they were two
thousand years ago. He did not come to change the rules of first century
Palestine, he came to change the rules everywhere and forever. His wisdom was wide
and eternal. Each and everyone of the one-sided interpretations of Jesus are
inadequate. The gospels offer ground for both revelation and misinterpretation
and there is nothing wrong with this, since Jesus challenged scriptural
authority. A part of me yearns for words written by Jesus’ own hands, but I
know that, being who he was, he couldn’t have left any literature behind.
That’s a human business.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The gospels can be read in the wrong way,
and there are at least two wrong ways to read them, opposite to one another.
Disregard the miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life and you will find nothing but a
prophet, although a very successful one, since Christianity is still the
largest religion in the world. Put too much emphasis on the supernatural and
you will be faced with a fantastic story<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>about <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>a heavenly being who came on earth in some mysterious way only to offer
himself as a sacrificial lamb to a cruel God and then flew back to heaven. But
there is one more way to read the gospels, as naïve as it may sound: Let them
speak to your heart. Little by little, Jesus will become a real presence that
will change you, embrace you, guide you. When that happens, you won’t ask
yourself who he was anymore, because you will know. </span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>_________________________</span></i></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-26636155416651028702013-03-25T12:57:00.000-04:002013-03-25T12:57:03.630-04:00Hell and Gehenna<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming
others…It is not a question of God sending us to hell. In each of us there is something
gnawing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I believe that this passage inevitably touches a cord in everyone’s
psyche. We all have tasted hell on earth, but few of us have realized that we were creating it with our
own hands or with our own thoughts. Sometimes we have also tasted joy, or had an intuition of
the divine, but we have overlooked it. Perhaps, even in the afterlife, it will be difficult to
acknowledge the reality of a principle in which we have never believed. But we’ll get there. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">C.S.
Lewis, though, is more pessimistic than I am:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“In the long run the answer to those who object the doctrine of Hell is
itself a question: ’What are you asking God to do?…To leave them alone? Alas, I’m afraid that’s
what He does.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">However, I must say that I am precisely one of those who object to the concept
of hell. How can this doctrine cope, for instance, with someone who became a serial
killer because he was abused as a child? This lost soul is entitled to another chance! Reincarnation
just makes more sense to me. I have embraced this idea because I believe that Jesus embraced it
too when he said that the prophet Elijah had returned in the person of John the Baptist. Nobody knows what happens after we die, but I think reincarnation is a possibility.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Maybe
our essence is not contained in our personal identity. Maybe we have to get past the point where we
can only recognize ourselves through our memories. I bet that after having lived many
different lives, this would come easily. Imagine if, in the afterlife, we could remember them all.
We couldn’t identify with any of those persons that we have been on earth. We would see them
all from a distance. If detachment is our spiritual goal, reincarnation would be a
good way to achieve it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I think that Jesus’ message is consistent
with the religions of the East: Heaven is a state of bliss and can
only be achieved by those who live in God-consciousness. A person who doesn’t
even try to live up to her faith is far from that state, just like a person who
leads a good life but rejects the very existence of that type of consciousness.
It won’t be a punishment if these individuals won’t know heaven, rather it will
be an impossibility. The former is not truly a believer, whereas the latter
won’t be able to get to a place that, for him, makes no sense at all. Satan
struggles for the death of God’s creation, and sin is the way to achieve it,
for it could lead to the self-destruction of the human race. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Theology teaches
that Christ is our Savior and that he dies for the forgiveness of sins, which is
not to be seen as a transaction between us and a cruel God, but as global
transformation of the state of affairs between God and his creation gone wrong.
Atonement is not only a personal matter, and not only our individual sins are
forgiven. In fact, Jesus’ aim was to reinstate People
Israel as the people of God. He went to the cross in an act of supreme love and
sacrifice, to defeat the dark power of evil.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Modern atheists hate the Christian concept
of us being redeemed, of needing salvation. They find it humiliating. I don’t
agree, or rather I don’t remember I ever was like them. I don’t see how anybody
can actually believe to be flawless: It seems to me like an enormous act of
presumption. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus said: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Where else can we seek for Jesus if not in
the gospels? Yet their content has been the object of scholarly controversies
for the last two hundred years. There are apparent inconsistencies within the
gospels, that much is true. The most striking one concern the very nature of
Jesus. Could it be that the same Jesus who preaches forgiveness
also threatens the sinner with eternal fire? In my modest opinion, there is no
real conflict here. Jesus tells us that the father will forgive us as we
forgive our enemies, because he knows the healing power of forgiveness. But he
also knows that evil will take care of itself and remorse will torment the
evildoer for eternity. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus had, so to speak, a personality with
many faces, and I don’t think we can dismiss the apocalyptic aspect of his
persona as a creation of the evangelists. As early as 1937 Carl Gustav Jung
identified the crucial problem of New Testament scholarship:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“The archetypal character of the life of
Christ can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical
details with world-wide myth motifs. These undeniable connections are the main reason why it is so difficult for
researchers into the life of Jesus to construct from the gospels reports and
individual life divested from myth. In the gospels themselves the factual
reports, legends and myths are woven into a whole.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The archetype of the God-man is embodied in
Christ and is inherent to everyone. When he says:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“<i>Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father
is perfect</i>”, he lures us into the mythical world of God. On Jesus we
project our longing for encompassing love, our desire to penetrate the Mystery
and to be one with the universe. Christ lives within, he’s the kingdom within
us, the God within us. He’s the way, the truth and the life. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-249451478240529562013-03-20T17:30:00.001-04:002013-03-20T17:30:14.992-04:00A Lot to Talk About<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">After an unbearably long winter, we are finally getting a taste of
spring. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">We southern Italians don’t have a good relationship with cold weather. The chilly air takes
our breath away and freezes our noses, so we give up strolling around town for the winter.
But today it was warm enough to go for a walk with my son. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“If I get it right,” I said to him, “you don’t like the idea of
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“That’s a silly question, mom. What I don’t like is the idea of a
supernatural judge inflicting eternal punishment or forgiving all sins, provided that one repents.
You can’t apply ethic values to a supernatural being.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Why not?”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Because the moment you allow a celestial dictator to enter the
picture, the entire ethical system is reduced to nothing more than ‘I’ll do this because God says so‘. Our
ethic values are a product of evolution. Society couldn’t function without laws. Many religious
people arrogantly maintain that ethics wouldn’t exist without religion, ignoring the fact that
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“But I’m asking YOU a very simple question! What is your choice,
punishment or forgiveness?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“If you want to know what I think should be done with a convicted
killer, well, I think he should be punished. But I don’t believe in capital punishment.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“So, should he spend his life in jail?”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Yes.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“That’s a sort of earthly eternal punishment, isn’t it?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I told you, you can’t compare human justice to a supposedly divine
justice!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“But we are made in God’s image!”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Maybe He’s made in ours!”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“True, that can be a problem. But let’s forget punishment and talk
about forgiveness. What’s not to like about it?”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“The total absolution of one‘s responsibility is immoral. The wrong
that has been done cannot be erased. ”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Don’t you think that to forgive is the only way to overcome one’s
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Well, I’ve always been able to leave the pain behind and go on with my
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absolved them.”</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“What you are describing IS forgiveness. Absolution means to declare
the defendant innocent, whereas forgiveness means to look evil in the face and then put it
behind our back. It’s only in this way that evil loses its power.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“It seems to me that you are taking meaning out of life with your
quasi-ascetic attitude. If something sad happens to me, I should feel hurt, because I want the
events in my life to matter.You religious people believe that you have to be happy whatever happens
because it’s the will of God!"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I don’t believe that God wills for people to get sick, or to be
homeless, or loose a loved one. But He can give strength if those terrible things should happen.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I’d rather be strong on my own, without the help of a hypothetical creator."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I hope you can. I’m sure you can.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Later that day, my son and I involved his father in our chat. He is
on his son side when we talk about the existence of God, but he’s on my side when we talk about
Jesus. He loves his parables, his sayings, his subtle intelligence. Paraphrasing the
professional atheists, our son often makes silly comments about Jesus, which unfailingly refer to the
problem of eternal punishment. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Jesus was immoral,” he begins, “He said that those who don’t believe
in him will end up in hell. This is a horrible thing to say.”</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I think he feels threatened, but for no reason. He’s a good person, and
good people don’t deserve </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">punishment. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">A few days ago I went to a conference on the subject of
damnation. When I came home Andrea asked me, trying to look cool:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“So, who goes to hell, only the bad ones or also those who don’t
believe in God?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Oh my!” I said, “Are you worried about your supposedly non-existent
afterlife?”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Not at all!” he answered, “I just want to know were you people stand.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Yet, he had a funny expression of his face. I know him well enough to
detect one one when I see it."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Don’t worry, you’re fine,” I said. “Jesus was an eschatological
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">understood in their historical context, although this is something that
your fellow atheists don’t seem to understand.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Hell is an invention of the church,” my husband intervened. “For Jesus,
Gehenna was the place of eternal punishment, but you have to read it as a metaphor for the
suffering of the soul that can’t get close to God.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“If faith is given by grace,” our son answered, “it is still wrong that
nonbelievers won’t have a chance to see God, in the improbable case that He exists.”</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“I can’t give you a chart of who is going to heaven and who is not!” I
said. “One way to look at the problem is that death might not be an entirely new state of being,
but rather the continuation of what we were during our lives.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">to be continued... </span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-77746641646926027332013-03-11T14:02:00.001-04:002013-03-11T14:04:22.633-04:00Insomnia<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I moved to the United States permanently, with my husband and son, at
the age of forty-three. </span></div>
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My mother passed away while I was here and my father, not having to
take care of her</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> anymore, came to visit me all by himself at the age of eighty nine. How
old and brave he</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> looked coming out of the airport, leaning on a stick! He also passed
away, in Italy, two</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> years later. I was living a difficult moment and one morning, about two
weeks after his</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> problems. </span><br />
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">A</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">ll of a sudden I felt his presence very clearly. The feeling was the same we have when we know that somebody is standing next to us but we aren’t
looking at him. It</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> lasted for about twenty minutes, and that was the one and only time I
experienced it. </span>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">For a long time I was unable to put this episode into writing. I
couldn’t find a poignant way to describe it because, in a peculiar way, it was very ordinary, devoid of
emotion. My father was simply there, speaking to me mind to mind. In A Grief Observed, C.S.
Lewis defines his encounter with his deceased wife as “business-like”, yet sharply
restorative. There is no nonsense about the dead, he writes. They are full of resolution. Utterly
reliable. So much so that I calmed down immediately and for good. From that moment on I asked my father
for help every time I was worried, and I sure had reasons to be. I was taking medications
for my insomnia, but obsessive thoughts were keeping me awake at night. It’s not an
overstatement to say that I was becoming suicidal, because that is one of the dangers of persistent
lack of sleep. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I was in bad shape, yet I recovered literally overnight, and that’s the right way to
put it, for I slept all night </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">through. My thoughts shifted in a different direction, and I felt that
there was no point in obsessing over my problems. All I had to do was to wait, and the
solution would come up sooner or later, even if I couldn’t take any action to achieve it. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In a way I
became irresponsible, yet that was my safety. There is only so much a person can do to change a
certain situation, and it’s useless and even dangerous to loose sleep over things that one cannot
accomplish. My recovery was so sudden, it can be considered as a miraculous healing. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In the last years I have learned to pray to Jesus when I
have a problem instead of asking my father for help, but I haven’t forgotten that day on the
porch, when I felt his presence so clearly. How did that happen? I wasn’t thinking about him
at that moment, of that I’m sure. He just popped out in my mind, maybe out of my pain and
my need for consolation. But perhaps he was really there to heal me, and honestly
that’s what I </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">believe. My son would say that this is a belief with no evidence, but
what kind of evidence are we looking for? I am content with my recovered ability to
sleep through the night. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Let’s assume that my father was really there in spirit. If one believes
that, then it doesn’t take such a big leap of faith to believe that Jesus appeared to his disciples
after his death. No matter how much I loved my father, I must say that he was a regular,
faulty human being. Jesus was not: He was perfect. From that perfection, a more
substantial presence <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">could c</span>ertainly stem, that is to
say, a “glorified body”. Jesus’ presence could not only be perceived, it could be seen, heard, even touched. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">As for me, I felt his love pouring over me once, but it lasted only a
few seconds. I blew it thinking that I was deluding myself, that it couldn’t be real. I
regretted it and wondered if I would be able to keep my rational mind shut if it happened again. It did one night, and I had no time to formulate any thoughts of doubt because I immediately fell asleep.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The first time my thoughts were just like my son's thoughts: How could someone who lived two thousand years ago be
there for me, care about me? I literally felt that he was embracing me with his love. It
was powerful, and I couldn’t take it. </span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Romano Guardini wrote:</span>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“When we experience any powerful sensation…the instant we try to
understand it, the current is cut. Wakefulness is wonderful but tiring, and we long to lose ourselves
in sleep. Sleep is pleasant, but how terrible to sleep away half of our lives!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I make amend for being too rational and I thank Jesus for revealing
himself to me. Had he left me alone, I would have slept away my entire life. </span></div>
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<br />
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></i><div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-35507749513181956052013-03-05T14:33:00.001-05:002013-03-05T14:33:28.680-05:00Nostalgia<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">My family wasn’t over religious. My mother went to church on Sunday and
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Look at these flowers!” she
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Back then I thought she was naïve, but I must admit that now I agree with her, especially when I think of all the animals that populate the earth.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">If
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Like my husband, my mother also met Padre Pio. I remember
vividly her disappointment when she told me that he had refused to give her the
absolution. He had a huge reputation for clairvoyance, and perhaps he saw in my
sweet mom an excessive attachment to luxury. When it came down to beautiful
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</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">As I’ve said before, my father lost all his
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Oh, how I wish we could do it all over again! Love and understand each other better in the light of Christ! </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I was born when my mother was forty-two. By then my father was making a
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I experienced a coincidence so peculiar that I had a hint of the supernatural.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-4917338344396710202013-02-26T15:38:00.000-05:002013-02-26T15:40:16.719-05:00Nature Miracles<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Today the historical accuracy of Jesus’
“startling deeds” is widely recognized among scholars, yet the line between
miracle and magic in the Greco-Roman world of the first century was often
difficult to establish. Some scholars claim that there is no difference between
the two, therefore Jesus can be labeled as a magician. But magicians used
complicated rituals and intelligible spells, whereas Jesus did not. His
adversaries, in fact, never attacked him with the charge of magic, although
some said that he was in league with Satan. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">One of the criteria used by
scholars<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to establish the historical accuracy of the
gospels accounts is the criterion of multiple attestation, which focuses on
Jesus’ sayings or deeds that are attested in more than one source. Only one
miracle is mentioned in all the four gospels, and that is the multiplication of
the bread and the fish. Yet, while I have no doubt about Jesus’ exceptional
healing power, I must confess that I have a hard time believing that he could
feed four thousand people with seven loads of bread and a few fish, but I’m
working on it. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In The Business of Heaven C.S.Lewis wrote about this particular
miracle with his usual wit:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Once in the desert, Satan had tempted Him
to make bread out of stones. He refused the suggestion. The Son does nothing
except what he sees the Father do; perhaps we may without boldness surmise that
the direct change from stone to bread appeared to be not quite in the
hereditary style. Little bread into much bread is quite a different matter.
Every year God makes a little corn into much corn.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The calming of the storm and the feeding of
the four thousand both fall into the category of the so-called “nature
miracles”. Even Catholic scholars, such as Reverend J.P. Meier, are skeptical
about their plausibility because they are unheard of in the natural world,
whereas healing still happen today in religious settings, so it’s not so
difficult to give them credit. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Being born in Naples, I’ve heard of a
particular nature miracle for as long as I can remember. It concerns the
liquefaction of Saint Gennaro’s blood, a martyr who was beheaded by the Romans.
His hardened blood is kept in an ampoule in the Cathedral, </span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">where the miracle happens twice a year, on the
first Saturday of May and on the 19th of September. Before the service, the
Neapolitans carry statues of saints in a procession, following the silver bust
of S. Gennaro. Later, in the Cathedral, the priests show the ampoule to the
people, while a group of women pray ecstatically until the blood liquefies. Then the bells start ringing,
and the crowd pushes its way through to take a closer look at the ampoule. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This miracle has a precise meaning to the natives of Naples, namely that
no major disaster is expected to </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">strike the city in the near future. Actually, when in
1980 the blood did not liquefy, an earthquake occurred </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">which took the lives of two thousand
people, and when the miracle failed to happen in 1528, the plague </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">broke out in Naples.
The Vatican removed Saint Gennaro from its list of saints on the ground of insufficient </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">historical documentation, but the Neapolitans rebelled to this decision, almost causing a riot,
so the Saint </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">was reinstated. However, the Vatican does not count the phenomenon of the
liquefaction of blood as a</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">proof of sainthood. In spite of that, my mom paid attention
to its successful accomplishment , and as a child I</span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I did too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-2019706518671818302013-02-18T17:04:00.000-05:002013-02-18T17:04:05.500-05:00Why I Believe in Jesus<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">There are prominent scholars who argue that no earth-shaking event took
place after Jesus’ death, except for some compelling visions and dreams. According to
them, the apostles felt that Jesus was still with them spiritually, and over the years the Church
came up with the tradition of him being raised physically. They think that this is the most beautiful
interpretation of Jesus’ story, because it gives him back his exceptional value as a human
being. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Other scholars strongly believe that this version of the birth of Christianity is just not good
enough and I agree with them, because to see Jesus as nothing but a moral teacher
leads inevitably to a complete distortion of the circumstances of his death. The truth is
that a Messiah was awaited and Jesus’ disciples thought he was the one. His crucifixion, given
their religious belief, could only mean that they were mistaken, for the Messiah was not supposed to
die, especially not by the hands of the Romans. This is why any historian who looks at the
gospels through the eye of a first century Jew knows that something must have happened to bring the
apostles back to their first conviction, namely that Jesus was the awaited Messiah. Love was <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>simply not enough to motivate them, in fact they fled when he was arrested and he died
alone. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">The birth of the Church is not
the only event that it’s difficult to explain if one rules out the resurrection. Anyone who knows something about ancient Jews will find
hard to believe that, almost overnight, they began to worship a human being as divine. They
considered the pagan idea that gods can take human guise as blasphemous, yet they called
Jesus the Son of God. For Jesus, the disciples completely transformed the basic shape of their
messianic belief, namely accepted a Messiah who would bring peace and justice to the entire
world and not only to the Jews. He would not rebuild a temple in Jerusalem, but a community of
disciples instead. He<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> would </span>not fight a war, but the Devil himself. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">According to Harris, in the modern Eastern world there are people who
are said to perform miracles and to have resurrected after death. I’ve read of a Tibetan
woman named Dawa Drolma (her son is still alive), who died at the age of sixteen and came back
to life five days later. She was clinically dead but her body remained intact, so her family didn’t
give her burial. She returned to the physical world with a deep understanding of the
afterlife. Although Tibetan Lamas were not inclined to give prominence to a woman, they had to
recognize her inexplicable knowledge of Buddhist theology and her paranormal abilities. I bet
Harris wouldn’t have too many problems believing this story and, as a matter of fact, I don’t
either. Why should I, if all miracles come from God? Harris wonders why an Indian guru who is said
to have returned from the dead doesn’t become the center of a worldwide religion. The answer
is that we don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">because</i>
he was raised and God was the doer of his resurrection. I wouldn’t even believe there is a God if Jesus hadn’t come on earth. We
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We believe because his whole life and death awaken </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">something so compelling in our heart that
nothing we experienced before has ever been even remotely close to it. This is the grace
people of faith talk about. We believe because Jesus lives inside of us. There is no other reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-65617946223073688982013-02-12T15:33:00.000-05:002013-02-12T15:33:23.417-05:00Sam Harris and The New Atheism<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br /><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Recently I was forced to reconsider self-knowledge practice in the
attempt to get to the bottom of my son’s passion for atheism. He’s very fond of Sam Harris and he asked
me to read his best sellers, The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape, so I patiently
submitted myself to the task. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Harris praises meditation and the Buddhist wisdom. Buddhism stemmed
from Hinduism and they share the same doctrine of reincarnation. Buddhists don’t believe
in God or in the afterlife.The original teaching
of the Buddha implies that we have no soul. What is it, then, that according to him is going to
reincarnate? The patterns that we create during our lives, namely our karma. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">There is no Self
involved in the concept of karma. Many Buddhists believe that we are like a stellar constellation:
From our planet we see it as a whole, whereas it is just an agglomerate of stars. In the same way, we perceive ourselves
as whole beings, but our Self is an illusion. The enlightened ones will annihilate
their “patterns” when they reach Nirvana. Today I find this ordeal quite
depressing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Harris insists that mysticism is a rational enterprise which requires
explicit instructions, similar <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">to t</span>hose, and I quote, for operating a lawn mower. It doesn’t occur to
him that some of us might not be inclined towards this kind of spiritual search. I tried it and I
found it ineffective. Maybe I couldn’t reach the point where all dualism and self-centeredness
disappear. Maybe I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to appreciate the wonders of a
teaching that can be compared to the instructions for operating a lawn mower.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Jesus came for those like me, who need emotional involvement. The
awareness that he died for us brings our affection to its climax. This awareness is the<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> byproduct</span> of a rational
reflection on his life, actions and motives. Paradoxically<span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">as it may sound,</span> the belief in
his resurrection, which was a supra-natural event, is also the product of a rational study of
early Christianity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt; mso-themecolor: text1;">However, Harris is witty and argumentative and I agree with many of his
ideas. <span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">But when it </span>comes to the analysis of
religious beliefs</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he misses the point. If only one person in a
given social context, he says, would maintain that a certain Palestinian was born
from a virgin and came back to life after being crucified, this person would certainly be labeled
as crazy. For Harris, the only reason why these beliefs are considered acceptable
is that they are so widespread. He doesn’t even try to articulate an explanation for why
billions of people believe in Jesus’ story, not to mention why ninety percent of the
world’s population believes in </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">some form of deity. For him, we are all victims of our illusions. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">True, the number of people of faith says nothing about the existence of
God but, to the atheist,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it says a lot about himself,
namely that he’s one of the few enlightened ones<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>who understand what faith is all about. But what if these very smart
people have gone lost in rationality? They have shut their brains to the perception of the
divine, overloading them with the concept of “evidence”. Without evidence, nothing is worthy of
consideration. Yet, in every religious tradition, God is spirit. He transcends nature, so why should
we find proofs of His existence in nature?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">According to my husband, there is a philosophical quasi fallacy in Harris’
argument against faith. Harris thinks that ancient men turned to religion to explain<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>phenomena that were later adequately accounted for by modern science, therefore, in the twenty-first
century, we should give up the obsolete beliefs in the supra-natural. Harris also thinks
that the desire for happiness is innate to the human being, as it is the awareness that it can be
achieved only through a peaceful, civilized behavior. For him, the moral sense doesn’t come from God but
stems from the ultimately selfish attempt to live a well-balanced life. Therefore,
Harris builds his philosophy around the idea that the human kind possesses an innate quality, namely
the desire for happiness. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Now, if religions were largely generated by independent cultures with
no interaction with one another, and today <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>90% of the
world population still tends to believe in God (or something equivalent) in spite of the discoveries of modern science, this
tendency may <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>also be investigated as an innate quality on a par with the desire for happiness. But if
this is the case, Harris’ founding ethics on one innate trait and disregarding the other as
obsolete, is a judgment of value. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Future investigation into the
biology of happiness and religion may reveal that the two notions are connected in such a way that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>happiness may be achieved only through the fulfillment of a religious project. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Harris trivializes Christianity,
reducing it to a number of supernatural events. But there is a lot more to it than that. After all, only the gospels of Luke and
Matthew celebrate his virginal birth. If one day it was discovered that this is just a myth, the
Christian belief would have to adjust but wouldn’t die. However, all the four canonical gospels narrate
about Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection, and it’s there that our faith is founded. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-87456070477233718302013-02-04T12:59:00.000-05:002013-02-04T13:04:30.599-05:00Meditating on the Amalfi Coast<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Love is risky, for when we love we make
ourselves vulnerable. Some of us are afraid, and subconsciously choose to hurt
one another to avoid lowering our defenses.
In that context, to show our love is too dangerous. So it is the love for God.
People are afraid of having to give up too much if they come to believe in God,
and even more if they come to believe that Jesus died for them. Yet, what Jesus
asks of us can be surprisingly easy. If you renounce your self-absorption,
you’ll gain a new self instead. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I couldn’t have changed my life by an act of
the will. I embraced Jesus and it simply happened. This is the huge difference
between Christianity and other major religions: They have teachers who show the
way to salvation. Jesus is the only one who claims to BE the way. What does
that mean? Only those who experience it can understand it. Jesus faced humiliation,
torture and death because he loved us. God is Christ-like, so He loves us. If
we are sure of this we’ll love him back and everything will come easy, out of
pure love. We won’t have to work on ourselves anymore, if we believe in Jesus.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">When I was attracted to Buddhism and
self-knowledge I tried and tried again, but my life did not improve. Why?
Because I was once again concentrating on myself, and there was no love involved. I was in my early twenties back
then and I was spending a lot of time with some friends of mine who had managed
to rent a house in the most amazing area of the Amalfi coast. It was an old villa with thirteen rooms, a
fireplace and a beautiful terrace. When the house was built there was no water
supply, so a few rooms were beneath the ground level in order to gather the rain and be used as swimming
pools. For us they became the grotto party area, furnished with candles and
pillows. The rent was very affordable because one had to climb seven hundred steps from the road to reach that
house, which was located above the small town of Praiano, and from the road to
the beach there were six hundred more steps. But we were young and it was <span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">a </span>magical <span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">world.</span> </span></div>
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<br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In that house I lived the most wonderful moments of my life. If I close
my eyes I can still see the coastal mountains and the blue sea at the bottom of the twelve hundred
steps. </span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">During the summer we would go all the
way down and then swim or climb a hill or take a rowing-boat to reach an empty beach, the
existence of which was known to very few people. We carried sandwiches and beverages but no
sunscreen or hats. All the girls were rigorously topless, but if there was a
lot of sex going on I wasn't
part of it. I had just ended a long-term relationship and I wasn’t in the mood. The breathtaking
beauty of the place was enough to make me feel elated. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In the evening we would climb our way up to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trattoria</i>, where we ate the most delicious sea food, and then up to the villa, where self-knowledge practice would
go on into the night.<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">During</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> the winter we
didn't go out much. We would seat around the fireplace and sing, talk and dance. We could see
the Mediterranean deep down under the steep mountains. At night the moon would draw a silver
sword into the water, and all the small boats anchored near the beach would turn black against the
light. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">It was the perfect environment for meditation. I tried really hard, but it didn’t work for me.
I remember clearly how our meetings were carried out. My friends and I would sit in a circle.
One of us would read a passage that would represent a negative state of mind, for example
resentment. Then, after turning off the lights, our leader would guide the others into complete
relaxation. Finally, we had to imagine a small luminous sphere penetrating inside our head and at the same time face our resentment. </span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">At the moment
the trick seemed to work; whatever it was that had upset me didn’t seem so important
anymore. We were supposed to become familiar with the peaceful state of mind that occurred with
relaxation, to the point that we would be able to evoke it in real life stressful situations.<span style="color: #c00000;"> </span>I practiced this technique for about two years, but I never reached that point. To tell you the truth, I got
tired of the silly little sphere that would not appear inside my head when I needed <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">it. It just wasn’t my thing, and now I know</span> the reason. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">In “The Lord” the theologian Romano
Guardini wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">”Buddha is free, but his freedom is not that
of Christ. Possibly Buddha’s freedom is only the ultimate and supremely
liberating knowledge of the vanity of this fallen world. Christ’s freedom is
based not on a negative cognition, but on the love of God.”</span></div>
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<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-67767021681176463462013-01-27T13:28:00.002-05:002013-01-27T13:28:40.617-05:00Are Miracles for Real?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I’m not trying to convert my son, nor I hope that his new girlfriend will be able to that any time soon. I just <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> h</span>ope he will understand that the professional atheists
he admires so much are far from being always right. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">For example, the British journalist
Christopher Hitchens (who died last year, may he rest in peace) reported </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">in "God Is Not Great" that the Vatican scandalously claims phony miracles
pursuing the proclamation of new saints. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Hitchens writes that he was invited by the Vatican to testify as a
critic at a hearing on the beatification of Mother Teresa. He suggests that, although the priests
seemed to ask for his opinion in good faith, the process was a mere farce, for Mother
Teresa was beatified in spite of his negative testimony. In his mind, the Vatican should
have listened to him only, overlooking the rest of Mother Teresa exceptional life. Poor lad,
those priests didn’t take him seriously! But how could they when even I, a nobody in
religious matters, </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">can easily unveil his partiality? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; punctuation-wrap: simple; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Miracles don’t have to subvert the laws of nature. Something
that might look as a fortunate coincidence to an atheist may very well be a God willed
event, and that was the case in which Hitchens was involved. But of course, the
Vatican wouldn’t consider such an event as proof of holiness. The Church is very cautious in accepting miracles as truthful. In The
Book of Miracles, Kenneth Woodward testifies that for decades he personally observed the
Vatican’s canonization process for various causes of saints. Whoever thinks that
the Vatican looks for chances to impose holy figures on the public is making a wrong
assumption. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Since the twelfth century, the Church gradually developed a legal process of
investigation to avoid that the </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">cult of saints would obliterate the worship of God and Jesus.
Miracles worked during the lifetime of the candidate do not constitute a reason for sainthood.
Catholics, in fact, believe that the devil can work miracles too, so what matters is if the life of the
candidate was a pious life. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Once the Vatican has collected enough proof that he or she led a holy
existence, posthumous miracles are taken into serious consideration, for the holy person is supposed
to be in heaven with God in order to intercede for people on earth. Tools of modern science and
medical technology are employed and a dossier is prepared by Vatican officials, which is
reviewed by sixty medical consultants. Cancers with high rates of remission are excluded and the
healing of the disease must be instantaneous.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Of course all the above doesn't
prove that miracles are operated by God, but it does indicate, in my opinion, that there is communication between the living and the
dead. Psychosomatic diseases show that there is a definite connection between body and
mind, where the mind can cause the disease. Nevertheless, I don't believe that terminally ill
people could think themselves back to health, except if they had spiritual power of their own, which
can't be the case for every healing allegedly performed by saints. Modern scientific studies have
shown that we actually have the ability to affect the external world and our physical self
through the power of our emotions, but to what extent? Could we cause the disappearance of a
tumor overnight, if </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">we truly believe that it’s possible? I don‘t think so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The saint is the one who was known for possessing healing power in life, so he or she is probably the one who
works the miracle when called for by the sick person. The latter, however, must have total
faith in him. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">Is the saint pleading with God on behalf of the ill person or is he operating on his
own? To answer this </span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">question I have to put my faith in Jesus. He said that we have a Father
in heaven who loves us all, and I believe him. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5124315598918243103.post-42716330106227393462013-01-20T13:30:00.000-05:002013-01-21T16:38:00.749-05:00Family Interaction in Faith<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">This is what Jesus had to say concerning
family ties:</span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me, and
whoever loves son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">We can read Jesus statement in the
context of our endurance for sorrow. Would we turn against God if something
happened to our loved ones? If instead we would ask for help, maybe we would feel
less alone. </span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">I can almost hear the answer I would have given a few years ago to
what I’ve just said: How could an abstract entity help us face the pain? Why
should we fool ourselves with heavenly tales? But today I suggest that we try
to ask for inner strength. I don’t know how it happens, but we’ll become
stronger. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">As I’ve said before, my father lost all his
possessions because of wrong investments in Yemen. It was very difficult for my mom to adapt to
the new situation, and she was never able to renounce all her habits. I
couldn’t help but finding her a little immature, although she had a big heart
and was a good mother.</span><span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was the only one in my family who was
professing religion, and this is one of the reasons why I never took it
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">him than my mother was to me, although for
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">“You’re right,” I answered, “I couldn’t take a hold of my life. But
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">powerful the encounter with Jesus has been for me. I hated
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<span style="mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">you suffer, yet I was unable to
change our interaction for years. Now you can see that I’m different.”</span></div>
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</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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I suspect that today he understands that being good is a pattern among Christians. He fell for a catholic girl!</div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;"> </span><div class="blogger-post-footer">In order to reed the book from the first page please go archive and click the chapter you want to start with</div>Antonellahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17654671215760801771noreply@blogger.com2