Happy Birthday to me.

The Dark End of the Street

"The conscience of fallen human beings is often mistaken (it needs to be educated by the Word of God) and often sleepy (it needs to be awakened by the Spirit of God).  True also, some people deny that they have any sense of sin, insisting at the same time that everything is relative now, for there are no moral absolutes anymore.  Do not believe them.  For by creation God still endows all human beings with a moral sense, which our inherited fallenness has distorted but not destroyed.  Unless and until people so violate and smother their conscience as to 'cauterize' it (a word Paul uses in 1 Tim. 4:2) or render it insensitive, it continues to trouble them.  They know they are sinful and guilty, however much they may protest to the contrary."

– John R.W. Stott

One Sunday...

"One Sunday in December, I was listening to Bach's Christmas Oratorio in Hedvig Eleonora Church... The chorale moved confidentially through the darkening church: Bach's piety heals the torment of our faithlessness."

– Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern, p. 281.

Of interest.

Where angels fear to tread.

Fore!

Trending

In the 1960s as a teenager, I stood with my fellow Democrats outside a segregated restaurant, because African-Americans were being denied the basic rights of human beings in my own country (many even dying as a result).

In the early 1970s, I marched with many of my fellow Democrats to end what had become an immoral war, a war that was killing not just innocent Vietnamese, but also many of my fellow Americans.

In the 1980s, I stood with my fellow Democrats to protest capital punishment, because institutional killing is wrong and because we can never be 100% sure the guilty are the ones being executed.

In the 1990s, I found myself standing against killing the unborn, guilty only of the crime of inconvenience. As with capital punishment, I could never convince myself that there was a point of 100% certainty at which I could know that an innocent human being's life wasn't being taken. But I found myself standing (at first) in a small corner of the Democratic Party's "Big Tent." Soon, I found myself pushed outside that tent.

Today, I am a man without a party. There are many things wrong with the GOP... but defending the lives of the helpless unborn isn't one of them.

That was then, this is now.

Then:
"One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave."
Angelina Grimké (1805–1879), U.S. abolitionist


Now:
"One who is a murderer at heart never recognizes a human being in a fetus."

What's rocking?

Where do we go from here?

Bible or Bard?

From whence it came?

Bible or Bard? | OxfordWords blog

Diana Collier

Is this it? Is this all there is?

Crash and burn.

This finishes it.

Isaiah 53:6

  We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

New International Version (NIV)

This just about sums it up.

Various people, spurred on by peer pressure from the Human Rights Campaign (a disingenuously named organization), have changed their Facebook profile picture to a pink on red pro-same sex marriage logo, as a way of showing support for the case being heard before the United States Supreme Court this week. Many have customized it as their own expression. The sample above (I will not name the individual) is my favorite, as it succinctly exposes the fallacy of the same-sex-marriage debate.

If you believe in some form of evolution (as I do), then you must realize that it requires swimming in the gene pool (and in the deep end at that). If you don't intend to swim in the gene pool, how do you intend to evolve? And if you believe homosexuality is completely genetic (I don't), how does one 'pass it on' with their same-sex partner?

Marriage has always been about children, family, and even property, but it has not always been about romantic love. The 20th century's popular basing of marriage solely on romantic love is probably (along with readily available and effective birth control, and abortion as birth control) why divorce rates are staggeringly high.

Beginning the festivities.

LAMENTATE
Arvo Pärt
Alexei Lubimov, piano
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Boreyko, conductor

ECM New Series

Buckle my shoe.

1.  
"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
– Tom Stoppard


2.  
"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."
– H. L. Mencken


 

Weighed in the balance.

"The repeated promises in the Qur'an of the forgiveness of a compassionate and merciful Allah are all made to the meritorious, whose merits have been weighed in Allah's scales, whereas the gospel is good news of mercy to the undeserving. The symbol of the religion of Jesus is the cross, not the scales."

– John R. W. Stott

My name.

The Name. The Movie.

The name.

Name twelve.

Name eleven.

Name ten.

Name nine.

New year.

Name eight.

Name seven.