A mother sends her child off to war. She comes home and prays for her son’s safety and victory. Her prayers ask God to protect him and to destroy his enemies. She wants her son to come home as a war hero, someone who risks his life to protect the liberty of his family and country. Her friends and family also pray for him. They pray for his safe return and reunion of his family. Their country wants them to believe that the war is holy and her son is noble. So they trust that God will watch over him and help him wipe out his enemies.
Another mother on the opposing side of the war sends off her son to meet the other son in battle. She, her friends, and her family also pray to God for victory and safety. They wish God to grant him power to destroy his enemies. The propaganda wants them to believe that he is fighting for a good cause. And of course the loving Father in Heaven will watch out for his servant on this mission for justice.
Both mothers pray with good intentions. But little do they know, they are praying for total destruction to each other. Their prayers ask God to kill the enemy in battle so that they can have victory. Each side prays for God to ignore the other’s prayer and annihilate her son. They wish that God would kill another son, take him away from his family forever, and leave his mother in grief. Only this way, can they have their noble victory and their son can become heroes of war.
What is God to do about this?
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Idealism
Idealism is the philosophy or theory that a thing exists only if it is mind-dependent. Idealists say that we can know something when we form an idea about it in our mind. We can have an idea only if we are conscious of the idea. In other words, an idea is an object of one’s consciousness and is conditioned by consciousness. And idealists claim that anything that is conditioned by consciousness is mind-dependent.
Let’s say there is a coin in front of you. You see it and you believe it exists. But how do you justify that belief? Idealists would say that the coin is dependent on your mind. You know that it exists because you have formed an idea about the coin. The coin is an object of your consciousness. Therefore, the existence of the coin is mind-dependent.
That sounds kind of funny, right? What would happen if my idea of the coin goes away? Does the coin cease to exist? If the coin is just dependent of my mind, can anyone else see it too? Why is it that we can all see the same things? Are all of our minds connected?
I think that the idealists have a very narrow and almost selfish kind of view. They want to believe that man has power over everything else. Or an individual person can have authority over others. A thing can exist only if a man thinks it exists. How absurd is that!
God, not man, created the heaven and the Earth. And by the way, God created man too.
Let’s say there is a coin in front of you. You see it and you believe it exists. But how do you justify that belief? Idealists would say that the coin is dependent on your mind. You know that it exists because you have formed an idea about the coin. The coin is an object of your consciousness. Therefore, the existence of the coin is mind-dependent.
That sounds kind of funny, right? What would happen if my idea of the coin goes away? Does the coin cease to exist? If the coin is just dependent of my mind, can anyone else see it too? Why is it that we can all see the same things? Are all of our minds connected?
I think that the idealists have a very narrow and almost selfish kind of view. They want to believe that man has power over everything else. Or an individual person can have authority over others. A thing can exist only if a man thinks it exists. How absurd is that!
God, not man, created the heaven and the Earth. And by the way, God created man too.
Truth
How do you define truth? What is truth to you? Throughout history many persons have tried to find truth for themselves. Many have failed, when they tried to define truth apart from the Bible.
Here is a funny example. As one gets older, he acquires more experiences. And "the individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he, meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had seen a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true tone. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outré explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions."--William James.
Why go through all that trouble when you can find the truth in God's word?
Here is a funny example. As one gets older, he acquires more experiences. And "the individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he, meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had seen a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true tone. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outré explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions."--William James.
Why go through all that trouble when you can find the truth in God's word?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
