Straw Man God

You can’t just say there is a God because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is. The wonder of nature must be taken in its totality and it is a wonderful thing. It is absolutely marvelous and the idea that an atheist or a humanist…doesn’t marvel and wonder at reality, at the way things are, is nonsensical. The point is we wonder all the way. We don’t just stop and say that which I cannot understand I will call God, which is what mankind has done historically.
–Stephen Fry, The Importance of Unbelief, Big Think

Is it possible that NEITHER the skipping-through-the-daisies god of people’s invention NOR the one that fails to exist is true? That neither the stoic, aloof god of people’s imagination NOR the one who winks in approval of whatever people fascinate themselves with is true? Is it possible that He is neither a crutch for that which is unknown nor a crutch used by those who find their identity in their sensual passions and therefore suppose their mentally-constructed god gives them a thumbs-up? Is it possible that He is both love and fearsome? And is it possible that love is defined on His terms, not ours? Is He even knowable except through that which He reveals Himself? The lion has roared…who can but prophesy?

Galaxies

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The Hubble telescope, which has taken pictures over long periods of time of blank spots in the night sky, and it sends back thousands of little dots in photographs–each of which is not a star, but a full galaxy, each with an average of between 100 and 1,000 billion stars in it. And scientists estimate there are around 100 billion galaxies–all expanding outward, their red-shift demonstrates they are getting farther and farther away from each other all the time–far more stars in total than the estimated total number of grains of sand on all the beaches on earth combined.

How Big is the Sun?

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All the planets and dwarf planets in the solar system, the asteroid belt, meteors, Oort Cloud, Kuiper Belt, the 146+ moons and everything else in between… only makes up 0.14% of the total mass of the solar system. The other 99.86% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun.

Impoverished Romance

“There is a whole wonderful realm of relational intimacy that our culture misses out on by loading all of its human-closeness eggs in the basket of specifically sexual intimacy. We tend to refer to these latter relationships as “romantic,” and yet perhaps our sense of romance here is a bit impoverished. Perhaps there is room for a kind of romance with our beloved friends: doing for one another the little deeds of affection that we often associate with a lover wooing his or her espoused, things like writing letters that affirm the beloved’s virtues and beauty, attending carefully to the things that delight their soul and spontaneously and gratuitously fulfilling them, forbearing with their irritating eccentricities while dwelling on their excellences, overcoming their occasional coldness with a deeper kindness.”

–Mac Stewart, All Souls’ Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City

Two Sins

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“My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

Two sins–a turning away and turning toward. Is this not the story of all of our sins? A turning away from God and a turning to our own way? Is this not what the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 7 states when he says, “This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes”? God makes us upright, but we devolve and fixate on the dirt. Why is it that we do not cling to what God has given us? Why reach to steal those things which he has not?