When are we going to get together my friend?

You have me trying to read backwards and forwards! I don’t see a comment from earlier…but this one is here and it is a long one at that. Thanks!

One thing that I know is true. The joy I saw on your face when you came out of the baptismal font. That is real.

I tried to leave a comment earlier, but I’m not big on the blog thing and I keep forgetting I have a gmail account.

Anyway, I like the previous bits alot and this as well. I’ve always considered myself lucky to have “felt” God in a loving way before I became a Christian. In some way I aknowledged that relationship early on in life and I think became immune to all the attempts by others to “step in between”.

I recently saw the new batman movie, and the Harvey Dent person strongly recalled an aquaintance– a person of strong charisma and good deeds, but who denies God and believes religion to be the “opiate of the masses”.

I’ve taken to standing up to these statements lately– Trying to call them out. The message or perhaps the tone I get from most of my “educated” friends, is that we Christians (and they typically mean Evangelicals (which even more hidden means Scary Creationists!)) are ignorant, naive. Belief in God in general and Christianity in specific is the mark of the unsophisticated and unschooled.

Anyway, when I was young before even college and Philosophy. I came to know that good and evil, and right and wrong are real. And the other thing I figured out was that it is universal. And on top of we have empathy that transcends language and culture.

So the last time my acquaintance brought up the opiate bit, and the men control bit, I asked who was doing the oppressing: God or Men? He pretty readily admitted it was men. Then I asked him did he believe in Right or Wrong, Good and Evil. Yes, was the answer. Where did he think that came from?

And this is where many people fall down in there thinking. Men, he said, invent right and wrong. And I think that is probably what most who share his kind of thinking would say… and they’d give all kinds of reasons, biological, psychological, all stuff that they got from someone else. Not really THOUGHT about themselves. But they’re thinking (and you can tell by the way they sound, and the way they look at you (if they do) or their friends conspiratorially), they’re thinking that Good and Evil is a lazy cop out and not in the realm of real thinkers. Ha! ابو علی الحسین ابن عبدالله ابن سینا‎; would get a good laugh at that! Aβιτζιανός. Yeah? Avicenna Ya know that great Persian dude that pretty much had it right on? Well if you don’t know who he is and what he taught maybe you shouldn’t go looking at me so condescendingly.

Lord, it would have been much easier if I’d read C.S. Lewis at 13 instead of in my late twenties.

I’d ask any of those secularist types to really think a bit about where right and wrong comes from.

So, didn’t mean to go off there. And wasn’t trying to do the Rood Awakening thing below, either, but I’ve thought a lot about all this, too my friend and I certainly don’t think it hurts to do so.

Love ya,
David