Don Tiny wrote:
That's the key right there. That's what the word 'faith' is about ... if you knew how it all worked together, you wouldn't have to believe anything, you'd know. Faith, many times, makes you feel like you're putting your last dime on the number 000 even though there's no 000 on the roulette wheel.
But, as far as any 'plan' goes, well, sin isn't any part of said 'plan' any more than murdering, stealing, or yelling "God Damned Cubs" at the tv is.
Now, nobody is obliged in any way whatsoever to say how great being gay is any more than we're obliged to say how great the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are. But, at no point whatsoever is anyone released from the plain and simple charge of "loving their neighbor", as the statement goes.
I feel very badly for people so self-centered that they can't see they're trying to sit in place of God's judgement that they can't wait to justify their marginalization or outright hate of a given person or subset of people based on nothing more than their spin on what God says ... very often characterized by picking and choosing words and phrases to suit their truly damnable efforts.
Still, as before, nobody is released from their charge to 'love their neighbor' ... not even if that neighbor in question is a myopic, self-aggrandizing, big-mouthed windsock of a lawyer.
Now, that certainly doesn't mean hateful thoughts, words, and deeds are going to ever stop happening ... any more than hate groups and so-called religious zealots, the latter whom almost always speaking for their own interpretation of "god", will be gone tomorrow.
It just seems that between our individual lives, as well as lives of individuals placed around us, that there's way more than enough shit to deal with - and, ideally, help with - that folks that sit around telling anyone in earshot why this group or that group should be put in their place or, sometimes, even just wiped out, really would be best served by taking some time trying to remove the log from their own eye before continuing on their particular idealistic crusade.
Some real good stuff in this post. I particularly liked the highlighted stuff.
I know this kind of discussion is right in your wheelhouse given your training, Don. Quite fascinating. Would be a thing to have a discussion with you about this some time.
I've always been something of a... not an athiest, but someone who just doesn't buy the Catholic or Christian idea of God. But the funny thing is the more I learn about science the more that science does point to something huge and extremely energetic and completely inexplicable.
For example, we believe that everything in the observable universe today, billions of galaxies each with billions of stars and trillions of planets and so forth, was all once contained in a area no larger than an atom. What could that have been? When we consider that prior to the event known as the big bang (or if you want to get biblical I suppose we could call it the first day) there was nothing, yet within that nothing literally no space...and not just the absence of matter but an actual lack of space-time fabric... what the hell was actually there when nothing was there? It's odd... even in the absence of matter in the observable universe today exists the space time fabric. It's observable, predictable. And of all the matter we observe today, we postulate that less than 1% of what was actually released at the time of the big bang still exists today...
Odder still is the forces that hold this matter together today. We know that a great deal of the amount of energy (read: matter, energy, doesn't matter which, literally interchangable on the quantum level) necessary to allow the cohesion of the universe appears to be missing and literally unobservable.
Could these scientific revelations be an attempt at a scientific explanation of God?
Anyway, didn't really mean to get to this point.
I really wanted to say that I thought that David's post was unfortunate. Mr. Spada seems on the surface to be a likable enough person. He has shown some signs of generosity. I'm sure he has other redeemable qualities that I've not personally observed. This kind of thought process seemed out of character and sad. I hope he thinks about this and changes his mind, if not just because it's an archaic mode of thinking but also out of respect for his own business and aspiration for his broadcasting career.
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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014
bigfan wrote:
Many that is true, but an incomplete statement.