Freedom and Love

Freely choosing to abandon God. Will God let this happen? No He won't and one of my blogger heroes, Dr. Richard Beck of Experimental theology has come out at it in a neat post here.

He does this by saying that freedom cannot just be about having the freedom to choose for or against God. It has to be "thicker" or more than just that. It has to be about caring enough to make the choice for God. Read his article because reading it has made me incoherent.

Kim Fabricius is great

A quote from a wonderful and rambling post by Rev. Kim Fabricius

"What is the difference between evangelism and proselytism? That’s easy. Proselytism has no ears, it’s all mouth. Some Christians speak of evangelism and dialogue, or even pit the former against the latter. No! Evangelism is intrinsically dialogical, or it is – exactly! – proselytism."

4 hot things for you and me today

And it’s in that process that we discover something about death, judgement, heaven and hell, sure enough.

Death because of course that’s what we’re all afraid of. And this particular message of the Gospel in Advent tells us that death is what you have to go through in order for truth to live in you, the death of all those things that you want to use to keep you safe. And the way you react to that apparently not terribly good news, the way you react to that with patience, with protest, with joy, with terror, that’s judgement. That’s what decides the kind of person you're going to be. And if by some extraordinary miracle of love, trust, and grace you're able to face death and step into it and beyond it for the sake of the truth, that’s heaven. And if you’re stuck in a constant unwillingness to face your death and the truth that lies beyond it, that’s hell. The four last things? Well yes, but four last things that are happening right now, right here, in you and in me, pretty well every moment.

Templar of the earth

I wonder what I can do as a templar of the earth. The Badge from Vinay Gupta's site.

The Air conditioned Classes and our Elixir for Living

An preview of how slow collapse could take place if current energy use patterns continue. Of course in the west the solutions may be more elegant but one can hear in the backdrop of this article the clattering death stroke of the Industrial age. ... "IN his 1999 novel Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid wrote about the air-conditioned classes – the elite – and the non air-conditioned classes – the masses. Today, the divide falls between those who have a generator and those who do not. The moment the lights go out, generators are fired up; they roar and drone like a hundred speedboats, drowning out noise, conversation, traffic, thought. The stench of diesel spreads all around, black smoke belching up into the air and staining walls with soot. At least with a generator, life can go on, hamstrung but not halted. The generator-less come out on the streets to riot against the power cuts every few months or so, but return to their homes, defeated at the end of the day when nobody listens to them or does anything about their plight
.

Everyone with a little money in this city has a generator. Every business, every store, every office, every restaurant. The elixir they deliver, uninterrupted electricity, is more valuable than the sixty litres of diesel that a large-size generator can burn through in two days. "

Favorite's favorite but too expensive

It seems my favorite blog author is publishing a book on my favorite theologian. No wonder he stopped theology blog posts for quite some time now and has started fiction. The book with a special offer cost 60 UK pounds at eden.co.uk. Now I will have to find some justification to buy it at that really high price or just patiently wait and pray till somehow it drops in price.

Update : One bookseller has suggested the age group for this book. I wish 15-20 year olds could read this book. I know that if I had read it at that age I would definitely not be able to understand much.

Where I call myself home??

From a site that scares me. Now should I be happy that I was born in Kuwait and live there rather than in my mother's birthland, India. Should I revisit my, 'sort of decision' no to attempt to live in the US? The numbers below should make my choice really easy if I consider myself a ideal economic person. One who makes cool, calculated, rational choices after consideration of all the variables. O for a light that shines and illuminates the murky future...

New Year obligation to post

The Acceleration of Addictiveness: "What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating."

God this year and every year, save me from my need nay my visceral attraction to faster, slimmer, safer, shinier, cheaper toys that promise to give me convenience, peace of mind and other therapeutic benefits.

Some Aphorisms

I just had to post this from here (Note 118) . 

"You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane; but you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy."

That's what most marketing / sales talk is. To some extant the story of Babel in the Old Testament is the beginning of this kind of wholesale camouflage. Language used to  connect things that cannot be connected. 

Here are some more beauties:

Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Most modern technologies are deferred punishment. 

You will get the most attention from those who hate yrou. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with equal curiosity.

Dubai borrowed to put vanity buildings on postcards; America and W. Europe need to borrow to just survive.

Naseem Nicholas Taleb

No vicious circle in faith

"There is enough evidence in the lives around me to show that stepping into that circle is not vicious"

This rather genial  video of Richard Dawkins talking to Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and this is the last sentence of that clip. Rather astonishing Dawkins being led by the gentle giant into quietness and turbulent agreement.

Bravo.!!!

Power in the hands of angry men

A brief extract from a Salon article by Andrew Leonard

...The fear is that if Obama federalizes the response and supplants BP, not only will it be more difficult to get the company to pay for the response efforts, but the federal government may not have the capacity to get the job done.

Think about that for a second. The government of the most powerful nation the world has ever known does not have the capacity to stop an oil leak. And our leaders are getting mad at BP for missing deadlines? ....


It looks to me like power not only corrupts as in the old adage but one of the ways it does that is by cutting out its own sustainability potential. It seems obliquely sane enough to kill itself by cutting away its own roots. Maybe I should rephrase that -- power is not sensible enough to want to be rooted even in its own little copy of Heaven. It prefers indirectly to be non-existent. This agrees with some theology I am highly sympathetic to although I do not fully comprehend it - evil does not exist as an entity / thing. It is a kind of hungry self devouring void. (There is also a creative void but that is another essay)

The only thing that can extend already existing roots is the power of relationship in self-emptying and self-giving love.

Barth on Google Books on AIDS etc.

All I know about Barth's Church Dogamatics is from here. So I found this funny. (You will have to click the image to see the larger version to make it redable).