More Quotes

Even though it is Christmas and the whole world is in celebration, my thoughts are still on death. But maybe I'm not so far off track because I really believe that death is an escape from life into eternity. And eternal life is really what Christmas is all about. A miraculous birth of God's own son. Why did God need to save all humanity in this way? Couldn't he just have changed the way of things without sending himself to suffer and die to change the fate of all human souls? I believe that He has to work in the order of his own creation to restore it, staying within the laws he set forth.I don't pretend to understand the unknowable but it makes sense to me that suffering must be important in some way. I don't know how else to explain an all powerful God allowing the pain and suffering throughout the ages. It frustrates me when people ignore this fundamental problem.

So many people try to wrap God up in a pretty little package with an instruction manual included. I think it is an attempt to gain a sense of safety and order; to make life palatable. The pop Christian culture filled with books, music, concerts, etc. seems like packaging to me. Beneath it all is a God that we can't really understand. A God who came to us as a baby, that grew into a man that was rejected and murdered to save us. A God who supposedly can intervene but often allows great suffering such as the holocaust and the genocide happening now in Darfur. I'm not going to solve the problem of pain, no one can. But I also can't gloss over it and pretend there isn't a problem, or begin to think I know God and can decide for all people that I am right.

I believe there is something more beyond this life and I believe it is very good. And right now that is enough for me. Here are the quotes I found:

Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity. -Milton

Death is like thunder in two particulars: we are alarmed at the sound of it, and it is formidable only from that which has preceded it. -Colton

Nature is the glass reflecting God, as by the sea reflected is the sun, too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere. -Young

THE SOUL SURVIVES! the arguments from reason by which the immortality of the soul is maintained are well known. But there is another argument, the scope of which has been so immensely enlarged in modern times that the disregard of it by the ancients does not count against its inherent validity. this is the general consent of the race. The future existence of the soul has been held as a matter of popular belief by the people of every age and country. It is found among the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Druids, the Celts, the Germans, the Slavs, and a great variety of uncivilized tribes in North America and South, in the centre of Africa, and in the islands of the sea. there are exceptions, but these are just enough to confirm the rule. The great body of the human family in every age have held, as they hold now, that the soul survives the body; and there is no way of accounting for this unanimity but by admitting the truth of the doctrine. Either it was derived by tradition from our original ancestors, who obtained it from their Creator, or it's evidences lie so deeply impressed upon the constitiuion of man that they compel assent. A judgement held so long, so widely, and by such different races, must be deemed to be correct. -G. F. Wright

Ok, that's probably enough for this post!