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"Go beyond reason to love - it is safe. It is the only safety. Love all you can,and when you are ready all will be shown to you. The state of mind that mostneeds enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as *needing* to be guidedor enlightened. The sin that most needs to be loved and forgiven is the stateof mind that sees human beings as sinners."
The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
by Thaddeus Golas
quoted here
"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reasons for the hope that you have. Butdo this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander."
"My belief in JAH is demonstrated in my attitude towards my fellow human beings. My faith is seen in my actions as well as my words. I prove I love JAH whom I have NOT seen, by loving my neighbor whom I HAVE seen & protecting his rights even though they may not belong to my same belief, family, tribe, or race. I reserve moral judgement for JAH, as I hold no right to judge. I love those who may doubt, mock, or scorn my devotion to walk righteous & live in peace and love. In everything that I even try to do, I let JAH light always beam from dis here Rasta."
from Phiya
-- Jah's luv iz like phiya shut up in I bonz
-- And see also 1 John 4:20
"According to Jesus, the way to spot a true preacher or teacher, is by the effect and influence of their teaching, in his own life and the lives of other people.more on Mat 7:15 here.
.
The Apostle Paul tells us, in Galatians 5:22:
"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."
How do we spot a spiritual counterfeit?It's not easy. But Jesus says the best way,is by fruit-inspecting. We shouldn't be deceived by teaching that sounds good. We shouldn't be impressedby the size and success of a ministry. We shouldn't be misled, by supernatural miracles.We should look instead, at the life of that person, and the influence and effect of that teaching. Is itproducing love? Is it producing Joy? Is it producing patience? Is it producing kindness? Is it producinggoodness? Is it producing faithfulness? Is it producing people who are gentle? Is it producing people whoare self-controlled?"
"Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law;
ye are fallen from grace."
"... the qualities of which you may know, 'These qualities lead to passion, not to dispassion; to being fettered, not to being unfettered; to accumulating, not to shedding; to self-aggrandizement, not to modesty; to discontent, not to contentment; to entanglement, not to seclusion; to laziness, not to aroused persistence; to being burdensome, not to being unburdensome': You may definitely hold, 'This is not the Dhamma (Buddhist teachings), this is not the Vinaya (appropriate conduct), this is not the Teacher's instruction.'
"As for the qualities of which you may know, 'These qualities lead to dispassion, not to passion; to being unfettered, not to being fettered; to shedding, not to accumulating; to modesty, not to self-aggrandizement; to contentment, not to discontent; to seclusion, not to entanglement; to aroused persistence, not to laziness; to being unburdensome, not to being burdensome': You may definitely hold, 'This is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the Teacher's instruction.'"
"The Circle has long been a symbol of enlightenment, wholeness. What is essential to acircle is the empty space. In ancient Sanskrit the term sunyata, "emptiness," describes this essential attribute of allthings. ...The Latin word Ausculta is the first word of the Rule of St. Benedict. The word means "Listen." For us to actuallysense, see, or hear God, we first must get out of our own way. We set up our own obstacles by believing that ourdelusions, illusions, and allusion about ourselves and life in general are true, absolute and form objective reality.Instead of knowing reality or God, we are caught up in the web of our own subjective experiences which we project as being The Truth. The Rule asks the monk continually to learn how to listen rather than just hear. For furtherinsight, please refer to the Prologue of the (Zen) Rule of St. Benedict."fascinating -- compare the discussion of SATI -- Mindfulness -- in the Buddhist tradition
"If you take care of only a few people that you are intimately related to, you are practicing partial love more than universal love. It is partial love that is responsible for all the calamities that human beings suffer"
"Apocalyptic views salvage the prophetic belief in God's power and justice - but by shifting the focus of religious attention fromthe community as the primary beneficiary of God's justice in this life (the just community will be rewarded with shalom, peaceand prosperity) to the individual who will receive his or her just reward in an afterlife."
"...to most Pagans, the need to attack others is viewed as a sign of fear and lack of self-confidence on the part of the attacker."
As far as I can tell, Gwydion's suggestions are sincere and effective --
i.e. prescriptions which would make it more likely that Christian evangelists would convert Pagans!
"Several weeks ago I saw a television interview with former president Jimmy Carter. He was explaining how he had become involved with Habitat for Humanity. He said he had long been a member of a church made up of people who sincerely cared about helping the poor. Among the many projects they undertook, one thing they did each year was to collect money to provide a special Thanksgiving dinner for a poor family. And every year they would have to ask a social service agency to provide them with the name of a poor family. Why? Because no member of the church actually knew a poor family. President Carter pointed out how the irony of this situation suddenly struck him. The members of the church cared about the poor, but no one in the church knew anyone who was poor by name.
In the parable Jesus tells in today's Gospel (Luke 16) the rich man has no name, but the poor man does. So it is that our Lord himself reverses the common custom at that time of naming the rich but lumping the poor together in a nameless mass of humanity. From the very beginning of this parable, Jesus makes it abundantly clear that in the Kingdom of God the poor have names because the poor are real people."
"The presence of numberless rich men in Christian pews leads one to wonder if the gospel of Jesus has been kicked out of the church. Such men do not, and cannot, respect the person to whom every church is dedicated. ... If he had any faith in the doctrines of Jesus he would "sell what he has and give to the poor." And not only this, but he would be poor himself.
Jesus never said a kind word of the rich. He never uttered a word that contains any consolation for the millionaire. He never gave any command that encourages the 'laying up treasures upon earth.' What is a rich man in the Christian church for? He has no business there, if he is an honest man. He is living exactly opposite to the life Jesus commended. He is doing what Jesus told men not to do. He refuses to do what Jesus said a man must do in order to be his disciple.
Either the rich man who joins the church is a hypocrite, or the minister, that receives such a man into the church, is. There is a hypocrite somewhere. You do not find that Jesus went into the temple to flatter the money-changers; he went in there to drive them out with a whip."
HB: You say religion, like art, is part of being human.
How, then, do you distinguish good religions from bad?
Armstrong: Compassion is the key. That's the test, always.
"Inevitably, people do things to hurt us. Inevitably, we do things that hurt others. This is part of what it means to be human, to have feelings, to be imperfect, to be vulnerable. Compassion moves us beyond our own wounds and back into human community. It asks the question: What sort of people do bad things? The answer: lonely, scared, ignorant, confused, sick, misguided, angry, fallible, human sort of people - in other words, all of us."
The Unburdened Heart: Five keys to Forgiveness & Freedom
by M. Burton-Nelson
"In the holiday season of 2002, Herald Press offered its patrons, "just in time for Christmas gift giving," a leather bound gift edition of the Martyrs Mirror, 'a book that is sure to please anyone interested in Anabaptist history.' ... The etchings graphically show Christians being tortured, drawn on the rack, beheaded and burned by fire. Over the past four decades the Martyrs Mirror has sold far more copies than any of the leading Anabaptist-Mennonite history books. ...(See online original for references.)
The most famous image from the Martyrs Mirror is that of Dirk Willems. It shows a condemned Anabaptist who had escaped from prison, but turned back to rescue his pursuer who had fallen through the ice. As a result of his compassion, Willems was recaptured and burned at the stake. Today that image appears on Mennonite church banners, Sunday School curriculum publications, church bulletins, conference brochures, periodical mastheads, newspapers, books, and even on the label for a (failed) Mennonite beer. One mission worker has said that 'the Dirk Willems story is not only persistently remembered by Mennonites, but shapes our understanding of life and reality in a most profound way. . . . This story is quite possibly the most potent illustration in the Mennonite subconscious.' The memory of Dirk Willems warns Mennonites not to expect to be rewarded for good works -- a sharp contradiction to the American gospel of success."
"Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, a novel about the life and adventures of a German-Australian seaman in the first half of the 20th century, is 255 pages of blank verse. ... The wonder is that this is an excellent book, one that revealed to me things I did not know about the narrative uses of poetry. (You can get an amazing amount of action into a very few lines, for one thing.)
... Fredy sees an appalling amount of unhappiness, so much that he describes all of Eurasia as a great execution trench. ... This brings us to Murray's own outline of a theodicy for the first half of the 20th century.
Fredy is an ordinary Catholic. ... What worries him is not the existence, but the sanity of God. Fredy knows from his own experience that the only way to survive a beating is to pretend he is being hurt, since even a very cruel human being will eventually recoil from inflicting pain. God, however, does not. Whatever His purposes may be in allowing suffering in the world, they override every other consideration. Fredy's numbness is a way of dealing, not with his own suffering, but with the suffering of the victims."
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"What is virtue? Beneficence towards the fellow-creature. Can I call virtue things other than those which do me good? I am needy, you are generous. I am in danger, you help me. I am deceived, you tell me the truth. I am neglected, you console me. I am ignorant, you teach me. Without difficulty I shall call you virtuous."- A page on this site on / Virtue /
Feed the hungry
Give drink to the thirsty
Clothe the naked
Shelter the homeless
Visit the imprisoned
Visit the sick
Bury the dead
attributed to
Giovanni Francesco Bernardone, Saint Francis of Assisi