abetterhope

Lewis answered: "A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those tho try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in...

"With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a `lucky chance.' If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over... I would add that Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists on the philosophical implications of the scientific data. Two noted philosophers, one an agnostic (Anthony Kenny) and the other an atheist (Nagel), recently pointed out that Dawkins has failed to address three major issues that ground the rational case for God. As it happens, these are the very same issues that had driven me to accept the existence of a God: the laws of nature, life with its teleological organization and the existence of the Universe."

"One thing becomes clear when you think about the power of feeling. No one can succeed in mastering feelings in his or her life who tries to simply take them head-on and resist or redirect them by 'willpower' in the moment of choice. To adopt that strategy is to radically misunderstand how life and the human will work." Dallas Willlard - Renovation of the Heart (p118)

"Dawkins seems more interested in polemics than in careful scrutiny of arguments. His discussions of the traditional proofs for God's existence are lamentably scrappy: the first three of Aquinas' Five Ways, for example, are dismissed en bloc in two pages whose cavalier abruptness will be embarrassing even to Dawkins' most ardent fans; and the ontological argument, whose logic has fascinated atheist philosophers as eminent as Bertrand Russell, is shrugged off as "infantile ... logomachist trickery". Whether these various traditional arguments are valid or not is beside the point. The point is that Dawkins' blatant failure to give them a decent hearing hardly serves the cause of the impartial scientific fairness that he professes to uphold."

"When Christians honor their lofty calling without passionately experiencing and embracing the deep ache in their souls, something important, even vital is lost. Their approach to people is less human, less real, less 'there'. Often they instruct, motivate, and challenge others, but their lives fail to draw people to the Lord. They push more than they entice"

Dr Larry Crabb, Inside Out

No other religion enjoys anything like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. If you are wanting [God] omnipotence to set up a religion, it seems to me this is the one to beat!
Antony Flew

The most terrifying aspects of the foundational shifts in our time is not just that the line between right and wrong has all of a sudden been made unclear, not just that morality has somehow had its boundaries altered. What has dramatically changed in your time and mine, is that those of us from a religious perspective or a Theistic worldview, it is now being demanded of us that we join the warring cry, a triumphalist cry of those who have taken off these restrictions, that religion had imposed upon them for centuries. So lifestyles that once at best abhorrent, or undesirable by Christian standards, we are now told not merely to accept - which is one thing, but to celebrate those very issues.

If a relationship with Jesus isn’t the first, last and middle thing you do, you’re on sticky ground. Everything comes back to prayer. Everything comes back to me at the Father’s feet and His love. At that’s a big Him and a little me.
Andy Freeman

"In light of God's judgment and justification of the sinner in the cross of Christ, we can begin to discover how to deal with any and all criticism. By agreeing with God's criticism of me in Christ's cross, I can face any criticism man may lay against me. In other words, no one can criticize me more than the cross has. And the most devastating criticism turns out to be the finest mercy. If you thus know yourself as having been crucified with Christ, then you can respond to any criticism, even mistaken or hostile criticism, without bitterness, defensiveness, or blameshifting. Such responses typically exacerbate and intensify conflict, and lead to the rupture of relationships. You can learn to hear criticism as constructive and not condemnatory because God has justified you."

The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.