ethan_jin wrote:rhapsody wrote:Ethan-Jin,
I will never know the truth or untruth of what you are saying. You might "have read it somewhere" (and heard it a bit too often) or it might really be your own experience, and the way you interprete your experiences may be correct on top of all that.
It seems these things can never be communicated though. You and others have a strong feeling and belief that what you say is true. I have a strong feeling and impression that you guys and girls are being deluded and deluding each other. Certainly not the end of the world, as personally I can get along with most people easily. Faith-nonfaith hardly has a final say on anything in daily life.
Any cursory examination of the annals of history, no nation excepting, shows pages soaked with blood and horror, every day spent on earth offends the conscience and crushes the sensitive soul with examples of man's gross inhumanity to man. Every moment in the workplace, and even with friends, entangles one in sins, so that even the man who wills the contrary, sometimes finds himself drawn into a web of wrongdoing, unwittingly, by his own animal instincts for self-preservation and self-aggrandization, and a host of other neurotic wants (like a superiority striving). The sensitive soul sees that everything in the earth is so irremediably fallen, that nothing has the natural capacity in itself to effect a sustained regeneration, so that everything, because it falls so far short, nay, even inverts the ideal, quite rightly deserves to be damned - this is perhaps a recognition that I long tried to deny, trying to turn my eyes to what little that was 'good' in it, not realising even this to have been the remarkable result of grace. All this is what the Christian recognises.
One can certainly be shocked, being sensative enough, by the cruelties in life. From natural disasters to what human beings can do to each other. As a child to find out reality in the big real world was very painful for me. From pictures of WW2 to seeing a little bird just hit by a car and dying on the asphalt...they hit me like rocks. I remember my growing response to these matters was: "I gonna find out why this is so". How things work. I never felt the urge to condemn really, as if anything or anyone needs to be "damned" or "redeemed" to begin with. Lareron I just noticed especially religious people tend to have this need: condemn, judge, redeem, using big carrots and huge scary sticks. That itself, I discovered early on, causes as lot of suffering as it all ties in with the emotion and behavior connected with envy, hatred and cruelty.
