Archive for 'Uncategorized'
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief accountant $100,000.
After [...]
Posted: November 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief [...]
Posted: November 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none
HEAVENLY JUDGMENT
Where do Christian moral standards come from? We have the Ten Commandments and something that Jesus said was a more fundamental and all-embracing law: to love your neighbour as yourself. I don’t think anyone would quibble about the Ten Commandments. But the rest of the Jewish law books, the first five books of the Bible, [...]
Posted: September 10th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 3
WAS JESUS RACIST?
There’s a story in Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28) that raises the question. Jesus and some disciples were hiking through the region of Tyre and Sidon. It was a cosmopolitan region – people from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. On their way a Canaanite woman accosted Jesus, pleading with him to heal her mentally disturbed daughter. The [...]
Posted: August 31st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 3
HONEST TO GOD
I have been re-reading a book that caused a sensation in the Anglican Church some forty-five years ago. That was a time when Anglicans were more concerned about evangelism than sexual orientation. Bishop John Robinson believed that the Church had a deep-seated problem in presenting God to the contemporary secular society. He described the problem [...]
Posted: August 17th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none
HEAVENLY ARITHMETIC
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is often over-mystificated, but religious people should be mystified. A sense of mystery is an important element of religious experience. God is the ultimate mystery. Jews do not even attempt to speak his name. The ninety-nine names proclaimed by Moslems are abstract attributes; physical images are forbidden. Christianity, Michael [...]
Posted: May 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none
FOREVER AND EVER AMEN
Forever and ever - endless time. But what is time? We all know what time feels like, but we can’t really define it. Poets have described it as flowing like a river, but many philosophers and scientists believe that this is an illusion: it’s just the way our brain works. Our mental apparatus and our [...]
Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1
HEAVENLY STUFF
The reason I have called this blog The Divine Universe is that I believe that matter, the physical world, is sacred. This is clearly implied in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, invented in the 3rd century by Tertullian and adopted as a universal dogma by the Council of Nicea in 325. Tertullian referred to [...]
Posted: March 12th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none
OUT OF NOTHING
Whether people think theologically or scientifically, they believe the universe emerged from nothing. Catholics use the Latin word nihilo; scientists use the word vacuum. For centuries scientists and philosophers have been pondering about the vacuum, a region in which there is no matter. In recent years they have gone further and explored a theoretical [...]
Posted: February 17th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2
THE THOUGHTFUL UNIVERSE
Neurologists, molecular biologists and others in the field can tell us a lot about the electrical, molecular and chemical processes that take place when we think or feel with our senses, but such information seems remote from our subjective experience of consciousness. There is a huge gap between objective, scientific knowledge and our experience. Feeling [...]
Posted: February 8th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2