Religious Conviction and Evil

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

Pascal

Will God get what he wants?

from a review of Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, HarperOne, 2011

He points out the many New Testament passages that point in this direction, like "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them" (2 Cor. 5:19), and Jesus' statement, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself" (John 12:32). He adds to that verses about God's omnipotence and God's desire that all should be saved.
And then he asks the arresting question, "Will God get what he wants?"

Jesus: "do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. 10:28, ESV)

John Wayne as a protective paternal figure

From: Emanuel Levy, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life, The Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Metuchen, N.J. and London (1988), page 1:

John Wayne was born as Marion Michael Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, a small town in Iowa. His father, Clyde L. Morrison, was a druggist of Scottish descent, and his mother, Mary Margaret Brown, of pure Irish stock... When he was six, the family moved to Lancaster in Southern California, where his father settled on a ranch...

Levy, page 161:

Wayne's sexuality [in his movie roles] is also monogamous; he neither betrays his screen wives nor flirts with married women. But his domesticity tends to be more familial than marital, family and children are at the center of his pictures. "The longer Wayne kept his promise, kept providing, stayed true, kept being there despite cancer and illnesses and age itself," Michael Malone observed, "the more valued the strength of his fidelity and the integrity of his identity came to be." Women's attraction to the values he stood for was so strong that in the 1970s even the feminists came to admire him as a protective paternal figure.

three stringent rules for living

From: George Carpozi Jr., The John Wayne Story, Arlington House: New Rochelle, NY (1972), page 17:

Clyde Morrison [John Wayne's father] was of Scottish descent... [John] Wayne describes his father as the "kindest, most patient man [he] ever met," saying that the elder Morrison never had an unkind thought in his mind and rarely spoke harshly to his son or anyone else. Nor did he ever lecture young Marion [John Wayne]. But he did teach him three stringent rules for living which have the ring of orders tumbling from the lips of Davy Crockett in the nineteenth century:
1. Always keep your word.
2. A gentleman never insults anybody intentionally.
3. Don't go around looking for trouble. But if you ever get in a fight, make sure you win it.

Our limitation is God's opportunity

quotes from same kind of different as me: a modern-day slave, and international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together, by Ron Hall & Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent, Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee, 2006.

There's somethin I learned when I was homeless: Our limitation is God's opportunity. When you get all the way to the end of your rope and there ain't nothin you can do, that's when God takes over.
I remember one time I was hunkered down in the hobo jungle with some folks. We was talkin 'bout life, and this fella was talkin, said, "People think they're in control, but they ain't. The truth is, that which must befall thee must befall thee. And that which must pass thee by must past thee by."
You'd be surprised what you can learn talkin to homeless people. I learned to accept life for what it is. ...
Sometimes to touch us, God touches someone that's close to us. This is what opens our eyes to the fact there is a higher power than ourselves, whether we call it God or not. ...
And I can tell you something else--I don't care what no doctors say, Miss Debbie ain't goin nowhere till she finished the work here on earth that God gave her to do.
Denver Moore, p. 169-170

When we let Miss Debbie down into the ground, I knowed it wadn't nothin but her earthly body. But I still felt my heart sinkin right down into that hole. ...
And I told Him I didn't like it. That's the good think 'bout God. Since He can see right through your heart anyway, you can go on and tell Him what you really think. ...
I cried and cried out loud and told Miss Debbie that was the most important thing she taught me: "ever man should have the courage to stand up and face the enemy," I said, "cause ever person that looks like a enemy on the outside ain't necessarily one on the inside. We all has more in common that we think. You stood up with courage and faced me when I was dangerous, and it changed my life. You loved me for who I was on the inside, the person God meant for me to be, the one that had just gotten lost for a while on some ugly roads in life."
Denver Moore, p. 192-193

Why Avoiding Rejection Is a Major Mistake

"At 40 I now believe rejection is God's way of kicking you to higher ground."

~ Suzanne Finnamore

The Promises of God Are True

Tom Long, a former preaching professor at Princeton, says that while he was at Princeton, he went to a nearby Presbyterian church that prides itself on being an academic, intellectual church. Early on, he said, he went to a family night supper and sat down next to a man, introduced himself, told him he was new, and said, “Have you been here long?”

“Oh yes,” the man said. “In fact I was here before this became such a scholarly church. Why I’m probably the only non-intellectual left. I haven’t understood a sermon in over 25 years.”

“Then why do you keep coming,” Tom asked?

“Because every Monday night a group of us get in the church van and drive over to the youth correctional center. Sometimes we play basketball, or play games. Usually we share a Bible story. But mostly we just get to know these kids and listen to them.

“I started going because Christians are supposed to do those kind of things. But now I could never stop. Sharing the love of God at that youth center has changed my life.”

And then he said this profound statement. “You cannot prove the promises of God in advance, but if you live them, they’re true, every one.”

intense anger over injured dignity

The Wall Street Journal
THE SATURDAY ESSAY
MARCH 12, 2011
Is China Next?
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Will the protests that have swept the Middle East inspire a similar movement in China, or is that country's middle class more interested in the material than the political?

quote:
"Over the course of three short months, popular uprisings have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, sparked a civil war in Libya and created unrest in other parts of the Middle East. They also have raised a question in many people's minds: Are all authoritarian regimes now threatened by this new democratic wave? In particular, is China, a rising superpower, vulnerable to these forces?"
...
"Perhaps the most relevant thinker for understanding the Middle East today and China tomorrow is the late Samuel Huntington—not the Huntington of "The Clash of Civilizations," who argued that there were fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and democracy, but the Huntington whose classic book "Political Order in Changing Societies," first published in 1968, laid out his theory of the development "gap."
Observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Huntington noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers. This could be explained, he argued, by a gap between the newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people and their existing political system—that is, between their hopes for political participation and institutions that gave them little or no voice. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor in such a society; they tend to be led, instead, by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity."
...
"It is certainly true that the dry tinder of social discontent is just as present in China as in the Middle East. The incident that triggered the Tunisian uprising was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart repeatedly confiscated by the authorities and who was slapped and insulted by the police when he went to complain. This issue dogs all regimes that have neither the rule of law nor public accountability: The authorities routinely fail to respect the dignity of ordinary citizens and run roughshod over their rights. There is no culture in which this sort of behavior is not strongly resented."
...
"All social revolutions are driven by intense anger over injured dignity, an anger that is sometimes crystallized by a single incident or image that mobilizes previously disorganized individuals and binds them into a community."

—Mr. Fukuyama is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His new book, "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution," will be published next month.

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703560404576188981829658442
.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Don't be so humble

"Don't be so humble;
you're not that great."

~ Golda Meir