"It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Humtley & Palmer biscuit tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape. But I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit--to find out what I could do. No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means." --Marlow (Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad)
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Great/inspirational quotes
- Thread starter Lanora115
- Start date
“So how do you know if a dream is really from God or if it’s just an idea that popped into your head? For one thing, God’s dream will never go against His Word, because His Will never contradicts His Word. If the desire you have goes against God’s Word, it’s not His Dream. Paul told us the secret to determining if a dream is from God when he said, ‘God . . . is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of – infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, or hopes’ (Ephesians 3:20, TLB). God’s dream will rise to the top while everything else will melt away.”
Kerry & Chris Shook
One Month to Live, 2008
Kerry & Chris Shook
One Month to Live, 2008
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects...
--Heinlein
--Heinlein
None of us know enough to be dogmatic. All that we wisest can say is, “At the present time, such and such appears to be true”; if we be wise, we add, “But fuller knowledge may make a change of opinion necessary.”
Miles Hanson
Post Office Mission #4 (1925)
Miles Hanson
Post Office Mission #4 (1925)
Adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
― J.R.R. Tolkien
God ushered evil into the world, and He will escort it out when it has accomplished His purpose.
Frank N. Pohorlak (1907-1988)
Frank N. Pohorlak (1907-1988)
It's a conundrum right? God is not the author of evil but He is completely sovereign and all things are under His control including the devil. He predestined all things to come to pass including the existence of evil and its fruit and ultimately its destruction. I take the quote that way rather than dualism...which I reject.
If the devil is under His control, that would make Him responsible for the devil’s actions. Sorry, that doesn’t work for me.
He created a perfect world, but both the angels and the humans had free will. Some of the angels rebelled, as did the first humans.
He has a plan to bring it all together at the end of the age, but He isn’t controlling it.
Trust the plan.
The Hebrew word often translated evil does not mean opposite of good in a moral sense. Some of us do not believe in The devil (singular), but rather that man(kind) are either supporting the law and plan of our creator God or working against it. If anyone works against it they are opposing YHWH. To a man in that position YHWH is opposing him....his adversary. Which is all sawtawn (wrongly transliterated into satan) means.
This is how the apparent contradiction between Satan causing David to number the Israelites and YHWH causing David to number the people can be understood.
Also explains the verse in Amos. Shall there be evil in a city and YHWH hath not done it?
Just a hint at the theological iceberg that lies under traditional christian teaching about the devil.
I can appreciate the struggle Steve in your words as I once thought that way myself. The logical fallacy that you are attempting to point out that total sovereignty over the end as well as the means would somehow make God responsible, culpable for evil creates its own logical fallacy that God is omnipotent and omniscient but cannot control how things play out and is held captive to the 'free will' of created beings.
We are in agreement that God will accomplish His purposes in the end at least.
One question, if Pharaoh had total free will, explain the hardening of Pharaoh's heart in Exodus 9?
Also these concepts play into the doctrine of total depravity. If we have free will to choose God over sin, does that not stand to reason that we have an inner core of goodness that is untouched by sin that would allow us to choose light over darkness? If so, what is to prevent someone from trying to reach moral perfection by building up the untouched core and rejecting sin without the blood of Christ?
To me it makes much more sense that as Paul says in Romans 3:10, "there is none righteous, no not one" we are totally lost and bankrupt in our sins and trespasses. IE there is no core of goodness untouched by sin, and we are indeed in need of a savior. Since we are dead in our sins, God is the only one who can reach us. He does so according to His divine pleasure.
I think Calvin's Institutes on this are sound.
John Calvin’s Proof for Satan’s Existence | The PostBarthian
postbarthian.com
Sorry didn't mean to go so far down the rabbit hole
That's interesting Jolene I have never met or heard of a Christian who didn't believe in the existence of Satan before. I will have to read more about that.
Thank God for the tough spots He put you in. That is where He is getting His love through you to the unlovely, and to people who harm you. That is how Christ lived on earth, expressing the love of God to those who criticized and hated Him; and that is how Christ now lives in us, expressing the same love through us. He has put us among difficult people, so that His supernatural love may be seen by them. So praise the Lord for every tough spot you are in. It is not God's will to deliver us from tough spots, but in them. There is no other way of getting at those who do not know Him except by those who do living among them.
Norman P. Grubb (1895-1993)
Knight of Faith, Vol. I
Norman P. Grubb (1895-1993)
Knight of Faith, Vol. I
We are going to have to agree to disagree.I can appreciate the struggle Steve in your words as I once thought that way myself. The logical fallacy that you are attempting to point out that total sovereignty over the end as well as the means would somehow make God responsible, culpable for evil creates its own logical fallacy that God is omnipotent and omniscient but cannot control how things play out and is held captive to the 'free will' of created beings.
We are in agreement that God will accomplish His purposes in the end at least.
One question, if Pharaoh had total free will, explain the hardening of Pharaoh's heart in Exodus 9?
Also these concepts play into the doctrine of total depravity. If we have free will to choose God over sin, does that not stand to reason that we have an inner core of goodness that is untouched by sin that would allow us to choose light over darkness? If so, what is to prevent someone from trying to reach moral perfection by building up the untouched core and rejecting sin without the blood of Christ?
To me it makes much more sense that as Paul says in Romans 3:10, "there is none righteous, no not one" we are totally lost and bankrupt in our sins and trespasses. IE there is no core of goodness untouched by sin, and we are indeed in need of a savior. Since we are dead in our sins, God is the only one who can reach us. He does so according to His divine pleasure.
I think Calvin's Institutes on this are sound.
John Calvin’s Proof for Satan’s Existence | The PostBarthian
postbarthian.com
Sorry didn't mean to go so far down the rabbit hole
If I thought that arguing it out would be productive, I wouldn’t do it in this thread.
“I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
“So my optimism is no mild and unreasoning satisfaction. A poet once said I must be happy because I did not see the bare, cold present, but lived in a beautiful dream. I do live in a beautiful dream; but that dream is the actual, the present – not cold, but warm; not bare, but furnished with a thousand blessings. The very evil which the poet supposed would be a cruel disillusionment is necessary to the fullest knowledge of joy. Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of truth and love and goodness.”
– Helen Keller’s paper “Optimism“
– Helen Keller’s paper “Optimism“
Now, before anyone decides to get clever, you should know I have multiple dead man’s sensors from every culture on my ship, and a few cultures I’ve haven’t heard of. My heart stops? We all go boom. My heart speeds up? It’s boom again. Too hot, too cold, too happy, too sad, thirsty, hungry bored… it’s John Lee Hooker time. Boom, boom, boom. And if you try your little psychic trick… kaboom. And we’re all pushing up day-glo daisies.”--John Crichton
A bit of tongue in cheek to post here but wanted to see if there were any Farscape fans among us.
A bit of tongue in cheek to post here but wanted to see if there were any Farscape fans among us.
"Life is a sexually-transmitted, always-fatal, communicable disease. We cannot eliminate all risk, and government always pretends we can."
Gavin de Becker
April 2022
Gavin de Becker
April 2022
I love this!