religion

Only Jesus is perfect!" isn't in the Bible.

Ask the question, receive the answer; don't ask the question, don't receive the answer.

...the basic premise of religion__hat if you live a good life, things will go well for you__s wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet he had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.

_ when we are talking about 'Christians' and 'Moslems' we must first make sure that we are talking about people who have an idea, which should be more or less correct, as to what the other is supposed to believe and what he is expected to do as a consequence of that belief.

These lecture provide material for the consideration of common factors, in theory and in development, from the viewpoint of the idea of surrender to the Divine Will, reviewing some aspects of the interplay between Christians and Moslems, and introducing material from and about Sufis.

And there are many people, both Moslem and Christian, who have a good grasp of each others0 conceptions of surrender to God an other principles. But the widespread existence of bias, misinformation and lack of knowledge (_) militate against the effectiveness of dialogue, (_) by the most subtle and one of the most effective of instruments, the subconscious, almost the subliminal, introduction of hostility.

Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes.

Unfortunately when I'm on my death bed I believe I'll be like most people and still looking for Jesus. And yes I've checked my sock drawer.

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present.

Desperation is a great giver of clarity: Bartimaeus needed no time to decide what to do next. __esus! Son of David!_ he shouted. __ave mercy on me!_ (Mark 10:47). The crowd turned to him in disgust. __hut your mouth, son of filth!_ But Bartimaeus knew what it meant to be despised. He also knew that the chance of a lifetime was literally passing him by, so he called to the Savior all the louder. (From: Bartimaeus)

My stubborn, self-savvy heart will not reach for the sky if my earth becomes everything I need. If people fill me up then where is my need for the transcendent? If everything is glory and beauty and sweetness and light, will I be the type of soul that reaches to Jesus?

Pain can either thrust me into the arms of Jesus or make me turn my back on Him. Either way, it's a choice.

Jesus is great -- is there a better role model? No. It's religion, it's the people who get in between -- the bureaucracy, you know. ... It's the way people abuse Jesus. Was there ever a greater victim of name dropping?

Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments _ The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don__ like that statement, but few can argue with it.

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is_ limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death__e had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

Jesus didn__ die to save me from God. Jesus died to save me from myself.

You don__ need a Master__ in Theology to love people.

The choice between James__ vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul__ vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus__ followers to make.Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul__ creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.