Originally posted by CalJust
One of the few things I seem to agree with GB is that the book by CS Lewis "Mere Christianity" is a good start. He presents his journey, as an Oxford don, from agnosticism to Christianity in exquisite language and sound reasoning. If only GB himself would heed his advice!
On a more advanced level, you may try the website www.cac.org. It stands for the Cen ...[text shortened]... ial message of Christ transcends divisions and even faiths.
I wish you well on your journey.
Originally posted by CalJust
One of the few things I seem to agree with GB is that the book by CS Lewis "Mere Christianity" is a good start. He presents his journey, as an Oxford don, from agnosticism to Christianity in exquisite language and sound reasoning. If only GB himself would heed his advice!
On a more advanced level, you may try the website www.cac.org. It stands for the Centre for Action and Contemplation. Why i like it is because it rises higher than many of the denomination-specific writers, most of which have an axe to grind. The author is a Catholic Monk (Franciscan, in fact) but he shows how the essential message of Christ transcends divisions and even faiths.
I wish you well on your journey.
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CJ, here are a few quotations from the Spirituality Quotations thread; I hope both you and Duchess64 enjoy them:
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." -C.S. Lewis
"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." -C.S. Lewis
"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'" -C.S. Lewis
"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." -C.S. Lewis
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...” C.S. Lewis
"If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not,, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die.” CS Lewis
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"The Problem of Pain (1940)"
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Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping.
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If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed." C.S. Lewis
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“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” -C.S. Lewis
"It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter." (C. S. Lewis)
"Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue." -C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
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"Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth. When truth is discovered
by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness." -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie (deliberate, contrived, and dishonest)
but the myth (persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic)." -John F. Kennedy
In chess and life, "The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off." -M. Pancoast
Defining a Christian Identity
25 Feb '14 06:282 edits
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