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Christianity Explained Information Find Christian Unity in Biblical Explanations of the Doctrines That Count! |
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You have a choice to
make: You can either believe the opinions of theologians, atheists, or
agnostics, or you can determine for yourself what the Bible says by
studying it. |
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What Is Religion and Where Did It Originate? What Is the Bible, and How Relative Is It to My Life? What Are Messianic Prophecies? Who Was Jesus of Nazareth, Really? Why Are There So Many World Religions? Why Are There So Many Christian Denominations? What Is the Law and How Does It Apply to Me? What's All This About the End of the World and End-time Prophecies? Isn't the Book of Daniel a Closed Book? Revelation: How can anyone understand all that symbolism? Who or What Was Jesus' Mother, Mary? Didn't Darwin Disprove Creation? What's the Truth About Faith and Works? Christian E-mails: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Complete Directory of Articles/Studies
Title Abbreviations for Books of the Bible Genesis - Ge |
Unity in Diversity
Is Unity within the Christian movement, let alone in the human race, possible? Everywhere you look, diversity of cultures brings disunity. Iraq jumps immediately to mind, where Sunni and Shiite Muslims engage in regular blood baths in the name of religion, and where Kurds are fighting to survive. In Ireland, the Catholics fight the protestants, and in the USA, the African Americans seem to think they need to fight with everyone. (Of course, this is only how the media would have it appear. It's not the whole truth.) What is it that makes it so hard for people to get along? It's really very simple. People, usually "leaders", think they have the "truth". The Muslim clerics think they have all the answers, and their followers, ignorant of what the holy book, the Koran, really says, follow along with whatever their clerics say. In Ireland, it's a matter of leaders wanting independence from England; [Irish] Catholics are supposedly downtrodden by the [English] Protestant leadership. In the USA, a minority of African Americans who are tired of putting forth the necessary effort to achieve, as so many others of their people have, incite others to riot. Every time the going gets rough, they play the race card, even the slavery card. Instead of getting sympathy, since there are so many other races in America who have to work just as hard, including poor whites, they just create disunity. Unity takes work: it takes compromise, but it also takes study. If you are willing to let someone else make all the important decisions for you, like who will lead your country and what you believe about God, you can, and most likely will be misled into error. Attention to detail is something my parents taught me. You can do a job right unless you do it completely. Doing it completely implies learning how to do it completely: Studying methods and theories and assumptions, and deciding which are useful or "true", that is, lead to the desired result, and which are not useful or "untrue", that is, do not lead to the desired result. People who deal with money and are required to tell the real from the counterfeit study the real money. There are as many different counterfeits as there are counterfeiters, so it is counterproductive to try to study all the fake stuff. Time is much better spend memorizing the real so that mere copies are instantly recognizeable by their differences from the real. There are many different counterfeit religions. In my opinion, the one true religion came from God and filtered down through his people, degraded, manipulated, twisted, and distorted by generations of simple people led astray by Satan and his evil angels. In each generation, however, there were a few people who had it right, and those were usually quickly "put down" by the vast majority who prefer self to others. You see, the religion of God is selflessness. Unmerited love toward others is what God showed the world in sending his own Son to save humankind from it's own selfishness. In every war, every strife, every religious persecution, the egos of people declare to them that they have a right to stomp out those who don't agree with them. This is the original sin of Lucifer, now known as Satan:
In the Bible, God demonstrated every possible way to deal with sinners. He, himself wiped them out, he helped the Israelites to wipe them out, he demonstrated his power to them, he attempted to lead them himself (the Israelites), he sent his Son to show them how to live. In every instance God demonstrated that the hearts of the truly evil will be evil no matter what, but that the hearts of those who have been led astray by the evil ones may, I repeat MAY, be turned to God if they haven't yet become evil themselves. People take offense at God's "judgment" against whole nations or civilizations, or even individuals. What they don't understand is that there is only one cure for evil: selfless love. Unless we esteem others higher than ourselves, there will always be disunity! Try a little humble pie. Try approaching others with a "Have you ever considered . . .?" instead of, "Well I have always been taught . . .!" Can you see that one invites intelligent, calm, cooperative study, while the other is a pompous justification and a challenge? Better still, have you ever tried studying with those with whom you don't agree to see if you might be wrong or at least to come to an understanding of why they believe the way they do? Finally, have you ever considered that God is a lover of unity in Diversity? Look at all the different flowers out there. In God's eyes, all are beautiful. None is more beautiful than another. God doesn't create something and then decide he needs to improve on it. He creates something he likes and then he creates something else he also likes. Mankind is the only creature that keeps trying to improve on something. We are the only one who have a 1-10 point scale of beauty. While other creatures will reject obviously deformed members of their species, only humans reject a "perfect" specimen just because it isn't a certain color or doesn't measure up to the level of beauty one thinks is right for onesself. Which brings us to another favorite argument for Satan's deciet of mankind. If in the animal kingdom, and man is an animal, the weak are defeated by the strong in order to win the favor of the opposite sex, why should it be any different for mankind? Well, Duh! If you're an animal and only an animal, go be an animal; however, the rest of us, you know, the ones to whom God gave brains?, let us be intelligent beings who make decisions with those brains instead of "instinctively" giving in to sin. God gave something special to man. He made us with the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong--between unselfish love and self absorption. It's the only difference between man and other animals, so let's use it!
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Copyright 2005
Lynda Karr
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