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Many Ways or One Way?

Rosemarie Buxton of Episcopal Divinity School wrote in response to Professor Stephen Prothero’s book (God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter) and his article (Separate Truths) in the Boston Globe on April 25, 2010:

According to Karen Armstrong, the difficulties arise when one religion sets itself apart as the one religion and chooses to do anything to defend itself, a sin that many religions have been guilty of throughout history.

Coming from the pen of a Christian Divinity school graduate, i am very disappointed at the above statement.

Mankind is but one-kind. And so is creation-kind. Can an offspring say that he has two fathers or two mothers? That is not only vulgar but also foolish. That there is but one God, the creator of heaven and earth transcends any sort of debate.

Now, there are a lot of injustices that are going unpunished by the government(s). The socio, economic, political, environmental crisis we are seeing today is testimony of that fact. Justice is not being meted out to all. That is why the Bible stresses on the Day of Judgment, when the Lord of lords and the King of kings will be seated on the throne and render justice to the nations.

Now for this justice to be rendered with equity, there needs to be one law that is self-evident and transcends all other laws. This Law is the Law of Agape Love that Jesus kept and “exceeded the righteousness of the Pharisees” of His time and went and sat at the right hand side of God to judge the world.

“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for His friends” ~ Lord Jesus Christ (John 15:13). How much more “self-evident” and transcendent can you get.

To say that there are other ways or back-doors to God is an affront to the living God who is Jehovah Jireh–the One who provided this Way–an excruciating death for His son the Lord Jesus Christ only in order to fulfill the transcendent AND self-evident truth in John 15:13 as stated above. If there were indeed other ways then God was a stupid fool to take His son through this excruciating death. So excruciating that the Lord’s sweat turned into blood well before He was going to be crucified because He knew what kind of pain He will have to suffer.

So, i believe, after the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Bhagavad Gita’s reference namely:

“As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take, through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee!”

and

“Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths that in the end lead to Me.”

apply to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself–all streams have to end up with Him. In other words, at the Judgment Seat of Christ!

For more on these lines, please read this article especially tailored for an Agnostic or one who is secular: http://truthunleashed.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20

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Calvinism Debunked!

“Proponents who deny that salvation can never be lost, reason on the subject in a marvelous way. They tell us …..

That no virgin’s lamp can go out; (Matt. 25:8)
That no promising harvest be chocked with thorns; (Matt. 13:22)
That no branch in Christ can ever be cut off from fruitfulness; (John 15:6)
That no name can be blotted out of God’s book! (Rev. 3:5)
That no salt can ever lose its savor; (Mat 5:13)
That nobody can ever “receive the grace of God in vain”; (2 Cor. 6:1)
That no one can “look back” after putting his hand to the plow. (Luke 9:62)
That Nobody can “grieve the Spirit” (Eph 4:30) till He is “quenched,” (1 Thess. 5:19) nor
That Nobody, or body of believers, can ever get so lukewarm that Jesus will spew them out of His mouth. Rev 3:16
They use reams of paper to argue that …
If one ever got lost he was never found;
That if one falls, he never stood.
If one was ever cast forth, he was never in
If one ever withered, (John 15:6) he was never green.
If one draws back, (Heb 10:38) he never had anything to draw back from.
That if one ever falls into spiritual darkness, he was never enlightened;
That if you again get entangled in the pollutions of the world, (2 Pet. 2:20-22) it shows that you never escaped.
That if you put salvation away, you never had it to put away,
That if you make shipwreck of your faith, (1 Tim. 1:19-20) there was no ship of faith there.
In short they say:
If you get it, you can’t lose it: and if you lose it you never had it. May God save us from accepting a doctrine, that must be defended by such fallacious reasoning. (John Wesley)

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Open Source Economics – A Sham

The industrial world has much to gain from making Software an Open Source commodity. Open Source licenses allow manufactures to bundle their industrial goods with the Open Source (free) software and sell the final product with a price tag. It is not the legalese that is in question here (because a “Copyleft” license can give the coder some leverage) but it is the very idea of “free software” that subverts software enterprise while also making software sound cheap. In the global economy the laboring states have much to lose from this. For the laboring state the industry is the human machine and this is what generates revenue for it. In other words, countries like India, which have plentiful labor depend on services for economic growth. The planners of India were brilliant in setting up Master of Computer Application (MCA) programs all over the country in the last decade or two. This has churned out plentiful knowledge workers to develop software of all kinds. Applications can be in any area of Services. But somehow the Industrial world within India has stopped the government—it appears—from allowing proper protection for software through patenting.

As someone quipped, “code (software) is poetry” and needs to be acknowledged as such not Open and Free.