RE: My Christian Faith - A Favorite Analogy
Beautifully written. You could write an article about paint drying and it would still be captivating. Your writing style is ... "calming," almost hypnotically so. I have no idea how you're doing it.
I'm not religious but I'm not irreligious either and have actually kicked the crap (with words, you'd be proud) out of more than a few strident atheists who make sport of deriding religionists. Remember, I'm a science guy ... I know where all our bodies are buried.
That said, I love old time hymns as well. And piano ... that's my poison too.
A lot of critics spend too much time yapping about the literal impossibility of this Biblical story or that. Thomas Jefferson wrote a Bible stripped of all the miraculous accounts (called, not surprisingly, the Jeffersonian Bible). His conclusion: That it was the greatest moral code ever created.
Even if that's all it is ... that's not nothing.
One of my favorite hymns is Amazing Grace. Here's a combination of Scotland the Brave and Amazing Grace ... I find it profoundly beautiful. If one cannot feel the Divine when listening to this, whatever one might believe that to be ... then perhaps one has lost their ability to feel.
Quill
Thank you, sir! I appreciate the compliment.
I'd venture to say it's through analogies. I love 'em, and I would guess that a decent number of my posts have one.
To me, I feel like atheism requires just as much faith as religion. Agnosticism makes much more sense to me, and is really what most non-religious people actually are. ("I mean, maybe there's a god, I don't know"). Either that or a deist ("there's probably a god, but we don't really know who or what he is"). Sounds like you fall somewhere between agnostic and deist, which is a demographic that I have no trouble getting along with. And if you can appreciate the music and the moral message, then I don't think we'll be getting into any debates over this area of life :D
That video is something else! And as you said, profoundly beautiful. The bagpipes coming back in gave me chills. Amazing Grace is one of those songs that will kick you right in the feels.