.

NOTE: With these ‘religion’ articles I pretend to be able to write, I am trying to provide a trough full of water or a small pond even. I fully realize I cannot make the horse drink nor am I going to worry myself sick about that needy beast. How sad so many forget that Jesus never, ever forced Himself on anyone. We can presume He would find that abhorrent.

Many of us are arrogant and proud and say that since we don’t like the world as it is (and it is a mess), we don’t like God either, not to mention Jesus Christ, His one and only Son. Therefore, we choose not to worship or revere a God or a Jesus who will and does allow harsh suffering here on earth, even if much of that suffering (especially wars and starvation due to corrupt government regimes) is caused not by any Divine force but by fallible humankind it self. Read humans and their famous free will here.

What we want is Paradise/Heaven right now in our grimy little hands and not later, much as the fast food we are accustomed to. Instant gratification or ‘bust’.  We don’t like the idea of ‘earning’ that paradise, and perhaps we can’t, and we don’t like the idea of being ‘good’ such a major portion of our lives either. We wanna have some fun, including fleshy fun. We also don’t want any bunch of rules we have to or should live by. We want to make our own way in life, discover on our own what is an advantage and what is a pitfall. We don’t want to recognize that others have been ‘there’ before us and may have a lot of wisdom to impart if we’d only let them. In short, we want to be little ‘gods’ in our own right and do some bossing much like today’s kids who tell their parents what time to stop at McDonald’s, what to order, what to buy in the mall, etc. (They don’t, however, pull out any coins and bills to pay for the items.)

Then we sometimes think we possess minds greater, even, than professed believers of the calibre of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, C. S. Lewis, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Tom Dooley, St. Francis Xavier, John Eliot, St. Augustine and Junipero Serra just to NAME A PRECIOUS FEW!

We don’t choose to follow these great thinkers. We choose to say we are agnostics, atheists, and what-not. That’s okay because it’s a free world, supposedly. (But does one of these alternatives make us ‘little’ thinkers when we could perhaps have been a great thinker?) As 'bad' as he might have been, even Lord Byron, I understand, never took the road of the unbeliever as did some of his contemporaries. Anyway, what is especially beautiful and courageous to me is when one of these agnostics or atheists gets tired of that path/rut s/he was traveling on and either ‘comes back’ or decides to investigate what s/he had heard about all their lives: Christianity. The bible says how the angels really rejoice then or something to that effect. Thanks for reading me.