stone

Khartoum Aid Kitchen

you can just say that violence is against your ideals but you also have other values and ideals in addition to non-violence, and you're relieved when a person is killed who had been causing a lot of harm, because no more people will be harmed by them. AND at the same time you wish that harm would have been prevented without violence being used.

in progressive Christian circles you hear a lot of "oh but we can't possible say we have exclusive access to the truth, God is such a mystery!" and this is true about many aspects of religious belief. but there is one rather significant exception that Christianity claims: the complete revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. if you believe in this, then Christianity does uniquely profess a major truth about God. this doesn't mean we are a special in-group with exclusive access to the truth, and it definitely doesn't mean we are right about everything - it simply means we have uniquely recognized the truth of Jesus Christ.

does this mean I think everyone should be a Christian, or that everyone who isn't a Christian is fundamentally wrong? no. I'm sure there are some truths about the divine that are better recognized and taught in other religions. I'm sure (almost) all Christians, including me, are wrong about certain things.

and I think Christ has His reasons for not calling all of us to follow Him in this life, though we will all be saved through Him in the end. some of us are called to live Christian lives and some of us are called to live different kinds of lives, I do believe that. I think my friends who follow different religions are on the right path for them, and I believe those religions have a lot of value and beauty and different pieces of the truth.

and I also believe that in the end, it is Christ who will come to judge the living and the dead, and it is through Christ that we are saved - all of us.

There would be no Christians in the military.

There would be no homeless in Christian majority countries.

There would be universal healthcare in majority Christian countries,

There would be equality across the board. There would be heaven on earth FOR EVERYONE.

At some point I took out my phone, and at the time I was using face unlock. This prompted him to tell me all the ways this technology doesn't work on him. How his phone selfie camera doesn't focus right because it's not detecting a face. How he had to update his ID the old fashioned way, because the website kept rejecting his photos. And how it was becoming more and more common, and how it was making his life way harder.

There’s a lot of hate on widowers and I saw a woman say “You cannot compete with a dead woman.” which is perhaps a reasonable statement to say if he’s constantly comparing you to his dead partner but that wasn’t what the post was about. And I realized “Oh my God, these people genuinely feel like they’re constantly in competition with their spouse’s exes and the ex being dead makes them feel insecure that they cannot best her.”

and i was thinking about abraham during the binding of isaac, who is not just an extreme edge case of trust in God, but actually a good role model all around, imo, because he models acceptance of bad things alongside a trust in God (not getting into the ethical side of child sacrifice; he is not a good role model in that regard)

by agreeing to sacrifice Isaac, in a way abraham has already lost him; he not only accepts the possibility of losing his son, but commits to making it a reality. but on the other hand, obviously, abraham has a huge reason to trust God, because of the promise he made through isaac.

so abraham is simultaneously accepting his son's loss even as he trusts that this isn't the whole story. but he's allowed neither a prosperity gospel luxury that actually this whole thing is just going through the motions and playing pretend for a big reward at the end, but nor does he sink into assuming he's been played for a sucker this whole time by a capricious cosmic prankster.

that can be encouraging for people who feel as if God is opening promising doors only to immediately slam them, or that signs of hope are turning out to be sources of despair, or that 'trusting God' means holding on to empty cope long after it's useful, or that faith is law of attraction style positive thinking. abraham feels like someone else who felt that tension between being realistic and being hopeful - and for whom trusting God looked simultaneously like letting go of your deepest hopes while trusting that they would ultimately be fulfilled