‘Jesse Bering’s mother died of cancer on a Sunday, in her own bed, at 9 o’clock at night. Bering and his siblings closed her door and went downstairs, hoping they might somehow get some sleep.
It was a long, hard night, but around 7 a.m., something happened: The wind chimes outside his mother’s window started to chime.
Bering remembers waking to the tinkle of these bells, a small but distinct sound in an otherwise silent house. And he remembers thinking that those bells carried a very specific message.
“It seemed to me … that she was somehow telling us that she had made it to the other side. You know, cleared customs in heaven,” Bering says.
The thought surprised him. Bering was a confirmed atheist. He did not believe in any kind of supernatural anything. He prided himself on being a scientist, a psychologist who believed only in the measurable material world. But, he says, he simply couldn’t help himself.
“The tribal story of a people as they walked through history,
and it is always evolving.”
The following is a video by Bishop John Spong of a book he is writing called:
THE SINS OF SCRIPTURE; SHATTERING THE TEXTS OF HATRED
IN SEARCH OF THE LOVE OF GOD.
It is good reading for any serious seeker who is trying to better understand some of the difficult passages in the Bible, many times in a humorous way. You will find insights that you haven’t found before that could lead to a better understanding of the one true creating, eternal, all loving Supreme Being.
Or, you may find that it hasn’t helped you at all and reaffirmed the faith you already have. I state no opinion. It is only what YOU find for you. -mackie
What you are reading now are just a collection of symbols. Your brain decodes theses symbols into meaning. Your brain has developed a knack for reading language, and that has given you a major advantage over other species.
Yet scientists still don’t know when and how we began using language.
“The Earth would not be the way it is if humankind didn’t have the ability to communicate, to organize itself, to pass knowledge down from generation to generation,” says Jeff Elman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. “We’d be living in troops of very smart baboons,” he says.
Instead, language has allowed us to cooperate in groups of millions instead of dozens, he says. It also lets us share the complex ideas produced by our brains, and it’s flexible in ways you don’t find in the communication systems of other species.
Bees, for example, use an elaborate communication system to tell one another precisely how to get from the hive to a source of pollen, Elman says. “But that’s all it does,” he says. “They can’t talk about politics. They can’t talk about who’s having an affair with what other bee — and these are things that we can do.”
There are at least three kinds of people in the world:
1) those who absolutely believe what they read and hear, no matter what any body else says,
2) those who believe that parts of it could be true or false and will check the facts; and
3) those who absolutely believe it is false, no matter what any body else says.
#2 IS AN OPEN MINDED PERSON. I hope you are in that group. Reviews will definitely help you understand.
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A Long Time Coming — But Worth The Wait
As far as I can see, this seems to be the only volume available on this subject. Masses of books on the history of other races, but political correctness has kept this one out of print – until now. First let me say that this is NOT a racist book ! It is what it says, a history of the white race from their first appearance through disaster and diaspora and right up to…
Reaching troglodyte stop!
It’s not enough for our texts books to be chalked full of omissions and lies, we have to endure outlandish racism in our amazon booksaswell. “The ruins of Detriot” really? The more the racist reaches and tightens his grip,the more it all slips thru his hands. (It=”The american empire“) May a million Hatians and Mexicans move next door to you all:)
Chapter 43 : In the Name of God – The Christian Wars
In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is quoted as saying that he had come to bring the sword, to “set father against son and mother against daughter” (Luke 12:53) and called on his followers to “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me” (Luke 19:27).
These words have, in the history of Christianity, been enacted in bloody reality many times – starting when an important political rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church took on a religious slant – leading to the split in European Christendom between Catholic and Protestant. This split sparked off a series of religious wars which were ultimately to be responsible for the death of nearly a third of the entire White race.
The Reformation is the name given to this 16th century religious uprising. Its major outpouring happened in the middle of the Renaissance, there can be little doubt that the two events were linked: added to this was a political problem which the countries in Northern Europe had with the all powerful role the pope had assumed from Rome.
Emerging European nationalism objected to the fact that the pope – usually an Italian – had to approve the appointment of any head of state everywhere else in Europe. The pope’s ability to even charge tax from foreign countries to support the Church headquarters in Rome also irked those living thousands of miles from Rome. It has been estimated that the Church ended up owning as much as one third of all the land in Europe in this manner: what the various national states must have secretly thought of this does not need to be imagined.
As most of us know, in all believers of faith there are liberal, moderate, and conservativein each faith. Most tolerate each other out of love and respect. There is one other group that most have problems with: the extremists.
There are 3 MAJOR FAITHS that developed from AbrahamJewish, Christian, and Islam. Last year several teenagers from these each of these faiths got together believing that if people get to know those of other faiths, conflicts would ease. over time a conference was formed called: “Children of Abraham: Building Interfaith Peace and Community.” It was organized by the Interfaith Center for Peace, a nonprofit group housed at Indianola Presbyterian Church (click #2 below). The following article reports on Islam with the same belief that if people get to know those of other faiths, conflicts would ease, and there will be less chance of war. -mackie
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It’s Ramadan — the holiest month for the world’s estimated 1.5 billion Muslims. We won’t discuss Ramadan so much as experience something of its meaning — its delights and its gravity — through the memories and musings of Muslims from far-flung perspectives.
The “Multiplicity in Singularity” That Is Islam
We’re thrilled to put this program back on the air a year after we created it. It is really more an experience than a show — one that was as full of discovery to produce as to hear.
In fact, we were surprised to find ourselves creating it. At the beginning of the summer of 2009, we
extended an invitation to Muslims to reflect on their lived experience of Islam, of what it means — in a daily, particular way — to be part of what is often referred to in the abstract as “the Muslim world.” Responses were slow at first but began to pick up in number and intensity as our query was circulated in networks far beyond the public radio universe.
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