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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Ferguson who wrote (26155)	7/9/1999 9:18:00 PM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 39621

No thanks Sam, I've got plenty of books still sitting here in front of me just waiting to be read, the questions I asked were more just for you personally. dan

To: Sam Ferguson who wrote (26155)	7/10/1999 7:43:00 AM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

A search for truth calls for the intensive cultivation and clever use of what Hindu wisdom called the "sharp and subtle intellect." No powers within reach of a commonplace order of mind can ever discern these analogues. Minds of this caliber look upon nature with no sense of meaning in it whatever. It is, after all, the philosopher, the poet, the mystic, and no less the scientist who may have conditioned his mind to look for the reflection of God's thought in his works, who may be expected to glean a harvest of truth from the cultivation of nature. Thought, divine or human, always precedes and initiates overt action. In every human and divine action, there is implicit the flash of a mental determination. Nature and spirit together are revelatory of truth. It is the task of spirit to discern truth from the evidences nature presents. As we have seen, nature is the expression of the modes and forms of God's subconscious mind. They are therefore impersonal, immutable products of mind. The child of God who would live his divinely ordained life moving always with the inexorable current of life will be wise to observe the phenomena, study them for discovery of purpose or beneficence, and in the end prudently conform his life to them and the courses they intimate. With the full sweep into Western Christian consciousness of the doctrine of the sinfulness of the flesh, there came the preachment of the evils of the world, the flesh and the devil, giving rise to the practice of self-mortification and brutal suppression of all natural impulses. To indulge the instincts and propensities of the flesh was not only pagan, but the direst sin. Because the body blocked the freer motions of the spirit, it had to be crucified. The spirit was all, the flesh was evil, and the deadly enemy of the immortal soul. As the body is an extension of nature into the human system, this special form of pietism had to attack it there where its power over the spirit was most gripping. The devilish power of nature could not be tolerated in such close and dangerous access to the spirit. Great Pan was the deadly enemy. Nature had to be throttled at its source, rooted by original sin in the deepest nooks of man's constitution. All this chaos in the religious area was attended, accentuated, if not largely inspired by, one of the most staggering phenomena in the history of the race. This was--and is--the presence, power, and influence of a--Book. This momentous tome appears to be a collection of ancient documents, of predominantly hagiographic nature, about which the tradition of their personal authorship by God himself, ostensibly using "holy men of old" as amanuenses for purposes of dictation, has tenaciously clung. It gained the name and renown of being the sole transmission of God's wisdom in literary form to his children on earth. To all intents and purposes, it was regarded as God's manual of instruction, knowledge, wisdom and truth. Under the power of such a persuasion, which spread to virtual universality in the West, this extraordinary volume gained a veritable homage and reverence that would not be erroneously described as the worship of a fetish.