Boots and Bibles

Good Art

There are reasons I hang around Christianwriters.com.  This one happens to have a website here, and she frequently guestblogs at this Christian speculative fiction website here.

Her name's Mirtika Shcultz.

And this little gem came up in the course of conversation...

"...the best way to glorify God is to write to the absolute best of your ability and make something that's worth reading.

If you love God, it will be reflected in what you write. If you love people, it will be reflected in your fiction. If you love stories, then just tell a cracking good story. If it's 'truth' but it's told poorly, it just adds to the 'Christian fiction stinks' mantra. If it's true and it's BEAUTIFUL and ENTERTAINING, too, it will get people's attention and it will reflect well on Christ.

Like anything. A carpenter who says he's a 'carpenter for God', but makes shoddy tables and chairs isn't glorifying God. A writer who isn't working his brain and heart out to produce well-crafted stories is a writer who is not glorifying God.

Do it mightily, whole-heartedly, and do it with excellence...and a gift to God. That will please God, that you want to offer up the best to him, not a lame and sickly lamb, but a perfect lamb."

Now, mind you, the grammar isn't perfect, this came from a message board after all, but I think the point is well made.

So, just a reminder to everyone.  Glorify God with the best of what you have to offer.

Oh, and this is an interesting article to read here.  It came out just a few days after my last post.

A Short Rant on Rationality and Skepticism

Skeptic magazine spends more pages debunking the notions of spirituality and religion than perhaps anything else.  An atheist think-tank known as the Rational Response Team goes out to openly debate theists, spiritualists, etc.

A small irony has occurred to me that I wonder if anyone else (especially within the “skeptical” and “rational” ranks) has ever caught.  The irony is one of assumption.  Skepticism and rationality are purportedly marked by stripping assumptions, and entering a realm of possibilities where evidence and reason lead one to the truth, or at least the best guess one can make at it.  Yet, atheists would have us believe, through their appropriation of terms like “skeptic” and “rational”, that the only conclusion any thinking person can come to regarding the spiritual is that it simply doesn’t exist.

Well, that’s assuming something now, isn’t it?

What the “rational” atheists promote is not so much true rationality or skepticism, but in fact is positivism, the metaphysical and (I daresay) theological assumption that unless something can be proven through purely scientific rigor, it does not exist.  Personally, I see many flaws in this line of thinking, none of which I shall go into presently (after all, I’m trying to keep this a “short” rant.)  Atheists have claimed as their own something that is in fact exercised (and not exercised) by peoples of all creeds, classes and backgrounds.  If they were honest, and described themselves as positivists, I wouldn’t be forced to whinge about this right now.  Instead, however, they claim as their own “rationalist” and “skeptic”.  They are rational and skeptical why?  Because they gainsay assume that there is no God, no spirit; only cold, hard science.

Hopefully it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find the flaw in this thinking.  I consider this all ironic, even nigh comical at points.  Unfortunately, I don’t think the positivists who have usurped the throne of reason are getting the joke, and I wonder how many of the general public are reasoned or enlightened enough to figure it out themselves…

Bad Timing

...And just when Tolkien was beginning to convince me, "Y'know, maybe Catholicism's not so screwed up, heterodoxical, and arrogant as I thought it was."  Just in time for that, that there Pope has to make it a point to remind everyone of this.

Not really new news, but a good reminder to me exactly as to why I am not a Catholic, and why I shall never become one.

(For source text, click here.)