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Beware when rhetoric becomes a substitute for substance. You always know that a person has a weak position when he tries to accomplish with the clever use of words what argument alone cannot do.
“Without the infinite-personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make “systems.” In today’s speech we would call them “game plans.” A person can erect some type of structure, some type of limited frame, in which he lives, shutting himself in that frame and not looking beyond it. This game plan can be one of a number of things. It can sound high and noble, such as talking in an idealistic way about the greatest good for the greatest number. Or it can be a scientist’s concentrating on some small point of science so that he does not have to think of any of the big questions, such as why things exist at all. It can be a skier concentrating for years on knocking one-tenth of a second from a downhill race. Or it can as easily be a theological word game within the structure of the existential methodology. That is where modern people, building only on themselves, have come, and that is where they are now.”
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“What we do in the crisis always depends on whether we see the difficulties in the light of God, or God in the shadow of the difficulties.”
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“..we're not asking the right questions. What if your relationship isn't as much about you and your spouse as it is about you and God? "We have to stop asking of marriage what God never designed it to give — perfect happiness, conflict-free living, and idolatrous obsession... Finding a 'soulmate' — someone who will complete us: the problem with looking to another human to complete us is that, spiritually speaking, it's idolatry. We are to find our fulfillment and purpose in God and if we expect our spouse to be 'God' to us, he or she will fail every day. No person can live up to such expectations. Everyone has bad days, yells at his or her spouse, or is downright selfish. Despite these imperfections, God created the husband and wife to steer each other in His direction. If happiness is our primary goal, we'll get a divorce as soon as happiness seems to wane. If receiving love is our primary goal, we'll dump our spouse as soon as they seem to be less attentive. But if we marry for the glory of God, to model His love and commitment to our children, and to
reveal His witness to the world, divorce makes no sense.”
― Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? Library Edition
reveal His witness to the world, divorce makes no sense.”
― Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? Library Edition
“The most dangerous state in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand.”
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“The most dangerous state in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.”
― A Conflict of Visions
― A Conflict of Visions
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