Jenn Layte is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Morning Quiet
Time: This is a recurring meeting
On Tuesdays at 9 a.m., join me on zoom for a time of Bible reading, brief discussion and prayer. This will not be an intense study, but more a time to quietly reflect together on God’s Word and God’s own presence in our lives at this time. It may only last half an hour on any given day, so please be on time.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/2723458603
Meeting ID: 272 345 8603
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Meeting ID: 272 345 8603
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I thank you for this invitation. Regrettably, I shall be unable to attend. I think you know why.
I suspect I do. 🙂 At the same time, I find it delightful that you understood that you are included in this invitation and found it in yourself to respond.
I’m also intrigued by that. Maybe some day you can tell me both what it is, from your perspective, that continues to connect the two of us, and also share with me in a little more detail your experience with not only people of faith but faith itself.
What connects the two of us? History! We ‘met’ years ago, and I consider you a friend — despite (or perhaps because of?) your strange and quirky beliefs 😉
Pretty sure I can’t share much about my experience with ‘people of faith’ or ‘faith itself’ without risking getting me banned… dare I say “those of faith all believe they know the face of the one true ghod — and they can’t ALL be right (particularly as most of them seem to want to kill anyone who doesn’t believe in their deity!)” ?
It’s the “because of” that I was suspecting. 🙂
Your second parenthetical aside is quite sweeping and I suspect it of being theoretical rather than experiential. 😉 I know quite a vast number of people of faith–and very differing faiths–but I have only ever seen the ones who want to kill people on the news.
But don’t worry. I won’t ban you!
You’re absolutely right. I’ve never yet met anyone (of any faith) who has said that they wanted to kill me because of my views. But it’s not just ‘the news’ that leads me to believe that this is a problem: if history teaches us anything, it’s that strong religious belief has caused more wars than anything else 🙁
I am familiar with that conviction, but I think it’s a little more complex than that.
Well, ok, let’s take science for example. Were it not for the Catholic church’s insistence that the Earth was the centre of the Universe (and resultant dismissal of any evidence to the contrary), humanity would probably be a couple of thousand years ahead of where it currently finds itself* and might even have expanded out to the stars by now.
*granted, where we currently are is in a situation where we’re about to destroy ourselves due to our over-reliance on fossil fuels, but that destroys my argument.
Ha–indeed. I think that’s what I mean; it’s multi-layered.
Re: science vs. religion–
Today I was working on a sermon about the Wrath of God for Sunday (I know you’ll want to look out for that one 😉 ) and at the end I was sort of “invitationally mulling” over the question about whether this pandemic should be viewed as an outworking of an act of God. And I thought–some people would say, yes, God is angry at sin, and it is His punishment for it. And others would say, no, this is about science–a result of human mismanagement of the natural world. But the thing is, from a truly Christian perspective, both those ways of looking at it boil down to human sin. I think it’s deeply frustrating that the church at the time you cite, and in large part ever since, has resisted science, and science has resisted religion, because I just don’t think they’re as at odds with each other as people tend to assume. They are different ways of talking about reality, but if people would consider them in cooperation with each other instead of in contradiction to each other, I think the human race would be even further along still. And possibly more beneficially.
I like the way you think 🙂
Clearly that is why we’re friends. 😁
PS