So much so-called Christianity is like any other religion, just a matter of following various rituals. Your whole life can be taken up by this and you may have a sense of fulfillment in doing it, but I assure you it is a false sense. What fulfillment is there is being in chains when there is another master who can set you free. Jesus didn't die for His people only to have them chained up in doing stuff that brings no benefit. Read the book to the Galatians and you will find right back then people were being pushed in the direction of doing things to make them more acceptable. The Jewish Christians wanted the gentile christians in the province of Galatia to take on the Jewish law by being circumcised. Paul wrote specifically to say that this was totally wrong. He said that if the Galatians did this they would be required to keep the whole law of the old covenant and then Christ would be of no use to them. Just take that in. If we try in any way to earn our own salvation, we are on our own and Christ cannot help us. A friend of mine once put it like this:- One day the milkman said to Mrs Jones(this is a milkman in the days when they still delivered to your door)"Mrs Jones I have decided that you will never have to pay anything again for your milk bill, from now on it is all free." Mrs Jones can't quite get the hang of this, but she accepts her milk for two or three weeks. Then one day she rushes out to the milkman and says,"I had some clotted cream this week I think I ought to pay for that." "No, no Mrs Jones I told you it is all free forever." We behave like that trying to make up for our sins by doing something about it ourselves. We must accept that Jesus has paid for it all or we will find ourselves hopelessly trying to make amends when we don't have the ability to do it. Here is this glorious salvation and instead of embracing it we run from it, think we know better. That's how the problem started. God told Adam not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but he and Eve thought they knew better. We haven't progressed much have we.
I have written in previous posts about disasters. In the case of Concorde, decisions by people, plus other factors were directly to blame for the event. In the case of the Penlee disaster it may have been avoided if someone had made a better choice in the time beforehand and as a consequence brave men and the ship's crew and the captain and his family died. 9/11 was certainly the result of wicked men committing a terrorist act, but even in this there was heroism notably by another Cornish man, Rick Rescorla who helped many to safety and left it too late to help himself. In situations like this we see what the human spirit is capable of both good and evil. What of disasters that come on people because of the earth restless movement of tectonic plates. Often people live near volcanoes because the land is rich and fertile and they have the chance of a better life there when the volcano is resting. We cannot blame them for that but sometimes people become complacent...
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