The Fall of the Western Empire

 ... or How the West was won.

No, I am not trying to imitate or emulate Gibbon who wrote six volumes on the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire some hundred and fifty years ago.

My aim is to write about the fall of the present West which has started some thirty years ago when the Cold War ended.

A place in the Son

 This is a short spiritual and intellectual note about who God is and who I am - or more generally who we are, because in a certain sense we are all generically and genetically the same - humans floating somewhere in space and time in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy called the Milky Way.

Self inflicted wounds - Part1 - Freedom

I have written a few articles on freedom and my view has always been, and will always be, that everybody cries for freedom and that freedom kills. So I must presume the paradoxical corollary that everyone wishes to be killed, but nobody wishes to be dead is true.

Have you seen the Saviour: a poem

 Have you seen the Saviour

hanging from a tree
Have you watched the Saviour
who died for you and me
Have you heard the Saviour
pleading for the lost
Have you thought the Saviour
wouldn't pay the total cost

God's Dilemma - Part 3

Continued from Part 2 ... 

 So, why can't I apply this principle to my friendship with God. The reason is that in this case God has the authority and it would be up to Him to relinquish that. I studied scripture and came to the following sobering thoughts:

1. God gave up all his authority (dominion) over the earth, in order to be friends with Adam and Eve, regardless of whether they would trade it for an apple or use it wisely.

God's Dilemma - Part 2

Continued from Part 1 ...

It was a very strange and difficult process to unlearn all I had learned in the Dutch Reformed Church. It got so bad that I ultimately realised that all I learned was wrong and I became used to doing and believing all the opposite things  which that Church taught me, knowing that it would be right. There are, of course, righteous people in that Church as well who serve God with all their might, but it did not work for a rebel like me.

The Decay of Lying: a Protest

 I have recently found this gem in the collective works of Oscar Wilde. It is a must read for my readers. After a hundred and twenty years it is still very apt.

A foretaste:

Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one. ... Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.

http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/wilde-lying.pdf

God's Dilemma - Part 1

 In the scheme of things God created everything and that made Him King of the Universe with anything He created becoming subservient to Him ... but it also automatically made Him alone and lonesome with no peer, friend, compatriot, confidante, family, adviser and many other things; not that He needed it, but the human part of Him needed someone to talk to, to confide in, to be friends with, to adore and love Him seriously and unconditionally. To be really one with Him.

Please remember to forget

You might have gotten used to me teaching the opposite of the teaching of convention and conventional wisdom; maybe it's the way I try to forget convention which takes me into this domain where senses must be reinterpreted and tested.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the madman is not one who has lost his senses, but one who has lost everything except his senses.

Pent up love will explode in your heart

Love is in your heart ... let it fly ...

What we all have in abundance, is love stashed away somewhere in the deep chasms of our inner being and it will on the least provocation open its eyes and rear its beautiful head, making itself ready to explode into something beautiful, long before we realise it.

No, this statement is not from a science fiction film, a western thriller, a Hollywood soapie or a new fashion.