Silly, I know. :)
OUCH! However...(buckle your seat belts, girls) I can't help but agree with everything you said about how many women give up making an effort in the areas you mentioned. I was thinking of those questions/answers in terms mainly of single women/men, but you have described what happens all too often in the land of Happily Ever After.
"Heaven-dust"...what a lovely visual! A daily prayer of mine is a personalization of a verse from Psalms: "Lord, satisfy me this morning with your unfailing love." Our natural state is a very needy one, fraught with insecurities. Unless we deal with them it is nearly impossible to love others with their best interest at heart. And I think this is true regardless of the kind of love it is; romantic, familial, or the love for a friend. Love is not going to pour forth (at least not well) from a gaping hole in our spirits.
C.S. Lewis (who I'm leaning heavily on today) gives a beautiful description in The Four Loves of what this looks like between friends:
"This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”
Expounding on Jesus' achievement at the cross: Christ's sacrifice was to atone for our sin and reconcile us to God (thus saving us from hell). I know, I know that is all just so parochial. In addition, it allows us to live an abundant life in Christ, "knowing" ;)) that we are loved and significant and that life has meaning.
There is a line of thinking popular now that says that Christ just died to show His great love for us, having been sent by God for the same reason. Put in the context of a parent/ child, this reasoning seems ludicrous. What parent would die for a child to demonstrate love? Or for that matter what soldier would fall on a grenade to show his commitment to his compatriots? What friend would offer himself as a hostage in return for the release of a kindred spirit, just to say "Hey, I really like you"? We do these things when there is imminent harm. We do these things when the cost of NOT doing them is the suffering, pain, or loss of someone we love. So the cost of Christ NOT sacrificing himself for us must have been a price He was not willing to have us pay.
You seem to have a problem with the word "know". lol
I am assuming that you are speaking in terms of mortals and their connection to/understanding of the metaphysical. (Although didn't Lewis say there are no "mere mortals" ?) and that you are saying that we can't know for certain about such things in our extremely limited state. Paul tells us:
Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. 1 Cor. 13:12 New Living Translation
So while I'm having a bit of fun with the word "know" Paul makes it clear that what we have in this life no matter how correct will still only be a partial knowledge at best. The complete mystery revealed only at the end (or as Lewis would say...the beginning).
Let me pause here momentarily to say that I don't think God is offended by our questions. I think He welcomes them. They lead us to communicate with Him (even if it is to ask "Why would you do that?") and further a relationship which He so desires with us.
Your issues with the Old Testament we can get to next time if you want otherwise this post will be so long no one will want to read it. But of course I disagree that this is all just some big cosmic adventure without much meaning.
I understand your many criticisms of the book, in this post and the first one and even agree with some of them; blanket statements and seeing everything as Satan-tainted, for instance. One interesting side note on the subject of accountability: I recently read online a survey of Christian men asking them what kind of women's clothing caused them to lust. They named every item of clothing you can imagine except a burqa! The general feeling among them seemed to be that those women were at fault for dressing attractively. Now I'm all for modesty at church and good taste everywhere, but their opinions seemed a bit extreme. Many of the things they mentioned weren't even immodest, which nearly made it sound as if they wanted someone else (in this case the woman) to rescue them from their own natural tendencies.
You may be right that a man of another culture or faith would get little out of this book. He is a man writing from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint and is clearly writing for his "very Western, and very Christian" audience though, so some of the things that you disputed may not be a problem at all for his target reader. I am very glad you found it worthwhile however many issues you had with it.
Persnickety? You? LOL
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