Enjoy.

Fides et Ratio

There are few people born with the hearts of a lion and the meekness of a mouse. This is one of them. Every time I read about her she blows me away with the amount of compassion. this story in particular had me completely disarmed:

We have many beautiful people; you have seen in the pictures, our poor people, our great people. I have been with them for so many years and I have never yet heard a complaint. Some days back, I picked up a man from the streets, eaten up alive with worms. I took him to our home. And what did this man say? “I lived like an animal in the streets, but I will die like an angel. Loved, and cared.” It took us three hours to clean him, to remove every bit of those worms that were eating him alive. And not a word from him. And just before, while we were still praying with him, praying for him, he looked up at sister and said “Sister, I am going home to God.” And he died. There was such a wonderful, beautiful smile on his face. He went home to God. I’ve never seen a smile like that. And yet there was this man, eaten alive, no complaint, no cursing, and just “I am going home to God.” And what a beautiful way of going home to God. With a clean heart, with a pure heart, filled with joy. Filled with that tenderness and love that he received from the sisters who looked after him.

[source: http://www.piercedhearts.org/purity_heart_morality/mother_teresa_address_united_nations.htm]

http://www.falsezeitgeist.com/

I truly ask how this is a crutch, to detach yourself from things that are worldly (money, cars, houses) and to set your focus on something intangible (not to be confused with unattainable) is probably one of the hardest things to do. A response might be: why would you devote yourself to something you cannot see? my answer is that everyone does it; agnostic, atheist and religious alike.  Think about the idea of a promise, someone promises you something, but you can’t see it, yet you trust in the words. Though this is a drastic simplification, its the same concept. You can come to a logical understanding that, sure this promise will probably be fulfilled because this person has never let me down. Christianity works in the same way.

I dare anyone to challenge that Christianity is a cop-out in life. Not in an aggressive way, but in a honest and true sense of  challenge. I would hearty like to hear the reasons, and not the statement and what justifications there are. If you have any please do lay them down, I’m honestly curious because I hear it thrown around, but never reasons for it.

Hippocrates: And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul?
Socrates: Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

I believe England exists, I believe there are people there, but I’ve never been there. I have faith in its existence. All the videos I’ve seen could be faked and images of a different place. But come on, lets get real. England exists

everything is so tightly interwoven, it’s almost disarming.

The world in which we live is composed of many objects. The word ‘object’ here means more of less the same as ‘entity’. This is not the proper meaning of the word, since an ‘object’, strictly speaking, is something related to a ‘subject’. A ‘subject’ is also an ‘entity’- an entity which exists and acts in a certain way. It is then possible to say that the world in which we live is composed of may subjects. It would indeed be proper to speak of ‘subjects’ before ‘objects’. If the order has been reversed here, the intention was to put the emphasis right at the beginning of this book on its objectivism, its realism, if we begin with a ‘subject’ especially when that subject is man, it is easy to treat everything which is outside the subject, i.e. the whole world of objects, in purely subjective way, to deal with it only as it enters into the consciousness of the subject, establishes itself and dwells in that consciousness. We must, then, be clear right from the start that every subject also exists as an object, and objective ‘something’ or ‘somebody’.

that is the FIRST paragraph of the book “Love and Responsibility by John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla). its heavy stuff. he sets up the idea he presents through the first part of the book about how love cannot be fully realized unless it’s understood on a basic level and that a Utilitarian way of seeing love is just flat out wrong. Unfortunately it’s the kind that seems to be prevalent here in the states. Hate to be the nay-sayer but it is true. In fact, it might not be going too far to say that it might be the human inclination to have a utilitarian view of love.

anyway, he goes on, and even that first paragraph has an entire section in the back expanding on just that first section. talk about heavy! But it is so fulfilling when you start to grasp what he is saying. He truly is going to be one of the great Philosophers of our age.

check his book out if you haven’t already its under $12 and worth EVERY penny and more:

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Responsibility-Pope-John-Paul/dp/0898704456