mexirish...nz

An article on the Washington Post website asks : What is your vision of heaven? What images from scripture, tradition or your own personal experience describe it best? The answer given by Paula Kirby seems to me to be the best, most well thought out response to a question such as this. I recommend you read it, but to summarize,  she says: To a Christian, the only point of life is to win a place in heaven to be with God for ever. But what is the point of that ? Apparently it is to praise God for his goodness in sending Jesus so that we could be saved from the eternity of torment that would otherwise have awaited us in hell (and there's another preposterous idea that has caused more than its fair share of avoidable human misery, but perhaps that will be a subject for another day). and... Fortunately, there is not the slightest evidence that points towards the existence of heaven, for it would be nothing but unspeakable tedium. I can't help thinking that the people who find...

I'm feeling a bit in-awe today.  The word awsome  has changed its meaning somewhat over the last 50 years.  These days, people bandy it about like "Cool" or "Hey that's great!". But I prefer to reserve it to describe the almost spiritual feeling we get when exposed to something truly amazing. The reason for my feeling of awe today is that I was contemplating the size of the Universe. I was watching an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos , for the first time since I was a child.   I hadn't really thought about it before, but our sun is one of 200 billion (or so) other stars in our one single galaxy (the Milky Way).  Our galaxy is one on a million billion other galaxies, each one with it's own 200 billion stars.  Isn't that utterly mind boggling? Isn't that awesome? And what about time? Carl gave an excellent analogy. Let's say that all of time has been compressed into a single calendar year.  The big bang happens during the first se...