Skeptics attempt to put Nothingness/Nihilism/Chance into the heart of a society's literature. Soon they discover that the absence of truth invites the rulers of the day to exercise unbridled and exclusive authority to govern according to their own folly. The abolition of truth creates a vacuum that is filled with force.This Book Changed Everything, 11
In the Cross - we will not only find our forgiveness - but there we will find our reason for living - the explanation for our own sufferings - the cure for all your anxieties - and the reason and purpose for our livesBacktothebible.ca
From around the twelfth century, British courts required witnesses to place their hand on the Bible to take the oath, "I swear by Almighty God [to tell] the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." This is because God himself commanded, "You shall not bear false witness." Traditionally, after swearing to tell the truth, witnesses bowed to kiss the Bible.
It is easy to denounce the practice of memorizing and reciting creeds as boring. However, it is children who complain that cleaning teeth morning and evening is repetitive and boring. When you stop these basic activities you begin to see the difference they make. By marginalizing the church, the West has deprived itself of finding life's meaning and purpose. It has deprived itself of the institution that cultivated its moral character.
The covenant of the Ten Commandments founded the modern principle of constitutionalism, or rule of law, by a perpetual written and binding law. Britain's submission to the rule of law was institutionalized with the Magna Carta (1215), founded on common law, tracing to the code of Alfred the Great. The Mosaic code was the foundation for such legal codes in the West. One-third of Alfred's "Dooms" (AD 893) quoted biblical law while collating the laws of three Christian kingdoms. Ultimately the Word of God was the basis for law and government
Buddhism blamed Avidhya (primeval ignorance) as the source of human bondage. Our salvation, nirvana, depends on deliverance from this delusion of personal existence. To be "saved" in Buddhism is the opposite of eternal life. Nirvana or Buddhist salvation is to be delivered from the delusion that you exist. Salvation is cessation of existence -eternal death.This Book Changed Everything, 57
Hindu sages went in an opposite direction. They concluded that our individuality is an illusion as is a wave in an ocean. The wave is part of the ocean. It has no independent existence. Illusion is to think that it exists as an independent reality. No! It is one with the ocean and must merge into the ocean. Salvation is to lose one's own existence. The post-Christian west is just catching up with the ancient Indian wisdom. This Book Changed Everything, 53-54
Sophism's challenge helped other Greek philosophers realize that logic and language can make sense only if they come from Logos -the Ground of Reason above the cosmos. Something of Logos must live also in man. This became the foundation of Greek rationalism that fascinated modern Europe. The Greeks were not sure if Logos actually existed. They deemed it to be a necessary assumption if logic is to make any sense.
Hindus and Buddhist sages were brilliant. They could have produced science. They didn't because a scientific interest in nature has to begin with the assumption that the world is real. That it is rational and valuable.This Book Changed Everything, 46
Prominent Hindu sages teach that the world, including individuality is Maya -illusion. Buddhism teaches Anatman -"No-self." Your belief that you exist as an individual person is your bondage. Rene Descartes, the father of European Enlightenment, tried to prove that he existed, but failed. Therefore, much of contemporary Western philosophy has lost the confidence that you exist as a real person; a permanent soul, self, or spirit. It is following the Buddha in giving up the confidence that your logic can know the truth and that your language can communicate it. This tectonic philosophical shift is moving the modern West to postmodern, neo-Buddhist nihilism.This Book Changed Everything, 45
Ramanujan raised serious doubt if atheism could make sense of numbers in the cosmos and their correlation with mathematics in the human mind.This Book Changed Everything, 40
Carl Jung began to feel that reducing human beings to soulless biochemical machines did not do justice to what we know about ourselves. Therefore he began to explore the "occult": spiritism, astrology, fortune telling, parapsychology, etc. This made him the most important influence on the "New Age Movement" of the 1980s.This Book Changed Everything, 36
Freud thought that since spirits can't exist, mental sickness called "demon possession" was often a case of repressed sexual desires.This Book Changed Everything, 35
Morally debased cultures tend to be controlled by a few wealthy people. Their riches come from power, extortion, and war, not honest and diligent work. "The ease of doing business" is always at a low ebb in a culture of corruption.This Book Changed Everything, 25
during the (so-called) Dark Ages, the Bible had begun to prepare the ground for Europe's economic transformation. Monasteries began to develop the medieval mind, work ethic, technology, agriculture, double-entry bookkeeping, etc., that went on to create an unprecedented miracle in the later centuries.This Book Changed Everything, 23
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the Cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.
The reason why many people give the wrong answers to questions about the cross, and even ask the wrong questions, is that they have carefully considered neither the seriousness of sin nor the majesty of God.The Cross of Christ (89)
On this interpretation of the work of Christ the whole Church rests. If you move faith from that centre, you have driven the nail into the Church's coffin. The Church is then doomed to death, and it is only a matter of time when she shall expire.Work of Christ (53)
Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there... Christ, I repeat, is to us just waht his cross is. You do not understand Christ till you understand his crossCruciality of the Cross (44-45)
At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign [the cross].Cross of Christ (John Stott) P21