DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Even Greener Pastures
  HTML https://evengreener.createaforum.com
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       *****************************************************
   DIR Return to: Found on the Internet
       *****************************************************
       #Post#: 9809--------------------------------------------------
       Quote from A Free Man`s Worship- Bertrand Russell
       By: SHL Date: December 1, 2018, 10:46 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       This is a lot nicer thought that Pastor MacArthur`s definition
       of God:
       „United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the
       tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is
       with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of
       love. The life of Man is a long march through the night,
       surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain,
       towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may
       tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from
       our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very
       brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their
       happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on
       their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to
       give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to
       strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair.
       Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits,
       but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the
       difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of
       their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in
       the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And
       so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have
       become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to
       feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of
       ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire
       kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with
       sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
       „Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the
       slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil,
       reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its
       relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest,
       to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it
       remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty
       thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward
       terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his
       own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to
       preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his
       outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that
       tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to
       sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his
       own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of
       unconscious power.“
       Bertrand Russell, A Free Man`s Worship, The Independent Review,
       1903
       *****************************************************