Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Some thoughts while traveling

Stuff my mind churns up when I travel on buses.

On the tearing down of church crosses in China.
Its not the outward manifestation of the church that makes a difference - the buildings, the concrete and iron icons - its what Christians do that matters. One of the letters of the Apostles stated that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." You could build a thousand churches bigger than the tower of Babel and get the same result as the latter. Vatican City and the great cathedrals of Europe are testimony to that - built on the sale of indulgences.

What is the point of being rich if you are a miser. You are only hoarding up wealth for someone else.

Good ideas are not good enough if you do not act upon them.

There are no such thing as the good old days. People who think that the past was great forget the many great evils that have been largely overcome for now - mass famine, total war, Nazism, polio, the Black Death, the utter subjugation of women, Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot era communism, the tyranny of religious governments, racist colonial empires...

Everyone will die. Not everyone lives.

We live in a superficial world. People are judged by what they wear, how they look, how much they earn, what family they came from - no one decides that they want to be born beautiful or rich, or tall or which country or religion they get to be born in. We can only decide how we choose to behave - abominably, maliciously, cruelly, without empathy or sympathy - or with kindness, compassion, consciously, and in due time with wisdom.

some were born to fly, some were born to swim. Somethings we don't get to choose.

No one dies truly. Our consciousness lives on. Who we are, what we are, our essential being is immortal.

Don't look at what you currently are - look at what you may become. Does a caterpillar dream that it will become a butterfly? Does a baby swan dream that it will remain an ugly duckling all its life? The biggest tree was once a humble seed. Grow. Overcome.

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