Very sad.

Yet, how can someone be expected to believe something they find completely unbelievable? The insistence that maybe if they scream it enough times, some of us will say, "Oh, now it all makes sense!" is baffling. The message now, though, is "Hey, come to my country club! We give out passes to hate while calling it 'love'! It's great!"

Indeed, we will know they are Christians by their "love."

Nothing can make someone an atheist more assuredly than reading the bible, if you can do it. No wonder the Catholics cursed Gutenburg (sp?) for inventing the printing press.

perhaps for long enough to understand, you cannot share, demand, insist, give, mandate or otherwise FORCE your beliefs on anyone else. Most of the time you don't have all the answers to your own questions, how then can you feel what you believe can be of any value to another? Need to find your own answers first.

The one thing at my age that still delights is WONDER.

Be it a mellow pink wine, an Indigo Bunting, the smell of lavender or how many varieties of flowers and trees exist. Its the poetry, the artistry, the scents and tastes. IF it ain't about romance, it'll end up being about control and wars.

We've a very small congregation, in the middle of very dedicated Evangelicals. A few are so hard, they are -well as Joyce Meyers puts it "going to church on Sundays don't make you a Christian, you can sit in your garage for a week, but that won't make you a car." Instead of growing tougher, more brash, you mellow.

If we get down to where our problems arise, it is within each of us, vanity, pride and lust. Its as though civilization can't learn, not from its Past long enough and deeply enough to use the lessons for Today. Read Genesis probably 40 times, then one day, WHOA, I'm just like Eve, a little vain and gullible enough to buy deceit..had no idea.

Its not what separates that worries me, its trying to realize what unites us. DU isn't about the greed, the disregard, the bias and prejudices. It is about caring, about justice being equal value of AND for equal value. Its also about being to able laugh at absurdities. I love that I will read new news, and come to DU, and someone already has a thread about it. It means thinking is going on. What if there choice is between stagnation, where rhetoric is questioned, where "platforms" aren't rigid and incapable of being fresh? Where Society isn't about what you have materially, its what you have within as a collection of individuals. The concern is that what the hard hearts have done is diminish acceptance here where there is Unity.