That which, My Love, by your Loving led me from you, from the love you shared with me, in the longing of separation in the love has lead me back to you, My Love, the Fount of all Good, and now I rightly see you in all these good things and love you through the things you have made.
From the sweet scent of the Rose, you have led me back into the Beauty.
What sweet lostness, I enjoy!
*Brian K. Wilcox, 12/05/2006
Romans 1.25 (NLT)
They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise! Amen.
Deuteronomy 6.4-9 (NLT)
The Shema': the basic principle of Judaism, declaring the unity, or oneness, of the Sacred One
4 “Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.[a] 5 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. 6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. 7 Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. 8 Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. 9 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
*Deuteronomy 6:4 Or The Lord our God is one Lord; or The Lord our God, the Lord is one; or The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.
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No one knows where he is going; the aim of life has been forgotten and the end has been left behind. Man has set out at a tremendous pace--to go nowhere.
*Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), Philosopher and Theologian
Jacques Ellul became a Marxist at age 19 and a Christian at age 22. He was one of the most thoughtful philosophers to approach technology from a deterministic position: as in, technology has a momentum of its own. Ellul authored some 40 books and hundreds of articles, his main theme being, according to Darrell J. Fasching (The Thought of Jacques Ellul), "the threat to human freedom and Christian faith created by modern technology." Ellul's constant theme was technological tyranny over humanity.
Ellul held to "that which desacralizes a given reality, itself in turn becomes the new sacred reality" (Fasching). Therefore, the sacred, as classically defined, is the object of hope and fear, fascination and dread (i.e., numinous). Once nature was the all-encompassing environment and power upon which human beings were dependent in life and death; so, humans experienced nature as sacred. (Fasching).
Fasching offered the following examples of Ellul's dialectic of desacralization-sacralization. 1) Christianity desacralized nature. 2) Christianity became sacred. 3) The Reformation desacralized the church in the name of the bible (i.e., Sola Scriptura, lit. Only Scripture). 4) The Bible became the sacred book. 5) Science and reason desacralized the Scriptures. 6) Since then science has become sacred.
Today, claimed Ellul, it is the technological society we hold sacred.
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