So I blogged earlier about this mysterious organization called Voice of the Martyrs which I initially accidentally mistook for Sacrilegious S&M Porn -- anyway, against my reason I ended up ordering some books and thus far have read 2 of them and feel quite enriched! Impressed enough, in fact, that I am going to post some excerpts here.
100 Prison Meditations is a collection of thoughts by Richard Wurmbrand. He was a Jewish-Christian Romanian pastor who preached Christianity during the Stalin regime and as a result served a total of 14 years in prison camps, 3 of those years in solitary confinement.
Wurmbrand noted: "A person must be very daring to assert that he has the final objective truth in religion. Northern Europe is Lutheran; the Southwest is Catholic; the East, Orthodox; India, Hindu; and the Middle East, Moslem. Can truth be geographically conditioned? The most murderous influence in religious history has been the assumption of objective truth in religion. We have to live with relative truth, accepted by our minds as the result of long heritage, education, circumstances of life, and the interplay of historical events. As in other domains, we must rely largely on probability in some religious matters, too."
I will add to this what I've said before, that I think people get stuck in syntax when it comes to arguments over religion. I personally suspect we are all talking about the same God - it is one God who has revealed some mysteries of the Universe to Monks, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Scientologists and whatever other multitude of spiritually enlightened doctrines exist. The bible itself states in Mark 12:29, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," and in 1 Corinthians 8:6, "there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things come and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came, and through whom we live." What we choose to name this God is I think where human beings go into battle.
Not one human being or religion has unlocked the secrets of the Universe, so to argue with hatred over who has the ultimate Truth, is useless and harmful. We're all just the proverbial monkeys trying to type out Paradise Lost, when it comes to understanding God.
The reason the bible is my study of choice is because I find it fascinating and astoundingly relevant to my personal life, millennia after the original writings. Whether one chooses to see the information it contains as myth, old wives' tales, metaphor, allegory or literal truth, you can't deny that it does contain elemental guidance for life in a world that is seriously confusing. And I do think it contains some Universal secrets we will probably never unlock. Still, it's fun (maybe even compelling) to explore.
As Wurmbrand states in 100 Prison Meditations, we may not get all the answers but it seems we can't help looking: "Woe to a faith that does not question. Reason questions almost everything it sees and hears. Only a reason undedicated to God does not question who He is and what He does and what His intentions are. The answers we receive are an inconclusive as those of science. If matter and its constituent particles, the atoms, are mysterious, the more so is God, their Creator. He has given us a revelation that would not be worthy of Him if it were not also enigmatic."
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