How He loves us

I was trying to think of how to explain our relationship with God to a young friend, and this image came to me. Imagine you are high up in the sky, floating above trees and buildings, clouds nearby. You are face down and scared to death you will fall, but someone is holding you from behind, someone you can't quite see. It's hard to believe they are there, but they are, obviously, or you would fall. That doesn't do much to quell your fear though.

Life is like that. All we can see is what's in front of us, what's making us afraid. God is there holding onto us, will never let go and, someday, will fly us beyond this. We'll remember all of it and will be able to smile about it infinitely more easily than we can now. Even though this life may scare us, even though it's all we can see right now, it doesn't change the reality that God is behind us the whole time and in charge of the flight. And He will never let us go. That's an important thing to remember, because if He was just there, but could let go, his love would not be perfect. He can't let go because it's not in his nature to stop loving us.

So how can we learn to live better, knowing that what we see on this world is not all we have, not all we are? As someone else wrote, how can we learn to live as LOVED.

On Faith - A new leaf?

I've noticed a few trends in myself. 1. I'm in a rut. 2. I don't write about faith. 3. I focus on things that don't matter in the long run. 4. Writing helps.

So I'm going to write things on this blog. No promises. No delusions of grandeur, but I hope it helps me and others.
Here's my thought of the moment, which began as a joke:

Those who pray to God and those who pray to Allah are trying to connect with the same entity. They just think He has a different e-mail address. Other faiths try to connect with entirely different protocols, but I think the body of their message is very similar.

What inquisition?

Apparently, the Catholic church downplayed to death count due to inquisition while they asked to be forgiven for it. http://after-words.org/grim/mtarchives/2004/06/Jun161425.shtml
According to skeptics, religious violence has led to many millions of murders, not just through Christians or inquisition, in the past millennium. http://www.theskepticalreview.com/JAHPoliticsDeathToll.html
How then am I to reconcile the church's apology, the fact of the killings, Christians' destruction of sacrificial "pagan" beliefs around the world, skeptics' accusations about religion as a source of violence, and the assertions of other Christians I know personally that none of them would support such actions? How then, also, am I to handle the remains of my pagan heritage, destroyed as it were by evangelism? Should I claim the Catholic supplanters' faith, the older beliefs, both, or neither? Which path would gain me the richness of an established tradition which will live on for generations after me? Sometimes we cannot learn answers, only questions. The rest is up to us. I sure wish I had a narrative to guide me, but the clearest story in the Bible is actually composed of four viewpoints, and the ancient narratives of my culture appear to be lost.
I guess I should love each person, as Jesus would do. Then, I should judge their actions as closely as I can to how God would. It comes down to credibility, after all. We shall know them by their fruit, not what they say or what they believe. A Satanist who harms no one is a good person. A Christian who engineers the destruction of others is evil. My beliefs do not change. Like a skeptic, I say that I have a higher standard of morality than Christians. Knowing skeptics, I believe I am more truthful than they.