Clarity on what is wrong with you and me.

Romans 7 brings with it a pretty simple and clear thinking explanation of how human life works and why it breaks down.

An atheist, agnostic, irreligious person tend to speak with conviction that there is no objective moral order or law, and reject the notion of sin.

Yet we use langauge like good, bad, evil, true, right, wrong, sacred, holy, perfect all the time to depict how we ought and ought not to live.

Moreover, so much of every day discussion is about what moral duties are we responsible for and to others.

The only way we " know " we have done a good or bad thing is by knowing what that law is.

And yet, even if we make up our own law, as Paul states in Roman's 7, we break it all the time, even though we don't want to.

Like a fitness regime, we set it up, and then over time, we let it lapse, even though we don't want to.

Here to me, is where Roman's 7 jumps out at me, when re reading it today :

But still, the law itself is holy, and its commands are holy and right and good.

Romans 7:12 NLT
The Law is "holy". That is precisely the point about a universal law : it is holy, by its very nature.

Holiness is God inspired, set apart, sacred, untouchable, innocent, true, good and perfect, becuase its author, creator is the good, the definition of good. Unlike God, you or i don't define inherent good. We just recognise it (like we do evil) becuase of our God given nature, the Imago Dei.
Goodness, is baked into God. God is the good, not outside of it, or subject to it.

Goodness is a personhood construct.

This is where my agnostic and atheistic friends diverge. They believe they can be the author of good, of their own holy law.

But they, like me are flawed.
You only know you are flawed if there is a Law to inform you as such..... and off we go around this circular discussion again.

The breaker in it, is God's recognised Holy law.

Thank God He has a law. Thank God he has given me a fix that i could never do on my own.

Read Romans 7 again. It's beautiful.

Rationale Universal Justification

If you didn't believe justice was a crucial element to the integrity of our existence, then a philosopher could very quickly show your hypocrisy.

Tied to justice is the pre requisite of a moral law.

Tied to a moral law, is a person or personhood.

Justice is a human personal construct. A turtle, a deer, a dog, a tree, an omoeba doesn't have the consciousness or capacity to know, pursue or create a system of justice.

Which brings me to Romans 8.

Many folks generally don't have a hard time accepting what i just laid out. In fact, most, if not all have said that aspects like religion have been the cause of so much injustice.

Imagine for a moment, if we lived into perpetuity.

Think of the amount of injustice building up and up, layer upon layer, brick of evil upon evil brick.
As far as the East is from the West, and then some.

Yet our innate desire for justice is still there.

How do we solve this in effect, unsolveable problem?

I'd like to suggest, especially to my irreligious friends, scripture seems to provide such a solution to this problem, in God being the only one who can provide universal rationale justice:

"So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death.

The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature.

So God did what the law could not do.

He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins.

He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit.

Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit. So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace.

For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will. That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God. But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not belong to him at all.) And Christ lives within you, so even though your body will die because of sin, the Spirit gives you life because you have been made right with God.

The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you.

Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, you have no obligation to do what your sinful nature urges you to do. For if you live by its dictates, you will die. But if through the power of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God."

Romans 8:1‭-‬14

https://bible.com/bible/116/rom.8.1-14.NLT

Postscript.

The irreligious, will have a hard time accpeting or understanding the term "sin" in the above passage. I can appreciate that, but it's not a far stretch to identify with it, becuase it means "to miss the mark".
Ever used the word "pefect" in a sentence about your life or someone or something else? In order for that to be true, there has to be a benchmark or target of what perfection actuall is.
In the moral sense, no one is perfectly moral. 

3 things on COVID

The COVID 19 situation has reinforced to me 3 aspects :

The clear and present universal purpose of our existence is : relationships.
When governemnts shut down the capacity to relate and give relational restriction policies, our ability to function long term, becomes untennable.

That mankind will not live on bread alone (but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God).
Material aspects, while good in of themsleves, shows that it has caused much unintnetional harm, as intnetional good.
We need for spiritual food, becuase we are spirit first, body second.

That we all have a death sentence and that ought to repriotise the most precious thing we have : our time.
Moses said it in Psalm 91 : teach me to number my days so that i can be wise in how i spend them.

How can God get angry, when He's God?

It's often been said that God is petulant, angry and vindictive.

Richard Dawkins has one of those word salads describing God in his book The God Delusion.

In Jeremiah 7.21-34, is a classic case of God getting angry at the Israelites.

So here's  a thing, if God is not anger3d by the child sex slavery, by the genocide, by the systematic corruption of governments... or the lies we tell about others, or the cheating on our spouses or tax returns, or the malice we do to others.....

Then what kind of god would they be?

Racism...?

You might be persuaded, Trump is inherently racist.

Especially as large sections of the media are spending very significant amounts of time questioning him on his reference to naming the COVID 19 virus the China virus.

AOC and many other Democratic part members have claimed that this has bread xenophobia and left Chinese restaurants in the US empty.

This is all rather odd.

In China town in Sydney, they have been largely empty for about 5-6 weeks already. And which ethnicity frequents China town ? Chinese oriented people.

What about MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
Or the German Measles or the Spanish Flu?

Are the media that stupid or that incompetent and bigoted, that their audience is unable to differentiate between the location of a virus vs the people's of that location?

Democrats are really Racist and Bigoted?

The Democrats are the most racist, privileged, sexist and bigoted group of voters - ever seen.

After espousing they are the party of inclusivity and diversity, based on the skin pigmentation, the biological sex, the gender identity, the sexual preferences and of "eradicating corrupt Washington and the rich", we now have the choice of :

one very old white very rich male from the Washington of almost 50 years
Or
another even older white very wealthy white male from Washington of almost 40 years, and has only worked as a politician.

We have Elizabeth Warren, who claims she was sidelined becuase of either her gender identity or her biological sex - same difference i guess. Similar to Kamarla Harris. Which is interesting that the Democrats didn't cheer when Sara Palin was the running mate of Mccain in 2008 or when Condelessa Rice was the first black female as Secretary of State.

We have Cory Booker claiming he was sidelined becuase he was black. Which is odd, given America had 8 years of a black president.

We had a hispanic, in Julian Castro demanding "transgender abortion justice", whatever that is.

We had a $60 Bilionaire spending $600M on trying to win votes. He lost.

We had Elizabeth Warren accusing Bloomberg of telling his female staff to have an abortion. Which is odd, given Warren supports abortion, doesn't see a fetus as a human (obviously) and wouldn't vote to make it mandatory that babies born post abortion that are alive, are kept alive.

To top it off Elizabeth Warren, claimed to be Cherokee, so much so she got a DNA test. It came back 1/1024 part Cherokee, which is less than the average American.

Now we have 2 very old men, one who is not quite sure where he is and the other who has never had a job not funded by other taxpayers, and now has 3 houses and is a millionaire.

Both are Washington establishment collectively of 70+ years.

The Democrats ran on being diverse and inclusive, anti wealthy, anti corrupt Washington, anti bigoted.

How else do you explain their current choices? Perhaps their policies do not make sense? Perhaps mandatorily taking things and rights away from others, in the pursuit of equal outcomes, a.k.a socialism, is a proven failure?
Perhaps stating that a 9 year old trans kid is going to determine who gets awarded the Secretary of Education, is a dumb idea?

Clearly they have proved themselves to be Clinton's 'deplorables'.