Stray thoughts

Two stray thoughts subsequent to my San Francisco visit ...

On friendship

Despite my religious conviction and political conservatism, for decades I've greatly enjoyed a friendship with a leftist whose 'atrocities' include being a campaign bundler for Hillary, and another with a former Anthropology professor from UC Berkley.   

Turns out, such relationships are not that uncommon.

In one of his series of lectures on the Reformation (1) Carl Trueman, a Presbyterian (OPC) Minister and significant church historian offers this insight:

“One of the difficult things to quantify but I'm more and more convinced as the more I study history, is significant and that is friendship.  Friendship is a powerful thing that often transcends party lines.  ... My best friend was a  atheist Jewish guy, very liberal old testament scholar we got on famously and on paper we should have been daggers drawn but our friendship was really really strong,   And I can't explain it to you, we just happened to click and connect.  And friendships, when you study history in terms of grand movements it can be fairly straightforward, when you get into ground level and look at the micro narrative of individual lives friendship is an incredibly powerful and unpredictable thing and Calvin has a number of friendships that are unusual and continued throughout his life and that is the same with a lot ...probably the same with yourself when you think about the friendships you have, not many of then are determined purely and simply along ideological lines.”

On atheist

Philosophically or metaphysically, there are some that cling to what they believe is rationality, and simply isn't.  As one group puts it -  “Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world.  Never distort scientific fact to one's beliefs.”   Many who do not believe in a Divine Creator would claim this to be one of their tenets, though how the universe sprung into being, spontaneously,  without Agency, defies explanation by a 'scientific' method.  In truth, to deny the Creator is to believe what is mathematically unsupportable as is explained by David Berlinski, author of a book on "Atheism and it's scientific pretensions” -  https://youtu.be/LuEaJDksxls  

I will continue to pray that good people of this persuasion see the truth before going the way of  Christopher Hitchens.  

Culturally, it's clear that the atheist dream of a godless, socialists, utopian society is, instead, bringing us a vicious, pagan one.





1. The Reformation, part 16, Calvin 1.  Original lecture series from Westminster Seminary no longer on the web that I can find.  A later version of his series on the Reformation is here – regrettably somewhat abbreviated and lacking some of the personal insights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEpQjtufzp0