It is no surprise.
Man misses God and God is always silent.
‘Among Languages,I am Silence‘ Lord Krishna says.
Being silent ,unaffected by the events around one,joyful at all times is the meaning of attaining peace and Godhood.
When Religion becomes dogmatic, forgetting that the Religion is for the people, right at that moment God, for that Religion, is dead.
‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ said Jesus.
Unfortunately, the Church, instead of following this, has been , for centuries, resorting to blind liturgy, ceremonies and other paraphernalia.Unless the Church returns to the main teaching of Christ , simple living, high thinking,tolerance and eternal quest to realise God,the West shall remain materialistic and be plagued by self doubts.
Story.
Resurrection of Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Europe today is tired of religion and bored by God claims the Irish bishops in a new pastoral letter dated March 29. Throughout the European Union it appears that God is ‘silent and unmissed in the lives of many.’
The bishops’ 12-page document, titled ‘Repent and Believe the Good News,’ advises the Irish not to follow the lead of their neighbors on the continent.
The bishops reiterate Pope Benedict’s observation that Europeans seem tired of their faith, including their history and culture, and they no longer seem to wish to know Jesus Christ.
Harold Camping has been broadcasting his Doomsday predictions around the world
The end of the world is nigh; 21 May, to be precise. That’s the date when Harold Camping, a preacher from Oakland, California, is confidently predicting the Second Coming of the Lord. At about 6pm, he reckons 2 per cent of the world’s population will be immediately “raptured” to Heaven; the rest of us will get sent straight to the Other Place.
If Mr Camping were speaking from any normal pulpit, it would be easy to dismiss him as just another religious eccentric wrongly calling the apocalypse. But thanks to this elderly man’s ubiquity, on America’s airwaves and billboards, his unlikely Doomsday message is almost impossible to ignore.
Every day Mr Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, speaks to his followers via the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded entirely by donations from listeners. Such is their generosity (assets total $120m) that his network now owns 66 stations in the US alone.
Those deep pockets were raided to allow Family Radio to launch a high-profile advertising campaign, proclaiming the approaching Day of Judgement. More than 2,000 billboards across the US are adorned with its slogans, which include “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!”. A fleet of logoed camper vans is touring every state in the nation. “It’s getting real close. It’s really getting pretty awesome, when you think about it,” Mr Camping told The Independent on Sunday. “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”
Mr Camping, who makes programmes in 48 languages, boasts tens of thousands of followers across the globe, with radio stations in South Africa, Russia and Turkey. After 70 years of studying the Bible, he claims to have developed a system that uses mathematics to interpret prophesies hidden in it. He says the world will end on 21 May, because that will be 722,500 days from 1 April AD33, which he believes was the day of the Crucifixion. The figure of 722,500 is important because you get it by multiplying three holy numbers (five, 10 and 17) together twice. “When I found this out, I tell you, it blew my mind,” he said.
Recent events, such as earthquakes in Japan, New Zealand and Haiti, are harbingers of impending doom, he says, as are changing social values. “All the stealing, and the lying, and the wickedness and the sexual perversion that is going on in society is telling us something,” he says. “So too is the gay pride movement. It was sent by God as a sign of the end.”
Mr Camping, who founded Family Radio in the 1950s, grew up a Baptist. Many of his strongly held views – he does not believe in evolution and thinks all abortion should be banned – are relatively commonplace among America’s religious right.
Critics point out that this isn’t the first time Mr Camping has predicted the second coming. On 6 September 1994, hundreds of his listeners gathered at an auditorium in Alameda looking forward to Christ‘s return.
“At that time there was a lot of the Bible I had not really researched very carefully,” he said last week. “But now, we’ve had the chance to do just an enormous amount of additional study and God has given us outstanding proofs that it really is going to happen.”
Mr Camping’s argument has convinced Adam Larsen, 32, from Kansas. He is among scores of “ambassadors” who have quit their jobs to drive around America in Family Radio vehicles warning of the impending apocalypse. “My favourite pastime is raccoon hunting,” Mr Larsen told CNN. “I’ve had to give that up. But this task is far more important.”
Content of Faith is more important than form. Question of practicing and non practicing is more of analysis of of our Faith than actual Faith we have. Faith is tested belief and as such it does not need reassurance of the same. Religion as such is meant to enhance the spiritual level of the individual. When prescribed practices are set in a regular form, human nature rebels and one develops a guilty feeling when they do not conform to what has been prescribed.This is not necessary. As you have remarked if you have a comfortable feeling with yourself, you are on course.Unalloyed reactions for what we have done or nor done indicates whether we are right or not.Only when we tinker with rationalization we have problems. All these conflicts arise when you have a standard ,prescribed format of procedures for realizing God. But if these barriers are removed, it is easy to live the life than practice what we believe in. Hinduism does not have standard text books to follow. You can either follow or not. You deny existence of God, you may not practice , yet you are a Hindu. In fact the name Hindu denotes geographical identity You are given the freedom to pursue your course of action.
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Some religions do some very smart things and state things in logical ways. For example I like a phrase the Catholics use, they are either practicing or non-practicing. As a young girl, my friend’s mom told me she was a “non-practicing Catholic”. I had no idea what that meant. I knew Maria in the Sound of Music was a Catholic, so non-practicing Catholic must be someone who didn’t act like Maria. Someone who wasn’t good and probably didn’t go to church or spin on a mountain singing about the hills being alive to a big 100+ musician orchestra.
Muslims as a group seem to be sick.May be they do not know what their Religion is all about and they seem to be threatening world order. By their activities they make one feel that the civilization might be better off with out Islam.
Christians want to use the world Allah for proselytizing.
Instead of following Christianity they are attempting to increase their numbers as directed by Vatican, which calls a decade’ Decade of Harvest’,by spending huge sums for promotional activities(this is not restricted to Catholics;other denominations have a fair share too).Some promote by instant healing by demonstrating Healing on Stage( I know of people who are being paid to fake illness on stage and recover-funny thing is they are not even Christians ).
Fortunately or unfortunately Muslims respond in kind unlike other other followers.If Christians really want to use the name Allah, they might do it in private but not for converting others.By the way I am curious as to who, in the familial tree has not been converted at some point of time in the past as Religion is practiced as a matter of privilege of birth rather than conviction.I hope who want to be Religious to read their Religious texts, whether it Be The Bible or The Koran directly with out interpreters like the clergy or mullah for these gentlemen have their own axe to to grind or they are after riches which are being offered by the respective so called Protectors of the Faith.Religion is for self upliftment /realization.It is intensely personal..Be it Sal or Jesus they will be shocked if they were to return to earth to witness the perverted intrepretations of their teachings, which are meant to elevate human beings and not to make them behave like cavemen.
UPDATE: Three churches have been torched in Malaysia as religion tensions rise. Churches are bracing themselves for further attacks.
God’s just been to court. Well in Malaysia anyway.
The Malaysian government has filed an appeal against a court ruling that allows non-Muslims to use the word Allah to refer to God.
Protests by Muslim groups are breaking out across the country and online. The blogs are going mad over this asking whose God is Allah anyway?
Malaysia’s Catholic Church says that it uses the word Allah to meet the linguistic needs of some Malay worshippers. The government believes that Allah is solely an Islamic word whilst the court upholds that the term predates Islam.
The debate got me thinking about how I would feel if another religion used a Hindu term to refer to their God, may it be “Ishwar” or “Krishna”. Whilst I don’t think I’d be angry, I think I might feel a bit uncomfortable.
Joel Trumpet isn’t impressed at the ruling and he’s a Christian. He feels that by using the word “Allah” Christians are sending out mixed messages.
For Blogger Lucia Lai however, it’s great news.
Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak is asking Muslims not to blow this out of proportion, but do they have a right to be angry?
“The idea of bringing Allah before the courts is abominable as it is abhorrent,” says Sakmongkol. ” In the Malaysian context, Allah has always been the god of Islam. Whose religion is this? It is the religion of the Malays. It is the religion of 15-16 million Malaysians as opposed to the religion of between 850,000 to 1 million Catholics. “
I’ve been taking a look at various online dictionaries and what they have to say about Allah. I couldn’t find a consensus.
So is it all about context?
This blogger feels that both parties are blowing this out of proportion.
‘If I were a Muslim, I would probably say, “Oh never mind, let the Catholics go ahead and use the word Allah.
If I were a Catholic, I would probably say, “Oh never mind, let’s just drop the word Allah and use the word Tuhan instead.’”
Space between the ears in California disagrees. “How one religion could have a monopoly on a generic term or name is beyond me,” he adds.
Who are these jokers to decide on who should have the communion?
Communion by the clergy is not sacrosanct and it is an interpolated concept.On the basis of religious qualification only Jesus is qualified.
The office of Papacy as a temporal power was a creation of Constantine.
If strict moral laws are applied, majority of Popes are unfit to to receive Communion because of their debauchery.
As to the concept itself, if all of us are the children of God, why should I receive permission from a joker to Commune with my Father?
God does not need brokers.
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The nephew of ex-president John F Kennedy, a US lawmaker, has been barred from receiving communion at his Catholic church due to his
US Representative Patrick Kennedy, son of the late senator Edward Kennedy, was told of the move by Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin, according to The Providence Journal newspaper in the US state of Rhode Island.
Kennedy represents a district in Rhode Island in the US Congress.
“The bishop instructed me not to take communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me communion,” the paper quotes Kennedy as saying in a telephone interview.
Kennedy said the bishop had explained the penalty by telling him that he was not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that he had taken as a public official, particularly on abortion, the report said.
The congressman declined to say when or how Tobin told him not to take the sacrament or whether he had obeyed the bishop’s injunction, the report said.
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