The Riddle of the Angel Priest UPDATED! Real Priest Found!

Here's an interesting story: a young accident victim is trapped in her car. She's seriously injured but awake through it all. At one point she asks for the emergency service people to pray out loud  with her. Out of nowhere, a priest appears, anointing oil in hand, and calms both the young woman and her rescuers, then disappears.

This is, as the young'uns say, way cool.

It's possible that the priest was just passing through the area and happened upon the scene. This is the most likely scenario, at least to me. He may be found eventually and we'll learn his name and his parish.

But what if he's never found? His appearance on a road that had been closed for a quarter-mile in both directions was unexpected and his departure from the accident scene went unnoticed.

OK, that's still not unusual. Many good Samaritans don't stick around after they've helped someone. But where this story takes a turn is that the priest doesn't appear in any of  the nearly 70 pictures taken at the scene.

This story just got way cooler...

UPDATE: Here's an interview with one of the police officers at the accident scene who shook hands with the priest.

UPDATED UPDATE!

The priest has been found. Rev. Patrick Dowling. Thank you, Father. What you did at the accident scene was just what was needed for the emergency responders and the victim.



h/t The Drudge Report

Really Dirty Cartoon Makes a Good Point

The satirically demented people over at The Onion have done it again. They've posted a cartoon that's, well, Not Safe For Work or Play to point out the vast differences in religious cultures that exist between islam and the rest of the world.

I'll just link it here with another warning: if your sensibilities are easily offended, don't click on it. It depicts deities from the major (meaning real) religions in a very sexual way.

A very, very, sexual way.

Meh, I'm not thrilled with the cartoon, but I'm not calling for the artist to be jailed, or beheaded, or anything like that. Neither is anyone else. As far as I know there have been no riots, and no one has died as a result of it.

You have been warned. You must be this tall (intellectually) to click on the link.

Let's Play 20 Questions

Here's an intriguing post that I found over at BadBlue.

20 Questions that Atheists Need to be Able to Answer.

It just so happens that I and the Moron Horde briefly touched on this the other day. As you know, I consider myself a Christian, whether or not The Big Guy does remains to be seen. Fingers are crossed.

I'm drawn to discussion and exploration of the idea, the more analytical, the better. This is easier said than done, because few things arouse the passions more than religion. I try to approach these discussions from a scientific angle, testing the author's assertions against my own experience and what I know to be true. A big part of this comes from my years in manufacturing and my daily dealings with the laws of physics. This experience has given me an appreciation for how things get made, so it's a simple matter to scale up that appreciation to the size of Reality.

I don't think that science and religion are mutually exclusive of each other. The urge and effort to make sense of the universe tends to answer just one question: What is it?

Religion asks: Why is it?

Here is where the difference in the scale of the complexity of the answer approaches infinity. Anything you can possibly imagine has been considered as the basis for what we call Creation. I mean anything, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.

To paraphrase Han Solo, "I can imagine quite a bit."

Rather than waste a lifetime making guesses about things, logic would dictate that you begin at the beginning. Science does this. It's a baseline, or rather The Baseline, for what we see all around us. We call this Reality.

Observe, test, observe some more, test some more, ad infinitum, seeking accuracy at all times. And always trying to ask the right questions.

Which brings us back, oddly enough, to 20 Questions.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear: this is not a dig against atheists. Your personal belief are yours, and because I wouldn't want to be judged for mine, I won't judge you for yours. And I'm certainly not going to try to "convert" you. That's just rude. The whole point of religion is that it originates from inside you, a true introspection. This is intended as a friendly conversation, much as we would discuss sports.

I really mean that.

And just so you know, I was agnostic at one time.

So, this question is pretty important:

And here's my take:

You have so many years to find what you should be looking for, which is a spiritual union with God. This union softens the heart, and allows for the qualities of forgiveness, compassion and empathy. It also imparts great strength of character and enables you to see what is true, and especially what isn't. This is the driving force behind my conservatism.

Only man stands on the edge of two worlds, one spiritual, the other material. We are born into the material, separate from God and Heaven: hence the phrase "born in sin." We must find our way back home in this life, much like the Prodigal Son. It isn't easy, and there are many detours and roadblocks along the way, but if we're grounded in Reality and Truth, we're always shown which way to go thanks to that spiritual union.

,
And here are a few of the 20 Questions:

1. What caused the universe to exist?
3. Why is the universe rational?
9. How is independent thought possible in a world ruled by chance and necessity?
10. How do we account for self-awareness?
11. How is free will possible in a material universe?
12. How do we account for conscience?
13. On what basis can we make moral judgements?
15. Why do human beings matter?
18. How do we know the supernatural does not exist?
19.How can we know if there is conscious existence after death?
20. What accounts for the empty tomb, resurrection appearances and growth of the church?
21. What's a henway?

I may have added that last one.

The author continues, and makes a point that I've been pondering for a few months now: Is it Time to make a decision? To choose sides? Will this question be asked of everyone sooner than we think?

So here’s the deal. It seems to me that there we can either search for and find answers to these questions, and then adjust our behavior to fit even if we will be less happy and fulfilled, or we can make our happiness and personal autonomy in this life the most important thing, and invent answers to these questions that are speculative. Either we live consistently with the evidence we have now, or we live how we want and hope for future evidence that will overturn the evidence we have now.

I think that this is the choice that we are facing as humans. Either we make truth the top priority, and let our lives change in order to respond to the evidence we have right now or we make our happiness the top priority and speculate that the universe is other than the way it is so that we can pursue happiness unencumbered by the obligation to know the Creator and Designer of the universe.

Everyone always talks about “the meaning of life”. I’ll tell you what the meaning of life is. It’s to puzzle about the questions above and get into an intimate, loving, self-sacrificial relationship with the Creator and Designer of the universe – a relationship bounded by facts, not feelings. What is so objectionable with the idea that there might be a Person out there who has a claim on us? So long as his intentions are good, why are we so unwilling to be his friend and to take his character into account when we decide what we will do with our lives?

Very well put indeed.

What Easter Means to Me

President Obama made this bizarre comment at the Easter prayer breakfast the other day, “…during this season we are reminded that there's something about the Resurrection, something about the Resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective.”

Spoken like a true believer.

My regular readers, all five of you, know that I’m a Christian. While I don’t harp upon that fact, it’s the foundation of my political beliefs. I call myself a Christian. Whether or not The Big Guy agrees, well, I’ll just do my best and hope that He does. As Ann Barnhardt said,  "I reckon He looks at me and just shakes His head."
My spiritual journey started around the age of ten. Mom never attended church, which was rather unusual in Alabama, being as it’s the buckle of the Bible Belt. One of my classmates invited me to his church. During Sunday school, we were assigned passages to read for the next week’s discussion. A curious thing happened: I started to notice that what I gleaned from our reading assignments was not the same thing that our teacher spoke about in class. Every week, I’d dutifully read the verses, and without fail, our teacher would discuss the same verse, but in a totally different way than I interpreted it.

Not only did this happen in Sunday school, when we attended regular service and the preacher gave his sermon, the same thing happened. He’d speak about a particular verse and get something else entirely from it than I did.

Being the stubborn little bastard that I was, I figured out that organized religion was not where I was going to find the answers about God that I was looking for. I thanked my friend for taking me to church, and set about on a personal quest to try to understand this religion thingy.

There seemed to be something inside of me that pointed me in my own direction.

Whatever it is, I’m glad it’s there.

It can get lonely traveling by yourself. My great-grandfather was one of five brothers who were all preachers. As a result, many of their progeny, my cousins, were also called to preach. It didn’t take too many family reunions before I was considered the black sheep of the gathering. I drank, I smoked, and I played music in bars, hardly their vision of a fine, upright Christian.

At one reunion, one of my preacher cousins engaged me in a conversation. He attempted to show me the error of my ways. I didn’t begrudge his effort; he sincerely was trying to help me. It wasn’t as if I’d ever had any run-ins with the law or was in any kind of trouble. He just wanted me to “join the crowd.” I politely declined.

I never heard from him again.

By that time, I’d met far too many hypocrites. People who loudly and proudly proclaimed their Christianity, attended church every Sunday, and were the meanest, most spiteful and despicable people who would gladly stab you in the back at the first opportunity. I was not going to associate with them or be identified with them in any way. Hence my silence.

After many years of searching, reading, and much trial and error, I’m at a point where I can speak with a bit of authority. As you know, I’ve called out some prominent “religious” figures in America today as false Christians: Jesse Jackson, Father Pfleger, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, the idiots at Westbrook Baptist Church (the military funeral protesters), none of them are true Christians. They are more like anti-Christians, the wolves in sheep’s clothing we were warned about. As such, they give the public the wrong impression of Christianity, like it hasn’t had an image problem since its very beginning.

This is a great disservice to the rest of us who are also searching for God. The uninitiated look at them and dismiss the whole religion outright instead of rejecting someone who deserves to be rejected. If there is anything I can do with this forum to point out blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty, I’ll do it, especially if someone claims to be religious.

And don't get me started on Islam, the polar opposite of Christianity.


But I digress.

Easter, to me, is the most sacred of Christian holidays. In a scant three days, all of Christianity is displayed on a grand stage. Persecution, betrayal, hypocrisy, forgiveness, love, death and mourning, followed by the Miracle of Christ’s Resurrection construct the Passion Play in a condensation of One Life.

Of particular note is the victory of eternal spiritual life over earthly death. Jesus’ reappearance to his friends in spiritual form is the lesson of Easter: this life isn’t all there is to life. What is hidden from you is hidden for a purpose. You’re supposed to question this life and all its shallowness, and listen to that little something inside of you that tells you there is something missing here, and then find out what that something is. You’re meant to discover the joy of the truth that sets you free.

That “something” is a spiritual union with your Creator. This takes the form of an inner knowing, an intuition (it’s not just for women anymore), whatever it is that tells you when something isn’t quite right. Kind of like a Vulcan mind meld, if you’ll pardon the analogy.

Mental stillness helps a lot. Learn how to meditate, to calm your mind and gain a measure of self-control. Cling to what you know is right within your heart.

Rediscover this ancient saying, “Your thoughts are not your own.” That’s not you doing the thinking. If it was, then you could change your thoughts.

Understand that sin isn’t a specific act, it’s the state of being spiritually separated from God. It’s how you were born. Observe what happens in a garden: seeds grow to maturity. In the Garden of Eden, your intellect grows to maturity in preparation for the Eternal Life you are meant to live.

Jesus left us with only two instructions: to love God and seek him within ourselves, and also to love your fellow man. Use the Golden Rule whenever and wherever you can. And if you manage to screw it up and become angry with someone, let your conscience be your guide so that the next time, you’ll succeed. Forgive and you will be forgiven.

It really is that simple. Just believe.

So this Easter, be glad. Open your heart and mind to the possibility of eternal life in a spiritual form. Your soul cannot die. It’s the part of you that animates your body. Your mind can be part of God, and receive Instruction from Him on how to live a better and more fulfilling life while you’re here. It’s the Light that guides you along the path of this life.

It's not unpossible that we're in the End Times. I know that's been said before, but how many things that you see in the news today cause you to think, "I've never seen that before." Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil, just might be televised. It could very well be time to make a decision as if your life depended on it.

If you’ve found what you seek in a traditional church, I applaud you. I, however, just couldn’t find it there. Wherever and however you find it, seek it with all that is within you. Ultimately, it’s between you and God anyway.

That’s why you’re here.

To all of you, have a Joyous and Happy Easter.

Good Religion is Also Good Psychology

While our President, House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader press forward with their healthcare summit today in an attempt to shove an unpopular piece of legislation down the throats of Americans who don't want it, this blog ran across a somewhat related article. It seems that a belief in God helps some to relieve depression.

This is good news.

"For people diagnosed with clinical depression, medication certainly plays an important role in reducing symptoms," Ms. Murphy added. "But when treating persons diagnosed with depression, clinicians need to be aware of the role of religion in their patients' lives. It is an important resource in planning their care."

Read the whole thing.