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d586f5c
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Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus's ideas makes Christianity truly radical.
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Brian Zahnd |
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9406559
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War, as a legitimate means of shaping the world, died with Christ on Good Friday. Jesus refuted the war option when he told Peter to put up his sword. Killing in order to liberate Jesus and his followers from the violent injustice of Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate would have been a just war--but Jesus refused to engage in a just war. He chose instead to bear witness to the truth, forgive, and die. Jesus took the death of a world framed by war ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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a61a913
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Jesus didn't seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners--tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin--the power brokers of religion and politics.
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Brian Zahnd |
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084ef9b
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It's not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It's the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be.
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Brian Zahnd |
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0766744
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Jesus overturned money-changing tables in the temple, but set up banqueting tables in his Father's house.
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Brian Zahnd |
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b9b58ed
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we eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we might give the impression that we really don't believe in Jesus's ideas of nonviolent resistance and enemy love at all.
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Brian Zahnd |
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ad2e8ec
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I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don't care. I've grown immune to their strain of unbelief. I've turned a corner. I believe that what Isaiah dreamed of, Jesus died for. I believe that what Isaiah said would come to pass in the last days, Jesus inaugurated in his resurrection. I've caught a glimp..
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Brian Zahnd |
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85af2fa
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What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God's love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the very image of God. Original blessing is more original than original sin!
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Brian Zahnd |
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2a86499
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this--when we feel hurt, threatened, or angered by a person, people-group, opinion, or situation, we instinctively look through the lens of self-defense. It's like looking at something through the sights of a gun--it's a narrow perspective framed in fear and held in hostility. Such a perspective is certainly not the full or true perspective. But if we are dualistic, non-contemplative people, we will think of our highly limited perspective a..
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Brian Zahnd |
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921c9ff
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The resurrection is not only God's vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity's burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen..
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Brian Zahnd |
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36e22bf
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For people who are poor at being spiritual (which is most people), this announcement really is good news. But do you see how counterintuitive this is? The kingdom of God is coming on earth, and who would we think would be the first ones invited in? The religious. The devout. The observant. The ones rich in spirituality. The ones good at being spiritual. But that's not how Jesus issued the invitation, and it's not what happened. It was the s..
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Brian Zahnd |
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3895205
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Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.
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Brian Zahnd |
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a6f10a0
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If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior.
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Brian Zahnd |
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5de15c8
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Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority.
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Brian Zahnd |
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4d84c07
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The tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder.
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Brian Zahnd |
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1f8d34b
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The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas--thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death. ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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90ddbf5
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It was Jesus's ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn't very dangerous. It's been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the "gospel" today--a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die--Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in t..
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Brian Zahnd |
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6f8a81a
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Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cann..
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Brian Zahnd |
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be6ce01
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It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.
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Brian Zahnd |
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119b26c
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When I say it's hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it's hard to believe in Jesus's ideas--in his way of saving the world. For Christians it's not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity--all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That's not hard for us. What's hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It's hard because his ideas for running the world are ..
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Brian Zahnd |
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945a904
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One of the problems with understanding what is meant by hell is that this tiny word has been forced to carry so much freight. Over the centuries it has picked up meanings often far removed from what was originally intended in the Bible. Hell has become a catchall word for however we imagine eternal punishment in the afterlife. But the Bible doesn't talk near as much about the afterlife as we have imagined. A surprising thing about the Old T..
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Brian Zahnd |
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70cb081
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But the Butlerians turn fear into violence and panic into a weapon. By creating imaginary problems and raising the specter of nonexistent enemies, they transform common people into a wild herd that destroys everything they do not understand.
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sci-fi
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Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson |
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d0129ef
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Even if we choose to use the nonstandard notion of distance and thereby describe the radius as being shorter than the Planck length, the physics we encounter--as discussed in previous sections--will be identical to that of a universe in which the radius, in the conventional sense of distance, is larger than the Planck length
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Brian Greene |
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227ab63
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To me, and to the participants of at the Green Bank conference, the idea that a civilization might destroy itself is both ludicrous and likely. We are pathetically inadequate at long-term planning, idiotically primitive in our destructive urges and pathologically incapable of simply getting along.
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doomsday
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Brian Cox |
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c8b6212
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The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.
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science
string-theory
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Brian Greene |
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8474298
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But there is a more catholic understanding of the term apostolic: it means missional. The apostles were those called together to learn (as disciples) so they could be sent out on a mission (which is what both the Greek root for apostle and the Latin root for mission mean). From this vantage point, disciples are apostles-in-training; Christian discipleship (or spiritual formation ) is training for apostleship, training for mission. From this..
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Brian D. McLaren |
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ec3c617
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Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.
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Brian Greene |
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6f200c1
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Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it's as if they're a single entity.
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Brian Greene |
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3314781
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In this language, we've found that the cosmic cheese acquires more and more holes because quantum processes knock the inflaton's value downward at a random assortment of locations. At the same time, the cheesy parts stretch ever larger because they're subject to inflationary expansion driven by the high inflaton field value they harbor. Taken together, the two processes yield an ever-expanding block of cosmic cheese riddled with an ever-gro..
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Brian Greene |
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df37ebf
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Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention."
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habit
inspirational
wonder
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Brian Christian |
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226bf9f
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Science is a way of life.
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Brian Greene |
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3a71c45
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Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury's orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton's mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury's trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.
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Brian Greene |
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de334e5
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they are beyond each other's cosmic horizon.
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Brian Greene |
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8acfa9a
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A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive. -- FRANK HERBERT, unpublished notes
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Brian Herbert |
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6f98fb9
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So the first time I ever came into contact with O'Toole was at one of these very gatherings. I remember it well because I'd just punched Harold Pinter down a flight of stairs. Oh yes, I'm afraid so. No long dramatic pauses this time, Harold; he got one right on the side of the jaw. Wham!
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Brian Blessed |
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673fe19
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But this ... creature was none of those things. He was barely distinguishable from an animal. The young man--singlehandedly--seemed intent on increasing the universe's entropy by an order of magnitude.
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Brian Herbert |
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6a36f7c
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Your outrageous and reckless chaos is the only reason you are able to beat me in any strategy game," Seurat said. "It certainly has nothing to do with your innate skills."
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Brian Herbert |
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5fd343a
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the tough philosophy of Ginaz taught that there were no accidents, no excuses for failure. Every event was the result of a sequence of actions. Intentions were irrelevant to actual outcomes.
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Brian Herbert |
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3cbe2ff
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Quite a body count around here today, Fenring mused. And I didn't kill any of them.
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Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson |
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5209af6
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Looking closely at de Vries, he added, 'You are a very ugly man, Piter. Even with my disease, I'm still prettier than you.
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Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson |
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933d310
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Some people consider facts to be dangerous things that must be locked away and carefully guarded. But I consider mysteries a far greater threat. We should seek answers wherever possible, regardless of the consequences. --GILBERTUS ALBANS, secret Erasmus dialogues
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Brian Herbert |
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81e007d
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the Baron felt cold inside, certain that even the most careful manipulations would not stand up to the close scrutiny of these demonic auditors.
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Brian Herbert |
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c021ece
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Each of us influences the actions of the people we know. --XAVIER HARKONNEN,
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Brian Herbert |
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42de09a
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A winner has more skills than a loser," Vor said, "no matter how you define the competition." --
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losers
losing
vorian-atreides
winners
winning
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Brian Herbert |