looking for my yellow brick road

let your hair down

me

...remaking this blog to rediscover, or perhaps finally truly discover, me.

kindness

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.  

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

An ex-fundamentalist on absolutism

The Shape of Absolutism by James C. Alexander (10 pages)
online excerpt from the book Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist (which I have not read yet)

Well worth the read. His description of the fundamentalist subculture is a good one, and I love the "Bible mania" part. I think he might blur the lines between moral absolutism and fundamentalism, but he gives a lot of food for thought, including this excerpts:

"Fundamentalism/absolutism is a reactionary phenomenon. It finds unique ways to both
engage and avoid the world. Moreover, it constantly uses the subculture to indoctrinate
against the world."

"Among the many varieties of fundamentalists/absolutists, the certainty of being right and fear
of rule breaking provide the common denominators."

"Absolutism betrays Christianity in three ways. It replaces historical doctrines with beliefs
without root in tradition, reason, or scripture. It replaces the central (Protestant) view of the
competency of the individual with a top-down clerical absolutism. Finally, it replaces love with
harsh and exacting laws (Bawer 1997, 11)."

"Love often goes by the wayside as rules and certainty move in."

change of direction

I considered making a new blog for more scope, specifically exploring and discussing current issues... but decided I will instead keep this as my main blog, and copy over my philosophical quotes to a new blog here: http://simplymerrier.blogspot.com

Is it worth keeping another blog for the quotes, or shall I just intersperse them here as I blog about other things?

“I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more,
if they had known they were slaves.”

~ Harriet Tubman

There is a misconception that John Calvin is someone worthy of emulation.

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by
our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to
faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our
determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the
modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but
our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.

~ Os Guinness

(gleaned from RZIM's Slice of Infinity, "The Most Progressive")