“
Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply'. But not in those words.
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Woody Allen
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He was the firstborn Bridgerton of a firstborn Bridgerton of a firstborn Bridgerton eight times over. He had a dynastic responsibility to be fruitful and multiply.
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Julia Quinn (The Viscount Who Loved Me (Bridgertons, #2))
“
God had commanded: Be fruitful and multiply! It costs men nothing and women everything.
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Nikki Marmery (Lilith)
“
Inside marriage, those feelings are pure. God wouldn't order us to be fruitful and multiply if He didn't want us to share intimacy. It fosters a special closeness.
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Cathy Marie Hake (Serendipity (Only in Gooding, #5))
“
The mind is the root from which all things grow if you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like the root of a tree. All a tree’s fruit and flowers, branches and leaves depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort.
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Bodhidharma (The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma (English and Chinese Edition))
“
Be fruitful, and multiply.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
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The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as long as possible—to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (2 B R 0 2 B)
“
On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.
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Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
“
Multiply me when necessary. Transform me into light where there is shadow.
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree)
“
I try to be a good investment to God. All the good things he’s given me, I aim to multiply and return to him and his purposes a maximum ROI. I’m just a tree in his fruit garden aiming to produce good fruit.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Judaism takes the verse in Genesis, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' as part of its statutory law. Because it is the first law in the Torah it holds a special eminence.
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Herman Wouk (This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism)
“
Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.
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Helen Keller
“
Multiply me when necessary,
make me disappear
when peremptory.
Transform me into light when there is shadow,
into a star
when in the desert.
”
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree)
“
Redemption is not just about being saved *from* the consequences of sin, it is also about being saved *to* something- to resume the task for which we were originally created. And what was that task? In Genesis, God gives what we might call the first job description: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it."
"Be fruitful and multiply", means to develop the social world: build families, churches, cities, governments, laws.
The second phrase, "subdue the earth" means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music.
This passage is sometimes called the "cultural mandate" because it tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures and build civilizations- nothing less.
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Nancy R. Pearcey (Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity)
“
The beauty of a living organism-be it good or evil-is that it will follow the law of God with singular vision.
Be fruitful and multiply.
-Bertrand Zobrist
”
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Dan Brown (Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4))
“
Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to the flesh but to “a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys filling the earth.
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Stephen Greenblatt (The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us)
“
When I speak of God, I mean that god who prevented man from putting forth his hand and taking also of the fruit of the tree of life that he might live forever; of that god who multiplied the agonies of woman, increased the weary toil of man, and in his anger drowned a world—of that god whose altars reeked with human blood, who butchered babes, violated maidens, enslaved men and filled the earth with cruelty and crime; of that god who made heaven for the few, hell for the many, and who will gloat forever and ever upon the writhings of the lost and damned.
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Robert G. Ingersoll (Some Mistakes of Moses)
“
Adam and Eve were placed in the garden with a mission. God said, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). It was God’s intention that as they bore more children, who also lived under God’s rule, they would be extending the boundaries of His garden (His government) through the simplicity of their devotion to Him.
”
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Bill Johnson (When Heaven Invades Earth: A Practical Guide to a Life of Miracles)
“
The innocuous-sounding term “fertility treatment” enables the wealthy to breed their own kind, buying sperm and eggs at “baby centers” around the country. Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor
”
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Nancy Isenberg (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America)
“
Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty.
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Milan Kundera
“
Our Master puts the desire to procreate in us to be sure that we are fruitful and multiply. He knows how important animals are to the planet because most animals He allows to reproduce in great number. He put every one of us on the ark for a reason. Do you think it’s a mistake that dogs and cats have litters of 8, 9, 10 or more and people typically only have one or maybe two? It’s no mistake. It’s because God intends that there is more than enough four-legged love to go around.
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Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 3))
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And God said to them, s“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth
”
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
“
When the Lord said be fruitful and multiply, did he mean this man?
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Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
“
I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.
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Woody Allen
“
I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.
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Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature)
“
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
”
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
“
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. GENESIS 1:28 Abide in me. JOHN 15:4 Go . . . [to] all nations. MATTHEW 28:19 Stay . . . and go. Jesus is our staying power in all our going. If you’ll stay while you go, you may not always know where you’re going. But you can know that wherever you end up, He will walk you there. [1] Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.
”
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Beth Moore (Chasing Vines: Finding Your Way to an Immensely Fruitful Life)
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Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery---which the world is filled with...
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Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
“
The world is changing rapidly, and everyone changes along with the world. Discoveries is now becoming rampant; intellectually, technologically,etc, each having its advantage and disadvantage.
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Michael Bassey Johnson
“
In an age of stagnant or declining birthrates, too, these communities’ willingness to heed the admonition to be fruitful and multiply has led to speculation about what the demographer Philip Longman calls “the survival of the godliest.
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Ross Douthat (Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics)
“
Churches that don’t celebrate children aren’t going to celebrate evangelism. After all, the “be fruitful and multiply” clause in Genesis is echoed in the Great Commission of Jesus (Matt. 28:16–20), a mission that also seeks to fill the entire earth.
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Russell D. Moore (Adoption: What Joseph of Nazareth Can Teach Us about This Countercultural Choice)
“
My creed is this: To make sure that every single ounce of true kindness given to me, will never be forgotten, and not only remain unforgotten, but that those acts of true kindness will multiply and bear fruit just because they were planted in me. To make people’s acts of true kindness towards me multiply like investments. That’s my creed. So that a person who has bestowed a goodness upon me, will never be able to regret that act and will in fact say to herself or himself “I am so glad that I did that for her, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. A good investment.” And I know for sure that the people who have shown me any amount of true kindness, can say for certain, that it's one of the best things they’ve done in life, because I make sure that they can say that about me. Ask anyone who’s been kind to me, and they will tell you. Because this is my creed in life. There is no greater evil, in my opinion, than the evil that infests a person who takes for granted any amount of true kindness given to her/him. To forget a kindness done unto you, is to be just like a donkey. Donkeys might even be better. And so this is the creed that I live by.
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C. JoyBell C.
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As full and equal partners Adam and Eve were responsible to tend the garden, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, to subdue the earth, and to rule over the creatures. In other words, together they were given stewardship of the earth because they were equals.
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Alan F. Johnson (How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals)
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Increase. Being fruitful is a good and necessary start, but it should grow into the next phase, increase. Once again, even though the idea here is to multiply or reproduce, sexual procreation is only part of the meaning. The Hebrew word for increase also can mean “abundance,” “to be in authority,” “to enlarge,” and “to excel.” It carries the sense of refining your gift until it is completely unique. It is impossible to reproduce what you have not refined. In this context, then, to increase means not only to multiply or reproduce as in having children, but also to improve and excel, mastering your gift and becoming the very best you can possibly be at what you do. It also means learning how to manage the resources God has given you and developing a strategy for managing the increase that will come through refinement. By refining your gift, you make room for it in the world. The more refined your gift, the more in demand you will be. Proverbs 18:16 (KJV) says, “A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.” By refining your gift, you make room for it in the world. What is your fruit—your gift? What are you known for? What do you have that is reproducible? What quality or ability do you have that causes people to seek you out? What brings you joy? What are you passionate about? What do you have to offer the world, even just your little part of it? Fruit must be reproducible or else it is not genuine fruit. “Be fruitful” means to produce fruit; “increase” means to reproduce it.
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Myles Munroe (The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage)
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I want to live somewhere where it rains a lot and things grow furiously. I want to see the fruits of the earth multiply and all that sort of thing. I want to make provision for the future. I want to lay up riches on earth since I don’t believe in heaven. Not material riches— I want green fields and fat cows and oak trees.
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Penelope Lively (Moon Tiger)
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Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
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Walter Pater
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Multiply your fruitfulness! Attract what it takes to rule the world.
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Anyaele Sam Chiyson (It Is Time to Get Very Rich)
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they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.
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Anonymous (The Holy Bible, King James version 1611 (Annotated))
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Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
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Anonymous (The Holy Bible, King James version 1611 (Annotated))
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Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion
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Anonymous (The Holy Bible: King James Version)
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But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
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becoming French.” Meanwhile, as the birth rate of Europe’s indigenous population remains stagnant, the newcomers are fruitful and multiplying. Over time, resentment toward them has grown, along with
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor
”
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Nancy Isenberg (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America)
“
I will tell you a thing about your new name,” Stilgar said. “The choice pleases us. Muad’Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad’Dib creates his own water. Muad’Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad’Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad’Dib we call ‘instructor-of-boys.’ That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad’Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you.” Stilgar
”
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Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
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Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.
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Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Crofts Classics))
“
When will it all cave in? The sky, I mean; our networks; our intricate pretensions. We were too good at what we did, at being fruitful, at multiplying, and now there’s too much breathing. We eat dangerous foods, our shit glows in the dark, the cells of our bodies turn on us like sharks. Every system is self-limiting. Will we solve ourselves as the rats do? With war, with plagues, with mass starvation? These thoughts come with breakfast, like the juice from murdered fruits. Your depression, my friend, is the revenge of the oranges.
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Margaret Atwood (Good Bones and Simple Murders)
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I don’t mean this to sound cruel,” Tish began, “but it seems like part of your heart can never work if you don’t have kids. Like it will always be shut off.” “I agree,” Katie said. “I didn’t really become a woman until I felt Mackenzie inside me. I mean, there’s all this talk these days of God versus science, but it seems like, with babies, both sides agree. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply, and science, well, when it all boils down, that’s what women were made for, right? To bear children.” “Girl power,” Becca muttered under her breath.
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Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects)
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The essential mark of maturity in Christians—as in peach trees—is generativity. Mature faith bears fruit. Mature Christians are branches on which God’s love is multiplied and offered for the nourishment of others. As Jesus pointed out, “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:8). By nurturing and offering the life-giving fruits of the Spirit (e.g., love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control [Gal. 5:22–23]), we become branches of divine grace, vehicles Christ uses to extend himself to others.
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Kenda Creasy Dean (Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church)
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What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies. Oh God, King of the universe, thank you for not creating me a man. Oh God, obliterate me. Make me fruitful. Mortify my flesh, that I may be multiplied. Let me be fulfilled... Some
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Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
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What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?
Philosophers have pondered that question for centuries. I'm afraid the answer is disappointingly simple: Mating.
That's it.
Christians seem to think that life is a test, and that the goal is to get into Heaven. But that's like saying your job is to get a promotion. No, your job is to work. And then, if you worked hard, then you get promoted. Heaven is supposed to be a reward or promotion, for a job well done. And what's our job? "Be fruitful and multiply." We are here to mate and procreate. That's it. That's all there's to it.
That's the meaning of life. Mating.
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Oliver Markus Malloy (Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends: Honest Relationship Advice for Women (Educated Rants and Wild Guesses, #1))
“
To St. Gertrude it was revealed that however small the good work might be that was done for the glory of God, if but one “Our Father” is said for the welfare of the Church, the Son of God receives that work with ineffable delight as the fruit of His Passion, gives thanks to God for it, blesses it, and in blessing, multiplies it.
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Mary Potter (Devotion For The Dying: Mary's Call to Her Loving Children)
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Yes, You did tell them to ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ but you didn’t tell them to breed like rabbits. They are breaking out of the natural restraints You put on them. All creatures have population restraints to keep the world in balance. Rabbits have foxes, worms have birds, and the stronger ones are killed by disease. These restraints work fine on other animals, but the humans have killed off every natural predator they’ve ever had and cured every disease that has threatened their numbers. If they haven’t found a cure for it, then they’ve found a way to patch the patient up well enough so that he or she can make more babies. God, Your people have a problem and it’s their own fault.
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Russell A Mebane (Squirrels & Puppies: Dark Morality Tales)
“
The battle of good versus evil is the oldest and most re-occurring story tale in the book of life. It never ends because no matter how you cut off the tail of evil, it will always grow back again and again. This old story will always continue into infinity until we closely examine our past errors to prevent giving the snake a new head in the future. You can destroy a demon, but a new one will always come back later in time. You can bring down a corrupt leader, but another one will rise up again with time. As long as the ego overcomes the heart of a man, evil will always exist, and the enemies of God will continue to multiply and thrive. If a tree is bearing bad fruit, you do not destroy the tree by cutting off its branches or eliminating its fruit, but by destroying its roots. I want you to look at the world as this poisoned tree. Even if we eliminate our enemies today, we will create new ones tomorrow. The forumla to cut off the head of the snake once and fall is very simple, and this basic solution is written in all your holy books — 'LOVE IS THE ANSWER'. The strongest counterspell to destroy all forces of black magic is love. Pure unconditional love. However, to be able to emit the right frequency of love, one must first succeed in their own personal battle of good versus evil: heart (conscience) vs. mind (ego). Once you learn how to use your heart to embrace all living things as you do your own reflection, and use your heart to detect truths and dictate your actions, your heart will not be fully activated to love all of mankind the right way. Where there is love, there will be truth and light. Take away the love or truth, and we will forever remain in the dark. Truth, light and love must all co-exist in perfect harmony to overcome evil on earth. And they cannot just be secluded to one part of the world, but reign as divine royalty across the entire globe.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
Sugar substitutes aren’t any better. Many people (including me when I was overweight) turn to artificial sugars to quell their cravings without packing on the pounds. Back then I would have happily performed heart surgery with a Diet Coke in my hand if only I could have found a way to sterilize it! But ironically, although these products are supposed to aid in weight loss, they do just the opposite. That’s because products such as sucralose, saccharin, aspartame, and other nonnutritive artificial sweeteners kill your gut buddies and allow the bad bugs to multiply. Believe it or not, a Duke University study28 showed that a single Splenda packet kills 50 percent of normal intestinal flora! It’s sad but true: if you eat too much of anything sweet, your gut buddies will starve to death, and your bad bugs will live long and prosper—and multiply. Even fructose, the sugar in fruit, has been shown to be a mitochrondrial poison! There goes the neighborhood.
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Steven R. Gundry (The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age (The Plant Paradox, #4))
“
As long as the ego overcomes the heart of a man, evil will always exist, and the enemies of God will continue to multiply and thrive. If a tree is bearing bad fruit, you do not destroy the tree by cutting off its branches or eliminating its fruit, but by destroying its roots. I want you to look at the world as this poisoned tree. Even if we eliminate our enemies today, we will create new ones tomorrow. The solution is very simple and this formula is written in all your holy books. LOVE IS THY ANSWER. The strongest weapon to destroy the snakes of hate and evil is LOVE. PURE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. However, to be able to emit the right frequency of love, you must succeed daily in your own personal battle of good versus evil: heart (conscience) vs. mind (ego). Once you learn how to use your heart to embrace all living things as you do your own reflection, and use your heart to detect truths and dictate your actions, your heart will not be fully activated to LOVE. Where there is LOVE, there will remain Truth and LIGHT. Take away the LOVE, and you will always remain in the dark.
”
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
What is this food in my head, anyway? Let’s see...it’s green and good for you and so delicious. It’s prepared by angels with love. The minute you bite into it, it’s savory, chewy, nourishing, and whole- some. You feel instantly revitalized. A small, tiny amount, just a few bites, rejuvenates every cell, deepens your breath, clears your mind, heals your wounds, and mends your heart. It’s made from joyous plants that voluntarily separate themselves from their stalks, laying themselves at the feet of the approaching gardener who gathers them. They eagerly offer their vital energies to nourish living spirits. The angels in their chef hats, singing mantras, cook it tenderly to retain all the benefits of the generous plants. It’s barely sweet, barely salty, and contains all the freshness of spring herbs, summer fruit, spreading leaves, and burgeoning seeds. It comes premade in bags or boxes...you just open it up, sit down, and enjoy. It’s a full meal, enough maybe for a whole day, maybe for a week, maybe for your family, maybe for your friends and neighbors. It multiplies like loaves and fishes, in little biodegradable containers that vaporize instantly the moment you finish them, without any greenhouse emissions. Nothing to clean up!
”
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Kimber Simpkins (Full: How one woman found yoga, eased her inner hunger, and started loving herself)
“
The Florida side of my family is huge. People married young. Were Fruitful. Multiplied. As a kid a family fish fry might see 50 gather in someone's First District yard. A great-uncle frying mullet. Adults in the shade as kids played. Games of tag with complex rules. Jumping Live Oak roots. Flinging Chinaberries. You'd limp to the shade bruised and breathless. Hear a story about a cousin caught stealing hogs. Quickly get sent away – "Go play! This is Grown People Business!" We'd head back out. Climb trees. Make palm frond swords. Years passed. I grew up and found that most of those relatives were gone. I had missed the Grown People Business.
”
”
Damon Thomas (Some Books Are Not For Sale (Rural Gloom))
“
Only a fool says in his heart
There is no Creator, no King of kings,
Only mules would dare to bray
These lethal mutterings.
Over darkened minds as these
The Darkness bears full sway,
Fruitless, yet, bearing fruit,
In their fell, destructive way.
Sterile, though proliferate,
A filthy progeny sees the day,
When Evil, Thought and Action mate:
Breeding sin, rebels and decay.
The blackest deeds and foul ideals,
Multiply throughout the earth,
Through deadened, lifeless, braying souls,
The Darkness labours and gives birth.
Taking the Lord’s abundant gifts
And rotting them to the core,
They dress their dish and serve it out
Foul seeds to infect thousands more.
‘The Tree of Life is dead!’ they cry,
‘And that of Knowledge not enough,
Let us glut on the ashen apples
Of Sodom and Gomorrah.’
Have pity on Thy children, Lord,
Left sorrowing on this earth,
While fools and all their kindred
Cast shadows with their murk,
And to the dwindling wise,
They toss their heads and wryly smirk.
The world daily grinds to dust
Virtue’s fair unicorns,
Rather, it would now beget
Vice’s mutant manticores.
Wisdom crushed, our joy is gone,
Buried under anxious fears
For lost rights and freedoms,
We shed many bitter tears.
Death is life, Life is no more,
Humanity buried in a tomb,
In a fatal prenatal world
Where tiny flowers
Are ripped from the womb,
Discarded, thrown away,
Inconvenient lives
That barely bloomed.
Our elders fare no better,
Their wisdom unwanted by and by,
Boarded out to end their days,
And forsaken are left to die.
Only the youthful and the useful,
In this capital age prosper and fly.
Yet, they too are quickly strangled,
Before their future plans are met,
Professions legally pre-enslaved
Held bound by mounting student debt.
Our leaders all harangue for peace
Yet perpetrate the horror,
Of economic greed shored up
Through manufactured war.
Our armies now welter
In foreign civilian gore.
How many of our kin are slain
For hollow martial honour?
As if we could forget, ignore,
The scourge of nuclear power,
Alas, victors are rarely tried
For their woeful crimes of war.
Hope and pray we never see
A repeat of Hiroshima.
No more!
Crimes are legion,
The deeds of devil-spawn!
What has happened to the souls
Your Divine Image was minted on?
They are now recast:
Crooked coins of Caesar and
The Whore of Babylon.
How often mankind shuts its ears
To Your music celestial,
Mankind would rather march
To the anthems of Hell.
If humanity cannot be reclaimed
By Your Mercy and great Love
Deservedly we should be struck
By Vengeance from above.
Many dread the Final Day,
And the Crack of Doom
For others the Apocalypse
Will never come too soon.
‘Lift up your heads, be glad’,
Fools shall bray no more
For at last the Master comes
To thresh His threshing floor.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Vocation of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #2))
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Cockroaches are survivors. Turn on the lights and you will see a scattering of casino hosts in three thousand dollar bespoken suits, corporate fruit flies in empty suits, lawyer-class slime on their way to the courthouse to go shopping for other people's money, bankers shilling bad loans by bundling them together with good ones and sending them down the financial pipeline knowing that they stand protected by the political scum from every level of government who have risen to breathtaking heights of mediocrity, tossing a couple of bucks from the public till to the obedient myrmidons in exchange for their votes. While decaying empire crumble, cockroaches multiply among the ruins. - Bonjour Amigos
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David Gustafson
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Thus the focal points of the Hebrew Paradise story, the woman, the man, the serpent, and the tree, were mostly likely re-interpretations of earlier Near Eastern iconography and mythology. An original myth and icon, which consisted of goddess, sacred snake, sacred tree, and male consort, perhaps the one who aroused the wrath of the goddess by eating her sacred fruit, become re-interpreted, among the Hebrews, into a story involving a foolish woman; a tree bearing fruit which must not be plucked but was plucked nonetheless by the foolish woman; a seductive snake; and a man who gave birth to a female. The Hebrew story not only changes the roles of the main characters in the story; it even shifts the birth process.
The Hebrew myth, then, was not the earliest word on the status of women. The antecedents of the Hebrew myth show quite clearly that at least the idealized woman, the goddess, held high status in early Near Eastern societies. This early status was considerably altered later in time by the Hebrews. The Near Eastern goddess, among the Hebrews, degenerated into a mortal scapegoat, one responsible for the ‘greatly multiplied sorrow,’ and the subservience of women in the ensuing centuries.
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Miriam Robbins Dexter
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Temptation...
What would the warning label in your life say? Something like this..
"You will think this is a way to ease the loneliness you feel. You will think it will make you feel all the things you deserve to feel: beautiful, respected, noticed, appreciated for who you are, and validated as special. You will think that you are the exception in being able to handle a flirty friendship without crossing any lines and that it won't hurt anyone. You will think this is going wonderful, because it stirs up such warm feelings in those places deep inside your heart that have felt cold for so long. You will think all those warm fuzzies are good for you. But it's all a lie. You are being blinded with desire. You are being made deaf to truth. You are reaching for a forbidden fruit that looks so good on the outside but is filled with razors on the inside. You can't even take a bite without getting cut. And, worst of all, even though you are bleeding from that first bite, you'll get so enamored with it's alluring sweetness that you'll keep eating it. You will devour this sin without realizing its devouring you. Trust me, your feelings are lying to you. This won't fix your disappointments. It will only multiply them into devastations.
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Lysa TerKeurst (It's Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered)
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Ultimately the reason for both the work of evangelism and the work of justice is not simply the relief of suffering, whether present or eternal. It is the restoration of God’s true image in the world, made known in the one true Image and Icon, Jesus Christ, and refracted and reflected in fruitful, multiplying image bearers set free by his death and resurrection to reclaim their true calling. Our mission is not primarily driven by a calculation of which suffering, present or eternal, we need to relieve most urgently; it is the fruit of glorious promises that call us into a new kingdom where the world is full of truth-bearing images. No image bearer can fully return to their true calling without finding themselves rescued and redeemed by the true Image Bearer, so no serious Christian witness in the world can fail to call people to put their trust in Jesus and the true God he makes known. And no image bearer can bear full witness to the glory of the Creator without the conditions for flourishing that are summed up in the rich biblical conception of justice. “He comes to make his blessings flow / far as the curse is found.” Because idolatry and injustice are the twin fruits of the curse, the work of evangelism and the work of justice are one.
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Andy Crouch (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power)
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And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. 24 ¶ And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26 ¶ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments - King James Version - Full Navigation)
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In a way, Star Wars could be interpreted as an extended reflection on what might have happened if Jesus had said yes to Satan’s offer. Qui-Gon wants to train Anakin to be a member of the Jedi, a diverse group of humans and other creatures who have a special connection to “the Force” (a kind of cosmic, spiritual energy). He believes that Anakin is “the chosen one,” born to defeat the dark side and restore balance to the Force, but he must convince the Jedi Council. As the council begins to interview Anakin, Yoda (a froglike Jedi with unusual syntax) probes his fear: Yoda: How feel you? Anakin: Cold, sir. Yoda: Afraid are you? Anakin: No, sir. Yoda: See through you we can. Mace Windu: Be mindful of your feelings. Ki-Adi-Mundi: Your thoughts dwell on your mother. Anakin: I miss her. Yoda: Afraid to lose her I think, hmm? Anakin: What has that got to do with anything? Yoda: Everything! Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.20 Yoda’s words foreshadow the path that will lead Anakin to embrace evil and ultimately become Darth Vader. Nonetheless, many on the council believe Anakin to be the chosen one, spoken of by the prophets, and they allow him to train. In Episode II, Anakin’s fear becomes reality as his mother is kidnapped and killed by the sandpeople. Anakin is filled with rage, and he attacks their village, murdering not only the men but women and children as well. This scene augurs a later, even darker moment in Episode III, when Anakin will slay a gathering of children who are being trained as Jedis. As Yoda predicted, Anakin’s fear has multiplied and born fruit in anger, hate, and suffering.
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Scott Bader-Saye (Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life))
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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1965
My fellow countrymen, on this occasion, the oath I have taken before you and before God is not mine alone, but ours together. We are one nation and one people. Our fate as a nation and our future as a people rest not upon one citizen, but upon all citizens.
This is the majesty and the meaning of this moment.
For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own.
Even now, a rocket moves toward Mars. It reminds us that the world will not be the same for our children, or even for ourselves m a short span of years. The next man to stand here will look out on a scene different from our own, because ours is a time of change-- rapid and fantastic change bearing the secrets of nature, multiplying the nations, placing in uncertain hands new weapons for mastery and destruction, shaking old values, and uprooting old ways.
Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged character of our people, and on their faith.
THE AMERICAN COVENANT
They came here--the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-- to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.
JUSTICE AND CHANGE
First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land.
In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.
For the more than 30 years that I have served this Nation, I have believed that this injustice to our people, this waste of our resources, was our real enemy. For 30 years or more, with the resources I have had, I have vigilantly fought against it. I have learned, and I know, that it will not surrender easily.
But change has given us new weapons. Before this generation of Americans is finished, this enemy will not only retreat--it will be conquered.
Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, "His color is not mine," or "His beliefs are strange and different," in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this Nation.
LIBERTY AND CHANGE
Liberty was the second article of our covenant. It was self- government. It was our Bill of Rights. But it was more. America would be a place where each man could be proud to be himself: stretching his talents, rejoicing in his work, important in the life of his neighbors and his nation.
This has become more difficult in a world where change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men. We must work to provide the knowledge and the surroundings which can enlarge the possibilities of every citizen.
The American covenant called on us to help show the way for the liberation of man. And that is today our goal. Thus, if as a nation there is much outside our control, as a people no stranger is outside our hope.
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Lyndon B. Johnson
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7You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. 8 gFive of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand, and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. 9 hI will turn to you and imake you fruitful and multiply you and will confirm my covenant with you.
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Anonymous (ESV Global Study Bible)
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Africans must realize that it is time to be fruitful and multiply.
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KENNETH MWALE
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After all, a pro-imperialist and anti-environmentalist stance is con tent with the church's long history of making strategic alliances v and conferring spiritual blessings on conquistadores and others v raped the land and the indigenous populations of the "new world exploit its resources. This history of conquest may in turn seen follow a tradition that ostensibly began in the Book of Genesis, w God said to the first human beings: "Be fruitful and multiply, and the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that mi upon the earth.
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George A. Dunn (Avatar and Philosophy: Learning to See (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series))
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DEUTERONOMY 7:13-15 13 And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.
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Kenneth E. Hagin (Bible Healing Study Course)
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1.28. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. This commandment has now been fulfilled.
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Richard Elliott Friedman (Commentary on the Torah)
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Prehistoric peoples probably charged interest on loans of corn and livestock. The association between interest and the fruit of a loan is embedded in ancient languages. Across the ancient world the etymologies of interest derive from the offspring of livestock. The Sumerian word for interest, mas, signifies a kid goat (or lamb).2 The ancient Egyptian equivalent ms means to give birth.3 In ancient Greek interest is tokos, a calf. Among the several Hebrew words for interest are marbit and tarbit, meaning to increase and multiply. The Latin for interest, foenus, connotes fertility, and for money, pecunia, is derived from pecus, a flock. Our word capital comes from caput, a head of cattle. These derivations, claim Sydney Homer and Richard Sylla, imply that interest originated with loans of seeds and of animals. These were loans for productive purposes. The seeds yielded an increase. At harvest time the seed could conveniently be returned with interest. Some part or all of the animal’s progeny could be returned with the animal. We shall never know but we can surmise that the concept of interest in its modern sense arose from just such productive loans.
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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Despite the divine direction to be fruitful and multiply, barren-ness is a common theme in the Bible.
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Karen Stollznow (Missed Conceptions: How We Make Sense of Infertility)
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Manifestation, then, is sexual insomuch as it takes place always in terms of the pairs of opposites; and sex is cosmic and spiritual because it has its roots in the Three Supernals. We must learn not to dissociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren; whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity. Nature is greater and truer than conventional morality, which is often nothing but taboo and totemism. Happy the people whose morality embodies Nature's laws, for they shall lead harmonious lives and increase and multiply and possess the earth. Unhappy the people whose morality is a savage system of taboos designed to propitiate an imaginary Moloch of a deity, for they shall be sterile and sinful. Equally unhappy the people whose morality outrages the sanctity of natural process and in plucking the flower has no regard for the fruit, for they shall be diseased of body and corrupt of estate.
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Dion Fortune (The Mystical Qabalah)
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England is awash in children without bread to eat or shoes to wear. More little dears are arriving by the hour. That ‘be fruitful and multiply’ business is fine for when you have a single breeding pair and all of Eden to populate, but here in the land of Nod, those conditions hardly apply, do they, my lord?
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Grace Burrowes (A Gentleman in Search of a Wife (The Lord Julian Mysteries #5))
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26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
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Anonymous (Authorized King James Version Holy Bible)
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For me, that connection was revealed in the 1960s, which marked the birth of consciousness. Our minds expanded on a mass scale like never before. Civil rights for minorities, women’s rights, gay rights; a politically active youth movement; the belief that questioning your government was a patriotic responsibility; environmental awareness; expansion of Eastern thinking; the end of colonialism; psychoactive substances; and of course, the Renaissance in all the Arts. That consciousness was founded on a few basic spiritual principles. The first was our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the Earth, and the vast gap between Western and Semitic religious belief, on one side, and American Indian, African, and Asian belief, on the other. Genesis 1:28 says, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion.’” What “God” meant by “subdue” and “have dominion” can (and should) be debated, but Western religion took it to suggest man’s superiority over the Earth. Man the conqueror. The other tradition—American Indians, Africans, Asians—did not believe that humans were superior to the Earth; rather, they believed that they were meant to live in harmony with it. This difference affected how we viewed our most essential relationship and contributed to a fundamental sense of alienation. That alienation was the first component of our spiritual bankruptcy. That was the theme explored more deeply on Revolution, but it would overlap with this one.
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Stevie Van Zandt (Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir)
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God names women, along with men, as his image bearers.
Furthermore, God's first word about women completely shatters the notion that boys are more valuable than girls. God isn't calling men and asking women to hang back. He gives both male and female the exact same identity--to be his image bearers. He gives both the exact same rsponsibilities when he entrusts all of creation to his image bearers, calling them to be fruitful and multiply and to rule and subdue the whole earth (Genesis 1:26, 28). Words spoken here encompass every human being, every facet of human life, and every square inch of earth, and leave every other conceivable view of women (or of men) in the dust.
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Carolyn Custis James (Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women)
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What is at issue here is not the familiar construct of formal mathematics, but a belief in the existence of ω (the set of natural numbers) prior to all mathematical constructions. What is the origin of this belief? The famous saying by Kronecker that God created the numbers, all the rest is the work of Man, presumably was not meant to be taken seriously. Nowhere in the Book of Genesis do we find the passage: And God said, let there be numbers, and there were numbers; odd and even created he them, and he said unto them be fruitful and multiply; and he commanded them to keep the laws of induction. No, the belief in ω stems from the speculations of Greek philosophy on the existence of ideal entities or the speculations of German philosophy on a priori categories of thought.
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Edward Nelson (Predicative Arithmetic (Mathematical Notes, Vol. 32))
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If the essence of the Cultural Mandate could be distilled into three headings, it would be these: 1. The blessing of God on the human race. The heart of humanity’s calling is to know the covenant presence of the Lord God, who is our God just as we are his people. As he has done everything to shower his love on us, he has given us all the gifts we need to flourish and return his love. 2. To be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with our productive presence. The human race was to populate the entire earth, always with the purpose of discovering God’s life-giving purposes for us, in all our diversity and talents. 3. To rule over the creation with gentle lordship. Always under the greater lordship of God, we are vicegerents in this marvelous place, taming what is untamed so that it redounds to God’s greater glory.
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Doug Serven (Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs)
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Figure 2.1 Cortical connections over two years adapted from Conel The top row shows the baby’s cortex at birth, then at one month and at three months. They all look about the same, don’t they? But look what happens at six months (bottom left box): the number of cell bodies remains the same, but the number of connections has multiplied exponentially. The connections grow so quickly in the first three years of life that neuroscientists call it neural exuberance. Neural exuberance! The name is well earned: The baby’s brain makes 24 million new connections every minute, and this continues for the first three years of life. Each neuron may be connected to 1,000 other neurons — that multiplies out to 100 trillion possible connections between neurons, more than the number of stars in the universe. This high level of connectivity between brain cells leads to the cortex of a three-year-old being twice as thick as an adult’s! As connections are created, new abilities emerge. For example, when connections grow in Broca’s area — speech production — around six months, then children begin to speak. Around nine months of age, the frontal areas (behind the forehead) become more interconnected, and that’s when most children develop object permanence: knowing that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight. Before object permanence develops, when Mom is out of sight she’s no longer in the baby’s universe. This is why young babies are inconsolable when Mom leaves. Once they start to develop object permanence, babies can hold on to an internal image of Mom. This is about the age that babies play peek-a-boo. Mom disappears when she puts the blanket over her head, but the nine-month-old knows Mom’s still there even if he can’t see her. The infant tests his “knowledge” when he pulls the blanket off and sees — sure enough! —Mom really is there! What is the use of so many brain connections in the first three years of life? These connections are ready-made highways for information to travel along. The toddlers’ ability to quickly adapt and learn is possible because they have a vast number of brain connections available for making sense of the world. Thanks to neural exuberance, the child does not need to create connections on the spur of the moment to make meaning of each new experience; myriad connections are already there. Pruning of connections The number of connections remains high from age 3 until age 10, when the process of neural pruning begins. Connections that are being used remain; others get absorbed back into the neuron. It’s similar to pruning a bush. After pruning, individual branches get thicker, fruit is more abundant, and the whole bush gets fuller. This seems a little counter-intuitive, but pruning works because it allows the plant’s limited resources to go to its strongest parts; water and nutrients are no longer wasted on spindly branches and dried-out roots. Similarly, when unused brain connections are pruned, neural resources are more available for brain areas that are being used. This results in a more useful and efficient brain that’s tailor-made to meet each individual’s needs. This process of pruning occurs in all brain areas. Figure 2.2 presents findings published by Sowell and associates. They measured Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 176 normal subjects from age 7 to 87 years. The x-axes in these graphs present years from 10 to 90 years. Notice there is a common pattern of decreasing connections in all brain areas. In some brain areas this change is steeper, such as in frontal areas, but is flatter in other areas such as temporal areas in the left hemisphere.
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Frederick Travis (Your Brain Is a River, Not a Rock)
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You can be fruitful and multiply when you let God direct your path and maximize your time.
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Gift Gugu Mona (The Precious Gift of Time: Inspirational Quotes and Sayings)
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The distinction between male and female is a biological reality and not something that is socially or self-constructed. What made Adam and Eve “male and female” is that they were told to be “fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). The fact that the man and woman can procreate tells us what God means by “male and female” as this is what their reproductive systems have been designed to do.
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Simon Turpin (Adam: First and the Last)
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Only a female “helper” could help Adam fulfill the command to be “fruitful and multiply” (cf. Genesis 1:28). The “one flesh” aspect of the marriage covenant is a social manifestation of a biological reality, as Eve is able to do what Adam cannot do — in that she can bear children. The distinction between maleness and femaleness is not self-constructed, but rather is constructed by God and is to be celebrated as being very good.
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Simon Turpin (Adam: First and the Last)
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We have largely lost the sense that a life lived sacrificially for Christ, in obscurity, among those who have little, in places where there is no private medicine, few domestic comforts, low literacy rates, but a desperate need for the gospel and the teaching and training of Christians, can be a life whose fruit for eternity can be amazingly multiplied. Such were the brothers Cyril and Methodius. Their modern counterparts are, like them, living in obscurity. But are they a diminishing number?
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Sinclair B. Ferguson (In the Year of Our Lord: Reflections on Twenty Centuries of Church History)
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In vain do you seek repose from beds of roses: in vain do you hope for enjoyment from the most delicious wines and fruits. Your indolence itself becomes a fatigue; your pleasure itself creates disgust. The mind, unexercised, finds every delight insipid and loathsome; and ere yet the body, full of noxious humours, feels the torment of its multiplied diseases, your nobler part is sensible of the invading poison, and seeks in vain to relieve its anxiety by new pleasures, which still augment the fatal malady.
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David Hume (On Suicide)
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Sometimes in church circles, we talk more about contentment (which is a good thing) but it can minimize the importance of ambition—that somehow it is more spiritual for Christians to be passive. This misunderstanding had slowed me down to the point where I wasn’t moving ahead at all. I learned that ambition is really a desire to grow. I realized that in order for me to obey God’s call to be “fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), I needed to stop shutting down ambition just because I was afraid to be disappointed. The Hebrew word pārâ in that verse means “to bear fruit, to grow, to increase.”2 This is the essence of ambition—it’s the desire to step forward, to take risks, and expand our lives, instead of shrinking back.
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Carolyn McCulley (The Measure of Success: Uncovering the Biblical Perspective on Women, Work, and the Home)
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fruitful and multiply and fill the earth
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Anonymous (ESV Study Bible)
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Pastor Madison looked steadily at the jurors, cleared his throat and started to read. “Marriage is what brings us together today. Where did the idea of marriage come from? What is marriage? Does marriage have any purpose in this modern age? Is it really a blessed arrangement? Why shouldn’t anyone, or any group of someones, be allowed to marry? Is marriage in danger of extinction? These are all questions, along with others, that we will examine today and in the next three week’s sermons. “First, where did the idea of marriage come from? Who thought it up? I’m going to read to you a few sentences from a sermon given by a Swedish Pastor named Ake Green. Pay attention to what he said, because he was arrested and convicted by the Swedish judicial system for what he said. As you listen to the beginning of Pastor Green’s sermon, ask yourself if you think his words are hate words. The Swedish government charged and convicted Pastor Green with a hate crime for these words. Here are Pastor Green’s opening few paragraphs: “From the beginning God created humans as man and woman. We begin in Genesis 1:27-28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." “Here, God's Word clearly states that you were created to be Father and Mother - as man and woman - designed for parenthood. The Lord states that very clearly here….The marriage institution is also clearly defined in Genesis 2:24, where it says: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." “Only man and wife are referred to here. It is not stated any other way; you can never imply or interpret it to mean that you can have whatever sexual partner you wish to have. ….” “What was it that led to these cities (Sodom, mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and Gomorrah) perishing, losing their dignity, disappearing from the face of the Earth? It was because they lived in homosexuality. It will be the same on that day when the Son of Man is revealed; consequently, this is a sign of the times we are facing. As people lived in the time of Lot, so shall they live before Jesus returns. This is something we cannot deny in any way. Jesus says that the lifestyle of Sodom shall be active in the whole Earth before the coming of Jesus. The one who represents this lifestyle today goes against God's order of creation.
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John Price (THE WARNING A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 2))
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When you invest your time you will notice that you are being fruitful and that you are multiplying your life.
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Sunday Adelaja (How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?)
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For you to be able to be fruitful, to multiply and saturate the earth with your products, you have to first know how to properly use the currency of time.
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Sunday Adelaja (How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?)
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(When God said, “Be fruitful and multiply” [Genesis 1:28], he wasn’t giving math homework.)
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Gregory K. Popcak (Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Raising Sexually Whole and Holy Kids)
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Consider that Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:27–2830). In a perfect world where there was no need for clothes to cover sin (this came after the Fall), we can deduce that man should have been able to fill the earth without wearing clothes, hence the extremes were not as they are today or the couple would have been miserable as the temperatures fluctuated. Even after the Fall, it makes sense that these weather variations were minimally different, because the general positions of continents and oceans were still the same. But with the global Flood that destroyed the earth and rearranged continents and so on, the extremes become pronounced — we now have ice caps and extremely high mountains that were pushed up from the Flood (Psalm 104:831). We now have deserts that have extreme heat and cold and little water.
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Ken Ham (A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter)
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Did you realize that one of the few commands given to mankind through Adam was “to be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:286)? If man had intense disobedience to God (e.g., Genesis 6:5,7 6:128) 120 years prior to the Flood (Genesis 6:39), are we to believe they were still being obedient to God’s command here? Likely not!
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Ken Ham (A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter)
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Be ye angry, and sin not: * the things you say in your hearts, be sorry for them upon your beds. 4:6 Offer up the sacrifice of justice, and trust in the Lord: * many say, Who sheweth us good things? 4:7 The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us: * thou hast given gladness in my heart. 4:8 By the fruit of their corn, their wine, and oil, * they are multiplied. 4:9 In peace in the selfsame * I will sleep, and I will rest: 4:10 For thou, O Lord, singularly * hast settled me in hope.
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Gregory Bellarmine (The Roman Breviary: in English, in Order, Every Day for November & December 2016)
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Before leaving the hospital, Myron played lawyer and warned Loren Muse not to speak to his client Lex Ryder without legal counsel. She responded that he should be fruitful and multiply, but not in those exact words. Win and Esperanza arrived. Win filled him in on his prison encounter with Frank Ache. Myron wasn’t sure what to make of it. “Perhaps,
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Harlan Coben (Live Wire (Myron Bolitar, #10))
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Race-ism: a religion where the pious practitioners walk faithfully in the dogma of social categorization. Often leading to a rise in violence, race-ism promotes the idea that men with an excess of brown pigment in their skin, a type of natural sunblock, and men who are lacking in this pigment, are as opposed to one another, and different from each other as cats and dogs, or birds and monkeys. Today, race-ism is preached from every available media outlet, flooding the hearts and minds of our youth with a false idea, one that's fueled by self hatred, and insecurity. Much like all faiths, the racists put on smiling faces, and tout the good causes of social justice, and equality, in a disguised attempt to dominate the world, and form it to their own perceptions. Race-ism is a meme, the offspring of the 'tree of knowledge', also known as men, or males. There is no "coexist" in the world of memes. They, the memes, although delusional, consider themselves vitally important, motivated by the most basic of instincts and desires, the desire to "be fruitful and multiply". There are many memes that humans have been trodden under. The most famous is the one in the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve's invention of the word 'naked', resulted in the faith that our entire civilized world is but a product of. The faith that one should be "ashamed" of one's self, just for simply existing. In other words, the faith in 'good enough', and not 'good enough'. The fruits of which, continue to curse every fiber of our existence. We have become so embarrassingly desperate in our need to conquer our faith, that churches have evolved into universities, where, for a price, professors preach divine instruction in the difficult path of attaining that most longed for goal, 'good enough'. Knowing that memes are so dangerous, and that they desire our worship, our belief, the taste of our blood, as well as our undivided attention, this is why I'm a member of the only denomination of race-ism that preaches the gospel. The church of One Race. The human race.
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Sun Moon
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To truly increase and multiply, you need to recognize, develop and deploy your gifts.
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Bidemi Mark-Mordi
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{10:1} Israel is a leafy vine, its fruit has been suitable to him. According to the multitude of his fruit, he has multiplied altars; according to the fertility of his land, he has abounded with graven images.
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The Biblescript (Catholic Bible: Douay-Rheims English Translation)
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Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen 1:26–28). Twice these verses affirm that humans were made in God’s image, and both times they go on to say that God granted humans dominion over the rest of creation. God created all humans in his image precisely because he wanted the entire race to share responsibility for creation. There is no superior class, ethnic group, gender, or territory. Humans must learn to share authority and responsibility in ways that affirm and uphold the dignity of all humans.
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John C. Nugent (Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church)
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Our God, the almighty Lord of heaven and earth,” he began in a clear, authoritative voice, “bless these two here before you with your grace. Grace to keep one another in sickness and in health. Grace to learn together to serve as you would have them serve. Grace to give them strength for daily toil and duty. Grace to keep them in the hour of temptation or weakness. Grace that will enable them to give and love and labor. Make them fruitful. Bless them with your presence. Wrap them in your peace. And multiply their love—for you, for others, for one another. In the name of our blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. Amen.
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Janette Oke (The Centurion's Wife (Acts of Faith, #1))