Ethereal Bible Quotes

The night is Ours. Rejoicing in the ethereal realms where We are kings. Blessed souls of forgotten immortality. They fear Us in every grasp.

Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator.

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

Some of the best portrayals I’ve seen of the eternal Heaven are in children’s books. Why? Because they depict earthly scenes, with animals and people playing, and joyful activities. The books for adults, on the other hand, often try to be philosophical, profound, ethereal, and otherworldly. But that kind of Heaven is precisely what the Bible doesn’t portray as the place where we’ll live forever. John

So why in the world was the universe accelerating? Today astrophysicists are still in the dark about how to answer that very pressing question. But they have agreed on a name for whatever material agent is behind the acceleration. They are calling it dark energy. Some astrophysicists suggest that dark energy is a property of space-time itself, that ironically Einstein’s infamous fudge factor is needed after all because it represents a repulsive force, just the thing to cause the acceleration. Others speculate that dark energy is a new twist on the old, discredited ether; an omnipresent, repulsive material many are calling the quintessence. Others still are betting that dark energy is related somehow to the quantum vacuum, whose own weirdness makes black holes seem as ordinary as watermelons. (For more on this idea, see chapter 6.) All told, astronomers have concluded that dark energy comprises some 68 percent of the total universe and dark matter, about 27 percent. That means only 5 percent of the entire universe is visible to us!8 That astonishing revelation bears emphasizing. Everything we call scientific knowledge is based on but a pittance of what there is to know about our world. Ninety-five percent of it is hidden from us. In light of this latest bombshell, do we stand a chance of ever really understanding gravity? Astronomers are hard at work believing they can. But they must labor with the unsettling awareness that our science is 95 percent in the dark about the universe it seeks and claims to understand; about what is real or not, what is possible or not — even about a prosaic force that exists literally right under our noses.

Inspiration is better than magic, for as any artist will tell you, true inspiration comes not to the lucky or the charmed but to the faithful—to the writer who shows up at her keyboard each morning, even when she’s far too tired, to the guitarist whose fingers bleed after hours of practice, to the dancer who must first learn the traditional steps before she can freestyle with integrity. Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator.

Psalm 19 1-6 Interpretation 1 The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. 2 Th'unwearied sun, from day to day, Does his Creator's power display; And publishes to every land The work of an almighty hand. 3 Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth: 4 Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. 5 What though in solemn silence all Move round this dark terrestrial ball; What though no real voice or sound Amidst their radiant orbs be found; 6 In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, For ever singing as they shine, "The hand that made us is divine.

Paslm 19:1-6 - Interpretation 1 The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. 2 Th'unwearied sun, from day to day, Does his Creator's power display; And publishes to every land The work of an almighty hand. 3 Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth: 4 Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. 5 What though in solemn silence all Move round this dark terrestrial ball; What though no real voice or sound Amidst their radiant orbs be found; 6 In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, For ever singing as they shine, "The hand that made us is divine.

Your trust issues come from your hope being broken. You have learned it is safer not to hope. It is safer to beat vulnerability to the punch and strive to control your surroundings. It is safer to treat hope as a wish. Hope then becomes something ethereal that you wish upon a star and then you continue on controlling your outcome. Or holding steadfast to hope–which really is your version of that “supposed-to” you want to see happen–as a symbol of your faith. This is not hope. Hope involves more of you and your soul than wishing it up to God. (Look out vulnerability!) It is easier to believe you can “easy button” this to God but a life of hope involves your guttiness.

I have spent time—along with many others—calling people away from the idea of heaven as the idle staring into a timeless light. If we are honest, I will often say, many of us secretly find the idea of heaven boring—a static existence for time without end. In reality, though, I have argued, the Bible does not speak of our future this way. We do not have an “afterlife”—as though our life now is our “life” and what follows is “after.” We have instead the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. What we have waiting for us is not an ethereal heaven but a joining of heaven to earth—a new creation.