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But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.
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Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
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Throughout the United States, divorce rates are highest where evangelical religious practices are strongest, in the Bible Belt.10
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Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
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It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand. – Mark Twain (1835-1910) The
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Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
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For just as Jacob and Esau came from their mother Rebecca and their father Isaac, so also both zombies and werewolves came from rabies and blind blessings of theology.
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L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
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The ark was like a portable computer hard drive and Noah was a one-man Geek Squad, and he dumped God's most important files onto it before he zorched the virus-ridden computer that was the world.
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BikeSnobNYC (The Enlightened Cyclist: Commuter Angst, Dangerous Drivers, and Other Obstacles on the Path to Two-Wheeled Trancendence)
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So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn't know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.
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Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
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To the visitors, it was clear that “the Bible denounced oppression as one of the highest of crimes, and threatened Divine judgments against nations that practice it;…that the virus of secession is found wherever the virus of slavery extends, and no farther; so that there is the amplest reason for expecting to avert Divine judgments by putting away the sin, and for hoping to remedy the national troubles by striking at their cause.
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Jon Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle)
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The pressure to bind is always present. Once the virus gets one hook into the culture, it has the means to place many more. In this case a hook might be reestablishing prayer in schools, which could lead to reading Bible verses in classrooms, which quickly leads to using schools for religious instruction, and so on. A culture that is bound with religion soon becomes an oppressive and toxic place for those who are not infected with the god virus.
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Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
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If I am a Christian, those who disagree with me are not by default intellectually inferior, they are not rationally benighted, they do not lack imagination, they are not narrow, weak, or juvenile, they are not medieval, and they are certainly not a virus. They have every chance of being my betters in all these respects. I simply cannot look down on them. It is crucial to emphasize that this is no clever rhetorical flourish. If I claim to be a Christian and do not acknowledge that my “enemies” are very possibly my moral and intellectual superiors, I have simply failed to understand the gospel of Christ. I am still operating according to the performance narrative, not yet according to the grace narrative.20
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Christopher Watkin (Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture)
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But surely the commute that defines the era was Noah's voyage aboard his eponymous ark, and to this day it remains the most epic commuting story ever told. As most people know, God felt that Earth had essentially "jumped the shark" (or "raped the angel" as they used to say back then), so rather than try to fix it, He instead decided to simply wash everyone away in a great flood and start over from scratch--just as you might do to your computer's hard drive if it has a really bad virus. So God spoke to Noah and commanded him to build an ark, aboard which he'd carry two of every animal in the world....Thus was born humankind's lust for gigantic vehicles, for God's instructions to Noah were basically the world's first car commercial, and the sales pitch was this: Large vehicles are your salvation.
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BikeSnobNYC
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Human life was reduced to slavery and the soul-ruled earthly realm through Adam’s fall but is now awakened to lordship in the heavenly realm of spiritual realities through the knowledge of our co-resurrection with Christ. ([See Col 3:1-11.] We theologically created the idea of man being “sinful by nature” as if humans are flawed by design. In fact it is a distorted mind-set that we inherited from Adam that Jesus had to free us from. “Your indifferent mind-set alienated you from God into a lifestyle of annoyances, hardships, and labors, sponsored by the law of sin and death that lodged in your bodies hosting a foreign influence, foreign to your design; just like a virus that would attach itself to a person.” Col 1:21 There is nothing wrong with our design or salvation, we were thinking wrong. [See Isa 55:8-11, Eph 4:17, 18 and also Eph 2:1-11.])
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François Du Toit (The Mirror Bible)
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What we need is a book of knowledge written so well as to constitute literature in its own right. Something for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and of us - a manual for living well and for survival. The quality of its writing must be such that it would serve for pleasure, for devotional reading, as a source of facts and even as a primary school text. It would range from simple things such as how to light a fire, to our place in the solar system and the universe. It would be a primer of philosophy and science - it would provide a top-down look at the Earth and us. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of medicine, including the ciculation of the blood, the role of the organs. The discovery that bacteria and viruses caused infectious diseases is relatively recent; imagine the consequences if such knowledge was lost. In its time the Bible set the constraints for behaviour and for health. WE need a new book like the Bible that would serve in the same way but acknowledge science. It would explain properties like temperature, the meaning of their scales of measurement and how to measure them. It would list the periodic table of the elements. It would give an account of the air, the rocks, and the oceans. It would give schoolchildren of today a proper understanding of our civilization and of the planet it occupies. It would inform them at an age when their minds were most receptive and give them facts they would remember for a lifetime. It would also be the survival manual for our successors. A book that was readily available should disaster happen. It would help bring science back as part of our culture and be an inheritance. Whatever else may be wrong with science, it still provides the best explanation we have of the material world.
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James Lovelock (We Belong to Gaia (Green Ideas))
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Few killer viruses are more difficult to discern than this one. On the surface all appears to be healthy and working, but it’s not. All those hours and hours spent lost in one Christian book after another . . . all those many Christian responsibilities outside the home or going from one seminar to another . . . all that extra time in prayer and Bible study. . . . At times we use these Christian activities as an unconscious attempt to escape from pain. In
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Peter Scazzero (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It's Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature)
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They are the subversive force progressively breaking down traditional mechanisms based on sacrificial repetitions of the founding murder and the cover-up that goes with them. Girard is very clear that the bible has had this unique effect which thoroughly pervades our contemporary world. But in these conditions there emerges a stark choice. After the Christian revelation there are no longer truly effective scapegoats and so, in Girard’s own words, ‘the virus of mimetic violence can spread freely’. Thus, ‘Either we choose Christ or we run the risk of self-destruction.’5 I do not disagree, but the way his analysis narrows simply to this statement cuts out a great deal of the field of contemporary reality. It becomes a kind of negative scholastic or churchy judgment on the world. All the deep genealogy he has labored over at this point becomes two dimensional and misses the profound transformative changes Christianity has brought about. In short Girard has produced a structural genealogy of violence; he lacks an equivalent genealogy of compassion. In
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Anthony Bartlett (Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New)
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I would personally like to thank God for protecting me, my family, my friends and You ,during this Covid 19 pandemic .
Psalms 23:4
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D.J. Kyos
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The Bible talks about the earth as being flat, but we know that it's round. So what had been understood literally must now be interpreted figuratively: We can no longer talk about the "ends of the earth" with the thought that we could actually get to a place where we could fall off the earth, because we had reached its end. We know, now, that disease comes from bacteria and viruses, not from demons.
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Roland Zimany (Sermons with Insight)
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There are hosts of other (lesser known) supposed extinction models that state the dinosaurs died because of: • An explosion of a nearby star that sent deadly cosmic radiation to earth • Diseases (like viruses or bacterial outbreaks) • Starvation • Climate change • Acid rain • Toxic foods • Tsunamis or other local floods • An ice age • Parasites • Rapid fungal outbreaks • Egg disorders • Magnetic field reversals • Mammals ate too many of their eggs • Volcanic eruptions • Aliens that invaded and killed or took them (yes, there are people who believe this) Notice that man hunting them and destroying their habitats to the point of extinction is not listed as a possible reason and not even considered an option by evolutionists (since humans and dinosaurs cannot live together in their secular story). And yet this was surely the case, after the Flood, up until dinosaurs went fully extinct.
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Bodie Hodge (Dinosaurs, Dragons, and the Bible)
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Fears are of viruses, sickness, war, poverty, and death. Once someone is attacked by these fears, they become like them and perpetuate negative thoughts and emotions by sharing them with others. These destructive thought patterns organize into groups. Suddenly, there are millions of persons exemplifying the same destructive pattern.
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Rico Roho (Aquarius Rising: Christianity and Judaism Explained Using the Science of the Stars)
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With the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, moderns have been reintroduced to the threat of pandemics. We have always been susceptible, of course, but most of us have short memories. When the next plague strikes, do we cite Psalm 91:5-7?
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E. Randolph Richards (Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible)
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do not think for one moment that there is any ready transfer from this narrative to our real-life crisis with the virus. The Bible does not often easily “apply.” The Bible does, however, invite an open imagination that hopes for the best outcomes of serious scientific research. At the same time, it affirms that deeply inscrutable holy reality is in, with, under, and
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Walter Brueggemann (Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty)
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We are not the masters of our fate. We think we control our lives—but we don’t. In an instant life can radically change— a car accident, a heart attack, a pink slip, a child’s raging fever. Frustrated researchers conquer one deadly virus, only to discover one even more lethal. The Psalmist pointed out our basic dilemma: “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away” (Ps. 90:10 NIV). Even if we live to a ripe old age, he said, we seldom know peace. No book is more realistic about the human situation than the Bible. It won’t let us get by with frothy platitudes or unsupported optimism. But it also gives us hope.
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Billy Graham (Hope for Each Day: Words of Wisdom and Faith)
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During this time of pandemic.
Treat your Church like distance learning, In order to get better results, protection, prosperity and blessings in your life. You need to put in more work than usually. You need read the bible more. You need to pray more. You need to intercede more. You need to be good more. You need to rely on God more than you do on your pastor, bishop or congregation.
Colossians 3 : 16
Ephesians 3:16
1 Peter 2 : 5
1 Corinthians 3 : 9
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D.J. Kyos