Humanism and Christianity

   When I was a new Christian, saved perhaps for two years, I was taking an education class at my Lutheran college. On the first or second day of class the teacher told us that he was a Christian Humanist. He said that anyone who thought that that was a contradiction in terms should come to his office after class. I went. I don’t remember what he told me, but it sounded like mumbo-jumbo, and I quit the class and changed my course of study.

   Now about 30 years later I am revisiting the question. What is the difference between humanism and Christianity? Is it possible to embrace both?

   If you believe liberal theology and call yourself a Christian, I suppose you would say that it is very possible, since the modernist version of the gospel is essentially humanism with Christian terminology tacked on to it.

   But if you believe the Bible, and believe that man is a sinner in need of a savior, then, No. Humanism and Christianity are mutually contradicting. Humanism teaches that man is essentially good, in need of education and opportunity. The Bible teaches that man is essentially wicked, in desperate need of regeneration.

   Now, on a practical level the two systems may actually appear to give similar results. For example, consider working (as I do) with people with disabilities. Many of the people who qualify for services have severe adaptive disorders. In other words, they don’t know how to behave. A humanist is taught to look at these people and say, “They are as good as I am.” If he can make himself believe that, he is a good humanist who sees all men as equals. The Christian, on the other hand, is taught to look at these people and say, “I am as bad as they are.” This is a much easier task, for all of us know the sin that lies within. We know that if it were not for the grace of God and the wisdom to know how to check the lusts of the flesh, we could easily misbehave as much as anyone. We can probably also think of times when we actually have done so. Thus, a Bible-believing Christian actually has an easier time viewing all men as equals. He knows that by nature “they are all under sin.” Rom. 3:9.

   Though the Christian and the Humanist have essentially opposite views of man, they both come to the same conclusion: That all men are equal. The Humanist professes to believe they are equally good. The Christian knows that they are all equally bad.

   It is rather ironic that the philosophy propounded continually on television is that of humanism, and all the while, man is portrayed by the same medium in all of his vileness and wickedness. On the other hand, the religion that teaches that man is essentially evil produces fruit that cannot be denied: love, joy, peace, gentleness, and goodness. Things which many who believe in the goodness of man are not afraid to make a mockery of ~ and at the same time accuse Christians of hypocrisy!

Fancy Knit and Purl Patterns

Generally I prefer mindless knitting, but recently I have been experimenting with projects that require a little thinking.

Fancy Lozenge Pattern

This complicated knit and purl pattern isn't hard to knit as long as you know what row you are on and pay attention. Two other keys to help maintain sanity are:

1. Know which is the right side, and remember that you will always be working an odd row while on the right side. With other similar patterns, the right side may be on the even rows. Just remember which it is, and if you have trouble distinguishing, pin a large safety pin on the right side.

2. With this particular pattern, keep in mind that the your knits and purls will generally be offset by one. In other words, the two you knit on the last row, when they show up as purls on your next row, will not both be purled. Your pattern shifts with every row, so you know you are doing wrong if you are knitting the knits and purling the purls over any length of stitches.

Expectations

Expectations ruin relationships 

 is a true saying. But it is also true that

Relationships build expectations.

   From people I don't know I expect very little, but as they prove their goodwill towards me and build a friendship, I begin to have certain expectations. If those expectations go unmet, the relationship dies. If they are met, the relationship grows, and I begin to have more and more expectations until a plateau is reached or perhaps a crisis intervenes that changes the dynamics of the friendship.

   Sometimes our expectations are built on unrealistic fantasies that no fellow human can meet. Such expectations ruin relationships. But unfulfilled expectations are not necessarily the result of expectations that are unreasonable. Often even very legitimate expectations go unmet due to the failure of those who have caused us, by one means or another, to expect better things from them.

   Concerning a close friend who began to take up more of his time than he desired to give, William Cowper wrote, "Customs very soon become laws. . . . Long usage had made that which at first was optional a point of good manners, . . . " He felt obliged to meet the expectations he had raised in his friend, and he did so (--- until he realized that she had fallen in love with him, which of course changed everything, and he cut off the relationship altogether.)

  When Daniel was in the habit of meeting God three times a day, we might suppose that God began to expect that meeting. If so, He was not disappointed, and Daniel continued to do as he had always done even in the threat of the lion's den.

   I have been thinking about these things for some time, but I have hesitated to write about them because I wanted to delineate the ramifications of it all. I wanted to explain what kind of expectations are proper and which ones are not. And I wanted to say when expectations ruin relationships and when a ruined relationship is the fault of the one who fails to meet expectations. But these things are deep and intricate, and I am able only to lay out the principle. There are two sides to every coin. To every thing there is a season. (Eccl. 3:1). A time to expect things and a time to give what is expected.  A time to  lower expectations and a time to expect great things.

~Somewhere in Utah~

~ and if you expect my pictures to have a direct connection with my subject,

you may want to lower your expectations. ~


WholeHearted-Home

Florence

Florence was born in 1930. She passed from death into life about 1946. She passed from life into eternity March 3, 2013.

There’s a twinkle in her eye

In her home above the sky.

She has shed her house of clay

And has thrown the clod away.

Though it bound and held her fast,

She is freed from it at last,

And the Florence we once knew

Is alive beyond the blue.

There’s a spring now in her step.

She has humor, life, and pep.

By the earth no more confined,

No confusion clouds her mind.

Nothing’s there to cramp her style

Or to check her charming smile.

She is Florence through and through,

But with vim and vigor new.

We can bear our present pain

For the joy of Poppy’s gain,

For the life she hid with Christ

Now is hers, and amply spiced.

Things she once by faith believed

She has now in fact received.

What a glorious gift of grace!—

She beholds the Savior’s face.

Resurrection Song

Oh, do you believe in my Savior?

      The One who arose from the grave?

You’ve heard of the man they call Jesus.

      Do you walk in His power to save?

You’re on the broad road to destruction,

      Deserving His judgement and wrath,

Until you embrace the Lord Jesus

       And enter the strait, narrow path.

He left all the glories of heaven

       And lived as a man among men.—

They hated, rejected, and killed Him,

      But He lives in His power again.

To those who by faith will receive Him

      He shares of His glory and might.

He seats them in heavenly places

      And gives them the strength to do right.

Don’t think that you’re His or you know Him

      If you don’t have power today.

There’s power through His resurrection —

      The power to trust and obey.

Nita Brainard

February 2013

Falling Leaves Hat

   Made out of Paton's Kroy sock yarn, this hat is on display at the Beehive in Spencer, Iowa. The pattern for it is found in Creative Knitting Magazine, September 2012. The gauge is given only for ribbing, making it difficult to calculate, and I had to knit the hat twice. I didn't realize how large the first one was until I tried it on. The second time around I got cocky about the pattern and made lots of mistakes ~ but they were easy to hide in the pattern. Most of them are missed increases that I made up in later rows. If you make the pattern, note that in one place a decrease normally labeled at CDD (center double decrease) is in one place abbreviated: s2kp (slip 2, knit 1, pass slipped stitches over).

Balance in Poetry by Ezra

For all the aspiring poets in my readership, here's something my son wrote about writing poetry..

Balance in Poetry
The patterns in nature are obvious to the eye, though usually not absolute.  The seeds on the sunflower are always placed in a wonderful spiral pattern, but yet every sunflower is diverse from another.  Every snowflake is completely unique, yet each has it’s own pattern.  All animals of a specific kind look alike, yet every one looks different.  

Man’s patterns are usually more exact than those found in nature. Circles, right angles and straight lines will very rarely be found in nature, but they are the basic principles that man uses in most everything he builds. You would never walk into a tree plantation where the trees are all in perfect rows and call it a woods. A woods needs the randomness of nature.  Yet, you would never walk into a meadow and call it a garden. To have a garden you need more pattern and less randomness.  

Depending on how you want your poetry to feel, you can lean more one way or the other, but however it gets done, patterns and diversity must be balanced. You need enough pattern that the poem answers to itself and enough diversity that it is interesting. This goes for everything from rhyme and rhythm even to the content of the poem.  For example: stop and brake do not rhyme because they have no pattern, whereas brake and break do not rhyme because they have no diversity.  But brake and lake rhyme because with them you have the perfect balance of pattern and diversity.  

As stated, the meter of a poem is an important place to balance pattern and diversity. Without a pattern, you have prose. But for your pattern to be pleasing, it must have some diversity. A poem with longer verses may have more diversity than others, but each one has its own arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables. The pattern should be consistent throughout the poem but should contain enough variety that the poem is not sing-songy or monotonous. Only in the lightest children’s poem could you get away with as much pattern as in the following example:

Swimming, swimming,

The whale was swimming in the sea.

Swimming, swimming,

The dog is swimming after me.

Swimming, swimming,

I’m swimming swimming really fast.

Swimming, swimming,

My dog went swimming right on past.

Only in this modern world of rhyme can you get away with as much diversity as in this example:

While out for a swim in the sea

I saw a whale was swimming with me.

Not sure what it was, I swam really fast,

But my dog who is faster went swimming on past.

Each line has it’s own meter, making way too much diversity.  If I matched any three lines to the other one, I would have a consistent pattern, and the meter would then be acceptable.

Truth and passion are two factors that must be balanced.  Any poem that does not have both is quite worthless.  If all you do is state the facts, your poem will be bland, but if all you do is paint pictures and express feelings, your poem will be hard to understand.  The one is the meat, the other is the salt. Depending on your taste and the style you are writing, you can change which is which by emphasizing one above the other, but you must have both.

You also need the perfect balance of things old and new. You want to revive thoughts and feelings that the reader has already had, but it’s not enough to stop there. You must build on those thoughts and take your readers places they have never been before. If you only use language that is common and accepted, you will have a poem that is very understandable but very boring too. If you use completely new thought, you will have a poem that is very hard to understand.  If you mix the two and have a good amount of common language heavily mixed with your own new thought, you will then have a poem with power in it. Of course the best place to derive your common language is directly from the Bible, and the second is from the rich heritage of Christian literature that we have in English.

The idea of balancing both truth and passion, and things old and new, is very well summed up by this statement said of Jeremy Taylor, “We will venture to assert that there is in any one of the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor, more fine fancy, and original imagery — more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions — more new figures and new applications of old figures — more, in short of the body and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and epics that have since been produced in Europe.” ~Edinburg Review*

Sourcing your thoughts directly from the Bible is not only beneficial because it is good to use concepts that your reader has already thought before, but it becomes necessary if you are going to have a poem that will have a lasting effect on someone’s life. The words of Scripture are living words like no other words ever spoken.  So tapping into them will put power in your poem, because now you are not the one saying it, but you have taken God’s words and put them to use.  I am assuming that you will use Scripture in context, fitting passages together that go together, otherwise it is worthless.  Now, if you do all that perfectly  but do not add any personal experience, you will have a poem that is doctrinally correct, even deep in a sense, but not touching in the least. I have seen poems where some poet rewrote a passage of Scripture in a poetic form, but such poems tend to be dry.  I would rather read the Scripture just as it is.  On the other hand, if you write a poem that is full of experience and emotion so that it is very touching, but not directly biblical, you will have a poem that is poor at best. I am not talking about poems that are unbiblical, because they teach things contrary to the Scripture, but simply poems that are not directly biblical.  Such poems may release a flow of emotion, perhaps even make people cry, but changing their lives will remain the work of those who use Scripture.


*. Library of Old English Prose Writers volume viii Jeremy Taylor, facing the preface