This is not about the video; posted it just for your convenience. The pictures are quite predictable, yet it is not overdone and very illustrative of the content!

Now for the song itself: simply amazing. Everytime I listen to it it kind of hits me right in the heart. An wonderful illustration of Jesus’ love for us and his unconditional grace. Having said this I also have some questions/comments:

• The story seems a bit cliché to me: Guy that smokes, divorced, regularly drinking? I know, there are probably more of these guys than I can imagine, but still this is only a fraction of the worlds population - what about a different story?
• Is it just the music that evokes my emotions, especially towards the end? Certainly, the guys know their business.
• It is a bit long…

And one final thougt about the theology put forward in the song: Doesn’t it serve as an excuse for us middle-class boring christians? We who don’t smoke and who come from functional families? An excuse that goes like this: Look at that guy, he is so bad … blabla… If Jesus can save such a person he can certainly save me; phew! I know, every human is a sinner, and there are no exceptions or gradations, but somehow it seems to me that there are gradations in our perception of the world. At least we tend to think of something like I am better than this or that person - I did not steal, I do not smoke, etc… Which in itself is a sin and results from the sinful nature of us human beings… Anyone still following me?

Have a look at that. Not much time to comment now, maybe after the weekend.

(via Deconstructed Christian)

This was an essay title for an examination essay writing class I took last semester. Voila here is my piece, slightly corrected, yet fragmentary due to the time constraints (90′ is not enough to come up with a thorough philosophical argument - maybe a life is…)

Scientific Progress Dispenses with the Need for Religion?

Ever since scientific methods of analysing the world were on the rise in the late sixteenth century, religion has been on the decline. The church, or rather the churches, bit by bit lost their influence on politics, and on culture as a whole, at least in western Europe. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries the sciences developed at such a pace that they were able to deliver a worldview without gaps by the middle of the 20th century (or even before). “God” was no longer needed to explain the world. And yet, scientific progress does not dispense with the need for religion, or rather the need for transcendence, as I will argue below. (weiterlesen…)