Deep thoughts

For those of you viewers who like to come and see pictures of the kids, first off, thank you. It's pretty amazing to see how they change ever so slightly over the course of just one day, but even more so when days and weeks go by like a flash right under my eyes!

However, if you're looking for info on the kids today, you can probably go ahead and stop reading. Today I'm going off on one of my ramblings again...mainly so I can make sense of what I've been thinking, but also to share my thoughts. So read on if you want to take the risk of entering my mind!

As I've previously mentioned, I've been reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I'm surprised it wasn't required reading in my philosophy classes or econ classes at ISU, but then again, it'd take most of us more than 1 semester to actually read!

Anyways, Rand is basically a philosopher and has come up with a way to contexualize certain phiolosophical theories into a fictional book, which is quite good! A little wordy, but good!

So, I've been led down the philosophical path for a while, and picked up a few more books, mainly by Ravi Zacarias. Now, he's a philosopher, yes, but he'd catergorize himself more as a Christian Apologetic. I never quite understood that word, apologetic. What are you apologizing for? No, it's not that meaning at all....:)

So, I read his fictional book, The Lamb and the Fueher: Jesus Talks with Hitler. This was also a book in which certain theological questions were brought up along with certain philosophical questions that have been around for eternity:

• How can there be a God when evil exists in the world?
• Could Hitler actually go to heaven if at the last moment he repents, asks forgiveness?
• Is there heaven, is there hell?
• Why does a "good" god allow such "bad" things...i.e. the Holocaust?

So, it was a good book...fictional in nature, like I said. It leads you through a dialogue between Jesus and Hitler, and then one other character comes in about half way through, Bonhoffer - a German minister who was persecuted and killed for publicly denouncing Hitler and his ways.

The next book, Cries of the heart: bringing God near when He feels so far was also a good look at different questions most of us pose at one time or other during our lives here.

So, I'm working out certain ideas. The good vs evil argument. Nietzche is the one credited for the famous saying that God is Dead, and his argument was that there are no moral absolutes, that evil and good do not truly exist, they have only been created by man. I worked through that one. There have to be certain absolutes or there would be no order, no logic.

So, this is becoming a very long post....I've mainly brought up these ideas to work through on my own, but I truly would like to hear what others think. Or, am I the only one who ponders deep thoughts? I wonder things like, how do these philosophical arguments (good vs evil, for example) influence society? How are certain economic policies, for example, effected by what people think about people? About absolute rights and absolute wrongs? Or is everything just relative, depending on the course of cultural influences (or feelings)? If that's the case, look out.

.....deep thoughts.