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-====== Faith in God ... ======
+====== Humans and our World ... ======
-Monday, May 28, 2018.
+Monday, May 28, 2018. It is part of human life to try to understand who we are, where we come from,
+where we go. We search for insight and orientation, we search for temporal and spatial perspective
+for our life. And we want to know what we can expect, we act based on will, emotions, instinct,
+reason and a basic understanding of our world.
+But what is part of this world? What is our idea of all that is? Human history always had various components
+of our understanding of this world. Let us look into this, and also try to understand the role of
+faith for human life.
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-** Creation, Holiness, Humanity **
+** The world as it is **
+Humans have always understood that the world follows laws. We use natural laws from morning to evening.
+We breath air, we use our eyes and ears, we work with gravity and motion, with the succession of day and
+night, summer and winter, spring and harvest.
+At the same time, humans have always taken the spiritual world serious. This can be traced back to the
+earliest human history. The belief in God, in the spiritual world, has been strong for all human history.
+But do we understand the religions? There is a science of religion, which tries to describe the
+laws and logic of religious belief. Can it tell the truth from what is wrong? Does it have this type
+of category at all? Or is it an atheistic science which can observe phenomena, but is basically blind
+for the validity of content and for its reality? Keep the question in mind for later discussion ...
+First of all, let us look into the beginning of the bible. The Jewish and Christian world view sees
+God in the beginning. He is the creator of the whole universe, of heaven and earth. Look into Genesis 1,
+the first book of Moses:
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-**  ...**
+** My Faith ...**
+Christian faith is the invitation to discover God as a personal vis-a-vis. God is the origin and source
+of all what is. He is personal, he wants to talk to you, to relate to you, to be your partner and your
+"father in heaven". Many terms, images and phrases are used to describe this relationsip.
+For humans today it is possible to live their life without God. That has always been the case. We see
+life without God back in the earliest human manuscripts. We also find the struggle of faith in these
+manuscripts. It is highly exciting! Why? Since this God described in the bible is holy. We find an insight
+in these books, which from the very beginning - as long as you can trace anything back in history -
+communicates the image of a holy God, who started it all.
+Justice and the ability to judge ideas and actions is one of the characteristic human features. The idea
+of a holy God is strongly linked to this ability. We know what truth is. We know justice. We know love.
+We know what reliability and care are. We also know hatred, ignorance and violence. We know it all from
+human experience. The biblical books have a very clear idea of the role of God in this.
+You can start with a completely agnostic or even atheistic world view. No problem for me - I myself started
+my spiritual journey with basic questions and without much assumptions. But then, let us discover what is
+said about God in the bible. Let us discover what faith is about - not a twisted strange image of faith,
+but the biblical idea of faith, trust, true humility and true mercy. And then let us ask what is real,
+what realitiy has to give us. We might well discover that this creation is more than just a bunch of
+natural laws, that there is this God which is proclaimed in the biblical books. And we might discover something
+unbelievable and fantastic, ... come and start this journey of discovery!
 (Roland Potthast)
 [[http://www.jesusnetwork.eu/en/topics_collection_ix|... further texts]]
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