This is http://www.essayz.com/a9710101.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %UNDERSTAND PREDICT CONTROL MYSTERIOUS SALVATION+971010 %ELIMINATE DOUBT AMBIGUITY PARADOX CONFUSION SIN+971010 %MANIPULATE CERTAINTY DOCTRINE CONFESSIONS EVILS+971010 %MYSTERY ENIGMA ISOLATION ALIENATION ALONE RIGHTS 971010 The nature of salvation is one of the essential mysteries of true living. Yet we seek to understand, predict, manipulate and control the nature of and occasions of salvation. We covet the fruit of eating from the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"; for we want to understand, predict and control salvation based upon knowing who is good and who is evil. To assure our perfection of such knowledge, understanding, prediction and control --- we must eliminate all doubts, ambiguities, paradoxes, confusion and mysteries which frustrate our ability to know with ultimate confidence. We must be willing to focus our efforts with great diligence --- concentrating our attention without distraction and make all the necessary sacrifices --- else we will not succeed in working out our own salvation. We dare not fail, else we will burn in hell for eternity. No sacrifice is too great to avoid burning in hell for eternity! Given the seriousness of our task, we cannot tolerate doubts, ambiguities, paradoxes, confusion and mysteries within our religious and secular communities. Our salvation depends upon our getting others in our communities to conform in the ways which are dictated by the the high standards which have been set down in our holy scriptures. Tolerance is intolerable in the face of the demands made by the commandments found in our holy scriptures. People who refuse to conform to those holy demands cannot be tolerated within our holy community as respected leaders --- for they will generate doubts, ambiguities, confusion and conflicts within our holy community of the saved. Our fears are well grounded. We dare not risk being faithless. We must believe in what we believe with utmost certainty --- in order to save ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us. We dare not care much for those who are unwilling to repent and unwilling to obey our most holy commandments which we have chosen as essential to our salvation. It will be prudent for us to fear the presence of nonconformists among us --- and so it is be prudent to cast such faithless people out into the outer darkness where they will be at home with their own kinds of nonconformist people. If we do all that is essential to our salvation we will be able to enter into heaven at the time of our final judgement. We will have saved ourselves from burning eternally in hell! Then only we and our kind will be together in heaven eternally. Then nobody will trouble us with being different from us in ways which are beyond our comprehension. In heaven, all the doubts, ambiguities, paradoxes, confusion and mysteries which frustrate our ability to know with ultimate confidence --- will all have been eliminated, and life will be eternally wonderful. - - - - - - - - - - - We need to think carefully upon these considerations to be sure that they make sense in ways which will promote and facilitate both personal and communal integrity. We need to think carefully to be sure that we are not stuck in disintegrative patterns of assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, thinking and behaviors. In all that we do we need to be prayerfully aware of the many ways in which we are inter-dependent upon each other --- and beware of isolating ourselves with thoughts of how good and righteous we are because of what we have chosen to do, and what we have chosen not to do; to be, and not to be. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================