This is Viewpoints for Saturday, May 28, 2016

Woodford for the BOE

Macon-Bibb County you have before you an opportunity to seat a well-educated, compassionate and service-oriented professional on your board of education. Dr. Sundra Woodford has the education and experience needed to facilitate reform within your public school system. Dr. Woodford has the ability to effectively work across divisive lines to create solutions that produce desired results. The children and families of Macon-Bibb County deserve the “best.” Voters in District 5, you have the ability to win one for the team by voting Sundra Woodford for the Bibb County Board of Education.

On Cummings

Dr. Bill Cummings’ columns express an epistemological vagueness that resists precision in their interpretation. I can only surmise from his latest — on the topic of “Hell” (May 22) — that it is not so much the imagery used throughout The Bible to symbolize its punishments that he objects to. It is the idea that those images symbolize anything that exists in reality.

I object to that idea, too. The problem is, it is too horrible to be applied as the fate of nominally “good” people; and perhaps too good for a select number of others. The reader can supply their own list as to who fits in either category.

Which raises another problem. Who is qualified to make that determination? To decide who obtains everlasting life, in the hyperdimensional environment called “Heaven”; and who is destined for eternal torment, where the ‘worms never die, and the fire never goes out’? “God” is the answer, we’re told — and are given The Bible as the authority for that answer. But doesn’t the Bible also talk about a “God of love”? How could a loving God sentence his own creatures to endless torture? It’s self-contradictory. If that’s what the Bible says, then the Bible must be wrong.

The ultimate answer to this dilemma, as with all dilemmas, lies with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It reveals that man is made to exist in a realm outside of our finite four-dimensional temporal domain. All religions, “even the strangest ones,” are an expression of man’s attempts to access that infinite eternal realm. In Christ, it has accessed man. He, being “God in the flesh,, is the “door” to the Kingdom of Heaven. Our choice is whether to enter through that door.

We are eternal creatures, whether we like it or not. We have the choice where to spend eternity: in the presence of God, as adopted sons and daughters and reflections of his power and glory; or we can choose to reject him, and experience the anguish of that choice, which is symbolized by unending darkness and misery.

Figure it out

Let's see if I have this figured out. Bernie Sanders wants to institute some socialism where we take money from the rich and give it to the poor. This will then make the poor rich. So now that they are rich they have to give it to the poor who were rich, but are now poor but rich again and the poor were rich but poor again.

Sort of like a snake eating its own tale.

This story was originally published May 28, 2016 at 12:07 PM with the headline "This is Viewpoints for Saturday, May 28, 2016."