Love, the gay child of sympathy and esteem, is, when attended by delicacy, the only happiness worth a reasonable human’s pursuit, and the choicest gift of Heaven. We do not and cannot see our World as a theater of conflict between supernatural powers, the demonic seeking to possess and destroy us, and God intervening to secure our salvation. Moreover, miracle stories lie at the very heart of New Testament belief: If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain (I Corinthians 15.17). Thus, the crucial question is: must a human, in order to be a Christian, commit oneself simultaneously to two mutually incompatible World pictures—that of twentieth century science and that of the first-century prescientific speculation? To attempt this is to make Christian belief unnecessarily difficult. It is equally unrewarding to view Christianity as a strictly and objectively historical religion and anxiously to sift all the evidence for and against the recorded events of the life of Christ. The evidence is substantial enough to show that Christ indeed lived and that he made a quite extraordinary impact upon certain contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

However, if religious faith is to stand or fall with the historicity of, say, the birth stories of the Easter narratives, if its degree of assurance must rationally be tempered with the historical probabilities, the assurance will be pitifully uncertain, and faith will almost certainly fall. Some people may properly grant that a very large part of the New Testament message is couched in mythical language and does not record objective history. This mythical material is not, however, an embarrassment, and it need not be discarded. It can be interpreted as indirect description not of the cosmos but of the conditions and possibilities of human existence. Historical studies derive their real seriousness not from sheer factuality but from what they discover about viable ways of life and viable options for human decision. Among such options, the Christian gives pre-eminence to that displayed in the accounts of the cross and the resurrection.  For it is through these that God makes available a distinctively authentic and free mode of existence to all humanity. It is also believed that freedom is a privilege, not a right.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The only way one will have freedom is by obeying conditions and these conditions are both supernatural and human. The rules of God state that we must be good people and have right actions and thought and we will go to Heaven. The human laws state that we much behave sane and obey the laws to keep our privilege of freedom. What happens when we enter into the inner sense of the World? We leave the World of space and enter into the World of movement; the noun World is transformed into a verb. As spatial location is itself a quality of things, so motion from place to place is an objective fact. Our Sun is a star, and all of the stars give out without taking in. The aim of our soul is to increase porosity on the side of giving out and to reduce it on the side of taking in. A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved. However, all humans almost are villains in their hearts because we feel inauthentic life in and after the flesh, the life of the natural human who is alienated from God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

How Hell should become by degrees so natural, and not only tolerable but even agreeable, is a thing unintelligible but by those who have experienced it. The idea of eternal life is Hell is totally scary and this should be enough motivation for people to be good. Habit hath so vast a prevalence over the human mind, that there is scare anything too strange or too strong to be asserted of it. On the authentic type of existence, there is a total acceptance of the fundamental conditions of our life. This involves, for any human, a realization of one’s own death, not as some vague, unpleasant, but indefinite future event, but as something whose constant presence, in possibility, should modify one’s sense of one’s own existence at every moment. Christianity, too, speaks, of renouncing the World and a life entangled with the World, of dying to the life of self. It has, however—or ought to have—some very different thing to say about life eternal. People should see and accept the limitations on our freedom imposed by the given circumstances of our lives as so far lived (facticity); one sees the present moment as the locus of decision, and it is in the future that one will work out those authentic possibilities of existence for which one decides. Earth should not look like a halfway house. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our ignorance. We show our ignorance of Him in the very way we decide to serve Him. Are we worshipping God in a way that will raise us up to where we can take hold of Him, having such intimate contact with Him that we know His mind about the ones for whom we pray? If we are not heedful and pay no attention to the way the Spirit of God works in us, we will become spiritual hypocrites. We see other people failing, and then we take our discernment and turn it into ridicule and criticism, instead of turning it into intercession. Such projects are the manifestation of a crude and vulgar optimism that springs us from the arrogant and egotistical assumption that our time is the consummation of all time and tended to justify the crimes and disasters of previous ages as necessary to the promotion of what came afterward. The role of moral judgment in history and life cannot be spirited away in this complacent manner; but neither, on the other hand should we allow our views of the past to be distorted by moral predilection peculiar to our own time and society. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Be careful that you do not become a hypocrite by spending all of your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself. What is above all requisite for true historical understanding is a contemplative, disinterested sense of the abiding and tragic aspects of human existence. Only through such detachment from prevailing concerns and preoccupations could the historian transcend the barriers that separate the mental life of one age from that of another. It is not merely that work of art and culture that has provided us with the most fertile material for interpretation of previous phases of human experience; history itself was (or should be) a form of art. The mechanical piling up of the results of specialized research, dear to so-called scientific historians, is not enough; there must also be intuition, an imaginative ability to re-create the vision of life underlying the relics left by former times. Remember our way back to God takes a lot of work. When are born into the World, we sometimes forget our Godly ways, much like people with much like people with Dementia forget the World around them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The Bible is a way for us to get back to God, much like how in the Netherlands, a radical idea is being tested. There are self-contained villages where people with dementia show, cook, and live together—safely. The village has things that will remind the Alzheimer’s suffers of the World they grew up in, there are Victorian houses, telephone booths, clock towers, cobble stone roads, and the village is closed to the outside World with gates and security fences. To see the past in these terms is to see it as the expression of the inexhaustible creative power of the human mind—great individuals, great artistic achievements, great moments of civilization all exemplified in different ways its potentialities.  So, this is how building and restoring your own faith in God will protect you from ways that are ungodly, it will surround you with God’s armor. Scholarship, painstaking investigation, are indeed essential, and they must be properly used and directed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Only thus could a particular source or authority throw light on the character of a person, the significance of a style, the pervasive atmosphere of a period. My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source of truth—God. Be relentless and hard on yourself if you are in the habit of talking about the experiences you have had. Faith based on experience is not faith; faith based on God’s revealed truth is the only faith there is. A new creed became mine—a belief in happiness. The wise order of providence has ordained that we shall makes others happy in being so ourselves. The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow. I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

The Winchester Mystery House

The brave and the fearless will find all the contact information and tour options they need to tour The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/