“You say you will never forget where you were when you heard the news on September 11, 2001. Neither will I. I was on the 110th floor in a smoke filled room with a man who called his wife to say “Goodbye.” I held his fingers steady as he dialed. I gave him the peace to say, “Honey, I am not going to make it, but it is OK … I am ready to go.” I was with his wife when he called as she fed breakfast to their children. I held her up as she tried to understand his words and as she realized he wasn’t coming home that night. I was in the stairwell of the 23rd floor when a woman cried out to Me for help. “I have been knocking on the door of your heart for 50 years!” I said. “Of course I will show you the way home – only believe in Me now.” I was at the base of the building with the Priest ministering to the injured and devastated souls. I took him home to tend to his Flock in Heaven. He heard my voice and answered. I was with the Firefighters, the Police Officers, the Emergency Workers. …read the rest of this article »
9/11: Where Is God During A Catastrophe?
September 10th, 2011 by Arthur KhachatryanWas Jesus Real?
September 1st, 2011 by Arthur KhachatryanWas Jesus a real person who lived or a fictional character around whom a religion was formed? It appears as though many atheists and skeptics of all kinds like to argue that Jesus was not real and did not exist. This presumption is generally made because the Bible conveys supernatural events, and therefore, those who hold that supernatural events cannot occur see it fitting to deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
However, as professor of biblical criticism and exegesis F. F. Bruce states,
“Some writers may toy with the fancy of ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the ‘Christ-myth’ theories.”1
The Evolutionary Implications on Human Dignity
August 20th, 2011 by Arthur KhachatryanMany times after people commit horrendous crimes we get a clear indication of their great disconnectedness with reality. But what happens when a mass murderer is a well-educated, well-read individual who fully understands his actions and shows no regret, not because he’s completely deranged, but because he has fully weighed the implications of what he’s been taught throughout his life? Such is the case with the infamous mass murderer, Ted Bundy, who confessed to killing over 30 people. …read the rest of this article »
What is a Free Thinker?
July 20th, 2011 by Arthur Khachatryan
What exactly is a free thinker? Is it someone who simply thinks without placing limitations on his thoughts? Ironically, no. The free thinker is someone who has refused to be held captive by what he would suppose to be the tyranny of religious thought, and instead opted to side with what he would perceive to be freedom from that manner of thought. The free thinker would think of himself to be more rational for not believing in God having supposed that this sort of belief is nothing short of superstition. The free thinker would perceive to be free from the “bondage” to superstition and of religious belief, that the person has come to a rational knowledge of reality instead of believing in things on the basis of faith. But whether intentional or unintentional, by ascribing to himself labels which make him look superior based on this new-found “freedom,” the free thinker would implicitly passively denigrate those who would believe in God.
Should Governments Decide Human Worth?
June 4th, 2011 by Arthur KhachatryanIt is a clean room mostly empty except for the government officials, a secretary and the Chancellor of the state. In enters Mr. Wordsworth, a man who is on trial on suspicion of being a librarian.
In this 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, titled The Obsolete Man, we see one of the most articulate demonstrations of the implications of tyranny, where civil law infringes upon personal freedoms in a way so blatant, it makes us doubt that such a scenario could ever be possible. Yet, a cursory review of history and the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung show us that such a scenario is but two gentle steps away. What were the common threads between these regimes that were responsible for the murder of an estimated 100 million people combined? Step one: remove the notion of God from public life, thereby removing natural law as the basis for intrinsic human worth, liberty and equality. Step two: create a totalitarian regime, preferably with a ruthless dictator at the helm. And there you have it – a society unable to understand why human beings have intrinsic worth, unable to account for their own liberties in order to retain them, and the horrific reality follows. …read the rest of this article »
Fallout from Judgement Day Prediction
May 21st, 2011 by Arthur Khachatryan
Well, another prediction has failed about Christ’s second coming, which was dated to May 21, 2011. Another prophesy has been shown to be false, made by Harold Camping, a man notorious for false prophesies. As the world awakes on May 22, we need to consider the implications of this false prophesy made by this false prophet, and others like him. It should, therefore, be very valuable to consider how each group of people should proceed to live lives in accordance to reality.
Update: Harold Camping has predicted a new date for the return of Jesus Christ of October 21, 2011.
To Christians Who Believed Harold Camping’s Prophesy:
First and foremost, a gentle ‘I told you so!’ is in order (read this article I wrote months ago about why Christ will not come back on May 21, 2011). Second, did you know that in OT times when prophets were proven wrong they were stoned to death? Why such harshness for mere teaching? Because if one were thought to speak for God and later proven wrong, he would be seen as a heretic of the highest order. The Bible communicates that teachers will be judged harshly because they have the capability to lead people astray from the truth. …read the rest of this article »
The Life of the Soul
May 17th, 2011 by Arthur Khachatryan
People all over the world appear to have a need, a need that appears to transcend their understanding in human terms. This need is buried in the most intimate and fundamental part of our being. It is a need for something outside, something greater, a higher power, a God. Of course we can all choose to quiet that part of our nature and rebel against it by denying its very gnawing existence. One scientific research1 after another confirms this to be the case. But still, we can claim that nothing is really missing from our lives, that there is really no validity to the existence of the soul. Yet, what are we negating? Can we claim that we tangibly know that there is no such immaterial reality as the soul? And by doing so, can we further claim that our lives are already complete if we do not conceive of that which may be lacking from it as a reality? If we reject the soul as a real thing we do not allow ourselves the ability to know how its consideration may impact our lives. …read the rest of this article »
The Life of the Heart
May 13th, 2011 by Arthur Khachatryan
As we are often reminded by that nudging, that jerking of our hearts just when we’ve erected our walls of rationale, we need our hearts just as much as we need our minds. For when our theories leave us cold and lonely inside ourselves, only the warmth of another will be able to break through the mist and darkness. It is very telling that when we usually utter phrases like, ‘I don’t need her,’ we are doing it with contempt for the truth of exactly the opposite. We do indeed need one another. A man who lives by the theories of his mind is a man who lives alone with a callus heart hardened by the illusion of his self-sufficiency and crumbling under the weight of his autonomy.
Yet, the heart will not only show us a new light by which we may see all things with a different perspective, but it will also give us the warmth and intimacy that we intrinsically crave. And though our love resonates from within us, when we love we are allowed to come outside ourselves into the world where our heart is able to direct its affection toward another. Our selfishness is then defeated by our love allowing us to see the world through others, for whom we choose to make life a bit more radiant. …read the rest of this article »
The Life of the Mind
May 10th, 2011 by Arthur Khachatryan
Most of us often regard one aspect of our lives to be supreme over the others, and as a result, we take the others for granted. We heighten the importance of the one we are most comfortable with, the one that resonates with our personality, and we diminish the significance of the others. For example, the scholar who’s learned to value the mind as a means of living and understanding the world is apt to favor the mind above all else, content to pursue the mind above all matters, often content to intellectualize all things, organize all things into little compartments, to mechanize everything possible in order to draw logical connections between all aspects of his existence. This, however, while a realistic and rational approach, does not allow him to experience the soft nuances and wonder of life. By reducing all of existence to a mechanistic process we are hardened and left out in the cold, and we are reminded time and time again that some of our theoretical understandings of the world appear misaligned with our practical experiences, and we slowly drift away and lose touch with the world and the people who mean the most to us. Many in this camp live lives of quiet desperation usually wrapped up in thoughts, always trying to rationalize their experiences as some piece, some cog in the wheel of unencumbered reality. …read the rest of this article »
The Perils of Reductionism (Dualism of the Brain and Mind)
April 26th, 2011 by Arthur Khachatryan
In an effort to try to understand entities with complex interdependent parts naturalism has fallaciously tried to reduce them to mere constituent parts. Since every piece of truth must pass through the brain in order to be understood, the human brain has been the biggest target. But, as Rene Descartes postulated, the mind is separate from the body; it is a separate entity. The mind is not physical; it is metaphysical. The mind has a separate realm of mental states and cannot be explained in merely physical terms. The mind is capable of willing action, thinking, predicting, comprehending, and even controlling the brain and the body. These are acts that are qualitatively different from their constituent neurons. And what of the notion that abstract concepts, such as thoughts, can act on natural things? That is completely out of the realm of the cause and effect relationship that most of the natural world appears to be operating under. There is in reality a dualism with separate orders of phenomena that at its core is very counter-intuitive and problematic for science alone to uncover. And were it not for this dualism of the brain/mind phenomenon, psychology would be a superfluous undertaking. …read the rest of this article »
