I say if I were to find a God, and I gave it the name "Ginger", do you think we could encourage my God and your God to get together, face the music and dance?
This is what I felt I had been doing for years -- being strengthened and encouraged by God through his word and prayer, experiencing his comfort in the midst of loss.
Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God.
"[The Foo Fighters] have a platform and should be using it to encourage obedience to God; instead they teach every person who will listen all things contrary to him: fornication, adultery, idolatry, fags".
He explained how the advent of trains helped create the third world and, more horrifically, how the ancient Egyptians once sacrificed their children to encourage the rain gods to end a drought.
Buddhism doesn't encourage beliefs in gods or their veneration and yet Buddhists in Sri Lanka make an annual pilgrimage to Kataragama.
He described his faith as nondenominational and said he felt compelled to encourage others to know God.
Preaching to the "spiritual but not religious" choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to "encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less of clergy".
This pessimism about the possibility of finding a stable truth may be realistic, but it seems to sanction, even encourage, special pleading of which "God's Crucible," for all its virtues, is an example.
And what happens around those tables, designed to encourage the people of God to see one another, face to face?
