This Hill I Climb - The Complete Volume: Journey on the Road to Salvation

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I left that open earlier and it's my responsibility as the writer to fix that.

It does matter to me! I have really big plans in store to expand the story in the future and another mini max is a part of it ok.

Digital Dante

That will be the end result. I'm just tying up a loose end, and opening a door for the future. The students had returned from their initiation with ridiculous amounts of pride on their faces as they strutted onto the stage. Led by miss Coco Adel. Coco was ecstatic to be the leader of the new team. Fox and Yatsuhashi were far subtler in their pride while velvet was still very shy. After they made their way off of the stage, Bruz, Aurora, Titus, and Sally walked proudly into the warm spotlight of the center stage.

Sally was deeply enjoying the acronym for her own reasons, while Bruz was a bit disappointed at the fact, at least the weight wasn't on his shoulders. Aurora gave Titus a peck on the cheek for hitting it big, which practically caused Titus to explode with joy. Bruz and Sally shook their heads comically at the sheer joy their leader expressed before turning their heads away from each other in spite. We're going to be stuck together for the next four years so get your shit together! I won't say it twice; do you get me?!

The rest of the team then made their way to the dorm where they'd be staying after the ceremony was over. Bruz had been congratulated by his fellow road crew members and little sis. Max told his apprentice of his pride, lifting Bruz's spirit, and that he'd be in for a world of hurt in the morning, causing the young mechanic to wince. With that done, he went to meet up with his team as they began organizing the room since they still had time to kill that night. The bat faunus wanted to explode in anger but remembered her brother's anger and let it slide with a sigh. Mark my words, oh you are so going to regret that poor choice of words later.

I personally guarantee it. We members of the Rorschach family are tough as they come! I've heard some of the stories though, word does get around. All I will say on the matter is that it is going to be an extremely long four years for all of us. Oum willing, we all survive. I hope you all have strong stomachs, because the boss has a way with finding food. Bruz began to giggle at the surprising accuracy of Sally's sentence. He'll teach the rules of the road alright, heck I think you can get a license in his class if I'm not mistaken. But don't hold me to that last part.

Tomorrow's going to be a long day.

Salvationist - November by The Salvation Army - Issuu

The young teen was currently laying down in his bed with his hands behind his head being lazy. His sisters were being themselves and he was just thinking about what he was going to do today since he had no homework or anything to do and it was Sunday. He remembered his X-ray and Vav comic collection that he'd kept safe from his sisters, he picked one up and began laughing at the antics of the two super-noobs.

After reading those for a while, he decided to take a nap and enjoy some peace and quiet in his slightly messy room.

This was no ordinary dream though as the young teen was about to discover. No sooner had he fallen asleep as he began to open his eyes again, but this time he was not in his own room.

How Did God Get Started?

This isn't my room! He tried to move but felt tired and groggy as he began to wake up himself up. He looked around to see various tribal markings on the black cavern walls around him along with several cages.

Looking to his wrist, he noticed his skin was ghostly pale and there was a blood transfusion tube attached to his wrist. He began to hear a drumbeat in the background as well as loud chanting and yelling. Then several other teens and even grown men ran past him, their skin pale white and faces covered with black grease. Another one ran by him and he tried to grab the guys' wrist as he stomped by.

When Jaune tried to speak what came out of his mouth was not his own voice or even his own words. He wants them back not a hand laid on 'em! The one named Slit mumbled something as if he were praying before grabbing a wheel and turning back to Jaune. He stood up and shuffled over to Slit and grabbed the steering wheel. Slit stood up and got in Jaune's face. He then grinned and looked to the fat man behind them. Organic, hitch up his blood bag.

From their Jaune began to see many strange things as his body moved on its own accord like he was along for the ride. Eventually he made his way with slit and the man dubbed 'blood-bag' to a vehicle where he was to be chained up. Then he was lowered down with other various vehicles of destruction one by one. The more Jaune saw, the more badly he wanted to wake up from this hellish place. As the war party rolled out in their furious pursuit, Jaune found himself clamoring for attention from a rotund armor-clad man in the black monster Cadillac, the vile immortan Joe himself.

Joe seemed to gaze right into Jaune's soul from the seat of the massive vehicle. On that note, he began arguing with Slit over what Joe really did. He looked right at me!

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He briefly looked down to see a name on one of the pedals, 'Nux'. That question was answered at least. After a few minutes a massive and menacing truck appeared in the distance. It was covered in armor plates, spikes and weapons along with various other people climbing all over to defend it. They helped fight off several other vicious vehicles that were more like steel porcupines than cars. One of the people was hit with a steel arrow and grabbed a canister of chrome air paint spraying across his face as his eyes turned blood red.

Mustering the last of his strength, the dying man jumped from the rig with two strange explosive javelins in his hands and destroyed one of the porcupine vehicles. Applying his idea to the broader sweep of history, however, suggests that the phenomenon of faith itself emerged from a similar reaction—not in mainstream Judaism, in other words, but only with the radically new splinter tradition that became Christianity as it was taken up by the larger Greco-Roman world.

And so rather than the transmission of an essential idea from one civilization to another, the rise of Christianity should be regarded as one stage of a long tug-of-war within a single civilization over the foundations of belief. Much hangs on how we answer this question, including how we interpret the last two and a half thousand years of Western civilization which of course also happen to be the first two and a half thousand years of Western civilization.

No one cared what you believed when you offered a sacrifice or prayed to the gods. What was important was to say and do the appropriate things in the appropriate way. They were alien to Judaism for the same reason. The question posed by Greek philosophy was whether the divine exists at all. Only when that sort of questioning starts does positive affirmation of something previously unquestioned become necessary. It was reason, with its pesky skepticism and even peskier inclination toward naturalistic explanation, that put belief on the table.

And there it has stayed ever since. Geoffrey Lloyd, a historian of science at Cambridge University, has spent his career examining the origins of Greek inquiry and comparing it with its counterparts in Babylonia, Egypt, and China. My exclusivity may rule out your God, in other words, but even your God is better than no God at all. So while the tradition of rational inquiry involves explanation about explanation, the tradition of exclusive monotheism involves belief about belief.

If reason is second-order explanation, faith is second-order belief. Explanation and secularism may actually take in the same territory. Where reason finds regularity in nature, faith extols miracles that overturn that regularity. In place of skepticism, faith exalts credulity.

We may find some hints about the psychological wellspring of this old antagonism by comparing Greek thought with Chinese thought, which is often credited with having developed a separate scientific tradition around the same time as the Greeks. Yet we hesitate to call the Chinese tradition one of free inquiry, since Chinese inquiry was sponsored, and therefore controlled, by the Chinese state. Greek philosophers, by contrast, were independent writers and thinkers, not bureaucrats.

The Chinese tradition retained a holistic outlook, braiding natural and supernatural influences together even as it evolved in quite sophisticated ways. That allowed a measure of control, since one of the big advantages of supernatural causation, long recognized by the powerful, is that it can be arbitrarily dictated by authority, or indeed by anyone aspiring to authority, as for example Paul and Muhammad did. The nascent discipline of evolutionary psychology offers scientific support for this analysis. It may have been this law which provided the legal context for the prosecution of Socrates several decades later.

Natural causation, evidence like this suggests, has the unsettling and potentially anarchic drawback of not being subject to human agendas. Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China , the Chinese tradition stressed practical application over theory, technology over explanation, results over understanding.

The great sinologist Joseph Needham, a strong defender of the Chinese achievement, recognizes this in explaining why China never underwent a Scientific Revolution comparable to the one that began much later in the West.

It may well be that here, at this point of tension, lies some of the secret of European creativeness when the time was ripe. We might even say that faith and reason both find their origins in the psychological consequences of this recognition. There may be something in that, although the distinction seems a little too clear-cut. Most of us, I should think, are to some extent pulled in both directions. The most searching questions about the origins of faith hardly ever get asked: Why did belief take center stage, when properly performed ritual, not inner conviction about truth, was sufficient for the worshipper of the pagan gods?

And how on earth did we get to the seemingly unlikely idea of one exclusive god? Why was this idea so anomalous at first, and why is it so dominant now? They were like outlaws in the Old West once the frontier was tamed. Anticipating the critique made later by Muslims, Celsus thought the idea that God might have a son to be downright blasphemous. The gods had originally been flamboyant characters with clear-cut and quite distinct identities—promiscuous Zeus was known for having children with any mortal woman who caught his eye.

If paganism, too, was centered on belief by the second century as Celsus and other sources suggest , what differentiated Christians from pagans in this crucial period of Christian growth? If the pressure of reason had transformed paganism, too, into a kind of monotheism, what was it that gave Christian faith an edge? A worshipper of Isis was still open, for example, to worshipping Apollo—indeed, all the more so now that they were seen as representing different faces of the same ultimate divine presence. But I would suggest that exclusivity did more even than this scholarship has observed.

Inclusive monotheism rolled the pagan gods into One, but like them that One remained firmly grounded in the old holistic world. Pluriform or uniform, the gods of nature could never fit comfortably in a world that had split the natural from the supernatural. Their worshippers had left them behind in this regard. In the late second century ad, as E. Dodds and many others since have noted, social and political turmoil turned this sojourn into a stampede.

Only an exclusive God could fully meet the demands of a society in the grip of supernaturalism, because only an exclusive God could be said to stand above nature rather than merely being part of it. And since these demons were thought of as holding the natural world in their grip, the old gods were still the gods of nature. In this specific religious context, exclusivity constituted the precise adaptation that allowed faith to hit upon its most resonant message, the triumph of the unseen over the seen.

Myth Meets History, Isaiah Meets Aristotle

By the time of Jesus, both pagan and Jewish miracle-workers were a dime a dozen. But Christian faith emphasized miracles in a way that was stunningly original in its rhetorical coherence and sophistication. The Gospels, the New Testament as a whole, and all of patristic literature are saturated with the wonder-working abilities not only of Jesus but also of his followers, through whom Jesus was said to work. This process seems to have begun with St. With this stroke, Christianity finally offered a coherent response to the challenge of radical naturalism initiated by Thales and first articulated by Hippocrates.

For more than a thousand years, until the Protestant Reformation, miracles stood as the unquestioned benchmark of religious credibility—and credulity—in the Christian world. It went hand-in-hand with the demotion of nature itself. And neither can be adequately explained without reference to the original rise of reason in classical antiquity. Yet the deep connections among reason, exclusivity, and supernaturalism go unremarked by the scholars who have described the latter two phenomena, seemingly without noticing the first. Where is the E. Dodds of the new millennium? Strikingly, the issue at stake was not whether miracles occurred, but whose miracles were divinely sourced, and whose were merely demonic or magical.

Certainly, both the Hebrew God and the original pagan gods had been seen as capable of working wonders. But the scrutinizing lens of reason magnified the miracle to gigantic proportions. The stronger the bonds of nature are perceived to be, the stronger must be the power that bends or breaks them; the more concrete the boundary between natural and supernatural, the bigger the thrill of transgression. This psychological effect set the stage for the new prominence of miracles starting just before the Christian era. In the same way, it also ratcheted up the power and the glory of the new Christian God, whose totalizing authority makes not just Zeus but even the Old Testament God look rather anemic—if bad-tempered—by comparison.

If we do wish to look for something that acted on religion in a way similar to steroids, in effect pumping up our conception of God and the divine, reason is a good place to start. There are likewise fruitful connections to explore between reason and the rising appetite in late antiquity for ethics and morality in religion. Nature is demonstrably amoral, and nature gods are hard to corral into a moral enclosure.

A marginalized minority of a marginalized minority, Jewish apocalypticists were double outcasts, excluded from the official power structures of Jewish life. Not surprisingly, they preached that the world was ruled by evil powers, and that those powers would soon be overturned by divine vengeance, most often in a great eschatological upheaval. A world dominated by evil powers is the common thread that runs between exclusivity and apocalypticism, and recent scholars like Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman emphasize that both Jesus and Paul were apocalyptic preachers. Ehrman thinks that even in the time of Jesus, not all Jews were exclusive monotheists.

Exclusivity may actually have infiltrated back into mainstream Judaism from the apocalyptic tradition that evolved into Christianity. Indeed, it was being swamped precisely because, then as now, it was so threatening to religious sentiment. Exclusivity fed into that reaction. Exclusivity at once focused supernaturalism and cleared the way for divine agency, by demonizing the weakened gods and putting the one true God above them and their material realm.

But what was it about the apocalyptic outlook that gave it such broad and lasting appeal as exclusive monotheism was taken up by entire cultures and societies? Once more, we can look to reason and its psychological consequences for an answer.

Digital Dante

From an epistemological standpoint, all believers are marginalized in this world. The End Times retain their original intoxicating flavor of revenge fantasy—which evolved first in a specific social context, but rapidly acquired broader appeal as cosmic payback for the outrage of naturalistic thinking. Nor does it suggest that the rise of Christianity was inevitable.

But it does explain how the major features that these traditions tend to share—not just monotheism and exclusivity, but also supernaturalism and apocalypticism—evolved and spread, and it does so in a way that connects them in a coherent narrative. And perhaps it suggests that if Christianity had not emerged, some other tradition that possessed these adaptations is likely to have evolved sooner or later—possibly, like Christianity, from an apocalyptic Jewish cult. Instead, we see them arising close together in both geography and time—the eastern Mediterranean world during the flowering of Greek thought.

When we think about it this way, the idea that the origins of these two seminal and often opposed innovations might be unrelated strikes us as unlikely, to say the least. It presupposes a coincidence whose stark improbability has been ignored by recent historians of science and religion alike. The tradition of exclusive monotheism, apparently, is how our religious instinct has expressed itself when confronted by the tradition of free rational inquiry.

To put it another way, faith is the unassailable citadel to which religion withdrew after reason had overrun much of its original territory. In the face of such relentless, even terrifying, psychological pressure, it makes sense that our collective embrace of the supernatural, if it was to persist without dissolving completely, would have to tighten to the point of obsessiveness.

But faith is also a mobile citadel, a portable fortress. Like the alien monster in countless movies, faith only gets stronger every time you shoot at it. If this model is correct in its psychology, monotheistic faith will spread across the globe together with reason—as indeed it seems to be doing already, whether through outright conversion or the subtle moulding of older traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism into more monotheistic forms. Faith and reason help define the package we call Western civilization.

We might even say that they do define it, and that they also account for its stunning global success. For both good and ill, we might add.

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