Cute Fable - good point!

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At 07:34 PM 9/27/95 -0500, you wrote:
>	The good point from this was how we as humans still robed in the 
>flesh and at war with the flesh, always find something that we will let
>creep into a position that is higher than God.  The story brought the 
>point of PRIDE in several of their accomplishments as humans rather than 
>showing of the wonderful mercy that they had received from God.

You're confusing two kinds of pride here.  First, there is the pride that
says that we are better than God, or better than someone else.  It's a pride
that comes from making us something that we're not.  Let's call it the
"sinful pride."

However, there is nothing wrong with being proud about what we've done as
long as we don't let it transform into the "sinful pride."  The "healthy
pride," as I'll call it, is feeling good about what we've accomplished.
This is the pride that enables us to achieve satisfaction from our past
accomplishments to move on and make them even better.  Without this "healthy
pride," we would stay in relatively the same location and station in life
and would never understand more about ourselves and others.

>	Being someone in Graduate School, I don't feel that there were
>anti-education or civilization overtones.  The story was merely a humorous
>story about what people will spend every waking hour doing and working
>on rather than giving time to God.  No reason to be offended here, brother.

You didn't follow me.  I'm working off a single idea here: everything on
this earth exists because God made it so.  So, any attempt that we make
towards understanding more about it is, in essence, to understand more about
God.  If God created the world, then the world is the expression of God,
and, therefore, to learn more about the world in which I live is to learn
more about God.

Consequently, these bored angels didn't exactly appealed to me.  We are far
>from understanding everything there is to know.  In fact, that's often seen
as a key factor in determining an intelligent human -- an intelligent human
is one who realizes how very *little* he actually knows.  However, since any
attempt to learn more about the world is to learn more about God, then I
think that God would be most delighted in our paltry efforts to discover
more about Him.  Then, it merely follows as a matter of course that,
whatever God took pleasure in would also interest the angels.

I'm not offended.  I just didn't feel the story was very worthwhile.  As far
as the overtones, I'll show them to you.  If God's world is so much more
fantastic than ours, and He's never really gonna be impressed with what
we're doing, then why bother?  This attitude encourages banality and status
quo.  Let's face it: any worship that you do is a pathetically miserable
attempt to compensate for everything that God has done for you.  Why bother?
You bother worshipping God because you like Him and you want to become more
like Him.

It's the same way with education.  We are on a quest for perfection, or, in
other words, to be like Christ.  To abandon education is to avoid even
trying to grasp the very smallest hint of what speaking a world into
existence must be like. 

>	Knowledge is a wonderful thing but don't let it posess you.

That's the very attitude I'm griping about!  There's a concept that,
somehow, somewhere, it's possible to get too *much* knowledge.  Is this
really what you want to believe?  

As I said previously, the world was created by God.  I don't know about you,
but anything that I create really says something about who I am and what I
want.  So, as I have posited earlier, to study the creation is to understand
the creator.  Extend this, now, to the whole universe -- it was all created
by God.  To understand the universe (or any aspect thereof) is to understand
God better.  Now, do you have any excuse not to try to grasp as much
knowledge as you possibly can?

In summary, God wants us to have accomplishments *and* to be proud of those
accomplishments.  For, in my view, every merit that you accomplish is just
that little bit more that you understand about the world that God created.

I'm sorry to be nagging on one fable for *so* terribly long, but it jumped
out at me for two main reasons.  First, I get a truckload of email daily.
Fortunately, I am able to quickly decipher which is pertinent and which is
trash.  So, when this little "play" came through, I thought it might be
something really neat, which I didn't find to be the case.  So, I was pretty
much upset about it.  Second, coming from a somewhat more conservative UPC
background, I really feel that there are anti-educational overtones almost
everywhere I turn.  Consequently, whenever I am offered something with these
overtones in it, I like to take the opportunity to try to help us overcome
this philosophy.  (In case you're wondering why I get so excited about
education, well, I'm aiming to be university pres. some day!)

Kyle
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
R. Kyle Jones                       || Internet: rkjones@fas.harvard.edu
60 Linnaean Street                  ||           rkjones@galstar.com
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"Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen,
I will be exalted in the earth."
                                     Psalms 46:10

R. Kyle Jones is not a licensed nor practicing psychologist, but merely an
undergraduate studying psychology.  Any advice given should not be 
miscontrued in any fashion to indicate any form of professional counseling.
Please seek a practicing professional for any mental health or other
professional counseling concerns.