If you have teenagers who like to read, you may want to offer them Blind Faith by Ellen Wittlinger. I haven’t read it, but the reviews on teenreads.com and amazon.com
This may be good for kids who are dealing with a death situation, but I would read it myself first, just to be sure I was comfortable before offering it.
While we usually think of religion as extremely personal, it can be interesting to turn that thought upside down and think about how many people have a particular belief or where they’re located relative to each other. The Association of Religion Data Archives can tell you things like the distribution of religions in your county based on zip code. Or that 72.9% believe in life after death, and 52.9% believe that Hell absolutely exists. And if you’ve ever wondered about all those denominations and how they’re related to each other (particularly Christianity), there are family trees of the denominations.
There’s an online survey that will show how you compare to the nation on religion measures. Thankfully, it’s very short. For my demographic (male, 36-55 years old, college degree, other religion), 62% of all respondents think that the Bible is an ancient book of history and legends, and 64% think that Jesus was one of many messengers or prophets of God. Check it out, see what you get.
Have you ever thought about how the world’s religions map to the population, that is, how many people are this religion or that, what religions are the most popular on the planet, and the like? Adherents.com has a number of interesting statistics about religions.
For example, there are 116,000 Spiritualists in the US. Spiritualism is listed in the top 20 religions, and in the top 10 of organized religions (in the US). And non-religious accounts for 16% of the world population.
It’s nice to find this kind of stuff in one place that’s redily accessible when you want it.
The Winchester house is famous for having been built due to spirit influence. The owner of the house worked on the house non-stop for many years to appease herself and the spirits regarding the invention of the Winchester rifle. This article discusses some of the details, which you may find interesting.
This is sad. It’s unfortunate that a medium would tell a seeker negative things and thereby affect the seeker in a negative way for the rest of her life. While people often “hear what they want to hear” and interpret things the way they expect them to be (even when it’s negative), in my mind, the lion’s share of the blame still goes to the medium.
When you think about it, if the desire was to do something good to make amends for having invented the rifle, how does building a house non-stop for years accomplish it? It doesn’t. It’s a waste of resources. And I doubt any of it made her feel better.
Not only is the story sad, but the article is too. It paints things-spiritual as dark, and then dredges up the classic Christian objections to mediumship, which are quotes from their bible. Deuteronomy is the one I see most often, and I’d say it’s their favorite. How tiresome.
Cities all over the world have beautiful things to see and do. Art, music, architecture, museums, and other special places, for example. Many things. But they also have places that are dangerous and should be avoided. The “bad parts of town”.
Would you avoid all cities on this beautiful planet of ours just because they have “bad parts of town”? If so, you miss out on a lot of wonderful things. To me, the classic Christian objections suggest you do exactly this, on a spiritual level.
It is wise to be careful and aware of what you’re doing when it comes to things-spiritual, so that you don’t run into the “bad parts of town”.
But don’t miss out!
