Tags:
I'm feeling it's time to discuss Excellence again. After dealing with some workers coming to my house to do various construction jobs on my Pastor's Retreat Center renovations, it was saddening to realize that the majority of bosses and their workers that I employed did not operate in Excellence. Just imagine if God is presently building Heaven using their same sloppy work ethics. (He said, "I go to prepare a place for you...")
I'm going to say it again--EXCELLENCE is not an end goal--it is a minute-by-minute WORK HABIT. (Perhaps my workers had never been exposed to the super levels of excellence that I was as a child.) If one is not sure of what excellence is within a given task, then GO EDUCATE yourself until you know thoroughly what is inferior and what is superior! This is how I desire to partner with God to build His Kingdom (The Domain of the King)! I don't want to be in the category of believers wherein all their wood-hay-and-stubble works are burned with fire while they themselves are barely saved.
I'd like to see Excellence applied to the church realm and building the Kingdom of God. (Does anyone mind if I ask challenging and provoking questions?)
Blessings, Dr. Dave
This is not from Aristotle but Will Durant an American writer. From the book,
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Will Durant fought for equal wages, women's suffrage and fairer working conditions for the American labor force.
Will Durant saw the decline of a civilization as a culmination of strife between religion and secular intellectualism, thus toppling the precarious institutions of convention and morality:
"Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization."
One more quote from, Will Durant.
"As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory."
Did Durant quote it from Aristotle, or is it an original statement from himself?
Durant's intellectual paragraph is worthy of much contemplation.
Also love Durant's statement that there is no good reason to torture God's account of creation into conformity with evolution.
© 2022 Created by Juanita.
Powered by