Grace, sacrifice and dolphins

"But when it comes to Grace from God, there seems to be a fundamental stumbling block -- we (or, I should say, many) find it very difficult to simply accept."

The acceptance of "Grace from God" assumes at least three things on the part of the person accepting. That person must also:

1. Accept the existence of an omnipotent and perfect Yahweh
2. Accept that we (humanity) did something wrong, something to upset Yahweh (who incidentally knew we were going to do this wrong thing anyway)
3. Accept that the omnipotent Yahweh wants us to recognize that we need his forgiveness for that transgression

I think it's 1, 2 & 3 above rather than the "Grace from God" that many people have difficulty in accepting. If you believe in 1, 2 & 3 then you may as well accept the fact that you need to accept Grace from God. "We did wrong, we need to be forgiven."

On the subject of sacrifice and Christ's "passion" - we've had this debate before but did God really sacrifice his only Son? What did God lose? And God is at liberty to change past events anyway.

About intelligence and the ponderance of one's own existence -- I recently read that a school of dolphins had saved some divers from sharks. The divers were diving and unbeknownst to them, sharks were on the way -- presumably to dine out on the human contingent.

Dolphins surrounded the divers in an effort to protect them from the (as yet unseen) sharks. One of the divers got spooked by dolphins behaving in such a manner and tried to swim away but one of the dolphins rounded him up and brought him back to the group of humans. The divers were protected from attack and they all survived to tell the tale.

I don't know how smart dolphins are, but in this case they were more aware (at least) than the human diver who tried to swim off. They also had an attitude of care which strikes me as quite enlightened. There are an estimated 10,000,000 unique species on the Earth of which perhaps 80% have yet to be classified. We seem to be the dominant species, but that may turn out not to be the case.

There is a connection between all life catalogued so far on Earth. We're all built on left handed proteins, this suggests a common root. We, and the rest of our lefty comrades, are not able to digest food constructed of right hand proteins.

The fact that the human species appears so advanced compared to most other life on Earth but at the same time so intrinsically connected to the rest of the biosphere suggests (to me) that we received special treatment at some point. But again this could be a failure of imagination, or nerve. Clarke's TMA-1 monolith springs to mind again.

Glad to hear that you are settling in down there Mr. Diy and I trust that your new Church is providing you with what you need.