Ronald V. Huggins

One of the mysteries of human evil is how easy it is for a person to become the very embodyment of the thing they claim to oppose the most, so that for example those who are most vehement in their repudiation of intolerance become the most intolerent, those promoting love and opposing hate, the least loving and most hateful, those who oppose violence the most likely to become violent, those championing critical thinking the least thoughtful and most gullible, and those who proclaim themselves to be open minded the most closed minded of all, and so on. I don't think anyone can deny the phenomenon exists. Probably everyone has suffered the brunt of it from some other person at some point or another. Freud tried to account for it with his concept of projection, in which we project on others the things we do ourselves, illustrated for example in the tendency of unfaithful husbands to unfairly suspect their wives of infidelity. C. G. Jung elaborates on Freud with his con...

In an earlier post I had described the Torah (including its stories) as "terrible" news, and said that Calvary and Sinai stand and fall together, tht you can't fully grasp grasp one without the other. People naturally responded very rightly that the Torah was good. It is a lamp to our feet, a light to our path, sweet as honey, by it we as God's servants are warned. And that is perfectly right.  The reason it's terrible is because its realistic about us. We see this soon after at the end of Joshua, in the larger context of the famous passage where Joshua says (as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord). In the larger context he is warning the people that they must choose between God and their idols. They all strongly affirm they have chosen to faithfully serve the LORD and keep his covenant. But then, in a passage that passage that is a much a protoevanglium as Genesis 3:13, Joshua does not say, "That's great guys! Let' do it!" No, he drop...