Random Thoughts from DeHart

How my my heart hates this world, yet loves it within the same breath. It is filled with sorrow, and anger at what surrounds me everyday. It cries out, and rejoices within the moments. What a conflicted creature am I that such emotions fill my heart from beginning to end of day, and yet, I rejoice in that conflicted being which I have become.  There are times that I feel as though the waves of grief shall overcome my mind, and overwhelm my heart. I cry out to the Lord to take away this agony of which plagues my heart daily since I can remember. The reply has continued to be the same, one of which I thought was silent apathy for my circumstance, but now, blessed with new wisdom and understanding, I realize that that silence was not truly silence. It was a calling to search for the answers. To pursue knowledge, to desire wisdom, to crave understanding. "But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the...

This chapter seeks to answer the question, “does religion have an adverse effect on psychology?” Within the first paragraph, we are introduced to a young man who has just committed himself to God. He gives up all he has, and sells some of his father’s possessions. Upon learning this, his father brings his son to court in order to have his son give back what he owes. The son walks out with nothing, joins a group of followers who lives in abandoned churches, and begs for food. All this is told in order to ask the question previously stated, and with a story like this, it would seem that the answer would be yes. Some say that religion is a crutch, or a disease that overwhelms people. Freud described religion as “obsessional necrosis” (p.176).  George Albee says that “religion…impedes efforts to relieve human misery by teaching that people deserve their fate, that to believe that misfortune and suffering are divine judgments on sinners legitimates blaming the depressed, the miserabl...