Musings of a Snickerdoodle

The title of this book, Dangerous Virtues: How to Follow Jesus When Evil Masquerades as Good by John Koessler, caught my attention when I was looking at Moody Publishers books offered to reviewers.  I looked at the description and realized that this was a book that might be a pretty interesting read.  I wasn't disappointed. Koessler makes the case that the 'seven deadly sins' have become the seven dangerous virtues of our day. Rather than moral ambiguity being the main problem of our day; our age actually has a standard of "morals" that they hold to quite firmly (though their justification of them is probably ambiguous).  The problem is that those 'morals' don't meet God's standard of morality and in some, or most cases, our age's morals are actually evils in disguise or, as the author puts it: "dangerous virtues". Things that used to be obvious sins are now praised and held up as high moral standards of our day.   Koessler talks abo...

  "To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor.  More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin-shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism.  It is self-absorbed love. This affection is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery.  It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies.  Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment and death.  For some reason, we return again and again to this false lover and expect a different result. The answer to sinful lust is love - God's love, which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ.  Adopting the language that Martin Luther used to speak of Christ's righteousness, we might call it 'alien love' because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can come ...

  I haven't been writing as much lately as I haven't found any new books I want to read and review (yet), I seem to be growing pickier and pickier, at least when it comes to 'Christian' books. And I haven't yet found any more history books that I want to read and review. But in the meantime, I've been working on a lot of family history/genealogy research stuff for fun.   One of the resources that I use for that is MyHeritage, I utilize their free family tree building software. They came out with a special technology that really, really impressed me.   It impressed me so much that I wanted to share it here.   They have released a Photo Enhancer, which brings the faces of people in your old photos into sharp focus using a 'deep learning' technology….which, somehow, seems to be able to figure out what blurry faces looked like in real life…if that makes any sense…   Anyway, I tried it out when they first came out with it, and was kind of impressed, ...