A couple of weeks ago, as we were driving somewhere, my son asked me to turn on the song “Zombie” by Cranberries. As we listened to the song, I suddenly was overwhelmed with a sense of profound connection with the entire humanity. I felt connected to all the 7+ billion of people on this planet. I felt completely one with that huge, multifarious organism called “humankind”. That took me by complete surprise.
I don’t think that I have never experienced that sense of unity with humanity before. It was very meaningful to me. A day or two later, I wrote this poem.
The poem’s uneven and somewhat jagged construction and varying rhyming schemes are meant to be expressive of the sense of beauty and diversity which exists in this world. Some stanzas and even some lines overlap and dovetail with one another, and this is done on purpose. This is illustrative of how different persons and people groups dovetail with one another to form one symbiotic organism. The poem’s cadence builds its pace to a crescendo to highlight a sense of urgency before the final stanza.
Enjoy!
IMAGE OF GOD
Religion with its plastic smile
Numbs our mind, and rapes our soul,
And leaves a gaping, bleeding hole
Where our heart once used to be.
It builds big buildings. It produces
A stream of talks and printed pages.
It worships books with guilded edges
Which can’t legitimize its crimes.
It lets us keep our greed, our judgments,
To Western sins it dulls our mind
Shuts off compassion, leaves us blind
To human suffering next door,
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It’s fascinating how often the Bible gets deified, based on the way we use certain phrasings: “The Bible says …”, “The Scriptures teach us “, “The Bible tells us”.
We are all created in the image of God. Inside of every single one of us, there’s a better human struggling to get out. If that’s focused upon, recognized, and encouraged, that will happen.
Here’s one verse that is often taken out of context and misconstrued. 
The Bible assigns a very special place to the “Word of God”. In fact, we even capitalize the word “Word”. Let’s take a deeper dive on this concept.
In the modern world, we are truly experiencing a crisis of integrity. I have no idea when it became normal for leaders to stop standing by their words, drastically changing the stories several times in a row in a course of days. Reading recent news stories about the United Airlines CEO squirm around like an eel on a frying pan trying to explain why it’s OK to knock out the teeth and break the nose of a paying airline customer gives a new meaning to a phrase “top communicator”. The only thing that’s uplifting about that particular story is the universal outrage that followed. On a practical level, that outpouring of wrath at a big corporation gone fat and proud gave me more faith in humankind than perhaps anything else in recent news. 
Something just dawned on me, as clear as day. At the root of the way modeled by Jesus Christ is the certainty and security about our relationship with our good heavenly father, carried into eternity. At the root of religious fundamentalism is the ever-present good old fear of death – and at its core, that fear of death is unmitigated even by the cross of Calvary. These two streams flow within the larger nominal framework of Christianity. They may employ the same terminology and the same sacred texts, but the difference is truly night and day.
Generally speaking, there are about 8 or so atonement theories out there, with variants. To me, it’s easier to divide them into two groups. 
I have a couple of presence points on social media. Over 95% of my digital footprint is about the person of Jesus Christ, and about pursuing his love, grace, and kingship. So naturally, my digital friends and followers tend to be of like interests.
Terminal Salvation 
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