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Learning to Have Quiet Time

Having a meaningful QT is a very important spiritual discipline. Throughout history great men and women have testified that they have grown so much in their spiritual walk through having QT. Learning the technique to have QT is easy, but it's not easy to maintain the discipline. So though there would been a gap it's important that we pick it up where we left and continue to journey.

It is more meaningful to select a book and read it over a period of time till the end instead of selecting a passage at random. One can start with Genesis and proceed onto Exodus and so on. But if is really new to the text, it's fine to start with the New Testament's Matthew, Mark, Luke and so on. Quiet Time for half and hour kind of reading has to be complemented with serious study of the text from time to time. 

So here's a technique. 

1. Pray and then read the passage, preferably, twice. 

2. Meditate. During meditation of the passage ask these following questions: 

a. Is there any example in the passage I need to emulate/follow?

b. Is there any command I must to obey? 

c. Is there any sin I should avoid? 

d. Is there any promise God gives to me? 

e. What character/quality of God does this passage teach me?

3. Pray, which may include praise, confession, seeking his strength and then close.

Evolution: Does Endorsing Evolution Entail Endorsing 'survival of the fittest' in Human Lives Too? Part 1

Lions and hyenas battle for food in the wilderness of Africa. The stronger party grabs the food and leaves none for the other party. Moreover, the lions do not care for the wildebeest; they just want to feed their own stomach. If the lions don't eat the wildebeest or other animals, they die of hunger. The wildebeest too cannot just get eaten easily. They have to adapt to avoid being eaten by lions. They would try to avoid getting too close to lions; they would try to run fast etc. They have to learn these things to survive. This is a case of survival of the fittest.

 

Since this is the kind of observation we have about the animal world, must humans too imitate the animal world? No. There has been cases in human world too where people have been eaten by humans. However, these cases are not the norm. Instead of killing one another for food, in human world we are to share resources; share food. We are to take care of the weak and the poor.  And when a person has been eaten by another person, we sue the cannibal -- or ought to sue. Whereas in the animal world, when a lion eats the wildebeest in the jungle of Africa, we don't say the lion has committed a moral blunder and it is to be taken to court. 

 

'Survival of the fittest' is primarily to explain the happening in the animal world. It is not that we humans are to behave like that. Far from behaving that way, if a human eats another we would condemn the act. Evolutionary biologists are not at all advocating the idea of cannibalism or propagating anti-mercy, anti-care, anti-sharing kind of practice when they talk about 'survival of the fittest'. They are rather saying that this is a happening, and this sort of happening leads animal to change behaviour, or rather, to adapt  or to evolve.

Whether one agrees with the theory of evolution or not is a different. But to argue that 'survival of fittest' is the reason for which one disagrees with the theory of evolution is, I think, not a good reason.