Logically Faithful-Beyond Opinion

What is the best way to communicate to people?  What are some of the best strategies we must use to not only get people’s attention but to also inspire them? If you want to know, then listen to this podcast.  It is a wonderful interview I had with Ken Davis! Ken is Best-selling author, frequent radio and television guest, and one of the country’s most sought after inspirational and motivational speakers—

In this interview podcast I ask Ken direct questions about how to really engage people.

This is what we will cover..

 

 

* What is a successful talk by definition?

* What are some important questions we can ask ourselves as we prepare to give a major presentation?

* Why is the “conventional wisdom” about public speaking just plain wrong, full of myths, and misconceptions?

If you want to take your public speaking skills to the next level, I cannot recommend this conference SCORRE more than I do!  It has had a major and revolutionarily impact on my own public speaking!

See http://www.scorreconference.tv or Kendavis.com

 

Something radical happened to me when I was 16 years old at Argo High School. My science teacher, Ms Moon began to talk about human evolution, she talked about, in so many words how we human beings, like other forms of life, have developed from aboriginal unicellular life by way of such mechanisms as natural selection and genetic drift working on sources of genetic variation. Natural selection discards most of these mutations, she argued, because they prove deleterious to the organism in which they appear, but some turn out to have survival value and to enhance fitness; they spread through the population and persist. It these mechanisms, or mechanisms very much like them, that all the vast variety of contemporary organic life has developed; we are all animals that come from this same Universal Common Ancestor by chance.[i]

We are all animals….animals by chance.  I heard nothing else she said. Animal!  I am an animal! I could not get my teenae mind around these words. How could I be just another animal like the rat, termite and dog! How could all of life itself come from purposeless mater? So I approached her and questioned her. She then gave me a project on Charles Darwin, who I never read before that day.

I found out after reading Darwin that she was partially right, we are all animals. But years later I learned that I was right all along, in another sense. We are not only animals.  We are sacred and special. And it is impossible for us or all of life to come by mere undirected processes alone.

My talk today is part one of the Blind Spots of Science.  This is the first section, which discusses what science is, how it contradicts naturalism and the conflict between religion and science.

 What do you think?

Do your devotions ever become monotonous, dull, repetitive and painful?  You are not alone. Something needs to change otherwise your prayer life and spiritual life in general can become a burden rather than a joy. This podcast addresses this issue.

EM Bounds said that  “Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things. It is the simplest and the most sublime, the weakest and the most powerful. Its results lie outside the range of human possibilities; they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.”

Spending time in personal devotions and will cultivate your heart toward the transcendent things of life.  Is the world evangelizing you and altering your views of life, sex, work, clothing, etc. or will God’s word be evangelizing your heart?  Weeds don’t need work to grow, they grow when you neglect your garden. Your soul is your garden.  The world comes in like weeds, if you do not cultivate it, before you know it you will become indistinguishable from the world.

I try to make time daily, to bathe my mind with his Holy word.  Our God is a consuming fire and his word is a lamp in our lives. Let that fire and light refine and purify our thoughts and desires daily.

 Solitude is important.  But change the way you have your quiet times. If you do not, you end up with monotony.   Stuart Grassian, a board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, has interviewed hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement. In one study, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” Why? Because doing the same thing over and over will make us insane!

The human minds needs variety and diversity—this applies to our personal devotional and prayer times.

How we have our prayers and devotions matters.  What I mean by “how” is not only the posture of our heart, but the posture of our bodies as well.

My children, AnaKaterina And Daniel are 6 and 7 now. One day when they were told to bow their heads to pray, my son said “Daddy AnaKaterina kept her eyes open when we prayed!”

I asked him “And how did you know she did not close her eyes”?  He did not even attempt to answer as he realized he was doing what he complained she was.

Now on a deep level why bother to bow our heads and pray?  It does not matter does it? In some sense it does not matter because God sees our hearts. But we are bodily beings and how our body behaves has a great impact on our psyche.  If you stay in your pajamas all day when you work at home it will have an effect on your work.

How you dress when you come to church or to the beach says something about what you value or hold to be worthy of your attention, even on a subliminal basis.

In the Screwtape Letters, Letter IV, C.S. Lewis has the demon write this to his nephew on how to destroy Christians. He said

 “At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls”

To have effective devotions, you need to provide variety.  Change the way you do things, when you do things and how you pray.

Let us consider the historical account of the burning bush incident of Moses in the book of Exodus chapter 3.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, renowned Orthodox  Priest gives us this illustration:

And  God  says  two  things  to  Moses.  First  of  all  he  says: “Remove  your  shoes”   Shoes,    are  made  of  leather  from  the  skin  of  dead animals. So spiritually shoes signify what is lifeless, dead. This way God’s command at the burning bush  means  strip  off  the  deadness  of...

There are three main questions we need to address to make sense of the world.  These three will be discussed in this podcast.  A few months ago, I had this conversation, “How can you be thankful? You are an atheist!”  This is what I said, with a smile,  to a friend of mine who told me that he was very thankful for his Thanksgiving.   He said, “What do you mean?”  “Well if there is no one to thank— how can you be thankful?” I said.  He said “ I can be thankful to the universe.” I said “The universe can give a flying rip about you! “It does not care about you or anyone.”   We had a lively conversation.  What I did there was ask him to question his own reasoning.

Gregory Koukl of Stand to Reason helps us here. I strongly recommend his book, Tactics.

Koukl argues that are two types of questions you can ask anyone.

Definition Question: 1) What do you mean by that?

Evidence Question: 2) What reason do you have for your position?

I add a third, an Application Question

3) What difference does it make? Or in teenager language, “so what!?” or “why should I care?”

In this podcast, I open  a portion of a lecture at Trinity International University on engaging culture.

As you engage people you may run into some who will tell you,  “No matter what you say to me, I will never change my mind!” No matter what they say, you can still leave a fragrance behind.  At 3 am, when they are alone with the man in the mirror, your words may be used to prick their hearts.

Lets hope it is a fragrance and not a stench you do leave behind!

 

 A professor said to his high school students one day, “You know the two greatest problems of the youth are?  “I don’t know and I don’t care!!”  said one of his students. Yes that is it, ignorance and apathy! 

Let me know what you think of this short podcast and would you please leave a review on itunes?

Thanks!

 

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Socrates said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”  Is yours an examined life?  Is what we believe about life, meaning, death, God, immorality, truth, justice, morality, sex and freedom, to name a few, true?  This is my first official Podcast :)It is a segment of my lecture, “Introduction to Philosophy,” in particular Plato’s Cave.

In this short lecture, You can listen to it by clicking the play button below.

Philosophy comes from the Greek words Sophia and Phileo. Which is The love of Wisdom. Philosophy is reflecting on yourself. Philosophy is shutting the TV, radio, MP3 , and phone, off and listing to your self think for once.

In this lecture I restate this popular pome as an introduction…

It all starts with a  thought     Philosophical

which leads to words      Political Science, Persuasion, management,

which leads to actions            Engineering, Biology etc.

which lead to habits                Psychology

which lead to character           Ethics

which leads to destiny.            Religions and Philosophical

 

–Let me know what you think!

I appreciate your time.

Khaldoun

 

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