Soulless faith

In Turkish, the -s_z suffix means "without." If you like black coffee, no milk, you ask for "Sütsüz kahve, lütfen." No sugar? That would be şekersiz. Today's thought from İncil is from Yacub (James) 2:26:

Ruhsuz beden nasil ölüyse, eylemsiz iman da ölüdür.

Ruh is, I believe, a cognate with the Hebrew word for spirit. That's what it means, anyhow. As a body (beden) sans spirit is dead, even so faith sans works is dead.

Which means -- for those of us who live in terms of our faith, it is way too easy to slip into a fantasy world. If we are not acting on what we believe, we are amusing ourselves within the playgrounds of our imaginations. You may have seen the movie A Beautiful Mind. The protagonist took vacations into a parallel universe, wherein he was at the center of a global conspiracy, and the world depended on what he did next. He was also schizophrenic.

May God have mercy upon us.
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And in other news, I just finished Orson Scott Card's Ender in Exile. A reasonably good read -- but the unremitting snarkiness of the dialogue does tend to get old pretty quick. All the characters sound like mouthy brats, alas.