Good Xtrians try hard to live up to the standards of other Xtrians, to win the respect and standing they want within Xtrianity.

  But truly good Xtrians don't care.  They life for God, even if all the other Xtrians didn't like them (hypothetically speaking) they would still serve God.  They have taken their relationship with Jesus and made it truly their own.

  In some way, evil is linked to immaturity. While I would say that it is a gross oversimplification to say that evil is an issue of adolescent development, I think an argument can be made that it is the childishness within people that thinks that in any given scenario evil is greater than good.

  Evil is never better than good.  While evil often assumes the appearence of being the better option, generally because weak humans preffer the quick and easy over the hard (and being good is hard, at least the two are associated in the popular mind), it is prudent of us Xtrians to remember that evil's gains are an illusion. 

  This is what the childish simplicity inside all of us needs to hear.

  Pastors should talk more often on this issue.  Spiritual experiences come from spirits (shouldn't take a genius to figure that out).  But there are many spirits besides God and His' angels. 

  The Welfare Issue has become a real hot button topic, and why not, it's only a source of major financial strain on our country.  I won't bother trying to convince anyone, I think we can all agree that welfare, while it does some people good, is also a major source of curroption.  Perfectly healthy people lie and cheat about nonexistant physical frailties in order to recieve free money from the government, siphoned from our pockets. 

  In my thinking you don't clean a social system with litigational reform: you do it with social reform.  If it becomes socially unacceptable enough, people will not want to be associate with welfare.  If people who abuse welfare are depicted in movies and TV as leeches it will make it that much harder for them to stomach it. 

  Of course it will have the drawback of driving away the needy families and single-moms for whom it was actually created for.  I don't claim to have all the answers on this one, I am merely offering some thoughts and ideas, namely that to solve the welfare issue requires not the enaction of new law but the mobilization of the perceptions of the commonwealth.

  Now wait - before you raise your eyebrows skeptically, let me explain.

  It has always been held that Christian unity is of the utmost importance, and rightly so.  It shows that we are a family, the family of God, and that we share a common lineage (Christ) and we can work in unity toward common goals.

  But I was reading a book on Church History the other day by Dairmaid McCulloch, and I was thinking...  If critics of Xtrianity believe that down through the ages all Xtrians have conspired to change Christianity to their own immediate benefit, doesn't the fact that we've had multiple churches from the very first centuries of the Christian era debunk that notion?  If the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Presbyterians and all the others all have the same Synoptic Gospels, doesn't that show how it hasn't changed?

  Yeah, there have been grammatical changes, but these changes are just that - grammatical.  The overall reading is the same with the most basic things unchanged (remember: early Church had Creeds to totally prevent theological degeneration, especially the Apostolic Creed).

 Let me be clear: Xtrians should strive towards unity.  All I'm saying is that, in unity or disunity, we can still prove Christianity.