I finished reading:

"Wisdom Hunter" written by Randall Arthur.

This book surprised me. I am not a big fan of "Christian Fiction" as it comes across tacky and in my opinion is quite often not well written. However, I really enjoyed this book. Why? Simply because it focused on issues that I feel strongly about. This is the legalism that is so abundant in the right wing, "evangelical", part of the Church today. In the story the "hero" is a pastor of a large church who was so rigid and legalistic that he ended up driving his daughter away and eventually she died, causing his wife to die of a "broken will". He eventually after some trials found true. living Christianity and what it is about in his quest to find his grand-daughter who he had never met. For me true, Bible believing, evangelical Christianity is not about a set of rules it is about living a life based on the teachings of Jesus which is compassion, love, forgiveness and equality. If your life is lived this way in a true submission to "The Spirit" the other things will come.

This is also in my opinion why a lot of Ultra-Right, and right-wing evangelicals have it wrong in so many issues. The Christ of the Bible was the ultimate socialist, or communist (of course the atheism of Marx and Engels makes this a bad analogy), for want of a better term. Our human understanding can not grasp the enormity of this concept, but, one only has to read the beginning of the book of "Acts" to see this in practice. So tell me, why is "sharing the wealth" wrong or, "Universal Health Care" wrong? We need to focus on the wider issues, not just the "ethical ones". For example fix the two issues I've listed the problem of abortion will become less because the financial means and other justifications to carry out this will not be there making the decision to save a life much easier...

OK, I didn't mean to go on such a rant on finishing a book, but, there you go. It's something I feel really passionately about!

-Richard