Free Republic

It all depends. One important reason for the problems in Iraq was the sheer number of weapons available in the country and in private hands. The Southern states lost the civil war but managed to recover a degree of independence because the North lacked the stomach to resist the so-called “redeemers.” take-over of state governments,at least not just to protect southern unionists and blacks.

They got on Palin’s case because she wrote a note on her hand. They call her dumb but she’s a much better speaker than this great orator, especially when speaking “off the cuff,” (Get it! lol))

A man is dead and we read all this huffery and puffery. As if this were an opera and the blood not real, nor his view of the Present situation of France.

I don’t know what you mean by rosy. In the Estates-general, in those places where there were feudal assemblies, the Church constituted the first “order,” of society since “citizenry” in Christendom belonged to the baptized, but the authority of a bishop in matters where the secular the religious blended ,was more like that of a federal judge, and the pope something like the Chief Justice, where the Emperor was supposed to act as his Sheriff. The parallel breaks down, of course, where the bishops and abbots were great landowners who were supposed to defer to lay lords such as the kings. The barbarism of earlier times, of course, had deeply impressed itself on society, especially since at the time of the First Crusades, the Northmen were just being assimilated into Christian society. The Emperors, of course, in both west and east, regarded themselves as successors to Constantine, as Roman Emperors. So strong to this attachment to the past that the Ottoman Sultans, after they took over the eastern Roman Empire, also cast themselves into that same role, except not as Christians.

Most nations just called themselves the equivalent of “the people.” or by klan names. Names like Apache,Cherokee, etc. are the result of historical contact with the Europeans, or names assigned by other nations. What I find most amazing about aboriginal history is the vast range of their trade. There were Choctow who hunted on the great plains and traded with the English in Charleston, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. The Chickasaw in Mississippi developed the quarterhorse by breeding horses that came from Osages who raided New Mexico.

That is the argument of the Bible. That man is engaged in a conversation with the Creator.

Religious liberty in a political context works only if the parties involved want peace. When the Turks attacked Vienna in 1683, both sides agreed on one thing:that the God of battles would decide the issue. Pretty much the same applied in the clash between the Christians and the Cathars. Feudalism is the name we give to the polity of the time, Europe was not a single entity except quite loosely something called Christendom, not a unite but more like 10,000 private estates of which maybe 1,000 were controlled by the bishops and monks. There was a spiritual allegiance to the pope and a broader allegiance to a hierarchy of overlords, the most important of which were called kings.

But in the colonies there was no such sharp divisions among the sects. Madison saw the matter in much the same light as he did when he treated special interests in his Federalist #10. That a majority faction is a danger to liberty but that a balance among them worked very well.

At bottom, the Constitution is still just positive law and the 14th Amendment added things to it never contemplated by the Philadelphia Convention. The only thing is sure is that someone John Peter Altgeld, who was as “American” as anyone else, was nonetheless debarred from the Presidency because he was born in Germany of German parents and bought to this country as a 3-year old.

The term “natural-born American” is not set in stone. The term was used to define the office of President as NOT a monarch, and to debar foreign princes from that office. . The question is whether Rubio was a subject of Cuba when he was born, and since he was born in the United States and his parents had in effect abandoned their allegiance to their homelands, and would formally renounce it.

That takes us back to the Thirteenth Century and into a feudal order where the Church was only one of the players. Innocent III was one of the few popes who was able to exercise the kind of authority that some think seem normal in papal history, As for the Cathars, are you sure you want to be the champions of a sect that was as different from Christian as the Muslims were? Imagine the Mormons of Joseph Smith but with ten times their numbers? It does, of course, show the futility of suppression. The South of France, where the Cathars were powerful, would be a hotbed of Calvinism and then of revolutionary radicalism. Injustice leaves a stain that lasts generations.

The cure being worse than the disease.

The old brother was physically moving around. What’s the use of intel if the agencies do not share? Where there is no will to act, even having a gestapo doesn’t help.

Since it did not prevent Boston from occuring, it would not have prevented 9/11. It would take magic to get the many different. agencies to work together.

Given what has happened in the Church during the last fifty years, I can only conclude that the Church has many faithless clergy. It happens when the priesthood becomes no more than a career path, or when priests take the faith as lightly as so many of us do, as a yoke to be set aside because we take every burden as intolerable.

Since you claim that the likes of the Spanish Inquisition were going on continuously after Constantine’s time, I expect you to produce a list.

One of the most dispiriting things about our involvement in Iraq was our total, I mean total indifference to the fate of the ancient Christian community in that country. That is why the pope was against the invasion, because he knew that the Muslims were primed for a war against Christians in the Middle East. Bush could have given Christians the protection of the US forces, could have but did nothing. Maybe he figured he couldn’t, not long term, that he had opened pandora’s box.

No, he is right. The little guy did not get prime time at the convention. That’s because guys like Romney have about as much insight into the daily lives of ordinary Republican voters as Obama does.

Santorum might have lost 48, but it would have been because the Republicans elites were doing their best to subvert him. Just a hint. He won in Iowa but Romney’s operative lied and the lie held enough long enough to keep his win out of the headlines. It was small enough that when it was found he had won that it gave him not help in New Hampshire. Even a second place there would have put him even with Romney and maybe kept guys like Newt and Cain out of the limelight. Santorum is not a very attractive guy, but one thing he learned in Iowa, and that is how to talk to real people. THAT is useful.

Shall we now call them KGB? What the heck.

Indians says “indians,” as in the Indian nations who were here when the English arrived and who were for so long treated as semi-sovereign entities until the Continent was finally conquered.

Well, I don’t think that the White race will be displaced as soon as some think. Blacks and Hispanics are aborting their children at a faster rate than the whites are, and marry even less often. Which is why, I suppose, the elites are so anxious to keep the immigrants coming.

Well, they seem to be the ants and we the grasshoppers. But Jeb is full of it. They are learning our bad habits quick enough.

The same thing is happening in Europe. Around 1970, the whites there and here decided to stop reproducing and to spend their wealth on themselves, forgetting about came after them. The same thing will happen to the blacks and “others,”at least until the wealth is used up. We will become Argentina.

I see Rubio as the point man for Jeb. Jeb wants to run in 2016. Rubio has plenty of time to wait in line, Jeb does not.

The Reformation was about an “iota” of difference. Zwingli, Luther and Calvin found political protectors with the power to use the wedge issues of these theologians to shatter Christendom.

The Edict of course did not have these divisions in mind because they were important only to the Christians involved. As to the principle of religious liberty as we understand it, this would have been foreign to the Romans. Madison understood the Romans, but his views would have been incomprehensible to the Romans. Furthermore, Madison was not so “conservative” about matters of religion as some seem to believe. He never grasped where the deism of the early French revolutionaries was leading their country, a quick evolution from state Christianity to atheism. and the spreading of such policies and attitudes wherever French armies prevailed. The same path taken by the Russian Revolution from 1917 onwards.

The Apostle’s Creed tells us, “He descended into Hades (to the realm of the Dead) and opened the portals to the Kingdom of God.

Not to put too fine a “pint” on it, what “horrible attrocities” has the Church of Rome committed that were worse than those committed by Protestants? In the religious wars in France and later in Germany, both sides acted with savagery. In England, the government of Elizabeth persecuted both Puritans and Papists with zeal, but killed as many Papists as Mary killed Protestants. Oliver Cromwell was as savage in his suppression of the Catholic uprising in Ireland as the Inquisition had been in the Netherlands.

If you belong to a Church that has false teachings, that is likely to have some effect on your relation with Jesus. Both sides in the Reformation knew this.

It is God who saves through the Church, which is the body of Christ.

Many of these people just got off an airplane with a visa and then after it ran out, just stayed.

Of course this is absurd.

The pope is not the person who must act. This is the responsibility of the local bishop. If nothing happens then it is because he chooses not to. But the bishops are terrified of schism, for the Church is divided with the divisions thinly papered over,

The wars are caused by misconceptions about the reality on things on the ground. But obviously, Obama has no strategy in mind, and consequently he is likely to be led to do something stupid.

The Edict of Milan aimed to empower Christians, not to establish religious toleration as we understand it. It was a political act, which sought to strengthen the Emperors hand. He intervened to strengthen the orthodox party in the Christian Church, and even before he dealt with the Arian issue, dealt with the Donatists. It was the divisions in the church more than the secular power that was at the root of the matter. It was their divisions, their lack of unity that prompted them to let Caesar decide. It was the same thing that recurred in the 16th century, in what is called the Reformation, but which was in fact a bloody war between Christians, that played into the hands of princes, and in the end, caused such slaughter that Christianity was discredited in the eyes of reasonable men. What a difference an iota in a creed can make can make, or as the Jews discovered once upon a time, the taking of one man’s life can cause fountains of human blood to flow.

The Gang of Eight has been saying constantly, “border security first, and now they admit it was nothing but talk. A totally empty promise.

The whole rationale of the Chaplain Corps is to guarantee the religious rights of men and women in uniform, not to help the Co maintain good morale, but this is what officers have been led to believe — that a Chaplain is something like a shrink.

Snowden has caught our attention and caused us to consider where we are now. The government now has a general warrant, That much is sure.

In any case, her nomination is a chance for conservative senators to get her on the record.

There is the “small”matter that until the time of Theodosius, which followed the critical battle of Adrianopolis, which changed the whole calculus of power, that it was more than two generations after the Edict of Milan which first legitimized the Christians. I was speaking of the situation before the Diocletian persecution, which itself was the climax of more than 50 years of “hard times” for the Christians. This is far more relevant to the question of the influence of the Jews on the Christians of Antioch than any discussion of persecution after the Establishment of Catholicism as the state Church under Theodosius. That, of course, was soon followed by the sack of Rome and the German invasions in the West, which ended the Catholic political ascendency is Gaul, Spain, and Africa, and finally Italy itself. The situation of the Church of Rome, as the Latin patriarchy, was pretty bleak in 500, with the only bright spot being the conversion of the Frankish king and his court about that time. There was a dark side, all right, and Church persecution of others had little to do with it.

Pray tell how Christians were able to be the aggressors prior to their being made the established religion, at a time when they themselves, unlike the Jews, had almost no legal standing in the empire? And you are resisting the plain fact that Jews and Christians were rivals for the loyalty of young .Jews. The very similarity of the two faiths comes out in Justin’s Martyr’s dialogue. Jews had been hellenized for hundreds of years, since the time of Alexander, and the Pharisee movement was occasioned the need to go against this, to establish a clear tradition for the people to follow. Christianity offered an alternative, and one that that did not require one to cut oneself off as much as the rabbis and sages did. My guess is that after Constantine’s time, many Jews joined with many pagans to follow the path to power by joining the Church. The Church Fathers were not entirely happy about the swelling of numbers. Especially those who had suffered through hard times knew opportunists when they met them, or thought they did. Jealousy made many “old” Christians in 15th Century Spain, do their best to cut down converted Jews to size, by spreading lies.

I know he is being facetious, but fact is that the illegals tend to live in a cash on the barrel-head world that makes it harder for them to be traced. Just imagine the world of fifty years ago, then you got paid in cash and spent it with the only record being a cash-register receipt .

Seriously, when Mandela dies, they will have a racial war down there.

The question is do we accept letting government have such power?

The problem is that we have no idea of the numbers involved. “Everyone” knows that there are gay priests. But is it 10%, or is it 40%? It was an “open secret” that Cardinal Wright was gay. Are there enough to form a dangerous clique in the Church?

Agree.

Yes, and no. If the process is what the public wants, then does the public want the end product to be this: that a hireling of no personal consequence, has this power at his finger-tips? This is like giving a buck private both keys at an atomic missile Launcher site.

The Parthian example shows that religion and politics make a witch’s brew. Paul Johnson proposes in his History of the Jews, that the number of Jews who became Christians was probably larger than we are inclined to think. The break between Church and Synagogue occurred in the 2nd century and was as much a break in Judaism as anything. Nothing more bitter than a family quarrel, or in the political realm, a civil war, because the parties have so much in common, their differences so small but critical, like a cracked vase.

You mean, there is no such thing as truth, only poetic truth? LOL! Meaning all liberals are insane?

No, in reality. The Inquisition was a state institution which employed the a church court against its enemies. The Bourbon reforms of the 18th century transferred church assets into the hands of the state, and Mexico continued this policy with greater or less degree of anti-clericalism. Many priests, especially those from families closely connected to the state, attach an almost sacerdotal significance to the state, whether it be a liberal or a monarchial state.