My neighbor at that time was probably about 5th grade.
Excellent observations about the churches. It’s what Nancy Pelosi doesn’t understand: If I choose to give my money to the poor it’s called love. If she choosed to give my money to the poor it’s called stealing.
Christianity, Islam, and atheism have all had the same results when political and religious power was all consolidated. I think that’s because man is fallen and prone to corruption. The worldview of the Founding Fathers took the sinner-saint duality seriously by stressing the need for separation/balance of powers, the checks and balances, and the guarantees of individual rights not to be infringed by government. Whether it’s the pope, the czar/Fuehrer, or the imam, somebody claiming all civil power to control other people in the name of God is a dangerous thing. Every tyrant claims to do it for the overall good of the society.
What’s sad is that most people are on religious auto-pilot. They do what they’re told and don’t think too much about it. That’s how forces totally opposed to the Bible can overrun and take over whole denominations without anybody within it seeming to even notice. The Bible (Revelation) seems to say that eventually the churches will be agents serving Satan.
And I say that as the wife of a Missouri-Synod Lutheran pastor. I love the Church (capital C). Unfortunately, not everything that calls itself a church is the Church. The closer we get to the end, the more the churches will be agents of Satan and the invisible, truly Christian Church will be underground. At least that’s what I believe the Bible says.
When I saw Tony Campolo heading up Obama’s campaign, to try to convince Christian pro-lifers that electing a guy who believes it too burdensome on women to enforce anti-infanticide laws, I knew we were heading into very, very rocky times. So here we are.
There are others flying under a false flag. The obvious ones are Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Fr Jeffery Pheiger, that whacked out family who protest at veterans funerals, all churches who teach Black Liberation Theology, and many more. I strongly suspect that much of the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is committed by infiltrators to discredit the church. I know that is not true of them all but I think it is of a lot of them.
We know the line has been crossed (from religion to government) when certain actions are demanded of us rather than just imploring us toward that behavior and when punishment is administered by man rather than by God in the Hereafter.
Since most laws are based on Biblical morality it is easy for my above statements to be misconstrued but I doubt you will.