Posted on 03/19/2008 5:01:33 PM PDT by annalex
As a technical writer, I spend a lot of time around engineers. Smart people. Whose bottom-line approach to life sometimes is -- "If you were as smart as me, and had studied as hard as I have, then you would agree with me." We cannot disentangle our "hearts" and "minds," the way pietists do, since we are, in the totality of our beings, affected by the fall, and redeemed unto life. I have brought all my faculties to bear upon the question at hand, on my own and in company with other serious thinkers.
In all humility, and recognizing the grace you have experienced, I have come to a different conclusion than you.
I meant, quite simply, that I read the writings of Luther and Calvin just as good as you can, and I also read the Holy Scripture, and I think that the two were anti-clerical pamfleteers who did not have much respect for the Gospels. They catered to the post-medieval mind and they developed a system of thought that made some conveneint compromises with what the Gospel actually happens to say. Liars.
Slavery is to sin, and the Gospel liberates.
Thanks for your powerful story of conversion.
Good Friday reading bump
On this day when we remember our Redeemer, let me apologize on behalf of those Protestants who established unitarianism as the American state church in the 1840s. Our loathing of our Catholic brethren seduced us into selling our future to a virulently anti-Christian utopian socialist, Horace Mann. The weapon we helped forge against Catholic children has now claimed our own. Your folks had sense enough to see what was afoot, and to create an alternate parochial system of education.
As Christians who take the gospel seriously, let us at least agree to do all within our power to undermine, discredit, and replace the public school system.
Yes, the government schools are a bane on America.
The Catholics, especially in America and West Europe, have a lot to apologize for. The tabernacles tucked away in the corner, statues of saints removed, confessions at 4:30 PM on Saturday, faithless History Channel pseudo-catholic clerics, Catholic schools that teach godlessness, pederast priests, Catholics in open defiance of the Church doctrine, — these are all signs of the crisis of faith that gripped the West since Vatican II. The apostles went to sleep once again, and I am very sorry — my Church failed not only herself but the world.
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