You know how crazy those Amish can get .....
4 Heresies listed in “Bad Religion”:
1)The first heresy is the “New Quest” for the “historical Jesus,” which destabilized Christianity by bringing about a “choose-your-own Jesus mentality.”
2)The second heresy Douthat examines is “Prosperity Theology,” which has roots in E.W. Kenyon’s “New Thought,” the source of Kenneth Hagin’s and Joel Osteen’s pray-and-grow-rich theology. This heresy solves the problem of suffering by “recasting it as a simple failure of piety and willpower.”
3)The third heresy is “God Within,” a “mysticism” that gives you the excuse “for doing what you feel like doing anyway, and calling it obedience to a Higher Power or Supreme Self.” This heresy regards evil and suffering as illusory, and repentance, prayer, and charity as unnecessary. Its goal is interior harmony, freedom, and choice, but it leads to solipsism and narcissism.
4)The fourth heresy is American nationalism, which has two sides, messianic and apocalyptic. The messianic side turns democracy into a religion capable of doing the “redemptive work that orthodoxy reserves for Christ and his Church,” while the apocalyptic side envisions our national history as a “downhill slide.” Today these two sides are “bipartisan afflictions.” Each takes its turn in the driver’s seat — the messianic when a favored political party is in power, the apocalyptic when it is out of power — with the result that they go through cycles of “utopian hopes and millennial angst.” Moreover, the two parties are “theological worlds unto themselves,” creating a Manichean landscape of good versus evil where a Christian is pressured to conform his “theology to ideology.”
I was told by an old minister the real cause for the decline was all the draft dodgers that were given sanctuary in seminaries during the Vietnam War. These non-Christian lefties became the next generation of ministers in the mainline, and things then went downhill pretty rapidly. The new chaplain at my school, a good example of this, went on to firebomb the ROTC building at the local university, made the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list and then ran away to Canada.
I really don’t think I am going to take religious advice from a Catholic.
#1, and the only thing needed. Christians decided to shut their mouths and go along to get along. This allowed all sorts of evil to influence them and their children. A smile and wave mentality.
Book: "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics"
Reading it now. It's good.
First half if a history of US-ian Christianity post WWII, from riding high to where we are now. He covers, roughly, the protestants, the RCC, and the black church. The protestant history I'm familiar with, the others not so much.
The last half of the book (where I am now) he deals with particular sorts of heresies, broadly considered. The quest for a different Jesus, god-within-ism, prosperity preaching. One other I haven't got to yet.
So far, worth the read.
1) At its very best compulsory, state imposed, and socialist-entitlement schooling was never more than generically and lukewarmly Protestant in its worldview. Children who attended these schools risked becoming generically lukewarm in their faith.
2) Progressives pushed relentlessly for greater and greater secularization. By the time I attended government school ( 1962 -1964) God was given a mere nod in the morning by way of the Lord's Prayer and a scripture verse. After that it was a non-stop godless worldview. Children who attended these schools risked learning that it was Ok to merely nod to God once in a while.
3) Since the mid-sixties government schools have been utterly godless. Children **will** learn to think and reason godlessly in these schools. They must just to cooperate in the godless classroom. How could it be otherwise?
Bump to self
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Protestantism.
Religions always goes wrong, because they are designed by man, to take power from others and collect money.
A savior is all one needs. We don’t need religion.
Someday people will learn.
I don’t blame God for religion.