"Don't count your Hatch's before they've Chickened."
Posted on 05/02/2007 7:28:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Mitt Romney is a picture perfect Republican candidate for President. Some on the left have suggested that Romney carries extra baggage: He is a member of the LDS (Mormon) Church. Will traditional Christians vote for a Mormon?
Traditional Christians believe their faith can inform politics. Other faiths can reach similar conclusions and become allies. Americans are electing the President of the United States not the Patriarch of Antioch, the Bishop of Rome, or the President of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Any labeling of Mormons as too “weird” to serve the public sets a risky precedent that will come back to haunt traditional Christians.
Most such attacks on Mormonism are name calling, the result of bigotry or ignorance, but not always. If bigotry narrows the field too much, it is possible to be too open-minded about religion.
Is Mormonism too “weird” or “dangerous?”
A traditional Christian should only make political alliances with groups that embrace reason, with a theology with agreeable public policy implications, and with a history of successful participation in the Republic. Fortunately for Romney, Mormonism easily passes these tests.
First, the religious beliefs of the candidate should be held by a significant number of people willing to defend them (even if unsuccessfully) in a rational manner.
The mere existence of a fully accredited Brigham Young University and Mormon apologetic groups settles this question. The Evangelical Torrey Honors Institute has hosted thoughtful Mormons willing to debate their ideas.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.washingtonpost.com ...
Precisely, I think Jews are closer to Christians than Mormons.
Hatch has also flip flopped on the embryonic stem cell research issue as well, to now being pro-embryonic stem cell research.
Just using the name "Jesus" does not make it Christian. Mormonism pours an entirely different meaning into the name than does the Scriptures and the historic Christian faith.
Jesus said there would be many who would come in His name, but would be imposters. Mormonism fits the imposter mold.
"Don't count your Hatch's before they've Chickened."
A bit doubleminded isn't it?
You should see all the nasty names "greyfoxx39", "colorcountry", "Yan Pans Wife" and myself were called by Mormons on the thread below.
"The Mormons: An American Experience /Frontline Special (Mitt Romney's faith)"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1822809/posts
LOL
I can not imagine how you came to a place where that question makes sense, and I mean it.
Whatever, My beliefs are what they are.
One day I asked my Father for a gift, and not long after that day, I regretted my request.
Over the years, it has been made clear to me that a lot of other people also seem to regret that request which I made, because it was granted.
“That argument makes it pretty clear that the empirical facts related to spirutality can support any (or at least most) approaches to spirituality. It goes to my overall view that discussions that are akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (or whose church is right, who is a Christian, who will wind up in heaven, etc.) is really always moot and never absolutely proven.”
I disagree quite profoundly.
Let’s go through the facts again.
(1) There are NDEs, documented. They do seem to happen cross-culture. So yes, that supports spirituality.
But look at (2) and (3): THE healing shrine in the world, the one where a blind kid, born blind, grew optic nerves in an instant, and a Christopher Reeves-type paralytic got out of his wheelchair and walked, and thousands of other alarming cases, is one place. It is only one place. It is not two, or three, or five. Just one. And that ONE place is a Shrine to the Virgin Mary. What THAT tells us is something very specific: there is something about the Virgin Mary, specifically (and not anybody else, because there is not ANOTHER Lourdes devoted to a different principle), that is related to these healings. The fact that the only person who died in the 19th Century whose body remains undecayed (and unembalmed) in 2007 is Bernadette Soubirous, the girl who says the Virgin Mary told her to dig and a healing spring would come forth, reinforces the particulars of this. Reason tells us that any real religion devoted to a real master of the universe who really controls the laws of nature such that He/She/It can actually create miraculous healings MUST contain specific veneration of the Virgin Mary, because whatever or whoever this God is, the ONLY place that He/She/It acts the way He/She/It acts at Lourdes, is at Lourdes. From Lourdes and Bernadette we eliminate all religions that do NOT venerate the Virgin Mary. Which leaves us with Catholicism and Orthodoxy as the only candidates for true religion in the world.
Enter a third fact: Islam. Islam conquered all of Orthodoxy except Russia. Catholicism RECONQUERED the part of Catholic Christendom that Islam took (Spain). Communism conquered the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Communism always had a fight to hold onto Catholic Hungary and the Catholic Czech’s (the Prague Spring, Hungary), and it was the Catholic Polish Solidarity that ended up breaking open a fatal crack in the Communist Empire. So, all of Catholic Christendom fought off the Muslims and resisted the Communists, but practically all of Orthodox Christendom succumbed to both. And Lourdes is in Catholic Christendom.
So, if we look to divine signs to distinguish between Orthodoxy and Catholicism (given that Lourdes is unique, and Marian, and Orthodoxy and Catholicism are unique in their specific veneration of Mary), Catholicism is the clear victor.
And finally, we have the Shroud of Turin to prove the resurrection, and the astonomical calculations done by a NASA astonomer which give astounding verification of certain stellar events recorded in Biblical accounts.
Far from being able to support any approach to spirituality, I believe that the empirical evidence forces one to acknowledge Catholicism as the only true religion.
But it’s impossible to test that idea about Lourdes. That spring has existed at Lourdes for many many years before Bernadette decided to associated it with the Virgin Mary. Is it possible the waters healed people prior to her happening upon the place? Do similar healings take place in the Ganges? What about the healing waters Ponce de Leon heard about in Florida?
I meant versus praying to Saints.
“One day I asked my Father for a gift, and not long after that day, I regretted my request.
Over the years, it has been made clear to me that a lot of other people also seem to regret that request which I made, because it was granted.”
Don’t keep us in suspense here.
What gift did you request, and what did God grant you?
I would love to see these calculations. Please cite the relevant NASA publication or peer-reviewed article. You might start your search here.
This would be without regard to their otherwise unusual theology and the training that would be wrong afterwards.
Anyone who places their faith in the Jesus of the Bible is saved. Most converts are NOT theological experts.
The above is true; BUT....
NIV 1 Timothy 1:20-2120. Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge,
21. which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you.NIV Proverbs 4:13
Hold on to instruction, do not let it go; guard it well, for it is your life.
NIV Hebrews 3:6
But Christ is faithful as a son over God's house. And we are his house, if we hold on to our courage and the hope of which we boast.
NIV Hebrews 3:14
We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.
NIV Hebrews 6:11
We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.NIV Hebrews 12:3
Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.NIV 2 Timothy 2:11-13
11. Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him;
12. if we endure, we will also reign with him. If we disown him, he will also disown us;
13. if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.
NIV 2 Peter 2:20-21
20. If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.
21. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.NIV 2 John 1:8
Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully.
NIV Jude 1:21
Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.
NIV Revelation 2:25
Only hold on to what you have until I come.
NIV Revelation 3:11
I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown.
Do you have this same attitude about LDS??
Just a question:
Is there, in your opinion, ANY groups that claim to be 'christian' that are not?
Aw... shucks.
(Kicks dust with toe; blushes...)
Nah, really; it's in the Word - all we have to do is READ it!!
Matthew 16:19"I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."
No, nothing at all like the medically documented (this is one key thing: the Western documented empirical science of Lourdes, as contrasted with the legends of elsewhere) healings at Lourdes happens anywhere else, with anything like the frequency.
And no, actually there was no spring of water there when Bernadette Soubirous dug it. It was in somebody’s field. She dug where she was told, according to her, and a spring came up. There weren’t any waters there before her. The reason people came is because she claimed the Virgin Mary appeared. The reason people KEPT coming is precisely the reason that people keep on going to the Hospital: there’s a good record of sick people being made well there.
There are legends everywhere. What makes Lourdes difference is not the legends of healings, but the sheer volume of ACTUAL healing, under the eyes of medical scientists who document it. This is in FRANCE, remember, the place where modern surgical medicine was born. The French are scientific. Cures - amazing things that medical science could not do then, and cannot do now - happened, and medical science wanted to know WHY and HOW? So there has been the International Scientific Committee there for over a century, collecting data on every alleged cure. These are physicians. In the really stunning cases, they go and check with the original medical records, social security status, etc. Actual medical bureaucracy looking at, studying, recording and collecting data on miraculous events. Many of the cases are studied and pronounced “Not medically explicable”. The difference between Lourdes and the Ganges or some faith healer in a tent revival, isn’t just the sheer volume of cures, but the fact that everything that goes at Lourdes happens under immediate scientific and medical supervision. Science has documented that an astounding number of people DO get instantly cured at Lourdes of real, long term or even terminal diseases. It happens practically routinely. Science does not know why, but it HAS documented “what”, and continues to.
This is what makes Lourdes different. Lourdes has medical charts, like a hospital. Each thing is recorded by medical science, and peer reviewed and reported. This ISN’T a case where the skeptical guy in the tent causes the faith healer to fail. The cures happen before the skeptical eyes of scientists and physicians, and being scientists, they dutifully record what happens.
This is why I reject the notion that it’s impossible to test the idea about Lourdes. Lourdes is a natural phenomenon. It is a physical place where real physical, medical effects happen. People who collect permanent disability insurance checks from their modern western governments and who have real medical dossiers at the Mayo Clinic and the Pasteur Institute go to Lourdes, and sometimes one of them will simply be cured of cystic fibrosis in an instant. Bam. This is a medical fact. HOW it happens is a mystery. But THAT it happens, is a fact. Cystic fibrosis doesn’t spontaneously cure itself. And congenitally blind people don’t grow new optic nerves, but both of those things have happened INSTANTANEOUSLY at Lourdes, and modern, at the time 20th Century Western Medical Doctors, with regular medical degrees, have collected the data, studied the cases, studied the medical records (and the social security disability checks), seen the obvious cures, and tracked the cured patients to see whether or not relapses happen, and have submitted their reports to peer review.
The medical records at Lourdes are as perfectly and correctly modern scientific as the medical records at the Mayo Clinic. They are part of modern medicine, not emotional religion. The cures are a documented fact. And not one, but hundreds. The Catholic Church has called 69 of them true miracles by the religious definition (which also looks into the moral character of the individual, as the true miracle is associated with beatification), but there are far more cases which 20th (and 21st) Century medicine has called “Not medically explicable”. Anybody who wants to can read the files that are published. It helps for somebody to understand physician lingo.
It’s not a question of the weakness of the evidence or even taking things on faith. With Lourdes, it’s actually the opposite! 100 years of hard science by modern, Western scientists at the site, and people still assert that it’s just mystic mumbo-jumbo. Tell them that, no, the records are like the Mayo clinic, and they actively DIS-believe it. The empirical evidence is there, but the choice is to obscure it and to assert that it ISN’T.
Why?
Because if one accepts that the evidence is real, or maybe is, and consults it and discovers that this is within the realm of modern peer-reviewed scientific examination, one is suddenly literally forced to confront the reality of an apparent open source of nature-defying miracles, perhaps divine power, out in the open. And THAT forces the mind to accept the probability of God. What’s MORE, it forces the Christian mind to accept the importance of the Virgin Mary, quite explicitly. There are plenty of people who are so committed to their FAITH that would accept a fountain of miracles coming from a temple to JESUS without comment, but there is no such thing. The only case of it in the world is a Shrine to MARY, and THAT carries with it a sullen duty: every argument ever made about why Mary should not be venerated because she’s not in the Bible...and therefore the full sufficiency of the Bible as all you need, is wrong. Protestantism itself is mortally wounded by the admission of the scientific reality of Lourdes, because Lourdes says that God favors those who bend the knee to Mary with things like eyesight and cures from paralysis or spontaneous remission and disappearance of cystic fibrosis. Real, hopeless illnesses, irreparable, repaired in an instant. Under the eyes of science. It forces acknowledgment of the reality, and it forces acknowledgment of MARY, and that forces one to acknowledge that the Bible is NOT sufficient to explain everything spiritually, because - as is so often pointed out as a CRITICISM of those who venerate Mary - the high theology concerning Mary isn’t in the Bible. But there is Lourdes, explicitly Marian, indeed, IDOLATRY according to many within Christendom. But God only cures the paralytics and blind and sclerotic openly, repeatedly, under scientific supervision, at Lourdes. The cures are real. And unique in both their volume and verifiability. And they happen at a particular Christian shrine, not a lot of different places. And that Shrine is to Mary.
So, to a Christian, it’s either divine power OR it’s demonic power. Those are rational answers for a believer. Denying the reality, however, is not scientific, and not rational. Lourdes cures are within the realm of documented empirical science. They are data, not anecdotes.
The Mormon faith should over all be judged on it's fruits, and it has rendered many good fruits indeed.
Nope: good works won't get you into Heaven.
Isaiah 64:6
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.Matthew 5:16
In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.1 Peter 2:12
Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
They might help someone to gloify and praise GOD, but they sure won't get you into the Kingdom!
Where?
In the Book; of course!
(Nah... this one I found on the web somewhere...)
Sorry that I have it center-justified. It looked ok in preview.)
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