[betty boop]

When I was a boy, my grandfather told me: "people say Christianity was tried and it failed.... Well, it was never really tried." Today I'd say that both were right.

Dear BroJoeK, I think your grandfather must have been a very wise, perceptive man.

I think marron spoke truly in saying —

You have the religion of the written doctrines, and the religion as it is lived out. So you’ll find people whose theology is sketchy but in whom God is alive, who know God and walk with him; and you’ll find people whose theology is right on the money but are deader than a hammer. And every variation in between.

It seems that Thomas Jefferson did not regard Jesus Christ as the divine Son of God. But he did regard him as a very great moral teacher. And Jefferson knew, as did Adams, Franklin, Washington, et al., that our Constitutional republic could not work for an immoral people.

Which is likely why Franklin, when asked what the Framers had wrought in Philadelphia, replied: "A republic — if you can keep it."

Yet in the modern period, there are many people who evidently believe that the ability to act immorally is the very proof of their "liberty."

You wrote: "Our Founders explicitly rejected state religions because, in their eyes and in ours, such had already 'been tried and failed.'" Oh, so true, dear BroJoeK.

On the other hand, evidently it's okay with lots of people nowadays to have a state-established "secular religion," which turns out to be the progressive State itself....

Dear friend, you poke lots of fun at spirited irish. Her research into gnosticism and its history is impressive; it is clear she is deeply alarmed by her findings, because she can clearly see how gnostic thinking has entered into the very climate of opinion of the intellectual elites of our society and their enablers in the media and academe.

I, too, am profoundly disturbed by this: They are engaged in the systematic falsification of Reality. And absolutely no good can come from that sort of thing.

Have a blessed Merry Christmas, dear BroJoeK — you and all your dear ones!

[BroJoeK]

betty boop: "Dear friend, you poke lots of fun at spirited irish.
Her research into gnosticism and its history is impressive; it is clear she is deeply alarmed by her findings, because she can clearly see how gnostic thinking has entered into the very climate of opinion "

Dear Ms boop: Gnosticism is a real word which first described real people (Greeks) who lived thousands of years ago.
These people rejected the material world, in favor of the spiritual realm.
When some of them first became Christians, they brought this dualism with them, and decided that Jesus Christ could not have been a real material human being, but must have been a spiritual projection of God.

So Gnostics were considered one of two great heresies facing the early Rome-centered Church.
The other was Arianism, which took the opposite opinion.
Arians said that Jesus was only a man, not God.
Arians were highly influenced by Jewish thinking which has always insisted that God is One, not some multi-headed monster.

Beginning in 325 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine brought all these bishops together at Nicaea and hammered out a compromise, wherein eventually God was fully defined (!) as One Person of Three "Substances."
And doesn't that sound just won--der--full, a com-pro-mise, where everybody stood around holding hands, singing Kum Bye Ya, praising God-in-three-persons, and all lived happily ever after, right??

And in the midst of all this happy wonderment, Emperor Constantine announced the "catch": anyone who disagreed with his new creed would be put to death, and their property seized by the state.
Yes, there was this, ahem, inconvenient matter of Constantine needing money for his treasury and where better to get it than from "heretics", "apostates", etc.?

And so it was, for the better part of 1,500 years, until in the Age of Enlightenment our Founding Fathers said: no more of that.

So today, some of these old "heresies" are rearing their heads again, but, but, but: not so much Gnosticism as that other ancient materialism: Arianism.

Arianism -- not Gnosticism! -- can easily be called the basis for all scientific & philosophical materialism.
In its modern form, Arianism not only insists that Jesus was human, but that there's no such thing as a spiritual realm.

So just where "Gnosticism" might even fit into the modern world -- all but barren of any spiritual references -- I can't imagine.
Then how Gnosticism could be such a great threat as spirited irish proposes, is beyond me.

But, maybe, maybe I missed something obvious, and like spirited irish need to get my eyes checked out?