03-27-2008, 03:40 PM | #561 |
The Chocoholic Sea Elf Administrator
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I've always wondered, with people having this strange desire to find and burn all witches, how do you know you've got an actual witch and not some new prophet or even Jesus' second visit or somethin'? Suppose someone can do so tricks or even do a miracle (I don't believe in that stuff personally, but let's say hypothetically.) Seriously, how do you tell?
I recall some tales of children in Africa being abandoned by family, sometimes hurt pretty badly because some nut-job relative or local priest is convinced the children are witches and that against the Bible. If that what is takes for religion, I think I'll pass.
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03-27-2008, 03:43 PM | #562 |
Elf Lady
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Funny, the theology thread here makes me feel like a very liberal Christian, whereas the thread of another forum I visit makes me feel like a very strict one... >_<
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03-27-2008, 04:20 PM | #563 |
the Shrike
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Personally, I like the anglican approach to xtianity. My boyfriend's granddad is an anglican pastor, and he's a firm proponent of science and the theory of evolution, etc. There's an anglican church in town that has rainbow sermons (for teh gays if you don't know).
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03-27-2008, 04:25 PM | #564 | |
The Ñoldóran
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My grandma and my family are Quaker, and while I reject the Christian teachings of it personally, the social morality has influenced me a great deal. They're really left-wing too. My grandmother has attended several gay civil-unions done by the Quaker church in Vermont.
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Then Celegorm no more would stay, And Curufin smiled and turned away... ~The Lay of Leithian Last edited by Curufin : 03-27-2008 at 04:26 PM. |
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03-27-2008, 04:57 PM | #565 |
Quasi Evil
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All Christians should really be "left wing" if you go by much of what we read in the Bible. The fundies and wack jobs have given Christianity a bad name. It wasnt too long ago that many true Christians were acting as radicals sometimes violently attempting to over turn the slave trade because they knew it to be morally wrong. I have no real issue with Christians who passionately oppose abortion to the point of causing civil disobedience if they truly believe its a moral wrong. But so many of them prove themselves enormous hypocrites by simply pandering to right wing issues rather than being consistent and acting truly Christian and being just as radical about the poor, about war, about the homeless, the death penalty, the environment, etc., issues on which they generally simply follow along based on political ideologies rather than moral ones.
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03-27-2008, 05:14 PM | #566 |
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Amen!
I've never understood how or when the right appropriated Christianity. All through the Civil Rights movement people like Martin Luther King Jr. used Christianity to further human and civil rights, and even further back, Christians (including Quakers, my ancestors), fought for women's rights, prison reform, and ran the Underground Railroad. Why do people think that liberalism and Christianity are so incompatible?
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03-27-2008, 05:27 PM | #567 |
Elf Lady
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Perhaps because that would include the possibility of several correct opinions. There is not one absolute truth anymore, but most people like an absolute truth. That truth being preferably their own.
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03-27-2008, 05:30 PM | #568 |
The Ñoldóran
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Absolute truths have always bothered me a bit.
Perhaps that's because in Quakerism (the religion in which I was raised) we have Queries instead of Dogma - questions that we're supposed to ponder and come to a decision based on our own direct relationship with God. I think this is a good idea. I don't think there's half enough thinking going on in modern day Christianity, while there's far too much following. As I said before, I have no gripes with Christianity as a religion. It's got some great ideas. I just wish people would think their ideas through before they accepted them as solid fact.
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03-27-2008, 05:44 PM | #569 |
Elf Lady
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I am particularly bothered by those nice Evangelistic Christians I grew up with who tell me I'm not a Christian because I don't mind people being gay and gay marriage, etc. It got scary when my cousin whom I've always looked up to told me I would go to hell, after she tried to "convert" me. (She's come around now, but that was scary!)
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03-27-2008, 05:57 PM | #570 |
The Chocoholic Sea Elf Administrator
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I like that. It sounds like an interesting way to approach the debates and let people figure it out for themselves.
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03-27-2008, 06:02 PM | #571 |
The Ñoldóran
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That's the way I've lived my life.
It's led me away from traditional Christianity into a form of spirituality that is very much my own (and more Pagan than anything else), but at least it's truthful... Mari - I feel for you. I've been told I'm going to hell so many times by so many people that I hardly listen anymore...
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03-27-2008, 06:18 PM | #572 |
Elf Lady
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Oh, we are going to the same church now, so I guess it's okay. I'll reserve a spot for her down there (She was "reconverted"... yay for her husband)
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Love always, deeply and true ★ Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer. ★ Friendship is sharing openly, laughing often, trusting always, caring deeply.
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03-27-2008, 06:24 PM | #573 |
The Chocoholic Sea Elf Administrator
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I think I've only been told once I was going to hell. I think it was also the only time I made such a speedy reply: "Fine, safe me a seat when you get there, will you?" (Which seems to be about the only right answer, eh Mari? )
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03-27-2008, 06:36 PM | #574 |
Elf Lady
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Hehe, yup, but I didn't tell her that. Just wanted to get out of there is quickly as possible, without permanently damaging family ties. Back then we still saw eachother twice a week with the rest of the fam.
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Love always, deeply and true ★ Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer. ★ Friendship is sharing openly, laughing often, trusting always, caring deeply.
...The Earth laughs in flowers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Hamatreya"... |
03-27-2008, 06:44 PM | #575 |
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I've been told "go to hell" and "you can go to hell", but never that I was "going".
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03-27-2008, 07:04 PM | #576 | ||
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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Quote:
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03-27-2008, 09:18 PM | #577 | |
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You seem to make your main argument, Lief, for the abolishment of religious freedom around the fact that we can't make important decisions for ourselves, and need a religion or God to do it for us, particularly the Christian one. But I think it's very clear that either way we have to make a choice using our own reason and intuition, so I don't see what the point is deciding to let someone else decide for me, considering that decision itself could have been wrong. How do I know I haven't given my trust to Satan? In my reasoning, if actually seems safer not to let the words of God as heard by a bunch of long dead dudes decide what I do, but the Word of God as heard by me now help me live a virtuous life. Or not, if the person involved is of a agnostic or atheistic persuasion. "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face, we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" Taken from the Intro to Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm curious as to why, Lief, you've said that liberalism has been a positive force up until the last forty or so years, but has since become a negative force. You've made this point clear, but why you think it's the case isn't clear to me. I hope you don't mind my asking what makes you think you're not like those conservatives who have, as you said, wrongly apposed liberal growth in the past? Just curious.
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03-28-2008, 02:41 AM | #578 | |
The Ñoldóran
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That said, I admit I don't know a whole lot about the Anglican church, but I've never seen it as being particularly fundamentalist?
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Then Celegorm no more would stay, And Curufin smiled and turned away... ~The Lay of Leithian Last edited by Curufin : 03-28-2008 at 02:42 AM. |
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03-28-2008, 12:47 PM | #579 | |||||||
Elf Lord
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I'm sorry I forgot to tell Entmooters about this earlier. I've not been very active here, lately. Quote:
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I know less about Julian the Apostate. These earlier episodes of Religious Freedom were brief moments, however, from a historical perspective. And Constantine rescinded his. Julian was an apostate, so his being a proponent of Religious Freedom doesn't do much for it, in my eyes. Exhaustion and secularism are the key reasons for modern Religious Freedom, though. Quote:
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I'll respond to the rest of your post a little later. At the moment I have to go. Quote:
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03-28-2008, 02:27 PM | #580 | ||||
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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But you are right, the Anglican Church is not particularly fundamentalist; if it were, Canon Johns would never have been nominated for the episcopacy! Quote:
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle Last edited by Gwaimir Windgem : 03-28-2008 at 02:38 PM. |
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