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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (112647)	6/4/2009 9:02:23 PM
From: Travis_Bickle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541777

A lot of the growth in the churches is among third-worlders, I guess there's little harm they can do there since the people are starving or being massacred as things stand.

To: Katelew who wrote (112647)	6/4/2009 9:57:45 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541777

Remember the sole purpose of a church is to try to teach and motivate its members to behave in ways that would be pleasing to God and to Jesus Christ, and those behaviors are clearly laid out in the Bible and easy to read. If you think there is a singular, clear interpretation like that then you clearly are a strong adherent of one particular faith to the exclusion of others. Those of us outside that particular mental paradigm see how the same words are interpreted or highlighted or ignored in dozens of different ways by dozens of different churches and faiths, rendering the notion of a single religious or Christian viewpoint fairly moot, for practical political purposes. I know you will disagree but those are the facts with how religion is practiced by modern society. And as time goes on, the fragmentation and diversity are likely to increase. The big four churches you mention will have small roles in most major US population centers, much as they do today outside their pockets of strong support.

To: Katelew who wrote (112647)	6/5/2009 5:13:36 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541777

I think we've had this discussion several times here, Kate, about just how easy it is to interpret scripture. There are, as you know, multiple interpretations out there, making it quite clear that all interpretations carry the present with them when they try to read the past. More progressive or liberal churches, in my experience, either totally ignore certain things and/or have lists that are rather mushy with lots of qualifiers. And liberal or progressive interpreters consider literalistic approaches to scripture almost hopelessly naive. Take the "Jesus said" interpretations, just for starters. Since there are no contemporaneous narratives, the actual source for the "Jesus said" quotes come, not from Jesus, but from the early church, all of which are second and third and fourth hand. So, even then, it's the present creating/recreating the past and reading it's own needs into it.