#for more than a decade protestant = lutheran for me

[haruka89]

Seems like they forgot the "celebrate" part in "celebrate mass".

One of my favorite things about the difference between Protestant denominations and Catholicism is that Protestants made their whole thing being So Fucking Boring(tm) and normal that if you were raised around Protestants with little to no connection to the Catholic Church when you find out about all the saints and rituals and bones and shit it genuinely comes off as a little like...pagan isn't the right word exactly but you know what I mean? Like for my entire life good Christians sat on folding chairs in a beige basement eating shitty donuts from Albertsons and told me liking Pokemon and Halloween made me a sinner and then I go to see an old Catholic church and there's just like. A fucking ancient corpse in the room?? That everyone is praying over??? Like????? And THIS is actually the religion all the "Pokemon normalizes devil worship" guys originally came from several hundred years ago??????

It's wild okay. It's just wild.

[racefortheironthrone]

Please don't shoot me and I'm not saying a marriage annulment is anywhere near the horror of things like Muslim travel ban or family separation policy, but Thomas Cromwell more and more kind of reminds me of Stephen Miller or some other horrible toadies of the Donald Trump administration where those flunkies find a dumb legal rational. I just never found taking on decade-long mostly failing legal battle over Henry VIII's misreading of a passage from Leviticus to marry someone else that heroic.

So I think this is somewhat unfair, in that aides of various levels of moral character have been finding legal loopholes for political figures of all stripes pretty much since the dawn of time.

In the case of Thomas Cromwell, I think you have to analyze his political actions from the perspective of a closeted Protestant who was trying to create a space for his religion in a political context in which, if he was found out or if he was anything less than a brilliant polymath at the very top of his game, he would be put to death as an upjumped commoner and heretic. (As he eventually was.)

So from that perspective, the annulment was less important as a vehicle for Henry's desire for a son and way more important as a vehicle for getting a closeted Lutheran (Thomas Cranmer) to become Archbishop of Canterbury and getting a closeted "evangelical" (Anne Boleyn) to become Queen. Similarly, however petty and personality-driven Henry's breach with the Pope was, Cromwell was able to see that it created an opening for an Act of Restraints in Appeals that would create an independent Church of England and begin the English Reformation.

In analyzing the rest of Cromwell's work as a minister, I am particularly influenced by the books The Tudor Revolution in Government and Reform and Renewal by Geoffrey Elton. As Elton lays out, Thomas Cromwell and his staffers basically invented the Early Modern state in England, and had Henry not been such a greedy warmongering bastard and Parliament not been quite so elitist, if he'd had his way in all matters, Cromwell would have made Early Modern England a much safer, wealthier, more productive, and more economically secure country to live in.

Unfortunately, Tudor politics was one that was played to the death, and not even a Thomas Cromwell could win forever.

[violetsystems]

I had a death in the family I really can’t talk about specifically for fear of bullying and retaliation in the real world . This is why I’ve been blocking sideblogs with names that have to much euphemism to things in my real life. Particularly as it relates to radiology. I have to accept it is a given that they stalk my social media as a group. Just like dentists, pediatricians and radiologists from northwestern and rush hospital follow me around on public transport. The person did die on his way to one of the two said hospitals last Friday after all. But I find a way to write about it anyway. It affects me in that there is drama in the parts of the family I am not close to. Not do I think I’ll ever be. I’ve always had to tiptoe around people’s emotions after my parent’s divorce before college. And I feel a lot of hate from people in my conservative family oriented neighborhood that I live alone. They think I’m some kind of deviant even when my dad visits me to eat street carnitas. Nobody wants to trust you around here if you don’t go to their churches when they’re really more concerned about your ideology’s affect on their property value. That’s what the white savior complex and radical inclusivity is all about. I’m an only child so it has never been catastrophic to be alone. But my dad let me know that somebody on the periphery in the family doesn’t want me to tell anyone. There’s some real bad blood and sketchy circumstances that somebody is very sensitive about. And some group think might be manipulating it to start more shit. But he thought I should let my mom know without telling her the source to avoid provocation. I called her and she said she was going to tell a cousin on that side of the family I never met which is probably closer to the trouble than my dad’s family. I don’t think I’ve associated with anyone but my mom or dad (and his wife) since my dad’s sister died. That’s the inflection point. That their entire family comes from a decade when people were forced together because of family money and interests. Not like anyone was really all that rich. My dad’s father was a Lutheran minister. My mom’s father turned Protestant and was disowned by the Catholic side of the family. The one where all the beef is coming from. I’m a non practicing non denominational Christian who accepts everything and nothing at the same time. The person who died is my mom’s cousin and associated with my dad’s sister. When I called my mom it was more about her emotions that she felt abandoned after she divorced. Didn’t have the guts to tell her they were never really good at including anyone. She changed the subject and mentioned she had a dream about this person recently and was more concerned telling me she felt psychic. She knew when Tina Turner was going to die apparently. I didn’t say anything. The only thing I really know is that since the thc is out of my system I dream more. So whatever the mystery behind life is for me? Drugs in this situation never really clarified how murky my life was. All it really does is forces people together under the watchful eye of something worse. I’m not saying it is wrong to experiment. But I am saying no amount of drugs can keep people from drifting apart naturally. Sometimes people drift together all by themselves organically and it makes people nervous. It’s the things that force us to be with things that are toxic that are far more insidious. A cult is a cult. Think for yourself.

[kyrieanne]

Dispatches from the Church Front: my church is meeting next month to pick a side in the ordination & marriage of LGTBQ persons...it’s gonna be a clusterf*ck

I really don’t know what is going to happen or what I’ll choose to do once the decision comes down...stay or go?

I’m talking about the United Methodist Church, which has about 12 million members worldwide, 7 million in the United States. 

Christianity at-large is flourishing in the Global South:  Latin America, Asia, and Africa (which has about 631 million Christians, making it the continent with the most Christian adherents) while it is floundering in America & Europe. In America, most new Christians are people of color. (x)

Christianity-at-large moves slow and large. Generalizing, in church history there is a major shake-up in worldwide Christianity every 500 years or so. It’s a rummage sale of sorts where old systems are thrown out, who makes up the church changes, and there are major theological shifts. It’s never a single issue - but a set of core issues/factors/historical events that are thematically linked - that spark the change. And those changes ripple outward in the cultures around the church. Like I said, we move slow and large. The kicker? 2017 marked 500 years since the last one (the Protestant Reformation). We’re due. (x)

My Methodist centric-life: Neither of my parents grew up in religious families; when they became Christians they each chose Methodism with a lot of intention. They met at a United Methodist seminary and both became pastors. Eventually my mom went back to school for computer science so then it was just my dad in ministry. Our pastors get moved a lot like soldiers in the military - so we moved about every 4 years to a completely new church and town. The church had been a huge part of my childhood just in the most practical way. I have never wanted to be a pastor. ::skips over long story:: still I earned my masters at a Methodist seminary. I’ve worked for lots of different kinds of churches, but most of that time has been spent in Methodist settings. Today, that is where I work and where I worship. To be thinking of walking away from my church [not my faith] is big and scary, but I feel ready to do it depending on what happens in the next few months. 

At the end of February, a called General Conference will happen in St. Louis, MO. General Conference is like the Olympics - it happens every 4 years and everyone shows up for it. The one happening in February is called one - a special one off schedule specifically to deal with our polity and human sexuality. 

In America, Methodists have a reputation for being nice. We kinda fall in the middle on the spectrum of church denominations you’ve heard of. We’re not too extreme one way or the other with our beliefs. I don’t say this to flatter ourselves; nice and medium can also be polite ways of saying wishy-washy. 

Most Protestant denominations in the US have already picked their side:  the Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, non-denominational/mega churches, etc. We’re the last major denomination to do so. 

We’ve been punting on this for my entire life. Our church is made up of conferences - usually one per state - and while technically, our polity (it’s actually called the Book of Discipline because clearly God has a sense of humor) prohibits the ordination and marriage of LGTBQ persons on a practical level that has been at the discretion of the bishops and pastors in each conference. I’m generalizing here but a conference in the South is going to be a very different experience for LGBTQ persons than one in the Pacific Northwest. It’s been a weird holding pattern for decades that is fair to no one and hurts everyone. 

Why the are you still part of all this? Well, my faith is Christian and not driven by a denomination’s beliefs or polity. But I’m here because this is part of my family and choosing to leave a part of who you are that is such a core aspect of your identity is never easy. Also, because I’ve been fortunate to be fairly insulated from the conversation. I’m straight raised in a household where our parents told us out loud and with regularity that love is love - you can love whomever you want and we will love you. The Methodist churches I’ve been a part of have been LGTBQ affirming congregations. In college, I participated in a conservative Evangelical church ministry and that was the first time in my entire life I heard a pastor say homosexuality was a sin. I challenged that, but I also stayed because there were other parts of that church community that were good for me. I got to set the issue aside and pretend it wasn’t that big of a deal. Eventually, I left because I couldn’t stand how they viewed women. I knew at the time that my frustration about the way that church treated women was parallel to what was happening to LGBTQ persons. I couldn’t care about one and not the other; it’d make me a hypocrite if I did. I wish I’d seen that more quickly, but it took that experience for me to get that this wasn’t some abstract theological debate - that it affects real people who I need to care about because Jesus already does. 

It’s as straight forward as 7 + 5 = 833/78  i.e. next month is going to be a clusterf*ck. In the UMC church there are 5 jurisdictions in the United States and 7 world-wide in Africa, Europe, & the Philippines. From those jurisdictions will be 864 delegates who will be the ones to vote. Those delegates are 50% clergy and 50% lay people, but the number of delegates from each jurisdiction is proportional to church membership & clergy. 504 delegates are from the United States and 360 are from Africa, Europe, & the Philippines. There will also be non-voting delegates from affiliated Methodist denominations in Asia and Latin America. They are autonomous from whatever decisions are made. This isn’t just about the U.S. 

Here’s where the numbers tell you this is going to be a clusterf*ck: They say the devil is in the details, right? Well in 2016, at the last General Conference they voted to finally stop sitting on the fence. The decision was to form a committee (GAWD my church loves committees and acronyms) to come up with a few proposals that’d be voted on at this called General Conference in 2019. Just to allow for us to take up the issue - to stop punting and being wishy washy - the vote was razor close. We’re talking 428 to 405. (Some delegates abstained, too) 23 people being the difference  one way or the other for 12 million. 

 Oh but, there are 78 separate proposals for “what to do.” Are you beginning to see why this is going to be a clusterf*ck no matter what happens? 

Taking this micro... The plan with the most likely chance of passing would allow individual clergy & churches to pick a side. I think the plan is super flawed for a lot of reasons, but that isn’t the point  ::long boring explanation about polity:: If this plan passes some important voting would need to take place at the local level that would affect the people I know and care about. My clergy friends who I went to school with. The church I work for. The institution I earned my degree from. The church where I worship. So on and so on.  My worshipping congregation is a medium-sized liberal one. Our pastor has asked for a sabbatical because she’s about to burn out. I’m on the governing board and we had to approve the request or not. She’s an important vote at the local level but if she’s on sabbatical our church’s voice won’t be heard when it might count the most. We approved it of course, but it made for some awkward, hard conversations. 

So that’s what is going on in a distant corner of church-land. I don’t know what I’m going to do - truly. I’m waiting to see what happens in February. 

[italwayshadtobeyou]

Hm, I'm a little surprised that "Keep Calm" was "Red Meat"'s toughest opponent. Then again, IIRC, "Red Meat" is season 11's last episode without God!Chuck, a character retcon that perhaps bothers more of the fandom than I thought.

Anyway, "American Nightmare" is definitely the better episode here. It makes good use of the dramatic irony in Sam's understanding of the situation ("No. You're really not"), and of Dean's inability to see the distinction between tightly knit families and cults. Dean, whatever happened to "the way we were raised was jacked"?

That doesn't mean it's perfect. For starters, it feels like a cop-out when Magda chooses not to kill her mother. Even 12 years ago, back in the other episode named "Nightmare," Sam argued for Max's stepmom's life, not because it was monstrous to kill anyone, but because she hadn't actively participated in Max's abuse. Given Sam's own choices over the past decade, I find it really hard to believe that mid-2010s Sam is any more judgmental of murder than he used to be, so why draw a tighter line than he did before?

I also think the episode depicts Dean's character almost as a caricature. We've seen 1 previous Wiccan on the show, in "Repo Man," and she didn't do anything terrible until a serial killer took her son hostage. We have, however, seen plenty of dangerous witches who lived outwardly secular or God-fearing lives (like the preacher's wife from "Faith," or the suburban coven from "Malleus Maleficarum") so why does Dean jump to the conclusion that the nearest Wiccan did it? Maybe he doesn't want to believe the worst of the cult farm family, but he's been at this a long time now, long enough to know that sometimes people aren't what you want them to be.

Lastly: The crucifix in Magda's cell bugs me. Cult Mom refers to the dead social worker as "a Papist," so the Petersons presumably dislike Catholicism, but there aren't a whole lot of denominations whose members would both call Catholics Papists and hang up crucifixes. Most evangelical Protestants use plain crosses, and even view crucifixes as possible evidence of heresy. It's pretty obvious that the Petersons aren't mainline Protestant, either (or mainline anything, for that matter). While (correct me if I'm wrong here) I think some Lutherans display crucifixes, I can't remember the last time I saw a Lutheran cult in the news, and wouldn't the pastor handle any exorcisms? Episcopalian, or Orthodox of some variety? I don't know much about those denominations, but they're pretty hierarchical, so I can't imagine that they'd be any happier about unauthorized exorcisms by untrained pill addicts.

Supernatural Battle of the Episodes!!

CONGRATULATIONS TO RED MEAT!! For taking home your 10th win and retiring to The Hall of Fame!! 🍻🎉

Taking its place, the episode that gave it the best fight, Keep Calm and Carry On! Let's see who it's up against!

Chuck: Next up we have American Nightmare - When a Social Worker dies in a church by bleeding to death from Stigmata, Sam and Dean dress up as Priests 🔥 🔥 to find out what happened. They're led to a very religious family, living off the grid and hiding and abusing their psychic daughter, Magda, in the basement!

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Joe Biden, in Kenosha, Says U.S. Is Addressing ‘the Original Sin of This Country’

(KENOSHA, Wis.) — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized the nation.

“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.

The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee and was a vivid illustration of the contrast he offers to Trump.

While Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Trump didn’t mention Blake during his own trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”

���I can’t say if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. But “it would be a whole better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road” if Trump isn’t re-elected.

“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”

Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.

Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.

Justin Blake called Biden “more of a unifier” and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”

Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.

Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”

Biden answered that, because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”

But he compared the current era of cell phone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.

“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility, because they now have seen what you see,” Biden told Bennett, the community organizer.

Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, told Biden of the deep pain exposed by the protests and how it has reached many business owners whose establishments have been burned. DeBerge noted her shop still stands, but said, “I just I don’t think I really grieved as much as I should because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said that he’d asked both Biden and Trump not to come. “I would prefer that no one be here, be it candidate Trump or candidate Biden,” Evers said in a news conference.

Yet Kenosha was mostly calm for Biden’s visit, other than some verbal jousting outside the church between activists, including Bennett, and at least one Trump supporter.

Michelle Stauder, a 60-year-old retired Kenosha school teacher said Biden is “here spreading the word of peace and rebuilding.”

Kenneth Turner stood nearby with a Trump-Pence yard sign. “Everyone is blaming Trump for everything,” the 50-year-old Kenosha man said. “But problems here have been around a long time before Trump.”

Biden criticized Trump for his sweeping condemnations of protesters, his absolute defense of law enforcement and denials that Americans with black and brown skin face barriers that whites do not — statements aimed by the president at his overwhelmingly white political base.

During his Kenosha trip Tuesday, Trump toured damaged buildings and discussed ways to quell unrest with law enforcement officials. Trump was greeted by supporters who occasionally mixed with and yelled at Black Lives Matter organizers.

The president amplified his approach Thursday evening in Pennsylvania, another state that could decide the election. “Biden went (to Kenosha) today. There was nobody there. There was nobody there,” Trump said. At about the same time, Biden was greeted after an evening event by hundreds of supporters who chanted, “Let’s go Joe!”

Trump also repeated his baseless assertion that Biden supports riots. Biden, in fact, has repeatedly condemned violence, most recently on Thursday, and he has criticized Trump for not denouncing a 17-year-old Illinois teen now charged with killing two protesters after he traveled to Kenosha armed and intent, he said, on protecting local businesses.

Biden, who enjoyed police union backing for much of his political career, has defended police officers for bravery and public service. But he said again Thursday that policing must be overhauled. He repeated his promise of a national commission on policing if he’s elected.

Biden does not want to “defund the police,” contrary to Trump’s claims. But he proposes that local forces agree to certain best practices as a condition of federal grants. He also wants to spend more on other public agencies, such as mental health services, to ease social problems police must handle by default.

Most police officers are “decent people,” Biden said in Kenosha, but he added that “every organization” has “bad people.” That, he said, gives the country “a chance to change things, and we can.”

As he boarded his plane for a return trip to his Delaware home, Biden said he didn’t know if his trip to Kenosha was more successful than Trump’s.

“But I felt good about it,” he said. “I think we brought people together and I felt good about it.”

___

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in Washington, and Michael Tarm and Noreen Nasir in Kenosha, Wisconsin, contributed.

By Bill Barrow, Will Weissert and Scott Bauer / AP on September 03, 2020 at 09:55PM

[messerdoodles-blog]

The Last Jedi is the Protestant Reformation of Star Wars

SPOILERS AHEAD

Remember Luke Skywalker from the original Star Wars? When we meet him he's a whiney moisture farmer from the most boring planet in the galaxy.  In The Empire Strikes back we learn his father is one of the most powerful villains in the galaxy, Darth Vader. Oh, and Luke has a secret twin sister and the entire series has been all about a royal family. And they're special. More special than anyone else in the galaxy.

In the prequels we find out why; they are literally divine. Anakin Skywalker was conceived by the Force itself. Force sensitivity is passed on through genes. They belong to a magical bloodline with a divine right of kings lock on the Star Wars narrative. Over six films we went from Luke as a total nobody to a destined hero with a prophecy and everything.

Over the years a Star Wars priesthood has developed; people who read the novels and know all the backstories for side characters and the names of all the ships and bounty hunters. People like me. The nerds you want to talk Star Wars with. People that can explain things. We've all got our elaborate theories on the Knights of Ren or secret Sith lord Jar Jar Binks or whatever. And our faithful devotion should be rewarded. Our knowledge should give us an edge. We should be able to predict things with some certainty.

Ever wonder at the origin of the world's many religions and denominations? They happen because at some point in history people say "Hey, this isn't working anymore. We should do this now." Then other people say "No, we should keep doing it like this." Bam. Suddenly you've got Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Baptists.

Every film in the Star Wars series was a doctrinal schism. Just look at old reviews for Empire or Return of the Jedi. When was Star Wars ruined? Was it when a muppet showed up? Or Ewoks? Midichlorians anyone?

The Last Jedi is the Protestant Reformation of Star Wars because it strips the power from the Star Wars priesthood.  Your pet theory about Snoke's origin doesn't matter. Anyone can be a hero. Rey is a nobody from nowhere. The divine is humanized. Luke is a damaged old hermit. Star Wars is for everyone. You don't need a geek priest to explain the sacred text to you. Just watch the film and enjoy it.

The Last Jedi is a brave for franchise film; a wildfire burning away decades of narrative overgrowth and clearing the board for fresh films. Is it perfect? Of course not. But that's a ridiculous standard to set for any piece of art.

Now someone stop me before I write another five hundred words on the Star Wars: Battlefront II loot box fiasco as modern day indulgences...

[the-bejeesus]

Mozgus Interests Me

     So right now I’m on Volume 19, Chapter 145 of the Berserk manga. Mozgus is the apostle that, when he’s not apostling and Berserking, is a priest that is also a torturer. Now he is not the first manga character or even the first TV & Movies character to present the idea that “Oh the priest himself is a sinner. How ironic and also edgy. And the Catholic Church also knows not what it’s doing; how sad,” but he is the first character I have ever seen to execute this properly.

    Now you might be wondering “What do all the other edgy priests in media do wrong?” The answer is that they aren’t real priests. They’re some twisted distortion of a real priest pretending to be a priest.

Let’s use as an example Donato Porpora from Tokyo Ghoul. He was a priest that ran an orphanage but was secretly a ghoul eating the kids. He was also associated with the clown organization. Never in the entire manga did I get the sensation that he is a priest eating kids. We never see him act like a priest or do priestly things. We never see him bless communion or hold mass or even see him run the orphanage. We only get to see him when Amon finds him eating kids and onwards. We only know the ghoul in a priest outfit. He doesn’t represent that priests or the Catholic Church is twisted, but that ghouls are twisted enough to infiltrate the Catholic Church and eat kids. The moral is moreso that “Wow living in the world of Tokyo Ghoul is scary. You can’t even trust the priest running an orphanage. Fortunately ghouls don’t exist in the real world. So you run on up to your Bible class and be grateful that your priest has never tried to eat you.” And that wasn’t necessarily a bad moral for Ishida Sui to use in this manga series. He’s always emphasized that the Tokyo Ghoul world is unstable and scary, and it would seem out-of-place to suddenly critique the Catholic Church. But there are many examples like this in other series where the intention was to critique the priesthood but it ended up just being “this world I’ve made up is scary.” Even in the rare case that you get to see the priest side and the serial killer side, they end up being two people; a sort of split-personality if you will. The good priest part of the person ends up feeling like no more than a simple ruse.

    Now lets look back to Mozgus. The first thing done right is that he’s living in the Catholic Church in Medieval Times, presumably a couple of decades before the Protestant church comes to form. The Catholic Church is at its worst; torturings, skewed teachings, and complete military rule. This means that Mozgus can do tons of torturing and disgusting shit without having to pull a front. It’s not like he kills 10 people on Saturday and then on Sunday he holds a mass and his Homily is about why it’s wrong to kill in God’s name. Now the manga could stop here with his development, because now he’s an edgy but possible priest. But it doesn’t stop there. They make him act and talk like a real priest too.

    One day Farnese comes to Mozgus asking if the Holy Iron Chain Knights are helping the poor or if they’re just instilling fear of God into them. Mozgus tells her the story of a nun who would cradle the dying poor in her arms so that they feel the warmth of God’s love before they die. One day, she finds a dying poor man in the woods and does the same. The dying man tells her “I’ve been living a proud life in these woods completely independently. All I ask is that you release me of your warmth so that I can go to the afterlife in pride of my independence.” The moral of Mozgus’s story is that no person of any level of wisdom knows for sure what helps people the most. All we can do is follow the Church’s teachings with absolute certainty and faith in God. At this point I thought to myself “Holy shit, this monster that I’m supposed to call a priest just said something my priest would say.” The best part is that, despite Mozgus’s monstrosities and his speech’s faith in God, neither part contradicts each other. When he tortures and does other sick shit, he justifies it with what is in the scriptures and what the Catholic Church is currently teaching at that time every time. His speech was neither evil nor contradicting his evil ideals. It also justifies the mindset of most people of the church at that time. How he told Farnese to think of the Holy Iron Chain Knights is what most people thought of the Catholic Church before Protestantism. “This doesn’t seem right, but hey I’m not the Pope. I haven’t read every word of the Bible. The people of God and the disciples of Jesus would have to do weird shit they didn’t think Jesus would tell them to do all the time, and they just had to have faith in God. I remember one time God told a guy to kill his son and the dad just did it. He was stopped right before he could and then it was shown to him how this was something God would do. So I just gotta follow the Church with absolutely certainty, and surely in the end, the world will be what God envisions.” It’s really interesting because in history class we’re told that before Lutheranism, the Catholic Church was monstrous. Berserk uses the character of Mozgus to instead say, “Yes, that is partly true. But everyone was still human.”

[confrontingbabble-on]

By Sarah Posner, March 20, 2017...Illustration by Brian Reedy Back

“ in August 2015, when Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions were widely considered a joke, Russell Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Moore knew that some of the faithful were falling for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate from New York City whose lifestyle and views embodied everything the religious right professed to abhor. The month before, a Washington Post poll had found that Trump was already being backed by more white evangelicals than any other Republican candidate.

Moore, a boyish-looking pastor from Mississippi, had positioned himself as the face of the “new” religious right: a bigger-hearted, diversity-oriented version that was squarely opposed to Trump’s “us versus them” rhetoric. Speaking to a gathering of religion reporters in a hotel ballroom in Philadelphia, Moore said that his “first priority” was to combat the “demonizing” and “depersonalizing” of immigrants—people, he pointed out, who were “created in the image of God.” Only by refocusing on such true “gospel” values, Moore believed, could evangelicals appeal to young people who had been fleeing the church in droves, and expand its outreach to African Americans and Latinos.

Evangelicals needed to do more than win elections—their larger duty was to win souls. Moore, in short, wanted the Christian right to reclaim the moral high ground—and Trump, in his estimation, was about as low as you could get.

“The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues,” Moore wrote in Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, a book he had just published at the time. “

But too often we do.

”As Trump continued gaining ground in the polls, Moore began to realize that the campaign represented nothing short of a battle for the soul of the Christian right. By backing Trump, white evangelicals were playing into the hands of a new, alt-right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of white nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and social-media propagandists who viewed the religious right, first and foremost, as a vehicle for white supremacy.

The election, Moore warned in a New York Times op-ed last May, “has cast light on the darkness of pent-up nativism and bigotry all over the country.” Those who were criticizing Trump, he added, “have faced threats and intimidation from the ‘alt-right’ of white supremacists and nativists who hide behind avatars on social media.”

Trump, true to form, wasted no time in striking back against Moore. “Truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for,” he tweeted a few days later. “A nasty guy with no heart!”

In the end, conservative Christians backed Trump in record numbers. He won 81 per- cent of the white evangelical vote—a higher share than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. As a result, the religious right—which for decades has grounded its political appeal in moral “values” such as “life” and “family” and “religious freedom”—has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda. Evangelicals have traded Ronald Reagan’s gospel-inspired depiction of America as a “shining city on a hill” for Trump’s dark vision of “American carnage.” And in doing so, they have returned the religious right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain the South’s segregationist “way of life.”

“The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious right coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism,” says Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at Dartmouth College. “The breakthrough of the 2016 election lies in the fact that the religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual predator, finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about abortion or ‘family values.’

”For more than a generation, the Christian right has sought to portray itself as a movement motivated principally by opposition to abortion and the defense of sexual purity against the forces of secularism. According to its own creation myth, evangelicals rose up and began to organize in opposition to Roe v. Wade, motivated by their duty to protect “the unborn.” Albert Mohler, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian, described Roe as “the catalyst for the moral revolution within evangelicalism”—the moment that spurred the coalition with conservative Catholics that still undergirds the religious right.

In fact, it wasn’t abortion that sparked the creation of the religious right. The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy. Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute and the alt-right’s most visible spokesman, argued during the campaign that GOP voters aren’t really motivated by Christian values, as they profess, but rather by deep racial anxieties. “Trump has shown the hand of the GOP,” Spencer told me in September. “The GOP is a white person’s populist party.”

Until now, the alt-right has presented itself largely as an irreligious movement; Spencer, its outsize figurehead, is an avowed atheist. But with Trump as president, the alt-right sees an opening for its own religious revival. “A new type of Alt Right Christian will become a force in the Religious Right,” Spencer tweeted on the morning after the election, “and we’re going to work with them.”

To alt-right Christians, Trump’s appeal isn’t based on the kind of social-issue litmus tests long favored by the religious right. According to Brad Griffin, a white supremacist activist in Alabama, “the average evangelical, not-too-religious Southerner who’s sort of a populist” was drawn to Trump primarily “because they like the attitude.” Besides, he adds, many on the Christian right don’t necessarily describe themselves as “evangelical” for theological reasons; it’s more “a tribal marker for a lot of these people.”

Before the election, Griffin worried that white evangelicals would find his “Southern nationalist” views problematic. But Trump’s decisive victory over Russell Moore reassured him. “It seems like evangelicals really didn’t follow Moore’s lead at all,” Griffin says. “All these pastors and whatnot went in there and said Trump’s a racist, a bigot, and a fascist and all this, and their followers didn’t listen to them.”

There is no way of knowing how many Americans consider themselves to be alt-right Christians—the term is so new, even those who agree with Spencer and Griffin probably wouldn’t use it to describe themselves. But there is plenty of evidence that white evangelical voters are more receptive than nonevangelicals to the ideas that drive the alt-right. According to an exit poll of Republican voters in the South Carolina primary, evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.

That’s why white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s victory—they provided the numbers that the alt-right lacks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s most influential strategist, knows that the nationalist coalition alone isn’t big enough “to ever compete against the progressive left”—which is why he made a point of winning over the religious right. If conservative Catholics and evangelicals “just want to focus on reading the Bible and being good Christians,” Bannon told me last July, “there’s no chance we could ever get this country back on track again.” The alt-right supplied Trump with his agenda; the Christian right supplied him with his votes.

For alt-right Christians, Russell Moore is the embodiment of where the religious right went wrong—by refusing to openly embrace racism. Throughout his youth, Griffin says, he felt alienated by Christians like Moore who were intent on “condemning racism.” He was only drawn back into Christianity when he married the daughter of Gordon Baum, a far-right Lutheran leader who co-founded the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a virulently racist group.” Griffin says he joined the CCC, as well as the white nationalist League of the South, because both groups embody the elements he views as integral to his faith: They are “pro-white, pro-Christian, pro-South.”Moore has become a popular target among alt-right Christians. The white supremacist and popular alt-right radio show host James Edwards, himself a Southern Baptist, regularly disparages Moore on his program, calling him a “cuck-Christian.” In June, after the Southern Baptist Convention banned displays of the Confederate flag, Edwards hosted Nathanael Strickland, proprietor of the Faith and Heritage blog. In a recent post, Strickland had argued that white Southerners “have faced a widespread and determined assault on our heritage, symbols, monuments, graves, and identity by secular and governmental forces,” and likened such supposed attacks to what Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf: that Germans faced “cultural extermination and ethnic cleansing.” Edwards seconded that analysis, declaring the Confederate flag “a Christian flag,” and arguing that to attack it “is to deny the sovereignty, the majesty, and the might of Lord Jesus Christ in his divine role in Southern history, culture, and life.”

Strickland recently told me that alt-right Christians see “racial differences” as “real, biological, and positive,” a view he insists is “merely a reaffirmation of traditional historical Christianity.” He argues that many on the alt-right who consider themselves atheists or pagans only lost their faith in Christianity “due to the antiwhite hatred and Marxist dogma held by the modern church.”

Strickland considers himself a “kinist,” part of the new white supremacist movement that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “uses the Bible as one of the main texts for its beliefs,” offering a powerful validation to white supremacists for their racism and anti-Semitism. Strickland sees kinism as a successor to Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement dating back to the 1960s that played a key role in the rise of Christian homeschooling. The movement’s primary goal was to implement biblical law—including public stonings—in every facet of American life.

After Trump’s victory, Edwards ferociously attacked the president-elect’s critics, Bible in hand. “The Bible says, ‘There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ and I want there to be that,” he said on his show. “Now is the time for retribution, and I want them to suffer. I want them to feel the righteous anger of a good and decent people. I want Trump to drive them into the sea.” He called on the “degenerates, perverts, and freaks,” and other “criminals who shilled for Hillary” to “make good on your promise to leave the country.” He added: “They can take Russell Moore with them on the way. That’s for sure. Good riddance. Please leave.”

Alt-right Christians like Edwards see their movement as part of a global battle for ethnic nationalism. Days before the election, neo-Nazis assembled at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to show their support for Trump. Matthew Heimbach, an alt-right Christian leader who founded the Traditionalist Worker Party, told the crowd they were in a worldwide struggle for the preservation of “ethnic, cultural, and religious integrity,” a battle that has been joined by “nationalists around the world that are fighting the same enemy.” That enemy, Heimbach said, is made up of “Jewish oligarchs and the capitalists and the bankers” who “want to enslave the entire world.” He ticked off some of the movement’s international allies: President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has overseen a Hitler-inspired campaign of extrajudicial killings, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has displaced and slaughtered millions of his own citizens. To Heimbach, Assad “is fighting to defend his people against the globalist hydra of Saudi Arabia, of the terrorist state of Israel, and United States interests.”

Heimbach, who made headlines last March for shoving a Black Lives Matter protester at a Trump rally, also draws inspiration from the far-right Russian writer Alexandr Dugin, whose book, The Fourth Political Theory, he considers “suggested reading” for all Traditionalist Worker Party members. Dugin’s writings reinforced Heimbach’s belief, he says, that “we must reject the failed and flawed concepts of democracy, capitalism, equality of ability, and multiculturalism.” To alt-right Christians like Heimbach, democracy itself is a failed and flawed concept.

Some, in fact, believe that Trump does not go far enough in defending the faith. Strickland, for example, views Trump as merely a “civic nationalist,” not a full-blown racial and ethnic nationalist like those on the alt-right. “There are four legs supporting the table of civilization,” he says. “Blood, religion, culture, and language. Civic nationalists only acknowledge the last three of those.” In Strickland’s view, the alt-right must now become Trump’s “loyal opposition,” prodding the president even further to the right. “The alt-right’s job in the coming months and years will be to solidify nationalism’s place in the Republican Party and push the importance of the fourth leg—blood.

”With the religious right now at the service of the alt-right, conservative evangelicals who opposed Trump find themselves at odds with the movement they helped to build. Reverend Rob Schenck was one of the leaders of the religious right’s war on abortion, famously getting arrested in 1992 at a women’s health clinic while carrying “Baby Tia,” a preserved fetus he claimed had been aborted. Through his organization, Faith and Action, Schenck has long provided spiritual counsel to top Washington officials, including Supreme Court justices and members of Congress like Mike Pence. Trump, he says, has no spiritual side whatsoever. “He has no facility in the language of faith,” Schenck told me in November, a week after the election. “At all. It’s not natural to him. It’s not even known to him. It’s alien.”

Two days before we spoke, Trump had announced his selection of Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist. To Schenck, the religious right’s support for the appointment was another “screaming alarm to American evangelicals that we must do some very deep soul-searching.”

But such soul-searching does not appear to be forthcoming. So far, President Trump has drawn little but praise from religious right leaders. From his first days in office, he moved swiftly to shore up their support. He quickly brought back George W. Bush’s “global gag rule,” signing an executive order that bars federally funded groups not only from providing abortions to pregnant women, but from even discussing abortion as an option. And his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court thrilled even Russell Moore, who hailed the selection of “a brilliant and articulate defender of Constitutional originalism.” Trump’s strategy makes sense: He’ll keep evangelicals happy and unified by moving some of their key priorities forward—and use their support to push for what is ultimately an alt-right agenda. Schenck fears that “Trump and his gang” have exposed an evangelical culture “that doesn’t know itself.” Sitting in his Capitol Hill townhouse, Schenck picks up his copy of Ethics, by the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, he says, argued that because Jesus was a “man for others,” Christians are called “not to hold the other in contempt, or to be afraid of the other, or contemptuous of the other.” Yet when Schenck visited evangelical churches during the Obama years, he lost count of how many times he was asked, quite earnestly: “Is the president the Antichrist?”

Schenck still holds out hope, as does Moore, that a new generation of evangelicals will ultimately reject what Trump and the alt-right represent. “I do think something is going to emerge out of this catastrophe,” he says. “It’s going to help us to define what is true evangelical religion and what is not.”

But for now, he concedes, the religious right has forfeited its moral standing by aligning itself with the alt-right’s gospel of white supremacy. “Evangelicals are a tool of Donald Trump,” Schenck says. “This could be the undoing of American evangelicalism. We could just become a political operation in the guise of a church.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/140961/amazing-disgrace-donald-trump-hijacked-religious-right

[viralnewstime]

(KENOSHA, Wis.) — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized the nation.

“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.

The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee and was a vivid illustration of the contrast he offers to Trump.

While Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Trump didn’t mention Blake during his own trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”

“I can’t say if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. But “it would be a whole better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road” if Trump isn’t re-elected.

“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”

Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.

Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.

Justin Blake called Biden “more of a unifier” and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”

Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.

Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”

Biden answered that, because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”

But he compared the current era of cell phone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.

“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility, because they now have seen what you see,” Biden told Bennett, the community organizer.

Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, told Biden of the deep pain exposed by the protests and how it has reached many business owners whose establishments have been burned. DeBerge noted her shop still stands, but said, “I just I don’t think I really grieved as much as I should because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said that he’d asked both Biden and Trump not to come. “I would prefer that no one be here, be it candidate Trump or candidate Biden,” Evers said in a news conference.

Yet Kenosha was mostly calm for Biden’s visit, other than some verbal jousting outside the church between activists, including Bennett, and at least one Trump supporter.

Michelle Stauder, a 60-year-old retired Kenosha school teacher said Biden is “here spreading the word of peace and rebuilding.”

Kenneth Turner stood nearby with a Trump-Pence yard sign. “Everyone is blaming Trump for everything,” the 50-year-old Kenosha man said. “But problems here have been around a long time before Trump.”

Biden criticized Trump for his sweeping condemnations of protesters, his absolute defense of law enforcement and denials that Americans with black and brown skin face barriers that whites do not — statements aimed by the president at his overwhelmingly white political base.

During his Kenosha trip Tuesday, Trump toured damaged buildings and discussed ways to quell unrest with law enforcement officials. Trump was greeted by supporters who occasionally mixed with and yelled at Black Lives Matter organizers.

The president amplified his approach Thursday evening in Pennsylvania, another state that could decide the election. “Biden went (to Kenosha) today. There was nobody there. There was nobody there,” Trump said. At about the same time, Biden was greeted after an evening event by hundreds of supporters who chanted, “Let’s go Joe!”

Trump also repeated his baseless assertion that Biden supports riots. Biden, in fact, has repeatedly condemned violence, most recently on Thursday, and he has criticized Trump for not denouncing a 17-year-old Illinois teen now charged with killing two protesters after he traveled to Kenosha armed and intent, he said, on protecting local businesses.

Biden, who enjoyed police union backing for much of his political career, has defended police officers for bravery and public service. But he said again Thursday that policing must be overhauled. He repeated his promise of a national commission on policing if he’s elected.

Biden does not want to “defund the police,” contrary to Trump’s claims. But he proposes that local forces agree to certain best practices as a condition of federal grants. He also wants to spend more on other public agencies, such as mental health services, to ease social problems police must handle by default.

Most police officers are “decent people,” Biden said in Kenosha, but he added that “every organization” has “bad people.” That, he said, gives the country “a chance to change things, and we can.”

As he boarded his plane for a return trip to his Delaware home, Biden said he didn’t know if his trip to Kenosha was more successful than Trump’s.

“But I felt good about it,” he said. “I think we brought people together and I felt good about it.”

___

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in Washington, and Michael Tarm and Noreen Nasir in Kenosha, Wisconsin, contributed.

[newstechreviews]

(KENOSHA, Wis.) — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized the nation.

“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.

The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee and was a vivid illustration of the contrast he offers to Trump.

While Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Trump didn’t mention Blake during his own trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”

“I can’t say if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. But “it would be a whole better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road” if Trump isn’t re-elected.

“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”

Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.

Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.

Justin Blake called Biden “more of a unifier” and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”

Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.

Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”

Biden answered that, because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”

But he compared the current era of cell phone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.

“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility, because they now have seen what you see,” Biden told Bennett, the community organizer.

Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, told Biden of the deep pain exposed by the protests and how it has reached many business owners whose establishments have been burned. DeBerge noted her shop still stands, but said, “I just I don’t think I really grieved as much as I should because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said that he’d asked both Biden and Trump not to come. “I would prefer that no one be here, be it candidate Trump or candidate Biden,” Evers said in a news conference.

Yet Kenosha was mostly calm for Biden’s visit, other than some verbal jousting outside the church between activists, including Bennett, and at least one Trump supporter.

Michelle Stauder, a 60-year-old retired Kenosha school teacher said Biden is “here spreading the word of peace and rebuilding.”

Kenneth Turner stood nearby with a Trump-Pence yard sign. “Everyone is blaming Trump for everything,” the 50-year-old Kenosha man said. “But problems here have been around a long time before Trump.”

Biden criticized Trump for his sweeping condemnations of protesters, his absolute defense of law enforcement and denials that Americans with black and brown skin face barriers that whites do not — statements aimed by the president at his overwhelmingly white political base.

During his Kenosha trip Tuesday, Trump toured damaged buildings and discussed ways to quell unrest with law enforcement officials. Trump was greeted by supporters who occasionally mixed with and yelled at Black Lives Matter organizers.

The president amplified his approach Thursday evening in Pennsylvania, another state that could decide the election. “Biden went (to Kenosha) today. There was nobody there. There was nobody there,” Trump said. At about the same time, Biden was greeted after an evening event by hundreds of supporters who chanted, “Let’s go Joe!”

Trump also repeated his baseless assertion that Biden supports riots. Biden, in fact, has repeatedly condemned violence, most recently on Thursday, and he has criticized Trump for not denouncing a 17-year-old Illinois teen now charged with killing two protesters after he traveled to Kenosha armed and intent, he said, on protecting local businesses.

Biden, who enjoyed police union backing for much of his political career, has defended police officers for bravery and public service. But he said again Thursday that policing must be overhauled. He repeated his promise of a national commission on policing if he’s elected.

Biden does not want to “defund the police,” contrary to Trump’s claims. But he proposes that local forces agree to certain best practices as a condition of federal grants. He also wants to spend more on other public agencies, such as mental health services, to ease social problems police must handle by default.

Most police officers are “decent people,” Biden said in Kenosha, but he added that “every organization” has “bad people.” That, he said, gives the country “a chance to change things, and we can.”

As he boarded his plane for a return trip to his Delaware home, Biden said he didn’t know if his trip to Kenosha was more successful than Trump’s.

“But I felt good about it,” he said. “I think we brought people together and I felt good about it.”

___

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in Washington, and Michael Tarm and Noreen Nasir in Kenosha, Wisconsin, contributed.

[phooll123]

New top story from Time: Joe Biden, in Kenosha, Says U.S. Is Addressing ‘the Original Sin of This Country’

(KENOSHA, Wis.) — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized the nation.

“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.

The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee and was a vivid illustration of the contrast he offers to Trump.

While Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family, Trump didn’t mention Blake during his own trip to Kenosha on Tuesday. Where Biden traced problems in the criminal justice system back to slavery, Trump refused to acknowledge systemic racism and offered his unvarnished support to law enforcement, blaming the recent violence on “domestic terror.”

“I can’t say if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. But “it would be a whole better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road” if Trump isn’t re-elected.

“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”

Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him on Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.

Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s respective visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.

Justin Blake called Biden “more of a unifier” and credited the Democrat for bringing up criminal justice changes before being asked. But Justin Blake said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”

Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered searing accounts of their struggles.

Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 years old and worried for her three young, Black children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”

Biden answered that, because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”

But he compared the current era of cell phone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.

“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility, because they now have seen what you see,” Biden told Bennett, the community organizer.

Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, told Biden of the deep pain exposed by the protests and how it has reached many business owners whose establishments have been burned. DeBerge noted her shop still stands, but said, “I just I don’t think I really grieved as much as I should because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said that he’d asked both Biden and Trump not to come. “I would prefer that no one be here, be it candidate Trump or candidate Biden,” Evers said in a news conference.

Yet Kenosha was mostly calm for Biden’s visit, other than some verbal jousting outside the church between activists, including Bennett, and at least one Trump supporter.

Michelle Stauder, a 60-year-old retired Kenosha school teacher said Biden is “here spreading the word of peace and rebuilding.”

Kenneth Turner stood nearby with a Trump-Pence yard sign. “Everyone is blaming Trump for everything,” the 50-year-old Kenosha man said. “But problems here have been around a long time before Trump.”

Biden criticized Trump for his sweeping condemnations of protesters, his absolute defense of law enforcement and denials that Americans with black and brown skin face barriers that whites do not — statements aimed by the president at his overwhelmingly white political base.

During his Kenosha trip Tuesday, Trump toured damaged buildings and discussed ways to quell unrest with law enforcement officials. Trump was greeted by supporters who occasionally mixed with and yelled at Black Lives Matter organizers.

The president amplified his approach Thursday evening in Pennsylvania, another state that could decide the election. “Biden went (to Kenosha) today. There was nobody there. There was nobody there,” Trump said. At about the same time, Biden was greeted after an evening event by hundreds of supporters who chanted, “Let’s go Joe!”

Trump also repeated his baseless assertion that Biden supports riots. Biden, in fact, has repeatedly condemned violence, most recently on Thursday, and he has criticized Trump for not denouncing a 17-year-old Illinois teen now charged with killing two protesters after he traveled to Kenosha armed and intent, he said, on protecting local businesses.

Biden, who enjoyed police union backing for much of his political career, has defended police officers for bravery and public service. But he said again Thursday that policing must be overhauled. He repeated his promise of a national commission on policing if he’s elected.

Biden does not want to “defund the police,” contrary to Trump’s claims. But he proposes that local forces agree to certain best practices as a condition of federal grants. He also wants to spend more on other public agencies, such as mental health services, to ease social problems police must handle by default.

Most police officers are “decent people,” Biden said in Kenosha, but he added that “every organization” has “bad people.” That, he said, gives the country “a chance to change things, and we can.”

As he boarded his plane for a return trip to his Delaware home, Biden said he didn’t know if his trip to Kenosha was more successful than Trump’s.

“But I felt good about it,” he said. “I think we brought people together and I felt good about it.”

___

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in Washington, and Michael Tarm and Noreen Nasir in Kenosha, Wisconsin, contributed.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/353XzWv

[johnjankovic]

WE ARE ASTRONAUTS

You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

Matthew 10:22-3

Ideologues of globalism vilify nationhood to create the homogeneity of a post-Christian world. Vatican leaders with bovine conformity endorse the idea akin to Asia’s dechristianization in the thirteenth century. The fertility of sciences, quality of life, and upward mobility in one hemisphere sources from Christianity, Arab autocracies rely on oil markets instead. Why did spacefaring Christianity send a man to the moon and not Islam? The one privileges freedom, that all men and women are equal, that life equates with a choice and the fruits thereof are thus savoury or spoiled, the other plumps for control. Europe’s crisis of economic migrants and refugees speaks for itself in spite of how guests exploit her hospitality only to then prohibit our prayer lest it offend them. The advances in medicine, media, freight, robotics, and energy are derivative of the seed sown by Jesus which the Church has nursed between the workmanship of Syriac, Catholic, and Protestant thought leaders. By the sweat of their brow did the West, as capitalism’s vanguard, industrialize for the lot of the commoner unendowed with royal birthrights. Christianity would create a system of wealth to escape servitude; a prodigious constitution we authored in Philadelphia; on the moon did Buzz Aldrin partake of Communion.

That seed sprouted the stoutest of oak trees though setbacks abounded when, in the Middle East, Christians were destitute of their homeland via genocide from Islamists, or the Church was riven with fissures in theology. By the 1500s did the Protestant Reformation restore Christianity to its primeval roots with no sale of indulgences, no sort of absolution for sin by the clergy, and no species of ritualism derogating from the message of Jesus. This departure from the papacy signalled the sunset for the abuse of doctrine and for intermediates whose agency as middlemen intervened in our relationship with Father: No man, not one, pardons you, nor does he dictate your life. We decide our fate. The intermediacy of saint-worshipping in Catholicism further aroused Martin Luther to defect from the growing superstition of Rome as the Reformers returned the primacy of the New Testament to Christendom. Our past was of an understanding for Father by way of love not orthodoxy, of persecution not some antiseptic record, and of shrewdness not credulity. This truth epitomized the cynosure of our faith for all of us who died on a cross, pyre, or arena. Protestants thereby would colonize the New World whilst Roman Catholics in Europe would be mired in the fratricide of the Inquisition.

In the wake of the Pope’s excommunication of King Henry upon the annulment of his marriage in 1533, which the Reformation preceded sixteen years earlier, did its offshoot of Anglicanism wed the Protestant and Catholic faiths together within the Church of England. Whereas the heterodoxy of Martin Luther’s ‘Ninety-five Theses’ was a rebuke for the snake oil of bilking money towards salvation from the sinner, King Henry’s impetus to break from Rome was for a remarriage to birth a male heir in his dynasty, therefore the genesis of Protestantism in Europe’s mainland and in the archipelago of British society was differently sourced. A hundred years later an atavism of this ‘protest’ against the papacy manifested once more in the internal strife of Puritans who sought to ‘purify’ the Church of England of Catholic customs entirely and whose diaspora later found them expatriated to colonies in the 1620s: schism within a schism within another schism colours the history of Christianity all of which will be reunited in the North. Then as did their Syriac brethren in Edessa, Nisibis, and Gundeshapur, or Catholics in Bologna, Oxford, and Sorbonne, the heirs to this scholasticism planted the same seeds in Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from which a nation germinated and was educated.

To remake civilization in the Protestant faith was closely aligned with the theology of John Calvin whose ideas actuated Anglo-Saxons more so than Lutherism. Upon Anglicans settling Jamestown two decades earlier in Virginia was there to be the first exodus of Puritans aboard the Mayflower to till the virgin lands of Plymouth in 1620. Ten years later John Winthrop founded the second colony of Massachusetts Bay in Boston. The fealty of colonies south of Virginia deferred to the Church of England with its vestiges of Catholicism, north of there was the monoculture of Protestantism sprawling from New Jersey up to New Hampshire in between of which Dutch Calvinists settled New Netherlands whose mishmash of denominations worshipped unmolested from government in Manhattan. Pennsylvania was next to this enfant terrible and became the preserve of Quakers, Scottish Presbyterians, and German Calvinists who abutted the Swedish Lutherans in Delaware. Southern Colonies were Anglican, Middle Colonies were a kaleidoscope of Protestants, and New England Colonies were Calvinist. The very founding of the United States was, therefore, an exercise in Christianity for dissidents of Rome akin to Europe’s influx of Christian Arabs three hundred years prior.

The seaboard gave vent to the revival of Christianity during the Great Awakening unlike the prevalence of secularism back in its metropole amid the Age of Enlightenment. By 1765, the American Revolution enshrined Protestantism in its unalloyed form when Anglicans, devout to England, absconded for Canada or New York as the end to monarchy would democratize a country in the company of its faith which the many carveouts spoke to between the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Seventh-Day Adventists (Millerites), Methodists, Baptists, or Episcopalians. Though the Founding Fathers were at pains to disestablish the clout of government in religion, what was never the case with English kings or Roman emperors, their abstraction of the state from the New Testament resurrected an earlier form of Christianity that did not mistake the profane for the divine in some variation of theocracy. Wise and Christian folks would try to edify you but never under duress from the hand of the state. Any aberration to this cardinal rule would always be the product of a Christian public clamouring for reform as in the cause of abolitionism, or in the temperance, sabbatarian, and women’s rights movements. Otherwise, it would be your choice, yours alone, to be a part of our family.

[deniscollins]

Amber Guyger’s Judge Gave Her a Bible and a Hug. Did That Cross a Line?

A judge’s job includes overseeing trials, making legal decisions and maintaining control over the courtroom. After a high profile murder case, where a white former Dallas police officer had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for murdering a black man in his own apartment, the judge hugged the victim’s parents, returned to the courtroom with her personal Bible in hand, gifted it to the officer, Amber R. Guyger, and pointed to John 3:16, a passage about salvation. If you were on the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, how would you rule on a complaint filed by The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national group that fights to defend the separation of church and state, which argues that the judge’s “proselytizing” amounted to an ethics violation: (1) the judge is guilty, (2) the judge is not guilty? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

The trial was over at last. After days of emotional testimony in a case that gripped and divided the nation, a white former Dallas police officer had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for murdering a black man in his own apartment. The shouts of protest that had filled the courthouse hallways had quieted. Everyone was getting ready to go home.

But the judge was not done.

After speaking with and hugging the victim’s parents, the judge, Tammy Kemp, returned to the courtroom with her personal Bible in hand. She gifted it to the officer, Amber R. Guyger, and pointed to John 3:16, a passage about salvation.

Then, as the woman convicted of murder reached out her arms, the judge, still in her black robe and pearled necklace, wrapped her in an embrace.

Some saw the striking moment between a black female judge and a white former officer as an extraordinary example of humanity; others have criticized it as inappropriate, biased and potentially unconstitutional.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national group that fights to defend the separation of church and state, filed a complaint with the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, arguing that the judge’s “proselytizing” amounted to an ethics violation. “Compassion,” the group wrote in their complaint, “crossed the line into coercion.”

Critics have also questioned whether a black defendant would have been shown the same compassion. African-Americans are more likely than white people to be arrested, convicted and given stiff sentences, according to research by the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for criminal justice reform.

Christopher Scott, a black man who spent nearly 13 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, said he had never received a hug from a judge in all his experiences with the criminal justice system, including at his exoneration hearing in Dallas County in 2009.

“I’ve watched all of the exonerations that happened in Dallas County — I’ve never seen it,” said Mr. Scott, who went on to found an organization that investigates other wrongful crimes. “We don’t get handshakes, we don’t get hugs, we don’t get Bibles. They just say, ‘We’re sorry for what happened to you and you are a free man to go.’”

Ty Toney, who followed the trial from his home in Las Vegas, was among those who viewed the judge’s actions as commendable. “I watch a lot of these trials because it’s kind of personal to me,” said Mr. Toney, 40, who said his brother was killed in a police shooting in California in the 1990s.

“To take the effort and go out there and console somebody, that touched me,” said Mr. Toney, a practicing Lutheran. “People can be mad at the sentencing, the time she was given, but that’s different than showing compassion for another human.”

Judge Kemp, a former prosecutor who was elected to the bench as a Democrat in 2014, did not respond to requests for comment.

Though judges are often thought of as impassive gavel-pounders, Judge Kemp is not alone in showing compassion toward the defendant and victims before her.

Judges who run court diversion programs meant to help defendants overcome issues like drug addiction often openly root for them to find a better life. When the cases are dismissed, the courtroom can feel more like a graduation than a conclusion to a criminal case. A judge in Brooklyn has occasionally ended low-level cases with handshakes or hugs for nearly two decades.

But few could recall a similar scenario in a high-profile murder trial like Ms. Guyger’s, which was unusual from the start. Ms. Guyger fatally shot her neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, in his apartment last year, claiming she mistook the apartment for her own and Mr. Jean for an intruder. To the contrary, a judge last year denied Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, from hugging his own wife.

Amanda Frost, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, said the judge’s decision to hug Ms. Guyger was not too far removed from judges who tell defendants that they regret being forced by the law to hand down a certain sentence or who encourage them to reconsider their paths.

“Impartiality is what matters,” Professor Frost said. “If the judge shows it throughout the trial and then shows some compassion to the defendant afterward, I don’t have a problem with that.”

The Bible, on the other hand, was “questionable,” Professor Frost said.

In the Guyger case, it was a panel of 12 jurors — not Judge Kemp — who weighed testimony and decided upon the former officer’s fate. But it was Judge Kemp’s job to oversee the trial, make legal decisions and maintain control over the courtroom.

Another hug may have inspired the judge. When Mr. Jean’s brother, Brandt Jean, took the stand to address Ms. Guyger after her sentencing, he turned to the judge for permission to express his forgiveness. “I don’t know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug, please?” he asked, looking up toward the judge’s bench. “Please?”

After a pause, Judge Kemp agreed. As he walked toward Ms. Guyger and wrapped his arms around her, Judge Kemp used a tissue to wipe tears from her eyes.

“Some judges seem to be able to turn off their emotions and not see the humanity, but I was never able to do that,” said Jan Breland, a retired judge who heard misdemeanor criminal cases in Austin for 26 years. “These people that come through our courts are human beings, regardless of the things they’ve done. They all have mamas, and they were all little boys and little girls at one time.”

Still, Judge Breland said she had never seen anything like the emotional scene in the courtroom this week. Her Facebook friends, mostly lawyers and retired judges, have flooded her news feed with video clips.

“That brother, that young man, it was almost like seeing Jesus talk,” she said. “The compassion and the grace that he showed were amazing, and it obviously got to the judge.”

After Judge Kemp had spoken with and hugged Mr. Jean’s family, she emerged from her chambers, flipping through the pages of a Bible. She approached Ms. Guyger at the defense table and handed her the book. “You can have mine,” she said. “I’ve got three or four more at home. This is the one I use every day.”

Afterward, Ms. Guyger stood up and reached her arms toward Judge Kemp. The judge briefly shook her head, before returning the hug.

Deborah Rhode, an expert in legal ethics and the director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School, said she believed that Judge Kemp’s behavior stayed within ethical bounds, especially because it came after the sentencing had ended.

“All the judge did is express some bonds of common humanity, and I don’t think we should be punishing judges for that,” she said. “If anything, our legal system has suffered from an absence of adequate compassion.”

[newstfionline]

Blue Christmas: Churches acknowledge that the season of joy isn’t always joyous

By Adelle M. Banks, Religion News Service, December 18, 2017

WASHINGTON (RNS)--The church was festooned with a green wreath above the altar cross and rows of red and white poinsettias. But the lights were dim and the candles were ready, along with small packets of tissues placed strategically in each pew.

The Blue Christmas service at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., was just what Charles Pugh, who worshipped alongside a couple of dozen others, needed that cold night in the nation’s capital.

Pugh, a Washington musician who visited the church for the special service, is estranged from his family.

“I miss my family very much and my father passed away a month and a half ago and I was unable to see him,” he said before the liturgy began.

The service was one of several events in the Washington area and many more across the country that have marked one of the longest nights of the year. They are acknowledgments that--despite the mall music and tinseled trees--the season can also be the darkest time of year for those who are grieving, no matter the source of their grief.

Pugh was the first to arrive for the Wednesday (Dec. 13) service. It featured gentle piano music, the opportunity to light a candle to commemorate his loss, and the offer of a private prayer with a member of the clergy.

“For many people who are feeling some kind of loss, Christmas can be the hardest season of all,” said the Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell, the church’s senior pastor, as she welcomed the attendees to the intimate gathering.

“You may not have felt very free to cry in front of other people in this season but this is one time and place where you may feel free to express yourself in any way that feels good to you.”

The people gathered, young and old, some sniffling, some stoic, and responded to a liturgy with the words, “Why am I so troubled? I will put my hope in God.” They sang “What Child is This?” and listened to a bass soloist’s rendition of “Sweet Little Jesus Boy.”

And they heard a testimony from the Rev. Paul Clark, a church consultant who recalled the death of his mother during the 1984 Christmas season and described the fresher grief of coping with his own recent diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

“We’re all born to live, to love and to die,” he said. “Between the birth and the dying the question is what do we make of it?”

The service was held for the second year in a row at the church just blocks up 16th Street from the White House. Across North America, the tradition seems to have grown in the last couple of decades.

“We wanted to provide a safe, quiet space for people to grieve, remember and reflect without apologizing for their sadness,” said the Rev. Marci Pounders, associate rector of the church whose members had not only dealt with the death of relatives but divorce, infertility and job loss.

“People in grief often do not have the strength to ‘get over it,’ and ‘get in the Christmas Spirit.’”

At her church’s service, attendees ranged from a man who lost his mother-in-law and his job in the same month to a woman who had to put down her cat, her sole companion.

Some churches seek tangible ways for people to remember their loved ones. At the Dallas church, there was a “Table of Remembrance” in front of the altar rail where people could bring mementos of those they lost. Reid Temple Restoration Center, a Maryland counseling facility started by an African Methodist Episcopal congregation, featured a “Wall of Remembrance” where attendees could place photos of relatives during its recent “Celebration of Life, Love and Remembrance.”

D. Fredrica Brooks-Davis, executive director of the center, said the celebration featured gospel musicians, with a singer performing Kirk Franklin’s “My Life is in Your Hands” and liturgical dancers ending the program with “This is My Wish,” a song by The Walls Group that expresses the hope “that peace will find its way to every boy and girl.”

Participants were able to stand and name the person or persons they were remembering, whether they died recently or long ago.

“When people are standing and they see others standing with them and they turn their candles on, it brings about a sense of unity,” Brooks-Davis said of the event in which participants are provided battery-operated candles.

In an article on “Christmas Blues” in his “World Encyclopedia of Christmas,” author Gerry Bowler said reasons for the seasonal sadness--depicted in songs such as Elvis’ that begins “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you”--range from loss of a loved one to “resentment of the commercialism” of the season.

“My own little evangelical church here in Winnipeg has held such services for years--not at the regular worship time but on an evening during the Christmas season (and not necessarily on December 21, the longest night of the year, which some churches do),” he told RNS, in an email, of his Canadian congregation.

While Protestants tend to offer these events more often, Catholics have them too, including a Mass five years ago that reportedly attracted 300 people to a Louisville, Ky., church after the priest wrote a column in the archdiocesan paper about holiday grief that sparked a strong response.

The Rev. Andrew Menke, executive director of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Secretariat of Divine Worship, said there’s no official Catholic liturgy for such a service, but some parishes have them.

“It would be up to a pastor to decide that there’s a need for something of this nature, and to decide on the best way to try to meet that need,” he said.

Beyond once-a-year-events close to Christmas, some churches start closer to Thanksgiving to offer support for members and visitors who are dreading the holidays.

Sam Hodges, executive producer of Church Initiative, said more than 8,000 churches have used “Surviving the Holidays” video resources offered by his ministry’s nonprofit GriefShare since 2008, with the number increasing by more than 80 percent since 2012.

Groups gather to watch the video and hear from evangelical leaders about how to cope with seasonal expectations, such as making tentative commitments to attend gatherings in case it turns out they’re not up to doing so at the last minute.

“That can make it easier for them to make a decision just not to go,” he said.

No matter what grief-related events people may attend before Christmas, clergy such as Pennington-Russell still make sure to let them know they’re also welcome at the Christmas Eve service where they’ll likely hear “Joy to the World.”

Pugh, who attended the Blue Christmas service at First Baptist and is Lutheran, said he wouldn’t rule out attending a more festive Christmas service too.

“I would because it reminds me of those happier times,” he said. “And I’m not one to be disgruntled and sad all the time.”

[torreygazette]

Baptismal Hypocrisy

"I’m not welcomed at this Church!" 

How did it come to this? Imagine for one second, you have visited a church for a few months and have decided to join. There are not many churches in your town, but you need to be around the preached Word of God. You do the walking to the front of the church routine to publicly show you want to be a member—many in my tradition do not understand this practice, but it's normal in the evangelical land. Everyone is happy. They give you full on and side hugs as church comes to an end.

Then you go to the office. It looks quite shabby. There are degrees and pictures everywhere. There is even a Billy Graham photo next to Michael Bolton ... wait, nevermind that's supposed to be Jesus. Still, you talk to the leaders and they ask you a few questions. You inform them “Yes, I am baptized.” They ask if it was full immersion and what the status is for your kids. You answer, “We are all baptized. We were sprinkled in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit some as adults and others as infants. As our Lord commanded in Matthew 28:19-20.”

The tone changes, a look of puzzledness appears in their eye. They regretfully inform you that your baptism does not count and you are in rebellion to God. Okay, they might not say rebellion, but from their view, baptism is an act of obedience and you sir/madam are disobedient! And so they ask you to enroll in their 6-week new members class that ends with baptism to welcome you to the family of the Lord (as a symbolic gesture to represent your new life and being buried with Christ).

At first, you are puzzled, befuddled, and then angered because in all your studies you have never heard of this stance. You have studied the Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Reformed/Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic church and never once have you heard that your baptism was "invalid."

 In Holy Writ, there are serious passages about taking the Lord Supper incorrectly. If this hypothetical church which stands against church history is correct, then you and your family have been taking the Lord's Supper wrong for decades:

28 But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself (1 Cor 11:28-29)

This passage is not directly about a non-baptized believer partaking in the Lord's Supper. But it would be hard to say that an unbaptized believer—in purposeful rebellion—should not be viewed in the same light. One stance universally and historical agreed upon throughout Christendom is that baptism is a sign of entrance into the new covenant and is required to be viewed as a member. (I would not be me if I did not tell you baptism is much more than that!)

In Holy Writ, people are baptized as soon as possible. Thus, the concept of a person in the faith that is not baptized is unfounded. They are basically saying I am not a Christian or that I am not in good standing as a Christian. So in the previous example, my family and I cannot officially be one with this visible church until I stop my rebellion and get really baptized (in my view re-baptized).

It is an un-argued fact, that since the 2nd century, church history states the universal church practice was infant baptism and sprinkling was not forbidden. But I am convinced by Scripture as well. A passage in Luke shows that it is possible for an infant to have faith and be moved by the Holy Spirit:

“When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit” (Luke 1:41)

If this was in modern times little Johnny would be denied baptism and viewed as outside of the body of believers. When Scripture cites "bring the little children to me," do they think Jesus wanted to play peek-a-boo with the kids or hide-and-seek? Nowhere in any part of the bible has a child of a believer been viewed as a pagan or outside of the covenant of God because the promise is for the parent and their children:

“Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.” (Acts 2-38-39)

To think that a church body would dis-fellowship and deny the majority of historic Christians from fellowship is appalling and offensive. Martin Luther one of the reformers credited with starting the Protestant Reformation would be denied membership because he was baptized as a baby. John Calvin’s father was close to the Rome Catholic Church, so it is safe to assume he was baptized as a baby too. He too would be denied. And a host of others from 100 A.D. til about 1800 A.D. would be told “you are not welcome or able to join our church body” by some churches. Let's look at a few.

Irenaeus

"He [Jesus] came to save all through himself; all, I say, who through him are reborn in God: infants, and children, and youths, and old men. Therefore he passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, sanctifying infants; a child for children, sanctifying those who are of that age . . . [so that] he might be the perfect teacher in all things, perfect not only in respect to the setting forth of truth, perfect also in respect to relative age" (Against Heresies 2:22:4 [A.D. 189]). 

Augustine

"What the universal Church holds, not as instituted [invented] by councils but as something always held, is most correctly believed to have been handed down by apostolic authority. Since others respond for children, so that the celebration of the sacrament may be complete for them, it is certainly availing to them for their consecration, because they themselves are not able to respond" (On Baptism, Against the Donatists 4:24:31 [A.D. 400]). 

"The custom of Mother Church in baptizing infants is certainly not to be scorned, nor is it to be regarded in any way as superfluous, nor is it to be believed that its tradition is anything except apostolic" (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis 10:23:39 [A.D. 408]). 

Hippolytus

"Baptize first the children, and if they can speak for themselves let them do so. Otherwise, let their parents or other relatives speak for them" (The Apostolic Tradition 21:16 [A.D. 215]). 

Origen

"Every soul that is born into flesh is soiled by the filth of wickedness and sin. . . . In the Church, baptism is given for the remission of sins, and, according to the usage of the Church, baptism is given even to infants. If there were nothing in infants which required the remission of sins and nothing in them pertinent to forgiveness, the grace of baptism would seem superfluous" (Homilies on Leviticus 8:3 [A.D. 248]). 

"The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants. The apostles, to whom were committed the secrets of the divine sacraments, knew there are in everyone innate strains of [original] sin, which must be washed away through water and the Spirit" (Commentaries on Romans 5:9 [A.D. 248]). 

Cyprian of Carthage

"As to what pertains to the case of infants: You [Fidus] said that they ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after their birth, that the old law of circumcision must be taken into consideration, and that you did not think that one should be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day after his birth. In our council it seemed to us far otherwise. No one agreed to the course which you thought should be taken. Rather, we all judge that the mercy and grace of God ought to be denied to no man born" (Letters 64:2 [A.D. 253]). 

"If, in the case of the worst sinners and those who formerly sinned much against God, when afterwards they believe, the remission of their sins is granted and no one is held back from baptism and grace, how much more, then, should an infant not be held back, who, having but recently been born, has done no sin, except that, born of the flesh according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of that old death from his first being born. For this very reason does he [an infant] approach more easily to receive the remission of sins: because the sins forgiven him are not his own but those of another" (ibid., 64:5). 

 I have come to realize that I am not welcomed in many Baptist, non-denominational, or Pentecostal churches. Yes, all church bodies throughout history acknowledge that a member of a church should be baptized. But for these sects (!) that have requirements not accepted or practiced in the majority of the 2000 year history of the church (or forbidden in scripture), I wonder if they realize the weight of their stance?

It's just a minor doctrinal point in their eyes and it truly shows how ignorant they are to the weight of their stance. I contend that they should at least acknowledge the full weight of their stance and deny complete fellowship with every other tradition. If a person is not baptized, should a church body really welcome them into fellowship? Draw the line in the sand and stand by your choice to cast out most of the Holy Saints that has ever lived! Truth be told, most of these church bodies would rule me (and the Saints quoted) a heretic anyways, once I informed them what biblically happens in baptism. So maybe the mode or age isn't even of real importance.

This hypothetical example is the reality for many people. Teaching or requiring someone be re-baptized doesn't just mean their first baptism was invalid. It means they are not true members of the church. Please consider the full impact of the doctrines you and your church body hold.