Posted on 03/03/2008 1:57:22 PM PST by Jim Robinson
Someone upthread stated that Lofton is a Calvinist, and I took that as accurate without double-checking it.
Apparently, it is not true.
“Does this mean that Lofton would govern without the consent of the governed?”
In a Theocracy the power comes from God and the Ruler doesn’t need the consent of the governed. This is the basis for the Divine Right of Kings.
To be fair, the other extreme, where the common assumptions of Western Civilization are denied, which derive from Christianity, is equally nutty.
The founders had it right. They recognized that God, as our Creator, gives us rights, and set out to protect those rights, while protecting the right for each man to worship from the interference of the state.
And I take it to mean that the swords were there not to deliver Jesus from the cross but to make a point -- namely the futility of using force to bring about the Kingdom.
The crowd came, a sword was used by Peter to cut off one of their ears, then the Lord went willingly.
So true acceptance of the Lord can only be done in freedom.
Of course, I think it would be good if children in public schools heard a prayer read over the P.A. with the understanding they didn't have to join in. And I think it would be good for those children to be read to from the Bible, and we should post the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule on the classroom walls, and there is nothing wrong with using those precepts to guide our laws --just consider that separation of church and state is a strong Christian value-- but forcing someone to believe in the Divine, or the supernatural is worse than pointless but counterproductive and unChristian as well.
I'm not sure if Mr. Lofton agrees.
Politic’s does not “corrupt” religion. Both are corrupt because the hearts of men is corrupt.
We try to keep them separate not because one is more corrupt than the other. But because each becomes more powerful when entangled with the other, and the more powerful, the more corrupting. Religion can corrupt politics (witness the Middle East) just as well as politics can corrupt religion.
following God’s Word does not include a loud Proclamation of doing so - whether personally or politically.
As for "writing for Playboy," let's be clear: he wrote one or more articles that appeared in Playboy. So to have many other persons not particularly connected with porn.
Whoops!
It makes more sense as “So too have many other...”
I think you’re right, and I think Mr. Lofton is not right.
Agreed. I have no interest in living in a theocracy.
I don’t know much about the author’s religious background, and I do consider myself an evangelical Christian,but I do know I dated a girl from a southern pentecostal family a couple of years back, and her family intimated several times that my Lutheran background meant I was basically Godless.
Waaaaahhh - you left out Ireland.
I'll argut that the degree of corruption you find within a given religion will be directly proportional to the extent that involves itself with politics. Islam defines itself as both political and religous, and is inherently corrupt. Contrast them with followers of religions that have no particular political aspirations, like the Buddhists of Tibet.
This evangelical Christian agrees.”
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As does this evangelical Christian.
Quaker.
Huh, I've never heard it phrased as "Laws of Christ" before.
I'm not sure how one would build an organized government upon the New Testament alone, and most of the Old Testament laws were particular to the situation of the Hebrews.
Piety is not a substitute for sound political philosophy, and vice-versa.
“I ran with this “conservative movement” from the mid-1960s to 1980”
Lofton ran with the movement as long as he was making a living in and off of it. He went from hard right evangelical (which certainly has its place, even if I disagree) to insane - and that was it for Lofton being a part of the movement he now calls “still-born.”
Okay, assuming that's true--and I agree--what's your point? I don't think I've ever maintained that it does.
According to Lauro Martines' Fire in the City, Savonarola was actually a great patriot and a lover of liberty whose oft-necessary religious reforms have unjustly been depicted as theocratic.
After the Medici were expelled, he was pretty hands-off, preferring religious reform to the daily grind of politics. Even his famous Bonfires of the Vanities were voluntary.
Buckley and many senior NR people were conservative Catholics, so the only way the movement was "Godless" is if you view Catholics as Godless.
One sure-fire way to make conservatism a minority movement for a generation would be to split conservative Protestants from conservative Catholics.
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