Posted on 12/03/2008 4:59:24 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Who's to say? Even though I don't follow Pope Benedict XVI, I might listen to what he says before I listen to Jeremiah Wright because I'm more likely to agree with him. I grew up with James Dobson's ministry. I like him very much and his endorsement matters to me.
If more Christians lived like it instead of being hypocrites . . . maybe the USofA would be a better place.
Amen!!!
My point was that NO MAN’s endorsement means ANYTHING over any other MAN’s endorsement.
Each person should pray and educate him/herself before casting ANY votes no matter WHO the “big name” or not endorses. I do not buy Hanes because Michael Jordan endorses them. The males in my family have always preferred Fruit of the Loom (or as we call it “Loon” - to gales of laughter).
The Catholic Church does not endorse the politician, but they do speak out about Morality and Ethics. The voter checks the politicians’ ethics and morality and votes based on the “fruit” of the politicians’ ethics and morals which the politicians exhibits.
This makes me shudder.
It is SO odd. Or maybe its ironic.
Ronald Reagan was not all that religious. He also was a divorced man when divorce was uncommon. Yet he convinced a nation that conservatism was a good thing. Even college kids in large numbers were calling themselves conservatives after four years of RWR.
There is a strong vein of anti-wear-your-religion-on-your-sleeve sentiment in this country but this is not why you can’t sell a right wing steak to a starving man in this country.
Reaganism is dead because the GOP and George Bush destroyed it. With prejudice. And great malice. It might rise again after we hit rock bottom as a nation .... but then none of us will be alive to see it.
Just found that verse the other night...
Gave me the same feeling. Christ wasn’t messing around. If you’re defying God’s law, you’re choosing to do the bidding of Satan.
Perhaps a better description would be a foundational document. This is the key to understanding the great assumptions of this nation's founding. The concept of Natural Law and inalienable rights. This document was set out as the justification for rebellion against the King. Something seemingly trivial now a days.. but at the time.. radical beyond radical. Moreover, the founders of the United States unlike the French Revolutionaries saw the source of the right to govern themselves as flowing from God, rather than the Dignity of Men as was the foundation of the French Revolutionaries.
The difference between these Revolutions is subtle, and much has to do with the fact that in America, Lords, Ladies and Nobles just didn't exist as such except as visitors to the Americas. There were great landowners, but the ownership of large tracts of land had much less meaning in the Americas than in England and Europe, and thus a Shopkeeper or a Craftsman was often of the same economic station as a landowner.
This subtle difference provided the space for the rejection of Kings not to have to include to some extent a rejection of God and Church.
Also, the existence by virtue of exile of large groups of faithful not owing to the Church of England provided a basis for most to not have to reject God when rejecting the Divine Right of Kings and accepting the Natural Right of Individuals as direct gift of God's grace.
Given this, our legal rights still primarily come from the Common Law as established in England via the pain and sacrifice of the rabble in conflict with the various kings. For starting with the Magna Carta, individual rights of all humans were recognized in England even though it seems rough and arbitrary to us from our perspective.
Thompson's equivocation on abortion completely undermined the truth: a child of rape has absolutely no less of a right to live than a child of casual sex or of the most sanctified marriage. Huck's equivocation on taxes, that it's OK to raise them if the highways or socialist school system need funding, while repugnant, is common to almost every single politician and cannot completely undermine the truth that free markets prevail in virtue, prosperity or awful consequences regardless of the many times that governments, frauds and pirates have molested and plundered them.
So you don't take much stock in endorsements period. I think my position is very close to yours. Disendorsements (not a word?) get my attention much more than endorsements.
Thank you so much.
I will not allow you to revise history. Dobson never said that. The media hate him because he's a Christian leader, and misrepresented what he did say.
Cut the anti-Christian crap, yongin.
lots of Clown Posse and Darwin Central types filtering back into the forum looks like from this thread
Sporadically? In the last 11 presidential elections the Republicans won 7 of them.
I'll worry about the religious right the next time I and all my work colleagues get an e-mail from the state government telling me to attend a “religious right training session” where I'll be told I'm not permitted to voice any views offensive to Christian conservatives. Until I receive such an e-mail, I'll regard the secular left as being A) dangerously intolerant and B) more of a threat to human liberty than anyone on the religious right ever thought about being.
This statement is the very definition of a non-sequitur. It does not follow. DOI has no force of law. Any more than Payne's Common Sense has the force of law. It is a statement of aspirations rather than a legal document. A declaration and a justification for Rebellion against King and Country which was an act beyond tragic for many, and certain to lead to death if the enterprise failed.
for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God
Remember you are reading this in translation. Jealousy as an emotion is petty. God is not petty. And do not pretend to lecture me on Torah. This passage gets at God's wrath for those who would cut themselves off from truth and the light, and lead others into the abyss. And I assure you, this is not something that God undertakes with a petty sense of being hurt, but rather the grim resolution of cutting away a rotten bit from plant that might yet be saved, or a dying limb, so that the body may be saved. The result is disfiguring and the shock reverberates. The lost tribes where not lost when Syria conquered the Northern Kingdom, but instead lost long before when the people ceased to practice their faith and became entangled with the practices of the Canaanites.
What was swept away was just the flotsam of a lost and broken vessel, long before sunk and despoiled.
The wrath of God's action against those who would worship other Gods is the result of cutting oneself off from the true source, and thus tragedy and iniquity flow without respite or end unless the error is recognized and repented. It is like saying, food left in a warm refrigerator rots. Its simple. But, God need not be charged with being petty or small in this, but instead, a sharp blow may save many who would be lost if the rot were allowed to continue.
The New JPS translation uses the English word "Impassioned" rather than "Jealous". They want to impress that violating this commandment can truly bring down "Biblical" wrath like visited on Sodom and Gomorrah or the Northern Kingdom. Where whole chunks of the community are destroyed to protect what might be saved. The need to do this is a great Tragedy and a wound to God, and thus done with great conflict. This is why such strong words are needed to evoke the seriousness failing to keep this Commandment.
If the Christian right alone is capable of generating 60m votes
The proposition that this was possible was a credibility destroyer to start with, and caused me to ask you if you wanted to be taken seriously. Certainly all propositions that might flow from this supposition are frivolous.. in that this just isn't the case. And supposing it to be the case, is a great foolishness. The "Christian" right is more along the size you already defined.. perhaps 30M voters. Other folks who are Conservative but do not identify as "Christian Right" make up the rest of 55 to 60 Million we have seen turn out in the recent several presidential elections. Keep it real.
The things you want to do, just are more examples of attempting overreach. And this is why you find yourself frustrated over and over and over. A consensus needs to be created before some of these issues can be settled in a way you would find acceptable and that consensus doesn't exist and the trust needed to begin finding that consensus doesn't exist, and for the fact that folks waste their time trying to fight over plaques when so many other problems need addressed first is foolhardy.
Yes, if the tools of government could be turned to the salvation of the masses, it would be convenient, but it would be a form of oppression. Thus, those who would share God's message need to be more creative.
Oh really? Why don't you just tick off for me all the thing the Republicans have done for the Christian Right in the last 27 years? And for the Conservatives at large for that matter?
Gosh I have heard this more often than I would like. I heard it used as a justification to vote for Obama.. and it is just a pile of crap. I will use Kennedy's quote. "Ask not what the Republican Party can do for you, Ask what you can do for the Republican Party." This gets at the fact that the "Religious Right" offers far to often to take its toys and play by itself. And this unreliability becomes a situation where those who need to make decisions discount this block. This whole thread is about how Dr. Dobson is seen as a loose cannon. His histrionics about the various candidates did nothing to help the Party or the eventual outcome.
I really like what he has to say, but the walk away solution makes you a joke rather than a power center. It is only the implied possibility that you might walk away rather than the rending process of doing that that gives power. The Conservative Base in its fury at Republicans in Congress that could be "played" by the Democrats to their advantage has given us a Congressional Majority of freaks and kooks, because this knee-jerk behavior of the "Christian Right" is predictable and useful against the Republican Party.
This is why the apparatchiks of the party hold this core voting block in contempt. They may be just as wrong headed.. but this division and the predictable behavior of the Right as far as melting down and dividing against each other leaves the MoveOn.org types laughing all of the way to the Halls of Power.
Sarah Palin is a much more important figure, because rather than being Miss Walkaway, she engages in trench warfare. She is an unapologetic Christian, a person of clear conservative values lived and acted on each day. Yes, the Liberals scream when they see her and pull out their hair, and the many Republican strategists do the same.
But, she doesn't whine and she doesn't threaten, she just leads. We just didn't have someone like this at the beginning of the process in 2008, and she is a transformational figure for the Republican party and thus will be receiving push back for some time.
But the party is in shambles right now and it is what you make of it. We need our own equivalent of Community organizing, and we have to remember its the statehouses that control the ground when it comes to the final outcome of elections. You have to hold the ground and then you can move forward. But this takes folks on the ground locally, and they have to do their thing or the system breaks down.
In many states, the idea of stealing seats from Democrats is bizarre. Why, because Republicans have forgotten their core message and ceased to believe in themselves. There is no Conservative party, it doesn't exist. Creating one would relegate the new party to 20 years of building before it could come out of its own wilderness, if it didn't die like several other recent attempts at split and form party dynamics.
So the Republican Party is our vehicle, but it is what we make of it. If the Conservatives are the core of the operation then thats who gets things done. Its that simple. If you let college kids taught by liberal professors be the core.. then don't be surprised what you get.
Are you kidding? A good portion of it has already occurred, or the groundwork for it laid (and not defended against)
My advice was to seed the population with faith and then let faith guide us out of our morass. How can you translate that into this bizarre screed against Republican's. You are behaving and thinking irrationally and like a loser.. and a loser you shall continue to be until you find your way.
Waving the Bible no. Quoting, I wish! Abortion and homosexuality are God's wrath. The fruit of iniquity is more iniquity.
Where has Dobson done this, specifically? Please provide a reference.
You understand that Dobson was taken out of context, right? He never denounced Fred as a non-Christian. He confessed to not knowing whether or not Fred was a Christian. Some Americans are not Christians, you know. And Dobson confessed to not knowing where Fred stood with the Lord.
And cut the "kingmaker" crap, Charles. That's one of the Libtard anti-Christian talking points.
Agreed!
Wrong. How many people was Scott Peterson found guilty of murdering?
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