CATFIGHT!!!
Posted on 02/09/2014 7:51:42 AM PST by daniel1212
MOORESVILLE, N.C. – A high school football coach in North Carolina has been ordered to cease leading his team in prayers following a complaint by a prominent atheist activist organization.
Officials with the Mooresville Graded School District recently told Mooresville High School football coach Hal Capps to stop leading the Blue Devils in prayer, and Capps has agreed to discontinue to the practice.
The Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) had contacted the district last fall after learning of Capps’ practice and asserted that the prayers were unlawful. According to reports, a parent of a student had complained to the organization, stating that they did not like promoting religion.
“It is a violation of the Constitution for the Mooresville High School football coach to organize, lead, or participate in prayers or other religious proselytizing before, during, or after games and practices,” FFRF Patrick Elliott wrote to District Attorney Kevin Donaldson. “It is well settled that public schools, and by extension public school officials, may not advance or promote religion.”
Superintendent Mark Edwards told the Charlotte Observer this week that he approached Capps following the football season and told him to discontinue praying with the team, advising that it was a violation of the separation of church and state.
“He said he understood,” Edwards stated.
FFRF had also asserted that Capps had held a team baptism, sending the district a photograph that showed the coach in an indoor pool with several young students and a group of onlookers. However, officials state that the event was not a team baptism, but that a local church hosted a baptism for some of the team members, who then requested that Capps be present.
Despite Capps’ agreement to discontinue the prayers, a number of area team members are now expressing their support for the coach and their disapproval of FFRF. #ISupportCapps soon became a new Twitter hashtag.
“#ISupportCapps and he’s the best coach I’ve ever had, and I’m twice the guy and player I was when I came to Mooresville as a freshman,” Tweeted team member Dallas Jackson.
“Love my coach mane; he do a lot for me,” posted Dash Ingram. “Helping me with a lot of stuff mane! Coach Capps [is] the truth mane #ISupportCapps.”
Local residents likewise largely supported the coach.
“I believe what the Bible says,” Belvin Sherrill told WBTV. “It upsets that some people can just dictate what you do because of their beliefs and not take into consideration your own.”
“I think the man, the coach, should be able to pray with his players or anybody else that he wants too,” resident Betty Lambert also remarked to the outlet. “That’s our right; we as Christians have stood back too long.”
You MIGHT want to pray for....
Oh NO!
I'm just SURE it's circumcision. Read Acts 15
The Separation of Church and State is in the Soviet Constitution, not the US Constitution.
Actually, the fact is that not only is Luther not a pope to us by a long shot (he was actually far more Catholic than us evangelical types), nor he did reject the teaching office established by God anymore than did "prophets and wise men, and scribes" (Mt. 23:34) which God raised up before him to reprove those who sat in power.
And Westminster states,
“It belongeth to synods and councils [not as assuredly infallible but as a help in grace], ministerially, to determine controversies of faith, and cases of conscience; to set down rules and directions for the better ordering of the public worship of God, and government of his Church; to receive complaints in cases of maladministration, and authoritatively to determine the same:... (CHAPTER XXXI )
But not as a perpetually assuredly (conditionally) infallible office.
The fact is that the church began upon Scriptural substantiation in word and in power, as alone it is the supreme material standard for obedience and testing truth claims, as is abundantly evidenced . In contrast is that of a person or church decreeing that it alone is the supreme infallible interpreter.
It seems your argument is that an infallible (conditionally) magisterium is necessary as being the steward of Scripture which assuredly establishes what is of God, so that its judgment on what it rejects or affirms must be submitted to. And the veracity of which magisterium is the ordained means by which one has assurance of Truth.
And that historical descent shows Rome to be that infallible steward of Scripture. Is this what you are arguing?
What are you talking about? What would make you think he wanted to baptize anyone?
BTW your remark doesn't sound very Christian.
Maybe he used to be MORMON.
That is refreshingly honest at least, rather than trying to support your earthly tradition by Scripture, which reveals it to not be in Scripture. And rather than being missing, again, the specific procedures and rules laid out in scripture require repentant wholehearted faith, and which normatively is by immersion, as the word means baptismo), and as you do not bury one by sprinkling. Nor does Ezekiel 36:24-25 state sprinkling is baptism.
So at least the traditions I follow are from Apostles and the early church fathers. Yours are “inspired” by “latter-day saints” such as Calvin and Luther.
Actually, that fallible source is not your basis for assurance of truth either, since unanimous consent is rare, and evidence for the Assumption is lacking for among early sources.
Thus your basis for assurance of truth is based upon the premise of the assured veracity of Rome, as she has presumed to infallibly declare she is and will be perpetually infallible whenever she speaks in accordance with her infallibly defined (scope and subject-based) formula, which renders her declaration that she is infallible, to be infallible, as well as all else she accordingly declares.
But the evidence does not warrant her assertion.
A VERY good question, which is akin to the fundamental question the Scribes and Pharisees asked an Itinerant Preacher from Galilee. (Mk. 11:27-33) And in answering it, as He did, i will ask you a question:
How did anyone know the book of Isaiah (among multitude others) was Divine, or have assurance that the Itinerant Preacher was of God (and God)?
But if one person complains about explicit sex-ed, nothing will happen.
As to the historic structure, which we see in East and West, whatever the cultural differences, the development of the papacy came about, if not of necessity than from the evident need for a place of appeal. As to Westminster, it is a bit ironic, since every Englishman, at that time, Catholic and Protestant, was convinced that Christian had more or less stated in England, what with Joseph of Arimathera, the Holy Grail and all that , taken on faith alone. If an English synod said, it it must be infallibly true. ;)
The point is that Scripturally they are not infallible, and you have failed to give a coherent answer to my basic questions, thus my response must wait.
That is because even if they will not admit it, they have subscribed to and teach a state sanctioned ideology of secular humanism with its ever-morphing immorality that fosters moral relativism.
During the colonial period the Bible was “the single most important cultural influence in the lives of Anglo-Americans." (Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1789. (New York: Evanston and London: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 40) Schooling in early America, and for most of its history in primary education, combined education in general Christian morality with standard academic subjects. The Bible was the first book in the classroom, and was central to a child’s education, both for its content and for building skills. Students learned how to read using the Bible, passages were copied to learn penmanship, and a good part of the school day was devoted to memorizing and reciting passages from it. (PBS, ''The Story of American education: The Evolving Classroom') In addition to the Bible, other good books such as Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan and Isaac Watt’s Divine Songs were used. (Elizabeth McEachern Wells, Divine Songs by Isaac Watts (Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1975), p. 11)
Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, Volumes 1-2, reports that in the first report of a public school in Washington which they had on record, in 1813 a Mr. Henry Ould states, “55 have learned to read in the Old and New Testaments, and are all able to spell words of three, four, and five syllables; 26 are now learning to read Dr. Watts' Hymns and spell words of two syllables; 10 are learning words of four and five letters. Of 509 out of the whole number admitted that did not know a single letter, 20 can now read the Bible and spell words of three, four, and five syllables, 29 read Dr. Watts' Hymns and spell words of two syllables, and 10 words of four and five letters.” < (Columbia Historical Society (Washington, D.C.), “Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, Volumes 1-2” , “Progress in reading and Spelling, p. 9)
< font size="3">The overtly Christian “New England Primer” was used in primary education in New England, which is estimated to have sold upwards to 3,000,000 copies from 1700 to 1850. Introduced in 1690, this reader was used in what now would be the 1st grade, and taught multitudes of children how to read for 200 years, until 1900. The Alphabet was taught with Bible verses that began with each letter of the alphabet. Lessons had questions about the Bible and the Ten Commandments. An example of the Primer is, A = In Adam's fall, we sinned all. B = Heaven to find, the Bible mind." (The Honorable Judge Robert Ulrich Chief Justice, Missouri Court Of Appeals, Western District; http://www.shalomjerusalem.com/heritage/heritage19.html)
In addition, approximately half of all American children (beginning in 1836 to approx 1930) learned from the “McGuffey Reader,” of which 122 million copies were published (during a time when the population was much less than today, and books were passed on more). This was an advanced teaching system for it's time, written by a man who later became a Presbyterian minister, a work which earned him the title, “the Great Schoolmaster of the Nation.” He exalted the Lord Jesus Christ, and used the Bible more than any other source. It became a unifying force in American culture, instilling basic Christian-based morality, giving America a common value-laden body of literary reference and allusion, (Cranney, A. Garr, “Noah Webster and William Holmes McGuffey: The Men and Their Contributions to Reading”) and “a sense of common experience and of common possession”. (Historian Henry Steele Commager) McGuffey Readers were used widely in America until just after World War I.
Even the Unitarian (a religion that effectively denies Christ and the Divine authority of the Bible, but, unlike its immoral form today, at that time it at least overall upheld general Biblical morality) “Father of the Common School,” Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 — August 02, 1859), who became Massachusetts Secretary of Education in 1837, not only understood the impossibility of separating education from religious moral beliefs, but held that it was lawful to teach the truths of the general Christian faith, asserting that the “laws of Massachusetts required the teaching of the basic moral doctrines of Christianity.” Mann, who supported prohibition of alcohol and intemperance, slavery and lotteries, (http://www.famousamericans.net/horacemann) dreaded “intellectual eminence when separated from virtue”, that education, if taught without moral responsibilities, would produce more evil than it inherited. (William Jeynes, “American educational history: school, society, and the common good,” p. 149, 150)
Mann evidenced that he rightly understood that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment did not prohibit officially favoring the general, common Christian faith and its morality, but that it forbade official sanction of one particular sect by distinctively favoring its doctrinal distinctions, stating that “it may not be easy theoretically, to draw the line between those views of religious truth and of Christian faith which is common to all, and may, therefore, with propriety be inculcated in schools, and those which, being peculiar to individual sects, are therefore by law excluded; still it is believed that no practical difficulty occurs in the conduct of our schools in this regard.” (Stephen V. Monsma, J. Christopher Soper, “The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Five Democracies”, The Unites States, cp. 2, p. 21) To critics who were alarmed at the concept of secular schools, he assured that his system "inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible...," but he did exhort that Bible reading be without comment to discourage sectarian bickering. (Mann, Twelfth Annual Report for 1848 of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts. Reprinted in Blau 183-84.
Considered second to Mann in his schooling endeavor was Henry Barnard, who was raised in a deeply religious family, and who saw his involvement in education “as part of the providence of God”. Like the majority of Americans, he believed that democracy and education went together in “the cause of truth—the cause of justice — the cause of liberty— the cause of patriotism — the cause of religion.” (Jeyness p. 154)
However, while America was blessed by Christian educators and those that overall upheld the teaching of Biblical morality, the devil also has his disciples, and one was named John Dewey, head of the Teachers College at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930. He also taught in Peking University in China, and after that in Turkey. After he returned to America, in 1933 he signed (along with 34 prominent Americans) the Humanist Manifesto, which he helped to author. The first manifesto talked of a new "religion", and referred to humanism as a religious movement meant to transcend and replace previous, deity-based religions. This was the Americanized version of the Communist Manifesto (sadly written by a soul with a root of bitterness , Karl Marx, and through which many were defiled: cf. Heb. 12:15).
Humanism in America is partly credited to a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter who created the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929. A year later he penned “Humanism: A New Religion. In this declaration he boldly declared, “education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”http://www.christiananswers.net/q-sum/sum-g002.html
Dewey became the father of modern American education, and he and his disciples worked to change the basic moral belief system that undergirded the moral educational system, in which [when the Engel v. Vitale case was decided] an estimated 75% of the school systems in the South had religious services and Bible readings (Colliers 1961 Yearbook p. 224). Rather than implicitly and often explicitly recognizing that God and the Bible were the ultimate authority on what was right and wrong, Dewey wrongly believed that it is the State that ultimately determines morality. Replacing the transcendent proven source of true liberty and it's necessary limits (the Bible) with the social engineering of secular humanism, allows a nation's school children to be indoctrinated with an ever morphing morality, which progressively calls evil good and good evil. More .
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02006b.htm
There are no claimants to the bones of Mary, unlike other saints. The first written mention is commonly believed to be in the 3rd to 5th centuries. This does not mean it was not believed by Christians before that time. Just as the Trinitarian doctrine does not jump out at you at first glance, neither does the assumption of Mary. God’s church engaged in the same process of looking at the evidence, oral tradition, theological reflection, etc. to define the Assumption of Mary infallibly. Note that the late declaration of the Assumption (20th century) is a result of heretical beliefs contradicting what was already believed by the Church. Heresy is often the catalyst for Church declarations.
Thanks for responding. I agree with your comments.
There are MULTIPLE QUESTIONS, like this, that could be asked.
There remains only one answer, don’t you think ?
LOL
There is circularity in this claim. Yes, the 2nd Century based its claims on the doctrines than came from the Apostles, and the fact that they were in writing substantiated their historicity. But the fact that they had been preserved seems to indicate they were preserved because they substantiated the claims of those who preserved them. Doctrinally, they are evidence, but they are a collection, not a treatise or a catechism, or a book of disciple. Like any library, they tells as much about the owner as they do about the writers.
You have a way with words. The fact is that it is not simply claimants to the bones that is missing, but any actual early testimony at all, despite what an important event this would be, and "fathers" of the earliest centuries repeatedly citing Enoch and Elijah as examples of people who didn’t die, but never Mary.
And rather than professing what you follow is from the Apostles and early church father, you need to admit it is on the basis of the professed veracity of Rome that you believe this, for as a RC you are not to objectively examine the evidence in order to ascertain the veracity of official RC teaching, but as in a cult you are to simply submit to the church as to God.
As Keating states, "fundamentalists ask, where is the proof from Scripture? Strictly, there is none. It was the Catholic Church that was commissioned by Christ to teach all nations and to teach them infallibly. The mere fact that the Church teaches the doctrine of the Assumption as definitely true is a guarantee that it is true.” — Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), p. 275.
“All that we do [as must be patent enough now] is to submit our judgment and conform our beliefs to the authority Almighty God has set up on earth to teach us; this, and nothing else.”
“He willingly submits his judgment on questions the most momentous that can occupy the mind of man-----questions of religion-----to an authority located in Rome.”
“Absolute, immediate, and unfaltering submission to the teaching of God's Church on matters of faith and morals-----this is what all must give..”
“The Vicar of Christ is the Vicar of God; to us the voice of the Pope is the voice of God. This, too, is why Catholics would never dream of calling in question the utterance of a priest in expounding Christian doctrine according to the teaching of the Church;”
“He is as sure of a truth when declared by the Catholic Church as he would be if he saw Jesus Christ standing before him and heard Him declaring it with His Own Divine lips.”
“So if God [via Rome] declares that the Blessed Virgin was conceived Immaculate, or that there is a Purgatory, or that the Holy Eucharist is the real Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, shall we say, "I am not sure about that. I must examine it for myself; I must see whether it is true, whether it is Scriptural?" 1">—“Henry G. Graham, "What Faith Really Means", (Nihil Obstat:C. SCHUT, S. T.D., Censor Deputatus, Imprimatur: EDM. CANONICUS SURMONT, D.D.,Vicarius Generalis. WESTMONASTERII, Die 30 Septembris, 1914 ); http://www.catholictradition.org/Tradition/faith2-10.htm]
This does not mean it was not believed by Christians before that time. Just as the Trinitarian doctrine does not jump out at you at first glance, neither does the assumption of Mary.
That is an absurd and grievous comparison! The Trinity as professed by the Nicene creed is so well substantiated by Scripture that this was the basis for it, and thus evangelicalism rose up to defend it among other core truths which liberal revisionism denied.
In stark contrast the bodily Assumption of Mary is absent from Scripture, which makes manifest important events and aspects of its characters, nor was it promised as distinct from the "resurrection of the just," which is when they arise and are crowned.
And just as absent among the 100+ prayers in Scripture is even one example of anyone except pagans praying to anyone in Heaven but the Lord, much less Mary being crowned as Queen with almost unlimited power, whose prayers are like commands to God, and who even can be a more ready help than any others, among many other attributes ascribed to the Mary of Rome .
I am referring to before the 2nd c. and even the completion of the NT, and thus i asked the questions which remain unanswered.
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