Juan Cruz

But Trefor, how can you keep up on the Word of God profitably divided?

3rdof4,

I liked your first sentence and your last sentence. The rest (oh, how can I be charitable?) made me yearn for a rope burn.

As much as I hate to help anyone read TWI hate-laced literature, here are lengthy excerpts from that article http://www.geocities.com/fdocc3/mc.htm

just musing here: One of the best ways to deprogram oneself is to learn to enjoy imagination - one's own and others. Your "correct" doctrine and the "Word's integrity" don't need no stinking help from nobody.

You got a problem with bodies rising up and entering the city? I think it’s great! (“gasp!”).

Yea, and I think saints in perfect form after a century or two of noncorruption is great too! (enjoying imagining discomforted fundamentalists, so keeps going, wickedly).

Yea, and I think Mel’s drop of water belongs in the Word of God too!

- right next to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail!”

NOW I’ve gone too far? If you think so, YOU’RE RACIST! (just kidding)

(done with fundy baiting for tonight)

Don't take yourself and your God so seriously, remember this is the Bible that has Rachel bleeding on her dad's Gumby collection. This is one very funny book (though Psalms make me cry).

Juan, don't post this.. people without imagination are very sensitive. You will lose credibility. You come across as condescending and patronizing.

"Oh come on, the girls just wanna have fun."

No, you can't "bait" people regarding their religious beliefs.

But surely they can enjoy a bit of a laugh at their own expense? I promise they can make fun of me for something. How about: for reading the Bible every day without believing that it all "fits together" so nicely? You know what it is? It's Mike. He drives me crazy. I don't read his stuff..but just knowing he's out there, and he's serious. That's scary to me.

Well now, I think the two of you should sit down and have some Earl Gray.

No! I promise I'll be good!

Are the Dead Alive Now? (in case you forgot the opening of this post, I am here coming back to the topic again). Well, I do think of Mom everyday. Will I see her again? I'll leave that up to the Boss -but I DO want to see that twelve-fruited tree (Rev. 22:2). Don't tell me THAT is just a figure of speech. It's almost the only verse in the Bible I take literally. Does it have watermelons and pineapples? Or just a bunch of orientalisamish fruits that I’ve never heard of or, at least, have never bought in the produce section?

I liked what this guy had to say. What do you think?

quote:

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Op-Ed: The Power of Marriage

By David Brooks

Originally published in the New York Times

November 22, 2003

Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.

But marriage is the opposite. Marriage joins two people in a sacred bond. It demands that they make an exclusive commitment to each other and thereby takes two discrete individuals and turns them into kin.

Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve to be. Even in the chores of daily life, married couples find themselves, over the years, coming closer together, fusing into one flesh. Married people who remain committed to each other find that they reorganize and deepen each other's lives. They may eventually come to the point when they can say to each other: "Love you? I am you."

Today marriage is in crisis. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. Worse, in some circles, marriage is not even expected. Men and women shack up for a while, produce children and then float off to shack up with someone else.

Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture of contingency. Today, individual choice is held up as the highest value: choice of lifestyles, choice of identities, choice of cellphone rate plans. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but the culture of contingency means that the marriage bond, which is supposed to be a sacred vow till death do us part, is now more likely to be seen as an easily canceled contract.

Men are more likely to want to trade up, when a younger trophy wife comes along. Men and women are quicker to opt out of marriages, even marriages that are not fatally flawed, when their "needs" don't seem to be met at that moment.

Still, even in this time of crisis, every human being in the United States has the chance to move from the path of contingency to the path of marital fidelity — except homosexuals. Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to a "partner," a word that reeks of contingency.

You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity. But instead, many argue that gays must be banished from matrimony because gay marriage would weaken all marriage. A marriage is between a man and a woman, they say. It is women who domesticate men and make marriage work.

Well, if women really domesticated men, heterosexual marriage wouldn't be in crisis. In truth, it's moral commitment, renewed every day through faithfulness, that "domesticates" all people.

Some conservatives may have latched onto biological determinism (men are savages who need women to tame them) as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage. But in fact we are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender. We're moral creatures with souls, endowed with the ability to make covenants, such as the one Ruth made with Naomi: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried."

The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.

Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.

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[This message was edited by Juan Cruz on March 07, 2004 at 14:03.]

Trefor,

Of course you're right but "Are The Dead Conscious Spiritual Entities At This Time?" would not look as good on the dust jacket.

quote:

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I don't believe those verses for a second. Sounds like some Catholic B.S.

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Can I reject a verse or two from Romans 1? They sound like Baptist B.S. to me.

Reality check time:

Doesn't humilty force us all to step back a second and admit that we haven't got a clue!?!

We might as well live as though we do (live forever) -you know courageously giving our hearts and all, and not being afraid to die.

AND as though we don't. "You only live once.

Go for the gusto."

So, I'm living as though I will

and I won't

I keep this schitzoid mindset to myself so nobody knows (until now, that is)

What were we talking about? Are they alive now?

Why does it matter? - oh, that's right, the inegrity of the Word. Is it so fragile it needs constant shoring up?

Well, since that issue no longer occupies my mind, I guess I really, really don't care about the health of the dead.

I do think that every psychic that has ever lived is a fraud.

I LOVED the "exactness" of TWI's pseudo-studies.

I remember we stayed up most of the night studying the diff. between heteros and allos in Galatians once after VP obfuscated it royally.

Not that genuine Greek scholarship isn't valuable... but re:the New Knoxville brand.. I gotta imagine God both laughed and cried that night.

quote:

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*...I saw clearly for the first time that the rest of my life I was going to have to hawk pfal in order to maintain my spirituality...it was so depressing

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This one by Rascal is the one that really hit me. So true. So sick. deep in the pit of your stomach sick. Our innards were trying to tell us something! I can still feel the pain, (hunching over).

We weren't witnessing our faith in God, no, not at all -- We were selling TWI product.

I'm so glad I finally learned the difference. I can share the love of God now with everyone - with great pleasure and joy -- cause I'm not selling them anything

which was nothing but some glitzed-over, two-bit, easy answers "from the Bible" (sort of), hack pseudo-intellectual, cut-you-off-from-neighbors-family-freinds-community-church crap anyway.

If people want to come to church and worship with me, fine (and they do and I'm thrilled to be able to share it with them because it's our best for His Highest.). some stick around; others to go another way; God-led, I'm confident.

I'm not a pius pimp any more.

God "saved a wretch like me" (from TWI)

Garth,

I was accompany you for paragraphs 1-6.

Your rationalism had made desire to say to you, "Oh Garth, just go see it, you big kitty cat."

Once, a young man, I prayed a very serious heart-anxious prayer."Lord, do not let me ever be a cop-out on You." God kept my prayer for years later when I found the way out of the Way. Thank you, Lord Jesus.

So Craig, rejoice and be very glad the Way calls you a cop-out, it is a good thing. You have been very sick in spirit. I know for I saw and heard you. I hope you are healing.

All the best,

Juan

I saw this film this morning. It is good. I, too, worry about what ignorant people might surmise regarding Jews role then and today. However, this film is muddling the role of the Jews just as in the gospel, I think. It is depicting Pilate's dilemma well.

I was also worried to be crying in public, but I did not. I only teared when Mary remembers running to pick up her little boy fallen. I could have been in whatever movie. I like the pieta in the frames penultimate.

It was typical Hollywood (not outstanding creative) which I am given up on. But as the devout Christian - I liked it anyway. Hollywood has no longer values for my time or money. Last movie I liked is Beautiful Mind. I am glad I went to The Passion though.

St. Ignatius Loyola instructs in "Spiritual Exercises" to use the imagaination for meditate on the passion. Mr. Gibson is helping my Lent. I got "dirty foreheaded" last night too.

I am a Way survivor. Down with bondage! Down with studies that are only to titillate and puff up pride. Down with a gospel without sacrifice. Up with truth which sets free.

Thank you,

Juan

[This message was edited by Juan Cruz on February 27, 2004 at 6:24.]