It’s off topic, but “In God We Trust” is taking the name of the Lord in vain. It it invokes God in a meaningless oath.
We trust in the Constitution and the worlds most powerful military. ‘God’ has nothing to do with it.
Crane
Float the idea of changing the motto to “In Whatever God You Trust,” or a series including Allah, Jehovah, Krishna, etc., and see how far that flies with the same folks.
The forms which are a social imposition are what I object to.
If I ask, fine. Leaving material on my car, coming up to talk to me uninvited one on e or otherwise, knocking on my door,proposing and passing laws that embed yhour beliefs, etc., those are not fine.
You understand the difference, right?
No, it is the result of a group of American Evangelists heading over there, and to be gentle about it, stirring up a hornets nest to get away with as much as possible. there is no doubt whatsoever who is behind the legislation and why. The local social mores pre-exist AIDS. They are being exploited by a group of people on the name of evangelizing as Christians.
So you are in favor of our laws being made and measured and debated in our governmental branches in how they measure up on the yardstick of “accumulated Divine Wrath”?
If so, there is a word for you and your politics and it is anti-American to the extreme: theocrat and theocracy.
So you are not capable of distinguishing between a secular government and the works of a Church. I wish know how you really feel about your non-Christian friends and neighbors: are we here only because you haven’t (yet?) legislated us out of existence?
So you are for gay couples having partners, but not having the same secular rights as straight people with partners. Interesting.
Then whyy do you favor Prop 8 in California, assuming you do? The Court case it was meant to overturn - In Re Marriage Cases, you can read the opinion, explained that marriage was NEVER defined as a man and a woman in California as a matter of law. People acted as though it was, but it wasn’t, and no one had really pressed the issue before.
So the real change of marriage in California was Prop 8 and nothing else.
Doesn’t it have to do with Christ, in that this is one way you believe we are racking up a Divine Wrath surplus?
And sorry to tell you, but saying you don’t support equal rights while your own fellow Christians do the dirty work of taking them away from people does make you an activist, complicit if not on the front lines, just as your silence is complicitness when evangelists set up and inflame hate to the point of legislation and mob murder in Uganda.
(I really think we are dealing with a substitute FriarTed here, prior to the last couple of weeks, I would not have expected any of this kind of stridency or political positin from you. Maybe I misread other stuff from you before, but regardless, I am surprised)
Unfortunately, no. It is true that some Christians go over the line in both evangelizing & in enacting their values in the public square. You and I do differ
as to where that line is.
Which is another way of saying, :If we can control your behavior by laws to confirm to what we believe is the wat Christ wants us to believe, that is good enough for us", isn’t it?
The goal is still the same, and as you called it above, you should not support it because what could be more of a social imposition than creating laws to guide behavior, stripping existing rights, limiting other rights and so on? Or in the case of Uganda, making it a crime to even be alive, or to know someone else who is of the undesirable class without turning him or her in.
FriarTed, how are these NOT social impositions? Or are they still mild ones to your taste?
That people wish to share about their religion is not offensive to me or probably almost everyone else. Social impositions are offensive, especially the ones as far over the line as I have described. But even milder forms too. Let me give you a non-Christian example.
In Mountain View CA, around the end of the dot-come era !10 years ago now, Church of Scientology bought or otherwise acquired a well located but vacant storefront downtown on the main street. With the support of City Hall, they renovated building, and the City even closed the street and had a big civic ribbon cutting and speechifying event when it was ready to open.
I know all this because I lived there at the time, in the downtown neighborhood. I was at the speechifying event personally.
This building was not a church though. There already was a church in town. It was meant to be a recruiting center. Evangelizing if you will.
Once the speechifying was over, a horrifying thing happened. It is not like anyone in MV is in the dark about CoS. Heck there are already 2 stores run by a known cult, one immediately next door to the CoS, and the other immediately across the street. Mountain Viewere are a tolerant bunch though and probably about as diverse demographically as any city in the country.
What happened starting the very first day at the CoS center was that they positioned tables, displays, and people on the sidewalk blocking patrons and shoppers. Not only that, but they met the shoppers at one end of the block, followed them past the place in the middle, and on to the other end of the block.
That CoS people wanted to tell their story was not an issue. That they sought to do so in a way that caused personal social impositions to people, and indirect social impositions to their neighbor shop keepers, and to the citizens of Mountain View by possibly damaging the willingness of shoppers to come to Mountain View when they could have just as easily gone to Palo Alto next door.
When objections were raised, the initial defense was “freedom of speech, religions, etc.”.
I don’t know how that was overcome, but it was. The chasers were limited as to where they could put their displays and people so that they didn’t block (or harass) traffic.
In the four or so subsequent years when I still lived there, I walked by that storefront an average of 4x a day. They did a nice job fixing it up, that’s for sure. But you know what? I never once saw anyone not already in the Cos ever set foot in there.
Which is pretty much how it was in the building’s prior incarnation as a Christian Science reading room IIRC.
Sometime after I moved away (I get back from time to time including this past weekend), the CoS had shut the place down, having found that even when available, the message was not of interest to anyone.
So go ahead and make your information available to me and others, I don’t mind. Just don’t impose social impositions, which look in practice like a cover for a fear that the message might not be as interesting to outsiders when left to stand on its own merits as you might wish it to be.
Vinyl,
Perhaps:
"In Gods We Trust - Take your Pick"
Crane
I haven’t been agreeing with many mods lately, but I have to agree here.
The other thread I have been referring to is when I asked as OP for explanations of the phrase “Jesus is Love”.
I could just as easily open a thread asking about the more common “Jesus is God” tautology. You already described yourself as a Trinitarian, so I know you are completely “all in” on Jesus and God being one and the same.
The objection to “In God we trust” is due to the fervor of the evangelists - including the City Councilmembers of Bakersfield. You can’t devote your life’s purpose to explaining to outsiders that “God and Jesus are one and the same/Jesus is God” and then object when the very same outsiders substitute “Jesus” where you place the word “God” before them, in non-secular place.
Like I said, no one is fooled by your collective crocodile tears on this matter.
The local politicians pull this stunt in nearly every city, they like to test the limits of the Establishment Clause of the 1st, while using “Jesus” (not even “God”) as the reason for their legislative decisions to restrict the rights of others to the extent they can.
Many people call that speaking out of both sides of their mouths, and it is not a pleasant thing to say or to have to say.
I’d prefer “In zero or more gods [lower case] we trust” if we had to have a form of this at all.
not_,
It is a meaningless platitude that has no place in the public forum. Religion is private and personal.
Crane
I’d be fine with one of those optically variable “hologram” effects, showing GOD when viewed from one angle, and GOD (inside a red circle with slash) when viewed from another.
I agree one hundred percent.
I am thinking photoshop fun is in order 
How do you think I feel about it? 
Until 1956 the official national motto was "“E Pluribus Unum”.
So you would have no objection to putting those names into a hat and making whatever comes out the official motto of your city? Of course we’d have to put a few dozen more in just to be fair, and maybe the words “Mankind” and “Ourselves”. Would this be suitable to you?
I think you feel like maybe some time you will whisper in a mod’s ear, perhaps your own - he can’t be all bad
Then why do they try to convert people who already have faith in Jesus? If I’m an Episcopalian, I don’t need to ‘convert’ a Methodist; the Methodist is already a believer. We may differ on some doctrinal points (and rather substantially in terms of style of worship), but they believe in the Lordship of Christ.
They’re welcome to start worshipping as an Episcopalian, but I would never in my wildest dreams regard that as a conversion. You convert nonbelievers, not people who believe in basically the same things you do, but differ on some things that aren’t fundamental.
Calling themselves Christians, yet wanting to convert Christians, seems to be trying to have it both ways. Plainly the LDS regards themselves as something more than merely Christian, which is fine by me (and which would amply justify their desire to convert people who are already Christian), but they should be upfront about it.
What bugs them is that many Christians of the non-LDS persuasion regard them as somewhat less than Christian, and they seem to have a chip on their collective shoulder about that. If you think your faith is better than theirs, it’s gotta bug you when they don’t even accept it as legit.
Regardless of their presentation of a rather absurd myth as historical fact, I couldn’t become a Mormon for a more mundane reason: I don’t believe God is calling me to give up caffeinated or alcoholic beverages. And of course, the LDS ban their members from consuming either of these.
So assuming I would recognize God’s call to give up these things if he were trying to get that through to me (something I have affirmative reason to believe is true), then either they’re wrong about this, or some are called to be Mormons and give up their alcohol and caffeine, and others aren’t. I doubt they’d accept either of these interpretations.
[quote=“RTFirefly, post:94, topic:571310”]
That is pretty much something I said to FriarTed (on another recent thread I think) when he said pretty much the same thing about Jews being a kind of incomplete Christian, and that Christianity includes Judaism for the most part because it originated from it and extended it. So in a sense Jews and Christians are already members of each others faith, they just don’t realize it :rolleyes: which raised the issue of why push so hard then on conversion instead of collaboration?
I hold no learned opinion at all as to whether Mormons are Christians. But if they are not by your reasoning, wouldn’t that also apply to Johnny-come-lately Christian groups who claim they are Jewish?
If so, this is certainly not a phenomenon exclusive to Mormon proselytizers. Plenty of other Christian denominations actively attempt to “convert” people who are Christian already.
Pentecostal groups, for example, maintain substantial mission efforts in Latin America, where the vast majority of their converts and potential converts are Catholic. Likewise, various evangelical sects actively proselytize in Eastern Europe to Eastern Orthodox Christians. Protestant missions in South India and Sri Lanka are gaining adherents from the regions’ Catholic communities that themselves originated from Catholic missionary efforts in the colonial period. And so on and so on.
Because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the one and only true, fully restored church on earth. That’s why. All the rest of you Christians believe in a substandard diety. Only Joseph Smith restored the true gospel of Christ’s primitive church. If you haven’t read the Book of Mormon, then you only have half the story and it is the divinely bound duty of every true, believing, good mormon to make sure you’ve had a chance to hear the message. Otherwise, your lack of acceptance of their gospel is on* their* head, not yours.
That’s why.
DISCLAIMER: The above statement is not meant to be a statement of my personal beliefs. In fact, as an exmormon, this holier-than-thou attitude bugged the shit out of me when I was a mormon. I refused to look my kind, loving, awesome, hardworking, dedicated never-mormon (raised Catholic) grandmother in the eye and tell her she was going to suffer trials and damnation because she didn’t believe the same thing I did.
Dogzilla,
Is it LDS doctrine that we are all souls who volunteered to receive a physical body and be tested by our actions here on earth?
Crane
Yes.
I am not enough of a scholar of mormon scriptures to be able to provide a cite, but yes, that’s what I was taught.
According to mormon doctrine, all souls that ever existed and ever will exist reside in a place called “the pre-existence.” You can often hear harried, exhausted moms (who already have 4 or 5 kids) talk about how they were prompted by the holy spirit to bring one more soul from the preexistence to their little mormon family.
Post death, mormons believe we go to a place called the Spirit World to await judgment day, at which time, we will be sorted into our various kingdoms (terrestial, telestial, celestial).
Lotta waiting around in mormonism. Which really just prepares you for a lifetime of endless mindnumbing meetings on this earth. 