Sex! Woohoo!

[Pseudonym]

They can be as opposite as night and day in both their theology and their practices. yet most believe theirs has "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them God";

I beg to differ. Even Roman Catholics these days believe that Protestants aren't automatically heretics. That goes double for Anglicans.

Even US-style evangelicals (which are a world-wide minority) don't, for the most part, claim to have "the whole truth".

So if someone says, "Will the real Christians please stand up!", they'll all rise.

Most of them won't have a problem with most of the others having stood up. "Real Christian" is a much broader category than it once was.

[whoosanightowl]

Tony wrote:

(Come on, everybody,...sing,,,, imagine there's no heaven..... it's easy if you try...) I can see the lighters now... (:-0)

Hey Tony, show some respect, for Lennon's sake! Stand up straight and place your right hand over your heart when you sing that please!

[whoosanightowl]

They can be as opposite as night and day in both their theology and their practices. yet most believe theirs has "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them God";

I beg to differ. Even Roman Catholics these days believe that Protestants aren't automatically heretics. That goes double for Anglicans.

Even US-style evangelicals (which are a world-wide minority) don't, for the most part, claim to have "the whole truth".

So if someone says, "Will the real Christians please stand up!", they'll all rise.

Most of them won't have a problem with most of the others having stood up. "Real Christian" is a much broader category than it once was.

Pseudonym,
Well so much for that narrow road which leads to heaven! Looks like it's been under construction, and several new lanes have been added, so the road is now open to many more people. That's cool.
By the way, I know of numerous evangelicals who do NOT consider Catholics to be true Christians. But you're partially right, most Catholics have finally come down off of their high horses that claimed they were the only ones following the one, true path to God, and therefore were the only ones eligible for heaven.

[Pseudonym]

By the way, I know of numerous evangelicals who do NOT consider Catholics to be true Christians.

I suspect that most of those who make such a blanket statement are either ignorant of what their denomination's opinion is, or are "fundamentalist" rather than "evangelical" proper. I don't know many evangelicals, but those I've heard on the topic who take the hard-line position would at least grudgingly concede that it depends on the Catholic in question.

[NH Baritone]

By the way, I know of numerous evangelicals who do NOT consider Catholics to be true Christians.

I suspect that most of those who make such a blanket statement are either ignorant of what their denomination's opinion is, or are "fundamentalist" rather than "evangelical" proper. I don't know many evangelicals, but those I've heard on the topic who take the hard-line position would at least grudgingly concede that it depends on the Catholic in question.

You're such an optimist about cross-denominational acceptance.

interdenominational pastors' associations in local areas are notoriously hard to organize and maintain because the pastors consider one another as heretics and untrustworthy.

Ecumenical services are among the least well attended church services.

Listen to the number of highly religious Christians who doubt Obama's or Romney's Christianity. Those who care the most are the least accepting.

Watch the Anglican Union disintegrate over the issue of homosexuality.

Study the history of denominational fractionation.

Recall that the punishment for heretics used to be death.

In other words, Christians have a strong history of hating one another.

[StillSearching]

I was watching the Today Show this morning and they did a piece on an interesting situation related to this topic. They told the story of two young men, both of whom forwarded nude pictures of their girlfriends to other people. Both were convicted of child pornography charges and both are considered sex-offenders (one is serving jail time), a label that will follow them for a long time to come and have serious repercussions on their lives.

Now I'm not saying that what they did was right. But can you lump these two boys into the same category as a 40-year-old who coerces a 12-year-old into performing a sex act, takes video or still images of it and distributes it for profit?

[NH Baritone]

I was watching the Today Show this morning and they did a piece on an interesting situation related to this topic. They told the story of two young men, both of whom forwarded nude pictures of their girlfriends to other people. Both were convicted of child pornography charges and both are considered sex-offenders (one is serving jail time), a label that will follow them for a long time to come and have serious repercussions on their lives.

Now I'm not saying that what they did was right. But can you lump these two boys into the same category as a 40-year-old who coerces a 12-year-old into performing a sex act, takes video or still images of it and distributes it for profit?

I have been genuinely enraged at the ways that laws designed to protect youth are then turned into capricious, life-ruining, legal sledgehammers that harm children instead.

Several years ago when New Hampshire first enacted a tougher child molestation law, there was a case nearby where a boy who was literally only 3 months older than his girlfriend turned 16 before she did. (New Hampshire's age of consent is 16.) In that 3 month gap, she became pregnant. The police charged the boy with felony statutory rape, initially denied him bail, and locked him up in the county's adult jail, because it was an adult crime.

They have since changed the law, and a wiser prosecutor saw to it that the boy never actually went to trial, but the life disruption on one so young was enormous. After all, he was doing nothing that he hadn't already done over the past year when they were both 15. So which was his crime: having sex or having a birthday?

Kids that take nudey pictures of themselves and send them via cellphones are simply engaging in childhood pranks. Using laws designed to prevent child predation to endanger children is both Orwellian & Kafkaesque. And police who insist that they're just enforcing the law are too often undermining public respect for that same law.

[whoosanightowl]

NHB said:

Kids that take nudey pictures of themselves and send them via cellphones are simply engaging in childhood pranks.

NHB,
The guys didn't take and send nude pictures of themselves, they took and sent nude pictures of their girlfriends! Big difference! Now unless the girls were under 16 and the young men were over 18, I don't think the young men should be accused of child porn or be registered as sex offenders. But I do think they should be held responsible for violation of privacy via unauthorized "sexting" or something on that order, and made to pay for their bad judgment.

[Atheist37]

The guys didn't take and send nude pictures of themselves, they took and sent nude pictures of their girlfriends! Big difference! Now unless the girls were under 16 and the young men were over 18, I don't think the young men should be accused of child porn or be registered as sex offenders. But I do think they should be held responsible for violation of privacy via unauthorized "sexting" or something on that order, and made to pay for their bad judgment.

My youngest son had two friends over after school to play. They were all 15 years old, one of them was a girl. The way I heard it, she started flashing them her breasts, which eventually led to her stripping for them, and then she asked them to take pictures of her with their phones. This was a young adolescent girl who was enjoying the sexual power she was able to exert over her two friends. It was all jokes and giggles. As I was driving the friends home they were looking at the pictures in the back seat and giggling. I figured something was wrong and my son confessed what they had done. I told them they could go to prison for child pornography. Those photos all got deleted very, very quickly.

But who is the victim here? Is there a victim? Can't adolescent kids play around with their emerging sexuality, in a safe environment, without risking JAIL???? And lifetime SEX OFFENDER status? Really when you think about it, I am an accessory to a crime by not reporting the event to the police. I could go to jail for child porn and become a life long sex offender because I didn't turn in the kids. Something is horribly wrong here.

[darkumbra]

The guys didn't take and send nude pictures of themselves, they took and sent nude pictures of their girlfriends! Big difference! Now unless the girls were under 16 and the young men were over 18, I don't think the young men should be accused of child porn or be registered as sex offenders. But I do think they should be held responsible for violation of privacy via unauthorized "sexting" or something on that order, and made to pay for their bad judgment.

My youngest son had two friends over after school to play. They were all 15 years old, one of them was a girl. The way I heard it, she started flashing them her breasts, which eventually led to her stripping for them, and then she asked them to take pictures of her with their phones. This was a young adolescent girl who was enjoying the sexual power she was able to exert over her two friends. It was all jokes and giggles. As I was driving the friends home they were looking at the pictures in the back seat and giggling. I figured something was wrong and my son confessed what they had done. I told them they could go to prison for child pornography. Those photos all got deleted very, very quickly.

But who is the victim here? Is there a victim? Can't adolescent kids play around with their emerging sexuality, in a safe environment, without risking JAIL???? And lifetime SEX OFFENDER status? Really when you think about it, I am an accessory to a crime by not reporting the event to the police. I could go to jail for child porn and become a life long sex offender because I didn't turn in the kids. Something is horribly wrong here.

Not to mention then posting the info on a public forum.

The rules are silly in the extreme. If 'playing doctor' is really a crime, then we don't have enough cells to lock up more than a few billion of us. The rest of us will get off Scot free (sorry Scot)

[Pseudonym]

You're such an optimist about cross-denominational acceptance.

interdenominational pastors' associations in local areas are notoriously hard to organize and maintain because the pastors consider one another as heretics and untrustworthy.

Maybe. Maybe my experience is just different.

Back in the 80s, when our Uniting Church (union of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist) was being renovated, we had our Sunday school in the Anglican church and the new cross was donated by the Roman Catholic church. The Salvation Army helped us out a bit with logistics, too.

Of all of the churches in our community, there was only one that we had trouble with: The local Assemblies of God.

Ecumenical services are among the least well attended church services.

In my experience, all services that aren't at the usual time and place tend to be poorly attended.

Watch the Anglican Union disintegrate over the issue of homosexuality.

I haven't been watching that closely, but so far, I haven't seen anyone pull out the "you're not a Christian" line.

In other words, Christians have a strong history of hating one another.

Even if you have a memory long enough to remember all that, we're still talking about less than a quarter of Christianity's history (the Reformation to around the late 20th century).

Now I'm not claiming that Evangelicals don't hate Catholics. Many, if not most, surely do. But few of those who are in charge would say outright that a Roman Catholic isn't a Real Christian(tm) just by virtue of being Catholic. They would admit, at least, that it depends on the Roman Catholic in question.

As for the Obama thing... look, I'm not American, and I don't pretend to understand that. But I have a feeling it's the same motivation as who think he isn't a US citizen. Those who don't call Romney a Christian are at least on a bit firmer ground, since his religion is, at the very least, not one of the "main streams" of Christianity.

[whoosanightowl]

Pseudonym wrote:'

Back in the 80s, when our Uniting Church (union of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist) was being renovated, we had our Sunday school in the Anglican church and the new cross was donated by the Roman Catholic church. The Salvation Army helped us out a bit with logistics, too.

Of all of the churches in our community, there was only one that we had trouble with: The local Assemblies of God.

Pseudonym,
I'm impressed to hear about all of those denominations working so well together. I did notice that you didn't mention any Baptist churches being involved, or really any fundamentalist "Evangelical" churches at all.
It seems to me from my own experience that people from those denominations, along with Assembly of God/Pentecostals, tend to view churches that are more liturgical in the way they worship with the pastor wearing vestments, sacraments considered very important, services being more ritualistic, etc., as not true Christians.
Also, if churches do not profess that only by being born again can we be saved by grace through faith in Jesus alone, but place importance on getting baptized and confirmed, and works along with faith, they do not consider them true Christians.
However while they may not believe some denominations are truly Christian, many of them do admit that they can't say whether each person within those churches are hell bound because only God knows the sincerity of their hearts and where their souls stand.

[marc]

Reminds me of the "living document" discussions about the US Constitution.

Hi Tony,

I just introduced myself in the Fellowship Hall and this comment of yours was one of the things that inspired me to stop lurking and start posting.

Sorry for sidetracking this thread, I'll gladly start a new one on the topic if that's preferred, but I must ask.

How can a document, the U.S. Constitution, that within itself describes the mechanism for changing itself NOT be considered a "living document"?

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

--marc

[Emery]

How can a document, the U.S. Constitution, that within itself describes the mechanism for changing itself NOT be considered a "living document"?

It's because the Constitution contains no ambiguities, and the founding fathers were perfect in their wisdom and included contingencies for all possible future circumstances in the original document.

Welcome, marc.

[NH Baritone]

How can a document, the U.S. Constitution, that within itself describes the mechanism for changing itself NOT be considered a "living document"?

It's because the Constitution contains no ambiguities, and the founding fathers were perfect in their wisdom and included contingencies for all possible future circumstances in the original document.

I hope no one misses your sarcasm.