Monday, August 10, 2009

unemployment has affected my faith incoming God

I Developed up in a Christian church class. I attended church, Sunday schooling and holiday Christian Bible schooltime. I acted my catechism, served for an communion table son. Christian serve was a biggest part of my life story.

Close to the time I accepted spinal surgical process respective a long time ago, I actualized that for some reason God and I made up no longer on as is paginate. Too many things were falling apart. When I prayed, I wasn’t getting that sense that God was there for me.

Out here in Oklahoma, churches teach that if you pray and really, really believe, God will answer your prayers. So pray. And pray some more. Then, wait. It’s rather like Dorothy and her ruby slippers.

Once things began going south for me, lots of friends told me they were praying for me. I converted a link in several prayer chains. I picked up e-mails and cards full of assurances that God had a plan for me, that the best was yet to come, that I should keep praying because God would hear me and make my life wonderful again.

Funny thing, though: My life kept spiraling down.

And down.

One day I was told rather pointedly by among those prayer-chain leaders that I was the obvious problem because either I wasn’t praying correctly or I hadn’t really accepted Good Shepherd as my personal Lord and Savior or I hadn’t confessed all my (impressively numerous) sins or God was testing me as he tested Job (I love that one).

And, naturally, I was told to be patient, as God works in mysterious ways and on her own timetable.

OK. I read and re-read the Bible till my eyes hurt, meditated, prayed till my knees hurt, fasted – beat attempt, like ET, to “phone home.”

Finally, I had to pack it in and call it quits. The phone kept ringing, but no one was home.

There's a God, of that I'm trusted.

I'm also sure that God isn’t the God of tele-evangelism or the God of my phone-chain-friends’ churches.

After a lifetime of religious education, reading and soul-searching, God has become an on-again-off-again God to me, who capriciously grants only those prayers that appeal, and then only when God feels like it.

A God who permits suffering under the guise of “teaching a lesson” or “testing” is a God who just isn’t that interested.

If not, then explain Somalia or the Sudan or the drought that’s killing the Southern Plains despite governors’ requests for national days of prayer for rain.

Before you start with the comments and e-mails, hear me out.

If God were the televangelism God, unemployed people wouldn’t have to beg for even the humblest jobs, for food so our children don’t go hungry, for medical aid … for help with the most canonical human needs. We wouldn’t be made to feel ashamed, be told we’re lazy and undeserving, to be told we’re to blame. We wouldn’t feel forgotten.

Which brings me to a greater question.

While my co-sufferers and I wait patiently for a message from on high, what are the Christians who have a direct line to God doing to help us?

How do these folks who wear their faith on their sleeve – bragging of their personal relation* with their personal God – make the laws that cut safety-net programs exemplify Jesus’ teachings? In Oklahoma, the Legislature (most profess their faith regularly publically) cut the top unemployment benefit from $430/week in 2010 to $358/week in 2011. And, as best I can discover, single Oklahoma adults who are not disabled don’t qualify for food stamp assistance, disregarding how little money they make.

Aren’t these as is folks stop few years ago wore bracelets and T-shirts and lapel pins asking “WWJD – What Would Jesus Do?”

That’s a no-brainer. It’s the shortest sentence found in the Bible, in the New Testament, Gospel of St. John.

“Jesus wept.”

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Faith do the religious terrorists

I'd look-alike to remonstrate to the newspaper column writer, to Judge Sohail Mahound, and to Gov. Chris Christie (who made Mohammed), that the entire universe, not only Garden State, gets on high pressure warning signal as  extraordinary, character by spiritual terrorist. They're all Moslem.

Anywhere you come in the world, even out in the Mideast, at that place are armed defends against this character of violent. Ne'er incoming my life have I looked so a lot of machine guns at the airports, even out earlier the 9/11 attacks.

A faith liberate to bring together or allow is by definition a truthful faith, just once you have to imperil destruction, so they are no longest a faith, but a religious cult through its really definition.

Islamic law legal philosophy or not, most Moslem* accept done little to fixing these most forbidding world trouble. The racialists are Muhammedan* like those in the Saudi Arabian politics that doesn't tolerate some a different interfaith symbolic representation*, literature, etc., in their country. And, yet, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia whole depends on non-Muslim countries to supplying them with around everything from food to medicinal drug.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Reveal myths Mormonism



The political campaign* by Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman Jr. for the GOP presidential nomination, along with the favourite and profane Broadway melodic “The Book of Mormon,” are arranging Mormon Church public. But common caricatures — not to mention some of the Church of Christ of Mormon*’ PR efforts — produce confusion about this fourteen million-strong religious belief. So let’s take out  misunderstandings about how this faith can engage the world, whether on a mission or in the White House.

Latter-day Saint* practice polygamy.

Mainstream Mormons don't apply polygamy nowadays, simply it stays part of our story and divinity. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saint religious belief, married at least 33 women (often without the consent of his first wife, Emma) and preached that polygamy was divinely sanctioned. In 1890, more than four decades after Smith’s death, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the mainstream Mormon Church — yielded to political pressure and phased out the practice. Nowadays, members who marry more one married person are excommunicated, but ultra-orthodox splinter groups continue the practice.

Polygamy continues a source of tensity since mainstream Mormon Church. Mormon figures routinely background our polygamous history, telling that only a small part of 19th-century Mormon families were polygamous. (Historians say it was 20 to 30 percent.) But the LDS Church, which teaches that marriages — or “sealings” — performed in its temples are eternal, has never disavowed chemical element* of Latter-day Saint theological system suggesting that polygamy will represent practiced in heaven. Church policy allows widowed and some divorced men to be sealed for all eternity to more one wife, while Mormon women may not be sealed to more one husband. Consequently, some mainstream LDS churchgoers anticipate polygamy as part of eternity, while others reject it.

Mormons aren’t Christians.

A couple of weeks ago, an anchor on Fox News stated that Mitt Romney is “obviously not . . . a Christian.” Yet that equal Sunday morning, millions of members of the Christian church of Jesus of Mormon* around the world prayed in the name of Jesus, received a bread-and-water sacrament memorializing the body and blood of Christ, and discussed Savior* teachings in Sunday school.

We Latter-day Saint* view ourselves as Christians. A lot of Christian pastors and scholarly person*, however, point to theological technicalities that disqualify us from the mainline tradition. Some evangelicals do not see us as Christians for reasons rooted in antiquated anti-Mormon prejudice. And Mormons distance ourselves from other Christians by claiming that our faith offers a “restoration” of doctrines lost to mainstream Christendom.

Growing up in California, I often discovered that I belonged to a cult; local churches screened anti-Mormon films; and classmates taped anti-Mormon notes in my locker. Some people will never see Mormons as Christians. But ask my Jewish husband if he thinks his Christmas-celebrating, New Testament-reading Mormon wife is Christian, and his answer will be absolutely yes.