Multiculturalism

I'm sure you don't need me to explain this to you, you just enjoy garbling Christian doctrine as do so many others here.But for the sake of others who may be able to profit from the truth, Jesus objected to buying and selling in the sacred precincts of the temple for the sacred purpose of providing the necessary sacrifices, not to buying and selling as such.And the fact that one group of Christians formed a commune in which they shared all their possessions doesn't make it the model for Christian life, though it remains A model, and it certainly doesn't make it the model for entire nations lorded over by greedy governments. Private property is the typical situation throughout Old and New Testaments. The NT is full of references to church meetings being held in private homes for instance.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I didn't know that bit of history. It explains a lot. As goes the church so goes the culture. Sad that abortion was ever justified by any branch of the Protestant church. From there to Roe v Wade and from there to fifty million abortions and from there, among other sins, to the destruction of the nation by God's judgment.

That position is certainly not new Faith, and in fact when Jesus was born a child was not recognized as human or a member of the tribe until it had lived a week. That is why Jesus was not named or circumcised until the eighth day. But it goes back even further and is mentioned in Genesis as well.AbE:And you continue to post unsupported assertions like "fifty million abortions" and utter nonsense maligning God like "to the destruction of the nation by God's judgment".Edited by jar, : see AbE:

References for number of abortions: it's over fifty million. GOOGLE PAGE "POLITIFACT" WEBSITEFetus is to baby as baby is to toddler as toddler is to teenager etc etc etc. These are stages of life, not different creatures.The Bible ranks the death of the unborn below that of a breathing person but doesn't treat it as a nonhuman. "You knew me when I was in the womb" says clearly that the unborn is a human being, and we know that the willful killing of an innocent human being is murder.The Bible is very clear that God judges nations for their sins. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." --- Matthew 6:24 "One group of Christians?" Faith, according to the Bible it was all the Christians. "All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need"; "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had."How much more "collectivist" can you get than that?

LifeNews is not a reliable source and like you, they simply post unsupported assertions and are surprised when any honest person person just laughs at their attempts. Chris Smith is even less reliable as a source of truth or honesty. Do you still not understand that simply repeating unsupported asserti0ons is no more valid then "TESTIFY Brother"? Yes, we know that is your mantra but it is more bumper sticker thinking and ignorance. And the Bible also is quite clear that God judges nations just to show he has the bigger dick.But so far there is absolutely no evidence that God has ever punished any nation.AbE:Plus you are still missing the point. Whether there were 5 abortions or 55 million abortions or 55 billion abortions, not one of them was murder.Edited by jar, : see AbE:

Capitalism is not putting money above God. It's being a good steward of the provision God gives us, using money wisely. It involves a strict work ethic, and i8ncludes saving for future need and for giving to others.The group of Christians who shared their possessions were the very earliest believers who came to belief at Pentecost because of Peter's preaching. They were Jews from other parts of the empire, in Jerusalem for the feast, they had no means other than what they had brought with them and were dependent on the Jerusalem Jews who always offered hospitality to the travelers to these feasts. It was an unusual circumstance in the history of the church and there is no evidence that the communal arrangement occurred in any other group at any other time. They were "all" the believers in that time and place. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That's not actually the definition of capitalism."Saving for future need"? Do you remember the context of Jesus' saying you can't serve God and money? It's a shame the Holy Spirit forgot to mention this while it was dictating the Book of Acts. So ... in your reading of it, everything from Acts 1 to 6 takes place in just a few days?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

To my knowledge, capitalism and capitalistic theory dates back to Adam Smith (1776 -- saw his statue in Edinburgh a few weeks ago). His ideas have been developed and perverted since then. I don't know how much of a role Christianity played in Smith's ideas and I see the question above as a matter of Christianity trying to come to terms with capitalism, which is as it should be (ie, as new ideas appear, Christian thought needs to take them into account and work out what to think about them and how to deal with them.). Using the New Testament to work these things out would be problematic at best, since the NT source manuscripts would have been snapshots of early Christian communal life which would not necessarily reflect what was happening in Christian communities three centuries later when Emperor Constantine standardized the Christian standard and mandated the destruction of all divergent forms (AKA "heretics"). One book I had read described how Constantine obliterated the heretical churches and their writings. There was one Christian community in particular in the area of Galilee that was marked for total annihilation, apparently since they were the direct descendants of the original Jewish Church. And everything that all Reformationists are able to build back to as "original" is what Constantine had given us.Earlier this month I was on a cruise around the UK. One woman on the cruise, Claire, was a Jewish woman born in Iraq whose family had to flee that country decades ago with those of her family who dared to return for their property being killed for their efforts. Be not so proud, Faith and consider the long history of pogroms that condemn Christian society over the centuries!In Liverpool, she asked me how the earliest Church, which was clearly Jewish, had lost all that Jewishness -- IOW, she was viewing it as a straight linear progression. I tried to explain that it was the Gentile take-over of the religion. I was using Galatians as a classic example of the conflict between the Jewish Church, which required all converts to also become Jewish, with the new Gentile members who did not want their tips to be nipped (reference to scene in Mel Brooks' "Men in Tights") -- namely whether new male converts to Christianity should be required to be circumcised.Anyway, at that point we had just reached a view of the Albert Docks across a lock-enclosed harbor in which the Planet Liverpool party ship as docked, so her attention immediately got sucked elsewhere.Where I was wanting to go with that was to point out that there is a massive gap between circa 70 CE ("Common Era") and circa 300 CE. During more than 200 years, a wide variety of Christian churches and cults were able to come into existence, such that much of Constantine's efforts was to eliminate all those variants. The point that I was wanting to make was that it was not necessarily the actual heir of the original Christian church that won out, but rather one of those Gentile variants and that the actual heir of the original Christian church was ear-marked by Constantine for annihilation.But all told, capitalism is not a Christian idea. Rather, the question is how Christianity can accommodate capitalism.

Bunch of BS about Constantine.Pogroms were a Catholic thing.

I was thinking more of Max Weber's book about the work ethic as the fruit of Calvinism. It emphasizes the moral use of money, not money itself. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Wikipedia

Nobody did pogroms bettern the God of the Bible.

Pogroms are a Christian thing. Even Protestants committed them, as well as Orthodox churches (actual Orthodoxy, not your perverted orthodoxy). There's lots of BS about Constantine, mainly from your camp.Bottom line: in the few centuries between the purported Ministry and the Council of Nicea, a helluva lot of things and idea systems happened which resulted in a wide variety of Christian thought and their supporting Gospels. Constantine and the Council of Nicea decided by committee which of those were true and which were heresy. The "true" sources and churches were allowed to continue to operate, while the "false sources and churches were marked for extermination.What part of that do you disagree with?

Query: does what Max Weber wrote have anything to do with what Adam Smith wrote?

But that does not sound very Christian, or, to be precise, it does not sound very Christ-like. To "strive systematically for profit for its own sake"? That sounds awfully like making Mammon one's master. And "Donation of money to the poor or to charity was generally frowned on as it was seen as furthering beggary"? How would one square that with Jesus' instruction to "sell all you have and give the money to the poor"?It may be historically true, as Weber says, that these attitudes went along with Protestantism. But then so did setting fire to Catholics; we don't infer that that is particularly in the spirit of Jesus.