FIRST REPLY TO ROCKO | 2005-09-03
I was beginning to get that awful feeling that I was talking to myself, then Rocko came to the rescue with a comment on *******Blog Book below.
I will have more to say, but let me put his comment and my first reply in at once:
ROCKO:
Bob,
You certainly know how to retire! I'm afraid to even take a peek at the "long blog"!
Methinks thou protesteth too much. Usually you can make a point in short order. Not on this one.
I think you have reversed cause and effect in trying to describe 4th Century Christianity. People are susceptible to "wordisms", which is why we get them all the time. Ruling elites can take on the form of something and twist it to the same old ends. That is what happened with Christianity in the 4th century.
But our "Odinist" ancestors who just wanted knowledge took to Christianity quite readily. Maybe they found in it something that appealed to their desire to know. Christendom also fostered science and technology, it didn't thwart it. The real story behind Galileo is not as simple as the simpletons in the Universities present it. Yes, priesthoods grow up and corrupt the very institutions they are put in charge of. That IS the story of the Bible. Jesus overthrew the corrupt priesthood of his day, not physically, but by his authority, because he cut through the BS, referred to as "traditions of the elders".
Leftism has denied the very foundation of Christian teaching, that one's words MUST match one's deeds. If what one is doing contradicts what one is saying (as in your yuppie example), then it is obvious that one doesn't know what one is talking about, and is not worth listening to. The book of James refers to it as double-mindedness.
Likewise, one builds on a solid foundation in order to be able to withstand and even thrive in the constant changing of life. That is what the sea hitting the houses in the parable represents. I think you've missed some basic points somewhere.
ME:
Rocko, I will write a blog entry dealing with your comment.
But let me say up front that I agree with your general point. In fact, if you look at what I have said over and over here, you are making much the same points I have made.
The missionaries who spread Christianity to our Odinist ancestors did not drag the whole seven hundred thousand words of the Old Testament with them on scrolls. It would have sunk their boat.
What they brought was the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our ancestors had no way of knowing that that huge rotting Middle Eastern crap came with it.
They had no way of knowing that for a thousand years their people would be drained of sustenance by the Medieval Papacy. In fact, everything they heard in the Gospel of Jesus Christ was precisely the opposite.
Wordism came after the Gospel. Our Odinist forefathers did not convert to the perversion that goes under the name of any church today.