an email i got today~ please read

AND WE SAID OKAY





Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God let something like this happen?"(regarding the attacks on Sept. 11).





Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She

said, "I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for

years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our

government and to get out of our lives.

And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly

backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?"



In light of recent events...terrorists attack, school shootings, etc.

I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body

found recently) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we

said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school . The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK. Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said OK. Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves. Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."





Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the

world's going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but

question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace. Are you laughing?

Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us. Don't sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in!!

 

Haha! I couldn't have said it better.

 

you are going to have to delve below the surface if you ever want to begin to understand "God."

 

Nahh. We reap what God sows, be it death, destruction, orgasms, fame, fortune, or idiocy. Me, I have greater than the average share of the latter... could go for more of the other 5...

 

just to let you know that none of that post was my words. It was all in the email, although i agree with it

 

thats like when my dad(the pastor) told me that god made me sick cause i behaved badly. just another reason i choose to turn away.

 

That's because we're in the world sister, and the world's anti-christian.

 

care to elaborate on your unique perspective dude?

why would you turn away from God because of something stupid that someone else did? Your dad shouldnt have made such a manipulative comment. Reminds me of the nuns in movies who literally try to "beat the hell" out of children, constantly threatening them with hellfire instead of loving them with heavenly things. Kinda sets the stage for a lifetime of feeling unworthy, dont you think? That was never God's intention for us to treat eachother that way.

When Jesus walked the earth he wasnt threatening people with the thought of hell, he was loving them into his kingdom. I hope you can recieve healing from that old wound and start fresh with God. We are not supposed to follow the followers. Just follow Christ.

 

wow i cant believe your 45. I thought people in thier 40's can actually explain where they're coming from and why they say the things they do. And no, that elaboration is not good enough, you basically repeated yourself. Try again?
Why is it a load of shit?

 

I'm going to have to go with Fuzzynuts on this one, though I'll try to be more articulate. Frankly that article, or e-mail or whatever it was depicts a person clearly out of touch with history and reality. Its conclusions and implications are truly disturbing.

Let us have a look back to a time when the Bible and Christianity were taught in schools, and when "God" was present in the work place. For the sake of Brevity and depth I'll limit this to America.
We had slavery, civil war, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and it was illegal for women and non-whites to vote. Natural disasters in general killed thousands more people than today (though there are obvious exceptions). Manual laborers such as mine and factory workers were treated like slaves and essentially were. We had the dust bowl, the Great depression, World War I. We nearly wiped out the Native Americans. Diseases like polio and scarlet fever killed more people than aids. Folks were sent to jail sometimes for decades for being homosexual. During prohibition murder and mob activity ravaged cities due mainly to the Christian temperance movement. I could go on of course, but since Church and state have become more separate (as they should be) things on a whole have gotten better, not worse. There is certainly bad shit now, but compared to a hundred years ago and more we are sitting pretty. Perhaps this is a coincidence, perhaps it is not, but the only evidence suggest that if there is a connection it is an argument for separation of church and state.

p.s. And if you want to talk about when Christianity was taught in the schools and the work place in Europe, man, ohman, oh man. .

 

Think of all of the worst oppression in the world...

...and then realize that religious fanaticism is almost always at play.

 

No sister. You left out the most important part. The Christians as anti-everything-that-is-not Christian make nearly everyone hate them.

If morons like GW Bush weren't trying to wipe out Muslims in the name of Jesus, if oh-so-pious assholes like Pat Robertson weren't urging the government to kill foreign heads of state in the name of Jesus and oil revenues, and if the American Family Association wasn't spending thousands of man-hours per week trying to restrict MY freedoms, I don't think Christians would have even half as many detractors. I personally don't hate anyone. To each their own.

But Christian righteousness is certainly attracting the Romans again and they have a whole new batch of lions. Nice and hungry, too. Good luck with that huh?

 

RE: Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said OK. Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves. Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with "WE REAP WHAT WE SOW."

I take exception to that. You don't have to beat your kids in order to teach them right from wrong or to prevent them from killing themselves. Spock's son MAY have committed suicide, but that's not because he wasn't spanked mercilessly with a stick.

Besides don't you Jesus Freaks refuse to care about right vs wrong, preferring instead to frame it as "saved vs unsaved?" enslave that black man, kill that red man, oppress that brown man it don't matter cause AM SAYUVED BA THE BLUD UV THA LAMB HALLYLUJAH WOOHOO WOOPP WOOP YEEEEE HAW!!!!! *much gunfire into the air*

 

And by the way Spock's son did NOT commit suicide. Thou shalt not bear false witness? But that takes second place before promoting your pro-war, anti-human agenda...

http://www.snopes.com/medical/doctor/drspock.htm

 

Funny how I have gotten that same exact email in my inbox, regardless of the fact it pretends that those stupid godly emails aren't filling up spam folders all over the world.

 

I don't know about you seahorse but my God goes where he wants. If your God turns his back on kids because they're not allowed to chant his name in a classroom, doesn't sound like there's much there to have faith in.


anyway, you claim to be a follower of Jesus of Nazereth, the guy who said "When you pray, go into your closet".
Do they hold classes in closets where you're at?

 

the most common response i get to the "pray in your closet" [which proobly mean like private room or whatever] is that He is speaking against the Pharasees who were praying so people saw them praying...i stil think it juist applies even if you aren't doing it to look rightous, look at Jesus in the garden before He was captured, He went off so to be alone

 

isn't that a matter of opinion?

get to know him and you will know His heart. He is never pleased by disaster or seeing people hurt, but as long as there's sinners on the earth, there will be disaster, and we havnt seen anything yet.

so how do you know that this deranged woman is wrong and you happen to be the right one? isnt this all just one deranged man's point of view? She's saying how she thinks GOd feels, you are stating your opinions as facts.

oF course He could have prevented it! But do we really deserve for Him to be saving our asses all the time? He already became human and took the weight of humanity's sin on His shoulders so we can be reconciled with HIm again, what more could we ask for.

Sorry to hear that, I've lost grandparents and my kids lost thier best friends in a house fire, but i've never lost anyone in my age group

this "Fairytale" offers more hope, more peace, more love, more fulfillment and more comfort than anything the world has got to offer you or me. And if i live my life for Jesus, and all the goodness this fairytale has shown and given me, and i die and find out it's all bogus, i have lost nothing.

yep thanks for elaborating.

there's obviously a difference between beating your kids and spanking them. I think Anne Graham was referring more to the undisciplined children. God does not want us to BEAT anyone! BUt it is necessary to have a strong yet loving hand with our children, as to raise them to respect authority. That's not hard to agree with, is it.

I too thought it was unneccessary to mention the suicide in the email. Not all undisciplined kids will kill themselves. Maybe even some discplined kids will end thier own lives. Who knows?

perhaps the most self - righteous of the bunch do. BUt we all have to stand before God one day. Christian or not, we all throw too many stones and dont pay enough attention to our own faults and large amount of room for improvement.

who here said GOd turns his back on anyone?

just like Burbot said, He meant to pray in private rather than praying to show off how good you are. If you've read that in the BIble, you can see His point. people were praying ont he street corners to be seen. Remember? The white-washed tombs.....cleaning the outside of the cup....God is not interested in how we can impress eachother with our spirituality, He is interested in our hearts.

 

Yeah, I know all that.
Why he said it isn't the issue.
What I want to know is how can you claim to adhere to that principle and still agree with someone saying that banning public prayer in school is a bad thing.

 

"Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She

said, "I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for

years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our

government and to get out of our lives."



This is a crock of shit on so many levels.

Equating the banning of christian prayer in public schools with "telling God to get out of our schools" or considerring the seperation of church and state the same as "Telling God to get out of our govermant" implies that everybody believes in the christian god and decided to take him out of the picture anyway.