The Evangelical Universalist Forum

How To Live Under An Unqualified President by John Piper

I’ll settle for 2 “reasonably” good choices (from each party) - Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg. :crazy_face:

I can just envision, the billionaire battle now. :crazy_face:

Amen, that has been how our system has worked best, and is what we need to encourage.

Going beyond church attendance or public pronouncements made for political ends, In this book, Frazer scrutinizes the Founders’ candid declarations regarding religion found in their private writings. Distilling decades of research, he contends that these men were neither Christian nor deist but rather adherents of a system he labels “theistic rationalism,” a hybrid belief system that combined elements of natural religion,Christian Protestantism , and reason—with reason the decisive element.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0700620214/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This is from today’s Patheos’ Evangelical newsletter. :crazy_face:

And now a word from our sponsor. :crazy_face:

And some “public service” segments. :crazy_face:

Ooooh - I’ll bet that SNL skit is all fair and balanced!! :rofl:

What’s up in the BBC? :crazy_face:

It was Calvinism that gave birth to modern Capitalism. Calvin and the Reformers also believed in natural law and God’s revelation in nature.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus ) is a book written by Max Weber, a German sociologist, economist, and politician. Begun as a series of essays, the original German text was composed in 1904 and 1905, and was translated into English for the first time by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1930.[1] It is considered a founding text in economic sociology and a milestone contribution to sociological thought in general.

In the book, Weber wrote that capitalism in Northern Europe evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of modern capitalism.[2] In his book, apart from Calvinists, Weber also discusses Lutherans (especially Pietists, but also notes differences between traditional Lutherans and Calvinists), Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and Moravians (specifically referring to the Herrnhut-based community under Count von Zinzendorf’s spiritual lead).

In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed this work as the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century.[3] It is the 8th most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.[4]

I hope that our politicians can address science concerns. :crazy_face:

And let’s not forget, those Valentine’s day love stories. :crazy_face:

Sam Harris says Calvinism is to blame for us not moving to a Universal Basic Income:

Self-reliance in the vein of Calvinism, said Harris, is a value that must be overcome to transition to a future era of plenty:

“If we have a culture of people who think, ‘I don’t want any handouts. And I certainly don’t want my neighbor to get any handouts. And I don’t want to pay any taxes so that he can be a lazy bum,’ if we have this hangover from Calvinism, it makes it impossible to talk creatively and reasonably about what has changed.”

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor — both black and white, here and abroad. ~~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Early America incorporated the Protestant’s work ethic or Calvinism’s work ethic but denied the essentials of traditional Christianity. They intertwined Reason and Natural theology to come up with a new religion. Some referred to it as Christian rationalism but a better word would be theistic rationalism since they denied the orthodox teachings of Christianity.

This is from the Yahoo news. :crazy_face:

The idea that a common Judeo-Christian ethics or Judeo-Christian values underpins American politics, law and morals has been part of the “American civil religion” since the 1940s. In recent years, the phrase has been associated with American conservatism, but the concept—though not always the exact phrase—has frequently featured in the rhetoric of leaders across the political spectrum, including that of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Watch out for fake food videos, folks. :crazy_face:

This is ALL “fake news”, food videos folks. Unlike TRUE news, from sources like BBC news and Weekly World News. This short BBC video, shows them trying to “duplicate” the recipes. :crazy_face:

Re: Comrade Bernie: “The tactics used against Trump and his supporters are Stalinist. Did the U. S. defeat the S. U. so that B. S. could turn the U. S. into the S. U. again?” - BV

Trump gives 3.9 billion this year to help homeless and mentally ill. a $328 million increase.

Americans have failed people with mental illness. Trump’s new budget will change that.

Social Darwinism is any of various theories of society which emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, claiming to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics. Social Darwinists argue that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease. Different social-Darwinist groups have differing views about which groups of people are considered to be the strong and which groups of people are considered to be the weak, and they also hold different opinions about the precise mechanisms that should be used to reward strength and punish weakness. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others were used in support of authoritarianism, eugenics, racism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism, and struggle between national or racial groups.