= Free will is the right to do both good and evil.

The Bible speaks nothing of natural or inalienable rights. NOTHING. Chapter and verse please.

= Gen. 1:26, Psalms 8:6 & 82:6 seems to indicate that man isn’t without self-control and freedom.

The verses you listed are completely non-germane. “Love one another” means we have an inalienable right to violate the First Commandment?

= You don’t get that just because someone else chooses not to follow the Commandments like you, doesn’t mean you can force them to follow the same religious laws that you do, or even force every member of a party to follow the rules of God the way you do.

Please. That is an absurd reach. Also, the neither Jew nor Greek verses refer to salvation being available to all through Christ.

= It shows that salvation is available to all, irregardless of where you came from or what you are.

It also says neither male nor female. Surely you don’t think that means God was abolishing gender roles or gender.

= It shows that God is no sexist when it comes to salvation.

Jews remained Jews and Greeks remained Greeks after those verses were written.

= Funny how I remember that some Jews were still converting to Christianity after those verses.

I’m really not even sure how that is supposed to apply. (You do realize that immigration supporters use those verses to attempt to Biblically illustrate why Christians are supposed to support open immigration, don’t you?)

= That are supposedly interpreted by them to prove it. There is also scripture that says we are to abide by the laws of the land; one of those verses I’ve already quoted here.

Really there is absolutely no Biblical basis for the concept of natural or inalienable rights.

= However there is a crystal clear basis for it in the Book of Mormon.

None. You will search in vain for support of those concepts in Scripture, so you should just give up now and admit you like the ideas based on rationalistic reason, not Revelation.

= Wrong. There’s the revelations of Joseph Smith and the other Prophets of my Church. That includes D&C Sec. 134.

Again, I am not convinced the Bible mandates a particular political order, but it is completely illegitimate to say that the Bible supports the concept that God grants us an inalienable right to worship as we please.

= If we couldn’t worship as we please, then we couldn’t sin, period, its that simple.

It simply doesn’t. The first 1700 or so years of the Church never believed such a thing.

“Perhaps you need to do your research into the Party history first…”

Perhaps you should test my knowledge.

= When did the AHP break off from the CP and why did they do it?

= Justifiable excesses. I do admit Chris Hansen went overboard on a few things, but he wasn’t the aggressor here.

Note, I have never defended the spirit of tenor of some of the Nevada critics. There clearly were excesses. But there were appalling excesses on the “victorious” side as well.

The verses you listed are completely non-germane. “Love one another” means we have an inalienable right to violate the First Commandment? Please. That is an absurd reach. Also, the neither Jew nor Greek verses refer to salvation being available to all through Christ. It also says neither male nor female. Surely you don’t think that means God was abolishing gender roles or gender. Jews remained Jews and Greeks remained Greeks after those verses were written. I’m really not even sure how that is supposed to apply. (You do realize that immigration supporters use those verses to attempt to Biblically illustrate why Christians are supposed to support open immigration, don’t you?) Really there is absolutely no Biblical basis for the concept of natural or inalienable rights. None. You will search in vain for support of those concepts in Scripture, so you should just give up now and admit you like the ideas based on rationalistic reason, not Revelation.

Again, I am not convinced the Bible mandates a particular political order, but it is completely illegitimate to say that the Bible supports the concept that God grants us an inalienable right to worship as we please. It simply doesn’t. The first 1700 or so years of the Church never believed such a thing.

“Perhaps you need to do your research into the Party history first…”

Perhaps you should test my knowledge.

“Or the view that divorce is morally wrong”

WHAT? You don’t believe that divorce is morally wrong?

= No idiot! I was talking about the views that many Christian Churches held back then! Even Divorce over adultery and abuse was frowned on then.

The Bible CLEARLY condemns divorce except in very limited circumstances. Surely you know this.

=DER!

“that a women’s place is in the home”

That is, of course, an argumentative and very PC way to put it and you know it, but the Bible and all of human history endorse the idea of gender roles. So are you now a feminist? Do you oppose the clearly Christian and traditional concept of gender roles? My how progressive of you.

= Obviously you are simpleton as to how Churches were firm on a women being ‘barefoot and pregnant’, where women couldn’t smoke or gather in large crowds.

The problem with feminists is that they go way too far in women’s rights and support abortion. The Calvinist crowd believes that women should always submit to her husband no-matter-what and have no voting rights.

= The truth is in the middle, in that balence, however.
Of course both sides can’t comprehend that.

Cody, I don’t think you really know where I am coming from.

= Sounds like you’re coming from the extremist faction that we battled years earlier.

You are arguing against where you think I am coming from or where past people have been coming from, not what I actually said. Take a few deep breaths and try to separate yourself from your emotions and the hostilities you obviously have for certain people or groups for just a minute. Try a little subtlety and nuance in your thinking. I am not a theonomist/Reconstructionist if that is what you think. I am, however, an illiberal Christian, and I am defending another group of illiberal Christians against attacks from a liberal standpoint.

=No, you’re defending them against attacks from a standpoint that Jesus took on the Pharisees and other intolerant & hypocritical sects in Jerusalem.

Theonomist should be opposed, if they should be opposed, because their theology is wrong. Not because you think the implications of their theology is too illiberal for your liking.

= I oppose them for BOTH.

If Theonomy was actually the correct interpretation and application of Scripture then Christians would be duty bound to follow it regardless, would they not?

= Then our nation and our Constitution would be completely different then it is now.

Or are the commands of man higher than the commands of God?

= “Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work.”

-Titus 3:1

“Religious tolerance however, Red, is something that comes from the Bible,”

Well there is the rub. Where does the Bible teach that? What chapter and verse?

= St. John 13:34, Romans 10:12, Gal. 3:28, Col 3:11, etc.

I do not think the Bible necessarily mandates a political order that suppresses opposing faiths, but I find NOWHERE in the Bible support for the assertion that God gave us a “right” to violate the First Commandment.

= If God didn’t give us a ‘right’ to violate the First Commandment, then we shouldn’t be able to sin in the first place.

If so, then doesn’t God owe the Baal worshippers, among others, an apology? Too many modern Christians have placed Enlightenment platitudes in the mouth of God.

= Other modern Christians have placed superstitious and ignorant beliefs of man & society in the mouth of God too.
Westboro Baptist Church ring a bell?

If you are going to invoke God, then you have to back that invocation up with theology, not just use God as window dressing for Enlightenment liberal platitudes that are philosophically arrived at.

= Which I already did, and also rebuked the irrational and pathetic arguments against my faith here in this blog.

I really like the way you set yourself up as the arbiter of who does and does not belong in the CP.

= You did that to yourself. I have been with the Party since I was old enought to vote, and continue to do so. Of course you’re sounding like one ‘who does and does not belong to the CP.

How tolerant of you.

= How ignorant of you.

Perhaps you should learn to make mental distinctions before you set out on your purge so you don’t take down some people with friendly fire.

= Perhaps you need to do your research into the Party history first and not defend those whom smear the name of Christ with Man’s own prejudices and doctrines.

I’m waiting for my Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ, to return in the flesh to take up his rightful place.

Intil that time, I don’t want my fellow, fallen humans, either singly or collectively, running my life, sending my kids to fight aggresive wars or taxing me to do it to others. (Isn’t this the part we all can agree on?)

I’ll call no man a bigot for disagreeing with my beliefs. I always hope to recieve the same curtesy, sometimes vainly.

O.W.

“Or the view that divorce is morally wrong”

WHAT? You don’t believe that divorce is morally wrong? The Bible CLEARLY condemns divorce except in very limited circumstances. Surely you know this.

“that a women’s place is in the home”

That is, of course, an argumentative and very PC way to put it and you know it, but the Bible and all of human history endorse the idea of gender roles. So are you now a feminist? Do you oppose the clearly Christian and traditional concept of gender roles? My how progressive of you.

Cody, I don’t think you really know where I am coming from. You are arguing against where you think I am coming from or where past people have been coming from, not what I actually said. Take a few deep breaths and try to separate yourself from your emotions and the hostilities you obviously have for certain people or groups for just a minute. Try a little subtlety and nuance in your thinking. I am not a theonomist/Reconstructionist if that is what you think. I am, however, an illiberal Christian, and I am defending another group of illiberal Christians against attacks from a liberal standpoint. Theonomist should be opposed, if they should be opposed, because their theology is wrong. Not because you think the implications of their theology is too illiberal for your liking. If Theonomy was actually the correct interpretation and application of Scripture then Christians would be duty bound to follow it regardless, would they not? Or are the commands of man higher than the commands of God?

“Religious tolerance however, Red, is something that comes from the Bible,”

Well there is the rub. Where does the Bible teach that? What chapter and verse? I do not think the Bible necessarily mandates a political order that suppresses opposing faiths, but I find NOWHERE in the Bible support for the assertion that God gave us a “right” to violate the First Commandment. If so, then doesn’t God owe the Baal worshippers, among others, an apology? Too many modern Christians have placed Enlightenment platitudes in the mouth of God. If you are going to invoke God, then you have to back that invocation up with theology, not just use God as window dressing for Enlightenment liberal platitudes that are philosophically arrived at.

I really like the way you set yourself up as the arbiter of who does and does not belong in the CP. How tolerant of you. Perhaps you should learn to make mental distinctions before you set out on your purge so you don’t take down some people with friendly fire.

=That’s why I wrote in Ron Paul’s name on my Primary ballot.

Anyone who knows anything about Mormonism is aware that they hold no significant distinctively Christian beliefs.

= WRONG AGAIN!

http://en.fairmormon.org/Latter-day_Saints_aren%27t_Christians

= I guess believing in Jesus Christ doesn’t make you a Christian then by this logic. LOL!

with. Period. Yes, they say they believe that Our Lord is the son of God but through, shall we say, the ordinary means of procreation–a disgusting blasphemy.

= WRONG!

http://en.fairmormon.org/Jesus_Christ%27s_conception

= Why can’t you get your facts right?

They also say, as Huckabee has pointed out, that Christ is the brother of Lucifer.

= WRONG AGAIN!

http://en.fairmormon.org/Jesus_Christ_is_the_brother_of_Satan

Ask a Mormon some time about what he expects to be doing on the planet he gets and whether he has informed his wife of the secret name by which he can be found in his next life. It is a wierd Judeo-gnostic sect based on what appears to be a fantasy novel,

= http://en.fairmormon.org/Plain_and_Precious_Book_of_Mormon_doctrines

written in an illiterate form of Jacobean English

= http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon_textual_changes

and purloined by the water witch Joseph Smith.

= http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith_and_the_occult

I would respect Romney more if he would simply come clean and tell the world some of the entirely wacky things that Mormons believe. Why are there no Mormon scholars?

= Because you obviously haven’t been to BYU!

Because Mormons believe lies and if they start to find out truth, they become ex-Mormons.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Education_and_belief

= Too bad those that claimed so we’re excommunicated for reasons like adultery or extortion, like Ed Decker, or even because of their sexuality, like Michael Quinn.

As for me, I’d vote for an agnostic immoralist like Giuliani long before I voted for a Mormon.

= Your choice.

The mere fact that the call us “gentiles” reveals how they really regard Christians: as unwashed enemies of their “faith.”

= Never mind the persecution and affliction the Church and it’s members received early on, including the murder of Joseph Smith.

Though I’ve never heard the word used figuratively in my Ward ever.

Why go on? I once naively asked a Mormon assistant

= A fictional assistant at best in this fairytale:)

why we couldn’t sink sectarian differences and shake hands on the Apostles Creed. He informed me politely that Mormons agreed with nothing in the Creeds. Not even, I persisted, that God is creator of heaven and earth? No, because they think that “God”–some kind of organic superman who worked his way to the godhead–

http://en.fairmormon.org/Infinite_regress_of_Gods%3F

merely shaped a preexisting universe. Wow, I answered, a giant leap backward from the profound insight of creatio ex nihilo…

http://en.fairmormon.org/Creatio_ex_nihilo

I would rather not speculate on why some Christians appear to be more loyal to the GOP than to their professed faith.

= Depending on the individual. Some are in it for the power.

All I can say is that while individual Mormons may be good people and some of them may even rise to the level of Christian heretic, their strange cult should preclude any Christian, Jew, agnostic, rational atheist from voting for them.”

= Too bad the Senate Majority leader is one, or that the majority of Americans don’t believe your crap.

Dr. Thomas Fleming
Editor, Chronicles Magazine

= An ‘Intellectual’ moron that shares the likes of John Lofton.

Wow ex-CP Committee! Constantly proving you wrong just makes you more petty and irrational, doesn’t it?

=And such religious tests were repealed within decades after our Constitution was established.

Calling someone a bigot, is a left-wing PC tactic, and no amount of foot stomping on your part will make it less so. As is playing the race card. I would be embarrassed to use such a tactic. Next, why don’t you use a Nazi or Hitler illustration? Then you will complete the whole left-wing PC circle.

= Sorry, but its not left-wing, and if you don’t like how we believe in treating everybody equal in the Party except for those that cannot treat others as they treat themselves, then look for another party.

Hey, maybe you can check out the LP? At least people like disinter are welcome among their ranks.

Christian Identity is not a serious theology. It starts with an idea, and tortures the Bible to confirm that idea. No serious Christian theologians support it.

= But it’s still a theology, indeed as pathetic and false as it is, just like Wahhabism.

But almost all Christians until relatively recently by historical standards recognized Enlightenment ideas as hostile to the Faith.

=Many Christians, that were Freemasons, or not, like some of the Founding Fathers, actually advanced ideas that were contrary to those Churches beliefs.

Accepting Enlightenment ideas and incorporating them into the Faith is the novel position. So you, the self-proclaimed determiner of who belongs in the Party, are essentially saying that anyone who holds the position that the Church held for all but the last couple of hundred years (give or take) doesn’t belong.

= Those that want to make America into something that it never was and never will be: a man-made Theocracy, do not belong at all with the fold of those that want to restore our government and not start a new one.

Are you saying that it is wrong to distance from those beliefs that slavery is a christian institution and slaves are more animal then man? Or the view that divorce is morally wrong and that a women’s place is in the home? Or the idea that the Earth is flat, or that the sun evolves around the Earth?

= Better yet, how about we go father back then that, when there was only the Catholic Church and anybody with a mental illness was seen as possessed.

How progressive of you.

=Mankind and the world is constantly progressing, Red.
The question is, will he, progress for the good, or the worse?

That would be fine, I guess, if the CP was the Enlightenment Liberalism Party,

= Well supposedly some constitutionalist consider themselves as Classical Liberals.

but I thought it was a conservative party, a party that even has pretenses of being a paleo party.

=WRONG! It is a ‘Constitutionalist Party’; conservative is such a pathetic word that the GOP has corrupted.

What is paleoconservatism if not the conscious rejection of Enlightenment liberalism? Paleo meaning before what? Please fill me in?

= ‘Paleoconsevative’ may come close to describing us, but officially we’re Constitutionalists, as in believing in our Constitution, word-by-word, including NO Religious Tests or any crap from the old European Kingdoms that the Founders abhored.

I actually don’t agree with some elements of your opposition that the Bible mandates a particular political order.

= One Problem, WHICH Bible? The KJV, the Geneva Bible? How about the Catholic Bible that includes parts of the Apocrypha? Another Problem was that those governments that had their own Bible, or particular Faith, as the supreme law of the land, were nothing but tyrannical monarchies that were toltalitarianistic in their approach of instilling ‘Biblical law’.
While the Founders wrote our Constitution as to avoid the horrible abuses of the man-made Catholic and Protestant governments of Europe.

But it clearly does not enshrine Enlightenment liberalism either. Far from it.

= There’s two sides to the coin. The Enlightenment brought about advances in technology and medicine, it also brought a new found respect in the aspects of Republican government. Of course on the other side came about secularism and atheism, and eventually the ideologies of socialism and communism.
The Enlightenment was essentially both good and bad for mankind.

My dog in this fight is the rejection of left-wing PC language by those on the “right.”

= PC is something invented by today’s society.
Religious tolerance however, Red, is something that comes from the Bible, from what the Savior taught. The ex-CP’ers that contradicted such scripture deserve that label; being no better then the Pharisees themselves, even Jesus had strong language for such people.

Anyone who knows anything about Mormonism is aware that they hold no significant distinctively Christian beliefs. with. Period. Yes, they say they believe that Our Lord is the son of God but through, shall we say, the ordinary means of procreation–a disgusting blasphemy. They also say, as Huckabee has pointed out, that Christ is the brother of Lucifer. Ask a Mormon some time about what he expects to be doing on the planet he gets and whether he has informed his wife of the secret name by which he can be found in his next life. It is a wierd Judeo-gnostic sect based on what appears to be a fantasy novel, written in an illiterate form of Jacobean English and purloined by the water witch Joseph Smith. I would respect Romney more if he would simply come clean and tell the world some of the entirely wacky things that Mormons believe. Why are there no Mormon scholars? Because Mormons believe lies and if they start to find out truth, they become ex-Mormons. As for me, I’d vote for an agnostic immoralist like Giuliani long before I voted for a Mormon. The mere fact that the call us “gentiles” reveals how they really regard Christians: as unwashed enemies of their “faith.”

Why go on? I once naively asked a Mormon assistant why we couldn’t sink sectarian differences and shake hands on the Apostles Creed. He informed me politely that Mormons agreed with nothing in the Creeds. Not even, I persisted, that God is creator of heaven and earth? No, because they think that “God”–some kind of organic superman who worked his way to the godhead–merely shaped a preexisting universe. Wow, I answered, a giant leap backward from the profound insight of creatio ex nihilo…

I would rather not speculate on why some Christians appear to be more loyal to the GOP than to their professed faith. All I can say is that while individual Mormons may be good people and some of them may even rise to the level of Christian heretic, their strange cult should preclude any Christian, Jew, agnostic, rational atheist from voting for them.”

Dr. Thomas Fleming
Editor, Chronicles Magazine

=The cases are still pending. The state government hasn’t taken a final decision on whether to impose the fines or not. Even Janine has fines against her and yet she is still running.

BTW its ‘Hansen’ NOT ‘Hanson’ you dolt!

The prohibition against religious tests was not entirely motivated by Enlightenment liberalism. It was also motivated by a desire to keep the peace among the States, most of which had established churches and religious tests, but of various denominations.

Calling someone a bigot, is a left-wing PC tactic, and no amount of foot stomping on your part will make it less so. As is playing the race card. I would be embarrassed to use such a tactic. Next, why don’t you use a Nazi or Hitler illustration? Then you will complete the whole left-wing PC circle.

Christian Identity is not a serious theology. It starts with an idea, and tortures the Bible to confirm that idea. No serious Christian theologians support it. But almost all Christians until relatively recently by historical standards recognized Enlightenment ideas as hostile to the Faith. Accepting Enlightenment ideas and incorporating them into the Faith is the novel position. So you, the self-proclaimed determiner of who belongs in the Party, are essentially saying that anyone who holds the position that the Church held for all but the last couple of hundred years (give or take) doesn’t belong. How progressive of you. That would be fine, I guess, if the CP was the Enlightenment Liberalism Party, but I thought it was a conservative party, a party that even has pretenses of being a paleo party. What is paleoconservatism if not the conscious rejection of Enlightenment liberalism? Paleo meaning before what? Please fill me in?

I actually don’t agree with some elements of your opposition that the Bible mandates a particular political order. But it clearly does not enshrine Enlightenment liberalism either. Far from it.

My dog in this fight is the rejection of left-wing PC language by those on the “right.”

= Have no idea.