re: are israelis racist - no more than catholics!
taruatio..... "Yak,you say,"there are suicide cults in the outreachs of Catholicism".Please name them or quote a reference"...do we need to go further than Reverend Jim Jones.....?????
THE THEOLOGY OF JIM JONES
As I have written in The History of Jim Jones, Jones became a student pastor at a Methodist church in 1952. He started preaching racial equality and soon Blacks were coming into the church. Jones was convinced that the Pentecostal church would be more open to his message because for some reason of their interracial heritage. So he went to meet some Pentecostalist officials from Kentucky and Tennessee, but the idea of racial equality was not officially accepted by these officials and this created a confrontation that the Methodist church did not like and so, Jones and his church were kicked out. Searching for some denomination to accept him and his group, he went to a Seventh Day Baptist Church and it was there he started honing his "healing powers".
But with Jone's tenacious attitude, the Pentecostal church accepted his congregation. With this, Jones transformed the Pentecostal theology in 2 ways so he could use it to his advantage. The first was to use the millenial expectations of the second coming of Christ to proclaim some divinity in himself and possibly in his members also. He would say that a person filled with the spirit would answer to the law of God and was not subject to the laws of morality. His second use of the Pentecostal theology was to use it to explain, prove and promote his famous communalist conclusions. Jones saw himself as an outcast just like the poor and the Blacks in the United States and therefore he would bring the subject of class struggle into his evangelical religion.
In the Pentecostal religion, there's a list of nine signs to prove you have the gift of the spirit: the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discerning spirits, diverse tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Jones claimed all nine but he never wanted to prove his power of speaking in tongues; he concentrated on discerning, healing and prophesying.
When it came to his healing powers, Jones admitted deception was a big part of the scene. A part of his staff would search out information on people who would be attending his church and with this information he would deceive people with his so called "powers". Eventually he followed a legal disclaimer and he would frequently say to a "healed" person that he or she had a spirit blessing but to go and consult his or her doctor for confirmation. Another power of Jones was the power of prophecy. Now whether or not his prophecies came true, his followers (or himslef) would explain an intervention for the cause of their struggle or that the person in question did not live up to the possibilities Jones had foreseen.
Later on, Jones separated from the Pentecostals because he would proclaim the Second Coming himself saying that he was the perfect example of a human possessed with the spirit. He would say: "I say I am your Savior but don't make me your creator." What Jones succeeded in doing was to create a religious group with a zeal prevalent during the times of the primitive Christian era, and incorporating the concerns of today's era: race, class and nuclear holocaust. He would focus his follower's attention not on the future and on Heaven but on the present; he would convince them that the situation they were experiencing would not always be like this but would change.
Jones had two trademarks when it came ti his messianic practices: the end justifies the means and a "revivalistic embellishment of radical social critiques" (Gone from the Promised Land , p.27). He would intertwine facts, half-truths and lies about race, class and the nuclear holocaust into a religious cry for redemption.
Now....if you accept extra ecclesiam nulla salus as being dogma....
....and if as a notion it is ex cathedra in the first place, and according to Catholic doctirne it must
....for no Pope can declare something to be true unless it has always been true, if only recognized implicitly, such as the Immaculate Conception...
Then it is immutable.
Whether or not another Council issues a new position doesnt really change the immutable.
Look..... we can go on about this for ever...I'm Jewish and dont believe in papal ingfallability etc etc....
...my point on the thread was........ if you chose to label someone as a racist such as was done at the head of the thread - then the very same measure MUST be drawn across others...
...to do less reveals a bigotry and inbalance in your approach.
