At least the much more moral candidate won the presidency.

Please shut up Franklin. You’re a disgrace to Christianity.

Excellent pun.

If only Paul had left out that second part I think a lot of them would be happier. They could be happy little Paulites practicing their Paulitics.

@Timothy Kincaid. Good insight, and biblically supportable from some of Paul’s writings in the NT.

Fundamentalists used to like Paul more than Jesus, but even Paul wasn’t judgmental enough for them. Now they seem to prefer OT prophets, the more dire the better.

Why they can’t use those prophets to support working for justice instead of calling down fire, I will never understand.

I can’t help but think that God’s primary prism for evaluating ministers is: ‘do they bring people to me or drive people away from me?’

Franklin should hope otherwise.

…and then Graham will say, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? and in your name have cast out devils? and in your name done many wonderful works?”

and the Lord will say, “I never knew you. Get away from me, you evildoers!”

I may be Buddhist but as a former Southern Baptist I still know my Bible quotes!

As a Buddhist I don’t believe that this will happen to Graham upon his death but the human in me can’t help but enjoying imagining it would.

I actually found Buddhism while I was a member, and Moderator, of a UCC. They gave me the space and the support to pursue a spiritual path that wasn’t Christian. I’ll always be grateful for that.

“I was looking and trying to read the parts in red of the New Testimony and Jesus was talking too much for me…”

It won’t be pretty when you stand before God in judgement and he opens your file in the Lamb’s Book of Life and finds that your mean-spirited hatefulness created a stumbling block for people who decided not to believe in God soley because of what you said and did to give God a bad reputation.

He’ll peer down at you and raise his eyebrows and say: “Well, Franklin. I commanded you to love your neighbor as yourself and all you ever did was love yourself. You seem to have missed that part of Leviticus, and didn’t pay attention when Jesus said it either. Explain yourself, Franklin. (Pause) Well? I’m waiting.”

No, Franklin. It won’t be pretty at all.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing in the Bible that singles out any modern nation-state/country for “blessing” or a “cursing.”

There is no interpretive lens that can support this view, not even literalism, which would require the United States of America be literally named, not symbolically represented.

Countries as in the concept of the modern nation state with fixed geographical boundaries simply did not exist in Biblical times. In the Bible, “nation” refers to ethnic people groups. “Kingdom” refers to geographical areas, usually occupied by a single dominant people group with a recognized hereditary ruler. This is more pertinant to the Old Testament (as Christians call it) than the New.

The political context of the New Testament is entirely the Roman Empire. “Nations” in the NT still refer to people groups, nothing close to the modern nation-state/country.