I don't have any problem with the Chesterton quotes. I am joyful about Christianity. I'm beginning to wonder if the image Christians in other English speaking countries have of American Evangelicals is distorted due to the involvement of some (but not all) Evangelicals in conservative politics since the Reagan years.

Regarding Carol, I was really kvetching about Carol's claim that I was not representing God fairly. She gave no evidence of it. She doesn't really have a conception of sin, just a conception of God as love, without realizing the greatest love of God is to not allow humanity to remain in sin forever.

It seems to me that the god of most people today is one they make up, not the God of the Bible or of historical Christianity. I am not stressing God's judgment of sinners, but God's judgment of sin. I know the liberal Protestant churches have forgotten about sin (except for sins of omission in social justice), but has the Catholic Church forgotten about sin too?

What seems more probable is that most churches outside of American based Evangelical churches aren't End Times oriented, they don't want to be heretical and set dates. It seems like Christianity is allegorized but secular teachings are taken literally. For example, the claim that homosexuality has no elements of choice, but only genetics, or that neo-Darwinian evolution is a proven theory that explains everything about how we came to be, or that there is no future salvation outside of social progress or technological development.

If I seem critical of Catholicism, that's not really true. I'm not sure I believe all the theology of Evangelical churches either. I am pretty much an Apostle's Creed, mere Christianity sort of person but I do think that the end of an age is approaching and that eternal choices are becoming clearer and less muddled as the 21st century progresses.

My stream of consciousness in that post was probably due to my consternation that no one wants to address the UFO aspects of my beliefs because they don't like for the Bible to be taken seriously enough that God's promises and warnings are literal. They don't like the End Times.

Modern fiction has often made the Catholic church out to be the bad guy, and movies are starting to show God as a villain who wants to destroy humanity. That makes me think that the world is looking beyond vague applications of Eastern mysticism to some sort of secular Gnosticism where anything short of murder and rape is accepted as normal behavior, God is seen as hating mankind and the only remaining sins are ecological.

That post was probably my most ADHD because I didn't think it through. Yet, I don't think I said anything in it that I didn't intend. I find myself in real life partly defending Pat Robertson (who I think is an idiot at times, but not always) in his comments on Haiti. If one accepts that vodoun as a magical practice actually contacts real spirits, then those spirits are demonic. The Haitian vodoun priest who started the revolution against the French began with a vodoun pact.

So, Pat Robertson was partly right on a Haitian deal with the Devil. Where he was probably wrong is on the curse aspect because the Bible's clear that God only curses those who hate Him for 4 generations. Unless a generation's a whole lifetime, 70 or 80 years according to Psalm 90:10; Pat Robertson is wrong that Haiti's still being cursed.

The secular world (using the modern, not the medieval meaning of secular) is uncomfortable with God cursing or judging. That is why universalism of one sort or another is popular among those who still believe in God. Yet, all we can hope for is universal reconciliation, not universalism. As I've argued with other Evangelicals and pastors who are more judgmental than I am, we only know of two groups who are outside salvation. One is the small number of people who committed the sin against the holy spirit: i.e. ascribing Jesus' miracles to Satan, when the miracles would still be from God even if Jesus had been a false prophet; see Deuteronomy 13:1-5. The other are those who worship the Beast and take the mark during the End Times.

http://www.raptureready.com/featured/graham/g106.html

I disagree with Ron Graham about Obama being a run up to the Antichrist anymore than George Bush, but he's right in the above article. I'm fairly neutral towards politics since we won't see demonic politics until after the rapture. All we see now are run of the mill sinful politics from all political parties in any and every country. A republic is only a good form of government compared to everything else. Compared to the future Messianic era, it is a failure. Same goes for capitalism as an economic system.

Regarding everyone else's salvation, we must have hope and I've often used the discussion of Bruriah with her husband Rabbi Meier on Psalm 104:35 that the text reads, let sin cease, not sinners. Thus if sin ceases, then there will be no more sinners and God's curses upon sinners will be annulled and there will be blessings instead. Note that the modern world wants sin to cease by declaring it nonexistent, but what the Bible is clear about is that we can repent and accept Christ. Our sin can only cease if they were nailed to the cross with Christ. That is how the truth of "let the wicked be no more" can come to pass, but sadly, the world rejects the truth and so sinners will be consumed from the earth by the end of the Tribulation when Christ returns.

I do not think the end of an age can be averted, even Catholics on the fringe (and not just Mel Gibson's heretical group) believe that this age is coming to a close. I do think that the number who can be saved before hand and removed from judgment by a pre or mid Tribulation rapture can be increased by preaching the whole Gospel.

When people can't be brought to Christ, they can at least be warned not to fall for the deception, not to worship cosmic evil as a savior and not to take the mark. Keep this in mind, Chesterton, Lewis et. al. saw trends in the making, but the world has progressed further than they could anticipate, even in their fiction. We can be joyful Christians, but we can't keep the truth of God's judgment of sin to ourselves. We can't just save ourselves and let the rest of the world happily proceed upon that "braid, braid road" in the ballad "Thomas Rhymer" stanza 13.

For those who want fairyland, the path there is not for mortals, it is not for us, and though Christian writers like Chesterton and Lewis imagined it, we cannot go there. Any attempts to do so will lead to madness and death. The only path left to humanity is the narrow road beset with thorns and briars, the path of righteousness. At the end of that road out of this vale of tears (with moments of joy and happiness), lies heaven and eternity. So, let's do our best to see that those in darkness see enough light that they can find their way to the narrow gate that is Christ Jesus, our Lord.

If only people really knew to praise God like in Psalm 35:10. Instead, they just hope (like Carol said) that 'someone up there is looking out for them' and they don't think that anything is wrong with the world, with their lives or their beliefs. They are ripe for the deception of witness and other evangelists for the occult. Soon, the entities worshiped in the occult will be revealed to the world in a guise the world can accept. I hope to not be here at that time, and perhaps any warnings I give or posts that I leave will make a difference to those left behind, because it will be harder to be saved during those times. God's promises of salvation are only to the Jewish people, not to the multitude who are ripe for the great deception. Then, those who seek to save their lives will lose them and only those who stand fast, who will die for Christ will be saved.

I think I'm going to post this on the Religion board. If you want to post here, that's fine. If you want to send PM's that's fine too. I won't post anything you send privately that you write, but I don't see any problems with my responses being made public. I've edited this a bit to enlarge upon a couple of points not in my PM that I think are important.

It’s difficult for me to answer these comments as I don’t speculate about the end times, and as much as I respect evangelicals, I don’t (Catholics don’t) subscribe to the rapture or ‘left behind’ idea that many Protestants seem to have embraced. I understand that your view of the modern world is conditioned to some extent by these end time speculations, but I can’t offer you much of an argument for or against. You might be right for all I know, we might be in the last days, but I don’t see why any church should be ‘end times oriented’. Eschatology concerns both the end of mankind and the end of each individual, and the idea that our behaviour ought to differ because we might die in an apocalypse instead of a car accident, makes little sense to me. Speculation about the end times might be interesting, but I don’t see why it ought to change the way we see the world or the way we live. The deceptions of secular culture as they presently exist are already ‘leaving people behind’.

What interests me most about your views is your Fortean outlook and what you mean by it. What is 'high strangeness' for example? My initial impression was that you were close to expressing Chesterton’s insight into the nature of reality which he developed over the course of his career. Perhaps this article (with minor reservations) best expresses the connection I saw:

In Praise of Chesterton

Gilbert wrote:
What interests me most about your views is your Fortean outlook and what you mean by it. What is 'high strangeness' for example? My initial impression was that you were close to expressing Chesterton’s insight into the nature of reality which he developed over the course of his career. Perhaps this article (with minor reservations) best expresses the connection I saw:

In Praise of Chesterton

Good link there, thanks. Chesterton was a Fortean. I do not think he was hampered in that by being a Catholic. Catholic culture has, at times, accepted far too many wonders for the average Protestant to be comfortable with, but it's also kept a bit of a skeptical distance in formal thought.

Most people today look to Eastern mysticism, or to modern physics, to explain how reality is not what it seems at first glance. I look towards folklore (not just European) and to Neo-Platonism. I take folklore with a grain of salt, Neo-Platonism in all it's forms with a shaker of salt, and modern physics with a great deal of glee. If modern physics is not factually true, then it is still spiritually true. It is materialism shaped around, not just the vague spiritual mix of the post modern world, but the innate truths found in the teachings of both Athens and Jerusalem.

"The Man Who Was Thursday" is my favorite Chesterton work. Never did like his treatment of orthodoxy as much as I did Lewis', and it's been long since I've read Heretics. Probably should pick it up, but here's a work on heresies that I recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Heresies-How-Avoid-Them-Christians/dp/1598560131/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264233453&sr=8-1

I take it you can't reconcile your initial impression with what you seem (to me) to feel is my lack of joy? Warning about the End Times is no different than warning about the end of life. If there is an eternal separation from God, then it has to be a conscious choice made by a person. Regardless of what an aeon means in the New Testament text, or whether eternity is truly forever, it's not something that we should wish on anyone. Evangelicals might be charged with hypocrisy (not true in general) and Evangelicals might be too engaged in conservative politics (true in many cases) but Evangelicals take the Great Commission seriously.

Part of the Good News is telling people that they are saved by Christ's atonement, if they choose to freely commit themselves to Christ. I'll enjoy the Fortean and engage the high strangeness as much as I want, but when doing so, I won't forget the Great Commission or refuse to warn people about the dangers of the occult, the reality of the demonic or the New Age world views that people adopt to justify the lives they live in separation from Christ.

God is not an angry perfect God. God is our Abba, and also like the mother who won't abandon us. Since Christ did not abandon me, I cannot abandon Him. I'd be more accepted on Fortean boards if I did. I try my best to proclaim Christ, not simply a theology or image of Him. That's not an easy thing to do, it involves being true to the Christ of not just the Sermon on the Mount, but also the Christ who gives warnings to the churches in Revelations and who returns to judge sin within history.

I do hope to find people in heaven who weren't known as Christ's sheep. I hope that the glimmer of playfulness and honest to God integrity I found in Charles Fort, John Keel and others who could not be Christians, but who were also not taken in by deceptions, is the light of Christ that they thought they didn't know. Perhaps the best I can hope for is to not be one of the goats who do thus and thus in His name but who do it for themselves and what they can gain here? At any rate, being a Fortean and an amateur preacher of the Gospel is not something I see as contradictory.

Gilbert wrote:It’s difficult for me to answer these comments as I don’t speculate about the end times, and as much as I respect evangelicals, I don’t (Catholics don’t) subscribe to the rapture or ‘left behind’ idea that many Protestants seem to have embraced. I understand that your view of the modern world is conditioned to some extent by these end time speculations, but I can’t offer you much of an argument for or against.

Catholics do subscribe to End Times beliefs, though perhaps not mainstream Catholics. Is this a non schismatic Catholic site?:

http://www.conventhill.com/endtimes/

They say that the Catechism rejects millenarianism within history but looks beyond history for fulfillment. In Dispensationalism, history is where God's promises to the Jewish people are kept. Only then can there be an uplifting of nature to the supernatural and history to salvation history. Only then will we see a New Earth merged with the New Heaven.

I differ from most other Evangelicals by believing that Jews are saved by Christ but do not have to accept Christ before the time of Jacob's Trouble. Jews are fulfilled by Torah, only by returning to Torah will there be the seed of a new covenant where God can reconcile Jews and Christians through Christ.

There are also schismatic Catholics who have End Times beliefs, and I thought as a Fortean you might have read about those and could comment on their beliefs, like the "three days of darkness".

Gilbert wrote:You might be right for all I know, we might be in the last days, but I don’t see why any church should be ‘end times oriented’. Eschatology concerns both the end of mankind and the end of each individual, and the idea that our behaviour ought to differ because we might die in an apocalypse instead of a car accident, makes little sense to me. Speculation about the end times might be interesting, but I don’t see why it ought to change the way we see the world or the way we live. The deceptions of secular culture as they presently exist are already ‘leaving people behind’.

Churches need to be "End Times" oriented to the extent that they do not forget that Christianity not only has a beginning, it has an end (but that end is a new beginning). Christianity has promises of life within Christ and warnings of the judgment of sin. I've diverged from the usual Evangelical playbook by quoting Bruriah (also transliterated Beruriah) on Psalms 104:35, that "the wicked will be no more" can also mean that they will repent and no longer be wicked. Sinners will cease because sin will cease. It's better to strive for the repentance of sinners than to anticipate their damnation, but the New Testament is as clear on hades and gehenna as the Hebrew Bible is on sheol.

My views aren't that far from Chesterton's. My Christianity is orthodox and I try to avoid the pitfalls of heresy; which never goes as far out on a limb as orthodoxy -- heresy tries to tame Christ. Heresy also makes God so wishy washy that no one is rejected regardless of what they desire. No amount of allegory or believing that Revelations refers to the time of Nero can mask the truth of the warnings to the Laodicean church. We all miss the mark, we do not save ourselves.

Dispensational views might seem to be heresy and many ascribe it's origins to a questionable revival, but it ties the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament together rationally and simply. Dispensationalism takes God's promises to Israel seriously in history and does not seek to provide a theological or philosophical basis for supercessionism. God keeps His promises to both the Jewish people and to the people who are grafted in as Christians.

I did not start out a Dispensationalist. Traditional Jewish speculations about the time of Jacob's Trouble, and the convergence of end of an age beliefs in many religions brought me to consider Dispensationalism, which then brought me to Christ. Beliefs in many religions about their end of an age seemed aimed more to mimic, to counterfeit and to disprove Christian beliefs about the rapture, the tribulation and the return of Christ as a fulfillment in history.

If Catholics don't have a rapture teaching, it's because the Church lost sight of the rapture text promises in the New Testament just as much as it lost an interest in Latin keeping the Church together the way Hebrew has kept Jews together.

As for the deception that Evangelicals see, they don't have to be solely demonic. They can be human deceptions as well. I don't often find Pat Robertson ahead of others or right on many theological subjects, but when he was attacked on his comments on Haiti, the clear truth in his message was mixed in with his speculation. The Haitian revolution started with voodoun ceremonies. One post at a body building forum cites a doctoral candidate in Carribean history:

The French Revolution had been going on for two years when slave leaders gathered in the Caiman woods outside of what’s today Cap Haitien. The fighting between and within the white elite and the free mulatto population presented an excellent opportunity for general revolt. Most of the slaves present worked as overseers or coachmen for their respective masters, giving them freedom of movement and the right to carry swords. Dutty Boukman, a slave originally from Jamaica, and a priestess of disputed identity led a Voudou ceremony where they allegedly charged the gathered slaves “to throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us.” They then made an oath of secrecy and revenge, sealing it by drinking the blood of a sacrificed pig, a ceremony possibly West African in origin. This event bears a similar relationship to the Haitian Revolution as the Boston Tea Party does to the American Revolution—a critical event that helped galvanize the founding generation and forms a centerpoint for revolutionary legend today.

One of the first things that comes to mind in any discussion of Haiti, Voudou is a complex blending of West African and popular Catholic traditions. Paul Farmer gave the best description of Voudou’s place in Haitian culture and society when he thus described a firmly Christian peasant: “Of course he believes in Voudou. He just believes it’s wrong.” The Voudou question strikes at the heart of Haitian religious life. For its practitioners, Voudou offers a pantheon of friendly spirits, or lwas, that offer avenues to healing and hope. For its opponents, including many conservative Protestants and Catholics, it is spirit possession and satanic worship. The two sides disagree on what percentage of Voudou involves curses and malevolence, but both agree that such things are part of the religion. And, for those who oppose Voudou, Boukman’s ceremony in Bois Caiman sold the country to the devil.

http://www.getbig.com/boards/index.php?topic=314749.msg4492256

It is my premise that people who accept magical rituals to spirits as being part of the life of a Catholic culture are deceiving themselves just as much as UFO abductees who see themselves as being taught by alien entities while following a Christ in the image of a Buddha or a Socrates. One cannot be a follower of Christ and a follower of spirits.

A newspaper article shows that Haitians aren't that far from Pat Robertson's views on the quake themselves:

ORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — Deeply religious Haitians see the hand of God in the destruction of Biblical proportions visited on their benighted country. The quake, religious leaders said Sunday, is evidence that He wants change.

Exactly what change He wants depends on the faith: Some Christians say it's a sign that Haitians must deepen their faith, while some Voodoo followers see God's judgment on corruption among the country's mostly light-skinned elite.

And then there's American evangelist Pat Robertson, who said Wednesday that Haiti had been cursed by a pact he said its slave founders made with the devil two centuries ago to overthrow their French rulers and become the world's first black republic. The White House called his remarks "stupid."

As desperate believers gathered to pray Sunday across the shattered capital, the Rev. Eric Toussaint told a congregation gathered outside the ruined cathedral that the earthquake "is a sign from God, saying that we must recognize his power."

Haitians, he said, "need to reinvent themselves, to find a new path to God."

Some followers of Voodoo, practised alongside Roman Catholicism by the vast majority of Haitians, said the devastation of key symbols of power was punishment for corrupt leaders who have allowed the mostly light-skinned elite to enrich themselves while the black majority suffers...

...And in that sense, the earthquake seems to have been counterproductive in terms of salvation.

"How could He do this to us?," cried Remi Polevard, who said his five children lie beneath in the rubble of a home near St. Gerard University. "There is no God."

Sunday night, as downtown residents began burning some of the bodies that have been rotting on the streets for five days, a woman walking by in an orange dress pulled out a copy of the Bible.

She flung it into the fire.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world ... z0dQTyaG6l

CNN quotes a professor of religion that Voodoun and Catholicism are compatible, and a Catholic priest who does not see any issues with that, but who finds God in the human response to the tragedy:

Haitian Vodou, often misunderstood and branded with stereotypes, has its own ceremonies and rituals meant to honor spirits, or loas. These spirits, seen as intermediaries with God and links to ancestors, can be called upon for help. And for practicing Christians, especially Catholics who can view saints as they would spirits, the two systems do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Not everyone is necessarily practicing Vodou, commonly anglicized as Voodoo, but McAlister said the Afro-Creole Haitian traditions are usually kept alive and the ancestral spirits are inherited by at least one member of every family.

...Haitian-born Leslie Desmangles remembered being hurt as a boy by the words of Christian missionaries who misunderstood and demonized his peoples' traditions. Theirs were sentiments much like those uttered last week by televangelist Pat Robertson who said the Haitian people are "cursed" because they "swore a pact with the devil" to get out from under French rule.

Robertson's comments were "insensitive, theologically unsound and loaded with racial connotations," said Desmangles, a professor of religion and international studies at Trinity College in Connecticut.

In the Decatur church Sunday, the priest reminded his congregants that theirs is an all-loving God, not a vindictive one.

Their God, he said, is in the international outpouring of support from people who, one week ago, didn't know where Haiti was. Their God is a rock of stability when the earth trembles. Their God is the one who lifts them up "to mend our broken bones, to brush us off and to bury the dead," Hill said.

And during this first Sunday Mass after the earthquake, their God was in the music that moved them. To the distinctly Caribbean sounds of their band and choir, they sang hymns of praise to the one they believe stands with them.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/18/haitian.faith.in.god/

Our European folklore traditions of Christmas trees, Easter bunnies and holidays in close proximity to ancient pagan festivals might be thousands of years separate from true paganism, but I doubt that the medieval Roman Catholic Church would have accepted spirit worship as just a folklore and cultural tradition alongside Catholicism or a scholastic theology professor claim, like a modern professor of religion, that there's no real difference between honoring the saints and rituals to spirits. I do not think that Rome is the only Laodicean church today, but I do think that the Roman Catholic Church has lost it's way with sponsoring hopes of alien contact on one hand and tolerating the practice of magical rituals among people who should be dedicated to Christ.

My overall hope is that of Julian of Norwich, that "all will be well, all things will be well, all manner of things will be well", and I'm indebted to what I've read of Primitive Baptist Universalist beliefs, but even if we cannot resist God's love and all will come to Christ, there will still be a judgment in sinful lives and in history. Christ defeated the spirits that claim worship and that enslave mankind. Christ took our sins upon Himself at the cross and He proclaimed a message to the spirits in prison. Someday, that message will also be given to the spirits of the air that hold a large part of humanity (not just the people of Haiti) in bondage.

There are two extremes in Christianity today, one is tolerating the occult in all it's popularity, and the other is to mistake the sense of wonder and joy at folklore and fantasy literature for the workings of Satan. Satan cannot create, he can only pervert, and while some fantasy works show his New Age teachings, many do not and the joy that comes from fantasy and folklore is a joy that is from God. All art is a gift of God which reflects part of His image back to mankind. We can see God's hand in art and music, but we cannot make art and music our gods. People today are more apt to worship the created than the Creator, or to worship God along with things of this world. That's especially dangerous when it involves the artistic license behind popular beliefs about spirits and aliens.

Mara natha. Come Lord Jesus!