Old Catholic Church of the Beatitudes

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February 25, 2007

That Dark Hole called Enlightenment

Since the French Revolution we have been spoon-fed the philosophy that extols science and reason while relegating Theology and Spirituality to the Dark Ages. Often the weapon is to look at the intransigence of the church to Copernicus or to remind everyone of the uncompelling views of Christian fundamentalism with respect to literal translations of the bible concerning creation. It is always to poke fun and derision and to ridicule the obvious protruding foreheads of people of Faith.

This purpose of this tome is not to challenge the right of anyone to present critical analysis of Christian thought and praxis. Lord knows, valid criticism always evidences the truth and power of Christ's message as well as the nobility of the human spirit we claim as the likeness of God. No indeed, Christianity can stand on its own strength.

What irks me is that challenge to reason is never made to our "enlightened culture" you know that culture we often like to call the "Culture of Death". We have no criticality because the truth of our culture is a floating, unanchored series of unchallenged assumptions that never undergo scrutiny. When they become indefensible the error is not recognized only forgotten. It happens in every area of Enlightenment attack.

Christian belief has been under steady assault from historical criticism groups like the Jesus Seminar and their every press conference receives blanket coverage. Scholarship, if this is indeed scholarship, must be subjected to its own criticism. The assumptions of the Jesus Seminar, the intellectual prowess of the group and the methods of critical analysis have been under siege by real scholars of the Bible for many years but their rebuttals of conclusions made by the seminar are never allowed to see the light of day. Instead the debate ends with points made to open discussion and nothing published about what happens after that discussion is engaged.

We are under assault by the great revelations of the Dead Sea scrolls. A never-ending litany of releases shows Gnostic thought and structure to a certain point. When it gets into its pagan sourcebook that portion does not see the light of day. Where one might question the theology it is never revealed because it would be immediately obvious that Gnostic Christianity is not original, it is not early in Christian development and it possesses a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. Even Elaine Pagels (who should be read by everyone) acknowledges the assimilation of Christian beliefs into an earlier specialize religion. But Gnosticism is never challenged. It was always said that "the church" destroyed Gnostic writing for their own purposes but Irenaeus recorded them all as he rejected them. Some of the most insidious forms of worship are recorded for all to see and the Dead Sea scrolls support that statement. The Gnostic writings are interesting history but were never early Christianity.

Here is a news report presented last week on most networks:

A premature baby that doctors say spent less time in the womb than any other surviving infant is to be released from a Florida hospital Tuesday.
Amillia Sonja Taylor was just 9 1/2 inches long and weighed less than 10 ounces when she was born Oct. 24. She was delivered 21 weeks and six days after conception. Full-term births come after 37 to 40 weeks.
Neonatologists who cared for Amillia say she is the first baby known to survive after a gestation period of fewer than 23 weeks.

In our "Culture of Death" we expound a women's right to her body but never the child's rights to an environment in which to live. Fetus is the key neutral word here, demolishing humanity as it morphs the baby into a mere parasite living off the host. What say we of a child of 21 weeks? Doctors assure us that the baby is normal in every way and has been released to sleep at home in its own crib. What do we say of the aborted who will never get that privilege? They are not babies do you say? Oh! Another anomaly falls off the radar. And what of the unique embryo of stem cells that is capable of producing a one of a kind human that can never again be duplicated? What is the difference between 21 minutes and 21 weeks? Are not both unique and unduplicatable? Science please answer that question. Isn't unduplicatable the sign of personhood?

Fr. Bernie

Enough....
September 2005
Fr. Bernard Callahan

This poor country of ours has been fooled by the profound evils of militant fundamentalism, especially OSAS (once save always saved) varieties, as well as the equally appalling veil of silence emanating from any and all the other "Christian" churches. It is as if the message of Jesus was difficult to fathom or discern or that the message was in some way complicated. We know that it is not.

"Christianity" has wrapped itself in the business of business, the stock market, bonds and securities and all the rest of the Capitalist smörgåsbord of power and money worship. Dickens scolded the same dolts over a hundred and fifty years ago and they have become worse not better. No Christmas season would be complete without watching "A Christmas Carol" yet we don't identify the present in that awful past. The Spirit warned of "ignorance and want" and now we are enveloped in it. Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas display what happens when the safety net of civilization is taken away. Generous “average” Americans donate yet they fail to realize that they are giving twice and three times. Most of the monies that used to be available for emergency relief were removed by tax cuts and the funds redistributed to the wealthiest people in the world. The rest of the money is being used to murder innocent Iraqi peasants for their oil. In the process the enormous debt has made us a third world country with enormous wealth, abject poverty and little in between. Americans make less than they did in 1975.

Somehow we wake up to the lie each day and go off to work hoping the pain won't reach us. That's a real "Christian" attitude isn't it? We have sold our children into slavery. We have punished the old and the helpless. We have murdered over six million people since the Korean war (Vietnam 4, Cambodia 1.2, Iraq 1.5, Misc. ?) and you can look it up, yet we believe we are God's chosen people. Which God is that? Baal? Thor? Can you accept Jesus as your personal savior and kill a half million Iraqi babies because it's worth it and Madeline Albright says so. The distance between what we say we will do about AIDS and what we really do is incredible! Thank you Jesus! What of the thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam who, it has been revealed forty years later, destroyed hundreds of villages, murdering civilian men, women and children in cold blood...... and one of them has the audacity to consider himself Presidential timber? God Help Us!!

It is time for people who believe in the teachings of Jesus as well as all who believe in love of God and love of neighbor (friend and enemy) to step forward. We cannot let this go on. God weeps.

Following Jesus
Fr. Bernard Callahan
April 2005

With almost every voice in multimedia singing our merits as a Christian bastion against all forms of evil, it might be a good idea to evaluate the veracity of that statement. How could we best accomplish that? Science would urge us to investigate all the attributes of something in detail in order to best define what it is. People of Spirit might, on the other hand, request that we look at the fruit that is born of something to determine its intrinsic value. It may be useful to implement both approaches in examining the teachings of Jesus Christ and their reflection in the “Christian” culture of our country as a sort of sanity check and validation of congruence.

Teachings of Jesus - Our Cultural Values

1. Love - Hate
2. Peace - War
3. Truth - Lies
4. Humility - Pride
5. Justice - Injustice
6. Respect - Intolerance
7. Freedom - Paranoia
8. Compassion - Indifference
9. Generosity - Greed
10. Sympathy - Callousness
11. Charity - Avarice
12. Life - Death

LOVE / HATE
Despite the absolute clarity of the Gospel instructions, love is not one of our strengths. Love is viewed as an old fashioned sentimental feeling detrimental to business, to capitalism, to profit and the advent of the 60 hour work week. Wasn’t it the Sex Pistols that sang “Love Stinks”? Obviously as we continue to remove help and support for the poor, as we continue transferring it to the wealthy at levels never before seen on earth in the entire history of humanity, we exhibit our belief that love is irrelevant. Allowing children to go hungry and the old to roast or freeze to death are but a few examples of love’s opposite, found to be a more than acceptable substitute in our culture, perhaps even its loftiest goal.

We have witnessed a massive rollback in social programs and a corresponding major philosophical shift from community oriented values to egocentric materialism and have sunk into a stupor of narcissism. This philosophy is in direct opposition to Jesus and to God.

PEACE / WAR
Our official government policy is endless war. Since this policy was implemented we have supported war to levels of popularity reaching 80% and have seen enthusiasm wane only because of the slow progress of winning, along with the extremely short attention span of the populous. Nevertheless, we re-elected a President promising endless murder and pain to peoples, not armies. Murder and pain to old men, boys, women and children, not soldiers. The genocide of Falujah was a war crime as repugnant as any ever committed, yet our “imbedded” and morally reprehensible reporters said nothing. There have even been calls from pundits and a sizable portion of the citizenry for nuking countries in order to speed up the victory process. Though we are called by Christ to love….even our enemies, churches remain fearfully, sinfully and satanically silent and these agendas are given credence.

TRUTH / LIES
No Al Quaida connections were found. No chemical labs, no WMDs discovered. There was no ethical reason for war. The list of government lies is legend on every topic, not just the war issue. One need only to Google “government lies” on the Internet to see the broad, persistent purposeful agenda that is recorded and on public record for all to see. There were more lies in the “State of the Union” address than truths. The scope is of a scale that puts Nazi or Communist propaganda to shame. It is lies about every aspect of the world we live in and the peoples who live in it. It is lies about global warming, the environment, peace treaties, where the social security “trust” went, the health of education or anything else associated with the common good. It is interesting that one of the ancient titles for Satan was “Father of Lies”. Not a single “journalist or “lawmaker” or “churchman” uttered a word of reprimand.

HUMILITY / PRIDE
We have all seen the “Power of Pride” stickers. We have seen the arrogance with which our country tramples the wishes and hopes of the entire world while scorning the United Nations and all multi-polar attempts at problem solving. Working at solutions to our problems and perceived problems in a civilized manner is beneath us because we have become barbarians. The notion of a world community living in harmony is abhorrent to our government and our people. Once again choices are made that are in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus and the will of God.

The workplace has become microcosm of our culture. Pecking orders take precedence over good business decisions while petty rivalry has made us non-competitive and dysfunctional. There can be no creativity when fear and insecurity are so pervasive. Business schools present outsourcing and slave labor as business solutions instead of the need for real plans that are society centric. A street person could do better, for God’s sake! Our law schools produce lawyers that circumvent the law for the sake of the powerful. Ethics are a sign of weakness in our brutal new world order. “Pro Bono” is an underfunded “window dressing” that soothes the consciences of everyone as they dismantle the protection of law and the wisdom of Hammurabi.

It’s all about the propaganda machine, the media. Television in the form of “The Donald”, Survivor, The Contender or Fear Factor have become our culture, and human life becomes the stuff of soap operas. We act as neither servants nor stewards for one another, just players in a Dickinsonian drama. Arrogance and anger are holy virtues in today’s society, which sees humble people as wusses and losers. Jesus is considered the ultimate loser. The “Christian” religious right never mentions the Sermon on the Mount but revels in a tribal killer God who forces people to act one way, then perversely kills them for doing so (read Genesis and Exodus). The American Jews have been taught to totally forget the Psalms and their proud history of social concern and to join their religious right brothers in the perverse dance of Armageddon. Falwell, Graham and Robertson lick their lips and smile as the Joe Liebermans join the party.


JUSTICE / INJUSTICE
If you have the money, you have justice and as much as you want. Corporations rape whole peoples, the environment where they live, the places where they work and the families that they live with. They are the greatest child molesters of all. Seven corporations, all strongly for Bush, own most every media outlet. Little boys leer at women’s breasts on sit-coms, little girls kick groins and sex is for sale 24/7. It’s about Disney and Mermaid Phallic symbols and subtle subliminal Saturday morning cartoons. It’s about a movie industry that is 60% about possession, and devils every weekend. Demons and devils and a Gnostic world of Rapture is the culture of America. The glowing eyes of Jesus spitting flames from his mouth and tossing the damned to eternal agony is what is left of the God of love. This is the Jesus of the churches.

If you are sick, worry! There is no FDA to protect us. Drugs reach the market after little effective testing. Prozac and Ritalin keep the kids in a stupor and all is well. People destroy their brains or liver to prevent arthritis pain. Government is the slave of these corporate entities and there are few officials in Washington not on the take in a massive way. Just remember death row is for the poor; living wages, healthcare, housing and education are not. Women are second class citizens and racism is alive and well, thank you.

RESPECT / INTOLERANCE
Respect? For whom? The dot-heads, ragheads, rugheads, spics, niggers, mexes or red necks that are at constant war with each other because the powers to be tell them over and over that the other is the cause of all the problems? Are we a human family? We stare at our WWJD bracelets, wondering what the letters stand for, turn up the IPOD volume and burp in boredom, blissfully unaware that their problems deeply affect us. But, hey, they aren’t my neighbors anyway. We forget that Jesus was specific about who our neighbor was, to our own doom.

FREEDOM / PARANOIA
Freedom is God’s greatest gift and God’s ultimate revelation. When our laws allow the FBI or Homeland Security to tap your phone, search your house when you are not there, examine your credit and health records, all without just cause, and never having to let you know, then we allow the government to usurp God’s will. When you, an American citizen, can be whisked away by your government to death or imprisonment and torture….never to return….without a trial or just cause ….. just “disappeared” then just who are the terrorists we should be afraid of? When you are asked to spy on your mother, father, sister or brother, neighbors and friends, which Godly attribute are you following? Which God?

COMPASSION / INDIFFERENCE
Zero tolerance! Mandatory Sentences! No Child Left Behind! If they don’t directly harm themselves or others, release them from the mental hospitals! Cut Vet Benefits! It must be pay as you go! Change bankruptcy laws! Eliminate the Superfund! Relax anti-pollution laws! Day after day we punish others to the point of death, without remorse, without guilt, without the slightest pangs of conscience. CEOs make 10,000 times more per hour than those in the grunt jobs. Why is that? What do they do to effectively grow the business? Buyout? Outsourcing? Refusing to pay income taxes (like all Fortune 500 Companies)? When a CEO is not a good steward, that CEO is an offense to God. When the stockholders demand excessive profits, then they also become an offense to God.

GENEROUSITY / GREED
Generosity is such an easy one. Well let’s stop foreign aid! …..We did…a long time ago and now we give nations money and make them use it to buy our weapons. Or we send in the IMF and the World Bank to make them buy what they don’t need, then kill them in a long slow debt repayment scheme that slowly suffocates them. We make farmers throw away their seed kept for millenniums and force them to use bioengineered seed. Then we make them buy our expensive fertilizer that is ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to make bioengineered seed grow. Then we jail them or kill them if they don’t cooperate. Jesus weeps because no one cares. It’s called Greed and yes, it is still a grave capital sin. Turn up that IPOD!

SYMPATHY / CALLOUSNESS
There are 200 million people out there who need not die of AIDS in the next decade. Proper, inexpensive protection and AIDS medicine would keep people alive and give children parents. Drug companies don’t care, churches don’t care, we don’t care. Holy abstinence for life is the only answer. A husband cannot use a condom to protect his wife and cannot afford drugs that would prolong his life and enable him to support his family. Sex, you see, is sin. Perhaps the only sin. The seven deadly sins have been reduced to having sex.

CHARITY / AVARICE
There is no social contract in America. There is no safety net. That wonderful godlike concept exists only in civilized countries like …all of Europe, for instance, and where there is dignity for humanity as in Cuba, Venezuela and Russia. I was stunned by the people stating how even Castro was forced to let the people see the Pope’s death on television. Here is a nation devastated by a generation of sanctions yet manages to have free healthcare, free education and pensions. At home we have only squalor and hunger and despair. The haves and the have-nots. The have-nots, by their very existence, exhibiting Calvinistically the proof of their deep sinfulness.

LIFE / DEATH
Life, so precious and God given and so unappreciated. Abortion is a very serious moral issue. We know that during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society abortions plummeted. We know that there are often outside factors leading to abortion. We take care of none of them. Wouldn’t honest sex education in the schools help to reduce this plague? Wouldn’t a living wage? Wouldn’t inexpensive neo-natal care? Wouldn’t cheap housing? Wouldn’t inexpensive daycare? How do we respect life if life is not that seamless garment of Bernardin’s? We have a packed Supreme Court , all nominated for their anti-abortion stance, a Republican majority in House and Senate and no reversal of Roe v. Wade. What’s wrong with this hypocritical picture?

During the Vietnam War 2-3 million Vietnamese civilians were murdered. We sold out Ho Chi Minh. He was honored at his post election inauguration by a front row of about fifty U.S. Army Generals and Colonels giving him a standing ovation. Then we gave Vietnam back to the French.
We stood and watched 1 million Cambodian civilians murdered in the Killing Fields while in full complicity with Pol Pot …..just to teach the Vietnamese a lesson.

In the last fifteen years a million Iraqi civilians (500,000 of them children) died during sanctions that devastated the population and over 100,000 more have died during the present war. We are against anyone who refuses our demands, seeks independence or wishes to follow God’s will. We are only interested in ourselves and our wishes correspond with corporate lust.

The death penalty is dispensed to the poor and only to the poor. It is assigned to those without proper defense whether innocent or guilty. So bad it is that the Republican governor of Illinois suspended the death penalty because of the innocent killed and the innocent likely to be killed. Forget that it is cheaper to grant life but that wouldn’t be as enjoyable. Who did Jesus butcher today, Brother? Sister?

WHAT IS LEFT?
How do we embrace a world in which the joy of life is a crapshoot that we won. We have lost this loving Jesus and this forgiving God of the Psalms. We do not admit that we all are stewards of this planet; in fact, we take responsibility for nothing. We fret about Rapture and Righteousness when we should be embracing the words of John that “God is love.” If we wish for God to abide in us then we too must abide in love. The solution is really that simple and it is the only solution.

Christianity today is as spiritually dead as the soul of the religious right, a whited sepulcher, so distant from Jesus that He is no longer heard. It is a barren fig tree, beyond bearing fruit. The name, once so holy, has been prostituted and damaged beyond repair. Where Evangelicals, Protestants and Catholics once lived lives that were concerned about their Salvation, they have fallen away. Evangelicals fly to the Once Save Always Saved (OSAS) heresy and self-righteousness, Mainline Protestants move to the sophisticated Arianism of the Jesus Seminar and destroy their own Spirituality. Catholics seek a dogmatic and secretive vendetta driven Opus Dei Church and have closed the windows that good Pope John opened so wide. Fundamentalists, now saved, find Spirituality in non-scriptural drivel like the Rapture, turning our Savior from gentle shepherd to blood thirsty wolf. Let Jerry and Pat and Billy, Canterbury, Rome and the rest have it. There’ll be no making of a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. Resurrection is reserved for souls and churches have none.

Perhaps it is time to declare belief in the teachings of Jesus. Let us forget the poor scholarship of Enlightenment driven historical criticism and Jesus Seminars and cling to this God who has never ceased to love us. Let us rise larger than Righteousness by being humble and non-judgmental. Let us admonish those who do not love the sinner and let us bear witness by our example. Let us for once acknowledge our own sinfulness and get the beam out of our own eyes.
Two thousand years have passed and we have not acknowledged our neighbor and therefore not acknowledged God either.

Difficult times are coming because of the selfish choices we have made. How technology has failed when divorced from Spirit! The bell tolls and materialism, narcissism and self indulgence will be impossibilities. We will find ourselves empty. The times that try souls are the times when perhaps we will have an opportunity to take on courage and put on God. There won’t be much else to distract. The stark choices of survival mode are coming. Will it be barbarism or neighborliness? Darkness or light? Many will opt for the former; we must opt for Light. We must be the presence of Christ. It is demanded of us.

God’s Healing Gift
Myra Callahan, Deacon
March 2005

Life often takes us to places we could never dream of in our own imaginations, and when we get out of our own way and let the Spirit and life take us, we may find ourselves on a much more exciting and meaningful journey than if we had followed our own pedestrian plans.

So it is with me, as I now find myself the wife of a priest, a deacon myself and creating a healing ministry in our fledgling Church of the Beatitudes to serve those in need of healing of body, mind and spirit. A healing ministry can have a myriad facets but the endpoint of all is bringing a person to wholeness, whether it be wholeness of body or wholeness of spirit.

As our ministry of presence with the poor begins to take shape, there will be a need to address the healing of the total person. The literature is full of research on the relationship between psychological and spiritual stress and the onset of illness. The poor and the marginalized living on the edges of society are especially susceptible to this stress and need to bring some kind of peace to their lives.

There are many avenues to healing. It can be energy work to aid the body in physical healing; it can be prayer, both for physical healing and for spiritual peace; it can be anointing; it can be the laying on of hands, or touch healing; it can be helping a person to realize their wholeness; it can be a listening, caring presence. We all need to tell our stories and have our life experiences validated, with respect, without judgment, whatever those stories may be. To simply be with people as they make their journey through life’s traumas and tragedies is healing work.

However, there are more concrete elements to a healing ministry as we envision it, one of which is working with the body’s electromagnetic field. Research has shown this work to have many benefits – it can alter vital signs, shorten healing time after surgery, provide relaxation and a sense of well being and, with ongoing treatment, has the potential to bring about healing of serious illness.

The body’s electromagnetic field contains a flow of energy that, if uninterrupted, results in a healthy body. Illness, accidents, traumas and painful emotions disrupt and impede that energy flow. The body becomes stressed and the perfect setting for disease is created. The role of a healer/practitioner is to use energy emitted from the hands to smooth and release those disruptions, then replenish depleted energy by transmitting energy from the practitioner’s hands to the individual. When the energy field is cleared and strengthened, healing can occur.
There are those who view this work as New Age silliness, or as something to be feared. It is neither. This energy is part of God’s creation and is a gift to use in service to others. In this energy exchange is an incredible feeling of closeness to God, the God whose healing flows in the form of that energy.

Prayer is also an essential part of healing which, when combined with energy work, creates a powerful force for healing potential. “Where two or three are gathered in my name…” has been proven to be true.

In our scientific age, where only that which can be proven empirically is given validity, most of us, in spite of assertions to the contrary, do not really believe healing can happen. Though spontaneous healings do occur, they are rare. Most healings happen over time with prayer, energy work, medical intervention, etc., but they do occur. Few people have ever witnessed a spontaneous healing, adding to the belief that they do not happen. We have become skeptical and cynical and dismiss such notions as the creations of fanatics.

Science is concrete, touchable, follows defined rules. Spirituality is an internal life, a constant review and reflection of one’s being. The two are not incompatible – humanity, while living in the scientific world, continually strives to touch God. The human spirit, no matter how jaded, at some level aches for the mystery and for connection with the unknown.

God loves his creation and wishes them to be healed and be whole. When we abandon ourselves to that love, let it heal us, make us whole, fill us, we can then carry that healing to those we serve in God’s name. We are all healers. Let us heal in whatever way God calls us.

What Will Be Our Response?
Rev. Bernie Callahan 01/09/05

The “christian” right continues to invade every aspect of American lives. They fight secularism and modernism with bluster and indignation yet teach a theology that enforces and blesses these very things that enrage them. They are all about school prayer, pledges of allegiance, In God we trust, Christmas creches and all that is christian lite. What they don't seem to be about is anything associated with Jesus Christ that has significant depth or meaning.

I believe that a person, upon careful self-examination, can declare that on such and such a date they were saved if by that they mean:

1. They have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
2. They have ascribed to all the teachings of Jesus.
3. They try always to live what Jesus taught and show
sorrow and a sincere effort to correct their
ways when they don't.

I think that these statements are accurate summations of the teachings of Jesus, the Early Fathers, Catholics, Orthodox and the great Reformers (including evangelical sects). This is the “Christian Life” and it is not attached to politics nor power nor self but reflects accurately simply the Will of God. Christendom rolled along, or stumbled along for seventeen centuries with this simple theology which, had it been followed to the letter, should have led to a rapid increase in disciples and a more harmonious world. An examination of the Church, the early years, indicates that, aside from the distractions of Gnostics or Arians running around with their chokes out, the church managed to attract, and at a high level. We also know what Power and Position did to exasperate everyone and that the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation did nothing to cure the power and position game. We also know that great saints and great sinners rose in the ranks of Christendom on a rather continual basis. Saints like John Hus and Martin Luther, Thomas More and Jean Calvin and Anabaptists by the hundreds graced the blood drenched tundra of “church”. All I'm afraid pledged allegiance to items 1,2,3 (see above).

Now, we have arrived at the purpose and point of this tome. We live in an age where somehow we have the audacity to claim salvation to anyone who at any particular point in their lives sincerely declares Christ to be their personal Savior. In some odd convolution of salvivic history Jesus' atonement for all our sins means that regardless of how we approach items 2 and 3 (see above) we can never be unsaved. This phenomenon is so prevalent that to a bible Christian the letters OSAS have real meaning, ONCE SAVED ALWAYS SAVED. I have heard ordained ministers (Charles Stanley is quite good at this) explain that since Jesus claims us, no matter what we do we cannot go to hell for Jesus can't or won't go there. Backsliding, sin or repentance lose all meaning after OSAS. Think of it. People like Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Heindrich Himmler and yes, by God, Lucifer himself at one time accepted Jesus as in item 1 above but went on to hate Him and demonstrated that hate with pagan rituals, mass murder, or demonic possession yet all fall into OSAS and are with the saints in the Lord. Jesus must wretch at the company but that's how this plays out.

I guess it is no wonder that we war and kill and lust and burn and rape and pillage. OSAS has rescued us from ever having to do Jesus in our lives. Comforting to know that I, Rev. Bernie, have accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior and can now (and no cut on Martin Luther whom I admire) do as Luther advised, Sin Boldly! See you at the “Christians for Sin” convention in Las Vegas!