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Have You had Someone do "Intercessory Prayer" for You? I Have

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The effect of prayer will go on forever so one wonders why discuss it? The link asks that question. You will not learn anything from the link except that believers like to pray and it makes them feel they are doing something even though there is no evidence prayer actually does anything. Many decades ago when I was a mayor of the largest city in ND, Fargo, people from outside the city regularly made appointments to talk to me. Some came to talk about money and business. Others came to talk about state politics. A popular topic was religion. I was surprised about that. The link made me remember my intercessory prayer experience. I may have written about it here before so skip the rest of this post if that's the case. A preacher from a couple of hours away made an appointment and spent his half hour telling me of the times he had done intercessory prayer and saved the lives of other politicians. One was the Governor at the time, Allen Olson, who said at the time the preacher was pray...
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Hegseth Removes 180 Religions from Military Chaplaincy

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There will be no dog tags or tombstones listing "Atheist". Gone is training of military Chaplains in a host of religions that exist in the U.S. and which troops have listed on their personal military resume. Atheist will now be called "No Religion." Various earth-type religions or ones from the tropics will be lumped together. If you are a troubled member of the armed forces and desire to confine your emotional state to an understanding member of your clergy, you may have to soldier on alone.  Readers know there has been an explosion in the number of religions people now identify with. There are news ones every year so we can expect this will continue. I suppose there remains a view in conventional wisdom the military needs to provide clergy to troops. We know, also, the origin of the practice came from Christianity. The expansion of religions has tossed the old model of a Chaplain for everyone's faith out the window.  One can understand that providing trained c...
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Popes to Bishops, "Don't be out there in la la land."

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When the new sheriff arrived in the Vatican, that was Pope Francis, some things changed. The changes continue with Pope Leo. There is a rule , "Don't be weird. Don't even sound weird." Francis $hit-canned a Bishop who talked to the press about sinful women who have abortions. Now Leo says Bishops cannot say UFOs are demonic. The Bishop that told this to the press was relieved of duties, even though he said repeatedly it was his view and not that of the denomination. Bishops are not to appear like they are whacko. That is, they are not to go further than the whacko of one cell human beings, dead people jumping up and you know the rest.  It must be hard for old-line priests and bishops to have spent their careers repeating far out and weird stuff like demons coming from outer space and having folks in the pews listen respectfully then be told they are nuts. There is deprograming for most of us, not Catholic clergy. We can see how hard it is to hold together a giant inst...
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Micro Economics, the Importance of the Individual in the Big Picture

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My academic field, economics, is thought to date back to publication of The Wealth of Nations written by Adam Smith in 1776. It was a break-through from religion, though Adam Smith was a religious, because clergy in the Western world for a thousand years or so had preached all of one's life was a gift from God. Smith said, no, wealth of nations came from individuals producing more than they consume. If humans divide up the work that is there to be done and each individual becomes specialized and more productive then trades his output with another specialist both will have more. Add them together the nation has more.  Smith basic idea of the individual was expanded to the individual firm by Alfred Marshal in 1890. The same principle applied, that a nation because better off when individuals and firms seek to gain for themselves. This dominated economics until the Great Depression and John Maynord Keynes. Keynes' idea was prosperity and the standard of living of the public could ...
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Prominent Catholic Clergy: UFO's are Demons

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Just when one thinks we cannot go further into the land of crazy, we hear from a Catholic "authority" on exorcism. He exorcises demons from people and says he thinks UFO's are demonic. A few years ago the late Pope Francis said the devil is real.  So, we have here an important person in the Catholic denomination who believes people with some kind of mental problem are possessed with demons. On top of that, objects are flying about which are also demons. If one looks up the term auditory hallucinations, hearing voices, one learns it is an illness. There are protocols for treating it.  In the case of invisible demons, or gods, there is not a matching diagnosis. It seems to me that seeing invisible things in the mind are not all that different than hearing voices that do not exist. Perhaps they are not exactly the same. Yet, to me, they don't seem completely different.  Seeing invisible demons, or hearing imaginary voices, is not harmful until those who affected start re...
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Can Christian GLBT Parents Have Pride During Pride Month

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June is Pride Month across the U.S., maybe around the world. Parents who consider themselves very Christian but have a gay child think they have an impossible dilemma. It is, of course, that their faith paints gay/trans as the sin at the top of the Sin Leader Board but the child tells them, "It's who I am. There is nothing you or I can do to change me" while their faith condemns and scolds. It was interesting to read a Christian post telling other Christian parents accept their GLBT children. Parents, she writes, can accept their gay/trans child and hold on to their faith. During the years I held a position in the national organization, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, I heard so many stories told by parents who thought their world had ended when then learned of a gay child. Later they realized a lot of their angst was about themselves, not their child. It was, "What will others think of me when they learn about him(her)?" Often there was a preacher pus...
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Some Mormons are Understanding the Decline

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A devout Mormon, now known as LDS, has done surveys about why people leave that denomination. He found the explanations people gave for leaving are very different than the reasons assigned to them by those still in the faith. What he found sounds just like what I have seen among people across Christianity. When Christian pundits talk about atheists, they most often attribute atheism to a desire to "sin." This, of course, requires the atheist to believe there is such a thing as "sin." In my experience atheists who were in the faith, not all of them were in it, simply stopped believing in the concepts of invisible gods, an invisible author of the Bible or that spokespersons for the faith, priests and preachers, have more insight into such matters than the average person.  The author of the link, a practicing and office holding LDS, swamped the internet asking both practicing Mormons and ex Mormons what they thought about the other. This was not a study up to the stand...
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