<div>You can't, of course, with fact and logic. </div>
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<div>The trick is to address the profound human needs that religion attempts to satisfy, needs that are inherent to the human condition, while not succumbing to dogmatic violations of fact and logic that many religions demand of their followers, to maintain the spiritual dimension of the human psyche, while accepting the scientific worldview, and all that follows. Not an easy task, given religion offers certainties of values and outcomes that science indicates are questionable, certainties that are part of the appeal of religion.</div>
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<div>I doubt singer/songwriter Jane Siberry is a follower of any dogmatic religion. Once she was asked about God, and she responded enigmatically "God is dog. I don't understand the question" and "The first church is nature. That's the first thing I ever trusted spiritually that was of a design far beyond my understanding." </div>
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<div>Read these quotes in the interview at the following website: <a href="http://www.furious.com/perfect/janesiberry.html" target="_blank">http://www.furious.com/perfect/janesiberry.html</a></div>
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<div>I was surprised a moment ago to find a version of the song "Calling All Angels" on GodTube! The website is below. Maybe those hosting this website don't know that Siberry has said nature is the first church; in other words, to some, a heretic! Reading the lyrics carefully reveals more uncertainty about life and the human condition, it appears, than many religious followers would be comfortable with. But Siberry attempts in her music to express a profound spirituality while not being religiously dogmatic (no pun intended) or doctrinaire. The version of "Calling All Angels" at the website below is not as good, I think, as the studio version from her album "When I Was a Boy."</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=JB1M1CNU" target="_blank">http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=JB1M1CNU</a></div>
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<div>Santa Maria, Santa Teresa, Santa Anna, Santa Susannah<br>Santa Cecilia, Santa Copelia, Santa Domenica, Mary Angelica<br>Frater Achad, Frater Pietro, Julianus, Petronilla<br>Santa, Santos, Miroslaw, Vladimir<br>and all the rest<br>
<br>Oh, a man is placed upon the steps, a baby cries<br>and high above you can hear <br>the church bells start to ring<br>and as the heaviness, oh the heaviness, the body settles in<br>somewhere you can hear a mother sing<br>
<br>then it's one foot then the other <br>as you step out onto the road of hope<br>step out on the road<br>how much weight? how much?<br>then it's how long? and how far?<br>and how many times oh, before it's too late?<br>
<br>calling all angels calling all angels<br>walk me through this one<br>don't leave me alone<br>calling all angels calling all angels<br>we're tryin' and we're hopin'<br>but we're not sure how...<br>
<br>ah, and every day you gaze upon the sunset<br>with such love and intensity<br>why it's ah, it's almost as<br>if you could only crack the code<br>then you'd finally understand what this all means<br><br>ah, but if you could...do you think you would<br>
trade in all, all the pain and suffering?<br>ah, but then you'd miss<br>the beauty of the light upon this earth<br>and the sweetness of the leaving<br><br>calling all angels calling all angels<br>walk me through this one<br>
don't leave me alone<br>calling all angels calling all angels<br>we're tryin' and we're hopin'<br>but we're not sure...<br><br>calling all angels calling all angels<br>walk me through this one<br>don't leave me alone<br>
calling all angels calling all angels<br>we're tryin' we're hopin'<br>we're hurtin' we're lovin'<br>we're cryin' we're callin'<br>cause we're not sure how this goes</div>
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<div>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Art Deco <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:deco@moscow.com" target="_blank">deco@moscow.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div>How can you tell which religion, if any, is the true one?</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank"><img title="http://www.nytimes.com/
CTRL + Click to follow link" border="0" hspace="0" alt="The New York Times" align="left" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif"></a> <u></u>
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<div>October 18, 2011</div>
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<h1><u></u>Anne Frank, a Mormon?<u></u></h1><u></u>
<h6>By <a title="More Articles by Maureen Dowd" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per" rel="author" target="_blank">MAUREEN DOWD</a></h6><u></u><u></u>
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<p>WASHINGTON </p>
<p>At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around. </p>
<p>Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy. </p>
<p>“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ” </p>
<p>He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.” </p>
<p>Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.” </p>
<p>But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher. </p>
<p>In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.” </p>
<p>In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion. </p>
<p>Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward. </p>
<p>Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. </p>
<p>Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.” </p>
<p>Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.” </p>
<p>The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. </p>
<p>It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims. </p>
<p>Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.” </p>
<p>Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.” </p>
<p>Richard Bushman, a Mormon who is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said that after “the Jewish dust-up,” Mormons “backed away” from “going to extravagant lengths to collect the names of every last person who ever lived and baptize them — even George Washington.” Now they will do it for Mormons who bring a relative or ancestor’s name into the temple, he said. </p>
<p>Bushman said that “Mormons believe that Christ is the divine son of God who atoned for our sins, but we don’t believe in the Trinity in the sense that there are three in one. We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct persons.” </p>
<p>Kent Jackson, the associate dean of religion at Brigham Young University, says that while Mormons are Christians, “Mormonism is not part of the Christian family tree.” </p>
<p>It probably won’t comfort skeptical evangelicals and Catholics to know that Mormons think that while other Christians merely “have a portion of the truth, what God revealed to Joseph Smith is the fullness of the truth,” as Jackson says. “We have no qualms about saying evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants can go to heaven, including Pastor Jeffress. We just believe that the highest blessings of heaven come” to Mormons. </p>
<p>As for those planets that devout Mormon couples might get after death, Jackson says that’s a canard. But Bushman says it’s part of “Mormon lore,” and that it’s based on the belief that if humans can become like God, and God has the whole universe, then maybe Mormons will get to run a bit of that universe. </p>
<p>As for the special garment that Mitt wears, “we wouldn’t say ‘magic underwear,’ ” Bushman explains. </p>
<p>It is meant to denote “moral protection,” a sign that they are “a consecrated people like the priests of ancient Israel.” </p>
<p>And it’s not only a one-piece any more. “There’s a two-piece now,” he said. </p>
<p>Republicans are the ones who have made faith part of the presidential test. Now we’ll see if Mitt can pass it. </p><u></u>
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<div><font size="2" face="Verdana">__________________________________</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Verdana">Wayne A. Fox<br><a href="mailto:wayne.a.fox@gmail.com" target="_blank">wayne.a.fox@gmail.com</a><br></font></div></div><br>=======================================================<br> List services made available by First Step Internet,<br>
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