-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
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posted
I attend Brentwood Hills Church of Christ, and DLU is Church of Christ affiliated. Whether Church of Christ is a denomination depends on your definition, though. There are a lot of churches with that name that worship in the same general way, and are organized in the same way. We consider that way to be as close as possible to the way early Christians worshipped and organized themselves. (Of course, until Christianity was assimilated into Roman culture in about the fourth century, there wasn't any such thing as a church building, much less a congregation of 1,400 people, but I digress.) However, each congregation is an independent entity. We do group projects occasionally, like the Nashville Workcamp, but there's no overarching organizational structure between churches.
So to answer the question you actually asked, I'm about as far from Catholic as you can be and still be Christian.
As for the arena, it's basically a gym with seating for 6,000. It's the only place on campus where the entire student body can gather at one time, which is apparently rather important to President Flatt.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
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Which has what to do with how early Christians worshipped or organized?
3/10.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
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Enough with the moralizing and religious banter, there is a dorky technical problem to be solved.
So you have 6000 purple seats and you want to engineer a system that can visually determine which ones are occupied. You're likely going to need several cameras/angles to do this properly. Witha single camera even at moderately high resolution you're going to have a difficult time resolving every seat. I'd say an array of webcams would be in order. This is good because they are inexpensive and tiny. This is bad because they frequently suck balls. There are going to be overlaps to take into consideration (which could be good for redundancy) and then there's Tim's unlikely but horrible fat-guy-in-a-purple-mack scenario which would be difficult to get around. But it does seem fairly do-able. And even kind of interesting.
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Or not. I mean, you've had a fundamentalist Christian in charge for, what, three years now, and yet abortion still isn't illegal, you still got separation of church and state, and the homosexuals haven't been smote by God or indeed anyone else. Sure, there are a few less Muslims in the world, and a bunch of old white guys have gotten even richer, but it's hardly The Handmaid's Tale is it?
No, we should all support Stephen's project and assist him in any way we can. If it comes to fruition, his plan will ensure that God-squaders everywhere will be far too busy hassling each other over their church attendance to bother the rest of us. And if that's not heaven on Earth, I don't know what is. 8)
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Sitting naked on the couch eating bon-bons and watching Cartoon Network?
-------------------- The philosopher's stone. Those who possess it are no longer bound by the laws of equivalent exchange in alchemy. They gain without sacrifice and create without equal exchange. We searched for it, and we found it.
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I think I'd be inclined to offer the Mormons that particular distinction...
I can never quite decide whether they qualify as Christians, is the thing. Thankfully, my opinion doesn't matter.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
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I was about to type "Well, they worship Christ, so surely that makes them Christians?" When it suddenly occurred to me I wasn't sure. . . Do they in fact worship Christ? At all? Is there a Holy Trinity Plus Brigham Young?
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Well, my main problem with the CoJCoLDS is that they hold as scripture various things that make no sense. I've never actually read all the way through that copy of the Book of Mormon on the bookshelf behind me, but from what I understand, one man was supposedly told the whole thing at one time, and little of it is consistant with the Bible as it's generally accepted. It's a bunch of stories, with minimal insight into how God intended life to be lived.
Hm.
Let me put it this way: You can (and arguably should) look at all of history as a single story of God workiing in the "life" of humanity, showing us how he intended life to be lived. Life was created with specific intentions for its nature, and we lost that path. God always tried to show us the way back, so that we may truly live. Jesus was the perfect expression of that. "I come that you may have life and have it abundantly." In that context, what possible purpose could the stories in the Book of Mormon serve? Why would God (or the angel Moroni) even bother? So yeah, Mormons believe Christ to be the Son of God, which is great, but if the whole point to Christ BEING the Son of God is that it allows us to live life in the best way possible... why bother with the Book of Mormon at all?
Of course, I personally believe that the whole thing was a massive joke. I mean, the whole bit about The Brother of Jarod is almost Pythonesque. SUBMARINES? Though the bit about God giving him the finger might qualify as inspired, just not in the way the Mormons think.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
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I really don't want to play Mormon's Advocate, but surely there's precedent for the message changing given (as I perceive it, but I know I'm not alone in this) the differences between Old and New Testaments? In that light, could the Book or Mormon just be reinforcing/supplementing the instructions contained in the New T, or even supplanting them, a Divine case of 'third time lucky?'
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Well, that's just it, it's not a question of instructions. The events of the Old and New Testaments were all attempts on the part of God to teach us how we might live as well as humanly possible. Christ was the ultimate way for us to see it. The Book of Mormon doesn't even pretend to improve on that. It's just stories of Lehi leading Jews to America, Christ appearing there after his ressurection, founding a church, which then mysteriously vanished leaving no evidence, only to be ressurected itself centuries later when some guy claimed to find disappearing tablets in a field.
Mind you, this is their beliefs as expressed in public. Many ex-Mormons claim that the CoJCoLDS has other beliefs that don't get out much, that seem more Bhuddist than Christian, i.e. we become God after death or somesuch. So yeah, they're Christian in that they believe Christ is the son of God, but their beliefs about what that means are apparently way different from what even they define as scriptural. Assuming what I understand from these ex-Mormons is accurate, naturally.
And, just for the record, my statements are intended to describe what I understand about the official beliefs of the CoJCoLDS. I say nothing about individual Mormons.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
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