Ken Is In The Hot Seat

I will have to give your first question some thought because, at this time, I don't have a clue. As for this one, I am pretty much an introvert. However, I like to do things that matter and I don't believe that I am entirely stupid, so I have trouble standing by and letting people dumber than I am call all the shots, so that has forced me to come forward from time to time. So I will come forward in a work situation, in church, or in school, as to do otherwise would be to not advance myself. In social situations, I don't know if it's accurate to say that I am shy but I don't feel the need to be the center of attention, and would rather have an interesting conversation with one person than being engulfed in something involving a lot of people. In most things, I think I just like to get things done, and sometimes that involves doing it myself or stepping forward, but if I am able to suggest something, I am perfectly willing to let someone take the ball and run with it, and score the point.

 

Vice Presidents are usually selected for their ability to get someone elected, and are chosen before the election. In that case, like everyone else, I'd choose whoever I thought would do me the most good, since Vice Presidents don't have much power on their own and, if it was someone I could trust, I might give them some power, but otherwise not. What the first day in office would look like would depend on what I learned during the briefings that are given to the president-elect beforehand, so I couldn't begin to guess.

 

Unfortunately, no. I haven't heard from him in quite a while. He moved out when he turned eighteen, then moved back in a few months later when he couldn't pay his rent, and stayed with me until he was twenty. At that time, he married a girl who he had dated in high school and I moved from California to Texas, paying the rent up on my townhouse in California for six months to give them a start. He came with me to Texas to help me move, and he and his wife drove to Texas another time to visit. The last time I saw him, I had flown to California to visit. At that time, he had his first baby. Seemingly, he has never gone online or I think I'd have found him, but I've moved several times since then, as I suspect he has as well, since people tend not to stay in one place for too long in Orange County. When I was getting started in EMS, that was my focus and I have never been very good at keeping in touch with people until Facebook. He will be fifty-three in July, so he's old enough to be here now.

No, except with the technical stuff. When people are having trouble connecting, getting emails or not getting emails, there is really very little that I can do about it other than see if my web host can figure out what the problem might be. I connect to the forum in the same way that the rest of you do, the only difference being that my Admin account allows me to access the back-end stuff, none of which controls whether someone will get a bad connection or a good one. Actually, there is a setting that I can use to discourage people that fakes a bad connection, but I swear I have only used that on a couple of spammers. When I ban their account or ISP, they just create another account or come in on a proxy, but when I set it to discourage, they think they can't get a connection and go away. That's the idea, anyhow.

 

That's a correct definition except that it doesn't -- or no longer -- applies to all Anabaptist groups. Anabaptist is a generic term that is used to describe a variety of denominations that includes the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Amish. Some of the modern Mennonite groups consider themselves to be Protestant but, traditionally, the Anabaptists came out of the Radical Reformation, which took place simultaneous or just a little later than the Protestant Reformation, but while the Protestant Reformation was still going on. The early Anabaptist groups fit the description that you found, but then broke off to form several other sub-sects, including the Mennonites, Old Order Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and others, including subsets of these. In the early days of both Reformations, some of the leading people who formed the first Baptist groups had an association with the Anabaptists, so that's where there was a form of mingling between the Protestant and Radical Reformations. Once Protestant groups, such as the Lutherans, attained political power in Europe, they began to persecute the Anabaptists as well, while there was little movement on the part of the Anabaptists to form political affiliations. There was one group of Anabaptists who attempted such, but they were quickly severed from the larger group of Anabaptists.

Simply speaking, the Old Order Mennonites, most of the Amish groups, and the Hutterites are similar in that they have decided not to embrace modernization. Contrary to popular belief however, this is not a religious belief on their part, but a choice that they have made as a body, intended to make it easier for them to remain the type of Christians they seek to be, and there are several types of Amish groups, separated largely by the the technologies that they have agreed to accept.

I was a member of a Church of the Brethren congregation, which is one of the more modern Mennonite denominations, with no bars to the use of technology. They were more or less neutral as far as participation in government, such as voting, although there were some in the church who strongly believed that a Christian should not hold public office or serve in the military. We did have a pastor, but it was significant that the pastor was expected to hold another job. When there were projects and programs that he was needed for, the church reimbursed him for his time, in lieu of a salary, but otherwise he worked as a plumber.

Since I was last able to participate in a Church of the Brethren congregation, as there were none near me in Texas and there are none near me here in Maine, that denomination has split over the subject of gay marriage and over gays serving in church positions.

I am very familiar with the history and various beliefs of the Anabaptists and am perfectly willing to participate in a thread about it in the religion section. I have never been Amish but I have several friends who are, or were, and am on good terms with the Amish community nearest us here in Maine. I am less familiar with the Hutterites as far as having personal relationships but I have studied the denomination, and have had one friend who was raised in a Hutterite community.

Ron Paul. Or Michigan Congressman Justin Amash. As far as changes, I would first undo every law that was put into force by executive action, then go back to operating as a constitutional republic, which does include the House and Senate.

Not exactly, as she has no familiarity with Anabaptism, other than what we have discussed. She is a Christian, and a much stronger Christian than I am. I believe that Jesus has the power to do whatever He wants to do, but that He chooses to work within the laws of nature that were established by God in most cases. In other words, since mankind has messed up nature, we have cancer. I believe that God may, and probably does, heal people of cancer from time to time, but that He does so because He has a special purpose for that person, and not because someone laid hands upon them or prayed for healing. Don't misunderstand this, however. I do believe that God may work through the laying on of hands now as He did during New Testament times, and I believe in the power of prayer. Still, I believe that two people might have an equal number of faithful people praying for them to be healed, yet one might be healed and another not. We cannot always understand God's purposes or plans.

Unless God has some special purpose for me, one that can't be just as easily accomplished by someone else, if I step out in front of a truck, my life or death is more likely to be controlled by the reaction time of the truck driver, rather than by my position in the body of Christ.

 

I have to say that it can have very much, but it usually has very little. Mostly, God provides the ability for a person to remain well through healthy foods and healthy living, and that He heals through doctors, medicine and yes, through natural remedies. At times, He may choose to heal someone based on prayer or faith, but I don't believe that poor health is the result of a lack of faith or that the reverse is true. That said, there is a natural benefit to having faith that a particular procedure, medication, or religious rite may heal you. That's the placebo effect, and it can lead to actual healings.

 

It may be a reaction to my mother's death at an early age. She was a very Christian woman in every way that I am aware of. Yet, when she was in, I think, her early forties, she went into the hospital and died a few days later of a stroke. I was a new Christian at the time and like, I am sure, everyone else in my family and a lot of other Christians in our extended family and community, I prayed that she would get well, and come home from the hospital. At that time, the hospital policies were that no one under the age of eighteen could visit and, unlike my older brothers, I was not allowed to visit her during her last days on earth. Nevertheless, I believed strongly in the power of prayer and actually felt confident that God would hear my prayers and heal my mother. When that didn't happen, I was mad at God for a long while, and finally realized that He is not at our command and doesn't necessarily heed our prayers. He hears them, I am sure, but the chances of any particular prayer being answered in the way that it was asked is about the same as casting dice.

I have trouble listening to preaching from the pulpit about God healing those who have enough faith, since the implications are that my mother didn't have enough faith or that our prayers were, for some reason, deficient.

This may sound like a harsh thing but God's concerns are not so much one of ensuring that we lead a healthy, happy life here on earth. Certainly, Christ did not grant this to His disciples, the ones who walked with Him while He was here in human form, so why should He now be sitting in heaven healing us whenever we get ourselves into trouble? The Apostle Paul was certainly a faithful man, yet he suffered from afflictions. Among them, the Apostle John was perhaps the only one to live into old age, and his life was certainly not on Easy Street.

So no, I don't believe in the easy Gospel, that if only one can have enough faith, everything will come up roses. More often, the reverse is true. We are tested through adversity and afflictions, and Christ tells us that we will be hated for His sake.

As a human being, I have surely prayed to be healed from cancer and from other things that have come upon me. I have prayed for jobs, for money, and for other things that I thought I needed here on earth, and I have asked others to pray for these things as well. I pray regularly for others who are in need and, as a paramedic, I prayed for the skill and the wisdom to do the right thing. God does hear our prayers, I believe, and there's always a chance that He will answer them in the way we'd like Him to. As a Christian though, my overriding concerns should look beyond the comforts of this life and to the one beyond. I can't say that I do that all of the time, or even most of the time, but that is my failing.