Health care Reform and Matthew 25.

Ironic that the actions of those who do not need health care, banks and brokers, were the reason health care will not make it this time. Unfortunately, job creation and financial reform is the right move because, even tho health care is right, legislation cannot be passed without credibility. Certainly we have to give Catholic bishops another zero here. They blocked it while they have had little to do with job creation. Perhaps as the country rebuilds we can get the climate right to help these forty million people whose lives will remain terrible because of the lack of health care. Perhaps we need to paraphrase Matthew 25 and state: “I needed health care and you did not provide it.”

http://www.best-quality-for-you.com/kindle.html

Cult of the Saints due to lack of faith.

Now with the Vatican again sporting popes of questionable lives we should remind ourselves that the cult of the sainst does not have a solid foundation. The cult of the saints is basically a fourth century creation and centered on martyrs. This cult multiplied principally because people who were now called Christians were for the most part opportunists. Bishops who theretofore were willing to die for their faith succumbed to an emperor and let him call and manage the Council of bishops. Veneration of saints multiplied, as did their bodies, (every town had the body of the same saint) because since the religion now became politically expedient it was necessary to visit the past in order to visit those who practiced Christianity. Robert Marcus called this “The Age of Hypocrisy, as well it was. Here are Marcus’ comments:

“As saints became ubiquitous, they also changed their functions. In the
early Christian community the living faithful prayed to God for their dead;
now the dead saint is asked to pray for the living: a whole new liturgy came
into being. As the martyr is , literally, detached from the place of his
martyrdom and made present wherever his relics have become the center of a
cult, so relics began to be seen in a new way…..relics soon became
themselves, the seats of holy power, God’s preferred channels for miraculous
action. A new nexus of social relationships centered around their shrines;
their cult provided ways of securing social cohesion in the locality, and
one of the means on which bishops depended to consolidate their authority.”
The Oxford History of Christianity.pg90.

More or less what much of the churches still have today. A lot of superstition lacking in the values of the gospel.