Married but not legally?

[MoNatureMan]

So. To fix this mess.
Abolish the illegal IRS to get rid of the federal manipulation of marriage by taxation.
Take the federal government back to it's original purpose, leaving most laws to the state and local governments.
Remove all government control of marriage, leaving it to the churches.
Term limit all government representatives and make them equal to all of us under the law.

There would be problems from that scenario, but it would never happen anyway.

Ron

[JimShedd112]

Ron, I like your sentiment about removing government and its many onerous programs from our lives. But, alas, the federal bureaucracy has grown too large and too powerful for it to ever be cut the way you describe. Just this afternoon I heard Mark Levin say Republicans BLOCKED Reagan's plans to abolish the Department of Education and another which i can't recall right now.

The bureaucrats never want to surrender their grip.

Jim Shedd

[Petros]

"too large and too powerful for it to ever be cut"

One thing [well, one of a few things] I have learned in a not altogether unpicturesque career - never say "NEVER". Maybe especially about the government. Thousand year empires have fallen, the world has turned upside down, subject peoples have subjugated their conquerors, mighty Casey has struck out, and I don't feel so good myself, thanks for asking, Julius.

Improbable, yes, even highly improbable; but friction and grenades can stop the Juggernaut. And if the time ripens for God to CHANGE - "impossible" events happen at alarming speed.

[JimShedd112]

Well said Petros. You're exactly right, I should not have used the term "never" but rather your phrase "highly improbable" or something similar.

Jim Shedd

[Bare_Truth]

Pray for it to be soon, and then leave the timing to God.

[Bare_Truth]

Cauton: World may end soon! Bare_Truth actually made a short post!

[Petros]

Hey, mon, even I make short posts now and then.

I once wrote a professional paper that clocked at 8 pp [my normal minimum 20 or so]. I was shocked, but there was nothing more to be said. Begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end, then stop.

The world did not end.

[DaveT]

It my opinion that the no. 1 authority for marriage is the church that Christ established,, If the state/government wants to authorize it, that's fine. They're just setting their seal on what God has already done/authorized. But whether they do or don't is irrelevant in God's view. Therefore if marriage is done without the states authority it's still just as legitimate in heaven's sight as if it were. And it goes the other way as well. The state can authorize whatever they want and call it marriage, but if's something contrary to what God has told us, He isn't going to recognize it. And I won't use the term "marriage" for it. It just isn't.

[Petros]

Ah, yes. And if Big Brother, who determines what words get to mean and what they shall mean, insists?

Long ago, when the world was so new and all, Best Beloved, I had a professor [who for his sins had me] who set us an assignment. And I humphed and harumphed and developed and turned in a most monstrous edifice of a paper. And - not least because what I had done made sense to me - the professor who was strong on seeing NeoBloomfieldianism as NEW and powerful had trouble making sense of what I saw as eminently sensible. Neither the first nor the last.

So he set up a meeting and we talked and scribbled and gradually he understood what I was doing - which was taking a linguistic prime and using word and concept in a way that made sense in the real world [the one in which I lived].

He was horrified. "But you can't do that" he exclaimed. You can't, in other words, use a word in a sense different from the usage of Big Brother, or the consensus, or the guru, or Dallas Seminary - whoever your authority may be. Nor can you harbor and use a concept or world view or theory or understanding that differs from those in the canon, lest you be shot at with or from a cannon.

So you or I may think or say that "gay marriage" is neither, that the self-labelled elite are NOT the chosen people, that Mario and Maria are married though there is no document, license, receipt saying so, and that Christian Naturism IS. But my professor and the Podunk Daily Trumpet and the police and courts and the Tweetocracy will be there to speak and act.

It was years before I even allowed myself to say the word which in my mouth so shocked him.

[jochanaan]

NeoBloomfieldianism?

If we, apart from Big Brother, are to use a word in other than its commonly-understood sense, it behooves us to explain our usage if we want others to understand us. But often we don't realize that our usage is different from others'.

And then of course there are those words that are only used in theology. Who, in daily speech, uses the word propitiation? Or atonement? Or especially, REPENT!!!

[Petros]

Neobloomfieldianism:

A. Leonard Bloomfield: leader of Mesolithic American Linguistics, important in Algonquian comparative studies, rather too behavioral and Junggrammatiker [nothing to do with Jungian] for me, bane of the generation of American Linguistics who had to work from his book and those of his students. For all that besser als Noam Chomsky - Neolithic - who subverted American Linguistics which has not recovered - or de Saussure - Paleolithic - who was plain incomprehensible.

B. Bloomfieldian - pertaining to the theoretical framework used by Bloomfield.

C. NeoBloomfieldian - pertaining to the shortlived [by my professor Golden] age developing and expanding building on Bloomfieldian foundations.

Personally, though I can rarely atone, I try when all too frequently I have to repent in nontheological contexts.