re: #151 Dangerman

I can sort of understand someone “sincerely” interpreting things in a way that ultimately proved incorrect when they arrived at the gates.

I do not understand those who think they’re smarter than god, can “cheat” and get away with it or that god doesn’t know everything including their every thought and motivation

the Catholic church already went through all of this with the idea of indulgences, which were really promulgated on an idea with absolutely zero basis for why it would exist—Purgatory. Somehow, you can either buy your way to salvation with coin, or with a kind of arduous pilgrimage (which you have to pronounce “pilgrimajuh” so that you sound appropriate for the early 1300’s), or by just paying an amount of gold sufficient to give you a literal “get out of jail not-so-free” bit of paper. And all of THAT, by the way, was helped along by a clever little man named Gutenberg, who allowed mass printing of indulgences via his invention, the printing press (here endeth my impression of James Burke and Connections).

One of the central tenets of the protestant sects—the whole “you can’t get to heaven based on Acts”—was built precisely because of the distaste those groups had for the pilgrimages and the indulgences. And of course, the less educated Baptist sects, along with pentecostals and other various holy rollers, have managed to bring it all around full circle by now imagining that Trump isnt’ the antichrist because a)they don’t wish that to be so and b)he grants them precisely the sorts of things that they want, which is precisely what Antichrist does, as all demons do.