There will never be another Billy Graham, because the world that made him possible is gone

https://www.yahoo.com/news/will-never-another-billy-graham-world-made-possible-gone-195847056.html

Maybe it was no coincidence that he died with the birth of the Trump presidency.

He was in physical decline long before Trump, and Trump was President more than a year before he died, but go ahead and bring Trump into it.

It's not like that guy I saw holding a sign at City Creek last year that said:

August 21st, 2017
Solar Eclipse
Monson's 90th Birthday

Coincidence?

Now THAT makes one think...

He was in his nineties. To be honest I thought he died years ago.

Is this the same Billy Grahm who didn't see a 900 foot tall jesus ?

Dave the Atheist Wrote:
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> Is this the same Billy Grahm who didn't see a 900
> foot tall jesus ?

Oral Roberts, not Grahm



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2018 03:54AM by angela.

Yes, I know it was Roberts. I said DIDN'T see.

There are, and will continue to be, legions of him.

And that's not a good thing.

No, it isn't good at all. More dumbing down.

Yes, I agree with you too about that.

If we can put that point aside for a moment, though, I think the article made good use of him to describe changes in American society. It struck me as insightful.

*you two, not you too.

If you register your username you can edit your posts.

Yes, but then I'd have no excuse for not editing my posts.

;)

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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> Yes, but then I'd have no excuse for not editing
> my posts.
>
> ;)

:) :) :)

And sad to say there will never be another Phil Hartman :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuJpalsj9sQ

Did anybody read the article? It feels like people are just reading the subject line of the post and lashing back with things like there's a million more where he came from.

It's an excellent article--thanks for posting it. Very thought provoking to think about the timeline of the rise of Billy Graham and the changes in our country. Yes, there will be plenty of crazy mega-church leaders. It's not really the point.

The only Christian leader who could probably unite most Christians in any meaningful way would be a charismatic Pope. Of course a lot of fundamentalists would see such a person as the anti-Christ. Even in the United States the Catholic Church is the closest thing to a large cohesive religious body even with all its divisions. It is still a little short of amazing to see what Billy Graham represented in the 50s and 60s.

Many Christian bodies view the Pope and what he represents as the archtypal anti-Christ.

Billy Graham actually emulated Christ much more influentially than the Catholic church has in its almost 2,000 year tradition.

Mainstream Christianity rejects Catholicism. Charismatic pope or no charismatic pope.

Yeah ... he was such a paragon of virtue
=============================================





''They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,'' Graham had said to Nixon. The Jewish ''stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain,'' he continued.
Graham told Nixon that Jews did not know his true feelings about them.
''I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal (A.M. Rosenthal) at The New York Times and people of that sort, you know. And all -- I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.'' -- Billy Graham

Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are mainstream Christianity. Evangelical Protestantism is a splinter group.

Justin Wrote:
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> Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are mainstream
> Christianity. Evangelical Protestantism is a
> splinter group.

Hmm, when I think of "mainstream" Evangelicals, Protestants, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, etc come to mind.

Catholicism may have been the first Roman Christian church to fill the planet. But it wasn't the first Christians that lived. Before Rome became the capitol for Catholicism, it slaughtered Christians like it did the Jews. It only became the Roman center of power over Christians so it could control the populace via religion rather than governance alone.

"Question: "What is the origin of the Roman Catholic Church?"

Answer: The Roman Catholic Church contends that its origin is the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ in approximately AD 30. The Catholic Church proclaims itself to be the church that Jesus Christ died for, the church that was established and built by the apostles. Is that the true origin of the Catholic Church? On the contrary. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament will reveal that the Catholic Church does not have its origin in the teachings of Jesus or His apostles. In the New Testament, there is no mention of the papacy, worship/adoration of Mary (or the immaculate conception of Mary, the perpetual virginity of Mary, the assumption of Mary, or Mary as co-redemptrix and mediatrix), petitioning saints in heaven for their prayers, apostolic succession, the ordinances of the church functioning as sacraments, infant baptism, confession of sin to a priest, purgatory, indulgences, or the equal authority of church tradition and Scripture. So, if the origin of the Catholic Church is not in the teachings of Jesus and His apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, what is the true origin of the Catholic Church?

For the first 280 years of Christian history, Christianity was banned by the Roman Empire, and Christians were terribly persecuted. This changed after the “conversion” of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine provided religious toleration with the Edict of Milan in AD 313, effectively lifting the ban on Christianity. Later, in AD 325, Constantine called the Council of Nicea in an attempt to unify Christianity. Constantine envisioned Christianity as a religion that could unite the Roman Empire, which at that time was beginning to fragment and divide. While this may have seemed to be a positive development for the Christian church, the results were anything but positive. Just as Constantine refused to fully embrace the Christian faith, but continued many of his pagan beliefs and practices, so the Christian church that Constantine promoted was a mixture of true Christianity and Roman paganism."

https://www.gotquestions.org/origin-Catholic-church.html

I suggest you read "The Apostasy that Wasn't" by Rod Bennett. Remember who gave you the Bible as well as the definition of the Trinity which most Christians accept. Excluding Catholicism from the mainstream goes beyond what Billy Graham did. He encouraged Catholics who professed faith at his crusades to go back to their parishes and had a good friendship with John Paul II.

His words said in private between himself and President Nixon came back to haunt him, and tarnished his image with the Jewish community even after his public apology.

"[E]lder Graham was an early and avid backer of Israel. A tour of the country in 1960 raised the country’s profile among American evangelicals, establishing the seeds of strong pro-Israel support that persist in that community until now. In 1967, he urged Israeli leaders not to yield to diplomatic pressures that could endanger the country’s security; such entreaties, commonplace now on the American right, were unusual at the time. He made a film, “His Land,” about Israel that continues to be screened among pro-Israel evangelicals.

Graham also was a champion for the Jews persecuted in the former Soviet Union and counseled his evangelical brethren not to proselytize Jews.

“Just as Judaism frowns on proselytizing that is coercive, or that seeks to commit men against their will, so do I,” Graham told an American Jewish Committee delegation that met with him in 1973.

He received awards from the organized Jewish community and was so beloved in its precincts that in 1994, when H. R. Haldeman, a former top aide to President Richard Nixon, revealed Graham’s lacerating anti-Semitism expressed in private talks with Nixon, the Jewish community dismissed Haldeman’s account out of hand.

Tapes from the Nixon Library released in 2002 validated Haldeman’s account, however.

“A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,” Graham told Nixon in 1972. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.”

Graham also said that the Jewish “stranglehold” on the media “has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.”

In 2002, Graham apologized for the remarks, and Jewish community leaders accepted his apology — but the relationship would never again be the same.

“We knew that Nixon was an anti-Semite,” Abraham Foxman, then the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, told JTA at the time, whereas Graham is “a guy we all felt comfortable with … And he was so infected with this virulent anti-Semitism.”

Rabbi A. James Rudin, the AJC’s senior interreligious adviser, wrote in a statement Wednesday that Graham regretted his remarks about Jews and Judaism.

“He publicly apologized for them and asked for forgiveness during his 2002 ‘Crusade’ in New York City,” Rudin wrote. “I had a private conversation with him at that time, where he expressed deep personal remorse and asked me to convey his sincere apologies to the entire Jewish community.”

https://www.jta.org/2018/02/21/news-opinion/politics/billy-graham-who-championed-israel-in-public-and-derided-jews-in-private-dies-at-99

Yeah, notice he didn't apologize until he got caught?
Oops.

It was a private conversation which he may not have remembered until the tapes.

Right. Because he never, ever said anything like that to anyone else, it was just that one time. And he didn't get caught lying about what he'd said to a reporter.

Right.

And I am sure you remember all of the idle words you have spoken which might embarrass you if they were revealed.

Justin Wrote:
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> And I am sure you remember all of the idle words
> you have spoken which might embarrass you if they
> were revealed.

Since leaving mormonism, I always speak honestly and I'm not bigoted against particular racial/ethnic groups. So there aren't any "idle words which might embarrass me" to worry about.

I did say some nasty, stupid things back when I was a mormon youth about particular groups, 'cause I was still drinking the mormon kool-aid. I remember every single one (to my shame).

But this isn't about me. It's about Billy Graham.
To pretend that he only said "bad things" about Jews one time is absurd. If that's how he felt (and it's clear that it was), he said the same things to other people.

Now, he could have changed his mind about that later on. I would applaud that. But he never said he changed his mind -- he just fessed up to the one time he got caught on tape doing it.

So either he was lying to Nixon (which would tend to show he was a dishonest kiss-up to politically powerful people), or he was stating his true feelings about Jews (which would tend to show he was a racist anti-semite). In either case, he denied even saying those things until somebody produced a tape showing that he did. None of which speaks well to his character or honesty in any way.

What are the chances that he was sorry, so very, very sorry... that he got caught?

Just heard his body will lay in state at the Capitol's rotunda

well, I don't agree. There will always be a Billy Graham. There are suckers born every minute... There will always be people
who will enrich those preachers , remember the preacher in TExas who lives in a 7 million dollar home there and was criticized for not opening his doors to those of his followers who lost their
homes in the Huston flooding? He later explained that some how
he was misunderstoo? Gullible people will always exist.


Religion teaches you are bad but if you give the churches money,

you'll be saved. Millions believe .

No Christianity I know of teaches that salvation comes through giving money to the church, whether a particular church or the collective church.

Oh , so no church has ever asked anyone for money? No tithing, no passing the plate? No donations for anything?

You are changing the playing field. You implied that churches promise salvation in return for money. The don't.

Tell us about roman catholic church indulgences if you dare.

Not being RC I wouldn't dare but then the charge was against churches, presumably all churches, today. I have no problem with differing opinions but only blanket statements that are false.

The Council of Trent in the 1500s explicitly made it illegal for church officials to accept money for indulgences. It was illegal even then, but some church officials were abusing the practice. Indulgences today are granted as a result of prayer, reading scripture, or some other spiritual exercise.

I would say the only church I know about that charges money for salvation is the LDS Church. It is pretty clearly taught there. Even Catholic indulges didn't ultimately bring you salvation though it might be taught they reduced the amount of time you spent in purgatory. If a person is in hell you could buy all of the indulgences you want and not get a person out of hell into heaven.

Billy Graham came into the world butt naked. And that's the way he left it. Butt naked.

We come into this world alone. And we leave it, alone.

All the money in the world may buy creature comforts, security, etc. It doesn't improve one's chances of what comes after.

Billy Graham wasn't one to live for money, unlike some other televangelists. You can spot the money grubbers a mile away. He wasn't in that category.

He was and will be remembered as perhaps one of the most influential giants of our time. He walked with kings and presidents as counselor and advisor. He was well respected, trusted, and looked up to like an elder statesman.

He will be missed. There isn't really anyone who comes close to filling his shoes. He was a stand alone.

I really liked Billy Graham. Not sure about his kids.

People say stupid stuff all the time. He had his fsults but he was a far better man than many of the greedy televangelists I see around the place.

The man was an inspiration and I'd take him over that racist eugenicist horror Richard Dawkins any day.