Just my little rant:
Many of the major events of my life have taken place in the Methodist Church. As a lifelong member of the UMC, I'd like to still feel at home there. But I do not, because IMO there's an important difference between a church's fulfilling its obligation to provide moral guidance to its membership, and a church's attempt to subvert the civil liberty of an entire country by trying to enforce its views on the general citizenry. If the UMC had, say, urged its members to weigh carefully the spiritual implications of using a weapon to take one life in defense of another, I would not have objected--in fact, most people who keep firearms for personal defense do this anyway. But, to me, the UMC crossed the line by promoting Federal gun confiscation paid for with tax credits, not to mention its phoney-baloney assertions about the social danger of handguns. So, as far as I'm concerned, the UMC has undermined its own moral and spiritual authority, cheapened itself, and betrayed a gross lack of wisdom by turning itself into a tool of left-wing politics.
I think that the Methodist Church has done what the Democratic Party has also done: moved so far to the Left that many of us who were brought up in Methodist and Democrat homes are wondering just where the principles and traditions of our families' institutions have disappeared to. In effect, we were more loyal to these institutions than they were to us. The whole thing makes me sick.
Finally, one of the few instructive things about the UMC's position on "gun control" is the media response to it or lack thereof. We're bombarded by media reaction to the so-called Religious Right. But the media either ignore or approve the Religious Left. IOW, mixing religion and politics is an apt subject for hysteria and fearmongering when the Right does it. But, hey, it's okay when the Left does it. Typical media bias and double standard.
[This message has been edited by jimmy (edited March 10, 2000).]
