Beryle here: I don’t know how this happened, but the above blog is FROM me TO Elliott. While I’m here, the “DNJLYBJ” is not only a dead, stinking horse, but it was and IS (usually) out of context!

I forgot to also say that you should keep in mind that when you warn others about heretics and puplit pimps, be prepared to get called an “agent of satan” and keep in mind that satan will use those closest to you to try to convince you that you are messing with “God’s Anointed” God Bless!!

(MN: Your assessment is very accurate. but it’s about a year and 10 months too late. I have been told that I am satan, a tool of satan, an author of confusion, a disturbed individual, a man with too much time on his hands and a bully. I still haven’t figured out the bully aspect. It’s not as if I’m making people visit the site and making them read the pages. I’ve also been told that I am going to hell and that my life would fall apart because I am touching God’s Anointed. )

Take a look at truthofgod’s comment. I was really slow in getting it out here. I wasn’t sure of how best to post it. But the longer I waited, the further down the stack his comment came out. Click on my comment here, and his is above mine.

But haven’t we for years heard “whispers” about MLK, his ministry, and other things pertaining to his life? I thought the “alleged” plagarism was a known thing…Anywho, just because he (MLK) was in the position that he was doesn’t make him and what he says “automatically ture.” Thanks for posting despite the potential backlash…

Wow…bullets you are right. You may catch’em like you are strollin’ down Compton Blvd. I pray that whatever the truth is…to surface. I have no idea of the legitmacy of this but it takes stength to post somethin’ like this….. John 8:31-32

King was not a Christian in any orthodox sense of “the word, unfortunately.

He didn’t believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, or the resurrection and Atonement.

Quotes below are courtesy of the staff of the King Papers Project……….

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African-American Social Gospel

” From childhood, King had been uncomfortable with the emotionalism and SCRIPTURAL LITERALISM that he associated with traditional Baptist liturgy, but he was also familiar with innovative, politically active, and intellectually sophisticated African-American clergymen who had themselves been influenced by European-American theological scholarship. These clergymen served as role models for King as he mined theological scholarship for nuggets of insight that could enrich his preaching. As he sought to resolve religious doubts that had initially prevented him from accepting his calling, King looked upon European-American theological ideas not as alternatives to traditional black Baptist beliefs but as necessary CORRECTIVES to those beliefs.

Tracing the evolution of his religious beliefs in a sketch written at Crozer entitled “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” King recalled that an initial sense of religious estrangement had unexpectedly and abruptly become apparent at a Sunday morning revival meeting he attended at about the age of seven. A guest evangelist from Virginia had come to talk about salvation and to seek recruits for the church. Having grown up in the church, King had never given much thought to joining it formally, but the emotion of the revival and the decision of his sister to step forward prompted an impulsive decision to accept conversion. He reflected,

“I had never given this matter a thought, and EVEN AT THE TIME OF MY BAPTISM I WAS UNAWARE OF WHAT WAS TAKING PLACE”

King admitted that he “joined the church NOT OUT OF ANY DYNAMIC CONVICTION, but out of a childhood desire to keep up with my sister.”

In the same sketch, he wrote that, although he accepted the teachings of his Sunday school teachers UNTIL HE WAS ABOUT 12,
“….this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type. At the age of 13 I shocked my Sunday School class by DENYING THE BODILY RESURRECTION OF JESUS. From the age of thirteen on doubts began to come unrelentingly.”

Although his convictions removed him from the kind of fundamentalist faith that placed great importance on emotionalism and a CONVERSION EXPERIENCE, he never considered abandoning his inherited faith. His early doubts did not interfere with his intense involvement in church life, his love of church music, or his fascination with the art of preaching.

Moreover, King was aware that the accomplishments of his father’s generation of African-American religious leaders represented more than just emotional folk preaching and scriptural literalism. Despite theological differences, King attributed his decision to enter the ministry to the influence of a father who “set forth a noble example that I didn’t [mind] following.” (Hardly a call from God.)

At Morehouse, King received his initial exposure to modern critical theology.

King’s descriptions of his decision to enter the ministry reveal that he had accepted the social mission of the church even though he had not yet resolved his theological doubts. He realized that the Baptist religion he had absorbed during his youth had derived mainly from daily contact with church life rather than from theological reflection. Growing up in the church provided a substitute for orthodox theological convictions; born a Baptist, he never felt the need to affirm all the tenets of the denomination. In his “Autobiography of Religious Development,” he explained: “Conversion for me was never an abrupt something. I have never experienced the so called .crisis moment.’ Religion has just been something that I grew up in. Conversion for me has been the gradual intaking of the noble ideals set forth in my family and my environment, and I must admit that this intaking has been largely unconscious.”

The consistency of King’s basic religious and political convictions throughout his life suggest that his collegiate training was not a transformative experience but was rather a refinement of preexisting religious attitudes. Recognizing that a Ph.D. degree from a northern university would set him apart from most other Baptist ministers, he approached his graduate education with skepticism and perhaps even a touch of cynicism, self-consciously acquiring academic credentials-that would add intellectual respectability to ingrained beliefs rooted in early religious experiences. KING’S REJECTION OF SCRIPTURAL LITERALISM did not lead him away from the Baptist church but toward an increasing interest in liberal theology. His understanding that religious belief could be rooted in reason also enabled him to think more seriously about an idea he had previously rejected: becoming a minister.

A crucial period in King’s deliberations about his career came during the summer of 1947, when he led religious services for his fellow student workers at a tobacco farm in Simsbury, Connecticut. Even before leaving Atlanta he had received his preaching license, and–more than he had during his 1944 stay in Simsbury–welcomed the opportunity to lead the weekly religious gatherings at the farm. After several weeks of deliberation, he telephoned his mother from Simsbury to tell her of his intention to become a minister. By the time he returned to Morehouse for his final year, he had pushed doubt out of his mind. His initial inclination to become a doctor or lawyer was overwhelmed by an “undying urge to serve God and humanity through the ministry.” The decision was the culmination of his experiences. ‘My call to the ministry was neither dramatic nor spectacular,” he later wrote in his application to seminary.

“It came neither by some miraculous vision nor by some blinding light experience on the road of life. Moreover, it was a response to an inner urge that gradually came upon me. This urge expressed itself in a desire to serve God and humanity, and the feeling that my talent and my commitment could best be expressed through the ministry…. During my senior year in college I finally decided to accept the challenge to enter the ministry. I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.”

King resolved to become a minister, but he continued to reject the anti-intellectualism that he associated with fundamentalism. His subsequent critical study of biblical texts and religious practices was driven by a desire to strengthen the rationale for a decision he had already made. He applied to several seminaries known to be academically rigorous and hospitable to liberal religious views, including Andover Newton in Massachusetts, Union in New York, and Crozer in Pennsylvania.

His Crozer papers occasionally referred to his experiences in order to explain his theological preferences. He noted that his initial attraction to liberalism stemmed from its willingness to answer new problems of cultural and social change,” UNLIKE ITS THEOLOGICAL OPPONENT, FUNDAMENTALISM, WHICH SOUGHT “TO PRESERVE THE OLD FAITH in a changing milieu.”" As he continued his studies, however, King found his initial attraction to liberal theology “going through a state of transition-” His personal experience with “a vicious race problem” had made it “very difficult … to believe in the essential goodness of man”; on the other hand, he explained that “in noticing the gradual improvements of this same race problem I came to see some noble possibilities in human nature.” While remaining wary of his father’s conventional religious beliefs, King was becoming, he acknowledged, “a victim of eclecticism,” seeking to “synthesize the best in liberal theology with the best in neo-orthodox theology.”

King reaffirmed his belief that “every man, from the ordinary simplehearted believer to the philosophical intellectual giant, may find God through religious experience.” His reading of Brightman led him to discover his own spirituality:

“How I long now for that religious experience which Dr. Brightman so cogently speaks of throughout his book (He seems to have never had it). It seems to be an experience, the lack of which life becomes dull and meaningless. As I reflect on the matter, however, I do remember moments that I have been awe awakened; there have been times that I have been carried out of myself by something greater than myself and to that something I gave myself. Has this great something been God? Maybe after all I have been religious for a number of years, and am now only becoming aware of it.”

Brightman’s explanation of religious experience convinced King that he could experience God’s powerful presence in his own life WITHOUT THE BENEFIT OF A SUDDEN RELIGIOUS CONVERSION.Personalism validated the notion that experience rather than intellectual reflection should be the basis of religious belief “It is through experience that we come to realize that some things are out of harmony with God’s will,” King wrote in another essay. “No theology is needed to tell us that love is the law of life and to disobey it means to suffer the consequences.”" King’s adoption of personalism as a theological orientation enabled him to REJECT ABSTRACT CONCEPTIONS OF GOD while continuing his search for cogency and intellectual sophistication.

King wrote that Personalism’s “Insistence that only personality–finite and infinite–is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me a METAPHYSICAL and philosophical grounding for the IDEA OF A PERSONAL GOD, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.”

Given the academic environment in which he attended graduate school, it is hardly surprising that King’s theological writings did not explicitly draw upon the insights of African-American religion. Yet, although King’s graduate school writings understated the degree to which his attitudes had been shaped by African-American religious writings, he was certainly aware of the publications of Kelsey and Mays and probably those of Thurman and Borders. Once accustomed to contrasting the religious emotionalism of his father’s religion with the intellectual sophistication he saw in the writings of white academic theologians. King became aware during his graduate research that orthodox Christianity was not necessarily anti-intellectual.

By the time he finished his course work, King had come to affirm some of the enduring values of his religious heritage, particularly conceptions of a divine goodness capable of acting in history. In one qualifying examination King declared that, despite modern society’s moral relativism, God’s judgment was final and eternal. “God has planted in the fiber of the universe certain eternal laws which forever confront every man. They are absolute and not relative. There is an eternal and absolute distinction between right and wrong.” One indispensable answer to the theodicy question, King argued, was contained in the concept of the suffering servant, one of the “most noble” teachings of the Old Testament. “His suffering is not due to something that he has done, but it is vicarious and redemptive. Through his suffering knowledge of God is [spread) to the unbelieving Gentiles and those unbelievers seeing that this suffering servant is innocent will become conscious of their sins and repent and thereby be redeemed. The nation would be healed by his [wounds].” The death of Jesus Christ on the cross was the fulfillment of the prophecy of the suffering servant, BUT KING ARGUED THAT HUMANITY SHOULD NOT WAIT ON HIS SAVING GRACE. An individual’s “faith and fellowship with God,” King wrote, was the “ultimate solution to the problem of suffering.”

I post this with sadness, since MLK has always been a personal inspiration to me. And he still is to a great degree……..a courageous man who fought for his ideals, and for a better world.

He is simply no longer a Christian inspiration…….by denying the inerrancy and inspiration of the Scriptures, the virgin birth, the literal Atonement of Christ upon the cross, the resurrection, and the exclusivity of access to the Father and salvation through Christ’s sacrifice alone, he has forfeited the name “Christian”.

“What doth it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his own soul?”

Heartbreaking……..

Yea….mlk was a real pimp!!!!….going around fighting for racial equality and risking his life. TOG how could you even raise the question “is MLK Jr. a pimp?’….why even raise the question…why, why why? Really why would you ask that? Seriously? To make mlk look bad?

(MN: I’m going to suggest he wasn’t a pimp - in these sense that the men and women discussed on this site are pimps. He may have been deceptive (while getting some good things accomplished. But if half of what I have read about Dr. King is true, he is an entirely different critter from the “Go for the Gusto” pimps I discuss. As with the pimps, he was not seeking to glorify the God of the Bible. But unlike the pimps, I think he had goals other than his own enrichment. I’m not sure I agree with the goals, but the goals were not for personal enrichment. )

Thats powerful. Many are quickened when they step away and search for the Lord themselves. I pray your journey is fruitful and you find your treasure.

Now you’ve got a witness! Me! (or is it “I” ?) Anyhow, sure, you’re right!!!!!!! Love, B

Thank you for your response. I have been to a number of churches and they all seem to be the same…give, give, give and if you don’t you will be cursed and will not prosper. They measure material things as blessings which contradicts the Word of God. If they really knew God, they would understand that Satan blesses his flock also!

Thanks again,

Friend of God

Hi GaryV/Melvin,

I know this topic/post is long gone but I thought it important to post and thank you guys that I stand very corrected on the “Message Bible”. The reasons to many and numerous to tabulate. It is totally not even a bible its all paraphrased.

Just to keep it short I have recently just burned all the “Message Bible” I bought (I bought about a 60 in ago because I thought it would be a good bible to give to my unsaved friends).

I have asked the LORD to forgive me on those I have given it out too.

I admit I was in ERROR.

I had to post this incase some one else reads this and see that I defended the Message and when I found out my error I refuted back everything for these version of the bible.

One Reason is: Any book endorsed or defended by Rick Warren of Saddleback Community Church definately is a sign that its not from GOD

Thank GOD for showing me this and also thanks guys.

Hi JLP!!

Hebrew poetry has a rhyme of THOUGHT rather than a rhyme of SOUND as we are accustomed to.

It is called “parallelism”…………it is a rhythm (I prefer to refer to it as a rhythm rather tham rhyme) of thought.

Sometimes by repetition of a thought.
Sometimes by a thought/antithesis.

There may be a statement, made, then another statement that mirrors and expands upon the first, achieving a beautiful and instructive balance in the language construction.

For example……..

Psa 4:2 O ye sons of men, how long [will ye turn] my glory into shame? [how long] will ye love vanity, [and] seek after leasing? Selah.

You see the balance of thought for thought by repitition and expansion.

A thought is articulated……..”How long will you turn My Glory into shame??”

Then a repetition of the same thought, with an expansion for clarification………”How long will ye love vanity and seek after leasing??”

The same thought is iterated in both (men turning His Glory into shame), yet the second verse adds information that tell you how they ARE turning His Glory into shame……….through vanity and leasing (lies).

Here’s another example………Psa 5:3 My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD;
(statement)
in the morning will I direct [my prayer] unto thee, and will look up.
(Repetition and expansion).

The use of opposites to balance verses is used as well, expanding the rhyme of thought.

Here is an example of this form…………

Psa 1:1 Blessed [is] the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
Psa 1:2 But his delight [is] in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
Psa 1:3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
(statement)
Psa 1:4 The ungodly [are] not so: but [are] like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
Psa 1:5 Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
(opposite statement)

Here is an example where opposite premises are used to provide the rhythm of thought, here using more than one verse for each, but a series of verses opposed by another series of verses emphasising through the opposite the point of the first.

There’s a LOT more to it………..it’s a fascinating study in itself. But this should give you the idea.

It’s a beautiful means of achieving a rhythm and balance in the language ……….a rhyme of sorts……. as well as a profound teaching tool to interpret verses correctly.

I hope this helps.

(MN: A bunch. Thanks. )

What about the King James type language in the prophecy? Do you think God’s speaks to us today like this?