Martin Luther - What do people think today?

[Mendalla]

Mrs. M and I were watching a good two bio of Martin Luther over the last couple nights. Someone had posted it, possibly dubiously, to Youtube where Mrs. M found it.

It did a good job of highlighting both his positives (e.g. how he moved Christianity from a faith where the church stood as an intermediary between humans and God to one where we could have a direct relationship with the divine) and his negatives, e.g. how his often vitriolic rhetoric helped start centuries of Protestant-Catholic conflict and promoted vicious anti-Semitism. His legacy includes the wild diversity of Protestant denominations, but also the Holocaust (Hitler and the Nazis used Luther's attacks on the Jews in their own propaganda).

So when we look at Martin Luther in all his complexity, how do we see him in the modern world? We likely would not have the society we do today without him. but that includes both positives and negatives. So should we celebrate his legacy, or look at it with a more critical eye? We cannot repudiate it. Most of us here to some degree owe our faith, and our ability to pursue our own ideas about faith and God, to his important first steps in breaking the power of the church over those parts of people's lives. But can we find a way to deal with both aspects of Luther, to recognize his human fallibility and complexity rather than simply idolizing him as a hero of the faith and glossing over the dark side?

 

[Mendalla]

And believe me, when I learned about Luther in Sunday School, it was very much about him as the hero who stood up to the authorities through the 95 Theses and his defense of his writing at the Diet of Worms. I did not learn about his anti-Semitism until much later, probably high school or university.

 

[Luce NDs]

We you did into the pious potentialities of these powers ... one begins to understand problems of the world or world power as a corrupt scheme ...

Schemes and plots are metaphors for conspiracy in spirit ... the essence of the story we will not understand when something is denied in our composition of character! Thus we just initiate deduction ... and then you are eliminated! It makes some folk suicidal or otherwise martyrs for unknown causes ... a blind rush?

Thus myth, story and other poorly understood intelligence ... because, well, we didn't really want to know did we? Maybe a brain worm ...

These sometimes present as prions and are virtually unknowns ... there being a hint that they are connected to RA Syndrome ... it is part of a diabolical construct ... it is said by agents if you are going to study this enigma you should see a psychiatrist ... as Eeyore said; "oh bother!"

Real folks don't like to be bothered by soul ... thus the confrontation of absolute and abstract ... the abstract is indeterminate unlike much of the stoic construct ... mine Dieu it can be enlightening ... ung stated that the study of hysterics is an infinite topic ... beyond mire mores!

Thus ET ... that is like and upright, watchtower, or Magellan item in your head ... Magi thoughts? Where do these things come from? Know*here?

We are infiltrated with alien personality constructs ... and a lot of depleted domains ... power of denial?

Relax it was just a hated, pass in thought ...