Wow. Mormons: The Latter Day Samaritans?

[blooit]

The following is the first comment after the article: "To My Fellow Iowa Christians: A Case for Romney."

http://www.article6b...ase-for-romney/

"I think another applicable Biblical analogy is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus had just taught that the two greatest commandments were to love God and to love our neighbors, but a “lawyer” wanted to play word games and restrict the duty of love by asking “But who is my neighbor?”

"The Savior’s answer was the parable if the Good Samaritan. A lot of people have forgotten that Jews resented Samaritans because they claimed to be Israelites but believed only in the five books of Moses (which include loving God and neighbor) and rejected the later prophets like Isaiah, and also rejected the temple in Jerusalem, since they had been excluded from helping to rebuild it. Christ had taught the gospel to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well and she and other Samaritans had accepted it.

"So when Christ made the hero if his parable a Samaritan, he was using someone who was a heretic in the eyes of the Jews, someone who claimed the religious heritage of Abraham and Moses and Israel but was not an orthodox Jew.

"By doing that, Jesus turned the lawyer’s question around. The lawyer wanted to narrow the range of people whom he was commanded to love as his “neighbor”. Instead, Christ taught that the reason the second commandment was “like unto” the first is that we are commanded to love all mankind in the same way that our Creator loves all mankind.

"Romney is a heretic and heterodox in the eyes of some fellow believers in the Jesus of the Bible, but he is demonstrating concern for his neighbors, the same way he devoted a thousand hours a year of volunteer church service when he could have easily concentrated on building his new business. He gave literal aid to the poor and downtrodden, to Haitian immigrants and Cambodian refugees, to the sick and the despairing and the unemployed.

"Who is your neighbor, whom you are commanded by Christ to love? Doesn’t it include the good Mormon?"

I thought this was a very good analogy in many ways.

Edited January 2, 2012 by blooit

[BCSpace]

Well yes, Santorum is the new Huckabee for evangelicals in Iowa since he's pretty strong in his support for I.D.and staunch in anti homosexuality. A little over the top on some of those issues imho but a pretty good conservative otherwise (based only on his description in Wikipedia I must admit). Evangelicals make up 50% of the vote in the GOP primary in Iowa. Romney has small but solid support among them, but most of them are looking for a Huckabee to vote for, someone who at least in word matches their religious experience. Romney has done a poor job appealing to this group. He has the opportunity to speak to the heart of evangelicals without compromising his stances and he's not doing it. He has to bite the bullet and speak at a prime evangelical venue to evangelicals specifically and with those evangelical leaders who do support him at his side. Too late for that in Iowa now. He should do okay in Iowa and he should win in N.H., but as the primary goes to southern states, Santorum could beat him with the EV vote with Paul siphoning off critical support if he doesn't nip this in the bud.

The interesting thing about evangelicals as I look at the polls is they tend to vote for someone who they think reflects their values even though they believe someone else has a better chance of unseating Obama. In other words, they've lost sight of what affects them most in negative terms. But if Romney wins the presidency, he cannot have done it without the EV vote so he needs to give them a reason not to hold their noses. That means, imho, he needs to get a little religious and there are ways to target that audience without negatively affecting other audiences that are turned off by that. As a Mormon, Romney can speak EV language without rejecting any LDS doctrine and without using the word "trinity".