Billy Graham has died...at 99

[Gypsy]

Billy Graham has died

 

[snippy]

I was both happy and sad to hear about this. Sad because the world has lost a great man and happy that he doesn’t have to endure the tears of the world anymore.

 

[skatesindreams]

He was respected by representatives of many faiths:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/obituaries/billy-graham-dead.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

 

[watchthis!!]

Goodbye to a confused man. Quotes from wikipedia:

During a 1953 rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham tore down the ropes that organizers had erected to separate the audience into racial sections. He recounted in his memoirs that he told two ushers to leave the barriers down "or you can go on and have the revival without me." He warned a white audience, "we have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride."

But on the other hand...

In 1970, Graham stated that feminism was "an echo of our overall philosophy of permissiveness" and that women did not want to be "competitive juggernauts pitted against male chauvinists." He further stated that the role of wife, mother, and homemaker was the destiny of "real womanhood" according to the Judeo-Christian ethic. He was criticized by feminists as backlash for these statements.

As well as this:

Graham held anti-gay views. He believed that AIDS was a "judgement from God" and he was opposed to same-sex marriage.

Goodbye to the old guard. Hope you've taken your out-dated views with you.

 

[Vagabond]

And good-bye and good riddance to this:

“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.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/billy...ro-israel-in-public-deriding-jews-in-private/

If he had acknowledged and rejected his own anti-Semitism before the tapes were released, it would be a lot easier to take his religious views, as expressed here, for example, more seriously.

 

[skatesindreams]

This addresses some of these issues:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/opin...d-a-gap-in-america-opinion-stanley/index.html

 

[Artistic Skaters]

When I was a young kid, Billy Graham came to my town & held his crusade at Jet Stadium & the place was packed. We heard a lot of his preaching during those years because my stepfather was a follower; & he continued to listen even though Graham was overinvolved about Vietnam (his views were more hard core than Kissinger) & other Nixon political issues.

Later after I graduated from college & watched so many of my dearest friends die from a horrible disease, Billy Graham came to my town for a crusade & told another packed stadium that AIDS was a judgment from God because of their sins. I have never forgotten his painful comments. Although his sermons seemed to bring comfort to many people, I was not one of them.

 

[quartz]

I was taken to the Toronto rally when I was 5. I choked on a Cotton Candy Lifesaver, which had to be pulled out of my throat. It was the first of many signs that I was not one of God’s chosen people.

 

[watchthis!!]

I was taken to the Toronto rally when I was 5. I choked on a Cotton Candy Lifesaver, which had to be pulled out of my throat. It was the first of many signs that I was not one of God’s chosen people.

But you're one of ours.

 

[quartz]

But you're one of ours.

Even better!

 

[my little pony]

since anti semitism and homophobia are having a moment right now

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...ahams-casket-will-lie-in-honor-at-the-capitol

 

[skatesindreams]

Since anti semitism and homophobia are having a moment right now

Many Evangelicals still share those beliefs, unfortunately.
Billy Graham is not alone.

 

[Artistic Skaters]

I usually don't post in the RIP threads when I don't care for the notable figure, but it's been disappointing to see Ryan & McConnell approve Graham to lie in honor at the US Capitol as "America's Pastor".

*** The Soul-Crushing Legacy of Billy Graham :
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-soul-crushing-legacy-of-billy-graham-w517067

Billy Graham saved my soul. In 1973, I was ten years old, growing up in a working-class clan in North Carolina, and I had a problem: I liked boys. Also, men. And even though my family's Methodist church served up the mildest form of Protestantism – no dire warnings about fornicators and sodomites and feminists from our pulpit – it was impossible not to know, from a million cultural cues and a fair number of spankings I'd received for "acting sissy," that this was not good. So when I heard that the world's most beloved televangelist was coming to Raleigh that September for one of his extravagant "crusades," I begged my parents to take me. It didn't take much. They knew what they were dealing with. Maybe Billy Graham could straighten out their boy.

Next week, Graham's corpse will lie in state at the Capitol rotunda – only the fourth private citizen to be so honored, and the first since Rosa Parks in 1995. This is a disgrace. But in a certain way, it's also right and fitting – as oddly appropriate as Graham's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If Billy Graham was, ultimately, a conniving hypocrite with a layman's grasp of the Bible and a supernatural lust for earthly power, he was also a quintessential American success story. He was not so much "America's pastor" as its greatest evangelical entrepreneur – the man who launched a whole separatist (and lucrative) Christian media culture, who laid the foundations for megachurches and prosperity ministries, who brought Jesus back into American politics. He was a public-relations savant, a shameless sycophant who whispered sweet nothings to power in lieu of hard truths. He demonstrated what fortunes could be made, and what human glory could be attained, by transforming evangelical Christianity into a patriotic corporate entity. If that's not American, by God, what is?