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Ha ha. More good news.

No he lost, less than 1 thousand of the over 5 thousand votes for Ward D went to him.
It will be a runoff between Conners and Yun.

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What happened with this guy? Did he win?

If elected, Rev. Mario will have the opportunity to vote on:

Grant funding to LGBT groups or projects.

Support for LGBT cultural events like the Pride Festival.

If our council was going to do a symbolic show up support for this act, as our council did for the DREAM college act, what would Mario do? Would he represent our city's, and his ward's, LBGT community or would he vote in a manner that shows he puts his right wing beliefs above the rights of our citizenry?

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page ... html#incart_river_default

The problem here is, when it comes to voting on laws that affects people lives, will he vote with his conscience (read: religious beliefs) or will he vote for what his constituency wants?

Because of the nature of his religious affiliation, I'm seriously doubting his intentions to actually help people.

I would think he wants to run for office to further his backwards beliefs. This may fly in some backwater town, not in Jersey City.

The members of his congregation may want his love. The rest of us are entitled to his respect if he wants to be a public servant. He teaches that women should be subservient and gays are morally corrupt. He's entitled to his beliefs and we are entitled to our reactions to them.

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It's pretty obvious he didn't say this when first asked because it's not what he thought of when first asked. The "message consultants" and "spin managers" had to get him to shut up first so they could tell him what he really meant to say.

The guy obviously has trouble sorting out church-state issues. He's running his campaign form his church. You can't expect him to be clear on what he should tell people he believes.

Note how lurking right behind the "I can love people I don't agree with" is the hate the sin but love the sinner crap so many churches peddle. "I disagree with every choice you've made in life, but just let me help you and eventually you'll see it my way."

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I'm mystified as to why he didn't say this when the question was originally asked. I think this was the kind of answer most fair-minded people wanted to hear.

Jersey City gay group quizzes mayor on running mate

By Michaelangelo Conte/The Jersey Journal
March 19, 2013 at 11:24 AM

Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy was peppered with questions about a running mate?s belief system last week at a campaign stop intended to attract lesbian and gay votes.

The Rev. Mario Gonzalez is running to be councilman in the Heights on Healy?s ticket. Gonzalez is a minister in the Assemblies of God Church, which among other teachings preaches that homosexuality is a sin and a choice that can be treated.

The Assemblies of God church also calls abortion ?evil? and dubs feminism ?an organized platform to degrade, bash, and hate men.?

Several people raised questions about Gonzalez?s beliefs last Tuesday at a meeting hosted by members of the city?s LGBT community at the Hudson Pride Connections Center on Jones Street.

One speaker told Healy, ?Assemblies of God, which is what your running mate?s church is affiliated with . . . is way more homophobic than the Catholic Church.?

Gonzalez, pastor of Hope Center Tabernacle in the Heights, was not present, but the mayor stood behind his running mate.

?When everyone was afraid to deal with AIDS back in the dark ages, Pastor Mario was ministering to all the folks with AIDS in several hospitals in New York City,? Healy said.

The mayor said Gonzalez welcomes all people at his church and art program and argued it?s not fair to single out Gonzalez because many major religions are against homosexuality.

?The religious groups have come along way (but) are always way behind, and I?m a Catholic, and the Catholic Church is way behind in a lot of things,? said Healy, adding that Gonzalez has assured him he believes in the separation of church and state.

HPCC Executive Director Jeffrey Campbell wasn?t ready to accept Healy?s argument.

?Being able to reach out to individuals with HIV and AIDS and not believing that homosexuality is an abomination, those are two different things,? Campbell said.

On Friday, Gonzalez told The Jersey Journal that he can love people who lead a life he doesn?t agree with.

?Just because you don?t share someone?s beliefs doesn?t mean you can?t love them,? Gonzalez said. ?I can care for them. I can comfort them. I don?t have to believe in what someone believes to help them.?

Gonzalez said that 20 years ago when AIDS was ravaging the gay community, he organized church people to prepare ethnically sensitive meals for the AIDS patients he encountered.

He said that he broke down crying in his office one day when five AIDS patients died.

?I?ve had people die in my arms when I was ministering to people with AIDS,? Gonzalez said. ?I have people in my own family with AIDS. I have homosexuals in my family.?

A woman who spoke Tuesday said she is a lesbian and HIV-positive and attends services at Hope Center Tabernacle.

?We are welcome in his church any time to listen to the word of God,? she said. ?I have come through bad times when I needed groceries and I went to the church and said I?m going through hard times and he (Gonzalez) has helped me.?

The municipal elections will be held May 14.

http://www.nj.com/jjournal-news/index ... ty_candidates_status.html

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I answered your original question - slavery is worse then abortion. Your attempt to draw a comparison is both silly and pointless.

Slavery is a direct infliction of harm to sentient beings. It's wrong. No disagreement from anyone.

Pro-lifers such as yourself provide contorted arguments, as to why you should be allowed to inflict your view on abortion on other people. So far, you have failed. I'm pro-choice. Thankfully being a male, I won't have to make that choice. But I could not in any good conscience, have the arrogance to deny that choice to others.

If I had been aborted as a fetus, I wouldn't have had the sentience to care. And if there is a god, I'd have ended up where god had decided I'd end up, as part of his godly plan.

Just what JC needs, right wing anti-abortion fanatics on the city counsel. Do you have a link to the article about the dismembered baby horror story? Was the doctor an evil gay terrorist?

To jtjcview - I recently read an article of a nurse who was force to participate in an abortion, it was a late term abortion (22 weeks) and the staff was shorthanded. She said no then the hospital threaten her with the loss of her job. She was required to count the twisted mangles arms and legs of the fetus to make sure all parts was out of the woman. The nurse filed a lawsuit because she is still suffering nightmares from seeing the twisted legs and arms from the fetus. Abortion is acceptable because the public does not see it and we use fancy terms as woman's right to choose. I am a baby boomer, and I am glad abortion was illegal when I was born. At least, a doctor could have done some serious jail time. Everyone who was born after abortion became legal have survived from being aborted. I suggest you ponder that because you could have been the victim that nurse saw.

or our Atheists

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Don't forget our Hindus.

This church really is a regressive group, the type that you dont want to believe is in a place as liberal and educated as northern new jersey/nyc. Truly a step away from snake handler churches. Belief that not just those who don't believe in jesus goes to hell but that catholics (since they believe in the "wrong jesus") go to hell as well. Talk about preaching intolerance in a city where over half of the population is catholic, muslim, budhist, or jewish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVDKSK2J_Ps

Among Rev. Gonzo's contemporaries in the Assemblies of God are Benny Hin, Jimmy Swaggart & Jim & Tammy Fay Bakker. Nuff said.

Thankfully this country is evolving it's postion on gay rights/ same sex marriages. My pre-teen children and their friends don't understand what the big deal is.

Hiding one's hatred and ignorance behind " the gospel" is the real sin.

Some people believe that Reverend Mario and his ilk are heretics. Do you want a heretic to serve as our elected representative on the city council? I certainly don't!

Who are the Assemblies of God? Link

very good article. somehow, around 3rd grade i knew there was something not right about religion (and Catholicism in particular).

my grandma took me to church every Sunday (she herself, went every day) and after the 4th or 5th time, i thought, what an awful waste of time - why do we have to do this every week? it's the same thing over and over, which is really, common sense stuff you should understand by the time you are 10 years old.

Hey Yvonne,

Dig this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ ... 3/04/AR2006030401369.html

The Book of Bart

In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him

By Neely Tucker
The Washington Post
March 5, 2006

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the marrow of the bones?

In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and the listeners' questions fade.

Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.

Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible "is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit."

But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option -- legend."

Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.

Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.

And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ.

There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of God? Both? Neither?

These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as a skeptic who rejects it all --suggests a demand for black and white in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the unknowable.

"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.

"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from? How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful religion?

"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."

Void in His Heart

On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of the most popular classes on campus.

His text for today is the Gospel of John.

Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is distinctly different from the other three Gospels.

Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)

But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon, there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire, shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.

"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine," he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the other three books,it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good enough."

The class files out a few minutes later.

"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's very threatening."

Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."

"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.

To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or punctuation.

Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in English, from Ehrman's book:

godisnowhere

Does it say: God is now here.

Or: God is nowhere.

Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.

One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to prove it.

"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded completely convincing," Ehrman writes.

One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and asked the Lord to come into his life.

He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again experience."

The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says, the closer he felt to God.

His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual exercise, like meditation."

He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith. Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or have physical contact with the opposite sex.

It was spiritually thrilling.

For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his execution.

What he found there began to frighten him.

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later,by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary. A professor wrote in the margin:

"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.

"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible, at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't there."

Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be facts, or there is no basis for the religion.

"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . . according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and void.' "

Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth,told by illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.

Dark Bubbles

It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.

Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?

Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."

For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was there a God paying attention.

"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast in hell.' "

He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone. No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his kids were grown. He stopped going to church.

"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the logic by which he reached them."

"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.

"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."

* * *

Life after the loss of faith, even for the deeply religious, is not necessarily a terrible thing.

Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a "happy agnostic." That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.

He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.

"I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday."

On this particular morning, he turns his attention to his new book, the story of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Christ. Judas resides, according to Dante, in the ninth circle of hell.

Ehrman's desk is filled with open books. His study is sun-filled, with a glass door giving onto a patio and the gentle pines of the Carolina forests.

Where does faith reside? Does it leave a residue when it is gone?

Bart Ehrman begins writing, the day unfolding, shafts of light falling through the window, the mysteries of the Gospels open before him.

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Yes.

Yvonne, you have it backwards, Man created God, not the other way around. We created gods out of fear and ignorance, to explain the mystery of life and nature.

you are a believer, so none of this would make any difference, but the Bible is not to be taken literally, especially not mixed in with politics. It was written with (mostly) good intent in a different time.

How do you know these people speak for God?

Abortion is a choice that women should have, and I don;t think any of them take that decision lightly. It is a personal choice and should not have anything to do with religion. Same goes for Politics

It is interesting you posed this question a week before Holy Week because the Gospels records Jesus? arrival into Jerusalem on a donkey as a king, the crowds spread their cloaks and palms on the ground shouting,"Hosanna to the Son of David" and "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," yet the Son of God died the death of a slave on the cross.
Marriage is an institution of God, but slavery is an institution of man. Yet God uses horrible things to bring good out of evil. Today is the feast day of St. Patrick. He was captured by the Irish and made a slave. He escaped and returned to bring Christianity to the Irish. Now he is the patron saint of the Irish. St. Paul also met a runaway slave, the property of Christian, Pheliem. He told Onesimun, to return to Pheliem and wrote to Pheliem to ask for his freedom because a runaway slave is never free. Moses was instructed by God that slaves, the Israelites owned, had to be set free after a number of years.
Slavery existed because people were a commodity. I went to college when African history was starting and took a number of courses. The people who were sold were basically the conquered people of many African kings. If you check the manifest of sailing ships that transported slaves, you will find 200 males to 2 or 3 females. Simply put slavery is better than death because that is usually the fate of conquered people. Several years ago, I saw a program on an African-American professor who traced his roots back to the tribe where his ancestor lived. The descendent of the king told this professor on camera, his ancestor did a good thing because if now he is a famous professor instead of being an ordinary person here. Even Muhmani Ali, during his Rumble in the Jungle, made the comment that he was glad his ancestor ?made the boat.?
I believe God allowed slavery to exist because it allowed conquered people to live. Since Roe v Wade, over 50 million babies have died, so is slavery worse than abortion?

I should know better than to get involved in this debate but I have a burning question, Yvonne: Would you have the same respect if he followed the bible's message on slavery, or just the gospel messages that serve your own purposes?

For the record, I am not anti-religion. I am anti-hypocrisy and I wish so-called Christians were more like Jesus Christ.

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...and guts to duck questions on it?

I do not know this reverend but I know the Gospel, if this reverend follows the gospels then he cannot ignore the passage where Jesus explains marriage:
Against this backdrop, the Pharisees asked Jesus about divorce. "The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?' And He answered and said to them, 'Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning "made them male and female," and said, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate'" (Matthew 19:3-6).
I have a lot of respect for a person who has the guts to follow the Gospel message and not the political winds.

No it's about suppressing the Christian vote? You are determined to feel victimized.

Keep stroking the rhetoric, and you will have more Christians who live in Ward D come out to vote. Let me give you a history lesson. In 1985, McCann used cops in the public housing to suppress the black vote. When the community found out what was going out, people came out in droves to vote. When these voters were interviewed by the paper, they said it was McCann's actions that drove them to the polls, many did not plan to vote. And when they pull that lever for the reverend, they will also pull the lever for Healy. These voters gave the election to Anthony Cucci.

Well let me put my 2 cents in: Religion is Evil. so let get that out of the way.

someone once said, Government is already screwed up (i would've used a better word, but it's not allowed), and Religion is obviously also Effed. Does anyone really think it's a great idea to combine there two?

Look at Iran.

Why is it scary? This idiot can vote against a law that has something to do with LGBTQ rights.


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