Luggage
Lump
Amen!
RegularFolksUnited has a statement of political philosophy eloquently sums up my own beliefs:
As a committed Christian first, everything I believe stems from my biblical worldview. I believe that life, liberty and the right to private property, the last statement putting into correct context “the pursuit of happiness,” are inspired largely by biblical principles of man’s worth before God.
The Bible was a primary source of inspiration for our founders and an essential text for the learned people of their day. Even the establishment clause of the First Amendment, designed to prohibit the federal government from instituting a state religion, is an extension of God’s provision of free will so that we choose to come to Him of our own volition, not by coercion.
Our founding fathers believed that our constitutional republic could not stand if the people were not virtuous, and they considered religion to be the primary source of virtue in society. So what has happened to lead us astray?
John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington said:
“And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”Some dismiss these uneqivocal statements because they contradict their belief that religion is the root of all evil in the world and should be expunged from the public square. The greatest atrocities of human history, however, were committed by atheistic or nationalistic regimes that declared God dead or themselves to be God. Whether or not God is proclaimed, man still sins. The common denominator is man, and man’s inability to achieve God’s holiness doesn’t invalidate the standard.
Government’s role is to restrain man from infringing upon the lives and rights of others. The teaching and promotion of public virtue, however, is the realm of the church, and the Christian church, the predominant faith in America, has failed to be a transcendent, unshakeable force in society for public virtue.
Mainline Protestant denominations rush headlong toward the prevailing culture in clear contradiction to God’s Word. Contemporary churches preach a neutered gospel free of obligation. The “emerging” church wants to embrace Christ’s redemption but not his conviction. Black churches have turned Christ into a socialist revolutionary who stands against oppression, precisely the mistake many of Jesus’ followers made when they thought He came to rescue them from the Romans. The Roman Catholic Church is all over the map, so much so that the phrase “cafeteria Catholic” is commonly used to describe practitioners who pick and choose from God’s Word. No wonder non-Christians are vexed by or contemptuous of us.
Therefore, I salute Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, Archbishop Naumann of Kansas City, Rev. Walter Hoye of Oakland, and all in the church who have recently taken a principled stand on abortion in the face of hostility from society. Christians should be humbled by their courage and commitment to obey Christ before men.
To those Catholics and other Christians who voted for Obama because of his promises, my prayer is that his duplicity is now revealed to you and you will redouble your efforts to stand against a president who one commentator described as “monstrously anti-life.”
To those Catholic politicians who hide behind the veil of personal opposition while unrepentantly rejecting all measures to protect unborn persons, the highest purpose of government is to defend life. If there is even a shred of belief within you that this act of legalized barbarism is the taking of a life, you are willfully violating your oath before man and God.
To those Christians who claim to be pro-life but put pro-abortion candidates into office for some “higher” priority than the defense of unborn innocents, your actions perpetuate the stain of abortion on our nation’s conscience and, by enabling these politicians, you are condoning murder.
To those black pastors who surrender their moral authority for political influence, it is folly to fear the wrath of man more than the wrath of God. There will be an accounting, not just for the millions of babies murdered but also all the people you led away from obedience to God for political purposes.
The apostle Paul said men in the last days would be, among other things, “holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.” Christ himself said in Revelation 3:16, “Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth.” The choice is sanctification before a holy God or saliva on the sidewalk of a fallen world.
Amen
Worrying About Nothing…
The new evangelical atheist movement expends an awful lot of energy opposing something it doesn’t believe exist, i.e. God.
From Time.com: De-Baptism Gains a Following in Britain:
More than 100,000 former Christians have downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” in a bid to publicly renounce the faith, according to the London-based National Secular Society (NSS).
Terry Sanderson, the society’s president, says the group started the online de-baptism initiative five years ago to mock the practice of baptizing infants too young to consent to religious rites. Their web site invites visitors to “Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had” and allows them to print out a paper certificate that uses quasi-formal language to “reject baptism’s creeds and other such superstitions.”
Seems like much ado about nothing.
But then…
That Empty Spot
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have an empty spot at the center of him, which must be filled in order to be really happy. That spot, like it or not, is reserved for God, and if you decide you are going to be lastingly happy, M@IL FOR MIKEY, my little instruction manual, could give you a jump start.
Read about “How Orson Bean Found God” over at Powerline.
Here, Now, Today
A Christian’s Duty
A post on the American Christian duty to vote by Jason Robertson of Fide-O blog:
God is originator of government, for God is the source of all morality, justice, and order. If not Him, who or what is? Isaih 33:22 declares, “For the Lord is our judge; the Lord is our lawgiver; the Lord is our king; he will save us.” God is the Divine Judiciary, Legislature, and Executive.
Since the chief end of man is to glorify God, God commanded mankind to have dominion and rule the earth in Genesis 1:26-28. At Creation, therefore, man was given the capacity and responsibility to govern.
Being created in the image of God gives us the capacity to govern as moral and rational beings.
Since we are commanded to rule the earth, governing is not just a right but a God-given responsibility. In other words, being active in ordering this earth is one of the ways in which men and women glorify God. To fail to do so is therefore a sin.
Voting is not just a right, it is a responsibility!
Christians should approach politics and government from the Creation Ordinance of Dominion and Ruling. Christians should run for political office if God wills. Christians should be aware of issues and policies that shape their community, state and nation. We should all vote and do so responsibly. Consider moral issues and justice and security before economics and personalities. Don’t be selfish in your votes – but vote for what is best for the nation.
Don’t be short-sighted in your votes: there is NEVER a perfect candidate. Everytime we go to the polls we must vote for the person or policy that moves our government in the right direction. It is better for a few good things to be accomplished rather than none.
God is sovereign over all governments (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-16). God has used both good governments and bad governments to further His will in this world. God has raised up both godly men and wicked men to accomplish His purposes. So when you go to the polls and are wondering if it is alright to vote for the lesser of two evils, just remember that God Himself has used such.
Incremental improvement in government is just as valid and glorifying to God as incremental improvement in your personal sanctification. Don’t sit out of a vote! It’s not just a right, it is a responsibility as a man created in the image of God.
Of course we know that salvation of the individual or of society does not rest with the government and is not achieved by political action. We also know that we are only temporary citizens of this nation, our true allegience is to the true King of Heaven, Jesus Christ.
But while we’re here on earth and in the United States, where we are both rulers and the ruled, we have a duty to vote. As Robertson says that vote often comes down to the lessor of two evils. I don’t consider John McCain evil. Some of his positions on various issues are unwise and his actions in the past call into question his judgment, but he is not evil.
Barack Obama may not be evil either, but his policy positions are. The things he stands for are as evil as they are unwise and will bring disaster on this country. Whether it’s his support of abortion or advocating of socialism, Obama represents the worst choice in a presidential candidate this nation has faced in more than half a century.
As Christians we have no choice but to vote, and likewise we have no choice but to vote for John McCain. Sorry folks, but sitting this one out is not an option.
Nothing You Could Ever Do…
Could make Him love you less.
Life TV Making Inroads in Muslim World
Christian, Arabic missionary satellite TV is waging an ideological war in Muslim lands, successfully spreading the Gospel in that dark region of the world.
Unbeknownst to most English speakers, Islam is currently “under attack” (at least that’s how many Muslims depict it) from Christian, Arabic missionary satellite stations. Spearheading this phenomenon is Al-Haya (or “Life TV”), a station dedicated to discussing issues relating to Islam and Christianity, specifically, demonstrating the many shortcomings and problems of the former, while pointing out how those problems are not present in the latter.
Life TV has been extremely successful in winning converts from the Islamic world. Unprecedented in all ways-Middle Eastern Christians (dhimmis) being confrontational and critical towards Islam, while unabashedly proclaiming their faith-Life TV has rocked the Islamic world.
According to Jihad Watch, “Faith and Dialogue of Truth” is a successful show produced by Coptic Christian Zakaria Botros that challenges the Islamic worldview. I’ve seen clips of Botros and he’s an effective apologists for the faith. Another program, ”Daring Question,” is hosted by apostate Muslim converts, who are known only by their first names, Rashid and Ahmed. “The show’s no-holds barred style has made it, along with Zakaria’s shows, one of the most watched programs on Arabic satellite,” Jihad Watch says.
The show typically deals with a theme in Islam-most recently, the absurdities of recent fatwas. Next the hosts, who, as former pious Muslims are evidently very learned in their former faith, proceed to describe the legitimacy of that theme straight from Islam’s sources-first the Koran, followed by (often little known) hadiths, and then the words of the ulema-that is, usul al-fiqh. After demonstrating the problem, as well as Islam’s support for it-recently, that drinking camel’s urine is salutary-they discuss the issue, as well as welcome calls from viewers, some sympathetic apostates, some on-the-fence Muslims, others Muslim zealots who promise the hosts death and misery in this world and the hereafter.
Read more at the Jihad Watch website and catch a clip of the program.
Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy
In today’s edition of The American Spectator, Doug Bandow writes about Christian persecution in Muslim lands. He begins with the following:
Last year in Turkey five Islamic extremists bound, tortured, and killed three Christian religious workers.
In Malaysia the nation’s highest court ruled that a Christian convert could not change her official religious affiliation without a ruling of apostasy in Sharia court — punishable by death or prison.
Earlier this year Christian converts in Bangladesh were beaten and expelled by Muslim villagers.
Last year in Sudan demonstrators demanded death for a British teacher — convicted and then deported — for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.”
In 2006 the Afghan government, which survives only because of allied military forces, sentenced a Christian convert to death, before allowing him to emigrate for reason of “mental illness.”
In Nigeria last year a Muslim mob murdered 10 Christians, injured scores more, and destroyed nine churches in response to a claim that a Christian student drew a cartoon of Mohammed on the mosque wall at school.
In Iraq in early March the body of kidnapped Chaldean Archbishop Paulus Faraj Rahho was discovered. Up to half of the prewar community of 1.2 or so million Iraqi Christians have fled abroad.
This reminds of Hebrews 11: 32-38:
32, And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— 33, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35, Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. 36, Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37, They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— 38, of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.
The Mustard Seed in Global Strategy
Interesting column by Spengler on the Asia Times web site about the best strategy for dealing with Islam.
The Mustard Seed in Global Strategy
By SpenglerA self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter’s. Allam’s renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global “war on terror” becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission.
September 2006 address at Regensburg was “undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert”. Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his position as “I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.” Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.
Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy’s newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of “moderate Islam” in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be “moderate”.
Since September 2001, the would-be wizards of Western strategy have tried to conjure an “Islamic reformation”, or a “moderate Islam”, or “Islamic democracy”. None of this matters now, for as Magdi Allam tells us, the matter on the agenda is not to persuade Muslims to act like liberal Westerners, but instead to convince them to cease to be Muslims. The use of the world “revolution” is Magdi Allam’s:
His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.
There is no deference to mutual respect and multi-culturalism. Magdi Allam forsook Islam because he considers it to be “inherently evil”. As he wrote to his editor at the Corriere della Sera:
My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy …
I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam”, assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive [emphasis added].
Far more important than denouncing the evils of Islam, though, is Magdi Allam’s embrace of what he calls the God of faith and reason:
The miracle of the Resurrection of Christ has reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness of a tendency where hate and intolerance in before the “other”, condemning it uncritically as an “enemy”, and ascending to love and respect for one’s “neighbor”, who is always and in any case a person; thus my mind has been released from the obscurantism of an ideology which legitimates lying and dissimulation, the violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission and tyranny – permitting me to adhere to the authentic religion of Truth, of Life, and freedom. Upon my first Easter as a Christian I have not only discovered Jesus, but I have discovered for the first time the true and only God, which is the God of Faith and Reason …
Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance. Much as I admire Hirsi Ali, she will persuade few Muslims to reconsider their religion. She came to the world’s attention in 2004 after a Muslim terrorist murdered Theo van Gogh, with whom she had produced a brief film protesting the treatment of women under Islam. As an outspoken critic of Islam, Hirsi Ali has lived under constant threat, and I have deplored the failure of Western governments to accord her adequate protection.
Yet the spiritual emptiness of a libertine and cynic like Theo van Gogh can only repel Muslims. Muslims suffer from a stultifying spiritual emptiness, depicted most poignantly by the Syrian Arab poet Adonis. Muslim traditional society cannot withstand the depredations of globalized culture, and radical Islam arises from a despairing nostalgia for the disappearing past. Why would Muslims trade the spiritual vacuum of Islam for the spiritual sewer of Dutch hedonism? The souls of Muslims are in agony. The blandishments of the decadent West offer them nothing but shame and deracination. Magdi Allam agrees with his former co-religionists in repudiating the degraded culture of the modern West, and offers them something quite different: a religion founded upon love.Only a few months ago it seemed fanciful to hail Benedict XVI as the leader of the West. I wrote late last year:
The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West’s opinion leaders, comprehends this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.
One does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love, although sometimes it is sadly necessary to love one’s enemies only after they are dead. The Church has lacked both the will to evangelize Muslims as well as the missionaries to undertake the task. Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, has thought about the conversion of the Muslims for years, as I reported just before his election in 2005. Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.
The Pope also has in reserve the European youth movement “Communione e Liberazione”, which he has nurtured for decades. Forty-thousand members turned out in 2005 when the then Cardinal Ratzinger addressed a memorial service in Milan for the movement’s founder. European Christianity may be reduced to a few coals glowing in the ashes, but it is not dead, only marginalized. If the Catholic youth of Europe are offered a great task – to evangelize the Muslims whose restlessness threatens to push Europe into social chaos – many of them may heed the call.
As I wrote in 2005, “Now that everyone is talking about Europe’s demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity.” Today’s Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them. If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name.
As Magdi Allam enjoins his new Church:
For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us. By one of those “fortuitous events” that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on September 3, 2003, was entitled “The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts”. It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself. Well, I hope that the Pope’s historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves.
What the outcome will be of the evangelization of Muslims lies beyond all speculation: that is a matter of every soul’s relationship to God. But the global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict’s Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.)
The Suicide of the West
Below a British man recounts his arrest and imprisonment for writing “hate speech” against the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. He doesn’t provide the details of exactly what the charges are that landed him in jail, only that he made some kind of “mistake” with his words.
The post on his Lionheart blog is a chilling reminder of what we in the West are up against.
Standing waiting to go through to the custody suite before being placed in the cell, so that I could be arrested, read my legal rights and stripped of my possessions and anything else I could hang myself with, I stood there thinking, look at the sacrifice I have made to write about the most serious threat to our way of life in 50 years, I was being arrested for it with the possibility of going to prison for my actions, for standing up for myself, for others and for my Christian belief.
I had my life threatened by Moslems, they are pumping their heroin and crack cocaine into my community, killing and destroying my friends, they are actively at War with British society from where I live, and here I am being arrested for a few words on a computer screen – There is something wrong there don’t you think?
I thought to myself about every other person who is standing up and speaking out against Islam and its Jihad against us, our society and way of life and thought; what sacrifice would others make?
What kind of sacrifice are we willing to make? What kind of sacrifice will we be forced to make? Will our inaction, silence, acquiescence allow an aggressive, brutal and savage enemy of Western civilization to triumph?
Either those of us who write and speak about Islam and Jihad are wrong or we are right, there is no middle ground, and if you care anything about the future society you want to live in and bring children and grandchildren up in, you have a responsibility to find out – You are reading this for a reason!
Moslems will tell you everything I am saying is rubbish that I am a scaremonger, Islamaphobe, racist or a hate filled person, this is because they are allowed to lie to the infidel (non-Moslem), they force their critics back and seek to silence them with these labels. Their religion teaches them that it is ok to lie to lead the kuffar into a false sense of security as they follow and carry out their duty of Jihad – This is called Taqqia and is a teaching of Mohamed
Come on, how can any peaceful religion teach that it is ok to lie to someone in their pursuit to dominate the person by all means necessary?
As Lionheart points out, every day in the U.K. and even here in the U.S. a war is being waged against the West, against democracy, against Judeo-Christian civilization. On our side are those who value tolerance above all, who believe negotiation and accommodation are the reasonable and right posture before a belligerant aggressor. Our enemy, and indeed Islam is the enemy of the West, knows no compromise nor negotiation, uses our rules and laws against us, to manipulate us into granting them special status from which they can continue their quest for dominance.
I’ve often wondered what lesson the German experience prior to World War II has for us here in the 21st Century. I’m beginning to think it is one of sleeping walking into a long national, or in the modern case, global nightmare. If you read William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or Corrie Ten Boom’s “The Hiding Place“, or even fiction like Herman Wouk’s “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance“ and Leon Uris’ “Mila 18,” a unifying theme emerges in each of those books of how every day people, Germans and Jews, almost whistfully slumbered into perhaps the greatest slaughter and cataclysm in the history of mankind.
Indeed the sense of melacholy is well captured by Woulk who writes about Poland’s national radio playing Chopin nearly nonstop on the eve of the German invastion. It was almost as if, everyone knew what was coming, but no one had the will, or even imagination to stop it. Christopher Browning in his “Ordinary Men” writes about how ordinary guys, fathers, brothers, sons, neighbors were anesthesized into partaking in atrocities that even at the distance of more than half a century take your breath away.
What lesson is there for us? Are we allowing ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security, denying the reality that every day confronts us? Even the stories and images that do make it through the filters of a media so fearful of causing offense that it censors itself, even those images paint a picture impossible to ignore. There is nothing untrue or distorted in Geert Wilders censored 15 minute film, just images and words, true and spoken, that portray a reality that we are too fearful to believe.
Believe we must.
Lionheart, if by some happenstance you read my post here, know brother that you are a courageous man and have my full support.
The Answer to Islam
“Put no confidence in princes, nor on strength of men depend”
The war against Islam ultimately will not be won by bullets and tanks, but by conversion.
An article from National Review Online on “Islam’s Public Enemy #1.”