A Long Time Coming

The American socialist/progressive/communist movement has been around for about 100 years. We are watching the the House vote on one of it's biggest attempts to impose government control on a huge portion of our economy. If this fails, they will not stop. If they succeed, they will grab for more.

Socialism is fueled by a world view that is diametrically opposed to Christocentric concepts regarding the human condition. Christianity holds that man was created in a perfect condition, sinned/fell from grace and because of sin requires a Redeemer to satisfy the righteous judgement of a Holy God. The problems of the human condition will disappear once sin is finally dealt with.

Socialism is an expression of humanism; humanism is a system of belief wherein Man does not need to be redeemed, he needs to be ruled. Once a perfect government is formed, then all the problems of the human condition will disappear.

Humanism is acknowledged by its adherents as a religion whose precepts are as follows :

FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

This is the first element of the socialist/humanist agenda against Christianity. This is one of the reasons why the Book of Genesis has been the object of so many attacks , The Genesis account is an affront against humanism and must be discredited. As the scientific method was bastardized to support AGW, the same was done to discredit the Genesis account of creation. Carbon 14 dating that fell short of the millions and millions of years needed to legitimatize evolution were simply ignored as errors.

SECOND: Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.

This second element is the continuous process of evolution, the replacement for Genesis; the Book of Origins. Under Humanism, everything comes from nothing; a singularity perhaps but that's not important. What's important is that there is no God, there cannot be a God; there must not be a God.

THIRD: Holding an organic view of life, humanists find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.

Not so obvious - this element rejects the concept that man has a soul and spirit. Therefore there is no afterlife. Therefore there is no Authority that controls events after death.

FOURTH: Humanism recognizes that man's religious culture and civilization, as clearly depicted by anthropology and history, are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction with his natural environment and with his social heritage. The individual born into a particular culture is largely molded by that culture.

Also not as obvious - Humanism rejects the notion that God has established standards of conduct. Our laws therefore are nothing but a "gradual development" of his social environment that have no basis in Divine Origin. Therefore these laws can gradually, or suddenly, change into .... whatever pleases Man. Rape isn't rape unless it's rape-rape. Murder is not murder if it is abortion.

FIFTH: Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. Obviously humanism does not deny the possibility of realities as yet undiscovered, but it does insist that the way to determine the existence and value of any and all realities is by means of intelligent inquiry and by the assessment of their relations to human needs. Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method.

There is no longer intrinsic value to anything including human life. All value to all things is ascribed by its assessment in relation to human needs. If we don't need you, then you have no value. Good-bye Grandma.

The free and unfettered expression of our religious beliefs must also be subjected to scientific examination. Instead of the Book of Revelations, we will be handed the Book of Scientific Negotiations. Except of course for AGW; that is a scientific belief based completely on faith and the potential profits to be made in carbon trading - thus AGW is sacrosanct.

SIXTH: We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought".

The Humanists have no decreed that the time has passed for tolerance. Only those belief systems that comply with the tenets of Humanism will be allowed. Perhaps this will also be the end of elevator music.

SEVENTH: Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation--all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.

Element number seven is simple. All aspects of human life are now subject to the dictates of government.

EIGHTH: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist's social passion.

Social Passion - the government will develop and fulfill you. After all, Comrade Obama knows best.

NINTH: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.

Hence the social gospel. There is no place for original sin, only the sin of non-cooperation with the effort to promote social well-being, whatever the hell that might be today.

TENTH: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.

From now on, the only tingle you will be allowed is the "Chris Matthews Inner Thigh Spasm."

ELEVENTH: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

Say good bye to prayer. I don't think that you'll go to prison or be fined for praying. But you just might find yourself in a psycho ward where you will be "treated" for prayer because that's the mental hygiene way of doing things.

TWELFTH: Believing that religion must work increasingly for joy in living, religious humanists aim to foster the creative in man and to encourage achievements that add to the satisfactions of life.

Prepare yourselves for more crucifixes reposing in beakers of piss. Somehow, somewhere, some pervert is satisfied by this.

THIRTEENTH: Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world.

Look to see government agencies examining church services in order to bring them into conformance with with human fulfillment. If having sex with other men or a three year old boy brings you fulfillment, then the altar needs to be replaced with a mattress. After all, psychologists have already started to discount the effects of adults having sex with children.

FOURTEENTH: The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.

What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine. This has already been tried and it has been a resounding failure in every instance. But won't stop the progressives. Obamacare is just the latest episode, but Bush 41's RINO's also had a hand in this with the Medicare prescription give away. It is just a little disingenuous for the Republicans to climb on the Outrage Bandwagon now when they helped move the whole socialization of medical care in this Country.

FIFTEENTH: We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow.

What humanism will accomplish is the destruction of America as we know it. And the only way for humanism to succeed is to insinuate itself into the very fabric of government.

So pray for America. We spit and sputter in fury on conservative websites, but the final disposition of these events have been, and always will be, in God's hands.

Time To Re-Evaluate

I was amazed this morning when our pastor used a segment of a video blog site, "Crackle", to shame me. Not that this was his intention, no indeed. But that's what I felt at the end of his message. And not just any blog, this is where Penn Jillette's personal video blog, "Penn Says", is located and where a personal observation made by Mr. Penn was used to great effect.

Most everyone has heard of the Penn and Teller team. They delight in exposing hypocrisy and sham. Mr. Penn is a liberterian and a confirmed atheist. Here's a sample:

But someone, a Christian, made a big impression on Mr. Penn last December. He gave Mr. Penn a bible.

Not that Mr. Penn made a confession of faith or anything like that. But notice his words; he describes this person three times as "good" or "very, very nice." Listen closely to what he says about proselytizing - the act or process to convert someone, to persuade them to accept your beliefs.

What are Mr. Penn's words? They were like a dagger to the heart of many professing Christians, I fear.
They were to mine.

"How much do you have to hate someone to not proselytize them?"

This from the mouth of an atheist.

Penn further states that if a truck is bearing down on you there is a point in time where "I have to tackle you." How tenacious are many Christians in witnessing? Do we give up too easily? Just how much do we believe Scripture and how willing are we to be "socially awkward?"

Mr. Penn's hospitable reception to this Christian's efforts was based on his perception that this was a "very, very, very good man." Mr. Penn sensed that this man was really concerned about his spiritual well being.

There was a reaction to Mr. Penn's video blog from the Christian community. Listen to what Mr. Penn has to say about that.

The question that was thrown in my face this morning was this, "Do I truly believe the Bible as it is written and am I willing to act on it?" Words without actions are nothing but wind.

But Mr. Penn's reaction to the gift of a bible was based on his perception that this man actually cared. You could see that he was stirred by this encounter. How many times do we mechanically react to what is perceived as our Christian duty without really caring for the people we are inflicting ourselves on? Do we bother to learn anything about them? Do we truly approach them as a friend? Or are we like the man on the street corner shouting at people trapped in a bus stop? Or the woman railing at school administrators at a PTA meeting?

The Apostle Paul knew this. He speaks to it in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13:

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Mr. Penn reacted to something that he sensed in that Christian. Can we say he would sense that in the rest of us?

He Hated Christians

Information on the Colorado church shootings is coming in.

24-year-old Matthew Murray has been identified as the shooter who has killed four people in Colorado. Murray had a beef with a suburban missionary school outside Denver and seems to have threatened the facility. The program he had trouble with is called "Youth With A Mission."

After shooting four people (killing two) yesterday morning in Arvata, he then drove 75 miles to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, which also has a ‘Youth With a Mission’ outreach program.

It is reported that he was carrying as much as a thousand rounds of ammunition. He threw a smoke grenade into the New Life Church building just as the 11 am service was ending .

Murray shot into a vehicle in the parking lot, killing two sisters. Murray then returns to the main building where he is shot by a volunteer female security guard. She shot him in the chest but the belts of ammunition afford him some protection. He reaches for what is described as a hand grenade and the guard delivers a fatal shot.

I wonder where he got hand grenades, if he had them at all. This kid sounds like he should have been on medication some time ago.

I volunteer once a month to work security for my church. I will not say whether or not I am armed while serving in this capacity.

Human Rights

Over the years I have developed a strong repugnance for human rights organizations. First, they are too whiny and self righteous; second, they are usually agenda-driven; and third, they highly selective in whose rights they are concerned about. They always seem to want to protect some so called "right" of a minority by limiting the freedoms of the majority. This is done by forcing the majority to accept something that is, at best, repugnant, or at the worst, destructive to the interests of the majority.

Nothing illustrates this clearer than the actions of the Canadian Islamic Congress in filing three lawsuits against a Canadian current affairs magazine and its editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte, for publishing sections of a book that analyzes the growth of Islam. The book, "The Future Belongs to Islam", was authored by conservative columnist Mark Steyn. Excerpts from it appeared in the October 23, 2007, edition of Maclean's.

The future belongs to Islam
The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.
MARK STEYN Oct 20, 2006

Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.

Steyn goes on to point out some very disturbing comparative demographics that show that western civilization, as we know it, is "running out of babies."

Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.

You might formulate it like this:

Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital.

Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.

The point is: Steyn is not mocking or criticizing their precious child molesting prophet. He is commenting about demographic forces shaping the future of Europe. And even this is too much for the mad imams of the ROP because Steyn hammers home some some incredibly salient points:

We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.

Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:

Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.

Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.

The Canadian Islamic Congress and its counterpart in the States, CAIR, would have us remain ignorant of these considerations, for it involves the very future of civilization as we know it.

Our future will not be determined by technology, war, famine, plague or any other factors. It will will be determined by God, first and foremost. Those who cherish the Christian roots of America have made their contribution to the future through their children and grandchildren. As we have abandoned the precepts that forged our nation, we have also abandoned the socio-political adhesive that binds us. Europe is finding this out as did Israel thousands of years ago. As the Israelites turned to other gods, they became enslaved by surrounding nations.

Who or what do we worship? For many Americans it certainly is not the Creator as revealed in Scripture. We can see the same effect in Europe as they abandoned their faith, for if all faiths are the same, then you believe in nothing. And you will pass on to your children exactly what you believe: snail darters and kangaroo rats and being inoffensive are more important than families to grow a nation.

[...]In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.

In a modern twist, Europe will become enslaved not from without, but from within. And the same fate awaits us if we don't wake up.

Our Savior Lives

In a new alleged documentary, movie producer James Cameron

and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn't esurrected --the cornerstone of Christian faith-- and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem.

And they found His old gym locker too. They are now seeking archeological clues for the combination to open it.

And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

It's not like we haven't heard this before. It's the same sad story that has been going on for hundreds of years. The authenticity of Scripture is challenged time after time. And Scripture always reveals itself to be true.

But the moonbats will flock to this and claim, like Friedrich Nietzsche, that God is dead.

No dear moonbats, Nietzsche is dead. You can find him here, in the Röcken Churchyard in Berlin where he has been busily decomposing for over 100 years.

A movie producer whose last works include the bomb King Kong does not shake my faith.

In the words of Samuel Medley:

I know that my Redeemer lives!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives!
He lives, he lives, who once was dead;
He lives, my ever living head!

He lives triumphant from the grave;
He lives eternally to save;
He lives exalted, throned above;
He lives to rule his Church in love.