I keep hoping that the purported peace-loving moderate Muslims are indeed the great majority who would prove me right by demonstrating their peacefulness and moderation in action. Thus far, only a faint murmur of equivocation is all that I hear from these people.
“I am already against the next war”, read the bumper sticker on a car ahead of me. I long to tell the driver: the next war is already here; Islamists are waging it in every corner of the globe and the “moderate Muslims” are either actively supporting them, placing the blame on the West, or simply looking the other way. This war aims to wipe out everything that free people cherish, including the right of expressing their sentiments. Banishing war has been the perennial dream of mankind’s best, while its worst has been frustrating its realization. To renounce war unilaterally and unconditionally is surrender and death.
Humanity has suffered horrific wars in the past. Yet, the present multi-form and multi-front war waged by Islamists has the potential of inflicting more suffering and destroying more lives than any before it. Ruthless Islamic forces are advancing rapidly in their conquests while those of freedom are acquiescing and retreating. Before long, Islamism is poised to achieve its Allah-mandated goal of cleansing the earth of all non-Muslims. Any and all means and weapons are to be enlisted in the service of this final holy war that aims to establish the Islamic Ummah.
But Islam is a religion of peace and the great majority of Muslims are not a party to any plans and actions of the radicals, so claim academic pundits, leftist journalists, and hired Islamic apologists. The incantation of these “authorities” is the lullaby that puts the people into a sleep of complacency. For an average free human busy with all manners of demands on his time and resources, would hardly want to worry about the threat of Islamism when those he believes are “in the know” emphatically claim that there is nothing to worry about. Some of these advocates of Islam go further by accusing those who sound the alarm as racists, bigots, hatemongers, and much more.
But where are all the peace-loving moderate Muslims that supposedly are in the great majority? The Muslims who are neither jihadists themselves, nor do they support them? I and others, time and again, have been calling upon them to stand up and show the world that they oppose the fanatical Islamists. It is small comfort even if the vast majority of Muslims are not fanatic radicals when they do nothing to demonstrate their position. It is instructive to recall that it is invariably a minority, and more often than not a very small minority, that launches a campaign of death and destruction.
Perhaps it is wishful thinking on the part of the non-Muslims to believe that one can be a Muslim moderate, given that Islam is radical at its very core. To be moderate Muslim demands that the person explicitly renounce much of the violent, exclusionary, and radical teachings of the Quran. By so doing, the individual who issues his own death warrant in Islamic countries is condemned as apostate if he lives in a non-Islamic land and may even earn a fatwa on his head.
It is deadly, in any confrontation, to assess the adversary through one’s own mental template, because the two templates can be vastly different from each other. People in the West are accustomed to relativistic rather than absolutistic thinking. To Westerners, just about all matters range from black to white with an array of gray shades between the two poles. To Muslims, by contrast, nearly everything is in black and white and with virtually no shades of gray. The former type of thinking is typical of more mature minds, while the latter is that of young children and the less enlightened.
This absolutist thinking is enshrined in the Quran itself. When the starting point for a Muslim is the explicit fanatical words of Allah in the Quran, then the faithful are left with no choice other than literally obeying its dictates or even taking it to the next level of fanaticism. Good Muslims, for instance, do not shake hands with women, even though the Quran does not explicitly forbid it. Although the Quran stipulates that men are rulers over women, good Muslim men take it upon themselves to rule women not much better than they treat their domesticated animals.
All extreme systems operate outside of the constraints of checks and balances and according to the principle of a negative feedback loop. That is, once it starts, the extreme becomes more and more extreme until self-destructs and takes the larger system down with it. Cancer is a case in point. It begins with only a few cells. Left unchecked, the few cells continue expanding and stop only with the death of the host.
Fanatical Islam may indeed be a minority. Yet it is deadly cancer that has metastasized throughout the body of the world. Urgent confrontation of this advancing disease is imperative to stave it off.
Dozens of Islamist shooting wars of lesser and greater bloodletting are presently raging in the world, aided and abetted by the “moderate Muslim” majority. The so-called moderate Muslims, even if they exist, are complicit in the crimes of the radicals either by providing them with funds, logistics, and new recruits or by simply failing to actively confront and unequivocally renounce them.
As is the case with cancer cells, it is the malignant minority that is death-bearing.
In Germany in the 1930s, for instance, very few people were Nazis and most Germans dismissed them as a bunch of hot-headed fools. Before long, the hot-headed few cowed in the dismissive masses and as a result, millions lost their lives.
The tentacles of the Islamist hydra have deeply penetrated the world. The Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood poses a clear threat in Egypt with its large block of representatives in the parliament, but also wages its deadly campaign through its hundreds of well-established and functioning branches all over the world.
The Wahhabis finance thousands of madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming fanatical foot soldiers for the Petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the Persian Gulf.
The end-of-the-world believers of the bomb-aspiring Iran’s Khomeinism are busy establishing the Shia hegemony in an arc extending from the Gulf of Oman to the Mediterranean Sea.
Al Qaeda and dozens of its like-minded jihadists relentlessly carry their barbaric campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, the former Soviet Union republics, the Russian Federation, Somalia, North Africa, and parts of Europe, as well as other lands.
I keep hoping that the purported peace-loving moderate Muslims are indeed the great majority who would prove me right by demonstrating their peacefulness and moderation in action. Thus far, only a faint murmur of equivocation is all that I hear from these people.
Are “moderate Muslims” an illusion? The only viable alternative for peaceful people of Islamic background, therefore, is to leave the bondage of violent Islam altogether and join ranks with humanity’s free.
The selected puppet president Ahmadinejad boasts that Iran’s mullahs’ nuclear train has no reverse gear and lacks brakes. He should harbor no illusions. The non-Islamist masses of Iranians will not docilely submit to the mullahs’ maniacal plans. It is the unmatched force of freedom that has no reverse gear and it is the force fully capable and determined to bring the mullahs’ train to a screeching halt before it is armed with the Armageddon nuclear weapons they so doggedly pursue.
On Sunday, March 26, Reverend Chad Scruggs faithfully preached God’s Word from John 12:36-50 to Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, extolling 1) God’s plan in the Jews’ rejection of Jesus and 2) Jesus’s subsequent glory. On Monday, March 27, his nine-year-old daughter Hallie was one of six people shot dead at the church’s Christian school by a 28-year-old former student.
The shooter carried out a horrific act of evil. Sudden, devastating loss is hard to process at any time. But, under such circumstances, it can cause us to doubt the goodness of God or provoke us to respond in sinful anger. Thinking through three questions can help us to shape a more biblical perspective on tragedies like the Nashville shooting.
1. Why did it happen?
The Bible teaches that all evil and suffering in the world is a consequence of mankind’s sin. When God created the world, he declared all that he had made “very good” (Genesis 1:31). But when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, he cursed creation and drove them out of the garden (Genesis 3); when mankind commits evil, God justly dispenses suffering as a consequence. Mankind quickly multiplied their sin, even committing (Genesis 4:8) and then boasting about (Genesis 4:23) murder. This general truth is foundational to a biblical understanding of suffering.
However, it does not follow that every bit of suffering in the world can be directly tied to a particular sin. The Bible supplies different categories, with numerous examples for each. People can suffer because of their own sins, because of the sins of others, or because of no discernable sin at all.
This often means that we suffer, or know others who suffer, without being able to identify a reason. Even if we can identify a proximate or instrumental reason — such as a school shooter — we often don’t understand why God allows the suffering, or why a trial afflicts a particular person.
Unexplained suffering is a thread that runs throughout the Bible. Joseph was sold into slavery (Genesis 37:28) and thrown into prison (Genesis 39:20) for no discernable reason. Only later, after his imprisonment led to his preventing a seven-year famine and saving his family from starvation, did Joseph clearly see God’s purpose behind his suffering (Genesis 45:5-8). The man born blind (John 9:1) lived to adulthood without receiving an explanation for his lack of sight. Jesus said the reason for his blindness was not any particular sin, but “that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3). His years of unexplained blindness led to his believing in Jesus unto eternal life (John 9:38). We read that the reason for Job’s suffering was that God was holding him up to Satan as an example of righteousness (Job 1:8). But, as far as we know, even after God restored Job to health and prosperity, he never told Job the reason for his suffering. David complained, “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause” (Psalm 69:4). Even as a prophet, he could hardly comprehend how his words looked forward to his greater son, Jesus Christ (John 15:25).
The Bible teaches that God is working out his good purposes even amid seemingly senseless suffering. We have God’s promise that “for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). Paul lists some of the things he had in mind, “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword” (Romans 8:34). God even turns the evil purposes of man to the ultimate good of his people. Joseph told his treacherous brothers, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20). Peter reminded his readers that their trials were “now” — not later — “for a little while” — not forever — and “if necessary” — not pointless (1 Peter 1:6).
2. What should I think about this?
The Bible teaches that God will only give his children trials that are necessary for them. At the same time, it teaches that they will face trials. “In the world you will have tribulation,” said Jesus, “but take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). The conclusion to draw from these two teachings is that sufferings and trials are necessary for us.
One purpose of the trials we face is “so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7). Like pure gold, pure faith is tested and proven genuine in the fire of affliction. Job’s trials revealed his faith, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25).
Another purpose of our trials is our sanctification. Trials produce steadfastness, making us “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:4). Our sufferings produce endurance, character, and hope (Romans 5:3-4). Our humiliation conforms us to the pattern of Christ Jesus who, “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).
One particular trial Christians should expect is persecution. We don’t know yet whether the Nashville shooter targeted the school because of its Christian beliefs; if she did, it would be entirely consistent with the Bible’s teaching. We do know that terrorists in Nigeria killed 27 Christians in two attacks this month because of their beliefs. “Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you,” Jesus told his disciples the night before is persecutors put him to death (John 15:20).
Remember, too, that other word of Jesus, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:11-12).
3. How should we respond?
Christianity is no abstract religion; its doctrines resolve into action. So, given the truths about sin, suffering, and trials presented above, how should Christians respond in action?
For starters, we should “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). The communities of Covenant Presbyterian Church and The Covenant School must be devastated right now. It’s appropriate to feel compassion for them, mourn with them, and take time just to bear that grief. By the way, that includes the shooter’s mother, who made the financial sacrifice to enroll her daughter in the Christian school and presumably earnestly desired her salvation.
At the same time, let’s be careful how we respond to the perpetrator. “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them,” said Paul in the same place (Romans 12:14). It can be tempting to let our minds run to angry, evil thoughts, or at least to let our mouths run to name-calling or condemnations of a whole class. But those aren’t Christlike responses. “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).
That raises another way in which we should take Jesus for our model: trusting God. “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19). This means continuing to worship God, adore his character, and look to his providential care even when he fills our days with bitter sorrow. It means continuing to believe that God “exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).
This trust in God entails an acknowledgment that God can order all things as he pleases. “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him” (Ecclesiastes 7:14). Or, as Job put it, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). Such a response is neither easy nor natural. It’s only possible if we are more convinced of the reality and worth of God’s character and promises than in our own circumstances. But it’s the type of supernatural response that God-given trials are designed to reveal in us to his glory.
Finally, when suffering touches us, we should endure obediently. “If when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God,” wrote Peter (1 Peter 2:20). Scripture gives several practical reasons to encourage us in obedient endurance.
First, humility is the path to honor. “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” Jesus repeated (Luke 14:11, 18:14). “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (1 Peter 5:6).
Second, all our striving against God’s mighty hand can accomplish nothing. “Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked?” (Ecclesiastes 7:13). In his book, “The Crook in the Lot,” Puritan pastor Thomas Boston explained that, instead of squirming and striving against the trial, a wiser approach is to consider what work God is doing through the trial. If the infinitely wise God has appointed this trial for you, and nothing you can do can make the trial go away until God takes it away, then the way to make the best of your circumstances is to consider what God is doing and submit yourself to his plan.
Third, God uses trials to sanctify us. The preacher said, “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit” (Ecclesiastes 7:8). The proud in spirit has yet to be humbled by God, and God will most certainly bring him down. But the patient in spirit can say with Paul, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound” (Philippians 4:11-12).
These biblical doctrines and instructions for holy living are difficult to accept — even more so when intense suffering besets us. But often, times of suffering are what God uses to change our hearts so that we can accept them.
The goal in trials should be to acknowledge God’s eternal plan and Christ’s eternal glory, as Reverend Scruggs preached on Sunday.
What is God doing through this Nashville shooting? Perhaps he intends to grow that church’s understanding of the truths preached to them just before this horrific tragedy. Perhaps he intends to display his glory through the supernatural responses of Christians struggling through unimaginable bitterness and sorrow. Perhaps he intends to confuse his enemies and advance his kingdom by converting the souls wandering furthest from him.
God has many good purposes in every good and bad thing that happens. Some we know. Some we can reason towards, based upon what we find in Scripture. Some we will learn about someday. But some purposes of the infinite, eternal Creator we will never know.
Of one thing we can be certain: all of our suffering will one day dissolve into insignificance when God himself will dwell with his people and “wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3-4). No stranger to suffering, the apostle Paul reasoned, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-30 05:51:122023-03-30 05:51:123 Questions to Shape a Biblical Perspective on the Nashville Shooting
Michael Pakaluk:All Americans must take responsibility for the common good, which is our nation’s culture. You cannot change the world. But you can change your own life.
Off the record – before his speech begins – to the press corps:
“I would ordinarily be enjoying an ice cream cone right now – you know how much I love the stuff; I’ve got a whole freezer full. But I take my Catholic faith seriously, as you know. It’s Lent. I’ve been fasting. – (Laughs ) Yeah, me too! – Can I offer a personal confession? As president, I get briefed on a lot of bad things that the nation never hears about. I have no idea how I’d be able to do this job without the graces that come from prayer and fasting, even outside of Lent.”
Press conference begins:
Good afternoon, fellow Americans. It’s common for politicians to use violence like the horrific crime this morning to attack their opponents for not supporting gun control or assault rifle bans. I am not going to treat this tragedy that way. Because it would be exploitation. About 500 people die in mass shootings every year. While lamentable, a far larger number, 25,000 commit suicide each year with guns. I’d insult you if I said the problem of suicide was a problem of guns.
Another 25,000 are murdered in our cities with guns. Guns make it easier to murder, but for centuries criminals killed with knives.
The colonists all owned pistols and rifles. But mass murders of random people were relatively unknown in our country until recently. One of the first was in 1949, the “Walk of Death” in Camden, New Jersey, by a decorated veteran. He shot 13 at point blank, including children. Since 2000 these incidents have skyrocketed. A bar chart would show a trend going sharply upward.
Guns do not rise up of their own volition, place themselves in people’s hands, and begin firing at school children. They are instruments, for bad and sometimes for good. Our country has a problem romanticizing guns. Surely, it’s easier to ban imaginary guns than real guns, no? I propose this, then: just as we did with cigarettes, let’s ban all guns from movies, tv shows, and video games. Not sure that you’re in favor? Well, until you stop wanting to entertain yourself by watching murders with guns, I won’t take seriously your talk of banning guns.
Let’s be honest that these shootings especially in schools disturb us because we take them to stand for our society as a whole. In economics, we learn that, although each of us has freedom, when numbers are large, individuals will invariably display the motives that to some degree are affecting many. The causes of these mass shootings are likely to be found there.
There are two kinds of mass killers. One hates himself and wants to destroy himself. He often begins by murdering his family and ends by killing himself. Another hates everyone else. Sometimes the two kinds of killers are combined in one. And often a mass killer aims to “make a statement.”
So what kind of society produces citizens who want to make statements like that?
A story in the Wall Street Journal last weekend carried the headline, “America Pulls Back from Values that Once Defined It.” The report begins, “Patriotism, religious faith, having children. . .are receding in importance for Americans.” In 1998, when the survey began, 70% said patriotism was important. Now it’s 38%. Religion used to be important for 62% of Americans; now it’s 39%. Having children was 59%; now it’s 30%. Another statistic won’t surprise you, if you’ve been paying attention to universities: tolerance has declined as a value from 80% to only 58%.
A pollster commented, “these differences are so dramatic, it paints a new and surprising portrait of a changing America.“ I remind you that these numbers were dropping precipitously over the two decades when mass shootings were rising precipitously. So, that is the first thing I want to say – culture abhors a vacuum. If good recedes, we cannot be surprised if evil asserts itself.
The dramatic differences in that poll didn’t come from just anywhere. In large part, they are the effect of our system of schooling, as many of you learned during the pandemic, when you could inspect your children’s curriculum. Therefore, I am announcing today a whole-of-government effort to support school vouchers and parental choice, and to facilitate homeschooling.
Then there is the ideology of “the unencumbered self.” The Supreme Court in Dobbs overturned Roe v Wade, which was based not on our Constitution but on this destructive ideology of autonomy. Ask yourself: If it’s not so important what we choose, as that we are the ones who choose it – on what basis do we criticize someone’s choice to destroy rather than to build? Why couldn’t malice express a person’s autonomy as much as love?
Culture abhors a vacuum. Although several states have admirably acted to affirm the dignity of each human person from conception, I also announce today a whole-of-government approach to support women in carrying through their pregnancies. I want to see a bipartisan effort to have all medical expenses of prenatal care, birth, and early childhood supported as a public good. And I pledge to you that I will work to take up once again a Human Life Amendment.
Also, henceforth, the executive branch of the Federal government will in no way lend support to transgenderism, which is simply the latest expression of the destructive ideology of the “unencumbered self.”
Following President Washington’s example, I wish to give a warning. I want all Americans to take responsibility for the common good, which is our nation’s culture. You cannot change the world. But you can change your own life. If shooting down children in cold blood strikes you as “demonic” – not my words, but what you yourselves say – then reject anything occult and demonic, anything that even hints at it, in your own lives. Have no part in it.
Finally, following President Lincoln’s example, 160 years later to the day, I hereby proclaim tomorrow, March 30th, as a National Day of Prayer and Fasting.
Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His acclaimed book on the Gospel of Mark is The Memoirs of St Peter. His new book, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel of John: A New Translation with Commentary, is now available. Prof. Pakaluk was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of St Thomas Aquinas by Pope Benedict XVI.
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“In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.” — Victor Davis Hanson, quote from Life Among the Ruins.
A must read from American’s great political philosopher, Victor Davis Hanson.
American society is facing three existential crises, not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.
American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.
Premodern Barbarism
We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.
Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it.
So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.
All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence. The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault—with de facto immunity. Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.
We have redefined felonies as misdemeanors warranting no punishment. Misdemeanors are now infractions that are not criminal. Infractions we treat as lifestyle choices. Normality, not criminality, is deemed criminal. We all know this will not work, but still wonder why it continues.
Many among the middle classes of our cities who can flee or move, do so—like 5th-century equestrians who left Rome for rural fortified farms before the onslaught of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. For most of our lives we were lectured that the old southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—were backward and uninviting. Now even liberals often flee to them, leaving behind supposedly cosmopolitan Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. The more people leave the blue states, the more those states praise themselves as utopian.
The less well-off, without the means to leave, hope that their environs have hit bottom so things can only improve. The elite who caused this premodern catastrophe assumes they will always have the money and wherewithal to ensure that themselves and their own can navigate around or even profit from the barbarism they unleashed. For them the critic, not the target of criticism, is the greater threat.
The hard urban work of the 1990s and early 2000s—cleaner, safer subways, secure nightlife downtown, clean sidewalks, low vacancy rates, little vagrancy, and litter-free streets—so often has been undone, deliberately so. We are descending to the late 1960s and 1970s wild streets—if we are lucky the mayhem does not devolve even further.
A mere 10 years ago, if an American learned that a man was arrested for clubbing, robbing, or shooting innocents, and yet would be released from custody that day of his crime, he would have thought it an obscenity. Now he fears that often the criminal will not even be arrested.
A once secure border no longer exists. Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas simply demolished it and allowed 6-7 million foreign nationals to cross illegally into the United States without audits—to the delight of their apparent constituent, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
What would shame a Biden or Mayorkas? What would change their minds? Billions of dollars spent on social services for the lawbreaking at the expense of the American poor?
Would 100,000 annual lethal overdoses—12 times more than those who died over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—from drugs that flow across the open border sway them? Or would it take 200,000, or 300,000 deaths before Joe Biden relented and ceased his chuckling?
What does a people do when its highest officials simply renounce their oaths of office and refuse to enforce laws they don’t like? Everyone knows the border will eventually have to become secure, but none have any idea whether it will take another 20, 30, or 50 million illegal entrants and 1 million more fentanyl deaths to close it.
Polls show race relations have hit historic lows. Much of the ecumenicalism of the post-Civil Rights movement seems squandered—almost deliberately so.
The Left now rarely mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. or even the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps it knows it has violated the spirit and legacy of both.
Today, our identity politics leaders believe that the color of our skin, not the content of our character, certainly matters more. The practitioners of the new tribalism in some sense fear outlawing segregation and discrimination by race. They know to do so would end racially restricted houses and safe spaces, racially exclusive graduations, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion on campus.
Read Professor Ibram X. Kendi and his message is implicit. For him, the problem with a Jim Crow-like system was not segregation or racial chauvinism per se, but merely who was doing the victimizing and who were the victims: so the original racism was bad; but racism in reverse is good.
We abhor violence, racism, and misogyny—in the abstract. Yet the entire hip-hop industry would find no audience—or so we are told by its appeasers—if rappers refrained from “ho” misogyny, brags of violence against law enforcement, and self-described proprietary use of the N-word.
Most know that young black males under 30 commit violent crimes at well over 10 times their 3-4 percent demographic of the population—so often victimizing the nonwhite. All know that reality must remain unmentionable even as its causes need to be debated and discussed if lives are to be saved. Yet the greater crime seems not the crime itself, but even mentioning crime.
Postmodern Abyss
Postmodernism in our age is deadlier even than premodernism. Sexually explicit drag shows that allow the attendance of children 20 years ago would have been outlawed—by liberals worried over the trauma of the young watching performance-art simulated sex.
Now the children come last and the performers first—as ratified by the same liberals. But to fathom the new transitioning, simply learn from ancient transitioning and gender dysphoria, an unhappy classical theme from Catullus’ Attis poem (stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, vagus/devolsit ili acuto sibi pondera silice/ itaque ut relicta sensit sibi membra sine viro) to Giton in Petronius’ Satyricon.
Current “science” is now synonymous with ideology, religion, or superstition. Lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, masking, transgenderism, “climate change,” and green power brook no dissent. They are declared scientifically correct in the manner that the sun used to revolve around the earth, and any dissenting Galileo or Copernicus is cancel-cultured, doxxed, and deplatformed.
It is now verboten to cite the causes of the current upswing. We must remain silent about the classical exegeses that cults, pornography, and constructed sexual identities, when not biological, were the manifestations of a bored culture’s affluence (luxus), leisure (otium), and decadence (licentia/dissolutio).
The classical analyses of an elite collapse focus on a falling birth rate, a scarce labor force, ubiquitous abortion, an undermanned military, and a shrinking population. We suffer all that and perhaps more still.
Millions of young men are detached and ensconced in solitude, their indebted 20s too often consumed with video-gaming, internet surfing, or consumption of porn. Many suffer from prolonged adolescence. Many assume that they are immune from criticism, given that the alternative of getting married, having children, finding a full-time job, and buying a house is society’s new abnormal.
Rarely has an elite society become so Victorian and yet so raunchy. A slip with an anachronistic “Gal” or “Honey” can get one fired. Meanwhile, grabbing one’s genitals while pregnant on stage before 120 million viewers is considered a successful Super Bowl extravaganza.
Our army is short of its annual recruitment by 25 percent. We all suspect but do not say out loud the cause. The stereotyping of poor and middle-class white males as both raging and biased, and yet expected yet to fight and die in misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, has finally convinced the parents of these 18-year-olds to say, “no more.”
Need we say anything about the lack of efficacy or morality of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA?
Or rather is there anything the FBI will not do?
Doctor court evidence? Hire Twitter to suppress the news? Monitor parents at school board meetings? Allow directors to lie under oath or “misremember” before Congress?
Swiping clean subpoenaed phones? Hiring fakers to compile dirt on a presidential candidate—and then using that known smear to hoodwink a judge to allow spying on Americans?
Suppressing evidence on a laptop to warp an election? Raiding an ex-president’s home with a SWAT-like team? Spying on Catholics in mass? Storming a home full of children of a man accused of a politically incorrect misdemeanor?
The more the military has been stalemated in Iraq, humiliated in Afghanistan, and dreading what China will soon do or what Iran will even sooner let off, the more it insists our priorities should be diversity, equity, and inclusion. Will that escapism ensure more lethal pilots, tank commanders, and Marine company commanders?
The mindsets of too many of our new generations of command are twofold: first to be promoted by virtue signaling woke policies that they must know eventually will hamper combat readiness, and then in the future to rotate at retirement into multimillionaire status by leveraging past expertise for defense contractors. Keep that in mind and almost every publicly uttered nonsense from our highest in the Pentagon makes perfect sense.
Them
There is a third challenge. Our enemies—illiberal, deadly, and vengeful—have concluded we are more effective critics of ourselves than are they. They enjoy our divided nation, torn apart by racial incivility, dysfunctional cities, and woke madness. (Notice how even the communists long ago dropped deadly Maoist wokeism, or how the Russians viewed the Soviet commissariat as antithetical to their military and economic agendas.)
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-28 15:51:152023-03-28 15:51:15The Real State of The Union
Back In 2021, thanks to the newly elected Scottish leader Humza Yousaf (then Justice Minister) legislation was put in place that would allow citizens to be arrested for dinner conversations that had in their our own homes, if anyone feels there is “hate” involved.
The bill is nothing more than a gag order against people who are unwilling to put up with the human rights violations that all too often occur when living next to Pakistani Muslims. Rather than adapt and fit in, many Muslims want us silenced so we can’t criticise them. (more)
The Scots elected him to lead them? The West is indeed on a suicide mission.
In light of Humza Yousaf’s words, that Muslim groups and their Leftist allies have for over two decades now insisted repeatedly that any honest analysis of how Islamic jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify jihad violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims is “stirring up hatred.” So he is essentially calling for the criminalization even of private conversations that appear to be critical of Islam. If he isn’t roundly criticized and removed from office, it will be another sign of Britain’s imminent demise as a free society.
“Hate crime bill: Hate talk in homes ‘must be prosecuted,’” by Mark McLaughlin, The Times, October 28 2020 (thanks to Eugene Volokh):
Breaking: The Scottish National Party has elected Humza Yousaf to lead, making him the first Muslim & person of south Asian background to head the Scottish government. In his speech, he said migrants should be celebrated. In 2020, he delivered a tirade in parliament complaining… pic.twitter.com/NoPnwosEgC
Humza Yousaf, a Muslim who complained about too many white people in the Scottish government, was elected the new head of the Scottish National Party.
“We should all take pride in the fact that today we have sent a clear message, that your color of skin, your faith, is not a barrier to leading the country we all call home,” Humza Yousaf said.
Yousaf’s father is from Pakistan and his mother is from Kenya.
CNBC reported:
Humza Yousaf on Monday was elected the new head of the Scottish National Party, promising in a speech to bring the party together, support citizens with the cost-of-living crisis and deliver independence from the United Kingdom.
He is slated to assume political leadership in Scotland following his nomination in the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday.
Yousaf said his immediate priority would be to “protect every Scot, as far as we possibly can, from the harm inflicted by the cost-of-living crisis, to recover and reform our NHS and other vital public services, to support our wellbeing economy, to improve the life chances of people right across this country.”
He added that he would work on plans to “extend childcare, improve rural housing, support small businesses and boost innovation.”
The SNP supports the campaign for Scotland to gain independence from the United Kingdom and holds a majority of 64 of the 129 seats in the Scottish parliament, giving it control over devolved areas that include housing, education, justice, local government and areas of taxation.
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Note: The following text is a slightly edited version of remarks that the author gave recently at the Catholic Information Center in Washington D.C. to mark the publication of her book Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, with an introduction by the late Cardinal George Pell.– Robert Royal
Mary Eberstadt: As pressure mounts on the Church to capitulate to the sexual revolution, evidence shows it would cripple the Church, as it has crippled every other church that’s tried it.
Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited, closes a body of work that’s occupied a lot of my attention for the past fifteen years. I don’t mean that the last word has been said – far from it. New voices are emerging, including from non-religious circles, that are also newly skeptical of the post-1960s status quo. I mean instead that an idea that started percolating fifteen years ago has now received the systematic treatment first envisioned for it.
For six decades, a secularizing Western society has been telling itself a falsely happy story about the outcomes of the sexual revolution. To counter that story, we’ve needed an account of its fallout closer to the truth. That account falls into two parts: one examining post-revolutionary reality among individuals; and the other examining its effects on the wider world.
In 2008, the then-editor of First Things, Joseph Bottum, invited me to write an essay about Humanae Vitae to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the encyclical. At the time, this seemed like a fine opportunity for an exercise in spirited contrarianism. After all, Humanae Vitae may be the most universally mocked and reviled religious statements of the past century. How, many millions have asked, could the Church possibly defend the teaching against artificial contraception? Didn’t it want to join the modern world? Etc.
Before I could try to shock the bourgeoisie with a rousing defense of Humanae Vitae, I actually had to read the thing for the first time. It’s hard to get across just how transformative that reading became. Humanae Vitae makes several predictions about what the world would look like once the sexual revolution really took hold. The reason these predictions amazed me was simple, yet profound.
As a researcher who had studied and written about various aspects of American society over the years, I knew from different forms of evidence, popular as well as expert, that these predictions weren’t just predictions – they had actually all come true. Confirmation abounded, especially in the social sciences. In fact, Humanae Vitae has been vindicated as few attempts to spy the future ever are: including by information that did not exist when the document was written, and by scholars and other experts with no interest whatever in its teaching.
What struck me most forcefully here was that Church teaching was being vindicated by secular sources – again, secular social science, assembled by mostly secular social scientists, and appearing in secular journals. It was not theology that was demonstrating the downside of separating procreation and recreation – though no doubt theology can. Instead, it was scholarship about subjects like broken homes, interrupted relations between the sexes, rising rates of mental illness and addiction, and lots of other interrelated facts. And though the myriad authors of that research across the decades wouldn’t have dreamed of it, their work, understood in full, had gone to show, in effect, that Humanae Vitae and related Church teaching were right.
That perception – that aha! moment – led to the two Adam and Eve books, and their contrarian readings of the legacy of the sexual revolution. The first, Adam and Eve after the Pill, examined what might be called the microcosmic fallout of humanity’s embrace of contraception: the effects on individual men, women, and children, and on the radically changed social mores of the postrevolutionary order.
The second, new book widens the aperture to cover the macrocosmic fallout. It dissects the effects of the revolution on society, politics, and the Church. Needless to add, the Foreword by the late, great Cardinal George Pell, with whom I discussed some of these arguments, is the honor of a lifetime. This book, like the earlier one, revolves around the same general theme: the most unpopular Church teaching is being vindicated inadvertently, but really, by the accumulation of postrevolutionary evidence.
Much of what we do in life feels accidental at the time. This body of work is no exception. The late Fr. Arne Panula was a great believer in Providence. At times I feel he’s laughing at me for not having shared his certainty about the workings of that capital-P word. The idea that I’d spend years committing these arguments to paper, and sometimes to public appearances, would have seemed unlikely, even absurd to me in 2008; and certainly unwanted. But unexpected or not, the work commenced, and its unfolding changed me.
Before, I thought of myself as a writer who happened to be Catholic. Afterwards, I became a Catholic writer. What does that mean? It means that even if I hadn’t been a Catholic in the first place, the assembling of the evidence in the Adam and Eve books would have forced me to become one.
That’s because, if the argument of those books is true, then Church teaching is true. And if Church teaching is true, and one is privileged to witness a proof of that truth, however unanticipated, one can’t move on, and pretend there’s nothing to see here. One is stuck. And that’s how I turned from an accidental Catholic into an intentional one.
A thought that permeates both books that takes us straight to the present: We are all witnesses, here and now, to a great irony that encompasses not only the Catholics of America, but those of the entire West.
After all, Western Christianity spends most of its time these days in a defensive crouch, squabbling internally. Yet all the while, evidence from outside the Church continues to point toward something that many inside the Church seem not to know. The Church, practically alone among all institutions, has been harboring profound truths for two thousand years – most notably, in this case, the truth that living by that big, bad rule book is actually better for human beings than discarding it.
The irony is extraordinary. Pressure has been mounting for a long time now for the Catholic Church to do what most Protestant churches have done – abandon the teachings that prompt the most complaining from the pews – i.e., put down the Catechism, and pick up the cool-kid flag. Yet even as the call for capitulation grows louder, transforming and deforming Catholic discussion, the evidence thrown out by the world itself points in the opposite direction: caving to the sexual revolution would cripple the Church – exactly as it has crippled every other church that’s tried it.
And beyond that institutional point lies another that is surpassingly important. This kind of remedial labor, this insistence that postrevolutionary reality is other than what the dominant culture says it is, is not done for no reason. The revolution continues to claim many, many victims. To honor their witness is not some kind of reactionary indulgence, as boosters of the revolution claim. No: it is humanitarian work. There needs to be more of it. And there will be.
Meanwhile, it’s my modest hope that the facts assembled during these past 15 years will persuade some believers and unbelievers alike, and above all, give new heart to the wounded and those who tend them.
Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and holds the Panula Chair at the Catholic Information Center. Her most recent book is Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited, with a Foreword by Cardinal George Pell.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-25 23:52:562023-03-25 23:52:56Giving New Heart to the Wounded
“We are our beliefs,” it is said. Beliefs steer people in life. Some beliefs are harmless, some are the motive force for good, and yet others are delusional, misguided, and even outright dangerous. Every version of the belief called “Islam” ranges from the delusional to the dangerous.
Islam is a Grand Delusion, birthed by Muhammad’s hallucination he relayed to his first wife and employer, Khadija. Greatly frightened, he told Khadija that he was visited by a jinn (devil) in the Hira cave. Khadija comforted the distraught man by assuring him that the episode was Allah’s way of choosing him as his messenger. Muhammad believed his rich wife-employer who was 15 years his senior and the delusion became a belief—Islam.
Remarkably enough, under the early tutelage of Khadija, Muhammad succeeded in attracting a number of influential followers. Before long, the movement gathered more and more power through violent campaigns, and the faith was taken to new people and alien lands. This grand delusion, Islam, presently has in its stranglehold over a billion humans, posing an existential threat to all non-Muslims.
Islam is rooted in the primitive tribal mentality of “We against Them,” “We the righteous against the heathens,” and “We the servants submissive of the Great Allah against the rebellious enemies of Allah.” Islam is a polarizer. Islam is an enemy-maker. To Islam, a non-Muslim is a combatant against Allah and he is fair game to be subjugated and killed.
When some billion and a half adhere to the pathological belief of Islam and use it as their marching order of life, the rest of humanity can ignore the threat only at its own peril.
Once again, a resurgent Islam is on a campaign of conquest throughout the world. Hordes of life-in-hand foot-solider fanatical Muslims are striving to kill and get killed. All they want is the opportunity to discharge their homicidal-suicidal impulse, on their way to Allah’s promised glorious paradise. And in the background granting the foot soldiers wishes are their handlers, the puppeteers, who pull the strings and detonate these human bombs. Those who cherish life must recognize these emissaries of death, what makes them, what motivates them, and how best to defend against them.
The campaign of death waged by the Islamist jihadist, be he a puppet or a puppeteer, is energized by the belief in delectable rewards that await the faithful implementer of Allah’s dictates. Through highly effective indoctrination, the jihadist has come to believe firmly in Islam’s grand delusion. He believes that Allah is the one and only supreme creator of earth and heavens; that it is his duty and privilege to abide by Allah’s will and carry out his plans at all costs; he believes firmly in a gloriously wonderful immortal afterlife in paradise, for which a martyr’s death is the surest quickest admission. Although the dominating theme of the delusion is quasi-spiritual, the promised rewards of the afterlife awaiting the martyr are sensual and material. All the things and activities that the jihadist desires and cannot attain or practice, and rejects in his earthly life will be purified and proffered to him in the paradise of the next life. Thus goes the delusion.
It is important to understand that the human mind is not a perfect discerner of objective reality. In actuality, the reality is in the mind of the beholder. The outside world only supplies bits and pieces of raw material that the mind puts together to form its reality. Depending on the type and amount of bits and pieces that a given mind receives, its reality can be very different from that of another mind.
The more prescribed and homogeneous a group, the greater the group’s consensual reality, since the members share much in common experiential input and reinforce each other’s mindset. Thus, members of a given religious order, for instance, tend to think much more similar to one another than to members of other groups with different experiential histories.
Various approximations of the objective reality, therefore, rule the mind. The degree to which these approximations deviate from the larger group’s consensual reality determines their delusional extent and severity.
A cocaine mainliner, for instance, under the influence of the drug, may become convinced that a bug is burrowing under his skin. In his absolute, although clearly false, a certitude of the reality of his perception, cocaine users are known to take a knife to their own body to dig the burrowing bug out before it has penetrated too deeply.
A methamphetamine user’s reality is often distorted in a different way. Under the influence of the drug, intense paranoia overtakes him. His reality is dominated by the belief that one or more people are lurking about to harm or kill him. He may wield a deadly weapon, going from room to room, from closet to closet, in search of the assailants.
If you believe that a bug is camping deeply inside your body, then you might go ahead and try to dig the non-existent bug out. If you believe that people are lurking around the house to harm or kill you, you go after them before they get you. If you believe that all the troubles of the world are due to the evil-doings of the non-Muslims who war against Allah, then you do all you can to fight and kill them, particularly since Allah tells you to do so in the Quran.
The drug-induced delusions are hallucinations. They are dramatic and usually transitory, while religiously-based implantation of ideas programs the mind with lasting delusions.
Delusions, even when they are at great variance from the objective reality, can rule the mind without the need for drugs, or as a result of neurological dysfunctions or other factors. The young and the less educated are most vulnerable to believing the claims of charlatans, con artists, and cunning clerics, as truth and reality.
A tragic example of the young’s susceptibility to induced delusion is the case of thousands of Iranian children who were used as human minesweepers in the last Iran-Iraq war. The mullahs issued made-in-China plastic keys for paradise to children as an enticement to go forward and clear the minefield with their bodies ahead of the military’s armored vehicles. The children believed the murderers and rushed to their death, thinking that they were headed for Islam’s glorious paradise.
The repeated intense indoctrination of the children even changed the perception of some of the charlatan mullahs so that they, themselves, believed their own lies, took their own keys to Allah’s paradise, and rushed to their death clinging to the plastic trinkets. Hence, some of the puppeteers, in this instance, became puppets themselves. Such are the follies and fallibilities of the human mind.
It is, therefore, understandable that many of the higher-up Islamic puppeteers, who are usually brainwashed from early childhood, devote their fortunes and persons to the implementation of their deeply engrained delusions.
Deluded by the threats and promises of Islam, Muslims, poor or rich, vie with one another in furthering the violent cause of Allah.
Many non-Muslims are also victims of a different, yet just as deadly, delusion. They believe that Islam is a religion of peace, that only a small minority of Muslims are jihadists, and that Muslims can be reasoned to abandon the Quran-mandated elimination of non-believers. These well-meaning simpletons are just as deluded as the fanatic jihadists by refusing to acknowledge the fact that one cannot be a Muslim and not abide by the dictates of the Quran.
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The Biden administration is either dangerously naïve or worse. It is presenting this plan under the pretext of helping to curb terrorism in Judea and Samaria, yet ZOA says this “unconscionable and illegal plan” would aid Palestinian jihadists. Meanwhile, another report has exposed the U.S. State Department’s funding of an anti-Netanyahu Leftist group that is behind the chaotic protests in Israel. What exactly is the motivation of the Biden administration?
A news article by Tablet Magazine stated of America’s most recent plan:
Incredibly, the U.S. is now proposing to take advantage of its ally’s political weakness by standing up a potential 5,000-man Palestinian terror army that would ostensibly fight terrorism in the West Bank in place of the IDF.
Washington, D.C.’s latest bout of Mideast pyromania began with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Ramallah at the end of January, right after a Palestinian terrorist shot dead seven Israelis outside a synagogue in Neve Yaakov.
The key words are “ostensibly fight terrorism in the West Bank in place of the IDF,” which puts a different spin on America’s possible intent from that of the ZOA below. But what would make the Biden administration actually think its plan could possibly work to bring Palestinians to “fight terrorism”? Given the administration’s consistent anti-Israel stance, does it really believe that arming, training and deploying Palestinians could be a trusted strategy to “fight terrorism,” rather than help perpetuate it?
In reality, such a plan would greatly empower the Palestinian “resistance.” History bears out the fact that the Palestinians do now want and never wanted peace. They aim to obliterate Israel from the River to the Sea, as is stated in the founding Charters of all the major Palestinian organizations, and they’re watching closely as America further positions itself as their ally rather than the ally of Israel.
Surely America should know that Israel cannot allow such a plan. The IDF, in fact, beefed up troops in Samaria last month in response to the escalating violence.
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) denounces, in the strongest possible terms, the Biden Administration’s unconscionable, illegal plan to provide commando training in Jordan to 5,000 Palestinian-Arab army of terrorists or future terrorists; and to then equip and deploy this Palestinian-Arab commando army in Judea/Samaria, along with foreign and U.S. forces.
The administration’s horrific, frightening, dangerous plan also requires Israel “to sharply curtail IDF counterterror operations.” U.S. security coordinator Lieutenant General (LTG) Michael Fenzel, who is currently responsible for training Palestinian Authority (PA) police in Judea and Samaria, proposed training the new 5,000-strong commando army, and deploying foreign forces, including U.S. military forces, on the ground.
Thus, under the Biden administration’s plan, Israel would be restricted from defending innocent Israelis from terrorists; and much of Judea/Samaria would become a “safe haven” for terrorists to retreat to and be celebrated after perpetrating murderous terror attacks in Israel, with no consequences.
Moreover, American and other foreign forces on the ground would become sitting ducks, subject to Palestinian-Arab terror attacks. American and foreign soldiers would also become human shields, who block Israel from going after the terrorists, lest foreign forces be caught in the crossfire. Further, the PA will want foreign forces to include Iranians, thereby introducing even more terror into the region…..
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-23 09:51:132023-03-23 09:51:13ZOA Accuses Biden’s Handlers of Planning to Train, Equip and Deploy Palestinian Terrorists in Judea and Samaria
The Biden Administration resumed American tax-dollar funded aid to the terrorist Palestinian Authority. Since then, Israelis have been under siege by Palestinian terrorists.
Call your member of Congress and demand that all U.S aid to the Palestinian Authority is stopped.
The aid is used to pay Palestinian terrorists to murder Jews. American taxpayers should not be financing this barbarism.
An American-Israeli man was seriously injured in the head in Samaria, but that didn’t stop him from responding quickly – as he was trained to do.
By Terri Nir, United with Israel
David Stern was driving with his family to a program at the Machon Shilo educational institute Sunday afternoon when a Palestinian terrorist suddenly began shooting at their vehicle that was passing by the town of Huwara, in Samaria.
David Stern, an Israeli-American citizen and a former Marine, was wounded by a Palestinian terrorist who fired 20 bullets at him as David was driving in Samaria through Huwara with his wife and 3 children in the back of the car.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-22 20:51:422023-03-22 20:51:42TRUE ISRAELI HERO: Wounded Shooting Victim (and former U.S Marine) Fires Back at Terrorist, Saves Family
Recently I met a man who is a “walking miracle.” A survivor of a horrible accident, 55-year-old Danny Yamashiro, a pastor’s son and native of Hawaii, is grateful for every day of life.
Danny’s website tells what happened: “At 18, he survived a deadly 400 foot fall from the famed Pali ridge in Hawaii. Rescuing his girlfriend from a 20 foot fall, Danny slipped and fell head first 300 feet and later another 100 feet. He suffered traumatic brain injuries (skull fractures, torn scalp), a shattered ankle, smashed organs, extensive lacerations, and being comatose. A spiritual awakening impacted his recovery.”
Danny’s story is highlighted in an article in Listverse.com about 10 people that survived precipitous falls from great heights: “Despite being severely injured, Yamashiro clung to life while rescue workers attempted to retrieve him. As the rescuers moved down the mountain, Yamashiro shifted his weight on the ledge causing him to fall another 30 meters (100 ft.).”
They add, “While he did survive both falls and go on to make a full recovery (as well as a successful career in televangelism), the ordeal didn’t leave him unscathed. Yamashiro sustained an array of life-threatening injuries.”
How could someone survive such an accident?
I got to interview Danny on the radio recently. We pick up right after he was rescued in 1985 from the fall: “The doctors told my parents, ‘It doesn’t look good. If he makes it through the night, surely he will be in a vegetative state for the rest of his life.’ And that was my turning point where the Lord intervened. I needed to learn to walk, talk, eat right. I couldn’t even breathe on my own at the time.”
I asked him to walk me through his eventual healing. “The recovery took a long time. I went through a deep period of several years of dark depression. I had major swings in my emotions. The Lord took me through that. It was a real breaking time—breaking emotionally, psychologically.
“But Biola University in Southern California played a very big role in my healing process, and at the same time grounding me in the Word. I was a biblical studies theology major.”
However, there were certainly times of doubt. Danny told me, “During my college years, there were times when I would actually ask the Lord, ‘Why did you save me? Why did you not just take me?’ It was so painful. And I was so confused. And I remember the Lord whispering to me, ‘Danny, one day I’m going to release you.’ And what I got by that was a sense of hope.”
Danny remembered the Scripture verse that says, “He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.” And that and other Scriptures (such as Isaiah 43:18-19) greatly encouraged him.
He says, “We talk about going to school and getting educated. But the brokenness was a different kind of education that has allowed me in a very unusual way to connect with people. I don’t even have to say things, and people get a sense where I know what they’re going through. It’s like my brokenness, my suffering allows me to relate with others where they are in their deepest, darkest times.”
He adds, “I think about our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief,’ and I think, ‘Wow, there’s some profound thoughts that go along and the relatability when we go through that kind of suffering.’”
Since his complete recovery, Danny has been involved in preaching the Gospel in Hawaii, in Africa, in Asia, the Middle East, and in Latin America. He has earned a Ph.D. at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. About 10 years ago, he went on to advanced studies at Harvard, where he received a standing ovation when he spoke upon graduation.
Today, he serves as an evangelical chaplain at M.I.T., where he is the co-chairperson of the Cambridge Roundtable on Science and Religion. They engage in dialogue with the faculty on science and religion. This includes participants from M.I.T. and Harvard.
He views these dialogues as “gateways to share the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Danny also hosts a regular Christian radio program based in the Boston area.
Any student of early American history knows that there were many examples of God’s Providence shining on this nation. George Washington said that Americans in particular should be grateful for the way God miraculously helped become a nation.
Dr. Danny Yamashiro, a walking miracle, experienced new life out of near death. I happened to meet him during Lent, which may be viewed as a season of miracles. After all, at this time, we celebrate the crowning event of all time, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave.
All my life I have considered myself to be a ‘problem-solver’. I have always enjoyed finding something, especially a power tool or other useful object, that is broken or has stopped working and is in need of repair. It really gets my juices flowing and my mental faculties focused on finding a solution to said problem, and if a real solution can be found, it is extremely fulfilling. I’m not bragging, but my track record of success in finding and implementing those solutions is pretty good.
I start by considering the problem, looking at it from every angle to see if the ‘fix’ is something so simple it would make one laugh. Sometimes the fix really IS simple, but usually, that ‘simple fix’ is non-existent and further troubleshooting is needed to come up with something that really works.
One critical part of that troubleshooting is to ask the question: “What if……”? and then carefully look at the broken and be willing to examine it from every angle to find the quickest, cheapest and possibly longest-lasting ‘fix’. That ‘fix’ could be as simple as “ ‘what if’ I took this apart and bent this flange this way so that this spring would……? “
You get the drift. The troubleshooting starts with the obvious fix and proceeds on to more difficult fare until the problem is resolved or….. until complete frustration sets in. The longer it takes to troubleshoot and actually find a solution, the more likely that frustration wins out and the tool is left unrepaired in the garage.
Even though my problems are sometimes left unresolved, in spite of my troubleshooting processes, it is still fun and enlightening to use the ‘what if’ means of looking at those problems from different perspectives.
Maintaining an optimistic attitude regarding the ‘solving of problems’ is a must if one expects to actually be successful, but eventually, one must confront the thought that there IS no solution to some of those pesky problems and since the problems are NOT life threatening, one can simply say, ‘So what’ instead of ‘What if’.
If Only It Were That Easy
All my life I was taught to respect our leaders and be obedient to them since they respected “the people” and were placed in their leadership positions for our benefit; I truly believe that was at least partially true when I was first taught it. But, what ifit is no longer true? What if those in leadership positions no longer respect us and have no concern for our welfare or our future? A scary thought, right? Extremely so since the effects of the decisions they make are much more critical that not being able to repair a malfunctioning power tool.
A close and objective view of the leadership of the USA for the past 40+ years is enough to convince me that our leaders have actually created more problems than they have ever solved, and we are all living with the devastation those problems have wrought. How wonderful it would be to just shrug our shoulders and say, “so what?” when we realize the problems created by politicians will NOT just go away.
Now, The REAL Problems
Unless you live in a bubble, completely insulated from all outside influences, you must be aware of just how messed up is this world in which we now live. Every sector of human existence is rife with problems. Wars are waging on several continents with no end in sight. Supply line disruptions have made availability of food and other necessary commodities a real threat to our continued existence. Our once great healthcare system is only a shadow of what it once was, with dwindling trust for our healthcare providers.
The world financial system is nearing a total collapse, with no one nation seemingly having a currency that will buy what it did even a short time ago. Since few, if any, currencies are now backed with “real money”, (think gold and silver), it is nearly impossible to determine what value any nation’s currency has. Now, the central banks of the world have determined that, in the near future, the ONLY money they will issue and recognize is what is being called a CBDC, or a Central Bank Digital Currency, a currency consisting of nothing more than ones and zeros in a computer; in other words, the CBDC is, like nearly ALL fiat currencies, backed by absolutely nothing that a person can hold in his hand. In such a system, no one will have final say over HIS ‘money’, with no option to go to a bank and withdraw a bagful of ones and zeros to take to a store to purchase necessities.
So, an optimist will read this and say, “There must be an answer to all these problems; after all, our government leaders would not allow our world, our way of life, to be destroyed simply because of a few pesky problems, right?
Those who adopt this optimistic view do so based on the premise that those same ‘leaders’ actually care about our lives, but what if your premise is wrong? What if they do NOT care? What if their intent is to destroy our way of life? You must then examine all your premises to see which of them is wrong and in need of changing.
International agencies that are run by ‘non-elected bureaucrats’ now seem to be in control of nearly every critical aspect of human life, from food availability, healthcare availability, jobs availability and financial INstability etc. Even though they spout off about ‘finding solutions’ to ALL our problems, they seldom actually implement any of them (Could it be that they really do NOT have any solutions?).
We are faced with so-called pandemics that, according to the unelected bureaucrats, require that we give up most of our freedoms in order to ‘stay safe’. We are told that the only way we can survive is to accept that human actions, driving CLIMATE CHANGE, are to blame for all the problems in the world, and those actions MUST be changed or we are all doomed.
In other words, the real problems definitely ARE life-threatening and seemingly insurmountable. The entire world is reeling from the effects of these overwhelming issues and is constantly looking for answers that will make their lives ‘easy’ and comfortable again.
Politicians especially love to spout off about their ability to provide answers to OUR problems, butwhat if THEY ARE the creators of the problems rather the ‘finders’ of the solutions?
We recently lived through a four year period of relative ‘quiet’, a time of relative prosperity and peace here in the US with plentiful energy, plentiful job opportunities and a somewhat optimistic outlook for our future. In fact, many in the US were discussing the prospects of that continued prosperity and peace, “Making America Great Again”. Now however, we are facing the most dire issues of our short 246 year history. The prospect of making our nation as great as it was even a few decades ago is a dim one indeed.
Facing The ‘What If’ Question Honestly – Crossing the Red Line
From Wikipedia: “The Red line, or “to cross the red line”, is a phrase used worldwide to mean a figurative point of no return or line in the sand, or “the fastest, farthest, or highest point or degree considered safe.” In most cases when the phrase is used, it is meant to establish a limit or figurative barrier dictating the furthest bounds of what is tolerable, allowable, or forgivable. Historically, red lines have been drawn that indicate a point beyond which one party will not allow another party to cross without having serious harm inflicted upon him. It is generally considered a warning that consequences will be suffered by those who cross the red line.
Depending upon the power and authority held by one or another party, that serious harm may, or may not happen, when the red line is crossed.
Does God establish His red lines and issue His warnings to those who think to cross them? The Bible has abundant instances recorded when God has done just that.
I know that many Christians are fervently praying for God to make all these insurmountable, unsolvable problems go away so that we can all go back to our normal, comfortable and easy lives. They are obviously operating under the premise that God will hear those prayers and MAGA.
But, what if that premise is wrong? Could it be possible that God WILL NOT hear those prayers and send someone who will MAGA? Is not the earth, and the fulness thereof the property of the Lord?
But, say many, God will NEVER forsake this nation; He has always protected us and kept us from being harmed by our enemies. But, what if God has NOT forsaken this nation, but instead, this nation has forsaken Him?
What if this nation has crossed a red line established by God Almighty? Is there anyone who can require that God repent and forgive the unforgiveable?
The United States is NOT the apple of God’s eye; that marvelous privilege belongs to the offspring of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Jewish people. Throughout history, God made covenants with them and ALWAYS honored those covenants. Many times, the Jewish people dishonored the covenants and the God Who made them, but God did not destroy them even though their disobedience made them a target of His righteous discipline and punishment many times. Some of those times when they crossed God’s ‘red line’ their punishment was very harsh but God always promised them that He would uphold them and bring them back to Him.
The United States does NOT have such a covenant with God and based on the parallels found between Israel and the US in the Book of Jeremiah (chapter 7 and 14 especially) when the US crosses His red line (or have we already?), what will the US look like when His righteous judgment is directed at this nation?
President Thomas Jefferson once stated, “Itremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever”.
Conclusion
The question I have used in my troubleshooting process many times, “What if?”, is often merely rhetorical and not meant to be answered or even taken seriously, only because the problems for which I seek solutions are NOT life-threatening. But What iffrom God’s perspective, the US HAS crossed His red line and is now merely awaiting the awakening of God’s justice? Then, one must consider that to be a life-threatening problem, especially for those who have no promise of protection from God’s wrath and destruction. If that be the case, then waiting for someone to MAGA is the least of America’s problems. Survival as a nation becomes a real possibility. It has been said that, if God does not judge America for her sins, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
This formerly great nation has received abundant warnings from God since her founding, and especially in the last 45 years, but what if we have seen the last of those warnings and are now facing His judgment?
It is indeed a frightening prospect, But,What If we are now just waiting for God to act, not in His mercy nor His compassion, but in judgment? Selah……
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He also called for “jihad” and “war against non-Muslims.” Why haven’t the multitudes of moderate Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. gone to Yonkers to explain to Ridon Kola how he is misunderstanding the Religion of Peace?
Meanwhile, where did Kola get this crucifixion idea? Could it have been from here? “The only reward for those who make war upon Allah and his messenger and struggle to sow corruption on earth will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or be expelled from the land. Such will be their degradation in this world, and in the hereafter, theirs will be an awful doom.” (5:33)
by Craig McCarthy and Steven Vago, New York Post, March 17, 2023:
An ISIS-loving radical Islamic extremist from Yonkers was busted by the feds Friday for plotting to kill the city’s police officers and mayor beginning on the street where the local St. Patrick’s Day parade was set to go down, authorities said Friday.
Ridon Kola, 32, directly messaged the Yonkers police, saying “I will crucify Yonkers cops and their bosses all along McLean ave. It will be a horror scene . . . Allahu Ekberr,” according to federal authorities.
Though Kola didn’t directly threaten the parade, McLean Avenue is the street where the city’s St. Patrick’s Day event is scheduled for Saturday — and it prompted officials to quickly bust him Friday so he couldn’t do any damage at the event.
“Yonkers is proud to host one of New York’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parades and threats like this will not intimidate us from celebrating the many contributions of our Irish American community,” Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano tweeted after the bust. Kola was arrested and charged with making threatening interstate communications, according to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams.
On multiple occasions, Kola had posted disturbing posts online, including support for a “jihad,” or “to war against non-Muslims,” the feds allege. He also voiced support for extremists from the Islamic State.
The messages apparently went on for years. In 2021, he posted one to an official Yonkers police social media account written in Albanian that read “I am going to slaughter you little girls.”
Then on March 9 sent a direct message to the police account that read “First people to be crucified will be the Yonkers rats Vallahi. Allahu Ekberr.” That message came along with the one referencing killing cops on McLean Avenue.
The joint terrorism task force arrested Kola Friday morning, according to the indictment.
A woman who exited their Yonkers home where an Albanian flag was hanging in the window on Friday threatened to “press charges” against a Post reporter.
“There’s nothing to report. Don’t make me press charges against you. You better step off my property,” snapped the woman, who neighbors identified as Kola’s sister.
Neighbors described Kola as a quiet man.
“He’s never exhibited weird behavior to me,” said Norina, a neighbor who only gave her first name. “He was never creepy. He was normal….
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-19 03:51:592023-03-19 03:51:59NY: Muslim told cops ‘I will crucify Yonkers cops and their bosses. It will be a horror scene…Allahu Ekberr’
John Horvat II: Calling a Catholic president heretical clears the air around debate by dispelling the theatrics surrounding “Catholic” figures who betray Church teaching.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki recently pointed to a crisis in the Church with his article “Imagining a Heretical Cardinal.” The learned canon lawyer masterfully laid out his case by quoting the positions of a “hypothetical” cardinal (taken from an article written by San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy, without mentioning his name). It does not take much imagination to apply the same principles the bishop identifies to other figures, starting with imagining a “heretical” American president.
Of course, this application should be used judiciously lest it becomes a witch hunt accusing everyone of heresy. But the bishop of Springfield, Ill., carefully showed how – on specific questions – the Cardinal’s heterodox stands about sexual matters and the Holy Eucharist put him outside the communion of the Church, among the “separated brethren,” i.e., this made him a heretic.
Moreover, he cited Canon Law showing how subscribing to these positions separates a person from the Faith, with no need for an official declaration of excommunication. It is automatic. The offender removes himself from the Church automatically by holding the condemned positions, latae sententiae, to use the technical terminology. He becomes a heretic and is excommunicated by the simple fact that he “rejects essential truths of ‘the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.’” (Jude 1:3).
Canonically, neither the Cardinal nor his numerous defenders have rebutted the bishop’s charge. They have sought to deflect the attack by questioning Church teaching on sexual matters or attempting to revive the condemned “principle of the fundamental option,” that the love of God trumps all – even long-defined dogmas and morals, and the Canon Law by which the Church is governed. Canonically, however, the Cardinal remains, as charged, a heretic.
Bishop Paprocki’s refreshing statement brings definition and clarity not only to the McElroy case, but to the wider debate. The willingness to call a spade a spade and a heretic a heretic has long been lacking. His bold invitation to get this discussion “out in the open” changes the dynamic of the present dispute. Catholics can now talk in precise terms about such important matters, thanks to a learned bishop who was unafraid of opening up the debate by using the forbidden H-word.
And we might add that, as in the case of the wayward Cardinal, the proper term also needs to be applied to influential public figures who take advantage of their Catholic identity to destroy the moral order, confuse the faithful, and offend God.
Because of the moral harm done to millions and the common good of the nation, it has become urgent to imagine a heretical president. The president’s case would differ somewhat from the Cardinal’s since it does not deal with the Eucharist. The bishop’s clear canonical outline about how to make this determination, however, is the same.
*
The bishop defines heresy as “the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith.” (Canon 751 of the Code of Canon Law)
With words and actions, President Biden denies the defined truth about abortion. The Church affirms that every procured abortion is intrinsically evil. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the Church’s teaching “has not changed and remains unchangeable” since the first century. Canon Law further applies sanctions on abortion and those who facilitate it.
Joe Biden has – both before being elected president and insistently since taking office – held positions regarding abortion, homosexuality, and other major moral issues that are contrary to Church teaching. He has made it his mission to vastly expand access to abortion and the distribution of abortion pills with the passion of a pagan Caesar persecuting Christians. And has hidden behind his Catholic identity and misrepresented Church teaching when challenged.
The president has had the advantage of being warned of his errors by faithful American bishops. He can claim no ignorance. As Bishop Paprocki skillfully demonstrated, however, such warnings have gone unheeded. The truth needs to be said. Anyone who denies Church teaching on the intrinsic evil of procured abortion separates himself automatically from the communion of the Church. Like the Cardinal, canonically imagining a heretical president must be on the table.
Such a distinction would seem irrelevant in a political order that recognizes no official church. “Heretical president” seems to have no place in a secular society. And whether he is a heretic would seem to make no practical difference.
What public offices and the people who occupy them promote, however, is important in a postmodern world without meaning. Indeed, the Church still wields immense influence on the public despite the great crisis inside her.
The president and his wife certainly know the political value of appearing Catholic in public. Mrs. Biden, for example, recently appeared at a function in Africa, discussing contraception while wearing a Catholic rosary around her neck. Mr. Biden loses no opportunity to present himself as a Catholic.
What the Church needs now more than ever is clarity. As Bishop Paprocki said, the time for private conversations is over. He provides an excellent template for bringing matters of great importance out in the open.
Imagining a heretical president clears the air around the debate. It dispels the theatrics surrounding “Catholic” figures that betray Church teaching. Frustrating every attempt to muddy the waters, the Paprocki template makes it clear that, unless they repent, the president and others like him must be treated as heretics separated from the Church. They can no longer use their Catholic identity as cover to advance their progressive agendas.
Such agendas need to be seen for what they are – evil opinions that lead to the destruction of innocent human life and the perdition of many. For the sake of the faithful and the unborn, the heretics must be publicly denounced.
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Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis for first time
Independents, Republicans still side more with Israelis in the conflict
Favorable views of Israel remain high across party groups
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a decade in which Democrats have shown increasing affinity toward the Palestinians, their sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.
Today’s attitudes reflect an 11-percentage-point increase over the past year in Democrats’ sympathy with the Palestinians. At the same time, the percentages sympathizing more with the Israelis (38%) and those not favoring a side (13%) have dipped to new lows.
The power of propaganda. “Palestinianism” is a genocidal Jew hating movement.
For the first time in decades, Democrats’ support for Palestinians passed support for Israel, increasing by 11% over the past year to 49% while the party’s positive view of Israel declined from 40% to 39%, according to a Gallup Poll released Thursday.
Anti-Israel sentiment has been increasing among the Democrat party, according to the poll, as both lawmakers and the Biden administration have been heavily critical of the U.S. ally following Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power. Support for Palestine among Democrats increased significantly from 2022 to 2023, going from 38% to 49%, as support for Israel declined to 39%.
Democratic support for Palestinians has been steadily increasing over the past decade, according to the poll, but for the first time, their support for Israel fell behind. Independents’ Palestinian support also increased by 8%, while their sympathy toward Israel declined from 54% to 49%.
Republicans maintained steady support for Israel as they have for the past decade, according to the poll. Sympathy toward Israel increased by 1% from 77% to 78% and support for the Palestinian cause declined from 13% to 11% between 2022 and 2023.
Views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted sharply among Democrats, who said they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in an annual Gallup survey.
The big picture: Overall, most U.S. adults sympathize more with Israelis (54%) than Palestinians (31%), and two-thirds of Americans continue to view Israel favorably. However, views on the Middle East conflict are becoming increasingly polarized in the U.S. by party and by generation.
Flashback: In 2016, 53% of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Israelis, and 23% with the Palestinians.
By 2022, that gap had virtually disappeared.
When Gallup conducted this year’s poll from Feb. 1-23, just 38% of Democrats chose the Israelis while 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians.
That shift has been driven largely by Americans born after 1980, a narrow plurality of whom are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis. Americans from older generations are more than twice as likely to sympathize with the Israelis.
The progressive wing of the Democratic caucus in Congress has also grown increasingly vocal about the Palestinian cause.
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“The list of Irish saints is past counting; but in it all no other figure is so human, friendly, and lovable as St. Patrick – who was an Irishman only by adoption.” — Stephen Gwynn
On Saint Patrick’s Day 2023 it is only fitting and proper to understand the true story of Saint Patrick of Ireland who has become one of the world’s most popular saints.
We do this to tell the truth about the life of Saint Patrick and how he came to embrace God and His Son Jesus. This Saint Patrick’s Day is not about leprechauns and eating corned beef and cabbage. Rather, it’s about the man who went from being an Irish slave to an Irish saint.
Catholic.org says in an article titled “St. Patrick” says this,
St. Patrick of Ireland is one of the world’s most popular saints. He was born in Roman Britain and when he was fourteen or so, he was captured by Irish pirates during a raiding party and taken to Ireland as a slave to herd and tend sheep. At the time, Ireland was a land of Druids and pagans but Patrick turned to God and wrote his memoir, The Confession. In The Confession, he wrote:
“The love of God and his fear grew in me more and more, as did the faith, and my soul was rosed, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers and in the night, nearly the same. I prayed in the woods and on the mountain, even before dawn. I felt no hurt from the snow or ice or rain.”
Patrick’s captivity lasted until he was twenty, when he escaped after having a dream from God in which he was told to leave Ireland by going to the coast. There he found some sailors who took him back to Britain and was reunited with his family.
A few years after returning home, Patrick saw a vision he described in his memoir:
“I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: ‘The Voice of the Irish.’ As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea-and they cried out, as with one voice: ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.’”
The vision prompted his studies for the priesthood. He was ordained by St. Germanus, the Bishop of Auxerre, whom he had studied under for years, and was later ordained a bishop and sent to take the Gospel to Ireland.
Patrick arrived in Slane, Ireland on March 25, 433. There are several legends about what happened next, with the most prominent claiming he met the chieftan of one of the druid tribes, who tried to kill him. After an intervention from God, Patrick was able to convert the chieftain and preach the Gospel throughout Ireland. There, he converted many people -eventually thousands – and he began building churches across the country.
He often used shamrocks to explain the Holy Trinity and entire kingdoms were eventually converted to Christianity after hearing Patrick’s message.
Patrick preached and converted all of Ireland for 40 years. He worked many miracles and wrote of his love for God in Confessions. After years of living in poverty, traveling and enduring much suffering he died March 17, 461.
He died at Saul, where he had built the first Irish church. He is believed to be buried in Down Cathedral, Downpatrick. His grave was marked in 1990 with a granite stone.
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The diversity expert is Huwaida Arraf 47 year-old Democrat born in Detroit to Palestinian Christian parents. She is US citizen but caries also an Israeli passport. As a Palestinian American activist and lawyer co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), “a Radical Palestinian-led organization suggests using non-violent protests and international pressure to support Palestinians.”
Bloomfield Hills High School issues apology after speaker refuses to stick to agreed upon topic, goes on offensive rant against Israel.
A Michigan high school has apologized after a Palestinian American anti-Israel activist was invited to a student-led diversity event where she went on a hateful tirade against Israel.
Huwaida Arraf, the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and a failed Democratic Congressional candidate, had promised Bloomfield Hills High School she would stick to topics vetted beforehand but did not do so, according to the StopAntisemitism advocacy organziation.
“Outrage by students, staff, & parents at Bloomfield Hills High School in Michigan as a Palestinian activist – Huwaida Arraf – was brought into to speak at a 10th grade diversity event,” StopAntisemitism tweeted. “Arraf refused to stick to agreed upon speaking points and started spreading lies about Israel.”
They pointed out that Bloomfield Hills has one of the largest Jewish populations in Michigan.
Bloomfield Hills High School Principal Lawrence Stroughter sent an apology to students, parents and staff on Tuesday night after the incident occurred.
The statement described the event as a “diversity assembly” that was led by students.
“Today, a BHHS student-led diversity assembly was held for all BHHS students. In preparation for this assembly, our student organizers and administrators met with each speaker to discuss the intent of the assembly and the prompts,” Stroughter said.
“As enshrined in international law and UN resolutions, we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle. However, we believe that nonviolence can be a powerful weapon in fighting oppression and we are committed to the principles of nonviolent resistance”.
Arraf is a radical anti Semitic and anti Israel propagandist who advocated violence to advance Palestinian causes.
She was never concerned about the plight of Palestinian Christians. Their population dramatically declined in Palestinian territories from 84% to 22% due to killing, kidnapping, confiscation of property and destruction of churches. Huwaida and her husband Adam Shapiro (not a Jew) advocate destruction of Israel with all means even violent. As supporter of Boycott Divest Sanction she is well financed.
International Solidarity Movement (ISM) which Huwaida Arraf created was popular in high schools and colleges and Arraf diversity effort is a recruitment effort of students to ISM. This organization sent naïve ignorant students to a war zone without training which resulted in 10 death of students.
While rampant antisemitism is spreading in this country and beyond the diversity program at Bloomfield Hills Schools makes the situation worse, making hate an option justified by false narrative. Media, TV and radio, take antisemitism seriously, colleges and schools lag far behind.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-17 14:52:422023-03-17 14:52:42MICHIGAN: Guess Who is Detroit’s Bloomfield Hills High School Diversity Expert?
Jon Erwin happened to be doing research for another movie when he stumbled on the iconic cover of Time Magazine from June 21, 1971. A copy in good condition goes for about $2,000 on eBay today, but Jon managed to snatch one up in 2015 — years before his movie made the psychedelic Jesus a collectors’ item. Back then, making a film about the 1970s revival known as The Jesus Revolution was a distant dream. Today, it’s a blockbuster reality — one that continues to exceed everyone’s expectations, in the box office and real life.
The news that “Jesus Revolution” crossed the $39 million mark this past weekend may have been a shock to Hollywood, but to Erwin — the movie’s writer, producer, and director — it was further proof that he’d happened upon something special eight years ago. He’d been working on another true story, “Woodlawn,” when he was “awestruck” by the parallels between the hippie movement’s desperation and the desperation of today.
“I’m a filmmaker. I’m curious by nature,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “And so I read this article. At the time, you couldn’t find it online. It was this 10-page spread about what God was doing at an incredibly similar time of hopelessness and despair. … And the more I read, the more I felt: Can this happen in my generation? Can this happen in my life?” At 40, Jon said, “nothing like this has ever happened to us.” “And the more I studied it the more I wanted to make a movie.”
Erwin was set to make “I Can Only Imagine” next, based on MercyMe lead singer Bart Millard, with other true stories like “I Still Believe” (Jeremy Camp) and “American Underdog” (Kurt Warner) on the horizon. Carving out time for another project was tricky. By the time “Jesus Revolution” was released, it was the longest he’d ever worked on a movie.
But in the end, Jon pointed out, it was a testament to “God’s perfect timing.” “That the movie came out as revivals are happening around the nation is so cool. And I love all the movies that we’ve gotten to make, but I’ve never seen such an incredibly profound response to a movie and, and lives changed as people watch it. So it’s a privilege to get to bring this movie to the screen.”
A stellar cast, led by Kelsey Grammar (“Fraser”) and Jonathan Roumie (“The Chosen”), team up to reach a 70s generation that’s trying to find meaning in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Despite his initial reluctance, Pastor Chuck Smith’s (Grammar) stodgy church is overtaken by barefoot hippies who follow evangelist Lonnie Frisbee’s (Roumie) invitation to stop searching and give their lives to Jesus.
The movement explodes, packing out Southern California’s Calvary Chapel and eventually moving to a big white tent where thousands come to know Christ, including Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney), who wrote the book the movie is based on. Laurie’s incredible story, from a tragic childhood to a spiritual awakening that led him to found Harvest Christian Fellowship, has resonated with audiences and critics (who gave the film an A+ CinemaScore rating).
For Erwin, one day in particular stood out. “[It was] by far the favorite moment I’ve had on set — and I think you feel it in the movie. You know,” he told Perkins, “it takes several miracles to make a movie. But I’ve never felt a day like the day we shot the baptisms in this movie. We thought it was very important to go back to the real Pirate’s Cove [where Smith and Frisbee baptized so many people]. And we did. And for a film, that is a very difficult place to go. It’s like a crater, very jagged rocks. You have to go up and over to get onto that location. … [But] I’ve never felt anything like it. We all felt it that day. There was a level of spiritual power there that I’ve never experienced in my filmmaking career before.”
At one point, they were filming with about 400 extras, and Roumie “came up out of the water and said, ‘This is real for people. … People are coming up to me and saying, I want to be baptized for real. I’ve just made a decision for Christ.’”
While they were shooting the part with actor Joel Courtney in the water, Jon said he was stunned to find out that “the real Greg Laurie was baptizing a member of the cast that he had struck up a conversation with a couple hundred feet away and none of us even knew [about it]. … I think you feel it when you watch the movie. But the power that is in the movie we felt on that day.”
Grammer, arguably the most well-known cast member, hasn’t been shy since the film’s release about the role faith plays in his life. “I’ve had some tragic times,” he admitted in an interview with USA Today. “I’ve wrestled with those and worked my way through them — sometimes rejecting faith, sometimes rejecting God even… But I have come to terms with it and found great peace in my faith and in Jesus.” If Hollywood doesn’t like it, Grammar shrugs. “It’s not cavalier — Jesus made a difference in my life. That’s not anything I’ll apologize for.”
In the meantime, Erwin still marvels at the impact the film is having. He’s seen videos of people praying outside the movie, or getting baptized in fountains outside the theaters — or in lakes the next day. “Not many people know this,” he told Perkins, “but 1972, which was the culminating year of the Jesus Movement was the most baptisms ever recorded in a single year, at least by the Southern Baptists. So wouldn’t it be cool if that happened again and we beat that record?”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
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2 Timothy 3:5, “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a formofgodliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
Romans 10:6-10, “But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) Or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
Hebrews 11:6,“6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Hebrews 12:1, Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses (read Hebrews 11), let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us……
What is 1Perjury?
1 Perjury = a) The crime of willfully and knowingly making a false statement about a material fact while under oath; b) An act of committing such a crime; c) the violation of any oath, vow, or solemn affirmation; specifically, in law, the willful utterance of false testimony under oath or affirmation, before a competent tribunal, upon a point material to a legal inquiry.
When a court of law is convened and the bailiff announces that the court is “now in session”, the judge will sometimes deliver his comments to the jury once it has been seated. Part of his commentary is instructional on how the court functions and how the members of the jury are to consider all the testimony they will hear. Every witness brought before the court to ‘testify’ will be required to place his or her hand on a Bible and swear that the testimony they are about to give will be “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. The phrase ‘the whole truth’ indicates that to deny any part of the truth sought is indeed a lie. They will have been previously instructed that, should they lie under oath, they can be charged withperjury and possibly face a penalty, which may include prison time, if found guilty.
The Oath to Speak the Truth
In our legal system, perjury is considered a serious crime and can cause the perjurer to be imprisoned; that is why the witnesses are required to swear before the judge and jury that their testimony will be truthful. It has been shown that many who commit perjury do so under influence or pressure from an outside force that has an interest in the case being tried. If the person who ‘suborns’ perjury is caught, accused and found guilty, he or she can be sentenced to jail for one year up to five years depending on where the crime was committed.
However, the bottom line on perjury is that the witness who swears to be truthful is responsible for doing so whether pressured to lie or not. Special circumstances, like being pressured to lie under oath, which in itself is a very serious issue, may allow the person charged with perjury to escape prosecution if he or she ‘recants’ the false testimony while the proceeding is occurring. After the proceeding has ended, there is usually no way to avoid prosecution for the crime of perjury.
Denial of truth, whether in a court of law or in one’s daily life is equivalent to lying, and a lie willingly told under oath IS perjury.
Now, we all know that the main purpose of some of the witnesses in a courtroom trial is to purposely obfuscate their testimony so as to make it nearly impossible to determine what IS truth and whether a witness has spoken truthfully or lied under oath. In many cases, those who lie under oath DO get away with it and are never caught and punished for their perjury. As bad as this is, it is not as consequential as lying in ‘real life’, especially on a habitual basis.
A person who has been found guilty of perjury has instantly lost much, if not all, of his credibility. His word, which should be the measure of his character, has been tainted and rightfully so. No one wants to have his security, his wellbeing, his future placed in the hands of a liar.
Does It Matter? And Why Does It Matter?
So you might be asking what all this talk of perjury has to do with the truth and the Christian walk. Good question. While we know that a witness in a trial case is sworn to tell the truth, placing his or her hand on God’s word and swearing, upon pain of punishment for breaking that oath, that the truth WILL be told, few seem to consider that, when a person accepts the truth of Jesus and His life, death and resurrection, he is swearing to the truth of His life, death and resurrection. In effect, an oath has been taken that, in God’s court, binds that person to the truth and requires that the truth become the very basis of his or her life from that moment on.
Perjury and the Church
Jesus, the anointed Messiah, Jeshua Meshea, is called “the Logos of God” in the Gospel of John. The meaning of ‘logos’ in John 1:1 is “the Divine Expression”, or the very embodiment of God. Before He came to earth in the form of a human being, He was the “Word of God”. As such, and since God is TRUTH, the Word of God is ALSO truth. While there are differences between committing perjury as a witness in a legal case being tried in court and the same offense committed by professing Christians, there are also many similarities.
When a person truly accepts the redemption provided by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, he or she has in effect sworn an oath to always follow Christ, with the word of God being the ‘life-guide’. His word is accepted as TRUTH, regardless of what the world may consider truth to be. Consider that the placing of one’s hand on a Bible while swearing to tell the truth during testimony aligns with the Christian allowing God’s word to be the basis for all truth and all decisions in his life.
Shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples about the Holy Spirit Who would be sent to them after His departure. Jesus called Him the ‘Spirit of Truth’ and informed them that, as the Spirit of Truth, He would guide them into all truth. Jesus wanted all those who would choose to follow Him to know how important it is to walk in the truth, following a perfect Guide Whose purpose is to ensure the follower understands Truth in order to KNOW the Truth and avoid any deception.
The thing about deception that makes it so dangerous is that it is often ‘cloaked’ with just enough truth to make it sound not only believable, but acceptable. Underneath the cleverly worded ‘cloaking’ lurks a dangerous lie that can cause untold destruction. There is a very fine line between walking in the truth and stepping off into a life of lies and deception and that line becomes blurred more and more as a person listens to the lies, seemingly wantingthem to be true. The more one listens to the lies, the more willing he or she becomes to deny the truth, which may at times bring discomfort, and accept the lie which, while more comfortable, will bring ultimate loss.
The Inherent Danger of Perjury
During the life of the Prophet Jeremiah, the Jewish people were straying far off the course that God had placed them on, missing out on the benefits of His promises to keep them whole and safe from any enemies. When they began to forsake the truth of those promises, God sent them warning after warning to try to get them back on the right track, but they refused, over and over, to listen to His prophet’s warnings.
Their failure eventually brought God’s judgment on the entire nation. Their captivity by the Babylonians and subsequent enslavement for seventy years was a low point in the history of the Jewish people. Many Jews perished and the course of the nation was forever changed due to their refusal to not only believe the TRUTH but to proclaim it to everyone, thus allowing the light of God’s word to grow dim in a darkening world.
If God loved His people Israel and did not hesitate to judge their evil actions, how can any believer in the Unites States possibly think that we will escape the same judgment for the same sins they committed?
The Truth of the Gospel
In Romans 10:8-10, Paul writes, “But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
The word ‘saved’ in verse 9 is the Greek word ‘sozo’ (Strong’s 4982) and many Christians truly believe it means only saved unto eternal life after we die. However it’s true meaning is “to save, heal, deliver, make whole and preserve”. According to Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome, the gospel is the ‘POWER of God unto salvation’ ( Romans 5:16). Let’s look at the word ‘salvation’ for a moment. It is a translation of the Greek word, ‘soteria’ (Strong’s 4991), meaning deliver, health, salvation, save and saving. The word is derived from the base word ‘sozo’ and the translators of the king James Bible could as easily have said this: That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved, healed, delivered, preserved and made whole. These definitions leave little for any true believer to be concerned about IF that truth is believed and adhered to.
In the passage above, read how Paul explicitly explains just what God’s powerful gospel has provided and ask yourself if you are enjoying all these benefits or missing out on fully experiencing that powerful gospel. If God designed His gospel to provide everything the word “sozo” entails: being saved, healed, delivered, made whole and preserved”, why would anyone deny His power to do what He says He CAN and WILL do for those who truly believe His word? After all, believers are sworn to uphold and speak that truth to a hurting world in need of the truth. And if believers publicly deny that truth, would that not be tantamount to perjury in a court of law?
The last ‘church’ that Jesus addressed in Revelation 2-3 was the Laodicean Church whose sin was that of denying the truth of the WHOLE GOSPEL and their NEED for the gospel and the benefits that every believer has been promised and instead stating, “I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing;” while in fact, they are, in God’s eyes, “wretched, and miserable and poor and blind and naked”. They are thus denying the truth of God’s word and denying that they have any need of God’s provision. Does this not sound like the Church in America?
God spoke to His prophet Jeremiah regarding the condition of the Israelites shortly before they were carried away into captivity by the Babylonians. In the first six chapters of the Book of Jeremiah, God was calling Judah to repentance, reminding them of all the sins they had committed against Him and His word. They refused to hear and still turned their backs on God. In the seventh chapter, God finally delivers His word of judgment by telling Jeremiah NOT to pray for the people nor to make intercession for them because He (God) will NOT hear him.This placed the inhabitants of Judah in a terrible place, about to be captured and placed in slavery, with NO God to hear their cries of despair.
Please read the entire 7th chapter of Jeremiah:
1The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,
2Stand in the gate of the Lord‘s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all ye of Judah, that enter in at these gates to worship the Lord.
3 Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.
4 Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are these.
5 For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye throughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbour;
6 If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt:
7 Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.
8 Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit.
9 Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not;
10 And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?
11 Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the Lord.
12 But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel.
13 And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the Lord, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not;
14 Therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh.
15 And I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.
16 Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up cry nor prayer for them, neither make intercession to me: for I will not hear thee.
17 Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?
18 The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.
19 Do they provoke me to anger? saith the Lord: do they not provoke themselves to the confusion of their own faces?
20 Therefore thus saith the Lord God; Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched.
21 Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Put your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices, and eat flesh.
22 For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices:
23 But this thing commanded I them, saying, Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people: and walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you.
24 But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward, and not forward.
25 Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them:
26 Yet they hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their neck: they did worse than their fathers.
27 Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them; but they will not hearken to thee: thou shalt also call unto them; but they will not answer thee.
28 But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction: TRUTH IS PERISHED, and is cut off from their mouth.
29 Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places; for the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.
30 For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the Lord: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it.
31 And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.
32 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter: for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no place.
33 And the carcasses of this people shall be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall fray them away.
34 Then will I cause to cease from the cities of Judah, and from the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride: for the land shall be desolate.
Conclusion
I know that’s a lot of scripture to read, but the thrust of this word from God to His people, Israel, is how they were placing themselves in danger by their disobedience. And as they refused to hear God’s correction, they were taken captive to Babylon for seventy years, exiled from their country. That message is so needed today in this nation that it MUST be read by every believer who should by now understand and see the parallels between Israel in Jeremiah’s time and what is happening in the cities and streets all across America.
God refused to hear the cries of His people Israel because of their disobedience. Could the United States be nearing that same precarious place where the God of all creation is about to close His ears to the cries of His prophets, pastors, evangelists and teachers who are seeing the coming destruction from God’s judgments against a wicked and perverse nation?
To repeat the words of God in Jeremiah 7:28, “But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction: TRUTH IS PERISHED, and is cut off from their mouth.
I fear that the United States is now close to that same situation, where no cries of the people for deliverance will be heard by God. If I am right, I urge you to return to God and diligently seek His counsel and wisdom, all the while speaking all the truth in every situation to a darkening world.
Do NOT commit spiritual perjury any longer: TIME IS VERY SHORT!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-14 10:51:212023-03-14 10:51:21Is the Church Committing Perjury?
Note: Two articles by Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego have caused a major stir in the American Church, even leading another American bishop, Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, to “imagine a heretical cardinal” quoting from, without naming, McElroy. Much further commentary has occurred, and much more is needed, which is why we publish here two columns that we think help to illuminate what’s at stake in the Synodal Process currently underway and the future of the worldwide Catholic Church. – Robert Royal
Are Sexual Sins Mortal Sins?
John M. Grondelski
Among Cardinal Robert McElroy’s seemingly multiple objections to Catholic teaching is its sexual morality. For McElroy, besides being unwelcoming and off-putting, Catholic sexual ethics distorts Christian moral life as well as makes assumptions that he rejects, by misusing in this context the old category parvitas materiae (“lack of serious matter”).
In plain English, he rejects the notion that sins against the Sixth Commandment by their nature are mortal sins.
In plain English, Cardinal Robert McElroy is wrong.
It’s hard to know where to start with this somewhat complex point of moral theology, given that all the background and merits of the issue cannot fit in the brief space of a column. But one could start with the structure of a moral act. Moral acts have moral value independently of their agent’s intentions. That’s what we mean when we say an act is “intrinsically evil” or even “intrinsically disordered.” It means there is a real moral order prior to action.
One could claim that sexual sins – in comparison to the foundational sin of pride, for example – are not among the “most serious.” But, as the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser has aptly noted, not being among the most serious sins doesn’t make them not serious. And why this allergy to using the quite useful term “mortal sin?”
McElroy distorts history because, while the term parvitas materiae may be of 17th-century vintage, the concept has historically deeper roots. When Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas spoke of sexual sins or when the notion of “sins crying to heaven for vengeance” (which traditionally included sodomy) was taking shape even in the Patristic Age, nobody suggested those authors thought the sins they rejected were venial.
All those theologians and churchmen insisted sexual sins were serious because they violated the very ends of human sexuality: procreation and mutual support. Put bluntly, because sin involves primordial values like life and a particular form of interpersonal relations, the violation of those values has to be serious.
As Karol Wojtyła put it sixty years ago, in Love and Responsibility, a human person is to be the object of love in all that person is (including his potential parenthood). One can either love that person or use him/her: there is no middle ground or sliding scale on use.
It’s hard exactly to pinpoint Robert McElroy’s complaint. Is it with the whole idea of a preexistent moral order, a real Christian anthropology, and an understanding of conscience that recognizes conscience does not create but mirrors that objective moral order?
Or is it (also) with specific issues?
Most people today blithely separate sex from marriage, as everything from “hookups” to pretended “pre-nuptial commitments” attest. But in all these cases, physical intercourse speaks a language of unity, permanence, and commitment that may be denied by current mores, but reveals a fundamental dishonesty. Is that not always serious?
And when that commitment is needed, as when an “unplanned” pregnancy occurs, doesn’t this attitude towards sex fuel what Vatican II calls a “crime against God and man” – abortion? And doesn’t it also reinforce a double standard, a denial of the sexual asymmetry between women and men, leading to claims women “need” abortion to be “equal to men?”
The separation of sex from marriage doesn’t only involve fornication. Masturbation – an exceedingly difficult habit to break and one reinforced today by widespread online pornography – already ingrains an understanding of sex as primarily a question of erotic pleasure rather than sex as a form of responsibility – the intimacy between spouses and the begetting of children.
Further, the separation of parenthood from marriage subordinated the real good of children to “parental projects,” so that the fundamental truth that a child has a right to a biological relationship with a mother and a father is increasingly seen as quaint, if not outright discriminatory. Hasn’t it led to couples deciding they are the “lords and givers of life” in terms of what they do with their intercourse, with practically no awareness of their subordinate co-Creatorship with God?
And the separation of procreation from mutual support has undermined understanding of the Divine design of sexual complementarity, leading to efforts of rewrite Scripture and Tradition to accommodate mores clearly alien to them.
Let me try to anticipate what could be McElroy’s objection. Fifty years ago, many confessors often heard penitents confess “impure thoughts” and had to instruct people on the difference between temptations and willfully entertained thoughts. We’re told people today are no longer “repressed.” But how often do those willfully entertained thoughts lead first to an intellectual rationalization for, and then an actual commission of, such acts? Even Christ teaches that what makes someone impure begins in “the heart,” i.e., in our thoughts. (Mt 15:18-19; see also 5:28)
Sexual sins, in and of themselves, are inherently mortal sins. Subjective factors – habit, emotions, compulsion, fear, force, addiction – can affect a person’s subjective culpability, which is to say diminish responsibility for an otherwise serious act. But that’s not the same thing as saying that the act in itself might not be serious or even “pre-moral.” That kind of revisionist morality is rejected in the whole of the Church’s tradition and restated in John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor.
That this is received Catholic teaching really was not disputed until the 1960s. It was an unprecedented revisionist moral theology that suddenly found no serious sin in the sexual realm. But that was never a position the Church affirmed, even if large swaths of priests and bishops practiced a studied omertà after the sexual revolution of the 1960s when it came to teaching people about sexual morality.
If McElroy wants a different sexual ethic, one that does not engender guilt because of “objectively grave sins outside of marriage,” he’s welcome to advocate for it. But he should at least admit what he wants is not Catholic.
His words (and those of his allies, on a mission to upend the faith) are a trap, luring us to react by rejecting the “primacy” of conscience. But as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment.”
Ever since Humanae Vitae, unfortunately, the mention of conscience has rattled the teeth of faithful Catholics. That encyclical marked the beginning of current public dissent, from prelates and even whole bishops’ conferences, who abandon conscience as the voice within, informing about a law conscience does not create, then warning us about the path to follow. They forget that, in its avenging mode, conscience wreaks havoc on the person and finally on the community.
Avenging conscience explains the remark of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown in “The Flying Stars”: “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.” Pursued by the Five Furies, the man becomes both more wicked and more stupid: more wicked because his behavior is worse, more stupid because he tells himself more lies.
Given that we lost the Humanae Vitae fight on the field – that virtually all Catholics today practice contraception (and abort at the same rate as the general population) – the authentically Catholic approach needs to be reassessed. Appeals to the authority of documents and even to rational arguments lack the strength of straightforward teaching; obedience to a magisterium in flux can be turned against the faith when authority becomes corrupt, as recent years and events ought to have taught us.
Catholics have developed an unsatisfying response to the claim that sinners are simply taking a noble stand on the basis of some twisted principle; we ourselves have unwittingly enabled this claim by denying conscience’s real power.
Conscience can’t be outsourced; it is interior to man. “His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths,” the Catechism rightly states. St. Augustine teaches, uncomfortably for some, that it is the voice of God within. We leave the high ground to dissenters by making that divine voice into something like “things you learn about decision-making from books written by theologians and apologists.”
Even the phrase “the well-formed conscience” – though true enough in the abstract – is notable for its mistrust of the immediate power of objective truth and Christ’s call to repentance to move the soul. We have become detached from our own experience of knowing in a flash that we have done rightly or wrongly.
Only by challenging the McElroy faction with the plain and simple truth of conscience can we escape the trap set by the Church’s enemies. The Catechism of the Council of Trent speaks simply of clean or guilty consciences. Scripture insists on a clear conscience and deplores a defiled one.
Cardinal Caffarra, one of the authors of the still unanswered Dubia presented to the pope after Amoris Laetitia – and no friend of the McElroy faction – urged the restoration of man by reclaiming the centrality of conscience in the poignant work now known as his Final Testimony, written just before his death: “Moral conscience. . .is the place where God addresses his first, original, permanent word to man: the place where God is revealed as man’s guide. If you turn off this light, man will blunder around in the dark.”
He added, “The most unmistakable pathological symptom. . .is the counterfeiting which the concept and experience of moral conscience has undergone. . . .We have to start from our daily experience. It attests to the fact that the judgement of conscience possesses a completely singular force: that of compelling our decisions, our freedom, in an absolute and not just a hypothetical way.”
Prayers in the liturgy exhort us without ceasing to ponder and study God’s Law and to follow His precepts. Teaching God’s Commandments is the normal way to inform and awaken conscience. Do our clergy in general and the episcopacy in particular know these Commandments by heart and obey Scripture’s exhortations? They mention them only rarely.
Conscience, embedded in man’s soul, exists. It has rights and duties. As J. Budziszewski puts it, there are things we cannot not know. Hearing sound moral precepts clarifies the voice within, calling the person to repentance. We must trust in this; our faith is based on its possibility.
The suffering souls McElroy claims to represent are desperate for relief from their accusing and avenging consciences. They exist in a state of objective moral disaster, but his emptying of conscience robs them of the essence of personhood – a grave crime.
Conscience is indeed primary, and we are uneasy if our consciences accuse us, as McElroy’s accuses him, of depriving misguided wrongdoers of the way out of sin: repentance that leads to redemption in Christ, who is the Good. McElroy seeks to impose, in the name of conscience, a regime that withholds the very thing that conscience craves.
John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views herein are exclusively his.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-14 09:51:522023-03-14 09:51:52Two Commentaries on the McElroy Controversies
Robert Royal: It’s painful for a Catholic to have to say it, but needs saying out of fidelity to the truth: the Francis Effect has resulted in a Church that has not, as hoped, attracted people from outside and has left those within even more confused and divided.
Exactly ten years ago this morning to the very hour (given the time difference), I was working on an article about the 2013 conclave for this site in the lobby of the Atlante Star Hotel in Rome. So, I remember the exact moment when the big flat-screen television there showed the white smoke coming from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel – and the hotel staff began shouting, “É l’americano!” They were wrong. It wasn’t – as they expected – NY’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, whose large personality had been making a big impression in Italian media.
People began running to St. Peter’s Square. Me included. I wanted to see with my own eyes a rare event like that before going to the rooftop studio to do my duty as part of the EWTN “Conclave Crew” (precursor to the Papal Posse). St. Peter’s is one of the largest squares in Europe, but it filled up almost instantly. It was raining and noisy and almost impossible to see the loggia of the basilica through the forest of cell phones and iPads people held up as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, stepped out.
The choice of a pope is always a surprise, almost a mystery, but this one was especially so since no one expected it to be him. He immediately set a personal tone. John Paul II had famously proclaimed, “Be not afraid!” Benedict XVI, a less demonstrative man, said plainly, “Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.” Francis’s first words were, “Buona sera.” In the moment, a charming casualness. Despite many later reports of a fiery Latin temper, it’s remained clear that Papa Bergoglio has a remarkable ability, when he wants, to turn on the charm.
People began to speak of “the Francis Effect,” the hope that a less “judgmental” and more welcoming Church would attract outsiders and reignite evangelical fervor. I myself, before the conclave even started, was thinking that maybe we needed a pastoral not a teaching pope who would implement the great intellectual and social legacies of JPII and Benedict everywhere in the Church, all the way down to the parish level. And for a brief moment, it seemed that was what we got.
At least, that was the image that Francis maintained in the media over those first days. But it was precisely among the media, thousands of whom he invited to a special gathering a few days after his election, that other traits began to appear. He praised the journalists present for recognizing that the election was a spiritual, not merely a political, process. At EWTN, we recognized that, but almost all the other “journalists” were only interested in abortion, gays, women priests. Still, a clever opening gambit that, for the moment, charmed a group in large part hostile to the Church.
Then, things took an ominous turn. Explaining – in Spanish now at the journalists’ gathering – that he knew that many in the crowd were not believers, he said he would not give his apostolic blessing outwardly, but would only say it silently. He inclined his head for a few moments then walked off the stage.
I wanted to think at the time that this might be a shrewd evangelizing strategy that might produce good effects. But after a grace period of several months, during which it became increasingly difficult to figure out exactly what Francis was up to, it became clear that the press – and the world – took his gestures another way: as a sign that this new pontiff would be a non-combatant in the “culture war.”
Indeed, he early on rebuked – no missing the hostility – those Catholics he categorized as “insisting” and “obsessing” about abortion, gays, and all the other usual points of conflict, as posing a threat to the Church. He emphasized the need for mercy not only as a theological but a practical matter: “Otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards.”
This odd judgment did not go down well, to say the least, with fervent Catholics who had sacrificed to defend children in the womb and marriage – and who have succeeded on several fronts over the past decade, without noticeable harm to the Church.
And ever since, a confusing ambiguity has been the modus operandi. For example, Francis has said multiple times that abortion is “like hiring a hitman to solve a problem.” He has excommunicated actual hit men in Southern Italy, but when it’s a matter of the worldwide slaughter of the innocents – more than 60 million year after year – he has done little.
The same with LGBT questions. Just three days ago, in an interview with the Argentinian publication La Nación, he rightly said: “Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations. . . .Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”
Quite so, and if we have ideological hit men and ideological gender colonizers running loose in large numbers, primarily in the developed world, and seeking to extend their dominance everywhere via international institutions, “mercy” – if it’s to be effective in protecting the innocent, and not mere talk – ought to be driving the Church to do something concrete to stop them. Maybe even obsessing a little.
One of the sour fruits of the excessive emphasis on mercy is quite evident in the way “Synodality” is developing in the Church. There’s a definite connection between a desire to be merciful – to favored sinners – and, say, the German bishops’ Synodale Weg, which is ready to celebrate several things that the Church has always declared sins. And the German synod is only the most open instance of what is very likely to happen with the worldwide Synods this October and October 2024.
Mercy was also quite present in the papacies of John Paul II (see his Dives in Misericordia i.e., “Rich in Mercy”) and of Benedict XVI (“Mercy is in reality the core of the Gospel message; it is the name of God Himself, the face with which He reveals Himself in the Old Testament and fully in Jesus Christ, the Incarnation of creative and redemptive love.’). But in the past ten years, it has morphed into something else: “inclusion” and “openness,” in the current secular not their authentic Christian meanings – contrary to historic Christianity.
So, after ten years, what has been “the Francis effect”? In the plus column, there’s been a modest reform of Vatican finances, but also a financial crisis that may reflect continuing lay worries about where money is going. And there are some improvements in dealing with sexual abuse, though the special treatment given the pope’s friends – even the Satanic Marko Rupnik – has made the effort seem somewhat short of serious.
It’s painful for a Catholic to have to say it, but needs saying out of fidelity to the truth: the Francis Effect has resulted in a Church that has not, as hoped, attracted people from outside and has left those within even more confused and divided.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2023-03-13 08:51:152023-03-13 08:51:15The Francis Effect, Ten Years On
