Category Archives: Ideology

Christianity Under Attack In US

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A sample of attacks in the US, over the last few years, on the expression of Christian belief in public:

(1)Ford Contractor Says He Was Fired For Speaking Against Company’s Support of Homosexuality, Christian News Network, February 8, 2015.

Thomas Banks, a design and release engineer with Ford Motor Company was fired for violating Ford’s anti-harassment policy in 2014, when he expressed his disapproval of homosexuality in Christian terms and suggested that endorsement of it should have no place in the company newsletter.

(2)Three-sentence letter to the ‘NYT’ results in Yale chaplain’s resignation, Mondoweiss, September 7, 2014.

Jewish students and the Board of Governors of Yale forced the resignation of Father Bruce Shipman, Yale’s Episcopalian chaplain, a long-time anti-war activist.  At issue was Shipman’s letter  to the New York Times, expressing his belief that anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere was the result of the lack of resolution to problems like the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the ongoing carnage in Gaza.

(3) IRS to Monitor Sermons as Part of Settlement with Atheists, Freedom Outpost, July 25, 2014.

A 2012 lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation was settled when the IRS agreed to monitor church sermons for evidence that they were taking position on politics, even though this  kind of monitoring  is completely unconstitutional.

[The tax-exempt status of churches is given to them as churches, not as non-profits. It is non-profits that lose their tax-exemption when they engage in political advocacy, not churches.]

(4) University Tells Student To Remove Cross Necklace, Fox News, July 2, 2013

A northern California university student was told to remove or hide her cross while she was working for a student association at a fair for incoming freshmen, lest it make incoming students uncomfortable. The university later apologized.

(5) Arizona Pastor Arrested, Jailed for Holding Bible Study In Home, Fox News, July 11, 2012

Pastor Michael Salmon was jailed for 60 days and forced to pay a $12,180 fine for holding Bible studies in his class. The Phoenix city prosecutor said the pastor’s home was not zoned as a church and he did not have a permit.

(6) Vanderbilt to Christian student organization: Drop commitment to Jesus Christ for leaders, Christian Legal Society, April 20, 2o12.

In 2011, Vanderbilt university officials told Christian student groups  to no longer require their leaders to have a commitment to Jesus Christ or lose their recognition on campus as student associations.

This was part of the university’s “all comers” policy that prevents any ideological discrimination by any group.

For eg., To comply with the policy, Democrat organizations must allow a Republican to apply for leadership positions and vice-versa.

The university stated that religious organizations were welcome as long as their leaders didn’t need to profess anything in particular and their creedal statements did not govern their actions.

Affirming Christian doctrine was as discriminatory as racial segregation, said officials.

As a result, in 2014, 14 Vanderbilt campus religious organizations lost their status.

Harvard has rejected Vanderbilt’s position on creedal groups and permits them.

But Tufts has followed Vanderbilt.

So has Rollins College.

And this year, California State University banned Christian student clubs from recruiting, defunded them, and took them off university websites and directories.

 

Sex-Week For A Six-Figure Price at Yale

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From CBN News.com:

For a glimpse into America’s future, look no further than its college campuses: American higher education is in moral and academic decline, so says 2009 Yale University graduate Nathan Harden.

Harden has written a new book on what he encountered during his time at the university. It’s called Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

Harden says Yale’s highly publicized “Sex Week” is just one example of the moral crisis affecting American higher education.

During Sex Week, porn stars and sex industry CEOs are invited on campus for a marathon of sex-related film screenings, seminars, and product demonstrations — all sanctioned by the university as “sex education.”

Other universities have followed suit and now offer their own versions of Sex Week.

Harden said this sex-saturated culture underscores the loss of purpose that permeates academia today. He points out that extreme agendas and single-minded political correctness have left us with universities that seem to no longer know what is or isn’t worth teaching in their classrooms.”

Harden’s book has plenty of “what isn’t worth teaching” in it:

 For days leading up to this biennial extravaganza Harden receives e-mails advertising seminars like “The Female Orgasm” and “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex (and Sex Toys!).” When the big week arrives, he, along with hundreds of fellow students, attends lectures by porn stars and porn moguls and peddlers of every sex toy on the market (all eco-­friendly, of course). Most of what he describes seems like fodder for satire, but Harden approaches it all with great seriousness, pausing often for helpful definitions: “ ‘double anal penetrations’ — a dangerous and frequently harmful act during which two males penetrate the anus of the female simultaneously.”
Harden finds himself much in the same situation as Brad Majors at Dr. Frank N. Furter’s convention in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”; that is, a choirboy type faced with a cast of characters he had not at this point in his squeaky-clean life imagined existed. He sits in on a lecture called “Babeland’s Lip Tricks,” given by a burlesque performer named Darlinda, who leads the students in chanting unprintable words, and then demonstrates with great care and enthusiasm her whole foreplay array of lip, tongue and hand techniques. The fact that Yale lends its name and its classrooms to such a display is too much for Harden to stomach. He sits in the back where a couple of pervy professors are lurking, and watches his dreams die.

Every oral-sex seminar, “every masturbation how-to session, every tip I heard on how to stimulate the anus — each of these seemed to be mocking the greatest achievement of my life up to that point, which was that somehow I, a home-school dropout with a G.E.D., had clawed and scratched and fought my way into Yale,” he writes. “Yale had been like some kind of drug. It was a blast, and then I came down with a crash.”

What else are hard-working parents paying six-figure prices for (a college education costs well into six-figures for 4 years)?

Workshops on incest, sado-masochism, and prostitution .….

And, if dark-skinned, man-handling by trigger-happy cops.

If light-skinned, they risk becoming the victim of racial hostility from the urban war-zone that is New Haven. Just ask the family of Christian Prince.

 

Men Forced Into Sex More Often Than Women

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In a thoroughly documented piece, “Yellow Journalism and the Meme of Rape Culture,” a blogger  takes apart Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage of the University of Viriginia “gang-rape” story to show the incredibly shoddy standards of investigation of many elite (read, left-liberal) news outlets and the biased advocacy that passes itself off as objective reporting.

Rolling Stone has retracted the story and issued an apology but no one has been fired for what amounts to criminal libel.

The agenda behind this, as admitted by the reporter herself, was to find a rape story that was “emblematic” of the rape culture that feminists declare is threatening women on campus.

But as I’ve blogged many times,  this isn’t so.

To find a “rape culture” on American campuses,  you would need to use a broad definition of rape that included seduction with alcohol, fraud, or other means.

I tend to agree with the broadening of what we define as rape, while disbelieving that the criminal justice system is the best place to address any of it.

Both Heather McDonald and Emily Yoffe named the beast that nobody wants to confront: an alcohol-lubricated hookup culture that begins in high school (if not earlier) and turns colleges and universities into rape traps for both women and men.

U-VA President Teresa Sullivan didn’t mention alcohol – not even once – in her November 22 statement about the Rolling Stone report of a gang rape at a fraternity house and her intention to quell sexual abuse on campus.

Yet a 2004 study by the Harvard School of Public Health (Correlates of Rape while Intoxicated in a National Sample of College Women) of almost 24,000 women at 119 colleges found that 72% of campus rapes happened when the victims were so intoxicated they were unable to consent or refuse.”

In this broad sense (but not in the narrow one) there is a “rape-culture”.

Only, today it victimizes men as much, or more, than women, as is the case elsewhere in the world .

Riversong.wordpress.com

“If any unwanted or not fully consensual sexual activity is defined now as rape, then more men then women are victims of rape and most of their victimizers are women.

An article about college students published in the Journal of Sex Research Vol. 31, No. 2 (1994), noted that Muehlenhard and Cook (1988) found that 46% of women and 63% of men had acquiesced to unwanted sexual intercourse, while Muehlenhard and Long (1988) also found that more men (49%) than women (40%) had engaged in unwanted sex. Muehlenhard and Rodgers (1993) found that 34% of women reported having engaged in token resistance to sex, in which they said “no” when they really desired to have sex. US women acknowledge a 55% rate of consent to unwanted sex, which is consistent with the findings of 50% false rape allegations in university studies.

[Charlene L. Muehlenhard, PhD, the author of all those studies, is a Professor of Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fellow in Three Divisions of the American Psychological Association (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Society for the Psychology of Women, Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues), and a Fellow in the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality]

According to a 2014 paper published in the American Psychological Association journal, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 43% of high school and college-aged men say they’ve had “unwanted sexual contact”, and 95% of those say a female acquaintance was the aggressor.

Researchers found that 18% reported sexual coercion by force (including by use of weapon), 31% said they were verbally coerced into sex, 26% said they’d experienced unwanted seduction, and 7% said they were compelled after being given alcohol or drugs.

Dr. Bryana French, who teaches counseling psychology and black studies at University of Missouri and co-authored the study, says that male victims are often less willing to describe sexual coercion in detail, “but when asked if it happened, they say it happened”.

French said, “Seduction was a particularly salient and potentially unique form of coercion for teenage boys and young men when compared to their female counterparts.”

The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions is co-authored by Lara Stemple, Health and Human Rights Law Project, UCLA, and Ilan H. Meyer, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.

The authors assessed 12-month prevalence of sexual victimization from five federal surveys conducted, independently, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2010 through 2012. The review of these surveys provides an unprecedented wealth of new data about male victimization, challenging long-held stereotypes about the sex of victims.

In one of the studies included in the analysis, the CDC found that an estimated 1.3 million women experienced nonconsensual sex, or rape, in the previous year.

Notably, nearly the same number of men also reported nonconsensual sex. In comparison to the number of women who were raped, nearly 1.3 million men were “made to penetrate” someone else. The CDC data reveal that both women and men experienced nonconsensual sex in alarming and equal numbers.

The study also included the 2012 National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that 38% of all reported rape and sexual assault incidents were committed against males, an increase over past years that challenges the common belief that males are rarely victims of this crime.

“These findings are striking, yet misconceptions about male victimization persist. We identified reasons for this, which include the over-reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions used by some federal agencies, and methodological sampling biases.”

The 2011 CDC analysis referred to in the 2014 report found that 6.7% of men (7.6 million) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else, and that 82.6% of male victims of “made to penetrate” events and 80% of male victims of sexual coercion reported female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman, according to the current and broadly accepted definition of rape as any unwanted sexual encounter.

The CDC report’s statistics for the preceding 12 months showed that a higher percentage of men were “made to penetrate” (1.7%) than women were raped (1.6%), such that if you properly include “made to penetrate” in the definition of rape, men were raped by women at least as often as women were raped by men.”

Poison Ivy: More Dangers Of Elite Schooling

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In “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite,” Free Press, 2014, William Deresiewicz writes that elite American schools corrupt the souls of their students …. but he fails to mention that they also endanger their bodies.

Recently, I looked at some crime statistics for Yale University, the premier academic seat of East Coast liberals – the Ivy League that trains the Ivy League, so to speak.

You’d think all that high-powered thinking would have had some impact for good where it most counts –  at home.

Not a chance.

Not only is New Haven, Connecticut, a haven of crime, Yale’s immediate environs are no bower of peace and prosperity.

The Yale Daily News, struggling to portray the campus’s successful spin on the subject as some kind of structural improvement, admits that Yale richly deserves its reputation as a poster-child for violent crime.

“Yale and New Haven’s reputation for being dangerous likely originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crack-cocaine made the city an entirely different place. During that time, when the city was the site of a drug war, there were three times as many shootings in the city as there are today.

And Yale’s campus was not as safe either. There were over 1,000 major crimes — including motor-vehicle theft, larceny and rape — on Yale’s campus each year in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Crime on campus peaked in 1990 with 1,439 major crimes. The image of a dangerous Yale is epitomized by the murder of Prince, who was fatally shot in the chest on Feb. 17, 1991, on the steps of St. Mary’s Church on Hillhouse Avenue.

“When 19-year-old Christian H. Prince died in an attempted robbery — just a block from the university president’s house — whatever remained of the students’ sense of protection around campus died too,” The New York Times reported two days after the murder in a story headlined: “At Yale, Fear and Anger Join Grief Over Slaying.”

The murder shook the campus: “That was a bad time,” Deputy University Secretary Martha Highsmith said. “It was a horrible time.”

After the incident, the University spent millions of dollars installing new lights and blue phones and adding security personnel. But, just seven years later, Jovin was fatally stabbed.……

…In 2007 and 2008 combined, New Haven reported 2,690 violent crimes for every 100,000 residents, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports. This number is comparable to the crime rates in two of Connecticut’s other major cities, Hartford and Bridgeport — 2,377 and 2,338 respectively. (As defined by the FBI, violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, robbery rape and aggravated assault.)

The average U.S. city of comparable size to New Haven had only 1,246 violent crimes per 100,000 residents — less than half as many.”

The average US city, of course, is no Swiss resort. If New Haven is TWICE as dangerous as the average in a field that includes such  vice- factories as Detroit, DC, Baltimore,  Atlanta, and Memphis, the situation is dire indeed.

Point two. The article relays perceptions of safety at Yale, focusing mainly on undergraduate students who live in carded security in campus dormitories.

But the main target of crime at Yale is the hapless graduate student living off-campus, who has to walk home in the dark.

One  comment on the article punctures the propaganda of the campus rag:

“This is the problem when you have school buildings spread out across a dangerous city and Yale does absolutely nothing to crack the town-gown animosity, give money back to a poor city and its citizens (many of whom are Yale employees), and protect students. Ms. Le’s death is a tragedy, and it is even worse to hear that it may have been committed by a member of the school community. But I will say this: New Haven is a dangerous city and Yale doesn’t care. Wait two weeks, let the news crews drive away, and I can almost guarantee that things will be back to normal for Yale security–putting all of us at risk. I commuted to Yale my last two years after a shooting and a stabbing on my corner. . . I spent thousands of dollars on commutation. I may have missed out on some social experiences, but my safety was–and still is–worth every penny. And for the liberals who claim that New Haven is safe: Go find a grad student living in New Haven Towers and ask them what a walk home at 8 PM is like. Offer to take the walk with that person, and maybe you’ll get a realistic view of the world.”

The comment makes a passing reference to a third point about crime on some campuses. Its source in the animosity between the locals and the “privileged” outsiders – the old town- and- gown conflict. To this hostility can be added racial feelings and class anger, as well as a dollop of xenophobia.

A 2010 analysis by the liberal Daily Beast put Yale in the top 25 most dangerous colleges in the US, a country where colleges abound in the tens of thousands.

And Yale made the top 25 again, in 2012, according to The Business Insider.

 

A Historicist View Of Revelation

Odd though it must seem to confirmed skeptics and atheists,  seminal events in contemporary politics – such as the conflicts in the Middle East –  are closely tied to interpretations of ancient religious texts.

One of the most influential of these is the last book of the New Testament canon, the Revelation (of Jesus Christ to St. John), written by John the Divine, the author of  the Gospel of St. John, around 95-96 AD.

[This popular dating is based on the rather flimsy account of a Church Father. Far  more likely,  from the textual and historical evidence, is a date of 66 AD… or earlier.]

Historicists believe that the events predicted in Revelations have occurred- and will continue to occur – until the (still future) second coming of Jesus Christ.

Praeterists believe all the prophecies have already been fulfilled in the past and do not apply to anything today.

Futurists believe that all the the prophecies apply to the last few years before the Second Coming.

Idealists think Revelation describes spiritual rather than actual historical events.

The Biblical prophets themselves, as well as the early church, appear to have taken a  historicist position.

The preterist and futurist interpretations, on the other hand, had their birth during the Counter-Reformation, the Roman church’s response to the Protestant Reformation.

Historicists argue that futurism and preterism were developed to take pressure off the Papacy and the Roman church, which the Reformers were united in condemning as the Anti-Christ figure of Revelation.

The following passage is excerpted from a  historicist interpretation of  the first six  of the seven seals of the Book of  Revelation, a passage from the Bible that has had astounding influence on international politics in the Middle East:

“Horsemen: The first four symbols are  few connected by using the same symbol. In the total scheme of all the symbols, this style — making the first four in each group of seven to be connected — continues in the trumpets and bowls. In the first of the four trumpets, blows strike, (1) one third of the land and vegetation; (2) one third of the sea and shipping; (3) one third of rivers and fountains; (4) one third of sources of light, sun, moon and stars.

Under the figures of plagues, the first four vials or bowls are likewise blows against land, sea, rivers, and the sun. In the fulfillment of these figures there would naturally be a relation of the first four symbols historically, with the possibility of some overlapping in the fulfillment. Remember then, the design of the book is that the first four symbols in each group are interrelated.

1. White: is a symbol of something good, the bow and crown of armored authority, and expansion of territory in conquest. So the first period of time after Domitian should be characterized historically as an unusually “good” (righteous) period associated with conquest and expansion. When we look in a secular history book the period just following Domitian should say, “something good.”

2. Red: is a symbol of blood, war, fire, not of “good.” Take peace from the earth indicates a total disorder. Kill one another indicates internal war, not killing the enemy, it is a figure of civil war. A great sword indicates a lot of dying in battle. So the second period of time should be characterized historically by breakdown of society, a great deal of armed conflict with many killed in civil disorders and not because of invasion of outsiders. This must follow a period of peace and “good” and expansion.

3. Black: is a symbol of darkness and despair. The scales and high prices and instructions not to waste suggest need for care because of shortages. The third period following hard on the civil disorder should be a period of famine and associated hardships. “Hard times” is the key note.

4. Pale: is a symbol of sickliness. The symbols associate closely with death, the abode of the dead (hades) as epitomizing history in the period. Twenty five percent, or the fourth part of the earth, are to die from (1) sword; (2) famine; (3) disease; (4) wild animals. So the fourth period following the previous (and probably overlapping, as death and famine are part of both) should be a period characterized by depopulation of the earth due to war, famine, disease, and wild animals.

5. Saints under the altar: refers to the dead in Christ awaiting judgment day. These have been killed because of their faith and testimony. They want to know how long before God takes vengeance indicating the day of vengeance on the persecutors. “Rest a little season until,” should indicate a short interval following the last horse’s period. “The time that your brothers should be killed;” when this is fulfilled it will be a period of further persecution for a short but intense period when history is epitomized by that persecution.

So, following the four horsemen (1) peace and good, (2) civil war, (3) famine, (4) depopulation, there should follow a period that is characterized by persecution. In the vision, the persecution has been going on previously, persecution in which Christians have been dying, but this last will be a climax and completion of the persecution. Many Christians will die but after a little season the persecution stops. History is to look like this in the future from John’s view.

6. A great earthquake: equals complete shakeup of those things counted secure: government, religion, social order, ethics, economy; all shaken. The sun and moon are symbols of authority in human governments, the emperor, etc. The stars represent spiritual powers just as astrological charts indicate. The gods of paganism were associated with planets and stars. Heaven departing indicates the removal of spiritual powers or ethical inhibitors. No guidance from above! Mountains and islands are symbols of nations and governments. These being moved out of their places is a symbol of turnover of government, continuing the symbol of a great earthquake, that characterizes this period. The following verses (15-17) make it plain that the whole upheaval is identified with Jesus Christ and it is a day of reckoning for the enemies of the cross of Christ. It is a day that will cause his enemies to hide, disappear, flee away, and he will take vengeance.

So following the period of persecution, world history should be characterized by the world being turned upside down, the disappearance of pagan powers, while Christian ethics take their place. Government will be likewise reorganized and shaken violently at the end of which Christianity will be in a good position, as the next symbol makes clear.

All of chapter seven speaks of conversion. 144,000 of the nation of the Jews and then a great multitude out of every nation and language, beyond number, are brought to worship God and Christ. (Vs. 9) Verses 14 and 15 contain a description of conversion that is symbolic of the changes that most born again believers associate with their own experience. What is characterized in the whole of chapter seven is a great ingathering or gospel harvest that follows the revolutionary period just previous to it.

So the interval is a period of evangelism and expansion of the Christian gospel that should epitomize that historical period. Any one knowing the history of the world from the time of Domitian through the next few centuries will be struck with the incredible coincidence of the outline of the seer of Patmos with what actually happened.

Let the Winds blow: At the commencement of the Interlude of sealing the servants of God an angel is instructed to “Hold back the four winds until the sealing is over. Thus after the ingathering of souls, the Seventh seal will be associated with events that will look like the destructive action of blowing winds associated with the first of the Trumpets. A map of the next 100 yearas after The triumph of the Christian Cburch should look like blowing winds.

Also as noted in the fist chapter of this book The seventh seal IS the Seven Trumpets. Confirming that the trumpets can not be concurrent with the Seals. They are designed to be in sequence. Let us note the following Maps. The first shows the Roman Empire in 395 at the end of the 60 or so years described as the Triumph of Christianity. Notice how the Empire is still in a very neat condition.

Please click to see the map and click the back button to return to this page map

This next map shows the the next 100 year beginning in 410, Beginning fifteen years after the last map.
Please click to see the map and click the back button to return to this page. map

Review

Let us review one more time. The historical periods following the time of Domitian should follow:

1. Something good.
2. Civil disorder, many die.
3. Hard times.
4. Depopulation by twenty five percent.
5. Persecution.
6. Revolution of religious as well as political life.
7. Interval of ingathering or expansion of Christian gospel.
8. Let the Winds Blow

Historical Fulfillment

1. The period immediately following Domitian introduces a century of peace called the Pax Romana or translated the Peace of Rome. The emperors of the period are known in history books as the “Five Good Emperors.” Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher whose doctrines approached the ethics of Christianity. The name of emperor Antoninus Pius indicates his inclinations. This period, from 98 to 180 is also characterized by the additions of large border regions to the empire and expansion to the greatest limits ever. If God wanted to picture the period he could not have chosen a better symbol than a white horse and conquest.

2. History texts call the period from 180 to 280 the period of disorder. Eighty emperors ruled in a space of ninety years and most of them met death by violence. The post of emperor was actually bought and sold at public auction. The empire was ravaged by civil war for most of the period. Every few months a new soldier of fortune would make a claim on the title and march on Rome from distant as well as more local locations, fighting, pillaging, and burning as they approached a war weary city. The depletion of stocks, burning of countryside, disruption of markets, and farms denuded of crops took their toll and the next two figures overlap the end of this period.

3. The devastation of the wars of the previous period brought the empire the worst of famines and shortages. This period overlaps the end of the last.

4. The consequences of the preceding wars and famines created a climate for the depopulation of the earth that historians tell us characterized this period. Due to the depopulation, wild animals increased in formerly civilized areas and death from them was common enough to be placed in the histories. An outbreak of the black plague (bubonic plague) is recorded at this time. The figures of death due to sword, famine, disease, and wild animals is a perfect description of the period, which, with the last, overlaps and extends as a result of the wars to the early 300s when they were cause for what followed. The Christians were blamed!

5. From 300 to 313, “a little season,” the history of the Roman empire is characterized by persecution. It is the last and most severe of the ten great persecutions against the Christian religion which were authorized by the emperors of Rome. Many thousands died, many church buildings and Bibles went to the flames. Every elder, (bishop) was arrested and killed and all other Christian leaders went into hiding or suffered death in the arenas publicly, as sport for the spectators. Diocletian resigned midway and his successor and son-in-law carried on the extremities. He it was who issued the edict of persecution. He would later admit defeat and would issue the edict of toleration which ended the OFFICIAL persecution on a world scale forever. Christians have never faced death on such a scale since. Historians all epitomize this historical period as an epoch of persecution.

6. Following the end of the persecution, Constantine the Great left York in Britain and marched against Galerius and his successors. His conquests and subsequent emperorship are characterized by turning the imperial system of Rome upside down. Rather than merely tolerating Christianity, he issued in 325 the Edict of Milan, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The pagan temples were closed and they were given to Christian churches; the pagan gods were swept away, not only from their pedestals but from peoples’ hearts. The figures of the stars falling and heaven being rolled up could not better describe the disappearance of the old religious and ethical order and the taking of its place by the Christian religion. Imagine being paid to become a Christian when only four or five years ago your family was being torn by lions for the same faith! New government took the place of the old order; the church would play a large part in the affairs of state; and the capitol would be moved from Rome to Constantinople. There could not possibly be a better set of figures to epitomize this great, eventful period than mountains and islands moving, a great earthquake and the day of Jesus Christ’s vengeance, and the shaking and disappearance of secure heavenly powers in favor of Jesus! There is much more to say about the fulfillment of these figures and while this is necessarily an outline it is extraordinary in its completeness and simplicity.”

Mehdi Hasan On The Notable Absence Of Holocaust Humor

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Mehdi Hasan at The New Statesman points out the glaring contradictions in the free speech orthodoxies of the liberal establishment:

“Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No?

[Lila: Consider the following joke:

“Question: How many Jews can ride in a Bentley?

Answer: Six million. Two in the front, three in the back, and 5, 999, 995 in the ash-tray.”

How “brave” would it have been to publish this joke on the front-page of a magazine, while Jews were being rounded up and exterminated by the state?

Would it have been brave free speech or vile Nazi incitation?

If someone had murdered the “humorist,” would decent people have been inclined to shrug and say, “one less idiot,” or would they have marched in solidarity on the streets?]

Mehdi Hasan (cont.):

“How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers?

I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

Charlie Hebdo: The Free Speech of Fools

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From Lenin’s Tomb, a clear-eyed look at the bigotry and spite posing as satire in the pages of Charlie Hebdo:

“From what psychological depths did you drag up the nerve to “laugh” at a cartoon representing veiled women baring their buttocks as they bow in prayer towards “Mecca-relle” [a pun onmaquerelle, the madam of a brothel – trans.]?  This pathetic stream of crap isn’t even shameful; its stupidity embarrasses you, even before it reveals your state of mind, your vision of the world.”

IMAGE DELETED TO AVOID OFFENSE TO MUSLIMS

 

Lenin’s Tomb:

“After September 11, Charlie Hebdo was among the first in the so-called leftist press to jump on the bandwagon of the Islamic peril. Don’t deprive yourself of receiving your own share of the shit, at a moment when the number of Islamophobic acts is breaking records: 11.3% higher in the first 9 months of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012, according to l’Observatoire national de l’islamophobie. They worry about a “new phenomenon” of violence, marked by at least 14 attacks on veiled women since the start of the year.”

Lila:

Here are some more Charlie Hebdo images that the mainstream media will not publish. They demonstrate convincingly that only some religions – specifically traditional Islam and traditional Christianity – were targeted by the cartoonists, not others.

They didn’t mock Judaism, for instance.

That omission makes Charlie Hebdo in effect a mouth-piece of Zionist sensibilities.

Notice also that Arabs and blacks were the main objects of the magazine’s animus,  suggesting that its so-called satire was no more than a vehicle through which it  propagated Anglo-Jewish racial supremacism.

Hebdo Cartoon: JESUS CHRIST SODOMIZING GOD THE FATHER AND BEING SODOMIZED BY THE HOLY GHOST

 

IMAGE DELETED TO AVOID OFFENSE TO CHRISTIANS

Hebdo Cartoon: PROPHET MOHAMMED DISPLAYING HIS BUTTOCKS FOR APPROVAL

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Hebdo Cartoon: ASKING IF DRAWING MOHAMMED’S BUTTOCKS IS PERMISSIBLE

 

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Hebdo Cartoon: FILM MAKER CLAIMING THAT PROPHET MOHAMMED HAD SEX WITH PIGS, BECAUSE  HE COULD NOT AFFORD TO PAY FOR NINE YEAR OLD PROSTITUTES

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Lila:

Meanwhile,  when it came to ridiculing the  religion or beliefs of the ruling class, the COWARDS at Charlie Hebdo failed miserably. 

They published no pornographic pictures of Maimonides or Moses, no edgy jokes about the Holocaust, no genitalia of Anne Frank, no raunchy pedophile gags about Rabbis.

[And I, for one,  would not wish them to. I would wish, however, that they had extended the same respect to other people and other faiths.]

Instead, the magazine caved in and fired an employee over the whisper of anti-Semitism. 

Thus, the moniker of “equal opportunity satire” so universally applied to Charlie Hebdo is demonstrable propaganda,  intend to hoodwink the credulous.

Selective satire was the facade behind which the lewd ravings of Zionist hate-mongers flourished without public outrage,  ceaselessly stoking the searing flames of perpetual civilizational war.

 

 

 

The Bible says you are not your brother’s keeper

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Gary North  (h/t LRC) describes how the left twists the Biblical story of Cain and Abel to support the welfare state.

In the story, Cain murders his innocent brother Abel out of envy of his piety and is questioned about it by God shortly after.

North argues that Cain’s famous reply to God,  “Am I my brother’s keeper?” should not be read to support the idea that people ought to be their brothers’ keepers, as it frequently is.

Cain was only temporizing.

He knew full well where Abel’s murdered body lay, since he’d put it there.

And he knew full well that God knew he’d put it there.

God’ question to Cain was only intended to find out whether Cain was willing to admit what he’d done to Abel.

Cain’s answer really has the opposite meaning from the commonly accepted one.

In this version, a keeper can only “keep” (that is, monitor) someone who is mentally non compos or physically incapacitated.

Since Abel was neither, Cain could not be  Abel’s “keeper.”

Cain was perfectly right on this point.

Which was why he made it, since he knew he was perfectly wrong on everything else.

Reading Cain’s reply this way, anyone who is someone’s “keeper” is obliged to “monitor” them.

The “kept” ones  necessarily lose their physical and moral freedom, since they no longer have full responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Having full responsibility for the consequences of your actions is roughly what it means to be a legal adult.

Obviously, if other people have to foot the bill for your actions, they are going to watch your actions very closely.

The bill could run up steeply, otherwise.

And that is  just what happens when the government (as proxy for the the public) is obliged to provide for its citizens (that is, for everyone).

The bill runs up.

To stop that happening, ostensibly, the government tightens the screws.

When everyone (as the government) monitors everyone (as the public), the results are pretty much what you have in the US, the UK, Europe, and many other countries following the same dysfunctional model of nationhood – a top-heavy bureaucratic police-state, with endless, infinite surveillance.

 

 

 

Marranos Behind Puritanism, Utopianism, Revolution:

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Note (added on Nov. 2, 2014) :

E. Michael Jones, like the owner of the Fish-eaters website, is a traditional Catholic of a stronger variety (radical) than most mainstream traditional Catholics.

I don’t subscribe to radical traditionalist dogma, being an eclectic/syncretist Christian myself, although I am very sympathetic to several of the positions that rad trads take.

I posted Jones’ piece, because it gives an analysis of history not found in mainstream accounts.

A further note:

Not having studied the matter at first hand to any great degree, I don’t dispute most of the mainstream version of the Holocaust narrative, although I also don’t think revisionists should be silenced or persecuted.  One can admit that Germans suffered enormously from Allied war crimes, without denying that Jews also suffered enormously from German war-crimes. To me, this demythologizes Jewish people from being either the super-heroes…or the super-villains…of Western (and thus, world) history.

E. Michael Jones on the Marranos behind the revolutionary Protestant movements of the 16th century and thereafter:

Once the Jews who were expelled from Spain began to regroup in the newly-Protestant regions of the North, their settlements began to draw Marranos

(Lila: Jewish converts to Christianity, who most often continued to practice their old faith)

like a magnet, and the disaffected Catholics who had once been living double lives as clerics with concubines in places like Saxony and Thuringia now began to make common cause with the Jews who had led double lives as well by converting to Catholicism simply to preserve their wealth.

Revolution, which is to say, a pan-ethnic coordinated attack on the cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church over Europe, emerged as a force in world history when these two groups merged in places like Antwerp in the middle of the 16th century. Revolution was, in other words, a Protestant-Jewish alliance from its inception.

The Jews, as Newman shows so well, promoted every “reform” movement in Europe, from the Hussites to the Anabaptists, as a way of weakening the hegemony of the Catholic Church, reasoning—falsely in the case of Luther—that the enemy of their enemy was their friend.

In places like Antwerp and Amsterdam, the Jews put their wealth as well as their considerable expertise in finance and publishing at the disposal of the libidinous German monks and their princely protectors as their way of waging cultural warfare against the Catholic Church and Spain, its defender………… 

..The revolutionary link between Jews and Reformers was theoretical as well as practical.

The “Reformers” for their part could justify their criminal behavior only by cloaking it in the imagery of the Old Testament. Regicide was the most heinous of crimes and viewed with revulsion by all of Christian Europe, and yet Cromwell justified his role in the murder of Charles I ……

Cromwell, according to one commentator, “was making a startling reference to the biblical story of Phineas, who thrust a javelin through a sinfully copulating couple, thus saving the people of Israel from the wrath of God. In the end, only brutal summary justice against the King had served to complete God’s work to save the nation from His wrath and to secure his continuing love.”

By 1649, when Charles I went on trial, the tradition of Judaizing which had been extirpated from Spain had struck deep roots in England. The English judaizers were known as Puritans, and Cromwell as their leader was as versed in using Biblical figures as a rationalization for his crimes as he was in using Jewish spies from Spain and Portugal as agents in his ongoing war with the Catholic powers of Europe.

The Puritans in England could implement the idea of revolution so readily precisely because they were Judaizers, and that is so because revolution was at its root a Jewish idea.

Based on Moses’ deliverance of Israel as described in the book of Exodus, the revolutionary saw a small group of chosen “saints” leading a fallen world to liberation from political oppression.

Revolution was nothing if not a secularization of ideas taken from the Bible, and as history progressed the secularization of the concept would progress as well. But the total secularization of the idea in the 17th century would have made the idea totally useless to the Puritan revolutionaries. Secularization in the 17th century was synonymous with Judaizing.

It meant substituting the Old Testament for the New.

The concept of revolution gained legitimacy in the eyes of the Puritans precisely because of its Jewish roots. Graetz sees the attraction which Jewish ideas held for English Puritans quite clearly.

The Roundheads were not inspired by the example of the suffering Christ, nor were they inspired by the medieval saints who imitated him. They needed the example of the warriors of Israel to inspire them in their equally bellicose campaigns against the Irish and the Scotch, who became liable to extermination because the Puritans saw them as Canaanites. Similarly, the King, who was an unworthy leader, like Phineas, deserved to die at the hands of the righteous, who now acted without any external authority, but, as the Jews had, on direct orders from God……

Graetz puts his finger on the heart of the issue when he identifies Puritan role models as “at once religious and national champions.”

Revolution as practiced by the Puritan Judaizers of England was a reversion to a more primitive, pre-Christian model. There was no separation the two swords of pope and emperor here—or, to use the terms of a later more secular era, no separation of church and state—instead, both pope and emperor were fused into one charismatic revenant of King David.

Israel had become ethnic once again, except that now the real Jews were Englishmen, the visible elect on earth, and England (or New England) was the New Jerusalem.

…….One can almost hear in Milton’s tendentious pleading for the legalization of divorce, the devotees of Planned Parenthood arguing that the logical sequel to America’s conquest of Afghanistan or Iraq should be contraception and abortion. Messianic politics and sexual liberation have gone hand in hand from the beginning, and they still do, now that America is the uncontested new Israel.

Messianic politics lies at the heart of what the Jewish and Puritan revolutionaries of the 16th century had in common, which is to say, both the Puritan and the Jew shared a desire to attain the spiritual goods promised in the Bible by secular means.

Messianic politics was a form of magic, since the attainment of wealth and power by spiritual means had always been the goal of Simon Magus and his followers, and as such it had a powerful appeal to a group of people who were just discovering the natural sciences at the same time that they were full of revulsion at the cross of Christ and the ideal of suffering which it embodied. “It is better,” St. Augustine wrote, summarizing the Catholic alternative to Simon Magus, “to love God and make use of money, than to love money and make use of God.”

The Puritan rejection of the medieval worldview of the Catholic Church (and its Anglican surrogates) was ultimately traceable to the Jewish rejection of the suffering Christ as an unworthy Messiah. “The chief priests,” St. Matthew tells us, “with the scribes and elders mocked him in the same way. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘he cannot save himself. He is the king of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.’”

A Traditionalist On Rabbinical Persecution Of Christians

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A passionate, politically incorrect refutation of the current pieties about the supposed inveterate anti-Semitism of the traditional Catholic church, at Fish-eaters.com.

It lists the extensive persecution of Christians over the centuries at the hands of Rabbinical Jews, starting with their judicial murder of Jesus,  using the Roman state as a proxy:

I know that it’s politically correct to bash the Romans on this account, but the Romans had no issue with Jesus and “only” acted as instruments to carry out the Jews’ wishes (which is culpability and cowardice enough, to be sure). The Jews, however, did want Christ dead, and used Roman power to make it happen. The Russians didn’t want it, the Poles didn’t want it, the Ugandans didn’t want it, Pilate washed his hands of the matter: the Jews wanted it.

John 11:45-53 (KJV), after the raising of Lazarus: Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him. But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done. Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.

Note, though, please, how many Jews here came to know the Messiah, Who Himself was genetically (partly) Semitic and Who fulfilled the Old Testament promises. The point, which I reiterate here, is that “race” and “ethnicity” are not the issue; the issue is a matter of idealogy, faith, belief, and acts of the will. Peter, Paul, Matthew, etc. — most of the Apostles — were Semitic followers of the Old Testament religion who came to know that the Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus Christ and who gave up their lives defending that belief.

In addition, while it is obvious historical fact that, proximately, it was Palestinian Jews who used Roman power to kill the Messiah, it is also true — and has been taught as true since the Church’s beginning — that we are all responsible. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, issued by Pope St. Pius V (A.D. 1566-1572), taught:

Furthermore men of all ranks and conditions were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. Gentiles and Jews were the advisers, the authors, the ministers of His Passion: Judas betrayed Him, Peter denied Him, all the rest deserted Him.

and

In this guilt are involved all those who fall frequently into sin; for, as our sins consigned Christ the Lord to the death of the cross, most certainly those who wallow in sin and iniquity crucify to themselves again the Son of God, as far as in them lies, and make a mockery of Him. This guilt seems more enormous in us than in the Jews, since according to the testimony of the same Apostle: If they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; while we, on the contrary, professing to know Him, yet denying Him by our actions, seem in some sort to lay violent hands on him.

In other words, Palestinian Jews were historically, proximately responsible for Christ’s Passion and death, just as were those Romans who allowed themselves to be cowed by them, but culpability for His death lies in us all — the more so with Christians who know Him and believe Him, but still offend Him. While the post-Temple Jewish religion can be described as a “Deicide religion” in that it glories in Deicide when exulting in the murder of Jesus, “the Jews” cannot be decribed as “Christ-killers” in any literal sense. This isn’t some new Vatican II teaching that changed the “anti-semitic traditional teaching of the Church” as anti-Catholics want you to believe so they can shame the Church into submission; it is what the Church has always taught, and the only reasons I even bring it up are our inability nowadays to speak of historical fact as revealed by the Gospels, the willingness of too many people to blame everyone — anyone — but “the Jews” (why it’s OK to diss “the Romans” but not “the Jews” is beyond me as a daughter of Rome), and the stupid, nerve-wracking idea that the Church “used to be anti-semitic,” but now, “since Vatican II,” the Church has changed Her teachings.

That last is only the world’s way of dismissing traditional — i.e, true — Catholic teaching altogether and of making the Church seem wishy-washy, anything but divine, and, above all, malleable (“You’ve ‘changed’ your teachings on the Jews, why not change your attitudes toward sex and priestly celibacy and the ‘ordination’ of women?”) It’s a way of shaming the Church’s History and stealing Her rich heritage from those who love Her. And it’s also a way of propping up “the spirit of Vatican II,” the most destructive force that has ever afflicted Holy Mother Church and which has rendered the institutional Church impotent and sterile, and has almost destroyed the Roman Rite. All one has to do to see the “disconnect” between the what the “the spirit” of this Council really did and how the Modernists want you to perceive it is to study the horrific effects of the interpreations of Vatican II — and then read how Jews, neo-Catholics, and the media speak of the “great Council” while they dismiss the “pre-Vatican II Church” as barbarous and unenlightened.

At any rate, it’s rather paradoxical, this clamor on the part of Jews to absolve “the Jews” of Deicide (note the hysteria in response to Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”), especially when in their “holy” books and by the pens of their “sages,” they openly and proudly state that Jews did kill Jesus. Note what Maimonides, who is considered by Jews to be “The Second Moses,” wrote in his “Letter to Yemen”:

[Jesus of Nazareth] impelled people to believe that he was a prophet sent by God to clarify perplexities in the Torah, and that he was the Messiah that was predicted by each and every seer. He interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead to their total annulment, to the abolition of all its commandments and to the violation of its prohibitions. The sages, of blessed memory, having become aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted out fitting punishment to him.

The Jewish historian Josephus confirms the Gospel account in his “Antiquities”:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day [my emphasis].

And see the Toledoth Yeshu (onsite). Interestingly, an article appeared on the website of the American Jewish Committee that affirmed what is being said here about what Jewish writings themselves say about the death of Jesus. That article disappeared from the site within days (oops! how’d this get published?), but you may read the article here on-site.

To continue with the topic: the errors of the Pharisaic rabbis, their legalistic, “anti-goy” elitism, grew even greater after the Temple fell and the only priests left were New Covenant priests. Their desires for a restored Jerusalem and a worldly Messiah-King were not shared by the Christians, ethnically Hebrew or not, whose Messiah told them to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”; this Christian anti-Zionism only fueled the Pharisees’ hatred for the Christians.

Around A.D. 100, the Pharisees started a school at Jamnia (often referred to as the “Council of Jamnia” or “Jabneh”) to solidify the Pharisees’ power. They threw out the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, used by the Palestinian Jews for hundreds of years and cherished by the Apostles, because this version, which contains the Deuterocanonical Books (referred to as the “Apocrypha” by Protestants), was used by the Christians to proselytize Jews due to its more specific language used to convey the Messianic prophecies. From this “Council of Jamnia,” too, came the Birkat ha-Minim — a part of the Amida prayer which consists of a curse against Christians asking God to destroy us. This Amida prayer with its curse against Christians has been prayed by religious Jews three times a day for almost two millennia. Rounding out this racism, in A.D. 125, one of the most respected rabbis (he is quoted over 700 times in the Talmud), Rabbi Simeon Ben Johai, formally declared that non-Jews are not even human.

Jewish pogroms against Christians took place not only in Palestine (note the famous Bar Kochba Rebellion of A.D. 135), in Caesarea, Scytpolis, Yemen, Antioch — a town through which Jews dragged the body of Patriarch Anastasius in A.D. 608, after they threw his genitals in his face and disembowelled him — and any other place they could get away with it.

When reading the typical history book talking about the “repressiveness” of the Church, or hearing a typical dispensationalist Protestant sermon reviling the great Saints like John Chrysostom who spoke against the errors of Pharisaic Judaism (just as Jesus did!), you won’t hear a word about the above — or how Jews agitated anti-Christian animosity among Kings and Emperors, resulting in the slaughter of true Israel (the Church). You won’t read this, from Sozomen’s (c. A.D. 375-c. 447) “Ecclesiastical History,” Book II, Chapter IX:

When, in course of time, the Christians increased in number, and began to form churches, and appointed priests and deacons, the Magi, who as a priestly tribe had from the beginning in successive generations acted as the guardians of the Persian religion, became deeply incensed against them. The Jews, who through envy are in some way naturally opposed to the Christian religion, were likewise offended. They therefore brought accusations before Sapor [King of Persia], the reigning sovereign, against Symeon, who was then archbishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, royal cities of Persia, and charged him with being a friend of the Caesar of the Romans, and with communicating the affairs of the Persians to him. Sapor believed these accusations, and at first, ground the Christians with excessive taxes, although he knew that the generality of them had voluntarily embraced poverty. He entrusted the exaction to cruel men, hoping that, by the want of necessaries, and the atrocity of the ex-actors, they might be compelled to abjure their religion; for this was his aim. Afterwards, however, be commanded that the priests and conductors of the worship of God should be slain with the sword. The churches were demolished, their vessels were deposited in the treasury, and Symeon was arrested as a traitor to the kingdom and the religion of the Persians. Thus the Magi, with the co-operation of the Jews, quickly destroyed the houses of prayer.

You won’t hear how Jews allied themselves with the Christian-born but later professing pagan Julian the Apostate, Emperor of Rome between A.D. 361 and 363 and fourth successor of Constantine, who oppressed Christians even as he tried to help Jews rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, a project that ended when mysterious balls of fires emanated from the ground (and sky, depending on the account) at the site, burning the workers to death, and an earthquake struck. (For fascinating accounts from primary sources as to what happened when the Jews tried to rebuild the Temple, see this page, onsite).

You won’t hear how the Jews allied themselves with the Persians in attacking Palestine in A.D. 614 — and how they reveled in slaughtering the Christians there and razing their churches, including the one built over Christ’s Tomb. According to Monk Strategius of Mar Saba (Antiochus Strategos), Jews purchased Christian slaves from the Persians for the sole purpose of slaughtering them “just as one might buy cattle to slaughter.” 3

You won’t hear how Jews rose to high levels in medieval Spanish society by falsely claiming to have converted to the Holy Faith, how many became priests, rose to prominence in the Church, and then proceeded to Judaize that country’s Catholics. You won’t hear how these false converts also cooperated with Muslims to overtake that country during the Muslim aggressions (oh, so that’s why that nasty Catholic Queen Isabella kicked them out in 1492!)

You won’t hear that on Yom Kippur, Jews pray the Kol Nidre, a prayer that releases them, in advance, of all vows they will make in the upcoming year, a prayer which allowed them to engage in fraudulent business practices while still remaining loyal to Judaism.

And you most certainly won’t hear about usury — the other true source of “anti-semitism” in Christian lands.”