Different Strokes

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This past year, I’ve been trying to go to church again.

I used to go to church fairly often in my childhood. Then almost regularly when I was an undergraduate.

Then not at all for a few years.

Later, I went on occasion – at Christmas, Lent and Easter. No more.

Of late, I’ve felt a real desire to go more often.

In the last couple of months, I’ve gone three times. For me, that’s a lot.

One was a Byzantine Rite Catholic church.

Another was Lutheran, which is my family background.

The last was a radical, leftist church.

The leftists had the best music – gospel-type singing and lots of clapping, spontaneous outbursts, and terrific piano-playing. The preacher (pastor?) was funny and referred to his gay partner casually. A woman gave communion. It wasn’t my thing, but it was genuinely infectious and welcoming. No harsh words. The crowd was about 65% gay, a number of black people, some seniors.

The Lutheran church was definitely much more bourgeois and more formal. The priest was stout and cheerful, I remember. The hymns were the old ones and the liturgy was traditional, but not in any way boring. The crowd was mostly white, middle and upper- middle class folk. They went out of their way to talk to me and ask me to come back.

Culturally, they were closest to me.

The Byzantine Rite Catholic church was mostly Eastern European. I understood the service only intermittently by reading the translation. The music was unaccompanied chant and there was a lot of standing and kneeling. My knees hurt. A young man crawled on his stomach the full length from the door to the iconostasis. The women were carefully dressed and their heads were covered. They lifted up the little children so they could kiss the Bible and the crucifix. From every corner,  red candles flickered and the somber faces of ancient saints and angels looked down on the congregation.

 

There was no quick good feeling to be had. No infectious singing.  The chants were spare and medieval.

Yet it was here I was most at home.

Each church offered something.

For those who scoff at foot-thumping, head-nodding services, I say, remember King David.

He danced and sang in exaltation in his worship. He even took off his robes while he sang. Some people pointed the finger and scorned him for it.

For those who mock the stuffy middle-class, remember that Jesus never did. He was at home in the houses of tax-collectors and publicans, drank at their marriage feasts and played with their children.

He didn’t deride their conventions, even when he flouted them. Instead, he kept traditional feasts in the traditional manner.

Media Using Trump To Bash Evangelicals

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While the media claims that evangelicals are a large part of Trump’s massive popularity, the statistics show otherwise.

The numbers show that Trump is actually much more popular with over-sixty unchurched voters, many of whom fall into the category of working-class.

That would explain why Trump’s distinctly secular and hedonistic attitudes have not put a dent in his support. Most of his supporters are not conservative/evangelical Christians at all.

They are disenfranchised older male working-class stiffs.

The Federalist.com:

Evangelical populists, the bloc once labeled the Religious Right, are frustrated by a GOP establishment that has frittered away this summer’s anti-Planned Parenthood moment. They are frustrated that party bigwigs spent much of the past few years calling for the party to “rebrand” and downplay social issues. They are frustrated by a Supreme Court that redefines marriage, lets Obamacare survive, and reigned by Justice Kennedy’s Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence. Evangelical populists are not just animated by social issues, but by generalized frustration with the ever-expanding, unconstitutional reach of big government. In Pew’s Political Typology, evangelical populists are “Steadfast Conservatives.”

 

Trumpian populists, in contrast, are frustrated by China “killing us in trade,” by hedge-fund managers who “pay no tax,” and, of course, by the bipartisan collusion of the Washington elite on immigration. In many ways, these sorts of complaints traditionally resonated with the white, working-class voters of the Democrat Party. Many of the same themes animate Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy. Per Pew, Trumpian populists are “Hard-Pressed Skeptics.”

But while evangelical and Trumpian populism are distinct, there is obviously the potential for some overlap. For instance, despite Russell Moore’s efforts, I think a majority of evangelical populists are immigration hawks. Still, the overall thrust and tenor of these two groups differs widely.

 

So if evangelicals do not form the backbone of Trump’s support and are instead the religious subgroup least excited about him, how can we explain the media’s behavior over the past two weeks?

Many of these pundits are merely looking for any way to bash the evangelical piñata.

Some of it is the fault of our reliance on polls that don’t differentiate between evangelicals who go to church and “evangelicals” who never go to church. It’s a garbage in, garbage out process when pundits premise their analysis on fundamentally defective statistics. Public Policy Polling’s latest national poll found that 53 percent of GOP primary voters were evangelical Christians. That’s a pretty dramatic overstatement.

But I think there’s something more systematic going on. Many of these pundits are merely looking for any way to bash the evangelical piñata, and associating this disfavored demographic with the Donald’s degeneracy is simply too tempting to pass up.

For one journalist, supporting the twice-divorced Trump might prove the rank hypocrisy of evangelical voters. Frank Bruni’s column laid this charge on particularly thick:

If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Seems to work for Donald Trump… proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.”

It’s all about bashing a(ny) religion that demands standards of behavior with which the thought-leaders of today no longer want to comply.

UK, France, On Verge Of Kafkaesque Police State

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The Guardian sounds a warning about the acceleration of surveillance in the UK and France:

Two British MPs, Tom Watson and David Davis, crossed the party divide and with campaigning organisation Liberty, won a legal challenge against the rushed, undemocratic Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa), passed in July 2014.

The High Court found that Dripa was unlawful because it did not adequately ensure that access to, and use of, communications data (though not its collection) was limited to what was necessary, appropriate and proportionate for preventing and detecting serious crime.

The decision has been welcomed for, finally, recognising in the UK what a number of other countries and a slew of independent examiners have demanded: proper judicial oversight of a “general retention regime on a potentially massive scale”. Where it falls down, as do many of those reports, is in accepting, implicitly or explicitly, the euphemistic re-characterisation of mass surveillance as “bulk interception” or “bulk collection”, thus endorsing an incursion into our private lives, papers, thoughts and communications that has no precedent in the law of the land.
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Disappointingly, however, the Dripa victory is likely short-lived. Immediately, the Home Office declared its disagreement with the High Court’s decision, pledging to appeal. And of course, the Conservative government has already made abundantly clear its intention to enact a single, comprehensive law – the so-called “snooper’s charter” – which many fear would unleash a tidal wave of surveillance at political and executive discretion.

This is where the other side of the channel comes in. Late on Thursday 23 July, in France’s highest constitutional body, the last safeguard of the rule of law fell, approving what is, by all measures, an intrusive, comprehensive, virtually-unchecked surveillance law.

A pipe-dream for two years, the French law gathered momentum in March this year in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, and was put together in the French parliament under emergency procedures, drastically reducing discussion time and preventing any meaningful debate. The law was overwhelmingly approved by parliament in June and immediately referred to the constitutional council by nearly everyone who could do so, including François Hollande – the first time the president has deferred a law voted by parliament in the Fifth Republic.
France approves ‘Big Brother’ surveillance powers despite UN concern

The case also attracted an unheard of number of amicus briefs, many of which were made public, and most of which involved an impassioned cry about the unprecedented incursion on civil liberties that the law mandates.

And yet, despite this, the French council approved, with very few exceptions, a law that allows intelligence agencies to monitor phone calls and emails without prior judicial authorisation; to require internet service providers to install “black boxes” that filter all internet traffic, combing everyone’s metadata in order to identify deviant behaviours based on unknown parameters and provide access to the agencies; and to bug cars, homes and keyboards for images, sound and data.

All of this, of course, is discussed as being targeted at “suspected terrorists”. But all of it, equally and more significantly, touches us all; anyone and everyone who traverses the internet. The law’s goal is to improve the agencies’ tools for a large variety of vaguely stated purposes: terrorism, but also political surveillance, competitive intelligence for France’s major economic, industrial and scientific interests, the fight against organised crime, and goodness knows what else to come.”

EU Forces Migrant Burden-Sharing On Europe

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The EU, which seemed to have fallen apart over the migrant crisis only last week, has rebounded, writes Nigel Farage at Breitbart:

The European Parliament Martin Schulz appeared on German national television, ZDF. And during an interview about the migrant crisis and the lack of EU solidarity, Schulz said: “We will eventually have to use force and fight to push ahead” that in the end the countries would have to be forced to do the right thing. This led to some slightly hysterical online reaction with some Poles believing that the tanks were revving up to cross the border. 

For my part, I simply couldn’t understand what he was saying. As the week then developed, the Schengen system appeared to be disintegrating with fences and borders going up, not just to countries like Serbia, outside the EU, but effectively even between EU member states. Many eurosceptics across the continent were happily predicting the demise of the whole project.

The European Parliament met this week for a one day plenary session on Wednesday. On Tuesday afternoon I heard that a special request had been made to extend the sitting to include Thursday going to be an important vote.

The EU Commission were proposing legislation to enforce burden-sharing amongst EU countries with the provision for any states that refused of a fining procedure. Never in my sixteen years in the European Parliament have I seen a piece of legislation so rapidly produced and without any warning beforehand.

I now understood what Schulz had been saying. The fact that the European Council had refused meant that the Commission in Parliament would legislate. 

No surprise to say that the European Parliament passed this law with an overwhelming majority. I could see a deep sense of self-satisfaction on many people’s faces. I think some of them truly believe that they are doing the right thing. 

This law now has to go back to the same European Council that last week rejected the very concept of burden-sharing. So you may think they will simply refuse it again. To think such things is to gravely underestimate the fantasism and chicanery that lie deep at the heart of the EU project. They will be able if they choose to push this measure through under a system known as qualified majority voting which effectively means that the big countries can outvote the smaller Eastern European states. 

It is a paradox with the modern EU that the more each of its grand designs such as the Euro and the current migrant crisis fail, the greater is the ability of Brussels to gain more powers and more centralisation. 

In nearly every case, from Tsipras’ election victory in Greece to the current crisis, nothing stops the juggernaut. Every objection is overruled. The European Council meets again next week. One day, this whole thing will blow apart though I suspect not just yet. For now, Mr. Juncker can enjoy his fine lunches.”

John Paul II Was Jewish, Says Jewish Historian

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This becomes more and more fascinating. Is there any major voice in public life that is not Jewish?

From The Catholic Knight blog:

A MANCHESTER historian has claimed that Pope John Paul II was Jewish.

Yaakov Wise says his study into the the maternal ancestry of Karol Josez Wojtyla (John Paul II’s real name) has revealed startling conclusions.

Mr Wise, a researcher in orthodox Jewish history and philosophy, said the late Pope’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were all probably Jewish and came from a small town not far from Krakow.

The Pope was a priest and cardinal archbishop in the Polish city before his election to the papacy.

Mr Wise said: “According to orthodox Judaism, a person’s Jewish identity is passed down through the maternal line. I saw a photograph of the Pope’s mother and I showed it to people who didn’t know who she was…

read full story here

THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: Somehow I’m not surprised by this. It is now common knowledge that Karol Wojtyla fell in love with a Jewish woman prior to enrolling in the seminary. Had she not been taken away by the Nazis, it is very probable that Wojtyla would have married and had children with her. Sadly, she was taken away, and Wojtyla’s sadness over this eventually led him to the priesthood, where he would find comfort in serving God. This makes a lot of sense to me. The man’s mother was Jewish (which officially makes him Jewish), and she died when he was very young. Then he fell in love with a woman just like his mom. I find it interesting that Pope John Paul II (Wojtyla), during his 27 year papacy, fostered within the Church a revived devotion to Mary — a Jewish mother.

Jewish popes are nothing new to the Catholic Church. We know the first ten popes were Jewish (especially St. Peter), and it is speculated that many more popes were Jewish as well…

  • Pope Zephyrin (199-217)
  • Pope Siricus (384-399)
  • Pope Hormidas (514-523)
  • Pope Analdet II (1130-1138)
  • Pope Callistus III (1455-1458)
  • Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503)
  • Pope Pius III (1503)
  • Pope Leo X (1513-1521)
  • Pope Clement VII (1523-1534)
  • Pope Paul III (1534-1549)
  • Pope St. Pius V (1566-1572)
  • Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585)
  • Pope Pius XI (1922-1939)
  • Pope Pius XII (1939-1958)
  • Pope John XXIII (1958-1963)
  • Pope Paul VI (1963-1978)
  • Pope John Paul II (1978-2005)

Brazil Denounces Christophobic Cultural Subversion

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Brazilians have reacted strongly against extreme anti-Christian bigotry on display in Gay Pride Parades in the country:

– In the wake of numerous homosexual “pride” parades laced with anti-Christian profanities that have sparked outrage in Brazil, legislators are advancing a new law that will make “Christophobia” a felony.

Photos of the desecration of Christian images at the parades – an activity which is common in homosexual “pride” events throughout the world – have circulated widely in the Brazilian media and social networking sites this year. The offensive image that is receiving the most attention is that of the male to female transsexual Viviany Beleboni in this year’s Sao Paulo parade, who was portrayed as crucified on a cross seminude with a sign reading “Enough of Homophobia.”

Other images reportedly taken from the parades and displayed on the Facebook page of one Brazilian congressman show additional cases of desecration of Christian symbols. One photo shows two naked lesbians on a cross kissing on the lips. Another shows two people who appear to be a man and a woman sitting naked on top of piles of crucifixes, with sacred images covering their genitals.

Other images show nude men smashing sacred images on the ground, and a transsexual stripping naked in a lewd dance in front of a church.

Rogério Rosso, representing the nation’s federal district in the House of Deputies, has responded by proposing a new law prohibiting such displays and imposing a fine, and up to eight years in prison, for perpetrators. Such legislation would reverse the penalties sought by homosexuals against Christians who express their rejection of sodomy, applying them to homosexuals and others who desecrate the sacred images of a religion.

“The intention of the bill is to protect the beliefs and objects used in religious rituals by Brazilian citizens, because what has been happening in recent years during demonstrations, particularly those of LGBTs, is what we can call ‘Christophobia,’ with the practice of obscene and degrading acts which show prejudice against Catholics and Evangelicals,” Rosso states in the text of the bill.

Senator Magno Malta denounced the government-funded parades for going “outside the boundaries” of proper discourse, sowing “intolerance and disrespect for religious liberty.” He has asked federal prosecutors to begin a criminal investigation of the behavior.

“This country is Christian, and now, here, I speak in the name of millions of Brazilian Christians, Catholic Christians, spiritualists, Evangelicals from throughout the country, taking a position in their name. There is a general revulsion with this nefarious, unscrupulous and abominable attitude. You have passed the limit,” Malta said on the Senate floor following the June 7 marches.”

Tell me again why Hispanics/Latins entering the US is a bad thing from the perspective of the culture wars?

 

 

Jonathan Cahn “Fake Shemitah” Update

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Jonathan Cahn, the hugely popular Messianic Rabbi, whose best-selling books have been preaching a “Shemitah” judgment on the US,  has admitted that he blew the date.

Sept. 13th came and went without a terrorist attack, financial collapse, or a meteor hit, but Cahn now says his window is bigger – any time between September 2015 and September 2016.

That of course makes nonsense of Shemitah timing, but who’s counting…

[When I call it “fake Shemitah” I don’t mean that the Shemitah cycle is fake. I am saying Cahn’s misappropriation of it is false and that if anything disastrous were to happen at the time, it would be because the masonic New World Order elite has contrived it, playing on the credulity of many Christians]

Right-Wing Watch.org:

After predicting for the entire last year that “The Shemitah” on Sunday, September 13, would usher in some cataclysmic event in America — possibly an economic crash, inclement weather, war or terrorist attacks — messianic rabbi Jonathan Cahn appeared on “The 700 Club” today to save face (and sell more books) after September 13 came and went without anything out of the ordinary happening.

When host Pat Robertson asked him if anything noteworthy happened on the 13th, Cahn first tried to avoid the question but eventually told the televangelist that “you can’t put God in a box or He’ll get out of it,” saying that God doesn’t work in exact dates.

Of course, Cahn himself declared that this potential disaster would occur on an “exact date … in accordance with the ancient mystery” of the Shemitah, a day when the land is left fallow and debts are forgiven. “The coming Shemitah will end September 2015. Its final climatic day, Elul 29, the Day of Remission, will fall on Sunday, September 13,” he wrote in “The Harbinger.”

WorldNetDaily repeatedlyreported on Cahn’s September 13 prophecy, with messages like “Mark This Date For Potential Disaster,” “Get Ready: Biblical Shemitah’ Begins This Week,” and “Countdown To Disaster.” WND is even making a movie about Cahn’s prophetic message.

Cahn, however, said that the stock market selloff that occurred on August 18 of this year came close enough to the September 13 date to count as a fulfillment of his prophecy. “It started in the summer,” he said. He also pointed to Sunday’s relatively minor earthquake off the Gulf of California, which is actually located in Mexico and doesn’t even touch the U.S. As if Cahn couldn’t get any more vague, he also said that the Shemitah period marked America’s decline from the world’s leading economic power.

Moving the goalposts even further, Cahn went on to claim that his prophecy would be proven correct as long as something bad happens anytime between now and September 2016: “That’s the period.”

So once something, anything, bad happens within the year, Cahn will take credit for predicting it!

The preacher went on to allege that the construction of a new skyscraper at Ground Zero, the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality and the White House’s rainbow light display celebrating LGBT Pride Month are all bringing God’s wrath upon America.

Cahn then presented the most conclusive proof of all: He once spoke to a man who said he had a dream before the 9/11 attacks of an angel telling him that the Twin Towers would collapse, but he didn’t tell anybody, and now this unnamed prophet who failed to warn everyone about 9/11 is having similar dreams of something bad happening in the future!

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/jonathan-cahn-blows-september-13-doomsday-prophecy-finds-convenient-explanation#sthash.WWkBxSu9.dpuf

The Racist Vision Behind Pan-Europa

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The current “migrant crisis” has been planned to hasten the demise of any vestige of Christian culture in Europe and impose on it a totalitarian anti-Christian system.

That much a careful parsing of the actors and ideologies involved tells us.

Israel’s Messiah must come…. and Edom/Esau must submit before he comes, according to the vision of eminent Rabbis.

But there is another element in this story.

The Pan-Europa vision is not simply of Fortress Europe commanded from a distance by Talmudic sages.

It is a vision of a racially mixed multitude that will be under an aristocracy of Jews and European nobility.

The promulgator of this vision  was Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, an aristocrat of ancient lineage and great wealth. He was of mixed Flemish, Greek, and Japanese descent, with an admixture of several other European ethnicities.

In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism), 1925, he wrote:

The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian–Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.

Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe’s feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation.”

 

Charlie Hebdo Mocks Europe, Christianity, Orban

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The cartoonist-provocateurs at Charlie Hebdo are back in the lime-light for a cartoon of the drowned Syrian refugee child, supposedly intended to mock European Christians for their refusal to admit Muslim migrants into the country, using Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, as the example.

But, as I’ve noted, Viktor Orban is an ethnic Jew whose Christianity is fairly nominal and intended only for political purposes. He  is a corrupt, crony-capitalist opportunist, heavily indebted to Jewish power-brokers, including the former chief Ashkenazy rabbi of Israel.

Furthermore, Hebdo is a leading neo-conservative and pro-Israel instigator for war against Islam that earlier published scurrilous pictures of Mohammed and Jesus, provoking global outrage.

The inflammatory cartoon is more proof that the “migrant crisis” was created by the powers-that-be to incite Muslims against Christians and immigrants against Europeans.

At the same time, the ruling cabal funds virulently racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, to which Hebdo itself has contributed.

From the NY Times:

And in a scathing editorial introducing the issue, Mr. Sourisseau made it clear that his intended target was what he called the hypocritical response to the crisis by European leaders and the public. After comparing indifference to the plight of the migrants in France to attitudes toward Jews in 1941, the cartoonist mocked statements by the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, who suggested that an influx of Muslims from the Middle East threatened efforts to “keep Europe Christian.” Mr. Sourisseau argued that this vision of Europe seemed to be based on a version of Christianity from which the ideal of Christian charity had been removed.

  1. One of his cartoons, showing the young boy drowning alongside Jesus walking on water, illustrated this idea. “The Proof That Europe Is Christian,” the cartoon was headlined. “Christians walk on water,” the text read, “Muslim children sink.”

“ISIS-Loving” Danish Teen, Refugee Friend, Murder Mother

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A murder trial from last year reveals an ISIS-inspired plot:

Lisa Borch, 15, planned to join ISIS in Syria with her Iraqi boyfriend after the killing

A Danish teenage girl has been sentenced to nine years in jail for murdering her mother in what appears to be an ISIS-inspired killing.

[“appears,” “ISIS-inspired”….]

The Independent reports that just minutes before the fatal assault occurred in October of last year, 15-year-old Lisa Borch had spent hours watching ISIS videos of the decapitations of the two British hostages, David Haines and Alan Henning.

A Danish court heard that the teen planned to join ISIS in Syria with her Iraqi boyfriend, Bakhtiar Mohammed Abdulla, 29. His fingerprints were also found at the scene of the crime and he has been sentenced to 13 years.

Borch originally met Abdulla at a refugee center near her home, the Independent says.

“This murder was cold-blooded, ice cold and committed in a bestial manner,” the prosecution told the court.

The court could not determine which of the pair delivered the fatal stab wounds, and both were found guilty of the murder.”

[Independent]

However, what is not mentioned in this account and in many other accounts is that it was Lisa who called the police after the killing and said,

‘I heard my mother scream and I looked out the window and saw a white man running away. Please come here, there is blood everywhere.’

This could just have been a clumsy cover story that the pair concocted, but it is certainly worth investigating, since we know that there are many people who stand to profit from war/confrontation in Europe.

He claimed to have only arrived to ‘help Lisa’ after the teenager had already killed her mother. But Borch said Abdulla had actually been the knifeman.

The muddled version of events meant the court heard several stories about what actually happened.

Although Abdulla was no longer at the property when police arrived, investigators found his fingerprints in the victim’s bedroom.

Although it couldn’t be established who’d actually delivered the blows that killed Mrs Holtegaard, both of the accused were found guilty of murder.”