The world we live in

h/t Mike Miles

"Religious tolerance" specialists

Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center are esperts at using wonderful-sounding words like tolerance, while practicing thugish, totalitarian behaviors. Bookworm writes,

Christians as a whole, whether they belong to big churches or small ones, do not embrace or practice terrorism to achieve their political or religious goals.

Muslims, by contrast, routinely practice terrorism to achieve goals that are simultaneously religious and political, owing to Islam’s fusion of God and state. Even though it’s remarkably simple to tie Islam to terrorism (9/11, the underwear bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, the attempted Portland Christmas tree massacre, the Boston Marathon bombing), Leftists scurry around like cockroaches exposed to the light in their desperate attempt to avoid acknowledging Islam’s violent heart.

...modern Christianity and genuine Judaism (as opposed to the hard Leftism that masquerades as “reform Judaism”) are the most humane, civilizing forces the world has ever seen. With their focus on justice and grace, they rid the world of slavery, ended child labor, advanced women’s status and, in Israel’s case, fought a 60-year war without sinking to the level of her enemies. But the Left truly hates them and seeks to undermine them at every turn.

...the military has brought in Michael Weinstein, Esq., a “religious tolerance” specialist and the man who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (“MRFF”). Michael knows all about tolerance. Or at least, he knows all about tolerance in the Obama era. To Michael (or “Mikey” as he likes to be known), a good way to express tolerance is to call Christians “monsters” or, even better “bloody monsters.”

What inspired Weinstein’s apopletic rage is the fact that conservatives took offense when the military piggy-backed on a delusional Southern Poverty Law Center screed and identified conservative Christians as the greatest terrorist threat in America.

Even worse than the applause he’s getting from the mainstream Left is the fact that he’s been taken on by the Pentagon as a consultant to help develop new policies on religious tolerance in the military. These new policies will include rules for court-martialing military chaplains who use the Christian gospel when they counsel the American troops under their care.

...The problem is that it’s not Christians committing the crimes he imagines. The major terrorist crimes come from the Islamists, something that Mike and his friends on the Left refuse to acknowledge.

Speaking of committed, though, in a sane world Mikey’s delusions would have him being checked out by psychiatrists as a clear and present danger. In our insane world, psychiatrists are used to disarm our veterans and the delusional, hate-filled, spittle-flecked Mikey gets to work with the Pentagon to create a tolerance policy that ensures that military chaplains will be court martialed for doing their jobs.

As for me, I think that people who are willing to fight and die for their country in a constitutionally-bound military run by civilians, in a nation controlled by the First Amendment, should be allowed to practice their religion without Leftists denying them the comfort of knowing that, as they go into battle, God walks at their side.

Read more here.

Christians and Pharisees

James Patrick Riley observes,

When you finally come to the conclusion there is a God, you’re likely to try to attempt to please Him.

And this is where it can get dangerous. You might be on your way to the sanctuary for worship, and you see a man curled up by the side of the road, bloody and beaten by robbers. Something tells you the man needs your help (that’s God talking to you), but you are wearing your Sunday best, and you’re not trained as a first responder, and you’ve been given the honor of opening today’s meeting in prayer, and, besides, this guy is probably a drug addict and you have little children you’re responsible for — so you hurry on to church and you prove that you have the spirit of the Pharisee — that weird inclination to ignore what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law.”

The #NeverTrump movement is defined by this Pharisee spirit. It is chock full of it. Texas pastor Max Lucado is a great example. Max leads what he calls a “red state” church, but Max has a maxim: ”I don’t want anybody to know how I vote.” Max does this to make sure the Democratic voters in his church, the ones who support abortion on demand, Islamo-pandering, and class warfare are not made to feel uncomfortable. However, Max recently broke his neutrality pledge when Donald Trump called a bimbo a bimbo. According to Max:

I would not have said anything about Mr. Trump, never — I would never have said anything if he didn’t call himself a Christian. It’d be none of my business whatsoever to make any comments about his language, his vulgarities, his slander of people, but I was deeply troubled … that here’s a man who holds up a Bible one day, and calls a lady “bimbo” the next.

Think on that for a moment. Max closes his eyes to another “Christian,” Barack Obama, who stands foursquare for the slaughter of millions of unborn babies, at your expense, but Donald Trump called a lady a “bimbo?” Intolerable! Unthinkable! Impolite! Time to engage the Pharisee warp engines.

Donald is a blunt customer, but it looks like he does have a heart. When asked about abortion, Trump related a story close to home. He said that he knew of a pregnancy that was going to be terminated. ”That child today,” Donald continued, ”is a total superstar. It is a great great child.”

When Donald Trump picked the most pro-life running mate in history to be his partner in the quest for the presidency, Governor Mike Pence, he backed up that claim. He made good on his conversion to the life issue, and, in so doing, he proved to be the opposite of the Pharisee spirit — a man who cares about the “weightier matters of the law.” Max Lucado may value political fence-sitting in church, a pleasant smile, and a polite manners, but Donald Trump risked the wrath of a baby-killing culture, and even repudiated his own past, by embracing the politics of life.

Who is the real Christian here? The one who acts like it, or the one who puts on a polite show of neutrality?

Another of my Pharisee correspondents on Facebook wrote this about Donald Trump:

“If you are unconvinced that a foul mouthed, arrogant, strip club and casino owning, philanderer who boasts about being able to shoot people in the streets without losing voters, is immoral then I’m not really sure where to go with this conversation.”

Yet another invoked scripture in his rejection of Trump:

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”I’ve been around church people all of my life. Even at Stanford, where humanism was the prevailing denomination, I can tell you the religious spirit — whether it is lamenting “gambling” or shaming someone who didn’t recycle his bottle of Pepsi — brings out the worst side of human nature, and it brings ignorance into high relief.

Let’s take a few of these, one by one, starting with wagering. The Bible, folks, doesn’t say much about gambling. Our pious ancestors in New England used lotteries to build churches. If your only objection to Donald Trump rests in casino ownership, you really would feel right at home with the Christ-killing band because you have imbibed legalism as doctrine.

Foul mouthed? I’m guessing you haven’t read scripture with any real scrutiny, because when God gets angry, He doesn’t hold back. His prophets call harlots harlots. His Son called religious hypocrites, “white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.” “Vipers.” ”Sons of the Devil.” But even if you value a polite tongue, and that’s your virtue, don’t begin comparing that virtue to being courageous in the face of Islamic jihad. I will take a foul mouth defender of life over a church-sitting coward any day.

Arrogant? I always get a kick out of people who spend all day in some corner of the bureaucracy, who never need to make a sale, who never need to appear confident, because they get paid every day, whether they do anything useful or not. Donald has to convince people a skyscraper is worth building, folks. You are mistaking confidence, faith even, for arrogance, because you’ve never had to really make a sale. Try it sometime, and see if you can do it without boosting your confidence and risking looking a little “arrogant.”

Strip clubs and philandering. I won’t make any defense for that, but I would ask you to look to yourselves. Do you buy television cable services from a company that also offers pornography? Do you stay in hotels with adult content on their television screens? Is your stock portfolio scrubbed clean of anyone who profits from soft porn? What’s in your wallet and where are you spending it? The press has been watching Donald pretty closely now for 18 months. Have you seen any philandering stories? I haven’t.

And I would ask you to look to your Bibles again. God uses some pretty gritty characters to work His glorious and sovereign will. Jacob was a trickster who lied to his father. Abraham had wives and concubines. Samson kept a harlot. Solomon had hundreds of concubines. Peter betrayed Christ. Saul of Tarsus, was a murderous wretch.

You actually know all about that, but when you see a flawed man, in the flesh, you act just like a stoning torch mob, and you won’t even admit it.

Jesus knew all about this dismissive, self-righteous character of ours. He knew our nature. He knew there’s a Pharisee spirit in us that takes pride in being faithful to our wives, even as our horn-dog spirit wrestles with Donald Trump’s beauty pageants. Are we righteous, or just jealous? When the harlot adorns Jesus’ feet with precious ointment, are we accusing or praising God for forgiveness?

Donald Trump is more righteous than you think. He wants to protect you from Islamic zealots. He wants to protect your right to defend your families with firearms. He even wants to exempt your pulpits from IRS tyranny. He wants to end the death tax, so you can pass on your farms and your family business to your children. He wants to lower your taxes. He wants to protect the lives of unborn children and appoint Constitutional judges.

Read more here:
h/t Gini McGrath

The greatest tyranny of all is the tyranny of relgion

Dr. Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy agrees that no Islamic should ever be elected President of the United States. Thousands of Muslims are fighting for freedom, and they are ignored by the President of the United States. One can be a Muslim without being a theocrat.

Feckless

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead puts the European immigration crisis into context:

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The migration crisis enveloping Europe and much of the Middle East today is one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the 1940s. Millions of desperate people are on the march: Sunni refugees driven out by the barbarity of the Assad regime in Syria, Christians and Yazidis fleeing the pornographic violence of Islamic State, millions more of all faiths and no faith fleeing poverty and oppression without end. Parents are entrusting their lives and the lives of their young children to rickety boats and unscrupulous criminal syndicates along the Mediterranean coast, professionals and business people are giving up their livelihoods and investments, farmers are abandoning their land, and from North Africa to Syria, the sick and the old are on the road, carrying a few treasured belongings on a new trail of tears.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Today we are watching the failure of Islamism. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic State, Islamist movements have had no more success in curing the ills of Arab civilization than any of the secular movements of the past. Worse, the brutal fanaticism and nihilistic violence of groups like Islamic State undercuts respect for more moderate versions of Islamic spirituality and thought.

The Turks and the Iranians have had more economic and institutional success than the Arabs, but in both Turkey and Iran today, the outlook is bleak. Iran is ruled by a revolutionary alliance of reactionary clerics and hungry thugs, and it is committed to a regional policy of confrontation and sectarian war. Like the Soviet Union, Iran is an uneasy conglomeration of national and cultural groups held together by a radical but increasingly stale ideology. Turkey, too, is cursed by blind Islamist enthusiasm and unresolved ethnic and ideological chasms. Neither country is immune to the violence sweeping the region, and neither country has been able to develop policies that would calm rather than roil their turbulent surroundings.

At the same time, foreign values are challenging traditional beliefs and practices across the region. Women throughout the Islamic world are seeking to shape theological and social ideas to better reflect their own experience. Modern science and historical and textual criticism pose many of the questions for traditional Islamic piety that 19th-century science and biblical criticism posed for Christianity. Young people continue to be exposed to information, narratives and images that are difficult to reconcile with traditions they were raised to take for granted.

As hundreds of thousands of refugees stumble from the chaos of an imploding Arab world toward Europe, and as millions more seek refuge closer to home, we see a crisis of confidence in the very structures of Middle Eastern civilization, including religion. Reports that hundreds of Iranian and other refugees from the Islamic world are seeking Christian baptism in Europe can be seen as one aspect of this crisis. If people feel that the religion they were raised in and the civilization of which they are a part cannot master the problems of daily life, they will seek alternatives.

In eastern and central Europe, the social and economic conditions for absorbing mass migration from the Middle East simply don’t exist. The relatively homogenous ethnic nation states that now comprise the region were created through generations of warfare, often accompanied by episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Most of these states enjoyed a brief period of independence between the two world wars and were then engulfed, first by the Nazis and later by the Soviet empire. Their independence and security still feel fragile, and most of their citizens still believe that the role of the state is to protect the well-being of their own ethnic group and express its cultural values.

And the flow of refugees to Europe could easily grow. The Turkish war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party could escalate. Social breakdown or the victory of radical Islamist forces in Egypt could provoke a mass flight of the Copts, the last remaining large Christian population in a region that has seen one Christian community after another exterminated or forced into exile over the last 150 years. The sectarian war in Syria could intensify and spread into Lebanon. The intensifying religious conflict across the Sahel and northern sub-Saharan Africa could create the kind of political and economic insecurity that would produce vast flows of desperate migrants and asylum seekers.

The humanitarian question of refugees and asylum seekers cannot be separated from the bankruptcy of Western security policy in Syria and Libya, and the bankruptcy of Western policy cannot be separated from the long-standing difficulties that many European states have in taking a responsible attitude toward questions of military security.

The utter failure of Western policy in both Libya and Syria has to be seen for what it is: not just a political blunder but a humanitarian crime. The feckless mix of intervention and indifference in Libya and the equally feckless failure to intervene in Syria have helped to trigger the flows of migrants that are overwhelming Europe’s institutions.

...Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.

Read more here.

About that junior varsity

Ann Voskamp gives us her second post on her trip to Iraq.

ISIS sells nine year old girls in slave bazaars.

Click away, turn the other way if you want, but those girls are wild to turn and escape — and they can’t. They are categorized. Stripped. And shipped naked. Examined and distributed. Sold and passed around like meat. Livestock.

You can walk into any mall and buy a pair of NIKE running shoes for what they are buying a Christian or Yezidi girl from 1-9 years of age — $172 dollars. And she’s yours. For whatever you want, for as long as you want, to make do whatever you want. Sit with that. Yeah, we’re all done living in a world where a pair of shoes can last longer, have more worth, be treated with more value, than a fondled, raped and discarded 9 year-old-girl.

The United Nations reports this week that at least one young girl’s been “married” over 20 times — and forced at the end of each violation to undergo surgery to “restore” her virginity.

So it could be ripped open and destroyed by the next highest bidder.

Look — We’re all done with keeping up with the Kardashians or whatever flash of skin is being flaunted on red carpets — when there are little girls being devoured on bare concrete floors and we will keep company with Jesus and be the ones who do something about the things that breaks His heart.

I sit with 4 Yezidi mothers in a shipping container where they sleep.

They need someone to have enough courage to not turn away. That is us.

Sozan holds a swaddled baby in her lap on the floor.

No furniture. No beds. No running water in a shipping container.

She leans forward and whispers to me: “Our life was normal before. Our children went to school. Our families had homes, we worked hard.

ISIS takes everything. ISIS destroys our homes. We lose everything.

Now we’ve had to run here for our lives. We don’t speak the language here. We have nothing here.

Our children can’t go to school here. Our children wake with nightmares here — about everything that happened there.”

Sozan, Marwa, Leyla, these mothers sitting here — not one of these mothers were ever allowed to go to school — because they were girls.

Not one of them can read. Not one can write. Not one of them can even read or sign any letters of their name. They have been made invisible. Made invisible prey.

...How do you just sit on the floor of a shipping container and just let these women carry this kind of terror alone — how do you turn away and go back to your neat little life of wheaties and news reels and how does the church not stand up and howl?

...“We had to choose…” Sozan looks up at me. Mawra’s eyes are squeezed tight — like she’s trying to forget.

“We had to choose which children we could take — and which we had to leave behind.”

It’s like the air’s sucked out of the shipping container, out of the membranes of my lungs.

True, you’ve got to shoehorn yourself into the car because the baby needs you running liquid into their hunger as milk — but how do you turn to your boy and say — “We can’t get you in, Son. There’s no more room, Son.” There are words you lose in translation. Who in the world has categories for this?

No water anywhere — for any of our children. There is no food. Six of the children with us — six of my nieces and nephews” — she holds up her fingers — “six of them, they die. No water, no food.”

“We have to leave their bodies on the mountain. We have to cover them with stones. We can’t get dig down, we can’t down into the mountain to bury them. Too hard.”

I am trying not to see the faces of my own children.

Why in God’s holy name are we born into North American ease?

Read more here.

It depends on whose ox is being gored

Investors Business Daily editorializes,

The lives of the four Jews killed in a kosher market in Paris were dismissed by Obama as "a bunch of folks in a deli" shot "randomly" as they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Detect a pattern here?

The recent murderous attack on a free speech event in Copenhagen organized by an artist who had caricatured Muhammad wasn't just another random attack on people who happened to be in the wrong place.

Nor was the mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by Islamic State terrorists in Libya, a failed state brought about by administration bungling and failure to acknowledge who our enemies are and why they're trying to kill us.

If the president really believes Americans shouldn't be murdered for what they believe or who they are, why does he seemingly include only Muslim victims?

And isn't it true that the Islamic State is only the latest to target Christians because they are Christians? From the Christian-influenced Yazidis in Iraq to the Christian schoolgirls targeted by Boko Haram in Nigeria, Christians worldwide have had their churches bombed and burned and themselves murdered, all because of what they believe and who they are.

Read more here.

Is the death of Africans any less horrific than the death of Frenchmen?

These are some of the 147 African Christian college students killed in Kenya by the Islaists. For some reason, our media does not cover these African stories like it did Charlie Hebdo. Have you noticed?

thanks to Christopher Buckley

A difference of degree

Mark Steyn had this to say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show about the "deal" with Iran:

I gather the talks were near to collapse when the Iranian foreign minister proposed converting the Fordo nuclear facility into a homophobic bakery. At that point, the Americans threatened to walk out and the whole thing looked it was going to collapse. But fortunately, they said they're going to keep the centrifuges spinning in that underground facility that can't be bombed...

HUGH HEWITT: Al-Shabaab has mercilessly executed 147 at a Kenyan university this morning. Things are quiet around the globe thanks to the leadership of President Obama.

MS: Yeah, that's right... Again, they demanded to know whether people were Christian or whether they were Muslim, and then, at this university in Kenya, they killed all the Christians. They haven't started killing them, yet, in Indiana, but this TV reporter going from pizzeria to coffee shop and demanding to know if the proprietors were Christian and what they thought of the legislation in Indiana, and then finding some poor sap who was willing to talk to her, and then the Big Gay enforcers descended on that pizzeria and forced it to close down. That's actually a difference of degree.

HH: Now Mark Steyn, I am a huge fan of Apple. I own every Apple device. I’ve got two of them in front of me. I think Tim Cook is a visionary. And I haven’t sold a share of the stock since I’ve got it. I’ve still got it. I believe in it. It’s a great product. On the other hand, he wrote this piece in the Washington Post, and he did not mention. I called his PR people and invited him to come on. I’d like to hear him answer this. He is selling products in Saudi Arabia. He is selling products in China. These are two of the world’s worst human rights violators. There is no freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia. In China, people are thrown in jail for gathering for prayer. You never see them again. What in the world prompts American CEO’s to attack a Religious Freedom Restoration Act which has been in effect in Washington, D.C. since 1993 without a single instance of the discrimination of the sort worried about by critics of the Indiana law?

MS: Yeah, you’re right. In a sense, a company like Apple has no nationality, has no borders. It’s global. And it does business with whoever wants it to do business with. I have no doubt that if Kim Jong Un made them the right offer, Apple would happily do business with Kim Jong Un. The Iranian government, after today’s events, will have a lot more money with which to buy a lot more Apple products, and I’m sure he looks forward, Apple looks forward to opening up in the Iranian market. They pick on Indiana because they can. And that’s the difference. That’s why they don’t, there’s nothing accidental about this. People who think that litigious betrothed gays are accidentally stumbling into homophobic bakeries, it’s an organized campaign targeting these bakeries. Now they’re not going into the nice, little Muslim patisserie in Dearborn, Michigan, or Falls Church, Virginia, and demanding that the Muslim bakers bake them a gay wedding cake, because they know they’d get an entirely different kind of response. Muscle respects muscle. And so Apple is happy to intimidate Indiana, but it understands that it’s, when it comes to Iran, that it’s not going to be able to intimidate them. And that’s why, and that’s why, and as you say, Apple makes very fine products. And congratulations to them on that. But when the CEO of a global company thinks that the biggest issue facing the world today is homophobic wedding cakes in Indiana is nuts, and he’s a bully, because bullies pick the weak targets, and Indiana Christians are a weak target, just like these poor Christian students in Kenya are a weak target.

Hewitt closes by asking Steyn about Hillary and her server being wiped clean:

Let me close by asking you about the politics of Hillary and her serve. She has brazenly wiped it down, and she got rid of the Sidney Blumenthal million emails from his private intelligence network, which at least to some people appear maybe to have skirted the outskirts of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Does she get away with this?

MS: Well, you know, the fact is Trey Gowdy offered her, I think, some kind of private meeting with his committee. In other words, he accepted Hillary Clinton’s view of herself, that she is not one of the 300 million citizens of this country, but she is some kind of special person. She’s like Barbra Streisand in politics. When Barbra Streisand comes into a room, you’ve got to have it carpeted before she’ll enter it, because otherwise, it might affect her voice. And Hillary Clinton regards herself as belonging to a special category. And the job, if any of this, these checks and balances things in the Constitution mean anything, the job of Trey Gowdy and other congressmen is to remind Mrs. Clinton that she is a citizen of the United States, no different from you, and no different from any other employee of the United States government when it comes to the bureaucratic requirements.

HH: Do you expect that to happen? 20 seconds.

MS: Well, given the way the Republican Party has behaved from Washington to Indiana to Arkansas in this last week, I think one would have to say that’s a bit of a long shot. But if I ever ran for the House of Representatives, Hugh, I can assure you it would happen. She’s supposed, if she’s going to be the president, she’s going to be a citizen president, not a queen.

HH: Oh, I thought we might have heard the prospect of a Steyn for House race there. We’ll follow up on that next week on the next Hugh Hewitt Show.

Read more here.

Losing incrementally

Mark Steyn writes,

... Christians are under attack in Africa. On this Passover, Jews are under assault in Europe. And on any day of the week anyone who catches the eye of the caliph's enforcers is getting his head sawed off in the Islamic State.

A commenter at Mark's blog wrote concerning the latest savagery by al Shabaab - the mass murder at Garissa University:

Mark, these Islamic militants singled out Christians. They separated them out and killed as many as they could. This happened at Westgate Mall and this happened in Mombasa during the World Cup. Why is it we will not admit a fanatical religion is a war with us?

To which Mark replied,

Because to do so would require too much of us. Marie Harf of the US State Department thinks that this is all a problem caused by lack of economic opportunity that can be solved with more investment, more jobs programs, etc. Modern civilization is deeply committed to the pre-eminence of homo economicus: Middle-class jobs and the comforts they bring are the solution to every problem. But the rise of Islamic imperialism teaches a cruel lesson - that culture trumps economics, always. The Kenyan targets - upscale malls, higher education, elite sporting events - underline the point: They tell the infidels that you can build the attributes of a successful, materially prosperous society, and we will destroy them. Because, to us, Islam trumps everything.

But, as I said, to acknowledge that would demand too much from us. It's easier to lose incrementally but unobtrusively - as those demographic numbers above suggest we're doing.

Mark was referring to this report by the Pew Research Center:

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) — Shifts in the world's major religions will see Islam growing faster than any other faith, with the number of Muslims nearly equaling that of Christians by 2050.

A new Pew Research Center study finds that with the exception of Buddhists, the world's major religions will all see an increase in numbers by 2050, although some will make up a smaller percentage from today. Muslims are the only major religious group projected to increase faster than the world's population as a whole... If current trends continue, Muslims will outnumber Christians worldwide around 2070.

Mark concludes on an optimistic note:

And yet tides ebb and flow. And on Good Friday of all days we should know that even at the darkest hour there is the possibility of resurrection, and new life. The future promised by that Pew study does not have to be, not if the civilized world recovers its will.

More here.

Christians fighting back in Pakistan

Ed Krayewski writes at reason.com,

A pair of suicide bombings the Pakistani Taliban took credit for interrupted Sunday mass at two churches in the Christian neighborhood of the city of Youhanabad. At least 15 people were killed, including two police officers who tried to block the terrorists’ way into the churches. Two suspected attackers were also killed by a mob that gathered after the attacks.

Via the Pakistani newspaper Dawn:

Up to 4,000 Christians later spread across the city’s streets; many were armed with clubs as they smashed vehicles and attacked a Metro bus station in a rare show of anger by the beleaguered minority…

The thousands of Christian protesters who clashed with police on Sunday attacked their cars with stones and sticks, as women wept and beat their heads and chests.

The protesters, some wearing crosses round their necks, later turned on the city's bus rapid transit system -- a signature project of the ruling PML-N party of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Christians make up around two percent of Pakistan's mainly Muslim population of 180 million. They have been targeted in attacks and riots in recent years, often over allegations of blasphemy…

Christians also took to the streets in other cities, including Karachi, where around 200 protesters blocked a main road and burnt tyres. There were also demonstrations in Peshawar in the northwest, in the central city of Multan and in Quetta in the southwest.

Best satire of 2015

Is Obama a Christian?

Matt Walsh asks,

Do you know who the media DIDN’T asked about Obama’s religion while Obama was running for president? Obama. And now they’re quizzing the governor of Wisconsin about it? Insane.

...You never win, no matter what, under any circumstance, when the liberal media set out to trap you. It doesn’t matter what you say or how you say it.

What would have been the appropriate way to respond? Walsh suggests:

Do I think Obama is a Christian? Do I look like his biographer? Why not ask me his shoe size next? Maybe his preferred Sleep Number setting? Truly, sir, this line of questioning is the dumbest thing I’ve encountered since the last time I encountered a reporter from the Washington Post. Why in the name of all that is holy are you quizzing me about the president’s religion? Why don’t you quiz him? Oh, that’s right, you’re a groveling coward and a pathetic excuse for a journalist. You forget that you’re job is to get to the truth and enlighten the people, not to seek out Republicans for cheap gotcha moments. You, sir, are a fraud, a disgrace, and an embarrassment to what’s left of your dying profession. This president has prosecuted, spied on, and stifled the media, yet you still carry his water like a spineless vassal. Why don’t you shine his shoes while you’re at it? You should be questioning authority, not shielding it from scrutiny, you shameless hack. I will not legitimize you by answering this question. Instead, I will pray that the Holy Spirit sees fit to endow you with even a shred of integrity and courage, so that you might one day decide to do something that in some way resembles journalism. Until then, please leave my presence before I become physically ill. Thank you, sir, good night.

As everyone has heard, Obama came of age in Jeremiah Wright’s church, learning that white people are bad and God hates America. He was indoctrinated into a heresy called Black Liberation Theology, which teaches, among other things, that Jesus was a black man who came to free the black race, and that whites can earn salvation through paying reparations to black people.

Now I don’t mean to turn this into a homily, but it is interesting to note that Jesus said “by their fruits you will know them.” So far all this talk about how we shouldn’t “judge” others, it seems that Christ is specifically telling us to make judgments about a person based on what they do. How else could we come to know a man by his actions? The insinuation here is that sometimes a person might say one thing but do another, and Jesus wants us to look at what they do and make judgments accordingly. That doesn’t mean we’re omnipotent; it just means we shouldn’t go around like blind idiots (my word, not His) believing everything everyone says, no matter how they actually conduct themselves.

What about Obama's consistent support for abortion throughout his career? Walsh writes,

We know that Obama is either lying about his belief in Christ (my guess) or he honestly believes that Christ blesses abortion and wants to see more of His children ripped to shreds and tossed in medical waste dumpsters. Obama hasn’t just done every conceivable thing in his power to bring about that end, he has done so while invoking the name of God. What sort of Christianity is this? And I hate to think what sort of Christians we are, that so many of us think it impolite to loudly say: “If you believe in a Jesus who celebrates the slaughter of babies, you do not believe in Jesus.”

While many of us try to equivocate and make excuses for men like Obama, it was Jesus who spoke out in terms that, nowadays, would lead to Him being scolded and disowned by many Christians. Christ Himself, who loved children and made it clear that the smallest among us should always be welcomed and protected, said:

If anyone causes harm to these little ones, it would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Did you catch that? Can we all take a moment to let that one sink in (no pun intended)? You would be better off dead than harming a child. It would be wiser to literally drown in the ocean than do anything that would bring harm, whether physical or spiritual, to a child. That’s God talking. Do we think He was joking? Exaggerating? Just blowing off steam? Does he need to calm down and be reasonable, as pro-lifers are constantly told when they make statements not nearly as strident and damning?

No. This was a direct statement. A command. A promise. When you bring harm to the innocent, you commit a sin so terrible that physical death would be preferable. That’s how much Jesus loves children. He loves them far more deeply and eternally than you love even your own kids. So how could anyone try to turn that Jesus, this Jesus, the Jesus, into a God who blesses abortion? And how could they commit such a heresy and still expect to be considered a Christian in any substantive way?

Walsh would ask Obama:

if I were in a position where I could pose a question to the commander in chief, I’d ask this:

Mr. President, do you believe that Jesus Christ condones, endorses, blesses, loves, or otherwise supports a woman’s right to choose abortion?

Read more here.

Do we recognize it?

Thanks to Mostly Cajun, All American and Opinionated, who writes an essay this week on how history repeats itself.

"Extremely bizarre"

Christians and depression

Ann Voskamp writes:

Jesus came for the sick, not for the smug.

The Jesus I know never preached some Health Prosperity Gospel, some pseudo-good news that if you just pray well, sing well, worship well, live well and deposit all that into some Divine ATM — you get to take home a mind and body that are well. That’s not how the complex beauty of life unfolds.

That’s the grace touch of Jesus: The dark is not your fault, the dark is not the heavy night that weighs the worth of your soul, the dark is not about blame.

The dark is about bravely being a canvas for light — about courageously letting your dark be a canvas for sparks of God glory, a backdrop for ambers of mercy in the midst of your fire.

I wanted them to say it all together, like one Body, for us to say it all together to each other because there is not even one of us who hasn’t lost something, who doesn’t fear something, who doesn’t ache with something. I wanted us to turn to the hurting, to each other, and promise it till we’re hoarse:

We won’t give you some cliche – but something to cling to — and that will mean our hands.

We won’t give you some platitudes — but someplace for your pain — and that will mean our time.

We won’t give you some excuses — but we’ll be some example — and that will mean bending down and washing your wounds. Wounds that we don’t understand, wounds that keep festering, that don’t heal, that down right stink — wounds that can never make us turn away.

Because we are the Body of the Wounded Healer and we are the people who believe the impossible — that wounds can be openings to the beauty in us.

No Shame.
No Fear.
No Hiding.
Always safe for the suffering here.

You can be different and you can struggle and you can wrestle and you can hurt and we will be here. Because a fallen world keeps falling apart and even though we the Body can’t make things turn out — we can turn up. Just keep turning up, showing up, looking up.

Please read more here.

"In the US, hell isn’t going up in flames anytime soon."

Kathryn Gin Lum writes:

Younger Christians may be ditching doctrines of fire and brimstone – but will Christianity ever get rid of hell entirely?

How long does hell last? Is it temporary or eternal? What is the purpose of hell's punishments?

corrective and purifying, or vengeful and vindictive?

What is hell's nature:

metaphorical mental state or a physical and literal place?

Do you believe in A God who could consign his own creatures to eternal torture for seemingly minor misdeeds?

Kathryn Gin Lum continues:

By the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, colonists were arguing not just over the wisdom of waging war against England, but also over the justness of eternal punishment. Attracted by Enlightenment ideas, some members of the founding generation critiqued the British monarchy and the Calvinist God as tyrannical dictators both. As Jefferson put it: ‘It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.’ Some freethinkers departed from the concept of hell as literal and eternal fire and brimstone in favour of a temporary hell where individuals would be punished in proportion to their crimes before being admitted to heaven. Others abandoned hell entirely, arguing that a loving and merciful God would save all of creation for heavenly bliss.

Rob Bell wrote in his book Love Wins:

A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better . . . This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

Kathryn Gin Lum writes that

To judge by the reactions to Bell’s book, it was as if no one had ever questioned hell before or emphasised God’s love over his wrath. Many evangelicals were appalled. The viral effects of social media magnified the outcry, with supporters and opponents jumping in to offer tweets of praise or condemnation. In the wake of the controversy, Bell left the church he’d founded and in 2013 told The Grand Rapids Press he would start a ‘spiritual talk show’ in southern California. The book’s publication also led some 1,000 members to leave the church, according to a report in The Christian Post in 2013.

The outcry over Bell’s book was perhaps all the more surprising given recent poll numbers in the US. A 2013 Harris Poll found that while 74 per cent of US adults believe in God and 68 per cent believe in heaven, only 58 per cent believe in the devil and in hell, down four percentage points from 2005.

These kinds of arguments have sustained the idea of eternal punishment for generations. Supporters of Hell have always claimed to have morality and justice on their side, even as its opponents have said the same. As much as some people might thirst for a hell-less faith and a hell-denying Pope, others eagerly participate in hell and judgment houses designed to frighten and convert attendees into belief. Poll numbers might fluctuate, but one thing’s for certain: in the US, hell isn’t going up in flames anytime soon.

Read more here.

The challenge of liberal dogmatism requires a united and robust response

Paul Diamond writes:

This time we are not hearing the voice of tyrants, but the siren call of equality, diversity, and freedom from sexual prejudice and discrimination. What reasonable person would not want this? Anyone who opposes this, so the argument goes, must be a bigot and should be denied their human dignity (because such a person denies dignity to others).

In the midst of these developments, the intrinsic value of free speech has been lost, and government and quasi-government institutions seek to tell us what we can say, and even what we can think. In the process, the rule of law is subverted to this cause.

My American friends tell me that they have the First Amendment; and it is still strong. But we should not underestimate what judges can do. In my cases on the wearing of crosses at British Airways and at Exeter Hospital, a total of 13 British judges denied that the Christian cross was a manifestation of religion. In another case, a tribunal recently held that Sunday was not a core component of the Christian faith. These decisions were reversed either in Europe or in national courts, but an appeal was required on these basic issues.

The price of citizenship in the United Kingdom is indeed high for the religious adherent. In a case I took to the European Court (McFarlane v United Kingdom), Mr. McFarlane was dismissed for the mere expression of opposition to same-sex marriage, although he could have been easily accommodated in his work as a relationship counselor by only counseling different-sex couples. In another case, a housing trust worker was disciplined and demoted for expressing the view of belief in marriage.

The new liberal dogma says that a Jew or Christian is a bigot if they do not believe in the homosexual agenda.

The challenge of liberal dogmatism, like the challenge of national and international socialism before it, requires a united and robust response.

Please read more here

Christians who wound Christians

Billy Graham's daughter talks about cruelty. People who get hurt by Christians! Jesus understands. They crucified Him! Who is the church? People who have personal relationships with God. Can we see our own sins? Do we have spiritual Macular Degeneration? Can we forgive? Can we reach out with forgiveness and do something for the person who wounds us? We need to extend that grace to other people.

The story of Middle Eastern shepherds updated

Kay Wilson, a British born Israeli, was the victim of a terrorist attack in 2010. She writes,

And it came to pass that in December 2010, two Palestinian shepherds left their little town near Bethlehem and set out to walk ten miles across the Judean Hills. There in the forest, they kept watch by night. The following day, at about the 6th hour (3pm) the shepherds saw two women walking along the Israel National Trail. With great fervour they took out their knives and attacked the women.

While shepherds held the girls that day and pinned them to the ground, their serrated blades glinted in the sun, shining all around. With knives to their throats, the women dare not move.

“Fear not,” said the men – for mighty dread had seized the women’s troubled minds – “we bring you good news that will cause great joy for our people.” What could these glad tidings be? Rape, a robbery, a beating? Anything was better than death the women pondered in their hearts.

And it came to pass that near the seventh hour, the shepherds said, “Behold, let us go forth and kill these Jews like Allah has told us to do.”

The shepherds gagged the women, removed their shoes, and bound their hands. They forced one woman to her knees, covered her head and pushed her neck forward. The woman knelt, and prepared herself to be beheaded. Suddenly she saw a great light – the blade of his knife glinting in the sun. The Jewish woman whispered, “Hear Oh Israel.” The Islamic host cried, “Allah HuAkbar,” and the Christian screamed “Jesus,” the name of a Jew born in David’s town.

Thirteen times the shepherds thrust their knives into the women, breaking bones, tearing flesh, even impaling one to the ground. As the Jew played dead, she watched the Christian friend hacked to death before her very eyes.

The shepherds returned home, glorifying and praising Allah for all that they had seen and spread the word concerning what had they had done. “Today near the town of David, two Jews have been slaughtered,” they declared. They plotted and schemed, boasting to their neighbours, “this will be a sign, they will find two of their own, all meanly wrapped in bloody clothes and in the bushes laid.” And everyone who heard of it, was amazed.

Read more by Kay here.