Christians have the Spanish Inquisition to apologize for. Secular humanists have Marxism, Maoism, and Nazism (few people today realize that “Nazi” stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party”) to apologize for.
The Inquisition – which Christians recognize was a terrible wrong – led to the execution of approximately 5,000 people over its 300 year history. It stands as an ugly reminder of what can happen if “Christians” allow political and temporal power to dominate their thinking to the exclusion of the teachings of Jesus.
Communism alone resulted in the murders of more than 100 million human beings at the hands of their own officially atheist governments during peacetime. But a) it is rare indeed to find the political left apologizing for the despicable sins of leftist ideologies; b) pure political and temporal power are at the very core of their ideology; and c) there is nothing even remotely close to the teachings of Jesus to guide them or tell them when they have gone too far in their all too often fanatic pursuit of pure political and temporal power.
History ignored, of course, is doomed to be repeated.
One of the favorite methods of dealing with dissent in the Soviet Union and the socialist system generally was to use the power of psychiatry to demonize dissenters. You weren’t just incorrect in your thinking. You were crazy. And the “fact” that you were “crazy” was used as a propaganda tool as a means to advance the statist agenda.
In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture.
Christians in the Medieval period feared demons and the evil influence of Satan. And fanatic and cynical temporal leaders alike harnessed that fear into a tool of repression. Their secular humanist counterparts have no such fears, of course. They have only power, and the determination to crush any who oppose them. And so rather than see demons in their opponents, they see madness.
If you don’t think that leftists still embrace the power of psychiatry as a means to advance their own political agenda, please think again.
I write the above because of a frightening thing that emerged today.
Image courtesy Taunton GazettePosted: Tuesday, 15 December 2009 1:56PM
Child’s Christmas artwork deemed ‘violent’
M.L.
Taunton (AP/WBZ Newsroom) — An 8-year-old boy was sent home from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation after he was asked to make a Christmas drawing and came up with what appeared to be a stick figure of Jesus on a cross, the child’s father said Tuesday.
Chester Johnson told WBZ-TV that his son made the drawing on Dec. 2 after his second-grade teacher asked children to sketch something that reminded them of the holiday.
Johnson said the teacher became upset when his son said he drew himself on the cross. Johnson, who is black, told WBZ he suspects racism is involved. He said he thinks the school overreacted and wants an apology.
Johnson told the Taunton Daily Gazette, which first reported the story on Tuesday, that his son gets specialized reading and speech instruction and has never been violent in school.
An educational consultant working with the Johnson family said the teacher was also alarmed when the boy drew Xs for Jesus’ eyes.
A call to Johnson was not immediately returned.
The boy was cleared to return to school on Dec. 7 after the evaluation found nothing to indicate that he posed a threat to himself or others. But his father said the boy was traumatized by the incident and the school district has approved the family’s request to have the child transferred to another school.
“They owe my family an apology and the kid an apology and they need to work with my son (to) the best of their ability to get him back to where he was before all this happened,” Johnson told New England Cable News.
The father said in the days before the incident the family had gone to the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, where there are crucifixion statues.
“That was fresh on his mind,” he told NECN. “And that was a good thing that he saw.”
Superintendent Julie Hackett said she could not discuss an individual student and did not address the drawing specifically or the teacher’s reaction to it, but did say the school has safety protocols in place that were followed.
Hackett did not return multiple calls from The Associated Press on Tuesday.
In June 2008, a Taunton fifth-grade student was suspended for a day for a stick figure drawing that appeared to depict him shooting his teacher and a classmate.
Let me just assure you that none of the teachers, principles, and “experts” who were so alarmed that a child would draw Jesus on the cross with “Xs” for eyes to show that Jesus had died were anything even close to “Christian” in their worldview.
We live in an time in which the government pays for an “artist” to drop a crucifix into a har of urine and label the creation “Piss Christ.” And now that same taxpayer-funded NEA is blatantly part of the left’s political agenda as a propaganda tool. But a public school child who draws a picture of Jesus on the Cross in response to sketch something that reminded him of Christmas is suspended and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation.
When it is the adults who SENT that poor, innocent child to the psychiatrist who desperately need psychiatric help.
A few days ago I read an article in the LA Times on the need to protect the free speech rights of children who use internet technology to bully and humiliate fellow students. And the ACLU is at the forefront of such legal action. Nobody on the left even thinks that children who publish pictures of their naked co-students has mental issue. And yet nobody is protecting the rights of a child TO DRAW A PICTURE OF JESUS AT CHRISTMAS.
Tags: 8 year old, Chester Johnson, Christmas, cross, crucifiction statues, Jesus, Julie Hackett, La Salette, National Shrine of Our Lady, Piss Christ, psychological evaluation, second grade, stick figure
Start Thinking Right 
December 16, 2009 at 4:22 am
The people who did this to this boy are nuts, absolutely nuts, scary nuts!
Thank the Lord he has a dad who is involved, looking out for him, bringing the matter to public attention and demanding justice.
December 16, 2009 at 9:26 am
I was telling a friend about this over dinner last night, and she said, “Where did this happen?”
I couldn’t recall, and said so. But then I added, “What’s scary is that it could have happened anywhere.”
There is no place in America where a public schooled child could genuinely expect that something like this absolutely could not happen to him or her.
December 16, 2009 at 11:53 am
Actually:
1. Hitler was not an atheist, religion was a very active part of the German national cult, and Fascists and Nazis rejected the ideas of class conflict, internationalism, and worker’s control of capital in favor of class collaboration, nationalism, and capitalist control of capital defended by the State, in a marriage of corporate and State power. They were in every sense of the word Rightists.
2. Most modern leftists actively hate Bolshevism and Stalinism/Maoism in particular. They won’t apologize for the actions of Bolsheviks because they are not Bolsheviks. Most are of the ideologies that were fighting the Bolsheviks.
3. I would defend this kid’s right to draw Jesus at Christmas.
4. The Right has also used psychiatry to punish and brainwash people.
December 16, 2009 at 7:24 pm
My advice to the father of this child:
a) lawyer up and do it now.
b) Do not wait. Sue them. That is about the only approach that stands a chance of keeping this same fate from befalling some other innocent child who doesn’t march to the tune of the “progressives” whose dream of tolerance is silence about any religious faith.
The First Amendment makes it very clear that we are not to have a “state religion” (which is why it forbids Congress making any law regarding the establishment of religion), but it also bars the government from taking any action to prevent the “free exercise” of religion. When we allow this kind of repressive crackdown on peaceful (and innocent) religious expression to pass with impunity, we take one more step toward the abolition of the freedoms that our founding fathers thought were crucial. Why else would this be in the “First” amendment?
December 16, 2009 at 8:38 pm
To your 1.
I don’t believe I ever say that Adolf Hitler was an atheist. It is rather difficult to prove whether most people are atheist or not, particularly politicians, who have clear and obvious reasons to say things that they don’t really believe for political expedience. Hitler was a liar and the worst demagogic political opportunist in human history, and Nazism was utterly evil. To cite the propaganda of such a regime as evidence that Hitler or Nazism were somehow “Christian” is both sick and evil.
Yes, Hitler tried to package his Nazism in a way that Germany would accept, just as the Marxist Sandinistas deceitfully packaged their communism into “liberation theology” in order to fool the overwhelmingly Catholic population of Nicaragua to support them. As to the latter, the Catholic church said from the start that it wasn’t legitimate Christianity; but that it was a heresy. And the Cardinal Ratzinger who went on to become Pope Benedict even called the movement “demonic”.
Quote:
“…it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads.”
– (Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)
Quote:
“Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.” Pope Benedict XVI
Hitler packaged his hard-core of Nazism with a candy-coating of lies in order to fool the people. And the people were fooled indeed.
Hitler said what he needed to say in speeches to deceive the people and bend them to his will, but to his inner circle he described that “after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions. I feel as refreshed now as a foal on a meadow” (Ernst Helmreich, “The German Churches Under Hitler,” p. 285).
From Joseph Goebbels’ diary, dated 8 April 1941 (Tue):
Goebbels also notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.” [Elke Frölich. 1997-2008. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Munich: K. G. Sauer. Teil I, v. 6, p. 272].
Hitler also said, “Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.” [Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books; 3rd edition October 1, 2000, p. 343].
Author Konrad Heiden has quoted Hitler as stating, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.” [Heiden, Konrad A History of National Socialism, A.A. Knopf, 1935, p. 100].
Albert Speer – another Nazi who worked extremely closely with Hitler – reports in his memoirs of a similar statement made by Hitler:
Sounds like an atheist to me. Certainly, Hitler was absolutely not a Christian. He used Christianity like he used everything else; he took ruthless advantage of it as simply another means by which to package his lies to the German people.
Fascism and Nazism were quintessentially hostile to monotheism.
Hannah Arendt describes Nazi spirituality in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. When convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows, “He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more; he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottglaubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death” [p. 252].
One of the leading experts on fascism, Ernst Nolte, defined fascism as “the practical and violent resistance to transcendence.” Fascism was anti-God and anti-transcendence.
Gene Edward Veith says:
By killing the Jews, Hitler intended to kill God.
Of Protestant Christianity, Hitler wrote: “Protestantism… combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established. Yet here we are facing the question without whose solution all other attempts at a German reawakening or resurrection are and remain absolutely senseless and impossible” (Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 113).
Hitler talked about solving the “church problem” after he’d solved the “Jewish problem.” He said, “The war is going to be over. The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem. It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” (Hitler’s Tabletalk, December 1941).
Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”
Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary of the Fuhrer, said pointedly, “National socialist and Christian concepts cannot be reconciled. The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populace as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations” (cited in Ernst Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler, p. 303).
At a Nazi rally we had this in a speech: “Who was greater, Christ or Hitler? Christ had at the time of his death twelve apostles, who, however, did not even reamin true to him. Hitler, however, today has a folk of 70 million behind him. We cannot tolerate that another organization [i.e., the church] is established alongside of us that has a different spirit than ours. We must crush it. National socialism in all earnestness says: I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
Nazism was pagan to its very core. Carl Jung (a onetime fascist sympathizer himself) described Nazism as the revival of Wotan, who had been suppressed by Christianity but now was released. Germany was being possessed by its archetypal god. (Odajnyk, Jung and Politics, p. 87-89). The Farmer’s Almanac of 1935, published by the Ministry of Agriculture, replaced the Christian holidays with commemoration days for Wotan and Thor. And Good Friday was replaced with a memorial for those killed by Charlemagne in his efforts to convert the Saxons.
In addition, at the very heart of the Nazi’s race programs and at the center of the Holocaust was the belief in atheistic Darwinian evolution. The principle rationale for the Holocaust was that the Jews were biologically inferior, and interfered with the Nazi scientists’ efforts to aid evolution by creating a master race.
Thus, whatever you might want to say about whether Hitler was an atheist or not, his Nazism was inherently opposed to Judeo-Christianity, opposed to monotheism, and opposed to Judeo-Christian transcendent morality. The spirituality was intrinsically pagan.
As to your 2. I have to say that you’re not only wrong, but a little bit nutty wrong. A few articles that have liberals very close to Obama explaining their Marxism:
Obama’s Mentor/Pastor For 23 Years A Confirmed Marxist
Why Did Obama Pick A Manufacturing Czar Who Despises Capitalism?
Obama Is To Lincoln What Mao Was To Mother Teresa
Ron Bloom: Yet Another Obama Handpicked Official A Communist Who Agrees With Mao
Anti-Free Press Obama Demagogue Anita Dunn A Self-Admitted Marxist
Obama’s Democrats: The Party Of Van Jones
I’m glad that you defend the kid’s right to draw Jesus at Christmastime. But obviously, other liberals don’t. Or else the kid wouldn’t have gone through hell for it.
As for your 4, let’s see the evidence.
December 16, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Good advice for the kid’s dad. Lawsuits are the only thing liberals understand, given that it is their own favorite tool.
Interestingly, the Constitution doesn’t in any way impose any restriction against a state imposing a “state” religion. And the states before and after the Constitution for a time continued to be Protestant, or Anglican, or whatever.
Wikipedia discusses this:
The First Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly forbids the U.S. federal government from enacting any law respecting a religious establishment, and thus forbids either designating an official church for the United States, or interfering with State and local official churches — which were common when the First Amendment was enacted. It did not prevent state governments from establishing official churches. Connecticut continued to do so until it replaced its colonial Charter with the Connecticut Constitution of 1818; Massachusetts retained an establishment of religion in general until 1833. (The Massachusetts system required every man to belong to some church, and pay taxes towards it; while it was formally neutral between denominations, in practice the indifferent would be counted as belonging to the majority denomination, and in some cases religious minorities had trouble being recognized at all.)
Only the federal government was prevented from establishing a national religion. As people moved to and fro in the states, having various Christian denominations reigning supreme in various states was enough of a hassle that the states just kind of stopped doing it on their own. But they had the right under the Constitution to keep doing so if they wanted (even after the 14th Amendment).
And the above, combined with what you say in your final paragraph, serves to show just how completely far off base our judges have gone. The only Constitution that has “separation of church and state” in it is the Soviet Constitution. Which is to say that liberal activist judges have literally imposed communism onto America.
December 17, 2009 at 10:03 am
Four words: Eight…year…old…boy.
These “school administrators” have lost it. I’d sue them from here to the moon.
December 17, 2009 at 10:13 am
Speaking as a practicing lawyer and a former journalist, I’d have to say that whatever Wikipedia says about it, any state that tried to create a “state religion” would immediately have major constitutional problems. “Congress” under the First Amendment has come to mean any arm of the government at any level, even a quasi-governmental body that is private in nature but acts on behalf of the government. I will certainly concede, however, that in the very early days of this country, there were predominant religious communities in the various states, and those who did not agree were often subject to persecution.
December 17, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Well, you’re right, but only because of how far we have gone from the constitutional democracy created by our founding fathers.
We both can agree on what the First Amendment “has come to mean.” What I contend is that it was never supposed to mean that, as far as our founding fathers were concerned.
Read what Thomas Jefferson wrote about activist judges, and see how far we have fallen into exactly what he said would be terrible for this country:
Stop and think about it: that which our founding fathers were willing to go to war over – a rather modest increase in taxes imposed by the king – has been transcended ten thousand fold by statist governments that have grown larger and larger and seized more and more powers and privileges for itself over the last century.
Wikipedia stated the history correctly: the federal government did not have the power to intrude into state matters unless it was given specific powers to do so by the Constitution. The idea was that you could vote with your feet and leave if you didn’t like your state, but you could not do so with your national government. The federal government was supposed to be small, relatively weak, and limited.
Unfortunately, the federal government, primarily at the impetus of judicial activists and “carrot and stick” politicking, have usurped the powers of the states and the rights of individual citizens.
As for the First Amendment, the freedom of religion, and religion as an expression of the American way of life, allow me to reproduce something I wrote in another article:
Consider the words and the intended meaning of George Washington in his Farewell Address given on September 17, 1796:
The problem is that George Washington would not be welcome in this country – the country that he more than any other man founded – today.
And that is a terrible shame.
December 17, 2009 at 7:47 pm
You and me both.
If I didn’t want to enrich myself, I would sue for a huge award, and then donate the money to a great Christian school where genuine moral and ethical values would be taught and preserved.
What tends to happen is that liberals take chunks of money, and conservatives are willing to accept an apology. And then the next time a school has to make a critical decision, which side do they fear?
December 31, 2009 at 3:24 am
Very Appreciated post. Easy to understand and straight to the point.
December 31, 2009 at 10:37 am
True words, some truthful words man. Thanx for makin my day.
February 3, 2011 at 4:19 am
Man, speak about a fantastic submit! I?ve stumbled throughout your blog a couple of occasions within the past, but I normally forgot to bookmark it. But not again! Thanks for posting the way in which you do, I truly appreciate seeing someone who actually has a viewpoint and isn?t definitely just bringing back up crap like almost all other writers these days. Maintain it up!
February 3, 2011 at 10:15 am
Emmitt,
Thank you very much for that.
The facts are the facts, and I try to provide supporting links and provide at least enough of an article for both context and a factual record.
We live in an age in which we can literally have a ‘1984’ scenario with a “Ministry of Truth” deleting reality. All the time mainstream media purge themsleves. And a lot of those “purges” are more than convenient.
Then it just comes down to describing those facts according to a Judeo-Christian worldview, and standing up for and fighting for the truth.