Liberal Religions Forced To Confront The Dodo-Bird Effect Of Progressivism

There was a “Far Side” cartoon that makes all the more sense to me now.  A dinosaur was standing at the podium in front of a large auditorium full of dinosaurs.  And he was explaining, “We’re facing a serious crisis, gentlemen.  The world’s climates are changing, mammals are eating our eggs, and we have brains the size of a walnut.”

The religious side of liberalism is every bit as bankrupt as the political side, and the constantly shrinking membership bears that spiritual, moral and intellectual bankruptcy out.

I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times about liberal Judaism that brought out the fact that liberal “Judaism” was as much a Dodo bird as liberal “Christianity.”  During the same week I spoke to a “Catholic” I frequently chatted with who – after telling me he was a “radical liberal” who believed in abortion and socialized medicine – proceeded to tell me that he utterly rejected the virgin birth of Christ.  Which is of course a central defining belief of orthodox/traditional Catholicism.  And that prompted me to do some thinking about these so-called “mainline” liberal religious movements, and just how utterly meaningless they are.

I better nip one objection in the bud immediately, realizing as I do that many liberals either can’t read very well or can’t understand what they read.  The following article is about the astounding decline of “Conservative” Judaism.  But “conservative” here has nothing to do with politics or even with theology.  “Conservative Judaism” is every bit as liberal as any liberal mainline “Christian” denomination.  It embraces homosexuality; it embraces the notion that the Bible is basically a meaningless book that can be interpreted and then reinterpreted according to constantly changing societal norms.  Which is to say, Conservative Judaism ultimately stands for nothing, and isn’t “conserving” anything remotely important.

That said, “Conservative rabbis” met in Las Vegas to try to deal with a crisis: they are going extinct.  What came out of the meeting is all the more hilarious:

Leaders of Conservative Judaism press for change as movement’s numbers drop
Leading Conservative rabbis gather in Las Vegas to ‘rebrand’ the movement, but there is little agreement about how to draw people back into synagogues.
April 12, 2011|By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times

Three hundred rabbis walk into a Las Vegas martini lounge. Bartenders scramble to handle the crowd — the rabbis are thirsty. Suddenly, an Elvis impersonator takes the stage.

We are faced with two possibilities.

One, this is the beginning of a joke.

Two, they don’t make rabbis the way they used to.

The Rabbinical Assembly, the clerical arm of Conservative Judaism, would have you believe the second message, or something like it. That’s why it launched its 2011 convention with a martini reception at a Las Vegas synagogue. The gathering was billed as an attempt to “rebrand” the Conservative movement, which has seen alarming declines in membership in recent years.

“We are in deep trouble,” Rabbi Edward Feinstein of congregation Valley Beth Shalom in Encino told the convention the next day. “There isn’t a single demographic that is encouraging for the future of Conservative Judaism. Not one.”

Those words could apply equally to a number of U.S. religious denominations, especially liberal Protestant and Jewish faiths. Membership is falling; churches and synagogues are struggling financially; and surveys show robust growth among the ranks of those who declare no religious affiliation.

The situation may be especially alarming to the Conservative movement because it was, for many years, the largest denomination in American Judaism. It was the solid center, more traditional than Reform, more open to change than Orthodoxy.

A decade ago, roughly one of every three American Jews identified as Conservative. Since then, Conservative synagogue membership has declined by 14% — and by 30% in the Northeast, the traditional stronghold of American Judaism.

By 2010, only about one in five Jews in the U.S. identified as Conservative, according to the American Jewish Congress.

The Reform and Orthodox movements also saw declines, although not nearly as steep. Reform Judaism for a time claimed the most adherents, but today that distinction goes to people who identify themselves as “just Jewish,” meaning they don’t associate with any of the traditional denominations. Many are entirely secular.

“We’re all in trouble,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly and one of those trying to save the Conservative movement. Correcting herself, she said, “We’re not in trouble, but we’re in urgent need of rethinking the institutions of Jewish life.”

[…]

The movement’s problems, many agree, begin with its name, which has nothing to do with political conservatism and doesn’t accurately describe a denomination that accepts openly gay and lesbian rabbis and believes the Bible is open to interpretation. But that’s just for starters.

Deep dissatisfaction with the organizations that lead Conservative Judaism prompted a number of influential rabbis in 2009 to demand urgent change, warning, “Time is not on our side.” The group won promises of substantial change from the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents Conservative congregations, and helped prompt reforms in the institutions that train and represent rabbis.

A similar revolt by prominent Reform rabbis preceded that denomination’s continuing effort to reinvent itself, a project launched at L.A.’s Hebrew Union College last November.

So what does it mean for a religious movement to reinvent or rebrand itself?

“It’s one thing for a corporation to say ‘We’re going to reinvent ourselves,'” said David Roozen, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“Sometimes they get into another business,” he said. “A religion … can evolve, it can be reinterpreted, you can express it in a slightly different style, but you can’t just be doing Judaism one day and say ‘I’m going to sell cars’ the next.”

The Conservative rabbis won’t become car salesmen, but they batted around some fairly radical ideas and predictably stirred up some opposition.

There was talk of eliminating membership dues for synagogues or switching to a la carte “fee-for-service” plans — so that a parent who wants only to send his or her child to religious school won’t also be paying to support the congregation’s other programs. But some said dues give congregants a vital sense of ownership.

Wolpe, the Sinai Temple rabbi, said the movement needs a slogan, one that’s short enough to fit on a bumper sticker. He suggested “A Judaism of Relationships.”

“We don’t have a coherent ideology,” he told his fellow rabbis. “If you ask everybody in this room ‘What does Conservative Judaism stand for?’ my guess is that you’d get 100 different answers…. That may be religiously a beautiful thing, but if you want a movement, that’s not such a hot result.”

[…]

And then there was the name. Some prefer Conservative, which was adopted when the movement began in the 19th century. It denotes the founders’ determination to conserve the best of Jewish tradition while being open to prudent change. But others said it is one reason the movement is seen by young people as being hopelessly uncool.

One suggestion: Change it to Masorti, a Hebrew word meaning “traditional” that is used by Conservative Jews in Israel and Europe.

“If we really want to appeal to the new generation, if you want to create a real worldwide movement … we need a common name, and I think it needs to be a Hebrew name,” said Rabbi Felipe Goodman of Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas.

As the meeting ended, there were pledges to work toward meaningful change. One example of what that might look like is an effort to employ a new definition of kosher food that would require ethical treatment of the workers who produce it —something that is being called magen tzedek, or “seal of justice.”

“This is an answer for Conservative Judaism because it’s about the marketplace, it’s about the public square,” said Rabbi Morris Allen of Mendota Heights, Minn., who is leading the effort. Magen tzedek “shifts the entire message of who we are as a religious community. Suddenly, it’s about more than just what is said at the prayer service on Saturday morning.”

Let me begin my analysis by means of a contrast.  Rabbi Morris Allen says, “This is an answer for Conservative Judaism because it’s about the marketplace, it’s about the public square.”  By radical, radical contrast, Christianity is about Jesus Christ, who He is—God incarnate—and what He accomplished—the redemption of sinners who embrace His atoning death for the sin of humanity.

“Conservative Judaism … [is]… about the marketplace.”  That is so sad.  “We need to sell more widgets, or rebrand our widgets, or maybe produce a different kind of widget.”

One of the reasons that Judaism is so swiftly disappearing is because of atheism and a virulent form of Jewish secular humanism which basically holds that it’s perfectly okay to not believe in God as long as you act as though you did.

Dinesh D’Souza points out why precisely why this phenomenon would occur – given the enormous influence of liberalism in Judaism – in his examination of why liberal “Christian” churches are losing membership in droves:

“Unfortunately the central themes of some of the liberal churches have become indistinguishable from those of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, and the homosexual rights movement.  Why listen to Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong drone on when you can get the same message and much more interesting visuals at San Francisco’s gay pride parade?”

And D’Souza provides a sizable pile of statistics to show that the traditional (i.e. evangelical) denominations and churches are growing leaps and bounds even as the liberal mainline churches are going the way of the Dodo bird.

His point, of course, is that these liberal religionists are dying out because they don’t stand for anything that has any spiritual power whatsoever.

Here is the story of Christian growth in the world today:

Compared to the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today, and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day – the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.

Christianity – which views itself (and which I personally believe is) the fulfillment of the Jewish Scripture – is the fastest growing religion on the planet.  Christianity is the world’s only universal religion; the only religion with a global reach.  It is particularly spreading in the third world and in Asia.  Soon, China will be the largest “Christian country” in the world.  There may very well already be more Christians in China than there are in America.  In Korea, Christians already outnumber Buddhists.

While mainline liberal Protestant and (mainline liberal) Catholic “Christianity” withers on the vine, evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity is exploding.  And while Western Europe and America increasingly deny the Christendom that brought them to greatness in the first place – even as they increasingly become less and less great as a result – Christianity is taking deep abiding root in cultures whose transformation can only be described as “miraculous.”

Meanwhile, as the statistics prove and as Dinesh D’Souza explains, atheism is shrinking in spite of all its grandiose claims to represent the fulfillment of modernity and knowledge.  “Nietzsche’s proclamation that ‘God is dead’ is now proven false,” D’Souza writes.  “Nietzsche is dead.  The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world’s population…  God is very much alive.”  Secular humanists have long self-servingly claimed that the progression of “reason” and “science” would conquer religion, but this is now demonstrated to be a lie, a fairy tale of secularism.

Christianity stands for something.  And as much as I may personally despise Islam, it too at least takes a powerful stand – even if it relies primarily on force and terrorism to make that stand.  Atheism and secular humanism are only parisites hanging on to Christianity and its superior moral values, and the political liberalism that theological liberalism invariably leads to is the nihilism of objective moral truth all together.

Allow me to provide a concrete example of the empty nexus of liberal politics and liberal theology.  Barack Obama, a quintessential theological and political liberal, has repeatedly stripped God out of the Declaration of Independence and its profound establishment of Creator God as the only and ultimate grounds for legitimate human dignity, freedom and rights.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” our founders assured mankind, and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Not so with Obama.  On his repeatedly stated version, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But just what created us (random mutation or perhaps benevolent fairies?) and exactly how did we become endowed with these rights that most cultures and most worldviews and in fact most political systems throughout human history have denied?  And further, why did the Judeo-Christian worldview which inspired these founding fathers be dumped on its head, such that its antithesis in the form of the radical homosexual agenda and abortion on demand be enthroned in its place?

Basically, the Judeo-Christian worldview – “Christendom,” if you like – has been treated like a salad bar in the Western Civilization that had been forged by Christianity, and secular humanists can pick out the parts that they like and throw away the rest.  But it’s not a salad bar; Judeo-Christianity as both a religion and a worldview is far more like the foundations of a great building.  And what these secular humanists have been doing is pulling out the foundational pillars one block at a time until there is nothing left to sustain the surrounding structure.

Which is precisely why the West – which used to be called “Christendom” – is now on the verge of complete collapse on virtually every level.

I see the war on terror, and from the start I have seen the glaring flaw in our strategy (yes, even when George Bush was waging it).  Basically, we have confronted totalitarian Islam on the military, political and economic fronts.  But we have utterly ignored the religious front – which is precisely the major front by which totalitiarian Islam has been attacking us.  Like it or not, 9/11 was a religious act.  And there has been no major movement whatsoever – either by the Western powers or by the movements within Islam itself – to confront the religious grounds of the totalitarian Islamists.

And the reason is because we have nothing to confront them with.  Secular humanists/atheists have undermined public religious expression at every turn, while cultural relativists have contextualized religion in such a way to strip it of any spiritual power whatsoever.  Now when we truly need true spiritual power to confront the demonic power motivating radical Islam, basically all we’ve got is allegorical dirt clods.

In the sphere of Islam, jihadists have the superior Qu’ranic argument that it is THEY who are carrying out Muhammad’s vision for Islam, not the liberal Westernized contextualizers who want to make very clear claims of Muhammad into metaphors and allegories representing something else.  Muhammad was a man of genuine violence; he had been in some thirty military campaigns in his life; he had committed numerous genocidal campaigns against “infidels”; and he had another thirty military campaigns planned at the time of his death, including the conquest of Western Europe as the means to spread Islam (“submission”) and the call of Allahu Akbar (a comparative which means “Allah is greater”).  If Muhammad is in any way, shape or form a representative paradigm of what it means to be “Muslim,” then the jihadists are right.

And liberalism – whether it be religious/theological or political/cultural liberalism – has exactly what to answer that?  Other than mocking or trivializing it?

Did political liberals – like the liberal rabbis from the LA Times article above – truly believe that we overcome the threat of terrorism by simply changing the name to “overseas contingency operation” from “war on terror”?

As bad as the religion of Allah may be for a free society, it has a great deal of force when the competition is cultural nothingness, the decaying leftovers of “salad bar pseudo-Judeo-Christianity.”

2 Timothy 3:5 says of such “Christians”:

“They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that!” (New Living Translation)

St. Paul told us, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.” (2 Timothy 3:1).  The risen and glorified Jesus told St. John of the seventh and final church age, “But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!” (Revelation 3:16).
of my mouth!

And it is with this final age of de-spiritualized, unglodly lukewarm “Christianity” and “Judaism” that makes God literally puke that staggering Western Civilization rises to the bell.

If anyone wants to know why I come across as angry from time to time in my blogging, it is because when I look around, I keep seeing the series of morally and even rationally terrible and despicable choices we have made right here in America that will invariably end with Antichrist, the Tribulation and Armageddon.  And it will not have been God that made this happen, or God who chose this end for mankind; but rather mankind that chose this end for itself.

C.S. Lewis said:

“We can always say we have been the victims of an illusion; if we disbelieve in the supernatural this is what we always shall say.  Hence, whether miracles have really ceased or not, they would certainly appear to cease in Western Europe as materialism became the popular creed.  For let us make no mistake.  If the end of the world appeared in all the literal trappings of the Apocalypse, if the modern materialist saw with his own eyes the heavens rolled up and the great white throne appearing, if he had the sensation of being himself hurled into the Lake of Fire, he would continue forever, in that lake itself, to regard his experience as an illusion and to find the explanation of it in psycho-analysis, or cerebral pathology.  Experience by itself proves nothing.  If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream.  Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.” (God in the Dock, “Miracles,” pp. 25-26).

The problem with liberalism is that it “fundamentally transforms” whatever it touches – whether Christianity, Judaism or fiscal and economic reality – into a game of make-believe pretend.

Margaret Thatcher put the end-state of econimic liberalism succinctly: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  And then comes the collapse.

When radical Islamist jihadists attack, you can’t answer or fight with make-believe.  Any more than you can fight massive debt with make-believe mass-printed dollars.

My one consolation is this: I’ve cheated; I’ve skipped ahead and read the last pages of Revelation.  God – and most definitely not Allah or secular humanism or liberal mainline pseudo religiousity – wins in the end.  And when God wins in the end, via the return of Jesus Christ as true King of kings and Lord of lords, He will win in a very literal way indeed.

Terrorism: Stop Calling Timothy McVeigh A ‘Christian’

I’ve heard it pop up a number of times that Timothy McVeigh is an example of a ‘Christian terrorist.’  As the charge surfaces again in light of the hearings that Rep. Pete King has called regarding terrorism and the militarization of American Muslims, let’s consider the “evidence” that Timothy McVeigh is a “Christian.”

From my looking for evidence that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian who executed his Oklahoma City bombing as a Christian, it mostly boils down to this quote from Time Magazine:

Time: Are you religious?

McVeigh: I was raised Catholic. I was confirmed Catholic (received the sacrament of confirmation). Through my military years, I sort of lost touch with the religion. I never really picked it up, however I do maintain core beliefs.

Time: Do you believe in God?

McVeigh: I do believe in a God, yes. But that’s as far as I want to discuss. If I get too detailed on some things that are personal like that, it gives people an easier way [to] alienate themselves from me and that’s all they are looking for now.

This quote from the Time Magazine article is so prevalent that I can’t find the actual article.  And, of course, I wonder what else he said that someone like myself would find useful.  Those who want to maintain that Timothy McVeigh was a ‘Christian’ explain that McVeigh distanced himself from Catholicism, not Christianity.  And that since he still believed in “a God,” he wasn’t an atheist or a secular humanist, and hence he was a Christian.

But what you see is a man who had some contact with Catholicism, and then basically turned away from it.

For the record, Christians don’t believe in “a God”; we believe in the one and only true God, the Creator of the Universe and of man.  McVeigh actually corrected the interviewer: “Do you believe in God?” (i.e., the monotheistic deity of Judeo-Christianity).  “I do believe in a god, yes.”  That usage of an indefinite article “a god” actually screams volumes about whatever Timothy McVeigh’s religion is.  But let’s examine the question whether religious affiliation as a child means that one is an adherent of that religion:

Obama’s mother, divorced from Obama’s father, married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. At first, Obama attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The document required that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.

And:

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended. That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.

Well, congratulations, liberals.  We now have the smoking gun proof that Barack Hussein Obama is in fact a Muslim.  Because we’re going to use the same childhood standard of religious affiliation on Obama that you want to use on Timothy McVeigh.  And by that standard, Obama is Muslim.

The fact of the matter is that Timothy McVeigh walked away from his Catholic faith (for the record, I myself am a Baptist), and never came back to it.  And rather than having anything whatsoever to do with Orthodox or organized Christianity, he had come to have his own subjective views about something he described as  “a god.”

He definitely did not bomb the Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah federal building in the name of Jesus, or do it as an act of his “Christian faith.”  There is absolutely no reason whatsoever save anti-Christian bigotry and profound religious intolerance to suggest that he did.

That is very unlike the hundreds of videos recorded by terrorist suicide bombers who expressed their intent being directly connected to Islam.

Let’s go on.  Was Timothy McVeigh a Christian?  Not according to his own words:

In his letter, McVeigh said he was an agnostic but that he would “improvise, adapt and overcome”, if it turned out there was an afterlife. “If I’m going to hell,” he wrote, “I’m gonna have a lot of company.”

And:

McVeigh once said that he believed the universe was guided by natural law, energized by some universal higher power that showed each person right from wrong if they paid attention to what was going on inside them. He had also said, “Science is my religion.” [Michel, Lou and Herbeck, Dan. American Terrorist. pp. 142–143]

I – as one example among millions of true Christians – am a Christian.  I am not an agnostic.  And science is very definitely NOT my religion.

I came across a quote – “Timothy McVeigh was not a Christian. he refused to have a clergyman while awaiting execution but changed his mind at the last moment “to cover my bases” – that is directly supported by firsthand sources who had direct access to McVeigh.  McVeigh was an agnostic who in the very end doubted his agnosticism.  He was most certainly no Christian.

Hey, I’ve got an idea: maybe the mainstream media can start saying that McVeigh was a scientific terrorist.  Or at least an agnostic terrorist.  Because either of those statements would be far closer to reality than that he was a “Christian terrorist.”

There’s a little more to say.

I am going to reproduce here the entire article that, if true, proves that Timothy McVeigh merely participated in yet another of the hundreds of thousands of Islamic terror attacks across the world:

“Homeless” Man Hussain Hashem al-Hussaini is “John Doe #2 in Oklahoma bombing
 Doug Hagmann  Friday, March 11, 2011

On Wednesday, a “homeless man” was arrested in the Boston suburb of Quincy, Massachusetts, on a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon after allegedly striking another man with a beer bottle. His name is Hussain Hashem al-HUSSAINI, although has several other aliases and a previous arrest record.

His arrest would have likely gone unnoticed except for the tenacious investigative journalism conducted in the months and years following the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by author and investigative journalist Jayna Davis. Ms. Davis, a former reporter for KFOR-TV at the time of the bombing, identified al HUSSAINI as the “John Doe #2” in the April 19, 1995 bombing that claimed the lives of 168 people, including 22 children, three who were unborn. Her investigation is chronicled in her book, The Third Terrorist, and is an important investigative report into the actual events that took place in the months, days and weeks leading to the bombing, and perhaps even more importantly, in the years afterward.

// //

The disheveled homeless man arrested this week is at the epicenter of a plot that involves not only domestic terrorism, but the inexcusable failures and activities of the FBI that led directly to the events of September 2001. Ms. Davis documented the direct involvement of a Muslim terrorist operation involved in the 1995 bombing, and attempted to warn the FBI of additional attacks being planned. Despite impeccable documentation compiled by Ms. Davis that I personally reviewed in my capacity as an investigator, her warnings went unheeded. Six years later, the worst attack on American soil killed another 3,000 people. It is my belief that the attacks of 9/11 could have been stopped had the FBI acted upon the evidence she submitted to the FBI.

Instead, twenty-two witness affidavits she compiled and submitted to the FBI in January 1999 that, in part, connect al HUSSAINI to the events of the bombing “disappeared.” Those affidavits contain sworn statements of multiple witnesses who placed al HUSSAINI in the company of Timothy McVeigh prior to the bombing, exiting the Ryder truck that was used for the bombing, and speeding away from the area just prior to the blast. Despite solid witness statements, the FBI reportedly failed to interview al HUSSAINI.

In addition to the “hands-off” approach with al HUSSAINI, the FBI continues to refuse the release of closed circuit camera footage that exists of McVeigh and “John Doe #2” as they exited the Ryder truck in front of the Murrah Building. Why?

Leading up to, and at the time of, the Oklahoma City bombing, Hussain al HUSSAINI worked for a property management company owned by a Middle Eastern businessman who was suspected of having ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization(PLO). Six months prior to the bombing, this man hired several former Iraqi soldiers. Four years earlier, he had been convicted of federal insurance fraud.

Investigation in Boston

In mid-May 2005, I personally conducted an on-site investigation of “John Doe #2” in Boston. My confidential 30-page investigative report was submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice on 1 June 2005. The information contained in that report verified all of the relevant aspects of Ms. Davis’ claims as they pertained to Hashem al-Hussaini. The following is a redacted version of my partial investigative findings from 2005.

Hussain Hashem al-Hussaini

The primary subject of this investigation is Hussain al HUSSAINI, an Iraqi national who has been identified in sworn witness statements obtained by Ms. Davis as, in part:

1. Accompanying Timothy McVeigh in the Ryder truck used to deliver the bomb to the Murrah Federal Building on 19 April 1995;
2. Stepping out of the Ryder truck at ground zero minutes before the blast;
3. Speeding away from downtown Oklahoma City immediately after the detonation of the truck bomb;
4. Being seen in the company of Timothy McVeigh a various times and locations prior to 19 April 1995.

Hussain al HUSSAINI, a former member of the Iraqi military and Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, currently resides in Braintree, (Norfolk County) Massachusetts, a southern suburb of Boston. As well documented in The Third Terrorist by Jayna Davis, al HUSSAINI came to the U.S. following the Persian Gulf War in 1991 under the guise of escaping persecution from the Iraqi dictator. Because of the significant number of refugees admitted into the U.S. and other factors, the checks-and-balances that were (or should have been) in place to verify the authenticity of those seeking entry into this county were admittedly strained or not properly implemented. Regardless of the reason, al HUSSAINI remains living in the U.S. as of the date of this report.

Subsequent to the Oklahoma City bombing, al HUSSAINI moved to Dallas, Texas, and then to Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked at Boston Logan International Airport.  At that time, he resided with two Iraqi men (brothers) who provided food catering services for the commercial airlines at Boston Logan during the time leading up to and including September 11, 2001.

The two Iraqi brothers referenced above have been identified as Khalid [REDACTED] and Majed [REDACTED]. They both continue to reside in Braintree, Massachusetts. Due to their close proximity to the primary subject and their activities in Oklahoma City near the time of the 1995 bombing, this investigator has also conducted comprehensive database research and an on-site investigation and covert surveillance to update their activities as well.

Both men were observed at their residence. The activities of both men were documented, and their activities undocumented by law enforcement, according to a source contacted within the FBI. According to this source, they have “no interest” in either subject.

Left: Surveillance photograph taken by Douglas Hagmann 16 May 2005

Multiple Identities

Investigation determined that Hussain al HUSSAINI possesses a social security number issued in 1994 in the state of Massachusetts. For reasons unclear, it was reissued in Texas in 1995. Several dates of birth are associated with al HUSSAINI, all listing his month and year of birth as September 1965. He also has a lengthy list of aliases, including but not limited to Hussain Hashem Jassem Al-Hussaini, Hussain Hashem Al-Hussaini, Hanan Hashim Jassem Al-Hussaini, Adnan Hashim Jassem Al-Hussaini, Salem Hashim Al-Hussaini and eleven others.

Neighbors as well as fellow employees knew him simply as “Sammy.”

At the time of this investigation, al HUSSAINI was working as a landscaper while living with his 30-year-old American girlfriend, her father, and a two-and-a-half year old daughter. He has resided at this location since 1997. Distinctive in his appearance, he has tattoo reflective of his association with the Iraqi National Guard.

Also at the time of this investigation, the two Iraqi brothers who provided food catering services at Boston Logan on 9/11 were investigated. The reports of their activities, although redacted here, were detailed in my 2005 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet, much like the warnings of Ms. Davis, nothing has taken place.

Left: The former residence of Hussain al Hussaini in a suburb of Boston

Foreboding prediction?

Confidential psychiatric records confirm that in 1997, Hussain al-Hussaini made a foreboding prediction about a future event to take place at Boston Logan International Airport, the point of origin for two of the four hijacked flights that slammed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

According to those records and prior to 9/11, al-Hussaini suffered anxiety so acute regarding his airport job at Boston Logan International that he checked into a psychiatric hospital to seek treatment for recurring panic attacks. When asked about the source of his trepidation, he told his therapist “if something happens there, I will be a suspect.”

Interestingly, only days after my investigation into the activities of Hussain al HUSSAINI, he “disappeared.” He left his residence of eight years and slipped quietly into the shadows of Boston, only to be found homeless and facing criminal charges this week.

Something is terribly wrong with the FBI’s handling of the 1995 bombing and the events leading up to and including the attacks of September 11, 2001. Something at the highest levels of government that continue through the present.

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I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusion regarding how accurate that article is.  But suffice it to say that there is far, far more evidence that Timothy McVeigh took part in a Muslim terrorist attack than there is that Timothy McVeigh was a “Christian.”

I close stating this: 126 individuals have been indicted on terror charges in the U.S. the last two years.  Every single one of them without a single exception is a Muslim.  Fifty of these terrorists were Americans.  And all fifty of these Americans were Muslims.  Conclusion?  There is clearly no connection between Islam and terrorism, says the left.

The same left that says that Timothy McVeigh is a “Christian” based on the flimsiest evidence proceed to refuse ironclad evidence about the terrorist threat of Islam.

And every single person who falsely claims that Timothy McVeigh was a “Christian” is merely an intolerant anti-Christian bigot.

Why FDR Would Have Denounced The Modern Democrat Party As Un-American

Democrats and the Democrat Party they form have become truly despicable.

I can cite former Democrats such as Dennis Prager who has frequently called himself “a Kennedy liberal.”  He has pointed out, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me.”

I can cite Ronald Reagan himself as such a man:

Reagan began his political career as a liberal Democrat, admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and active supporter of New Deal policies, but in the early 1950s he shifted to the right and, while remaining a Democrat, endorsed the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 as well as Richard Nixon in 1960.[54] His many GE speeches—which he wrote himself—were non-partisan but carried a conservative, pro-business message; he was influenced by Lemuel Boulware, a senior GE executive. Boulware, known for his tough stance against unions and his innovative strategies to win over workers, championed the core tenets of modern American conservatism: free markets, anticommunism, lower taxes, and limited government.[55] Eventually, the ratings for Reagan’s show fell off and GE dropped Reagan in 1962.[56]  That year Reagan formally switched to the Republican Party, stating, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”[57]

One of the things that undoubtedly resulted in these two brilliant political thinkers’ sense of abandonment was the fact that they clearly HAD BEEN abandoned by the Democrat Party as it continued to “evolve” (liberals love that word, worshiping it in place of a God who stays the same) into a degenerate spiral.  And it was that profound abandonment of key Democrat liberal views – the abandonment of classical liberalism into something that can only be described today as a hybrid of Marxism and fascism – that then led these men to question their entire political presuppositions that had resulted in their being Democrats in the first place.

Yes, I know, liberals always confidently assure us that Nazism and fascism are right wing.  But how, exactly?  If they say militarism, then how was it that the Soviet Union had the largest and most powerful military machine in the world?  If they say racism, then – apart from their own bigotry – how do they escape their own racism?  If you want to talk about anti-Semitism of the Nazis, it turns out that Democrats are actually far more anti-Semitic than Republicans.  And, again, the genocide of the leftwing Soviet Union dwarfs even that of the Nazis.

So, what exactly is it that makes Nazism “right wing”?  Well, maybe the left would say that the Nazis were “Christian” and left wing ideologies are secular.  But that is hardly true, either.  I document in a previous article (“Hitler Wasn’t ‘Right Wing’, Wasn’t ‘Christian’; And Nazism Was Applied Darwinism“) that Nazism and Christianity had virtually nothing to do with one another, and that in fact Hitler was an acknowledged atheist.

I did not know at the writing of that article that in fact Hitler actually wanted to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and that the SS officer placed in charge of the operation understood that Hitler would have murdered him following his capture.  I don’t see how that doesn’t do anything more than strengthen my case that Hitler was hardly a “Catholic.”

When it comes to Nazi ideology and Nazi policies (not the least of which was the sort of abortion and Darwinian eugenics that liberal progressive and modern-day Democrat Icon Margaret Sanger engaged in), Nazism was far more in line with liberal progressivism than anything remotely conservative.  A couple quick statements by Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Hillary Clinton:

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger referred to immigrants and poor folks as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning  … human beings who never should have been born.”

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she said, “if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon)

In her “Plan for Peace,” Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed “feebleminded.” Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. (Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107)

And I also show in a comment to that article that Nazism was far, FAR more in line with Democrat Party liberalism than it ever could be Republican Party conservatism when it came to big government and big government policies.

Jonah Goldberg points out that Nazism was in fact “far right.”  But only in the sense that the Nazi Party, i.e. the National Socialist German Workers Party, was the far right of the extreme left.

A good article I recently found on the subject of socialism and fascism is available here.  Basically, the latter is simply a particular species of the former.

American conservatism calls for a strong military defense, yes.  But as we shall see, so also did FDR.  And in every other aspect, consistent conservatism calls for limited and small national government.  Which was the diametric opposite of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi project, which controlled every sphere of life the same way the Democrat Party tried to do during the last two years when they had power.

If you think for so much as an instant that Adolf Hitler wanted less centralized power for himself and more control in the hands of the states/districts and the individual people – as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and conservatives constantly talk about – you simply couldn’t be any more ignorant.

That said, just what are the two fundamental issues I claim in my title that FDR would have denounced in the Democrat Party of today?

They are military power and the willingness to use it (i.e., the heart of any foreign policy) and government or public employee unions (i.e., the heart of Democrat’s domestic agenda).

These are no small matters: the former is central to any rational foreign policy and the latter has become central to Democrat domestic policy.

I describe FDR’s fundamental opposition to government unions and the reasons he was opposed to them here.  And I provide FDR’s very own words and his very own reasoning.  Suffice it to say that as pro-union as FDR was, he was profoundly opposed to government/public sector employees having the very sort of collective bargaining rights that Democrats today routinely demand for the public sector unions which constitute the bulk of union power today, and which massively contributes almost exclusively to the Democrat Party machine.  FDR realized that these employees were employees not of some unfair private company, but of the American people.  He also recognized that the government becomes a monopoly unto itself, and that government unions striking 1) exploited that monopoly power in an unfair and un-American way, and 2) was a defacto attack against the American people.

Please read the article above for more.

That leaves the other issue, the foreign policy issue of military power and the willingness to use it to deal with threats to the nation.

A speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could have been given today to expose the American liberal views of Democrats basically since Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to seek re-election after liberals turned on him.  It certainly powerfully applies to the Democrat positions in the war on terror – that Obama once refused to even acknowledge – of today.  Churchill began:

I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject and I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given to them.

As we go to and fro in this peaceful country with its decent, orderly people going about their business under free institutions and with so much tolerance and fair play in their laws and customs, it is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home.

For nearly a thousand years England has not seen the campfires of an invader. The stormy sea and our royal navy have been our sure defense. Not only have we preserved our life and freedom through the centuries, but gradually we have come to be the heart and center of an empire which surrounds the globe.

It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has served to form a state; an hour may lay it in dust.

What shall we do? Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.

But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”

Churchill gave that speech back in 1934.  Just imagine how much unparalleled human suffering would never have happened if only the weak and appeasing policies of the leftist bleeding hearts had not triumphed!  The left wrongly claim to stand for peace and compassion and every good thing.  But the exact opposite is true, as they have in fact murdered millions and millions of innocent human beings with their naive and morally stupid policies.  And to whatever extent liberals have good intentions, the road to hell is paved with liberal intentions.

Think back to Obama’s positions as a candidate in which he demonized Bush’s war in Iraq and his surge strategy.  Think of Obama’s incredibly naive and incredibly failed policy of talking to Iran without preconditions.

I could go on all day about Democrats taking on the views that Churchill condemned; that our enemies really aren’t that evil and how we can talk to them and reach some kind of accord short of fighting them.  It is as naive and morally idiotic today as it was in the era of Churchill and – yes – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I did not realize this until I watched a program I viewed on the Military History Channel called “Decisions That Shook the World.”  But FDR rapidly became what we would today call a neo-conservative.

In the late 1930s, FDR began to watch with growing horror as the Nazis began to take over Europe.  In secret letters to Winston Churchill, he offered his moral support to the Allies.  FDR knew that if the people – who did NOT want to become entangled in what they saw as a European war – were to find out about these letters, they would turn against him in outrage.  The American people in the 1930s and early 1940s were crystal clear that they did not want to become involved in another world war in Europe.  As it was, at the very time that the American people were the most worried about FDR secretly getting involved in the war behind their backs, FDR was in fact secretly corresponding with Churchill to do that very thing.  FDR also – again secretly – ordered his military commanders to devise a secret military plan with Great Britain for when FDR was able to involve America in the war against Hitler in Europe.

Now, today, it would be very easy to condemn FDR as duplicitous.  And he WAS incredibly duplicitous.  FDR was a man – we find out in the words of the historians who narrated the “Decisions” program – who had no problem saying and doing things in private that he very much did not want to be known in public.  As an example, FDR, in direct defiance of the United States Supreme Court – directed his Attorney General to wiretap suspected spies.  That was literally an impeachable offense.  FDR was breaking the law to deal with what he saw as a growing threat against America.

Rep. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate for president in the 1940 election – warned the American people, “If you elect FDR, he will get you into a war you don’t want.”  And FDR, deceitfully, in a speech, said, “That charge is contrary to every fact, every purpose of the past eight years.”  It was, as history documents, a complete lie.

Another lie FDR told the people came on the eve of the 1940 election.  FDR told mothers, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”  And it is hard to imagine a more dishonest promise, given that he was at the moment he said those words doing everything he knew how to get America into the war in Europe.

One of the points the historians made clear is that, “If all of Roosevelt’s acts were publicly known, he likely would have been impeached.”  He most certainly would NOT have been re-elected in 1940.

FDR was reelected on the promise that he would not do what in fact he was determined to do.

In 1940, the “anti-war” candidate was the Republican, Wendell Wilkie.  He had the virtue of being honest, but likely on the wrong side of history (we can’t know for sure what would have happened had the United States not become involved in World War II, but it doesn’t look pretty).  Democrat FDR may have had the virtue of being right, but he was certainly profoundly dishonest.

Now, I could write how FDR was quite constant with other modern liberal presidents who say one thing and do the exact opposite (I’m speaking directly about Barack Obama, the examples of which are now already legion).  But that isn’t my project here.  My project is to point out that, when it came to being prepared for war and then fighting that war, FDR was fundamentally in opposition to the modern Democrat Party agenda.

That briefly stated, it was the Republican Party which ultimately came to realize that FDR was correct in his views of the military and the need to vigorously defend American national security.  And it was the Democrats who came to turn on FDR’s realization and abandon his views.

They didn’t do so all at once, or right away.  As much as modern liberals tried to attack Ronald Reagan as putting the world on the brink of nuclear war in his Cold War stand against the powerful Soviet Union, one President John F. Kennedy was every bit the cold warrior that Reagan ever was.  And, again, any liberal who doubts this is simply a fundamentally ignorant human being.  That said, it was during the Kennedy presidency that JFK cynically – and by executive fiat rather than any vote by Congress – allowed the government unions that came to own the Democrat Party lock, stock and barrel to collectively bargain as a means to help the Democrat Party.  And the moral collapse of the Democrat Party was incredibly precipitous after that.

At this point in time, anyone who doubts that radical Islam is easily capable of not only destabilizing the world, but plunging it into economic depression and global war is delusional.  The mere prospect of a collapse of the Libyan government alone could spell enormous problems in the likely event of a civil war in that country.  Oil prices could literally more than double, which would simply obliterate any potential global economic recovery.  If Iran is able to obtain the bomb – which is most assuredly will if it hasn’t already – we will see a rise in Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism and terrorism such that the world has never seen as the Iranian regime rightly sees itself as impervious to any meaningful international action against it.  If that isn’t bad enough, we would also see a nuclear arms race quickly escalate in the craziest region in the history of the planet as Sunni Muslim regimes tried to protect themselves against the Shiite Iranian threat.

For what it’s worth, even as mainstream liberals celebrate and rejoice in the overthrow of one Arab leader after another, it is IRAN which is most benefitting from the chaos.  From the New York Times:

MANAMA, Bahrain — The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

I have been warning and warning about this.  But the world listens to Obama, not me.

But in light of Obama’s policy of appeasement, of asking for meetings of minds with no preconditions, allow me to rephrase Churchill’s words to suit our modern-day situation:

Would the invaders consent to hear Barack Obama’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Hillary Clinton? Would they agree to meet that famous African, Kofi Annan, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it.

Allow me to share with you the consensus view of liberalism today at one of its elite headquarters of Columbia University:

Columbia University is holding a series of public hearings on whether or not to allow ROTC back on campus now that DADT has been repealed. A wounded Iraq veteran who recently enrolled at Columbia took to the microphone and asked fellow students to support ROTC. He was booed, jeered, and called a racist.

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.

The former soldier responded to the jeers with this awesome statement:

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”

The despicable so-called “Americans” in the audience only laughed and jeered more.

Anthony Maschek was a staff sergeant with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. He was shot 11 times and spent two years recovering at Walter Reed. He’s an American hero and those thugs at Columbia are a disgrace. This is no different than those pieces of crap who spit on veterans coming back from Vietnam. It’s disgusting that in 2011 our veterans should have to be heckled by cowards.

Read more: http://www.thehotjoints.com/2011/02/21/wounded-veteran-booed-and-jeered-at-columbia-university/#ixzz1Evn0A8qL

FDR would have turned his back on this Democrat Party as a bunch of contemptible and despicable traitors to the United States of America.  He would have looked at the government unions that today are the sine qua non – the “that without which” – of the Democrat Party machine.  And he would have been disgusted that the entire Democrat Party rests today upon an inherently un-American foundation.  Then this president who risked so much to keep America and the world safe from tyranny would have looked upon the modern Democrat Party and its repeated denunciation of those who would fight America’s most terrifying enemies even as those enemies grew stronger and stronger while we have grown weaker and weaker, and he would have vomited in contempt for the party that he had such a profound role in shaping.

By the very standards of the figures that you cite as your greatest heroes, I denounce you as the pathetic, vile, un-American fools that you truly are, Democrats.

I would say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but I doubt that you are capable of that virtue in this house-of-card world that you are building now.  And the problem with houses of cards is not merely that they fall; it is also that they tend to burn furiously when a match is struck.

And when the Antichrist warned of by the Scriptures for more than 2,600 years comes (as described in the Books of Daniel and Revelation), it will be Democrats, the quintessential fools, who welcome him with cheers and adoration.

The Crisis In The Islamic World, The Future And Bible Prophecy

A couple weeks ago I wrote an article titled “The Crisis In Egypt, The Future And Bible Prophecy.”  I have also written an article titled, “Iran, Iraq And The Future In Bible Prophecy.”  But I would now like to expand to the entire Muslim world, given the massive unrest that is going on as we speak.

The crisis in Egypt isn’t over; it has merely reached a new phase with the departure of Mubarak.  The largest and most powerful nation in the Arab world is now being ruled by a military council; who knows for certain what will happen next?  Only our Lord God, who knows the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:9-10).  And to a much lesser extent, the Bible exegete who rightly divides God’s prophetic Word of truth.  And no one else.

Let me say at the outset that there is a great deal of disagreement in the area of Bible prophecy and eschatology (the study of “last things”).  I represent a very solid viewpoint in Protestant theology who embrace premillennialism (which holds that Jesus Christ will return to prior to establishing a literal 1,000 year millennium on earth per Revelation 20:1-7) and dispensationalism (the two basic tenants of which are that God has dealt with humanity progressively in an unfolding manner in history and that Israel is distinct from the Church).  On a dispensationalist view, God began with Israel and He shall faithfully keep all of His promises to Israel and end with Israel.  Dispensationalists read passages such as Romans 11:16-24 and recognize that God did not kill the olive tree of Israel or plant an entirely different tree; rather, He grafted Gentile Christian believers into the olive tree of the hope of Israel which He had planted in Abraham centuries before.  On a dispensationalist perspective, the purpose of the Millennium reign of Christ on earth will be to fulfill every promise that God ever made to Israel that Israel was not ready to receive: God will one day expand Israel to the boundaries that He promised Abraham (Genesis 15:18-21); one day all the nations trulywill one day go up to Jerusalem to worship Messiah on the forever throne of King David (see Zechariah 14:9, 16; see also 2 Samuel 7:9-16 and Psalm 89:29-37); the wolf will one day really lie down with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6), etc.

The dispensationalist will excitedly assure you that God’s promises are not like a human politician’s promises, in which some skilled lawerly linguist reinterprets the promises and explains that said promises were fulfilled, however unliterally was their fulfillment.  Rather, when God makes a promise, He will ultimately fulfill that promise LITERALLY in His sovereign timing.  It is God’s nature to fullfil His Word.

And all of this beautfiful fulfillment of God’s Word concerning Israel – according to the dispensationalist – will begin to happen when all Israel finally “will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son” (Zechariah 12:10).  Israel is “the apple of God’s eye” (Zechariah 2:8).  Nations harm Israel at their peril.  And God will not ultimately forsake “His people” or “His land” of Israel.

There are other views toward eschatology.  The most dominant view in the Protestant world at one time was Postmillennialism.  It holds that the millennium is a metaphor, and that Christ’s millennial kingdom is even now being extended over all the earth by the preaching of the gospel.  And that when most of the world is converted to Christ, Christ will return to His kingdom.  It largely went out after World War I; World War II pretty much killed this view off as the optimism of humans ushering in the kingdom of heaven for God proved to be unattainable.

Then there is the more substantial view of Amillenialism – which is the view of the Catholic church as well as a number of Protestant mainline denominations.  It holds that there is no literal future millennium (a means no).  It teaches that although Satan is currently bound, the kingdom of evil will continue to increase in parallel along with Christ’s kingdom.  But when Jesus Christ returns, the end of the world will occur and there will be a general resurrection and a general judgment of all human beings.

We don’t see early evidence of amillennialist thought until Augustine described the view in the early 5th century.  I would argue that the key reason that Augustine set out the highly allegorical and metaphorical interpretation system of amillenialism was due to the apparent absence of national Israel.  Israel had been wiped out by Rome in AD 70, in fulfillment of Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:2.  With no Israel, any system based on taking Bible prophecy literally fell apart.  Prophecy was something to be explained away, rather than revelled in as proof of a God who truly knows the end from the beginning.

It didn’t have to be that way.  One just had to believe the Bible and to truly trust in the God whose Word the Bible is.

There is another key difference between premillennialism and its amillennialist and postmillennialist rivals: literalism.  Premillennialists want to take their Bible literally.  Oswald T. Allis, an amillennialist champion of covenant theology and a vigorous opponent of dispensationalism, said on page 17 of his book Prophecy and the Church:

“One of the most marked features of premillennialism in all its forms is the emphasis which it places on the literal interpretation of Scripture.  It is the insistent claims of its advocates that only when interpreted literally is the Bible interpreted truly; and they denounce as “spiritualizers” or “allegorizers” those who do not interpret the Bible with the same degree of literalness as they do.  None have made this charge more pointedly than the dispensationalists.”

And, while amillennialists have been quite willing to do a great deal of “denouncing” of their own, I agree with Allis’ point: premillennialists and dispensationalists DO seek to literally interpret their Bibles, in marked contrast to his own amillennialist and Covenant viewpoint.  There are passages that speak of the arm of the Lord, or refer to God as a great bird protectively keeping His people under His wing.  The biblical literalist knows that God doesn’t have arms or wings or feathers because many other passages tell us that God is Spirit and doesn’t have a physical body apart from Christ who assumed a human image in the incarnation.  So we rightly understand passages describing God’s strong arm or God’s wings as metaphors.  But there is no place in Scripture that tells us not to understand the 1,000 year Millennial Kingdom as a literal kingdom or a literal thousand years.  We read the Bible literally unless context demands that we read it otherwise.

On the other hand, every single mainline liberal denomination that has evacuated historic orthodox Christianity has been one that has interpreted their Bibles using the allegorical approach of amillennialism and postmillennialism.  And I will include the nation of Germany that first became the most atheistic nation in Europe and then became the hosts of Nazism’s attempt to destroy the Jews and their influence upon “Judeo-Christianity” and the Christendom that Judeo-Christianity created.  An illustration of this phenomenon was revealed in a Pew Poll in which respondents were asked the pluralist question, “Do many religions lead to God and eternal life?”  70% of all surveyed said “yes.”  Amazingly, amillennialist Catholics (79%) and amillennialist Mainline churches (83%) were the most likely of ALL respondents to abandon the orthodox Christian confession that only Jesus Christ gives eternal life.  And while their are many strong and staunch Christians who embrace amillennialist theology, once you embrace a hermeneutic approach that encourages highly allegorical interpretations of Scripture, you open the door wide to abandoning the doctrine of the deity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement and the bodily Resurrection.  All of these abandonments of genuine and orthodox Christianity have been done by the opponents of dispensationalism.  Whereas a literal interpretation of the Bible guarantees against such radical departures from the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).

Dispensationalists also believe in the doctrine of the rapture of the saints prior to the divine judgment of the Tribulation.

What is the Tribulation?  It is described in the book of Revelation, beginning in chapter 6 and continuing through chapter 18.  It is a seven-year period of time that culminates the “Seventy Sevens” of prophecy given to Daniel (Daniel chapter 9).  It is a period during which God will give sinful mankind it’s chance to govern itself apart from God.  It is a period of divine judgment as God pours down divine wrath upon wicked humanity.  Interestingly the church is never mentioned even a single time after the words “come up here” in chapter 4.  Prior to that the word “church” was all over the place.  Where did all the Christians go?  What we see instead are Jews who become Christians after the rapture of the Christian church, and 144,000 Jewish Christians divinely sealed from each of the Twelve literal tribes of Israel (Revelation 7) evangelizing the whole world even as an insanely evil global dicator known as “the beast” or “Antichrist” reigns under the possession of the devil himself.

What is the Rapture?  Well, those words “come up here” (Revelation 4:1) sum it up pretty well.

The word “rapture” (to seize or snatch) was translated from the Greek word “Harpazo” in 1 Thess 4:16.  “Harpazo” has the same meaning as the Latin word “rapturo” in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate written in AD 385. We can consider the writings of early Christian exegetes such as Ephaim the Syrian, who wrote about AD 373 in a book entitled, “Antichrist and the End of the World”:

”We ought to understand thoroughly, therefore my brothers, what is imminent or overhanging. Already there have been hungers and plagues, violent movement of nations and sins, which have been predicted by the Lord.

Let us prepare ourselves for the meeting of the Lord Christ so that He may draw us from the confusion which overwhelms the world. Believe you me, dearest brothers, because the coming of the Lord is nigh. Believe you me, because the end of the world is at hand. Believe me because it is the very last time. Because all Saints and the elect of the Lord are gathered together before the Tribulation which is about to come and are taken to the Lord in order that they may not see at any time the confusion that overwhelms the world because of our sins.”

That’s just one particularly clear example from the Church Fathers. Papias – companion of Polycarp, the disciple of the apostle John – believed in the literal earthly pre-millennial doctrine. As did Papias, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus, and Lactanitus, Apollinaris of Laodicea, Melito of Sardis, Jerome, Gennadius, Hippolytus of Rome, Nepos, Ambrose of Milan, as well as others. Pre-millenialism was in fact the dominant view of the church for the first few centuries. It is the oldest eschatological view.

Contrary to a very oft pubilicized misconception, Charles Nelson Darby did not “invent” dispensationalism.  Dispensatioanlism had already been around LONG before Darby came onto the scene.  But Darby did systemize and popularize dispensational eschatology more than had been the case previously.  And it has since exploded to become the dominant view of the Protestant church, in terms of numbers of adherents.  This is hardly a point against dispensationalism, as we are frequently told: we knew that as the last days approached, knowledge would be greatly increased (Daniel 12:4).  And in fact as we see more and more things that the Bible described that are being fulfilled right in front of our eyes, that understanding shall certainly continue to be increased.  It seems quite unremarkable to me that as we get closer and closer to the last days, we would understand more and more about the last days and about biblical eschatology.

One of the things that Charles Nelson Darby and those who came before him did was literally predict that there would HAVE to be a state of Israel in order for prophecy as they understood it to be fulfilled. He implicitly taught that if his system for understanding Scripture was correct, there would be a powerful nation of Israel at a time when there was no evidence whatsoever that such a nation would arise literally from the bones and the ashes (see Ezekiel 37 and see here).  And, as God’s workings with man so often come about, it was because of his faith and the faith of early dispensationalists that Israel DID reassemble from the bones.  It was the early Christian “Zionists” who believed in the regathering of national Israel who largely funded the purchase of the land of Israel for the future establishment of a nation.  Prior to Darby and the dispensationalists, Israel had been an empty desert wasteland populated only by a few nomads; because of the biblical Zionists the land flowed with water in yet another literal fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

Darby and the dispensationalists also predicted that Russia – at the time a backwater and hardly a major international power – would become mighty as the land of Gog and Magog in the ultimate north (see Ezekiel 38).

Now allow me to get closer to our present day and refer to another “Darby” who correctly predicted events to come according to an understanding of dispensationalist eschatology: a Messianic Jew named Joel Rosenberg.  Allow me to quote from my aforementioned article “Iran, Iraq And The Future In Bible Prophecy“:

A Wikipedia article on Joel Rosenberg probably provides the most concise summary (accessed June 23, 2009):

Rosenberg’s novels have attracted those interested in Bible Prophecy, due to several of his fictional elements of his books that would occur after his writing of books. Nine months before the September 11th attacks, Rosenberg wrote a novel with a kamikaze plane attack on an American city. Five months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he wrote a novel about war with Saddam Hussein, the death of Yasser Arafat eight months before it occurred, a story with Russia, Iran, and Libya forming a military alliance against Israel occurring the date of publishing,^[7] the rebuilding of the city of Babylon,^[12] Iran vowing to have Israel “wiped off the face of the map forever” five months before Iranian President Ahmadinejad said the same,^[13] and the discovery of huge amounts of oil and natural gas in Israel (which happened in January 2009).^[14] The U.S. News & World Report have referred to him as a “Modern Nostradamus,”^[15] although Rosenberg tries to play down those proclamations, stating that “I am not a clairvoyant, a psychic, or a ‘Modern Nostradamus,’ as some have suggested.”^[16] He gives the credit for his accurate predictions to studying Biblical prophecy and applying to the modern world.^[16]

Why did Rosenberg predict that there would be a “kamikaze plane attack on an American city” by Islamic terrorists?  Because he accurately understood the evil at the heart of Islam.

Why did Rosenberg predict a war between Saddam Hussein and the United States resulting in the overthrow of Saddam and his brutal regime?  That’s where it gets interesting.

Joel Rosenberg had done a thorough study of the Book of Ezekiel and of the Bible (as a couple of overlapping articles summarize – Article 1; – Article 2).  He learned that one day, according to the Bible, a massive army under the leadership of Russia and many of its former republics (Magog) and Iran (Persia) and consisting of many countries that are today Islamic [e.g. “Cush” (modern-day Sudan and Ethiopia); “Put” (modern-day Libya); “Gomer” (modern-day Turkey); “Beth-togarmah” (modern-day Armenia); and many peoples “along the mountains of Israel” (modern-day Lebanon and possibly Syria)] would form an “exceedingly great army” that would one day attack Israel.

What Rosenberg noted was the absence of two countries: Egypt and Babylon (i.e. Iraq).  Egypt had been a perennial enemy of Israel until 1973, when Egypt alone in all the Arab/Muslim world forged a historic peace treaty with the state of Israel.  That left Iraq.  Rosenberg asked himself, “How could a nation like Iraq, under the leadership of someone like Saddam Hussein, NOT participate in this mega-colossal-last-days attack on Israel?

Rosenberg concluded that Saddam Hussein WOULDN’T refrain from such an attack.  And that meant that Saddam Hussein would have to go.

And so, NINE MONTHS before the 9/11 attack, Rosenberg in his “fiction” created a scenario in which terrorists flew a plane in a kamikaze attack, and the United States took out the Iraqi regime and replaced it with a stable Western-friendly government.

And because the Bible is the true Word of an all-knowing God who knows the end from the beginning as revealed through His prophets, the scenario laid out by Joel Rosenberg turned out to be eerily true.  It wasn’t a “lucky guess”; it was based upon the God who had revealed the last days to an inspired prophet named Ezekiel some 2,600 years ago.

Thus we have Iraq, its tyrant who had filled mass graves with the bodies of at least 400,000 of his own people, overthrown and a stable democracy growing in his place.  And we have Iran, a country strongly allied with Russia; a country bent on acquiring nuclear weapons; a country that has announced its intent on the destruction of Israel; a country under the leadership of men who in all likelihood believe in establishing a future by an act of violent apocalypse.  Two countries on two very different paths.  And both paths known to God 2,600 years ago.

It is not my primary purpose to attack other Christian viewpoints, but rather to argue that the predictive power of Bible prophecy viewed through the lens of dispensationalist theology has been nothing short of remarkable.  And to argue that when the Bible is given a chance via literal interpretation, it shines brightly as the true Word of the Living God.

One day, the early dispensationalists taught, Israel would be regathered as a powerful nation.  It happened literally, not metaphorically or allegorically.  One day in the far north a nation would grow to prominence such that it could lead an international invasion against that nation Israel.  It happend as Russia became a superpower.  It happend literally, not metaphorically or allegorically.  The nations that would be led by Russia would include the nation of Persia (modern Iran) in a strategic alliance and and a host of nations that would have some powerful commonly-held ideological rationale to launch an all-out attack against Israel.  That has happened quite literally.  And today Russia, Iran and modern Islamic states have both a common alliance and a common hostility to national Israel.  Just as the Bible literally taught would happen in the last days.

There was a period during which naysayers ridiculed dispensationalist interpretations of prophecy, because many dispensationalist Bible scholars talked in terms of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s/early 1990s.  But the same Gog and Magog in the north is back in international power, and the new Russia is more involved with its Islamic alliance than ever.  Literally.  Just as the Bible taught all along.  A good presentation of just how powerful this very literal last days alliance is can be read in Joel Rosenberg’s book Epicenter.  He supports this powerful endtimes alliance with documentation galore.

Joel Rosenberg described a world in which two powerful Muslim nations – Egypt and Iraq – would somehow NOT join the last days alliance.  I describe that further in my article “The Crisis In Egypt, The Future And Bible Prophecy.”

Right now Egypt is being controlled by the military.  And that is the best state of affairs for Israel, given that the military is the most pro-Western element in all of Egypt.  I don’t profess to have any idea what kind of government Egypt will ultimately end up with; I merely state that Egypt will ultimately-  and frankly amazingly (along with modern Babylon Iraq) – NOT participate in the war of Gog and Magog described in Ezekiel 38 and 39, in which a Russian-and-Iranian-led host of Islamic states attack Israel in the coming last days.

But what about the many other Islamic nations that are likewise experiencing great unrest with all of these “days of rage” erupting in first one Muslim nation and then another?

Here’s a map detailing the spread of protests currently erupting all over the Arab world:

You can add Iran to that list, as protests are erupting even as this article goes out.  You can also add Bahrain.  And I have no doubt other Muslim countries as well.

What about THESE countries?  Is democracy afoot throughout the Islamic world, which has never had democracy in its entire history?

People should stop and think: is it a mere coincidence that the Muslim world has been a world of tyrant kings and dictatorial regimes, while democracy spread throughout Christendom and as a direct result of Judeo-Christian principles?  Or is there something fundamentally and profoundly wrong with Islam as both a religion and as a political system?

We have the recent example of the Palestinian Authority, which had democratic elections only for the people to enthusiastically vote for the terrorist organization Hamas.  Secular humanists and liberal religionists have denounced this as an embrace of religion which makes democracy impossible.  But that is clearly not what our American founding fathers who created the first lasting democracy in human history believed.  Rather, our founding fathers argued that true religion and the morality which true religion fosters are ESSENTIAL for a democracy and a people capable of self-government.

I think now of the Andrew McCarthy book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. (and see the descriptions of this book here and here).  And I would submit that on the one hand we have the Islamic threat of radical jihadism, and we have the Western threat of serving as the useful idiots of radical jihadism.  It was liberals and liberalism which gave us the multiculturalism that leaders of the most powerful European countries (Germany, the UK and France) are now vehemently denouncing as having fomented the spread of radical Islam.  And as an example of this we have breathless mainstream media liberals describing the Egyptian people as a nation of freedom-loving secularists when the truth is very different.  According to a Pew survey:

“At least three-quarters of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan say they would favor making each of the following the law in their countries: stoning people who commit adultery, whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery and the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion. Majorities of Muslims in Jordan and Nigeria also favor these harsh punishments.”

Which is to say that rather than being a theory, it is a fact that secular humanist liberals have done more to spread radical Islamist jihadism than anyone short of the radical Islamist jihadists themselves.  And it is in fact those who embrace a literalist view of the Bible who have most strongly decried this moral stupidity for years.

God knew these days would come thousands of years ago.  He knew that the Middle East – for centuries a forgotten backwater – would become central in the last days due to the discovery of and need for oil.  God knew that Israel would be once again established as a nation literally coming to life from dry bones (Ezekiel 37).  God knew that ancient Persia and modern day Iran would once again come to dominate the Middle East in the last days.  God knew that Russia would rise to become a great bear in the last days.  God knew that something would unite virtually all of the nations surrounding Israel to join in an attack against the tiny nation that God founded through Abraham.  And God knew that these nations would come together in one massive force against that nation Israel as described inEzekiel 38-39.  Because God knows the end from the beginning.

Even as I write Libya’s Gaddafi is calling upon Palestinians to revolt against Israel.  Already the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has been saying the treaty with Israel is over and calling for preparations for a war on Israel.  And this isn’t a bunch of allegories; it is quite literal, indeed.

As you read your newspaper and watch your news, does this all-out war described in Ezekiel 38 and 39 seem farfetched?  Or does this insane attack against Israel seem to be the far and away the most likely outcome as history unfolds just as God described through His prophets?  The only thing that should seem farfetched is the conclusion of this battle, as God supernaturnaturally comes to Israel’s aid and destroys this massive army that would seek to destroy His people.  But is such a demonstration of divine power really so incredible for a God who knows the end from the beginning, and revealed that knowledge in His Word?

And I would argue that an explosion of democracy in the Islamic world – which the very same liberals who cheer it now vehemently denounced when Bush was advocating it – may well backfore horrendously just as it did in the Palestinian Authority.  It may well be the agent that binds the Islamic world together into the coalition led by Russia and Iran that will one day come streaming toward Israel in the rapidly approaching last days.  Once any of these radical jihadist groups such as the ayatollahs in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian Authority – and outfits like the Taliban or the Muslim Brotherhood – gain powere through a popular vote, they become impossible to vote out.  Because they are fundamentally anti-democratic; in fact they despise democracy and everything it stands for.  And once they get power, they will never let it go.

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party never had more than 37% of the vote in Germany.  But once in, he and the Nazis totally seized power.  The same thing happened with the communists in Russia and everywhere else that communism has spread.  And it has happened again and again with Islamofascists like the Ayatollahs and secular Islamic dictators such as Saddam Hussein alike.

As I consider the popular Islamic people’s uprisings in light of passages such as Ezekiel 38-39 and Psalm 83 (e.g., “They say, ‘Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more!'” – Psalm 83:4), I believe that this move in the Islamic world will not end well for most of the nations experiencing these “days of rage.”

What the Bible predicted would happen as the Word of a God who knows the end from the beginning will happen.  And it will happen very literally indeed.

As Iran gets the nuclear bomb – and Iran WILL get the nuclear bomb, thanks to Western liberals and American Democrats (see my articles here and here) – it will become emboldened in a way that will make its previous insolence to the global community seem like nothing.  They will feel impervious, and they will most certainly join Russia in an attack upon Israel as leaders of a pan-Islamic international force.  And this coming world war against Israel will be no allegory and it will be no metaphor; it will be terrifyingly literal.

But you don’t have to be afraid.  Because the God who told us that these days would come is sovereign over the world.

I pray every single day, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus,” which is what Maranatha means.

As one who stands quite guilty indeed of being a biblical literalist, I believe that the Lord will rapture His people before the coming Tribulation which will test and judge the whole world and ultimately bring about the national restoration of Israel to its Messiah.  I believe that this rapture will “snatch” every single genuine Christian as the Lord comes for His people and meets them in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).  Jesus went to prepare a place for us; and we will soon be with Him in His beautiful and glorious presence before we return with Him as He comes to earth as King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19).

I believe that the rapture will even catch those Christians who don’t believe in the rapture.  Even as I believe that as one who loves the Lord’s coming, I will be awarded a special crown in heaven.

Jesus said that in the last days before His return to earth as King of kings, the times would become so fearful and so terrifying that men’s hearts would fail them for fear (Luke 21:25-26. KJV).  But Jesus said to His own, “Do not be afraid” (John 14:27).

You don’t have to be afraid if you have Christ in your heart.  Especially if you also have the prayers for His soon coming on your lips.

Maranatha!

Demonization And Other Examples Of Liberal Hypocrisy

I recall a bit from a Seinfeld episode that involved a bedroom technique known only as “the move.” It was apparently a very potent and successful “move,” indeed:

Elaine: I was with David *Putty* last night.

Jerry: Yeah, so.

Elaine: He did the move.

Jerry: What move?

Elaine: You know…*the* move.

Jerry: Wait a second. *My* move?

[Elaine nods].

Jerry: David Putty used *my* move?

Elaine: Yes, yes.

Jerry: Are you sure?

Elaine: Jerry! There is no confusing *that* move with any other move.

Jerry: I can’t believe it. He *stole* my move.

Elaine: What else did you tell [reaches over to slap Jerry] him. [does it

again] The two of you must have had *quite* a little chat!

Jerry: Oh, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t even mention you. You know, we

were in the garage. You know how garages are. They’re conducive to sex

talk. It’s a high-testosterone area.

Elaine: Because of all the pistons and the lube jobs?

Jerry: Well, I’m going down to that garage and telling him to stop doing it.

Elaine: Well, wait—wait a second.

Jerry: What?

Elaine: Isn’t that a little…rash?

Jerry: No! He stole my move!

Elaine: Yeah, but…*I* like the move.

Jerry: Yeah, but it’s like another comedian stealing my material.

Elaine: Well, he doesn’t even do it exactly the same. He–he–he uses a

pinch at the end instead of the *swirl*!

Jerry: Oh, yeah. The pinch. *I’ve* done the pinch. That’s not new.

Well, with that that long bit of introduction, the Democrats have their very own “move,” – an extremely potent and successful “move” – and they are clearly angry that Republicans are beginning to steal their move.

The Democrat’s “move” – by the way – is demonization.  It’s their move, they’ve used it to great effect for the last twenty years or so, and they don’t want their rivals using it.

Here’s a little story to illustrate the Democrat’s and their “move”:

It Takes One to Know One
“Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, one of the most prominent Catholic conservative intellectuals in the United States, announced yesterday that she would refuse a prestigious award from the University of Notre Dame rather than appear on the same platform on which President Obama is being awarded an honorary degree,” the Boston Globe reports.

The Globe notes that not all Catholics are unhappy with Notre Dame’s plan to give the president an honorary degree:

“There are some well-meaning people who think Notre Dame has given away its Catholic identity, because they have been caught up in the gamesmanship of American higher education, bringing in a star commencement speaker even if that means sacrificing their values, and that accounts for some of this,” said the Rev. Kenneth Himes, chairman of theology department at Boston College. “But one also has to say that there is a political game going on here, and part of that is that you demonize the people who disagree with you, you question their integrity, you challenge their character, and you brand these people as moral poison. Some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue, and, consequently, they have simply launched a crusade to bar anything from Catholic institutions that smacks of any sort of open conversation.”

Now read this 2006 Associated Press dispatch:

Nearly 100 faculty members at Boston College have signed a letter objecting to the college’s decision to award Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree.

The letter entitled “Condoleezza Rice Does Not Deserve a Boston College Honorary Degree,” was written by the Rev. Kenneth Himes. . . .

“On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice’s approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College’s commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university’s work,” the letter said.

Himes, it seems, is an expert on demonization.

Kenneth Himes lectures us: How DARE you do what I did to you!  There must be something morally WRONG with you!!!  Demonization is “OUR” move, and you can’t steal it!

Well, as Obama folk like to say, “YES, WE CAN!”

Being a liberal means being a hypocrite.  Hypocrisy defines liberals; their shriveled little souls swim in it.  And part of being a total hypocrite means having the pathological ability to be perfectly at home with their own massive contradictions.

For instance, liberals are “tolerant,” which means they lash out and demonize anyone who doesn’t think exactly like them – in the name of “tolerance.”

A few other examples of liberal hypocrisy:

Liberals support high taxes on the rich.  As long as it is understood that they have no expectation to pay such taxes themselves.  Ask pretty much anyone on Barack Obama’s cabinet.  Liberals like “Turbo Tax” Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, Ron Kirk, Hilda Solis, Nancy Kelleher, and Kathleen Sebelius.  And that doesn’t include Congressional Democrats such as Charles Rangel – who is writing YOUR tax laws even as he cheats on HIS taxes.  And don’t forget the mantra from Rangel’s former fellow member of the House Ways and Means Committee William Jefferson: “FBI sting money hidden in freezers is NOT taxable.”

Liberals claim that it is the rich’s “patriotic duty” to pay a shockingly high percentage of total income taxes while simultaneously pandering to the clearly unpatriotic – by their own standard – 42% of Americans who pay NO federal income taxes at all.

Liberals claim that they are generous and conservatives are stingy; yet the facts demand the exact OPPOSITE conclusion.  The fact of the matter is that conservatives are FAR more “liberal” givers than liberals.  Conservatives give 30% more than liberals even though liberals earn slightly more.  And religious conservatives give THREE AND A HALF TIMES more of their income to charities than secular liberals.  If you’d like some particular cases, consider the loathsome lack of personal generosity displayed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden relative to the extremely generous conservatives like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and John McCain.

Liberals love racial diversity – as long as they can continue demonizing black conservatives such as Michael Steele, Clarence Thomas, and Condoleezza Rice as “Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs” or “race traitors.”  Janeane Garafalo is completely free to be a hard-core racist, just as long as the minorities she viciously attacks are conservatives.  Newsweek Magazine –  in wholehearted agreement with Garafalo – literally argued that whites who don’t vote for Obama are racist.

In the same vein, liberals are pro-woman – just as long as “women” are defined as “liberal feminist”; otherwise, they hand out the Sarah Palin treatment (e.g., “Palin: Bad Mother, Bad Woman”).  Ultimately, of course, Sarah Palin is a “bad mother” for allowing her baby born with Down Syndrome to live.

Liberals stand for the helpless and oppressed victim: as long as that helpless and oppressed victim isn’t a baby having his brains sucked out.  Meanwhile liberals attack conservatives as not caring about the poor, even though – as has already been pointed out – conservatives are in fact FAR more generous than liberals (example 1, example 2).

Liberals continually decry the “rightwing smear machine” even as they have hard-core hate sites such as Moveon.org, Media Matters, and the Daily Kos – which DWARF anything even remotely compatible on the right.   The primary funding comes from documented Nazi collaborator George Soros, an American-sovereignty-undermining trans-nationalist who has made his billions undermining currencies all over the world – including America’s.  And his friends have been just as bad.  And Soros and friends such as Peter Lewis, Steven Bing, and Herbert and Marion Sandler have used their massive fortunes to ensure that NOBODY smears like the left: think “General Betray Us.”

Liberals “interpret” the Constitution to find “penumbras and emanations” that they allege mandate a constitutional and sacred right to abortion on demand, but twist and contort the English language until the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give the people the right to bear arms.

Liberals demand socialized medicine.  Michael Moore made a ton of money demonizing America’s privatized system and claiming that Cuba’s socialized medicine was better; yet when that fat SOB needed heart surgery, he elected to go to Cleveland rather than Cuba.  Even more glaring, Belinda Stronach of the Canadian Parliament opposed even allowing private medicine in Canada; but when she was diagnosed with breast cancer she came to the United States to obtain the very thing she denied her fellow citizens from having.

As to the death penalty for convicted murderers, liberals argue that inserting a hypodermic needle into the vein of a death row inmate constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, yet insist that sucking the  brains out of a viable baby whose head is sticking out of a birth canal is compassionate.

They also say that a 13 year old girl should be able to have an abortion without her parents’ consent, then tell parents that they face jail if they don’t ensure that that same 13 year old girl doesn’t miss school (with attendance being the barometer for public school funding).

Liberals demand that they be able to teach issues such as homosexuality in the guise of open-mindedness and diversity, but come absolutely unglued if any school board so much as suggest that evolution is only a theory rather than a law, let alone present any alternative to evolution whatsoever.

On the subject of evolution as it relates to morality, liberals denounce any dependence on the natural law (grounded in a transcendent Creator God) as the only basis for objective morality, and then impose one utterly subjective moral norm after another.  In so doing, they literally subjective natural law and objectivize their own highly subjective moral preferences.

Liberals demand that all children go to government schools and fight any effort to provide vouchers to parents, and then send their own children to private schools.  For all of liberals’ indignant outrage concerning “the children,” the fact is that the teachers’ unions are far more important than the education of children.   Barack Obama ensured that children like Marquis Greene couldn’t go to his daughters’ Sidwell Friends School.

Liberals take private jets to denounce people for being polluters.

Liberals claim that whether the Antarctic ice sheet grows or whether it shrinks, it still proves global warming.

Liberals lampooned President Bush for his verbal gaffes, and yet idolize the “sublime speaking ability” of a man who can’t so much as say, “Good morning” without reading from a teleprompter screen.  Barack Obama has already used his teleprompter FAR more in just his first 100 days than George Bush did in his entire 8 year term.

Liberals repeatedly (falsely) claimed that Jefferson said “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” when conservatives attacked their lack of patriotism.  They were terribly upset with any insinuation that they might be unpatriotic – because when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proclaimed defeat in Iraq (QUOTE: “I believe that this war is lost” UNQUOTE) even as our troops were in the field fighting to prevail, he was surrendering as a “patriot.”  And when John Murtha proclaimed Marines who turned out to be innocent of murderous war crimes in Haditha, his demonization of our Marines was “patriotic.” Now, of course, Democrats are all over themselves labeling Republican opposition to their socialist agenda as “unpatriotic.”

As for liberals’ view on patriotism, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words – when that picture is a cartoon drawn by Ted Rall:

Let’s see: racial hatred directed at white males.  Check.  Cynicism of the patriotism that would make a young man fight for his country.  Check.  Mockery of religion.  Check.  Contempt for America as a country of suicide bombers.  Check.

Or another liberal cartoon.  America as viewed through the warped lenses of the liberal New York Times: the Statue of Liberty swinging a whip at the poor, tired, huddled masses.

As liberals now demand that conservatives stop using “their move,” realize that they will NEVER stop using it themselves.  It is simply who they are.  So we might as well sick their own dog on them – and let us make sure that dog is foaming at the mouth when it bites them back.

Archbishop Rips Moral Idiocy Of Obama’s Abortion Democrats

Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput had a lot to say about Democrats and abortion:

DENVER (AP) – Denver Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput labeled Barack Obama the “most committed” abortion-rights candidate from a major party in 35 years while accusing a Catholic Obama ally and other Democratic-friendly Catholic groups of doing a “disservice to the church.” ….

Chaput, without getting into much detail, called Obama the “most committed” abortion-rights major-party presidential candidate since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in 1973.

“To suggest – as some Catholics do – that Senator Obama is this year’s ‘real’ pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse,” Chaput said according to his prepared remarks, titled “Little Murders.” ….

The Obama campaign has been promoting an unusual-suspect sort of endorsement from Douglas Kmiec, a Catholic law professor and former legal counsel in the Reagan administration.

Kmiec wrote a book making a Catholic case for Obama. He argues the Obama campaign is premised on Catholic social teaching like care for working families and the poor and foreign policy premised on peace over war. Democratic efforts to tackle social and economic factors that contribute to abortion hold more promise, Kmiec said, than Republican efforts to criminalize it.

While applauding Kmiec’s past record, Chaput said: “I think his activism for Senator Barack Obama, and the work of Democratic-friendly groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, have done a disservice to the church, confused the natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermined the progress pro-lifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue instead of fighting within their parties and at the ballot box to protect the unborn.”

Pro-Obama Catholics “seek to contextualize, demote and then counterbalance the evil of abortion with other important but less foundational social issues,” said Chaput, who wrote a book this year, “Render Unto Caesar,” about Catholics and politics.

I have heard many people say that world hunger, global poverty, and other social welfare issues should be primary, and that abortion is of relatively minor significance in comparison.  It doesn’t work that way.

First of all, a fetus is a human being, every bit as much as you are or I am.  According to the most rigorous scientific categorizing of all things – taxonomy – a human fetus is of the Kingdom Animalia, of the Phylum Chordata, of the Class Mammalia, of the Order Primates, of the Family Hominidae, of the Genus Homo, and of the Species Sapiens.  From the moment of conception, that is how a human being is classified.  And nothing else in existence is so classified.  As a matter of funamental reality, you who are reading this are no more or less human than a human zygote.  An unborn human being is human by virtue of its parents, and a being by virtue of the fact that it is a living, growing, developing thing: it is a human being.

Either human beings are fundamentally, intrinsically, and incommensurably valuable as human beings in and of themselves or they are not.  If they are not, and a woman can subjectively choose to terminate her pregnancy – and kill her child – then human beings have only subjective value.  Human beings in this sense would be little different from a pet dog: my dog has a great deal of value to me, but not much to anyone else.  One woman loves and cherishes the baby growing in her womb; another despises it and wants it dead.  Neither is any more “right” or “wrong” than the other.

The baby who emerges from its mother’s womb in the delivery womb would be the kind of thing that could have been killed only moments before.  And as that child grows into adulthood, it is always the kind of thing that could have been terminated without moral consequences.

I remember seeing a bumper sticker on a car that read, “Pro Child, Pro Choice.”  If you can be pro-child while strongly supporting abortion, then why can’t you be “Pro Jew, Pro Holocaust”?  We have in the United States aborted nearly 50,000,000 innocent human beings for the simple reason that they were unwanted.  And the view that one can care about children so much that one supports that babies’ death because it isn’t wanted by its mother has rather terrifying implications about other “unwanted” people.

That’s not a real strong position from which to argue about social and economic justice.  The desperately poor, starving child in Africa?  Does he or she have rights?  Does he or she matter?

Is a newborn baby a precious human being, or is it merely an abortion that didn’t happen?

If his or her value is merely a matter of subjective determination, then the answer may be yes or or it may be no, depending on how you personally feel about the baby in question.  If, on the other hand, his or her value is a matter of objective ontological status as a human being, then the answer is an unqualified YES.  And if you don’t care about that baby, then the issue isn’t about that baby’s humanity, but about your appalling lack of human decency and compassion.

Why should a woman’s decision to have her child or to kill it alter the reality of that child’s value?  Who is she to decide, “This child is valuable,” or “This child is worthless”?  “Oh, she had her child, so therefore it matters, and I should care” is a bizarre thought to hold at the same time as “Oh, she aborted her child, so therefore it didn’t matter, and I shouldn’t care.”

That’s the archbishop’s point.  If you’re not pro-life, nothing else really matters.  It’s such a bunch of subjective posturing once you have abandoned the fundamental dignity of human life.  We’re just meat puppets, then.  We’re just primates who are somewhat more “evolved” than the very animals we eat for food or allow to live as pets.  We’ve killed untold millions of such primates in wars, and untold millions more have died of neglect.  What does one more – or one million or one billion more – matter?

Please watch this video:

Catholics Open Can-O-Whoopass On Nancy Pelosi’s Abortion Of Catholicism

Thanks for helping Catholics understand how hateful Democrats actually are against religion, Nancy!  Kick start the DNC with a statement of foolishness and hate.

Pelosi – after making sure she was represented as speaking as a Catholic – was so unrelentingly stupid, and so full of blatant lies, on a crucial issue to the Catholic Christian worldview that you knew a response was coming.

Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York, was one of the Catholic leaders to refute Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s incredibly stupid view of Catholic thought on abortion:

Statement on Remarks by Speaker Pelosi

August 26, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 26, 2008

STATEMENT OF HIS EMINENCE, EDWARD CARDINAL EGAN CONCERNING REMARKS MADE BY THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Like many other citizens of this nation, I was shocked to learn that the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America would make the kind of statements that were made to Mr. Tom Brokaw of NBC-TV on Sunday, August 24, 2008. What the Speaker had to say about theologians and their positions regarding abortion was not only misinformed; it was also, and especially, utterly incredible in this day and age.

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.

Edward Cardinal Egan

Archbishop of New York

Nancy Pelosi “should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.”

That’s why devout evangelical Protestants like myself love devout evangelical Catholics.

See my piece, “Pope Pelosi Issues New Papal Decree Re: Catholic Stance On Abortion” for Pelosi’s blatant misrepresentation of her own professed religion for despicable political purposes.

It’s whoop-ass day for Nancy Pelosi. The Catholic League weighed in over her terrible lies as well:

On yesterday’s NBC-TV show, “Meet the Press,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked to comment on when life begins. Here is what she said: “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition.”

When Tom Brokaw told her that the Catholic Church “feels very strongly” that life begins at conception, Pelosi said, “I understand. And this is like maybe 50 years or something like that. So again, over the history of the Church, this is an issue of controversy.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: ‘Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception.’ It also says, ‘Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.’ Looks like Pelosi didn’t study the subject long enough. But not to worry: We are sending her a copy of Catholicism for Dummies today (the Catechism is like maybe a bit advanced).

“Whether Joe Biden is as ignorant of what his religion teaches remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is the enthusiasm which NARAL showed when he was selected to join the ticket. The radical pro-abortion group was delighted, as were the radical pro-abortion delegates to the Democratic convention: as reported in today’s New York Times, 64 percent of Americans reject abortion-on-demand, yet only 23 percent of the delegates do. It is only fitting, then, that NARAL’s president will speak today at the Convention and Planned Parenthood’s president will speak tomorrow.

“So there we have it: the man running for president on the Democratic ticket supports selective infanticide, his running mate is a pro-abortion Catholic, the delegates are wildly out of step with Americans on abortion and the Speaker of the House hasn’t a clue what her religion teaches on the subject.”

The Pope has already spoken on the subject. A Reuters article titled, “Pope warns Catholic Politicians Who Back Abortion” says:

Under Church law, someone who knowingly does or backs something which the Church considers a grave sin, such as abortion, inflicts what is known as “automatic excommunication” on themselves.

The Pope said parliamentarians who vote in favor of abortion have “doubts about the value of life and the beauty of life and even a doubt about the future”.

“Selfishness and fear are at the root of (pro-abortion) legislation,” he said. “We in the Church have a great struggle to defend life…life is a gift not a threat.”

“ALWAYS A GIFT”

The Pope’s comments appear to raise the stakes in the debate over whether Catholic politicians can support abortion or gay marriage and still consider themselves proper Catholics.

In recent months, the Vatican has been accused of interference in Italy for telling Catholic lawmakers to oppose a draft law that would grant some rights to unwed and gay couples.

During the 2004 presidential election, the U.S. Catholic community was split over whether to support Democratic candidate John Kerry, himself a Catholic who backed abortion rights.

Some Catholics say they personally would not have an abortion but feel obliged to support a woman’s right to choose.

But the Church, which teaches that life begins at the moment of conception and that abortion is murder, says Catholics cannot have it both ways.

“The Church says life is beautiful, it is not something to doubt but it is a gift even when it is lived in difficult circumstances. It is always a gift,” the Pope said.

Catholics, please be true to your religion: vote out the Party of Death. Vote out the Demagogic Party. Get rid of these blatant blasphemers and cast your vote for life.

Pope Pelosi Issues New Papal Decree Re: Catholic Stance On Abortion

The question as to when human life begins may be above Messiah Obama’s paygrade, but it turns out that Nancy Pelosi shares God’s paygrade. In a Meet The Press interview, Pelosi had this:

MR. BROKAW: Senator Obama saying the question of when life begins is above his pay grade, whether you’re looking at it scientifically or theologically. If he were to come to you and say, “Help me out here, Madame Speaker. When does life begin?” what would you tell him?

REP. PELOSI: I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose. Roe v. Wade talks about very clear definitions of when the child–first trimester, certain considerations; second trimester; not so third trimester. There’s very clear distinctions. This isn’t about abortion on demand, it’s about a careful, careful consideration of all factors and–to–that a woman has to make with her doctor and her god. And so I don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins. As I say, the Catholic Church for centuries has been discussing this, and there are those who’ve decided…

MR. BROKAW: The Catholic Church at the moment feels very strongly that it…

REP. PELOSI: I understand that.

MR. BROKAW: …begins at the point of conception.

REP. PELOSI: I understand. And this is like maybe 50 years or something like that. So again, over the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy. But it is, it is also true that God has given us, each of us, a free will and a responsibility to answer for our actions. And we want abortions to be safe, rare, and reduce the number of abortions. That’s why we have this fight in Congress over contraception. My Republican colleagues do not support contraception. If you want to reduce the number of abortions, and we all do, we must–it would behoove you to support family planning and, and contraception, you would think. But that is not the case. So we have to take–you know, we have to handle this as respectfully–this is sacred ground. We have to handle it very respectfully and not politicize it, as it has been–and I’m not saying Rick Warren did, because I don’t think he did, but others will try to.

Note: Nancy Pelosi is a “practicing Catholic” the way I am a “practicing brain surgeon.”

Jim Morrissey is often an astute observer of the liberally-sponsored cultural-meltdown. He was on his game again, writing a piece titled, “Pelosi lies about Catholicism and abortion.” He goes back to the first written Catechism of the Christian church from AD 70, the writings of Tertullian, the writings of Hippolytus, and Scripture from the Psalms to utterly destroy Pelosi’s claim. Either she lied about having every once studied the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion, or she lied about what she found.

My guess is the former, simply because I think Pelosi is too ignorant to have ever studied anything.

Morrissey writes, “I’m always astounded as to the extent of deception in which pro-choice Catholics indulge themselves, both inwardly and outwardly, to justify their positions.”

It is frankly amazing how ignorant liberals are on matters of religion. They didn’t even CARE about religion until the aftermath of the 2004 election, when they began to realize that their secular humanism and atheism had cost them the election. They came up with a strategy to fake (they use the term ‘frame’) their secular liberal policies in religious terminology.

Democrats have been trying to fake their religious creds ever since this bombshell broke:

U.S. voters are split along religious lines

Nov 30, 2003 by Steven Thomma Knight Ridder Newspapers

DES MOINES, Iowa — Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before.

If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will vote Republican by a 2-1 margin. If they never go, they likely will vote Democratic by a 2-1 margin.

This relatively new fault line in American life is a major reason the country is politically polarized. And the division is likely to continue or even grow in 2004.

A new poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center For The People & The Press this fall confirmed that the gap remains; voters who frequently attend religious services tilt 63-37 percent to Bush, and those who never attend lean 62-38 percent toward Democrats.

“We now have the widest gap we have ever had between Republicans and Democrats,” said Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew survey.

“It’s THE most powerful predictor of party ID and partisan voting intention,” said Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington research center. “And in a society that values religion as much as (this one), when there are high levels of religious belief and commitment and practice, that’s significant.”

Fully sixty percent of Americans identify themselves as either very or somewhat conservative. Liberals did the math. Honesty about their horrible pro-gay, pro-abortion, anti-God agenda simply wasn’t an option.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean trotted out a couple years back to put the new strategy into motion, but showed how truly full of crap he was:

As he heads into what H. L. Mencken called the ”Bible Belt,” the candidate moved to plug an apparent hole in his résumé about an interest in religion. After hearing Dean’s observation beginning ”If you know much about the Bible — which I do,” a reporter asked about his favorite New Testament book. Dean named Job, adding, ”But I don’t like the way it ends . . . in some of the books of the New Testament, the ending of the Book of Job is different . . . there’s one book where there’s a more optimistic ending, which we believe was tacked on later.”

The candidate returned an hour later to confess error: Job was in the Old Testament, not the New. Beyond that slip, his recollection of ”one book where there’s a more optimistic ending” is muddled; the Book of Job in the Old Testament has an upbeat ending, with God doubling Job’s former wealth and giving him new children for having sustained his piety through all his trials.

It didn’t matter if it was a gigantic ruse. Their followers are breathtakingly stupid, and they count on American stupidity the way our first founding fathers used to count on American decency.

The truth is, liberals despise God as much as they ever did. Nancy Pelosi is far more inspired by the hard-core feminist-abortion agenda than she is by her Catholic “faith.” Liberals have to lie about who they are – and misrepresent their motivations and their agenda – or they will be rejected. Hence the lies. And now they even lie about the Catholic Church’s millennial-old stand against abortion. As Nancy Pelosi describes her God, He smiles down benevolently every time a woman decides to have her baby’s brains sucked out.

A Speaker of the House of Representatives who literally attempts to justify her Catholic beliefs by worshiping at an alter made from aborted babies is an ideologue of such shocking proportions that it makes me shudder.

Bill Maher vs. Pope Benedict: and the Winner is…

The too-often unfunny comedian Bill Maher’s comments about the pope deserve all the outrage and contempt that the self-righteous media could possibly dump on the man.  But it is very unlikly that he will receive more than the most mild criticism.

You think of Don Imus getting dumped over his “nappy headed hoes” comment; you think of the media universe literally coming unglued over Senator George Allen’s use of a single word – “macaca” which I still have never actually heard defined.  (Media narrative: “We don’t know what it means, but it just sounds racist to us, coming as it did from a Republican and all.”).  Actor Isaiah Washington was fired from his role on Grey’s Anatomy over an anti-gay slur.  But when Bill Maher viciously rips the pope and a billion-plus Catholics again and again, the media doesn’t seem to see any problems.  It’s a matter of one of their own targeting one of their targets.

Christians – and Catholics, especially – are fair game.  I guess when every other group has special protections, somebody has to remain on the “fair game” list.  Every propaganda machine needs a villian, after all. 

I’d like to say a few things about Bill Maher.  But first let’s let the man speak for himself:

According to Newsmax:

“The comments were made on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, Apr. 11. Maher went into a long monologue on his program comparing the Catholic church to a polygamous cult — the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — which was raided on Apr. 3 and whose founder, Warren Jeffs, was convicted last year for being an accessory to the rape of a teenage girl. Bill Maher compared the Texas scandal and its latest alleged abuse with the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in the United States in 2002. http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/Pope_bill_maher_/2008/04/15/88028.html

These are a few of Maher’s remarks:

“I’d like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult,” Maher told his audience. “Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. That’s right, the Pope is coming to America this week and, ladies, he’s single.”

And again:

“If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.’ It’s like, if you can’t pay your mortgage, you’re a deadbeat. But if you can’t pay a million mortgages, you’re Bear Stearns and we bail you out. And that is who the Catholic Church is: the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia — too big, too fat.”

First of all the man is a documented liar.  Pope Benedict XVI – like ALL German youth of the time – was conscripted against his will into a German youth organization, from which he fled as soon as he could.  He was not a Nazi.  He was never a Nazi.  If anyone is a Nazi, it is Bill Maher for using Joseph Goebbels-like propaganda tactics to maliciously brand an innocent man with the most despicable charge.

Bill Maher clearly doesn’t mind telling vicious, hateful lies.  So it isn’t surprising that he would also talk about the Catholic Church in this manner.  I did a little reading on the subject, and discovered that one of the most reliable sources available – the February 2004 research study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice – found that 81% of the so-called abuse cases involved teen-age boys and up.  Stephen Rubino, a lawyer who has represented over 300 alleged victims of priest abuse, estimated 85 percent of the victims have been teen-age boys. And Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, who has treated many victims and offending priests, agrees with that figure, noting that 90 percent of his patients are either abused teen-age males or their priest abusers.  These were cases of evil abuse against young men who were taken advantage of by certain priests in the worst way, but they were NOT cases of “child molestation” and/or pedophilia.  Rather, these cases were the result of a massive homosexual sub-culture within the Catholic Church taking advantage of their positions and the unequal-power-relationships they initiated to have homosexual intercourse with teens and young men.

It turns out that genuine cases of pedophila are MUCH more likely to occur in the public schools than in the Catholic Church.  And that the culture of cover-ups, transfers, and

other protective schemes to conceal abusive teachers are likewise FAR more likely to occur in the public school system than in the Catholic Church – especially today.  Public school abuses – including both the cases of sexual abuse by teachers and the covering up of such abuses by the administrators and unions – ought to be far more shocking and disturbing, because parents are forced to send their children to public schools whereas they are not so required to send their children to priests.  Why doesn’t Bill Maher charicterize public school teachers as pedophiles?  If you hate religion, don’t let facts get in the way of a good propaganda campaign.  The Catholic League has documented the points I made at:  http://www.catholicleague.org/research/abuse_in_social_context.htm

Second, Bill Maher is a bigot.

That’s what he’d call him if he singled out ANY other group of people for such hateful remarks.  If I go on a comedic rant about blacks, or Muslims, or gays, or most anyone else, and I’m sure going to hear that label applied to me.  And from no less a personage than Bill Maher, to boot.

As a counterexample to Maher, I, along with the overwhelming majority of genuine Christians, would never use rhetoric like Maher’s to describe or ridicule homosexuals in spite of our beliefs about the nature of their lifestyles.  We recognize that they are human beings who deserve compassion.  So are the one billion Catholics that Maher calls deranged cultists.

Third, Bill Maher is a coward.

I’m sure in his little “yuk-it-up” elitist social gatherings, Maher is routinely praised for his “courage” in “taking on” the Catholic Church, Christianity, and organized religion.  But this atheist wouldn’t dare attack and insult and lie about Islam the way he so cavalierly does about Catholicism and Christianity.  why not?  Because they will go after him and kill him, that’s why.  And he won’t go after Jews or Judaism (or rabbis, who have about the same rate of sex-abuse as Catholic priests, by the way) the way he goes after Catholics and Christians, because that really would be “politically incorrect” (the title of his former show), and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League would rightly make him pay.

Fourth, Bill Mayer is a bully.

Instead of taking on people and organizations that would go after him or undermine his popularity, Maher takes advantage of the fact that Christians believe in turning the other cheek.  He takes advantage of their goodness, graciousness, and self-restraint to attack them and hurt them.  He takes advantage of the fact that his core audience – which is as vile, as bitter, and as mean as he is – are the type of people who wouldn’t at all mind seeing Christians killed by the tens of thousands in the Coliseum just as they were in the Roman days.  He’s no different than the ringleader of a group of thugs in a school yard who single out a particular kid for torment.

Fifth, Bill Maher is a hypocrite.

I mentioned that the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests’ sexual abuse cases were homosexual in nature rather than cases of pedophilia.  Let me take a moment to document the homosexual subculture within the Catholic Church before I relate this to Bill Maher. I quote one paragraph from the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (source: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_rcc1.htm).  I am including the footnotes in order to better document the following statements, and maintain the numbering of the footnotes as they are found in the article:

* Father Donald Cozzens wrote that several studies have concluded that about 50% of priests and seminarians are gay. 5
* David France of Newsweek, referring to St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, CA, wrote:
“Depending on whom you ask, gay and bisexual men make up anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of the student body at the college and graduate levels.” 3
* Rt. Rev. Helmut Hefner, rector of St. Johns Seminary “accepts that his gay enrollment may be as high as 50 percent.” 3
* Gay journalist Rex Wockner commented: “When I was in the Catholic seminary in my early 20s (St. Meinrad College, St. Meinrad, Ind., 1982-1983; University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Ill., 1983-1984), at least 50 percent of the students were gay….At St. Mary of the Lake, the straight students felt like a minority and felt excluded from some aspects of campus life to such an extent that the administration staged a seminar at which we discussed the problem of the straight students feeling left out of things…” 6
* Author and sociologist James G. Wolfe estimated that 55.1% of seminarians were gay. 7

3   David France, “Gays and the Seminary,” MSNBC, 2002-MAY-20, at: http://www.msnbc.com/
5   “Vatican threatens gay purge of priesthood,” The Data Lounge, 2002-MAR-6, at: http://www.datalounge.com/
6   Rex Wockner, “The end of Catholicism in America,” PlanetOut, at: http://www.planetout.com/
7   James G. Wolf, “Gay Priests,” Harper and Row, 1989, Pages 59-60. Cited in Father Donald Cozzens, “The Changing Face of the Priesthood: A reflection on the priest’s crisis of soul,” Liturgical Press, (2000), Page 99.

One of many supporting articles would be http://www.actupny.org/YELL/catholicpriests.html which begins, “Roman Catholic priests in the United States are dying from AIDS-related illnesses at a rate four times higher than the general population and the cause is often concealed on their death certificates, The Kansas City Star reported in a series of stories that started Sunday.”  The article goes on to describe the homosexual subculture within the Catholic Church.

I don’t point out that the maliciously characterized “pedophile priests” have actually been homosexuals in order to attack homosexuals or homosexuality in this context.  Most of these homosexual priests – in the overwhelming majority of casaes – have practiced their vows of abstinence.  The statistics demonstrate that a tiny minority of priests perpetuated all the abuses.  Rather, I bring this up in order to reveal what a hypocrite Bill Maher is.  This man, who has made so much of these abuse cases within the Catholic Church, is a hard-core liberal activist.  Homosexuals are very much one of the groups of people that he and people like him have shielded.  One of the main reasons people like Bill Maher have so vindictively attacked Christianity and Catholicism has been because Christians and Catholics have condemned homosexuality.  And for Maher to lay at the feet of Catholicism what more deservedly lays at the feet of people whose rights he defends is the basest form of hypocrite.

The Catholic Church could have done a much better job of dealing with the abuse cases by aggressively purging homosexuals from its priesthood – which would have brought the ire of liberals like Bill Maher.  Instead, they tolerated this massive homosexual presence within their midst for decades – and Bill Maher attacks the Catholic church for tolerating a group of people that he demand they tolerate!

Thus I conclude my case that Bill Maher – and quite frankly every one who agrees with him – is a lying, bigoted, hypocritical, bullying coward.

The Catholic Church is a flawed organization, without a doubt.  But when I look at all the good that Catholics have done in the world, and then look at the fruits of people like Bill Maher, it is not the Catholic Church that looks bad.