The Story Of The Wise Men And The First ‘Official’ Christmas

Who were the wise men?  If you read the Bible, you see them described in the Book of Daniel.  They were also known as the magi, or the Chaldeans. The Chaldeans were priests of Babylon’s chief religion which was based on astrology.  In the Book of Daniel, unfolds, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had a dream that terrified him not only because of its disturbing nature, but also because he could not understand it.  Not trusting the Chaldeans to accurately tell him what the dream meant, he insisted that they first tell him what his dream had been – and THEN interpret its meaning.  And when the Chaldeans couldn’t perform this task, Nebuchadnezzar was outraged. He threatened to have both the Chaldeans and their families executed unless they could describe his dream to him.  It was all up to Daniel, the Jewish prophet who had been captured when Babylon had defeated Israel in battle and hauled off to Babylon years before.  Miraculously, Daniel was able to tell Nebuchadnezzar what his prophetic dream was and then explain its meaning. Daniel saved the Chaldeans from being destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s anger.  And they never forgot how Daniel’s Hebrew God had delivered them from otherwise certain death.

One of the things that Daniel told them about was the Prophecy of the Seventy Sevens (see Daniel chapter 9) which precisely prophesied when Messiah would be killed to atone for mankind’s sins.  But according to Babylonian legend, he also described to them a star that would appear in the night sky to herald the birth of the coming Messiah of Israel as well.

Daniel lived some six centuries before Jesus was born, but this prophetic sign was embedded into the Chaldeans’ religious beliefs and culture from the time that their deliverer Daniel first told them. So when the Chaldeans saw this prophetic sign in the heavens at the time of Jesus’ birth, they began a journey to the land that the star led them to: to Israel.  The star literally led them to the very house where Jesus lived (Matthew 2:9).

In Mathew 2:2, the wise men arrived in Jerusalem after what would have been a dangerous journey of about 800 miles one-way from Babylon and started asking “where is the newborn King of the Jews? We have seen his star as it arose, and we have come to worship him.” At that time King Herod was the king of the Jews, and of course the news of the birth of a King made him troubled along with all of Jerusalem. (Mathew 2:3) So he called the wise men into his chamber for a conference. He instructed the wise men to return to him when they found this new born king. Herod told the Chaldeans that he wanted to go and worship Jesus as well, but that was not King Herod’s true intentions. Eventually the magi reached Jesus and worshiped him.  Many people believe there were three wise men, but that is only because they brought three gifts with them: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (Mathew 2:11). They took a new route back to their home country (another 800 miles) because God warned them not to return to King Herod on their way back. (Mathew 2:12).

In actuality, the first “official” Christmas actually took place when Jesus was about two years old.  That’s how long it took the Chaldeans to prepare for their long journey, make that journey, and then find Jesus’ home (Matthew 2:7 cf. Matthew 2:16).

King Herod was demonic with anger at the thought of being replaced as king. He asked his leading priests where the messiah was to be born and they told him from the Book of Micah, “In Bethlehem.”  He then ordered all children ages two and under in Bethlehem to be murdered and thus kill this coming king as a helpless child. But God had already came to Joseph in a dream and commanded him to take the child and flee from Bethlehem and seek refuge in Egypt. (Mathew 2:13-14).  But how were Joseph and Mary to flee?  They were extremely poor and would have had no resources to make such a long journey and support themselves when they arrived in Egypt. They never would have been able to afford a trip like this on their own. But don’t forget what the wise men gave Jesus. They gave him gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold can obviously be used as currency, but the frankincense and myrrh were extremely rare and very expensive. In other words, the wise men gave Jesus and his family a small fortune which made an exodus to Egypt possible. This also fulfilled a prophetic word “I called my Son out of Egypt” (Mathew 2:15).

Christmas is about God’s gift in the form of His Son sent to earth to reconcile sinful man and holy God. It is also a story of divine provision; God takes care of His own and provides for their needs.

Hal Lindsey has a great presentation about this:

A Christmas Story (Alas, No Carols Were Involved)

I had an enjoyable time serving as a volunteer for the Christmas Store program through my church.

It began with my serving as what I termed a “poultry elf” delivering Christmas food packages to the cars of the hundreds of families who were signed up to participate in  our Christmas Store.  Without mentioning any names, it actually began with the daughter of the Christmas Store coordinator coming through the door with a family while serving as a personal shopper.

Oops.  I’d better tell you about the Christmas Store.  It is a wonderful program that seeks to provide a Merry Christmas! to families in need.  As families show up for their appointments, a family photo is taken with Santa, which is printed out and ultimately given to the family as a nice card.  This year we had The Best Santa Ever.  The man was a giant teddy bear who towered over 6’6″ and didn’t need a pillow with his Santa Suit.  This volunteer was there every single day for 12 hours a day during the four days the “store” was open and never missed a single family (again, out of HUNDREDS of families).  Little boys would stare up at this giant in sheer amazement.  The Best Santa Ever.  I had one of those “ahhhhhhh” moments when Santa got up during a short break in the action to cool down outside in his red “They don’t call it the North Pole for nothin'” suit: half a dozen children sitting in the foyer immediately sat at attention and waved and waved shouting, “Hi Santa!  Hi Santa!”  I said he’d be back: he just had to check on some reindeer.  Mind you, our Santa looked like he could have wrestled down and saddled up a polar bear and ridden IT.  Best. Santa. Ever.

After the picture, children go into rooms according to age to wait while their parents “shop” for their gifts.  The Christmas store has one “big gift” and “two small gifts” for every single child.  Last year the coordinator cried describing a miracle to the congregation because they had been OUT of gifts and suddenly nearly a dozen enormous bags of presents showed up in a locked room in which only she and the church staff had the key.  It was ALWAYS kept locked because lots of presents were in there that were yet to be brough out onto the floor and we didn’t want them stolen for the sake of the children to come.  And the coordinator knew there were no more presents because she’d gone in there minutes earlier and freaked out to find an empty room with families still coming through.  And then whammo, suddenly there were awesome presents!  Those presents got the store through the rest of that final day.  She is to this day convinced that God beamed those presents into that room.  I don’t know who – or Who – put those huge bags in there, but to me it is every bit as much a miracle that God could move someone to buy that many presents and then smuggle them into that locked room at just that right moment.  Either way, it’s always amazing to see how God works, isn’t it?

Anyway, a “personal shopper” escorts each parent, guardian or couple through the rooms that the appropriate gifts for the children’s ages are displayed.  The personal shopper gets an opportunity to talk with and pray with the parents as they go through.  After the parents pick out the gifts for their children, they go to the wrapping room to wrap the gifts while the children are waiting in classrooms with volunteers.  They aren’t just “waiting,” mind you; they get to hear about Jesus Christ.

After the gifts are wrapped so the children can’t see them, the parents pick up their children and proceed outside – where a food package is waiting for them.  Each family gets a 13 lb. turkey and a large box of canned and dry goods.

So anyway, the daughter of the Christmas Store coordinator comes out while I’m helping as a “poultry elf” and tells me that this family gets two packages because she’s signed up to go through the store (she’s a young, poor, single mother herself) and she wants this family to have her food package.

Well, that’s neat, I thought.

Anyway, I was serving for a couple of hours bringing the food to the families’ cars when I came upon one particular family.  The mother was so surprised and so delighted about the food that it lit me up.  They had five kids and she told me both sets of grandparents were going to be there.  Well, I did the math and came up with the decision to give this family another food package.  And watched momma’s face light up with joy again when I came out to their old car with it.

I interrupt my narrative to add the fact that this family was black and that the people who provided all the food were rich old white people who are clearly greedy by liberal definition.  Because greedy rich old white people on behalf of the chapel at an incredibly caucasian-populated “snowbird trailer park” common to our area had spent over $5,000 buying those turkeys.  Other rich, greedy white people had bought all those canned and dry goods for these families to have a Merry Christmas dinner regardless of their race, culture or creed.  And a whopping share of families spoke only Spanish.  Which is really quite surprising given the “fact” that rich greedy old white people hate them Mexicans so damn much.

I just wish that the liberals who so frequently slander evangelical Christians had the slightest clue about how much money and time we give to the people they slander us for hating.  I just wish that they knew that Christians in thousands of churches give billions of dollars to the needy; and that maybe they would rather be able to do that than let Obama seize their money so he can give it to political boondoggles like Solyndra.  But as hard as it is for a rich man to enter heaven, the Bible is even more clear that it is even harder for an ignorant fool to ever become anything other than an ignorant fool.

We also gave away lots of toiletries (shampoo, toothpaste, pretty much you name it, we gave it away) to help these families.  One young Hispanic family just had lost everything in an apartment fire.  We found them immeidate housing, and gave them clothes, jackets, blankets and everything we could round up to give them.  And we’re not done with that family yet, either.

But I digress.

I told the coordinator what I’d done knowing that she wouldn’t be happy with me and knowing why she wouldn’t be happy.  Those turkeys had to last for all the families.  And my “generosity” could cost another family such that they didn’t get any food at all.

Well, I thought about it.  The worst people on earth are those who are “generous with other peoples’ money.”  We call them liberals and they are the worst, the most self-righteous, the most sanctimonious people on earth as they seize money from people they demonize in order to cynically redistribute it to people who will vote for them and keep them in power.  And it didn’t take very long to occur to me that if that situation were to arise, well, I owed that family.  After all, I had given that extra food package to that family.  And if anybody needed to “pay his fair share” to take care of the family that may not have received a package because of what I did, it was me with my own money; not the “Other People’s Money” with which liberals “help.”

A figure just popped into my head with crystal clarity: $35.  That was about what each food package cost as I thought about the cost of the turkey (about a dollar a pound at Wal-Mart) and the canned and dry goods.  I made sure I had $35 cash in my billfold and decided to monitor the turkey situation and make sure I would be there for the first family to not get a turkey if that situation occurred and give them $35.  It was worth it; I’d felt led to do it and it felt like the right thing to do.

As it turned out, we had more than enough turkeys.  I was “spared” having to give money to some family I’d deprived.  And I felt further vindicated that I’d done what the Lord had led me to do.

Yea for me.

But it turns out God wasn’t done with that $35 that I now merrily thought was mine again.

You see, there was another issue that was going on at the same time.  The daughter of the coordinator was trying to give away three very cute puppies that she’d brought in her old minivan.  The son of our Santa Claus – a teenager who had ADHD – made it his mission in life to give away those puppies.  And he gave away two of them.  One of them went to a mother who had just lost her dog when it jumped out of her car.  When she heard that these puppies were a mix of the same breed of the dog she lost, she came over and ended up adopting a pup.  Her son was soon holding that dog and utterly refusing to give it up.  But the third puppy was a different story.

It clearly had an eye infection, because it’s eyes were “gooey” and rather painful looking.  And nobody wanted it because they didn’t want to get stuck with the vet bill.

Santa’s son was beside himself worrying about this puppy he’d tried to give away all night.  He had waylaid each family as they came out clutching this puppy to his chest to keep it warm.  He was afraid that nobody would help it and it would die.  He desperately wanted his dad to let him take that puppy home – but it was pretty obvious that this was one Christmas wish Santa was NOT going to grant.

I heard the daughter of the coordinator talking to some other volunteers.  She didn’t know what to do.  Even the shelters wanted to charge her to take the puppy, and she couldn’t afford to pay for a veterinarian’s office charge.

I heard a young man say that the Animal Samaritan’s charges $35 for a vet visit, not counting the cost of the medicine the pup would surely need.  Which was WAY too much for the daughter to afford.

And then I heard God say, “Ahem.”  I didn’t have to look up at the sky and point at myself with a questioning look.  I knew He was talking to me.

And I realized that God had been buttering me up just like the turkeys I was giving away with the notion that I should pay $35 for a food package for a needy family.  Because He’d known that I wouldn’t have otherwise felt very led to give money for the care of somebody else’s puppy problem.  You know, unless He sneaked it in on me.  I love animals, but I generally give my money to charities for PEOPLE.

That’s when I realized that I’d already devoted that money to the Lord, whether I’d thought so or not.  And the Lord had a use for it.

Because I didn’t WANT the Christmas store to run out of turkeys; and why was I “off the hook” to the Lord for money I had already committed to Him simply because the Lord had graciously come through and given me what I wanted?  And I realized I wasn’t giving money to help a puppy; I was giving money to help PEOPLE to help that puppy.

I suddenly blurted out that I would be willing to pay that $35 vet bill – which just somehow happened to be the exact same figure as the figure that had been repeatedly in my head regarding the cost of the food package.  And another guy immediately volunteered another $20 to help that puppy out.

Found out this morning that that sum was exactly the cost of the entire vet bill for that puppy.  And that it will be fine now.

Well, there was another little miracle in this story: that teenage boy was determined to take that puppy home because he was worried about it and wanted to make sure it was okay.  He’d come to love it because he’d held it and watched over it for a good share of the day.  When I came out (this being after the last family had been through the store) there was a rather raging argument going on between that kid and his no-longer-Santa dad.  But I was able to calm the boy down by assuring him that the puppy would get to go to the vet and somebody would surely adopt him when he was recovered from his eye infection.

It’s so often amazing how God works.  He worked for a mother and young boy who had just lost their dog by giving them an adorable puppy of the very same rather rare breed that they had lost; He worked for the coordinator’s daughter who wanted to do the right thing for that little puppy but was daunted by the cost of doing that right thing; He worked in the heart of that ADHD boy who may have been worried about that puppy as an extension of himself (if the puppy was a throwaway because of its eyes, was that boy a throwaway with his ADHD?); and He worked on me, frugality and all.  Because He brought me through a process – as He so often does – to the point where I was able to see things HIS way and then rejoice at the outcome.  I’d started out reluctantly being willing to pay for the consequences of something I’d felt led to do.  I ended up trying to think of how I’d ever spent that same amount of money that had brought me more sheer pleasure than this – and couldn’t think of a single time in my life.

There were scores of people who received Jesus through the Christmas Store, not counting those who were rededicating their lives to Christ.  Over nine hundred Bibles were given away.  God moved, whether any atheist could see it or not.  And He moved in large ways and in small ways through His people.

Merry Christmas!  Celebrate the birth of the King of kings.

The Two Beautiful Names Behind ‘Merry Christmas’

Christmas – and the meaning of Christianity itself – can be summed up in two names.

The first is “Immanuel,” which translates from Hebrew to “God with us.”  It comes from a prophecy written approximately 700BC about the future Messiah 

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” — Isaiah 7:14

Of this same miraculously conceived child the same prophet writes about other things this same child would be called in addition to “Immanuel”:

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” — Isaiah 9:6

I often marvel over the bickering of unbelief over whether the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 should really be translated “virgin” given what is said about this same child in Isaiah 9:6.  How ELSE would one expect this child, this son who would be born, who would be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace to be conceived other than by miraculous supernatural means?  Seriously?

What does “God with us” mean?

It means that this child – rightly called “Immanuel” in Isaiah 7:14 and “Mighty God” in Isaiah 9:6, would literally be God come to be with mankind in some powerful way.

It is a beautiful reference to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the unique, One-and-Only Son of the Living God.  Isaiah prophesied that some day in the future, God would somehow take a human nature and be born as a child, as a son.  It was a prophecy of the coming birth of One who would one day call Himself “the Son of Man” (e.g. Mark 10:45).

The other name that completes the meaning of Christmas and Christianity is “Jesus.”  It comes from the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (or “Joshua”) which means, “Jehovah is Savior.”

Two things emerge from this name: the first is that God Himself would one day come to personally save and deliver mankind from the bondage and death sentence of sin; the second is that One particular bearer of that name would be Himself God on earth.

The same Book of Isaiah that we have been discussing amply attests of our Lord Jesus Christ taking upon Himself the name both of “Jehovah” and “Savior.”

Isaiah 43:11 makes it most clear:

“I, even I, am the LORD [i.e., Jehovah], and apart from Me there is no Savior.” — Isaiah 43:11

See also Isaiah 45:21 to see that this is no fluke description from the prophet who described the coming of “Immanuel” who would be “Mighty God”:

Declare what is to be, present it–let them take counsel together. Who foretold this long ago, who declared it from the distant past? Was it not I, the LORD [i.e., Jehovah]? And there is no God apart from Me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none but Me.” — Isaiah 45:21

But as we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the birth of the One of whom the angel proclaimed:

“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; He is Christ the Lord.”

The mystery of Jesus, of this Savior who would be born in spite of the fact that only JEHOVAH could be called “Savior,” is given a little clarity in the first words of the Book of John as it identifies Jesus Christ as “the Word”:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being which has come into being.” — John 1:1-3

When St. John says, “In the beginning was the Word,” it is a direct reference of Genesis 1:1, which begins, “In the beginning God…”

When St. John says, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he is pointing out that while the Word, Jesus, is divine (i.e., is God), He is not God in the logically exclusive sense that the Father and the Spirit are not also God.  Jesus is God (the Son), and Jesus was also with God (the Father and the Spirit).

When St. John tells us, “He was in the beginning with God,” we know that Jesus was NOT a created being.  He could not have in any way, shape or form been created, because in fact He always existed; He was with God the Father from the very beginning.

If this wasn’t clear enough already, St. John further elaborates on the eternality of Jesus Christ when he says, “All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being which has come into being.”  All things came into being by Jesus Christ.  God the Son was the Creator Moses describes in Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”).  Not only that, but “apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.”  Which is to say that this Son of God, the Word – who would one day become Incarnate under the name of Jesus who was born of a virgin in fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 – created every single thing which has EVER been created or come into existence.  It is a logical impossibility that the One who created ALL things could Himself have been in any way created.

A short poem sums it up more simply and more concisely that I ever could:

“He came to die on a cross of wood, yet made the hill on which it stood.”

He was truly God.

But He was truly God become man.

How?  Why?

God the Son added to Himself – added to His eternal divine nature – a human nature in the Incarnation.  God became man.  And 700 years before it happened, He revealed it to His prophet Isaiah.

One verse from the first chapter of the first Book of the Bible becomes significant in understanding this:

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” — Genesis 1:27

In Genesis the Son of God, the Word, created man in His divine image; in the Incarnation, that same Son of God assumed the image He had created.  Which is to say that God made man in such a way that He could one day become man Himself.

In the most remarkable act of other-centered love in the history of the universe, Christ the Son of God did the following as recorded in Philippians 2:5-11:

“You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.  Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.  Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.  Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” — Philippians 2:5-11, (NLT)

In verse 7 of that marvellous passage in the original Greek language we have the word “kenosis” occur.  It means, “emptied”:  “He emptied Himself.”

In becoming a man, God had to temporarily let go of attributes of deity that belonged to Him by very right of His divine nature.  He entered into time, which means He had to divest Himself of His eternality while on earth so He could age and grow and die.  He set aside His omniscience so He would experience living as a man, depending on faith just like any other man before or after Him.  He laid aside His omnipotence, such that He could experience the helplessness and fatigue that all men feel.  And so on.

Jesus was completely dependent upon His Father and upon the Spirit for all things, because He had made Himself weak in the Incarnation in order to fully experience human frailty.  He had to walk by faith and live by the power of faith, just as we do.

We can imagine the One who created the Cosmos – and in whom all things literally hold together (Colossians 1:17) – emerge from Mary’s womb that first Christmas as a tiny, helpless baby, struggling just to open His eyes.  He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52) because He had made Himself a man in every way that it was essential to be a man.

It makes me weep to think about what Jesus laid aside so He could come to live with mankind as a man.  Think of the choice of God to do that!  We all want to become great and mighty and awesome and have all the status that accompanies our greatness; Jesus radically went the other way and took a plunge from all the glorious majesty of heaven to a trough that farm animals ate out of.

And the obvious question is, why did He do this?

He did it to take the blame that rightly belonged to me, to live and then die in my place.

He did it to be my Savior, because He as God knew that I, a miserable sinner, desperately needed saving.

In the Incarnation, Jesus lived a perfect life in our place because we could never hope to live such lives.  And then, as the perfect God-Man, He gave His life to take the death sentence earned by OUR sins upon Himself, so that we would not have to experience eternal death the way that all sinners apart from His grace will one day experience.

This mighty act of salvation was God-sized; no mere man could even attain his own salvation, let alone that of the entire human race. And yet just as sin entered the world through a man, only a man acting as a true representative of man could deliver us from that sin.

Enter the God-Man.  Enter Jesus.

Jesus explained His mission to a Jewish Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin named Nicodemus in the most beautiful and powerful words ever spoken:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish, but have eternal life.” — John 3:16

Isaiah 64:6 says,

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”

Isaiah 53:6 says,

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” — Isaiah 53:6

On Christmas morning, a little over 2,000 years ago, in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4), God came to save me from that from which I most needed saving: from myself; and from my sins which separated me from my Creator, my King and my God.

God is holy and righteous and perfect and sinless: He can not tolerate sin in His presence; nor can any sinner survive His presence.  As a sinner, I deserved hell.  And apart from the grace of God, hell is precisely where I would have gone.

Only there is a God who loved me, and gave Himself for me (see Galatians 2:2o; Ephesians 5:2; Titus 2:14) so that I could be alive in Him and share eternity with Him in His glorious presence forever and ever.

Thank you, Jesus.  I bow down before You and thank You with all of my soul that You alone had the power to save.  I desperately needed a Savior, and You came to save me.

I pray that you, too, bow down before Jesus your King and thank Him from the bottom of a saved, delivered soul this Christmas day.

‘One of the prettiest sounds on earth’: A Quarter Of Americans Now Think Obama Is A Muslim

Why do nearly one out of every four Americans now believe that Barry Hussein is a Muslim?

More Americans say Obama is Muslim
By Olivier Knox (AFP) – 13 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Roughly one in five Americans wrongly says President Barack Obama is a Muslim, according to two new US opinion polls out Thursday amid a furor over a planned mosque near New York’s “Ground Zero.”

And about 30 percent of Americans say followers of Islam should be barred from running for president or serving on the US Supreme Court, according to one of the surveys, published in Time magazine and available on Time.com.

The Time poll found 24 percent of respondents said Obama — a Christian church-goer who has repeatedly spoken out about his faith — is a Muslim, while 18 percent said the same in a study from the non-partisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

On top of the Americans who believe Obama is Muslim – including a hefty percentage of Democrats, for what it’s worth – is the fact that more than half of Democrats, and even more than half of African Americans, don’t believe that Obama is a Christian.  And less than half of all Americans think Obama is a Christian.

Two years into Obama’s presidency, the American people don’t know who or what the hell has his feet on the desk in the Oval Office.  Kind of strange coming from a man who promised unparalleled transparency.

So the question that matters is why Americans believe that Obama is not a Christian, but is in fact a Muslim.

Well, at least partly because OBAMA once actually said he was a Muslim:

Let’s not play games. What I was suggesting — you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you’re absolutely right that that has not come–

STEPHANOPOULOS: Christian faith.

OBAMA: — my Christian faith. Well, what I’m saying is that he hasn’t suggested–

We all know about Freudian slips.  All I know is that I have never been so confused about my Christianity that I had to be corrected as to which religion I sincerely and passionately held.

But that doesn’t explain why MORE Americans now believe Obama is a Muslim than at any time in the past.  You know what does?  The fact that the American people have had time to see Obama as he really is in his actual policies, rather than as a preening pretender saying whatever he needs to say.

Maybe Americans have finally digested the New York Times article that came out over three years ago:

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

And what was it that Obama recited, and called “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth”?

“Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet… “

Now, you see, as a genuine Christian, I DON’T happen to find that chant very pretty.  Because Allah is NOT supreme – even if you say it four times.  And I particularly find that “there is no god but Allah” part to be anything but ugly.

Because, unlike Obama, I actually AM a Christian, and take no artistic pleasure in claims which specifically deny Jesus Christ’s deity.

In fact, I believe that I would refuse to recite those words even with a gun pointed at my head.  Much less admire their beauty.

It’s remarkably sad that Barack Obama would find some of the most hateful blasphemy ever uttered to be “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.”

Maybe Americans believe Obama is a Muslim because they took the advice of their president and started giving Muslims’ beliefs more credit:

And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that’s not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he’s a Christian, but they do not.

I mean, why is Obama so intolerant to so flagrantly deny the sincerely-held belief of Muslims?

And, given that converting to Christianity would make Obama an apostate subject to death under islam, Obama being a Christian would be the worst possible thing in terms of our relationship with Islam.  Why do we want a Muslim apostate for a president?

Maybe it’s because Obama – who routinely cites the “Holy Koran” as authoritative – mocks the Bible which he doesn’t bother to refer to as “holy”:

Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.

For the record, I dealt with Obama’s profoundly un-Christian argument in another article.  Like everything else Obama says, it offers a candy-coating of truth over a big chewy mass of lies.

And a lot of Americans realize that no true Christian would think or argue that way.

Obama doesn’t believe the Bible is authoritative.  It’s just the words of a bunch of moldy old long-dead men who weren’t even particularly wise.  It’s a book filled with errors and inaccuracies.  Unlike the “holy Koran,” which Obama has repeatedly cited as being incredibly relevant to our times.

Maybe Americans realize that a guy who pisses on the Bible and yet seems to revere the Koran is a hell of a lot more of a Muslim than he ever will be a Christian.

Maybe Americans need to start hearing Obama start pissing on the Koran the way he’s pissed on the – dare I say it – HOLY Bible.

Maybe it’s because Obama tried to ban Christ from Christmas, but celebrates Ramadan.  Why is that?

Maybe it’s because of the way Barack Obama has repeatedly attacked Christians, calling them racist bitter clingers desperately hanging on to their implements of violence:

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama said:

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked,” presidential hopeful Obama said.  “Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us.”

Those are incredibly harsh words coming from the most polarizing and divisive president in American history.  If Obama actually bothered to give the Bible any real credit, he’d think about Jesus’ words about taking out the log in his own eye before attacking someone else for the speck in theirs.

Barack Obama has only managed to unite everyone once in his entire embarrassing career, during one of his myriad greed-sicking fundraising events in Los Angeles:

A two-mile drive on the Westside took 45 minutes. Frustrated drivers vented on the Los Angeles Times’ website, among others. No matter their politics, Los Angeles residents were united.

“It was a beautiful thing,” said Brentwood resident Myles Berkowitz, commiserating with his neighbors on Montana Avenue. “Young, old, black, white — everyone was pissed off.”

Maybe the American people find it bizarre that evangelical Christians are much more the enemy to Barack Obama than the terrorists who have actively murdered Americans.  Maybe Americans find it weird that Obama believes that evangelical Christians are more dangerous than terrorism (a label he banned until political pressure forced him to put the word back into use).

Maybe it’s because most Americans can’t understand why Obama pushed for the construction of the Ground Zero mosque but didn’t bother to assist the Christian church that was destroyed in the 9/11 attack and has never been allowed to rebuild.

Maybe it’s because of the weak, apologizing, appeasing stupidity toward Islam Obama has displayed again and again and again in his apology tour, in his asinine Gitmo policy, and other atrocities of moral reasoning.

Getting back to the mainstream media characterization of Obama as a “Christian church-goer.”  Really?

From ABC News:

If church attendance is one measure of a man’s faith, then President Obama may appear to have lost some of his. The first family, once regular churchgoers, have publicly attended services in Washington just three times in the past year, by ABC News’ count, even bypassing the pews on Christmas Day.

By the most recent count I could find, Obama has now gone a total of five times.  Out of 83 weeks.

I wonder if my boss would call me a “work-goer” if I strolled into the office once every three weeks and change or so.

It’s a shame we have a media that just will not simply tell the truth.

I’ve also got to laugh at the fact that 24% became “roughly one in five” as though 24% is closer to 20% than it is to 25%.

So maybe it would help Obama if he went to church.  And I mean a decent Christian church that disavows radical black liberation theology Marxism, too.

Pope Benedict correctly labeled liberation theology as a heresy of Catholicism, and said of Obama’s version of “Christianity”:

“Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much.  Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.” Pope Benedict XVI

And the Pope – who understands something about Christianity – got it right: “Demonic” is the right word to describe Obama’s Marxist apostate Muslim Christian heresy.

Because maybe the American people can’t see “Christianity” in Barack Obama’s Marxist collective (as in “collectivist”) view of salvation that is nowhere found in the Bible Obama has trivialized.

So unlike the mainstream media – which has just become psychologically unraveled over this poll – I understand why so many people think Obama is a Muslim.  And it is frankly incredible to me that so many supposedly smart people in the media don’t get it.

For the record, I am personally much more worried that Barack Obama worships himself than I am that he secretly worships Allah.

Yet Another Liberal Points Out That Obama Is An Abject Failure

You have to appreciate the irony at the start of this article.  Democrats have mocked Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill.”  But is their increasingly loud wail to Obama – “Do something, baby, do something” – somehow supposed to be better?

Where was plan A?
By KIRSTEN POWERS
Last Updated: 9:58 AM, May 27, 2010

Do something, baby, do something: That’s the cry from Obama supporters and opponents alike as the oil keeps gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The political firestorm kept growing yesterday, with supporter James Carville ranting that the administration has been “lackadaisical” and “naive” in its response to the disaster. He urged it to rapidly “move to Plan B.”

But that suggests there was ever a Plan A.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is so frustrated with the lack of response to his plan to stop the slick with sand barriers that yesterday he called on the White House and BP to either “stop the oil spill or get out of the way.”

“Plug the damn hole,” President Obama reportedly barked at staffers in frustration after the explosion. That’s right up there with “Heckuva job, Brownie” in terms of clueless statements uttered by presidents in the midst of nationally televised disasters.

Meanwhile, White House regret over Obama’s politically expedient embrace of the “Drill, baby, drill” trope is growing faster than the vast oil slick.

Back on March 31, Obama announced — to the horror of many of his supporters — that he was expanding offshore drilling along the coastlines of the south and mid-Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico. Worse, he painted a (too) rosy scenario of offshore drilling being eminently safe.

True, it is rare that a full-blown environmental catastrophe results from an offshore oil well. But it can happen — and a Democratic president who’s embracing drilling ought to know the risks, and be prepared for the worst. But rather than planning for a spill, Obama parroted McCain-Palin talking points about how safe offshore drilling is.

Turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration back in 1994 drafted plans for responding to a major Gulf oil spill, a response called “In-Situ Burn.”

Ron Gourget, a former federal oil-spill-response coordinator and one author of the draft, told the Times of London: “The whole reason the plan was created was so that we could pull the trigger right away.” The idea was to use barriers called “fire booms” to collect and contain the spill at sea — then burn it off. He believes this could have captured 95 percent of the oil from this spill.

But at the time of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the federal government didn’t have a single fire boom on hand. Nor is there any evidence that the government required BP to have any clear plan to deal with a massive spill. How is this OK?

The administration’s chief response so far was to send out Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to do his best impersonation of a totalitarian thug, proclaiming that the government would “have its boot on the throat of BP.”

(Fun fact: While in the Senate, Salazar backed an increase in oil and gas leases in the Gulf Coast region by promoting and voting for the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.)

Since the “blame BP” strategy isn’t working, Obama will today announce tougher safety requirements and more rigorous inspections for offshore drilling operations. Sounds nice — except the problem isn’t a lack of safety requirements, it’s that the experts at the US Minerals Management Service ignored the existing requirements.

In fact, it was under Salazar’s reign that the MMS approved BP’s drilling without getting the permits required by law for drilling that might harm endangered species. The agency routinely overruled warnings regarding the safety and environmental impact of drilling proposals in the Gulf.

None of this was a secret.

It also shouldn’t be a secret that no matter how many inspections and safety requirements you have, you can’t ever completely prevent disasters like this one. If you’re going to permit offshore drilling, be prepared to respond to a spill.

If he promised us anything, Obama promised us competence. Instead, we’ve gotten the Keystone Cops.

Ah, competence.  One day after Obama is gone, we might actually have some of that in the White House.

Obama is bringing his incompetence everywhere he goes, rather like the travelling salesman with the unfortunate body odor that exudes out of every pour brings stink with him everywhere he goes.

What was it about being a community organizer that prepared him to actually lead anything constructive?

It’s not right to say that Obama has been doing everything the federal government could do; no, he ignored the very first thing that the federal government already had as policy to do in the event of a disaster like this – and has done absolutely nothing else in its place.  Oil that could have been contained and burned off is instead murdering all of the pelicans on the coast.  And, instead of helping Louisiana do everything it could to keep that oil off its coasts and marshes, Obama’s federal government has massively screwed up on that side of the coin, too.  Governor Jindal demanded 24 temporary sand berms to act as a barrier between the coast and the oil; first the federal government said it had to dot every i and cross every t with endless environmental studies before it would authorize any such construction; then the government said it would only permit six berms, and would only actually pay for just one berm.  And now the oil is all over the place and its too damn late for much of anything but to scrub oil from the few pelicans that might survive.

Instead, what Zero did was ZERO.  Instead of actually working to resolve he problem, Obama has handled this like a campaign issue.  He handed all the responsibility over to British Petroleum while simultaneously saying he was responsible.  It has all been about words rather than action.

Bobby Jindal has called upon Obama to “either “stop the oil spill or get out of the way.” And of course Obama won’t do either.  His government is worse than useless, because it is getting in the way of actual efforts by Louisiana to DO SOMETHING.

So here’s what we’re facing now under the failed regime of our Turd-in-Chief:

“In Revelations, it says the water will turn to blood. That’s what it looks like out here — like the Gulf is bleeding,” said P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Plaquemines Parish as he kneeled down to take a picture of an oil-coated feather. “This is going to choke the life out of everything.” […]

Eugene, 54, who has worked for decades in a shipyard, said he was growing tired of the government’s response.

“He ain’t much of a leader,” he said of Obama. “The beach you can clean up. The marsh you can’t. Where’s the leadership. I want to hear what’s being done. We’re going to lose everything.” […]

Newly disclosed internal Coast Guard documents from the day after the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig indicated that U.S. officials were warning of a leak of 336,000 gallons per day of crude from the well in the event of a complete blowout.

The volume turned out to be much closer to that figure than the 42,000 gallons per day that BP first estimated. Weeks later it was revised to 210,000 gallons. Now, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million gallons of crude is believed to be leaking daily.

“He ain’t much of a leader.”  You got that right.  I was screaming that from the rooftops two years and change ago.

Do we have good information?  No, everything keeps turning out to be wrong – and always much for the worse.  Is anything getting done?  No.  Just one failed plan after another.  Having never bothered to implement the plan we’ve had since 1994 for a disaster like this.

Now we’re being told that the latest “fix” is capturing about 42,000 gallons of oil a day.  Which might sound impressive until you realize that it’s leaking a MILLION gallons a day.

And we’re looking at the very real possibility that we’re going to continue to see a massive disaster get more massive every single day until Christmas.

The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is rather like the Obama administration itself: there’s just no end to this disaster, and all we have instead of solutions is a constant stream of misinformation and excuses.

Even Liberals Now Recognize Obama Massively Screwed Up Christmas Terrorist Case

The editors of the mainline liberal Washington Post describe the Obama administration as being “myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous.”  You’d think that would generate some media buzz.

Did the Obama administration blow an opportunity in the Flight 253 case?
Saturday, January 23, 2010

UMAR FAROUK Abdulmutallab was nabbed in Detroit on board Northwest Flight 253 after trying unsuccessfully to ignite explosives sewn into his underwear. The Obama administration had three options: It could charge him in federal court. It could detain him as an enemy belligerent. Or it could hold him for prolonged questioning and later indict him, ensuring that nothing Mr. Abdulmutallab said during questioning was used against him in court.

It is now clear that the administration did not give serious thought to anything but Door No. 1. This was myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous.

Whether to charge terrorism suspects or hold and interrogate them is a judgment call. We originally supported the administration’s decision in the Abdulmutallab case, assuming that it had been made after due consideration. But the decision to try Mr. Abdulmutallab turns out to have resulted not from a deliberative process but as a knee-jerk default to a crime-and-punishment model.

In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, all said they were not asked to weigh in on how best to deal with Mr. Abdulmutallab. Some intelligence officials, including personnel from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were included in briefings by the Justice Department before Mr. Abdulmutallab was charged. These sessions did provide an opportunity for those attending to debate the merits of detention vs. prosecution. According to sources with knowledge of the discussions, no one questioned the approach or raised the possibility of taking more time to question the suspect. This makes the administration’s approach even more worrisome than it would have been had intelligence personnel been cut out of the process altogether.

The fight against an unconventional enemy such as al-Qaeda cannot be waged exclusively or effectively through any single approach. Just as it would be a mistake to view all terrorist acts as law enforcement challenges, so would it be unwise to deal with all such incidents as acts of war. All paths must be seriously considered before a determination is made.

The administration claims Mr. Abdulmutallab provided valuable information — and probably exhausted his knowledge of al-Qaeda operations — before he clammed up. This was immediately after he was read his Miranda rights and provided with a court-appointed lawyer. The truth is, we may never know whether the administration made the right call or whether it squandered a valuable opportunity.

Here’s Stephen Hayes’ commonsense response to the Washington Post repudiation of its earlier support for Obama’s

The Washington Post supported the Obama administration’s treatment of Christmas day bomber Umar Abdulmuttalab as a criminal rather than as an enemy combatant. In an editorial published yesterday, It has nevertheless retracted its support. The Post writes that it “originally supported the administration’s decision in the Abdulmutallab case, assuming that it had been made after due consideration. But the decision to try Mr. Abdulmutallab turns out to have resulted not from a deliberative process but as a knee-jerk default to a crime-and-punishment model.”

The Obama administration’s treatment of Abdulmutallab as a criminal accorded the constitutional rights of an American citizen is absurd and indefensible. Yet the administration persists in it.

It is highly unusual to see a prominent newspaper editorial board publicly change its mind. The stated ground for the Post’s original editorial position is lame. It criticizes the decision on procedural grounds. Is the Post incapable of judging its substance?

A defective decision making process is more likely to have resulted in a defective decision, but who cares what process the Obama administration used to come to the wrong decision? The administration is full of world-class liberal chin pullers who would come to the same decision if they had taken more time to think about it. They are simply on the wrong track.

Yesterday’s Post editorial also concludes on a lame note. The Post can’t quite bring itself to the conclusion that the Obama administration’s treatment of Abdulmutallab as a criminal is in fact a mistake. Maybe, maybe not. It professes to have an open mind on that question.

It notes, on the one hand: “The administration claims Mr. Abdulmutallab provided valuable information — and probably exhausted his knowledge of al-Qaeda operations — before he clammed up. This was immediately after he was read his Miranda rights and provided with a court-appointed lawyer.”

That sounds bad. Abdulmutallab was singing like a bird until the FBI read him a Miranda warning. Reasonable people would conclude that he stopped singing because of the warning.

But here the Post injects a note of epistemological uncertainty befitting a college philosophy class. The Post asserts, on the other hand: “The truth is, we may never know whether the administration made the right call or whether it squandered a valuable opportunity.” The truth is, we may never know this only if we are prohibited from employing the most basic common sense to assess the situation.

More importantly, however, the administration’s decision to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal is mistaken on its face. It cannot be defended on the merits in principle and the administration has not chosen to do so. It is an obvious mistake that can be rectified — the administration can dismiss the criminal proceedings and remit Abdulmutallab to the custody of the armed forces as an enemy combatant — but it would be helpful to have reasonable administration allies like the Post editorial board say that it should do so forthrightly.

If the administration now chose to treat Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant, he might well remain “clammed up.” At that point we would have a good case in which to debate the folly of the administration’s abandonment of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.

Via Stephen F. Hayes.

Stop and think about it.

To begin with, the “transparent” Obama administration missed FAR more warning signs of the terrorist attack than it acknowledged.  Which already leads one to wonder just what kind of idiots are sitting in the White House?

But that’s nowhere even close to how bad this thing is.  We have a terrorist bomber with al Qaeda connections attempt to attack the United States – and very nearly succeed.  And how does the Obama administration react?  Dumber than a box of rocks, that’s how.  Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, immediately grabs bombing “suspect” Abdulmutallab without even bothering to so much as notify Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, or National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter.

They didn’t just carefully deliberate and then choose to do something stupid with our national defense; they blindly, unthinkingly and moronically chose to do something stupid with our national defense.

But it just keeps getting worse and worse.  The Obama administration, which arrogantly, self-righteously, and incredibly naively and stupidly banned the Bush interrogation system NEVER BOTHERED TO PUT ANY OTHER SYSTEM TO INTERROGATE HIGH-LEVEL TERRORISTS IN PLACE.

So we basically no longer have the capacity to effectively interrogate a high-level terrorist even if we DON’T immediately protect him with Miranda rights first.

Dumb and Dumber are running our nation right now.  And I’ve got bad news for you: “Dumber” is the one running the whole show.

If we suffer another terrorist attack, Barack Obama needs to be impeached.  He has blindly, stupidly, and even WILLFULLY left us defenseless.

And we may be about to suffer a massive attack.

Note To Obama: We Want A War On Terror, NOT A Comedy Of Error

Let’s make sure everyone’s up to speed. On Christmas day a terrorist with a bomb just like the one a terrorist tried to use 8 years ago nearly creates an explosion that would have murdered 290 passengers, plus whoever happened to be in the jumbo jet’s path as it crashed into the airport. The only thing that saved us from mass death and unmitigated disaster was pure dumb luck and the heroism of a passenger – who dragged the terrorist down and separated him from the device he was still attempting to detonate.

Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security trotted out to say “the system worked” – earning immediate derision even from the liberal lamestream media.

As Joe Scarbororgh put it:

“Unfair, how is that unfair, the system worked? Is there a part of the system where we’re going to have the guy from Denmark jump over 3 seats, beat up the guy and put out the fire?”

Well, it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that neither Obama’s system that was ostensibly supposed to protect Americans from terrorists, nor his administration’s statements ostensibly supposed to cover his ass, were working at all. So Janet Napolitano uttered a revision of her previous statement: “Our system did not work in this instance. No one is happy or satisfied with that.”

She says that she was misinterpreted the first time, and what she meant was that the system worked after the attack, as opposed to before the attack when it utterly failed. Aside from the fact that it really matters that the system work BEFORE the terrorist gets on the plane with the bomb in his underpants, 20,000 pilots angrily pointed out that no, it utterly failed afterward, too:

DALLAS — The pilots union at American Airlines says federal officials failed to notify crews on planes in the United States about the attempted terror attack aboard a Northwest jet on Christmas Day.

The Allied Pilots Association calls it “a large-scale communications breakdown concerning this terrorist event.

But other than before and after the attack, the system worked.

Granted, Janet Napolitano is an incompetent clown. But at least she paid her taxes, in contrast to all the other incompetent clowns in the Obama administration who didn’t bother.

Well, the B-team failed. Obama finally decided it was time to bring out the “good, solid B+” team and appear before the cameras himself. Obama came out a full three days after the terrorist attack, presumably armed with accurate information.

After telling Americans that the terrorist was going to be treated like a US citizen rather than like a foreign terrorist and enemy of the state (while simultaneously claiming he would do everything possible to keep us safe), Obama said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was merely an “isolated extremist.” Hardly anything to trifle over. Go home, folks, nothing to see here.

Little Green Footballs immediately called Obama’s idiotic statement the “Outrageous Outrage of the Day.” And every thinking human being on the planet knew that Obama was chock full of the stuff they use to fertilize farmland.

The New York Daily News voters were apparently more prescient in Obama’s grade: 57% gave him an ‘F’, another 19% gave him a ‘D’, and only 13% combined gave him an ‘A’ or the ‘B+’ he gave himself.

Sorry, there IS no ‘A’ team on the Obama administration. Or even an ‘A-‘ team. Obama is a narcissist who is consumed with his image. He just couldn’t emotionally handle having someone on his administration who actually knew what he or she was doing.

So now we’ve finally got Mr B+ by his estimation (and Mr F by most Americans’ view) finally coming out yet again and saying what every non-brain-dead person knew was correct right away when Obama was saying the exact the opposite: that the terrorist was part of a major terrorist organization, very likely al Qaeda:

“We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of al Qaeda, and that this group — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America,” the president said.

Only we already knew all that the day Obama called Abdulmutallab an “isolated extremist,” too. The media had already published links between Abdulmutallab, al Qaeda, and Yemen before Obama even addressed the nation only to deny the obvious.

As Forbes’ Claudia Rosett put it in her title, Abdulmutallab was “Not So Isolated, And More Than Extremist.”

The only one whose isolated here is Obama. And of course, the phrase “more than an extremist” applies to Obama, as well.

Basically, one can’t help but get the idea that the Obama administration is pretty much swinging wildly at every pitch, and missing every time.

From all reports, Abdulmutallab was singing like a canary until Obama gave him his lawyer. And then he clammed up like, well, a clam, after said lawyer advised him to shut his mouth. Counter-terrorism officials are using every “pretty, pretty please” trick in their new Obama terrorism manuals to get the kid to tell them what they need to know to break up the next plot. But to no avail.

58% of Americans (that’s 1% more than think Obama deserves an ‘F’ as in “failure” for a grade) think that we should be waterboarding Abdulmutallab until he either tells us what we need to know, or grows gills.

Unfortunately, we voted for a president who would rather protect terrorist’s rights than protect Americans’ lives.

Remember how the Obama administration demonized the Bush administration and the CIA for trying to keep us safe? Too bad Obama won’t try to keep us safe.

I said it back in February 14th of last year, and I’ll say it again now: “Hold Obama Responsible For Dismantling American Intelligence.”

But that’s hardly the dumbest or craziest thing Obama is doing. Even as we find out that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was trained by a Gitmo terrorist whom we had foolishly released, Obama – who has already sent half a dozen terrorists to Yemen – is “absolutely” planning to continue to send more. As many as 90 more, to REALLY train those new Yemen-based al Qaeda terrorists right. When even Democrats are starting to say, “ARE YOU FULL OF STUPID!?!?”

It’s almost as if Obama realizes that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would have been a better terrorist if he’d only had even more help arrive from Gitmo – and wants punks like Abdulmutallab to “be all they can be.”

Obama finally announced today that he was suspending Gitmo transfers to Yemen for at least a little while, whereas only yesterday administration officials were swearing up and down that the transfers would continue. But Obama is allowing “diversity visas” to proceed full speed ahead. Why? Because we don’t have enough radical jihadists coming to us from Yemen. The words “terrorist state” really don’t seem to matter to these people.

We also find out that 61 terrorists previously held at Gitmo returned to terrorism to be captured or killed again in 2008. Which means a lot more probably went back to terrorism; but that only 61 were actually caught. Doesn’t matter. Obama wants Gitmo closed, and if our soldiers and intelligence agents have to fight or track down terrorists they’ve already captured once, well, our warriors are paid to die, aren’t they?

The numbers of Gitmo detainees who were released only to return to terrorism looked real bad in 2008. So what does the Obama administration do in 2009? You know, that open, honest, transparent administration? They suppress the report about how many freed Gitmo detainees returned to terrorism. That’s what. Because what you don’t know can never hurt you – even if it is wearing a bomb in your airplane.

Update January 6, 2010: The White House are covering up their numbers on Gitmo detainees returning to terrorism, but the Pentagon just released a frightening picture.  Fully one in five of the terrorists we are releasing from Gitmo are returning to terrorism to threaten American lives yet again.

Given this information, the president who releases terrorists is a terrorist.

But don’t you worry. If we catch these terrorists in the act of trying to murder Americans again, Obama will make sure they get their Miranda rights read to them a second time.

On Celebrating The Virgin Birth Of Jesus With Both Heart And Mind

I take my “Santa cap” off to the American Spectator – which is such a strong force for political conservatism – for providing articles such as this one.

There is more than health care, or cap-and-trade, or deficits, or any part of the ideological battle between Democrats and Republicans.  Because long before we were fighting any of those issues, we were celebrating Christ.  And we shall be celebrating Christ long after all of these other, lesser issues are gone.

The Case Against the Case Against the Virgin Birth

By Jeremy Lott on 12.22.09 @ 6:07AM

Every year at about this time, readers can count on a few Christmas-themed articles appearing in newspapers and magazines that question the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. It really is something to see the wide variety of people who get worked up over this ancient Christian belief.

Scientific reductionists — the Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins set — will tell us that it’s impossible. By definition, a virgin cannot be with child. Certain biblical scholars will be trotted out to poke holes in the dogma, by making points about the Bible passages in question that sound convincing to non-scholars. And moderate, embarrassed believers such as Newsweek editor Jon Meacham will try to smooth things over. The Virgin Birth, they will say, is symbolically but not historically or scientifically important. It’s about new life or specialness or some other non-offensive, wooly-headed thing.

The scholars will say that the verse in Isaiah (7:14) that prophesies a “virgin shall conceive and bear a son” is a mistranslation. “Virgin” could be “young woman,” you see. They will point out that only two of the four Gospels of the New Testament mention the Virgin Birth and that the Virgin Birth Gospels (Matthew and Luke) do not agree about many details. They will say that the earliest Gospel (Mark) leaves it out entirely.

Therefore: Who can say what really happened? The point of this exercise is to paint defenders of the virgin birth as narrow fundamentalists who cling to two tenuous, unscientific, conflicting scraps of the biblical text that rely on a questionable translation of Old Testament prophecy. There are perhaps a dozen problems with this approach. We’ll focus on three:

One, it manages to misrepresent all four Gospels at the same time. Matthew and Luke have miraculous conception and birth narratives. Mark and John are rooted in the first chapter of Genesis. That itself says something about Christ’s origin. According to the first chapter of John, “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God.” In Jesus, “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”

In fact, all four Gospels are rooted in Genesis. Modern audiences tend to focus on the creation narratives of the first few chapters and skip over the genealogies. To a first century Middle Eastern audience, those lists were far more important. Echoing this, both Matthew and Luke attempt to construct genealogies of Jesus, and in the process both books finger God as the father and Mary as the mother.

Two, in pointing out contradictions between Matthew and Luke, scholars and more progressive believers think that they are scoring points against literalism and fundamentalism. The supposed contradictions do present a problem for some believers, but they help make their case as well. Historians are trained to suspect collusion of sources: if two accounts line up too neatly, then one is likely based on the other and thus less valuable. It’s better to have two divergent accounts — even wildly divergent accounts — of the same event to serve as confirmation of the details where they agree.

The stories about Jesus’ conception and birth in Matthew and Luke are far enough apart — the “wise men,” the flight to Egypt, and the murder of innocents are in Matthew but not Luke; the census, the shepherds, the meeting between the mothers of the still unborn Jesus and John the Baptist are unique to Luke — that they must come from different sources. They both agree about the Virgin Birth.

Three, the case for a mistranslation of Isaiah is simply beside the point. Yes, the word in Hebrew could be rendered “young lady” but that’s irrelevant. When an angel tells Mary that she will have a child and she wonders, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34) she’s not saying “since I am a young lady.” The Gospel writers, the popular early Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, and the early church all understood it to mean “virgin,” and their understanding is what matters here.

None of this is indisputable proof for the Virgin Birth, nor is it meant to be. We can give evidence for miracles but cannot replicate the results in a laboratory, and the chasm between history and mystery is where faith comes in. However, the hostility of scientific reductionists to the idea does not make nearly as much sense as it used to. Now, with advances in reproductive technology, a woman who was biologically a virgin could in fact conceive a child. Experiments in animal DNA are showing that you can manipulate eggs in such a way that sperm is not necessary to create a whole new creature. If scientists in the 21st century can manage it, is it really such a stretch to say that God 2,000 years ago would have been up to the task?

You should go to the American Spectator site itself to read this, as there are some excellent and informative comments that follow the article.  But I have a few things to say, myself.

The Septuagint was the translation into Greek by Jewish scholars (it is often abbreviated as “LXX” because tradition holds that 70 scholars were involved in the translation), and was undertaken and completed between 300 and 200 BC.  It was not written by Christians.

It is, however, particularly noteworthy to Christians that the Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew word “almah” in Isaiah (which basically meant a young woman of marigiable age still under the protection of her family) as “parthenos,” which is the Greek word that clearly means “virgin.”

Some scholars rigidly maintain that the Hebrew word “almah” does not necessarily mean “virgin.”  But the fact of the matter is that in Hebrew culture/tradition, a young unmarried girl under her family’s protection was basically either a virgin, or else she was stoned to death as an adulteress.  When you add the fact that the LXX scholars – who clearly were more in touch with the understanding of the ancient Hebrew Bible than we are today – deliberately chose the word “parthenos,” you have a rather ironclad case that the Jews understood Isaiah 7:14 as prophesying a virgin birth (i.e. an immaculate conception).

Only Jesus – in all of recorded human history – has been proclaimed as having been uniquely born of a virgin.  And the two largest religions in the world – Christianity and Islam – recognize and affirm that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a young Jewish virgin girl named Mary.

The passages presented in the New Testament then eradicate even the tiniest shred of remaining doubt.

The so-called “scientific reductionists” claim that the miracle of the virgin birth was impossible.  What is interesting is that a “virgin birth” is quite possible today, given our medical technology.  I bring this out just to say that these are philosophical atheists, who don’t believe in the virgin birth simply because they do not believe in God.  Otherwise, their view toward the virgin birth becomes asinine: they would literally be arguing that God the Creator of all matter, energy, space, and time would be unable to replicate a feat that humans today routinely perform.

As one who accepts the possibility of God, I have no problem whatsoever accepting the possibility of miracles.  Some atheistic thinkers have defined a “miracle” as “a violation of the laws of nature.”  But they are trying to load the issue and tilt it toward philosophical naturalism by doing so.

Let me explain it this way.  Suppose someone accidentally knocks my cup of coffee off the table and I catch it.  Is this a “miracle”?  After all, according to the law of gravity, that cup should have continued to fall and strike the ground – and that didn’t happen.  What did happen was a personal agent possessing sufficient power chose to intervene and change the outcome of natural laws by themselves.

A miracle is God – the all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of the universe – intentionally choosing to reach down and intervene in the affairs of men, usually by a means we our limited understanding cannot fully understand.

Please allow me to explain why Christmas is so important to me, by means of a series of declarations of faith:

I believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ.

I believe that God supernaturally implanted into Mary’s womb (and specifically into one of her unfertilized eggs) a human baby possessing a perfect human nature, uncorrupted by the effects of the Fall.

I believe that this baby, Jesus, possessed every single property essential to human nature (flesh and bones, a human brain, etc.) such that He was 100% man.  Sin is not essential to human nature; God created both Adam and Eve without sin.

I believe that this baby, Jesus, simultaneously possessed every single property essential to Deity, particularly the Deity of The Word, the Second Person of the Triunity of the Godhead.  Such that He was 100% God.  As He grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), He came to recognize His unique Christ-consciousness.  And specifically, He began to become aware that He was the fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 9:6-7, and Micah 5:2 (among some 300 other unique and amazing prophecies).

I believe that when God created human beings in His image (the Imago Dei) in Genesis 1:27, He was in fact creating beings whose image and nature He Himself would one day assume.  He created Adam in His image so that He could ultimately assume Adam’s image and so save mankind from the Fall (Genesis 3).

I believe Jesus voluntarily restricted the use of His divine prerogatives prior to His assumption of human nature, such that He lived His life on earth as an ordinary human being who had to rely completely on the Holy Spirit for His power (just like every Christian since has had to do).  Please read Philippians 2:1-11.  And then read it again and again.

I believe He came to live a perfect life on earth as a human being so that He could fully and truly represent the human race.

I believe that He died in my place – and in the place of everyone who believes in Him – so that I could be fully restored with God the Father (Luke 19:10, Mark 10:45).  I believe that I am a sinner (Romans 3:23; 6:23), saved only by grace and by faith in the name of Jesus (Ephesians 2:8,9; Romans 5:1; 10:9).

I believe in the words of a simple poem,

He came to die on a cross of wood,
Yet made the hill on which it stood (see John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:15-17).

I believe that Jesus had to become a man to die in my place – or even (as God) to be able to experience death on my behalf – and that He had to be God to have the power to save me from my sins.  Only Jesus, as true God, and true Man, could save me (Hebrews 9:24-28).

And I believe that, because of His finished work of sacrifice in my place, that I will live forever with Him in heaven, celebrating an eternal life more magnificent and more exciting than anything I have ever begun to imagine.

And all of the wonder of God coming to His creation, all of the wonder of the most loving act in the history of the universe, all of the existential cries that are answered by God taking my place and saving me, are all answered in the birth of Jesus.

And so I read Job 19:25-27 and say with him, “For I know that my Redeemer lives…”

And so I read with tears of joy the words of Mary in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

And so I recognize in that First Christmas not only joy to the world, but hope for the world.  And the source of that Christmas joy and hope is Christ.

Merry Christmas.

8-Year-Old Suspended, Given Psychiatric Counseling, For Seeing Christ In Christmas

Christians have the Spanish Inquisition to apologize for.  Secular humanists have Marxism, Maoism, and Nazism (few people today realize that “Nazi” stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party”) to apologize for.

The Inquisition – which Christians recognize was a terrible wrong – led to the execution of approximately 5,000 people over its 300 year history.  It stands as an ugly reminder of what can happen if “Christians” allow political and temporal power to dominate their thinking to the exclusion of the teachings of Jesus.

Communism alone resulted in the murders of more than 100 million human beings at the hands of their own officially atheist governments during peacetime.  But a) it is rare indeed to find the political left apologizing for the despicable sins of leftist ideologies; b) pure political and temporal power are at the very core of their ideology; and c) there is nothing even remotely close to the teachings of Jesus to guide them or tell them when they have gone too far in their all too often fanatic pursuit of pure political and temporal power.

History ignored, of course, is doomed to be repeated.

One of the favorite methods of dealing with dissent in the Soviet Union and the socialist system generally was to use the power of psychiatry to demonize dissenters.  You weren’t just incorrect in your thinking.  You were crazy.  And the “fact” that you were “crazy” was used as a propaganda tool as a means to advance the statist agenda.

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture.

Christians in the Medieval period feared demons and the evil influence of Satan.  And fanatic and cynical temporal leaders alike harnessed that fear into a tool of repression.  Their secular humanist counterparts have no such fears, of course.  They have only power, and the determination to crush any who oppose them.  And so rather than see demons in their opponents, they see madness.

If you don’t think that leftists still embrace the power of psychiatry as a means to advance their own political agenda, please think again.

I write the above because of a frightening thing that emerged today.

From WBC Newsradio 1030:

Image courtesy Taunton GazettePosted: Tuesday, 15 December 2009 1:56PM
Child’s Christmas artwork deemed ‘violent’
M.L.

Taunton (AP/WBZ Newsroom) — An 8-year-old boy was sent home from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation after he was asked to make a Christmas drawing and came up with what appeared to be a stick figure of Jesus on a cross, the child’s father said Tuesday.

Chester Johnson told WBZ-TV that his son made the drawing on Dec. 2 after his second-grade teacher asked children to sketch something that reminded them of the holiday.

Johnson said the teacher became upset when his son said he drew himself on the cross. Johnson, who is black, told WBZ he suspects racism is involved. He said he thinks the school overreacted and wants an apology.

Johnson told the Taunton Daily Gazette, which first reported the story on Tuesday, that his son gets specialized reading and speech instruction and has never been violent in school.

An educational consultant working with the Johnson family said the teacher was also alarmed when the boy drew Xs for Jesus’ eyes.

A call to Johnson was not immediately returned.

The boy was cleared to return to school on Dec. 7 after the evaluation found nothing to indicate that he posed a threat to himself or others. But his father said the boy was traumatized by the incident and the school district has approved the family’s request to have the child transferred to another school.

“They owe my family an apology and the kid an apology and they need to work with my son (to) the best of their ability to get him back to where he was before all this happened,” Johnson told New England Cable News.

The father said in the days before the incident the family had gone to the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, where there are crucifixion statues.

“That was fresh on his mind,” he told NECN. “And that was a good thing that he saw.”

Superintendent Julie Hackett said she could not discuss an individual student and did not address the drawing specifically or the teacher’s reaction to it, but did say the school has safety protocols in place that were followed.

Hackett did not return multiple calls from The Associated Press on Tuesday.

In June 2008, a Taunton fifth-grade student was suspended for a day for a stick figure drawing that appeared to depict him shooting his teacher and a classmate.

Let me just assure you that none of the teachers, principles, and “experts” who were so alarmed that a child would draw Jesus on the cross with “Xs” for eyes to show that Jesus had died were anything even close to “Christian” in their worldview.

We live in an time in which the government pays for an “artist” to drop a crucifix into a har of urine and label the creation “Piss Christ.”  And now that same taxpayer-funded NEA is blatantly part of the left’s political agenda as a propaganda tool.  But a public school child who draws a picture of Jesus on the Cross in response to sketch something that reminded him of Christmas is suspended and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

When it is the adults who SENT that poor, innocent child to the psychiatrist who desperately need psychiatric help.

A few days ago I read an article in the LA Times on the need to protect the free speech rights of children who use internet technology to bully and humiliate fellow students.  And the ACLU is at the forefront of such legal action.  Nobody on the left even thinks that children who publish pictures of their naked co-students has mental issue.  And yet nobody is protecting the rights of a child TO DRAW A PICTURE OF JESUS AT CHRISTMAS.

H1N1 Vaccine As Proof Of Mind-Boggling Obama Incompetence

Remember when President Obama “declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.” Boy did they ever get the ball rolling after that.

Even as it became increasingly obvious that the administration was falling woefully behind in their H1N1 production goals, they continued to urge people to demand the vaccine.  The result was more typical of Soviet-era bread lines than the U.S.A.

Not only am I not able to get this stupid vaccine, but both my doctor and my dentist have told me that they aren’t able to get it, either.

Even The New York Times pointed a finger at Obama last month in an article entitled as “H1N1 Widespread in 46 States as Vaccines Lag“:

Federal officials predicted last spring that as many as 120 million doses could be available by now, with nearly 200 million by year’s end. But production problems plagued some of the five companies contracted to make the vaccine. All use a technology involving growing the vaccine in fertilized chicken eggs; at most of them, the seed strain grew more slowly than expected.

The manufacturers are “working hard to get vaccine out as safely and rapidly as possible,” Dr. Frieden said. But since it is grown in eggs, “even if you yell at them, they don’t grow faster.”

Since last winter’s more isolated cases of swine flu, the expectation that the virus would return with a vengeance in this flu season had posed a test of the Obama administration’s preparedness.  Officials are mindful that the previous administration’s failure to better prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 left doubts that dogged President George W. Bush to the end of his term.

The Obama government predicted 120 million doses, but – as the article makes clear – they have only 30 million.  This is an absolute disaster – and it is entirely appropriate to compare this level of sheer incompetence to George Bush’s “Katrina moment.”

And blaming the delays that will leave Americans woefully exposed to H1N1 is tantamount to George Bush blaming the Hurricane Katrina response on the American Red Cross.  That pig just doesn’t fly, Barry Hussein.

This is not good:

Swine flu, also known as H1N1, may infect as much as half of the population and kill 30,000 to 90,000 people, double the deaths caused by the typical seasonal flu, according to the planning scenario issued yesterday by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Intensive care units in hospitals, some of which use 80 percent of their space in normal operation, may need every bed for flu cases, the report said.

A revised report from the CDC dated November 12 demonstrates that all the kings horses and all the king’s men really don’t have a whole lot of a clue as to what is going on:

CBS/AP) Federal health officials now say that 4,000 or more Americans likely have died from swine flu – about four times the estimate they’ve been using.

If you go back and survey this slowly unfolding disaster, you will find that the Obama government has routinely been wrong by a factor of between 400% – 500%.  At some point you’d think the mainstream media would really start coming unglued over this incompetence.  But not so much (hint: the president is a Democrat).

Are conservatives wrong to blast Obama for this gross incompetence?

Not if history counts for anyting (which it usually doesn’t with liberals).  Amy Geiger-Hemmer writes:

Remember a few short years ago how President Bush was just ripped apart by the mainstream media and blamed for flu vaccine shortages?  Most Democrat representatives acted outraged at the President and his inability to have enough flu vaccines available for the American people during flu season.   Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are two excellent examples:

From:  Hillary Clinton blasts Bush on Vaccine Shortage: (October 18, 2004)

“They’re more interested in tax cuts for the rich than for flu shots for everyone who needs them,” Clinton railed Monday afternoon at a press conference at New York’s Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center.Found this on “The Daily Kos” – so lefties will believe it:

Remember this from October of 2004:

Democrats have seized on the vaccine shortage to accuse the administration of being unable to protect Americans – from either illness or terrorism. “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism?’‘ Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, asked in an interview with National Public Radio. “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?”…” (WOW!!!! Imagine if ANYONE would ask Obama this same question?)

And that was just an ordinary flu year.  No “national emergencies.”  No super-flu.  No flu that kills four times as many people as authorities predicted it would.

Not that Democrats (and that includes the mainstream media) are capable of being fair or objective, but if they were only capable of turning their demagoguery on themselves…

This is not only a shocking failure, but an incredibly dangerous and potentially deadly failure as well:

“I’m worried the virus (H1N1) is getting ahead of the public health system’s ability to control it” — Senator Joe Lieberman (I)

And the fact that the Obama administration assumed control of the flu vaccine in an unprecedented way make Obama and the Democrats even more blameworthy yet:

There are extreme shortages of the H1N1 vaccine all over the U.S. As a result, people are getting sick and they are dying. This pandemic is raging, and spreading like wildfire, and for the first time ever the private sector has been removed from the process of distributing the vaccine.

It has been standard operating procedure in the past for private industry to distribute vaccines that were needed for the greater good of the people. Now, however, with the H1N1 vaccine and the Obama administration in charge, the government has taken over all responsibility for distribution of the vaccine to the states via the CDC.  The government has failed so miserably in distributing the vaccine that now the [DEMOCRAT!!!] U.S. Senate is investigating their incompetence and possible corruption.

Picture this if you will, right now in the U.S. Senate, The Homeland Security Committee headed by Joe Lieberman (Independent and former Democrat), is investigating the complete and total incompetence and perhaps corruption, as well as the assertions from some that the Obama administration is playing political favorites with your lives, as it relates to one area of health care while at the same time another Senate committee is gathered trying to hammer together legislation that would allow the U.S. government to take total control over all health care in the U.S.

Lieberman’s committee is trying to determine why the U.S. Government so grossly underestimated the amount of vaccine that would be available and why the vaccine may be available when it’s too late.

“It’s moved with alarming speed and took an exceptionally high toll at a time of year when we don’t encounter a high number of flu cases.  Flu spikes typically occur in January.  We’re in October … and the number of cases is higher than what we usually see at the flu’s peak in January,” Lieberman said this morning.

There are also accusations by some that Blue States are receiving the vaccine in multiples far higher than Red States regardless of population. As an example; Texas, a traditionally Republican stronghold and the second most populous state in the union is ranked at number 48 in terms of vaccinations received.

Is the Obama administration saying that if your state voted Republican then it is okay for H1N1 to kill your kids, or you?

We’re talking about the worst kind of incompetence.  And now we’re talking about the most hateful form of partisan viciousness ever seen in this country from the man whose “core promise” during the campaign was that he would transcend the political divide.

And the point that the Democrat candidate for president asked (see above) in 2004 applies BIG TIME now: “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program do you think you CAN run?”

Are you going to allow these clowns to run your health care system?  Are you going to trust them with your life?  Are you going to put another 1/5th of the economy under their control?

Speaking of the economy, this isn’t merely a health disaster; it is increasingly likely that it will create a massive economic disaster as well.

I’m sure you are aware that many retail businesses make 70% of their profits during the Christmas season?  What happens if people are afraid to shop for fear of the H1N1 Obama Death?

Consider that what is increasingly likely to become a health disaster is even more likely to be an economic disaster, as H1N1 escalates its attack during the Holidays and the Christmas shopping season, with still no significant stocks of vaccine available.

How much longer can Obama keep blaming Bush for his growing list of failures?