I have to admit, this started out to be a very different blog than it ended up. Like many, I was discouraged at the results of the election. Yes, I know that God is in control and uses even government for His purposes but sometimes those purposes are to punish His people or the nations in which His people dwell and they suffer as well. To be perfectly honest I am not a big fan of suffering.

I know that politics is messy business and corruption abounds in the hallowed halls of Congress and the White House. Special interest groups are working hard to persuade the Federal Government to use the club of legislation to beat down the opposition. But that is how government works in a Democratic Republic. We vote for candidates that most closely align with our worldview and values and trust they will at the very least protect us from those who have a different view. Continue reading …

Isn’t that just like God. Nearly as soon as I wrote last week’s blog, ”Raise the Level of Discourse” Barack Obama gave his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. God, it seems, gave me the opportunity to go back on what I wrote (in my flesh I would love to do that) or ignore the speech (which may be the coward’s way out) or comment on the issues and reserve any personal attacks. Hopefully, God will grant me success in doing the latter.

At a religious events like the National Prayer Breakfast, it seems appropriate to comment on spiritual issues and it often reveals ones worldview as they handle or mishandle the sacred texts of the group to whom one is speaking. This is true in the case of Barack Obama and this speech. As we have documented in our article, Barack and the Borg , for twenty years he attended a church that is steeped in Black Liberation Theology. Anthony B. Bradley’s article, The Marxist Roots of Black Liberation Theology defines and comments on the origins and implications of the theological view which Obama has been steeped in for over twenty years so I won’t spend much time on that here other than to say, it is this life centered and has little to do with our relationship to God or the person and work of Jesus Christ. This may sound odd since Obama stated in the speech: Continue reading …

A friend sent me this little picture which many of their left leaning friends are putting in their emails and posting to their Facebook accounts. It demonstrates a lack of biblical literacy and a substitution of socialism for biblically based Christianity. I am not saying that they may not have genuine compassion on those in need but they do not have a biblically informed view of how to address the problem. It assumes that somewhere in Scripture there is teaching that it is the unbelieving, secular government’s responsibility to take resources from those who are working, investing, building businesses and yes, supporting charities of their own choice and redistribute it to others of the government’s choice. If true, the passage would sound something like this:

For I was hungry, and you didn’t allow the government to continue expanding the food stamp program for Me; I was thirsty,  and you tried to get alcohol and cigarettes removed from the food stamp program; I was on taxpayer funded welfare and you expected Me to get a job. I incurred college debt and you expected that I would keep my word and pay my debts.

Obviously, I could go on but you get the idea. This is a mentality that has been the hallmark of the cry-baby boomer generation. In the very insightful article, Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun, after describing the accomplishments of the generation preceding the cry-baby boomers, Walter Russell Mead writes: Continue reading …

Well, it was only a matter of time that the Occupy Wall Street crowd would drag Jesus into there amorphous angst. I found this picture on one of my friend’s “wall” on Facebook. Of course I had to get involved. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about Occupy Wall Street. What you know about their demands may be very little. Though a list of demands has been voted on and posted, this statement seems accurate:

There are no Official Demands of the Occupy Movement. that being said, multiple factions of the movement have been assembling to discuss and vote on the output and message for the movement. Below is a LIST OF PROPOSED “DEMANDS FOR CONGRESS” proposed by the website (occupywallstreet.org) which does not entirely represent the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly.

Fair enough. When you look the demands of the coalition of the outraged Continue reading …

I was talking with my partner in crime, Jonathon Miles, about this week’s blog and he mentioned a quote that C.S. Lewis had made about having first things first. In my trolling the Internet in search of the quote I stumbled across something that combined the quote with issues of social justice at, of all places, First Things.

Over on Catholic World News, a fellow who goes by the name of Uncle Di reflects on the way that clerics in recent decades have abandoned revealed truth and saving souls in favor of sundry causes of social justice. He recalls a 1942 essay by C.S. Lewis, “First and Second Things.” Lewis wrote: “To sacrifice the greater good for the less and then not to get the lesser good after all–that is the surprising folly. . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made. Apparently the world is made that way. If Esau really got his pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception. You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

Ultimately, that is the dilemma Continue reading …

When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a Qur’an into a glass container of his own urine and photographed it under the title Urine for the Qur’an, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion.

Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on last week when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an “anti-blasphemy” campaign by French Islamic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon.

The violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph has plunged secular France into soul-searching about Islamic fundamentalism and Nicolas Sarkozy’s use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year.

It also marks a return to an old standoff between Serrano and the religious right that dates back more than 20 years, to Reagan-era Republicanism in the US.

The photograph, full title Urine for the Qur’an, was made as part of Serrano’s series showing religious objects submerged in fluids such as blood and milk. In 1989, rightwing senators’ criticism of Urine for the Qur’an led to a heated US debate on public arts funding. Republican Jesse Helms told the senate Serrano was “not an artist. He’s a jerk.”

Serrano defended his photograph as a criticism of the “billion-dollar terrorism-for-profit industry” and a “condemnation of those who abuse the teachings of Mohammed for their own ignoble ends”.

The photograph had been shown in France several times without incident. For four months, it has hung in the exhibition I Believe in Miracles, to mark 10 years of art-dealer Yvon Lambert’s personal collection in his 18th-century mansion gallery in Avignon. The show is due to end next month, but two weeks ago a concerted protest campaign began.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a lobby group that says it aims to re-Islamize France, launched an online petition and mobilised other fundamentalist groups. The staunchly conservative Imam of Vaucluse, called Urine for the Qur’an “odious” and said he wanted this “trash” taken off the gallery walls. Last week the gallery complained of “extremist harassment” by fundamentalist Islamic groups who wanted the work banned in France.

Lambert, one of France’s best known art dealers, complained he was being “persecuted” by extremists who had sent him tens of thousands of complaint emails and bombarded the museum with spam. He likened the atmosphere to “a return to the middle ages”.

On Saturday, around 1,000 Islamic protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

The above account is true but the religion has been changed to make a point. Continue reading …

Since, the holidays are over and school is about to reconvene, I am (to put it mildly) busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest as we say in Mississippi. However, I wanted to revisit the discussion about Jesus and Social justice because we got such interesting responses. One good comment was about Christians who claim to be Communists or at least Marxists:

One teaching of Communism is that communism is completely anti-religious. Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, extreme Communists, both spoke out against religion altogether in rise of Communism. If Communism preaches against religion altogether, why would Jesus be a Communist? Doesn’t make sense for anyone to say that or think that if they any Biblical knowledge at all.

This is an important point. Can one be a communist without being an Atheist? Continue reading …