Evolutionary Cosmologies: Religious Endeavor To Become Like God

Throughout the de-Christianized West and America neo-pagan and mystical pantheist evolutionary reasoning is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern thought and experience.  It not only undergirds biological and earth sciences, but also Freudian and Jungian psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, politics, economics, the media, arts, medicine, and all other academic—and increasingly seminarian—disciplines as well. The West’s amoral transnational elite Gnostics, the “chosen” ones, are particularly enamored of evolutionary reasoning:

“Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their own circles. At first, they disregarded God. Then they deliberately desecrated Western tradition and lived in ways that would have spelled disaster if they had been followed more closely. But now in the early twenty-first century, their movement from disregard to desecration to decadence is going mainstream, and the United States is only the lead society among those close to the tipping point…. Soon, as the legalization and then normalization of polyamory, polygamy, pedophilia and incest follow the same logic as that of abortion and homosexuality, the socially destructive consequences of these trends will reverberate throughout society until social chaos is beyond recovery. We can only pray there will be a return to God and sanity before the terrible sentence is pronounced: “God has given them over” to the consequences of their own settled choices.”  (Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times, Os Guinness, p. 20)

Evolution: what is it?

“Evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept.  In fact, some of the first thinkers to seriously explore the topic—the German Idealists of the early 19th century—were mystic philosophers who predated Darwin’s Origin of Species by at least a century.”  (A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality, Tom Huston)

Rene Guenon (1886-1951) concurs.  Guenon was a French metaphysician, writer, and editor who was largely responsible for laying the metaphysical groundwork for the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of thought in the early twentieth century.   In his brilliant critical analysis of Theosophy and Spiritism entitled, “The Spiritist Fallacy”  Guenon investigates and exposes the satanic esotericism working through various modern Western secret societies to pervert true religion—orthodox Christianity in particular— in order to ultimately turn the world over to Luciferian forces.

Guenon reveals that in early Theosophist and spiritist circles use of the word ‘progress’ or ‘progressivist’ preceded the use of the word ‘evolution.’ The roots of Theosophy, hence of evolution–the universal life force–stretch back to the ancient Upanishads of India in the East and in the West to ancient Babylon, Egypt and Greece.  In its modern version, progress, transformism, and/or evolution describes the progress (transmigration) of soul made possible by the life force as it inhabits in succession the bodies of different kinds of beings over the course of thousands or even millions and billions of years.

Eventually the word evolution became preferred, especially by empirical realists and materialists like Karl Marx because it had a more ‘scientific’ allure:

“This kind of ‘verbalism’…provides the illusion of thought for those incapable of really thinking…”  (ibid, p. 231)

Evolution is an ancient occult doctrine originating in ancient Babylonian Cabbala, Egyptian Hermetic magic and Mystery Religion traditions both East and West from the time of Babylon—the mother of all Mystery Religions—that entered Christendom during the Renaissance.  In “God and the Knowledge of Reality,” the Catholic philosopher and historian, Thomas Molnar (1921–2010), reveals that certain Christian theologians, mystics and scholars such as Emanuel Swedenborg had discovered Hermetic magic and occult Jewish Cabbala texts which they studied and translated resulting in Hermetic Cabbala. Then like Pico della Mirandola, they argued that Hermetic Cabbala— the divine occult science or Magic Way of reaching divine status and powers through initiation, evolution (progress), and ritual procedures is the best proof of the divinity of Christ. In other words said Molnar,

“…..by the time of the Renaissance the esoteric texts of the first centuries A.D. had acquired in scholarly and humanist circles an unparalleled prestige, confronting as equals the texts held sacred by the church. In Pico’s estimation, ‘nulla est scientia que nos magis certificet de divinitate Christ quam magia et Cabala’ (there is no science that would prove for us Christ’s divinity better than magic and the Cabala.)” (pp. 78-79)

That Hermetic magic and Babylonian Cabbala are ancient Mystery Religion traditions undergirded by evolution is affirmed by G. H. Pember in his classic work, “Earth’s Earliest Ages.”    In his impeccably researched book Pember thoroughly examines the role of fallen angels in connection with the occult science they taught to pre-flood generations and compares them to the explosion of spiritism (open intercourse with evil spirits), astrology, the Mysteries and other occult traditions sweeping over Christendom.

Pember writes that the Mysteries are no longer veiled in mystery but boldly presented by the powerful occult progressive brotherhood that emerged out of the Renaissance as the fruit of modern science, especially evolutionary philosophy, which the brotherhood assert was included in the instructions given,

“…to the initiates of the Hermetic, Orphic, Eleusinian, and Cabbalistic mysteries, and were familiar to Chaldean Magi, Egyptian Priests, Hindu Occultists, Essenes, Therapeutae Gnostics, and Theurgic Neo-Platonists.” (Pember, pp.243-244)

Today, evolutionary dynamics and science as the instrument of the will of sovereign man has so thoroughly replaced the personal Creator in the consciousness of vast numbers of secularized Westerners, both within and without the whole body of the Christian Church, that one of the leading evolution-worshippers of our day, Professor S.J. Gould, goes so far as to describe evolutionary biology as the story of mankind.  Evolution:

“….tells us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science’s version of Roots, except it is the story of us all.”   (The Religious Nature of Evolution Theory and its Attack on Christianity, John G. Leslie and Charles K. Pallaghy, Ph.D., )

In fascinated affirmation, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) , a prominent evolutionary biologist and progressive creationist, sees evolution as a light that illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow, for if man,

“…has arrived at his present state as a result of natural processes rather than a supernatural will, he can learn to control these processes…The concept of evolution, which is now basic to the life sciences, has provided new and in some ways revolutionary answers to questions men have been asking for centuries. The two most important of these are, ‘Why am I here, what is the purpose of human existence, and what is the nature of the world of life that surrounds us?”   (Dobzhansky, T., Ayala, F.J., Stebbins, G.L. and Valentine, J.W., Evolution, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1977)

The most widely held evolutionary cosmology, or model of the universe’s beginning and development is the Big Bang theory.   According to this version of the “story of us all” the universe is thought to have ‘exploded’ from a ‘cosmic egg,’ sometimes called the ylem in a universe bounded by an edge.  The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that the big bang is a theory,

“…of the evolution of the universe.  Its’ essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a state of extremely high temperature and density—the so-called big bang that occurred at least 10,000,000,000 years ago…..”(Big Bang Model, The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 2:205, 1992)
The big bang is based on two assumptions:

“The first is that Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes the gravitational attraction of all matter.  The second assumption, called the cosmological principle, states that the observer’s point of view of the universe depends neither on the direction in which he looks nor on his location.  This principle applies only to the large scale properties of the universe, but it does imply that the universe has no edge, so that the big bang occurred not at a particular point in space but rather throughout space at the same time.  These two assumptions make it possible to calculate the history of the cosmos after a certain epoch called the Planck time.  Scientists have yet to determine what prevailed before Planck time.”    (ibid)

Distinctions are in order here. While the first assumption qualifies as true science, the second assumption, sometimes misnamed the Copernican Principle, does not since it is completely metaphysical, or philosophical.  This is illustrated by Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered that distant objects appeared to have ‘red shifts’ approximately proportional to distance from earth. Hubble’s speculative interpretation of this discovery presented it as evidence of an expanding universe without a center and without an edge (unbounded) as opposed to Hugh Ross, the popularizer of progressive creationism whose own imaginative assumption pictures everything exploding from a central point in a universe bounded by an edge. (Refuting Compromise: A Biblical and Scientific Refutation of ‘Progressive Creationism’ as Popularized by Astronomer Hugh Ross, Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M., p. 146-147)

Ross’s brand of evolutionary Christianity is wildly popular among certain Christians.  It was as a teenager that Ross decided the non-biblical big bang was a fact, thus it is the foundation stone of his twisted Scriptures—twisted because his big bang assumptions lead him to trip, stumble and fall down evolution’s downward-spiraling vortex blurring distinctions between humans and animals as he goes. (ibid)

The Big Bang is devoid of experimental proof, yet because the universe is definitely running down this fact surely points to some kind of beginning. This is apparently why some Christian leaders–theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists such as Pope Francis, Hugh Ross, Tim Keller and many others who feel we simply have to accept the evolutionists’ billions of years— have decided to accept the Big Bang theory. After all, the Big Bang requires a beginning, and they feel this fits with the Bible.  (Big Bang — The Bucks Stop There, Henry Morris, Ph.D., )

However, not only does the Big Bang—or any other evolutionary cosmology—- not fit into the Bible but it also turns the Creator, Jesus Christ, into a liar, for He said that Adam and Eve were there “from the beginning of the creation” (Mark 10: 6; Gen. 1: 26-27) rather than several billion years after the beginning of the creation as evolutionary speculators hold.

As the Nicene Creed affirms, Gods Word starts with the creation of absolutely everything visible and invisible ex nihilo in the space of six days.  In his “Literal interpretation of Genesis” Augustine of Hippo notes that when God brought material reality into existence, “then time began its flight.” That is, when God created material things (the visible), at the same time He created space and time (the invisible) as their context.  (Creator and Creature, Douglas F. Kelly, Table Talk: Biblical Dichotomies, p. 6)

“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh (matter) is no help at all” John 6:63

The Triune God brought the angels into being sometime during that first creative week and as Thomas Aquinas, one of the most respected theologians of the medieval church affirms,

“Nothing entirely new was afterwards made by God, but all things subsequently made had in a sense been made before in the work of the six days.  Some things…had a previous experience materially, as the rib from the side of Adam out of which God formed Eve; whilst others existed not only in matter but also in their causes, as those individual creatures that are now generated existed in the first of their kind.”   (Summa Theologica, ibid, Sarfati, p. 120)

Evolutionary Cosmologies: Imaginative Assumptions

George Francis Rayner Ellis, a high-profile evolutionary cosmologist lets the cat out of the bag with his candid confession regarding the important role of imaginative assumptions with respect to the broad range of evolutionary models of the universe such as the Big Bang. Ellis admits:
“…I can construct…a spherically symmetrical universe with earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.”   “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds.  In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.   What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models.  A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”  (ibid, Jonathan Sarfati)

In other words, the Authority and Revelation of God, particularly in His six day creation account is rejected a priori not on the grounds of observational science but on the philosophical assumptions of arrogant, defiant speculators whose imaginative evolutionary models are metaphysical projects pretending to be observational science.

Another unspoken Big Bang assumption is neo-pagan and mystical pantheist naturalism, which ought to ring alarm bells for faithful, orthodox Christians.   Naturalism posits that the universe and everything in it, including conscious life, is the result of entirely natural processes.  The Big Bang therefore, is a neo-pagan and occult pantheist evolutionary cosmology, an esoteric program from hell that rejects both the personal Creator and the supernatural dimension.  This position holds true despite the uninformed claims of speculators like Hugh Ross who claim that God created and ignited the Big Bang.

While Pope Francis, Tim Keller and many other liberal revisionists embrace and endorse Big Bang cosmology thirty-three leading evolutionary scientists expose its frauds and fallacies in ‘Open Letter to the Scientific Community’ published on the internet () and in New Scientist (Lerner, E., Bucking the big bang, New Scientist 182 (2448) 20, 22 May 2004).  According to these evolutionary scientists:

“Our ideas about the history of the universe are dominated by big bang theory. But its dominance rests more on funding decisions than on the scientific method, according to Eric Lerner, mathematician Michael Ibison of Earthtech.org, and dozens of other scientists from around the world.” (Secular scientists blast the big bang: What now for naïve apologetics? Carl Wieland, )

The open letter includes statements such as:

1. “The big bang…relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed—inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory.’

2. “But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation. … Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements.”

3. “In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.”

4.”What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.” (ibid, Carl Wieland)

It’s amazing to see how many Christian leaders have not merely succumbed to the ‘big bang’ idea, but embrace it wholeheartedly.  Carl Wieland comments:

“To hear their pronouncements, believers should welcome it as a major plank in our defense of the faith. ‘At last, we can use science to prove there’s a creator of the universe.’ However, the price of succumbing to the lure of secular acceptability, at least in physics and astronomy, has been heavy. We have long warned that adopting the big bang into Christian thought is like bringing the wooden horse within the walls of Troy.” 

The Big Bang model is not the only game in town.  Among other imaginative models there is the quasi-steady-state model of the big bang antagonist, the late Sir Fred Hoyle.  Then there is the ekpyrotic model positing that our universe is a four-dimensional membrane embedded in a five-dimensional ‘bulk’ space.  Its proponents admit:

“Our proposal is based on unproven ideas in string theory and is brand new.” (ibid, Sarfati, p. 182)

Then there are the openly occult multiverse models proposing that our universe is not the only one but that space is filled with an infinite number of parallel universes.  Royal Astronomer Lord Martin Rees, who holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal champions multiverse conceptions in the hope that in at least one or more of them living beings created themselves who are far more advanced than our own life-forms. Rees believes that if this is the case, then super-intelligent aliens might be capable of simulating in their brains or in a super-computer the complex history of our universe, meaning the universe we inhabit is a simulation lacking real substance and existing only as a mental construction in the minds of highly evolved aliens who seeded our world with life and travel through time in order to control man’s evolutionary progress. (Scientific Mythologies, James A. Herrick, p. 216)

The idea that the universe we inhabit exists only as a mental construction is very similar to Hinduism’s Brahman. Brahman is the Great Cosmic Spirit – the Ultimate One Substance (energy field, Void, Essence, prakriti matter) of material phenomena, meaning that the universe exists only as a mental construction in the mind of Brahman: brahma satyam jagan mithya, or “Brahman is real, the world is unreal.” ()

Rees proposal is also similar to the fanciful hypothesis presented by Olaf Stapledon, a scientist who has always kept one foot firmly planted in neo-pagan and occult pantheist science fiction accounts and imagines our universe to be an artifact of the Star Maker. Building off of Stapledons fantasy Carl Sagan suggests that we are“star folk” made of “star stuff.” (Herrick, pp. 216-217)

Replace Star Maker with Brahman and “star stuff” with sarvam khalvidam brahma, or “All is truly Brahman” () and we have ayam atma brahmam: “The Self is Brahman.” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5

In the caption of his book, “Just Six Numbers,” Rees reveals that the ancient occult basis of his proposition is the serpent biting its tail:

“The ouraboros. There are links between the microworld of particles, nuclei and atoms and the cosmos.” (Rees M., Just Six Numbers, P. 9)

The serpent-powered Ouroboros with its astral planes or multiverses is well-known around the world in its’ many ancient and modern occult traditions.

Evolutionary Cosmologies:  Abominations that Desolate

Like witless moths mesmerized by strange fire, from the Renaissance to our own time liberalized Christian theologians situated within the whole body of the Christian Church have been drawn irresistibly to evolution.   Followed by countless unwitting souls, they’ve been flying into an abomination that desolates and ejects them into a downward-spiraling vortex issuing into eternal hell unless they repent and turn back to the Truth, the Way, and the Life (John 14:6).

Evolutionary Cosmologies: The Significance

Today’s broad range of evolutionary cosmologies symbolize the deep religious desires of certain men, who in their rejection of our Lord Jesus Christ and physical resurrection, seek autonomous self-creation, transcendence and self-redemption, thus are incarnations,

“….of the ancient, deeply religious endeavor ‘to become like God’— infinitely wise, omnipotent, autonomous, and immortal.” (Mircea Eliade, “The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy,” Dr. Erdmann)

They endeavor to become like God but shall instead,

“…drink of the wine of the wrath of God and be tormented with fire and brimstone.” (Rev. 14:10)  And the devil who deceived them shall likewise be “thrown into the lake of burning sulfur…” (Rev. 20:10)

Glenn Beck Goes Off On “Religious People”

“The Doctrine and Covenants leaves no doubt about the Mormon teaching of exclusivity when it says the LDS Church is, ‘the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased….’”

Glenn Beck recently threw a hissy fit on his daily radio program over “religious people [who] claim to be followers of Christ” getting upset that he was the featured convocation speaker at  (LU).  Beck accused those who were concerned over a cultist preaching a sermon of “absolutely smearing” LU.

Let’s cut to the chase.  Glenn Beck is a Mormon in good standing.  Mormonism is a theological cult.  Thus Beck’s not an authentic Christian — period.  That some Christians have the temerity to object to a cultist giving a sermon at a Christian university offended Mr. Beck, thus his rant.

In an earlier column I wrote Questioning with boldness: Which is it Glenn, are you a Mormon or a Christian? I provided an in depth examination of the .  So I’m not going to spend a lot of time re-examine it here.  However, to help you get a handle on what Mormons believe, the following is a snippet of Mormon Christianity from my column.  As you will see, what they believe isn’t even close to biblical Christianity:

LDS Christianity outright denies the Trinity which is an essential of biblical Christianity.  So LDS Christianity and orthodox Christianity do not believe in the same God.  Mormon Christianity teaches that there are many gods who are overseers of other planets.  The god of planet Earth, the one they call Elohim, was just a man with a body of flesh and bones who progressed to godhood and was rewarded with his own planet.  [Founder]Joseph Smith taught, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret… [Y]ou have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you…”

Brigham Young believed in a plurality of gods: “How many Gods there are, I do not know. But there never was a time when there were not Gods…” (Journal of Discourses 7:333).

Mormons believe that after death they will become gods and will be rewarded with their own planet.  Thereafter they will spend eternity with their many wives (polygamy) producing offspring to populate their planet.  Traditional Christianity says that God is not a man. (Numbers 23:19) Mormon Christianity teaches that man first existed as spirits in heaven.  Biblical Christianity says that the physical body comes before the spiritual. (1 Cor 15:46) 

And LDS Christianity teaches this humdinger: Jesus and Lucifer are spirit children of God, which makes them spirit brothers. 

Bible believing Christians will understand that historic orthodox Christianity does not hold to any of what Joseph Smith conjured up.  There is no way that Glenn Beck is unaware of Smith’s beliefs and background.  Later in my column I brought to light that,

…it was Joseph Smith and subsequent Mormon hierarchy that attacked Christianity.  The truth is Joseph Smith’s religion, which he made up out of whole cloth, is an abomination to God! 

It seems weird to me that Glenn Beck spends oodles of time gathering dirt on leftist radicals and that he digs deep to get the skinny on President Obama but has neglected to do some deep digging on …  Joseph Smith.  His church’s so-called prophet was a charlatan, a polygamist, an adulterer, and he was up to his eyeballs in the occult as was his father.  There’s plenty of evidence on the web for inquiring minds that want to know the truth about Mormonism’s founder.  ()

For reasons known only to him, Glenn Beck holds the LDS Church in high regard.  Consequently, he’s deluded.  Why do I say that?  To put it bluntly, Mormonism is a satanic cult.  (Those who wish to research the LDS are invited to visit my .)  LU knows this full well, yet Beck was invited to speak to its students.  As I mentioned above, Beck preached a sermon saturated with Mormon theology.  Moreover, he shared a valuable artifact — Joseph Smith’s pocket watch.

Liberty University Enlightens Us

Following is LU’s explanation, in part, for their decision:

We have explained over the decades repeatedly that convocation is an opportunity for students to hear from people of all faiths and from all walks of life.  Liberty has also made it clear repeatedly that it does not endorse any statements made by any convocation speaker.

So far so good.

By contrast, our faculty are all required to profess Liberty’s statement of faith and to affirm our doctrinal statement.  Our students are all required to take many credit hours of theology and Bible courses, regardless of their major.  Our students have no question about what Liberty’s doctrinal statement is.  It is posted publicly for all to see. Our doctrinal statement is our public statement on Mormonism.  It is the same statement that Liberty was founded upon and it will never change.

College is about learning.  How can you defend what you believe if you don’t understand what others believe? 

Good point.

I believe our students are stronger in their faith because of our convocation speaker series and the wide diversity of views that they have been privileged to hear in person over the last few decades.

By the way, many conservative evangelical leaders who are closer to Beck than me have told me that they believe Beck has had a born again experience recently.

Hold it right there!  The “Glenn Beck is saved” rumor has been circulating for several years thanks largely to Wall Builders Founder , “American evangelicals’ favorite historian.”  If it’s true, then why is Beck keeping the good news from his friends and fans?  Moreover, if he truly is  then why hasn’t he cut all ties to the LDS Church and joined a church where the true gospel of Christ is preached?

LU’s explanation continues:

I do not know his heart but our audience knows that he was speaking only for himself and expressing his personal opinions and beliefs, not those of Liberty University or even of Mormonism generally. As Jerry Falwell, Sr., our founder, often used to say about speakers at Liberty who had different views than him, Liberty students are smart enough to eat the fish and spit out the bones! I believe that’s as true today as it was in his day.

Are we to assume every student is mature in their faith and has spiritual discernment?  Are we to assume that every student who attends a Christian university has been born again and thus saved? Did it not occur to Jerry Falwell, Jr. that some of the students who ate the fish Glenn Beck dished up could have choked on the bones?!

Now, don’t get me wrong. Liberty University has the right to invite whoever they wish to speak to its students.  But lately they seem to have an affinity for Mormons, as Glenn Beck has spoken at the university twice.  In 2010 he delivered the commencement address and received an honorary doctorate degree.  Likewise, Mormon Mitt Romney gave the commencement speech in 2012.

A Martyr?

Is it true that Joseph Smith died a martyr, as Glenn Beck declared to LU’s students?  Not so fast, Glenn!  The factual account of what led to Smith’s death reveal that he and his brother Hyrum were charged with treason and conspiracy by Illinois authorities whereby they were arrested and imprisoned in a minimum security cell in the Carthage city jail. According to The Martyrdom of Joseph Smith by Eric Johnson:

He and his brother Hyrum Smith were murdered on June 27, 1844, by an armed mob, an event that has prompted Mormons to classify them as martyrs. It has caused others, however, to raise the question whether someone who dies in a gun battle fighting against his enemies can be considered to be a martyr. A close examination of the term reveals that one must meet specific requirements to be considered a martyr, which involve, for example, the reasons why one is put to death and the way one faces such a death. An investigation of the reasons why Smith was murdered and the actions he took to avoid this fate inevitably makes it difficult to maintain that Smith was “like a lamb led to the slaughter.” ()

Johnson offers several reasons why he believes it is not accurate to classify Smith a martyr which you’ll find in his essay under the heading: THE FALLACY OF DEEMING SMITH A MARTYR.

Glenn’s Rant

To spare you from having to read Beck’s ridiculous rant, I’ll post a few quotes from a piece by Erica Ritz:

This is why your churches are dwindling. … You think you’re standing for something, when indeed, you’re standing for hate and bigotry. I think Jesus was hanging out with prostitutes and sinners, wasn’t he? You won’t even listen to a man who says … ‘I challenge you to know your faith, not my faith, your faith so well that you’re willing to die for it. Stand with one another.’ That frightens you so much? If it does, you might want to consider that you’re on the wrong side.

Let’s see.  “Prophet” Joseph Smith said that “Christianity had become apostate, and all of their creeds were corrupt, and all of their followers were deceived.” Therefore, it fell to Smith not to “reform” the Christian church, but to “restore” it.”

And anyone who rejects Mormon heresy is “standing for hate and bigotry.”

More…

I look at every single lover of light and truth as my ally, my friend, my brother. … I look at everyone who is my enemy as my brother. I don’t care what you say; I don’t care what you think your belief is; I don’t care what your lifestyle is — you’re not going to change me. And I invite you to join me, join others of multiple faiths — never asking anyone to change their faith — asking you to strengthen your faith, whatever it is. ()

Beck is oblivious to the fact that his truth is NOT biblical Truth.  On the contrary, what he’s “preaching” to anyone who’s willing to listen, and to a captive audience at LU by the way, is .  This New Age Mormon who professes Christ vociferously urges his followers to join together with other religious faiths and sing We Are the World.  If Michael Jackson were alive today, he’d be proud of Glenn.

Partnerships

Glenn claims he’s read the Bible several times.  Perhaps he has.  However, he must have skipped over Paul’s teaching in :

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?  Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?  What agreement has the temple of God with idols?  For we are the temple of the living God.

Unbelievers are in darkness.  For this reason believers are not to unite with them in any sort of spiritual enterprise.  And those who are in darkness, the unsaved, are not our brothers and sisters.  Thus, we are commanded to share the gospel of Christ with them.  ()

One last quote from Glenn Beck’s hero, Joseph Smith where we learn a bit more of his bizarre and unbiblical understanding of God, which, by his own admission is the view of God Glenn holds as he is, after all, a professing Mormon:

I say, if you were to see him [God] to-day, you would see him like a man in form–like yourselves, in all the person, image, and very form as a man . . . it is necessary that we should understand the character and being of God, and how he came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity,  I will refute that idea, and will take away and do away the veil, so that you may see . . . and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did.  ()

Now a bit of wise counsel from Erin Benziger in What If ‘My God’ Is Bigger than ‘Your God’? :

It is sinful pride that leads men into idolatry as they create imaginary gods that suit their own personal needs. It is the same sinful pride that prevents men from bowing low before the True God. It is this pride that refuses to acknowledge one’s own inability to offer anything truly “good” and refuses to acknowledge his own sinfulness. Yet it is God Who can, by wonderful, amazing grace, break a man of this pride and bring him to his knees in humility. It is God Who can bring the most stubborn, prideful man to a place of repentance and faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. May we pray this day and every day that God would use us to proclaim the truth of His Gospel to such men, and may we pray that His Spirit would stir and work within those men to bring them to repentant, saving faith and knowledge of His Son. ()

Recommended:

—On Solid Resources

—On Solid Rock Resources

Glenn Beck’s “pure personal truth,” , —Marsha West

The Supreme Court and Faux-marriage Fallacies

With cultural defenders such as some of our conservatives, who needs liberals? One could draw this conclusion when observing the Proposition 8 case currently before the Supreme Court.

So far we have we heard arguments about the “sociological” impact of faux marriage and, from pro-marriage (conservative) lawyer Charles Cooper, about awaiting “additional information from the jurisdictions where this experiment is still maturing,” as if the case is just a matter of whether the Court should be an agent of social engineering at this time and in this instance. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could be the swing vote in the case, weighed in on both sides of the debate, saying, “There’s substance to the point that sociological information is new. We have 5 years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more.” But he also claimed that California’s “40,000 children with same-sex parents…want their parents to have full recognition and full status” and asked Cooper, “The voice of those children is important in this case, don’t you think?” My answer?

No, it isn’t.

The only voice that matters is the Constitution’s. The whole point in having rule of law is that its application is not dependent upon what the “voice” of a given group of Americans might say at any given time (or upon some smaller group’s conception of what that voice demands), regardless of how sympathetic that group may be. Would you want First Amendment rights to be negotiable based on how a compelling “voice” may be able to tug on heartstrings?

And the Constitution is silent on marriage, meaning that the issue is the domain of the states. What, though, if the states legislate a marriage standard that has negative “sociological” impact? Well, what if a state institutes a poorly conceived driver’s test or productivity-stifling tax laws and regulations? The proper remedy is the ballot box. The Constitution prohibits unconstitutional ideas — not merely bad ones — and these two categories often don’t intersect. Thus, a justice’s legitimate role is not arbiter of sociological impact, but only of constitutionality. Yet many today behave as if “bad” is synonymous with “unconstitutional” and as if both are defined as “whatever I don’t happen to like.”

But then we come to the equal-protection matter. Shouldn’t homosexuals have the right to marry if other Americans enjoy that right? Yes, they should.

They have a right to form that union with a member of the opposite sex that we call marriage.

This isn’t just rhetoric. It is in fact a point that gets to the very heart of the matter, and traditionalists ignore it at their own peril.

Before you can debate whether or not there is a right to a thing, you have to know what that thing is. What is marriage? If we agree that it’s the union between a man and woman, then there is no argument because no one is trying to stop any adult American from entering into such a union. Ah, but the anti-marriage (liberal) side will reject this time-honored definition, and this brings us to the point: the marriage debate is not a matter of rights.

It is a matter of definitions.

It is also brings us to the Achilles heel of the anti-marriage side. They attack traditionalists with the notion that the time-honored definition of marriage is exclusive and discriminatory, but then defend themselves by saying that their agitation for faux marriage won’t lead to polygamy and other conceptions of “marriage” being legalized. But what is implicit in these claims is contradictory. For if they’re putting forth an alternative definition — such as marriage being the union of any two adults — they’re also being exclusive and discriminatory, as any definition excludes what doesn’t meet it. Yet if they don’t put forth an alternative definition and exclude something, they are including everything. And everything encompasses every conception of “marriage” imaginable. This definitional failure would also contribute to the destruction of the institution because the closer marriage gets to meaning anything, the closer it gets to meaning nothing.

This brings us to traditionalists’ great mistake: falsely accusing the other side of redefining marriage. They’ve done no such thing because they haven’t, in fact, consistently propounded any alternative definition. To do this would be, once again, to relinquish their illusory high ground of inclusivity and the bigotry hammer they use against traditionalists. So if the anti-marriage side isn’t redefining the institution, what are they actually doing?

They are “undefining” it.

To reiterate, this is a process by which marriage is rendered meaningless and is ultimately destroyed. This definitional problem is why the left has very smartly framed this issue as a matter of rights. And, tragically, traditionalists have fallen into the trap of arguing it on this basis, of letting the left define nothing — except the debate.

So the relevant questions here are obvious. If the left cannot say what marriage is, how can they be so sure about what it isn’t? If they cannot put forth what they’re sure is the right definition of it, how can they say with credibility that the time-honored one is wrong?

This also should inform judicial decisions. If the Supreme Court were to reflexively accept the time-honored definition of marriage, it would simply say that homosexuals already have a right to marry — to form a union with a member of the opposite sex — and that’s that. Barring this, however, it seems that before the justices could rule on laws pertaining to this thing called marriage, they’d have to rule on what this thing is in the first place, something clearly beyond their scope. And why should they even consider redefining the institution when the movement represented by the plaintiffs before them hasn’t even bothered to do so?

This is also why, when crafting pro-marriage laws and amendments, framers should not use language stating that “marriage will be limited to a man and a woman”; rather, it should read, “Marriage is defined as the union between one man and one woman.” This makes clear that it isn’t people being limited — but an institution. This matters because people have rights; institutions don’t. If you extend legal recognition to some Americans’ marriages, you may have to extend it to all marriages. But this doesn’t mean that if you extend legal recognition to one conception of marriage, you have to extend it to all conceptions.

Of course, winning the debate in the realm of reason won’t hold sway with people awash in the effluent of emotion. But it certainly doesn’t help if conservatives conserve nothing but yesterday’s liberals’ victories, one of which is to convince us to speak of “gay marriage” and “traditional marriage,” as if the former actually exists and the latter isn’t a redundancy. So remember that this debate isn’t about rights but definitions, and something that doesn’t meet the definition of “marriage” doesn’t exist as a marriage. And you cannot have a right to that which doesn’t exist.

Gay Marriage, Obama And The Me Value Culture

Debating the virtues and morality of accepting gay marriage unions is like discussing the merits of pedophiles catering head start parties for children. How one comes down on the comparison, usually depends upon your own personal value system and culture of acceptable conduct. The red herring of committing a “Hate Crime” for even having the cojones to raise the issue, exemplifies just how far society has sunk to abandon valid intellectual scrutiny. Audacity in the defense of Western Civilization traditions, ethics and, much less religious principles, is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous bias-motivated offense. Celebrating diversity has become accepting depravity.

Obama’s attempt to clinch his ideological base by pandering to the gay community, bought an immediate inflow of political . However, the fall out in swing states will haunt his re-election prospects. That is the popular analysis from his endorsement of a perverted legalization of marriage. The social issues run deep and clarify why the country is poised for ruin. If evolving to accept progressive perversion is advancement, the country is truly doomed.

The Associated Press provides international reaction in their report, . The culture war churns into a soufflé of burnt cuisine. Now that Obama has opened the door, the calls for what is in the closet, commence. The Religious Right Slams Obama for Backing Marriage Equality has all sides upset.

“Religious Right Slams Obama for Backing Marriage Equality While gay conservative groups have come out attacking President Obama for endorsing marriage equality today, Religious Right groups have also started to berate Obama on the issue.”

One of the most articulate and consistent spokespersons for authentic family values is Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. He claims that Obama “has fully broken with his Christian moorings” and suggests he also favors polygamy:

“In 1996, when Barack Obama was up for a state senate post in Illinois, he said he supported gay marriage. Eight years later, when he set his sights on the U.S. Senate, he discovered his Christian roots and said he was against it. In 2008, he said he was opposed to homosexuals marrying, but he also opposed a ballot initiative in California, Proposition 8, that affirmed marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman. In other words, his Christian roots were losing their grip. Since then he’s been “evolving.” Now the evolution is over and he has fully broken with his Christian moorings.”

 

A devotee dances as Obama prances in the video, , which provides a long history of spoiled sentiments. Finally, the POTUS makes it official. Seldom spoken or never admitted, but known to the insiders, goes public.

“The Me” ethnicity plagues every aspect of postmodern life. Self-absorbed with egocentric conceit, President Obama is unable to utter a pronouncement without the personal pronoun I. The first-person singular succumbs to the twisted appetites that resemble the decadence of Greek debaucheries and Roman orgies. No wonder the secular humanistic “end days” empire draws near with a stand-in Gaius (Caligula) on the throne. See any similarities in Obama’s conduct – “Gaius’s military activities on the northern frontier, and his vehement demand for divine honors. His military activities are portrayed as ludicrous, with Gauls dressed up as Germans at his triumph and Roman troops ordered to collect sea-shells as “spoils of the sea.”Accepting a fabricated “rock star” celebrity as the leader of the free world is a destructive result of the “Me Value Culture”. If the polls are correct that the public is equally divided about gay marriage, what will be the next indignation that the remaining 50% will be forced to suffer? The country continues to implode because cultural restraint is an unknown commodity.

The demise of national character coincides with the abandonment of moral values. Nature has rules for survival. When society departs from inborn constraints, the consequences are terminal. Thus, the newest dilemma is how to combat a president that lacks the character and internal righteousness of moral conviction.

It should be clear that Barry Soetoro has always been a lover of homosexual practices. If you have doubts, examine the account, Mom of Murdered Obama Gay Lover Speaks Up

“In late May, Wash. DC-based investigative journalist Wayne Madsen had a bombshell revelation about Obama’s membership in a Chicago gay club, Man’s Country. Madsen also reported on Obama’s sexual relationships with other men, including named D.C. politicians and Donald Young, the openly-gay choir-director of the church in Chicago of which Obama was a member for some 20 years — Jeremy Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ black liberation theology. Obama’s relationship with Young was confirmed by Larry Sinclair, who claims to have had two sex-cocaine trysts with Obama.Now, in an exclusive interview with The Globe, Norma Jean Young, the 76-year old mother of the late Trinity United Church of Christ choir director Donald Young, has spoken out and declared that persons trying to protect Obama murdered her son at the height of the 2007 Democratic presidential primary to protect Obama from embarrassing revelations about his homosexual relationship with her son. Donald Young’s bullet-ridden body was found in his Chicago apartment on December 23, 2007, in what appeared to be an assassination-style slaying.”

 

The video  adds context and testimony to the allegations. The fact that such chronicles, seldom reported in the press or investigated in the media, is consistent with the cloak of protection that clothes the mysterious man with no verifiable history. The rumors circulate under the radar, as the evidence develops in a sealed tomb of silence. Yet the uninformed and worldly cripples that lack an astute ability to learn and face the cruel grueling facts of politics, lumber on with the delusion that their leader is trustworthy.

Gay marriage is symbolic of a cultural meltdown. In How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps, cites the Overton Window, developed in the mid-1990s by the late Joseph P. Overton, which is useful to understand the adverse impact of the demise of the traditional family.

Step #1: From Unthinkable to Radical — The first step is the easiest—provided the issue can become a fetish or the topic of an academic symposium. Since both the professoriate and the perverts have a fascination with the faux-transgressive (the truly transgressive [i.e., Christianity] tends to terrify them) all you need to do is get the attention of one of these groups. It doesn’t matter which you start with since the politics of the bedroom and the classroom inevitably overlap.

Step #2: From Radical to Acceptable — This shift requires the creation and employment of euphemism. Want to kill a child exiting the womb? Call it “dilation and extraction” and infanticide becomes a medical procedure. Want to include sodomitic unions under the banner of “marriage?” Redefine the term “marriage” to mean the state-endorsed copulation of any two(?) people who want to share a bed and a tax form. Be sure to say it is about “love”—in our culture, eros excuses everything.

Step #3: From Acceptable to Sensible — There is nothing more sensible than to submit to one’s god. And while Americans may profess to worship Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus, we mostly worship an American Idol—ourselves. That is why social libertarianism has become our country’s fastest-growing cult. It has tapped into this self-idolatry by preaching a gospel of the Individual. It’s a pragmatic and accepting message. You were, as its chief evangelist Lady Gaga says, “born this way”: “It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M / Just put your paws up /’Cause you were born this way, baby.”

Step #4: From Sensible to Popular — This step merely requires personalizing the issue. Do you know someone who is LGBT? Divorced? Had an abortion? Sure you do, they are in your family, in your school, at your church.

Step #5: From Popular to Policy — Commission a public opinion poll. Show it to a politician. They’ll do the rest.

The United State is not united, nor will cultural multiplicity ever agree on a common political order. However, for the nation to heal itself, it must seek forgiveness for transgressing the laws of nature. Any civil authority must respect universal precepts to be legitimate. Granting legal status for gay unions is bad enough. But, compelling religious faiths to trespass their doctrine and swallow sinful conduct as acceptable, is Satanic.

“President Barack Obama drew cheers and applause for his endorsement of same-sex marriage during a fundraising spree on Thursday that will culminate in a multimillion-dollar extravaganza at the home of Hollywood movie star .” The jet set festivities that contribute more than money to the sin city culture epitomizes the decay within the national consciousness.The relativism behavior that lionizes same-sex unions is the same cultural perversion that denies that natural core principles are sacred. Obama fosters the demise of a civil society by supporting the practices of a depraved community. The end-result is a country irrevocably divided and poised for an ultimate demise.

Libya’s Liberation Front Organizing in the Sahel

On the edge of the Sahel, Niger…

“Sahel” in Arabic means “coast” or “shoreline”. Unless one was present 5000 years ago when, according to anthropologists, our planets first cultivation of crops began in this then lush, but now semiarid region where temperatures reach 125 degrees F, and only camels and an assortment of creatures can sniff out water sources, it seems an odd geographical name place for this up-to-450 miles wide swatch of baked sand that runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

Yet, when standing along its edge, the Sahel does have the appearance of a sort of dividing shoreline between the endless sands of the Sahara and the savannah grasses to the south. Parts of Mali, Algeria, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, all along the Libyan border fall within this supposed no man’s land.

Today the Sahel is providing protection, weapons gathering and storage facilities, sites for training camps, and hideouts as well as a generally formidable base for those working to organize the growing Libyan Liberation Front (LLF). The aim of the LLF is to liberate Libya from what it considers NATO-installed colonial puppets.

The Sahel region is only one of multiple locations which are becoming active as the Libyan counter revolution, led by members of the Gadahfi and Wafalla tribes, make preparations for the next phase of resistance.

When I entered an office conference room in Niger recently to meet with some recent evacuees from Libya who I was advised were preparing to launch a “people’s struggle employing the Maoist tactic of 1000 cuts” against the current group claiming to represent Libya,” two facts struck me.

One was how many were present and did not appear to be scruffy, intensely zealous or desperate but who were obviously rested, calm, organized and methodical in their demeanor.

My colleague, a member of the Gadhafi tribe from Sirte explained “More than 800 organizers have arrived from Libya just to Niger and more come every day”. An officer in uniform added, “It is not like your western media presents the situation, of desperate Gadhafi loyalists frantically handing out bundles of cash and gold bars to buy their safety from the NATO death squads now swarming around the northern areas of our motherland. Our brothers have controlled the borderless routes in this region for thousands of years and they know how not to be detected even by NATO satellites and drones.”

The other subject I thought about as I sat in an initial meeting was what a difference three decades can make. As I sat there I recalled my visit with former Fatah youth leader Salah Tamari, who did good work at the Israeli prison camp at Ansar, south Lebanon during the 1982 aggression, as the elected negotiator for his fellow inmates.

Tamari insisted on joining some of them at a new PLO base at Tabessa, Algeria. This was shortly after the PLO leadership, wrongly in my judgment, agreed to evacuate Lebanon in August of 1982 rather than wage a Stalingrad defense (admittedly minus the nonexistent expected Red Army) and the PLO leadership apparently credited Reagan administration promises of “ an American guaranteed Palestinian state within a year.

You can take that to the bank” in the words of US envoy Philip Habib. Seemingly ever trustful of Ronald Reagan for some reason, PLO leader Arafat kept Habib’s written promise in his shirt pocket to show doubters, including his Deputy, Khalil al Wazir (Abu Jihad) and the womenfolk among others in Shatila Camp who had some grave misgivings about their protectors leaving them.

At Tabessa, somewhere in the vast Algerian desert, the formerly proud PLO defenders were essentially idle and caged inside their camp and apart from some physical training sessions appeared to spend their days drinking coffee and smoking and worrying about their loved ones in Lebanon as news of the September 1982 Israeli-organized massacre at Sabra-Shatila fell on Tabessa Camp like a huge bomb and many fighters rejected Tamari’s orders and left for Shatila.

This is not the case with Libyan evacuees in Niger. They have the latest model satellite phones, laptops and better equipment than most of the rich news outlets that showed up with at Tripoli’s media hotels over the past nine months. This observer’s question, “how did you all get here and where did you secure all this new electronic equipment so fast?” was answered with a mute smile and wink from a hijabed young lady who I last saw in August handing out press releases at Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel for Libyan spokesman Dr. Musa Ibrahim late last august.

On that particular day, Musa was telling the media as he stood next to Deputy Foreign Minister Khalid Kaim, a friend to many Americans and human rights activists, that Tripoli would not fall to NATO rebels and “we have 6,500 well trained soldiers who are waiting for them.”

As it turned out, the commander of the 6,500 was owned by NATO and he instructed his men not to oppose the entering rebel forces. Tripoli fell the next day and the day after Khalid was arrested and is still inside one of dozens of rebel jails petitioning his unresponsive captors for family visits while an international, American organized, legal team is negotiating to visit him.

The LLF has military and political projects in the works. One of the latter is to compete for every vote in next summer’s promised election. One staffer I met with has the job of studying the elections in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the region for possible applications to Libya.

Another LLF committee is putting together a Nationalist campaign message plus specific campaign planks for their candidates to run on and putting together lists of recommendations of specific candidates.

Nothing is firmly decided yet, but one Libyan professor told me “for sure Women’s rights will be a major plank. Women are horrified by NTC Chairman Jalil said while seeking support from Al Qaeda supporters who threaten to control Libya, about polygamy being the future in Libya and the fact that women will now longer be given the home when divorced.

Libya has been very progressive with women’s rights as with Palestinian rights.” Aisha Gadhafi, the only daughter of Muammar who is now living next door in Algeria with family members including her two-month old baby, was a major force behind the 2010 enactment by the Peoples Congresses of more rights for women.

She has been asked to write a pamphlet on the need to retain women’s rights which will be distributed if the 2012 elections actually materialize.

While their country lies in substantial NATO bombed ruins, the pro-Gadhafi LLF has some major pluses on its side. One are the tribes who during last summer were starting to stand up against NATO just as Tripoli fell before they launched their efforts which included a new Constitution. The LLF believes the tribes can be crucial in getting out the vote.

Perhaps even a more powerful arrow in the LLF’s quiver as it launches its counter revolution are the 35 years of political experience by the hundreds of Libyan People’s Committees long established in every village in Libya along with the Secretariats of the People’s Conferences. While currently inactive (outlawed by NATO–truth be told) they are quickly regrouping.

Sometimes the subjects of ridicule by some self-styled Libya “experts,” the People’s Congresses, based on the Green book series written by Gadhafi, are actually quite democratic and a study of their work makes clear that they have increasingly functioned not as mere rubber stamps for ideas that floated from over the walls of Bab al Azziza barracks.

A secretary general of one of the Congresses, now working in Niger, repeated what one western delegation was told during a late June three hour briefing at the Tripoli HQ of the national PC Secretariat. Participants were shown attendance and voting records as well of each item voted on, for the past decade and the minutes of the most recent People’s Congress debates.

They illustrate the similarities between the People’s Congresses and New England Town Meeting in terms of the local population making decisions that affect their community and an open agenda where complaints and new proposals can be made and discussed.

This observer particularly enjoyed his 4 years term representing Ward 2A in the Brookline, Massachusetts Town Meeting while in college in Boston, sometimes sitting next my neighbors Kitty and Michael Dukakis.

While we both won a seat in the election, I received 42 votes more than Mike but he rose politically while it could be said that I sank, following my joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the ACLU and the Black Panthers all in one semester as an undergraduate Boston University, following an inspiring meeting with Professor Noam Chomsky and Professor Howard Zinn in Chomsky’s office at MIT.

The Town Meeting debates were interesting and productive and “Mustafa”, the National Secretary of the Libyan People’s Congress, who studied at George Washington University in WDC and wrote a graduate thesis on New England Town Meetings, claimed his country patterned their People’s Congresses on them. Unfortunately, “Mustafa”is also now incarcerated by the NTC, according to mutual friends.

Who LLF candidates will be if an election is actually held is unknown but some are suggesting that Dr.Abu Zeid Dorda, now recovering from his “suicide attempt” (the former Libyan UN Ambassador was thrown out of a second floor window during interrogations last month by NATO agents but he survived in front of witnesses so is now recovering in prison medical ward).

Contrary to media stories, Saif al Islam is not about to surrender to the International Criminal Court and, like Musa Ibrahim, is well. Both are being urged to lay low for now, rest, and try to heal a bit from NATO’s killing of family members and many close friends.

Many legal and political analysts think the ICC will not proceed with any trials relating to Libya for reasons of the ICC convoluted rules and structure and uncertainly of securing convictions of the “right” suspects.

Whatever happens on this subject, if a case goes forward, researchers are preparing to fill the ICC courtroom with documentation of NATO crimes during its 9 month, 23,000 sorties and 10,000 bombing attacks on the five million population country.

Some International Criminal Court observers are encouraged by the ICC Prosecutor’s office pledge this week and as reported by the BCC: “to investigate and prosecute any crimes committed both by rebel and pro-Gadhafi forces including any committed by NATO.”

As one victim of NATO crimes, who on June 20, 1911 lost four of his family members including three infant children, as five NATO American MK-83 bombs were dropped and two missiles fired on the family compound in a failed assassination attempt against his father, a former aide to Colonel Gadhafi, wrote this observer yesterday from his secret sanctuary, “This is good news if it is true.”.

As NATO moves its focus and drones to the Seral, it is possible that its nine months of carnage against this country and people will not in the end achieve its goals.

It Doesn’t Matter To Them If It’s Untrue. It’s a Higher Truth

“We came, we saw, he died.” — US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi.

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: “We came, we saw, 3,000 died … ha- ha.”

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands … this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a “bloodbath” in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn’t intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi’s army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)¹

The New York Times (March 22) observed:

… the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

The Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels’ media operation:

It’s not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:

• No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
• No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
• No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
• No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That’s [Qaddafi’s] propaganda.)

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels’ trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for “humanitarian” intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can’t get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?

In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.²

For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, .

If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.³

In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴ The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation, and laws that contradict “the teachings of Islam” would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.⁵

Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as “terrorists” in the United States for a lot less.

What began in Libya as “normal” civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, “Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence“. The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.

Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi’s planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that’s the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of “eyewitnesses”: “little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally”. After awhile, he declares that “there is no way” to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?

Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization’s working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.

Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document’s Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as “redacted”. In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.

Historical footnote: “Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe’s takeover” in the Mideast.⁶

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: “We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. … Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair.”⁷

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.⁸ … Then came shock and awe!

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.⁹

In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that “he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians.” “Finally,” Marcos said, “they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes.”¹⁰ Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.

The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.¹¹ The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America’s help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that “the four powers” (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹² Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.

America’s presstitutes

Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) … Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here’s the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: “Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide”; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.

And here’s TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: “They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world … 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican.”¹³

The object of Leno’s humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the “justification” of America’s murderous attack on Libya. If I had been one of Leno’s guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: “Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn’t you like to have that here?”

I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.

And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi’s personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There’s no business like show business.

The Iraqi Lullabye

On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled “What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?” concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: “I’d like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days.”

I received no reply.

Has there ever been an empire that didn’t tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year	Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	59-2	US, Israel
1993	88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	101-2	US, Israel
1995	117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	157-2	US, Israel
1999	155-2	US, Israel
2000	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	187-2	US, Israel
2011	186-2	US, Israel

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁴ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Notes

1. Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011 ^↩
2. See, for example, “Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya”, June 20, 2011^↩
3. The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011 ^↩
4. Washington Post, September 15, 2011, “Islamists rise to fore in new Libya” ^↩
5. USA Today, October 24, 2011 ^↩
6. Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007 ^↩
7. Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected ^↩
8. New York Times, November 6, 2003 ^↩
9. New York Times, April 16, 2002 ^↩
10. Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7 ^↩
11. Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop:Associated Press, May 29, 1983, “Leftist Government Officials Visit United States” ^↩
12. The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123) ^↩
13. Washington Post, October 26, 2011 ^↩
14. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩

Libertarianism’s Folly: When the “Live and Let Live” Mentality Becomes Vice

While there was a time when I might have described myself as a libertarian, those days are long gone.  In fact, I don’t even call myself a conservative anymore.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree with libertarians on many issues, and their governmental model is vastly preferable to what liberals have visited upon us.  Yet there is a problem: However valid their vision of government may be, their vision of society renders it unattainable.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Now, I certainly agree with the first sentence, as it’s merely a statement of the obvious.  But then we have to ask, what constitutes “injurious”?  And, when determining this, do we completely ignore indirect injury?  Then, if we do consider the latter, to what extent should it be the domain of government?  (When pondering these matters, note that the Founding Fathers didn’t reside on the modern libertarian page.  They certainly would have, for instance, supported the idea of state and local governments outlawing pornography and would be appalled at what is now justified under the First Amendment.)

However you answer these questions, you should question Jefferson’s second sentence.  While it may make sense on the surface, it ignores that spiritual/philosophical foundation affects morality.  And what happens when a people becomes so morally corrupt they elect a government that picks your pocket or breaks your leg?

Lest there be any misunderstandings, I don’t propose that our central government establish religion.  But I do have a problem with the implication that a person’s most fundamental beliefs — which influence action — always do me “no injury,” as this leads to a ho-hum attitude that lessens the will to uphold proper traditions and social codes.  And if you doubt the power of belief, wait until a European nation turns predominantly Muslim and watch what ensues — then get back to me.

And today’s libertarians have gone Jefferson one better.  They ignore not merely religion’s effect upon morality but also morality’s effect upon government, as they apply their ideology not merely to law but also social codes.  Indulging “moral libertarianism,” they not only oppose anti-sodomy and anti-polygamy laws, they also look askance at social stigmas that could discourage such sexual behaviors.  Not only do they oppose obscenity laws, they’re wary of courageous condemnations of the obscene.  Even that most intrepid libertarian, Glenn Beck, is guilty of this.  When asked during on the O’Reilly Factor whether faux marriage was a threat to the nation in any way, he laughed and mockingly replied, “A threat to the country?  No, I don’t . . . .  Will the gays come and get us?”  I don’t know, Glenn, ask the Europeans and Canadians who criticized homosexuality and were punished under hate-speech law.

Quite fittingly, right after Beck answered, he quoted the “It neither picks my pocket . . . .” part of the Jefferson quotation, espousing the libertarian idea that we really shouldn’t care what others do as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.  To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, however, this is much like having a fleet of ships and saying that you don’t care how the vessels function as long as they don’t crash into each other.  Obviously, if they don’t function properly, they may not be able to avoid crashing into each other.  So libertarians may say “Whatever works for you — just don’t work it into government,” but what about when someone doesn’t work properly?  Thinking that personal moral disease won’t infect the public sphere is like saying, “I don’t care what a person does with his health — carry tuberculosis if you want — just don’t infect me.”

And the proof is in the electoral pudding.  Did you ever observe what groups vote for whom and wonder why?  Churchgoing Christians cast ballots overwhelmingly for traditionalist candidates while atheists and agnostics support leftists by wide margins.  In fact, consider this: Virtually every group involved in something those Neanderthal Christians call sinful or misguided votes for leftists.  Goths?  Check.  Homosexuals?  Check.  Wiccans?  Check.  People peppered with tattoos and body-piercings?  Check.  You don’t find many vampirists, cross-dressers or S&M types at Tea Party rallies.

In light of this, do you really believe there is no correlation between world view and political belief?  In fact, is it realistic to say that there isn’t likely causation here?  And what can you predict about America’s political future based on the fact that an increasing number of people are embracing these “non-traditional” behaviors and beliefs?  The irony of Jefferson’s statement is that whether our neighbor believes in twenty gods or no God, he will likely vote the same way (this is at least partially because paganism and atheism share a commonality with liberalism: the rejection of orthodox Christianity).  And equally ironic is that he will elect people who do injury to the very Constitution Jefferson helped craft.

So there is a truth here hiding in plain sight: If someone is not a moral being, how can he be expected to vote for moral government?  Do you really think a vice-ridden person will be immoral in business, when raising children and in most other things but then, magically somehow, have a moment of clarity at the polls?  This is why John Adams warned, “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue] . . . .”

Despite this, libertarians tend to bristle at bold moral pronouncements that would encourage private virtue.  As was apparent when I penned this seminal piece on the Internet’s corruptive effects, they fear that, should such sentiments take firm hold, they will be legislated and forestall the libertarian utopia.  But they have it precisely backwards.  As Edmund Burke said:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites . . . .  Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.  It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.  Their passions forge their fetters.

Thus, insofar as the libertarian governmental ideal is even possible, it is dependent upon the upholding of morality, upon the “controlling power” of social codes.  For not only do they help shape moral compasses, thereby increasing governance “from within,” insofar as that internal control is lacking, the social pressure attending the codes serves to govern from without.  And insofar as this social control is lacking, governmental control fills the vacuum.  As freedom from morality waxes, freedom from legality wanes.

Ultimately, the tragic consequence of the libertarian mentality is that it guarantees the left’s victory in the battle for civilization.  This is because, in libertarians’ failure to fight for hearts and minds in the cultural realm, they cede it to leftists, who aren’t shy about advancing their “values.”  And proof of this is in the social pudding.  You see, if talk of establishing social codes and traditions sounds stifling, know that we haven’t dispensed with such things — that is impossible.  Rather, the left has succeeded in replacing our traditional variety with something called “political correctness,” which describes a set of codes powerful enough to control the jokes we make and words we use, get people hired or fired, and catapult a man to the presidency based partially on the color of his skin.

As for elections, political battles need to be fought, but they are the small picture.  For if the culture is lost, of what good is politics?  People will vote in accordance with their world view no matter what you do.  Thus, he who shapes hearts and minds today wins political power tomorrow.

The libertarian chant, “I don’t care what you do, just lemme alone” sounds very reasonable, indeed.  But as hate-speech laws, forcing people to buy health insurance and a thousand other nanny-state intrusions prove, when people become morally corrupt enough, they don’t leave you alone.  They tyrannize you.  A prerequisite for anything resembling libertarian government is cast-iron morality in the people.  And we should remember that, to echo Thomas Paine, “Virtue is not hereditary.”

For this reason, neither is liberty.  Scream “Live and let live!” loudly enough in the moral sphere, and in the hearts of men the Devil will live — and the republic will die.

Lack of Intellectualism is Losing the Marriage Debate

Judge Vaughn Walker’s legal ruling striking down California’s Proposition 8 certainly was no triumph of intellectualism. But while it’s easy to thus dismiss it, what’s usually forgotten is that reasoning such as his flies only in a certain cultural milieu — a milieu that, in part, has been shaped by conservatives. Let’s examine the matter.

Walker’s lack of intellectualism is profound. Among other things, he said that opposition to faux marriage was ultimately based on “moral disapproval.” While this is a rhetorically compelling argument in an age where “morality” has become a dirty word, it is also nonsense. This is not because he is wrong in his understanding of marriage’s more cerebral defenders; it is because he is wrong in his understanding of law. For the fact is that all credible legal proscriptions and prescriptions are a matter of “moral disapproval.” Don’t believe me? I’ll explain.

A law is by definition the imposition of a value (and a valid law is the imposition of a moral principle). This is because a law states that there is something you must or must not do, ostensibly because the action is a moral imperative, is morally wrong, or is a corollary thereof. If this is not the case, with what credibility do you legislate in the given area? After all, why prohibit something if it doesn’t prevent some wrong? Why force citizens to do something if it doesn’t effect some good? You’ll never see a powerful movement lobbying to criminalize chocolate ice cream or broccoli.

To provide a concrete example, what is the possible justification for speed laws? It isn’t simply “me no like speedy.” Rather, there is the idea that it is wrong to endanger others or yourself, and, in the latter case, it could be based on the idea that it’s wrong to engage in reckless actions that could cause you to become a burden on society. Of course, some or all of these arguments may be valid or not, but the point is this: If a law is not underpinned by a valid moral principle, it is not a just law. Without morality, laws can be based on nothing but air.

This brings me to a problem with a certain conservative argument. We have heard many, while bristling at Walker’s ruling, complain that “one judge has wiped away the votes of seven million people with the stroke of the pen.” Like Judge Walker’s “moral disapproval” nonsense, such talk certainly is rhetorically effective. And if it is used simply for the purposes of rhetoric, it may be fine. But the reality is that if the Proposition 8 vote had been swung a few percentage points the other way, the measure wouldn’t have passed, and the left could be citing the will of the people to buttress its cause.

But right and wrong aren’t determined by popular will. Nor should the latter have a bearing on judges’ rulings, as they are supposed to be governed by the Constitution. Thus, the problem with Walker’s ruling is not that it is anti-majoritarian; it’s that it is unconstitutional and dumb.

Since the constitutional factor is obvious, let’s delve into the dumb part. Harking back to the foundation of law, if “moral disapproval” is off the table, on what legitimate basis can we refuse to recognize any conception of “marriage”? If right and wrong cannot be a guide — or if we live in a relativistic universe in which there is no wrong — then how can you, with credibility, prohibit polygamy or Billy from marrying his billy goat?

So while many people today believe, in grand relativist fashion, that morality is some arbitrary thing, they have it exactly backwards. Morality is “The Rules,” and, just as with a football referee who ignores his game’s rules and makes calls based on what feels right, it is when you ignore The Rules that you become arbitrary. Your rationale, boiled down, is then nothing more than “me no likey,” nothing more than might makes right. For, to state the obvious, the recognition of morality is the only thing that moors us to reality — moral reality.

And this is where the 7,000,000-vote argument finds common ground with Judge Walker’s judicial activism. Both perspectives ignore morality and reduce the debate to one of who will wield the might that makes right, of who will be that renegade football referee. It is either the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of a black-robed minority, and who advocates which depends on how each group lines up on a given issue.

(Note: This isn’t to say that 7,000,000-vote-argument advocates aren’t more morality-oriented than Judge Walker’s set. After all, many conservatives would point out that they  cite the majority only because it supported a constitutional and moral position. Nevertheless, when taken at face value, the majoritarian argument is not logically sound.)

So what should be the logical basis for an argument against faux marriage?

Simply that it doesn’t exist.

And you cannot have a right to that which doesn’t exist.

This is not slick-lawyer sleight-of-hand — this is what exposes it. For this issue is about changing definitions, not changing rights. After all, like all people, those experiencing same-sex attraction have always had a right to marry and have done so since time immemorial. It’s just that marriage was always understood — correctly — to be the union of a man and woman. Thus, whoever did get married tied the knot with a member of the opposite sex.

But when we accept that a same-sex union can be marriage — a standard with no credible basis whatsoever in history (which renders the votes of the ultimate majority) or morality — the discussion about rights naturally follows. After all, if such a union is marriage and people have a right to marry, how can they be denied recourse to it?

Speaking of majoritarian folly, this brings us to another way most of us have undermined ourselves. While many say the Walker set has redefined marriage, this is nonsense that gives non-thinkers too much credit. They have not redefined it.

They have undefined it.

That is to say, they do not steadfastly, unabashedly, and definitively say, “Marriage is the union between any two adults and nothing else, and here is the moral basis for this conclusion.” No, they would then be drawing a line just like the traditionalists, wouldn’t they? They would be guilty of the kind of “bigotry,” “exclusiveness,” and “narrowness” of which they accuse their opponents. Relativists can’t have that, so they offer no definition. All they do is imply that the traditional definition is incorrect.

And this is another hole in the Walker set’s argument. After all, while they scoff at the claim that legalizing faux marriage paves the way for polygamy and everything else, an “undefinition” excludes nothing. Sure, they can oppose such things, but only as the renegade football referee saying “me no likey.”

The reality is that if they cannot definitively say what marriage is, how can they be sure they know what it is not? And this is why their criticism of traditionalists deserves no respect: If they cannot say what defines a “right” marriage, they cannot credibly say the traditional definition is the wrong one.

Yet they don’t have to because, while they can reliably define nothing, we allow them to define the terms of the debate. Know this: Every time you use the term “gay marriage,” “homosexual marriage,” or even “traditional marriage” (the Lexicon of the Left), you undermine yourself. If one of the first two, it is because you are explicitly acknowledging an imaginary institution’s existence. If the last one, you are implying it. For what is the other side of the coin of “traditional marriage”? And if the American psyche is imbued with the idea that “marriages” between same-sex individuals exist and that marriage is a right, well, you can forget the legal and political battles. If you lose the cultural one, everything else follows. It’s just a matter of time.

This is why “conservatives” must stop being conservative and start being bold. They must start thinking outside the box. Otherwise, we may win some battles in courts and ballot boxes — we may carry the approaching November day — but we’ll be sure to lose the war and the way.

Obama: “I Am Not an Animal!”

Actually, Obama said, in so many words, “I am not a socialist!” in a delayed-reaction response to a question from a New York Times reporter.  That is to say, his initial answer was a very pithy “no,” but then he felt compelled to call the interviewer back and give the scribe a piece of his mind (how much, we don’t know.  But rumor has it that it was sufficient to lower Obama from socialist to communist status).  And here is what he said:

Ah, methinks he doth protest too much.  Could this be, calling a reporter back to set the record crooked?

What do you notice about this answer?  Well, as someone Obama might admire, Eleanor Roosevelt, once said, “Great minds discuss ideas.  Average minds discuss events.  Small minds discuss people.”

Except for an unsubstantiated claim that his actions are “entirely consistent with free-market principles,” Obama said nothing about ideas.  He never actually explained why what he embraces is not socialism and defended his policies; he only said that whatever is being done, George Bush did it first.

But this doesn’t tell us that Obama isn’t a socialist, only that Bush may be a bit of one himself.  And this is typical of how liberals reason and debate.  It’s a puerile schoolyard response, like saying “He started it!” or “Johnny stole part of the fat kid’s lunch before I did!”

Of course, when someone doesn’t actually defend what he has done it sometimes means it’s not defensible.  And it’s always easier to attack a flawed person than defend a flawed policy.

Another example of the liberal knack for completely missing the point is Boston Globe columnist Scott Lehigh.  He wrote a very dismissive and sarcastic piece in which he opined, “OF ALL THE inane accusations about President Obama, the silliest has to be this: The president is a socialist.”  He then proceeded to wax Obamaesque and obfuscate, as he started talking about how what Obama is doing is “well within the tradition of FDR and LBJ.”

Again, is this a defense of Obama or an indictment of FDR and LBJ?  And, really, telling me that the man often referred to as president is much like those two individuals doesn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Lehigh also quotes Boston College political science professor Marc Landy as saying, “Epithets are substituting for thinking.”

Yes, Scott, and so is sophistry.

Basically, the journalist portrays those of us who question Obama’s ideological status as nuts.  So, Scott, allow me to help you.  I know this may be hard to believe, but it’s rumored that politicians are occasionally dishonest about their beliefs and intentions.  And I think there are a few minor details you’re missing.

As I and others have documented, there is every reason to believe that Obama was a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s.  I wrote about this here, linking up to New Party documents and those of other socialist entities that illustrate this association.  Moreover, Newsbusters has cited numerous communist sources that seem to be claiming Obama as one of their own.  For instance, there is this excerpt from a letter issued by Communist People’s Weekly World:

“Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface.”

You see, Scott, this is why you mainstream media retreads have no credibility among thinking people.  If you journalists had actually been practicing journalism, these issues would have been thoroughly examined during the campaign and there might have been some resolution.  Instead, you stuck your head in the pablum and became Obama’s public relations team, steadfastly refusing to examine the facts.  And, now, after burying the truth about his ties, you want to bury those of us who speak the truth?  Well, Scott, I usually refrain from visceral reactions in print, but if you would be so kind, shut the heck up.

Then, Lehigh writes, “. . . if Obama were a socialist, crypto or otherwise, he would surely be proposing government-run healthcare, rather than an expansion that builds upon our current hybrid model.”

No, Scott, that is only the case if he’s as stupid as you seem to be and not as smart as you say he is.

Unless Obama is completely without finesse, he will only bend the wire as far as he can at the moment without breaking his political fortunes; it will be evolutionary change when necessary, revolutionary only when possible.  This is what all successful politicians, from the good to the bad to the ugly, do.

As to this, something seems to have eluded you, Scott. Obama has said that, because of the economic malaise, there are certain things we can’t do right now.  And bear in mind that even Adolf Hitler, who had absolute power, implemented his agenda in steps and not one fell swoop.

But the main reason I consider our liberal politicians to be socialists is because I grasp liberalism.  I understand that while we can’t know precisely what lies in the hearts and minds of the Obamas of the world, they often don’t know, either.  I’ll explain what I mean.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”  This mutable view of progress typifies our progressives.  What is the liberal vision?  Can anyone really define it as anything but constant change?

The point is that there is no end game with modern liberals.  At one time their ambition for marriage policy was the elimination of anti-miscegenation laws, which was fine, but now it’s faux marriage.  And in Sweden there is a movement to legalize polygamy.  What will it be in 15 years?  Can any leftist tell me with sincerity that his set has a concrete vision for marriage?

Liberals cannot have a vision because they don’t recognize Moral Truth, and without such recognition there can be no ultimate goal.  This is why the liberal agenda changes markedly from generation to generation – and, in fact, it is always in a state of flux – based on what feels right at the moment.  Utopia always lies around the next corner but just out of reach, but liberals will always have something resembling hope as long as they can look forward to the next tax, regulation, mandate, law or social program.  It’s much as with a drug addict.  No amount of a mind-altering substance will ever yield true happiness, but as long as he can look forward to the next fix, he has hope and meaning – or at least a vague approximation thereof.  And only overdose and death can end the vicious cycle.

But before that ultimate demise, where will that cycle bring us?  If liberals cannot point to an end game – if they cannot say that when we have a given number of laws, mandates, regulations and programs and a given amount of government control, their vision will have been realized – how can they expect us to believe that their ever-recycling pattern’s second-to-last stop is anything but totalitarianism?  I just state the obvious: If I take more freedom from you every year, eventually you end up with no freedom at all.

I truly believe that, in their hearts, most of our leftists have no problem with socialism at all.  But that is secondary.  The point is that liberalism today is not an ideology as much as it is simply a process, one that takes man well beyond the vision of socialism.  Its only end game is the complete crushing of the human spirit and the death of civilization.

Subverting the Word of God

Recently we learned that President Bush, an evangelical Christian, doesn’t take the Bible literally. During an interview ABC’s Cynthia McFadden asked him if the Bible is literally true and he replied “probably not.” He said he does believe you can learn a lot from the Bible, “but I do think that the New Testament for example is … has got … You know, the important lesson is ‘God sent a son.’” [1] Important lesson? No, Mr. President, the New Testament contains Good News…and “the important lesson” is not that “God sent a son,” it’s the reason He sent His Son. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

The president certainly knew that his words would be heard by millions of people, yet this professing Christian stopped short of explaining the Good News of the Gospel. President Bush’s answer was a huge let down for true Christians.

Another quote from the president:

“It is hard for me to justify or prove the mystery of the Almighty in my life,” he said. “All I can just tell you is that I got back into religion and I quit drinking shortly thereafter and I asked for help. … I was a one-step program guy.”

Our president obviously lacks a clear understanding of Christianity. Sadly, he admitted that he’s not a literalist. Translated this means he doesn’t believe in the authority of Scripture. In other words, he takes the Bible cafeteria style. And he’s not alone! Today many professing Christians don’t hold to the authority of the Bible, and like Bush they pick and choose what they like and ignore what doesn’t make sense to them or seems offensive. One example of this is the doctrine of hell. Many Christians choose to reject the idea that a good and loving God would send those who deny Jesus Christ to eternal damnation. A literalist believes He will do just that. Literalists hold that all Scripture is the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God. The Apostle Paul called the scriptures “God-breathed.” Simply put: God spoke into the minds of the writers.

“Our authority is not our own,” Albert Mohler reminds us. “We are called to the task of preaching the Bible, in season and out of season. We are rightly to divide the Word of truth, and to teach the infinite riches of the Word of God. There are no certainties without the authority of the Scripture. We have nothing but commas and question marks to offer if we lose confidence in the inerrant and infallible Word of God. There are no thunderbolts where the Word of God is subverted, mistrusted, or ignored.” [2]

In an effort to promote same-sex “marriage,” “Newsweek” went after conservative Christianity in a big way when Lisa Miller attempted to make “the religious case for same-sex marriage.” [3] “Newsweek,” it seems, has taken the “progressive” view of homosexuality. “Biblical literalists will disagree,” said Miller, “but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history.”

She’s right. Biblical literalists disagreed — vehemently. Tony Perkins of the conservative Family Research Council said in a recent Washington Update:

“Newsweek magazine effectively declared war on marriage this week, running a long essay on “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage” as their cover story. In the wake of the victory of California’s marriage amendment (Proposition 8 ) on Election Day, homosexual marriage advocates realize that their opponents are not going to fade away or compromise their convictions. Not content any longer to make a “separation of church and state” argument for same-sex “marriage,” they are instead mounting a direct attack on Christian opposition to homosexual conduct and to same-sex “marriage” on biblical grounds.”

The tone of the “Newsweek” essay was arrogant and condescending. Lisa Miller presumes to know what Christians think and feel. She went so far as to say that some followers of Jesus operate out of prejudice. She even tried to make the case that Christians oppose same-sex “marriage” because they’re uncomfortable with same gender sex which is simply not true. Christians oppose same-sex “marriage” because the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sexual perversion.

Perkins went on to say:

“The article included blatant factual errors, such as the claim that Jesus never “explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman” (see, e.g., Mark 10:6-8-“But from the beginning of creation, God MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE. FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH; so they are no longer two, but one flesh.”), and the claim that “nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women” (see Romans 1:26). It also had logical contradictions, arguing for the Bible’s support of “gay marriage” while simultaneously dismissing the Bible as supportive of slavery and anti-Semitism.” [4]

Romans 1:26 says, “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.”

“For the record,” said Chuck Colson, “nowhere in the Bible is homosexual activity praised or advocated. The only mentions of it condemn the practice, some calling it an abomination. On the other hand, the Bible has plenty to say about the marriage of one man to one woman. Take a look at God’s commands in the garden, or Christ’s words on leaving and cleaving and becoming one flesh, or look at Paul’s instructions specifically for “husbands” and “wives” in Ephesians 5.” [5]

A well-known evangelical “shifting” on same-sex “marriage” is Richard Cizik. The chickens have come home to roost for Cizik. On Dec. 12 he resigned as vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization that claims to represent 45,000 churches. His resignation came after protests over a Dec. 2 interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” show with Terry Gross. Cizik told Gross that he voted for pro-abortion Barack Obama in the Virginia primary and “suggested that Christians should not be afraid to vote for candidates who support abortion and same-sex “marriage.” He also admitted on that broadcast that he was “shifting” on the issue of marriage and that he supports homosexual civil unions.” [6]

Emergent Church leader Tony Jones recently came out in support of same-sex “marriage.” In my article, “Tony Jones’ Continuous Leftward Slide Into Apostasy” I took him to task for making the announcement that practicing homosexuals can be Christians. Among other things, I pointed out that his “opinion” does not line up with what Scripture teaches on homosexuality. Sadly, in his zeal to promote same-sex “marriage,” Tony neglected to mention that same gender sex has HUGE health risks! (More on this later.) Since Christians are to strive to be like Christ the obvious question is can a practicing homosexual who engages in risky deviant behavior be like Christ? I await Tony’s answer on this.

Another theological liberal, Tony Campolo, claims he doesn’t support same-sex “marriage” yet in his book “Red Letter Christians” he says otherwise. So what gives? (To find out, read Joseph Farah’s article “Campolo on same-sex marriage.”) Does Tony Campolo really oppose same-sex “marriage”?:

“Allow me to suggest a way out of this conflict and the difficult questions being raised these days about whether our country should approve of homosexual marriages,” he writes. “I propose that the government should get out of the business of marrying people and, instead, only give legal status to civil unions. The government should do this for both gay couples and straight couples, and leave marriage in the hands of the Church and other religious entities. That’s the way it works in Holland: If a couple wants to be united in the eyes of the law, whether gay or straight, they go down to city hall and legally register, securing all the rights and privileges a couple has under Dutch law. Then, if the couple wants their relationship blessed – to be married – they go to a church, synagogue or other house of worship.

“Marriage should be viewed as an institution ordained by God and should be out of the control of the state. Of course, homosexual couples could go to churches that welcome and affirm gay marriage and get their unions blessed there, but isn’t that the way it should be in a nation that guarantees people the right to promotion religion according to their personal convictions?”

Sorry, Tony, but this is not what the Bible teaches. What it does teach is, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” (Lev. 18:22)

Campolo’s wife, Peggy, who is an activist involved in homosexual causes, said, “We both believe that homosexual orientations are not chosen any more than heterosexual orientations are chosen.” There’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support her claim, still it’s what she and her husband choose to believe, in spite of what the Bible teaches. Peggy thinks, “homosexuals are entitled to the same rights and privileges I claim for myself, including being able to marry legally and in the sight of the church…”

Tony and Peggy go around the country debating homosexuality. Tony defends his view of what the Bible teaches, Peggy defends homosexuals. (Read one debate here…footnote 7)

Without getting too far afield, Peggy tells of her personal experiences with “gays” she’s known. What she wants is for the church to love and accept homosexuals just as they are. Tony wants that too. Peggy’s words tug on your heart strings! But this well-meaning woman never once warns the audience of the inherent risks in same gender sex! She has harsh words for the Christian community, yet she fails to mention the pain HIV-AIDS causes its victims and their families and friends, or the medical cost to society. No mention of drug resistant MRSA, the virulent staph that’s infecting the “gay” community, either. Also on the rise is gay bowel disease, but no warning from the Campolos.

Why would they want to withhold this kind of important information from the public? People deserve to know the truth! But progressives are mute.

Since we live in a free country liberals have the right to say whatever they want to about Christianity. Moreover, they’re free to demonize Christians and criticize them for having what they perceive as Stone Age moral values. Progressives have the freedom to make bogus claims in regards to what the Bible does and does not teach on a whole host of subjects, including homosexuality. And they have a perfect right to promote tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism. But do they have the right to lie about and try to silence those who disagree with them? This is exactly what liberals, who claim to be loving and tolerant, are doing. After the passage of Proposition 8, the ballot measure that banned same-sex “marriage” in California, here’s how they reacted:

“[It] stirred the ire of gay activists like little else,” noted Chuck Colson. “Besides thuggish vandalism of church property, that anger is being translated into mockery of the faith community.”

“Nowhere do we see it more clearly than the viral video, “Proposition 8: The Musical,” created by “Hairspray” composer Marc Shaiman, which has now been seen by 2 million people online. In it the religious characters sing, “It’s time to spread some hate/ And put it in the constitution.”

“The short video is full of distortions, and even lies. As radio commentator Dennis Prager of the Hoover Institution puts it, “Hatred based on ignorance is known as bigotry.” [8]

Progressives are out to knock Christianity off its orthodox foundation that’s based on absolute truth and are trying to rebuild it on a foundation of moral relativism, where truth is unknowable. You heard what Lisa Miller said about the Bible being a “living document.” Well the same has been said of the U.S. Constitution! In 2000 Al Gore said if elected he promised to appoint judges “who understand that our Constitution is a living and breathing document,” and who understand that “it was intended by our founders to be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of the American people.”

The question people of faith need to ask is did God intend for the Bible to be a living and breathing document that should be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of moral relativists?

Another question people of faith need to ask themselves is what would happen in terms of group marriage, incestuous marriage, and polygamy if same-sex “marriage” becomes legal? What else are we opening up the doors to? And if you think this kind of thing will never happen, think again. For years radical “gay” activists, public school teachers, and the Hollywood elite have been indoctrinating kids to believe that the homosexual, bisexual, and other sexually deviant behaviors are the moral equivalent of biblical heterosexuality. What’s next on their agenda!

Something people of faith need to ask themselves about same-sex “marriage” is does it help create a healthy society? We preach to our kids about good nutrition and exercise. We warn kids of the hazards of smoking and alcohol and drug abuse. We even try to protect them from secondhand smoke, yet we say little or nothing about secondhand sex, which is more of a health risk than secondhand smoke!

Parents who love their kids limit their time on electronics, protect them from sexual predators, try to keep them from viewing unseemly TV programs and movies, and buckle them into car seats. Many teachers scare students with all the hype about so-called dangers of global warming and then get them fretting over polar bear extinction. What kids should be fretting over is the risks inherent in anal sex because more and more of them are engaging in this perversion!

Anal sex isn’t the only area parents and teachers fall short. Young girls are not being told that lesbians have higher rates of alcohol and drug use, especially among young lesbians, plus poor nutrition and obesity. Thus there’s an increased risk of breast, ovarian, endometrial, and other cancers. Girls need to be informed of health risks! Telling the truth is loving, not hateful!

Sadly, I have yet to hear words of warning from the lips of neo-evangelicals who proudly promote same-sex “marriage.” They pat themselves on the back for not sitting in judgment of anyone and spout the Left’s mantra that the Church must become tolerant and inclusive. While these phonies are preaching acceptance of every perversion imaginable, Christ’s lambs are being led over a cliff by these moral degenerate wolves!

The truth is, neo-evangelicals are feeding the wolves and starving the sheep! Sound harsh? Jesus was even harsher. He called the religious leaders “hypocrites.” He also called them a “generation of vipers.” He told them that God had been right about them when he said, “This people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” Jesus loved people but he condemned the religious leaders as the blind leading the blind, calling them “whitewashed tombs containing dead men’s bones.”

Paul wrote in Phil. 3:16-17 “Let us walk by the same rule let us be of the same mind. Brethren, join in following my example, and note those who so walk, as you have us for a pattern.” The New Testament was not in circulation so Paul used himself and the other apostles as examples to follow. They were servants of God. They were not worried about their reputations — and they certainly didn’t care if they were politically correct! Their purpose was to spread the true Gospel of Jesus Christ and to challenge anyone who taught a false gospel.

Christianity is under assault! God’s people must forget about their reputations and start defending the faith! Should followers of Christ do less than Paul, who warned the Church to, “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the mutilation!” (Phil. 3:2). Paul was talking about false teachers!

It’s astonishing how masses of professing Christians will sit idly by and allow a small number of liberals to change the face of Christianity. In this article I provided a few examples of this — but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Lisa Miller’s hack job article for “Newsweek” is the most recent attempt, but rest assured plenty more like it will soon follow. By running the article “Newsweek” has put forth its agenda to normalize same-sex “marriage.” But in order to accomplish this, Christianity must be redefined so that it blends into a culture where happiness and pleasure, not truth, are of primary importance.

“Newsweek” is a secular magazine. But until recently Richard Cizik was a representative of the largest evangelical organization of in the country! Where does he get off speaking for evangelicals, when his views on same-sex “marriage” and abortion don’t represent the organization’s view? And what gives emergent church guru Tony Jones the right to declare that homosexuality is compatible with Christianity when the Bible says it’s not? Who are Tony and Peggy Campolo to bash historic orthodox Christianity because they feel the need to placate sinful behavior?

As for President Bush, not long ago he shocked conservative Christians when he said he believes Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Clearly, he doesn’t grasp one of the essentials of the Christian faith: The Trinity. True Christians hold that God exists as a unity of three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each person is divine and there is only one God. Muslims reject the Trinity. They hold that Jesus Christ is not God, he was a prophet. Since the Christian God is Trinitarian, anyone who believes that Christians and Muslims pray to the same God is dead wrong.

Serious Christians are to:

“have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11).

Moreover:

“ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints”(Jude 3-4).

And remember:

“there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed” (2 Peter 2:1-2).

Footnotes”

[1] Bush Says Creation ‘Not Incompatible’ With Evolution—Fox News

[2] As One With Authority, By Albert Mohler

[3] Our Mutual Joy, By Lisa Miller

[4] Tony Perkins’ Washington Update

[5] The Bible and Proposition 8, By Chuck Colson

[6] Evangelical leader resigns amid controversial comments, By Jim Brown and Jody Brown, OneNewsNew

[7] Is The Homosexual My Neighbor, transcript of a videotape of a talk at North Park College Chapel on February 29, 1996

[8] The Bible and Proposition 8, By Chuck Colson

Marsha West is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
She can be reached at:

Texas Body Snatchers

The Bible would never have taken off if US law enforcement agencies had been around. They would smother the sublime quest of mankind in its infancy, sending the twelve sons of Israel into foster care in Sodom, for their good old sire had four wives and loved them all. On second thought, the Bible would not even have come that far either, as their ancestor Abraham, this fountain of our faith, would have been locked up for the same sin. That is, if he had not been locked up earlier for teaching his children at home, instead of sending them to the Pharaoh’s school, or for giving birth at home. Every aspect of normal behavior mankind was used to, has become criminalised in the new American legality.

In beginning of April, hamfisted Texan police swooped on a remote Mormon ranch, and arrested the men and carried away the women and their children and babies, separating them from their mothers. A judge allowed separating even nursing breastfed babies, giving them to foster care.

This snatching case, where the police took away 437 children and babies from their parents who preferred to live an alternative communal family lifestyle, has advanced the US well beyond any grim vision of totalitarianism ever envisaged by real-life politicians. Americans have already entered the realm of extreme social engineering trod by the LSD writer Aldous Huxley. In that realm of the United Totalitarian States, happy families are being broken up, and hundreds of babies and children are given into adoption to single gender couples. People have lost their children to the state for failing to expose them to the moronising power of the TV[1], or refusing to send them to the state schools. Some have lost their lives as well: in Utah, a John Singer was shot dead for trying to keep his children out of school. The holocaust of Waco with its dozens of parents and children murdered for no sin but their sturdy independence was just the first swallow of elimination of private life in America.

The Texas police had used a false claim in order to justify their action. They claimed a member of the family, one Sarah Barlow, had lodged a complaint. Soon it became clear that the complaint was made by a delusionary outsider woman with a history of false reports, and probably in cahoots with police. There never was a Sarah Barlow. The good wives and daughters of the Texan dissidents were placed under terrible pressure, amounting to torture: they were not even allowed to nurse their babies, unless they bear false witness against their husbands and fathers. It is amazing that all of them withstood the torture and remained faithful. What made the Texas police use such extreme measures against people who peacefully carried on with their lives?

There is a good reason for this onslaught on privacy: The policy of Total Spectrum Dominance promoted by the Neocons does not refer to far away lands only, to unruly Afghanistan or disobedient France. It refers to you. It is you, Americans, they want to dominate totally; by controlling your lifestyle and punishing every free thought and act. And in order to dominate, they need to smash all compartments; first of all, Family. Nothing may stay between an individual and the State. By way of projection, your ideologists ascribe this attitude to your erstwhile enemies, Hitler and Stalin, but as a matter of fact both arch-villains were strongest supporters of family. Stalin terminated the free run of wild-eyed feminists he inherited from the Revolution days; while even today, any reference to family values is considered “pro-Nazi” in Zionist-occupied Merkel’s Germany. It is to the third force of liberal totalitarianism that we owe this last and definite attack on Family.

In a normal world, the Texas kidnapping would be condemned by every voice until the children were free and back in the custody of their parents, until the kidnappers were safely locked in jail. Instead, the American papers and internet sites bother with Tibetan monks’ inalienable right to own serfs and the evil Chinamen’s interfering with this right. They discuss whether the Japanese may eat whales (no, they may not) and whether the US corporations may consume millions of starving people by turning their food into fuel (yes, they may). At the same time, they allow the oldest and most natural freedom of forming family life to be eroded and undermined. Why don’t presidential candidates Obama, Clinton and McCain demand safe release of the Texas prisoners – before the Bush regime rides into sunrise to impose his version of permissible intercourse on the rest of mankind?

The enemies of your freedom, the proprietors of your media, have prepared for this onslaught for a long time. They spread malicious rumors of frequent parental child abuse to undermine the natural tie between children and parents. They constructed a fictitious offense of flirting with a girl and called it “harassment”. They invented a “plague of the 20th century”, AIDS, though this malady occupies umpteenth place in the list of dangerous diseases, well after obesity. They promoted and elevated homosexual activity on their TV channels and in official propaganda – all that in order to eliminate family and turn you into obedient tools in their hands.

They preached to bewildered mankind that whoever objects to their apotheosis of gay love is but a bigot interfering with a question of personal choice between consenting adults. Now, in Texas this sophism has come to naught: a group of consenting adults were arrested and imprisoned for their personal choice – not for having wild sex, or running orgies, or for disturbing the peace, but for forming a steady and caring relationship of polygamous marriage, like the one approved by the Hebrews of old and by the entire East, by the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists of our own day, in short, by the vast majority of mankind. If there is narrow-minded bigotry, it is the American persecution of alternative families. Alleged persecution of pederasts in Iran is peanuts comparing with this attack on the most traditional way of family life in America.

Polygamy or monogamy? This is ultimately a question of local custom and personal preference. The East allows for polygamy, the West allows for sodomy. The East is not worried by age difference, the West lives in fear of underage wedlock. Apparently, the Eastern gentleman prefers marital bliss with a few nubile beauties at once; the Anglo-American man likes to be buggered by an elderly gentleman. For this reason, the Anglo-American man is forever trying to move eastwards, to escape into the realm of sexual freedom, or – if this man is content with his part – to conquer and eliminate this realm. This could be a good explanation of Middle Eastern wars, the War of Pederasts against Polygamists, surely not a worse one than oil or Jews: in the unforgettable words of George W. Bush, “they [the Americans] attack us [the East] because they hate and envy our freedom”, that is, the Eastern freedom to marry a few wonderful women without going through divorce.

The sturdy villagers of my Palestine do practice polygamy, as I described elsewhere: “I stayed at Hassan’s hospitable house, built on his own land in Yanoun. Hassan is over eighty, a strong and stately old man in grey galabiye and abaya, a sort of full-length dress with a mantle on top. His galabiye is girdled up by a broad leather belt, and a sharp short knife hangs on it. His hands are of good shape and feel as hard as if they were chiseled from local stone when he shakes my hand. Last year Hajj Hassan made the pilgrimage to Mecca, but he is first and foremost a peasant. Our Lord and Lady of Palestine blessed Hassan. He married, and had a few sons and daughters, and then he took a second wife, and had had some more, until he was surrounded by twelve strong sons and pretty daughters. His spacious three-storied house with smaller outbuildings can compete with the manor of the Beg. There are many olive trees he planted on the slopes, and there is a vine with heavy yellow grapes in front of his house. In the morning the second wife of Hassan, a tall and dignified woman in her sixties, brought me this thick greenish juice of olive together with a big and round country bread, hubz baladi, she had baked half an hour ago. Hard white goat cheese, salty thyme, a bunch of grapes and a glass of sweetish tea with maramiye (sage) leaves completed the meal. Hassan’s first and elderly wife sat with us, basking at the winter sun.”[2]

It is normal to have two wives, and it is normal to have one wife, and it is normal to have no wife at all, as so many monks choose. Moreover, it is normal to have two husbands, as the mountain folk of Tibet, Ladakh and Nepal do. (In the West, it is called ménage a trois, and this arrangement allowed Lily Brick to live happily with Vladimir Mayakovski and Osip Brick.) Every such arrangement is normal, if agreed by the involved parties. What is abnormal that’s state interference in the unions of men and women.

The American State pays too much attention to the sex life of its subjects. In normal circumstances, the stained dress of Mlle. Levinsky would cause some anxiety only for her drycleaner; the escapade of Mr Spitzler would annoy his wife only, while the extended family lifestyle of Texan commune would be just their own business. Until the 1960s, the police and FBI used to arrest men and women of different races who dared to congregate – in bed. It is still embedded in American conscience. Recently, a young black American was sentenced to ten years of jail for having oral sex with a young white girl.

Another sexual obsession of American authorities is “child pornography” interpreted in the widest possible way. FBI agents-provocateurs email Japanese anime depicting young girls, and then happily assault the receivers of the emails. Often it has a clear political undertone: an American dissident, an objector to Iraqi war, Kevin Strom, was recently sentenced to two years of jail for having an email with a girlie picture (actually, that of Brooke Shields, the actress) on his computer. The American Gestapo would lock up Benvenuto Cellini, the great Florentine, for his enticing hermaphrodite child, and probably the visitors to Louvre where the statue is presented, as well, just for looking at it.

In the eternal search for the “hidden hand”, men have produced many unlikely candidates, from the Masons to the Wise Elders of Zion to the Gray Aliens and Lizards, or even as the Russian esoteric Alexandre Dougin proposed in jest, a secret ancient order of women-priestesses pulling and pushing behind the scenes. In a similar vein, tongue-in-cheek, one can imagine a cabal of old man-hating butch dyke’s, or even eunuchs (like in medieval China or Byzantium) forming the hidden US government, directing the FBI to snatch children and destroy families in Texas, sending Bush to subdue the Middle East and kill off the men – both Oriental and American – their natural competitors for female charms.

We in Israel have been ruled by our Wise Hags of Zion from Golda Meir up till the present president of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish, and what we do today, America repeats tomorrow, as Steve Niva noted in his fine essay The New Walls of Baghdad, subtitled The Israeli Model Surges Toward Iraq. “What we are seeing in Iraq today has much to do with a deeper and far-reaching “Israelization” of U.S. military strategy and tactics. Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky, like Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes “penetration raids” and airborne “targeted killings” when resistance is offered.”

These imaginary ruling harpies can’t comprehend that women are naturally attracted to men.

There is a new Israeli law saying that every act of intercourse between man and woman is coercive, and if they work in one company, it always constitutes harassment. In short, there should be no flirtation, no sex either. An Israeli couple had a long and tumultuous relationship for a few years, making love everywhere from the company’s strong room to its computer center, but, when the relationship soured, the woman brought a complaint for harassment and coercion, and walked away with a cool hundred thousand dollars. An even better and newer Israeli bill proposes to fine every customer of a prostitute by a flat sum of ten thousand dollars – in favor of the prostitute.

Likewise, the American imitators of the Israeli model can’t comprehend why some women prefer to share one man with a few others – or why some men may share one woman with others, as Abbe Prevost wrote of Manon Lescault. They will forever ruin your lives, corralling you towards the genderless anti-utopia of Huxley.

As much as one feels sorry for imprisoned Palestine, devastated Iraq and for threatened Iran, I can’t help but feel sorry for you, Americans, the first victims and the first slaves of the New World Order your country tries to impose on the rest of the world. We are together in this fight, we have one enemy, and this enemy is not in North Korea, but in Washington, DC.

[1] Judges in the Texas snatching case and in other cases referred to children being kept away from TV as one of the motives for taking child into state care.

[2] From “Reading Douglas Adams in Yanoun”.

Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war.

After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia.

In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.

Email at:

Unfair and Unbalanced

The phrase “fair and balanced” certainly has a positive connotation. It is thought the greatest quality a news outlet can possess; it has even become a motto of the Fox News Network. Yet I don’t find Fox very balanced at all.

Oh, I give credit where it’s due. Given that neo-communist organs such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and most other mainstream newspapers believe presenting the “other side” means airing the voice of socialist dissent, Fox and its soul mates are a major improvement. I say soul mates because, while among TV news outlets Fox may be unusual, its perspective certainly is not.

I am never fair and balanced, certainly not in the modern way of thinking. My problem with the approach is that it breeds something akin to the following reportage:

“God says Devil is evil; Devil says God is evil.

We report, you decide.”

The above is more literally true than you may think. We often complain about internationalist news bureaus that will call terrorists by a euphemism such as “insurgents” or “militants,” but in the fair and balanced world it makes sense. After all, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Sure, that widely-accepted U.S. government definition of terrorism states that it is “. . . violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents . . .,” but, first, why should our perspective carry the day? Then, what is this business about “subnational” groups? It is obviously a tendentious definition allowing the biggest bullies on the block, nations, the latitude to employ an effective tactic while denying it to the less powerful. And we know that during WWII both sides aggressively targeted civilian populations. Let’s be fair and balanced now. And all is fair in love and war.

You see, everyone has a perspective, his own truth, and who is to say what is right or wrong? We shouldn’t impose our values on others.

We may dismiss such a defense of terrorism out of hand, but the moral relativism that underpins it imbues our fair-and-balanced mentality. You may wonder about such an assertion; after all, whether it’s O’Reilly or another fair and balanced person, such an individual takes strong positions all the time. For instance, O’Reilly (I don’t mean to make this about any one individual, but consider him the archetype for the perspective in question) has bemoaned the failure to call terrorists what they are, and he has boldly attacked the toxic rap sub-culture, the faux marriage movement, anti-Christmas crusaders, and localities that have lax punishment for child molesters. Yet he also does something else.

On other issues, O’Reilly is quite content to sing relativism’s song. For example, I’ve heard him refrain from making judgments about the sinfulness of homosexual behavior (this is just an example, as this isn’t about one issue, either), saying “I’ll let the deity decide.” This is interesting. Why don’t we just “let the deity decide” about bestiality, polygamy and child molestation as well? One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and one man’s perversion is another’s pure love. For that matter, why not let Him decide about rap, Christmas, faux marriage and everything else? In point of fact, God has already decided; our job is simply to discern what those decisions are.

This is the purpose of all philosophical inquiry: To determine Truth, which may be defined as God’s answers to all life’s questions. This is where the modern man may click his mouse. You, Duke, have the temerity to speak of God? Not everyone believes in God, and, even insofar as believers go, not everyone has the same conception of Him. Let us just leave God out of it and talk about issues.

This is a contradiction. The problem is that there are only two possibilities: Either man determines what we call right and wrong or something outside him does. If it’s the former, as relativists assert, then “right and wrong” is synonymous with consensus opinion and only serves to muddy the waters. We then may as well be honest with ourselves and recognize that it is all a matter of taste and that the most popular tastes will prevail. We might as well recognize that all the words we use to describe these tastes – morality, values, right and wrong, etc. – are simply window dressing, a way of lending an air of legitimacy and intellectualism to a very crass modus operandi; to wit: My version of right and wrong will prevail over yours simply because more people agree with me than with you. I have more votes.

We also might as well accept that serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was more sane than most of us, as he recognized this “fact,” saying “If there’s no God, why can’t I make up my own rules?” And we should accept the same about a completely unreasonable little child who says, “That’s not fair!” simply because he doesn’t get his way. At least there is little or no pretense about fairness having any relationship to something more than personal taste.

Even more to the point, however, this would render discussion and debate about politics, religion and social issues unnecessary. Why? Because the purpose of all intellectual inquiry is to find answers, and if there is no Truth, there are no answers to be found. This is the reason why our great debates center around things such as abortion and marriage and not what ice cream is the best. I may like chocolate and you vanilla, but there is nothing to discuss; it would be ridiculous for me to say chocolate is good and vanilla evil – even if 90 percent of the population also preferred chocolate – because that is the terminology of Truth, not taste. Likewise, if “morality” is a function of consensus opinion, then it is also just a matter of taste. Thus, murder can only be “evil” if there is something above us dictating it is so; if we only view it as such because 90 or so percent of us prefer it not be committed, then the most we can honestly say is that we dislike it.

This brings us back to the concept of fair and balanced. What really constitutes being so? Certainly it doesn’t involve granting a hearing to any and every point of view; everyone picks and chooses, and O’Reilly himself has said that he won’t have “radicals” on his show. It also doesn’t seem to involve giving voice to “radical” ideas as O’Reilly’s desire to leave the morality of homosexuality to the “deity” illustrates (note that the “deity” doesn’t have a news and commentary show; He leaves that role to us).

But there is a problem with this. As history has proven time and again, radicals and their radical ideas have often been correct. At one time, those who opposed slavery (and for most of history no one opposed it) were thought radical. Sometimes a radical is just a person who is right 50 years too soon.

The lesson here is that while the Truth often lies at the center of civilization, it’s also sometimes found at the fringes. Being radical doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but simply that your views deviate greatly from the mainstream. In a land where most believe that 2+2=5, a person who insists it is 4 is a radical.

So what is true fairness? How do we determine who will be given the podium and who won’t and what ideas to promulgate? The fair-and-balanced crowd boasts of giving voice to “both sides,” which means, in essence, “Society says that answers are only found within the confines of two legitimate ideologies, so we will feature them.” But is this what the Truth says? They tell us that certain moral issues will be tackled with manly vigor while others will be treated as matters of taste, which means, in essence, “Society says there are certain acceptable “values” and certain unacceptable ones, so we will feature the former and suppress the latter.” But is this what the Truth says? No, a given civilization may be more or less oriented toward Truth, it may be a relative heaven or hell, but it is not the Truth. We are to judge it with the yardstick of Truth, not use it as a yardstick for judging what will be considered “truth.”

If the nature of true fairness isn’t yet clear, consider this question. If false allegations were leveled against you, would you want to be judged based on some standard of man, which would by its very nature be flawed? Or would you rather come before a judge who is guided by Truth, which by its very nature is perfect? True fairness is never achieved by judging based on the spirit of the time, but by the spirit of the timeless.

In other words, journalism professors may point out that all people have biases, and this is true. But what most of these academics may not tell you, being relativists virtually one and all, is that there are only two kinds of people: Those biased in favor of a lie and those biased in favor of the Truth.

This brings us to the problem with the fair-and-balanced set. They judge fairness not with reference to the true center, Truth, but the center of our cultural spectrum. It’s an easy mistake to make, and it gives them more in common with those who euphemize about terrorism than they care to think. When Reuters called terrorists “militants” and O’Reilly, in so many words, called homosexuality a preference, they were both saying (and perhaps sincerely thinking) what the most strident elements of their audience wanted to hear, not what the Truth demanded they tell. Insofar as this goes, the only difference between them is also a similarity: The contexts in which they operate. O’Reilly’s context is America; internationalist news organs’ context is the world. Yet they are the same because they are both a context of man, not the context of God.

A prerequisite for fairness is the ability to judge matters properly. And just as we cannot properly judge the soundness of an engineering plan without understanding the laws governing the physical world, we cannot properly judge the soundness of a social plan (e.g., ideology, policy or philosophy) without understanding the laws governing the moral world. Simply put, you cannot know if a thing is good without knowing what good is.

This is why no one, no matter how clever, witty or profound, has any right being a commentator if he is a moral relativist. Such a person is essentially telling us that there are no answers to be found, but he will talk about them anyway; he is saying that your perspective cannot be better, but it is better to accept his perspective. The problem with commentators nowadays is what ails most of us: It’s not that we sometimes profess untruths, but that we’re detached from Truth. This is why the media are actually becoming more unfair, and why, as the degradation in the wider society proves, we become more unbalanced all the time.

Selwyn Duke is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
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Girls taken from polygamist ranch: Kidnap or rescue?

In recent days, law enforcement agents have raided a compound belonging to the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) — Warren Jeffs‘ operation — and removed nearly 200 girls and women from the premises.

I was discussing it with a neighbor, who told me that this amounted to kidnapping. “These girls were forcibly removed from their homes,” he explained. “The girls had done nothing wrong, yet they must feel like they’re being punished — being ripped from their homes, from their families.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but a very simplistic one. The situation inside the compound was anything but simplistic, as chronicled in the memoirs of a few rare escapees.

In normal society, when it is discovered that a child is being abused at the hands of her parents, the authorities intervene, if the child is lucky, and the child is removed from the abusive environment.

The recent activity at the FLDS compound is no different. The authorities simply removed those girls and women from an abusive environment.

Some are probably too young to realize that they are being rescued, and all must be very frightened by the abrupt change of course that their lives have taken. But such is probably the case for just about anyone who is rescued from a dangerous home life.

While I don’t personally have a problem with polygamy, if it’s between consenting adults, girls who are raised in the FLDS are not willing participants. They are forced, when very young, to marry whomever the church leaders deem appropriate.

Imagine being a young girl forced to marry a man old enough to be your father — or perhaps even old enough to be your grandfather. You are treated like breeding stock. Your purpose in life is to have lots of children and to obey your husband. Those are your keys to heaven. That is how you are measured.

You have no control over your own life, your own body, or your own children. All the decisions are made by your husband and by the church leaders on behalf of “God”.

You are powerless. You have to ask permission to make even the smallest of decisions.

The only decision you can make, the only power you can gain, is to win your husband’s favor through sex and thereby perhaps have some minimal influence on things. And, of course, this leads to backstabbing and rivalry amongst wives.

And then there is the abuse by husbands, other wives, and the community.

No one will help you. No one will listen.

Imagine the effects that kind of life must have on a girl’s self-esteem.

These girls are prisoners. They are trapped in this cult with no way out. They are, essentially, slaves.

They are brainwashed and told that the outside world is “evil”, so that they won’t dare try to escape. Besides, to reject or even question these practices, they are told, is to defy the very word of God. Do so and you’re hellbound.

It is hard to believe that this is happening in the 21st century, but then I live near Pennsylvania’s Amish country. But at least Amish children are given a choice.

The girls and women of the FLDS have no choice. All they have is their cruel duty.

If I am ever treated that way at home, would someone please “kidnap” me?

Mary Shaw is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated. E-mail: