Category Faith

Apr 14 2015

Silence Beholden

 

One of the greatest misconceptions of Christianity, both within and without the faith, is that peace loving, God-fearing, and the true expression of God’s love is somehow equal to or synonymous with silence. The idea that in order to love one’s fellow man one must live beholden to silence in the face of persecution is simple not true. Christians of today are constantly reminded if they are not placid and pliable they will immediately be affixed with the moniker of hateful and unloving.

Christianity, from its inception during the Roman Empire, has been brutally persecuted down through the centuries and civilizations. It certainly hasn’t been because of their silence and muted beliefs. While scripture is saturated with teachings of love and peace, it also is equally laced with admonitions to maintain and preach a holy life. It is this preaching in the face of overwhelming opposition that cost many a Christian their life.

Once such Christian was Apostle Paul. A gifted teacher and prolific writer, the Apostle was once a zealous persecutor of Christians, most notably overseeing the execution of Stephen, a beloved deacon of the early church. After his conversion, Paul would exhort the Roman Church to “live at peace with all men” with this interesting caveat: “as much it lies within you”. The Apostle would later recount how he himself had been thrown to the lions yet had defeated the lions in the coliseum.

Perhaps Paul was concerned the Christians were meekly walking to the slaughter abdicating their rights as Roman citizens. It should be noted that Paul when imprisoned in Corinth demanded to know why he, a Roman citizen, should be beaten and jailed with out a proper trial. Paul, on several occasions, eloquently and effectively defended his faith in the high courts of the Roman Empire until his strong views on homosexuality proved too much for the government and he was beheaded.

Still, Christianity has also been guilty of persecutions as many of its detractors are quick to point out. While many will use this truth as reason for retaliation against any Christian form of faith, this natural desire for a comeuppance is really the catalyst for the Freedoms we once enjoyed in this Country. The Founders wanted to maintain expression without repression.

Christians began fleeing to the “New World” to escape persecution, ironically, from the Christian church. These believed that a salvation experience was a personal one that did not need to come from the church. The church, now infused with the power of government, dealt harshly with these miscreants with inquisitions and excommunications. Sadly, humanity has the propensity to, once free from persecution, repeat the very same atrocities it most recently was freed from.

Our Founding Fathers were well aware of this tendency in the frailty of human behavior. They crafted a Republic that would break the old world cycle of religious persecutions and strong man politics by protecting the right to express one’s faith or lack thereof and prohibiting the repression of such. While many of the “enlightened” move to disparage the wisdom of our founders, time has only proven them all the wiser.

The idea that the framers of our great Republic never envisioned the madness in which we are embroiled in today is one more fallacy. The liberties we enjoy in principle, though debatable in practicum, serve notice that they were established for such a time as this. They foresaw that should a time come that a corrupt, weak, and feckless government and minority of people emboldened by that government’s cowardice and complicity would work, through repression, to eliminate the citizen’s Freedom to express their faith, the people would have the power to stand and fight for their freedom. Yet in this time of unparalleled freedom in world history, Christians seem strangely quiet to do so.

Never in the history of mankind has a civilization offered to its people such freedom. The blood of the millions of Christians who have given their all under the oppression of regimes cry out in astonishment as Christians in the United States silently abdicate their Freedom spurning the sacrifice not only of the great patriots of this Nation but the souls of so many whose unjust deaths were the impetus for the Freedoms of this great Republic. Are Christians beholden to cower in silence or are they accountable to their God to preserve and protect these great liberties, not just for Christians, but so that all peoples of faith may freely express their faith without fear of reprisal? What do Christians believe?

Apr 3 2015

A Willfully Wacky World

Its just astounding to watch the willful wacky contortions liberals will put themselves through just to attack Christians. CEO’s who berate  Christians for adhering to their personals beliefs about not promoting or sanctioning gay marriage and yet will spend millions in Countries that execute individuals who are gay.  Still others, such as Wal-Mart, decry the Christian faith and announce their support for Sharia Law and also do business with those that execute gays.  Now we have Universities that are banning Easter Services.  The persecution has just ramped up.  History is repeating itself because we willfully refused to learn from it.

Apr 2 2015

Republicans Show What They Are Made Of….Again

The Republicans are showing once again that in the face of adversity they cannot pass up an opportunity to cower and concede.  The Republican Party of Indiana has given the rest of the Nation a flaming example of what feckless leadership looks like.  After passing a bill to protect people of faith from being targeted and persecuted for their faith, the Republicans, in the face of protest from such upstanding citizens as Miley Cyrus, have amended the law to say that people of faith are protected from targeting and persecution until they are targeted and persecuted for their faith.  Then all bets are off.  In other words, we are back to where we were. You are allowed Freedom of Religion as long as you shut-up about it and don’t act like you believe anything. The “new freedom” trumps all other Freedoms.

Of course there will be protests.  Whenever you make a stand there is bound to be opposition.  There Republicans never cease to amaze as they climb to new heights of cowardice. This is why the Nation is steadily losing faith in the Republican Party. They cannot be trusted in the heat of battle.

Apr 2 2015

The Battle for Expression: Faith versus Sex

“Give me your huddled masses”   This famous quote from the Statue of Liberty was intended to be a description of the very heart and core of the American belief. The “huddled masses” came to this Nation for the freedom to express their beliefs without fear of reprisal from their government.

For hundreds of years this was the standard by which the United States stood, but things have changed. Political leaders of today are now advising religious leaders that they are free to hold their views but not free to publicly express them. This is not the freedom that drew the masses across the ocean to the fertile shores of the New World.

If the measure of religious freedom were simply to hold a personal belief with no allowance for outward expression, there would have been no need for the many peoples of faith to flee their lands and come to the New World. These people were not persecuted for their quiet inner beliefs, but for the way they publicly expressed their faith: The way they dressed, the tenets of their faith, their style of worship, and their defiance or non-adherence to government sanctioned churches.

These persecutions drove them to a new world where they could worship with a freedom to express their faith. Later, our Founding Fathers constructed our Constitution with the intent to preserve that freedom. Much of the freedoms we once enjoyed stemmed from this desire to protect Religious Freedom.

Yet now, as our society is increasingly permeated with the influence of hedonism, a new freedom has emerged that cannot function in an amicable relationship to all other freedoms. The emergence of sexual freedom has signaled a death knell to the Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion, and Assembly if those freedoms do not comply with the edicts and whims of the Freedom to Sex. While the American people are struggling to find the Freedom to Sex in the Constitution, our government has fully complied with its demands.

With the rise of sexual expression, the marriage tradition, specifically in its Christian form, is viewed as a hindrance to its free expression. For now, Christianity has been the target of choice for persecutions because of its “archaic” moral codes and perceived intolerance to the “new freedom”. Once government has sufficiently squelched the voice of Christians, drunk with its new power, be assured it will search for other voices of dissidents to squash.

We have become a nation defined by our sexual acts. Heterosexual, homosexual, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual are all terms referring to a sexual act defined by the individuals or victims engaged in the act, but now, we have become individuals defined by the sexual act. The balance has shifted.

History is again repeating itself as the self-indulgent rail against the impervious nature of religion. The relativists cannot comprehend why faith, for the most part, remains unflinching in its morality, even in the face of a populace disdain. The moralist’s stance in an immoral culture is viewed as an obstruction to the “new freedom”.

For people of faith, sex is one facet in a happy life. For the hedonist, sex is way of life. The God-fearing view sex as a private and sacred relation within their marriage and have no need or desire for public affirmation. This infuriates the hedonist who finds his value and satisfaction in fleeting moments of pleasure and must constantly seek popular affirmation to find his worth.

The recent events surrounding the defense of religious expression in Indiana, and now Arkansas, bring into sharp contrast the competing freedoms in our Country. People of faith want to continue to express their faith as they have done for centuries in the United States. Those defined by their sexuality crave affirmation for the public expression of their sex acts. Any criticism, rebuke, belief, or disparagement that challenges their sexuality is viewed as a threat to their freedom to sex, the “new freedom”, and must be silenced. Sadly, it seems we have made a choice in our Nation that free expression of sex is more valuable than all other expression of freedoms especially faith.