Setting Brushfires of Liberty

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5 years in the making, filmed in 25 states with over 40 patriot super stars, REVELATION Dawn of Global Government is resonating with Christians and conservatives alike. Although highly unusual for a conservative Faith based film to release in theaters, REVELATION, was 7th in the nation for box office. Hundreds of enthusiastic fans have written reviews urging concerned Americans to watch this critically important film and share it as a tool to educate their own families and friends.

Watch the trailer by clicking here.

Here’s what people are saying:

“This was exceptional! Anyone who truly loves this country will take an hour and a half out of their life to go and learn. I knew a lot but it sure connected the dots for me!

“I spent many years in television news and one of the best things that I took away from that experience is… Nothing makes a huge impact like a film can! During my career, I saw many small groups do wonderful things. This is one of those!! May God bless you all.”

“We went last night to see REVELATION….. Amazing!!! My spirit was Sooo stirred…. we live evil times and this was eye opening on so many levels! WE need to get this message out to the public! GO see this movie!!!”

“Like drinking from a firehose!”

“My husband and I saw it and it was EXCELLENT !! I hope and pray it goes well spreading the word for all to see it!! This is so well put together. A MUST-SEE if you love America!”

Now this beautifully produced film is available on FREE beginning JUNE 8- 17!

The home spun wisdom and common sense of Country music legend Charlie Daniels is woven through out this riveting story as the narrator. Sitting in an old Tennessee log cabin, fiddle in hand Charlie reminisces:

“When I was a boy, things were pretty much like those wonderful Norman Rockwell images of 30’s America. But today, something’s wrong and we all know it!”

Mr. Daniels goes on to explain and introduce the main themes in this 5 star “must see” film which connects the dots on what has happened to our once mighty nation. Our Republic, originally blessed because of our Christian founding principles and heritage, is in a fight to the death involving the unseen realm of spiritual warfare.

Co-Star Lt. General “Jerry” Boykin proudly served this nation in the uniform of the U.S. Army. Most of his time was spent in Special Operations. He was one of the original members of the Army’s Delta Force. He commanded all of the Army’s Green Berets. He served a tour at the Central Intelligence Agency and finished his career as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. General Boykin was the commander of Delta Force during the tragic events of “Black Hawk Down” He is a devout Christian and serves on President Trump’s evangelical advisory team.

General Boykin explains the many facets of Marxism and Socialism increasingly popular in our nation, as he witnessed them in other countries around the world. The fascinating true life story Elena Chitta who escaped from a totalitarian Romanian communist regime is interwoven with General Boykin. The 73-year-old soft spoken Chitta feels called to sound the alarm by comparing her experiences to what she sees today.

Edward Griffin succinctly explains the birth of the Federal Reserve and how our Republic was secretly subverted during the infamous meeting at Jekyll Island.

He also explains Collectivism, which many people foolishly believe is our system of government!

Ex Muslim Brotherhood member, Kamal Saleem was sent to America as a sleeper cell and exposes the stark reality of the Islamic threat which goes to the heart and foundation of our civilization. Sharia law is not compatible with our form of government!

We then go on a wild ride through history with General George Washington and several very realistic historical reenactments reminding us of our Nation’s great moments of courage and sacrifice including the faith of our founding fathers and the Black Robed Regiment so named during the American Revolution.

Many other critical subjects are introduced by host Alex Jones of InfoWars.com including the Globalist Agenda and its incompatibility with our hard won and God inspired Constitution. The goal is to create a one world government. It’s as old as time itself. National sovereignty is a firewall against a globalist takeover.

At one time, mention of the New World Order was considered conspiracy but REVELATION exposes the roots, which go back to the time of biblical Nimrod and the battle for world control continues today. The latest and most diabolical plan, developed by the UN, is called Agenda 21. Every American citizen needs to understand and protest the implementation of Agenda 21 which is antithetical to our Constitution. The underlying premise is that private property rights, the backbone of our Constitution, are to be abolished!

The Second Amendment Right to bear arms is explored by several speakers including our own founder Stewart Rhodes.

Rock star Ted Nugent emphatically states “We the people have the right to keep and bear arms so that no king or emperor, or slave driver, ever rises up again and stops this sacred, unique unprecedented experiment in self government.”  Larry Pratt executive director of “Gun Owners of America” explains how we must be working to roll back much of the legislation put in place unconstitutionally.

Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge notoriety, in an extremely rare and candid interview gives his heartbreaking testimony of a militarized police out of control. His young wife and nursing baby were shot and killed by an FBI sniper along with his 11-year-old son, Sammy. You will cry with him as he states “I’ve always loved this country; I still do”

The unique design of our Constitution is based on the concept that our rights come from God, not man. We the people, of the United States, then delegated 17 enumerated powers to this newly established federal government. For many decades now, the federal government has continued to get outside those bounds. It is the states’ responsibility to stop that overreach. We need to educate people about the 10th amendment and how the states have a rightful role to say “no” to corruption from the federal government. The states, who created the federal government to begin with, must be the ones that say, “Enough.”

When our forefathers, just a few years after having fought for liberty from tyranny, decided that they needed to establish a federal government, they were scared to death of reestablishing another tyranny.

This film is the “Common Sense” of our time.

Oh ye that love mankind, ye that oppose not only tyranny, but the tyrant. Stand forth. Thomas Payne, Common Sense, 1775.

We have been given a short reprieve with the election of Donald Trump but now is not the time to rest. We need to be more vigilant than ever in preparing for the next huge battle on the horizon. Obama has set up camp just blocks from the White House in an effort to undermine President Trump and our liberty with his “Organizing for Action”501 c3. Armed with the databases collected during his own presidential campaigns, OFA is strong, organized and well funded. As Charlie Daniels puts it “Kind of like the Trojan horse, you roll it inside the gates and all the bad guys slither out in the dark of night.”

After educating yourself and those around you by watching this film you will conclude as Samuel Adams did “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

The film may best be summed up by the lyrics to the original theme song written by Charlie Daniels below:

There was a mighty nation, blessed above all of creation, it was a rare and precious pearl.

Conceived in faith and liberty, home of the brave, land of the free, it was the envy of the world.

But this shining city on a hill has turned from the Creators will and let evil take control…now the reckless men who lead them want to strip away their freedom and steal their very souls.

Now it’s smoke and mirrors, switch and bait, criticize and confiscate, and let the guilty walk away.

In this once righteous Godly nation, in the halls of education, they forbid a child to pray.

They say we need to spread the wealth, they pretend to guard the health of the feeble and the poor, while the hand they hold behind their back confuses and conceals the fact that the wolf is at the door!

There’s an unseen hand that pulls the string and makes his little puppets dance to every song he sings.

The night rolls in on a rising tide, look beyond the shadows…Behold A Pale Horse rides!

They claim to seek a New World Order, nations without borders, but don’t believe the lie!

Even in this wealthy nation it can come down to starvation in a twinkling of an eye.

They tell us there will soon be peace, our lives will be an endless peace but they lead us toward the dark.

In the distance sabers rattle and armies train for battle as the beast prepares his mark.

There’s an unseen hand that pulls the strings and makes his little puppets dance to any song he sings.

The night rolls in on a rising tide, look beyond the shadows…Behold A Pale Horse rides!

It’s time for every righteous man to step up tall and take a stand there is so little time.

For if we hear and hesitate soon it will be too late, we are the last hope for mankind.

Time hurries on, the shadows fall, the hand is writing on the wall but even now there is still a chance.

For if the ones called by God’s name repent of sin and seek his face he will hear and heal the land.

There’s an unseen hand reaching from above and the gentle voice that beckons us to the shelter of his love.

Come on home my wayward child cause out on the horizon there is a…Pale Horse Running Wild!

America my wayward child can’t you hear the thundering hoof beats of a…Pale Horse Running Wild.

Pale Horse running wild…

Pale Horse running wild…

Pale Horse running wild…

VIDEO: The real story behind the Gaza riots

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What’s the real story behind the Gaza riots?

Are they peaceful, are demonstrators being shot indiscriminately by the IDF Israeli soldiers, or are the demonstrators terrorists using women and children as human shields.

Is the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem to blame or the bloodthirsty intentions of Hamas to destroy Israel. You decide.

EDITORS NOTE: Please visit www.clarionproject.org for real commentary!

A Lessen of Liberty in North Korea

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The worst part of the State Department’s new report on international religious freedom isn’t the stories it tells, but the ones it doesn’t.

In some of the darkest corners of the world, a lot of people aren’t even captured in the statistics. They just vanish — victims of a brutal war that’s been waging for centuries on faith.The West has seen flashes of the cruelty in places like North Korea, where the simple act of bowing your head could be all the evidence the government needs to ship you to prison camp. There, refugees warn, you’ll be beaten — sometimes to death — or die from something as simple as diarrhea because there’s no access to medicine. It’s a country where Christians trust no one. Kim Jong Un’s spies are everywhere, trained to “uncover religious people.” Even a secret prayer meeting could be a trap, organized by state officials to catch believers. Some Chinese pastors are even recruited and paid to turn in North Korean believers.

The ones who are caught talk about the torture, the brainwashing, and executions. “The government continued to deal harshly with those who engaged in almost any religious practices,” the State Department report read. “An estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in the political prison camp system in remote areas under horrific conditions.” Children grow up never knowing their parents were believers, a fact that’s hidden from thousands of young people for their own protection.

Christians like Han-me flee to China, only to be captured and sent back with a virtual death sentence. “Some defectors [on the train] had been arrested before,” she says. “They told me: ‘When you’re interrogated, there are two questions you should never answer ‘yes’ to. The first one is: Have you been in touch with Christians? The second one is: Have you read in the Bible?’ It turned out to be true. In prison, the interrogators tied me to a chair and beat me with chains and a wooden stick wrapped up in a newspaper. They pressed me to confess I had been in contact with Christians. I told them I hadn’t met any Christians while in China. It was a lie, but I wanted to survive. It was all I could think of.”

Higher profile Christians are the targets of assassination. After one Christian, who was heavily involved in an underground railroad for refugees, was murdered, South Korean intelligence officials stepped up their surveillance of people crossing the border. They called one local man and warned him not to meet up with a North Korean acquaintance. “This man will attempt to murder him, they say. Not much later at a train platform, South Korean police arrest the North Korean agent carrying needles and poison.”

Over the last seven years, the crackdown has only gotten worse. When Kim Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011, the already-brutal regime became the stuff of real-life horror. More house raids, more spies, more killings. “Every Christian in my country has the spirit of martyrdom in him,” said the friend of one detainee. “If you lose that spirit for one second, you cannot carry the burden of being a follower of Jesus.”

Unfortunately, this is the grim backdrop U.S. officials face in their high-stakes negotiations with North Korea.”Religious freedom is in the American bloodstream,” Secretary Mike Pompeo told reporters yesterday during the flurry of behind-the-scenes work to salvage talks with Kim Jong Un. “The release of the report is critical to our mission to defend religious liberty, and brings to light the state of religious freedom all over the world.”

From more allied countries like Saudi Arabia to known enemies in Iran and Nigeria, the report outlines the tall — but not impossible — task of Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback. In hot spots like Myanmar, the attacks seem to be growing right along with worldwide outrage. Extremists are burning, raping, and killing their way through the Rohingya Muslim population with a ferocity world leaders are desperately trying to stop. In a dramatic turn from the Obama years, Trump’s State Department was quick to label the campaign “ethnic cleansing.”

“It’s extraordinarily significant when the United States formally designates something as ethnic cleansing,” said an advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity.” Almost a quarter million Rohingya have already fled to Bangladesh, the report points out, where the situation is just as dire. Mudslides continue to wipe away makeshift shelters, stripping families of whatever peace of mind they had leaving the turmoil at home.

Fortunately for the Rohingya — and every persecuted faith group — they have an ally in this White House. “Our goal is to protect the freedom of conscience for all people. That means protecting a Muslim, Buddhist, Falun Gong practitioner or Christian in China and their ability to pray and live out their life,” Ambassador Brownback said. His partner in the effort, Secretary Pompeo, told reporters what most Americans already know: “Religious freedom is, indeed, a universal human right that I will fight for.” The world has made important strides, he went on, “but we still have a lot of work to do.” Thanks to this report, they know exactly where to start.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

RELATED ARTICLE: We’ll See You… in September!

State Department Reviews Religious Freedom around the World

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The State Department’s 2017 International Religious Freedom Report was released today. Issued under the direction of Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, with guidance from other senior officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), the report serves as a guide to the work yet to be done on this issue in many places around the world.

The places which one might expect to be covered in detail (North Korea, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, etc.) featured discussions of the major persecution taking place within their borders. Yet countries less well-known as religious persecution hot spots were featured too. For example, the report notes that in Burkina Faso, several individuals were killed and others threatened “if they did not start teaching the Quran in schools instead of the regular curricula,” and the discussion of the Comoros observes the strict enforcement and preference for Sunni Islam in law.

Muslim/Christian interreligious conflict continues to simmer at a lower level in a number of sub-Saharan countries, in some worse than others. Discomfort and conflict persists within these communities when one is seen as having the upper hand in government or society. While the concerns in these countries are often relatively less serious, it is important to address them before they flare up into larger, more destabilizing situations. And regardless, all religious freedom violations, however small, deserve to be addressed as a matter of principle.

Human rights and humanitarian concerns drive much of the State Department’s reporting on international religious freedom which we see reflected in the 2017 report. Very often, in each country’s section of the report, there is a note stating that the U.S. embassy or its officials in that country hosted meetings or met with religious or government leaders to raise religious freedom concerns. While this attention is good and helpful, there is much more to the story of religious freedom. Not least in this story is the emerging proof of religious freedom’s benefit to security and economic prosperity — proof which is not being raised by our diplomats and foreign policy professionals, whether in Foggy Bottom or around the world.

As long as religious freedom is seen merely as a humanitarian issue, governments and leaders who see nothing in it for themselves will be reluctant to address it, and we will be resigned to continue the worldwide backsliding on religious freedom that has occurred in recent years. But when the United States seriously and systematically begins to show others around the world that religious freedom is in their interest — their security and economic interests — we can begin to make headway.

Raising religious freedom as a human right is the right thing to do. But we have only achieved so much with this approach. If we increasingly explain the many benefits of religious freedom to those who otherwise wouldn’t care about it, they may begin to see a real shift towards protecting it. Whatever else, doing what we can to protect religious freedom for the maximum number of people around the world is always the right thing to do.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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President Trump to U.S. Naval Academy graduates: ‘You are now leaders in the most powerful and righteous force on the face of the planet’

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President Donald J. Trump addressed the graduating class of the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland on May 25, 2018. At the beginning of his remarks the President of the United States used the words “righteous force.” The word righteous appears in Bible 493 times. From Genesis to Revelation righteousness is used to show how evil is defeated. Revelation 15:4:

Who will not fear you, Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.”

Here are some excerpts (watch the full speech below):

You are now leaders in the most powerful and righteous force on the face of the planet: the United States military. Each of you will make your own mark on the Navy, the Marine Corps, the military, and the history of our great nation…There is no hill our Marines our can’t take and there is no stronghold the SEALs can’t breach. There is no sea the Navy can’t brave.

Together you are the tip of the spear, the edge of the blade and the front of the shield defending and protecting our great country. America is the greatest fighting force for peace, justice, and freedom in the history of the world.

[ … ]

Together their is nothing America can’t do. Absolutely nothing. We are all in for America like never before. We are all in for our great country.

Strive for excellence, live for adventure, think big, dream bigger, push further, sail faster, fly higher, and never, ever stop reaching for greatness. As long as we are united with the same mission, the same purpose, the same patriotic heart, we will win because we are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God.

President Trump understands that our military must be righteous in order to be a “glorious nation under God.”

Learning the Lessons of Chile

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Fr. Gerald E. Murray writes that the resignation of Chile’s bishops reminds us that removal of abusers from the priesthood is a necessary and unmistakable rebuke.

The surprise announcement by all the bishops of Chile of their submissions of resignations to Pope Francis is a stunning development. I did live television commentary for the Brooklyn Diocese’s NET TV of Pope Francis’ January apostolic voyage to Chile and Peru. At that time, we discussed, at length, the pope’s strong rebuke of people who accused Bishop Juan Barros of having enabled the sexual abuse of minors by his friend and mentor Fr. Fernando Karadima.

Five months later, the entire Chilean Bishops’ Conference, after a three-day meeting in Rome with Pope Francis, concluded that their collective departure would please him, and would allow him the greatest freedom to rebuild the confidence of Chilean Catholics by installing new bishops throughout the country. How did we arrive at this point?

At the press conference announcing the mass resignation, Bishop Fernando Reyes, the Secretary General of the Chilean Episcopal Conference, said:

In this context of dialogue and discernment, various suggestions were presented as to how to deal with this great crisis, and furthermore the idea developed that, in order to be more in tune with the will of the Holy Father, it was appropriate to declare our absolute readiness to place our pastoral charges in the hands of the pope. In this way, we were able to make a collegial gesture of solidarity to take responsibility – not without sorrow – for the grave things that occurred, and so that the Holy Father could freely decide how to proceed regarding all of us.

The Chilean bishops seem to have thought that the pope wanted their resignations. This turn of events was unthinkable back in January. What happened? Outrage by victims of sexual abuse and by ordinary Catholics exploded in Chile, combined with persistent media coverage of this conflict.

The pope took to heart the vehement reactions to his dismissive comments. He sent two outside investigators to Chile to gather evidence and report back. Then he called the Chilean hierarchy to Rome.

He then laid out the evidence gathered by his investigators in a letter (later leaked to the press) given to the Chilean bishops when they arrived in Rome. The manifest wrongdoing cited by the pope rings true, given similar experiences in other countries: destruction of evidence; transfer of accused priests without concern for the minors who would come under their influence; delaying tactics and superficial or non-existent investigations of complaints received, pressure put upon those carrying out the canonical investigation of alleged crimes; and the placement by bishops and religious superiors of priests suspected of being active homosexuals in seminaries and novitiates.

The investigators, it’s no surprise, discovered this familiar pattern in Chile. The self-reporting to Rome by the Chilean hierarchy in these matters was gravely deficient and even deceptive.

The lesson here is clear: if the Holy See wants to root out the sexual abuse of minors by clergy, and also put an end to the associated cover-ups by senior clergy and bishops, then it must use the same means in other places that it used here. Vatican designated investigators with no ties to the local church under investigation should be sent to gather evidence when complaints of sexual abuse and cover-ups are received.

The self-policing and self-reporting system has been shown to be completely inadequate in the Chilean case. The effectiveness of canonical provisions governing the handling of accusations of sexual abuse of minors by priests depends on the full and vigorous cooperation of the local hierarchy. Absent that co-operation justice is not done. Such co-operation is often absent.

The sad reality is that the exposure of the crime of sexual abuse of minors and the widespread efforts by bishops and religious order superiors to hide the facts from the public was not the result of actions initiated by the Church herself. That exposure came by way of the police, the courts, and the media in various countries.

In the case of Chile, victims of sexual abuse only got a fair hearing in Rome by insisting on the truth of their claims in the face of both episcopal and papal rejection. Pope Francis decided to have another look at the matter and what he discovered is that he had not been given the complete story.

He should also review the record of the various Roman curial departments that were involved in monitoring the situation in Chile for the past thirty years. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found Fr. Karadima guilty in 2011 of the sexual abuse of minors. He was forbidden to exercise priestly ministry and commanded to lead a live of prayer and penance. He is reported to still claim his innocence. Was this enough?

By not removing him from the priesthood and returning him to the lay state, the gravity of his crimes was not sufficiently recognized. As in the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel, who also was not removed from priesthood despite his multiple and grave crimes, a life of prayer and penance becomes the functional equivalent of forced retirement and does not deprive the sexual predator of the state of life that allowed him to have easy access to his victims.

Removal from the priesthood unmistakably rebukes him for the grave offense he has given to Christ and to Christ’s little ones, and also clearly communicates to the whole world that the Church considers him to have completely forfeited his right to exercise the office of the priesthood that he so badly misused.

Roman action on Chile was necessary and purgative. The Church’s mission is to uphold the Gospel. That includes doing all that is possible to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. This is not vengeance. This is justice.

And now is the time to take a similar look at other countries where there remain similar questions about the proper handling of accusations of sexual abuse and cover-ups.

Fr. Gerald E. Murray

Fr. Gerald E. Murray

The Rev. Gerald E. Murray, J.C.D. is a canon lawyer and the pastor of Holy Family Church in New York City.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Pope Francis with the Chilean bishops. © 2018 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Good News: God Didn’t Make This Mess

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Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek writes that God does not make us sin, although He permits us to choose sin. And our sins are the reason for the Incarnation of Christ.

Pope Francis is reported to have told a homosexual, “God made you that way and loves you.” In the last six months, I have responded to the miscarriage of a three-month-old baby, the sudden death of a hospice nurse due to an aneurism, and the terminal diagnosis of a middle-aged husband and father. In these situations, I have continually insisted on God’s love and providence. I have never said God made it happen.

One of the most astonishing features of the Biblical creation account is that the entire cosmos is declared “very good.” This flies in the face of human experience. In fact, the creation myths of many cultures hold that good and evil are inherent elements of human nature and the world order. It is the way things are made.

Genesis corrects this error by revealing that evil is not rooted in creation, but in humanity’s abusive decision to turn away from God, one another, and God’s created order through sin. At the same time, the account of the Fall of Adam and Eve unfolds in the context of God’s continual love and providential care in the face of sin and the evils unleashed by it.

The Scriptures tell the story of God opening a path to salvation that frees us from the effects of personal sin and the evils that befall us so that we might fully share His divine life through nuptial union with Christ. In Jesus, we discover that God foretold this saving union when He created the human race as sexually differentiated persons united in indissoluble marriage. (Mt. 19:56, Gen. 2:24, Is. 62:5, Eph. 5:31-32)

Despite the fallen nature of the human race and the cosmos, therefore, we can still affirm that God created us and loves us. But we cannot simply say, “God made me this way.” If “this way” refers to the image and likeness of the Trinity and the calling to be a member of the body and bride of Christ, then the statement is true. If “this way” refers to the ill-effects of the messed-up world or of our personal sin, then the statement is false.

God loves sinners, the handicapped, the sick, the mentally ill, the imprisoned, the enslaved, the abused, the starving, the doubting, the grieving, the dying, etc. In some cases, these people contributed to their situation, in others they did not. God loves them all, but He has not made them that way.

It can be said truly that God tolerates these situations since, evidently, He chooses not to enter into history to prevent these particular wrongs from happening. The nature of this toleration, however, warrants our careful attention. It is not indifference, acceptance, or welcoming. It is a “bearing with” (Latin: toleratio) or a “suffering with” (Latin: compassio).

The full revelation of God’s compassionate toleration of sin and the effects of evil is found in the passion, death, and glorification of Jesus. Precisely because Jesus loved us with the Father’s love, He carried in his humanity the burden of all the ill that we do and that we bear. In doing so, He made our innocent and culpable sufferings a place of encountering God and his love, that is, a place of conversion, healing, and communion.

God brings about our salvation, our “well-being” (Latin: salus), not by preventing, denying, or eradicating evil at each moment, but by fundamentally altering our relation to it through our union with Christ. He thereby enables us to carry and suffer every form of evil that afflicts us and others without entering into further sin.

This is the Good News we have been sent to live and to proclaim: “God did not make us the way we are and He loves us. That is why He carried the burden of the sins and evils that distort our lives and invites us to carry that burden with him. He wishes to espouse us to himself so that we might share his divine life now and forever. And I love you enough to tell you this.”

Experiencing same-sex attraction, being divorced by a spouse, feeling a compulsion to abuse others, having an addiction, and the myriad of other troubles of body, psyche, and soul that we face as members of the fallen human race are not made better by being declared the handiwork of God. Nor, of course, are they helped by being treated as sins if we have not deliberately willed them or if we have repented of the sin that gave rise to them.

What is helpful, indeed the only thing ultimately able to sustain us, is the truth about our fallen, sometimes sinful, condition and the union that God offers us in Christ. That union requires, as Jesus said, that we take up the Cross daily. We do so by acknowledging our sins, our distorted inclinations, the burden of evil in our lives and the lives of those we love, and by carrying those with Christ who first carried them for us. Because of this union, we can carry these burdens without yielding to sin.

That is the Gospel. It is not something to hide or to evade. We are called to announce it unambiguously to the world. Consequently, when our witness to Jesus is misunderstood we are obliged to take reasonable steps to offer a correction.

Were a priest to be misquoted about the Gospel in the local paper or by a parishioner publicly recounting a private meeting, the priest would need to remedy the error. I have myself faced this situation.

The solution is simple and involves no accusation of deception or violation of confidence. A priest need only say, “The position attributed to me is mistaken. It mischaracterizes (or contradicts) the Gospel of Christ that I profess. I regret any misunderstanding and am happy to clarify the matter.”

To do less would harm those misled by the report. Besides, my brother, a priest, would charitably but firmly insist on it.

Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek

Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek

Fr. Timothy V. Vaverek, STD has been a priest of the Diocese of Austin since 1985 and is currently pastor of parishes in Gatesville and Hamilton. His doctoral studies were in Dogmatics with a focus on Ecclesiology, Apostolic Ministry, Newman, and Ecumenism.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is titled “Go and sin no more.” The Woman Taken in Adultery by Lorenzo Lotto, c. 1528 [Louvre, Paris]. © 2018 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

How many times does the word ‘sword’ appear in the Bible?

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The word sword has a special place in the Holy Bible. Most members of the clergy don’t present sermons on this important symbol to their flocks.

Perhaps it is time to revisit the different uses of the sword in the Old (Hebrew) and New Testament.

Bible Gateway lists a total of 406 passages in the Bible that have the word sword. Of these 373 are in the Old (Hebrew) Testament and 33 in the New Testament. From Genesis to Revelations the sword is used as both a weapon and metaphorically to bring Christians to the truth about God’s grace and his promise of life everlasting. But why the sword?

According to Knights Edge:

The sword was called by many the “Queen of the weapons”. There is a lot of merit in this epithet as the sword, throughout the ages possessed beauty in its many forms and the art with which it has been adorned. It took a lot of skill and sophisticated knowledge to make a sword and also, it took a lot of skill and knowledge to know how to wield the sword efficiently.

For Christians it too takes a lot of skill and knowledge to know how to wield the sword of God efficiently.

Hebrews 4:12 reads:

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

Swords are in the shape of a cross.

Many people link the use of the sword in Christianity to the crusades and the crusaders who wore a cross on their tunics.

Thomas F. Madden, professor of Medieval History and Renaissance Studies as Saint Louis University, is a recognized expert on the Crusades. Professor Madden in his book “The Crusades Controversy: Setting the Record Straight” notes,

“Prior to September 11, 2001, the world was a different place. Then, the Crusades were a faraway concept, an odd series of events in a distant and murky medieval past. Wars of religion seemed largely irrelevant to citizens of a modern secular civilization. That has changed.”

Professor Madden’s expertise in the Crusades brought him into the lime light and lead him to write how we got to this point in time. Professor Madden wrote that Osama Bin Laden,

“never failed to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam, and the Americans themselves as crusaders…The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for example, routinely refers to the United States, Israel, and European nations as ‘crusader states.’ Ironically this perspective is not an uncommon view in the Middle East.”

Are Christian nations “crusader states”?

Professor Madden notes that the Crusades were defensive acts to stop the spread of Islam. He writes, “Pope Urban II called the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war.” Why did they do it? For two reasons:

  1. The first was to redeem [free from oppression] the Christians of the East.
  2. The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ.

Professor Madden writes:

The word crusade is modern. Medieval crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher.

[ … ]

The re-conquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was understood by Christians as an act of restoration and an open declaration of one’s love of God.

[ … ]

In Medieval Europe, Crusades to the East were universally seen as acts of tremendous good. And how could they not? A crusader was one who, at great expense and personal peril, sought to rescue the downtrodden, defend the defenseless, and restore to Christendom what had been violently taken away. A Crusade indulgence, then, was a formal recognition of the penitential component of these actions. Crusaders were sinners. They undertook the Crusade not only to defend their world, but to atone for their sins. By the nature of their profession, warriors put their souls at risk. The Crusade was a means for them to save their souls. And that was no small thing. I the medieval world, where death was always near at hand, the salvation of one’s soul meant everything. It was a matter of constant concern. [Emphasis added]

Of the eight Crusade expeditions that occurred between 1096 and 1291, only the First Crusade was a success.

Is it time for a Ninth Crusade?

In a column titled “PBS Broadcasts Crusade Myths & Falsehoods” Andrew E. Harrod writes:

The Crusades were a Christian reaction to centuries of Islamic jihadist aggression that directly targeted the Catholic Church and [Saint] Francis’ followers. Frank M. Rega, a Secular Franciscan and author of Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims, has noted that an army of 11,000 Muslims sacked Rome itself in 846 and desecrated the tombs of saints Peter and Paul. Rega’s fellow Secular Franciscan Vail noted that Muslims later in 1240 attacked the Franciscan Poor Clare monastery in Assisi, which the order’s founder herself, St. Clare, successfully defended.

Professor Madden reports:

[I]n a speech delivered at Georgetown University a few weeks after 9/11, former President Bill Clinton stated:

“Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it.”

Clinton is correct that the story is still told, but it is neither accurate nor is it a long-held memory of a traumatic event. Indeed, the simple and startling fact is that the Crusades were virtually unknown in the Muslim world even a century ago. The term for the Crusades, harb al-salib, was only introduced into the Arab language in the mid-nineteenth century.

Many people see what is happening with the Muslim migration (hijrah) in Europe as a warning that Western civilization is being invaded once again. This time, however, the invasion is at the behest of the United Nations and with the support of the European Union (EU). While some members of the EU like Poland and Hungary are resisting, the pressure is mounting to allow this new invasion. Unlike previous invasions by Muslim armies, the violence comes after the migrants arrive primarily targeting women and children.

The below video by Dr. William Finley provides in five minutes a timeline of the Islamic Jihad (holy wars) and Christian crusades:

Islamic jihad is evident today in places like Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Many see the turmoil in the Middle East and the migration to Western Europe as a new Jihad. A holy war by other means.

It is time for a Ninth Crusade? We report, you decide.

Revelation 19:21:

The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

RELATED VIDEOS:

Crusades, McGuire, 2016-06-14 from Institute of Catholic Culture on Vimeo.

Crusades, McGuire, 2016-06-21 from Institute of Catholic Culture on Vimeo.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

McGuire, Brendan, Ph.D.

McGuire, Brendan, Ph.D.
(Find more talks from this speaker)

Dr. Brendan McGuire is Professor of History at Christendom College, his alma mater. He received his doctoral degree in medieval history from Saint Louis University, and in recent years he has presented scholarly research on various historical topics at prestigious regional, national, and international conferences. Dr. McGuire is a popular speaker and has been featured in Christendom College’s biennial summer conferences. In the summer of 2015, he spoke on “Historical Scholarship in the Thought of John Henry Newman.” He has taught both history and classical languages at the undergraduate level, and he currently teaches courses on the Ancient Biblical World, Early Modern Europe, Late Antique & Medieval Europe, and the Reconquista and Crusades.

The Pope’s New Clothes

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As a Catholic I have been following the travails of Pope Francis. The phrase “the emperor’s new clothes” came to mind. The phrase is a “label given to any fictional item that viewers have been induced into believing as real.”

Since becoming the Bishop of Rome and Holy See, Pope Francis has worked to turn fiction into Biblical reality.

Every Christian, is commanded to wear the full armor of God. Ephesians 6: 10-18:

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.

The Pope has taken off the full armor of God. The Pope is wearing new clothes.

In April 2014, the BBC reported:

The UN has accused the Vatican of “systematically” adopting policies allowing priests to sexually abuse thousands of children.

Pope Francis has said that dealing with abuse is vital for the Church’s credibility, and that “sanctions” must be imposed against perpetrators.

But the Church has been accused of failing to address some allegations properly.

Pope Francis’ papacy began on March 13, 2013.

When asked about Juan Barros, the bishop of Osornos, Chili, and reported sexual abuses of under-aged children, Pope Francis in January, 2018 said to reporters:

“You, in all good will, tell me that there are victims, but I haven’t seen any, because they haven’t come forward. No one has come forward. They haven’t provided any evidence for a judgment. This is all a bit vague. It’s something that can’t be accepted.” [Emphasis added]

Pope Francis recently met with Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean gay man who was a victim of clerical sexual abuse under Bishop Juan Barros 30 years ago and has become one of Chile’s leading spokesmen for abuse survivors. According to Mr. Cruz Pope Francis said to him,

“You have to be happy with who you are. God made you this way and loves you this way, and the pope loves you this way.” [Emphasis added]

What made Juan Carlos Cruz a homosexual was a Catholic priest, not God.

Pope Francis lied first to the press about the long and ongoing sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Chile and then to Juan Carlos Cruz. Dummies.com writes this about Catholicism and the Ten Commandments:

According to Exodus in the Old Testament, God issued his own set of laws (the Ten Commandments) to Moses on Mount Sinai. In Catholicism, the Ten Commandments are considered divine law because God himself revealed them. And because they were spelled out specifically with no room for ambiguity, they’re also positive law. Hence they’re also known as divine positive law. [Emphasis added]

Divine positive law is the law given by God to man in addition to the natural laws.

Dummies.com goes on to state this about the Eighth Commandment of God’s divine positive law “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”:

The Eighth Commandment condemns lying. Because God is regarded as the author of all truth, the Church believes that humans are obligated to honor the truth. The most obvious way to fulfill this commandment is not to lie — intentionally deceive another by speaking a falsehood. [Emphasis added]

Sadly, Pope Francis lied to not only all Catholics, but to the entire world when he told Cruz that he “should be happy with who you are.”

Twice Pope Francis violated God’s divine positive laws by not telling the truth. Pope Francis took off the belt of truth and with it opened himself and his sheep to “the devils schemes.”

God’s truth is clear. Galatians‬ ‭6:7-8‬ ‭ASV‬‬:

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life.”

God is especially hard on “those who follow their own twisted sexual desire.” If God made Juan Carlos Cruz a sodomite, then the moral boundaries on human sexual desires has been torn asunder by Pope Francis. We are seeing the Pope’s new clothes.

Pope Frances has shed the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace, the helmet of salvation and dropped his shield of faith. The Pope is naked.

RELATED ARTICLES:

FLAT. OUT. WRONG. A fallible, personal opinion.

Can a pope change moral truth?

What the Bible Really Says on Homosexuality in 5 Quotes

AP Exclusive: 2015 letter belies pope’s claim of ignorance

Pope Francis: World Government Must Rule U.S. ‘For Their Own Good’

CRITICS: Pope Losing Credibility in Abuse Cases

UN Poses Danger to Free Speech, Parents’ Rights. Here’s How Trump Administration Can Fight Back.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Pope Francis celebrating the Assumption Day mass in the Castelgandolfo’s central square on August 15, 2013. AFP PHOTO / POOL/ ALESSANDRO BIANCHI.

VIDEO COMMENTARY: Killing Puppies, The Man-eater Wars & Bonus Words of Wisdom

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What if Planned Parenthood Killed Puppies?

The Man-eater Wars

BONUS VIDEO: Man Card Christians

St. Ambrose College’s Segregated Muslim Prayer Room Is A Chilling Reality

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That St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa has opened a sex-segregated prayer room for Muslim students requires an explanation. On the surface, it seems totally bizarre. Why exactly do Muslims want to go to an explicitly Catholic college and why is that now-progressive Catholic college proudly violating normative standards of equal treatment for men and women?

The answer is found in why feminists have turned into crickets on select overt sexism when they howl outrages over only perceived slights against women. Muslims, feminists and most American progressives have a common enemy: America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, which they have been working to dismantle for generations.

This is the only way to make sense of the otherwise head-scratching alliance of religiously antagonistic progressives, feminists and devout Muslims. Their stated beliefs and goals should make them natural foes — and they are in Muslim run countries. But they are not in America. However, if you identify a common enemy, the reason for their alliance comes into focus. It also explains why these groups are so disdainful of American exceptionalism, of America’s heritage and specifically of the founding fathers and the Constitution they produced.

The hrumphing at this proposition will be loud. But it is undeniably a part of today’s Islam around the world. It is pretty easily a part of modern feminism that focuses on the demon of the patriarchy, denies differences in the genders and celebrates whatever the Bible decries. And it is patently manifest in pretty much all of the actions of modern progressives.

Judeo-Christian America is what modern feminism and progressives find to be an archaic, backward, gun-toting, Bible-clinging threat to the march of civilization — as they perceive it. And the Muslim march of civilization is basically all Muslim.

And what this decision by St. Ambrose College shows is that the college makes policy based on being progressive before being Catholic. That, it would seem, is unarguable.

Just listen to the very-pleased-with-himself college senior who designed the prayer room, in conjunction with the Saudi Student Association — because every Catholic college needs to have an association of the women-crushing, hand-cleaving, civil-rights-denying ruling House of Saud.

“It’s uniquely Ambrosian, and it just sort of shows our commitment to all different faiths,” Matt Mahoney said of the sex-segregated worship room he designed. “It is really outstanding.”

What might the early church father St. Ambrose think of this “commitment to all different faiths” — which rather sounds like a commitment to no faiths? Let’s look at who Ambrose was.

“A zealous preacher and valiant defender of the Christian Faith, Saint Ambrose received particular renown as a Church writer. In dogmatic compositions he set forth the Orthodox teaching about the Holy Trinity, the Sacraments, and Repentance,” according to Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Ambrose, defending the unity of the Church, energetically opposed the spread of heresy.” [Emphasis added.]

Ambrose converted many pagans to Christianity, from Germany to Persia (he lived before Mohammed founded Islam) and most famously, he showed a wayward young man named Augustine the way to God through Christ. Ambrose would most certainly have considered Muslims as pagans in need of conversion — not celebration.

It’s safe to say that Ambrose would be aghast at what was being done at a college named after him. And it’s further safe to say that when the young man said the sex-segregated Muslim prayer room is “uniquely Ambrosian” he was not referring to Ambrose the man, but the culture of the progressive college that appears to have turned its back on the legacy of St. Ambrose — and made alliance with those who actively seek to destroy the actual legacy of Ambrose.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

VIDEO: Rape, of body and mind

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“Taharrush,” or “collective harassment,” is an Arab phenomenon that defines an horrific form of rape, both physically and psychologically.

Originating as a weapon against female protestors in Tahrir Square in Egypt, May 2005, it became commonplace by 2012, and it has reached Europe. It takes the form of a group of male aggressors who encircle the female in a public setting and simultaneously grope, molest, beat and rape her, while a second, outer circle of men diverts the attention of strangers.  While they continue to scream Allahu Akbar, the outer ring prevents the victim from being heard or accessed by police, who might also be fewer than required and inadequately armed.

Islamic rape is steeped in hatred and vengeance.  These jihadis have been trained to hate and dehumanize women, and inflict great physical harm on the female, who may be as young as a toddler or as old as Lost Horizon’s Lo-Tsen.  There are also Muslim gangs, criminal organizations that kidnap young girls for sexual slavery, rape and torture.

The vulnerable young preteen girl may be kidnapped near her school or approached by a 17-year-old “Romeo,” the bait.  He plies her with drugs and/or alcohol, emotionally isolating her from her family to lure her where she’ll be simultaneously raped by ten men in a room.  The men’s behavior is mandated by Islam; she is forced into prostitution.  Just as FGM (female genital mutilation) destroys the woman’s sexuality, so these gang rapes completely destroy these girls, an ongoing phenomenon for 25 years in England, yet protected by fearful law-enforcement agencies.

Deceptively identified as Asian, they are devout Muslims who follow sharia law, praying in mosques by day and preying on women by night, reaching extreme intensity in Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.  The Koran decrees, “Women are your fields; go, then, unto your fields when and how you please.” 2:223; “We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, 3:151; and Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.  Deal firmly with them,” 9:123.

In civilized, diverse Germany, where women might expect government protection, Angela Merkel has invited, since 2015, 1.2 million invaders who are responsible for 90 percent of the increased violent crimes.  Two thousand Muslim migrants assaulted 1,200 women on New Year’s Eve 2015/16; few were apprehended and punished.  Accusations of Islamophobia deter the population from redress. With 600,000 able-bodied “asylum seekers” on welfare, and poverty at an all-time high, they are free to indulge in violence.

Although the UK’s voters are distressed about homeland security, PM Theresa May recently announced her favoring trade, and unlimited immigration until the end of 2020, despite a 15 percent increase in rapes, a record-breaking 65,000 child sex-abuse cases registered last year, an average of 177 cases per day.  In nearly 14,000 cases, the victim was under age 10, and 2,788 were age four and under.

Sweden has become the rape capital of the European continent, 95 percent of the rapes committed by “foreign” men.  Political analyst Nicolai Sennels alerts that Sweden is in collapse, under violent Islamic control, destined to endanger all of Scandinavia. The Swedes can no longer shield themselves from their “self-inflicted misery.”

Western multiculturalism facilitates the increase of Muslim rape and violence.  In America, violence is increasing as we lose our survival instinct.  Somalis drove their trucks through a Minnesota neighborhood, broadcasting sounds of women being raped, screams of jihad.  Weeks later a 5-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, was brutally raped. The media withheld the stories. The State of Maine’s democrats support FGM, a precursor to the sharia laws that are encroaching upon our own civilized society. 

A disturbing question emerges.  Where is our survival instinct?  Where are the men, the traditional strong defenders and protectors of women and children?  Our adults of tomorrow are being demoralized by the Left’s disastrous teaching standards, both in America, as Common Core, and in Europe.  If we do not address the crisis, we must prepare for a deteriorating situation.

The assault is confined not to curricula alone, but to altering the children’s psychology.  (Schools are altering the children’s psychology and support system, as I explained in “Good Morning, Little Comrades.”) We find gender-free pronouns encouraged in our schools, enforced by law in Canada.  Today, the excitement of belonging to a masculine group, Boy Scouts, has been officially diminished to accepting girls whose interests and physical prowess differ.  Scouts BSA’s equalization and identity destruction for older children has begun.

Students are overwhelmed with readings deliberately assigned beyond their maturity level.  Phonemes, necessary for reading comprehension, have been discontinued.  Cursive writing, essential for visual recognition, learning of letters, motor skills and creativity, has been withdrawn.  Students cannot tell time on an analog clock and will be unable to read our Founding documents, requiring them to be explained by all-too-obliging politicians.  Math courses have been proven academically inferior to other standards, making eventual college entry more grueling.  History textbooks are revised with socialist and Islamic propaganda and Christians are labeled racist; our Judeo-Christian heritage is under destruction.  A new textbook, “By the People,” by James Fraser, which slams President Trump and his supporters, is planned for use in the upcoming school year.

Our schools are teaching that Americans are evil racists, guilty of historic victimization of all “people of color,” warranting the replacement of white-skinned by darker-skinned people, capitalism by socialism, our Constitution by activism, and our Judeo-Christian morality by sexual freedom and abortion.  Novels of adventure, discovery and heroism have been replaced by depressing dystopian stories, a possible contributing factor to a steadily rising suicide rate for adolescents, doubled for ages 15 to 19 from 2007 to 2015.

These changes particularly affect the psychology of the boys.  From a very early age, they are deprived of their usual interests and toy selections, their book preferences of exploration and valor, their innate eagerness and energy.  This social engineering is designed to alter their sexuality and their identity.  In fact, boys’ testosterone levels and cognitive abilities have been decreasing, their weight and lethargy increasing.

By destroying their masculine get-up-and-go, they are not only less likely to protect the females in the community, but also unlikely to reject and reverse the new social order.  They are being emasculated, learning to eschew confrontation and challenges, to not bite the bullet, but to run from life into the nearest safe space, complete with hot chocolate, or to a Cry Closet, or to a Yale University  emotional-support animal, to further their snowflakery.

The left wants to incapacitate the masculine spirit, its natural assertiveness, its instincts of hunter, breadwinner, and protector, and create, instead, “grown children” who will cower and quaver for the rest of their lives.  And all this has been implemented under the name of equality, that boys and girls be conformed, reduced in intelligence, reasoning and ability – a compliant population subservient to the triumphant regime.  Since rape is taking advantage of somebody’s vulnerability, clearly there is rape of both body and mind – a way of destroying the spirit of both.

“The Feminization of Boys,” by Dr. Leonard Sax, reveals that more boys than girls in America are in special education classes, and more often prescribed with mood-managing drugs. They do not read well, are more likely to drop out of school and shun college, more apt to wind up in prison, and five times more likely than girls to die by suicide.  A February 13, 2018 report discloses that 75 percent of US youths (17-24 years old) are ineligible for military service due to lack of education, criminality, and obesity.

Here, the blame goes to the Obama administration, academia and their supporters.  These students may never hold decent jobs, marry or become responsible parents.  They will live in dread, never venture out, take chances or create anything for the good of mankind. The traumatized will become welfare recipients, mentally unstable, perhaps a danger to society.  Paradoxically, the young in a multicultural society are taught to belong to categories (race, religion, ethnicity).  As a result, they are losing their individual identity to the group’s defining characteristics, and sacrificing the hope of personal merit, achievement, and excellence.  An even greater cost will be the loss of freedom, prosperity, and the historic derring-do of the American character.

The Afterlife

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I suppose the great majority of people who have ever lived have believed in life after death in some form or other.  It may not have been a happy life after death they believed in.  For instance, Christians and others have believed in an absolutely miserable place where many of us (but not all) will be punished for our sins.  Homeric Greeks believed in a dark underworld where almost everybody will go: not a place of punishment but simply a place where the spirits of the dead reside after their earthly lives end.  The shade of Achilles gives Odysseus some idea of the misery of Hades by telling him, “I’d rather be a servant in the house of the poorest man on earth than be a king in the underworld.”

Christians used to believe that some of us (the bad ones) will go to hell while others among us (the good ones) will go to heaven.  But in modern America, as far as I can tell, not many people believe in hell. I often read newspaper obituaries that say something like this: “On Wednesday of this week Mr. John Doe, a longtime resident of this city, went to be with Jesus.”  I never read anything that says, “On Monday of this week Mary Roe, a local woman who was no better than she had to be, went to live with Satan and other evil spirits.”

And those who believe in hell don’t think it is densely populated.  Hitler and Stalin may be there, and perhaps Charles Manson and Attila the Hun.  But not many others.  Americans seem to be mostly universalists.  We find it hard to believe that God, a really nice guy, could be so hard-hearted as to condemn anybody to an eternity of punishment.

I have sometimes thought that if, when I die and approach the seat of judgment, I learn that Hitler and Stalin have gained entry to Paradise thanks to the infinite mercy of God, I will shout “not fair!” and refuse to pass through the heavenly gates.  I like it that God is merciful, but I don’t want him to be that merciful.

In our skeptical age, many people do not believe in life after death.  When you’re dead, they contend, you’re dead. That’s the end of the story.  But how can this be?  How can they dissent from the ancient and almost-universal opinion of their fellow human beings that our souls (or ghosts) live on after bodily death?

One reason they offer to justify their disbelief is that this world, the world of material objects, of atoms and molecules and stars and planets, is the only world there is; and if you’re dead in this one and only world, you no longer exist.  This seems to me a preposterous belief.  Of the billions and billions and billions of possible worlds, why should only one actually exist, the one we happen to live in?  That our universe is the only one, that there are no other universes either material or nonmaterial – can anything be more improbable?

Another reason offered by those who disbelieve in life after death is that such a belief is merely wishful thinking.  We would, of course, like to think that we ourselves live after death, and even more we’d like to think that our friends and family members live after death. And we’d like to think that Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley live after death.  Such wishes are only natural, like the wish to win the lottery.  But they are only wishes.  No more than that.

But wishes often come true.  I have wished to have food to eat, a house to live in, a wife to live with, money in my bank account – and many more things.  And these wishes have come true.  Why shouldn’t my wish for life after death also be realized?

The strongest argument against survival, it seems to me, is that the dead never get in touch with us.  Over the years I myself have lost many persons who were very dear to me: my grandparents, my mother and father, my sister, and some of my very best friends. But not one of them has ever contacted me after death.  Wouldn’t they get in touch with me to assure me that they are okay?  Wouldn’t they from time to time offer me advice and guidance? Wouldn’t they try to push me in the direction of good or hinder me when I was drifting in the direction of evil?

Who can be sure, however, they are not doing this?  Below the level of our conscious minds, we have unconscious minds. And below the level of my personal unconscious there may be (as William James once suggested) an impersonal unconscious.  My dead family and friends may not be “talking” to me at the level of my conscious mind, but why can’t they be “talking” to me at the level of the unconscious mind?

Many other things happen at the level of unconscious mind.  Not just Freudian fears and wishes, but all sorts of creativity – artistic, scientific, mathematical, political, commercial.  I read the other day that Mark Twain, in his belief that a novel would write itself (so to speak), took long intermissions in his writing of Huckleberry Finn.  Finally, his creative unconscious gave birth to a literary classic.

If one’s unconscious mind can write poetry, paint pictures, solve scientific and mathematical puzzles, etc., why can’t it be the place where we receive messages from the great beyond?  For that matter, why can’t God Himself talk to us in our unconscious?

I’m fully aware that this is a dangerous hypothesis.  For madmen and fanatics have often imagined that they hear voices. All the same, the hypothesis may be true.  Perhaps we really do hear voices – including, quite possibly, the voice of God.  At all events, I don’t know how to rule the hypothesis out.  God and other spirits may be closer than we think.

David Carlin

David Carlin

David Carlin is professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of the painting Vanitas (the essentials: life, death, and time) by Philippe de Campaigne, 1671 [Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France]. © 2018 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Though Persecuted, Christians and Patriots are Standing

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I praise God for Wyoming GOP county chair Vicki Kissack having the courage to share my article, “Christians Deceived by the LGBTQ Movement” on her Facebook page. Folks, my article is 100% factually correct; spoken in God’s love.

As might be expected, leftists at the Casper Star-Tribune, distorted the truths in my article to brand Mrs Kissack a hater — hoping that fearful Republicans will run away from her. Please pray that God gives this patriot sister courage to stand and will build a hedge of protection around her and her family. I claim this scripture for Mrs Kissack, “No weapon formed against you shall proper.” Isaiah 54:17

The immediate severe attack on Mrs Kissack for simply sharing my article confirms the bullying and intolerance of LGBTQ enforcers exposed in my article.

A few years ago, I was an executive of a conservative group. LGBTQ activists launched a media assault attempting to brand me and anyone associated with me haters; to bully me into not writing obvious truths. My wonderful wife Mary and I realize God is our financial source. I must freely spread God’s truth. Therefore, I resigned from my position to protect friends and associates from LGBTQ enforcers. God is faithful.

I told my 90 year old preacher dad about the April 23rd international parents’ Sex-Ed protest. Parents are outraged, unable to opt-out their children from LGBTQ lessons which include asphyxiation, BDSM, gender-bending, anal sex and rimming. Dad replied, “Rimming? I don’t even know what that is.” Ponder that folks. LGBTQ bullies have successfully mandated that elementary school kids be taught a dangerous sexual perversion unknown to a 90 year old.

A Texas pre-K teacher sounded-the-alarm that her principal ordered teachers to explain homosexuality to 4-year olds and teach them that “gay love is beautiful“. And yet, LGBTQ activists are trying to brand us haters for seeking to protect our kids’ innocence, while they tyrannically demand that we surrender our children for LGBTQ indoctrination.

My wife alerted me regarding another Christian bridal shop in business for 22 years in Pennsylvania, driven out of business by LGBTQ enforcers. Despite the owners referring a lesbian couple to another bridal shop eager for their business, that was not acceptable to LGBTQ enforcers. Clearly, LGBTQ enforcers’ mission is to force Christians to betray their faith, demanding that they kneel in worship to leftists’ false gods.

The good news is Christians and patriots are standing up for their religious liberty and freedom of speech.

Cathy Miller refused to bake a wedding cake for a same sex couple but offered to sell them a pre-made cake. The lesbian couple, in essence, said screw you and sued Ms Miller. As I stated, this is not about acquiring a cake. LGBTQ enforcers are targeting Christian businesses to force them to affirm their agenda.

Remarkably, a California judge ruled in favor of Ms Miller. Judge Lambe said,

“The State asks this court to compel Miller to use her talents to design and create cake [sic] she has not yet conceived with the knowledge that her work will be displayed in celebration of marital union her religion forbids . . . Such an order would be the stuff of tyranny.”

Amen! 

Demanding total subservience, LGBTQ enforcers sought to fire New Jersey high school teacher and ordained minister Jenye Knox for posting homosexuality is a sin on her personal Facebook page. Ms Knox sued the school district for violating her right to free speech and religious expression. A confidential settlement was made regarding Ms Knox’s tenure. I salute Ms Knox for courageously fighting back. 

A standing room only crowd of 190 showed up at the EWC board meeting to raised their hand to oppose the implementation of transgender policies at Eastern Wyoming College. Wyoming GOP chair Frank Eathorne read his party’s 2017 resolution vs SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity). 

In essence, the GOP resolution explained how SOGI laws attack our freedom rather than the other way around.

Whereas the Party of Abraham Lincoln was created to abolish slavery, recognizing the dignity and equality of every human being under the law; and this same Republican Party continued to lead the fight for the natural rights of our common humanity, against the Jim Crow laws of the southern Democrats; and still stands for the rights of all people regardless of color, culture, ideology, or religion, and

Whereas such equal protection under the law demands protection against personal injury or property loss, but cannot demand affirmation of personal ideas, choices, or behaviors without infringing upon the integrity and property rights of other persons; yet “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” (SOGI) laws obliterate this foundational legal distinction, and

Whereas, laws using undefined and undefinable terms are inherently unjust, depriving persons under the law of any reasonable opportunity to know in advance how the law will be applied to them; and “gender Identity” lacks any definite legal content such that even its proponents are unable either to list every current identity, or rule out the addition of new identities in the future, and

Whereas wherever the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” have been added to anti-discrimination laws, this ill-defined language has enabled unjust prosecution and legal harassment such as…

Life has taught me to always look for the blessing in everything. Samuel Adams said,

” It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.”

While being persecuted, the courage of Christians and patriots standing up for our free speech and religious liberties will ignite a national movement. Therefore, all is well.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by Shutterstock.

Security Camera Video Captures an Archangel?

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Security camera photo image. Photo: Glen Thorman.

Connor Hansson from WPBN/WGTU in East Jordan, Michigan asks,

Do you believe in miracles?

A group of people in East Jordan believe they have come across one.

“I said ‘That’s an angel!’ And I was just blown away,” said Glen Thorman, whose security camera captured the image. “I couldn’t wait to send it to my wife and send it to Deneille. And I said ‘I got an angel, and my camera took a picture of an angel.'”

The above image appears to be an archangel. An Archangel has historically been depicted as having wings and carrying a sword, which is the word of God.

The featured image is of the Archangel Michael. Archangel Michael, also known as St. Michael the Archangel, serves on the first ray of protection, faith and the will of God. The guardian angels serve under Archangel Michael. He is the Prince of the Archangels and of the Angelic Hosts, the Defender of the Faith, the Angel of Deliverance and his divine complement is Archeia Faith. In the Book of Daniel he is called “the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people.” Archangel Michael is the sponsor of police departments and law enforcement agencies around the world.