Month: May 2015
Black Power Earns-Not by Stealing ~ MachoSauce
The Constitution Does Not Allow For Social Programs
Here is Walter William’s article Larry Elder mentions:
Now that we’re about to decide the White House’s next occupant, let’s speculate about how previous presidents might fare were they standing for election in today’s America. What would be the presidential prospects of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, our third and fourth presidents? Here’s my bet: They’d go down in an unprecedented landslide defeat. I could see the likes of a Joseph Stalin or a Mao Zedong winning long before a Jefferson or Madison. Let’s look at it.
In 1792, Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees. James Madison wrote disapprovingly, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” Even though our Constitution hasn’t been amended to authorize Congress to spend on the objects of benevolence, I can’t imagine today’s Americans electing a president who’d share Madison’s view. Such a candidate would be labeled mean-spirited, racist, sexist and homophobic.
Today’s politicians might argue that James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, is all wrong. They’d say spending on the objects of benevolence (legalized theft) is authorized by the Constitution’s “promote the general welfare” clause. James Madison spoke to that argument saying, “With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers [enumerated in the Constitution] connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
Today’s Americans wouldn’t elect Thomas Jefferson either. He’d be labeled an extremist and a gun nut. Jefferson warned, “The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” Today, he’d be referring to the White House, Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and federal regulatory agencies. Because of elite proclivities, Thomas Jefferson urged, “No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” Jefferson wasn’t referring to just any old government; he was referring to the U.S. federal government.
Franklin Pierce, our 14th president, took actions that would be political suicide today. In 1854, he vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill saying, “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity,” adding that to approve such spending, “would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”
In 1887, President Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president, said when vetoing an appropriation to help drought-stricken counties in Texas, “I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds . . . I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.”
Today’s politicians can’t be held fully responsible for our growing constitutional contempt. We might blame them for not being statesmen. The lion’s share of the blame rests with 270 million Americans. Our elected officials simply mirror our contempt for constitutional principles and our desire to live at the expense of our fellow American. It’s unreasonable to expect a congressman, or a president to live up to his oath of office, to protect, defend and bear true allegiance to the Constitution, if doing that means political suicide.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Forgotten Warning to America (Updated)
“I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust and prevent those wise persons who are attempting to establish even finer degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality – some because of their distorted outlook, others because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest – from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat – one which has never been seen before in the history of the world.” ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
…found in Larry Elder’s book, Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies and the Special Interests That Divide America (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 64.
(Book 1)
BigGovernment has this article (GONE! Now found at found at Virtue Online) to which I will only post a small portion of here. It is nice to see this level of deep thought over there!
The fact that moral relativism, multiculturalism, and political correctness are failures hasn’t prevented us from adopting these self-destructive concepts as the basis upon which we interact with others, at home and abroad. The failure to prevent the jihad treason murders at Fort Hood is perhaps the most obscene and obvious culmination of the damage that moral relativism has done to us all.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines moral relativism as something that one accuses another of, rather than something to which one proudly admits. Reasonable people know that some cultures, ideologies, and political systems are better than others, but most now lack the courage and clarity to declare it.
Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes ‘Moral Relativism’ is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them.
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 “A World Split Apart” speech at Harvard was both an appreciation of and a warning to the West that rejection of definitive truths will lead to our decline and eventual fall. He identified the abandonment of the concept of evil and the rise of “humanism” that today is moral relativism and post-modernism as the cracked egg from which failed cultures are born.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected.
(Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” 1978)
Without a firm concept of identity and a clear understanding of and belief in concepts of right and wrong, good and evil and the ability to resolve similar dichotomies our society will fall to more absolutist ideas. We will fall because we lack the moral willpower to resist.
And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal…
[…..]
It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth; so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding.
A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.
(Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” 1978)
“I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality…. We will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence — imperious, relentless and cruel.”
Hitler, from a plaque hung on the wall at Auschwitz; in Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God (Nashville, TN: W Publising Group, 1994), 23.
Media’s Predictions About U.K. Election Woefully Wrong
“Poverty, Despair, and Big Government” ~ Larry Elder
In the above audio, Larry Elder reads from the below article via National Review entitled: “Poverty, Despair, and Big Government“
…For example, Maryland has one of the most generous welfare systems in the nation. A mother with two children participating in seven common welfare programs — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, housing assistance, Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), energy assistance (LIHEAP), and free commodities — could receive benefits worth more than $35,000. Yet, nearly a quarter of the people in Baltimore still live in poverty. In 1960, Baltimore’s poverty rate was just 10 percent. While some of the increase since then is a result of demographic and other structural changes, we’ve clearly been throwing a lot of money at poverty in the city without much result.
And while Baltimore’s high welfare benefits haven’t reduced poverty, they may well have exacerbated other social problems. For example, some studies have long shown that high welfare benefits correlate with high out-of-wedlock birth rates. It should not come as a surprise, then, that two-thirds of births in the city are to unmarried mothers, and almost 60 percent of Baltimore households are headed by single parents.
The unemployment rate in Baltimore in February was 8.4 percent, compared with just 5.5 percent nationally. In the Sandtown–Winchester/Harlem Park area, which is near the center of the unrest, more than half of the people did not have jobs, according to a February 2015 report from the Justice Policy Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative.
- RELATED: The Left’s Burning Cities
One reason for this is the city’s — and the state’s — unremitting hostility to business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that only seven states and the District of Columbia have a worse business climate than Maryland. The state’s tax burden is huge and growing. According to the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index, Maryland ranks a dismal 40th in terms of business taxes, and an even worse 45th in terms of personal-income taxes. According to this report, Maryland is one of just a few states where the personal-income tax creates “an unnecessary drag on economic activity.” The state’s small businesses face the nation’s seventh-highest marginal tax rates.
As if that were not bad enough, the city of Baltimore adds one of the highest property taxes among comparable cities. Despite a recent modest reduction in property-tax rates, Baltimore still has a tax rate more than twice the rate of most of the rest of the state. A recent study by the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy ranked Baltimore twelfth out of 53 major cities in terms of high property taxes. When the city taxes are combined with state taxes, Baltimore ends up with the ninth worst tax burden out of 50 major American cities.
[….]
The city’s schools represent another failure of government. Teachers’ unions are among the most powerful special interests in Maryland. To cite just one example, even as other states were enacting right-to-work laws for public employees, Maryland passed a law mandating that all teachers pay fees to the Maryland State Education Association.
Although Baltimore ranks fourth among major cities in per-pupil expenditures for districts with more than 40,000 students and spends $16,578 a year per pupil — roughly 52 percent above the national average — more than a quarter of Baltimore students fail to graduate from high school. Fewer than half of Baltimore high-school students passed the last Maryland High School Assessment test. SAT scores for Baltimore students are more than 100 points below the national average.
Yet Maryland has one of the nation’s most restrictive charter-school laws. There are just 52 charter schools statewide. In neighboring Washington, D.C., 44 percent of the city’s public-school students are educated in the District’s 112 charter schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Even within the public schools, choice is extremely limited in Maryland; parents are not generally allowed to send their children to schools outside their assigned district. Needless to say, any larger efforts to give parents more control over their children’s schooling — such as vouchers or tax credits — have gone nowhere.
Dennis Prager Interviews a Political “Thug” ~ Larry Elder
Larry Elder was interviewed by Dennis Prager and the discussion went — naturally — to Baltimore and the foundational issues. It is NOT black and white, but left v. right.
As only Larry can, he dismantles the Left’s racial rhetoric… quote-by-quote.
For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/
For more clear thinking like this from Larry Elder… I invite you to visit: http://www.larryelder.com/ ~AND~ http://www.elderstatement.com/
MachoSauce Slams a Meme in 4-Parts ~ Crazy Democrats Refuted
This is a h/t from 4 Times a Year’s Twitter:
This is a unifying of four-parts via “MachoSauce, AKA, Zonation,” for a “one-viewing consumption.”
The Word-Faith Movement Discussed by Robert M. Bowman, Jr.
This is via THE WORD on The Word of Faith (a GroupBlog)
This is the description by The Mind Renewed under the video [to be clear, I do not recommend as a whole, “The Mind ‘Renewed,'” as their views of conspiracies and history enslave good thinking.]:
We are joined by Robert M. Bowman Jnr., Executive Director of the Institute for Religious Research, for an in-depth interview on the history and teachings of the Word-Faith (or Word of Faith) Movement within Christianity. Born out of the “faith-cure” teachings of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries, and developed and popularised in recent decades by flamboyant evangelists and preachers like Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, Word-Faith teaching now reaches the homes of millions through TV broadcasts around the globe. Promising health and wealth in the name of Christ, and assuring its followers that they have delegated spiritual power from God literally to speak miracles into their own lives, this unbiblical distortion of Christianity sets unrealistic expectations, and often leads to disappointment, and sometimes even to rejection of Christ.
California Dreamin’ of a Bygone Eras ~ Droughts vs. Politics (UPDATE)
Don’t forget: drought, fires, and wild weather were blamed on global cooling.
THANKFULLY we got out of global cooling so we don’t have to worry about droughts, fires, or wild weather any longer ~ WHEW! That was a close call.
(Real Science, also see, RPT)
Here are excerpts from Kotkin’s article that Prager is reading from in the above audio (video):
The Big Idea: California Is So Over: California’s drought and how it’s handled show just what kind of place the Golden State is becoming: feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior.
….But since the 1970s, California’s water system has become the prisoner of politics and posturing. The great aqueducts connecting the population centers with the great Sierra snowpack are all products of an earlier era—the Los Angeles aqueduct (1913), Hetch-Hetchy (1923), the Central Valley Project (1937), and the California Aqueduct (1974). The primary opposition to expansion has been the green left, which rejects water storage projects as irrelevant.
Yet at the same time greens and their allies in academia and the mainstream pressare those most likely to see the current drought as part of a climate change-induced reduction in snowpack. That many scientists disagree with this assessment is almost beside the point. Whether climate change will make things better or worse is certainly an important concern, but California was going to have problems meeting its water needs under any circumstances.
It’s not like we haven’t been around this particular block before. In the 1860s, a severe drought all but destroyed LA’s once-flourishing cattle industry. This drought was followed by torrential rains that caused their own havoc. The state has suffered three major droughts since I have lived here—in the mid ’70s, the mid ’80s and again today—but long ago (even before I got there) some real whoppers occurred, including dry periods that lasted upwards of 200 years.
[….]
But ultimately the responsibility for California’s future lies with our political leadership, who need to develop the kind of typically bold approaches past generations have embraced. One step would be building new storage capacity, which Governor Jerry Brown, after opposing it for years, has begun to admit is necessary. Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere. This piece of infrastructure is so irrelevant to the state’s needs that even many progressives, such as Mother Jones’ KevinDrum, consider it a “ridiculous” waste of money.
[….]
This fundamentally hypocritical regime remains in place because it works—for the powerful and well-placed. Less understandable is why many Hispanic politicians, such as Assembly Speaker Kevin de Leon, also prioritize “climate change” as his leading issue, without thinking much about how these policies might worsen the massive poverty in his de-industrializing L.A. district—until you realize that de Leon is bankrolled by Tom Steyer and others from the green uberclass.
So, in the end, we are producing a California that is the polar opposite of Pat Brown’s creation. True, it has some virtues: greener, cleaner, and more “progressive” on social issues. But it’s also becoming increasingly feudal, defined by a super-affluent coastal class and an increasingly impoverished interior. As water prices rise, and farms and lawns are abandoned, there’s little thought about how to create a better future for the bulk of Californians. Like medieval peasants, millions of Californians have been force to submit to the theology of our elected high priest and his acolytes, leaving behind any aspirations that the Golden State can work for them too.
(CBS) …The Sorek plant produces more than 165 million gallons of fresh water and accounts for more than 20 percent of Israel’s water consumption, according to Udi Tirosh, a director at IDE.
Factoring in several other desalination plants, an astonishing 50 percent of the country’s drinking water now comes directly from the ocean – an amount capable of supplying the entire city of Los Angeles.
Plant officials also say it offers some of the world’s cheapest desalinated water because of new technology and a series of engineering improvements that have cut down the massive energy normally required to transform seawater into fresh water.
Fountains that were once forced to dry up now are flowing again….
Another MUST READ excerpt by a really well written article is this one by Victor Davis Hanson:
Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.
All the while, the Green activists remained blissfully unconcerned about the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico that would help double the state’s population in just four decades, to 40 million. Had population growth remained static, perhaps California could have lived with partially finished water projects. The state might also have been able to restore the flow of scenic rivers from the mountains to the sea, maintained a robust agribusiness sector, and even survived a four-or-five-year drought. But if California continues to block new construction of the State Water Project as well as additions to local and federal water-storage infrastructure, officials must halve California’s population, or shut down the 5 million acres of irrigated crops on the Central Valley’s west side, or cut back municipal water usage in a way never before done in the United States.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Scorching of California: How Green Extremists Made a Bad Drought Worse,” The City Journal, Winter 2015 (Vol 25, No. 1), 82.
Global Cooling Flashbacks! Including Leonard Nimoy
This is ALL Real Science, I recommend you make his site a regular, here is what he posts:
In 1976, climatologists said that that global cooling caused drought and fires in California, and produced catastrophic erratic weather globally.
Climate Depot as well has a Flashback…
the United Nations in 2015, is once again issuing tipping point deadlines by which humanity must act in order to combat man-made global warming.
- Former UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan: ‘We must challenge climate skeptics who deny the facts’ – Warns of ‘tipping point’ – Touts carbon taxes – ‘World is reaching the tipping point beyond which climate change may become irreversible.’
May 2015 is also the deadline for another 2007 UN climate tipping point. 
- 8 year tipping point expires May 4! Flashback 2007: ‘There could be as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more’
But as far back as 1989, the UN was issuing ‘tipping points’ that have now long since expired. The UN claimed in 1989 that the world had to act to solve global warming by the year 2000 — or else!
As early as 1989, the UN was already trying to sell their “tipping point” rhetoric on the public. See: U.N. Warning of 10-Year ‘Climate Tipping Point’ Began in 1989 – Excerpt: According to July 5, 1989, article in the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming….
Highest Ranking Cold War Defector On Origins of Liberation Theology
Revolutionary Religion: Liberation Theology and the Struggle for Socialism
One must keep in mind that I left a church of twelve years partially for this reason… a mixing of “‘postmodern’ cultural Marxism” in the pastors influence on young minds. And Obama went to a church that was influenced by Liberation Theology in their own “Black Liberation Theology” program…. besides from being anti-white and anti-Semetic. Jimmy Carter as well has fallen into this error.
“We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.” ~ Then, Sen. Obama (2007)
Here is Breitbart’s story on the subject that will renew some interest in the subject for myself and for other friends I know.
Highest Ranking Cold War Defector: The KGB Invented “Liberation Theology”
In a startling new interview, a 3-star general and former head of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978, claims that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the continent.
Ion Mihai Pacepa has been called “the Cold War’s most important defector,” and after his defection, the Romanian government under Nicolae Ceausescu placed two death sentences and a $2 million bounty on his head. During the more than ten years that Pacepa worked with the CIA, he made what the agency described as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”
He is reported in fact to have given the CIA “the best intelligence ever obtained on communist intelligence networks and internal security services.”
“Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians,” Pacepa said in a recent article. In his role as doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called liberation theology a “singular heresy” and a “fundamental threat” to the Church…..
[…..]
According to the General, during those years, the KGB had a penchant for “liberation” movements, and a Theology of Liberation fit right in.
The National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), created by the KGB with help from Fidel Castro; the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB with help from “Che” Guevara; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), created by the KGB with help from Yasser Arafat are just a few additional “liberation” movements born at the Lubyanka — the headquarters of the KGB.
Pacepa said that Liberation Theology was born of a 1960s top-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies.
The program mandated that “the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool,” Pacepa said.
The Soviets were aware that the WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, he said, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.
According to Pacepa the KGB followed a step-by-step procedure to bring Liberation Theology to Latin America, starting with the establishment of an intermediate international religious organization called the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), headquartered in Prague. Its main task “was to bring the KGB-created Liberation Theology into the real world,” he said.
“The new Christian Peace Conference was managed by the KGB and was subordinated to the venerable World Peace Council, another KGB creation, founded in 1949 and by then also headquartered in Prague,” he said.
In his work with the Soviet bloc intelligence community, Pacepa managed the Romanian operations of the World Peace Council (WPC).
“Most of the WPC’s employees were undercover Soviet bloc intelligence officers. The WPC’s two publications in French, Nouvelles perspectives and Courier de la paix, were also managed by undercover KGB – and Romanian DIE – intelligence officers,” he said.
Pacepa said that in 1968 “the KGB-created Christian Peace Conference, supported by the world-wide World Peace Council, was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia.”
Though the Conference’s official task was to seek solutions to poverty, its “undeclared goal” was “to recognize a new religious movement encouraging the poor to rebel against the ‘institutionalized violence of poverty,’ and to recommend the new movement to the World Council of Churches for official approval,” he said.
“The Medellin Conference achieved both goals. It also bought the KGB-born name ‘Liberation Theology,’” he said.
Here is a prelude to Obama’s liberation theological influences when I was in seminary:
Implications of Liberal Theology
The correlation/anthropological method have inherent in its premise a restricting aspect in its application to the Christians life. If the theologian starts with man and works his way to God, the Bible and its saving message is viewed through cultural mores and biases. Man can impose then on God, but God cannot impose upon man because one’s culture cannot critique one’s culture. If however the theologian starts with God and works his way towards man, then the saving message of the Bible can confront man and his culture, rather than man’s culture determining God’s message: “…by allowing the culture to specify the questions, one has already determined the kind of answers that the revelation is permitted to give, and that one has also to consider the critical questions that the revelation raises for the culture” (Gentz 1986, p. 228).
Liberation Theology
Liberation theology has been thrust into the limelight again – at least for the armchair theologian – by Barak Obama, a possible Democratic nominee for President. Mr. Obama’s pastor is an ardent follower of Liberation Theology. Originally it was more Catholic based and in Latin America but has since infected many seminaries in the U.S. and Europe. It teaches that “Christ’s message pertained not only to salvation of the soul, but also to political salvation here on earth through the establishment of Christian socialism” (Frohnen 2006, p. 502). An excerpt from Obama’s church’s website will elucidate somewhat the theological prose involved in “political salvation:”
This wouldn’t be the first time the Soviets (or any totalitarian group) tried to control the reigns of religion. For instance I note in the first chapter of my book the following:
One early attempt by the Bolshevik Revolution to take over the spiritual was through the Renovated Church (also known as the Living Church Movement[10]) which was meant to reinterpret the teachings of Christ and the Apostles towards a Soviet end. During one of the short-lived attempts here by the Soviets we find this official “statement of faith:”
(a) The Soviet power does not appear as a persecutor of the Church.
(b) The Constitution of the Soviet state provides full religious liberty.
(c) Church people must not see in the Soviet state a power of the anti-Christ.
(d) The Soviet power is the only one which tempts by state methods to realize the ideals of the Kingdom of God.
(e) Capitalism is the “great lie” and a “mortal sin.”
(f) The Soviet government is the world leader toward fraternity, equality, and international peace.[11]
[10] A great short history of this movement can be found at the online here: Edward E Roslof, “Living Church Movement,” Encyclopedia of Russian History, The Gale Group Inc. 2004. Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3404100764.html (last accessed, 8-7-09)
[11] Edgar C. Bundy, How the Communists Use Religion (Wheaton, IL: Church League of America, 1966), 12.
- (I will put this caveat here; however, it applies to the whole: I will quote authors with whom I do not necessarily agree with. I often quote authors that are: atheists, pagans, fellow Christians, politicos, homosexuals, evolutionists, and the like… merely because I quote an author, this quotation does not mean that I support their work as a whole.)
And here is a quote from a pamphlet dealing with a bit of this history in the failed “social justice system” entwined in this Marxist (non-Gospel) theology:
As Dr. Carl F. H. Henry pointed out: “The Chicago evangelicals, while seeking to overcome the polarization of concern in terms of personal evangelism or social ethics, also transcended the neo-Protestant nullification of the Great Commission.” “The Chicago Declaration did not leap from a vision of social utopia to legislation specifics, but concentrated first on biblical priorities for social change.” “The Chicago evangelicals did not ignore transcendent aspects of God’s Kingdom, nor did they turn the recognition of these elements into a rationalization of a theology of revolutionary violence or of pacifistic neutrality in the face of blatant militarist aggression.” (Cf. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, “Evangelical Social Concern” Christianity Today, March 1, 1974.) The evangelical social concern is transcendental not merely horizontal.
We must make it clear that the true revolutionaries are different from the frauds who “deal only with surface phenomena. They seek to remove a deep-seated tumor from society by applying a plaster to the surface. The world’s deepest need today is not something that merely dulls the pain, but something that goes deep in order to change the basic unity of society, man himself. Only when men individually have experienced a change and reorientation, can society be redirected in the way it should go. This we cannot accomplish by either violence or legislation” (cf. Reid: op. cit.). Social actions, without a vertical and transcendental relation with God only create horizontal anxieties and perplexities!
Furthermore, the social activists are in fact ignorant of the social issues, they are not experts in the social sciences. They simply demand an immediate change or destruction of the social structures, but provide no blueprint of the new society whatsoever! They can be likened to the fool, as a Chinese story tells, who tried to help the plant grow faster by pulling it higher. Of course such “action” only caused the plant to wither and die. This is exactly what the social radicals are doing now! And the W.C.C. is supporting such a tragic course!
We must challenge them [secular social activists] to discern the difference between the true repentance and “social repentance.” The Bible says: “For the godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret; but worldly grief produces death” (II Cor. 7:10). This was the bitter experiences of many former Russian Marxists, who, after their conversion to Christ came to understand that they had only a sort of “social repentance”—a sense of guilt before the peasant and the proletariat, but not before God. They admitted that “A Russian (Marxist) intellectual as an individual is often a mild and loving creature, but his creed (Marxism) constrains him to hate” (cf. Nicolas Zernov: The Russian Religious Renaissance). “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one…. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:10,23). A complete change of a society must come from man himself, for basically man is at enmity with God. All humanistic social, economic and political systems are but “cut flowers,” as Dr. Trueblood put it, even the best are only dim reflections of the Glory of the Kingdom of God. As Benjamin Franklin in his famous address to the Constitutional Convention, said, “Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.” Without reconciliation with God, there is no reconciliation with man. Social action is not evangelism; political liberation is not salvation. While we shall by all means have deep concern on social issues; nevertheless, social activism shall never be a substitution for the Gospel.
Lit-sen Chang, The True Gospel vs. Social Activism, (booklet. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co: 1976), 9.