Gay Christians?

  • and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Galatians 2:20)

Luther Comments:

“Yet not I.” That is to say, not in mine own person, nor in mine own substance. Here he plainly showeth by what means he liveth; and he teacheth what true Christian righteousness is, namely, that righteousness whereby Christ liveth in us, and not that which is in our own person. And here Christ and my conscience must become one body, so that nothing remain in my sight but Christ crucified, and raised from the dead. But if I behold myself only, and set Christ aside, I am gone. For Christ being lost, there is no counsel nor succour, but certain desperation and destruction must follow.

The following story starts will quote first BREITBART, following it will be a portion of an article (and audio) from an NPR PIECE.

(BREITBART) National Public Radio aired a remarkable interview on Sunday’s Weekend Edition with Allan Edwards, a Presbyterian pastor who is gay, yet lives a heterosexual life. Torn between his sexuality and his faith, he chose his faith–without trying to “convert” his attraction to men, and without trying to change his religion to fit his personal preferences. The conversation between NPR’s Weekend Edition and Edwards–and his wife–sheds light on an often overlooked constituency in the debate over gay marriage.

Edwards explains that he began to realize he was attracted to men during his teenage years, at the same time he was active in his church youth movement. He realized immediately that there was a conflict between his sexuality and his faith, and tried to find a justification in the Bible for living a gay life as a Christian. He could not, he says–and so he chose to live a heterosexual life, in accordance with the teachings of his church. He does not deny his gay sexuality, but does not act on those feelings, he says.

In that way, Edwards says, he is no different than anyone else. Everyone, he says, experiences some kinds of forbidden desire, or a sense of discontentment with their lives, and they have to adjust their behavior to their values and goals. He and his wife have a sexual relationship, despite his attraction to men, and they are expecting their first child. He is reluctant to judge others, but when pressed by Montaigne, says that he believes those who try to adjust Christianity to accept same-sex marriage are “in error.”

He acknowledges that others might call his lifestyle one of suppression–one that is doomed to divorce or suicide. He disagrees, and says that his relationship with God comes before other parts of his identity, including his sexuality….

…read more…

How did this young man come to find his identity within the Christian faith? Simple, if Jesus is who He claims to be, then he [pastor Edwards… and we/us] should believe what Jesus believes. Simple:

(NPR)

Allan Edwards is the pastor of Kiski Valley Presbyterian Church in western Pennsylvania, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. He’s attracted to men, but considers acting on that attraction a sin. Accordingly, Edwards has chosen not to act on it.

“I think we all have part of our desires that we choose not to act on, right?” he says. “So for me, it’s not just that the religion was important to me, but communion with a God who loves me, who accepts me right where I am.”

Where he is now is married. He and his wife, Leanne Edwards, are joyfully expecting a baby in July.

[….]

He didn’t understand how he could resolve his feelings, he says, and had little support from his friends. “I didn’t know anyone else who experienced same-sex attractions, so I didn’t talk about it much at all,” Allan says.

But at a small, Christian liberal arts college, he did start talking.

“My expectation was, if I started talking to other guys about this, I’m going to get ostracized and lambasted,” Allan says. “I actually had the exact opposite experience … I actually was received with a lot of love, grace, charity: some confusion, but openness to dialogue.”

Allan considered following a Christian denomination that accepts gay relationships, but his interpretation of the Bible wouldn’t allow it, he says.

“I studied different methods of reading the scripture and it all came down to this: Jesus accepts the rest of the scripture as divined from God,” he says. “So if Jesus is who he says he is, then we kind of have to believe what he believes.”

…read more…

In other words, Christ’s claims and later His backing his claim with the Resurrection should make any one WANT to thank his/her creator by worshiping Him in obedience for the work done for each of us on Calvary. Pastor Edwards is building riches in his heavenly home in his obedience.

Wesley Hill, who is a scholar of New Testament studies and happens to be an openly gay Christian. He says the Bible makes it clear that marriage is between one man and one woman. And so, subjects himself to the will of the Lamb… not subjecting the Lamb to his will:

Now… I would be remiss to note as well that there are many people who once were gay, but through Christ’s redeeming power they no longer identify as homosexual. There is a play list of some testimony in this regard at Theology, Philosophy and Science’s YouTube Channel: Ex-Gay People.

The above testimonies and viewpoints add to a previous upload of mine a while back with three church leaders talking about this same-sex attraction but duty to God ~ and it is this duty to God that gives a new identity (a “new man” if you will):

The three men in the above interview (see below) have a powerful testimony to God working in their lives. They take Scripture serious and share their struggles openly and honestly in this interview by Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio for his show, “Unbelievable” (http://tinyurl.com/d2sgjrz). This interview and some other recent insights via Stand to Reason and Girls Just Wanna Have Guns, has me evolving and honing my apologetic on this more and more (See #4 of my cumulative case: http://tinyurl.com/acqhcfv).

▼ Sean Doherty is associate minister at St Francis, Dalgarno Way in London and teaches theology at St Mellitus College;
▼ Sam Allberry is associate minister at St Mary’s Church, Maidenhead;
▼ Ed Shaw is part of the leadership of Emmanuel Church, Bristol.

This is the larger interview of which I isolated Sean Doherty’s portion here.

And Savi Hensman of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and Anglican blogger Peter Ould debate the issues in the interview.

Here I am adding a video by First Things, and it is a short talk about a woman who is gay but has chosen to live towards truth. While I am not a Catholic, I am an admirer of people who sacrifice for the faith:

Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith
— from First Things on Vimeo

Eve Tushnet is a lesbian and celibate Catholic freelance writer. She studied philosophy at Yale University, where she was received into the Catholic Church in 1998. She writes from D.C., and has been published in (among others) Commonweal, First Things, The National Catholic Register, National Review, and The Washington Blade. Eve blogs at Patheos.com.

And one of the most important presentations delineating the issue of “can a Christian be a homosexual?” is by Dr. William Lane Craig (see also his article, “Christian Homosexuals?” & “A Christian Perspective on Homosexuality“). His other noteworthy videos are these:

Another pastor who grew up in the mix of the LGBT culture… and his in-depth knowledge of what is often “Messy Grace” in a fallen world.

A Response To “Mr. Atheist”

Mr. Atheist thinks these are verses Christians would rather skip. Some probably would, but in this episode, we walk through them and explain why context is key. Mr. Atheist seems unfamiliar with the ancient near-eastern contexts and languages that inform the proper translations and understandings of several passages on his list. (Also, The Bible On Slavery: Part One | Part Two)

 

AEI’s Christina Sommers Visits Real Time w/Bill Maher

“The Factual Feminist” host Christina Hoff Sommers joins Bill Maher to discuss the state of modern feminism.

The two spend most of the time pointing out and ridiculing the absurdity of leftist victim culture. The greatest example Sommers provides of just how broken and nonsensical the Left has become is when she details how she is now treated when she speaks on college campuses, where she not only needs security, but the universities set up “safe rooms” for the poor dears who are subjected to some opinions differing from their own.

Maher’s language gets salty a couple of times near the end, but most of the video clean. For those unfamiliar with Sommers, she’s always worth listening to….

(PJ-MEDIA)

Google Censored Search Content in Orange County

GATEWAY PUNDIT has some great links in their set-up of the video:

In a previous appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight Dr. Epstein revealed that Google can take a 50-50 split among undecided voters and change it into a 90-10 split with no one knowing they had been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail… It has to do with their search suggestions.

Far left Google has a history now of election interference.

In June James O’Keefe and Project Veritas  released alarming new undercover video, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider revealing the tech giant’s plans to meddle in US politics and “prevent a Trump situation in 2020.”

The tech giants already pulled this off in 2018.

In January Dr. Epstein revealed that just one Google shift in search results on Election Day in 2018 shifted from 800,000 to 4.6 million votes to Democratic candidates

FULL video interview HERE.

The Main Reason To Vote For Trump (UPDATED!)

I mean besides smaller government, religious freedom, pro-life advancement, his support of our police and military, his wanting a protected border, proper immigration, foreign policy positions, his judgeship choices, etc, etcbut mainly because he isn’t anti-burgers:

Here is another example that I really like… besides this:

  • By the time Trump got to the White House, there were 103 judicial vacancies in the federal courts. Since his inauguration, Republicans led by McConnell have pushed through an astonishing 144 judicial appointments, including 99 district court judges and 43 appellate court judges. TRUMP HAS NOW APPOINTED NEARLY ONE OF EVERY FOUR FEDERAL CIRCUIT COURT JUDGES AND 15 PERCENT OF ALL DISTRICT COURT JUDGES. In 2019 alone, the Senate has confirmed 13 of Trump’s nominees for the circuit court and 46 district court picks. (SALON)

This is GREAT NEWS for the normal guy who loves liberty:

The Trump administration is turning out the lights on Obama-era rules that set onerous energy-use requirements for some of the most commonly used lightbulbs.

the Energy Department will repeal a regulation enacted under President Barack Obama, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, requiring an expanded number of lightbulbs in the U.S. to be in compliance with stricter energy efficiency standards. That regulation change was spun off of a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush that aimed to gradually phase out energy inefficient bulbs like incandescent and halogen bulbs.

The regulation that’s being eliminated would have redefined four categories of incandescent and halogen bulbs so that they would be subject to existing energy efficiency rules from which they were previously exempt. It would have applied to about half of the 6 billion lightbulbs used in the U.S., experts have said.

The Trump administration said that the Obama rule is a misreading of the 2007 law.

The standards had been scheduled to take effect in January 2020 and applied to roughly half of the 6 billion lightbulbs in use. The Trump administration’s new rules will likely be challenged by environmental groups.

[….]

As Nicolas Loris, an economist who focuses on energy notes, no regulations are needed if energy-efficient bulbs are superior in cost and function.

There’s no mandate forcing families or businesses to use inefficient lighting. Consumers can voluntarily replace inefficient bulbs with more efficient ones if they so choose.

The practices of being resourceful and saving money are intuitive, which means that the economy does not need mandates or rebate programs to nudge families into making decisions the government thinks are best for consumers.

In fact, many families and businesses are switching over to LED bulbs because of the cost savings.

According to the National Manufacturing Electric Association, “The general service LED bulb now accounts for approximately 70 percent of the shipments in the general service lamp category.

“Because of their longer life, it is estimated that by the end of 2019, 80-84 percent of the general service lamp sockets will be occupied by LED and [compact fluorescent lamps], while the halogen incandescent bulb is estimated to be in 16-20 percent of these sockets,” the industry association says.

Clearly, the Trump administration trusts consumers to make the smart choice. And, in an era where energy production is going up and emissions are going down, its trust is well place.

The lightbulb rule rollback creates a clear contrast to the Democratic Party. As a reminder, seven hours of draconian climate crisis proposals included 3rd-world abortions, meat taxes, and a gutting of our energy industry.

The “Lifestyle NAZIS” Want Your Vote in 2020

  • ‘He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,’ Woelk said of the Nazi leader. (DAILY MAIL)

As you read the following, keep in mind both this post detailing the size of government to do everything the 2020 Democrats want to do, which includes even our diet. Walter Williams called these people LIFESTYLE NAZI’S a long time ago

Lifestyle Nazis Update (02/16/2000)

Without any real evidence, Mrs. Obama has claimed that poor Americans are trapped in what she calls “food deserts,” where they must apparently trudge for miles outside of their dismal neighborhoods to buy a piece of fruit or some celery sticks. According to Mrs. Obama, a food desert is an inner city without a grocery store. She envisioned spending millions of federal dollars to plant grocery stores in those blighted areas so the “poor” won’t have to buy food at mini-marts.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan actually attended Al Sharpton’s National Action Network annual convention in April 2012. There he told an absurd story about how Barack Obama, who attended Harvard University, knows what “it’s like to take a subway or a bus just to find a fresh piece of fruit in a grocery store.” No fruit at Harvard?

The story may be ridiculous, but Michelle Obama was dead serious about extorting $400 million from American taxpayers to solve the nonexistent problem of food deserts.

In reality there are no such things as food deserts. Researcher Roland Sturm at the Rand Corporation studied food desert claims and found that individuals in urban areas can get any kind of food they want within a couple of miles. He suggested we call these areas “food swamps,” rather than food deserts.

In addition, researcher Helen Lee at the Public Policy Institute in California found that in poor neighborhoods, citizens had twice as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier neighborhoods had, and more than three times as many corner stores. These areas had twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocery stores as wealthier neighborhoods.

The truth was exactly the opposite of Mrs. Obama’s claim, but hers satisfied the mind-set of the utopians, who believe they alone could solve problems that never existed. Mrs. Obama later began a second crusade to force restaurants and schools to serve “healthy” foods, ban “junk food,” and bully restaurants into serving smaller portions.

Michelle Obama worked in 2010 to get Congress to pass a nutri­tion bill that would give the Department of Agriculture new powers to regulate school lunches. The bill was passed in December of that year, and now that the regulations have gone into effect, it is having a devastating impact on students and their angry parents.

Under Department of Agriculture edicts, cinnamon rolls and chili are banned. School bands and groups can’t sell candy bars for fund-raising. The government is now mandating portion sizes, including how many tomatoes must go into a salad!

Children are permitted to refuse three items on a tray, but not fruits and vegetables. Of course, the Food Police can’t yet force them to eat their veggies, but it’s not far-fetched to think they might someday. After all, the Obamas have rammed through legislation that initially demanded that nuns buy insurance coverage for contraception and preg­nancy. Fortunately the Supreme Court ended that requirement in 2014.

The new federal guidelines, thanks to Michelle Obama, now limit caloric intake to between 750 and 850 a day for schoolchildren. Teenagers require between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day to be healthy and grow, and high school athletes need up to 5,000 calories per day. In short, the First Lady is responsible for malnourishing kids through the school lunch program.

In 2006 the three-term mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, decided to add the title “Food Police Chief’ to his list of duties in the Big Apple. That year, he banished trans fats from city restaurants and, in 2010, forced food manufacturers to alter their recipes to include less sodium. He failed, however, to remove salt shakers from the tables. Patrons who receive a dish of food at a New York restaurant that they deem not salty enough may still simply add salt.

In spring 2012 Bloomberg decided that New Yorkers had to be protected even more from themselves, so he issued an edict banning soft drinks larger than sixteen ounces. The ban applied to restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and arenas.

In August 2012 Bloomberg banned the distribution of baby formula in city hospitals unless it is medically necessary because he, a man, had decided that new mothers should always breast-feed regardless of their weight, professions, or other personal details. Free formula provided to mothers was also eliminated. Bloomberg determined that breast-feeding is best for children and that new mothers should not have a voice in the decision regardless of their circumstances. But Bloomberg did want women to have freedom of choice to kill their young before they are born. He was willing to give moms the option to abort their unborn babies, but not to feed formula to those who are living.

What is next for those like Obama and Bloomberg? Mandated cal­isthenics each morning at six? Currently the United States seems to be incubating and hatching utopian tyrants at an alarming rate.

Keeping in mind as well as my bullet-points regarding the supposedly “right wing” El Paso Shooter:

  • a basic universal income
  • universal healthcare
  • complain about cost of college
  • talk about how oil companies are polluting water
  • how we waste resources — trees for overuse of paper-towels and other wasteful indulgences
  • think corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources
  • corporations merely want illegal immigration for cheap labor
  • overpopulation is a real danger/threat that needs immediate dealing with

In an excellent post at CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION, we find some concerns about diet and environment similar to the 2020 Democrat candidates and Left leaning people:

Hitler was a vegetarian, as many of his close associates affirmed, particularly once WWII began, although some claim that he ate some meat occasionally.  He would tell dinner guests the graphic details of a slaughterhouse that he visited in order to shame his guests into not eating a “corpse.”  Hitler’s vegetarianism was not just a personal health-kick.  It was what he thought was necessary to make the master race healthier, but it was also integral to his nature-worshipping, Christianity rejecting worldview. Goebbels says,

We come back to religious questions again. The Fuhrer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of religious rites. Both (Judaism and Christianity) have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed.  The Fuhrer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle. His arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis.  They are totally unanswerable.  He has little regard for homo sapiens. Man should not feel so superior to animals.  He has no reason to.  Man believes that he alone has intelligence, a soul, and the power of speech.  Has not the animal these things? Just because we, with our dull senses, cannot recognise them, it does not prove that they are not there.

Hitler’s attachment to “the animal element” led him to be an opponent of vivisection, even though, according to Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich, he regarded humanitarianism as “a mixture of cowardice, stupidity and intellectual conceit.”

Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax created controversy when they published “Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust” in 1992.  In Sax’s later book, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, he relates:  “That the Nazis might be capable of humane legislation was such a disconcerting idea that even the detached, academic style of our paper could not make it acceptable to many people. The topic of animals, like the Holocaust itself, evokes passions of great intensity and confusion.”

Within months of gaining power, the Nazis passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals and banning vivisection, with some exceptions, in regions of Germany.  On the radio in August 1933 Hermann Göring announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and promised “to concentration camps those who still think that they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.”  Animal protection efforts continued to be a prominent part of the Nazi agenda:

In 1934, the new government hosted an international conference on animal protection in Berlin. Over the speaker’s podium, surrounded by enormous swastikas, were the words “Entire epochs of love will be needed to repay animals for their value and service” (Meyer 1975). In1936 the German Society for Animal Psychology was founded, and in 1938 animal protection was accepted as a subject to be studied in German public schools and universities.”

The Nazis enthusiastically promoted all the causes of late twentieth-century American environmentalists:  Vegetarianism, organic farming, homeopathic medicine, animal rights laws, special protection of certain species of animals and plants, creating nature preserves to block development.  Peter Staudenmaier, in “Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents,” documents the extent of environmentalist legislation during the Nazi era:

The prominence of nature in the party’s philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth “in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life.” Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining….

With Hess’s enthusiastic backing, the “green wing” was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly “ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time.” Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe….


Along with Darré’s efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert’s attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented “nature protection law” not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and “natural monuments” across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance “required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside.” 

[….]

After Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, evolution became integrated into German environmentalism.  Staudenmaier writes:

In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecology’ and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment.  Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called ‘monism.’ The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views.  Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. 

He held a naturalistic, yet Romantic, view of the oneness of nature, which included the oneness between society and nature.  This allowed the Nazi horror of science being used to treat human beings as lab rats.  Haeckel held that “civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.”  Haeckel thus helped lay the foundations on which National Socialism would be built.

A hippie-type youth movement began in the early 1900s in Germany.   Known as Wandervögel (‘wandering free spirits’), Staudenmaier recounts that this youth movement included such beliefs as neo-Romanticism, Eastern mysticism, and a “back-to-the-land emphasis [that] spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered.” Thousands of these youth later came to be aligned with the Nazi movement….

The following excerpt come from an entire Chapter I have HERE... but I narrowed it a bit:


MELANIE PHILIPPS


THE CONTINUUM OF FASCISM AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

Perhaps the most striking continuation of fascist ideas under the guise of left-wing progressive thinking lies in the modern environ-mental movement, with its desire to call a halt to dehumanizing modernity and return to an organic harmony with the natural world.

Veneration of nature and the corresponding belief that civilization corrupts man’s innate capacity for happiness and freedom go back to the eighteenth century and Jean Jacques Rousseau—who bridged the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment, the world of reason and the world of emotion, movements of the left and the right. His idealizing of a primitive state of nature, along with a theory of human evolution through survival of the fittest that predated Darwin by a hundred years, became a galvanizing force in the nineteenth century among those who were sounding a retreat from modernity and reason, into the darkness of obscurantism and prejudice. And one of the principal routes they took was through the natural world.

In the mid nineteenth century, Darwinism was sowing the seeds of environmentalism, and in doing so it also fed into fascism. The critical figure in making this crossover was Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Haeckel believed that the theory of evolution would transform human life by dethroning man from the pinnacle of Creation. He and his followers saw Darwinism as far more than just a biological theory; it was the central ingredient of a new worldview that would challenge Christianity. His Darwinist views led him and his followers to espouse scientific racism, the belief that racial competition was a necessary part of the struggle for existence and—even though he opposed militarism—that the extermination of “inferior” races was a step toward progress.31

Haeckel also believed that mind and matter were united everywhere, and he ascribed psychic characteristics to single-celled organisms and even to inanimate matter.32 As the authoritative historian of the ecological movement Anna Bramwell relates, it was Haeckel who in 1867 coined the term “ecology” to denote a scientific discipline focusing on the web that links organisms with their environment.33 With his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bolsche and Bruno Wille, Haeckel deeply influenced subsequent generations of environmentalists by binding the study of the natural world into a reactionary political framework.34

The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Klages was firmly in the Haeckel mould. In 1913, he wrote an essay titled “Man and Earth” for a gathering of the Wandervogel or Free German Youth, the prewar movement that rejected materialism for excursions in more basic outdoor living. According to Peter Staudenmaier,

“Man and Earth” anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyperconsumption and the ideology of “progress:’ It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality.35

A political reactionary and virulent antisemite, Klages was described as a “Volkish fanatic” and an “intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich” who “paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects:’ Denouncing rational thought itself, he believed that the intellect was parasitical on life and that progress merely represented the gradual domination of intellect over life.36

During the interwar period, most ecological thinkers subscribed to this way of thinking. There was a particularly close association between ecologists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. Their thinking was that nature was the life force from which Germany had been cut off, ever since the days of the Roman Empire, by the alien Christian-Judaic civilization, the source of all the anti-life manifestations of urbanism.

In 1932, the proto-fascist intellectual Oswald Spengler wrote about the deadening effect of machine technology” on the natural world and humanity:

The mechanisation of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-extension…. In a few decades most of the great forest will have gone, to be turned into news-print, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished…. Whole races of humanity have been brought almost to vanishing point…. This machine technology will end the Faustian civilisation and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten—our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman Roads and the Chinese Wall.37

Such ecological fixations were further developed in German Nazism. According to Ernst Lehmann, a leading Nazi biologist, “separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations.”38 The Nazis thus fixated on organic food, personal health and animal welfare. Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of “natural healing”; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies; Hitler wanted to turn the entire nation vegetarian as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism.39

There was top-level Nazi support for ecological ideas at both ministerial and administrative levels. Alwin Seifert, for example, was a motorway architect who specialized in “embedding motorways organically into the landscape.” Following Rudolf Steiner, he argued against land reclamation and drainage; said that “classical scientific farming” was a nineteenth-century practice unsuited to the new era and that artificial fertilizers, fodder and insecticides were poisonous; and called for an agricultural revolution towards “a more peasant-like, natural, simple” method of farming “independent of capital.” Himmler established experimental organic farms including one at Dachau that grew herbs for SS medicines; a complete list of homeopathic doctors in Germany was compiled for him; and antivivisection laws were passed on his insistence. As Anna Bramwell observes,

“SS training included a respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions”40

They did not show such respect, of course, for the human race. Neither does the ecological movement, for which, echoing Malthus, the planet’s biggest problem is the people living on it. Even though our contemporary era has been forged in a determination that fascism must never rise again, certain viilkish ideas that were central to fascism—about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal “rights” and the denigration of humans as enemies of nature—are today presented as the acme of progressive thinking.

This astounding repackaging was accomplished during the 1970s. While Western politicians were committed to growth and consumer society was taking off, the dread of overpopulation also grew. It is probably no coincidence that the fear of global immiseration coincided with the end of empire and the West’s loss of control over the developing world. Reports by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos presented to the UN World Conference on Human Environment in 1972 preached imminent doom as a result of rising technological capacity and argued that man had to replace family or national loyalties with allegiance to the planet. The Club of Rome, which was founded also in 1972, prophesied imminent global catastrophe unless resource use was curbed, a view that the oil shock of 1973 served to validate and embed in Western consciousness.

If ecology was to take off, however, it had to shed altogether its unhappy links with fascism, racial extermination and ultranationalism. It took a number of different opportunities to do so. During the 1960s in both Europe and North America it identified itself with radical left-wing causes, latching onto “alternative” politics such as feminism and, in Britain, Celtic nationalism. In the 1970s, the “small is beautiful” idea of the anti-Nazi emigre Fritz Schumacher took hold.41

In 1971, Schumacher became president of the Soil Association in Britain, which was critical in both promoting deeply ecological ideas and laundering them as fashionably progressive. Rudolf Steiner was the arch-proponent of “biodynarnic” agriculture, which eschewed artificial fertilizers and promoted self-sufficient farms as preserving the spirit of the soil. When the Soil Association was created in 1946, it embodied this “organic farming’ ideal. But Steiner was the also the founder of a movement called anthroposophy, which was based on the development of a nonsensory or so-called supersensory consciousness. It held that early stages of human evolution possessed an intuitive perception of reality, including the power of clairvoyance, which had been lost under the increasing reliance on intellect. It promoted the belief that the human being passed between stages of existence, incarnating into an earthly body, living on earth, leaving the body behind and entering into the spiritual domain before returning to be born again into a new life on earth.42

These essentially pagan and irrational ideas were, as we shall see later, intrinsic to ecological thinking. But they were also to surface in a remarkable new alliance between neo-Nazi doctrines and radical left-wing, anticapitalist and New Age ideas. Towards the end of the 1960s, finding itself criticized for espousing reactionary views, the Soil Association turned sharply leftwards and developed an egalitarian socioeconomic perspective instead. It published articles admiring Mao’s communes in China and suggested that plots of land a few acres in size should be distributed similarly among the British population.43

In Germany, the green movement that emerged from the student protests of 1968 bitterly attacked the “biodynamic” organic farmers for their perceived authoritarianism and social Darwinist beliefs. Thus German Greens of the 1970s, with a considerable communist element, had less to do with ecology than with participatory democracy, egalitarianism and women’s rights.44

Among radicals in America, there was a split after 1968 between those favoring organized terrorism and alternative groups. Young radicals in the latter camp, galvanized by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1966), claimed that multinational capitalism was responsible for pollution. Environmental concerns offered up a radicalism for the middle classes. The anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin wrote of a utopian future in communes when scarcity would disappear and man would return to living close to the land. American feminists in particular took up ecology, drawing upon its foundational belief in a primitive matriarchal paradise to support their attacks on patriarchal oppression.

The result of all this ferment was that the green movement became not just radical but radically incoherent. It became the umbrella for a range of alternative, anti-Western causes and lifestyles. But its constant factor was a strongly primitive, pagan and irrational element. As Anna Bramwell caustically comments, “The new paganism, often based on Atlantean theories of a lost golden age and theories of cultural diffusion via a vanished super race, is open to all and especially attractive to the semi-educated, semi-rational product of today’s de-naturing educational process, stripped of religion, reason, tradition and even history.”45

Despite a veneer of fashionable progressivism, the fact is that environmentalism’s fundamental opposition to modernity propels it straight into the arms of neofascism. For just like their precursors in the twenties and thirties, today’s ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups chime with many of the ideas that also march under the green banner. In France, Italy and Belgium, the Nouvelle Droite combined Hellenic paganism with support for the dissolution of national boundaries; it was anticapitalist and anti-American, adopting sociobiological arguments to stress the uniqueness of each race and culture within national boundaries and to oppose colonization and empire. In Germany, the radical-right journal Mat was pacifist and ecological.46 Such groups met the left on the common ground of New Age paganism, expressed in particular through the religions and cultures of the East.

From the 1970s onwards, neofascist extremists began to repackage the old ideology of Aryan racism, elitism and force in new cultic guises involving esotericism and Eastern religions. Some groups mixed racism with Nordic pagan religions, celebrating magical signs of ancestral heritage and mystical blood loyalty. In the United States, Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, racial pagan groups today ponder runes, magic and the sinister mythology of the Norse gods Wotan, Loki and Fenriswolf. Like the Nazis, these groups resort to the pagan world to express their antipathy to any extraneous organisms that disturb their idea of racial or national purity. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes, “The racial interpretation of these esoteric ideas, cosmology and prophecies betrays these groups’ overwhelming anxiety about the future of white identity in multiracial societies.”47

In Italy, Julius Evola, who inspired a whole generation of postwar neofascists, embraced Hinduism and Tantrism, a radical Hindu cult focusing on women, goddesses and sexual energy, and revolving around the notion of breaking all bonds. By means of taboo and spiritually dangerous practices such as orgies and intoxication, the superior adept can raise his consciousness to supreme levels of unity with the divine female power of “Shakti;’ which animates and inspires the whole universe, thereby acquiring exceptional knowledge and power. Tantrism’s secrecy and elitism, writes Goodrick-Clarke, negates the modern world of rationalism and democracy.48

In Chile, the diplomat, explorer and poet Miguel Serrano adopted the mystical doctrines of Savitri Devi, the French-born Nazi-Hindu prophetess who described Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu and likened Nazism to the cult of Shiva because of its emphasis on destruction and new creation. Tracing semidivine Aryans to extraterrestrial origins, Serrano recommended kundalini yoga to repurify “mystical Aryan blood” to its former divine light. He also proposed a gnostic war against the Jews, promoted the idea of the “Black Sun” as a mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race, and believed that the Nazis built UFOs in Antarctica….

FOOTNOTES

[31] Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, pp. 186-87.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (Yale University Press, 1989), p. 39.

[34] Peter Staudenmaier, “Fascist Ecology: The `Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents;’ in Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier (AK Press,1995)… [see new edition]

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics (Allen & Unwin, 1932).

[38] Staudenmaier, “Fascist Ecology.”

[39] Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, pp. 385-87.

[40] Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 204.

[41] Ibid., p. 213.

[42] Robert A. McDermott, “Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (Crossroad Publishing, 1995).

[43] Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 218.

[44] Ibid., pp. 219-25.

[45] Ibid., p. 232.

[46] Ibid., p. 232.

[47] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York University Press, 2003), pp. 5-6.

[48] Ibid., p. 54.


WILLIAM J. MURRAY


REGULATORY UTOPIANS

CASS SUNSTEIN

Cass Sunstein was the Edward Mandell House/Rexford Tugwell char­acter in the Obama administration. He was appointed to run Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009. He left the administration in 2011 to return to Harvard, where he continues to brainwash his students into supporting his anti-Constitutional and totalitarian beliefs.

Sunstein is the consummate Progressive and utopian tyrant. He believes that the Constitution is a “living document”—code words for liberal judges having the power to interpret the Constitution and law in general to support the latest leftist political agenda.

Writing in The Partial Constitution (Harvard University Press, 1993), Sunstein pushed the idea of a “First Amendment New Deal,” which would create a government panel of experts to ensure a “diversity of views” on the airwaves. Imagine a panel of presidential appointees determining what constitutes diversity on TV and radio.

Sunstein also believes hunting should be banned, that animals should have the same rights as humans, and that lawyers should be empowered to file lawsuits on behalf of animals. Despite being against the killing of rabbits or deer, he is, like all Progressives, perfectly agreeable to destroying unborn humans at any stage of pregnancy.

In 2004 he published A Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. In it, he proposed a series of “rights” for individuals that would inevitably result in greatly expanding the power of the federal government over every aspect of our lives.

According to Sunstein, “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government inter­vention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.”

Sunstein’s views sound like those of Benito Mussolini or Philip Dru in the utopian novel.

JOHN HOLDREN

President Obama appointed John Holdren to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and to cochair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Holdren sounds like a very dangerous tyrant in his written state­ments on population control and other issues. In 1977 he coauthored a book with Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich, titled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (W. H. Freeman, 1978), which seriously pro­posed, among other things, that women should be forced to abort their children; that populations should be sterilized by dropping drugs into the water supply; that people who “contribute to social deterioration” should be forcibly sterilized or forced to abort their children; that a “Planetary Regime” should assume total control of the global economy; and that an international police force should be used to dictate how all of us are to live our lives.

Because this was a White House office, the Senate did not have the authority to stop the appointment; however, some senators should have come forward and pointed out on the record that Holdren’s suggestions were very much the same as those of fascist utopian Adolf Hitler.

Holdren openly condemns the free enterprise system as the enemy of the people and a threat to the environment. Writing in his 1973 book, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, also cowritten with the Ehrlichs, he called for a “massive campaign . . . to de-develop the United States” and other Western nations.

According to Holdren, the “mad czar” of science and technology:

De-development means bringing our economic system (especially pat­terns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation…. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.

Elsewhere, he wrote, “By de-development, we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

The Soviet Union successfully did away with “planned obsoles­cence” by eliminating innovation. As no new cars were designed for decades, vehicles like the unsafe Lada lived on unchanged for decades. Like many Progressives who believe jobs should be “preserved” as a right, Holdren does not understand that artificially preserving out­dated industries and nonproductive jobs results in a failure for new industries to come into existence.

  • William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016), 165-171.

Ban Everything | 2020 Democrat Platform (Updated)

GATEWAY PUNDIT noted: …CNN hosted a seven-hour climate hysteria event on Wednesday and Democrats went hog wild. By the end, they’d called for bans on plastic straws, red meat (especially cheeseburgers), incandescent lightbulbs, gas-powered cars, airplanes. They also want an end to fossil fuels, oil drilling, fracking, natural gas exploration and coal plants, along with nuclear energy.

Adapted a bit from LOUDER with CROWDER:

ONE: culling the population of undesirables (the poor) through genocide.

[….]

TWO: Deciding what we can and cannot EAT!

“My body, my choice” my ass. Now you’re telling us what we can and cannot consume.

Kamala says she wants to “ban certain behaviors.” Not like killing your baby. No that’s fine. Especially if it’s some poor brown baby. But eating cheeseburgers or meat at all, that’s verboten.

Oh sure, Kamala is talking about reconstituting the food pyramid and “incentivizing” certain behaviors. But let’s play this out. Take a cheeseburger and treat it like cigarettes, which have a “sin” tax to de-incentivize smoking. The sin is just eating that which tastes good….

[….]

FOUR: Banning things we use, as small as a plastic straw to as large as our gasoline-powered cars….

Almost all the candidates want to stop oil, gas, and coal selling/production. Gas powered cars will be a thing of the past — almost immediately — if they get their way.

DAILY CALLER video

GRABIAN video

I updated a post showing the impossibility of Trump being a “Russian Asset” as the MSM and Democrats said for almost 3-years. Here is the updated portion:

when oil prices rise above $60-$65 a barrel… fracking increases supply, serving as an effective cap on energy prices. (Broadly speaking, the same principle is true of natural gas prices.) Putin’s government revenue and foreign policy are dependent on high crude prices and foreign nations buying their crude from Russia. Lower prices due to U.S. or other nations’ competition cost him a lot of money, and put the Russian economy and his public support at risk. Even more importantly, it deprives him of the tool of energy blackmail, which he has used to extort other countries into adopting Kremlin-friendly foreign policy choices. This is why Russian intelligence services have been so active in supporting western environmental groups and other interests opposed to fracking. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER — in other words, our energy policy, under Trump, is anti-Putin. By contrast, ALL of the Democratic 2020 candidates energy policies will enrich Putin.)

WATTS UP WITH THAT has a linked DAILY CALLER article that highlights 7-BANS by the candidates:

1: Biden Applauds The Green New Deal

“I think the Green New Deal deserves an enormous amount of credit,” former Vice President Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper before listing off what he considers to be the problems with the much-criticized idea to stop global warming.

He noted that “85 percent of the problem” (climate change) is coming from the rest of the world.

2. Harris Says She Would Ding The Filibuster To Implement The GND

“If [Republicans] fail to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” Sen. Kamala Harris of California said to audience applause.

Harris said Republicans should “look in the mirror and ask themselves why they failed to act,” calling the fight for the GND one “against powerful interests.” Democrats would need to win Senate control along with the presidency to have any hope of ending the longstanding tradition.

3. Yang Won’t Talk About Electric Cars

Yang skirted questions about whether every American will need to drive electric cars in the future. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Yang why he would promise federal funds for “potentially risky” and experimental means of energy production.

“We’re here together because we can. This is a crisis. In a crisis, all solutions have to be on the table. If you were attacking on one side, you should be researching various alternatives on the other side. That to me is just responsible management and responsible leadership,” Yang explained.

4. Sanders’ One Word Answer To A Question About Light Bulbs

“The Trump administration announced plans to overturn requirements on energy-saving lightbulbs. … Would you reinstate those requirements?” CNN’s Cooper asked Sanders, who has described himself as a self-avowed democratic socialist.

The Vermont senator answered with one word: “Duh.” Sanders’ comment came several hours after the Trump administration announced new rules Wednesday rolling back requirements for energy-saving light bulbs.

(Read it all at WUWT)

See some more articles:

90% Of Weather Stations Failed

For some reason the original uploads are in two parts, I combined them… the resolution is bad so I merely shrunk it as the main ideas are still sound:

(From the original video description) Anthony Watts is as interesting a person as you will meet in a lifetime. It was my pleasure to have him come to our KUSI News studio for an interview for my recent “Global Warming: Meltdown” program. Not only did I interview him, but most importantly, he presented his entire SURFACESTATIONS.ORG Powerpoint presentation as an answer to my second question. Anthony Watts is an American broadcast weather presenter (AMS sealholder retired), editor of the blog “Watts Up With That?”, owner of the weather graphics company It Works, and founder of the SurfaceStations.org project that documents the siting of weather stations across the United States. He is a meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio. (Part 1: https://youtu.be/ZzLNQV3dmcI | Part 2: https://youtu.be/x8vlFZlFWKw)

This is an updated segment from an older post from December of 2014, titled: IS 2014 THE HOTTEST YEAR? NO (PART 2 OF A SERIES). A recent inclusion of the hard work done by Anthony Watts over at WATTS UP WITH THAT? is included in the article from Commentary, linked below:

EQUIPMENT FAIL

Here is a recent mention of the below in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (added here 9-4-19, emphasis added here):

STUDY by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that almost 90 percent of the 1221 weather stations in the U.S. did not meet the National Weather Service’s setting standards, which requires that they be at least 100 feet from any artificial heat source or radiating surface. You can see some of the most egregious violators HERE. To deal with this defective information, climate scientists, have “adjusted” the data to solve this problem. Invariably, these adjustments have made earlier data show lower temperatures, and recent data show higher ones.

To develop reliable data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed 114 state-of-the-art weather stations relatively evenly spaced about the lower 48 states. They were carefully sited to be away from urban areas, which are heat islands, airports, which can be affected by jet exhaust, etc.

The system became operative in 2005. Now, realclearenergy.com is REPORTING that there has been no increase in average temperatures in the continental United States over the last 14 years, as measured by these new stations. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than they were….

Here are some examples of fudged data because of sub-standard equipment:

You’d think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month.

Here is what you see in visible light:

Here is what the infrared camera sees:

Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C

This station will be rated a CRN5 by this definition from the NOAA Climate Reference Network handbook, section 2.2.1:

Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”

More than half of the stations the NOAA use are tainted or wrongly placed equipment.