Posted on 04/19/2016 1:58:10 PM PDT by detective
Can you believe anyone even organizes a "white privilege" conference these days — seven years into Barack Obama's presidency? Well, you'd better believe it, and you should also know that at least one of the speakers at this conference is militantly Christophobic.
The 17th annual White Privilege Conference was held in Philadelphia from April 15 to 17.
Blake Neff of The Daily Caller attended the conference and reported that "activist and author Paul Kivel" actually claimed that "almost every dysfunction in society, from racism and sexism to global warming and a weak economy, is united by the ideology of 'Christian hegemony.'"
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Unlike, say, musslimes who slaughter men, women and children most often in the cruelest methods possible?
Islam is responsible for genocide, mass murder and the flooding of the world markets with oil (you know, that fossil fuel, carbon footprint stuff).
Got it, Christianity is bad.
“[God] has a bourgeois mind” — Screwtape, from C. S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters”
He cashed out just before the tech bubble burst and retired before age 35. He was no dummy. There are many more who share his opinion and don't limit the blame to the Catholic Church.
In short, there's loads of money to be made if we could just lose that whole moral and spiritual outlook and see things as they really are. Let's get to gettin'!
Yeah, cuz islime is much friendlier and more respectful of women.
Well, usually we earthlings do a pretty piss-poor job of carrying it out when we try. It takes a serious contemplation of God to begin to get His idea of bourgeois straight. But even if we just called it a religion, maybe we should say it’s the worst in the world except for all the others.
Anyhow, my reaction to this is to laugh at this pitiful foolishness, rather than to rage at it. They don’t even KNOW the first thing about Christ, they are acting in ignorance and unbelief.
This doesn’t say enough to inform us. How did he earn his riches, through fair means or was it through foul?
All of modern Christendom has the problem of mixing up Christianity and state, but the Roman church gets special attention for criticism stemming from this because it was the first on board this folly train.
Yeah this is a hobby horse of mine — but I don’t think without good reason.
I am convinced from the bible that gospel operates best as a private enterprise. We do not need gospel compliance — or even full Ten Commandments compliance — to have a decent government. The criteria for a decent government were stated to Noah not long after his ark landed.
A lot of the opposition to Christians might actually not be that as much as being opposition to Christianity assuming a role that God never assigned to it, short of the return of Jesus. It dumbs down the church and whitewashes the state.
Good analysis
Christianity (serious Christianity) is a spiritual enterprise, and as such it really doesn’t have any rival in the material world. It only has rivals in the spiritual world. The material world is only so many tools that can be used, or not used, by Christianity at the proper time.
It ran into trouble in the gospel era when it butted heads with the state religion of various kinds of idolatry including worship of Caesar.
There are various ways of dealing with state religion problems, but I don’t think Jesus ever suggested “if you can’t lick them, join them.” I think a respect for Christian beliefs, and an adherence to human decency, is the best we can legitimately ask out of a state. We can’t ever ask a state to BE Christian any more than we would want the DMV to run any of our churches. That’s outside the church’s mission. Now a returned Jesus could deal with such a conflict, and through His personal physical presence force states to obey His will to a higher level, but He’s the name above all names. The church is not that name.
Well said and profound. In Taoism there is a saying, "a great country should be ruled like you cook a small fish," i.e., gently under low heat. While at the same time, the demands of discipline upon a spiritual practitioner are extreme.
I think your history on this is a bit ... odd. It was the "Roman church" that stood up to, over, and against the state in most of Western Europe for 1500+ years ... cf King Henry II vs. Thomas a Becket, the Popes vs. the Hohenstaufen Emperors, King Phillip IV of France vs. Boniface VIII, etc.
Meanwhile, after the Reformation, the church in England became unambiguously an arm of the state. The same thing happened in Orthodox Russia under the Tsars, and something very close to it in Orthodox Byzantium.
Before the Reformation, the states were arms of the one Church. That bothered a lot of people.
They want to eliminate Christianity and replace it with a way of life that slices necks, rapes women and kills gays. Oh but they have dark skin so they’re all right.
I wonder if the pope organized this?
Mark 13:13 “You will be hated by all because of My name, but the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.
Impact on the Value of Human Life
Compassion and Mercy
...
Christmas, of course, is to honor the birth of a humble itinerant rabbi from the ancient world. Emperors and governors have come and gone, but it is this man Jesus whose birth we still celebrate 2000 years later. We hope everyone can enjoy this account in the delightful spirit of Christmas.
Even most non-Christians at least respect Jesus as a great moral teacher. In addition, few would argue that this one man has had more impact on the world than any person in history. Putting aside the supernatural, let's examine how the person of Jesus impacted the course of history.
Most of the following material is from these books: (1) What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? by D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, (2) What's So Great About Christianity, by Dinesh D’Souza, and (3) Why You Think the Way You Do by Glenn S. Sunshine.
“Christianity is responsible for the way our society is organized and for the way we currently live. So extensive is the Christian contribution to our laws, our economics, our politics, our arts, our calendar, our holidays, and our moral and cultural priorities that historian J. M. Robers writes in The Triumph of the West, ‘We could none of us today be what we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, dead, and buried, and then rise again.’ “ (From the book What's So Great about Christianity by Dinesh D’Souza.)
Top of page Impact on the Value of Human Life
Human Rights. The concept of universal human rights and equality comes exclusively from the biblical idea that all people are created in the image of God.
Women. In ancient cultures, a wife was the property of her husband. Aristotle said that a woman was somewhere between a free man and a slave. According to the book Reasons for God by Tim Keller (page 249), “It was extremely common in the Greco-Roman world to throw out new female infants to die from exposure, because of the low status of women in society. The church forbade its members to do so. Greco-Roman society saw no value in an unmarried woman, and therefore it was illegal for a widow to go more than two years without remarrying. But Christianity was the first religion to not force widows to marry. They were supported financially and honored within the community so that they were not under great pressure to remarry if they didn't want to. Pagan widows lost all control of their husband's estate when they remarried, but the church allowed widows to maintain their husband's estate. Finally, Christians did not believe in cohabitation. If a Christian man wanted to live with a woman he had to marry her, and this gave women far greater security. Also, the pagan double standard of allowing married men to have extramarital sex and mistresses was forbidden. In all these ways Christian women enjoyed far greater security and equality than did women in the surrounding culture. See Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity.” In India, widows were voluntarily or involuntarily burned on their husbands’ funeral pyres. Christian missionaries were a major influence in stopping these century-old practices and ideas. Also see Misconceptions item #13.
Children. In the ancient world, for example in classical Rome or Greece, infanticide was not only legal, it was applauded. Killing a Roman was murder, but it was commonly held in Rome that killing one’s own children could be an act of beauty. Through a higher view of life, it was the early Christian church that ultimately brought an end to infanctide. The modern pro-life movement is largely Christian. This pro-life view has been true from the very beginning of Christianity. A Christian document called the Didache, dated from the late first century or early second century, contained instructions against abortion.
Slavery. While it is true that Christians have owned slaves in history, it is clear that this was a distortion of biblical teaching. (See Misconceptions, item #12.) Early Christianity elevated the roles of those oppressed in society, by for example, accepting women and slaves as full members. Slaves participated equally in worship and the community and were afforded contract and property rights. According to historian Glenn Sunshine in his book Why You Think the Way You do, “Christians were the first people in history to oppose slavery systematically. Early Christians purchased slaves in the markets simply to set them free.” It is also true that slavery was ended in great measure by Christian activists. For example, historians credit the British evangelical William Wilberforce as the primary force behind the ending of the international slave trade (which happened prior to the American Civil War). Two-thirds of the members of the American abolition society in 1835 were Christian ministers.
Gladiators. A 5th century monk, Telemachus is credited as being the pivotal force ending the gladiator spectacles.
Cannibalism. Missionary followers of Jesus are credited with stopping cannibalism in many primitive societies.
Top of page Compassion and Mercy
Kennedy and Newcombe in their book detail the rise of charity in the name of Jesus over the centuries. This is in stark contrast to history before Jesus. Historians record that prior to Jesus, the ancient world left little trace of any organized charitable effort.
An important aspect of Jesus’ ministry was his emphasis on helping the neediest and lowliest in society. For example, his Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) is a classic illustration that is still part of our language today. While there are good charitable efforts outside of the name of Jesus, Kennedy and Newcombe argue that Christian charities stand out. They point to Mother Theresa, the Salvation Army, religious hospitals, and church supported soup kitchens and thrift shops in every community. Jesus has had such an enormous impact on charity that one wonders how different things would be if he had never been born.
D’Souza points out: “This is our culture's powerful emphasis on compassion, on helping the needy, and on alleviating distress even in distant places. If there is a huge famine or reports of genocide in Africa, most people in other cultures are unconcerned. As the Chinese proverb has it, ‘the tears of strangers are only water.’ But here in the West we rush to help....Part of the reason why we do this is because of our Christian assumptions....The ancient Greeks and Romans did not believe this. They held a view quite commonly held in other cultures today: yes, that is a problem, but it is not our problem....However paradoxical it seems, people who believed most strongly in the next world did the most to improve the situation of people living in this one.”
http://www.faithfacts.org/christ-and-the-culture/the-impact-of-christianity#impact
Sponsored by Satan's Puppets and the Black Entitlement Attitude Movement.
I seem to recall Jesus predicting this sort of thing.
We may not know the day or the hour, but the season seems to have changed...
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