Posted on 10/03/2023 6:46:26 AM PDT by truthxchange
The cultural conflict is no longer simply political. The economic value of socialism or capitalism is no longer the debate separating citizens. It is, rather, what our children are learning, whether in non-Christian state schools or even in some Christian schools, about their sexuality, their family life and the theological issues that determine ultimate meaning.
The Sixties was a key moment for Western culture. It might be hard to imagine, but when I was growing up as a lad in working-class Liverpool, England, and even when I became a young man in the Fifties, I had never even heard the word “homosexual.” If, by some chance, that word came up at one time, I would not have known what it meant. Then came the Sixties, when deviant sexuality exploded into the public square and now “alternate” sex is seen as normative.
Normalizing the LGBTQ Agenda The present administration boasts that its cabinet has more female, gay, black and trans members than ever before. It went further in the normalization of sexual extremism by appointing Sam Brinton to the Department of Energy, where he is responsible for nuclear waste. It seems he took “nuclear” to heart, appearing at the White House in high-heeled shoes, bright lipstick, a striking moustache—and sporting a fetching dress he had stolen at an airport luggage collection point! When his theft was uncovered, the administration reluctantly let him go. The Biden Administration also elevated Rachel (née Richard) Levine, a trans lad/lass with flowing golden tresses. Levine is a four-star admiral who holds the post of Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. In public, he proudly presents in formal naval attire, thus reinforcing the administration’s position on transgenderism. This is the new political norm,[1] which the President made official. At the end of the “Proclamation on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month, 2023” the president declared (joining God and queer issues) that the month of June was to be a time for all Americans to “recognize the achievements of the LGBTQI+ community, to celebrate the great diversity of the American people, and to wave their flags of pride high.” The final line states: “In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of May, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-seventh.”
It’s little wonder that “nearly every major U.S. brand promulgates the LGBT agenda,”[2] and many people are proud of their support of LGBTQ issues. This is especially true of sports personalities. Georgia Marie Stanway, captain of the British ladies’ soccer team, exults: “We’re never shy in saying what we stand for. We’re a squad that promotes inclusivity, equality, we obviously have a number of people that feel very strongly about it.”[3] The California Senate engaged in a ceremony honoring “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.[4] The “Sisters” are gay men dressed as nuns, who make fun of the traditional nuns’ view of sex. They are drag queens in nun outfits, calling themselves by obscene names, peddling hatred and reveling in blasphemy. Americans are a tolerant people. But we should realize that sexual deviance has by now become an issue to divide the nation into the morally and socially cool, versus the luddites.
They Are Coming for our Children in their Schools Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, friend of Jeffrey Epstein and visitor to his island, has invested tens of millions of dollars in a radical nongovernmental organization called the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which is endorsed by the World Health Organization. The IPPF is pushing for young children to be considered “sexual beings.” “Sexual activity may be part of different types of relationships, including dating, marriage, or commercial sex work, among others,” IPPF said, about what children under 10 should be taught. The toolkit said that children under 10 should also be told: “As you grow up, you might start to be interested in people with diverse gender identities.”[5]This view is taught in numerous schools.
Such explicit instruction is clearly emphasized in the drag queen shows put on in public libraries for children all over the country, developing in them an interest for “diverse gender identities,” that is, interest in non-binary sexual androgyny in which sexual identities are joined in a hopeless mish-mash. This androgynous sex is expressed in: homosexuality, in which both males become females in their love-making; bi-sexuality, in which a person enjoys both male and female sex; transgenderism, in which a male or female person pretends to be the opposite sex; and in drag queen practice. Interestingly, Texas Christian University now offers a course teaching that the male/female gender binary is an expression of white supremacy![6] It also discusses how to create a drag persona. As the culmination of this “academic work,” students participate in a performance in the university's annual drag show.
They Are Coming for our Children in Our Churches On Monday, June 5, 2023, the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine hosted a “Faith Perspectives Panel” examining the intersection of religion and the LGBTQ+ movement as part of the Cathedral’s iconic Pride celebration. The panel discussion centered around deconstructing the “binary view” of the church, namely the doctrine of God the Creator.[7]
In June, 2023, another Lutheran female “minister” recited a heretical “Sparkle Creed” as part of a recent church service, (about which I have already commented).[8] The Edina Community Lutheran Church (ECLC) “minister,” Anna Helgen, led the congregation in the “creed”:
I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural. I believe in Jesus Christ, their child who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling-child of God. I believe in the rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity….
A non-binary God is not the Creator we know from Scripture. A little later in the service, another male “pastor” then offered another prayer: “You come to us as [LGBTQIA+] youth with no home. You are embodied by Two-Spirit people still fighting against the impacts of colonization, erasure and stolen land.”[9] (Two-Spirit people are the androgynous shamans in pagan religions.)
Clearly future church attenders (our children and grandchildren!) will encounter even less dogma from church authorities about sexual issues such as premarital, extramarital and androgynous sex. They will be less willing or able to realize the sinfulness of free sex, especially as they hear about their Bible’s “queer” god and the oppressive powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness and capitalism.
Eager wannabe pastors will be trained in highly respected training programs in our major divinity schools. For example, The University of Chicago’s religion department offers a “queering god” class which explores queer and trans foundations in relationship to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and “analyzes the ways that contemporary artists, activists, and scholars are using theology to reimagine gender and experiment with ‘new relations, with new relational forms.’”[10] Most recently, Harvard Divinity School also proposes a course on queering God and discusses “Dismantling Heteronormativity.”[11] Duke Divinity School held a pride worship service with prayers to “the great queer one” during the spring 2023 semester.[12]
Journalist Robert Knight describes our present cultural situation in a striking but realistic manner:
The growing divide in the United States isn’t merely political. This runs far deeper. It’s a struggle between those intent on using government and corporate power to turn America into a Marxist version of Sodom and Gomorrah, and those resisting this radical transformation.”[13]
The LGBTQ agenda has become the new orthodoxy of woke culture. Anyone who even questions it is declared a heretic and cast from society for blasphemy. In this cultural setting we can expect resistance to and eventually persecution of those who hold to biblical orthodoxy. This agenda is new in recent Western history, so it is important for us to take a look at ancient history.
From Where Do These Perversions Come? I have developed a line of investigation in a long article, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,”[14] in which I cite a number of important sources. This history is crucial for understanding the theological and spiritual implications of homosexuality for the thinking of today’s church and culture.
To understand how we go there, we must travel back into the past, where we find that the priests associated with the worship of the goddess Ishtar from the Sumerian age (1800 BC) flaunted their androgyny.[15] Their condition was due to their “devotion to the goddess Ishtar who herself had ‘transformed their masculinity into femininity.’”[16] They functioned as feminized men and as occult shamans, with their divine‑demonic ability to transgress boundaries.”[17] They celebrated no boundaries, that is, no binaries. So, you see that the “non-binary,” as we say today, was already a powerful, spiritual notion, denying the existence of the binary, separating creation from the God the Creator, which was the ultimate function of these pagan shamans.
The renowned history-of-religions scholar, Mircea Eliade, calls this “ritualized androgynization.”[18] Androgyny is also an appropriate term for alternate sexuality today, for it evokes the joining of sexual distinctions in one reality.
We see the myth of a non-binary pagan god, served by non-binary androgynous or homosexual priests in ancient Mesopotamian and Indo-European nature religions, as well as in the myths of Australian Aborigines, African tribes, South American Indians and Pacific islanders. Even though separated by many centuries, Eliade shows an evident historical and “theological” connection between the Mesopotamian homosexual shamans called assinnus, what the Canaanites called qedeshim, what the Scythians called ennares, and the Syrians galli.
Mircea believes that “ultimately, it is the wish to recover this lost unity in existence that has caused man to think of the opposites …as a single reality.”[19] Eliade explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration…of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the creation,”[20] in direct opposition to the Old Testament account of creation which is marked by male/female distinctions and a distinct divine Creator. The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, Oneist quest, whether ancient or modern:
In mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole.[21]
For many years, I have tried to give understanding to same-sex sexuality, not simply as a means of breaking God’s law, but as a deep expression of pagan spirituality. I do this not out of a sense of superiority but out of love for fellow human beings who ignore the life-giving truths of the Bible. So this has deep implications for our witness in today’s world. The presence and importance of androgynous sex was also practiced in the North American tribes, known generally as berdaches, amongst the Navajo as nadle, and among the Zuñi, as Awonawilona (“he-she”).[22] This is a source of pride among present-day homosexuals, showing their spiritual importance in earlier times. Homosexuality is thus not the invention of the 19th century romantic religion, where sexual orientation began to be openly identified and accepted as “my personal truth.” On the contrary, homosexuality has a long spiritual history.
Showing this relationship is not just a cause, on the one hand, for pride, as homosexuals now affirm, seeing their spiritual place as leaders in ancient religious cults as “two spirit persons.” This phrase means people who succeed in creating an androgynous unity, denying the opposites of male and female. This gives a certain historic understanding of a sexual practice that reaches much further back in history and why the Old Testament knew about it, and why Moses, in announcing the reality of God the Creator to the Pegan world of his day, emphasizes the importance of the male/female distinction (Genesis 1:27).
Christians need to understand that the practice of androgynous sexuality/spirituality is essential to pagan animism and has been throughout the centuries. It is widely expressed, as we noted, in South American spirituality, for instance. The stubborn, universal rejection of God’s created design through time and space helps us understand why Scripture takes such an opposing view of this sexual expression. Understanding the deep relationship between sexuality and spirituality helps us as we interact not only with ideas but with human beings in our own culture. This “big picture” delivers us from some simplistic “better than thou” opposition to homosexuality as part of a moralistic discourse. We all are sinners.
They are Coming for our Children’s Worship However, a deep confrontation between biblical orthodoxy and pagan religion is already bursting out not only in a perversion of sexuality but also in a perversion of spirituality. The California school system now requires that children be exposed to the worship of the old pagan gods—in the name of fair play. In 2021 the state board of education, as part of ethnic studies, approved programs to decodify systems of oppression into their component parts of white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, genocide, private property and God. The state curriculum encourages teachers, in accord with DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the contemporary notion of morals, to have children sing praises to the Aztec gods, in particular the god Tezcatlipoca who was worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism.[23] Needless to say, this state program includes accusing Christianity of “theocide,” killing the gods of South American indigenous spirituality.
Ultimately the confrontation between sexuality and spirituality is a confrontation between the pagan gods and the God of the Bible. These are two fundamentally different worldviews. One you can call “Oneist” or “non-binary” because everything is one including God who is no longer the distinct Creator. According to “wokist” orthodoxy, “those [oneist] deities must be resurrected and restored to their rightful place in today’s social justice cosmology.”[24] There may well be a rebirth of the worship of these pagan gods. This is just a glimpse of what the coming social-justice-Marxism-Sodom and Gomorrah takeover may mean.
Both worldviews speak of human sacrifice. In paganism, the conflict of the gods is expressed as political power where those in power kill their political opponent, as in Soviet and Maoist Marxism. In Christianity, the good news is that God himself gave His Son, as a human sacrifice, to be killed to save us from our sins. In this confrontation of the gods, the Biblical God is the one who shows grace to sinners, including sexual androgynes, and eventually redeems the cosmos. In that love, the Church, as His bride, must also show love to her opponents, whatever the cost might be.
[1] https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4146133/postschallenging the heteronormative culture [2] Warner Todd Houston, Iconic American clothing company wants to follow Bud Light, build out 'gender-fluid' line wnd.com ^ | 5/11/2023. [3] “Georgia Stanway insists England will 'stand by what they believe in' - despite FIFA forbidding the One Love armband at the World Cup,” MailOnline, July 3, 2023. [4] Katy Grimes, CA Senate Honoring The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, California Globe | May 28, 2023 |. [5] Frank Bergman, “Bill Gates Plows Millions into Group Claiming Kids Are ‘Sexual Beings’ SLAY New^ | April 17, 2023. [6]Samantha Kamma, Texas Christian University offers “Queer Art of Drag” course teaching “gender binary”is white supremacyChristian Post ^ | 06/22/2023 | n. [7] https://juicyecumenism.com/2023/06/22/episcopal-cathedral-panel-deconstructs-binary/ [8] Lutheran female “minister” leads congregation in pro-LGBT ...LifeSite--https://www.lifesitenews.com › blogs › lutheran-femal...Jun 29, 2023. [9] Art.cit. [10] “Is God queer?”: University of Chicago offers “Queering God” course to study reimagining of gender in theology Course description asks questions like, “What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam?” [11] Harvard Divinity School offered a course in “Queering Congregations.” HDS Spring 2023 / Section: 01 / Class number: 21466: Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity. [12]https://juicyecumenism.com/2022/04/05/queer-god-duke-divinity/ [13] Robert Knight, “The Real Battle -- and Opportunity,” The Washington Times (September 25, 2023). [14] Peter Jones, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,” Journal of Evangelical Theological Society, 43/3 (September 2000), 443–69, a review article posted on Amazon of a book on homosexuality by Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), see https://truthXchange.com/ 2011/05/heterosexuality-is-an-abomination/. [15] Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 28. For what follows of this older period, I am greatly indebted to this study. Nissinen's work is supported by Helmer Ringgren, Religions of the Ancient Near East transl. John Sturdy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), 25, who speaks of naked “eunuchs” associated with the cult to the Sumerian goddess Inanna (another name for Ishtar), that includes an hieros gamos rite. These priests dressed up and wore make‑up like a woman, and expressed their “otherness” via their androgyny. Physically they were men but their appearance either was feminine or had both male and female characteristics. [16] Nissinen, ibid, 30. [17] Nissinen, ibid., 32. [18] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” vol vi, The Encyclopedia of Religion, (Macmillan, 1987), 277: also Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 134. [19] Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles, 122. [20] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 277. [21] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” 277. [22] See the long and favorable study of the South American situation by Walter Williams, The Sprit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Beacon Press, Boston, 1986, 1992). He sees the role of the Berdache as elimination dichotomies for the acceptance of ambiguity (p.3). [23] https://www.themonastery.org/blog/california-considers-adding-chants-to-aztec-god-to-school-curriculum. [24] Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023), 165.
“Where Are We Now?”
In a hand basket.
“Where Are We Going?”
Hell.
We are in a world of hurt as a nation. :(
In a handbasket
Balkanization is where we are going.
This ain’t no upwardly mobile freeway...
All because of the precious “open borders” “muh cheap labor” “diversity” worshippers.
ping
“In that love, the Church, as His bride, must also show love to her opponents, whatever the cost might be.”
So he spends the whole article bemoaning the take over of queerism, paganism, degenaracies, war on Christianity, and concludes that we must love those very people who want to destroy the “church”.
No wonder we are where we are!!
Constantly turning the other cheek ain’t going to win you any battles.
I mean, Jesus didn’t make loving your enemies optional. We don’t really get a choice in the matter.
Then don’t complain about getting kicked around and demolished.
As the saying goes “embrace (and enjoy) the suck!” More please!
“Then don’t complain about getting kicked around and demolished.”
That’s a non sequitur argument. I can love someone and still object to the bad things they do.
“I can love someone and still object to the bad things they do.”
That’s the true nonsequitur... and what I would call a truly pathological definition of “love”.
Hey, but if you enjoy being a bleeding heart masochist it’s your choice.
Enjoy the suck.
If there are enough of them, then interest rates could go substantially higher, and they would be seriously screwed if they hold mid to long term bonds.
“That’s the true nonsequitur... and what I would call a truly pathological definition of “love”.”
Not in the least, you just don’t understand the meaning of the word “love” if you say that.
For example, every single parent that loves their child will also, at least from time to time, object to some things their children do. If they never do, then they are not good parents and probably do not really love their children.
I suppose you were head over heels in love with Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, etc, etc.
How one chooses to behave is very much part of who he is, not a separate unconnected thing.
Even your all loving God recognizes this. And he’ll gladly send you to hell for sinning (acting against his dictates).
And even Christ chased the moneychangers from the temple with a whip.
“I suppose you were head over heels in love with Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, etc, etc.”
Everyone means everyone.
“How one chooses to behave is very much part of who he is, not a separate unconnected thing.”
Yes.
“Even your all loving God recognizes this. And he’ll gladly send you to hell for sinning (acting against his dictates).”
Yet He still loves you.
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