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This may be a personal question, but did you happen to hear or read the first, second and Gospel readings yesterday (the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time)?

When in the Gospel of Luke Jesus speaks of loving your enemy, how does this cause you to feel? Admittedly, it causes me some serious discomfort. But let's just, for the sake of argument, limit this discussion to just "loving your [non enemy] neighbor". When Jesus speaks of having love for others, do you really think that He is asking [remember God does not require you to practice nor even believe Him] for you to limit your love toward Americans only? Maybe just Christians only? Maybe both?

How do you reconcile this with your faith. Because I'm here to tell you that I struggle and sin, daily, because of all the hard things that Jesus asks of me as a Christian. I'm not writing to tell you that your views and your faith are incorrect but I am telling you that I've come up with a different conclusion. I very well could be the one that's wrong on this one but I do believe that I'm being consistent.

No, I didn't hear it - but, I am familiar with the doctrine.

All I can tell you is I try to be as obedient as I can. Sometimes my faith directs me to Samuel in the OT.

This prayer offers me guidance:

"We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love." ~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

I spent years puzzling over the seeming paradoxes of scriptures. "Love thy enemy, pray for them that spitefully use you", yet, "don't even eat with someone that says they believe and don't live like it", and, scriptures like, "Go and preach the good news to all the world", yet, "make of yourselves a people set apart a peculiar people".

I have come to understand how they fit together, at least I think I have. The kingdom of God is not made up of just Americans, or just Frenchmen, or just caucasions or just blacks, the kingdom of God is made up of every race, language, nation, and tongue, but they are ALL believers. These are our brothers and sisters, will we always get along on this earth? Nope. Christians argue, they fight, they have different ideas, and can get just as nasty as anyone else in a business deal gone bad and sue each other instead of taking it to a religious leader to settle such disputes. Canada and the US are composed of mostly Christians, Cananda sues the USofA over additives to gasoline, they may win in an international court that wants to take a slap at the USofA, but God may have a differnt take on it and Canada may pay the price somewhere else economically or in some other manner, perhaps spiritually.

God has told us to go and preach the gospel to the whole world, how they receive it determines their blessings or non-blessings. We are to be charitable, to a point, but if the word is rejected we shake the dust off and move on leaving them for God to deal with. When all of mankind comes under the same laws and the same authority that is not of God, does not respect the rights of the individual then nothing but tragedy can be the outcome. Pure unrestrained Democracy is a form of government that can strip the individuals liberty and self determination far more than any other form of government. The individual is stripped of his freedom by both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority. Our founders understood this and developed the Electoral College to prevent just such tyranny by heavily populated areas over less populated states.

Our government uses which ever one is handy to direct us the way they want us to go. The minority doesn't want smoking in public, the majority wants you to use your private property, or not use it, however the government directs you to.

We know that God does not approve of globalism, that should be enough of a reason to resist it. We resist it not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of all of mankind, believer and non-believer, that will find themselves suffering under the same dictator as we. In Daniel, God lays out all the, ever going to exist world empires, under the rule of one man . Each one less powerful than the one before, encompassing less and less with less riches, till it comes to the final global dictator, the one that is the result of one world globalism.

His kingdom is made up of ten nations of the old roman empire, remember though that the old roman empire had two legs, just like the statue in Daniel had two legs. One leg was made up of the European nations, and one was made up of middle eastern nations. This rulers power over the lives of individuals will be so all encompassing that the individual cannot even buy or sell a toothpick without permission, the mark of the beast. Yet his power over the governments of the skittish nations will not be all that strong.

Each nation fearful of not getting it's slice of the pie, or fear of not being the most favored, the fear by politicians of losing their power, will all contribute to this empires weakness even though the entire world joins it.

So while each nation is perfectly willing to sacrifice the freedom of the individual to this dictator, it's a whole nother matter when it comes to the rights, power, and expectations of the big dogs.

That is exactly what we are seeing going on in the E.U. right now. It is exactly the kind of infighting we are seeing in OPEC. And it is exactly the kind of trouble this last global dictator will face. It takes him three and a half years to set up, he rules for three and a half killing off Christians and other desenters, then it all blows up in his face, along with the entire world as it decends into WW3.

This is why I am against artificially manipulated Free Trade and globalism. It's going to look real good and profitable for some, and for some time, until the entire world is under international law as it creeps in as the last defining word, not the Constitution and it's Bill of Rights. The USofA is the leader of a world, even though hated, we should not be leading the world into globalism.