“THE MARK LEVIN SHOW” Live – HEY HEY it’s RAY FRIDAY! Aug-1, 2008

Jeremiah Wright is the tiny tip of Obama’s spiritual iceberg

The phenomenon that raised so many questions for me in January, when I visited Trinity United Church of Christ, was not Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, which turned out to be just a call for all good congregants to support Barack Obama for President. It wasn’t the sermon that caught me off guard; I was prepared for that. I had watched video of Wright, giving five of his fiery sermons.

The thing that really got me to thinking, reading and searching for answers was the church bookstore.

Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic. In all of those places, one thing tied together the books for sale: Christianity.

Not so in Obama’s church bookstore.

I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian thought. Black Muslim thought, to be specific.

And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more political than religious nature. The books by James H. Cone, Wright’s own mentor, were prominent and numerous.

Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright’s congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (emphasis mine)
- Marx and Engels; The Communist Manifesto; 1848

If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to nearly every modern person, they would be “class struggle” and “oppressed vs. oppressors.”

James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King, Jr.

All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and painted it black.

Liberation Theology vs. Traditional Christianity

The teaching authorities of the Catholic Church, have for more than 20 years now, been attempting to stamp out these heretical liberation theologies, denouncing them as vehemently antithetical to the Catholic Christian faith, and have been strenuously combating this Marxist counterfeit Christianity on many fronts within the Church herself.

Of course, the Medieval, iron-fisted clamp of the Catholic Church’s authority, even within the Church herself, is routinely overstated, and there are renegade priests all over the place (more on another of Obama’s spiritual mentors, a liberation theology Catholic priest in Chicago, in Part Two next week).

Not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church has no authority whatsoever over those claiming to represent protestant interpretations of the Christian faith, such as Cone and Wright.

But it is important to note here that liberation theology, including black liberation theology, has not gone unnoticed by the learned biblical scholars within the Vatican, and liberation theology has been roundly denounced as both heretical and dangerous, not only to the authentic Christian faith, but even more so to the societies which come to embrace it.

Just one nugget from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’:

“...it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads.”
- (Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)

Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone’s “Christianity” and Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam.” They are two prophets in the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as backdrops for their black-power aims.

As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power:

“As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God’s reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion’.” (p. xii; emphases mine)

And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm X:

“The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle.” (p. xiii)

(Ironically, considering the formal Church teaching regarding liberation theologies, this book of Cone’s was published by Orbis, owned and managed by The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, a Maryknoll religious entity. So much for the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church.)

It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in 1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly:

“For the marxist, the truth is a truth of class: there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class.”

Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the Marxist class struggle, then he is a “white Jesus,” and they must “kill him.” (Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111)

And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation from traditional Christianity itself:

“The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about he white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution.”

Move over Jesus and make way for Cone, Wright and Obama.

The revolution is at hand.

And presto-chango, once we’ve followed Marx, Cone, Wright and Obama down the yellow brick road to revolution, Christianity as we’ve known it for millennia ceases to exist.

Obama was raised by his mother, the agnostic anthropologist, to regard religion as “an expression of human culture...not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.” (Audacity of Hope; p. 204)

However, when Barack Obama met Jeremiah Wright in the mid-eighties, between his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, he found a “faith” perfectly accommodating to his already well-formed worldview.

From The Audacity of Hope:

“In the history of these (African people’s) struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.” (p. 207)

As Obama explains further, it was Wright’s (and presumably Cone’s, as required of new members at Trinity) peculiar form of Christianity that Obama found palatable:

“It was because of these newfound understandings (at Trinity under Wright) — that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice...that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity...and be baptized.”

Wright’s vision of Christianity was perfectly appetizing to Barack Obama; he didn’t need to change a thing.

Liberation Theology and the New Order of Things

James Cone devotes many words in all of his books to instructing his disciples to beware of those resistant to the necessary change in the power structure, warning that,

“those who would cast their lot with the victims must not forget that the existing structures are powerful and complex...Oppressors want people to think that change is impossible.” (James H. Cone; Speaking the Truth; p. 49)

Pope Benedict XVI (writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) give an equally stringent message to Catholics about liberation theology regarding the perversion of the Christian understanding of the “poor”:

“In its positive meaning the Church of the poor signifies the preference given to the poor, without exclusion, whatever the form of their poverty, because they are preferred by God...But the theologies of liberation...go on to a disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle.”

According to Pope Benedict’s instruction on liberation theology, our understanding of the virtues, faith, hope and charity are subjugated to the new Marxist order:

Faith becomes “fidelity to history.”

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, to bring about the final fruition of the class struggle.

Hope becomes “confidence in the future.”

Yes, we can change the world; we don’t need God. Our collective redemption comes when we engage in the Marxist class struggle.

Charity becomes “option for the poor.”

All are not created equal. Special political privilege for the oppressed, socialism, will set us free.

It’s the dawn of a new age.

Corsi is on George Noorey occasionally. I wish he wouldn’t do that.

**muah!!**

muah! muah! muah! muah!

backatcha

All of his published work has been verified to this extent as his work delves into some pretty nasty stuff and exposes powerful people for what they are.

Also, his academic integrity is on the line.

It’s the dawn of a new age.

Speaking as a newly aging American........

PPPPHHHHLLLLLLBBBBBTTTTT!

the police say there is no one there,

Yet occasionall congressmen are seen leaving.

The obsession with skin pigmentation even extends to the Savior, Jesus Christ.

I believe every description we need of Him is in the Good Book. The best being in Revelation which includes His hair, eyes and mouth.

Somehow, I don’t think we will have any trouble recognizing Him when we see Him. Skin pigmentation is the least of my concerns.

I can tell Axelrod’s blaxploitation and DVD/Video collection by his speeches (as well as what he reads), remember, he’s an ad guy and he used to write for the Tribune (hence the unsealing of Ryan’s divorce records and Hull’s conundrum). Ax also did Daily and Kwame Kirkpatrick’s campaigns.

This is a guy who watches Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing or Malcolm X and coaches O on the lines... say for... Louisiana, where he used hoodwinked, bamboozled. No one says that anymore.

ok, thanks.

I wish he would stop that too but I must ask in my mostest polite way - how do you know? :)

DU doesn't care if they were a plant. Remember that Hollywood and Oprah are the type of marketing that Obama has access to. Here is a sampling of DU's comments regarding the so called 'hecklers'.

******

Hope this gets covered in the media. This is the first time I've ever seen him heckled. Instead of having him taken out while making a joke (like McCain does), he took the guy's concern seriously and addressed them.

He took it and ran with it, a great moment in the campaign, I hope a clip of this gets played a ton on TV.

This DOES need to be played over and over on tv. EVERYONE sees him as a “celebrity,” and he deals well with those people.

Spoken like a wise, capable leader - and with grace and dignity

People who think he can't speak without a teleprompter better take note.

I've never seen protesters handled that way! GO OBAMA!
They didn't get tased?

No...maybe if they go to a McCain event they'll get tased, though.

I know you meant it as snark, still on CNN they said that right after the protest two secret service guys moved next to the protesters. Did not do a thing, just stood there. Which is OK and the right thing to do I think. dude, they are checked in through security.

This isn't Bush or McCain, who only allow supporters in.
They're highlighting Obama’s handling of the heckler ... saying, “now that's how you handle things!

Just saw the clip, Obama totally controlled the situation. Notice how he didn't wait for anyone to intervene, nor did he want those people removed ... he just wanted the ground rules to be set.

Excellent leadership display!

That's good that it's being covered. My tinfoil is on, a theory: Obama’s campaign is composed of some very, very smart people, including Mr. Love who “knows people.” This incident will take away a couple of things. The constant loop of Obama w/Paris, Britney, change the focus away from McSame, on a Friday dump day, and give Barack the opportunity to let the “militants” know if he becomes POTUS, he will not be handing out welfare and other benefits to black folks as he's been accused of on other sites.

Having said that, the fellas were not militant, just a little noisy, got the attention of all of us. This was a good thing, it gave Barack the opportunity, on camera, to dispel the notion of his “give aways” to the African American community. I'm sure these guys are members of the group you mentioned, and have been bugging the campaign to address their concerns. The campaign listened, said they would address their questions and voila! Okay, I'll take my foil hat off, but I never, never underestimate this Obama group. They're geniuses in their own right.

Well, if it WAS planned, it went well.

Exactly. I tell you, his people (Obama’s) are the best...

They are, but I don't think this WAS planned. If it was, we'll probably find out about it.

I do not think that it was staged. Barack Obama is a student of history. The tactic that he used today was one that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., employed. I think it is far more likely that the incident was a result of Obama’s understanding of why King handled situations this way, than it was a staged event.

His community organizer skills were fine tuned nt
I agree, if it was a plant, it was brilliant..and if it wasn't it was brilliant. It worked either way.

They weren't dragged away in cuffs under the comment “We believe in free speech in America.”

To tell the truth, I'm glad young AAs are interested and involved.

Hopefully Obama answered their question(s) and feel good they had the guts to get out there and ask him. As a white woman, I'm proud of these young men, they got involved without being nasty, etc.

This is quite extraordinary. remember, people even got tased at a Kerry event. For Obama to respect the protesters right to Free Speech and treat them with dignity while at the same time countering their argument, is the sign of a true President.

When these protesters were asked by Obama to wait their turn, they waited their turn. And when their turn came, they asked questions instead of shouting insults at Obama. They were treated reasonably because they behaved reasonably.

Standing up screaming with a banner covering your face is reasonable?

Kerry's people and the security guards handled that situation terribly.

Obama handled this like a Champ. The protesters didn't get out of control and tase worthy because they were not dismissed out of hand.

Obama took control of the situation before anybody tried to throw them out. Kerry could have done that.

We are watching a President in action.

What no SS agents hauling them off?

No taser moment? Obama actually treated them and their grievances with dignity? This hasn't happened in eons...why this is a CHANGE. I guess the Democratic Candidate is really all about CHANGE. GOOD ON HIM, and GREAT for AMERICA!

BTR asking if police were ordered to clear things out.

Couldn’t hear the answer.

Isn't Noorey a truther nut?

Never listened to him.

Beg to differ....next one will be a “two for one” veil

Leaving? WTH?

Jerome Corsi is (or was) a FReeper. Forget his screen name, though. Probably met him when I went to DC to join other vets in September ‘04 to demonstrate against Kerry and his Viet Nam lies. Met John O’Neil there and what a courageous and humble man he is.

Any of you Levinites want to attend a Levinite picnic on the East Coast in October?

Answer:

I see nothing

I hear nothing

I know nothing

Zieg Hiel!

BTR blogger suggests looking up Pelosi’s bood schedule and showing up at her signings across the country.