Posted on 10/06/2003 8:51:09 AM PDT by Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
All across America, Christianity is under attack. The battlegrounds in this war are the nations courtrooms, schools, the media and within federal and state governments.
Now, for the first time a courageous American lawyer, author and columnist, David Limbaugh, has gathered a mass of documentation showing how far this war against those who worship Jesus Christ has progressed.
In his new, best-selling book, "Persecution How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," Limbaugh exposes the outrageous bias and discrimination against Christians.
Wherever the forces aligned against Christianity can find a legal loophole, an agnostic judge, government official, school administrator, professor or teacher, the full weight of the law is employed to drive the faith from the public square.
Limbaugh explains what Christians are facing on dozens of fronts. The examples of the multiple successes of anti-Christian campaign present a frightening picture.
In this first part of a three-part series, NewsMax.com explores the geneses of this campaign, looks back at how Americas government schools developed out of a widespread system of Christian schools, recalls the growth of anti-Christian law, and provides examples of how the war has been fought against the nations schoolchildren.
Driving Christianity out of Americas Schools
Even if you were reading ""Persecution How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity" in a freezer with the temperature way below zero, your blood would still boil.
David Limbaugh pulls no punches in reporting the unrelenting assault on Christianity being waged against it by a collection of latter-day Neros who want nothing less than to throw Christians to the lions of total secularism.
Christians, he tells us, "are often subjected to scorn and ridicule and denied their religious freedoms" and are referred to as "Bible-thumping idiots."
One incident he mentions should turn up the heat under the arteries of any devout Jew or Christian who cherishes the Holy Bible as the word of God. He tells the shocking story of a teacher at a Houston middle school who saw two students carrying Bibles. The girls were taken to the principals office, and the mother of one was summoned. Upon her arrival the teacher "waved the Bibles at her and exclaimed This is garbage and then threw them into the trash can."
Among todays Neros, the author explains, are "activist judges misinterpreting the law," the idiot acolytes of political correctness, Hollywood movie makers, the overwhelmingly paganistic mainstream media, and "educators" at all levels from preschool to universities.
Limbaugh, a skilled lawyer, goes to some length in explaining the constitutional underpinnings of religious freedom and shows how legions of black-robed tyrants have badly distorted the meaning of the First Amendment, imputing to it shadings and gradations never intended by the men who wrote the Bill of Rights.
This facet of the war against Christianity recently came to the fore during the infamous case of the federal court-ordered removal from the courthouse in Montgomery, Ala., of a monument containing the text of the Ten Commandments.
If You Tell a Lie Often Enough ...
Thanks to the issues raised by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, for the first time many Americans were startled to learn that the famous slogan of "separation of church and state" theyve been told bans government at all levels from allowing religious expression within public facilities or by official bodies is nowhere to be found in the Constitution of the United States.
It is a largely a judicial fiction based on a deliberate misreading of the Establishment Clause "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and the Free Exercise Clause, which follows: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It was not until 1947 that any other meaning than that which forbade Congress (but not the states) from setting up a state-sponsored religion was found. In that year, in the case of Everson vs. Board of Education, Justice Hugo Black took a passage from a private letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a friend in which he mentioned an alleged "wall of separation" and made it a key part of the Constitution, where, as noted above, it is nowhere to be found.
All of the subsequent court actions concerning the state vs. religion grew out of Blacks misleading view of the Establishment Clause. From that point on the courts have steadily eroded the prohibition against the "free exercise" of religion.
The full impact of this misreading of the Constitution became apparent with the Supreme Courts 1962 decision in Engel vs. Vitale, which outlawed state-sponsored prayer in government schools (it's no longer accurate to call them "public" schools; they serve the government, not the public that pays for them). In that case the prayer at issue was non-denominational: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."
In the first part of his book, Limbaugh laments the damage done to Americas schools that has resulted from the courts open hostility to religion, especially to Christianity which has become a target of federal judges seeking to drive Jesus Christ out of the public arena.
He provides an exhaustive history of the growth of public/government education, largely a mid-19th century development that built upon a disparate network of local schools in the various states that were fully Christian in every sense of the word. All education in the U.S. was erected on a platform of Christian schools, and even after public schools became the norm, Christianity was an important part of the curriculum upon which all other subjects were taught.
The author traces the development of secularism in the government school system, which he says many Protestant leaders claim was the result of the work of Horace Mann, a Massachusetts legislator who played a key role in establishing the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837.
The Thought Police
Limbaugh cites some of the shocking results of the enforced secularization of public education:
A teacher at the same school where the Bible was described as garbage confiscated book covers that contained the Ten Commandments and threw them in the trash saying the Commandments were "hate speech" that might offend other students.
In May 1995, U.S. District Court Samuel B. Kent of the Southern District of Texas decreed that any student uttering the word "Jesus" would be arrested and tossed in the pokey for six months.
Said this blacked-robed Nero: "And make no mistake, the court is going to have a United States marshal in attendance at the graduation. If any student offends this court, that student will be arrested and will face up to six months incarceration in the Galveston County Jail for contempt of court. Anyone who thinks Im kidding about this order better think again Anyone who violates these orders, no kidding, is going to wish that he or she had died as a child when this court gets through with it."
Thank God this Nero had no lions around to feed with Christians.
Limbaugh sums up this part of the book by commenting that: "When you consider that the first common schools in this country were established for the purpose of Christian instruction, the current climate of hostility to all in the public school environment is sobering."
The separationists, he warns, "are determined to purge public schools of Christian thought, symbols and expression."
Editor's Note: Get "Persecution How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," the latest book by the author of "Absolute Power." David Limbaugh exposes the farce of leftist "tolerance" and reveals the true agenda of "liberals" who abuse the law to force Christianity out of the public square. Click here now.
The extremity of the war against Christianity was manifested in Madison, Wis., where transit authorities sought to honor the late Mother Teresa by putting her image on the metro pass in April 2003, a distinction later planned for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.
The idea, however, infuriated one Annie Laurie Gaynor, the president of the appropriately named Freedom From Religion Foundation. She claimed that using Mother Teresas picture on the bus pass was "an insult to Madisonians who value womens rights and separation of church and state."
Mother Teresa, she charged, was unworthy of being honored because she "lived in parts of the world where she saw firsthand the overwhelming poverty and tragedy resulting from womens lack of access to birth control. Yet she campaigned stridently throughout her life at every opportunity against access to contraception, sterilization and abortion for anyone."
This about a saintly woman who became famous because of her years of going into the streets of Calcutta, gathering the destitute and dying, taking them to her convent, bathing them, cleansing their festering sores and helping them to die with dignity.
Wrote an astonished Limbaugh: "So this remarkably strong woman, Mother Teresa world-renowned for her selfless lifetime of charity works in poverty-stricken nations, whose Missionaries of Charity Order was sanctioned by the pope and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her astonishingly good works is an insult to womens rights?"
The author cites numerous examples of attacks on Christianity at local, state and federal levels.
In Alabama, after Gov. Bob Riley together with his cabinet members and senior staff began having weekly voluntary Bible studies, Larry Darby, the Alabama director of American Atheists, attacked the sessions as "a form of Christian terrorism."
This was the same Darby who joined with the notoriously anti-Christian ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center in the successful attempt to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama State Judicial Building.
Even though the First Continental Congress opened with two hours of prayer and the first session of the U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 24, 1789 began with a four-hour communion service, Americans for Separation of Church and State protested plans to use the U.S. Capitol Rotunda for prayer sessions for members of Congress.
"The U.S. Capitol is not a revival tent," stormed the groups president, Barry Lynn. He suggested that if members of Congress wanted religious service they should "go to their houses of worship."
Secularist attempts to ban any use of Christmas symbols on public property are rife all across the nation, and in many places even the mention of the word Christmas is banned. Government schools now tend to refer to Christmas as a "winter festival" or as some other pagan celebration.
Hooray for Satan
The monomania of ACLU's war on religion was illustrated when the organization set out to sue Carolyn Rusher, mayor of Inglis, Fla., for denouncing Satan.
Every Halloween night for nine years Rusher had issued a proclamation banning Satan from city limits and posting it on her office wall and four other places in the tiny municipality.
"Be it known from this day forward that Satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town, Inglis. Satan is hereby declared powerless, no longer ruling over, nor influencing, our citizens."
Taking up a complaint from a resident, ACLU eagerly planned to file suit, that, if successful, would ostensibly make Satan welcome in Inglis.
When the complaining resident said she was unwilling to file the suit, ACLU said it would go ahead on its own, no doubt to the delight of the prince of darkness.
Anti-Christian hostility became blatantly obvious when Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and his leftist comrades began attacking some of President Bushs nominees to the federal bench for the crime of having religious principles he feared might influence their judicial decisions.
When the president nominated J. Leon Holmes, a devout Roman Catholic and opponent of abortion, to the federal bench, Sens. Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and alleged Catholic Dick Durbin became unhinged.
Schumer stormed, "This man is an embarrassment to be nominated this guy is so far off the deep end."
As Limbaugh notes: "Undeniably, the litmus test is as clear as it is unconstitutional: Practicing Catholics need not apply."
Churches as Cancer
Real estate has become a battleground in the war against Christianity. All across America zoning laws are being used to ban construction of churches, the excuse being that they are a public nuisance and supposedly lower the values of real estate where they are built or attract too many of the wrong sort of worshippers.
In Castle Hills, Texas, Castle Hills Baptist Church was compared to a cancer. In a lawsuit against the church, city officials stated that the church "seems to grow like a cancer, feeding on homes in much the same way as a cancerous tumor feeds on healthy cells."
In Portland, Ore., zoning authorities ordered Sunnyside Centenary United Methodist Church to curtail its meals program for poor families and homeless people and demanded that attendance at all events, including Sunday services, be limited to 70 people. They even further restricted Wednesday night Bible classes and other uses of the church.
The abuse of zoning as a weapon against churches finally got so bad that Congress passed a law in 2000 forbidding any discrimination against churches by zoning authorities.
The Media and Hollywood War Against Christianity
In his new, best-selling book, "Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," David Limbaugh exposes the outrageous bias and discrimination against Christians. Read Part I in this series, Intolerant 'Liberals' Wage War on Christianity, and Part II, Leftists Treat Christianity as 'Cancer'.
The two most powerful molders of opinion in the nation, the media and Hollywood, are at the head of the line in the war on Christianity, frequently ridiculing and disparaging Christians in ways they would never dream of employing against any other group of Americans.
Writes David Limbaugh: "This anti-Christian bias manifests itself in unflattering portrayals of Christians in Hollywood films and entertainment television, and also in the demonization of Christian conservatives in the media."
Sometimes, he notes, the Catholic Church is singled out for special ridicule, a fact made obvious with the incredible overplaying of the recent sex abuse scandals where the facts were often overblown, especially in the medias incessant labeling of it a "pedophile priest" scandal, where only a tiny percentage of the cases involved pedophilia and the overwhelming majority involved teen-agers molested by homosexual priests.
The media, the author says, portrays Christians as unreasonable and violent, charging them with violent acts against abortionists, abortion clinics or homosexuals while at the same time both Hollywood and the media downplay injustices and violent acts committed against Christians.
A favorite media tactic is the use of the pejorative term "religious right" to describe Christian conservatives, implying such believers are, as the author writes "intolerant, backwoods fanatics, and yet never labeling religious liberals such as Jesse Jackson, as the religious left or other leftists as the anti-religious left." Limbaugh cites a screed by the Washington Posts Michael Weisskopf who described followers of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson as "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command."
Other shocking examples of this tactic cited by Limbaugh:
Bryant Gumbel in a June, 2000 CBS "Early Show" interviewing Robert Knight of the Family Research Council appearing to defend the Boy Scouts refusal to allow homosexuals to be Scout leaders, thinking the mike was off, muttered that Knight was "a f***ing idiot."
CNN founder Ted Turner asked employees who had ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday if they were "a bunch of Jesus freaks?"
In his book "Bias" Bernard Goldberg reported that CBS producer Roxanne Russell called Christian activist and then-presidential candidate Gary Bauer "the little nut from the Christian group."
Christians have been called "the American Taliban, with one reporter for a Florida newspaper, Bob Norman referring to "evangelical loonies," and "way-out-there Christian wackos." In the St. Petersburg Times columnist Robyn E. Blummer wrote that the "religious right" is trying in "Taliban-like ways to inject religion into public schools and the operations of government."
One of the more outrageous examples of anti-Christian ranting was exhibited on the liberal taxpayer funded National Public Radio (NPR). On January 22, 2002, NPR reporter David Kestenbaum "seemed to imply," that the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), a pro-family ministry was involved in the terrorist anthrax attacks on the nations capital.
Here, as Limbaugh reports, is what the NPR reporter said: "Two of the anthrax letters were sent to Senator Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, both Democrats. One group who had a gripe with Daschle and Leahy is the Traditional Values Coalition, which before the attacks had issued a press release criticizing the senators for trying to remove the phrase so help me God from the oath."
Kestenbaum then went on to say that TVC had not been contacted by the FBI without bothering to explain why they would have, clearly implying that they might be suspects in the attacks. It took NPR a full year to apologize for that slanderous report.
"No one told our reporter that the Traditional Values Coalition was a suspect in the anthrax mailing," their apology stated, adding that "no facts were available then or since to suggest that the group has any role in the anthrax mailing."
But that didnt stop NPR from making what amounted to a thinly veiled charge of attempted murder against TVC at the time.
One of the more current cases of extreme media bias has been the handling of the controversy surrounding Mel Gibsons new film, The Passion" which tells the story of Jesus Christs final 12 hours.
Although the film is solid based on the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Gospels that have been accepted as the true narrative of Christs passion and death from the very beginnings of Christianity Gibson is being attacked for promoting anti-Semitism.
Yet numerous Jews who have seen the film deny that charge. Given that the film does faithfully follow the Gospels, as both evangelical Christian Bible scholars and the Vatican attest, it can only follow that those charging anti-Semitism are charging that the Gospels are anti-Semitic.
Wrote the Boston Globes columnist James Carroll: "Even a faithful repetition of the Gospel stories of the death of Jesus can do damage exactly because those sacred texts themselves carry the virus of Jew hatred." Aside from the absurdity of the statement, what Carroll is suggesting is that Christians should avoid reading the Gospels for fear that it will cause them to be anti-Semites even though the Gospels make plain the fact that Christs death was the work of sinners.
The role of the media, especially that of the New York Times, the Globes owner, and the papers far-left arts columnist Frank Rich has been to keep the pot stirring, no matter how many times the charge of anti-Semitism is disproved. This has been in keeping with the Times long anti-Christian record.
"Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," is far and away the most thorough account of the war on Christianity it is complete and detailed, and he makes a prima facie case that the faith is under a sustained and vicious attack in all aspects of American life.
Editor's Note: Get "Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," the latest book by the author of "Absolute Power." David Limbaugh exposes the farce of leftist "tolerance" and reveals the true agenda of "liberals" who abuse the law to force Christianity out of the public square. Click here now.
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and no one will leap to our defense.
Nietzsche's point has even more force in our own society, wherein, with few exceptions, men and women live their lives as if there were no God and yet still carry on a profession of being religious. In Nietzsche's dramatic picture, there is something tragically absurd about the man who is shocked by someone else's atheism when it is impossible to discover any genuine religious faith in him. For the average American today, as for the average individual in Nietzsche's Germany, it simply makes no practical difference whether God exists or not. This is true in spite of those polls that show that 98 percent of Americans believe in God. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Death of God Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Death of God ,Dr. Ronald H. Nash
Barna's research indicates that, of the 80 million Americans who claim to be born again, roughly only 7 million of them have a biblical perspective. In Think Like Jesus, he examines guidelines for developing a Christian worldview and letting it change one's way of life.Researcher Says Most Christians Lack Biblical Worldview AgapePress ^ | September 15, 2003 | Allie Martin / George Barna is the founder of Barna Research Group
Q. Sir, on May 6th, on the floor of the house you asked the question: "Are the American people determined they still wish to have a Constitutional Republic." How would you answer that question, Sir?
A. A growing number of Americans want it, but a minority, and that is why we are losing this fight in Washington at the moment. That isn't as discouraging as it sounds, because if you had asked me that in 1976 when I first came to Washington, I would have said there were a lot fewer who wanted it then. We have drifted along and, although we have still enjoyed a lot of prosperity in the last twenty-five years, we have further undermined the principles of the Constitution and private property market economy. Therefore, I think we have to continue to do what we are doing to get a larger number. But if we took a vote in this country and told them what it meant to live in a Constitutional Republic and what it would mean if you had a Congress dedicated to the Constitution they would probably reject it. It reminds me of a statement by Walter Williams when he said that if you had two candidates for office, one running on the programs of Stalin and the other running on the programs of Jefferson the American people would probably vote for the candidate who represented the programs of Stalin. If you didn't put the name on it and just looked at the programs, they would say, Oh yeah, we believe in national health care and we believe in free education for everybody and we believe we should have gun control. Therefore, the majority of the people would probably reject Thomas Jefferson. So that describes the difficulty, but then again, we have to look at some of the positive things which means that we just need more people dedicated to the rule of law. Otherwise, there will be nothing left here within a short time. Are the American people determined they still wish to have a Constitutional Republic An Interview With Ron Paul, SierraTimes.com, 05. 23. 03
Well, at least not in this life....
Point of View Radio Talk Show with Marlin Maddoux reaches about 2 million and they did an interview Point of View - Broadcast Archives 10/1/2003 - Wednesday DAVID LIMBAUGH - "HOW LIBERALS ARE WAGING WAR AGAINST CHRISTIANITY CELL" REAL PLAYER for replay.
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