Posted on 10/05/2015 8:58:21 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
Putin is an atheist.
Putin is an opportunist who sees that many in the West are unhappy with the turn Western Culture has taken and has tried to position himself as their champion.
It’s like I said before on another thread, whereas the Soviet Union positioned itself as the leader of the World’s Left, Putin envisages himself as the leader of the World’s Right.
I don't believe anything has changed from this. I'm just wondering why Putin is playing the audience who he is playing. Maybe Communist Russia just hates Islam more than Christianity.
Even Stalin reopened the Churches during WWII, he knew he needed all the help he could get.
One other thing to consider is that Putin was a recent convert to the thinking of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who tried to warn the West of the consequences of their decadence. Putin made Solzhenitsyn’s writings required reading in Russian schools, something that would have been unimaginable during Soviet times.
Worth repeating...
Simply a tactic for gaining the trust of unsuspecting people in the West. To win them over to their side and support of their larger true agenda. Kind of like the communist-concocted "peace rallies". To this day, every one of the organizing groups are communist.
There is: United For Peace and Justice, which is actually a front for Communist Party USA. ANSWER, a front for Workers World Party. And the student-targeting World Can't Wait, an "anti-war" front for the very dangerous (Maoist) Revolutionary Communist Party.
Russia plays a double game. It uses its “Orthodoxy” to appeal to far right groups, both at home and abroad, and even toys with anti-semitism. It’s “Orthodox” supporters tend to be Stalinists and Communists, as they see Stalin as a person who “converted” in his later years, and lived an exemplary life of getting rid of Jews and other bad influences. On the other hand, the Russians also toy with far leftists, holding Communist meetings and promoting far left ideology through its agents of influence. That “Ghost Stories” spy ring (the one with the red head) is an example of this, as Russia had a “journalist” on the payroll who spread Anti-American propaganda in a Spanish language news paper.
Basically Russia hopes to create a Left-Right, or, rather, Communist-Fascist alliance, all united by a common hatred of the United States and western style government.
Only Putin knows what he believes—Is he a Christian? Only God knows for sure—But between Obama and Putin—I tend to believe Putin is more Christian than Obama—who went to a Black Church that hated white people.
Evangelicals in Russia have become ardent fans of President Vladimir Putin because of Russia’s efforts to maintain its influence in Ukraine, its takeover of Crimea in 2014, and the widespread Russian belief that the West is to blame for the present economic woes on the home front.
This realization dawned on me during my November visit to Russia. The evidence is hard to ignore. Meeting in St. Petersburg back in May, the official Congress of the Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists ended their meetings with a strong endorsement of Putin just two months after brutal conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine.
Addressing Putin, they said, “We express to you sincere appreciation for your labor in the post of president. . . . We reaffirm our principled loyalty with respect to state authority, based on the unchanged words of the Bible, ‘Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; and the powers that be are ordained of God’ (Rom. 13:1, ASV).” The evangelical congress also directly challenged the legitimacy of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and the February 2014 overthrow of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich.
Originally, I suspected backroom state pressure must have been at play. But after conversations with more than a dozen Protestant and Orthodox believers in Moscow, I have to admit that no outside interference was necessary to generate such high praise for Russia’s president.
Putin is genuinely popular—and admired—by Russians across the spectrum: among believers as well as the religiously indifferent, among Protestants as well as Orthodox, and among academics as well as taxi drivers.
This holds true even after the December collapse of the Russian ruble. Quite a few of the trusted Christian leaders who I interviewed in Moscow have family members in Ukraine, or are themselves originally from Ukraine. They are convinced that their anti-Russian relatives across the border have been manipulated by Ukrainian propaganda. (Several were willing to be quoted, but a first name pseudonym will be used for those seeking to remain anonymous.)
Believing in Putin
A pastor from Siberia explained to me that a Russian is more likely to believe Putin than anyone from Ukraine—even a family member.
A Russian Orthodox journalist—and a rare opponent of Putin—shared that even the tiny Russian Quaker community is deeply divided over Ukraine. The majority favors Putin’s military moves there. A Protestant educator with long-standing, firsthand knowledge of American academia put it this way: “We really thank God for Putin’s leadership. We do not want to protest as Ukrainians think we should.”
Evangelicals love Putin? That sounds suspiciously of propaganda. Evangelical churches are targeted by Russian authorities for harassment and often demolition. In Ukraine, Protestants have been targeted by Russian forces, often tortured and murdered, and their properties either converted for some other use or destroyed.
Email the writer of the article. Maybe he’ll answer you.
Answer me what? I wasn’t asking any questions.
I meant explain his position. Here’s another link.
Could Russia become the strongest defender of Christianity while American values are replaced with multiculturalism, atheism, and individualism? Has this ALREADY happened? In 2012, “The head of [Russian] External Church Relations, Metropolitan Illarion, said that every five minutes one Christian was dying for his or her faith in some part of the world… [he] asked Putin to make the protection of Christians one of the foreign policy directions in future.” And Putin suggested that you can count on it. You certainly won’t hear Obama agree to anything like that.
This is in stark contrast to the American military, on which (Billy Graham’s son) Frankin Graham says “’My son just got back from his seventh [military] tour this weekend. So, I love the military. There has been huge pressure on the chaplains in our military – and our chaplains have been a wonderful thing for the military. But there is a move to get rid of the chaplains in our country, and to completely secularize our military. Actually, they are hostile to Christians. A lot of this is coming from this administration and is being pushed by people within the White House,’ said Graham…. ‘They are hostile to Christ. They are anti-Christ in what they say and in what they do,’ said Graham. ‘And they are pushing this agenda into the military. It’s scary.’” http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/franklin-graham-some-administration-officials-are-anti-christ#sthash.4u5ziG1t.3nCJtggZ.dpuf
Listen to Putin’s comments from a speech at 2014’s Valdai Club: “Another serious challenge to Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote pedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.”
This hardly sounds like the godless communists I heard about while growing up in America. My generation was never taught that Russians might have a spiritual side; we were only taught about their rejection of God and religion and how they were going to nuke us someday so we better practice duck and cover drills to hide under our desks from the inevitable nuclear destruction…. Never in my life did I ever think I would see the following quote in Pravda (the once upon a time leading Communist propaganda newspaper) “There is no longer a real powerful conservative in the West the liberals fear. In the East there is someone that causes the western liberal’s maniacal laughter to stop. Vladimir Putin. He has real world power, which causes the liberal media to fearfully ignore or warp his image. Like a good Christian King he leads a nation to Christ. Deep down in their evil souls they shriek like devils because they know Christ is true God and true power that they cannot defeat. They thought the Bolshevik revolution destroyed Holy Mother Russia. Christ cannot be defeated and his servant Putin has welcomed Christ and His church.” (from “US threatened by Russia’s Christianity” – http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/01-07-2013/124992-russia_christianity-0/)
Are you really that simplistic and naive to believe crap like this? I'm referring to the first part. The other is obviously an increasing reality.
You know him well?
We’re talking about governments. Please tell what country with the most Christians in it, is the strongest defender of Christianity?
It damn sure ain’t the United States. Under Obama Christians are persecuted left and right and Christians get kicked out of the Armed Forces for not bowing down to radical homosexual commanding officers. Priests/Pastors are not allowed to preach that homosexuality is a sin. Christians are ran out of business for not catering to homosexuals. Christians are made to provide abortion causing drugs when it violates their faith. The only countries in the world that treat Christians worse than the United States are Muslim countries, and they cut their off.
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