Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

ROBERT KNIGHT - LIBERAL GOSPEL EXALTS GOVERNMENT

Robert Knight rightly observes:

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has done us a wonderful service with her Aug. 15 article in the Atlantic, “Is Rick Perry as Christian as He Thinks He Is?”

It’s a masterpiece of liberal misuse of the Bible, which will become more frequent as the campaign heats up.

Knight clarifies what Townsend is advocating:

[...] Mrs. Townsend starkly makes the case that being Christian means using other people’s tax dollars to help the poor.

  Criticizing Gov. Perry, Mrs. Townsend reveals her view of Christian charity:

“I see a fundamental inconsistency between Perry's concerted opposition to government social programs and his promotion of himself as a Christian politician,” she writes “….Christ teaches us to feed the hungry and care for the sick, not to abandon them. Perhaps Gov. Perry hasn't read that part of the Bible where Christ admonishes us to care for ‘the least among us.’”

To which Robert Knight appropriately responds:

Perhaps Mr. Perry has, which might be why he opposes welfare programs that have trapped millions in poverty, dependency, crime and destroyed families and communities. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, the Bible admonishes us to care for widows, orphans and the poor – not create more of them.

(Brillliant response, that).   More from Mrs. Townsend:

“I don't see any place in the Bible that says we shouldn't use all the tools we have at hand to help the poor, the sick, and the hungry.”

Knight's response:

No, but please note that robbing Peter to pay Paul is not recommended. In Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who helps the mugging victim pays out of his own pocket. He does not demand that the government recompense the owner of the inn where he arranges for the man to stay.

Knight wins this debate hands down.  Read the entire article for more.

POPE LAMBASTS LIBERATION THEOOGY

Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute reports:

It went almost unnoticed, but on December 5, Benedict XVI articulated one of the most stinging rebukes of a particular theological school ever made by a pope. Addressing a visiting group of Brazilian bishops, Benedict followed some mild comments about Catholic education with some very sharp and deeply critical remarks about liberation theology and its effects upon the Catholic Church.

After stressing how certain liberation theologians drew heavily upon Marxist concepts, the pope described these ideas as “deceitful.” This is very strong language for a pope. But Benedict then underscored the damage that liberation theology did to the Catholic Church.

"NO, MR. PRESIDENT" - JOHN PIPER'S RESPONSE TO PRESIDENT OBAMA ON ABORTION

I have seen this YouTube video on a number of websites, and most recently over at HotAir.  It's well done, passionate, and unanswerable.   Technically, the juxtaposition of voice and graphics would be worth viewing even for those who resist the message.

Update 5/19/09- Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput offers hard hitting comments on Notre Dame and the issues that remain

Update 5/19/09 - Chuck Colson offers excellent (if depressing) commentary on President Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame University.  Particularly disturbing, as Colson says, "was the appalling sight of the field house filled with faculty, students, and parents wildly cheering."  I felt exactly the same way. 

Do read all of Colson's commentary.  As shocking as it may seem when first stated, Colson is right to

BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION IN THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH (A SAD COMMENTARY)

This is a sad account of an orthodox priest going head to head with the liberal Presiding Bishop in the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori.  (She's the top person in the hierarchy). 

When Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori recently visited the Diocese of Georgia she got more than she bargained for when she went head to head with the orthodox rector of St. John's Church in Savannah, Georgia.

At a meeting with the clergy of the diocese, she asked them to meditate on Mark 1:11, "You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased", the words spoken by "a voice from heaven" to Jesus at his baptism in Jordan.

"We were to apply this text directly to ourselves, and to ponder what it meant to be assured of God's unconditional love and approval. To judge from the responses, the assembled clergy loved this exercise, and in the discussion that followed the conventional themes of inclusiveness emerged - although a few did

WILL THE REAL IRRATIONALISTS PLEASE STAND UP? -- Turns out to be the Atheists and Liberal Protestants, not Evangelicals

Jonah Goldberg links to a Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway Wall Street Journal essay, "Look Who's Irrational Now," and provides these excerpts:

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Keep reading. . .

JAMES DOBSON ACCUSES OBAMA OF "DISTORTING" THE BIBLE

Here is today's Associated Press story on the issue.  Dobson's discussion will take place on today's (June 24, 2008) radio program available here.  I may make comments later, but in the meantime, see my earlier post, "Does Obama Have a Conventional Christian Faith as He Claims?"

"GOD DAMN AMERICA" SAYS OBAMA'S PASTOR, THE REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT

Note updates at the end of the post

**

From ABC News.com via Kathryn Lopez:

Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric," including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.

Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon. "The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification," Obama said in a recent interview. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," Obama told the paper.

Rev. Wright, who announced his retirement last month, has built a large and loyal following at his church with his mesmerizing sermons, mixing traditional spiritual content and his views on contemporary issues.

"I wouldn't call it radical. I call it being black in America," said one congregation member outside the church last Sunday.

Me: What does it say about a person (Obama) who has willingly sat under a man preaching such views for such a long time?  And who has furthermore called him a friend and mentor and guide?  To me it says a lot.  Spooky.  Note: I previously blogged about Obama's pastor here.  - For Victor Davis Hanson's comments, keep reading.
 

OBAMA SERMONIZES ON THE "SERMON ON THE MOUNT"

Michelle Malkin offers a post with many useful links.  Obama's views on abortion and
homosexuality conform to his consistent ultra-liberal perspective.  The Bible suffers from his exegesis and his statements regarding his church seem extraordinarily disingenuous to me. For my previous posts on Obama, click here.

Update 3/4/08 - The Baptist Press offers useful commentary.  (HT: Hugh Hewitt)

Update 3/5/08 - Mollie Ziegler over at "GetReligion" (a blog written by journalists that analyzes press coverage of religion), asks why the press didn't  follow-up with logical questions to Obama such as "which specific portion of the Sermon on the Mount are you referencing?"  Reporters were left to speculate (lamely!)  Her article is appropriately titled, "Blessed are the question askers."

Useful Review of Liberal Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong's New Book

Jason Lee Steorts reviews Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious, and says

[Spong]has tried to lob his book like a hand grenade into the institutions of Christendom. The idea is to explode two millennia of traditional belief on which these institutions rest, thereby making room for a new Christianity based on a conception of Jesus that is palatable to “a twenty-first century person.” What actually crawls out of the rubble is a Jesus for John Shelby Spong.

Steorts concludes:

It is hard to see how the new story can survive when the God at its center is nothing but an overwrought sentimentality plummeting down an abyss. If that is all we have left, Spong can keep his Christianity.   (more)

Steort  should have put "Christianity" in quotation marks since Spong's religion is a subjective quicksand of his own making.

Speaking of liberal Christianity, the Boston Globe reports that the top official of the Episcopal Church USA stands foursquare behind the Episcopal Church's endorsement of homosexual activity.   According to the Globe, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori regards