It's Only a Game, For Cryin' Out Loud

It’s Just a Game, For Cryin’ Out Loud!

I watched a couple of play-off games for the NFL this past weekend and I was extremely frustrated by a couple of things I saw.  It was the level of frustration where you actually yell at the television set even though that does nothing at all except make you sound like you are  as insane as the event you happen to be watching.

The two games I watched were the Baltimore Ravens against the Denver Broncos on Saturday night and the Seattle Seahawks versus the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday afternoon.  Unlike NFL games that were held at the first part of the seasons, there didn’t appear to be any officiating miscues and all the calls that were made appeared to be legitimate and appropriate for the offense that was flagged.  Both the games I saw seemed to be played by “adults” and good sportsmanship seemed to be the spirit of both games.  Not a lot of drama being presented on the sidelines of any of the football teams participating.  What a nice change of pace. 

In the Falcons against the Seahawks, both teams played well and it was an exciting game with the lead being traded a couple of times.  The first half was all the Falcons scoring with the final score at the half being 20-0 Falcons being on top.  Obviously, the Falcons outplayed the Seahawks at every turn during the first half.   But the Seahawks came back from half-time a different team and began to level the playing field.  As the fourth quarter began, the Falcons were facing another team altogether and Seattle scored 28 points to Atlanta’s 27 total points.  There was one play where Seattle’s quarterback, Russell Wilson, threw a great pass that was blocked by one of Atlanta’s defensive corners. 

At this point in the game, the Falcons were ahead only by one point and the success of the game was far from a foregone conclusion.  The Atlanta defender who made the required play then proceeded to do his “success” dance at the spot of the play as if to say, “Hey, everybody, look at me and see how great I am!”  Keep in mind, this is that player’s job for which he is being paid (and quite well, I might add) to do.  This same player had already allowed a Seattle receiver to get past him and make enough plays where Atlanta was on the verge of going home for the season.  Jesus had something to say about this attitude.  In Luke 17:10, he tells people who work for others “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.'” (Luke 17:10 NIV)  A little humility goes a long way.  Apparently, not in the NFL, though.

During the Broncos/Ravens game, the battle was fever-pitched with both teams vying for dominance in a high tension, high scoring match-up.  When it all came down to the wire, Baltimore won in double overtime with Baltimore scoring 38 points to Denver’s 35 points.  Ray Lewis, a defensive linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens since their inaugural season, is undoubtedly one of the most exciting players to watch when professional football is being played.  He has been in the NFL for 17 years and still makes guys ten years younger cringe when they see him coming after them.  He is without a doubt one of the best in his field.  He is an inspiration to his team to continue to work and play hard on every play but his comments after the game just floored me.  A commentator asked him how he felt winning in Denver in such a long fought battle.  He started to quote Isaiah 54:17, which says, “No weapon forged against you will prevail.” (Isa 54:17 NIV)

Think about that.  Does Ray Lewis really think that God cares about the outcome of a football game other than that no one was permanently injured or handicapped?  With all that’s going on in the world, the 56 million babies that have been brutally murdered in the womb for the crime of being “inconvenient”; the thousands of innocent girls being sold into the sex-slave trade each year; the hundreds, if not thousands of innocent Christians being martyred every year; the millions of hungry, the homeless, or emotionally injured or living on the streets with no hope or despairing of all hope; corrupt politicians using people for their own evil ends; and the list goes on and on.  Does Ray Lewis actually think God cares if the Ravens get into the Super Bowl?  How about the Christians that are playing for other teams?  What does that say about God if he chooses one team over another to be the champion?  The Dallas Cowboys have a tongue-in-cheek saying for why their stadium doesn’t have a dome. It’s so God can watch his favorite team play on Sunday.  But even when they say that, I think they know it’s just talk and nothing more. 

But Ray Lewis was almost in tears as he started to quote Isaiah and I wonder if he really knows this?  I understand that both of these games were hard fought by both sides and a lot of emotions came forth in during each of them, but seriously?  It is only a game, after all. 

I’m guessing what all four teams need, in fact, probably every professional sports team playing today in this country and everywhere a professional sport is being played, is a little perspective on the sport.  I have no problem with professional sports and enjoy watching these athletes compete using their skills and sports acumen to accomplish physical feats that I could not accomplish when I was in my prime, much less now.  But if you look at sports in the light of everything else in life and eternity, it is only a diversion from reality after all.  I hope Ray Lewis and the rest of the NFL realize that.             

Completely Missing the Point

Last Friday, December 14^th, in the Sandy HookSprings Elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, a lone gunman by the name of Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty-six people, most of them first-grade children, in what can only be described as pure evil on display.  The killer (notice that I did not say “alleged killer”), when emergency service people started to show up, then took his own life with the weapons he had just cut down so many innocent lives moments before.

The echoes of the weapon firing had not even stopped ringing through those halls before the president immediately began talking of the problem being a “gun control” issue.  The problem is not that people have the right “to keep and bear arms”.  The problem in the Sandy Hook Massacre is that there is a lack of personal responsibility being taught to our children.

Our culture condones everything in school except prayer by students and teachers in public school.  When God was kicked out of the public school systems back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, all we had left was a void which had to be filled.  You can read about a man who had a void in, of all places, the Bible, in Matthew 12:43-45, where a man who had a demon ejected from him life became worse because of the void that was produced by the vacancy of that evil spirit.  “When it (the evil spirit) arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.  Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” (Matt 12:44-46 NIV)  Every book on biology and nature will tell you that nature will not abide a void.  Something will come in to replace that which has been displaced.  It has taken almost forty years, but something has filled the void that was created when God left.

Before the 50’s and throughout most of the 60’s, schoolroom discipline was generally not a problem.  The teacher had complete control of her classroom and dealt with problems head-on without so much as batting an eye.  Children who where unruly or disrespectful in those days found themselves sitting in the principal’s office waiting to get punished by a swift swat on the behind or standing quietly in a corner in the classroom. But when God was kicked out, people like the ACLU came in and said that paddling a child was a form of child abuse and making a child stand in a corner in front of the rest of the class could hurt the child’s self esteem.  These are probably the same people who said that any consensual sex, even in a marriage, was a form of rape.  The discipline problems of that era were talking out of turn, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, dress code infractions and littering. 

In the 1990’s, the problems were drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Teachers were almost afraid to discipline their students for fear of retaliation.   When I was in high school from 1974 until 1977, there was an armed Cincinnati police officer who was part of the school staff as well as several security personnel who roamed the hallways to insure no one was outside his or her classroom while school was in session.  And that is still almost twenty years ago from where we are today.

The gun did not kill the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School any more than the bottle of whiskey drove a car into oncoming traffic and killed a family of four or the computer sent bullying messages by itself to a troubled teenager who committed suicide because of it.  These “tragedies” were caused by a human being acting in a way that is not even considered “animalistic”, since animals usually have a valid reason for the things they do or the way they act.  As long as we take personal responsibility out of the public arena, we will continue to have problems like these.  Adam Lanza sought to avoid such responsibility.  When the emergency response personnel showed up, he turned the gun on himself and killed himself.

All the reporters from the liberal press are saying that we need more gun control laws.  They are saying that we need more ‘gun free’ zones.  Unfortunately, to a psychopath like Adam Lanza, who killed his own mother while she slept in her bed, a ‘gun free’ zone is more like the ‘target rich environment’ he is used to in the violent video games he played in the basement of his home.  The National Rifle Association spokesman, Wayne LaPierre said it correctly when he said that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  The killer of twenty-six people, when he saw an armed response to his mayhem, took his own life rather than face the just consequences of his evil actions.  LaPierre said that policies banning guns at schools leave schoolchildren “utterly defenseless” and create a place that “insane killers” consider “the safest place to inflict the maximum mayhem with minimum risk.” (http://www.krdo.com/news/NRA-School-gun-bans-create-dangerous-places)        

Failure to Look Past the End of Their Noses

Billionaire Warren Buffet recently made comments in the New York Times that the president’s plan to “soak the rich” is not bad, it just needs some adjustments.  He feels that the bar for raising these taxes should be raised to people like him who make over 1 million dollars a year, no matter where they get their income. 

This would put an end to creating wealth through strategic investment and would greatly hamper anyone from becoming as wealthy as he is.  In a New York Times piece he wrote, he said, “Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”  He also wrote in that same piece that wealthy people like him “have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”

 Why would someone who has made a lot of money through his own efforts and hard work ask for the government to take more of his money away?  It just defies all common reason and logic.  Warren Buffet has done this for some very specific reasons.

1. Warren Buffet wants desperately to be liked by the political “in crowd” and all of their hanger-ons.  He’s afraid of the potential public relations problems he might face if he tells people who don’t have what he has, for any number of reasons, that he has a right to keep his own money without fear of the government taking it from him and wasting it on some cockamamie, hare-brained scheme to “make life more fair by spreading the wealth around” to everybody, no matter if they work or not.  He wants to be invited to the political dinners and be thought of as someone who‘s really an ‘okay guy for a rich guy’.  As they say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”  I never thought someone like him would be afraid of a little bit of bad publicity from people who haven’t got what it takes to do what he has done in his life.

2. Mr. Buffet apparently doesn't want anyone to be as wealthy as he is.  He’s not only at the top of the economic ladder, he wants to pull the ladder up so no one else can get to the heights he has reached.  For any young entrepreneur coming up, sorry, but there’s no room in the inn for you.

3. “The Oracle of Omaha”, as he is called is old and will probably not be here to face the consequences of his actions in the future.  At eighty years old, he’s not only in the autumn of his life, he’s in the dead of winter with eight feet of snow on his grave site.  But the taxes he will have to pay are probably of no consequence to him because he has enough to keep himself comfortable and that’s all that matters to him.  It reminds me of another very wealthy and powerful man who had the same attitude. 

There is a story in the book of 2 Kings about King Hezekiah, king of Judah.  He was sick and God told him through the prophet Isaiah to “put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.” (II Kings 20:1 NIV)  Hezekiah prayed to God with tears and God relented, allowing him to live another fifteen years.  A little later, the king of Babylon sent emissaries to him and Hezekiah showed them all the wealth of the kingdom.  When Isaiah asked what these men saw, Hezekiah told him that they saw everything in his palace.  God told him through Isaiah that the time would come when all his wealth would be taken away from him and his descendants would be slaves to the king of Babylon.  Hezekiah’s response?   “The word of the LORD you have spoken is good,” Hezekiah replied. For he thought, “Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?” (2 Kings 20:19 NIV)

There are a few things that maybe even Warren Buffet may not have considered, but then again, he probably has. The first is, and I’m no expert in economics and haven’t even taken an economics class in college, that anything you overtax will by its very nature shrinking in size.  The state of South Dakota had a referendum and passed a new tax of $1.00 per pack on every pack of cigarettes sold in the state in 2008.  The revenue generated was supposed to go to the schools.  Sales of cigarettes plummeted almost immediately with some people who lived on the borders of states like Iowa and Nebraska going across state lines to buy their cigarettes and others just quitting smoking altogether rather than pay such an exorbitant tax on their habit.  Even the state of California, which is almost bankrupt after years of democrat control, has lost almost two and a half million residents in the past ten years due to the excessive taxation of the people producing wealth.  According to a Manhattan study, “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look”, by Thomas Gray and Robert Scarmadilia (October 2012), roughly 225,000 residents vacate California each year and have done so consistently in the last decade.  And they take their money with them.  California has one-eighth of the country’s population but one-third of its welfare recipients.

France found out that “soaking the rich” is an invitation for the wealthy to find a more suitable climate to live when Gerard Depardieu, one of France’s most famous and beloved actors established a residence in the small village of Nechin in Belgium, just across the border from France, to avoid France’s 75% millionaire tax implemented by the socialist government of President Francois Hollande.  And he is not alone.  France’s richest man and head of the LVHM luxury goods empire, Bernard Arnault, and the Mulliez family, billionaire owners of Decathlon sports and the Auchan supermarkets also moved to Belgium to avoid excessive taxation of their wealth.  Others, like actor Johnny Depp, French  singer Johnny Hallyday and Alain Delon have also left the country of France to live, and pay taxes, elsewhere.    

Another thing people need to consider is that wealthy people are not stupid.  They did not get wealthy by just allowing the government or anybody for that matter, to just rob them blind.  The Warren Buffets of this world can leave this country and take up residence in any country they choose.  They don’t have to renounce their citizenship or anything drastic like that.  And when they are living in another country, that particular country gets the benefits of their wealth.

Costco and many other companies, The Washington Post included, are giving their yearly dividends before the new capital gains taxes taking effect on January 1^st.  This helps many wealthy people, Warren Buffet included, to avoid the new taxes that are obviously coming down the pike in the next few weeks.  I told you these people are not stupid.

Here’s a solution to Warren Buffet’s problem that he’s not paying enough taxes: Simply write a check made out to the IRS and mail it in to Washington DC.  There is no law against rich people giving more of their money, or all of their money if they so choose, to the federal government.  But making everybody do the same thing whether or not they want to or can afford to is just wrong-headed.

Both Warren Buffet and King Hezekiah are about as short-sighted as a man can be.  Both men’s thinking is exactly the same.  Neither of these two men could see past the end of their own noses and are only thinking about right now, right here.  Warren Buffet must be fairly intelligent to be as wise in business and to have such a great acumen at making wealth.  But his lack of foresight for his heirs and this country is about as selfish as a man can get.  He’s called the “Oracle of Omaha” and is supposed to be really smart.  These words and actions don’t seem all that smart to me.  They just seem selfish and petty.

To Split or Not to Split

My church recently has gone through some turmoil that could ultimately destroy the fabric of this gathering of believers.  There is really a potential for a church split that would end up being the end of our little community of faith.  The church is not very large, but it is a comfortable community of believers that made fellowship fun and the worship was always energetic and lively. 

Some people might think that a church split is no big deal.  They especially think this way if the church is ‘large enough’.  After all, if you split a church with a thousand members, you get two churches with five hundred members each, right?  Wrong.  Even if the church splits evenly, there are probably one third of the people in the congregation that will see all the in-fighting and decide that they no longer want any part of ‘church’, or any organized religion, and stop attending any religious services at all out of disappointment and discouragement.  And this doesn’t include the live of the children involved.  The spiritual fallout has the potential to be devastating, to say the least.   

Like most divorces, the individuals in the church family are forced to decide which side they’re on.  And therein lays a big part of the problem.  Just as divorce was never a part of God’s plan (see Malachi 2:16 or Matthew 19:18), neither is a church split part of God’s overall plan.  When we as a church are forced to ‘take sides’ in a church squabble, we always lose when we think this group is right and that group is wrong.  However, when this happens, I really think God weeps over us and considers us lost sheep without a real shepherd. 

Jesus did not stretch out His arms on the cross at Calvary to die in order to make a social club for us to gather together every week and have a good time.  He died to provide a haven from the storms of life that invariably affect us all.  The church is several things at once.

The church is a hospital for weary and wounded people to find healing for the wounds that this world has inflicted on them.  I remember when I came back to the church after being away for so long; I found a group of people that didn’t care where I’d been or what I’d done.  They were just happy to see me there and they gave me the love and acceptance I was dying to receive.  I found strength for the journey that God had intended for me and spiritual nourishment to make me strong. 

The church is also a boot camp of sorts for God’s army, training us up in the ways of spiritual warfare that will inevitable come into all of our lives.  God gives us the required skill set necessary to survive in a hostile world and to bring as many people as we can into the fold where they too can find the “peace of God, which transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) as they come into a living relationship with their Creator.

The question about whose side God is on always comes into play.  It’s like the political cartoon about God in politics where one candidate is screaming, “The Lord is MY shepherd, I shall not be in want” and the other candidate is yelling back at him, “Thy word is a lamp unto MY feet and a light unto MY path!”  If the consequences of such thinking weren’t so disastrous and long lasting, it would be laughable.

Someone once said “If you ask the wrong question, you’ll get the wrong answer.”  The correct question is not “whose side is God on?” but “who is on God’s side?”  After all, the church does belong to God.  It is His church, is it not?  And if it’s His church, doesn’t He has some say in how it’s run?

The second person of the trinity, Jesus Christ, prayed in John 17 was for the church, that it might find unity.  And not just any sort of unity, but complete unity.  Do you get that?  When we are in complete unity, the enemy has no recourse against us.  Why do you think that Proverbs 6:16-19 says, “There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him:… and (the seventh) a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.”  God knows that when the church is united, they are essentially unbeatable by any enemy.  “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”  (Ecclesiastes 4:12)

Think about that.  “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”  (John 17:22-23) Again, “I in them and you in me…”  There’s your three strand cord. 

Do you realize how powerful this statement is?  “…that they may be one as we are one…”  If you could only remotely comprehend how much Jesus and God the Father are one, then you might have an idea how much Jesus wanted, no, longed for, the church to be united from the ground up.  If anything, this is the testimony that we as the church give to a world that is not only antagonistic, but actually acrimonious towards us in the body.  You will notice that this unity has nothing to do with church polity, doctrine or statements of faith. 

Jesus said that this was the defining issue for the body, that we might have unity and be one.  “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35)  To reach a lost and dying world, we must be the real thing to real people because people can smell a fake a mile away.  They know what insincerity feels like because they deal with it all day long in the world we live in.

The entire world is dying to see someone who is sincere in their faith and willing to live that out in day-to-day life.  The writer of the Book of James said, “You have faith; I have deeds. Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.”  (James 2:18)  Someone wiser than myself once said, “Evangelize at all times; and if necessary, use words.” 

The Culture of Death Part 2

In our society today, we are supposed to have ‘evolved’ into a kinder,

gentler sort of people. We are an educated people who are the penultimate in sophistication. We no longer make sacrifices to strange idols, do we? We are all about “the children”. And we are always trying to renew our commitment to our environment so that others will be able to enjoy what we have enjoyed for so long. We have become so advanced that we might even bring Heaven to exist right here on Earth. Right?

And yet the evidence is clear that this is not really the case. By all outward signs, we are as dysfunctional and deviant as any generation to have previously walked the face of this earth. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel would be proud. See 1 Kings 16 through 2 Kings 9.

Our lives are continually being disrupted by a deluge of information regarding our time here on this earth and how we are supposed to live. Someone else is always trying to tell us how we should live in order to please everyone else. And as Christians, most the information we get from the popular culture is not generally in our best interest to listen to and should be ignored.

In the last forty years, the drum has been beating for the call to the Abortion Clinics. Since 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down anti-abortion laws, over 1.2 billion children have never seen the light of day in the world which we find ourselves. The abortion industry, a billion dollar a year mega-industry, has had to reinvent itself with a new public relations campaign trotted out every few months.

In the past few weeks, with the Susan G Koman For the Cure Foundation deciding to de-fund Planned Parenthood, the abortion industry stopped even trying to play the nice guy and showed their true colors. Even though the amount of money Koman was giving was paltry in relation to the abortion industry budget, abortions were again reinvented as ‘women’s health’ and Koman was bullied into continuing to fund the abortion mills.

In this time, numerous new books about the effects of abortion on the real health issues women have after having had an abortion have come out. One in particular is “Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion” by Dr. Theresa Burke with David C. Reardon. It deals with the aftermath of the abortion, which is deeply traumatic and often ignored by the mainstream media.

Some of the post abortion risks, which are never mentioned, are:

* There is an 800% increase in breast cancer for women less than 18 years old who have an abortion after the eighth week of pregnancy.

* There is an 80% increase in breast cancer if the woman has an abortion before a live birth.

* The risk of breast cancer increases with the number of abortions.

* Women who have an abortion before a live birth and develop breast cancer have a greater possibility of a faster growing tumor with a poorer cure rate than women who have not had an abortion.

And these are just statistics in regard to breast cancer. It doesn’t take in consideration all the other types of cancer that rise significantly as soon as a woman has even one forced abortion to a pregnancy. And this is supposed to be about women's health? Really? Is that your final answer?

Our culture is one that is the modern day equivalent of Israel under Ahaz and Jezebel, who led their nation in Baal worship. We may not actually bow down to a graven image of a half-man, half bull, but all the signs of Baal worship are alive and well in our culture. Baal was one of the seven princes of Hell and is the primary pagan idol of the Phoenicians, often associated with the pagan goddess Ashtaroth. The name Baal means ‘lord’, such as Baal Zebub, ‘lord of the flies’; this is another name for Satan.

Three pillars of Baal worship are:

1. Child Sacrifices. Today this works itself out in the abortion industry with over a billion children having been sacrificed on the altar of convenience since 1973. There was a recent study in Europe by two bioethicists justifying the deliberate, premeditated murder of newborns during the first few days and weeks after a child is born. They would not call it murder, but a post-birth abortion. As one sign said, “Abortion does not make you Un-pregnant; it makes you the mother of a dead baby.”

2. Sexual Immorality. This is found in both homosexual and illicit heterosexual sexual promiscuity. From comprehensive sex education in schools (beginning as early as elementary school), to the militant ‘gay rights’ movement that doesn't want just equality but complete acceptance of their lifestyle as to be considered ‘normal’ and healthy. Radical feminism essentially states that men are no longer needed or wanted to make a safe environment for everyone to live in. One of their statements made the implication that all sex, even consensual sex, between a man and a woman in a marriage is still rape.

3. Pantheism. The worship and reverence of all things over the Creator. You can see this in the worship of Gaea, the Earth Goddess, or Mother Earth. It is also seen in the radical environmentalism movement that places Earth above the lives of human beings. As I said before, there are people that actually believe that the world cannot maintain its equilibrium with this many human beings on it. But facts are hard to argue with and the fact is that the entire population of the world could probably live in the land mass found within the state of Texas with every family having something like 2 ½ acres of land. And our advanced technology in agriculture has shown that the United States can actually grow enough food to feed all 6 billion inhabitants of this world.

Here’s a thought: some say that the television is an idol. If it’s not an idol, why are all the chairs in the TV room facing it?

God’s plan for mankind has always a place of peace and rest in Him. But man from the start, beginning with Adam and Eve’s disobedience and subsequent removal from the Garden, has been duped into thinking that the key to his ultimate fulfillment will be found in being like God. Satan thought then, ands still thinks today, of man as “useful idiots”. Man doesn’t even realize that he is being used.

Part of this ‘being like God’ is the “God complex” that man has developed. And with this comes the ‘right’ to make life or death decisions. Thus abortion, both pre-birth and post birth, and its brother of the death culture, euthanasia, makes absolute sense to modern man. If a person has cannot contribute to society in a meaningful way financially, as well as socially, it is in man’s self interest to remove them from that society. This is what we’ve come to.

And this is what now passes as being sophisticated. I don’t know. If that’s sophistication, well, all I can say is that Hell will be filled with sophisticated people. Remember, everything Adolph Hitler did when he was chancellor of Germany was ‘legal’. It still doesn’t make it right.

The Culture of Death

The Culture of Death

Rush Limbaugh found himself in a major brouhaha recently over remarks he made about Sandra Fluke, a 30 year old third year law student at Georgetown University, and her demands that insurance companies pay for her birth control medicines. Actually, her comments were that Georgetown University should be forced, by the federal government, to pay for her birth control.

Georgetown University is a Catholic University and contraception is against the Catholic Church’s belief system. Georgetown University is only exercising their 1^st amendment right to practice their religion

without interference from the government. The Catholic Church’s teachings on birth control are spelled out in excellent form in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Human Life), which condemned all form of unnatural or artificial birth control as wrong

The 1^st Amendment reads as such: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…” That seems pretty clear to me. But then I consider myself a reasonable person. And, unlike Ms. Fluke, I am not an activist.ersity is a Catholic University and contraception is against the Catholic Church’s belief system. Georgetown University is only exercising their 1^st amend

ment right to practice their religion without interference from the government. The Catholic Church’s teachings on birth control are spelled out in excellent form in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Human Life), which condemned all form of unnatural or artificial birth control as wrong.

A considerable amount of information came out recently about Ms. Fluke that shows her entire issue in a clearer light. Ms. Fluke is a liberal, left wing activist who enrolled at Georgetown University specifically so she could springboard herself into the public eye as a victim of the 223 year old Jesuit Institution’s “medieval infringement on her rights as a human being.” (The Daily Caller article titled “Sandra Fluke’s Choices”) Personally, I don't consider Ms. Fluke a victim at all. Her only victim hood is that her parents never raised her to believe in taking personal responsibility for her actions.

Another issue at stake is how hilarious the entire matter is in the first place. Nobody at Georgetown is denying Ms. Fluke the opportunity to purchase contraceptives or any birth control measure of her choosing. Since 1965,

contraception has been legal in the United States, after the Supreme

Court decision in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, when the court struck down Connecticut’s law against contraception.

Ms. Fluke spoke to a Congressional hearing about how Georgetown was denying her civil rights by not paying for her contraception devices, even though Target sells birth control pills for $9.00 for a month’s supply, roughly $297 for the 33 months she would be enrolled at Georgetown Law School. This is something that the Mainstream media either refused to cover or is simply too lazy to do a Google search about. The fact that Ms. Fluke is a left-leaning liberal activist, becoming one of the mainstream media’s poster children for abortion and distortion of the Constitution, and is setting her sights on the Catholic Church, the arch-nemesis of the liberal left, makes this choice all too easy for the mainstream media to immediately paint Ms. Fluke as the victim here. She stated that the cost of her birth control was going to be around $3000 for her time at Georgetown and that Georgetown was obligated to pick up the tab.

Rush Limbaugh picked up on this absurdity of how she connected the dots from her being able to have sex (without consequences) to Georgetown University being responsible for the cost. If Geo

rgetown was responsible for the cost of Ms. Fluke’s birth control, the logical conclusion is that Georgetown would be shouldering the responsibility for Ms. Fluke’s sexual activity. Ms Fluke is part of a growing generation of spoiled ‘children’ that do not want to take responsibility for their actions. She wants to have sex without the consequences of that lifestyle. A good question that should be asked is “Is there anything that Rush Limbaugh said that is not true?”

Let me start by saying that first of all, there are NO ACTIONS THAT DO NOT HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Even Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Now I do not know what the opposite and equal reaction to having sex might be, but there definitely is a reaction. They are called children. Ms. Fluke demanding that Georgetown University take responsibility for her irresponsibility is a ludicrous as someone stepping off a multi-story building and demanding that someone else take responsibility for their falling down. Even the president of the United States, no matter how powerful he thinks he is, cannot repeal the law of gravity

But the government stepping in and stating they were going to force Catholic institutions to cover birth control via fiat has all the fingerprints of a tyranny in the making. But then Pope Paul saw this one coming. In Humanae Vitae, he predicted four separate societal disasters awaiting us if we legalized contraception.

Contraception, at its core, is the inhibiting the God-given truth about the purpose of sex in the first place. Sexual activity, within the boundaries of marriage, provides three specific purposes. 1) Reproduction and childbirth; 2) Protection of the family unit through a closer union, intimacy and mutual respect between husband and wife; and 3) Recreation, the physical enjoyment of each other through the intense physical pleasure a married couple can share through the sexual experience. Sexual activity was never intended to be an activity that was self-centered.

1. There would be a loosening of morality and the inevitable marital infidelity that goes along with it. The rise in divorce rates, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortions, and venereal diseases in the past twenty-five years is undeniable. The amount of marriages in particular is nothing less than shocking. Some countries in Western Europe have a marriage rate so low as to think that a wedding is a sort of an anomaly in that culture.

2. There is a general loss of respect for women. Paul argued that the man would ‘lose respect for the woman’ and consider her simply an instrument to satisfy his own physical desires. The rise of pornography has resulted with a major theme in pornographic films being the sexual abuse of women, even to the point of a women ‘enjoying’ being raped. Someone said back around 1997 that there are 1000 new websites put out on the internet every single day and somewhere in the area of half of those are pornographic websites. And that was almost 15 years ago. This is billion dollar a year industry (that’s billion with a ‘B’) that targets teenage young men in the same manner as illegal drugs.

3. The abuse of power. Pope Paul said that acceptance of contraception would be a “dangerous weapon …in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral” urgencies. Rahm Emmanuel, the former Chief of Staff to Barak Obama once said something similar to “We can’t allow an emergency go to waste.” China’s overpopulation policy is an extreme case in point. But there are people in this country who think we need to lower the population to “save the planet”. Ted Turner believes that 2/3 of the population has to go for our world to survive. I wonder if he realizes that at his age, he’s a prime candidate to be first in line for ‘culling the herd’. The real problem, though, is that most countries are not suffering from overpopulation but under population growth.

4. Unlimited dominion. Man will eventually start to think he has unlimited dominion over his own body. This is the old “I’m the master of my destiny, captain of my fate” song and dance. This, of course, completely takes God right out of the equation. Right along with that frame of thought comes sterilization (which is now the most widely used form of contraception), growing children specifically for the purpose of harvesting their organs for our own use when our own organs fail, and then euthanasia when a person of lesser financial means is of no further purpose to meet our own needs. If there is one truth that is eternal, other than there is a God in heaven, it is that He will not be mocked.

Ms. Fluke seems like a reasonably intelligent woman, although her moral compass has obviously been skewed. In order for her to even get into Georgetown Law School, she has to have some amount of reason and an ability to think logically. Unfortunately, Georgetown does not give tests that determine a person’s ability to be used as a dupe for the ‘Death Culture’, which Ms. Fluke obviously has fallen into. She’s not alone in this arena. Brighter, more culturally savvy people than she have fallen for this sham of logic that ‘if it feels good, do it’. The main problem is that if, and when, she realizes her stupidity, the damage will already be done and many people will be hurt by this cultural genocide.

I’m afraid that she may find herself facing off against Someone who is less likely to be cowed into apologizing to her and His comments will cause a whole lot more trouble than just a few days embarrassment.

One can only pray for someone like this, hoping that God will be merciful to her and the thousands that are following in her footsteps.

The following web pages were very helpful in writing this blog.

http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/264/popepaul.htm

http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/03/sandra-flukes-choices/

Read other blog postings by this author at http://insearchofintelligentlife.wordpress.com or http://insearchofintelligentlife.com.

Mysticism and Prophecy in the Christian Church

A question was asked in an on-line forum, “How can we religious promote the spirit of mysticism and prophecy in the Christian people?” It took me couple of days to consider this question and whether I wanted to attempt to answer it. The following is my attempt to adequately define the terms mysticism and prophecy and their place in the Christian Church today.

The terms mysticism and prophecy in Biblical Christian terms have always been controversial as they conjure up visions of non-Christian practices performed by peoples such as the Druids, the priestly class in Britain, Ireland and Gaul, who are portrayed as sorcerers who opposed the coming of Christianity.

The term mysticism is an –ism based on mystery, or “religious truth via divine revelation”, the term originating in the 14th century. The use of the term today signifies “anything that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown” (see #1 definition of the word in dictionary.com i.e. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mystery).

Mysticism or mystics are simply those who have a deeper understanding of a spiritual truth that the average citizen does not understand. Daniel spoke of a mystery that King Nebuchadnezzar asked to be interpreted by his wise men in Chapter 2 of Daniel. The Apostle Paul used the word mystery in his letters to the Romans, the Corinthians, the Ephesians, and the Colossians, as well as his letter to Titus.

Mysticism or mystics are not necessarily anti-Christian, as I’ve heard from some well-meaning Christians. It is just that these truths are not comfortable for most Christians. In our society, we want Christian thought that does not bring us discomfort or pain. Entire volumes have been written about escaping trials or learning to “deal with” tragedy in our lives. The book, “The Prayer of Jabez”, by Bruce Wilkerson, is a book about how Christians should pray like him, “Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” (1 Chronicles 4:10) Bernie Kjos combats this thinking in his rebuttal of Wilkerson’s book in his column, “Problems with the Prayer of Jabez”. (http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/Jabez.htm)

Suffering is only one of the mysteries that are mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. Another is found in the Book of Job. The question, “Why do bad things happen to good people” has been around as long as there have been people on this earth. And as we see in Job’s case, it wasn’t because he was bad, or wicked, as his comforters tried to rationalize.

Prophecy is another mystery that is difficult to explain. Biblical Prophecy is often thought to be only the foretelling of the future. But prophecy in terms of Biblical truth is always more than that. It can be simply putting popular events in light of Biblical truth, such as is found in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God--having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.”

In this passage, Paul was not only speaking futuristically, but also how events he was seeing were relevant in God’s economy in his day. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that all these issues are coming to pass. A modern day “prophet” could simply be someone who gives you God’s perspective on the nightly news. In other words, how current affairs are lining up with what God’s prophets of old said way back when.

Probably the best way to promote mysticism and prophecy to today’s church is to become as knowledgeable as possible on God’s perspective on what’s happening around us and then live a life that honors God. The prayer that we all call “The Lord’s Prayer” is a good place to start. Allow this prayer to consume your life, that you recognize that 1) God is your Father in Heaven, 2) You desire Him to return and want His will working in your life like it would if you were in Heaven right now, 3) that you are relying on Him for all your basic needs, 4) that you wish to live a life of daily repentance for your sins, which are debts that you owe, and that you will give others the benefit of the doubt when they owe you a debt, and 5) that you need help to keep away from the temptations of this word, which are many, and deliverance from the Evil One.

A couple of Christian writers of note are Soren Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, or Watchman Nee. They would all say from experience that to experience things that put us out of our comfort zone is to experience the Christian life. A life without hardship or difficult is not a life that has been tested, and therefore a life that doesn’t know what it can actually accomplish through the power of the Holy Spirit working through it.