Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)
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Saving Women’s Lives* (with caveat)
Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)
Read this article:
Saving Women’s Lives* (with caveat)
Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)
More here:
Saving Women’s Lives* (with caveat)
I’m afraid we need a little Sunday morning theology. Hopefully someone at the White House will read this and realize just how ill advised the President was to do what he did this week and we should be praying hard for him to see the error of his ways on this. In the Bible we read these things: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” Gen 1:28 (ESV) “Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?” Job 31:15 (ESV) “Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.” Psalm 119:73 (ESV) “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139:13 (ESV) These are clear references to God intending people to procreate and recognize that, even in the womb, God played a vital role in the formation of children and we should not casually destroy life God himself created. These passages of scripture are what inspire so many pro-life advocates to defend the unborn. Had the President of the United States stood at the National Prayer Breakfast and uttered any of those passages and then announced his intent to protect the unborn, abortion rights advocates would have stormed the White House and the Courts all in the name of separation of church and state. The media would have had on Barry Lynn to proclaim his outrage that the President was mixing religion and politics. Jim Wallis would have gone on the news to dance around life issues and try his best to neuter God out of them and the media would have treated him as an objective source. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the President went to the National Prayer Breakfast and quoted Jesus Christ himself to defend a tax increase. The President paraphrased Luke 12:48, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.” (ESV) He said it was because he was a Christian that he thought the rich should pay more in taxes. It’s a good thing President Obama did not draw from Matthew 13:12 instead or the poor would really be screwed. “For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (ESV) It is worth pointing out that the very same people who would have been outraged had the President quoted clear scripture on life to defend the unborn were willing to be silent or even applaud the President perverting the words of Christ to pursue his tax plan. It is also worth pointing out that President Obama sat at the feet of Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, so this might be the best he can do. But we must also point out that Christians have an obligation to pray for their leaders and, given how the President of the United State just twisted the words of our Lord and Savior, we should pray all the more fervently for him because in reading Luke 12:48, he clearly ignored or has no understand of Luke 12:47, the prior sentence, which reads “And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating.” (ESV) One must wonder about the Christian grounding of the people in the White House who encouraged the President of the United States to pervert the words of the Living God. What the President seems not to know is encapsulated well by Breeanne Howe here. Christ was not talking about money. The President, in making the case for his tax plan using that passage of scripture, perverts Christ’s meaning. Christ was talking explicitly about the blessings flowing from God to the apostles and us through the Word and the need to proclaim Christ as the Living God. To better understand what Christ was actually talking about, first understand that he was talking about an individual’s relationship with God. In fact, throughout President Obama’s speech he perverted a number of passages from Holy Scripture having to do with an individual’s obligations toward the poor and toward God, co-opting those passages as claims that the state can then tax and spend in the name of Jesus. I dare say I’d take peddlers of the “social gospel” much more seriously if they concerned themselves first with the actual Gospel as it pertains to men’s salvation and eternity. Not to delve deep into the theology, but Luke 12:47-48 is reflected in Hebrews 2:1-4, in which the writer preaches, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.” The Greek used for “pay much closer attention” ( prosecho ) and “lest we drift away” ( pararheo ) derive from Greek nautical terminology the original audience would have understood. Prosecho means to tie up or moor a ship in harbor (a metaphor for Christ) and pararheo means to negligently and knowingly let a ship drift past the harbor, or Christ. In other words, what Christ is telling us in Luke and what the author of Hebrews explains in greater detail is that these passages apply to people who, like the President, claim to be Christians and claim to have experienced blessings in life and then turn their back on or drift away from Christ without securing themselves to him. 1 What both Hebrews 2 and Luke 12:47 say that the President conveniently ignored is that anyone who claims to be a Christian or who has experienced the blessings that flow from being surrounded by believers and then does not accept Christ will be judged more harshly on the last day than those who never knew or experienced Christ’s love. Yeah, those levels of hell aren’t just for Catholics. See e.g. Matthew 11:21-22 in which Christ says, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. ” [Emphasis added] Unfortunately for the nation, we have a President who claims to be a Christian who is willing to take God’s Holy Word repeatedly out of context, subsume God’s commands for individuals in their conduct with each other and with Him, and try to make the case for the government’s fiscal policy with that perversion. Contrast that with his other actions this week. The President, through the Department of Health and Human Services, has ordered religious organizations — targeting more specifically the Catholic Church — to offer health plans that cover the costs of contraceptives and abortifacient drugs. I started this post with, unlike the President’s use of Luke and Proverbs, un-perverted scripture Christians use to show their objections to abortion. But moreso, these are non exhaustive passages of scripture Catholics rely on as foundations both to their opposition to abortion and to contraception. God himself said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” The President this week chose to pervert God’s Word to make the case for a tax increase, but he also chose to ignore God’s word on life and is ordering Christians, while he claims to be one, to violate their Christian conscience on abortion — requiring Christian organizations to provide health insurance that will cover the cost of drugs that induce abortions. He is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to use God’s Word to defend a tax policy that dissuades individuals from giving gladly and charitably to the poor as God instructs and is ignoring God’s Word in order to force fellow Christians into violating their Christian conscience — something about which God cares a great deal. This cannot end well for him, particularly doing this claiming to be a Christian. And it might not end well for the rest of us either. Barack Obama has gone to war with Christians’ consciences and he is perverting God’s word in the process to get his way on public policy. “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” 1 Timothy 2:1-2 (ESV) Pray hard. The President needs it. Some very silly secularists proving they have no clue what they are talking about have taken issue with my use of the word “claim” in this paragraph. It’s not that I am expressing or casting doubt on the President’s faith or my own. I’d use the word about myself too. The point is that this scripture applies to (1) people who claim, or hold themselves out to be, Christians and (2) those who have experienced the blessings derived from God unto Christians. The President explicitly said he was Christian in his speech. When a person says they are a Christian, the presumption for other Christians is that they must be Christian. The silly leftwing secularists attacking me here are proving their very deep and real ignorance about orthodox Christianity and their hostility to it as well. ↩
Continued here:
The Perversion of the Words of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the Sinner Barack H. Obama
Promoted from the diaries Most of my writing is on foreign policy. There are few other topic areas other than the law on which I’m comfortable writing. However, as streiff notes , I, like most other Catholics, got to hear a heartfelt letter from my Bishop — a living examplar of St. John Chrysostom’s famous (possibly apocryphal) maxim — explaining that clear out of nowhere, somehow, the Obama Administration decided to make Catholic institutions pay for abortifacents, birth control, and sterilization procedures, all of which are actually explicitly mortal sins in my faith, which is to say, one can be in danger of Hell merely for helping to provide them. As Sts. Nicholas and Chrysostom would not, in their unenlightened days, have likely had warm feelings for His Excellency, it is perhaps incumbent upon me to note that my Bishop neglected a few details in the sermon he had our deacon read aloud. His Excellency was absolutely silent on the possible election of a man who actively defended the post-uterine execution of neonatal infants, which I ascribe to moral laziness and cowardice, though it may have been instead interest in funding a short lived billboard campaign in Atlanta extolling Catholics who believe him and the Pope evil to come on back for a quick round of communion. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a self-professing Catholic who is one of the most ardent defenders of the abortion license in our country. Obamacare was passed through the good offices of numerous nominally-Catholic Senators and Representatives, despite warnings from Catholic groups (such as the Knights of Columbus, who fought tooth and nail) and without so much as a peep of the same from our esteemed Bishops, that maybe, just maybe, the Obama Administration might be vaguely interested in making free abortion on demand and contraceptives available to all, conscience exceptions be damned. No pun. Instead, in that pastoral letter, there was a general note that this was bad, and we should all be aware of it. In the background, I believe I heard someone dropping bread into a bowl of milk. I may have also heard someone washing his hands before a condemned man, but I’m not sure about that. Back when there was a New Ledger , I wrote a now long-forgotten piece excoriating the Bishops in this country for complicity in its passage, for not speaking up, for not excommunicating the public officials who actively fight for the abortion license despite the infallible teachings of our Church — and by extension, for enabling a culture of license that enables the Culture of Death. (Piece stolen here ; TNL no longer publishes essays.) I stand by every word, and would like to add a few things. Let me start with the most basic one. You can all, each of you, and I say this after a week of prayerful meditation and with all of the respect I can give, go straight to the darkest pit in the lowest valley of the Ninth Layer of Hell and burn there. It was easy to sell out the unborn, wasn’t it? To just wish away an infallible teaching that — let’s be honest — has been such a headache since a Catholic Supreme Court Justice helped its mass breaking, and Catholic Democrats abandoned everything else to protect that breach, right? To let others commit a sin that our Church treats as so grave that it incurs the automatic sanction of excommunication? All in return for a goal you’ve shared with your Democrat masters since the 1940s — a chance to drive healthcare costs through the roof with the fig leaf of social caring. All so you could work with the sorts of people who are elected to office by publicly calling you theocrats and misogynists for more-or-less upholding the two-thousand-year-old Tradition of our Church. Thirty pieces of silver must buy one Hell of a lot more for you than it does for me. Who among you has stepped forward to say, Whoops! Or, We are infallible on matters of faith expressed through the Tradition or through an ecumenical Council, but we can err on policy, and hoo-boy, did we blow this one . Who among you spoke out last week and said, Attention my flock: I must now inform you that the Democratic Party has proven once and for all that if you vote for a Democrat in this country, you engage in material cooperation with evil. We will now be holding weekly mass Confession to handle the backlog until it clears. Because that is truth. In 2009 and 2010, nominally faithful Catholics who value all of the policy choices you do — labor unions, forced charity, high rates of taxation, urban ghettoes, and of course, universal “health care” — and who claimed to be ardent defenders of the unborn sold out to a one , sacrificed millions of babies and betrayed the infallible teaching of their faith so they could get one gigantic step closer to the social justice you so crave. And for that, for that moment when they put aside their baptismal and confirmation vows, repeated every Easter, and their recitation of whatever version of the Nicene Creed you’ve settled on this week, your response was … applause. Silence. Satisfaction. A professed willingness to work with the Administration. You made all of this possible. For almost my entire life, you have given my fellow Catholics every reason to believe they can freely sin, and hey, no problem, so long as they favor higher taxation and government spending. They can murder the unborn, and I have had all of two homilies, two, in my entire time as a Catholic, which is to say from birth and for the thirty-five years after, in parishes and dioceses across the country, in which a priest has said, If you have had, caused, or aided in obtaining an abortion, and you take communion today, you will go to Hell . You look out into your emptying pews, terrified of the wood you see and the flesh you don’t, through families of one, two, or sometimes amazingly three children, and think, Well, at least they’re still coming , as if you do not understand the connection between these things. In the wake of the sex abuse scandal, I got to hear read to me and my wife and small baby a heartfelt letter from a bishop not even in office when the terrible events at issue took place, making a sincere apology. In 2006, I got to get lectured at Easter about the importance of having lots of illegal immigrants in our country, from the same Bishop who told me last week he’s kinda confused about what happened with this whole Obama thing. As a child, the only time I read of the bishops taking a unified stand was on the evil of Ronald Reagan attempting to dismantle the greatest threat Christianity has known since the height of the Ottoman Empire. While I’m to the left of many of the readers and writers here on the issue of illegal immigration and how to resolve it, I’m struck by the fact that my Church seems to care more about defending the right to stay here of people whose first act on entering this country is to break its laws — a right not dogmatically defined by my faith — and on the evil of producing nuclear weapons than what it by its very teaching describes as the slaughter of one million innocent babies year in and year out. I am utterly appalled to realize that they are either too gullible, too cowardly, too stupid, or too dishonest with themselves and others to realize that if they tell Catholics that abortion can be traded off for more social welfare, a significant number of Catholics will make that trade, today, now, this instant. You have materially cooperated with evil, and I have yet to hear mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa . (Try the older Confiteor if you prefer: I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault. In my thoughts, and in my words ; in what I have done, and what I have failed to do . ) You are abetting scandal. You are aiding in the all-but-literal poisoning of political discourse in this country. And you are lying . You are lying by your words, by your acts, by your omissions. Whatever your rationales, you hide from the truth of what has been before you for forty years , and you aid in that deception to your flock. And the net result is that you now need to either (1) give in; (2) dump all of your employees into public healthcare (a double win, right?); or (3) disband . Given how you acted when Mitt Romney’s reign in Massachusetts forced you into the same corner, I fully expect (1). Heck, if you can provide abortifacents and prophylactics in New England, why not in Arizona? In a purer time, you would have been haled before an Ecumenical Council and been required to give an account of yourself, or been summarily excommunicated on the spot. In an emergency, the Pope would do this thing. I was born into the Faith. I was confirmed before my twelfth birthday. I nearly applied to seminary twice. I married in the Church. I am raising my many-more-than-two-children in the Faith. And every time I see something like this come down the pike, complete with passive-voice verbs and hand washing everywhere, the only things keeping me from joining one of the Orthodox Churches are my dislike of incense, my desire to avoid being as dim as poor Donatist Rod Dreher , and my firm belief that the Church teaches Truth, even though its princes are men by genetics only. But as you now reap what you have sown for twice my lifetime, I say, with all the charity I can muster, that you can rot.
Read the rest here:
Excommunicate the Bishops.
