Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot: October 2015

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Billy Graham: US Church Should Brace for Persecution - US - CBN News - Christian News 24-7 - CBN.com

Sunday, October 25, 2015

RELIGION AND SOCIALISM / LEFTISM

America's religious left, with its utopian and collectivist ideals, has a long history dating back to the days of the Pilgrims. For a discussion of this history, click here.

One notable religious leftist who embraced communist and socialist causes was the late Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr. In the 1960s Walker was a sponsor of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, a Communist Party USA front group.  In 1967 he founded the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, and from 1973-78 he served as Associate General Secretary for the National Council of Churches. A longtime critic of American policy toward Fidel Castro's Cuba, Walker in 1994 was an initiator of the International Peace for Cuba Appeal (IPCA), which called for normalized trade relations with Castro's island nation. IPCA was an affiliate of the International Action Center, which was itself a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party.

Like Lucius Walker, Rev. Jesse Jackson has been effusive in his praise of Castro. “Viva Fidel! Viva Che [Guevara]!” Jackson once thundered. “Castro is the most honest and courageous politician I've ever met.” On the domestic front, Jackson has given voice to his own socialist views by proposing that in return for the $600 billion that African American consumers spend each year, black business owners should be guaranteed a corresponding share of the service and manufacturing contracts that U.S. companies award. “We must have a plan to achieve equal results,” he asserts.

Rev. Calvin Butts, a New York-based Baptist minister, has likewise made clear his own affinity for Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba. When Castro made a 1995 visit to New York, he was hosted and feted by Butts (and an adoring crowd of 1,300) at the latter's Abyssinian Baptist Church. There, Butts lavished praise on his honored guest: “It is in our tradition to welcome all who are visionaries, revolutionaries and who seek the liberation of all people.”

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the longtime former pastor at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), detests America’s capitalist economic structure, viewing it as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. “Capitalism as made manifest in the ‘New World,’” he says, “depended upon slave labor [by African slaves], and it is only maintained [today] by keeping the ‘Two-Thirds World’ under oppression.” Wright’s anti-capitalist perspective is reflected in TUCC’s “10-point vision,” which calls for the cultivation of “economic parity” and the eradication of “America’s economic mal-distribution.” At a September 17, 2009 anniversary celebration for the socialist magazine Monthly Review, Rev. Wright praised the periodical for its “no-nonsense Marxism.” “You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism,” he asserted.

In a May 2010 address to a Connecticut church congregation, Rev. Al Sharptoncharacterized the late Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream as a socialist one:

“So many of us [who act] as though the struggle for social justice and the struggle for rights is over, don’t realize that the struggle is not over until we achieve equality. Someone was saying to me the other day, 'Rev. Sharpton, we’ve got an African-American president [Barack Obama]. We’ve achieved the dream of Dr. King.' And I told him, that was not Dr. King’s dream … [T]he dream was not to put one black president in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody’s house. President Obama is in the White House to help us get there, but we’re not there yet.”

Another luminary of America's religious left is Jim Wallis, founder of the evangelical ministry Sojourners. In the 1960s, Wallis joined the radical Students for a Democratic Society and avidly championed the cause of communism. In 1979 the journal Mission Tracks published an interview with Wallis, in which the activist expressed his hope that “more Christians will come to view the world through Marxist eyes.” To this day, Wallis remains fiercely opposed to capitalism and the free market system. In 2005 he stated that private charity to help the poor was insufficient, and that true social justice could be achieved only by an expansive central government empowered to redistribute wealth. In a January 13, 2006 radio interview with Interfaith Voices, Wallis was asked, “Are you then calling for the redistribution of wealth in society?” He replied, “Absolutely, without any hesitation. That's what the gospel is all about.”

How To Stamp Out Cultural Marxism In A Single Generation

by Brandon Smith

There are very few legitimate cultural divisions in the world. Most of them are arbitrarily created, not only by political and financial elites, but also by the useful idiots and mindless acolytes infesting the sullied halls of academia.

It is perhaps no mistake that cultural Marxists in the form of "social justice warriors", PC busybodies and feminists tend to create artificial divisions between people and “classes” while attacking and homogenizing very real and natural divisions between individuals based on biological reality and inherent genetic and psychological ability. This is what cultural Marxists do: divide and conquer or homogenize and conquer, whatever the situation happens to call for.

They do this most commonly by designated arbitrary "victim status" to various classes, thus dividing them from each other based on how "oppressed" they supposedly are. The less statistically prominent a particular group is (less represented in a job field, media, education, population, etc.) in any western society based on their color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc., generally the more victim group status is afforded to them by social justice gatekeepers. Whites and males (straight males) are of course far at the bottom of their list of people who have reason to complain and we are repeatedly targeted by SJW organizations and web mobs as purveyors of some absurd theory called "the patriarchy".

Although cultural marxism does indeed target every individual and harm every individual in the long run, my list of personal solutions outlined in this article will be directed in large part at the categories of people most attacked by the social justice cult today.

I do not write often about PC cultism and social justice because the movement is only a symptom of a greater problem, namely the problem of collectivism. The only true and concrete social (group) division is the division between collectivists and individualists: between those who believe the individual should be subservient to the group mind and those who believe the group is meaningless without the individual mind.

I have already spoken on the root dangers and logical inconsistencies of the social justice cult in articles such as ‘The Twisted Motives Behind Political Correctness' and 'The Future Costs Of Politically Correct Cultism.'

There are many intelligent commentators on the Web who have consistently demolished the PC mob with reason and logic, and I leave that battle to them. In this article I would like to continue my examination but with the goal of presenting some real and tangible solutions. And like most solutions to most problems, it is the individual who is required to draw the line in the sand and change the way he approaches the realm of cultural Marxism. It is not up to groups, organizations or governments.

First, let’s be clear, cultural Marxism has already done most of the damage it can possibly do to our way of life. And by damage, I mean the end of long-standing foundational pillars of society that provide stability and prosperity, including traditional marriage (not government-licensed marriage), family, gender “roles,” etc. (which cultural Marxists openly boast about tearing down).

In Western nations male suicide rates are way up. Women’s proclaimed levels of happiness and contentment are way down, despite the fact that they have had wage equality for decades (yes, the wage gap is a perpetually pontificated Lochness monster-sized myth that was debunked years ago by economists like Thomas Sowell), despite the fact that they have surpassed men in educational participation and despite the fact that they have total control over family planning.

Marriage rates are at historic lows since the 1970s and the rise of social justice activism. Of course, the argument is often presented that economic decline has more to do with this than cultural Marxism. However, setting aside the rising tide of men who fear being bled dry through divorce settlements based on double standards, the West’s economic decline (and thus marriage decline) can be correlated to the increase in overt debt spending. And debt spending is driven directly by socialist legislation, entitlement programs and social welfare addiction, more so even than it can be correlated to military spending.

Therefore, cultural Marxism and its vicious attempts to forcefully “harmonize” wealth through taxation and welfare have indeed caused the very economic conditions by which marriage is made untenable and families are made unstable.

While women become more and more unhappy, men and masculinity are essentially demonized by cultural Marxists (mainly feminists) as “toxic.” This propaganda campaign has been so successful that men in many first world nations are beginning to pursue, for all intents and purposes, an asexual lifestyle safer from collectivist intrusions and judgments.

As if the psychological browbeating were not enough, the chemistry of the male body is also being warped by estrogen-imitating chemicals present in industrial products, plastics and soy-based foods. A decline in normal levels of male testosterone and an ever increasing hormonal feminization of younger generations of men and boys is becoming prevalent.

Indirect chemical influences aren’t the only threat. Direct drugging of boys (with far greater frequency than girls) with psychotropics in order to subdue their natural tendencies towards physicality and frenetic activity is epidemic in public schools, all with the goal of making boys behave more like girls.

Finally, the erasure of free speech and thought is always the holy grail of cultural Marxists; but this is not always done through government power — at least not right away. Social justice cultists rely more on collective pressure and public shaming tactics to engineer an environment in which people feel compelled to self-censor rather than deal with the hailstorm of witch hunters and wagging fingers.

Cultural Marxists do use government force to police what they consider thought crimes, but usually in an incremental manner. One day, it’s the use of government to demand associations, as with a Christian-owned cake business being forced to work for another party that feels entitled to a gay wedding cake. Another day, it might be a public school being forced to allow boys dressed as girls in the girls’ bathroom or locker room. Another day, it might be the implementation of lowered standards and quotas to force businesses to hire people with victim-group status, even if they are unqualified for the job.

All of these actions impede upon the individual freedoms and privacy rights of others, all under the guise of “equality.” And because cultural Marxists need to constantly observe ever greater modes of oppression and inequality in order to justify their existence, the impositions on individual liberty will never end. Today, people may argue that such violations are “minor” and not to be concerned over. It is happening to strangers or distant neighbors, not to them; so why should they care? Liberty movement champions know full well why this thinking is idiotic; the trampling of one person’s individual liberties is the trampling of ALL people’s individual liberties. Totalitarianism is a virus that feeds on one person to the next until everyone is on the menu.

It is not enough anymore to simply continue pointing out the insanity of political correctness; we must also take useful steps toward reversing the destruction already wrought.

And so, here are my solutions, which must be enacted by individuals in their daily lives regardless of the potential backlash. Do you have leftist leaning friends or family members? It doesn’t matter. Are you employed in a workplace crawling with social justice ideologues? Stop seeing them as part of the equation because they do not matter. Worried about losing a relationship if you make a stand? Say good riddance. This is what must be done by free thinkers if they are to counter and reverse the collectivist nightmare of cultural Marxism.

Feel no shame: Social justice relies on shaming tactics, usually by slandering an opponent with a label that does not really apply to him, in order to control his arguments and behavior. If you don’t care about being called a bigot, a racist, a sexist, a misogynist, a homophobe, etc., then there is not really much that they can do to you.

Do not self-censor: This does not mean you should go out of your way to be antagonistic or act like an ass, but the thought police have power only if you give power to them. Say what you want to say when you want to say it, and do it with a smile. Let the PC police froth and scream until they have an aneurism. Cultural Marxists are generally weaklings. They avoid physical confrontation like they avoid logic, so why fear them?

Realize there is no such thing as white privilege or male privilege: In reality, there is only institutionalized “privilege” for victim-status groups. There is no privilege for whites, males, white males or straight white males. When confronted with such claims, demand to see proof of such privilege. Invariably, you will get a long list of first world problems and complaints backed by nothing but easily debunked talking points and misrepresented statistics. People should not feel guilty for being born the way they are, and this includes us “white male devils.”

Demand facts to back claims: Cultural Marxists tend to argue on the basis of opinion rather than fact. Present facts to counter their claims, and demand facts and evidence in return. Opinions are irrelevant if the person is not willing to present supporting facts when asked.

Do not play the game of "unconscious bias": If social justice cultists can't counter your position with facts or logic, they will invariably turn to the old standby that you are limited in your insight because you have not lived in the shoes of a - (insert victim group here). I agree. In fact, I would point out that this reality of limited perception also applies to THEM as well. They have not lived in my shoes, therefore they are in no position to claim I enjoy "privilege" while they do not. This is why facts and evidence are so important, and why anecdotal evidence and personal feelings are irrelevant where cultural Marxism is concerned.

Let cultural Marxists know their fears and feelings do not matter: No one is entitled to have their feelings addressed by others. And, a person’s fears are ultimately unimportant. Whether the issue is the nonexistent “rape culture” or the contempt cultural Marxists feel over private gun ownership, their irrational fears are not our concern. Why should any individual relinquish his liberties in the name of placating frightened nobodies?

Demand that society respect your inherent individual rights: Collectivism’s ultimate propaganda message is that there is no such thing as inherent rights or liberties and that all rights are arbitrary and subject to the whims of the group or the state. This is false. I have written extensively in the past on inherent rights, inborn psychological contents and natural law, referencing diverse luminaries, scientists and thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, Carl Gustave Jung, Steven Pinker, etc., and I welcome readers to study my many articles on individualism. Freedom is an inborn conception with universally understood aspects. Period. No group or collective is more important than individual liberty. No artificial society has preeminence over the individuals within that society. As long as a person is not directly impeding the life, liberty, prosperity and privacy of another person, he should be left alone.

Maintain your rights; they do not hurt other people: PC cultists will invariably argue that every person, whether he knows it or not, is indirectly harming others with his attitude, his beliefs, his refusal to associate, even his very breathing. "We live in a society", they say, "and everything we do affects everyone else...". Don’t take such accusations seriously; these people do not understand how freedom works.

Say, for instance, hypothetically, that I refuse to bake a gay wedding cake for a couple and I am accused of violating their rights in the name of preserving my own. I would immediately point out that no one is entitled to a gay wedding cake, baked by me or anyone else and I have every right to choose my associations based on whatever criteria I see fit. Now, a corrupt government entity may claim I do not have that right. But the fact is I do, and no one — not even government — can force me to bake a cake if I don’t want to. Also, I would point out that the gay couple in question has every right in a free society to bake their OWN damn cake or open their own cake shop to compete with mine. This is how freedom works. It is not based on collective entitlement; it is based on personal responsibility.

Refuse to deny the scientific fact of biological gender: Gender is first and foremost a genetic imperative. Society does not determine gender roles; nature does. A man who chops up his body and takes hormone pills to look like a woman is not and will never be a woman. A woman who tapes down her breasts and gets a short haircut will never be a man. There is no such thing as “transgendered” people. No amount of social justice or wishful thinking will ever allow them to reverse their genetic proclivities. Their psychological and sexual leanings do not change their inborn biological reality.

By extension, we should refuse to play along with this nonsense. I will never refer to a man in a wig and dress as a “woman.” I will never refer to a woman with identity issues as “transgendered.” They are what nature made them, and we should not police our pronouns just to falsely reassure them that they can deny nature.

Deny the illusion of Utopian equality: There is no such thing as pure equality. Society is not a homogeneous entity, it is an abstraction built around a group of unique individuals. Individuals can be naturally gifted, or naturally challenged. But there will always be some people who are more apt towards success than others.

I have no problem whatsoever with the idea of equality of opportunity, which is exactly what we have in this country (except in the world of elitist finance which is purely driven by nepotism). I do have a problem with the lie of universal equality through engineered means.

Standards of success should not be lowered in order to accommodate the least skilled people to facilitate artificial parity. For example, I constantly hear the argument that more people with victim group status should be given greater representation in positions of influence and regard within our culture, from science and engineering, to media, to business CEO's, to politics, etc. The key word here is "given", rather than "earned". There is nothing wrong with one group of people excelling in a field more than another group, and there is nothing wrong with inequality when it comes to individual achievement. We must begin refusing to reward people for mediocrity and punishing success simply because the winners are not part of a designated victim group.

If you are a man, embrace your role: I am a man and cannot claim to know what specific solutions women should take to counter cultural Marxism. I would love to read an article written on the subject by a woman in the Liberty Movement. I will say that men in particular have a considerable task ahead in terms of their personal endeavors if they hope to repair the destruction of social justice.

For thousands of years, men have been the primary industrial force behind human progress. Today, they are relegated to cubicles and customer service, to video games and Web fantasies, to drug addictions and a lack of responsibility. If we have any chance of undoing the damage of cultural Marxism, modern men must take on their original roles as producers, inventors, entrepreneurs, protectors, builders and warriors once again. They should do this for their own benefit, and not for the validation of others.

You don’t have to prove to anyone you do "manly things", just go out and do them. Most importantly, become dangerous. Men are meant to be dangerous beings. That does not mean we are meant to be indiscriminately violent (just as women aren’t meant to be indiscriminately violent), but we are supposed to be threatening to those who would threaten us. Modern society has NOT removed the need for masculinity and I believe people will begin realizing this the more our culture sinks into economic despair. Train in martial arts, learn tactical firearms handling, go hunting and don’t take lip from people. In my opinion, every man should know how to kill things, even if he never plans on using those abilities.

Home-school your children: It’s simple, if you don’t want your kids propagandized, if you truly want them to be free from collectivist conditioning, then you will make the sacrifice and extract them from public schooling. With the introduction of Common Core into U.S. schools in particular, there is no other recourse but home schooling to prevent the brainwashing of cultural Marxism. If you do not do this, you are relying on the hope that your children will escape with their critical thinking abilities intact. Some do, and some don’t. Others turn into mindless social justice zombies. You can give them an advantage by removing them from a poisonous environment, and that is what matters.

The insane lie that cultural Marxists seem to have conned themselves and others into believing is that their “activism” is somehow anti-establishment. In fact, social justice is constantly coddled and supported by the establishment. From politicians to judges to media pundits to the blogosphere, the overwhelming majority of people in positions of traditional power (even in supposedly conservative circles) have been more than happy to become the enforcers of the social justice warrior agenda, an agenda representing a minuscule portion of the public. There is no establishment for the PC army to fight; the establishment bias works vastly more in favor of their ideology than any other. Cultural Marxists ARE the establishment.

Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot 26 October, 2015

Prayer Breakfast

0700 at BJ’s Restaurant

Hamilton Montana

O Father, send your transforming power into my life as I seek to serve you this day. Grant unto me wisdom, courage, grace, and strength to faithfully fulfill the ministry to which you have called me. In Jesus Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

1. Opening - Round the Table Individual Prayers

2. Morning Psalm: 19

3. Breakfast Reading: John 9

4. Breakfast is served

5. Breakfast Discussion Topics:

a. News around the valley

b. Hand out phone tree

6. Closing - Round the Table Individual Prayers

7. Benediction

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. – Romans 15:5-6

Upcoming Events:

2 Nov 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

9 Nov 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

16 Nov 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

23 Nov 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

30 Nov 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

7 Dec 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

14 Dec 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

21 Dec 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

28 Dec 2015 – Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot Prayer Breakfast

26 Mar 2016 – March for Jesus Christ

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October 25, 2015 Worship Service

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

UNDERSTANDING LIBERATION THEOLOGY

A movement that sprang from late 20th-century Roman Catholicism and has found a particularly welcoming environment in Latin America, liberation theology holds that the church must stand on the side of the impoverished and the downtrodden, and that it must, if necessary, support the overthrow of social systems that contribute to their oppression. Its more extreme advocates believe that capitalism is chief among the oppressive systems in causing social and material inequities around the world.

This movement is usually held to have begun with the second Latin American Bishops’ Conference, which was held in Colombia in 1968. At that conference, the attending bishops proposed to combine the teachings of Jesus Christ with those of Karl Marx as a way of justifying violent revolution to overthrow the economics of capitalism. The bishops interpreted every biblical criticism of the rich as a mandate to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have-nots, and every expression of compassion for the poor as a call for a social uprising by peasants and workers. At the end of the conference, the bishops issued a document affirming the rights of the poor and accusing industrialized nations of enriching themselves at the expense of Third World countries.

The liberation theology movement's seminal text, A Theology of Liberation, was written in 1971, three years after the Bishops’ Conference, by Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest and theologian.

But liberation theology's real creator was the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence and domestic security agency, the KGB. Patriarch Kirill, who today heads Russian Orthodox Church, secretly worked for the KGB under the code name “Mikhailov” and spent some 40 years promoting liberation theology. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc official ever to defect to the West, writes: "Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians.... Its genesis was part of a highly classified Party/State Disinformation Program, formally approved in 1960 by KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and Politburo member Aleksei Kirichenko, then the second in the party hierarchy after Nikita Khrushchev."

Adds Pacepa: "In 1971, the KGB sent Kirill — who had just been elevated to the rank of archimandrite — to Geneva as emissary of the Russian Orthodox Church to the World Council of Churches.... Kirill/Mikhailov’s main task was to involve the WCC in spreading the new liberation theology throughout Latin America. In 1975, the KGB was able to infiltrate Kirill into the Central Committee of the WCC — a position he held until he was “elected” patriarch of Russia, in 2009. Not long after he joined the Central Committee, Kirill reported to the KGB: 'Now the agenda of the WCC is also our agenda.'”

Prior to liberation theology, Catholicism was unambiguously hostile to socialism and communism, which it saw as “godless.” From the earliest centuries of the Christian era, a long line of orthodox theologians had consistently rejected collective ownership, embraced private property, and affirmed business economies. In the first year of his papacy, Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) devoted an encyclical to criticizing socialism.

But in using the texts of the New Testament to justify political activism, even violent activism (Jesus was often portrayed as a revolutionary dressed in guerrilla fatigues and carrying a rifle), liberation theology seemed to embrace socialist theory as well. Dressing up Marxism as Christianity put it at odds with the Vatican, which, in the 1990s under Pope John Paul II, began trying to slow the movement's momentum through the appointment of more conservative prelates throughout Latin America.

Ultimately, liberation theology was crippled by a convergence of several factors: (a) oppsition by the Church hierarchy; (b) the defeat of the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador; and (c) the free market economics boom that swept through Latin America soon after those defeats. This boom demonstrated that economic growth was a far more efficient way of fighting poverty than armed struggle.

Adapted from "Catholics for Marx," by Father Robert Sirico (June 3, 2004), and "The Secret Roots of Liberation Theology," By Ion Mihai Pacep (April 23, 2015).

More 2015 March for Jesus Christ photos

Sunday, October 18, 2015

RELIGIOUS LEFT ORGANIZATIONS

From Robespierre to Stalin (himself a former seminarist), leftists have traditionally been opposed to all religion, viewing it as a threat to their own revolutionary schemes. But in recent decades -- in fulfillment of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s prediction that communism would gradually make its "long march through the institutions" of culture -- leftists have entered the religious arena and made churches throughout the developed world into captives of radical politics.

One early warning of this evolving movement came in the late 1960s with the appearance of liberation theology, a movement founded on the belief that God makes Himself known particularly through the poor, and that the Bible can be fully understood only when interpreted from the perspective of the impoverished. Centered in Latin America and especially influential within Roman Catholicism, liberation theology advocated political activism, even including revolutionary activity, as a means of applying the tenets of Christian faith.

When socialism and communism had presented themselves candidly as essentially godless doctrines aiming to seize a secular version of the power enjoyed by religion, they enjoyed only limited appeal among a traditionally religious population. But now, reframed by liberation theologians, socialist theory had a new power in church going populations because of its vision of transforming socioeconomic structures -- generally meaning capitalism -- that caused social inequities around the world.

Since the 1960s, the religious left has expanded its reach to embrace the tenets of leftist doctrine in a host of spheres, including: radical environmentalism (depicting capitalism and industry as inherently destructive to the natural world); feminism (supporting "pay equity" and, in some cases, universal access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand); gay rights (supporting a radical redefinition of marriage and family); anti-war movements (viewing the United States as the chief cause of international strife); open borders (supporting amnesty and expanded rights for illegal immigrants); human rights (classifying the United States and Israel as the world’s foremost transgressors); civil rights (characterizing the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation where preferential policies are needed to counterbalance this intractable trait); criminal justice (viewing crime as a by-product of corrupt social institutions like capitalism); and economics (again, depicting capitalism as an exploitative system that harms the vast majority of the world’s population for the benefit of a small, powerful elite).

Many Christian churches seek to justify the foregoing views by asserting that Jesus Christ himself, were he alive today, would have adopted these same positions. Thus religious leftists propose to combine the teachings of Jesus with the teachings of Marx as a way of justifying a socialist revolution designed to overthrow the economics of capitalism and greed. They re-render the gospels not as doctrine impacting on the human soul but rather as windows into the historical dialectic of class struggle.

In the religious left’s ideal, the Marxist State serves as a substitute for Christ, offering a theory of sin (private property) and salvation (collective ownership); a church that dispenses grace (the State, as administered by the vanguard of the proletariat); and a litany of saints (socialists) and sinners (capitalists). And the eagerly anticipated Marxist “revolution” takes the form of wealth redistribution rather than violent looting.

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines the worldviews and activities of organizations that seek to advance the doctrines of the religious left. The RESOURCES column on the right side of this page contains a link to the section where profiles of these groups can be found. It also contains links to articles, essays, books, and videos that explore, in depth, the following:

liberation theology, which holds that the church must stand on the side of the impoverished and the downtrodden, and that it must, if necessary, support the overthrow of social systems -- especially capitalism -- that contribute to their oppression;
the religious left's affinity for socialist and leftist doctrines;
the religious left's embrace of radical environmentalism and its agendas;
the anti-Americanism that is a hallmark of the religious left;
the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic worldviews that are commonplace among the religious left;
the religious left's support for open borders, unregulated immigration, and amnesty for illegal aliens residing in the United States;
the religious left's steadfast belief that pacifism is the only morally acceptable way of dealing with aggressors around the world;
and the religious left's alliance with certain elements in the labor-union movement.

March for Christ Christ

Christian Veterans of the Bitterroot 19 October, 2015

Prayer Breakfast

0700 at BJ’s Restaurant

Hamilton Montana

O Father, you have sent Jesus to show us how to live. Grant us the power of your Holy Spirit so that we amy follow him faithfulness all the days of our lives. In Jesus Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

1. Opening - Round the Table Individual Prayers

2. Morning Psalm: 139

3. Breakfast Reading: 2 Chronicles 7:11-22