“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,
whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”
~ St. Paul, 1st century
Philippians 4:8 ~
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in
heavenly places.”
~ Ephesians 6:12 ~
"Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it is said: 'Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'"
~ Ephesians 5:11-14 ~
"Blessed is that man who makes the LORD his trust, and does not respect the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies."
~ Psalm 40:4 ~
"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables."
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the militant group has captured Assyrian Christians from 11 villages near the town of Tal Tamr in Hassakeh province (at the Iraq-Turkey border).
On Tuesday, a group of Egyptian-American Coptics gathered near the White House, demanding the Obama administration do more to protect Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Christians.
Their rallying cry: “Obama, Obama, did you see? Christian blood in the sea.”
Sorry folks, the president chooses not to see.
Unfathomably, the man who said his “Christian” faith means “being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper; treating others as they would treat me,” seems oblivious to the blood shed at the hands of ISIS. He refuses to acknowledge the reality of the ongoing genocide.
But let’s take a short walk down memory lane shall we? Let’s flashback to a time when Obama at least pretended to believe that, as Americans, we had “responsibilities to our fellow human beings.” It’s been almost four years since Obama decided to bomb Libya without official Congressional approval. At the time, he justified the action because it ~
… was in the national interest of the United States to stop a potential massacre that would have “stained the conscience of the world.” 😯
Remember how forthrightly the president made the case for his airstrikes against Gaddafi’s regime? ~
Wow! Shades of “truth, justice and the American way!”
Hard to reconcile that 2011 Obama with the 2015 version. When it comes to the Christians under siege in the middle east, Barack Hussein Obama has been more than content to “wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”
Every new day brings another batch of images of slaughter and mass graves from ISIS path of destruction. Apparently POTUS is so jaded they no longer faze him.
This president emphatically denies America’s responsibility as the world’s remaining superpower, unless – acting will advance his radical agenda. While his lofty rhetoric is frequently sprinkled with language intended to project a sense of righteous patriotism, every move he makes – especially on the international front – is the result of deliberate, cold-blooded ideological calculation.
Back in the last century when I was in college, one of the favorite campus mantras was “Question Everything!” Non-conformity was the order of the day. Many of my fellow students actually seemed to major in rebelling against the establishment.
Fast forward a few decades and college is the least-likely place we’ll find a rebellion breaking out. Long gone is that revolutionary spirit. Today’s campus is a rainbow coalition of utopian visions and non-judgmental sameness. The new collective maxim appears to be “Question Nothing.”
Robert Weissberg, writing at the American Thinker has a name for the current crop of college activists: “Social Justice Warriors.” I would replace the “social” with “socialist;” and “warriors” with “workers.” There’s more than a hint of the totalitarian about these kids. And the only thing they appear to be at “war” with is reality.
As Weissberg relates, the latest trend at major universities seems to be presenting the administration with a set of fanciful “demands” calculated to do the impossible – make life “fair.” Last year at Dartmouth, a group of 30 students commandeered the president’s office to announce a “Freedom Budget.” They were calling for ~
… greater diversity, eliminating sexism and heterosexism, an improved campus climate for minorities and gays, banning the term “illegal immigrant,” offering a class on undocumented workers in America, creating a professor of color lecture series, and harsher penalties for sexual assault, among many, many others.
Other student wishlists have included:
• more diverse student bodies
• mandatory sensitivity training for faculty and administrators
• a “safe” multicultural center for students from “under-represented” groups
• removing all racial descriptions from university police reports
• offering gender-neutral bathrooms at all college facilities
These young people actually seem to believe that reality itself can be altered to conform to their self-determined definition of justice.
The shallowness of these demands is breathtaking and suggests that these activists are just winging it. The Dartmouth students are surely among America’s brainiest but why do they denounce “ableism”? Are they suggesting that acknowledging variations in ability is morally wrong and if differences are to be abolished (hopeless anyhow), how would society function? Why must the campus offer gender-neutral bathrooms?
The University of Michigan has taken this silliness to a whole new level with their Orwellian “Inclusive Language Campaign” ~
(The college) recently released a banned words list as part of its $16,000 “inclusive language” campaign on campus. The move, which many are deeming an infringement on free speech, is reportedly designed to teach students that “certain words are considered offensive.”
For example ~
• “That’s so gay”
• “ghetto
• “I want to die”
• “illegal alien”
• “That’s retarded”
• “tranny”
• “gypped”
[To illustrate how nonsensical this censorship effort is, the “N” word didn’t make the list. But “insane” did. So I guess we can’t say: “This ‘Inclusive Language Campaign’ is pure insanity!”]
Steven Crowder tried to get these young U of M drones to understand that this ridiculous policy actually violates Freedom of Speech ~
I’m not sure how successful he was. Without discussion, debate or critical thinking, they’ve almost subconsciously replaced the First Amendment with a newly-contrived Right Not to be Offended.
In my convocation address I said that there is a move afoot on campuses “to marginalize and even to demonize voices of traditional and historic Christian faith. . . and that this is troubling . . . because to think we can have real and enduring freedom and real liberal education without robust voices of faith ignores history.”
I spoke of Os Guinness’ “Golden Triangle” of freedom, virtue, and faith, all of which depend on each other, which is why standing up for religious freedom is so vital for any healthy society.
And then I urged students to “listen respectfully” to those with whom they disagree, because “This is at the heart of liberal education and it’s at the heart of democracy and freedom.”
Now I’ve heard Metaxas speak several times. He’s low-key, humorous, thought-provoking, winsome even – hardly “offensive.” Apparently not everyone agrees ~
At the time I thought it went rather well. But then I read an opinion piece published in the student newspaper. It called my speech “one of the most offensive and disgusting” the writer had ever witnessed. It said that, “Beneath a thin veneer of reason and civil discourse,” I “continued to push [my] evangelical agenda.”
Strangely enough, when he pressed for specifics, no one could say exactly what it was that they found so “offensive” ~
… no one seemed to be able to say what in the speech bothered them. They just flat out were offended.
To be sure, those who objected to the speech were in the minority. But for those who claimed “offense,” it’s as if they’d been programmed to have a negative reaction to certain words, phrases or topics but they’re unable to articulate why. Almost Pavlovian. It brings to mind the Eloi in H.G. Wells “The Time Machine.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don’t want to believe that these young minds are so tightly closed already. It doesn’t bode well for America’s future.
And so as Crowder emphasized, and Metaxas concludes, we’ll just have to continue to risk “offending” them with the truth ~
… if we grow silent out of fear that we’ll be shouted down or criticized, we’ll soon lose our right to speak freely at all. And that would be disastrous, not only for preaching the Gospel, but for maintaining a free and truly tolerant society.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Related: Campus Thought Conformity FIRE ~ (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) An organization founded to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities ~
Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom and a human right, and there’s no place that this right should be more valued and protected than America’s colleges and universities. A university exists to educate students and advance the frontiers of human knowledge, and does so by acting as a “marketplace of ideas” where ideas compete. The intellectual vitality of a university depends on this competition—something that cannot happen properly when students or faculty members fear punishment for expressing views that might be unpopular with the public at large or disfavored by university administrators.
When a middle school student sounds more like the leader of the free world than the president himself does, you know the country’s in peril. But with a few more young people like CJ Pearson we might just survive! This kid is awesome!
You may need to adjust the volume on the player itself ^
Update:
Just learned that this tune is featured in an upcoming film: “Do You Believe?” A crucial question Americans need to be asking themselves right now ~
Random links of interest, concern or curiosity from the past week or so, that deserve at least a SHORT mention:
ObamaCare’s Latest Victims Include a Day-Care Center, And An Insurance Company ~ And the hits just keep on coming! A 30-year old church-run day care center in Texas, and a new nonprofit cooperative insurance provider (specifically created under the Affordable Care Act to generate more competition and choice in insurance markets, but now overwhelmed with claims); both casualties of the (UN)Affordable Care Act.
…more than $3 million in funding to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone is wholly unaccounted for. The government has vowed a prompt investigation as it begins to quarantine previously untouched neighborhoods in the capital, Freetown.
Samaritan’s Purse has an Feb. 3 update on the deadly virus HERE. The news is mostly positive; Ebola didn’t spread nearly as rapidly as initially predicted ~
The general thinking is that the outbreak may be declared over in Liberia in the next couple of months. However, that is likely not true for Sierra Leone and Guinea. The bottom line is that no one is sure. EVD can spike at any time; it only takes one infected person to spread the disease.
More encouraging – the “Good News” of Jesus Christ is being spread ~
Since March 2014, the Gospel has been presented more than 50,000 times through our work. Nearly 1,200 people have made a profession of faith and received subsequent discipleship.
Top 10 Astroturfers ~ A primer from Sharyl Attkisson explains how to recognize the key propaganda pushers, including such notables as Media Matters, Daily Kos and Salon.com ~
Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress. There’s an entire PR industry built around it in Washington.
Yippee. Lying for fun and profit – at our expense.
Mayor Kasim Reed first suspended Cochran for 30 days and announced that he would have to complete “sensitivity training” after activists who don’t agree with the fire chief’s Christian views on sex complained about a men’s devotional book Cochran had written on his personal time. Biblical sexual morality is mentioned only briefly in the 162-page book.
After an investigation that included interviews with employees found Cochran did not discriminate against anyone, the mayor fired him anyway – citing as his basis, ironically, the need to tolerate diverse views […]
“Every American should be concerned about a government that thinks it can fire you because of what you believe,” said ADF(Alliance Defending Freedom) Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot. “If it can happen to Chief Cochran, a distinguished firefighter who attained the highest fire service position in the United States, it can happen to anybody.”
Yes it can ~ How believing in the Bible can get you canned in today’s America ~ The Benham Brothers, whose HGTV show was cancelled because the network disapproved of their views on traditional marriage, discuss this chilling new trend. (Includes an inspiring video of a Fox & Friends interview)
And what happens when the intolerance from the diversity police escalates? Consider the Christians in another part of the world who are being martyred for their belief ~ The Middle East is red with the blood of Christians ~ Centuries-old Christian communities are being decimated. This UK Telegraph article documents years of persecution at the hands of the Religion-of-Peace ~
The atrocity by Islamic State sympathisers in Libya highlights the worsening persecution of non-Muslims all over the Middle East – violence that is driving them from their Biblical homelands.
Marie Harf explains ~ Some of the complete nonsense spouted by these State Department spokes-chicks is mind-boggling ~
“We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs…”
Which brings me to… my favorite Tweet of the Week ~
I defy you to cite a stupider string of words ever uttered by another human being in the history of mankind. http://t.co/zRDnXNR6S3
Checking my archives recently for posts I’d written about the president’s radical roots, I came across “Channeling Reverend Wright,” a piece from October 2nd, 2012. It included a video that had just been unearthed, featuring Senator Barack Obama speaking at Hampton University, Virgina back in 2007. It revealed a decidedly different Barack than the one who’s been charming we-the-folks for the last few years.
I write that in the past tense, because – very suspiciously – the You Tube account that featured the video has been “disabled” ➡
(Hmmmm…somebody doesn’t want it out there?)
In my search for the missing speech I was able to find these two segments from Sean Hannity’s show ~
Just listen to this divisive, race-baiting charlatan!
Watching these clips is like being on an emotional roller coaster; from surprise (at the faux homeboy accent) to dismay to anger to sadness – and back again. If the mainstream media hadn’t completely ignored this racist demagoguery back in October of 2012, chances are we’d have a different man sitting in the White House today. One who was actually proud to be an American.
As you may have heard, our ever-growing federal leviathan is now greedily eying the internet; the weird, wild, worldwide web, as their next entity to devour. In typical Orwellian “Newspeak” they’re referring to their take-over plan as “Net-Neutrality.”
Of course it’s anything but “neutral.”
As with most progressive legislation, what we’re getting under the guise of “Net-Neutrality” is simply another nefarious solution to a non-existent problem. The whole endeavor is wrapped in leftist buzzwords, “fairness,” “equal” internet access for all users. But where are the nefarious restrictions on access or usage now that desperately call for new FCC rules and regulations? Nowhere.
… takes power away from consumers, website developers and small business owners and puts it in the hands of Government. This will drive up costs, slow down innovation, and put unelected political appointees in charge of picking winners and losers.
Specifically, what the proposed FCC expansion would mean is:
• $11 billion+ in new taxes
• massive new regulations; 332 pages so far (the government has to “pass it to find out what’s in it”)
• federal government gets to control information, and regulate free speech (shades of communism)
But if it’s that bad, why are so many large internet companies like Google and Netflix getting behind this effort? Simple corporate greed.
As Glenn Beck has explained, it’s a sneaky way for these large tech providers to spread out the bandwidth costs ~
“We’re talking about a sewer,” Beck analogized. “You’re on a regular street, and everybody is using sewers the way everybody uses sewers. But then a giant hotel comes in and it’s packed all the time. And those little, teeny pipes that were there made for your one-family home … are not big enough to handle all of the sewage that is coming from that hotel.”
Beck said companies like Netflix are the hotel in the analogy, and they are signing on to support net neutrality because they don’t want to pay more for the disproportionate amount of bandwidth they are using.
Bottom line: We should have learned our lesson after being “Grubered” with Obamacare. If Obama and his gang of progressive power-grabbers are for it… get the flock out of there!
“The internet was not created by the government. Nowhere in The Constitution is there a provision allowing the government the power to regulate the free flow of information. In fact The First Amendment directly flies in the face of internet regulation.”
“He was equating the sins of medieval Christianity, namely the Crusades, with the contemporary terrorism of ISIS,” D’Souza said.
“Now, leaving aside the fact that all of this happened with the Crusades over 1,000 years ago, it’s important to remember that the Crusades themselves were a response to Muslim conquest.
“The Muslims not only conquered the Holy Land, they conquered parts of Italy, all of Spain, they were at the gates of Vienna, and had the Christians not fought back, most likely all of Europe would have fallen into Muslim hands.”
With bonus commentary on Brian William’s mis-remembrance.
Video via Dinesh D’Souza.com
In fact, Muslims are responsible for both ISIS and the Crusades—the Crusaders were fighting a defensive war to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim conquest! […]
And as for the Inquisition? The Inquisition over four centuries killed fewer people than radical Muslims killed in one day on 9/11. How hard the Muslims must laugh to hear Obama respond to ISIS atrocities by blaming Christianity!
Watching Obama deny the radical Islamic terrorism that is plainly happening in front of him is sort of like looking at a Nazi concentration camp and denying that Nazis are running it and Jews are the target.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In pushing his progressive, revisionist version of history, Obama is hoping Americans will suspend critical thinking skills long enough to believe that there’s no such thing as motivation for one’s actions. While attempting to construct a false moral equivalency, he wants us all to pretend that there isn’t a pathological ideology fueling “radical” Islamic violence.
(Hence the administration’s surreal Jobs for Marginalized Extremists Summit.)
Reality no longer seems to intrude on the Obama clan does it? While the Islamo-nazis slaughtered 21 Christians on a beach in Libya, the first family unit was out west vacationing. Separate vacations, mind you (Barack and Michelle actually seem to prefer it that way – even on Valentine’s Day – but that’s another whole story); Barack living it up on the links and the wife and daughters on the slopes in Aspen, but nevertheless, indulging themselves once again on the taxpayers’ dime.
Ignorance is bliss I guess… And yet ISIS couldn’t be more clear in their blood-thirsty intentions ~
Since Obama defiantly declared America is no longer a Christian nation, he apparently has no clue which “nation” ISIS is referring to.
But never fret. The progressive, valley kids in Obamaland have convened a special summit to address the unpleasantness and will soon have the ISIS cretins well in hand. Seems all the misguided barbarians really need are hugs and jobs…
• Odds of being struck by lightning? About 1 in 1 million.
• Odds of winning last week’s $564 million Powerball lottery? 1 in 175 million.
• Odds of the universe existing at all? “Heart-stoppingly astronomical.”
It’s been more than 2 years now and we still don’t have answers, nor any sort of resolution, to the IRS persecution of conservative groups leading up to the 2012 presidential election. The mainstream media can’t be bothered to cover the scandal. They’re all leftists, so they surreptitiously approve anyway. And most establishment Republicans were secretly pleased about the harassment because the targets were those same “right wing extremists” they want to silence as well.
The Department of Justice is supposedly conducting an investigation of their own into the IRS abuses (what a joke eh?). But recent revelations indicate the two bureaucracies may actually have been in cahoots the whole time.
“The IRS scandal is getting worse. These documents show that the Obama IRS Counsel’s office, run by an Obama political appointee, was stonewalling a federal criminal investigation. And only in the Holder Justice Department would it be deemed appropriate that the offices implicated in the IRS abuses should investigate the IRS abuses,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Earlier this month, Wetumpka Tea Party leader Becky Gerritson, spoke at the 26th Annual Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, MO. Becky testified in Congress at the House Ways and Means Committee Hearing on June 4th last summer. Thank God there are still Americans like her willing to stand up to the fed’s tyranny ~
Becky and her husband started the Wetumpka Tea Party in 2009. They applied for tax exempt status in 2010. The IRS wrote them that they had received their application and cashed their $850 fee. The IRS then sent Becky a list of over 80 additional questions including names of all members of her organization and the names of all of their donors. The IRS wanted copies of all speeches at their meetings and dates, times and locations of all future voter registration drives. The IRS sent letters to almost 300 conservative organizations. The IRS wanted copies of the prayers that were said and tweets.
Under President Obama the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has become a rogue agency, thus far unaccountable for this scandal, and totally out of control. If our representatives don’t have the fortitude to fight for the rights of we-the-people over this egregious abuse of power the Republic really is finished.
CNN’s Cuomo: ‘Our Rights Do Not Come from God’ ~ This is quite stunning. We have to wonder whether this talking head realizes that the alternative – might makes right – sets the stage for the next Mao, Stalin or Hitler…?
Waltrip, a NASCAR Hall of Fame recipient with 84 wins, spoke about the importance of coming to Christ and becoming a new creature before approximately 4,000 attendees, which hailed from 170 countries worldwide. He spent most of his talk sharing his story of how God changed his life from being a man that struggled with pride and alcoholism, to a person who now is humble and lives for Christ and not himself.
