Camille Paglia analyzes our present cultural attitudes toward evil and how those attitudes affect campus life...

Christian Theology: Grace vs. Law

The Law (the Ten Commandments etc.) and Grace (God's unmerited favor which Jesus purchased on the cross) cannot be in the same room with one another.

The Law is lesser than Grace; Grace is greater. If Grace is not greater, then Jesus died for nothing. Jesus, who is Grace Personified, kept the Law and paid for all the infractions against it. He was able to do this because He was Perfect in Everything. He paid for all, not some, all infractions against the Law. Once He did that and if we call Him "Lord," dragging our behavior back into the picture also drags back in the Law. When we focus on our behavior instead of Jesus' Love, we reduce the importance, the glory, the magnificence, the power and the majesty of the Cross to insignificance in the light of our failure according to the Law. We magnify our sin and reduce the Lord Jesus. And, we, in effect, call God a liar. We say to God, "We are not what You say, "the redeemed; joint heirs; children of God; brothers of Christ, " we are still sinners." Any time human beings focus on their behavior, good or bad, it is a guaranteed, automatic FAIL. That is because it becomes all about us and how well we've kept the Law and not about Jesus.

The Apostle John refers to himself in his Gospel as "the disciple Jesus loved." I'd always thought he did this because he didn't want to call attention to himself. Matthew carefully tells his Gospel account in third person and Mark, in a practical, pragmatic fashion, relates the facts with simplicity in his Gospel. (Luke was not  one of the disciples, but a physician who set about to write the early history of the church, the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, and does so with affection and detail.) But John simultaneously distances and personalizes his account by calling himself "the disciple Jesus loved."

Mark tells us Jesus called John and his brother, "Sons of Thunder," teasing them for wanting Jesus to punish a town that rejected their presence, Mark 3:17. And John's mother approached Jesus asking Him to place her two sons, James and John, one on His left and the other on His right, when He enters His Kingdom, Matthew 20:21-23. However, when Mark tells the story, he sets the responsibility fully on James and John, Mark 10:35-37. John is not the pure driven snow. He's temperamental, vindictive and power hungry. Yet, in his Gospel, John almost always refers to himself as "the disciple Jesus loved."

We see Peter in action, the bold, impetuous disciple who blurts out the first thing that comes into his head, once declaring the revelation, "Jesus, You ARE Messiah," and another time imploring Jesus not to go to seeking death, for which Jesus said, "Get thee behind me satan," Matthew 16:21-23. During the Last Supper, Jesus explains that soon they'll all scatter and hide because He is going to a very bad death. Peter replies he will never deny Jesus, Mark 14:27-31; Luke 22:31-38; John 13:36-38. In his heart he is firm in his resolve, commitment and love, but when confronted in the courtyard outside the Jesus' first sham trial, he fails. Not only does he prove incapable of laying down his life, he is incapable of even admitting he knows Jesus at all.  Peter boldly declared, "I will follow you. I will lay down my life for you," John 13:37. The Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai promised, "We will keep the Law," and no sooner had the words escaped their lips than the Israelites built an idol in the shape of a calf and worshiped it, breaking the most important commandment of all. And like them, no sooner had Peter's declaration escaped his lips than he denied even knowing Jesus.

Here's the scene: John was the disciple with the contacts able to gain admittance to the courtyard of the building where the Pharisees' and their soldiers took Jesus for His first illegal trial. He managed to get Peter into the courtyard, but John, with higher credentials, went on into the room where the Pharisees questioned Jesus. Later, we see John standing at the foot of the cross--the only Apostle with the balls to be there; all the others had run away and hidden themselves on the night of Jesus' arrest, one losing his clothing in his mad rush, Mark 14:51 & 52.

What gave John the balls to stick with Jesus all the way? It wasn't his temperamental attitude nor his desire for power. Raging at the Pharisees would have gotten him crucified along with Jesus and there was no power to be gained following the Lord to the foot of the cross--at least not in the temporal and immediately obvious sense. The Man, Jesus, endured three trials during which the accusers each took their turns beating, mocking and humiliating Him. There's no power for John to gain in the midst of that apparent disaster. Yet John was either present or nearby throughout Jesus' entire ordeal. All of Peter's burning desire to follow Jesus to death, his will power to honor Jesus with his whole being, amounted to nothing. He couldn't even remain true to Jesus in the face of a servant girl who insisted Peter had been with Him, Luke 22:54-57.

What's the difference? The difference is the focus. Peter focused on behavior--his behavior. He said things like, "I will follow You to the death," and "I will never deny You." John, whose behavior was clearly bad, focused on Jesus' love for him. Jesus' LOVE gave John the power to follow Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane, through the courts and to the cross. Peter's "I will" amounted to worse than nothing. John's revelation of Jesus' vast LOVE made it possible for him to do anything, and this was before Pentecost.

When we focus on behavior, we're looking at the wrong thing. As human beings, for us, it's all about behavior. It's about rules and regs. And we put ourselves back under the Law when we do that. And so, like the Israelites and Peter, when we focus on behavior, the Law and our intentions to keep it, our words espousing our will power to do what we promise amount to worse than nothing; our "I will" is a guaranteed, automatic FAIL. But, if like John, we focus on Jesus' LOVE for us, we can do anything. A good place to start, follow the Apostle John's example and think of ourselves as "the one Jesus LOVES," then we can do anything, even keep the Law.

Thoughts on religious liberty....

If you're an American citizen, the present, American, federal government wants to become your god. It wants to watch you and control every aspect of your life. It wants you to have sexual liberty, but it doesn't want you to choose for yourself how you will eat, what car you will drive, what kind of toilet you will own, how much stuff you can put in your garage, what you can do with water that you own or falls as rain on your land or which light bulb you will use.

More than anything, the American federal government wants to control how you think and for whom you vote. Voter fraud is rampant and the idea of "one man (or woman) and one vote" is a joke, but nobody who has any power does anything about it. And those who try are persecuted by the IRS, the new enforcement arm of the American king and his minions.

Unfortunately, the American media largely is in agreement with these objectives and the Republican party too often appear hapless and inarticulate. Truly, only someone with the talent of Ronald Reagan, which most of us do not possess, can talk over the media's heads directly to the people and make thoughts clear. However, too many Republicans get to Washington and become infected with the same disease that rots the Democrat party--the notion that begins with the idea that government can help.

The truth is, ninety-nine percent of the time, government cannot help, it can only make things worse. The "War on Poverty" has destroyed black families and has made poverty and living on government charity a way of life for many. The federal minimum wage law has ensured that no person who lacks basic skills and a high school education can get a job an employer can afford to give him while he trains him in a trade. Federal laws controlling student school attendance and integration of students no matter their academic ability or mental capacity ensures that neither our brightest students nor our dullest will receive what they need. Government student aid has driven up the cost of a college education to the point where only the wealthiest citizen can pay for a full load of course hours per semester by himself and the rules make sure that the middle class is hammered because they are neither wealthy enough to pay for everything themselves nor poor enough to obtain a free ride. And now the federal government is busy making sure that nobody can afford healthcare either.

Unless we're talking public roads, national defense and international diplomacy the federal government can't do anything useful. Government is like a zombie, except it is blind and though it is controlled by regulation, there is no mercy or true charity. That can only come with the sight and intelligence of personal contact and liberty to do some things and not others as best benefits the needy individual.

Where power can be concentrated, those who desire power will also concentrate. The ultimate objective of a person who desires power, as opposed to someone who desires to serve, is the ability to control, to rule, to dominate--to become a god.

"Religious freedom is the freedom to practice your faith, not just in the church, but outside the church. And, unfortunately, increasingly, the progressives in this country and the president see freedom of worship as just the ability to do whatever you want to do within the church, at least for now. But once you are outside the church, then you have to do what the government tells you to do and think the way the government tells you to think. That's not what the first amendment says, that's not what the court, thankfully, said....Freedom of conscious is the most important freedom because none of the others matter if you can't say and act according to what you actually believe," Rick Santorum.

Americans have been endowed with vast liberties which are being whittled away little by little through time. Compared to the days when a teenager could leave an abusive home and strike out on his own to build his own business or take a viable job learning a trade, he now has no such liberty. A teenager who leaves home soon becomes a slave in the sex trade or a homeless derelict. Ask any farmer how much liberty he has when federal law for chemical use damns him if he does and damns him if he doesn't--the only thing that prevents him from suffering a huge fine, a lawsuit or arrest is the fact that the authorities haven't decided to punish him yet. In labor law, the employer is guilty, now what is the question? How much liberty do we have when the government can confiscate our money and do things with it which we abhor? And, when a government becomes a "charitable" organization, doling out aid to the needy, its blindness and its regulations automatically make it an organ to be massaged for free cash.

The (Not) Affordable (No) Care (subject to un-constitional revision by the executive branch) Act seeks to further whittle away Americans' liberty.

 "The prevailing view in Democratic circles is that Americans enjoy constitutional and legal rights when acting alone but not when acting jointly — i.e., not when it matters most to public affairs. Under this model, the owners of Hobby Lobby enjoy First Amendment religious protections, and RFRA protections, when they are kneeling in prayer by their bedsides, and perhaps, with certain limitations and IRS oversight, when they are in their church pews. But if they make a decision together, as a group of business owners with a particular vision of the good life and their own duties as people of conscience, then the Democrats believe that their legal and constitutional rights should be set aside, as though human beings and American citizens acting in concert with one another were less than human beings or less than American citizens because of that act of coordination," National Review editors

 Americans need to do more screaming, they need to do more pounding on politicians' doors and more pelting them with letters. We the people need to rise up and demand bureaucracies funds be curtailed, that our borders be secured and agencies be whittled down to the barest minimum. We need to run for office and we need to write letters to the editor. We need to cry out to God for help. He will answer.

The truth about the Middle East...

The Roman emperor, Hadrian, hated the Jews and wanted to obliterate them from the face of the earth. From the Roman point of view the Jews had been a thorn in the Roman side for generations. He renamed the land of Israel, "Palestine," with the idea that renaming it would mean that Israel had never existed. The ancestors of the "Palestinians" lived there alongside Jews back then and still live there now, only now, they want to claim Israel has no right to exist. This video is short, succinct and to the point covering many of the key points pertaining to conflict in the Middle East.

The Great Global Warming Swindle (Full Movie)

Interview with Snowden from the German Press

You won't see this interview in the American Press. That's because the American Press believes the Obama Administration can do no wrong--which is a very bad thing for a press to believe of any administration. In short, the American Press is not doing their job.

Very interesting interview....

Obama Stole the Election

The Truth About Abortion

Can't say it any better than this!