Category: Marxism/Cultural Marxism

McAtee Contra Dr. Russell Moore… Christianity or State-olatry?

This was a question and answer exchange from the floor of the recent meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

How in the world can someone in the Southern Baptist Convention support the defending of the rights of Muslims to construct Mosques in the United States when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans. They are murdering Christians, beheading Christians, imprisoning Christians all over the world. Do you actually believe that if Jesus Christ were here today that he would support this and he would stand up and say let us protect the rights of those Baal worshipers to erect temples to Baal?  Do you believe that Dr. Moore?

John Wofford
Pastor – Armorel Baptist church

Dr. Russell Moore, Chairman of the Southern Baptist “Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission”  responds to the question,

You know sometimes we have to deal with questions that are really complicated. We have to spend a lot of time thinking them through, and we’re not sure what exactly the final result is going to be. Sometimes we have really hard decisions to make. This isn’t one of those things (delegate applause). What it means to be a Baptist is to support soul freedom for everybody (delegate applause). And Brothers and sisters when you have a government that says “we can decide whether or not a house of worship can be constructed based upon the beliefs of that house of worship” then there are going to be Southern Baptists Churches in San Francisco and New York and throughout this country are not going to be able to build. The bigger issue though is not one of self interest. The bigger issue is that we have been called to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A government that has the power to outlaw people assembling together and saying what they believe that does not turn people into Christians. That turns people into pretend Christians and it sends them straight to hell. The answer to Islam is not Government power. The answer is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the new birth that comes from that (heavy delegate applause).

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I wish I could say this was satire. You know, something from the Babylon Bee. Unfortunately Dr. Russell Moore was dead serious. Honestly, it is difficult to consider any “Christian” who actually sincerely believes this to be Christian. Can one be Christian and suggest that other Christians should support the ability of anti-Christian religions to flourish? If there is no God but God how can Christians support the proliferation of false gods? Before I get ahead of myself let’s take this in order.

I’m going to be exhaustive here so there will likely be overlapping in some of these observations.

1.) Note, first of all that Moore doesn’t directly answer the question asked of him. Moore’s indirect answer seems to be that if Baptist expect to build Churches in San Francisco and New York then they have to abide Muslims killing,  beheading, and imprisoning Christians throughout the world.

2.) Don’t miss that Moore’s answer is “yes” to the question as to whether or not Jesus would support the erecting of Baal Temples. According to Dr. Moore, Jesus would indeed support the building of Temples to Baal in a pluralist social order.

3.) Note Moore’s mocking of Rev. Wofford’s question. Moore offers that it’s really an easy question to answer. This is contemptuous arrogance on Moore’s part. This is difficult to swallow when it is Moore who is the one offering a simpleton and disastrous answer.

4.) Notice what Moore offers here as the first part of his answer is “soul freedom.”  “Soul Freedom is techno-speak for Baptists. “Soul Freedom” or “Soul Liberty,”  comes to Baptists from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island Plantation. Williams absolutized the liberty of conscience in terms of choice in matters of faith. Williams wrote on this matter that,

“It is the will and command of God, that a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s spirit, the Word of God.”

Now this sounds enlightened until one realizes that Williams (and now Moore) are advocating the Baptist religious principle  that the  sword supported statute  of the state be used to insure that no one religion be allowed to be the one unique religion of a people. The Baptist state, enforcing “Soul Freedom,” must use the statute supported sword of the state to make sure that all religions proliferate. Of course this has the effect of making the State the god of the competing gods making sure that each god only goes so far in the public square. Baptists “Soul Freedom” is institutionalized idolatry (State-olatry). Williams and Moore’s “Soul Freedom” coerces people to accept the Baptist version of religion for the public square. Baptist “Soul Freedom” is not Freedom at all but is bondage to idolatry. Baptist thinking on this matter is thus “anti-Christ.”

5.) When we consider “Soul Freedom” in this light we see that “Soul Freedom” is actually an absolutizing of unbiblical notions of freedom. Moore’s freedom is religious anarchy. Freedom is never absolute but always operates in the context of some ordered religious framework. Moore’s “ordered framework,” is the framework of religious pluralism, a synonym for the monotheism of State-olatry.

6.) Moore misses the fact that the State is God’s State and is responsible to the God of the Bible. As the 1958 revised Belgic Confession Article 36 teaches,

“…And being called in this manner to contribute to the advancement of a society that is pleasing to God, while completely refraining from every tendency towards exercising absolute authority, and while functioning in the sphere entrusted to them and with the means belonging to them to remove every obstacle to the preaching of the gospel and to every aspect of divine worship, in order that the Word of God may have free course, the kingdom of Jesus Christ may make progress, and every anti-Christian power may be resisted.”

Now of course a Baptist would disagree with this but even the Baptist London Confession of Faith does not support Moore speaking of the necessity of the Magistrate to be, “encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers.”

7.) Moore seems to think that it is possible to have a a-religious neutral State. In point of fact all states are theocracies including this one and Moore is advocating for a pagan God (the State) to remain the the god enforcing “Soul Freedom” as its humanist religion. Moore’s religion is the ancient Roman religion which allowed any religion to prosper in Rome as long as all adherents of all religions pinch incense to Rome. When Moore insists that the State should remain un-attached to any God or god concept Moore, at that very moment is pinching incense to the God State.

8.) As we have noted, in advocating for “Soul Freedom,” where the State, by sword supported statute, protects all religions as equal and so supports the presence and proliferation of all religions, makes all the social order slaves of a State that is in control of the competing gods. It turns the social order into an Egyptian Mahat system where all are slaves to the State. Because of Baptist “Soul Freedom,” we live and move and have our being in the State.

9.) Note, that Moore suggests that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with whether or not idolatry is allowed to flourish. In order to be faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ  we must support the building of pagan temples. If that makes sense to anybody they are hopeless to reach.

10.) Is Moore really suggesting that any “house of worship” of any variety should be allowed to be built? Would Moore support a building that housed the Santeria cult?  By what standard would Moore cut off supporting building worship centers that housed the vilest of cults? I know for a fact that Moore would oppose supporting any worship center which had the Confederate flag as a religious symbol, and that even if that worship center was Christian.

11.) Honestly, if this is Moore’s understanding of Christianity I would praise God with all my being if Baptists churches were not built in San Francisco, New York, Bombay, India, or anywhere on the planet.

12.) Moore gives us a false dichotomy when he offers that Government is not the answer to Islam but rather the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer to Islam.  Can not the Gospel of Jesus Christ convert Magistrates in Government so that they desire to protect Christianity from the inroads of pagan faiths?

13.) Moore is worried about pretend Christians going to hell  but he does not seem concerned about real Muslims going to hell. Indeed, Moore wants to help them go to hell by supporting their institutional infrastructures.

What Russell Moore is advocating is nothing but Cultural Marxism and anti-Christianity. While, I have no reason to doubt Moore’s good intentions it is simply the case that Moore is doing the Devil’s work by intellectually paving the highway to Hell.

For another good piece on this issue see Adi Schlebush’s work at Faith and Heritage. Adi brings out some points that I do not cover.

http://faithandheritage.com/2016/06/russell-moore-endorses-idolatry/

 

Republican Presumed Nominee Trump and Judge Curiel

I’m not voting for Donald Trump. I’ve made the reasons why clear on Iron Ink. Nothing has changed in that regard. However, since I don’t have a dog in the election fight, as it concerns the two major party candidates, it does give me a wee bit of dispassion when looking at the issues that are being tussled over in this election cycle.

The most recent caterwauling by the Media, the Democrats, The Republicans and the general Elite cognoscenti establishment has been Donald Trump’s daring to offer the politically incorrect statement that he doesn’t think he can get a fair hearing from a Obama appointed Judge of Mexican heritage who has remote but very real ties to THE LaRaza and has  served on a La Raza scholarship board that awarded scholarships to illegal immigrants, thus demonstrating his attitude towards U.S. law. I think this might be called, “Mestizo privilege.”

All of this phony outrage has been an attempt to stampede the electorate into discarding Trump as a vile evil racist. That the SJW media and SJW inside the beltway establishment are rather selective in their outrage against putative racists is seen by the way that other statements from cultural gate-keepers is met with a nonplussed and ho-hum response,

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,”

Barack Obama
Identifying with a African-American against what was initially misreported as a black youth being slain by a White man.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Sonya Sotomayer
Puerto Riccan Supreme Court Justice

“The Cambridge police acted stupidly … there is a long history in this country of Arican-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

Barack Obama
White House Press Conference
Complaining about a White Cop Arresting a Black Professor

So, given that there was little to no consternation or outrage over these statements quite similar to Trump one has to wonder why Trump is being excoriated.

Then there is the observation by Ann Coulter on this subject,

“Two weeks ago …  the (New York) Times published an op-ed by a federal appeals judge stating: ‘All-white juries risk undermining the perception of justice in minority communities, even if a mixed-race jury would have reached the same verdict or imposed the same sentence.'”

For how many decades have we been told that minorities cannot get justice from White judges or white juries and that has been perfectly OK and even has become enshrined in our “law?” But now Trump accuses an Obama appointed and LaRaza connected Judge of Mexican heritage of the very same thing and suddenly everybody is all outraged? Me thinketh the lady doth protest too much.

These observations, combined, inform us that the only reason that Trump is being slammed by the cultural gatekeepers about his recent Obama appointed and LaRaza connected “Mexican judge” statement is that Trump is white.  None of the above quotes are unlike Trump’s statement. The “problem” with Trump is that he, as a White Man, is holding Cultural Marxist non-Caucasians to the same standard that cultural Marxist non-Caucasians and their self-hating white liberal lap dogs use against whites.  Since World War II the cultural Marxists have worked to turn these united States into a nation of Tribal interests and now the SJW cultural elites want to scream ruddy hell when Trump acknowledges that Tribal reality? Physician heal thyself.

Speaker of the House, Rep. Paul Ryan told us that what Trump said was a textbook case of racism when Trump spoke concerning the Obama appointed and LaRaza connected Judge of Mexican heritage . Just count Ryan as one more leftist worshiper genuflecting at the  altar of political correctness and white hatred. What does one expect from a pig but a grunt?

That white people are guilted into believing and buying into this double standard tripe suggests that the real goal of all of this hypocritical guilt mongering is the complete subjugation of white people under the heels of a neo-Marxist multicultural, politically correct, anti-Christian agenda.  All this propaganda guilting works to the same end that was arrived at in the French revolution. During that time the Jacobins bombarded France with saturation guilt propaganda so effectively that even the French nobility and monarchy were left unable to defend themselves to themselves against it. A date with madame guillotine was the consequence for many in the the French Aristocracy because of this propaganda to which no response was forthcoming.  If Christian white people do not resist this demonization propaganda I see a similar future for Christian white people.

 

 

Sex Outside the Boundaries and Destruction

A social order trajectory that begins with unconstrained libidinous passion will end in social order horror that consumes individuals, families, and nations. For example the French intelligentsia philosophes embarked on the trajectory of emancipating the sexual impulse from the moral order and the end result was the tender strokes of Madame la’ Guillotine. What began as a loosening of sexual mores ended with the loosening of heads off of shoulders.

Consider also, as example, the Weimar Republic of the 1920’s. What began as the Sexual cabaret of Europe in the 1920’s where every kind of fetish and deviance possible could be had for the right price ended with unnamed tyranny and rampant death for the “fatherland.”

Consider also the Bolshevik Revolution. Alexandera Kollentai led the way in sexual freedom for women. Women, under communist rule, were considered as belonging to no man but as belonging to the state for purchase. Kollontai, with Lenin’s approval, sought to destroy the concept of marriage and families. The results of this sexual freedom was so disastrous that even the Communist realized that they had to reverse course lest they wipe themselves out by sexual freedom.

There is a nexus between the liberation of sex from God ordained expression and the consequent social order blood in the streets that naturally follows. We are witnessing that again in the West as we seek to eliminate any boundaries for sex. It almost seems that there is a principle at work here… a truism that demonstrates that unfettered sex guarantees unfettered death.

God’s Call For Virgin Skin … Baptism and Tattoos (#4)

Titus 3:5 He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

I Corinthians 12:13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body–whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free–and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

In teaching the covenant children on Baptism I often times will us the illustration that Baptism is like God’s branding us with His mark of ownership. I will tell them just as a Rancher might brand his cattle, so God brands us with the mark of Baptism that is indelible to His eyes. When He looks at us He sees that we are marked with His mark and so treats us as His own.

In Baptism we are marked with God’s mark. It is the mark wherein we find our identity. It is the only mark that we need have placed upon us. Indeed, by marking ourselves with other permanent marks it could be easily argued that we are putting marks on ourselves that are in identity competition with God’s mark of Baptism.

In this vein it is interesting that historically tattoos have been used as an identifying mark that one belongs to this or that god. The gods were thought to have required that their people be marked with their mark. Of course, today no one in the modern West would, upon receiving a tattoo, think that they were doing so as a mark of belonging to some ancient tribal deity but perhaps worse yet what being tatted today demonstrates and signals is the god-like power one seizes over one’s own body.  If one views themselves as autonomous beings then they will mark themselves with their own marks. This is understandable but the Christian who has been marked with God’s mark of Baptism should not want to be marked with any other mark.

Not only should they not want to be marked with any other mark they are forbidden to be marked out with any other mark. The Priest class in the Old Testament was not allowed to be tattooed, like the pagans around them,

Leviticus 21:5 They (the Priests) shall not make bald patches on their heads, nor shave off the edges of their beards, nor make any cuts on their body.

This is relevant to those who profess Christ today who resolve to be tattooed because in the New Testament it is the Church and Christians who are identified as God’s Priest class.

I Peter 2:9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

All God’s people today are prophets, priests, and kings under sovereign God, and so all God’s people today, as God’s Priests, are proscribed by God from making any cuts on their body. And why should they want any other marks on their bodies since they’ve been marked by their God in Baptism?

Why this desire, by professing Christians, for a further marking besides God’s mark of Baptism? One wonders if the increase of tattooing isn’t due to God’s people not understanding their identity in Christ. In so many ways Westerners have been separated and stripped from, and of, their Christian history — and so their identity — that perhaps, at some level, the reason body modification is being pursued by Christians so intently is because they are trying to find a meaning that has eluded them. The modern Western man has been deracinated to the point that he no longer is even sure about gender, and is now treated as a interchangeable cog in a vast impersonal machine culture. Given that, it is not a wonder that the modern Western man, be he Christian or non Christian, is exploring all avenues, including tattooing, to imbue his life with some possible meaning.

Of course modern Western man does not speak to himself in such terms. He probably couldn’t and wouldn’t articulate his thinking (if he even thinks about it at all) in such a way. For modern man tattooing one’s self is just what people do. Modern man would insist that tattooing doesn’t mean anything except, “it’s cool and it’s pretty and my peers are doing it and I want to fit in.”

However, if Christians who are also Moderns, had explained to them what God’s mark of Baptism means then just possibly they would see that pursuing any other mark, besides the mark of Baptism, would be a pursuing of a counter claim by a different god.

God’s Call for Virgin Skin … A Few Sociological Observations

Now, that I’ve set the table regarding tattoos, demonstrating from Scripture that tattoos are not biblical in and of themselves (#1 in the series), nor does tatting up reflect the teleological end to which Christians are called (#2 in series), I’d like to take some time looking at a few sociological implications of tattoos, particularly on beautiful women. Some of this analysis owes its insights into what today is called the “manosphere.” This is a sociological movement, that is seldom Christian, but does sometimes offer some interesting insights into what current male – female relationships have devolved into given this current culture of feminism. I’ve read a couple of their books and I keep my finger on the pulse of some of their better known blogs.

It needs to be remembered that these are general observations which means that they are posited as generally true. There is no doubt that exceptions will exist to these general observations. As such this is a case of, “if the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.”

1.) Tattoos on a single woman tilts the “I-am-easy-meter” needle towards full on easy.   Women with Tatts signal to men on the lower end of the social scale … “Come see about me.”

A comment left on one of the “manosphere sites,” read,

Someone already mentioned that tattoos are a tell-tale indicator of impulsive behavior, and short-sightedness. Most likely will be an easy score on the first date.

2.) Beautiful women subconsciously, as impressed upon them by the culture, are guilt ridden over their beauty. One means of reducing that guilt is to reduce their beauty by tramp stamping themselves with tatts.

Heartsite Chateau adds on this score,

“Tattoos in the current year could be seen as a sort of “maimgeld” (i.e. – self-uglifying): the tribute that white women pay in self-disfigurement to a growing Diversitopia they live in that both covets the white women’s exquisite natural looks and hates it to the verge of eliminationist rage.”

3.) Beautiful women with tatts is one means by which they contribute to the Babel melange where equality is the measurement of virtue. If they can’t change their beauty to an acceptable base line ugliness that doesn’t clearly place them in the above average class, they can at least lower themselves into the undifferentiated bricolage culture by tatting up and so be found acceptable according to egalitarian cultural standards.

Remember, this culture is all about sinking itself into a un-diversified egalitarian garbage scow where each human cog is equal to each other human cog. This requires, from beautiful women, a disintegration downward into ugliness. Tatts are one means to accomplish this goal.

4.) Beautiful women with tattoos no longer stand out as advantaged or privileged by that beauty. The greatest crime in this culture, for guilt ridden beauties, is to be consumers of what we might call “attraction privilege.” By tatting up, beautiful women negate the loathed “attraction privilege” they would otherwise carry.

5.) In this fame culture where it seems that everyone wants to be noticed, tattoos are one way women can seek being noticed. Other reasons for getting a tattoo besides wanting notice, are minimal (i.e.– burn victims). Tattoos, like billboards, scream, “look at me.” Sociologically speaking, then, tattoos fit in well with our current narcissistic culture. Some might counter that some people get tattoos where they can’t be seen publicly but the response to that may be, “Why bother?”

The last thing narcissists need is to have their narcissism fed.

It is clear, upon reviewing this, that many of these points are pointing towards how female tattoos are serving a Cultural Marxist egalitarian order where ugliness is exalted at the cost of uglying down beautiful women. A couple of the other points above underscore the “tramp stamp” quotient. Women with tatts are simply seen as lacking sexual virtue by the manosphere. It doesn’t matter what tatted women think about their tatts. What matters is that this is what men think of tatted women. Tatts on females are a dog whistle for sexual advance from men.