Secular humanist propaganda, for decades aided and abetted by the mainstream media and public education, is successfully turning the Christian church against itself. Jesus described a time when "many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved." (Matthew 24:10-13) That time seems to be arriving with surprising swiftness.
Consider this excerpt from a two-year-old N.Y. Times article highlighted today by the conservative MRC/NewsBusters.org blog:
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count. This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.The writer of that article, Chris Hedges, is set to publish a book in January '07 titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America — add one more book to the mushrooming genre of "theophobic" lit (as dubbed by Dan at WithChrist.org) appearing on bookstore shelves these days. For commentary on and a comprehensive list of those books, check out the October 17th entry of the WithChrist blog.
The ecumenical Christian leaders and nominal Christians seduced by this kind of rhetoric identify more with the tenets of Rousseau than plain Scripture. They equate born-again Christians to the radical Muslims "hijacking" their religion. To mollify their secular counterparts, the Christian humanists will do whatever is necessary to survive.
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New York Times columnist Chris Hedges is the master of the verbal ruse. His comments are shown in
italics.
“All debates with the Christian Right are useless.”
“Useless,” means incapable of persuading them based on secular and humanistic argument.
“We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue.”
The Religious Right has engaged in all kinds of “dialogue” with liberals. The Religious Right cannot accept the Left’s secular and atheistic presuppositions, conclusions, or self-exalting monologues. For this reason, the Left falsely accuses their opponent of not wanting to “dialogue.”
“It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion.”
By “rational” Hedges means exclusive naturalistic and secular thought.
“It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School.”
Why is the Religious Right obligated to be “mollified” by the superficial, and often hypocritical, religiosity of liberals??
“These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly.”
Superficial and hypocritical religiosity are a disingenuous efforts to “reach out” to anyone. They are insulting! The Religious Right is not bent of the “destruction” of liberals or the Left. We simply seek to marginalize and deny you access to power—by legal means. As a group, we are energized by the fact that our opponent wish to seize power by whatever means, legal or illegal.
The Religious Right has never doubted that liberals have “values” too. Where the difference lies is in veracity of liberal values. The Religious Right does no accept moral relativism like the liberal Left, and thus does not see judge liberal values of equal value to their own.
“They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution.”
The Relgious Right rejects liberal views and interpretations due to their naturalistic and secular presuppositions. This does not constitute “hate.” The liberal’s use of the term “enlightened” is simply self-flattery. The Religious Right believes, based on substantial evidences, that the liberal misinterprets the U.S. Constitution due to their intensely bigoted, anti-religious and theophobic bias. Despite the liberal Left’s claims to intellectualism, we see them as grossly illiterate of early American history. A reading of the book, Never Before in History, America's Inspired Birth will easily prove the point.
“Our opinions do not count.”
This is not true. Your opinions are at best, simply opinions, equal to ours. However, what absolutely sends you into orbit is that fact that the Religious Right allows for a source of knowledge higher than human opinion. Atheistic liberals go berserk and rabid when their opinions are trumped by Judeo-Christian revelation (reference to the Bible) and their power to influence and control discussions is marginalized.
“This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.”
Mr. Hedges proves beyond a question, that he has mastered the art of creative hyperbole. He truly writes as a man seized with fear, even fear of his own future moment of eternal accountability.
All great points, Dan.
Chris Hedges is not unlike many contemporary anti-Christian polemicists. He comes from a humanist religious background: he attended the Harvard Divinity School and his father was a Presbyterian minister. A facility for "Christianese" concepts and vocabulary acts as an effective cover; hence his defense of John Kerry and Jimmy Carter.
Hedges suggests in his 2003 Bill Moyers interview that war and fundamentalism are inextricably tied: "There is an appeal to fanaticism or fundamentalism in times of war." Of course, secular fanaticism or fundamentalism is not the issue. After all, humanists are "enlightened,"at least according to their peculiar tunnel vision which ignores the likes of a Robespierre or Stalin.
The take-no-prisoners approach of Hedges' column echoes the odious rhetoric of the earliest Nazi propaganda. For example, he writes, "All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion." For the sake of our conjecture, substitute "Christian Right" for "Jew" in this 1929 newspaper piece by the arch-propagandist Joseph Goebbels:
"One cannot defend himself against the Jew. He attacks with lightning speed from his position of safety and uses his abilities to crush any attempt at defense.
Quickly he turns the attacker's charges back on him, and the attacker becomes the liar, the troublemaker, the terrorist. Nothing could be more mistaken than to defend oneself. That is just what the Jew wants. He can invent a new lie every day for the enemy to respond to, and the result is that the enemy spends so much time defending himself that he has no time to do what the Jew really fears: to attack. The accused has become the accuser, and loudly he shoves the accuser into the dock. So it always was in the past when a person or a movement fought the Jew."
Granted, one-to-one comparisons between current and historical time periods are a bit of a stretch without the benefit of hindsight. Of course, in 1929, the Nazis had not yet risen to power so no one could've suspected what would happen a decade later.
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