Was it a year not to step on the toes?

Posted on 2022/11/18 by Marcus Ampe

Not a silent but (perhaps) less irritating year

Three years of Corona pandemic came along and except for China not many countries seem still to worry.

In Europe, something very different from a Coronavirus has caught our attention. The danger is that this virus could spread and kill many more people than Corona did.
It is about the Putin virus or Russian disease as Trump might start calling it.

Just as a lot of fake news came our way during the Trump era, a lot of work had to be done in recent years to ‘debunk’ those misleading or deceptive reports.
You might think that here on this site with the name “Stepping toes” would be the ideal place to strip such disseminated falsehoods or lie talk of credibility. People like to sell talking points, and in recent years it seemed to have become a sport to send as many falsehoods into the world as possible. But to counter the many false messages posted on social media, this site was actually not originally planned.

Last year may have reached the pinnacle of fake message spreading. It could not go on any longer. Something had to be done to restore honour to journalism and bring correct messages to the world.

Young people were increasingly reaching for their smartphones with all kinds of apps to follow Facebook and Instagram posts, as if they could get the very best news there. But correct messaging was far from there. Social media won out over the daily and weekly newspapers that lost out, raising the question of whether there was still a possibility of life for serious journalism.
While newspapers were under pressure and many wondered how to survive this resort to social media, blogs also came under fire. Google and WordPress thought no better of changing their systems. At Blogger, it made a lot of bloggers tired of the difficulties in the system and took refuge elsewhere. Thus, I too decided to take refuge in the WordPress that was familiar to me with the old editor, hoping that WordPress would not force everyone to have to use the hideous block editor (introduced in 2018) (because it is really totally impractical for free writing and design).

Converting all the Google sites to the new system took a lot of time, so there have been somewhat fewer articles on my WordPress sites over the last two years, except for this year at my newcomer.

It is for that newcomer that I would like to draw your attention today.

The format of that new WordPress site is not really new, as the newcomer is actually a continuation of the former Blogspot sites “Christadelphian World” and “Our World“. The only difference now is actually a result of an easier form of writing and shaping for publishing or publishing articles. Because this is now much easier than Blogspot, I can now provide more articles at the same time.

As the title for the site, I chose “Some View on the World” or “Enige Kijk op de Wereld” because the site wants to give a view of what is happening in the world, while also giving more clarity on certain facts.
In the first year of its new form, it has been a bit of a search to find a way to leave enough time for my other Christian websites, while still being able to provide a balanced news overview that can be relied upon to be verified reporting and thus present accurate facts to the reader.

I believe I now know roughly how to tackle it for 2023 and hope that with my outline I can attract enough readers to further follow the links provided in the articles as well.

I do hope still to provide a day-to-day events review, and do hope people will find it useful.
I shall continue to try to offer ideas and context and depth, as well as information: a combination of clarity (the facts to help you understand the world) and imagination (the ideas you need to build a better one).

This better world that needs to be worked on is extremely important. We must realise that it is not ‘five to twelve’, but that the hands have long been moving in the wrong direction and that the earth is crying out loudly for support. For far too long, we have neglected the earth and been careless with its resources. Now we have to bear the consequences. Global warming is a fact, although many still do not want to acknowledge it. On “Some View on the World” we do want to pay attention to that earth which we have been given on loan by the Creator. Indeed, it is high time we took our responsibility and took steps to address that climate change.

We don’t particularly want to tread on toes on that “new site”, but we do want to regularly draw attention to those issues that really should get our attention.

In a way, I also hope to have caught your attention and made you warm to go and take a look at that news site (or online newspaper) and (who knows) subscribe there too to be kept informed of new articles.

Be welcome to “Some View on the World”.

Additional reading

Anti-Semitism: Dramatic rise in 2021, Israeli report says

Posted on 2022/05/05 by Christadelphians

BBC, April 22 + Audit of antisemitic incidents

Event

The number of anti-Semitic incidents around the world dramatically increased last year, a study by Tel Aviv University has found. The report identifies the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia as among countries where there was a sharp rise. This was fueled by radical left- and right-wing political movements and incitement on social media, it says. The report’s release coincides with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins on Wednesday night. Known in Israel as Yom HaShoah, the day commemorates the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany across Europe during World War Two. The Anti-Semitism Worldwide Report 2021, by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Humanities, is based on the analysis of dozens of studies from around the world, as well as information from law enforcement bodies, media and and Jewish organisations.

Comment

In these very last days we can expect anti-Semitism to increase. The Jews are often blamed for world crises. They are blamed for financial collapse, for conflict, for making the Covid19 virus etc etc. Social networks spread conspiracy theories about the Jews and this spreading of lies incites hatred. In the kingdom though it will be the exact opposite. We are told in Zechariah that 10 men will take hold of the skirt of one Jew and say

“We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.”

Mankind will finally realise in the kingdom that the words of Jesus himself were true – that

“salvation is of the Jews.”

Through baptism we become adopted Jews as we are ”covered” in Christ who was a Jew and also God’s son. We are then related to the promises to Abraham….

23 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you. (Zechariah 8:23)

Andy Walton

Weekly World Watch

Preceding

Objective views and not closing eyes for certain sayings

Additional reading

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Trump Dragging the Jews and Israel into the scrum, using both as one more weapon in his racist rants.

Posted on 2019/08/21 by Immanuel Verbondskind

President Trump, long a trafficker in anti-Semitic stereotypes, treated American Jews to a classic anti-Semitic canard Tuesday afternoon. When asked about two Congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who had been barred from Israel at Trump’s own behest, he broke out an oldie but a goodie from the closet of anti-Semitic tropes.

“Any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” President Trump told reporters.

Per Trump, Jews are and should be loyal to Israel rather the United States; to show their loyalty, they should vote for a Republican.

Do You Want to Believe?

Posted on 2018/08/04 by Marcus Ampe

The “WEIRD-people” from the Weird world may have very weird ideas loving to belong to the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic world but seem often to be blinded by their politicians, like the present presidents of the U.S.A., Turkey and Russia, who are of the same breed and love the tyranny of a dictatorship where they must play the lead, over a a group of people who are caught up in human doctrines of one of their religions, be it a very conservative form in Christendom, or in Islam, or in Russian Orthodoxy mixed with Stalinism.

We may be asked to calm down, but what happened to our family members, our teachers and friends in the 1930ies and 1940ies is clearly printed in our heads and here in Europe we see history repeating itself.

In Christendom there is also once again a growing hate to those of Christianity. The ones believing in a Trinity got their agricultural fork out again, trying to get down who believe in the Only One True God of Israel, (Jews, Jeshuaists, Non-Trinitarian Christians and Muslims). Those who say they are Christian often do not take on the attitude of Christ, who should be their rebbe and show how they prefer to live without a God Who has given mankind His commandments. They want others to believe we do not have to keep those commandments any more, and do live accordingly a life full of indecent and immoral actions and foul language.

Our best hope should not be on that sort of community but should direct with open eyes for a better world where people of all sorts of culture, colour or race can live together in a global community of loving and sharing people.

*

To remember

We all have friends who believe things that seem crazy, but we don’t think our friends are crazy.

People adopt beliefs based on several factors. If those factors are different, then the people tend to adopt different beliefs.

Differences in factors as: region, economic class, ethnicity, social circles, information sources, + life experiences lead people to different beliefs.

differences show up mainly in emotion + intuition, which influence our political + moral judgments.

perhaps half of Americans accept utilitarian + universalist ideas, but also value loyalty, respect for authority, respect for the sacred, individual liberty, + support for the common good.

disagreements exist + also a few genuine crazies + haters: in a population of over 300 million, that’s inevitable.

Don’t let a tiny minority of crazies and haters blind you to the fact that most people want to be good and to do the right thing – even if their idea of “the right thing” sometimes clashes with ours.

Screaming at people, calling them names, and dismissing their concerns as unworthy of consideration => on-going conflict + social disintegration.

The Thousand-Year View

graphic-01-newrepublic My latest blog post for The Jewish Journal:

After a bitterly divisive election season, there’s one question on everyone’s mind:

“How can people possibly believe that?”

What “that” is depends on who’s doing the talking. It means one thing to Trump supporters, something else to Clinton supporters, and who knows what to third-party supporters.

We all have friends who believe things that seem crazy, but we don’t think our friends are crazy. So we’re completely baffled. Are the people who disagree with us ignorant? Stupid? Hyper-emotional? Or – this seems to be the favorite – are they just plain evil?

It’s usually none of those things. The true answer is simpler and more innocent.

People adopt beliefs based on several factors. If those factors are different, then the people tend to adopt different beliefs.

In 2016 America, those factors differ a lot – by region, economic class, ethnicity, social…

View original post 589 more words

When there is secrecy involved

Posted on 2018/08/02 by Guestspeaker

In this world there are lots of denominations in Christendom. Lots of Christians say that the non-trinitarian christians belong to cults or sects, but clearly than they forget what the characteristics of a sect or cult are.

The many non-Trinitarians who found one or another denomination in which they go to meetings are all free people with no obligations to that meeting, congregation or church except to live according to the commandments of God. In nearly all other Christian denominations of trinitarians we can find churches which dare to say they are the only church by which people can be saved or “go to heaven”. Nearly all of them are weekly asking money to their parishioners or even ask a tithing. Whilst in most of the non-trinitarian churches the parishioners are free to give or not to give any amount of money and are not pushed to do so. Never are they threatened by a so called burning in hell for ever, because such false teaching even does not exist by them.

Anna in Shadowland is a web-blog from a certain Andrea which represents the view of a disillusioned girl who left her own church to have an experience in a Charismatic church influenced by the New Apostolic Reformation. She writes

Every so often I receive testimonies from people who have read my “Leaving the NAR Church” series. There are more than 50 of them, and I am adding another. These stories are precious to me, and serve as a painful reminder that there is hope for the dear deceived ones caught up in this insidious movement. If you don’t know what NAR is, I hope you’ll take a moment and read What is the New Apostolic Reformation Movement. {Leaving IHOP and the NAR: Sammy’s story}

She has a testimony about how the good and faithful God she loves and wanted to serve opened her eyes and removed her from the clutches of the deception, lack of discernment, and false teachings of a movement that has invaded the worldwide church on a massive scale. {An open letter to the church I left}

In Christendom and Christianity we may see many churches who claim to be adhering to ‘authentic New Testament practices’ but when we look closer at them we find all sorts of practices which are not according to the lifestyle of the first Christians (which we can come to know from the Acts of the Apostles and from civil writings of the first century CE).

Today there are several churches who love to attract people with their “Speaking in tongues” and all sorts of trance movements, even not minding to have people in hysterics, shaking on the floor to the very contemporary music of Hillsong and Bethel (not to be confused with the Bethels of the non-trinitarians), surrounded by all their technological advances, big screens, and coffee bars, and all the other comforts of modern convenience that they manage to accumulate around them.

Although it sure is a whole lot of fun and I have to admit, you had me fooled there for a while. {An open letter to the church I left}

does the blogger says after her eyes were opened. Continuing

I was really starting to climb up that ladder to sit there with you because I’m sure the view is amazing. But thankfully I could never quite manage to get there, and these days I actually find it rather insulting that anyone can claim to be living ‘authentic Christianity’ just because they belong to a certain kind of church. {An open letter to the church I left}

The blogger Andrea thinks

seeking after a truly authentic apostolic life and experience would be completely unattainable, because I currently live in 2017. {An open letter to the church I left}

but than she forgets we do have enough civic papers, next to the biblical account, to give us a fair image how life was by the first century followers of the Nazarene Jewish master teacher Jeshua (Jesus Christ).

Naturally she should also know that life 2000 years later is so different that we should take that into account too.

Today we see a growing amount of people loving the ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ (NAR), a movement which seeks to establish a fifth house within Christendom, distinct from Catholicism, Protestantism, Oriental Orthodoxy, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Some of that church, at the moment, say they are ‘Charismatic’ others say they are a ‘New Testament’ or ‘Apostolic Household’ church and do not belong to the Charismatic movement.

For sure all the modern Holly-Bolly-Woody-Booly modern entertainment forms a very attractive asset to lure people in the community. At several places in the United States certain movements took place which were noticed by C. Peter Wagner to fall under the same denominator. Unlike several sects or cults groups it is not some secret society or shadowy organization. They started to find like-minded people who had no intention to overthrow world governments or undermining the Church. For many of them the “New Apostolic Reformation” started off as a name giving for a movement that was going through the established church. Nothing more but a term used to classify a subset of people throughout denominational and non-denominational Christendom who seem to share some common characteristics.

In Christendom we may find lots of churches which not only worship a Trinity, but also believe that the Holy Spirit is with them and moving around in their church even in such a way that this spirit would choose special pastors, giving them a special role in the Church of God and/or in the Kingdom of God. They may come up with many different stories even telling that people got ‘gold dust’ on their hands.

One of them was the wife of one of your pastors/elders, and she very excitedly and animatedly told us how the ‘spirit had been moving’ in a certain meeting, because the people had seen ‘gold dust’ on their hands. {An open letter to the church I left}

Andrea remarks

it is easy to dismiss the ‘manifestations of the spirit’ thing when someone is interpreting a verse of scripture about ‘being filled with the spirit’ or ‘being drunk in the spirit’, while you are sitting under the cloud of false teaching. But when you realize that these kinds of ‘manifestations’ are actually completely absent in scripture, and had been completely absent in the church until only a couple of years ago, that is when you sit up and take notice. And then when you realize that during all that time it had actually been present in the occult and Eastern mystic religions, that is when you start opening up a whole can of worms. That is when you get up and walk out of a meeting before the end, leaving behind some dear friends who are violently convulsing on the floor, and shaking in fits of ‘holy laughter’. That is when you walk out of a large WOF centre from a Jesus Culture ‘revival’ concert, feeling like you had just walked out of the depths of hell, and all the while absolutely hating yourself for having such feelings and for questioning ‘the work that God is doing through the moving of His spirit’.
And you’re asking yourself ‘Is this really the God that I know?’, but still you are convinced that the problem lies with you because you are ‘not open to the spirit’, because that is what you’re being told over, and over, and over again. And then you get pushed, and pushed, and pushed to get baptized so that you can also ‘receive the spirit’, and you’re left scratching your head because you had thought that because you were already a believer, you had already received the Holy Spirit, but the word ‘obedience’ gets thrown at you over, and over, and over again. And this is when you start to see the indoctrination above the doctrine. {An open letter to the church I left}

People should come to see that at such point they do come in the danger zone. There it is, where we would differentiate between a through church and a cult or sect. Whilst non-trinitarians do keep to the biblical teachings and are not pushing people to come into their church, afterwards demanding all sorts of obligations, and not letting people easily go, this is typical for the cult groups we notice in the trinitarian churches. Also when people then want to leave such a church or group we notice the leaders of such community want to give a ‘guilt feeling’ to the person who wants to leave.

Andrea gives a nice example how such cults or groups work

Instead you preyed on my hurt and my weakness, and used it to set your trap, so that you could be the ones who avoided the issue. This leads me to believe that, despite the deceptive façade, you actually have no idea who you are or what you believe, and you are carried about by every wind of doctrine. If this was not so, you would have had no problem answering all the questions I had first, despite any other issues that might have been present. {An open letter to the church I left}

Backsliding term used within Christianity to describe a process by which an individual who has converted to Christianity reverts to pre-conversion habits and/or lapses or falls into sin, when a person turns from God to pursue their own desire. – The story of the Prodigal Son has become a representation of a backslider that repented. Engraving of the Prodigal Son as a swineherd by Hans Sebald Beham, 1538.

In most such dominating churches we can see that they try to put the guilt feeling by accusing that person who has objections of being a backslider. Saying that the faith is watering down because the person is going the wrong way, spiritually. They want to have the doubting person to believe all lies within him or her. Saying that he or she is regressing rather than progressing and that there is no proof any more of a commitment to Christ or that a certain standard of behaviour is not there any more.

DivideTheWord.blog, a cloud-based ministry who claim to have as purpose to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world in such a way as to be available to all of God’s children, saying it is free from denominational judgmentalism, free from race, colour or creed stipulations, brings a testimony

Having been a member of an independent Oneness Pentecostal (Apostolic) church for fifteen years, gaining a 4-year degree from a Oneness Pentecostal Bible College, and being involved in many ministries within that church, to them, I am now completely backslid. I know the doctrines. I learned the dogma. I defended it ardently.

I justified foul behavior for the purity of the doctrine and I even considered, as they do, all other Christians, lost. According to Apostolic Oneness Pentecostals (the majority, there are personal exceptions) all other Christians, be they Baptist, Lutheran, you name the group, they will not be going to heaven, because they do not follow the Pentecostal doctrines.

And when I finally had enough of the stink of judgmentalism, elitism, self-righteous pomp, the hypocrisy of their holiness standards, I backslid. I left the church. I’ll never return, nor attend another Oneness Pentecostal church again.

But something miraculous happened to me, and to hundreds, and thousands of others I’m connected to via this blog, my YouTube channel and many recovery based online groups;

I backslid, right into Jesus {I Backslid Into Jesus}

Also Andrea writes

I can assure you that I am anything but a ‘lukewarm’ Christian. {An open letter to the church I left}

The woman who likes to think of the NAR as a ‘mega cult’ or an ‘out-of-control cult’ seems to have not such nice experiences, though at first it looked even so attractive she left her ‘old’ traditional church.

For her

Praise and Worship during a Catholic Charismatic Renewal Healing Service.

It is probably important, at this point, to also note its interconnectedness with the Signs and Wonders, and Word of Faith movements. And that it is also known or characterized by a bunch of other terms, like ‘Dominionism’, ‘The Third Wave’, ‘Kingdom Now Theology’, ‘Joel’s Army’, ‘Manifest Sons of God Doctrine’, ‘Charismania’, ‘The Seven Mountain Mandate’, and ‘The Fivefold Ministry’, to name only a few. And that its precursor was ‘the New Order of the Latter Rain’, a discredited movement out of which a lot of current day NAR teachings is derived. It seems to be an ever changing, constantly evolving and expanding movement, which is what makes it so hard to pinpoint and, I believe, is part of its deceptiveness. {Eighteen Months in a Cult: Prologue}

In Pentecostalism there may be found so many subgroups that often people can not see the woods any more because of the trees. Some of those groups evolve around one ‘spiritual leader’ who can have many people under his spell. Some groups have an end to their existence when the pastor dies, others have a longer life.

In the book ‘A New Apostolic Reformation? A Biblical Response to a Worldwide Movement’, Geivett & Pivec writes:

“Whereas the Latter Rain revival lasted only a few years, NAR has been around for more than thirty years – since the 1980s, when the office of prophet began to be restored. NAR teachings have gained enough momentum for an entire generation of young people to be raised in churches that promote them. For these people, NAR teachings are at the heart of Christianity.”

Andrea was raised Reformed, and writes

– that is, the other reformation. Whereas the NAR is a falling away from the authority of Scripture towards ‘experiences’, ‘encounters’, and ‘new revelations’, the Protestant Reformation was a return to the light of Scripture. To the eternal things that God has already promised and revealed in His Word, and to recognizing it as the only truth and authority to live by. Hence one of the battle cries was Sola Scriptura – Scripture Alone. And even though I do not remember the emphasis ever really being placed on the fact that we were Reformed, or being taught exactly what that even meant, this was very much the culture and mind set I had grown up with. {Eighteen Months in a Cult: Prologue}

For the Mega-churches and Pentecostal Churches youngsters are an easy prey because they are not so much interested in pure words of the Scriptures, but like more “ambience” with song and dance and special actions, like seeing people going in trance or watching unbelievable things like people nearly going mad.

Andrea also admits

when you are a young person, still searching for passion and a sense of purpose, it is very hard to disagree with those who say that the traditional church is ‘dead’. And hymns, structure and doctrine simply does not seem all that relevant and exciting anymore.
So for me, when the opportunity presented itself to become part of a young, vibrant, hip & happening church, suffice it to say that I did not hesitate for very long. Even though the circumstances of how I came to be introduced to this church was accompanied by a sense of hurt and rejection, I nevertheless grabbed the opportunity to join what seemed like a genuinely committed, and caring, community of believers. I was hoping, and expecting, to have my faith nurtured and strengthened in the process. {Eighteen Months in a Cult: Prologue}

Question is how much such attractive groups can nurture a person in the good sense. We should know it is really god’s Word that must give guidance to people. It is the Bible which can give us the most correct education and foundation for a good faith.

When not much attention is given to the text from the Bible, people shall miss out edifying material, for reproof and profitable for correction for building up a life according to the Will of God.

When to much attention is giving to the pleasures of life or to the human or natural flesh the real faith can not grow. Mike sojournerphoto remembers

I (was) removed from these organisations many years ago – initially with judgement in my heart – but have since watched the ‘Toronto ‘blessing’ and such stuff thrive. I became increasingly appalled at what was happening and now am amazed that it continues, ever more subtle. I remember a dark day sitting in ‘my church’ sometime around 1986 or 7 and the band deciding to play on after the service to ‘continue to seek God’ and as looked down it was a though there was a dark pit (not visual, so much as metaphorical) and I felt compelled to leave the building. I later came to recognise so much of this as seeking after ‘the flesh’ and to equate it with James observation on the ‘earthly, natural, demonic’.

Therefore let us remember that a true Christian church should be open, have no secrecy for its members nor for the outside world, and should give most attention to the Word of God, it is to readings from the Bible.

Preceding

Lovers of God, seekers and lovers of truth

Some one or something to fear #3 Cases, folks and outing

All Souls’ Day

Additional reading

+++

Christian fundamentalists feeding Into the Toxic Partisanship and driving countries into the Dark Ages… #2

Posted on 2018/02/08 by Guestspeaker

In the United States we not only see that religious groups become endangered. Also the female person seems to be placed in a secondary role. We see the growing tendency by several American citizens to consider the female being as second-class citizen whose place belongs in the kitchen and by her kids. the woman according several man should be subject to a strict social hierarchy. This hierarchy can be observed in every stripe of fundamentalism, from Islamic fundamentalism to Christian fundamentalism and it goes like this:

God/Jesus is the head of the man

Man is the head of the woman, subject only to God

Woman is subjugated to a status which is wholly reliant on having “faith” that her husband will do the right thing because he is specially influenced by God by special decree of the Bible.

Fundamentalist website after website counsels women that if her husband does wrong that the only thing she can do is pray that God will guide him to a different decision, that she is not to disagree with him publicly (or in front of children). She is free (sometimes) to give an opinion, but the ultimate decision is the man’s, because he has special dispensation by God to be in that position. The equal status of women is a threat to this hierarchy, and thus, a threat to God.

According to several writers on the net there is “Anti-intellectualism” at the base of the extremist behaviour of so many evangelicals and for others it is a matter to have everything in control. In order of occupancy of the Oval Office, there is an inverse relationship between the number of Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist presidents of the United States and the percentage of each of those denominations in the broader population. As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, there are no evangelicals among the current justices of the Supreme Court!

In fact, there aren’t even any Protestants these days!

Dakota O’Leary believes this is why America is seeing so many attacks on women, from trying to pass laws that undermine Roe v. Wade (personhood laws, restrictions on abortions, waiting periods, attempts to push laws to punish abortion doctors, restrictions on being able to get birth control, etc), to going to the trouble of redefining rape as being the woman’s fault, even part of God’s plan, while pushing to give rapists parental rights, to the unfortunate proclamations of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, et. The present president of America even boasted that girls love it to receive the male’s attention and being the prey man has to conquer. Nobody called yet to bring him before court for molesting women, though several women came forward with their story and some even with proof what this man had done to them in the past. To no avail…. He seems to be untouchable.

Many (conservative and evangelical) Americans are convinced that women dress in such a way they demand to be played at and to be raped and that babies born of rape are either a penalty for their attitude or are a blessing from God, (that the female body shuts down its reproductive system when a woman is being raped, etc.).

Controlling women’s bodies while at the same time denouncing “big government” is the popular meme of the fundamentalist mind. Women are simply not meant to destroy that Godly hierarchy set up by the Bible, and in their minds if you can control women, you’ve got half the populace conquered for God.

Fundamentalist anti-intellectualism often manifests itself in a sort of “pseudo-intellectualism” by which those with little or no educational background read a few articles or watch a few videos about a particular subject (usually published by their own religious compatriots, particularly about what a scientific theory is and evolution), and consider themselves “educated” because what they read agreed with their worldview, or, if being highly educated, usually get that education in a fundamentalist educational setting. They even go so far to say that scientists forge or falsify research to mislead pepole and to bring them away from God’s Word. They will then take that “evidence” and proceed to use it against empirical evidence that directly contests and even eviscerates the arguments they have carefully set up around what they have read or seen, and the argument invariably ends with ad hominem attacks against reason, facts, and education — because they have no actual evidence outside of the Bible to use to “win” the argument. A favourite tactic is to call the opposition an “atheist” (or a “liberal”) if someone disagrees with their worldview.

Richard John Santorum

By the extremist evangelicals we also may see that education is then “demonized” as being a covert movement to “indoctrinate” the masses in the secular worldview, and thus, part of the forces of Satan. The American attorney, author, and politician Santorum demonstrates this principle admirably. Although he himself is highly educated, with a bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and JD from Penn State, his Biblical worldview clearly trumps his empirical education and allows him to disregard it as a fly in the ointment in the “light of Biblical truth,” which is, of course, only empirical in that it is in print, in black and white, not empirical that it can actually be proven.

Faith is evidence enough, and reason becomes a threat to faith, thus, reason is from Satan, not God.

A good case in point is the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo by the Catholic Church, regarding the revolution of the Earth around the sun. This old argument, which has been proven in favor of Copernicus and Galileo, has arisen once again to haunt us.

According to a recent National Science Foundation survey, over twenty percent of the respondents believed in the geocentric model popular during the 1500s, that the sun revolves around the earth instead of the other way around. This is old, disproven thinking that comes from the idea that since humanity is God’s creation, naturally, everything revolves around humanity, with humanity at the centre of creation.

Humanity is thus, special. Anything that challenges the idea that humanity is special is thus a threat against God. After all, you can’t feel the earth move, so it must be stationary. You can’t see the stars move (well, you can with a telescope, something called parallax), but you can’t see it with the naked eye, so thus, the earth must be stationary with the sun moving around it.

This is an example of pseudo-intellectualism. You know what you see, but you don’t investigate to see if your assertions are valid under close scrutiny. Fundamentalists cannot afford to indulge in close scrutiny of their ideas, because close scrutiny would most certainly disprove most of what they believe, and they fear, more than anything else, of the erosion of their own faith.

Science In Action — In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Furthermore, the percentage of Americans that believe in biological evolution has only increased by four percentage points over the last twenty years.

Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason” and “Freethinkers” sums up the problem of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism succinctly:

This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.

Copernicus and Galileo were persecuted by the Catholic Church for suggesting that humanity on earth was indeed not the centre of the universe. Copernicus did not suffer much persecution while he was alive, but after he was dead, his hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun certainly did. Galileo dared to revive Copernicus’ idea, and packaged it in a mock debate between characters in a book he wrote called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) in 1632. The Catholic Church’s militaristic arm, the Inquisition, caught wind of what he had written, and banned his book, and placed Galileo under house arrest.

Now, the Catholic Church’s disagreement with Galileo and Copernicus did not make their ideas less true, which the idea certainly was, and revealed to be true through empirical scientific investigation over a period of years. Instead, the Church deflected the facts as “heresy,” which is something fundamentalists are particularly adept at doing. Ken Ham’s Creation Museum is a testament to this deflection of scientific facts as heresy.

By dismissing evolution as nothing more than a “theory,” (which goes to show pure, deliberate ignorance of what exactly a scientific theory is), we see again the application of the ad hominem attack Christian fundamentalists so love to employ when inconvenient facts get in the way.

The fundamentalists of today are a hardy lot, and they will use anything to win this battle for God — the Bible, which is the ultimate authority, the Constitution, revisionist science textbooks, and revisionist American history (a la David Barton) that “proves” America was a nation founded to be their brand of a “Christian nation.”

Their view of a Christian nation is a very restricted view where there is only place for their Christian conservative doctrinal teachings and where there can only some place for other trinitarian christians as long as they do not go against their views.

Never mind they are not Constitutional scholars. The Constitutional scholars are a threat to them because even though scholars have differing opinions about interpretation of the Constitution, any opinion that differs from the fundamentalist worldview is a direct attack on God. Never mind that the fundamentalist that lives in the general population is not a scientist.

They know better, because the Australian Christian fundamentalist and young Earth creationist living in the United States, Ken Ham and the Bible tell them that there is No Way God would use evolution to create (even though the Bible says nothing on the subject of evolution)

The Bible is black and white. God created the world as it is now in six days, and rested on the seventh.

You will rarely see a fundamentalist in a secular college or university because secular universities and colleges do not agree with their worldview (logically). This is why for the most part they are homeschooled, and go straight from homeschool to fundamentalist universities that teach their worldview.By presenting homeschooling by the parents themselves, who did not receive any educational formation to be a teacher, the kids are squeezed the truth and deprived of sound formation. Opportunities to go to a proper high school or to a good university is taken away. For such children is there only an opening to universities and colleges churned out fundamentalists who are schooled in law, but only an interpretation of law that fits their Biblical worldview. Lawyers or judges who disagree with them, particularly in Supreme Court cases are dismissed ad hominem as “activist lawyers” and “activist judges” (i.e. enemies of God).

This lack of empirical education is changing American society into one that has eroded science education, particularly with their attempts to force the school voucher issue, which is nothing but a bid to get taxpayers to fund fundamentalist education, yet they object to taxpayer funded public education because “secularism” is persecuting them for their beliefs by simply disagreeing with them (because again, nothing they believe is based on empirical evidence).

Jerry Falwell Jr. has ambitious plans to affect life, law and culture in America, and it’s all being germinated at Liberty University, the fundamentalist bastion his father founded. (Source: Americans United)

The lack of empirical education is eroding American society in favour of a “faith based” education that has nothing whatsoever to do with facts that threaten their worldview. Liberty is something they interpret as the freedom to live in a society based solely on their Biblical worldview and does not at all give any liberty to free expression or freedom of thought. Freedom of religion for others in an inclusive society is anathema to them, because such freedom threatens to sideline them to the fringes. Individual liberty does not exist except for them, because they have an inherent distrust of the individual to make reasonable decisions, unless those decisions are based on their interpretation of Scripture. Thus, mainstream Christians are not their brethren; mainstream Christians are simply misinformed individuals who have deluded themselves into believing they are of the family of Christ, and only the clear lens of fundamentalism can see that mainstream Christians have been deceived by the enemy of God which is secular society. In this lies a big problem. They think they have to spread their ‘true religion’ all over the world and consider themselves as the chosen people of God and therefore they also consider themselves as the connected with the Zionists aiming to have peace in the Middle East. Though they do forget that by their refusal to see and understand that Jesus was not his real name, but that is was Jeshua and that he spoke Aramaic and as such used the word “Allah” for “God” plus that in the present day still millions of pepole use that word “Allah” which disgusts those American fundamentalists. And by their action against that word they bring resentment in several believers their heart. Their action against the use of non-english words for “God” gives not only peevishness, but lets many wonder if they belong to the right Christian religion of worse should not become a worshipper of the Only One true God and have to become Jew or Muslim and leave the Christian Trinity doctrine aside. A pity not more by those extremist Christians offended Christians go looking for an alternative Christianity where there is praised the God of Jeshua (Jesus Christ (Allah, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah) and where they still can use their Catholic or protestant Bibles with that word “Allah” in it when it talks about The God.

The extremist fundamentalist Christians say their sole aim is to “obey” God in creating conditions favourable to the return of Christ – and this one thought, this one design drives American foreign policy with Israel (they believe that when the Jews all return to Israel and the 3rd temple is rebuilt that Christ will return, (but not without sacrificing 2/3 of the Jewish people in the process), then all the remaining Jews will become Christians.

American fundamentalists are only interested in Jewish people and Israel insofar as it furthers the return of Jesus Christ. That is all.

Dakota O’Leary is convinced that because fundamentalists are engaged in the idea that they are warriors in a fight for God, (something Christian fundamentalists hold in common with Islamic fundamentalists), and says

they have the sort of mindset that if it came to it (which it has not yet, I do not think), they would not afraid to die for their faith. Proof of this idea was given a disturbing form by a video game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” which advocates killing anyone who doesn’t agree with them (i.e. can’t be converted to their idea of Christ):

Katherine Stewart writes

Aimed at conservative Christians, the game’s story line begins in a time after the “rapture”, when fundamentalist dogma contends that Christians will go to heaven. The remaining population on earth must then choose between surrendering to or resisting “the Antichrist”, which the game describes as the “Global Community Peacekeepers” whose objective is the imposition of “one-world government”.

“Part of the object is to kill or convert the opposing forces,”

Simpson said.

This is “antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said, adding that he was dismayed by the concept in “Eternal Forces” of using prayer to restore a player’s “spirit points” after killing the enemy.

In the game, combatants on one side pause for prayer, intoning, “Praise the Lord”. A player can lose points for “unnecessary killing” but regain them through prayer.

But Simpson counters,

“The idea that you could pray, and the deleterious effects of one’s foul deeds would simply be wiped away, is a horrible thing to be teaching Christian young people here at Christmas time.”

Troy Lyndon, CEO of Left Behind Games Inc., which is promoting the new video, has defended the game as “inspirational entertainment” and said its critics were exaggerating. The game is based on the popular “Left Behind” novels, a Bible-based end-of-the-world-saga that has sold more than 63 million copies.

Dakota O’Leary reacts

Now, while this is a disturbing element, and the Left Behind books have genocidal scenes that seem to justify killing masses of unbelievers because they are incorrigible (not ever going to convert to the fundamentalist mindset), it should be reiterated that fundamentalists are not yet at the point in the US where they want to kill people, so let us not be alarmist. However, that being said, the way some fundamentalists are choosing to portray institutional racism and genocide (as punishment for sin and disbelief) to school age children is disturbing, and it is the belief of this scholar that the elements for radical action portrayed in the video game are there – but would need utter desperation in order to explode into being. It is the opinion of this writer that fundamentalists are not yet this desperate, but attempts to normalize killing for God are disturbing, to say the least. The Guardian had this to say about the subject in May of 2012:

The story of the Amalekites has been used to justify genocide throughout the ages. According to Pennsylvania State University Professor Philip Jenkins, a contributing editor for the American Conservative, the Puritans used this passage when they wanted to get rid of the Native American tribes. Catholics used it against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics.

“In Rwanda in 1994, Hutu preachers invoked King Saul’s memory to justify the total slaughter of their Tutsi neighbors,”

writes Jenkins in his 2011 book, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (HarperCollins).

In the fall of 2012, more than 100,000 American public school children, ranging in age from four to 12, were scheduled to receive instruction in the lessons of Saul and the Amalekites in the comfort of their own public school classrooms. The instruction, which features in the second week of a weekly “Bible study” course, came from the Good News Club, an after-school program sponsored by a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The aim of the CEF is to convert young children to a fundamentalist form of the Christian faith and recruit their peers to the club.

There are now over 3,200 clubs in public elementary schools, up more than sevenfold since the 2001 supreme court decision, Good News Club v Milford Central School, effectively required schools to include such clubs in their after-school programing.

The CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that “the Amalekites were completely defeated.” In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one:

You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left.

“That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?” the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.

Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:

The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment.

The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed.

Dakota O’Leary writes

Educating Christian fundamentalists simply doesn’t work. They do not accept any education that is in direct conflict with their worldview. What remains is to educate the rest of the American populace about Christian fundamentalism and dominionism, educating the American populace about the David Bartons of the world, so that when elections occur, an educated populace can reject the infiltration of fundamentalism on the rest of American society, which will, given the right opportunity (usually in a climate of fear like 9/11), erode American democracy entirely and push our nation into the fringes of the world into irrelevance.

Every American should know that Anti-intellectualism – as advocated by large and vocal elements within the Republican Party is dangerous to the future of their nation. but they also should know that those fundamentalist Christians threaten world peace, by their continuous actions against Muslims and against people who use the word “Allah”.

For the future of the States there is also the education danger, by having the students not to see how the world evolves and how everything is related with each other. Students who are protected from “globalist” views and real science will not grow up to be leaders. If the Americans themselves do not take care of providing a sound education to their children and to give them an understanding of other peoples and other languages they shall have to face a downfall of their nation.

**

Dakota O’Leary is a freethinker, and often sassy, scholar of theology and literature. She got her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Theology from the State University of New York College at Buffalo, and her Master of Arts degree in Theology and Literature from Antioch University-Midwest. Dakota is a co-host of the God Discussion radio show, offering insight to the news stories of the week.

Preceding

Act of Faith held on February 6, 1481

American Christianity no longer resembles its Founder

Christian fundamentalists feeding Into the Toxic Partisanship and driving countries into the Dark Ages… #1

Science, 2013 word of the year, and Scepticism

Additional reading

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Further related

Christian fundamentalists feeding Into the Toxic Partisanship and driving countries into the Dark Ages… #1

Posted on 2018/02/08 by Guestspeaker

At The Mendocino Humanist – Cheerfully Contrary there is an article which required our attention but can not reblogged, like the original article at Church and State from 2013 by Dakota O’Leary , which on its turn a review of the article by Katherine Stewart in the Guardian entitled “How Christian Fundamentalism Feeds Into the Toxic Partisanship of US Politics,”

Dakota O’Leary agrees that America has an infection. We would even say a serious problem, which did not become a lesser problem with the new president. Though that 45th president of the U.S.A. may have Jewish family, he has a racist tendency on some strange and dangerous facets, which seemed to be very much liked by neo-Nazis and extreme right Christian fundamentalists.

From certain reactions on our writings and on what we came to see in certain articles talking about Christian faith and Muslim faith we only can come to the conclusion that there are many extreme conservative and right-wing Christians blogging. A big problem with them is that they do not seem to want to listen or to accept certain things, like matters of language. For example not willing to come to understand that “Allah” is a word which is used in many languages to denote “God“. As such there are many Catholic and protestant Bibles with that word in their printed editions, but those Americans refusing to see that and to see that “Allah” is not a false god but the God of Abraham and the God of many Christians, Jews and Muslims.

That refusal to understand or to know that the English word “God” means “Allah” in many other languages gets such articles as “Muslims bow and worship allah / satan Everyday!!” or often repeated and reblogged (a.o.) Muslims bow and worship allah / satan Everyday!!, , Blasphemy!! Florida City Council Meeting Opens with a satanic prayer to satan and allah!!, Ungodly!! House of Representatives allows the sworn enemy of America to pray to allah-satan Baal on the House floor!!, with people not listening to others who dare to react to such stupid indications. They forget that such articles not only set bad blood by Muslims but also by devout Christians and by Jews who dare to speak out a tittle, because “God” or “Allah” is a title and not a name. But many American writings in the ‘Bloggosphere’ have authors who even do not seem to know the difference between a name and a tittle.

Some American writers see in that attitude of their compatriots the lack of their education and give the impression we should feel sorry for them. But than you could wonder why they not adjust their thinking when others do not mind to spend time to react to their wrong ideas and want to give them more correct information. Dakota O’Leary thinks such conservative Christians are infected with the consequence of anti-intellectualism, a steadfast refusal to acknowledge that one’s worldview is mutable, a worldview in which facts are only facts if they fit that worldview, and that anyone who disagrees with a Christian fundamentalist worldview is an “enemy” of God.

The infection has taken hold in conservative politics, where it has spread to a significant portion of the American population, and even into a significant amount of the Canadian population. Though the Religious Right lost some ground in 2000 and in 2008 the Time Magazine dared to declare “The Religious Right’s Era Is Over,” having the Republican party platform containing only two references to God and reaffirming its past positions on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and gays in the military but not expanding on them. Four years later the party’s platform contained again more references to God (10) and 19 references to faith, but also the first reference to a “war on religion.”Because at that time it really seemed that certain American citizens had declared a war on religion. The first and worst victim of that war were the Muslims and the second victim the true followers of Jesus, who do not worship their Trinity. Clearly we in Europe saw their battle against president Obama, some even claiming he would be a Muslim, and their battle against anything which had a social flavour, loathing it as ‘communist’. Normally one would expect from a good Christian that he is willing to share with others and to help those in need, but the American Christians with a big mouth are not at all prepared to share anything from their wealth with the needy or to contribute to a healthcare system when they are in good health.

Citing what it calls the Obama administration’s

“attempt to compel faith-related institutions, as well as believing individuals, to contravene their deeply held religious, moral, or ethical beliefs regarding health services, traditional marriage, or abortion,”

the platform accused “liberal elites” of trying to

“drive religious beliefs — and religious believers — out of the public square.”

From many writings on several blogs we in Europe could only conclude that several Tea-party members and extreme conservative Christians, mostly Creationists, wanted to gag the more liberal or freethinking Christian authors.

In Katherine Stewart’s article in the Guardian entitled “How Christian Fundamentalism Feeds Into the Toxic Partisanship of US Politics,” Stewart notes:

I don’t believe for a moment that this hysterical voice [Christian fundamentalism] that screeches in America’s political sphere is the authentic voice of religion in America. Most religious Americans want to mix it up at lunch! They want to make friends across party lines, and they want to help people who are less fortunate. A survey by the Public Religious Research Institute, released on 24 October, reveals that 60% of Catholics believe the Church should place a greater emphasis on social justice issues and their obligation to the poor, even if that means focusing less on culture war issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, in response to the Ryan budget, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined other Christian leaders in insisting that a “circle of protection” be drawn around “essential programs that serve poor and vulnerable people”.

So why is it that the so-called “values voters” are urged to vote against the politician who supports choice, not the politician who wants to shred that “circle of protection” for the poor and vulnerable? Why is it that when politicians want to demonstrate just how religiously righteous they are, they talk about banning same-sex marriage and making contraceptives hard to get, instead of showing what they have done to protect the weak?

There is an obvious answer, and it is, in a sense, staring you in the face every time you watch a political debate or read about the latest antics of Focus on the Family and the AFA. The kind of religion that succeeds in politics tends to focus on the divisive element of religion. If you want to use religion to advance a partisan political agenda, the main objective you use it for is to divide people between us and them, between the in-group and the out-group, the believers and the infidels.

The result is a reduction of religion to a small handful of wedge issues. According to the religious leaders and policy organizations urging Americans to vote with their “Biblical values”, to be Christian now means to support one or, at most, a small handful of policy positions. And it means voting for the Republican party.

Dakota O’Leary says

Christian fundamentalists are not to be confused with mainstream evangelical Christians.

and he might be right because it seems to apply mainly on principally North American evangelicals. But we must be aware their language or their voice is spreading as a virus, and could come to infect several European, African and Asiatic evangelical and Pentecostal churches, coming to brew mischief between all the denominations who have people who in their language have “Allah” for the English word “God”. They also stir up trouble in regions where there are many Muslims who than find a stick to throw at the Christians. It gives than reason for Muslims to get on the wrong side because it makes it clear that Christians would prefer to worship an other God than the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus and his disciples. In Christendom and in Christianity there is already the problem that those words gets mixed up and that the majority of people who call themselves Christian worship three gods instead of the One God, like real Christians worship the God of Abraham, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah Who is Only One. But those real Christians also come into problems by those extremist Christians who claim they are worshipping Satan or Baal, and as such give every Muslim reason to believe so.

One good thing about is is that several trinitarian Christians are noticing to Whom Jesus prayed (“Allah” Jehovah God) and that they are seeing that the doctrine of the Trinity is a false human doctrine. Bad thing or a regrettable matter caused by those North American writers is that they are pushing away many Christians in the hands of Muslims teachers so that they become Islamic converts, instead of coming to non-trinitarian Christian groups which there is choice enough here in our regions. We encountered already many previous Catholics who now became Muslim and to whom we try to show that Jesus is the way to God and that real Christianity is the following of Jesus as the son of God and not as a god son.

Not only on the level of loosing Catholic and protestant believers to the Muslim Faith because of those Christian fundamentalists we also see that the position of our teachers and preachers gets undermined. The symptoms of the infection of anti-intellectualism brings an erosion on education, not only in the States but also in the Old World. Escalating attacks on teachers as bad citizens, teachers’ unions as greedy “takers”, the evolution vs. creationism debate, resistance to stem cell research (or any kind of scientific research that conflicts with their Biblical worldview), fundamentalist emphasis on voucher system to create taxpayer funded fundamentalist schools, fear of a changing, increasingly pluralistic society (the current face of which is the extraordinary power fundamentalists give to the LGBT community as the force eroding American morality and bringing down the entire nation), and a negative economy which is generating public support by those who consider themselves members of the Religious Right by demonizing public education as a “liberal conspiracy” to take their children away from God. Many who see how those extremist want to have their will also on educational matters, prohibiting children to learn about the normal evolution in this world and coming to accept that dinosaurs really existed and that our world still evolves, makes many now wanting to be part of a religion that prohibits to see the reality of our world.

Calling anything that disagrees with a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible a product of Satanic manipulation makes many religious people to doubt their faith and to abandon it.

Today we also might find an oversimplification by the idea that there is a clear right and wrong (based on Biblical laws, or cherry-picked verses), the universe is either moral or immoral, and that so-called “assaults” on religious “freedom” of fundamentalists signify an invisible war between the forces of God (or “good”) and the forces of Satan (or “evil”).

American essayist and Federalist politician of the 1790s who was an archopponent of Jeffersonian democracy Fisher Ames.

According to the North American extremists there may not be such thing as Religious Freedom or Freedom of belief, because every one all over the world has to come to speak English and using their words and terms on all levels and should come to believe that what they believe. Lots of Americans do forget many of their ancestors just left the Old Word to get more freedom. They also seem to have forgotten that the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was signed January 16, 1786, and is commemorated each year on National Religious Freedom Day. Thomas Jefferson’s landmark statute became the basis for Congressman Fisher Ames’ establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Consitution.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Today the majority of North Americans seem to want against that idea and do not want to leave other people enter their nation and want to make sure no person shall have an other faith than they.

Those who want prayers being said in class should remember that all religious people should be respected and in such instance should have prayers according to their faith too. If they want certain specific prayers being said they should do that in their own private schools, like Catholic Schools, Anglican Schools, Presbyterian, Evangelical etc religious schools, like there should also to be the freedom to have a Muslim or a Hindu school. But the State School should be open to everybody, allowing people to wear their own religious symbols, be it a little cross, a fish, a Davidstar, a yarmulka or other head covering. Each government all over the world should take care that every person can feel himself or herself happy in an environment where there is no discrimination for skin-colour or religious affection.

Some Americans do forget that they want to limit freedom of speech and freedom of religion by demanding to have only their religion presented in public schools.

Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour goes so far to say taht

“The symbols and celebration of Christmas have shaped our history [and] Western Civilization,

having so called christians to think that she noted Christianity’s “transformative” impact on the old pagan world and the culture of Germanic barbarian warrior tribes, forgetting Christmas is totally a presentation of all the pagan elements, and is even an abomination in the eyes of God.

Christianity and broader Judeo-Christian values, suggested both Bannon and Mansour, reinforce Western Civilization’s sense of purpose in the face of internal and external threats.

The migration of tens of millions of Muslims to Europe in recent decades, said Bannon, is an existential threat to Europe and modern iteration of aforementioned civilization conflict between Western and Islamic societies: “The entire situation with this mass migration and refugee situation, which is really, there is no doubt, is starting to destroy Europe.” {Judeo-Christian Values essential to Victory of Western Civilization vs. Islamic Invasion of Europe}

Preceding

American Christianity no longer resembles its Founder

Governments need to be more proactive to ensure racism is kept in check

Added commentary to the posting A Progressive Call to Arms

You are what you wear

Allowing dress code according liberty of religion

Meditating Muslimah on “hijab to be a religious obligation”

A British judge rules that mother can’t indoctrinate son with religion

Additional reading

Further related

As there is a lot of division in Christendom there is too in Judaism

Posted on 2017/07/31 by Immanuel Verbondskind

After a three week period of mourning during which the Jews remembered the series of events that led to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of God’s people’s first Temple on that date in the year 586 BCE. we still do not have any reason to be very happy.

The last few days we could take some time to remember also the year 70 CE when the Roman legions pushed through the crumbling defences of Jerusalem to desecrated and destroy the rebuilt second Temple, as they crushed a rebellion that shook the heart of the Empire and drove the Chosen people of God into exile, but also to remember many of the most painful moments Jews had to undergo in camps and pogroms.

Many lovers of God showed their faithfulness to the Most High Elohim. They did everything to join with brethren and sisters and feel united in the family of the Patriarch Abraham.

On Tisha b’Av, many Jews felt most keenly their sense of powerlessness and their feeling of separation from their spiritual centre in their ancestral homeland. It was the day on which we acknowledged the emotional and spiritual pain of God’s people‘s exile.

Today, no longer in exile, when there is such an opening to see the Holy Land becoming a reality, so many Jews having returned to the Eretz Ysrael or Land of Israel, it looks like there is even more division than in the previous times of worries.

There are some groups who consider it not necessary any more to remember all the evil that has happened to the Jewish people. Even in the light that many may see a brighter future we should know and keep remembering what happened in the past. Jews and real lovers of God should understand that despite the many setbacks the Chosen People underwent, their struggles, their real loses and deep suffering, the Jewish people, have overcome the obstacles fate has set before them.

The Fast of the Ninth of Av should in a way stay a day of mourning to commemorate the many tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, many of which have occurred on the ninth of Av. But in these times we also should open our eyes and receive a ‘slap in our face’ because there is something going on in this world by those who call themselves Jew. As in this world where we see many who call themselves ‘Christian‘ calling themselves names and fighting against each other, we can find also persons who call themselves Jew doing things against the Will of God, like creating hate between people or excluding people as if they are the pest.

Rabbi Ruth Adar, or the Coffee Shop Rabbi, has her eyes also open, seeing the division in the Jewish communities she also felt sick at heart this Tisha B’Av.

The people’s spirit might have gone in so many varied directions whereby some of them might have us wonder if they are not going away from the path laid in front of them by the Most High Elohim.

The Coffee Shop Rabbi writes

” The Jewish community is horribly divided. We are divided in many ways, and we poke many fingers at one another, scolding.

Some Haredim see the Kotel as their synagogue. From their point of view, whatever they need to do to maintain the sanctity of that place as they define sanctity is justified.

Some other Jews believe that the Kotel belongs to all Jews everywhere and because the Haredim have said and done ugly things, whatever they say about the Haredim is justified. {Sick and Tired}

The world has come to know so many different Judaic groups and various movements with very different ideas. Years ago between Jews there was a feeling, a sense, a rich swirl of emotion, a deep notion of Jewish communality. This is what the Talmud means when it says,

“all Jews are responsible one for the other” (Shavuot 39a).

But today it looks more that there is egotism and greed that has darkened the hearts of many Jews, not willing to be open for others. Perhaps today only a few (or more?) Jews are swimming upstream and striving for peace between all people living around Jerusalem, which in the end shall have to become the capital of the Holy Land, for all those who love and go for the Divine Creator. It was the wish of the Bore and it shall become so, whatever man wants to go against it.

In Israel there are Jews living who have put aside their faith in God and have become atheists calling other Jews to fight against the enemies of their state. In Israel as well as in other places around the world we also, strangely enough can find Jews who have taken a three-headed god as their god. Though they take Jesus (Jeshua) as their god, they clearly do not follow the teachings of that Nazarene rebbe who taught peace and tolerance. We can wonder if one may call such ‘Messianic Jews‘ really Jews. Opposite to them are real Messianic Jews, who stay faithful to the Jewish belief in One True God, the God of Israel, Jacob, Isaac, Jesus and his disciples, but have taken Jesus as the Messiah. But they are ‘shredded’ and hated by the trinitarian ‘Jews’ and ‘Christians’. By other Jews they are spoken of as traitors to the faith. Others speak about the Conservative Jews as the wrong believers, whilst others talk about the Reform, the Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Liberal or other sorts of Jews, as if they are “monsters”.

Some Jews act as if Jews of color don’t even exist.

Some Jews think other Jews don’t “look Jewish enough.”

Some Jews say Jews who became Jewish as adults aren’t really Jews. {Sick and Tired}

We can see that Judaism has become sick in the same bed as Christendom. There too has come such a shims that several groups claim the other group may not call themselves Jew. It has even come so far that Israel’s rabbinical authorities have compiled a blacklist of overseas rabbis whose authority they refuse to recognize when it comes to certifying the Jewishness of someone who wants to get married in Israel.

Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef (L) and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau. Moti Milrod – The Chief Rabbinate having released a list of foreign “kosher” rabbis whose conversions it recognizes and whose signatures it accepts on documents attesting to various aspects of personal status.

The Christian community and the Jewish community should remember

However, considering that the people during the Second Temple period were engaged in Torah study, observance of mitzvot, and acts of kindness, why was the Second Temple destroyed?

It was destroyed due to the fact that there was baseless hatred during that period. This comes to teach you that the sin of baseless hatred is equivalent to the three transgressions: Idol worship, forbidden sexual relations and bloodshed. – Yoma 9b {Sick and Tired}

Preceding article

Women their education and chances to become a parliamentary

Additional reading

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Objective views and not closing eyes for certain sayings

Posted on 2016/12/01 by Bijbelvorsers

The reblog A Progressive Call to Arms caused several very different reactions. Pity some people did not want to react straight on the article and choose other, non public, ways.

History of Marxism timeline (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We very much appreciated the reaction of “camden41” a retired public school administrator and retired history professor, who took the time to spend a whole article on the writing and an extra one on our reaction. Though perhaps the impression may be given by that author that we do not know our history or do not want to see the “crux of the matter” or to belief Hitler “considered Marxists, Communists and Jews to be traitors.” We are aware of that fact, but that is just what makes us so weary about the president elect. In what way does he want to look at Marxists, Leninist, Communists, Jews, Muslims, refugees, Mexicans, homo’s, transgender and other people?

We also are aware of specific groups who would love abolishing the ever-enlarging systems of hierarchy, control, and environmental destruction necessary to sustain the growth of capital.

We also saw how certain people in the past made use of blackening others to get their goal coming into power. We also are aware that in the past many made use of the chaos and fear to bring others in discredit and to get people on their hand, promising that everything would change by them in power. And once in power they made sure that they could have the highest power for some time, getting rid of those who were standing in their way.

Should we not know when precious experiences in a person his life can make a very dangerous person of him or her, make sure that we look at the previous history of a person and come to look at him or her seriously, not making a joke of him or of his remarks. And Trump made remarks which should make us to think about it.

Should we not be aware where hate can come into existence and how it can grow fast like a virus? Should we not have our eyes opened seeing that people do want to shut out others and that marginalisation has become a favoured thing? Should we not be aware that some might think that marginalisation may be a strategy of protection, so that defence and obstruction cannot wait for the inauguration of an autocrat? Should we do not know what a certain person his sanctuary cities may be and how others may react on it?

Should we also not wonder how long people are going to take it that there may be political domination over them, having the capitalists squeezing workers’ pay packets, keeping individual wages for all blue-workers pretty much flat since a long time, having only a raise for higher level salaries?

These capitalists and their apologists hid the double squeeze behind their effective rhetorical use of issues such as civil rights and affirmative action to invoke in the late 1960s and after the “wages of whiteness”–which any attentive person should have figured wouldn’t pay any better than they did at the close of Reconstruction a hundred years earlier. {W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1991). }

Should we not worry when the president elect, though he might show to be calmed down, still continues in his line of thinking when he announced that Bannon, the controversial executive chairman of Breitbart News, would be his chief strategist, though he denied holding “ethno-nationalist” views?

Does oppression in all of its forms: microaggressions, street harassment, slut shaming, resource hoarding, not feels like hate? And is it not easy to generalise and should politicians not warn people to generalise, instead of generalising themselves?

Conflating oppression and hate is fraught with many more problems than such a seemingly small semantic shift would suggest, and if we are to effectively combat domination it’s imperative that we learn to avoid discussing oppression in terms of hate. {Why We Must Stop Speaking of Oppression as “Hate”}

When looking at our society we should not close our eyes for certain situations. There may be many Christadelphians who think we should not be active in politics, but they forget that does not mean we should close our eyes for what happens in the world or should not comment on it.

Even when we give our opinion we do want to have our readers to make up their mind for themselves and want them to give the opportunity to hear different opinions. Only by being open to other opinions people can come to a better insight and also can come to understand why and how others think differently. That way also people can come to see who can be going on dangerous paths of thinking and as such even can become a danger for the society. Only by exposing such ways of thinking the society can be protected.

It is not by closing our eyes for the things we do not want to hear nor see, that they will not exist. That is what our and our parents generation have clearly felt in the previous century. What happened in the Third Reich could only come so far because so many people did not want to know and did not want to see, because most often they were too much concerned about their own ego and their own well-being.

Today we should learn form the lessons of the past and should be weary of what is possible to come.

In the United States of America during this past year, anti-Semitic imagery proliferated on social media, Jewish journalists were targeted and longstanding anti-Jewish conspiracy theories got a fresh airing. Much of the bias originated with the alt-right, or alternative right, a loose group espousing a provocative and reactionary strain of conservatism. It’s often associated with far right efforts to preserve “white identity,” oppose multiculturalism and defend “Western values.”

There are too many Americans who close their eyes for the reports of anti-Semitic vandalism and other attacks which have risen. As the presidential race intensified, Jews started seeing their names bracketed with a series of parentheses in harassing tweets, signalling that the person had been identified as a Jew. The image became known as the Jewish cowbell and its source was traced to neo-Nazis and white nationalists.

During his run for president, Mr. Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to curb terrorism, claimed Mexican “rapists” were pouring into the country, making that Mexican immigrants also were looked at as perverts and criminals. For the African Americans Trump expressed he has no good eye for those who have “no education” and are “monkeys”. After Donald Trump won the presidential election, handouts where presented in many colleges with texts like “He’s much more likely to abuse you” and “Your kids probably won’t be smart.” Several universities made it clear that those flyer’s hateful propaganda and did not belong at a university.

At several places speeches where given against the Muslims.

LeftOfCenter writes

One of the techniques favored by Right-wingers like Kobach are to demonize strongholds of the Democratic Party. They call these big metropolitan areas, a.k.a. America’s biggest cities, Sanctuary Cities, which is code for ethnically diverse areas that want to relieve tensions between its residents, documented and undocumented. They have vowed to only enforce local laws and won’t do the bidding of Federal immigration agents. Kobach wants to change all that and we know he will do everything he can, likely with the help of the other Kansas notorious K word, the Kochs. So many K’s…KKKoincidence? {Kris Kobach Rumored To Be Attorney General Pick, Would Oversee Deportation Policy}

anonymous-kkk On television we in Europe could see Americans bringing the fascist greeting, holding out their arms in a Nazi salute, shouting, “Heil the people! Heil victory.”

We also could see several letters mosques had received. In those hate letters the Muslims are called “Children of Satan” and “vile and filthy”.

Clearly the writers of those letters do not know much about Islam and Who they worship, because they wrote

“You are evil. You worship the devil. But, your day of reckoning has arrived.”

It also called on Muslims to

“pack your bags and get out”.

Authorities were first alerted by the San Jose mosque, which received the letter on Thursday November 24. The other letters were received by the Long Beach and Pomona mosques a few days later and in the latter weeks of November other mosques all over the country were targetted.

Trump will do to Muslims what 'Hitler did to the Jews', letters to California mosques say

Law enforcement agencies across the US have reported 257 anti-Muslim incidents last year, which represents a nearly 67% increase from 2014. The CAIR has said that more than 100 such incidents have taken place since Trump won the country’s presidential elections, Reuters reported. Trump, who campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform, had also pledged to ban the entry of all Muslims into the country for an unspecified period of time if he were voted into power.{Trump will do to Muslims what ‘Hitler did to the Jews’, letters to California mosques say}

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-LA’s executive director Hussam Ayloush said the “irresponsible, hateful rhetoric” of the Trump campaign has fueled

“a level of vulgarity, vile hatred and anger among many self-proclaimed Trump supporters.”

Preceding articles

A Progressive Call to Arms

Added commentary to the posting A Progressive Call to Arms

Additional reading

+++

Added commentary to the posting A Progressive Call to Arms

Posted on 2016/11/17 by Marcus Ampe

1. Clarification

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We love to clarify some expressions and make it clear what our thoughts are on the present subject of the Clinton-Trump matter.
It looks like the article A Progressive Call to Arms made some Hillary Clinton fans angry taking we are attacking her and in favour of Donald Trump. The other way round we also had reactions from people who found we attacked Donald Trump and where in favour of Hillary Clinton, gay marriages, paedophile acts, free sex, abortion a.o..

2. Ways of reaction

First of all, please do know that all who want to react on an article may do that straight onto the particular article and do not have to use the personal e-mail addresses of the authors of this site. All reactions shall be published as long as no abusive language is used, and for this above mentioned publication some heated minds used not such nice words, not to be presented in public. F- words and swearing can be censured and replaced by dots ….., but we would prefer not to have such words being used.

Normally we also do not like it when replies are given anonymously, and if so we shall answer them if we have the impression it is not spam or phishing. For those who become marked as Spam by the WordPress Spamfilter Askimet we do not bother to reply.

3. Concerning opinions of us and of the writers of the original blog article being reblogged by us

Please do find some words here to bring clarity on some reactions to us as well as on the article A Progressive Call to Arms presented.

On November 11 “No” reacted on the site of The independent thinker’s article A Progressive Call to Arms which seem some others might think the same of us.

You preach about love and acceptance, but you gloat about how happy you are that people who voted for Hillary are crying and upset about this election.

As editor of this site I noticed that out of the very good founded negative reactions, there where also ones where the accuser could not see the difference between what our writer wrote and what the writer of the reblog article wrote. Please always keep in mind that when we reblog an article and present the short overview of it, it does no have to offer our view, or we do not have to agree with everything what is written in the reblogged article.

4. Concerning the given links to other articles

We also want to make it clear that only the heading “Additional Reading” presents articles of which we mostly totally agree with, but when they have reblogs in it, the same applies like in this sites opinion, to present a view from someone else who does not have to have totally the same views as us.

Under the heading “Further related articles”, as the title indicates, we do want to give our readers a list of some interesting literature around the spoken off subject. Though that list may have contradicting articles in it. Because we do prefer to bring an objective overview of what is thought about the subject.

To be as objective as possible for all discussions we want to present different opinions. We do believe objectivity for selecting the articles is a necessity also to keep credibility and not to come over as biassed and brainwashing.

5. Our or/and my personal opinion

Hillary Rodham Clinton, January 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is not because we do not like it that Donald Trump became president-elect that we would not present articles in favour of him. From my point of view he can well be a very dangerous candidate, or not the one who would be stabilising the country, but more the opposite, could bring more division in the United states of America, what the heated debates already proof. For those who follow my personal blog (or My space) and “Our World” it is also no secret I admire the work Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and if they would have read my opinions on different matters they also could know that Bernie Sanders would be some one whom I wanted in the running for president. Others break me off being a communist, though I would say to them I am more an Utopist who can live with social democrats.

6. Attacked from four sites

Funny though that, from the two sites we got criticism hating the particular person (Clinton and Trump) and people calling us names because we would be for abortion and other things they are against (homos). On the other hand we also got reactions from transgender who were not pleased with certain links we placed.
We understand that these might be people who are worried about their loved ones, worried about the future of their families, and their healthcare, and the state of their country. They also seem to give the impression to be worried about their rights, but then we do wonder if they are also worried about the rights of others. That is one facet we want to come up for, for all people their rights. Good people but also bad people have their rights … also criminals do have their rights (many seem to forget that, or not want to give them rights). But in the heated debate about the controversy around Trump-Clinton many seem to considers other citizens as criminals though they are not.

A lot of people also want to see the world in black and white and do forget that there are shades of grey. In a way have received remarks from the different camps to be in favour of the other camp might proof we were not so bad with our remarks, being somewhere in the middle, showing different aspects of one or the other group which should be under consideration.

7. LGBT, Transgender people versus Eunuchs and Androgynous persons and sexism

Violet Velvet has good reason to be upset with some writings in the articles we presented in our selection on the reblog A Progressive Call to Arms. Certainly when she looks at an article of Florence Selvan, who lives in Bangalore, India, who claims to like woman as a beautiful creation of God.

Though this Florece Selvan, writing “Perceptions” under Flo Sel on WordPress, when she writes over transgenders does have a weird look on such other creations of God. Where did she get it from to speak about eunuchs and having it about transgender people as if they are both the same, plus writing it in a very negative way?

The Kızlar Ağası, head of the black eunuchs of the Ottoman Imperial Harem. The title literally means “Chief of the Girls”.

Violet Velvet and others may not forget that though in their region there may not exist eunuchs any more, they still exist in the world. Though Florence Selvan and others should also know that transgenderism has nothing to do with eunuchs as such (except when you limit it to the idea of a man who has had his sexual organs removed, what some might do) or people taken away (like a castrate) deprived or losing the testes or external genitals, having made incapable of reproducing his species..

In this time and age people have to come aware that “Transgender persons” may include transsexuals, transgenderists (in one usage of the term, persons who gender-identify with the opposite sex but who choose not to undergo sex-reassignment surgery or hormone treatments), and androgynes (biologically or psychologically androgynous persons), among other groups. In its broader sense, transgender is closely related to the more-recent term genderqueer, which is self-applied by persons who are either transgender or who have no gender, a third (neither male nor female) gender, or a fluctuating gender, but which is a term which I would not prefer to use because they are not “queer“, though some of them might be eccentric, or unconventional. They might be odd in the eyes of many but have not to be unbalanced mentally and they too should have the right to live in our society.

LGBT publications, pride parades, and related events, such as this stage at Bologna Pride 2008 in Italy, increasingly drop the LGBT initialism instead of regularly adding new letters, and dealing with issues of placement of those letters within the new title.

Sel Flo wrote pehaps with good intention, under the heading “love Others”

There’s so much more to learn about eunuchs and LGBT, but for now, I choose not to ignore them but be nice to them whenever I get to see them and make them know their life is respected and valuable. {Love others – Transgenders}

but does not comprehends what a transgender really is and what such a person often has to endure. The same with several people in the United States being against those male and female people who find that they are not sitting in the right corps, and want to change that situation, transferring their (sexual) outlook. Though people who are feeling offended by her article should not take it so personal and perhaps better try to give that writer a better insight in transgenderism.

“No” in his/her reaction may think we are not in the knowledge

They’re worried about whether or not they could possibly be deported, or that they may die without access to health insurance. People who are afraid because of the racism and violence surrounding them, about what might happen to their children.

and asks

Are you pleased and proud when you read news stories today about little girls getting their pussies grabbed in school? People scrawling racist messages on people’s lockers in school, on the outside of buildings? Children being told by other children that now they’re going to “go back where they came from”? This is what makes you happy? This has made you smile for the last three days? Really?

By placing the link to the reblogged article and to the one on transgenders we did not want to hurt people, though we might have stepped on many toes (hence the name of this site).

The unknown reactor (who reacted on The independent thinker 2016 a progressive call to arms under the name “No”) like others who accused us for agreeing with the awful actions of Mr. Trump, should know that we detest such sexism from any person and do not find it acceptable in our civilised world. (In case they would have read our other articles that sexist attitude was one of the elements we put in the spotlight as one of the reasons not to vote for Trump.)

We are totally against the sexist attitude to value one or an other person of one or another sex as less valuable. But as such we also demand people to accept people who changed their sex or who have same sex relationships, as long as they do not harm others with it. We also complained that too many American voters seem to think that all homophiles or male gay are paedophiles, and that certain people think or find it justified that males in higher functions just can do whatever they like with people from the other sex. Those Americans who think transgender are people who have a psychosexual disorder which creates for them an obsession with children as sex objects and would have them to overt acts, including taking sexual explicit photographs, molesting children, and exposing one’s genitalia to children, have really no idea what transgenderism is and should be educated to understand such people.

Many also seem to overlook that those now having come in charge already passed laws making it legal for businesses to discriminate against members of the LBGT+ community and that Mike Pence passed laws discriminating against a woman’s right to choose.

8. More than one community targetted

Black Lives Matter die-in protesting alleged police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota, September 20, 2015

We also may not forget that Donald Trump has not limited his hate-speech to members of just one community. People may not think we would also be blind for several crimes done by people from the black community. We can understand the ex-schoolmaster who wrote

The problem is that certain segments of our society are in denial about some of the crimes committed in our country. For example, the Black Lives Matter supporters blame the police for the killing of a few black people some of whom had criminal records. But they ignore the fact that the greatest killers of black people are other black people. In Chicago, the murder rate of black on black is greater than the casualties we suffered in Afghanistan. So why doesn’t the Black Lives Matter supporters focus on the greatest killer of young black men? {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

Though since Trump was chosen the extreme right parties and the KKK think they have again ground to stand up and to bring actions against coloured people. Just a few of the spate of racial incidents are given in the article The Great Divide Widens.

Even when there may have been blacks who voted for Trump they are warned that their votes do not matter. When in schools youngsters may find again on the toilet doors “Whites only,” “White America” and “Trump”, plus see everywhere slogans who should remind people to whom America (so called) belongs “#Go back to Africa” and “Make America great again,” the whole world should look in agony to that state which calls itself a free country. And for American Christians it should be reason enough to ring the alarm bell.

9. Rage against Jews, Marxists and communists

Camden41, the retired public school administrator who wrote

The inference here is the Nazis Party coming for the Socialists, etc. Well the word Nazis is an abbreviation for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. The translation is National Socialist German Workers Party. Notice the second word is Socialist and the forth word is Workers. If you read about Germany from 1917 to 1920 there were a host of new political parties competing for power in German. Street battles were fought between competing left wing groups and between competing left and right wing groups. In 1919 two Jewish Marxists, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, tried to overthrow the Weimar Government through violent revolution. It was brutally suppressed and Luxemburg and Liebknecht were executed. Because of this event and others, Hitler as a World War I soldier considered Marxists, Communists and Jews to be traitors. This is what fueled his rage against them. {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

He should know that the ideology of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP, the political party of the mass movement known as National Socialism was “own people first” and that their hate for Jews did not arose from the attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. The leadership of Adolf Hitler, brought a totalitarian regime in Germany in 1933 and its methods brought not only Europe but the whole world in turmoil until 1945 and even several years after World war II.

Some of us having remembrances of those years and we having been imprinted very much by our family how such attitude of mind could bring terror on a whole society, even having had family members also been victims of the camps, do know what agony such attitude of a dictator and of a swept away people can mean.

That we compare what is happening in America to that person is because we have felt it ourselves what happened so many years ago and saw how many people were blind or did not want to see it what was going on or what was going to happen.

The hate for the Jews had much deeper roots and in a bad economical situation in many countries those masters in finances always have been the easy target, because they mostly seemed to have it better than the poor locals.

Bijbelvorsers writing

In Europe we have seen the vitriol and hate spreading of Donald Trump and how he created division. As such we can understand people over there now are afraid of violence under a Trump presidency. {A Progressive Call to Arms}

is a general impression of many Europeans, but got the American reaction

What nonsense! You are either a victim of propaganda or ignorant of what is happening in this nation. {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

It can well be w e do not know enough what is happening in the United States, but than that would come of not enough information or the wrong information reaching us. He writes

We have had a crime wave from illegal immigrants. Murders, rapes, etc. in such numbers that many Americans voted for Trump to stop the violence and return our nation to law and order. Fueling the crimes are the drugs flowing over our unprotected open southern border. Are you not aware that our Border Patrol police fully supported Trump? Are you not aware that police forces throughout the US supported Trump? Are you not aware that over 200 generals and admirals supported Trump? {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

In case, like you say and like we know that many from the police-force voted for Trump, it also can mean that the U.S. of A. has become a police state, which should have us worrying as well.

That

Only the ignorant would associate the KKK with the Republicans. It was also Eisenhower, a Republican President, who used the law to enforce the integration of schools in the 1950s. {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

is not taking into account, or even ignoring, that the weapon lobby and several racist groups and Neo-nazis as well as the Ku Klux Klan gave money to support the Republican Party candidate. In case police, other armed forces and KKK where so eager to vote for Trump that does tell a lot to us about the agenda of Trump in which those people could find themselves. for us in Europe even a more clear signal that we do have to be very careful about that person who became president elect recently.

10. Winners and losers

Obama-Biden Transition (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We accept that the American people have chosen and for a system (Electoral college) and for a person who by them could be nominated to be the next president of the United States of America. that we call all Americans to their senses and to respect the outcome of the voting, not going on the streets to fight for it, does not mean we agree how everything worked out or that we would stand behind one or the other without seriously taking into account what they want to accomplish and even more important How they want to accomplish something.

For the ones, like “No” who think we do not realize that the States has come into a difficult situation whereby many people are not just upset because their candidate lost, they should know we are very aware that their fear might be very legitimate and real. (They also should now that Trump never has been our candidate to become the president of such International important state.)

No writes

Most of these people just wanted to live in a place where they didn’t have to worry about being assaulted for their religion, or race, or gender. They do not deserve this condescension and smug attitude.

But than he totally goes wrong saying

They do not deserve to see people like yourself bragging about how they had this coming to them because they voted for Hillary, and this is their punishment.

We advised people not voting for Trump and if No would have read our material much better he would have seen that after Bernie Sanders was out we also advised his voters And republicans to go for the safety of the country and as such to voter for Hillary Clinton.

Many of these people, like myself, were Bernie supporters, trying to stop what they thought might be the end of their civil rights. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted to see this country united in love, not in hate.

It makes me sick to see posts like your most recent one, gloating about people being upset with the election results. Have some empathy. Have some compassion for these people. They voted for a candidate that you didn’t like, but now many of them are suffering the consequences of seeing millions of racists emboldened because their candidate won. This is what you want? This fills you with joy?

For the record, as said above we have nothing at all against Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders (we like him very much), and for the Republican lovers we have nothing against several party members and even could have found Carlson a good candidate.

But to say that those who vote for Hillary Clinton would be helping her with her criminal activities {Hillary is the only candidate with this record…} is to take short views. And to say because we advised to vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate Clinton does not mean we do not like many of Bernie Sanders his iedeas, which are more in line with my political thinking.

11. Time for additional parties in the United States of America

We are aware of the diversity within the Republic Party, also in the Democratic Party. We even would find it much better that several who are now still belonging to those parties would go out of those parties and create some new parties to give a better balance in the American politics, offering so much more choices for people to vote for, and having a better representation of the diversity in the population.

Do not think we are not aware of some other parties in the U.S.A. The liberals and Green party being the more usable acceptable political parties, but we also have seen the guy with his cowboy hat defending all the weapon carrying, and then also some girl (of which I forgot the parties name) who did not seem to live in a realistic political world. But please enlighten us and give an overview of all the political parities on which the American population can vote for a president, and tell us how the ones who have not enough money would be able ever to go for president candidate.

The retired public school administrator and history professor who taught Western Civilization, American Civil War, United States History, Economic History, Ancient & Medieval Foundations, American History Since 1945, commented

I can supply a list of people of different minorities who are Republicans and Republican supporters. Also are you aware that Elbert Guillory who is a Louisiana State African-American politician switched from being a Democrat to a Republican two years ago? When he was asked why he switched, he said, “I was tired of the same old false promises of helping my constituents by the Democrats. My constituents are worse off today than 50 years ago. The only thing the Democrats have done is given us a government plantation.”) {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

It is also known and shown to Europeans that many Democrats after so many generations and years being for the one group went to the other camp wearing the Trump gadgets, proud to go for change. But is it not that many citizens just had to switch from the Democratic party to the Republicans because there was no other valuable alternative.

The U.S.A. like Great-Britain shall have to come to learn that countries in the present time may better be governed by more than two political parties. A legislative power vested in both the government and a chamber of parliament, Senate and a Chamber of Representatives, having a variety of parties making coalitions.

12. Workforce and Feeling for others

Camden 41 asks us

If Trump is so much a bigot why does he have so many minorities working for him even in executive positions {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

In the lower echelons he used lots of people, he wants now to put out of the country, because they were cheap labour for him and he knew they would not protest, because then they would be nowhere. For the executive positions it would not surprise us that Mr. Trumps shall use any body as long as he or she is usable for him. It looks a person who is willing to go over corpses to get his goal. In the end it shall be a person who shall not show any compassion for anybody. At his campaign he showed already how he could make use of people and how he could abandon them.

For those who called us names and did find we do not have compassion for people, we want to assure them we just feel for others and try to have empathy with many.

If you truly cared about love and acceptance, and were a compassionate person, you would feel a sadness for these people, not happiness at their despair. {wrote No}

We are not at all

gleeful about the outcome of this election. {No}

Though No’s reaction may not be directed to us, but more to the writer of the reblogged article, I found it important to react to some of his words, because our readers coming to the reblogged article and coming to read further, should know clearly where we stand in all this, and what our opinion is.

13. Not spreading hate nor killing

We do not want spreading hate, but would like to shed light on the circumstances we all have to face. Only by open debate, willingness to listen to all parties involved, analysing all things said, and having the will to understand the way of thinking of the other, willing to show empathy, we shall be able to come to know more, to enrich one another and to come to live together in peace.

Not only racism is ingrained in several societies, also prejudice or partiality and short-sightedness create a lot of unnecessary problems in many countries and many societies. Everywhere people should come to understand that liberty and freedom can only be fully existing there where people are willing to respect the freedom and choices of others.

Progressives and Hillary supporters are hypocrites! On the one hand they say kill fully formed babies but spare murders the death penalty. They also support sparing animals from being killed for furs but kill babies. {A Progressive Anti-Trump View Point With My Rebuttal}

We, like many other Clinton supporters never said to kill fully formed babies. We are even not for abortion, but do defend those who would like to undergo an abortion.

In reaction to Make Religious Freedom Great Again I also expressed my self for myself and for my Christian community, saying that in a democracy, those who believe in the Most High Divine Creator should have full respect for their Maker as well as for the one God Who allows to be in charge of the nation.

Like Jesus taught his followers to have respect for the Caesar and the system which was ruling over them, we too should be humble and accept the vote of the majority. We also should know that real believers in God are the minority and that those who are children of God would have to follow their heart but also have to protect and come up for the weaker ones and for those who are at the marginal site of the society (tramps, transgender, psychopaths, criminals, the ill and poor). As Christians, i.e. following Jesus Christ we may not exclude any one, even not our worst enemy. For all people around us we should have an open hand, an open heart and a listening ear. For all around us we should be prepared to help and to be ready to come to be there for them.

Papapound and others, may think I would be ‘for’ abortion; Not at all.

We are against any necessary killing, be it plants, animals or people.

I am against abortion. But I do know that in certain cases choices can be made which we would not prefer. We always have to take into account the circumstances a person came into such situation, she has to make such a difficult choice … because do know often it is not such an easy choice. When a person is a victim of rape, who are we to going to decide that woman does not want any remembrance of her rapist facing her every day of her further life?
I know she could have taken the ‘morning after pill’, but that is by many also already considered ‘abortion’ or something ‘not to be done’. I my self would not like to see some needing or willing to take such a drug. Also a a contraceptive women do not have to use chemical medical drugs, but can use other preservatives or methods for not becoming pregnant (e.g. temperature methods). But in a society where there should be freedom of thought I should respect the choice of the other person. I have no right to decide over the body and/or mind of others. As such it is also not to me to judge those who are born in a body and afterwards do feel like it is not their body nor their personality. What right do have hetero’s to cast away gay, transgender and other people who are not like them and whom they often may not like?

The person going to lead the country should be there for all sorts of peoples and all sorts of men and women living in his nation. He should be the protective ‘father’ of all in the nation.

If a boy feels he is really a girl, wants to be recognised as a woman and finds in the medical world the solution to help him to get a body that feels like ‘her’, who I am or any body else, to forbid such a choice? The same for a girl who has the feeling she is a male being and wants to take part in the male activities as an equal?

God has given man talents and the medical profession is one of the higher goods God provided for man. In case the medical world can bring solutions for people who are not feeling right in their skin, why should they not have the free choice to get what they want with and for their body and mind?
Also those, who have part of their body male and part of it female, why should they stay excluded from a normal life in our present society? I do agree two centuries ago those people could only survive by acting in circuses and to be a rarity on fairs. Did we not come more civilised?
Have we no better feelings for such people who are confined in a tortured body and soul?

For homosexuals, transgender and other people, they should be able to go to places for care where there is no objection to their choice of being or against their longings, like having children and caring for a family. Many Christians in America seem to have lots of difficulties with that. Perhaps they better ask themselves what would Jesus do and what would Jesus expect me to do?

14. Political correctness and free choice

I am against a state pampering and overruling everything and everybody. Also the ‘overcorrection’ and absurdities like not allowing schools to use the word ‘mother’, ‘mom’, ‘mams’, dad’, papa’ is just absurd, the same as those who do not want that we use the word “zwarte piet” (black Pete) and may not have those helpers of Saint Nicolas have black painted faces.

But I also disagree with the state ruling that Catholic or Protestant hospitals have to do things against their faith. If people want to have something done to them of which we religious people would not agree to, they should have the right to go to other places where such things can be done to them. But for general state hospitals everybody from whatever religion or class should be helped in the way that person would love to be helped, and as such when an abortion is required in that state hospital or in any neutral clinic such people should receive help in this difficult matter.

The same for the uniforms in schools. I totally disagree with states who (like the Belgian government) forbid in state schools that children wear any religious symbol. That goes in against the freedom of choice and against the respect of man himself and of his religious choice. In a state or provincial school each pupil should be free to wear any religious symbol, be it a cross, a fish, a David star, a yarmulke, a headscarf, a long dress, cloths which cover arms and legs, decent shorts or trousers. But when a Muslim wants to go to a Christian school he or she can not complain about the uniform he or she has to wear and has to go swimming with both sexes in the same swimming pool (though I can accept they can demand separate clothing rooms for male and females). It is their free choice to go to whatever denominational or non-denominational school. When somebody goes to a Bible-school he or she can not complain that before classes start there is been read from the Bible and been said prayers and that even at times they have it about a three-headed god. Those who only want to worship The Only One True God (like me) should make their choice in such a way that the children are brought up in a Christian, Jewish or Islam way, respecting that Oneness of God.

Having religious/and/or ethic or liberal education an obligated subject, all schools in Belgium are obligated to offer 5 main religious denominations plus ethics or morals. I do know in the United States of America they still do not have such a provision, mainly because conservative Christians would be against such a system, but also one may find such education is not at all the task of the governement and that should be something each individual family should have to decide for themselves. But then this would create that children do not know about the other religions. Like in our country all children have to learn about the other religions and about the other philosophies, as such avoiding that the citizens would grow up with wrong ideas about the other religion, something which we can clearly see in the United states. In the U.S.A. lots of Americans have a totally wrong concept of the other Christian denominations and, even worse, about the other religious groups, in particular the Islam. Because in the States at school nobody was obliged to read the Bible nor the Quran they can not openly properly discuss with each other and see where certain groups claim things which are not written in those holy Scriptures.

15. Freedom and Knowledge safeguard for the future

Only knowledge can safeguard the future of a state and not like we can see the bad evolution now of many states (even the Belgian state) trying to keep their youngsters dumb and not thinking for themselves. A really dangerous evolution. (As a teacher I myself had the last ten years of my career, to lower the level of the courses each subsequent year and had to see the degradation of the bachelor, Licences and Masters degrees, not only until I retired, but saw it continuing and schools aiming for better evaluation marks and more people coming out with so called high cyphers but less knowledge.)

The freedom spoken off in the constitution of France, America and some other countries based on the French revolution was made to guarantee each individual’s freedom. Each citizen of a state should have the right to make his or her own choices concerning the own body and concerning himself or herself. If we want to belief in One True God, that should be our right. If we want to worship that Maker of the Universe, that should be our right. But others who want to worship a tri-une god, trees, planets or do find such things rubbish should have the right to worship those or not to worship anything.

Also for what people want to eat, all should have the freedom to eat and drink whatever they want, like for all things, as long they do not hinder other persons with it. If you want to eat pork meat or blood, that is your full right, but if a Jew, Christian, or Muslim does not want to eat pork that should be his or her right too, and nobody may force him or her to do so. The same for people like me, who prefer to eat more vegetables and prefer to eat natural non-tampered foods, we should have the right and the possibility to have vegetarian or vegan or kosher or halal meals. Also me not wanting to eat blood or having contributed blood, should be in the liberty not to have a blood-transfusion.

It looks like such allowances to others seems to be something very difficult to cope with by North Americans. When I hear certain Christians talk about the amendments and their freedom, they often only think about their own denomination and their own particular choices. A great example is the use of weapons. How can it be that a Christian would carry or would use weapons and even teach their children to use guns? Though those so called Christians living in the United states of America call it their inexorable law.

16. Right to kill or to wear weapons

The papist and editor of the WordPress blog The Good News in the reactions on his article Make Religious Freedom Great Again writes

“Carrying” a gun is NOT the issue in America. Of course hunting is not the issue. If caught killing in wanton waste, there are high fines. If it continues, you go to jail. We have laws for all your concerns. Not sure where you are getting your data on gun use and waste in America. {comment on the carrying of guns}

America has a different cultural heritage and Constitution than other cultures. I don’t believe that there is no hunting in Belgium. There is lots of hunting in America. Hunting is a big sport. That is the main purpose for the love of guns. Also it puts meat on the table (I eat meat–I used to be a vegetarian). Are guns used irresponsibly–every day. I put that mostly to lack of guidance from elders and the welfare state. {Good news now WordPress 2016/11/11/ Make religious freedom great again/#comment-3443}

In Belgium, like in other countries in Europe we do have hunting under strict laws, but that does not comprehend having people carrying weapons just like that or for their own defence.

In Belgium people also do eat meat of untamed animals or venison, brought on the table because there where hunters killing those animals. But those in charge of the hunt have to go through a selection and have to pass the exams for hunting. But when they are Christians they too should keep in mind what God expects from us how to treat the things we want to eat. We may not kill animals nor plants just for pleasure and may not waste food, as such only do it out of necessity and for necessity (e.g. keeping a balance).

But such weapon-carrying should never be for carrying it as a defence weapon or to use against human beings, and that is what many Christian Americans learn. In Europe we have seen lots of examples where the target when practising is a figure of a human being. We also hear enough of innocent killings in schools, because youngsters could have access easily to such deathly tools.

Christians always should promote life and should be ready for those who have problems concerning life matters. Anti-conception is also part of such life matters, to avoid worse decisions. Every civilised country should make it that there should be no reason to discuss abortion. The same every country should protect its citizens that no accidents or no crimes can be done by dangerous tools, like all sorts of guns.

Why should a citizens being able to buy war guns, or even pistols (which are not much use for hunting I think), but also why would people have to be allowed to wear certain knifes when they are not working on the field or in the wild or on hunt?
Certain knifes can well be accepted in certain occasions but not in others, the same for certain rifles.

But as Christians we should not carry guns at all. Even if you want to eat wild flesh, the hunting can be done by others, let them do it. Plants, animals, human beings are all creatures of God we should respect. We may not tamper with our food and may not spill or kill living things unnecessary or for fun.

All those American Christians should remember that

“Freedom means not limiting the freedom of others”

and that they themselves should also always keep to the teachings they so call promote. So often we hear Americans shouting to “Love the Lord” and saying that they are Christian and that others should become Christians. As such they and we, as Christians, should promote Life (and not death by the use of weapons or by medical tools) and should promote peace and respectfulness for all around us, even when they are not of the same opinion like us.

17. Conclusion

All are welcome to react on certain situations and certain sayings. Such reactions should always happen in a civilised way. What we see and hear happening in the United States of America, protestors not happy that Trump became the president elect, protesting in a violent way never can receive our approval. But certain sayings and action of that political figure who in the coming four years has to lead an enormous nation can’t receive our approbation either. Also us giving our fiat for one way of thinking does not have to mean we exclude all other ways of thinking of the counterpart.

Life is never build up on only two colours black and white. Luckily there may be lots of variations in shades and in colours but also in opinions. Having different opinions on different subjects can only enrich our society and make us to think continuously about those matters discussed. Together we all should construct a society where as many people as possible can live in peace.

People need to find ways to live with each other in a situation that can be pleasant for all parties involved. They should look for ways to be united, not divided.

I thank all people who took the time to read this article and who are willing to take time to read our other articles. I am also very grateful for those readers like papapound and camden41 who were willing to spend time in reading our material and to comment on it, at their own sites (though pity Camden 41 did not make our replies public on his site).

– Marcus Ampe
Founder and editor of Stepping Toes and From Guestwriters

Preceding articles

Islamophobia Must be Fought and Defeated

Stand Up

God Isn’t a Republican

American Christianity no longer resembles its Founder

A Progressive Call to Arms

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Not a silent but (perhaps) less irritating year

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1. Clarification

2. Ways of reaction

3. Concerning opinions of us and of the writers of the original blog article being reblogged by us

4. Concerning the given links to other articles

5. Our or/and my personal opinion

6. Attacked from four sites

7. LGBT, Transgender people versus Eunuchs and Androgynous persons and sexism

8. More than one community targetted

9. Rage against Jews, Marxists and communists

10. Winners and losers

11. Time for additional parties in the United States of America

12. Workforce and Feeling for others

13. Not spreading hate nor killing

14. Political correctness and free choice

15. Freedom and Knowledge safeguard for the future

16. Right to kill or to wear weapons

17. Conclusion

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