Culture War Christianity in American history

In this article, you might find our comments on our previously published articles about Culture War Christians

What Are The Culture Wars?

A History Of The Culture Wars

A Theology of Culture War Christianity

Beyond the Culture Wars

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Jared Stacy writes

What are the Culture Wars?

Think of “culture” as a way of life. It is the sum total of all values, beliefs, and practices making up a communal existence. When God commissions newly formed humanity in Genesis 1 to “fill the earth and subdue it”, he sets men and women into the world with a cultural mandate. His plan was for a human society, united under his rule in the world, ruling with him over the Cosmos as his vice-regents. {What Are The Culture Wars?}

Karl Marx saw how main religion tried to lure people in the ban of the church by false doctrines. It is because the majority of people did not take the time to read the Bible that so many religious groups were able to get people following their false doctrines.

Regularly, people were so prayed for by those doctrines of those churches that they no longer faced the real thing because they preferred to float on those ideas of those churches. It had become so bad that Marx also realised that for many, religion was like an ‘opium for the people’. In lots of Christian and Islamic denominations, their church leaders managed to have their followers, following and worshipping a wrong god and not following the real Christ. since his time still not much has been changed, and there are still lots of false teachers and false prophets around. Marx was disturbed by the knowledge that he saw so many people around him falling for those false human teachings and giving their money away to those churches when there were so many people around them suffering. Marx also noted few dared to question, let alone challenge, church doctrines.

It also bothered several thinkers in the 19th century that the church made no attempt to defend the majority of their churchgoers or parishioners, and did not stand up against the exploitation of parishioners. For far too many centuries, the Roman Catholic Church itself had done everything possible to trot out money from the poorer population.

The German revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist, Karl Marx and his closest collaborator, the German socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels’ answer to the ills of society was according to some, just the opposite of the utopian dreamers’ answers. Mainly this, because the ideas of utopists (like Mr. Ampe) seem for many too far-fetched and unreachable. Though Marx and Engels found enough people who, like them, believed that one could change the way people lived and could come to a better world with less inequality. They, too, went for a better world.

Since World War I the world has evolved incredibly on all levels. Politically it was a time of trying out several political systems, getting more than once in a lot of problems and crises. The Western world clinched at the industrialisation and experienced mixed economies floating between all kinds of political thoughts. Even as the western world became less religious and the church got less of a grip on its citizens, the rich continued to control everything and did everything they could to maintain their power.

For Jared Stacy we have come into a Culture War Christianity where elections are consistently framed He looks at legislation, movies, businesses, etc. as affecting the survival of Christianity itself. For him such

hyperbolic rhetoric is typical. {What Are The Culture Wars?}

For him it is clear that Christ should be at the centre of Christianity. But he also expects something for those who call themselves Christian. He writes

When Jesus prayed,

“on earth as it is on heaven”

he was indicating his expectation and desire that the culture of Heaven becomes the culture of Earth by way of his Church. But does Culture War Christianity, the sort launched in the ’70s, contradict the nature of Jesus’ Kingdom? {What Are The Culture Wars?}

So many people had looked forward to the 20th century, hoping that because of all the new inventions, brought forward by the Industrial Revolution, they would be able to create a world where everything would be much easier and giving them more time to relax. The century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. The English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead.

Already before the seventies of the previous century there was something going wrong in the industrialised world. Even though many countries were allowed to offer independence back to their colonies, they continued to exploit people in their own countries. Even when churches wanted to present God in different ways over the years, people should know That God never changes. He will always be the same and keep to the same Plan He had already from the beginning of times.

The American pastor and current PhD candidate in Theological Ethics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Jared Stacy 
wants to call our attention to this basic theological ethic:

The work of God’s rule spreading throughout the world in individual lives and communities will never contradict who God is. {What Are The Culture Wars?}

We would have loved that, but reality shows something totally different. For centuries, the main Christian churches have chosen another path than the disciples of Christ. The majority of people preferred to keep to their heathen traditions and festivals and the Catholic and several Protestant churches followed them and made Jesus Christ (the Messiah) their god. As such, we must say there is a lot of contradiction in what people say God is. For many, He is not the God of Christ, Who is the God of Israel, but is a god who is part of a three-headed godship, the Trinity.

It is not just that difference of who God is and who Christ is that has brought division in the world of believers. The diversity of religious groups has also brought both confusion and discord. Coming closer to the 21st-century tension or strife resulting from a lack of agreement came to bring even more separation between the true followers of the Nazarene Jewish masterteacher Jeshua  ben Joseph (Jesus Christ) and the name-Christians who worship Jesus as their god and do not shy away from also worshipping all kinds of people they call saints, this while the One True God desires full recognition and worship.

We have the impression that the blog writer who also writes for platforms like NPR, the BBC, Current, and For the Church, does not see (or does not know) the multiple camps in Christendom. He only mentions two of them. He writes

To speak generally, mischaracterizations come from two camps. Let’s call one group “conscientious objectors” and the other, “vocal advocates”.

Some accuse conscientious objectors to the Culture Wars of believing that Christianity should have no influence in the public square. They slander these conscientious objectors as faithless & godless, or misrepresent them as conspiratorially hypocritical, secretly harboring a progressive political agenda.

On the other end of the spectrum, some conscientious objectors accuse vocal advocates of conflating Christianity with cultural power. This often leads them to slander vocal advocates as compromising sell-outs, or mischaracterize their advocacy & well-connected influence as grounded in an inherently complicit conservative agenda. No doubt, I believe there are instances of legitimate criticisms from boths sides in Christian spaces. But polarity abounds. {What Are The Culture Wars?}

For him the polarizing gap between vocal advocates and conscientious objectors reveals a vast “no man’s land” in American evangelicalism. This is why he believes his series has pastoral and personal implications for all of us.

Because either you or someone you know is wandering the no man’s land as a refugee from the Culture Wars. {What Are The Culture Wars?}

Many American evangelicals are proud that they (so-called) keep to The 10 Commandments, though all of them already sin against the first commandment, not keeping to The Only One True God, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah of hosts, the God above all gods.

David Hansen correctly says

“The majority of Americans will tell any pollster that they believe in the Ten Commandments. But only a small percentage of those people could even recite the Ten Commandment; and even a smaller percentage have any genuine interest in following them.” {The 10 Commandments in American Culture}

Lots of North Americans should seriously think about their religion and their faith. About that faith Stacy says there is a danger.

On a day of hope, we need a fresh reminder of the danger inherent in an embrace of Christian faith. {The Danger of Faith}

He points out the trap many Americans have fallen into.

It is American consumer Christianity that invites us to “make Jesus Lord of our lives”. This pitch makes Christ a commodity, leaving us—the consumer—with control. The resurrection and ascension is a coronation that happens apart from our consumer choice & control. {The Danger of Faith}

1909 painting The Worship of Mammon, the god of material wealth, by Evelyn De Morgan

The great part of the US population, as well as in other developed countries, is that believers have deviated from Biblical truth as well as become wedded to matter and thus actually honour the god Mammon. Several denominations in the United States make clever use of asking people for money all the time, pretending that they will then have a better life. It has also become so ingrained in people that one can only be successful if one has acquired a lot of money. Consequently, many do everything possible to be as rich as possible (on the material plane) while completely neglecting spiritual wealth. Many have forgotten that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

Stacy writes

It is hard to deny today that for many, the supposed downfall of America is synonymous with the collapse of Christianity. Jesus confronts this idolatry with his Kingdom. {The Danger of Faith}

Lots of Americans are even not aware of how they participate in idolatry, which they prove by continually clinging to pagan festivals such as Candlemas, Easter, Halloween and Christmas, to name only the main ones, and to cling to money and material gain.

He reigns over a Kingdom that cannot be shaken through the rising and falling empires of this world. {The Danger of Faith}

And throughout history, many kingships or kingdoms and principalities as well as republics have risen and fallen. Never before has man succeeded in creating a nation or empire in which everyone was comfortable and where justice was done to everyone. Several Christians, in imitation of Christ, have tried to make people understand how best to live in unity with fellow human beings, plants and animals.

The 1963 March on Washington participants and leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, as mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s.

When we look at the German culture struggle of the 1870’s (kulturkampf) it’s clear that the American Civil Rights movement was a “Culture War” too. King’s commitment to non-violence laid a distinct Christian foundation for the Civil Rights movement. But white evangelicals of the time either distanced themselves from King, or denounced the Civil Rights movement entirely, with calls to “just preach the gospel.”  {A History Of The Culture Wars}

writes Stacy.

But not many white Americans were really willing to go to preach what was really written in the gospel. They prefer just to take some phrases out of context to repeat them so that people come to believe them.

The forty odd years from this origin point until today witnessed the end of the Cold War and an insurrection at the US Capitol. Between these bookends, Culture War Christianity made itself known & felt in American society through movements. (See, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne; Stan Gall, Borderlines: Reflections on Sex, War, and the Church; Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals; Tim Gloege, Guaranteed Pure; historical treatments on these movements) {A History Of The Culture Wars}

Stacy reminds his readers:

The arguments and relationships in the antebellum South were transported via Lost Cause theology 100 years into the future, seen in white evangelical responses to the Civil Rights Movement. But these leaders could not ignore the impact of King’s kulturkampf. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

He assures his readers that

Culture War Christianity started after the Civil Rights Movement, not before. It borrows the playbook of the CRM. Ironically, it thrives on a sort of “persecuted minority” mindset, borrowed from the Civil Rights movement, but not actually indicative of the communal experience in its main constituents: white evangelicals. A minority mindset is a prominent characteristic of God’s people in the Scriptures. However, this mindset is not characteristic of evangelical experience in the United States. Race relations and evangelical’s historic participation in the moral establishment offer two historical keys that present a necessary critique of modern Culture War Christianity. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

He believes it is impossible to understand the history behind Culture War Christianity apart from race relations in the United States. So, we begin where we left off, with this statement:

The Culture Wars began when white American evangelicals took the activist playbook from the very Civil Rights leaders they opposed, to advance a moral agenda they could support.

…

Some were overtly political, like the Moral Majority or Christian Coalition. Others would serve the notion of family values, yet retain political influence, like Focus on the Family or Promise Keepers. Local churches and expansive media (books, radio, television) formed the local grassroots communities made these movements possible.

While this all may seem quite familiar, especially if you inhabited spaces within white American Christianity during the last 40 years, a history of the Culture Wars would be best served by going back 2 centuries to look at the phrase “Culture War” itself. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

In his blog he then goes back to the 19th century, across the Atlantic Ocean where the Germans provide us with a glimpse into a framework upstream to both the Civil Rights Movement and “Culture War Christianity” at a time when a new world order was being born. In that era, he recognises the central position of the Catholic Church, facing new threats to its grasp on power.

From the political power of the nation- state to the intellectual frameworks of liberalism and Darwinism, the winds were shifting. In response, the Church produced a flurry of theological statements and denouncements meant to stem the tide of ideas that threatened its hold on the Old World Order. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

Portrait of Pope Pius IX circa 1864

The Holy See under Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1864, brought an appendix to the Quanta cura encyclical, with a syllabus where the church wanted to have the people see that it was with the times and recognised 80 of the

“principal errors of our times.”

As the errors listed had already been condemned in allocutions, encyclicals, and other apostolic letters, the Syllabus said nothing new and so could not be contested. Its importance lay in the fact that it published to the world what had previously been preached in the main only to the bishops, and that it made general what had been previously specific denunciations concerned with particular events. Perhaps the most famous article, the 80th, stigmatising as an error the view that

“the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation,”

sought its authority in the pope’s refusal, in Jamdudum Cernimus, to have any dealings with the new Italian kingdom. On both scores, the Syllabus undermined the liberal Catholics’ position, for it destroyed their following among intellectuals and placed their program out of court.

The Church denounced religious liberty, the nation-state, and other consequences stemming from the “threat of liberalism.” {A History Of The Culture Wars}

For some time there had been bumbling or difficulty in having a good relationship with the Catholic Church. More thinkers also came to speak out about the huge profits the Church was making on the backs of the faithful. Increasingly, there was also the idea of going back to the basics of Christ’s teachings where simplicity was preached and people were taught how to stand up for and care for each other. In the gospel, Jesus set a good example of how not only Christians should live, but actually every human being.

In the 1870’s, the German people, specifically within the Kingdom of Prussia, found themselves in conflict with the Catholic Church over their own Reformation roots and a rapidly secularizing order. This conflict had ramifications for both the Church and the separated German states. As a result of this conflict swirling around the German peoples, individual German States united along highly Protestant lines under Otto Von Bismark of Prussia. (See, Helmut Walser Smith, editor, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History) This period of conflict and change was given a name: Kulturkampf, or “Culture Struggle”. This German kulturkampf shows us how struggles between competing visions for human existence are sparked by complex reactions between religion, politics, and power. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

It is the clash between people of the common people, as well as philosophers and political thinkers, with the church, that caused very animated conversations in several places in the German Empire about faith, church, and the way we as human beings should choose to arrive at a better world.

After World War II several American religious groups tried to have the power over the American people. They tried to convince them that they were the sole church which preached the truth. Some even went so far to tell the people they were chosen by God and that their church is the only one that can bring them in heaven. For those churches, it is certain that one can only be accepted by God if one follows their rules. Of course, such a saying is absurd, but a large majority of Americans follow that false statement. In the life of faith, it is also certain that no particular church by Jesus was ever designated as the only one to follow.

By studying German kulturkampf, we can begin to see the American Culture War’s false claim to exclusivity and authority by claiming itself to be the sole representative and defender of orthodox Christianity. When we realize this — that American Culture War Christianity is not the single defender of the faith —  it trains us to adopt a healthy critical filter every time a Christian leader describes the “very survival of Christianity at stake” as a smoke screen for unChristian agreements with power. On the other hand, conscientious objectors to Culture War Christianity would do well to consider how “culture struggle” might be a positive expression of Christian faith. There is space to consider positive “culture struggle”. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

King’s kulturkampf was rooted in Christian principles, and sought to dismantle the injustices of racial segregation, subjugation and discrimination within America. With the upcoming of the more conservative Christians, and/or conservative evangelicals, the position between coloured people worsened again and nationalism and (far) right-wing ideas came to the forefront in the States, the same way they did in the 1930s in Europe. Thus, from Europe, we could see the very dangerous development of right-wing rule and the glorification of such despots as Donald Trump, who is a danger to the world.

What would come to define and shape Culture War Christianity in 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s in the US is not at all what King and several serious preachers had in mind. The growing conservatism by the Americans brought forward people who are against equality and who find the white man is the pure race. Even Billy Graham came to criticise segregation but also denounced the non-violent demonstrations as contributing to further violence.

Others denounced calls for desegregation entirely. Back in 1960, Bob Jones Sr. took harder lines at Christians supporting an end to segregation by referring to them as “religious infidels”. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

Several pastors of mega-churches, especially in white neighbourhoods, succeeded in shifting all the faults of the system onto the backs of the blacks and refugees who just’ came and invaded America’, without the government doing enough to stop them. One would think the religious leaders would have their moral reasoning to flow from a theological calculus, but it (for sure) did not come from Biblical teaching.

Stacy writes

Charles Ivory’s masterful Proslavery Christianity examines the white evangelical relationship with black evangelicals before the Civil War. He looks at how these interactions between white and black Christians, slave and free, actually came to shape the white evangelical theological defense of slavery. If we want to understand the Culture War Christianity of Falwell, and other white evangelicals, we need to examine their response to the Civil Rights Movement. I believe their response has its source in the theological calculus of white evangelicals in the antebellum South. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

Ivory writes it was not uncommon for white and black evangelicals to worship within the same church. Indeed, the revival of the late 18th century did not discriminate on the basis of cultural background. But the theological conflict in evangelical churches pre-Civil War centered around conversion. Namely, does Christian conversion necessitate manumission? Today, Christians would argue chattel slavery is indefensible regardless of a slave’s conversion to Christianity. Humanity is not property. However, the historical context of the time made the question of conversion and manumission the frontline theological conflict regarding chattel slavery within evangelical churches. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

In West Europe the people had gone already through that process, knowing that slavery was something one could not accept in a civilised society. On this, several speakers came to draw attention to a system to bring more equality among all people. The road to socialism and communism was thus promoted by several enthusiasts.

Culture War Christianity has long since ossified into the de facto expression of faith for many white American evangelicals.

But those white American Christians have come to love themselves more than someone else and consider themselves as the only ones worthy to govern America. They do not have an eye at all for the indigenous people, because they consider themselves as the rightful founders and owners of America.

For 200 years, white evangelicalism has been an insider. No where has the minority mindset been more pervasive in our modern conception of Culture War Christianity than rhetoric. Phrases like “drain the swamp”, “make America great again”, and “take back America for God” in evangelical politics go right next to “that’s too political” and “just preach the gospel” in evangelical churches. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

We can wonder from who those evangelicals have to take back ‘their country’! Those evangelicals seem not to have any idea what the ‘founders’ of America had in mind and why they wanted religion and government separated.

While separation of church and state was federally enshrined in the Constitution, it did not play out in those strict terms in state and local governments. This changed in the early 20th century, when the Scopes trial, New Deal politics, and internal theological warring between fundamentalists and modernists left a vacuum in American society that evangelicalism used to fill in common culture. Neo-evangelicals like Billy Graham emerged in this vacuum. But for the long of American history, Christians have not only been influential, but privileged.

How can a privileged majority come to see itself as a minority? Culture War Christianity accomplishes this in part by dressing itself in the Biblical and theological concept of a remnant. A faithful few of God’s people who remain loyal to God and his ways in a foreign, godless land. But this theological adaptation does not line up with the historical participation of white evangelicals in the moral establishment of the United States. Yet, the drums of Culture War for white American Christians implied a greater enemy beyond its borders. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

Though the big problem of those Tea Party and conservative or fundamentalist evangelicals is that they are not at all remaining “loyal to God and his ways in a foreign, godless land” they even have betrayed God and His son on several levels. They have created some three-headed god (or three-une being) and political leaders such as Trump as their gods, and consider their American flag as their religious symbol ^{even a Christian symbol}. For sure they can not belong to the faithful few of God’s people, because they do not believe in the Only One True God and because they do not act like People of God. They themselves are part of that ‘dark world’ the Bible is talking about. And now in those times that darkness and of gloominess can be seen everywhere, they also do everything to create division and spread hate, instead of spreading the love of Christ and his great message of a world full of peace. Those evangelicals with other name Christians have made it a sport to make fun of, blacken and curse true Christians. They do everything possible to get people away from those true worshippers of God. They also have some sort of paranoia and consider all people from abroad as dangerous suspects. They fear those coming from outside America would destroy their freedom.

Stacy remarks

the drums of Culture War for white American Christians implied a greater enemy beyond its borders. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

and also see what happened under the influence of certain political figures.

The Culture Wars of white American evangelicalism was not the reaction of the minority against the majority, but the majority against a imagined majority. It is hard to avoid this conclusion given overwhelming support for President Trump. {A History Of The Culture Wars}

Stacy continues writing

In the place of Jesus’ active reign today, we find American Christians given to other reigning power structures: nationalism, racism, misogyny, and bigotry. They are discipled by political—not resurrection—power. This is partly the reason why Culture War Christians took greater issue with Kaepernick’s supposed desecration of the flag than they might with his concerns over police brutality against image bearers. They operate in a power structure other than the Kingdom of Jesus. {A Theology of Culture War Christianity}

Stacys wonders

What if Culture War Christianity long ago bowed the knee to a nationalist, secular conservatism? One with its law & order politics, reticence on issues of race, and idolatry of country? {Beyond the Culture Wars}

Ans says that he has argued this in his series.

Long before white evangelicals told MLK to “just preach the gospel”, there has always been a Christianity domesticated by, and deployed in defense of, the status quo in this country. Frederick Douglass called it before any of us. And in this sort of Christianity, “make disciples” has too often been code for “make people like us” not “make us like Jesus”. {Beyond the Culture Wars}

There lies one of the biggest problems in American Christendom. The majority of Americans does not take time enough to seriously study the Scriptures. For most of them the Bible also only means the New Testament. Lots of those evangelicals also do not understand what that sacrificial offering of Jesus, letting himself be nailed at the stake, means. For them it is very difficult to grasp how a man of flesh and blood could give himself as a lamb for whitewashing the sins of many.

Some of those white evangelicals living in the United States of America are convinced they are the only ones who can  Make America Great Again and build up the most correct state. They forget how so many people before them have tried already to construct an ideal state. They should know it shall only happen under Jesus Christ that we shall be able to live in a perfect world.

Let us also not forget Niebuhr’s saying,

“any good worth doing takes more than one lifetime.”

According to Jared Stacy

This should give us pause before we entertain pragmatism to bring about change in our lifetime. It was Jesus who said,

“what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his soul?”

This should give us pause as we count the cost of pragmatism to reveal the Kingdom of God. {Beyond the Culture Wars}

He ends his article series by saying

After all, the cross is not a symbol of cultural superiority for white America, but of surrender and sacrifice in the Kingdom of God. We must measure our motivations by the Cross, and our methods. Take it from me. A millennial. The generation who was born in and shaped by the ‘Jesus & John Wayne evangelicalism” in its prime. {Beyond the Culture Wars}

And recognises the problem

Culture War Christianity allows you to have a Christian worldview and reject the Cross.   {Beyond the Culture Wars}

By which he hopefully means: rejecting the ransom offering of that Jewish Nazarene master teacher, Jeshua ben Josef, or Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

It substitutes other, more pragmatic means to really get things done. But in the Kingdom of Jesus the only strategy available for implementing a Christian worldview is the Cross.  {Beyond the Culture Wars}

We have to do away with the false teaching in Christendom and have to go back to the Biblical teachings and keep to them, adhering to Biblical Truth and not human doctrine.

We should recognise the danger of that growing conservative evangelism.

For all it’s posturing about the morality of America, Culture War Christianity has stopped its ear to calls for ethnic & economic justice. Has tied its hands in response to sexual scandal and abuse in its ranks. Yet expresses incredulity when the world fails to take its sexual ethic seriously. Culture War Christianity can only provide more entrenchment, more combat, and more pragmatism. But crucified Christianity is growing the world over, and—as it has always done— turning the world upside down.  {Beyond the Culture Wars}

Writing from Scotland, the author of the mentioned articles, wants to suggest a simple but humble invitation to venture into the wilderness as an act of faithfulness. For him,

the wilderness meant stepping out of the American pastorate, and out of America. This was my move made in faith. An attempt to combat the rise of cynicism in my own spirit, channeling it into meaningful, faithful action.  {Beyond the Culture Wars}

From Moses, to Elijah, to Christ. Perhaps the wilderness is the place for those disenchanted and disillusioned, those disowned and disinherited from Culture War Christianity, to begin to see the Cross not as a symbol storming the US Capitol, but again as a place where our power grabs go to die. And where there is death to our ability to bring about change, God brings resurrection that changes everything.  {Beyond the Culture Wars}

The Austrian philosopher and Roman Catholic priest known for his radical polemics arguing that the benefits of many modern technologies and social arrangements were illusory and that, still further, such developments undermined humans’ self-sufficiency, freedom, and dignity, Ivan Illich illumines what it is to be in the world, but not of it — just like Jesus.

Jared Stacy offers his words as a simple reflection in the conclusion to his series:

It is astonishing what the devil says: I have all power, it has been given to me, and I am the one to hand it on — submit, and it is yours. Jesus of course does not submit…Not for a moment, however, does Jesus contradict the devil. He does not question that the devil holds all power, nor that this power has been given to him, nor that he, the devil, gives it to whom he pleases. This is a point which is easily overlooked. By his silence Jesus recognizes power that is established as “devil” and defines Himself as The Powerless. He who cannot accept this view on power cannot look at establishments through the spectacle of the Gospel. This is what clergy and churches often have difficulty doing. They are so strongly motivated by the image of church as a “helping institution” that they are constantly motivated to hold power, share in it or, at least, influence it.  {Beyond the Culture Wars}

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Please also do find to read

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3. My faith and hope
4. Utopian dreams
5. Are Christianity and Capitalism Compatible?
6. The Upbringing of Ideas and the Extrapolation of Capitalism
7. A famous individual by the name of Jesus of Nazareth
8. 19th and 20th Century Shifts in bourgeoisie
9. All that is solid still melts into air.
10. Intellectual servility a curse of mankind
11. The New Imperialist Structure
12. Is Christianity a Greedy Religion?
13. Should church members question preachers about the doctrine that is not in the Holy Bible?
14. A History Of The Culture Wars
15. Unhappy people in empty churches
16. Gradual decline by American Christians
17. Christians are increasingly mixing and matching their faith in unexpected ways
18. Being Christian in Western Europe at the beginning of the 21st century #1
19. The decline of religion in the US continues unabated
20. Liberation, salvation and the Latin American voice entering the Vatican
21. Eyes on pages and messages on social media
22. Troubles testing your faith and giving you patience and good prospects
23. The Most Appropriate teacher and Scoffers in our contemporary age
24. Social media for Trumpists and changing nature of warfare
25. Blinded crying blue murder having being made afraid by a bugaboo
26. False teachers and false prophets still around
27. The Field is the World #4 Many who leave the church
28. Unhappy people in empty churches (Our World)
29. Hardships for choosing to follow the real Christ
30. Church indeed critical in faith development
31. Crises of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic Money
32. International Proletariat
33. The killing of capitalism
34. The Principles of Communism – Friedrich Engels
35. Ability
36. Ability (part 2)
37. Ability (part 3) Thoughts around Ability
38. Ability (part 4) Thought about the ability to have ability
39. Ability (part 5) Thought about the abilities to be under God’s Spirit
40. To whom do we want to be enslaved
41. Compromise and accomodation
42. A Living Faith #3 Faith put into action
43. Not saying Jeshua is God
44. The 17th annual White Privilege Conference a militantly Christophobic conference held in Philadelphia
45. Faith, storms and actions to be taken
46. Christ’s ethical teaching
47. Obeying God rather than man & A Time to Act
48. Entering 2022 still Aiming for a society without exploitation or oppression
49. News that’s fit to print
50. Beyond the Culture Wars
51. January 6: A Failed Apocalypse
52. Hope For, But Not In, Evangelicalism
53. Presbyterians and Reformed Christians, membership and active involvement is part of a congregation’s DNA
54. The Guardian’s view on the world 1st week of June

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22. Cultural Amnesia
23. The Future of Governance
24. False American Dream
25. Thinking Critically about Marxism, Socialism and Communism (All in fewer than 1000 words!)
26. The Missing Faith Dimension of the Capitalism vs. Socialism Debate
27. A Broken system
28. Psychological Warfare
29. Humanities Retribution
30. Walk The Path
31. Reform or Revolution? A Debate (I)
32. Reform or Revolution? A Debate (II)
33. Editorial: what is humane socialism?
34. The virtues of good, enlightened, accountable elitism
35. The Radical Left Needs to Call into Question Existing Social Institutions at Every Opportunity, Part Four
36. End of capitalism as we know it
37. The Future is History
38. The true believer
39. Research Resources: Communism in America
40. “A Spectre is Haunting Europe…”
41. Finding the Ideal, Perfect Community
42. So You Think Capitalism Is Evil
43. Capitalism: The Ultimate Empowerment
44. Capitalism: Misunderstood
45. On the Current Conjuncture
46. The discipled political church
47. Veneration (Gilbert and Gilbert)
48. Christianity and Idealism (Van Til)
49. Brief Insights on Mastering Bible Doctrine (Heiser)
50. A Field Guide on False Teaching
51. Andrew McWilliams-Doty looks at evangelicals
52. Evangelical: Leave It or Love It?
53. How the term Evangelical has grown to blur theology and ideology
54. Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics – An Interview
55. Which Christians Actually Evangelize
56. Is it Time to Abandon “Evangelical?”
57. Warped Christianity
58. The 10 Commandments in American Culture
59. Communist Infiltration, What Did Bella Dodd REALLY Know – YouTube
60. German priest contradicts pope and backs pornography as sexual ‘relief’ for celibates | Catholic News Agency
61. Sports Star to Be Jailed 10 Months for ‘Transphobic’ Message
62. What is at stake in the buffer zone debate? | Isabel Vaughan-Spruce | The Critic Magazine
63. Win for Christian ministry after judge refuses to strike out discrimination case – Christian Concern
64. Watch the body language in this heated exchange yesterday between Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Chinese Emperor Xi 👀 | Not the Bee
65. Episode 21 – Stella(r) (Hypo)Creasy and the Gov Crackdown on Free Speech – YouTube
66. Senate advances same-sex marriage bill amid religious freedom concerns – Catholic World Report
67. America/Brazl – After 50 years, the mission of Cimi is still “to defend with courage and prophecy the cause of the indigenous peoples” – Agenzia Fides
68. The Christian Father -Conferences of the Men’s Group – YouTube

A serious inflammation of the liver and dark corners in American medicine

When World War II began, the US military discovered that it had a huge health problem: hepatitis. Nothing much was known about the disease and the military wanted to know how to prevent it and cure it.

So, from shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1942 to the end of the War and continuing to 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and to develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks.

A new book from Yale University Press, Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis describes the medical and ethical issues behind hepatitis experiments.

Please read more:

Hepatitis research: more dark corners in American medicine

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5. Liver expression of IL-22, IL-22R1 and IL-22BP in patients with chronic hepatitis C with different fibrosis stages
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7. Prevalence of Hepatitis B Calls for Further Intervention in Asia
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5 ways America changed God

In the period of our present time system (Gregorian Calendar), the world has done everything to change God.

The majority of America’s churches teach that God is the same yesterday, today and forever. though when they would look at the person many take as their god and the God of the Bible, you would expect them to see that they are totally different entities. One is an Eternal Allknowing Spirit God, not having birth nor death, and having no flesh, bones or blood, and Who can not be seen by man. The other person they take for god, is called the son of God in the Bible, and was born and seen by many people. That man of flesh, bones and blood also had to learn everything and at the end of his life still did not know a lot of things; He even did not know when he would be coming back or when the Last Days would take place, which would be very important and not to be missed moments for all people.

Lots of Christians and certainly lots of Americans do not seem to see those differences between those two Biblical characters. Considering their country’s near-400-year history, can we honestly say that their concepts and perceptions about God haven’t evolved?

In a column for CNN, Matthew Paul Turner wonders if the contemporary American God is the same as in 1629, when the Puritans began organizing a mass exodus toward their “Promised Land”?

He writes:

Is our modern God the same as in 1801, when Christians at a revival in Kentucky became so filled up with God’s spirit that they got down on all-fours and barked and howled like wild dogs?

More recently, is our God the same as in 2000, when born again Republican George W. Bush won (sort of) the presidential election by rallying America’s then thriving evangelical electorate with a Jesus-tinged GOP rhetoric he called “compassionate conservatism.”

The truth is, no. God is likely not exactly the same as God was yesterday, not here in the United States, not among America’s faithful. Here, God changes.

According Matthew Paul Turner  the American’s making God into their own image isn’t a new trend. He recognises that they’ve been changing God since Anglo Saxons first stepped foot onto these shores of the New World. He gives five examples.

1. The Puritans’delusions, who had the idea that God had chosen them and ordained their prosperity before the foundations of the Earth.
2. God creates evangelicals. One of the biggest influences of the Great Awakening was how God altered the way he interacted with America’s people.
3. America falls in love with Jesus. Looking at Baptist and Methodist, congregations which boasted a more laid-back approach to worship and faith as opposed to the stuffy religiosity of Congregational and Anglican gatherings. – The simpler approach to Christianity that Methodists and Baptists offered would eventually be tested by the nation’s debate over slavery, a conflict that divided America’s churches long before it divided a nation.
4. America’s apocalyptic obsession In the decades after the Civil War, America’s Jesus-focused Christianity led to John Nelson Darby’s apocalyptic-heavy theology, dispensationalism. Among evangelicals, dispensationalism also cultivated a culture of fear, defensiveness and carelessness about helping a “doomed world.”
5. The Billy Graham effect As the country sought healing after World War II, Americans began searching for hope in the God-smorgasbord that Christianity had laid out, from Bible-believing fundamentalism to Holy Ghost-inspired Pentecostalism, from education-minded Roman Catholicism to progressive-leaning high church spiritualism.

He remarks

Today, most Christians can’t distinguish between God and GOD®, which has made America’s deity into a superpower, an almighty deity that can be mixed with just about anything, from enterprise to politics, from hate campaigns to promises of prosperity.

Here in America, God is constantly changing. It’s a divine story that we edit and manipulate—sometimes innocently and sometimes intentionally—into our own narratives.

Matthew Paul Turner is the author of “Our Great Big American God: A Short History of Our Ever-Growing Deity.” The views expressed in this column belong to Turner. 

On Holocaust Memorial Day US Embassy Falsely Claims America Liberated Auschwitz

To take note:

United States Embassy in Denmark apologized for statement made > incorrectly claimed American troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp > Red Army troops reached its gates on January 27, 1945

• incorrect statement = immediately met with scorn online => another example of Soviet erasure + insult to enormous sacrifice U.S.S.R. made to defeat fascism in Europe.
• Wikipedia has been removing those same pictures, a fact discovered by Lithuanian journalist Vladimir Vodo. While the encyclopedia’s administrators argued that they might not technically be in the public domain, erasing images of the Russian liberation of Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day is not an optically wise move.
• Soviet Union = responsible for killing ~ four/five Nazis during conflict + suffered ~ 95 % of all Allied Army casualties. => scale loss enormous ~  26.6 million dead – ~ sixty-three times total American sacrifice in both Europe +  Pacific.
• Latvia + Lithuania lost a similar number of people as entire United States. 
• far from common knowledge in America > 2015 poll = just 11 % of Americans knew > Soviet Union contributed most to defeat of Nazi Germany,
• Americans large majority picking U.S. = most important nation.
• United Kingdom >Britons incorrectly believed they primarily defeated Soviet Union.

UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM

By Alan Macleod

Source

he United States Embassy in Denmark has apologized for a statement it made earlier this week that incorrectly claimed that it was American troops that liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In fact, Red Army troops reached its gates on January 27, 1945. “We acknowledge the important contributions of all Allied Forces during WWII and remember the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust,” the correction read.

U.S. Embassy Denmark

✔@usembdenmark

 · 

I går skrev vi ved en fejl, at Auschwitz-Birkenau blev befriet af amerikanske soldater. Det var selvfølgeligt sovjetiske soldater. Vi anerkender alle de allierede styrkers vigtige bidrag under Den Anden Verdenskrig og mindes de 6 millioner jøder, der døde under Holocaust.

U.S. Embassy Denmark

✔@usembdenmark

Yesterday, we inadvertently wrote that US troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was of course liberated by Soviet troops. We acknowledge the important contributions of all Allied Forces during…

View original post 677 more words

Oswiecim

To remember

village of Oswiecim, more commonly known by German name as Auschwitz, ordinary S. Polish village with small Cavalry school, in swampy land, area covered by forests, about 40 minutes fr.ancient Royal Capital of Krakow.

Death Camps > Holocaust =/=  place you want to visit more than once.

• Heinrich Himmler, Head of SS wanted to study habits + lifestyle Sinti people (belonged to an Aryan tribe)
• Sinti housed in Birkenau = large industrial extermination camp, > Auschwitz I = very small in comparison.
• After study > all gassed in one night / one survivor (sent to another camp day prior to mass execution).
• could not imagine having family living in such a place > very common amongst SS Guards.
• Camp Commander Höss hanged in 1947 by Polish Government.
• site refurbished by SS  just after invasion of Poland > first opened in May 1940 > to house + kill Polish Intelligentsia, Polish Resistance Fighters + Russian prisoners + Resistance fighters from many other European countries, Priests + Nuns also. Later Jews form a contingent of prisoners. => ~ 70,000 people die at Auschwitz I Camp.
• one building in particular = never forget > Camp Tribunal ~~ only sentence = death.
• Prisoners quick trial to humiliate + degrade person = common for political prisoners, + inmate stripped naked > outside stone courtyard > knelt + shot behind the head.
• different insignia prisoners > what class of prisoner
• list of people not fit into political agenda of Nazi ideology = very long.<= criteria could be racial, ethnic, religious, political, medical, sexual orientation, general, etc… =/= restricted to Jews only
• ~ 7 million Poles special target => Poland to be wiped out completely +  systematically,
• Russians + other Slavic people targeted for extermination.
• Opponents, resistants of any stripe, persons belonging to an opposition or a labour union, journalists, teachers, people suffering fr. physical or mental handicap = exterminated.
• In Germany = hospitals emptied, families received an official death certificate with an invented cause of death.
• Catholic Priests + Nuns not safe either,<=  old rivalries of Thirty year War between Catholics + Protestants playing out again > in Bavaria a Catholic stronghold repression was vicious.

 

• Little library cards recorded in details lives + who they were = madness = ? killing people systematically =>understood humans capable of great evil which boggles the mind + becomes incomprehensible.
• Birkenau – built on ruins of small village Brzezinka, swampy ground Birkenau or Auschwitz II = immense, cheap wood barracks lined up = opened in November 1943 > trains entered through infamous gate tower.
• Dr.Mengele + his acolyte decided on the spot >  who would die now or be worked to death or who would be subjected to horrible pseudo-medical experimentation.
• camp divided in neighbourhoods, all fenced in from each other.
• Most prisoners at Birkenau = Jews + Gypsies with populations of Russian prisoners +  section for Czech & Slovak families. = one million people perished.
• no human emotions involved = cold mechanization of death as a means to achieve a political goal enshrined in an ideology of hate > presented to the masses in Germany as well meaning & reasonable to ensure prosperity.

 

• total numbers of dead =/= important =>  important = to remember people = just like you or me = ordinary people with jobs, families & friends, from all walks of life, from many countries, princes + paupers, of various religions + beliefs.
• Nazi destroyed Europe, culture, education, humanity > whole way of life.
• introduced into the world an evil we still live with today, that evil was not destroyed in 1945, it lingers, > in former Yugoslavia 1991-1995 + so many on-going conflicts.

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Preceding

An Anniversary forgotten

How a British ‘Master Spy’ Saved Thousands of Jews in the Holocaust

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Find also to read:

1. Reformed Churches Muzzled but Protest at Barmen
2. Through the Lens of Faith
3. Nazi Germany
4. the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served
5. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
6. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
7. Luca Jahier, EESC President on the present intolerance
8. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
9. Seventy-five years ago on January 27
10. January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
11. 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
12. 5th World Holocaust Forum
13. Dedication ceremony for a memorial at Jerusalem’s Sachar Park in honour of the casualties of the Siege of Leningrad
14. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking
15. What’s the Future of Holocaust Remembrance?
16. Christadelphians’ role in the rescue of Jewish children from Nazi Germany
17. Christadelphians, the Kindertransport, and Rescue from the Holocaust

Larry Muffin At Home

You have heard of the village of Oswiecim in Southern Poland about 40 minutes from the ancient Royal Capital of Krakow. Today it is more commonly known by its German name as Auschwitz. I visited this village and the Death Camps about 5 times while in Poland. I did not know much about it at first, no more than the average person did through the usual media reports, movies and history that has been repeated so many times about the Holocaust. I went many times for official reasons to attend ceremonies or because our visitors wanted to see it. It is not a place you want to visit more than once.

Oswiecim, Southern Poland, today 

Oswiecim was an ordinary Polish village with a small Cavalry school, the school was closed at some point and then the buildings became a trade school which was in turn closed. The area is covered…

View original post 1,365 more words

How a British ‘Master Spy’ Saved Thousands of Jews in the Holocaust

In 2005, the United Nations designated 27 January as an International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. On Monday 27 January 2020 it was a more special International Holocaust Remembrance Day because of the 75th anniversary of the Jewish liberation from Auschwitz.

Underneath you may find a list of articles looking at the commemorations and reactions which were made to those who were allowed to speak at those commemorations. In those articles you shall come to see how we are developing again to a dangerous situation where certain people with ‘other ideas’ and another religion than the ‘main stream’ are again considered as to be outcast and to be silenced or not having the right to speak.

When looking at that horrible period of cruelty and the many years that people stood aside not daring to open their mouth, we luckily may find also dome positive notes of people who dared to help others, risking their own life.

Despite the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, thousands of Jewish lives were spared because of the covert operations of unsung heroes.

One such man was Major Francis “Frank” Edward Foley CMG , a passport control officer for the British embassy in Berlin, who “bent the rules” and helped thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht and before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Major Francis “Frank” Edward Foley (1884-1958) recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust and as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Though most saw Foley as a “low-level British bureaucrat serving in Berlin” just before World War II, ^{[1 Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Nazi Holocaust, “Francis Foley,” (Center Street Publishing, 2017). ]} he was actually a master spy in the MI6, the British intelligence service. He focused his efforts on the rise of German Communists, then on Hitler’s campaign to reactivate and expand the German military — until he learned what was happening in the Nazi concentration camps.^{[2 Gradd, 2017]} He went on to secretly save thousands of Jewish lives.

To remember the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, we offer this reflection on Frank Foley’s selfless rescue missions, adapted from My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Nazi Holocaust. 

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Foley’s intelligence operation . . . revealed evidence that Jewish inmates imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps being erected throughout Germany were suffering horrors. Despite his protests, however, his London superiors waved away the accounts as ridiculous exaggerations. Foley then appealed to British immigration officials, asking them to expedite Jewish requests for asylum in Great Britain and its colonies, but encountered more bureaucratic apathy.

Frustrated but determined, Foley decided to help Germany’s Jews himself. Using his official cover as the British passport control officer in Berlin, he began issuing droves of passports to Jews seeking escape from Germany. Like Feng Shan Ho, his Chinese counterpart in Austria, Foley was motivated by more than just humanitarian concerns: his faith as a Christian compelled him to act, he believed—especially when so many of those who were persecuting the Jews claimed that they were Christians.

. . .

The pogrom against the Jews which left thousands of premises, homes and synagogues destroyed and therefore became widely known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass – its meaning taken from the smashed windows and shards of broken glass strewn across German streets.

After Kristallnacht in 1938, the desperation increased within Germany’s Jewish community. Determined to escape the Nazis and save their families, German Jews began showing up unannounced at Foley’s Berlin flat. As a passport officer, he did not have diplomatic immunity, and he knew what could happen to him if Nazi authorities learned he was issuing thousands of passports or personally harbouring Jews. Despite the danger, he continued his mission. . . . Every month, hundreds of Jews came to Foley seeking escape from Nazi Germany. He realized that most of them would be hauled off to concentration camps before they could be processed by the ponderous, bureaucratic British immigration system — so he developed a streamlined process that severely stretched regulations but still complied with British law.

As relations deteriorated between Nazi Germany and Britain and France, Foley realized that war was imminent and redoubled his efforts to help Jews escape Germany. When warfare erupted in September 1939, Foley disappeared — off on the first of many wartime espionage assignments in which he would distinguish himself as one of the key allied intelligence operatives of World War II.

Obituary of Leo Baeck

A few days before the war began, Leo Baeck, a leading German rabbi and one of Foley’s chief Jewish contacts, received a message to pick up a package from Foley’s office in the British consulate. Foley was gone when Baeck arrived, but the package awaited him. It was Frank Foley’s final outreach to the imperilled Jews of Germany. Inside were more than eighty British passports officially stamped and approved for travel outside Germany, each with the spaces for name and address left blank — to be filled in by escaping Jews whom Frank Foley had never met.

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Find also to read:

1. Reformed Churches Muzzled but Protest at Barmen
2. Through the Lens of Faith
3. Nazi Germany
4. the Soup will not be eaten as hot as it is served
5. Black page 70 years Release – commemoration Auschwitz
6. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
7. Luca Jahier, EESC President on the present intolerance
8. Polish commemoration of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau
9. Seventy-five years ago on January 27
10. January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
11. 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
12. 5th World Holocaust Forum
13. Dedication ceremony for a memorial at Jerusalem’s Sachar Park in honour of the casualties of the Siege of Leningrad
14. Auschwitz survivors providing a warning of rising anti-Semitism and exclusion of free thinking
15. What’s the Future of Holocaust Remembrance?
16. Christadelphians’ role in the rescue of Jewish children from Nazi Germany
17. Christadelphians, the Kindertransport, and Rescue from the Holocaust

Dr. Miller looking at Jews in France

About the Author Dr. Yvette Alt Miller
Yvette Alt Miller earned her B.A. at Harvard University. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Jewish Studies at Oxford University, and has a Ph.D. In International Relations from the London School of Economics. She lives with her family in Chicago, and has lectured internationally on Jewish topics. Her book Angels at the table: a Practical Guide to Celebrating Shabbat takes readers through the rituals of Shabbat and more, explaining the full beautiful spectrum of Jewish traditions with warmth and humor. It has been praised as “life-changing”, a modern classic, and used in classes and discussion groups around the world.

Jews and France: 11 Interesting Facts

As France headed to the polls, Dr. Miller presented some fascinating points about Jews and France through the ages on Aish.com

As France went to the polls in the first round of its presidential election, France’s 500,000-strong Jewish community was in the spotlight: two front-runners, Marine Le Pen and Jean Luc Melenchon, having been accused of making high-profile anti-Semitic comments.

Long before France’s unpredictable election, Jews have been making history in France. Here are 11 interesting facts about Jews and France through the ages.

Greatest Jewish Scholar

Rashi, acronym of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzḥaqi (born 1040, Troyes, Champagne—died July 13, 1105, Troyes), renowned medieval French commentator on the Bible and the Talmud (the authoritative Jewish compendium of law, lore, and commentary).

A modern translation of Rashi’s commentary on the Chumash, published by Artscroll

Rashi, as the great Medieval Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki is known, is the most widely consulted Jewish rabbi of all time. His commentaries on the Bible and Talmud are considered crucial to understanding these Jewish texts. Rashi’s explanations help us understand the Torah and at times, a knowledge of French can help us understand Rashi.

Monument in memory of Rashi in Troyes, France

That’s because this greatest of Jewish scholars had humble beginnings. Rashi lived in the northern French town of Troyes from 1040 to 1105. Out of a total population of 10,000, Troyes was also home to about 100 Jewish families. Jews travelled from far and wide to consult Rashi. Many of these visiting Jews lodged with nearby Christian families.

Troyes centre ville – capital of the department of Aube in north-central France

In some respects, Rashi was very French. He earned his living as a vintner (wine maker), and incorporated some French words in his commentaries. A typical example comes in Rashi’s discussion of the Torah’s description of the beautiful golden Ark that our ancestors were commanded to build, which stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. Its gold ornaments were joined together, or soulderix (soldered in Old French), Rashi explained (Rashi on Ex. 24:18).

Rashi’s sons-in-law and grandsons – who continued to live in northern France – became rabbis of nearly his towering stature, penning additional commentaries on the Torah and leading European Jewry. Their scholarship continues to define Jewish life to this day.

Talmud on Trial

In the year 1239, Paris was witness to a very strange trial; the Talmud was accused of insulting Christianity.

The Talmud was defended by the Chief Rabbi of Paris, Rabbi Yechiel ben Joseph, though there were restrictions on what Rabbi Yechiel could say. Leading the charge against the Talmud was Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who seemingly harbored an intense hatred of his fellow Jews or, possibly, a desire to impress his new Christian co-religionists. He was encouraged to make fun of the Talmud, quoting its text out of context and distorting its meaning. Presiding over the trial was none other than the Queen Mother of France, Blanche of Castille, and several Archbishops.
After hearing the “evidence”, the Talmud was found guilty and condemned as “dangerous to Christianity”. Volumes of the Talmud were confiscated. In 1242, 24 cartloads of hand-written tractates of the Talmud, representing countless thousands of hours of work, were brought to a public square in central Paris and burned.

Medieval Crusades

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a holy Crusade to conquer Jerusalem and wrest it from Muslim rule. (The temptation to launch a crusade might have been closer to home. Historians note that the harvest of 1095 was particularly bad in northern Europe; calling for a crusade was a way to distract the population and encourage them to plunder wealth in other lands.)

100,000 men signed up for the Crusade. (The term “crusade” refers to the French word for the crosses they sewed on their clothes.) Soon, their attention turned from conquering Jerusalem to attacking Jewish communities along their path. In three waves, spanning a hundred years, over ten thousand Jews were murdered in Europe and Israel. Frenzied demonization of and violence against Jews became a hallmark of the Crusader period.

France’s Jews were periodically expelled during this intense period of Jew-hatred, as well. In 1182, and again regularly in the 13th Century, Jews were forced to leave French cities, only to be let in again a few years later. In 1306, a more organized expulsion was decreed by France’s King Philip. Short of money after war with Flanders, King Philip decided to force French Jews to flee, and compound their property.

The decree was handed down on July 21, 1306, which was Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning on which we mourn the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as other calamitous events in Jewish history. The following day, July 22, 1306, 100,000 Jews were arrested. France’s Jews were ordered to leave the country within one month or face death. French Jews were allowed to leave only 12 sous (cents) apiece. Their property was confiscated, auctioned off, and all proceeds reverted to the French crown.

(King Philip’s decree was reversed by his son King Louis, but Jews continued to be banned from France and were ordered to leave in 1322 and 1394 again, before returning slowly over the subsequent years.)

French Chocolate’s Jewish Origins

Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, and the introduction of the Inquisition into Portugal in 1536, some Jews fled to the French town of Bayonne, near the Spanish-French border. There, they used their contacts with Jewish traders in the New World to import materials and know-how to process cocoa, a New World product which was just starting to take Europe by storm.

Dark Chocolate with Espelette pepper.

Bayonne Jews adapted cocoa recipes to European tastes, creating sweet versions of chocolate and using additives like milk, butter and nuts. Jews built the Bayonne area into a chocolate center, but their very success undid them: once local Christians learned how to make chocolates too, they petitioned local authorities to ban Jews from the chocolate industry.

Jews were only permitted to resume making chocolate in 1767 when a court annulled the decree. In 2013, the town of Bayonne formally recognized the contribution of Jews to the region’s famed chocolates. “Since we are the inheritors of the Jews’ savoir faire”, explained Jean-Michel Barate, head of Bayonne’s Chocolate Academy, “it was our duty to thank them….” and to right the historical wrong of overlooking the fact that it was Jewish refugees who created sweet chocolate confections as we know them today.

Equality

Palais des Papes – Avignon in south-eastern France in the department of Vaucluse on the left bank of the Rhône river

Although Jews were banned from France for many years after the 14th Century, by the 1700s about 40,000 Jews lived in France, particularly in Bordeaux and Avignon, which never formally expelled their Jewish inhabitants.

These 40,000 Jews became the first Jews in European history to gain full and equal rights with the French Revolution. The decision wasn’t easy: France’s new rulers deliberated for over two years about whether they should extend their new regime’s ideal of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to Jews. When they did, in 1791, it was seemingly with some regret: “The Jews” explained a leading revolutionary, “conscious of the error of their ways, have felt the need for a fatherland; we have offered them ours.”

Napoleon’s “Sanhedrin”

The Emperor Napoleon styled himself “defender” of the Jews, noting that he had (unsuccessfully) tried to conquer the Land of Israel for France. Back home, even though Jews were nominally recognized as citizens, Napoleon harbored much of the intense anti-Jewish prejudice that was typical in France at the time.
Seeking to assure himself that Jews were indeed “Frenchmen”, Napoleon decided to invite Jews from throughout France to participate in what Napoleon called, with much pomp, a “National Assembly of Notables”. Napoleon deliberately scheduled the Assembly for a Saturday; the “notables” he invited turned up despite the assembly’s scheduling on Shabbat, and voted yes or no to a series of questions Napoleon had devised to ascertain whether Jews could indeed be French. The “notables” were asked whether Jews could engage in manual labor, whether they could marry Christian women, whether Jews would help defend France, etc.

Cover page to siddur used at the Grand Sanhedrin of Napoleon, 1807.

Not satisfied with his Assembly, Napoleon sent word to the governors of France to elect Jewish representatives to a new group, which Napoleon grandly named the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish court that governed Jewish conduct for hundreds of years. Like the Sanhedrin of old, this new “Sanhedrin” contained 71 members, was governed by a leader (picked by Napoleon) whom he gave the traditional Hebrew title Nasi, or “prince”, and was meant to issue new decrees for the Jewish people.
Napoleon’s “Sanhedrin” met in Paris with great pomp, and the puppets making up this group did indeed go along with many of Napoleon’s requested declarations. They declared that Jews serving in the French army were free of Jewish mitzvot, or commandments, and (echoing long-held prejudice against Jews, who’d long been forced into the money-lending business by European rulers) declared money-lending illegal for Jews. Even the stooges on Napoleon’s “Sanhedrin” drew the line at some of the Emperor’s requests, refusing to countenance mixed marriages, for instance.

Despite the assurances of this “Sanhedrin”, Napoleon went on to issue a host of infamous Jewish decrees, restricting Jewish rights to live in certain parts of France, suspending repayment of debts to Jews for ten years, and limiting Jews’ rights to go into some areas of business.

Official Names

Another legacy of Napoleon’s rule was an official list of approved names that could be given to babies born in France. Most of these were Christian saints’ names, though a number of Jewish names were included on the list, as well.

The list was abolished in 1993, though even in recent years French authorities have banned some names. In 2016, for instance, a French judge ruled against two parents who wanted to name their newborn Mohamed Merah, after the terrorist who murdered a rabbi and three children outside of a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse in 2012.

The Dreyfus Affair

Jews were ostensibly equal French citizens, but the dramatic 1894 trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus exposed deep anti-Jewish hatred in France. After being arrested on manufactured charges of spying for Germany (Dreyfus was later exonerated; the real culprit had fled to England and some of Dreyfus’ fellow soldiers forged evidence against him), Dreyfus was publicly humiliated and sent to prison, while a mob of French men and women shouted “Death to Jews!”

Throughout Dreyfus’ trial, French Catholic authorities continued to stir up Jew-hatred. The intense bitterness made many in France conclude there was little future for Jews in France. Emile Zola, the non-Jewish great French author, wrote in 1896 “For some years I have been following with increasing surprise and disgust the campaign which some people are trying to carry on in France against the Jews. This seems to me monstrous….” Two years later, Zola wrote his famous open letter, beginning with J’accuse, or “I accuse”, directed against French President France Felix Faure, complaining about irregularities in Dreyfus’ trial. Zola was prosecuted and found guilty of libel and fled to England for a year to avoid imprisonment.
Another observer came to a similar conclusion during Dreyfus’ trial, realizing that Jews faced an uncertain future in France. Theodore Herzl was a young reporter for the Viennese newspaper the Neue Freie Presse, and he covered Dreyfus’ trial in Paris. He later wrote that the chants of “Death to Jews” shook him to the core, and helped him realize that only a Jewish state could provide security and safety for the world’s Jews. In 1897, Herzl organized a Zionist Congress in Zurich, where he called for the reestablishment of a Jewish country.

France and the Holocaust

With World War II looming, France became a destination for desperate Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe. From a Jewish population of about 80,000 in 1900, by 1939 France’s Jewish population had swelled to 300,000 as Jews fled to France for safety.

Tragically, that safety proved illusory. After Germany invaded France, it divided the country into a northern, “occupied” zone, and a southern “free” zone which was allied with Nazi Germany. Both areas of France willingly participated in the deportation of Jews from France; in the nominally independent southern part of France, it was French policemen and authorities who helped implement Hitler’s so-called “final solution to the Jewish ‘problem’”. Over 70,000 French Jews were sent to concentration camps; only about 2,500 survived.

After the War, France’s devastated Jewish community was revived by an influx of Jews from former French colonies in North Africa. In the 1950s and 1960s nearly a quarter of a million Sephardi Jews moved to France from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

Resurgent Anti-Semitism

In recent years, tragically, the call “Death to Jews!” has once more rung out in the streets of Paris and elsewhere in France.

A string of horrific attacks has targeted Jews throughout France. In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man living in Paris, was lured into a trap by local Muslim hoodlums; he was tortured for a month in a public housing project in Paris before being murdered; it later emerged that his ordeal was an open secret in the neighborhood, but no one intervened. His mother later had Ilan buried in Israel, fearful, she explained, that if he was buried in France his grave would be desecrated by anti-Semites.

In 2012, in the central French city of Toulouse, a terrorist shot three children and a rabbi at point-blank range in front of a Jewish school. In 2014, a mob rampaging through the streets of Sarcelles, a Paris suburb, chanted “Death to Jews!”, burned Jewish-owned businesses, and surrounded a synagogue, baying for the murder of those Jews inside. For hours, scores of Jewish families cowered inside, fearing for their lives, until police finally managed to disperse the mob late that night. In 2015, terrorists murdered four hostages in a kosher synagogue in Paris. In 2017, two Jewish brothers were forced off the road in a heavily Muslim neighborhood near Paris and attacked by passers by; one of the brothers’ thumb was sawn off in the attack.

In fact, the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes is going up. In 2014, there were 423 reported hate crimes against Jews in France. In 2015, there were 851 reported anti-Jewish hate crimes.

In the face of rising hatred, more and more Jews are fleeing France. One 2016 poll found that fully 43% of French Jews are considering moving to the Jewish state. In 2014, a record-breaking 6,658 Jews moved to Israel from France. (By way of comparison, only 1,923 French Jews had moved to Israel in 2010, when the number of anti-Semitic crimes was lower.) In 2015, 7,469 French Jews moved to Israel.

France in Israel

Beach promenade of Netanya (Hebrew: נְתַנְיָה‎, lit., “gift of God”; Arabic: نتانيا‎‎) a city in the Northern Central District of Israel, and the capital of the surrounding Sharon plain.

As more French Jews move to the Jewish state, parts of Israel are gaining a distinctly French accent. In 2015, the Times of Israel noted that the Israeli seaside city of Netanya calls itself the “Israeli Riviera” and that in recent years, it has indeed come to resemble the famed French Riviera: “walking along its main pedestrian boulevard, one would be hard-pressed to tell it apart from its twin city of Nice” in France. French restaurants, French style – and French Jews – have given parts of Israel a very French feel.

One recent immigrant from France explained that the rising anti-Semitism in France sparked her family’s desire to move to Israel: “Here we get the feeling that we can protect ourselves. There we have the impression that we are on our own and if, God forbid, something happens we will have to manage.”

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Preceding articles

Kindertransport

Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter

Seeds from the world creating division and separation from God

What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

The Rise of Anti-Seminism

If you’re going to be a hater, make sure you’ve done your homework.

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Additional reading

1. Religious Practices around the world
2. January 27 – 70 years ago Not an end yet to genocide
3. World remembers Auschwitz survivors
4. Migrants to the West #6
5. Protest against Tzahal concert in Antwerp
6. 2014 European elections
7. French Muslims under attack
8. Objective views and not closing eyes for certain sayings
9. At the closing hours of 2016 #2 Low but also highlights
10. How importance on religion is placed
11. Is Europe going to become a dictatorial bastion
12. Declaration of war against Islam and Christianity
13. 25 Orthodox rabbis issued a statement on Christianity
14. The American clouds of Anti-Semitism
15. Donald Trump after declining numbers of people victimised for their religion managed to increase the numbers again
16. Incidents of hate have become commonplace in the U.S.A. anno 2017
17. Today’s thought by the French elections and right-wing populism in the world

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Further reading

1. Judaism Fast Facts
2. History of the Jews in France
3. France Virtual Jewish History Tour
4. Jewish Attempts at Rejudaizing Converts
5. The French Jews have landed – les juifs français sur Londres
6. U.S. Immigration Policy and the Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 1930s
7. Incarceration and Detention
8. Villains, victims, untold stories of refugees and officials
9. That proud History of welcoming refugees
10. Jewish Refugees and Liberation
11. Timeline of deportations of French Jews to death camps
12. Drancy internment camp
13. Criticism of the Talmud
14. Alliance Israélite Universelle (political organization)
15. Adolphe Feder at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum
16. death camp showers in ww2
17. Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadows Death Camps
18. Was Soviet Jewish Identity Strengthened by Russian Anti-Semitism During the Second World War?
19. Netanyahu: Allies could have saved 4 million Jews if they’d bombed death camps in 1942 (Lol…..)
20. Himmler diaries found in Russia reveal daily Nazi horrors – BBC News
21. Public Service Announcement
22. Remembering Elie Wiesel
23. Denial. . . . . . A Film
24. The Tony Hall case revisited
25. Never Again!!!
26. Feast of Saint Edith Stein (9 August 2016)
27. Surviving The Holocaust
28. The Deep History of US, Britain’s Never-Ending Cold War On Russia by Finian Cunningham
29. Bernie Sanders Talks Out of Both Sides of His Mouth, Tries to Justify Signing onto UN Letter
30. Will We Live Out Our Heritage as People of Faith or Will We Succumb to fear?
31. At home in London, French Jews dread vote on exiting the EU
32. ‘French Jews experiencing worst situation since 1945’
33. Natan Sharansky (French Zionist Jew) to French Jews mulling aliya: Do it!
34. Natan Sharansky (Jew) : There is no future for Jews in France
35. In Manuel Valls, French Jews get a presidential candidate they can trust
36. In Manuel Valls, French Jews get a presidential candidate they can trust (Not good!!!!)
37. Another 5,000 Jews quit France for Israel
38. French Jews will have to give up Israeli citizenship, says Le Pen
39. French Israelis fume at Le Pen’s plan to ban dual citizenship
40. French Jews ‘will have to give up dual Israeli citizenship’ if Marine Le Pen wins presidential election
41. French Jews imagine life under Marine Le Pen
42. French Jews put off by Le Pen now worry about another presidential candidate
43. French Jews worried over Le Pen’s success in presidential vote’s 1st round
44. French Jews ‘relieved’ Macron won but worried over Le Pen’s electoral gains
45. See you at the Demonstration: Protesters Remember the Refugees, Forget the Jews
46. Looks like a Holocost to me
47. Israel’s abuse of the Ethiopian Jews is a vital piece of the puzzle of Talmudism
48. Israel’s New Cultural War of Aggression
49. How Information Is Controlled by Washington, Israel, and Trolls, Leading to Our Destruction
50. Jews Are Still the Biggest Target of Religious Hate Crimes
51. A New Kind of ‘Safety’ School: Coping With Campus Anti-Semitism
52. What is the Federal Government Doing to Oppose Anti-Semitic Hate Crime?
53. SPLC Grudgingly Admits Many Recent Hate Incidents Targeted Jews
54. Politicians React to Vile and Vulgar Palestinian Hatred
55. Who Is Behind Anti-Semitic Attacks in the U.S.?
56. Denying Islamophobia is Islamophobia

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• Mike Pence is trying to heal divisions with the Muslim world by praising Indonesia’s moderate Islam
• Jewish and Christian traditions of elders
• Ketuvim, Writings, Hagiographa, Five Megillot and Messianic Scriptures
• Healthy life can be found in sacred books
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Remembrance and freedom in the Netherlands – Dodenherdenking and Bevrijdingsdag

Remembrance Day 4 + 5 May =  low-key affair, focussing on memorial services + parades at war memorials + military graveyards.

Liberation Day = Bevrijdingsdag = celebration of freedom => free festivals throughout the country

lighting of bevrijdingsvuur (Freedom Fire) = transition to a day of celebration commemorating liberation + celebrating freedom.

victims of Nazi persecution: Jews, Sinti, Roma + others

victims of Japanese camps in Indonesia

capitulation > City of Liberation > Wageningen Hotel de Wereld

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Voorgaande artikelen / Previous articles:

Religieuze feesten in mei 2016

Dodenherdenking. (Opinie)

Geef Vrijheid Door

Bevrijdingsdag Wine, Art & Jazz festival

May, for many a month for mothers and many celebrations

Integrated Expat - a British expat's views on Nijmegen, Arnhem & the Dutch

On 4 and 5 May every year, the Netherlands first remembers the sacrifices made by those who lost their lives, then celebrates the freedom those sacrifices made possible. Dodenherdenking (Remembrance Day) is a low-key affair, focussing on memorial services and parades at war memorials and military graveyards. Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day) is a celebration of freedom, with free festivals throughout the country. After a day of remembrance of those who gave their lives, the lighting of the bevrijdingsvuur (Freedom Fire) symbolises the transition to a day of celebration commemorating the liberation and celebrating freedom.

There are always many events surrounding both Remembrance Day and Liberation Day, particularly in the east of the Netherlands, so I will give some background information and pick out a few interesting things I discovered about this year’s celebrations in Gelderland. This year is the 70th anniversary of the official end of WWII, so many places have…

View original post 1,361 more words

The price of freedom

Those people who say they don’t want to remember the dead, nor celebrate the liberation of their country because “it’s not about them” do forget that it is about their own family , those who existed long before them and they who would come after them. It is because of those battle fought, the talks having taken place, the covenants being made, that we also thanks to the European Union do have a period of already 70 years with out a war in the Netherlands.

Also not wanting to remember all their struggles shows disrespect and proves the egoism which has taken its toll in this capitalist materialist world.

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To remember

paternal grandfather = adventurous + accomplished technical engineer, who traveled the world

WW2 => joined the resistance >> team betrayed => Nazi’s transported him to a concentration camp

By miracle, he lived to see the early days of May 1945 > survived bizarre allied bombing > passed away, only shortly upon his return to his family.

done his duty > fought for freedom

I agree we need to rewrite history + have a critical look at whose dead we commemorate + whose freedom we allow ourselves to celebrate – + at which cost.

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Preceding articles:

May, for many a month for mothers and many celebrations

Religious celebrations in May 2016

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Kirsten van den Hul

I never got to meet my paternal grandfather. From what I’ve been told, he seems to have been quite an amazing man. An adventurous and accomplished technical engineer, who traveled the world (wonder where I got that from ;-)) before settling down with his wife, my grandmother. Life looked good, he had a job, they bought a house, they were starting a family.

Then WW2 started.

Now he could have just done nothing when the Germans invaded his country. He simply could have kept on working as an engineer, trying to make ends meet in those difficult years and raise his two blue-eyed baby boys. But he didn’t. Instead, he joined the resistance.

I would have loved to be able to talk to him and ask him why he did that. If he ever was afraid. If his wife ever tried to dissuade him. If he ever worried about his…

View original post 505 more words

Summermonths and consumerism

Summertime seems to have difficulties to show her face this year. Over a few days the days will shorten again and we did not have yet some real good nice warm days.

In the supermarkets they feel the consumption of meat not taking off like they want and therefore they are presenting special bargain prices, advertising against other trying to present the cheapest products. If they would be the best products would be an other matter. Also if they would be produced in a decent ethical way is for many of no concern.

We can imagine Middle School teacher Bob James throughout the year has to face his pupils with all sorts of gadgets, disturbed and tempted by lots of consumer products and market activities.

Real teachers do find it necessary to help others. Bob James also is firmly convinced that all of us need to be more proactive in helping others.

We need to help them when disaster strikes, when they are recovering and then when developing their lives to be the people that God intended them to be. We are meant to be independent of all except for God. On Him alone should we be dependent. Thus, as I seek to help others, I seek to move beyond mere relief and am focusing on rehabilitation and reconciliation. We are to be reconciled with God, with our fellow human beings and with our environment. If any one of these is missing, we will have problems. This is a tall order, but I will always seek to bring reconciliation. {About Me}

He, like many teachers are daily confronted with the non-interest for God, is probably also seeing that today the kids, but also their parents, have made new gods and have more interest in the material belongings than the spiritual.

The Human Use of Human Beings (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In previous articles on this blog we pointed out to this behaviour which is destroying our society like CO poisoning, not seen, not smelled, not heard. We are living in a society where eyes are directed on gaining capital, even if we need not to take notice of necessary protection for man or do not mind bringing shortage or harm to others, to get more money.

Our economy is based on consumerism. Ads are designed to appeal to people like me and make me not just want, but Need, the latest thing – whether that be a soft drink or the latest model car. {June 8 – What I Really Need}

In the years straight after the World Wars people seemed to know again the value of the necessities of life. Folks appreciated again the small things. (We remember sitting with three on a bench, having one study book, which we savoured like the best we could have to receive knowledge. We never wanted to have it for ourselves alone and where pleased when we could share things with others.) They were pleased with what they could get. They also wanted to show to others who they were and used their cloths to present their identity.

Today everybody seems to be hiding behind their clothes. They now have to be from one or the other brand, design and colour which is in fashion. All want to belong to the group and hide their own self behind brands which are ‘in’. Everything must be dictated by the market. Nobody wants to go against what the market dictates.

RedEye Sailboat one of the things people like to have for enjoying themselves and to show off (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Summer this is made even more clear by everybody wanting to go in the garden and show off with what the market advertises and wants to press on everybody. As such, once it is beautiful weather, we can not sit outdoors without having to smell all the combustion products, from the people who do not know how to use properly those advertised and bought barbecue sets.

Having holiday also became equivalent to travelling. When people to day are saying they go on holiday, they mostly mean and want the other person to think they are going to travel abroad. For many taking a holiday in the own garden or in the own country is not having a holiday any more. The market made them to believe to relax and to take vacation or to take leave has to be going abroad and spending a lot of money at enjoyment, entertainment parks, luxury meals and pampering and health treatments.

People have to believe they only count in this society when they can show that they are using the latest gadgets and are ‘by the time’. All people who have not the newest things are ‘old’ or ‘out of date’. They best are ignored or put aside, as not being the right people to associate with. Or they are laughed at as old fashioned or ‘nerds’.

Bob James remarks:

How easily we buy the latest thing and throw away the old. One of the problems is that we not only throw away things, we also tend to throw away people or relationships if they don’t “meet our needs.” {June 8 – What I Really Need}

Those needs have become very selfish. Everything is directed to the ‘I’ and to the ‘what can I gain from this relationship’. Most people want to associate with other people in such a way that they may be sure others will find them interesting for the knowledge and acquaintances of such people. Most relations are build on the use they can provide for the self. Not the giving away has become important, nor the meaning something for some one else, but the meaning for the person him or herself, has become the landmark.

Clearly the focus of most people came on to the wrong things. This also made many relationships not last and break down. Often we see the other person has become of no real value, when not usable any more. We see that at work. As son as a person gets to ‘old’ or to ‘experienced’ and to ‘expensive because of ‘seniority’ he is made redundant.

But also the material things do not get time to stay in use as valuable. As soon there is a new model, the old one is considered as ‘passée’ .
Most people have placed their mind on things which are disposable.

What we should be thinking about is not “things,” but people. {June 8 – What I Really Need}

writes Bob James.

What we should be focusing on more than anything is our relationship with God. {June 8 – What I Really Need} (Though in his article gives a quote about focussing on Jesus, who is not God but the son of God, but who also deserves our attention.)

Today, we can see that a lot of people who are debtors to the material things of this world. Most have forgotten that their body should be a temple, a place for clean things. Natural products for many are a laugh-stock. Biological products for many are either for the ‘loonies’ or have become a way to show off, because they are much more expensive and a way to proof they can afford it and belong to such a class of people, having enough money to buy such things.

Instead of respect for nature and respect for the Creator of all those things man shows more interest to the highly perishable idols presented on television and more and more on the internet, which brings totally new sorts of idols in the living room. All those living according to flesh, often forget that they too, like anybody else, are going to die, but if in spirit they kill the deeds of the body, and that they have much better prospects. For those who live in the spirit can find real intense worthwhile life.

Part of our problem with this issue is that our desires have been made to seem like needs. If we began each day with a focus on Jesus Christ, many of those things we think are “needs” would be shown to be desires. {June 8 – What I Really Need}

Christ Jesus is the man of flesh and blood who gave the world an example how to live according to the will of the Only One God, Whom we should consider the Most High and the Most Valuable. Jesus knew he could not do anything without God. Jesus never did his own will but always wanted to do the Will of God.  Today most consider God a flaw or useless invention.

Lots of people, having all those modern gadgets still do not feel happy. Having so many things they do not yet feel satisfied. They still have a hunger …

They are starving for the real better thing which they do not seem to see by the mist of consumerism. Lots of people are running into problems when they work so hard to take care of all their desires for material things, that they forget to spend more time to build up good relations.

Most people do not see or forget about what they really need.

Bob James thinks about a strong relationship with Jesus Christ, but seems to forget an even more important relationship, namely that with the heavenly Father of Jesus, the Only One True God.

This world needs to find the way back to God. It has lost connection with the Creator. The world has become strayed. We have to take care we become not astray by the temptations around us.

Keep your eyes on Jesus and as such find the Way to God and the way to God’s Kingdom.

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Preceding articles:

Lonely in the crowd

Misleading world, stress, technique, superficiality, past, future and positivism

Less… is still enough

Less for more

Contentment: The five senses

How to Find the Meaning of Life and Reach a State of Peace

See the conquest and believe that we can gain the victory

The Cares of Life

The natural beauties of life

Engagement in an actual two-way conversation with your deities

Just be yourself…

A Snippet of Advice on Cultural Analysis

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Find additional literature:

1. Capitalism
2. Increasing wealth gap of immense proportions in the Capitalist World
3. Classes of people and Cronyism
4. Uncertainty, shame and no time for vacillation
5. Because men choose to go their own way
6. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #9 Consumption
7. A risk taking society
8. What IF you’re only driven by stress?
9. Ecological economics in the stomach #2 Resources
10. How do you keep people from stealing your joy?
11. 2014 Social contacts
12. Justififiable anger or just anarchism
13. Ability for a community to come back from a crisis
14. Green Claims in Europe
15. Greenpeace demands scale up of ecological farming
16. Happy International Happiness Day!
17. Being Religious and Spiritual 1 Immateriality and Spiritual experience
18. Being Religious and Spiritual 3 Philosophers, Avicennism and the spiritual
19. Being Religious and Spiritual 8 Spiritual, Mystic and not or well religious
20. Looking for True Spirituality 2 Not restricted to an elite
21. How long to wait before bringing religiousness and spirituality in practice
22. Sharing thoughts and philosophical writings
23. Lovers of God, seekers and lovers of truth
24. Fools despise wisdom and instruction
25. In a world which knows no peace sharing blessed hope
26. The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places
27. Cleanliness and worrying or not about purity
28. Cognizance at the doorstep or at the internet socket
29. Jehovah steep rock and fortress, source of insight
30. Perishable non theologians daring to go out to preach
31. Bringing Good News into the world
32. How should we preach?
33. Thanksgiving wisdom: Why gratitude is good for your health
34. Food as a Therapeutic Aid
35. Remember there’s a light in the next day
36. It is a free will choice
37. To know Christ is filling life with meaning
38. Heed of the Saviour
39. Songs in the night Worship God only
40. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked

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Less for more

After World War II we did not have so much at school and had to sit with three on one bench having just one book for three pupils. We never felt it as something missing. Though the Germans had first confiscated many assets of my family and the allied forces stolen and destroyed lots of things in the family houses, because the Germans had made their quarters in it, I had not to complain about shortage in my parents house. I had the blessing to be brought up in a wealthy family.

In our house we had no lack of material things, but our parents learned us to share and to respect all the personal in the house who took care of us, the maids, matrons, teachers, cooks, gardener and labourers. Though I do agree we were made clear of the difference of class and if we made friends they had first to be approved of by the pater familias, the father and boss in the house. We were brought up and formed by ideas of class systems, knowing very well the difference between the propertied, the underclasses or lower classes and higher classes.  I, myself left the path of family tradition and went a total different way, with the consequences of seeing black snow at certain moments and having to work hard and long hours to make a decent living. With no regret, because I still would choose for the profession I have enjoyed a lot.

From a lot, I came in a big less … but I did not loose much. In a certain way I think I have gained a lot. The only thing I regret most is that I still can not afford to buy our very good own family wines and I dare not to visit the castles of some cousins. But what I can see, that many families have gone far away from their previous positions of the 19th and 20th century. The 21st century has brought a lot less for most of them.

Noticeable is that we can see a lot of new rich, who have a total different mentality than my grand-grand parents, grand parents and parents. Today we also find a nivelation from the categories who were divided in the golden sixties, noticing the rich from then more ‘poverised’ and not able any more to have so much personal to keep the house(s) and ground(s). But the previous rich and great families had ethics and rules of living which by the present new rich seem to be not known.

By the young we see a lot of youngsters who love to have a lot and best all the newest things, because something having of an older version is not cool and just not done. Many eyes today are on what is presented by the glossy magazines and by the television and computer screens.

Amish couple shopping in Aylmer, Ontario, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lots of parents feel a pressure by the media giving them a bad feeling if they not provide enough for their kids. Many parents seem to get not only a bad feeling, but a guilty feeling. It is like their kids would be missing something & would look back at it as a sad memory. Many parents have fallen in the trap of commercialism and are going for spending a ton on things they not necessarily need and worse also on ‘things that don’t matter’ like ‘goodie bags’ people always forget to take.

Luckily we may notice some shift in behaviour by some people. It might well be some consumers become more aware of their impact on our environment.

Would it not be better if more people would come back to their senses and consider only buying those things they necessary need and those things that really can improve their quality of life?  It is good to see that there are more people who want to shift their focus and who want a simpler life.

We should be much more aware of our own impact on our environment. We also should take up our own responsibility for the protection of our own environment and for the future of our next generations. When we commit to living a simpler life, we can commit ourselves to get rid of, stop doing, and not including things that don’t bring us happiness, have a meaning in our lives, or does something positive for us. By doing so you will find out that you also shall get rid of the distractions, the noise, & the clutter in your life.

But do know simple living isn’t only about material things. As I started of, remembering the stories which filled our life, traditions which formed us, it was all about a life style of the mind, a feeling which made us to take on the required attitude. We as children had to behave decently and live according to family laws. They ordered life. And this ordering seems to be gone, because there are no laws or rules which are respected and kept by people. Most people have no religion guiding them and the laic or secular conventions have thrown over board the ethics of good and right living. Though the good living and respectful living is a frame of mind, a train of thought that requires us to examine our lives on a daily basis and eliminate things that aren’t working for us physically, mentally, & spiritually.

We should not be afraid to do shortage on our children. It is wrong to think you do short by not giving in on the new trend or new ‘revelation of the season’.  The market wants us to buy everything it can offer. The managers do want our money spend on utilities but also on things we do not really need. Our world has become build on sandcastles. The danger is that the dream and soap-bell are going to burst, not so far in future.

The youngsters today got chained by their i-phones, i-pads, beatiful cars which can ride much faster than is allowed, think they have much choice in the shops and eating places, but have no eye for the real quality of the goods. They became blinded by and for many things.

It is up to their parents, grand parents and their real friends to open their eyes again and to bring them to understand that we are better only to buy those things which were made by people who were fairly paid and were no damage was done to either animal, plant, man or the environment (water and air). We all should come to respect nature much more and should also to come to respect those who make all those things. what I notice today, is that there is no respect at all any more for those who do the dirty work. And that is where our society has gone wrong.

They all were envying the place of some in our society, who had grounds and houses and who gave work at people. They all nurtured people in government to enrich themselves. Now we are facing greedy governments which charge taxes, which make labour to expensive and contribute to less people at work and less people able to make themselves a proper living. The greed of some made the economical world to collapse. And the protective hands of those in parliament, made that it even could happen that those who mocked up the system got bonuses. And nobody seem to have cared, because they were all so busy with themselves only looking at themselves, only concerned about themselves.

The egoism with the want for more has taken mankind and made them to shut their eyes for realism and for the truth of natural laws and ecological matters. As such they all started to poison themselves (literally). The more is giving them less in the end.

Whilst the world should know that there are better options. We do not have to go to find our food miles and miles away from where we live. We do not have to find cheap labour to soothe our mind not having slaves working for us. We do not need slaves and we do not need to be independent on other continents. If we really take care we can provide enough for each of us in our own environment, not damaging our and others their environment.

We can see a lot of literal and figurative bulimia. It is time that we come to consume less and take at heart:

“Less is more”

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Preceding article: Less… is still enough

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Additional reading:

1. Subcutaneous power for humanity 2 1950-2010 Post war generations
2. Gender connections
3. Self inflicted misery #2 Weakness of human race
4. We all have to have dreams
5. Forward ever backwards never!
6. Luxury
7. Scepticals of the Bible
8. Watch out

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Reflections on the Great War #1 100 years on

Today 11 November it is remembrance day for the worst tragedy that came over the world, war bringing many countries in agony.

In the 2014 August and November issues of the Christadelphian is spent some time to think about those awful years.
In the august issue brother Roger Long looked also at the “Signs of the times” Nearer the exit?

Today in several countries there is an annual holiday honouring military veterans. At Veterans Day, also celebrated as Armistice Day, Remembrance Day or Poppy Day, the world remembers the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I.  At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 the guns of the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of continuous warfare, with the German signing of the Armistice. It is marked by parades and church services and in many places the flags of the country and of the union (Europe, Common Wealth, America or United States) are hung at half mast. A period of silence lasting one or two minutes may be held at 11am.

The British do have Remembrance Sunday on the second Sunday in November, the Sunday nearest to 11 November. Remembrance Sunday also sees special events and services relating to remembrance and was this year (2014) on the 9th of November.

The Christadelphian August 2014 issue with Reflections and Lessons from the Great War 1914-1918

 

100 years on

Reflections on the Great War

The First World War was one of the most important events of the twentieth century, shattering the international settlement of the previous century and leading almost inevitably to the Second World War.

The War brought serious challenges to the Christadelphian community, challenges reflected in the pages of The Christadelphian and Fraternal Visitor magazines. In this brief series, these will be considered from time to time.

“A bolt from the blue”

“The murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort on June 28th, at Sarajevo, has proved to be the match the dropping of which has converted Europe into a ‘lake of fire’. It has come like a bolt from the blue …” (“Signs of the Times” – September 1914, The Christadelphian, page 451)

Franz Joseph I of Austria 1855 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When the first news was received of the murder by Gavrilo Princip of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, it was not front page news. The Times newspaper reported it on page 7 very much as just another assassination in a Europe accustomed to periodic murders of kings and politicians. After all Tsar Alexander II of Russia had been killed by a bomb thrown by a Polish student in March 1881; the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph’s wife, Elizabeth, had been stabbed to death boarding a lakeside steamer in Geneva by an anarchist in 1898 and the Russian Prime Minister Stolypin assassinated in a Kiev theatre in 1911, to name but a few. The main comment in the newspapers was about the extraordinary ill fortune of the House of Hapsburg: Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian had died in an ill-fated attempt to become emperor of Mexico in 1867, his son Rudolf committed suicide at Mayerling in 1889, his wife had been murdered and now his nephew and heir and his wife had been shot dead in Sarajevo in yet another episode in the troubled history of the Balkans.

It is doubtful if many of the British public had ever heard of Sarajevo before and many people, including politicians, saw it as an unfortunate episode which might raise temperatures in a troubled area which had experienced two wars within the previous three years. However, those wars had been prevented from spreading by the intervention of the great powers, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Britain, France and Russia, and expectations in the initial days after the murders were that this new mini-crisis could also be resolved. No one in those first days and weeks thought that it would lead to a world war. Other crises involving the Powers had come and gone without leading to conflagration, so why should this one be any different?

Militarism and alliances

Of course, the Powers were all armed to the teeth and had been for some years; in January 1914 The Christadelphian noted the huge rise in the number of Dreadnought battleships across the Powers – up from 1 in 1905 to 125 in 1912 and 150 in 1913. The “Signs of the Times” column noted the “steady drift towards Armageddon” and that the nations were “angrier than ever”. But it also noted the general concern that money devoted to growing armies and navies was being wasted at a time of great social need. In those early months of 1914 there was no great sense of urgency, even amongst eagle-eyed surveyors of the world stage in the Christadelphian Office. Indeed an interesting observation from the Daily Chronicle quoted in February 1914’s magazine was that, “Never has Europe been more militarist or less warlike”. This comment reflected the widespread feeling that the very level of military preparedness made war less likely. The two great alliances, of Austria-Hungary and Germany on one hand and Britain, France and Russia on the other, seemed to cancel one another out and peace of a sort had prevailed ever since 1871 – a period of just over forty years. Whilst there were signs of troubled times ahead, in the spring of 1914 there was little awareness of the imminence of the disaster about to unfold or the millions of lives it would consume. People had become lulled into a false sense of security.

Watching world events

The Christadelphian magazines of those early months have a recognisable mixture of exposition, exhortation and other articles of general interest. There was much concern for the fledgling Jewish settlements in Palestine, then still under Turkish rule; Brother Frank Jannaway sent regular reports of his travels there and in neighbouring Bible lands. There was great concern for Jews being persistently mistreated in Russia, comments on events and matters of interest in other churches and the regular reports of ecclesial activities. Until September, after the war had started, the lecture titles recorded were a cross-section of issues, with few if any indicating an imminent world crisis.

So there is an interesting mix of news. In February 1914 aeroplanes were seen over Jerusalem for the first time; in March it was reported that the European Unity League was advocating an alliance of the states of Europe on an economic basis and that suggestions had been made that Jerusalem should be declared a neutral city. In April there was a report of some Suffragettes setting up their own women-only church; in May the visit of the King and Queen to Paris to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Entente Cordiale alliance with France; in June an article bewailed the failure of clergymen in the established Church to uphold the authority of the scriptures, especially with regard to miracles.

The magazine reports were not entirely ignorant of the threats posed by the Powers’ large armies and navies. In April the “Signs of the Times” reported that there were rumours that some of the Powers might consider that a “preventative” war would be better than allowing their enemies to grow stronger and stronger; it also listed the huge armies of the time – Russia 1,700,000 men, Germany 870,000, France 714,000, Austria 360,000 and Italy 290,000. Relying on its navy, Britain mustered a mere 256,000. In June a letter raised the question of whether it would be wise to send a fresh petition to the British Parliament again to request exemption if conscription was introduced: the rather cautious response was that the time was not right for such an action, although the Lincoln Ecclesia had petitioned on the subject in 1913 and received responses from senior politicians including Asquith, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.

The July “Signs of the Times”, probably written before the news of the assassination in Sarajevo broke, covered a diverse range of events – the crisis in Ireland over Home Rule; the Suffragette campaign which included planting a bomb behind the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey; oil exploration in Southern Persia; a suggestion from an Admiral Scott that air power and submarines would eventually make warships obsolete; references to a revolution in Albania and to collisions at sea. Even in August, the assassination only made an appearance as the third item in “Signs of the Times”, although the publication of the magazine at the beginning of the month and early requirements for copy may account for this.

The crisis everyone in Britain feared concerned Ireland, which was then entirely within the United Kingdom. A Home Rule Bill passed through the House of Commons in June 1914, but the Protestant northern counties of Ulster had been preparing for some years to resist if any attempt were made to force them into a united independent Ireland. Ulster Defence Volunteers openly marched and prepared to fight, with large numbers of guns being smuggled into the country. British Army officers stationed at the Curragh threatened to resign rather than be ordered to take action against the Protestant counties. Had the war not intervened, a civil war in Ireland would almost certainly have broken out.

The low priority given to the assassination in Sarajevo reflected the initial lack of alarm amongst the leaders of the Great Powers. The German Foreign Minister went off on July 5th on his honeymoon; the Kaiser set out the next day for his usual twenty-day summer cruise to Scandinavia; other leaders looked forward to time on holiday away from the troubles of the world. The British public planned whatever time they could get at the seaside or other holiday destinations, looking forward to August Bank Holiday, then on the first Monday in August.

A rapid escalation

All things continued much as before until July 24, when Austria-Hungary’s fierce ultimatum to Serbia, who it blamed for the assassination, set in train a rapid escalation. The Austrians had first secured the support of the Germans for this move, which made the involvement of Russia and France more likely. Within a week the mobilisation of the rival armies of Europe, unable to stand and watch their allies attacked or threatened, had brought Austria-Hungary and Germany into war with Russia and France. The invasion of Belgium as part of the German plan to defeat France quickly brought Britain into the war on August 4 and the last summer of the old order was overwhelmed by the earthquake which was the Great War.

There are lessons in all this for us. We too live in days when we have become accustomed to living with crises in different parts of the world. They form a constant backdrop to our lives. Scarcely a day goes by without a fresh report of trouble in the Middle East, whilst the Great Powers of our day posture and threaten much as they did a hundred years ago. So it is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security and to push beyond the horizon our expectation of the Second Coming and the final crises of this world which will precede it. The Lord warned us that his return would come suddenly “as a thief in the night”. In 1914, the world which then was disintegrated in the space of little more than a month from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, serving as a warning of how quickly things change in God’s purpose. The lesson is clear and uncompromising:

“Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming … therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect … Lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.” (Matthew 24:42,44; Mark 13:36)

John Botten

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Continue reading: Reflections on the Great War #2

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Please find additional reading:

1. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting… George Orwell
2. August 4, 1914 to be remembered
3. 11 November, a day to remember #1 Until Industrialisation
4. 11 November, a day to remember #2 From the Industrialisation
5. 100° birthday of war and war tourism
6. 1914 – 2014 preparations
7. Liège 2014 remembering the Great War
8. Mons 2014 remembering the Great War
9. Friendship and Offer for the cause of democracy
10. Juncker warns for possible new war

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  This weekend – Armistice weekend in the 1914 centenary year – London will have three rivers: water, people and poppies.
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  For the first time on any war memorial anywhere in the world, the names of former comrades, former allies and former enemies will be listed together, alphabetically, with no distinction of rank or country. President François Hollande will open the memorial. Both the Prime Minister David Cameron and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, were invited. Neither, sadly, will attend.
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  At this time of year it’s hard to miss those unmistakable red poppies adorning everyone’s lapels and buttonholes. Having become such an iconic symbol of the sacrifices made and the lives lost in past wars how did this simple little flower come to mean so much to so many?
• World War One: Use our widget to search for anyone in your family or your street who died in The Great War (manchestereveningnews.co.uk)
  The last recorded death in the conflict from Greater Manchester was James Isherwood Bolton, of Belmont Road, Astley Bridge.He sadly lost his life on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.James Arthur Parkes, of Meadow Bank, Chorlton, was the oldest casualty when he was killed on March 29, 1917, aged 67.

  And the youngest to die was 15-year-old Frederick Thorley Finucane, the son of Theatre and Emily Finucane, when he died on November 27 1914.

  The bloodiest day was on July 1, 1916, when 585 soldiers from Greater Manchester died in the Battle of the Somme.

• Opinion: Echoes of Great War reverberate to this day (ww1.canada.com)
  If you had been in one of those cold, wet trenches on the Western Front, bracing yourself to go “over the top” into the face of machine-gun fire, how would you want future generations to honour your potential death?Well, having spent a lot of time between attacks listening to cries for help from No Man’s Land, you’d probably not be satisfied with occasional remembrances of your sacrifice.Rather, you’d want future generations to figure out what happened, with a view to making sure the Armageddon you were living through at least became the War To Make Wars a Lot Less Likely. And today – just three days shy of the 100th anniversary of Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia, starting the First World War – it’s fair to say this is a debt posterity hasn’t properly paid.
• Arrivals: This week, Remembrance Day (thestar.com)
  Military expert Doyle has assembled 100 objects to tell the story of the Great War, beginning with the 1911 Graff and Stift Double Phaeton open car in which Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were travelling when they were assassinated, and ending with the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium, and other memorials that remember the war dead.
• Today in History, Oct. 28 (rep-am.com)
  On Oct. 28, 1914, Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, sparked World War I, was sentenced in Sarajevo to 20 years’ imprisonment (he died in 1918); four conspirators were sentenced to death. (Princip escaped the death penalty because he was underage.)
• Time Machine: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (1875-1914) (rosiepowell2000.typepad.com)
  The assassinations produced widespread shock across Europe. There was a great deal of initial sympathy toward Austria. Within two days, Austria-Hungary and its ally, Germany, advised Serbia that it should open an investigation on the assassination, but the Serbian government responded that the incident did not concern them. After conducting its own criminal investigation, Austro-Hungary issued what became known as the July Ultimatum, which listed demands made to Serbia regarding the assassinations within 48 hours. After receiving support from Russia, Serbia agreed to at least two out of ten demands. The government mobilized its troops and transported them by tramp steamers across the Danube River to the Austro-Hungarian at Temes-Kubin. Austro-Hungarian soldiers fired into the air to warn them off. On July 28, 1914; Austria-Hungary and its ally, Germany, declared war on Serbia. Under the Secret Treaty of 1892, Russia and France were obliged to mobilize their armies if any of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austo-Hungary and Italy) mobilized. Russia’s mobilization completed full Austro-Hungarian and German mobilizations. Soon all the Great Powers, except Italy, had chosen sides. World War I had begun.
• Speech: Remembrance Day (gov.uk)
  Ladies and gentlemen, we come here, of course, to pay our respects to all of the fallen and of the wounded in all conflicts over the last 100 years. 2014 also marked the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of WW2 and the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, commemorated by World Leaders, including HM the Queen, in Normandy this summer. This spirit of courage, bravery and sacrifice continues to the present day. As we welcome home our returning troops from Afghanistan, we grieve for the 453 of them who were lost to that conflict. We also pay tribute to the Cambodian troops currently serving overseas in UN Peacekeeping operations in countries as far afield as Mali and Lebanon. We wish them success in their missions and a safe return home upon their completion.Today, as every day, we remember those who volunteered, served, fought, and died, all for the cause of freedom. We have with us today several veterans of these conflicts. We are grateful for your service. We thank you, and we salute you as we salute those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. We will remember them.

A Story of the Soldier and a Spider

Many times we look for solutions in the wrong directions. Often we have an idea of difficult solutions when they could be so simple, and there lying in front of us, without us noticing them. At moments we also can loose trust in the Higher Being because it looks as if we do not get the answer to our question right away. When we look at it, after we needed some patience, we shall see that the Most High always provides the best answer in our, but mainly also in His interest, and at His time.

We should trust Him more and give our live in His hands instead of directing it so much ourselves.

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To remember

Scrambling for cover > crawled inside one of the caves.

After praying … he thought, “Well, I guess the Lord isn’t going to help me out of this one.”

“what I need is a brick wall and what the Lord has sent me is a spider web. God does have a sense of humor.”

“I had forgotten that in you a spider’s web is stronger than a brick wall.”

Facing times of great trouble it is so easy to forget the victories that God would work in our lives, sometimes in the most surprising ways.

“In God we will have success!” [Nehemiah 2:20]

With God, a mere spider’s web can become a brick wall of protection. Trust and believe that He is with you always. Just ask for his help and you will see His great power and love for you.

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Additional reading:

God’s non answer

Does God answer prayer?

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• Giant Spider In The Pants (blogpestcontrol.com)
  While at work today, I got a frantic phone call from my four year old daughter.

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  “It’s scary Daddy!” “We caught in a jar.”

  After a examining the spider, and talking to some spider control professionals, I was able to determine that the spider in question was a Giant Arizona Crab Spider; a common spider in Arizona.

My Good Time Stories

Photo Credit: Petra via CC Flickr

During World War II, a US Marine was separated from his unit on a Pacific island. The fighting had been intense, and in the smoke and the crossfire, he had lost touch with his comrades.

Alone in the jungle, he could hear enemy soldiers coming in his direction. Scrambling for cover, he found his way up a high ridge to several small caves in the rock. Quickly he crawled inside one of the caves. Although safe for the moment, he realized that once the enemy soldiers looking for him swept up the ridge, they would quickly search all the caves and he would be killed. As he waited, he prayed, “Lord, if it be your will, please protect me. Whatever your will though, I love you and trust you. Amen.”

After praying, he lay quietly listening to the enemy begin to draw close. He…

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