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Today — March 29th 2024Your RSS feeds

On Good Friday, behold the man

The Museum of the Bible’s new exhibit features 21 pieces that help us imagine the deeper spiritual realities behind what Christ went through on Good Friday.

Yesterday — March 28th 2024Your RSS feeds
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Kenya starts to hand over to relatives the bodies of 429 members of a doomsday cult

Kenya's government began returning to relatives the exhumed bodies of more than 400 members of a doomsday cult; leader of the cult is accused of asking followers to starve themselves.

Pope Francis Is a Fool

(John Hinderaker)

Pope Francis says that all nations have a moral duty to disarm:

Pope Francis said Sunday that military disarmament is not optional but constitutes a “moral obligation” for all nations.
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“How many resources are wasted on military expenditure, which, because of the current situation, sadly continues to increase!” he told the estimated 20,000 tourists and pilgrims gathered in the square.

Actually, I think it is a fact that a smaller proportion of resources is going to military spending, in almost all countries, than at any time in history.

He went on to express his hope that “the international community will understand that disarmament is first and foremost a duty, and that disarmament is a moral obligation.”

“Let’s get this into our heads,” he added. “And this requires the courage of all members of the great family of nations to move from a balance of fear to a balance of trust.”

But some leaders, and some nations, can’t be, and shouldn’t be, trusted. Francis’s foolish advice is reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most overrated men ever, who urged Jews not to resist the Nazis. Wouldn’t want to dirty your hands with weapons. Back to Francis:

In the past, the pope has suggested that if people are really serious about world peace, the solution is to “ban all weapons.”

This is gun control writ large: blame the inanimate weapon, which can be used either for good or for ill, rather than the evil regime of Hamas, Putin, or the Chinese Communist Party.

For decades, the Catholic church has criticized the arms race and consequent build-up of nuclear arsenals, but Francis is the pope to call for the banning of all weapons. If he were to be taken at his word, this would imply outlawing everything from rifles to hand grenades to the halberds carried by the Pontifical Swiss Guards in the Vatican.

Good point! People used to go to war with spears and swords, tools which were sufficient to kill vast numbers.

The existence of weapons leads humanity to live “in fear of war,” the pope declared, and the only way to remove this fear is to eliminate all weapons.

People live in fear of war for excellent reasons. They lived in fear of war two thousand year ago, too, when weapons were much more primitive. The way to remove fear of war is to be more powerful than one’s potential adversaries.

I suppose Francis’s defenders would say that his call to disarm is aspirational, and that he doesn’t really want countries like the United States and Italy to turn their swords into ploughshares tomorrow. But when you tell people they have a moral duty to do something that it would be stupid and even fatal for them to do, you forfeit any claim to moral leadership.

Francis is a fool. Happily, there is no chance that anyone will listen to his bad advice.

This Is CNN

(Lloyd Billingsley)

As in Christian Nationalism Nonsense, and the always insightful Mark Tapson explains it for you:

The label “Christian nationalism” is the new Progressive dog-whistle for “scary American patriots.” It signals to Progressives that Americans who love God and country – which used to be the norm before our descent into a post-Christian, post-patriotism culture – are a subversive danger to democracy. Christianity, after all, imposes a moral code that chafes Progressive libertines, and nationalism, with its emphasis on state sovereignty and secure borders, frustrates their globalist ambitions.

Whenever Christians wave the Stars and Stripes, wear a MAGA hat, or pray that God blesses our country, the Left hyperventilates over the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy on the rise. They envision America becoming a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia in which white male Christian mullahs hang homosexuals and imprison women for seeking abortions. The Left’s vision of the separation of church and state, therefore, is one in which Christian patriots and their values are best excluded from the halls of government power entirely.

And so on, with Heidi Przybyla of Politico terrified that these Christian nationalists, “believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.” So much for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” from the Declaration of Independence. The woke leftists, in effect, now issue a declaration of war.

Add Christian nationalist to “white supremacists,” “MAGA Republicans,” “semi-fascists,” and those 2016 loser Hillary Clinton smeared as “deplorables.” These all signify that the speaker doesn’t like you, but there’s more to it. Pronouncing people enemies of the state is to justify violence against them. This comes at a time when the Biden Junta (“Our Democracy”) has a domestic Nazi-Soviet Pact working, and sees the greatest threat from those citizens who want the nation to be great. So all those deplorable Christian nationalist and MAGA types could wind up excluded from more than the halls of government. Don’t say it can’t happen here.

Politico Reporter Apologizes for ‘Clumsy’ Comments on ‘Christian Nationalists’ After Outcry

Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla wrote an article on Thursday apologizing for her comments painting those who believe their rights come from God as “extremists” and “Christian nationalists.” Przyblya’s article was published after leading Christian organizations sent a letter to Politico leadership on

What Is the ‘Christian Nationalism’ Fearmongering Really About?

Is America on the verge of establishing a theocracy? The Left’s recent warnings about the rise of “Christian nationalism” suggest that a powerful, conservative Christian cabal is pulling the strings behind the scenes to forcibly convert the entire nation, or something.

In the past week, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla has been hammering the drum on this issue, first claiming—apparently without concrete evidence—that former Trump administration official Russell Vought has prioritized “Christian nationalism” by name in documents for a potential Trump second term, and then defining Christian nationalism as the doctrine that rights come from God, not government.

“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists—not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalism’s very different—is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority, they don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” Przybyla said in an appearance on MSNBC. She also complained that “it’s men” determining “what God is telling them.”

Although Przybyla admitted that “so-called natural law” has done some good in the civil rights movement, she went on to warn against “an extremist element of conservative Christians who say that this applies specifically to issues including abortion, gay marriage,” and in vitro fertilization. She later noted that conservatives are applying natural law to surrogacy and “sex education in schools” as well.

?"Christian Nationalism" isn't the real threat to the free exercise of religion in America today. The real threat is the sexual revolution ideology imposed on the people by government force, and Heidi Przybyla can't stand the idea of that establishment being challenged. pic.twitter.com/3UBwHgO0Gc

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) February 27, 2024

Shortly after Przybyla’s article about Vought, radical leftists have widely echoed her rhetoric and suggested that America’s future may resemble a dystopian “Handmaid’s Tale.”

What’s really going on here?

First, Przybyla’s fearmongering has nothing to do with reality. According to her definition of “Christian nationalism,” the Declaration of Independence is a Christian nationalist document.

Not only does the declaration ground Americans’ ability to declare independence from Britain in “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” but it explicitly roots the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” in an endowment from the “Creator.” It addresses its appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world,” with “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.”

That’s not exactly subtle.

Przybyla’s real problem with “Christian nationalists” isn’t the whole rights-derive-from-God thing. It’s the content of those rights and the mere whiff of a possibility that the government won’t impose her preferences for what those rights should mean.

America isn’t on the verge of a Christian nationalist theocracy, you see. No one is seriously arguing that we should throw out the Constitution and replace it with the Bible, or that we should make citizens, candidates for office, or government officials recite the Nicene Creed before they may enjoy legal rights.

What conservatives are seriously arguing, however, is that some rights of the sexual revolution should be curtailed in the interests of more fundamental rights.

Przybyla unwittingly revealed her cards when she addressed the issues she thinks should be off-limits for these “extremist Christian nationalists.” The heart of her complaint isn’t some quibble with the Fourth Lateran Council but with the very idea that natural law should apply to abortion, same-sex marriage, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and sex education in schools.

You see, Christian nationalism isn’t the real threat to the free exercise of religion in America today. The real threat is the ideology of the sexual revolution imposed on the people by government force, and Przybyla can’t stand the idea of that establishment being challenged.

That’s why the Left has a conniption when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and allows the states to make their own laws on abortion. According to Catholic Vote, vandals attacked at least 88 pregnancy centers and pro-life groups after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in that ruling, and they also attacked 236 Catholic churches since the leak.

The Biden administration moved to aggressively support abortion, even though President Joe Biden himself had been a staunch defender of the Hyde Amendment, which previously barred federal funds from supporting the killing of the unborn. A Department of Justice official even said the overturning of Roe increased the “urgency” of DOJ efforts to enforce a law disproportionately applied against pro-life protesters at abortion facilities.

The Left demonized all the conservative justices on the Supreme Court after the ruling, with ProPublica launching an inquisition into Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Left isn’t objecting to the Right’s imposing its worldview on Americans by force—it’s objecting to the Right’s finally getting a say on issues springing from the sexual revolution. We’re not witnessing the rise of Christian nationalism, but the weakening of an anti-Christian establishment.

Other news items should make it clear what’s actually happening in America today.

Last week, the Supreme Court refused to take up a case in which a person who holds traditional views on sexual morality is considered “presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is lesbian.” As Justice Samuel Alito noted, this case exemplifies a danger he warned about when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), “that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”

Oregon’s Department of Human Services treated a widowed mother of five children in this way when it denied her the right to adopt a pair of siblings from foster care. Why? Because she disagrees with Oregon’s state religion, the religion of LGBTQ identity.

The Biden administration is also considering a rule to bar “non-affirming” parents from foster care. People who dare to dissent from the idea that a male can become female just by saying so have no business raising children in Biden’s America, it seems.

As for sex education in schools, parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty are reacting to the Left’s extreme overreach in education. They’re not “banning books,” they’re calling for sexually explicit materials to be removed from school libraries.

Many of these groups exist because parents got a sense of what their kids were “learning” in school when the kids “attended class” via Zoom during the pandemic—and leftist indoctrination in racial lessons and transgender identity rightly shocked moms and dads.

This isn’t some exclusively Christian movement, either. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, and others have joined Christians of every denomination in supporting parental rights to opt their kids out of having to read sexually explicit books.

I’ve reported exhaustively on the Southern Poverty Law Center because I see that organization as the tip of the spear in the Left’s efforts to demonize any dissent from its agenda, and its ties to the Biden administration horrify me. The SPLC brands mainstream conservative Christian organizations as “hate groups” in an effort to raise money and to demonize its opponents into silence. It represents the institutionalization of the effort against “Christian nationalism.”

Many Americans think the Civil War was about slavery, and they’re not entirely wrong. Abraham Lincoln didn’t actually oppose slavery when he ran for president in 1860, though. He ran against the expansion of slavery into the federal territories.

You see, the Southern Democrats had such a stranglehold on the federal government that they couldn’t imagine needing to compromise. They had also begun to think of slavery as a positive good, not the “necessary evil” the Founders called it.

Southern Democrats couldn’t live with losing the ability to force their ideology on the rest of the country, and that ambition became their undoing.

“Christian nationalism” is the modern equivalent of Southern Democrats’ demonizing Lincoln, kicking and screaming as they lose the ability to foist their beliefs on the rest of the country. If history is any guide, this trend does not bode well for the Left—or America’s civil tranquility.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state. 

The post What Is the ‘Christian Nationalism’ Fearmongering Really About? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

EXCLUSIVE: Catholic Churches Attacked 400 Times Since 2020, Tracker Finds

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Catholic churches in the United States have been attacked at least 400 times over the past four years, according to data compiled by the Catholic advocacy organization CatholicVote.

The hundreds of attacks across the nation began in connection with widespread civil unrest in May 2020, CatholicVote said. Examples include church burnings, beheadings of statues of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, swastikas painted on grave stones, satanic and blasphemous statements graffitied on walls, windows smashed, Masses disrupted, and even the murder of a Catholic priest.

The leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade led to another spike in attacks—since then, there have been 236 attacks on Catholic churches.

CatholicVote has only found evidence of an arrest in about 25% of the cases it tracked and estimates that the attacks have caused around $25 million in physical damages to churches.

Many of these attacks are abortion-related and include graffiti such as “Jane’s Revenge” (a reference to Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) or “If abortions aren’t safe, then neither are you,” indicating that the attackers could potentially be charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law protecting churches, pro-life pregnancy centers, and abortion clinics that the Department of Justice has used to charge dozens of pro-lifers praying outside of abortion clinics over the past few years.

President Joe Biden’s DOJ has not charged any vandals with FACE Act violations in connection to attacks on churches, however.

“Catholics across America are effectively under siege while the Biden administration’s reckless refusal to enforce the law continues to allow anti-Catholic extremists to endanger law-abiding citizens of faith and destroy their places of worship,” said Tommy Valentine, director of the CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project.

“These unacceptable acts of bigotry against Catholics, and really all Americans of faith, cannot be tolerated,” he added. “It’s time for every elected official to take seriously their solemn duty to protect all citizens, including religious Americans.”

The 400th attack that CatholicVote recorded involved transgender activists who used deception to hold a “sacrilegious funeral” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City for an atheist, transgender-identifying prostitute, Cecilia Gentili, revered by LGBTQ activists as a “transgender icon” and advocate.

Funeral attendees dressed in fur, fishnet stockings, miniskirts, and even thongs, as photographs posted by Time magazine showed. And during the funeral service, transgender activists appeared to mock Catholic saints and repeatedly celebrated “whores.”

Transgender activists attend the funeral of Cecilia Gentili at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Feb. 15 in New York City. (Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

One of the organizers of the funeral said that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was not told that Gentili was a man who identified as a transgender woman. “I kind of kept it under wraps,” organizer Ceyenne Doroshow, a man who identifies as a woman, told The New York Times, explaining that St. Patrick’s is “an icon, just like her [Gentili].”

A livestream of the event depicts one of the funeral organizers describing Gentili as: “This whore. This great whore. St. Cecilia, mother of all whores!”

The funeral attendees also placed a picture near the altar, where priests celebrate the Catholic Mass, that depicted Gentili with a halo and the Spanish words for “transvestite,” “whore,” “blessed,” and “mother,” as well as the text of Psalm 25.

CatholicVote sent a letter to New York Attorney General Letitia James last week calling on her to investigate “the facts and circumstances surrounding the recent use of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City by transgender activists to deceptively gain access and advance ideas and beliefs hostile to doctrines of the Catholic Church, while openly mocking these beliefs.”

The letter reminded James that under New York’s hate crimes laws, “selecting the victim of a criminal trespass based on a religion or religious practice is a hate crime” and “New York’s court’s have recognized that those who gain access to property by deception are liable for criminal trespass.”

Neither James nor New York Gov. Kathy Hochul immediately responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal as to whether such an investigation would be done. New York is second only to California when it comes to attacks on Catholic churches over the past four years, according to CatholicVote: New York has seen 45 acts of violence and vandalism, while California has seen 54.

Biden, though described by his staff and legacy media as a “devout Catholic,” has not commented on the hundreds of attacks. In 2020, former President Donald Trump’s campaign condemned the onslaught of anti-Catholic crimes occurring throughout the United States to the Daily Caller News Foundation, accusing “radical leftists” of attempting to destroy the “moral fabric of our nation.”

“The rise in violence against houses of worship, religious symbols, and sacred spaces is quickly becoming an epidemic across the country, led by radical leftists hellbent on destroying the very moral fabric of our nation,” Trump campaign deputy press secretary Ken Farnaso told the Daily Caller at the time.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Catholic Churches Attacked 400 Times Since 2020, Tracker Finds appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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