Kairos_News

 Editor

‘My husband knew it was Jesus’ tomb’

________________________________

David Horovitz , THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 17, 2008

________________________________

The widow of the Israeli archeologist who led the excavation of a hugely controversial First-Century burial tomb in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood 28 years ago said on Wednesday that her late husband knew he had found the burial place of Jesus and was afraid the discovery would trigger a wave of anti-Semitism because of the apparent challenge to Christian beliefs.

Ruth Gat unleashed her archeological earthquake when accepting a lifetime achievement award on behalf of her late husband, Yosef Gat of the Department of Antiquities, at the conclusion of a four-day academic conference in Jerusalem, at which leading archaeologists, epigraphers, biblical experts, statisticians and other scholars gathered to evaluate “the Talpiot Tomb in context.”

A small-framed, frail-looking lady, Mrs. Gat told the scholars calmly that her husband knew he had found “the burial tomb of Jesus Christ,” and that he had “serious concerns and fears” over the consequences of his discovery. She noted that Yosef had been a child in Nazi-occupied Poland, and that with his bitter childhood memories still in mind, he had feared “a wave of anti-Semitism” might erupt as a result of the Talpiot find. She said she was relieved that the world had “changed for the better,” and that this feared reaction had not come to pass.

Speaking briefly to The Jerusalem Post after her address, Mrs. Gat said her husband had been “staggered” by the discovery, and that he had discussed it with her “at the kitchen table.”

Gat died soon after excavating the Talpiot tomb in 1980, and left only minimal notes of what had been found there. The findings were only written up 16 years later by the former Jerusalem District archeologist Amos Kloner, who has consistently ridiculed the notion that the First-Century tomb was related to Jesus in any way. Kloner restated that position to the Post after Mrs. Gat spoke, and said the idea that Gat had believed he had found Jesus’s tomb was “absolutely not the case.”

Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born, Canadian-based filmmaker whose The Lost Tomb of Jesus brought the issue into world headlines a year ago, called Mrs. Gat’s comments “a showstopper.” Jacobovici, who attended the symposium, said he “fell off the chair” when he heard her.

At the concluding session of the symposium, following Mrs. Gat’s comments, two of the five panelists - Dr. Shimon Gibson, who was a young archeologist on the 1980 dig, and Eric Meyers, a professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University - indicated that they did not believe the tomb on East Talpiot’s Dov Gruner Street was linked to Jesus. Gibson also said Gat had never told him he believed the tomb was Jesus’s.

Two others panelists - Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University, and James Tabor, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina - said it was very possible that this was the tomb of Jesus.

The highly respected chairman of the symposium, James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament language and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, rejected the idea that Jesus had been buried at the tomb, but said, “We have to be open to the possibility that [the tomb] is related to the Jesus clan.”

Among his objections to the notion that an ossuary from the Talpiot tomb bearing the apparent inscription “Yeshua son of Yehosef” was that of the founder of Christianity, Charlesworth said, was that the inscription was “graffiti, just scratching,” and that the ossuary was “lousy.” He found it unthinkable that the followers of Jesus would have put “the remains of ‘the messiah’ in such a horrible ossuary.”

Jacobovici said he felt vindicated by the conference and by the call by several speakers for further study at the tomb, as well as for more research at a neighboring tomb that might hold further information. When the content of Jacobovici’s film was first reported in the Post last February, the Jerusalem Municipality, which is responsible for the site, said that if a request were made to open the site, it would be considered.

Jacobovici’s film claims that six of 10 ossuaries found in the tomb bear inscriptions that link them to “Jesus son of Joseph,” “Mary,” “Jose” (a brother of Jesus), “Matia” (another relative), “Mariamne” (said to be Mary Magdalene) and a child named “Judah son of Jesus.” The ossuaries are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Jacobovici has said he hopes the tomb will be more properly excavated. He and a colleague were able to enter the tomb, which lies sealed beneath a rectangular slab between rows of buildings, only briefly during their filming, with the permission of neighbors. An Israel Antiquities Authority official who was called to the site asked them to leave and reseal it.

Kloner, who called Jacobovici “a liar” at an earlier session of the symposium, last year branded the documentary “brain confusion” that mixed fact with fiction and “dressed up facts” in a Hollywood-like manner that could easily lead laymen astray.

Kloner also told the Post last year that when the ossuaries were found nearly three decades ago, most of the bones inside had been badly decomposed. Due to haredi pressures put on the Israeli government, no anthropological tests were ever carried out on the remains, he said, and the bones were transferred to the Religious Affairs Ministry for immediate reburial along with assorted other remains found in various construction projects and digs. The location of the bones, which were then interred by the Jewish burial society, is not known.

________________________________

________________________________

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1200475897708&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull <http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1200475897708&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull>

dailypress.com

Pastor offers up a small-church manifesto

January 12, 2008

Enough already.

Is it just me, or are mega-churches the only Christian congregations deemed worthy of mention in the media or for discussion in religious circles these days? These congregations with 2,000 or more in attendance for regular weekend services (by accepted definition) have started gobbling up the scenery like Sylvester Stallone in a Rambo flick.

Is this small-church pastor shell-shocked, or have we reached the point that if you don’t have drop-down screens, a rock band, a stage and a see-through Plexiglas pulpit in the sanctuary, you’re no longer considered church?

Churches today are either mega-churches or mega-church wannabes.

Therefore, I offer this “Small Church Manifesto.”

We will no longer purchase any teaching videos or books produced by mega-church pastors. I recently completed a well-recommended video series in which the deeply-tanned mega-church pastor related how he won a member of his yacht racing team to the Lord. I’ll give that a shot as soon as I gather my 2005 Buick LeSabre racing team.

We will no longer feel guilty that our 1897-version sanctuary is not suited for today’s contemporary worship services. I appreciate the expert advice on this, but we have no plans to rip out pews just so folks can jump around. The backs of those pews have been worn smooth by countless burdened folks pulling themselves up to sing “Amazing Grace” one more time. I think we ought to keep them around until the Lord returns as testimony that we at least tried to live as we ought.

We will no longer feel that pastors of small churches are inferior just because they haven’t led trips to the Holy Land or walked through AIDS-ravaged villages overseas and sent streaming video back (to play on those drop-down screens). Additionally, we believe that just because a pastor doesn’t know how to turn on a lapel mike does not mean her theology is unsound. Neither, we believe, is a pastor’s theology suspect because he doesn’t wear his shirttails out and sit on a stool while preaching.

We will no longer feel that a sermon is lacking something if it doesn’t include a video clip from a major motion picture. We believe that any sermon with two or more video illustrations has ceased to be a sermon and has become a film festival.

We will no longer use any statistics produced by religious research groups that are paid for by our denominational contributions and then used to predict our extinction.

So I say to you today, small churches, we must no longer allow ourselves to be dismissed like last year’s cell phone. Let us demand our place around the ecclesiastical table. Join me in mailing road maps to our churches to our leaders who have forgotten us.

But, what do I know? I’m a small-church pastor who spent over $50,000 (in 1980s dollars) to get a theological education so I could lead a congregation that averages just over 50 folks each week.

That doesn’t look like much until you consider that on one recent Sunday, when I asked for prayer needs and began to write them on the back of my bulletin I later counted 20 from a group of about 40.

If I believed in using statistics (which I don’t) I’d say that if 50 percent of your congregation asks for prayer one Sunday morning, you must be meeting a need.

Tippens is pastor of Wallace Memorial United Methodist Church in Hampton. He can be reached at 224-5314 or by e-mail at ntippens2@cox.net.

Copyright © 2008, Newport News, Va., Daily Press <http://www.dailypress.com/>

January 18, 2008

Hillary’s Oedipal Problem

Whether Hillary has ever grown beyond her radical past is an open question; she may not know the answer herself. Charles De Gaulle once said that politicians need to lie so much that they can no longer tell when they are telling the truth. Whether Hillary knows when she tells the truth by now is doubtful. You can only play so many roles before getting deeply confused about yourself.

The trouble is that American voters can’t know her real beliefs either. That is not an accident, but a result of a lifelong decision to hide her deepest thoughts from the public.

At her radical core, Hillary Clinton is the candidate of female vengeance. Just as Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement has turned into its opposite — the Racial Revenge Movement of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson — Hillary is riding the Gender Revenge movement, whipped up by ideological feminists over the last thirty years. Our colleges have become incubators for second and third-generation radicals, who spread the fervor of the enraged Left through American culture. Hillary was a star pupil of the Boomer Left in the Sixties and Seventies, the first generation to undergo that radicalization process. Radical indoctrination is not unlike Marine Corps boot-camp, but with the opposite outcome. Marines learn to sacrifice for the sake of the country; Leftists learn to sacrifice the country for their own concept of the greater good.

“Contemptuous condescension seems to be Hillary’s default mode with any male who criticizes her or stands in her way. … It’s a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias.”

Those who know Hillary well talk about her rage. Well, she has been betrayed by Bill in the most fundamental way, over and over again. Her sense of betrayal is constantly renewed as another rumor of Bill’s latest conquest comes to Hillary’s ears. But she must have known that would happen from the very beginning, when they first met in college. Bill hasn’t changed one whit since that time. They were certainly well-suited to each other, and they still are a symbiotic couple. So Hillary rage reaches back to her early years before she even knew Bill, growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois.

Sexual promiscuity was of the norm for the Boomer Left in the Sixties and Seventies. A lot of women still harbor feelings of painful betrayal from that time, and that may in fact be the biggest single reason for the rise of man-hating feminism. Yet Hillary chose to marry the most promiscuous hit-and-run male politician of the Left, precisely because of his ability to enthrall men and women and then dance away. He’s done it all the time she has known him, and she still decided to marry him. Her need for that kind of man therefore did not start with Bill; it may go back to her childhood.

But Hugh Rodham was dead by the time Bernstein did his interviews, and he is reporting the memories and impressions of Hillary and her brothers thirty years later.

Yet it must have been a painful childhood. How else to explain her drastic swing in a few years from a Goldwater Girl to a radical feminist? Such total, semi-religious conversions are not coincidental. They are the ways in which humans redefine their identities when they have a deep need to do so.

Hillary’s thesis was titled, “There is only the Fight, An Analysis of the Alinsky model” (italics added)

“The key word for an Alinsky-type organizing effort is ‘power.’ The question is how one acquires power, and Alinsky’s answer is through organization… For Alinsky, power is the ‘very essence of life, the dynamic of life’ and is found in ‘…active citizen participation pulsing upward providing a unified strength for a common purpose of organization….’” (P. 7-8)

What is the “social revolution” Hillary and the radicals-cum-insiders want? Hillary doesn’t want to merely make law or implement policy; she wants to re-shape humanity in her own image. She explains:

“A radical is one who advocates sweeping changes in the existing laws and methods of government. These proposed changes are aimed at the roots of political problems which in Marxian terms are the attitudes and the behaviors of men.” (p. 6)

“Alinsky: ‘In order to organize, you must first polarize. People think of controversy as negative; they think consensus is better. But to organize, you need a Bull Connor or a Jim Clark.’” (italics added)

The Left adores Communists, but covers them up from public view. Alinsky was more willing to tell the truth:

“Alinsky told Playboy (Magazine), “I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work…. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. … I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days…I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.”

In the Playboy interview, Alinsky also describes his close work with mobster Frank Nitti and Al Capone’s gang and his relationship with the emerging CIO and the Roosevelt administration. He describes how he used these connections to make a 1930s deal with then-Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly to deliver a meatpackers’ union contract-one of his earliest “organizing” victories.”

This is Hillary’s adolescent hero. The pattern of working with corrupt and criminal figures to achieve radical aims also characterized the first two Clinton terms.

Hillary was raised in the Methodist Church, but at Wellesley her new religion became Leftism of the feminist variety. Thus she took an all-American girlhood and transformed it into its opposite, reworking the pieces to chart an oppositional life course. That is a very common pattern in the lives of Leftist radicals, going back to Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin.

Carl Bernstein explains,

“She chose Yale (in 1969) because … it was an activist school that very much believed in the use of the law as an instrument for social change…. This was the year of the Black Panther trial in New Haven. …

“That summer she went to work at the most important radical law firm in America at that point: Truehaft, Walker and Bernstein in Oakland. They defended the Panthers. Two of their partners were members of the Communist Party-including Bob Truehaft, who was married to Jessica Mitford. I talked to Bob Truehaft not long before he died, and he said he was certain that Hillary came there because she subscribed to some of the kind of law they practiced and the kind of clients they defended.”

I don’t know enough about Hillary’s mother, but it seems likely that Hillary may be acting out a vicarious rage against her father on behalf of her mother. That would make sense if Hillary’s father also hurt his wife, but we have no direct evidence for that. It would explain why Hillary felt driven to marry a sex addict who was bound to betray her over and over again. Hillary’s role was to cover up Bill’s various addictions, with the wholehearted cooperation of the press, his staff, and the Democrat Party.

Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is a guidebook for splitting the world into irreconcilable camps of Good and Evil. It is a war manual, with the clear and explicit aim to destroy and defeat the American nation and culture as we know it. People who find making war on their own culture attractive have a deep need to see the world in extremes of good and evil. There are no shades of gray in Alinsky’s world, just as there are none in Hillary’s. Such people start off with a need to find a lifelong enemy; any rationalizing they do comes after the fact.

That is what a revolutionary is, after all — someone who has declared war to the death on his own society.

Years later, Senator Bill Bradley would tell Carl Bernstein that “At one meeting with Democratic senators, Hillary openly threatened to ‘demonize’ any member of Congress who opposed her plan…”.

Some regimes deserve to be overthrown in favor of something better. But that is emphatically not the pattern of Leftist revolutions. Russia was not better after the Bolshevik Revolution. In many ways it was much worse. Stalin killed far more Soviet people than the Tsars ever did. Likewise, Hitler’s revolutionary Germany was not a better place than the Weimar Republic. Pol Pot was a French-trained Communist, and turned Cambodia into hell on earth. The whole pathetic story of Leftist revolutionary regimes in the 20th century is just one murderous catastrophe after another.

One explanation is that radical Leftists are malignant narcissists, who have an aching need to destroy things. They are compulsive iconoclasts — needing to smash all existing idols and ideals, only to replace them with their own. The public narrative of the Left is always compassion and love, but in the end, the real agenda always turns out to be destroying and oppressing ordinary people in a cycle of failed efforts to control them. Whether it’s overthrowing the rich, herding famers into communes, forcing them to produce more for less return, and controlling speech — it’s that need to overcontrol people that quickly leads to terror and mass executions. It leads to gigantic overexpansion of the state at the expense of other human enterprises. Hillary is exactly such a compulsively controlling personality.

Is that record of repetitive revolutionary failure on the Left just an accident? Is it that radicals are just experimenting in country after country, and eventually they’ll get it right? (That seems to be the ongoing Leftist fantasy). Or maybe there is something malevolent in the very nature of revolutionary personalities?

The last possibility is always ignored by the Left, but the evidence for malignant narcissism among Leftist radicals is very consistent. It goes back to the first famous revolutionary in Western history, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gave away his own out-of-wedlock babies to orphanages for the poor (horrific Institutions at the time), rather than taking care of them. That is malignant narcissism in a nutshell. Rousseau was the prototype of Leftwing narcissism.

The unconquerable conviction that “I have the answer to all the ills of mankind” marks Leftist narcissism. Marx and Lenin had it; Pol Pot had it; Hitler and Mussolini had it; Hillary and Bill are possessed by it; the whole gang seems to suffer from it.

Hillary and Bill are obsessed with that Napoleonic sense of total certainty. That’s how Hillary had the breath-taking gall to cobble together a centralized plan for one-seventh of the US economy, the entire health-care sector. In today’s 13 trillion-dollar economy that would be almost two trillion dollars per year — more than the Gross Domestic Product of Italy. Think of the mind-boggling presumption needed to believe that one person can dictate that much economic activity in minute detail. But Hillary was determined to dictate how many doctors would go into each specialty, how many would be assigned to rural areas and inner cities, and what racial composition would be demanded for medical school admissions. That kind of rock-hard belief in one’s own divine rightness is deeply irrational.

But that is exactly what the Left continues to believe: Hugo Chavez thinks he can do it today in Venezuela. Unless she has suddenly learned shattering humility in last seven years, Hillary Clinton is still very much in the Hugo Chavez mold.

Radicals consider their own rock-hard convictions about knowing the answers in life to be proof of their compassion. But they never seem to consider that they could be wrong. El Jefe Fidel Castro has been experimenting with the poverty-stricken people of Cuba for the last fifty years, and he still hasn’t quite gotten it right. There are still a few bugs in the system, even after many thousands of Cubans have fled the island floating on rubber tires and jury rigged car bodies. That kind of absolute certainty is not a product of adult reasoning with a realistic amount of humility. It is the opposite of the scientific attitude; rather, it’s the missionary certainty of Algore the Prophet, who can predict global warming a hundred years from now with a devout sense of certainty in his own righteousness.

Charismatic Leftists manage to convince lots of other people that they have all the answers. That is Bill Clinton’s talent, to make people fall in love and surrender to him. His clique of followers — Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright and the others — all seem to share the delusion of his greatness. Hillary is not nearly as charismatic as Bill, but teamed up with Bill she can swing an awful lot of clout.

So Hillary came out of her teenage years as a classic Leftist radical: Utterly convinced of her own rightness, entirely prepared to split the world into Good and Evil, and knowing with more-than-human certainty that other Americans were the incarnation of Evil.

Hillary was attracted to Saul Alinsky presumably because she had an emotional need to split the world in exactly that way. It helped her to navigate the 180 degree flip from an anti-Communist upbringing to the pro-Communist New Left.

It is common for teenagers to find father and mother substitutes to bridge the passage from childhood to independence. Parent substitutes can be personal — a teacher, mentor, an older friend or lover. Or they can be idealized figures we may never meet — movie stars, philosophers, politicians, sports heroes. When young girls today scream to see Barack Obama, they are showing their emotionally attachment to an imaginary hero. The same goes for the emotional Hillary fans. Deep down, the Left doesn’t operate by reason, but by appealing to very primitive emotional needs. Conservatives tend to be more skeptical, more aware of human fallibility, and more willing to judge by experience. We rarely fall in love with politicians, and certainly not when we know nothing about them. In the presidential race, conservatives are doing skeptical job interviews; liberals are looking for love in all the wrong places.

The shaping of Hillary’s adolescent identity was amazingly black-and-white. She had one real father, whom she loved as a young child and hated as a teenager. Then she learned to adore the political opposite of her real father, Saul Alinsky.

Several years after graduating from Wellesley, Hillary served as a newbie lawyer on the Senate Watergate Committee. There she was able to pursue her personal hate object, Richard M. Nixon, the Darth Vader of the Left. Nixon was precisely right in saying that by allowing the Watergate burglary “I gave them a sword” which they used destroy him. His Leftist enemies stabbed him to death with that sword, and just to ensure that he stays buried, they periodically bring out their swords and dance around Nixon’s grave. That is why we always hear new details about the terrible things Nixon said on those Watergate tapes. Somehow we never hear about LBJ’s Oval Office tapes, or Jack Kennedy’s. The editor of the Washington Post at the time, Ben Bradley, famously said that he “never had as much fun” as when he was destroying Nixon. Think about that.

Watergate was the great Oedipal victory of the Sixties Left. It was revenge for Richard Nixon’s successful anti-Communist campaign. The New Left thereby avenged the political defeat of the older Left, including Saul Alinsky himself. That is also why the Hollywood Left needs to constantly remind us of the “horrors” of Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee five decades ago, even though Soviet archives have shown that McCarthy and HUAC were pretty accurate. Stalin’s spies did indeed run all over the US government in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. They stole atom bomb secrets, and thereby initiated the near-lethal nuclear standoff of the Cold War. But these plain historical facts are constantly covered up by the Left. They cannot tolerate them. Yet in today’s Hollywood, the powers that be exercise a blacklist against conservatives that is less public but every bit as nasty as the reign of Joe McCarthy, and far more effective.

Saul Alinsky and Richard Nixon were the opposite magnetic poles that defined Hillary’s ways of splitting of the world between idolized Good (the radical Left) and demonized Evil (Republicans). As far as we can tell, she has not changed much in that respect. Bernstein calls her “rigid, secretive, combative, deceptive and angry.”

Dick Morris worked with Bill and Hillary for a number of years, and talks about how different they are. Bill is the natural seducer. Hillary is the all-or-none love-’em or hate-’em personality, a “splitter” or “borderline personality,” in psychiatric jargon. They represent two varieties of narcissism, manipulative personalities who utilize other people as objects for love, lust, hate, and power. Together the Clintons make up a kind of folie-a-deux, a two-person cult. From that point of view, they are incapable of true empathy and compassion. At Ron Brown’s funeral, Bill famously went from yucking it up with his buddies to crocodile tears in just a few seconds. It’s a sort of talent, a “gift” if you will.

Bill Clinton’s political style is rooted in the segregationist politics of his mentor William Fulbright and the racist Dixiecrats. The segregationists had a very particular style — they all came across as good ole’ boys and rarely said anything bad about Blacks — directly. Everything was done by hints and insinuations. It was called “segging.” Bill Clinton does exactly the same thing, except that he’s flipped sides. He does his segging against conservatives, always insinuating that they are evil, racists, sexists, and so on. It is an intensely malignant style, designed to slander human beings as irredeemably evil. That malignancy has come to be the Clinton mode, the “politics of personal destruction.” For Bill Clinton, it also reflects his mother’s class envy of poor Southern whites against the rich and favored. Clinton’s compulsive need to score sexual triumphs has some of that quality of hostility and denied aggression.

Clinton’s political style has not changed. Only the objects of his scapegoating have. He is still claiming to be a good ole’ boy while slyly spreading racial distrust and division.

Hillary is Bill’s best student. She’s a lot clunkier in her political hints and insinuations than he is, but they share that black-and-white view of their enemies. Like all radical Leftists, they are convinced that they, and only they, represent the higher good of humanity. To belong to their clique you first must believe that delusion.

Sandy Berger is a good example of a Billary follower who fell on his sword out of loyalty to ensure the Hillary Succession. It was crucial for Hillary’s career that Bill’s administration should escape any blame for the 9/11 fiasco; that was the job of the 9/11 Commission, and that is why Jaimie Gorelick had to be one of its members. The Commission was stacked to absolve the Clinton Administration of any blame for its many national security failures, thereby clearing a path for Hillary to take off in her run for the presidency. As a reward, all those old Clinton loyalists are now on the Hillary team. She may still decide to dump them, but not before the election is in the bag.

So what kind of Hillary Administration can we expect? The aim of the hard Left is to lock in total power. The European Left has largely succeeded in that, and we can see the results right in front of our eyes. The means used by the Left is to stack the bureacracy and the judiciary, and if possible, the legislative branch and the media. The Left will also push through international treaties that supersede congressional legislation. International treaties are underhanded ways to change the Constitution.

For example, in law school Hillary published “Children under the Law” in the Harvard Educational Review. That article ridiculed the antiquated notion that families should be seen as

“private, nonpolitical units. … Along with the family, past and present examples of such [dependency] arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system.”

Dick Armey was more candid:

“Her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around with a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists.”

A good chunk of the Federal bureaucracy hates George W. Bush and loves the Clinton Succession. That is why the CIA and the Pentagon drop national security stink bombs in the New York Times and Washington Post to undermine the War on Terror. They’re not against war as such; they hate Republicans who attempt to lead the nation at a time of war. At least some of those bureaucratic enemies were planted there in the reign of Clinton I. They are due to be promoted for their Leftist militancy in the Clinton II Administration.

Hillary knows exactly how to present herself to the public, and we will never know the truth until she is firmly in the saddle, our first compulsively Oedipal President, who is fanatically convinced that “everything must be different!” That was, of course, the Nazi creed. It is not an ideology but a compulsive personality trait.

With the Hillary Succession, America may be about to stumble into the darkest abyss in our national history.

* These words were mistakenly attributed to Camille Paglia when the article was first published. We regret the error.

By ELIZABETH FISHER

Bucks County Courier Times

On a Sunday afternoon in October, the Rev. David Wagner made an announcement that rocked his congregation. But even the standing ovation he received and the groundswell of support from his flock wasn’t enough to keep him at the pulpit from which he had preached for 10 years.

Wagner, now the former pastor of the Lutheran Church of God’s Love in Newtown Township, said he’s still reeling from the ordeal that began after he confessed that he was gay and had been living with a companion for five years.

His announcement came on the heels of a meeting with several individuals who said they had decided to leave God’s Love to attend a more “Bible-oriented” fundamentalist church. They assured Wagner that their departure “had nothing to do” with his lifestyle.

Those words alarmed Wagner, especially after hearing that some church members were “investigating” the 59-year-old clergyman’s private life. It was time to come out, he said.

The majority of his flock supported him, but what he called a core of opponents mounted a telephone campaign against him, trying to schedule a formal congregation meeting. That meeting would have required a two-thirds vote of support for Wagner to keep his job, he said.

Early on, officials at the Southeastern Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Norristown had decided not to bring disciplinary action against the pastor.

“I believe I could have gotten the votes I needed to stay, but I felt the divisiveness that occurred was harmful to the church and that’s when I decided to resign,” Wagner said.

Wagner left with dignity, but not quietly.

At his last service on Christmas Eve at God’s Love, he introduced his partner, Tom Piccoli, 54, a medical physicist, along with Piccoli’s former wife and other family members. Wagner’s extended family received enthusiastic applause, he said.

On a recent rainy evening, Wagner and Piccoli sat in the comfortable living room of the neatly tended Tudor home they’ve shared since 2002. A Christmas tree towered over the sitting area and Piccoli’s teen-age children (he shares custody with his ex-wife), bustled in, carrying packages.

Wagner said he was moved at the end of the Christmas Eve service by the many worshippers who embraced him, shed tears and wished him well. Piccoli took another view, saying that all that warmth left him cold.

“Why didn’t they fight for him? Why didn’t they speak out? They kept telling him he was the best pastor they ever had,” he said. “I’m appalled at what happened. I think it was reprehensible, unconscionable.

“How bigoted some of these people are to listen to the word of God and Jesus, then stay silent,” Piccoli added.

He said he urged Wagner, whom he met a dozen years ago, to stay at God’s Love and fight it out. Wagner said he tried, asking the church board for 30 days to decide what to do. Finally, Wagner said he understood that his longtime secrecy was dividing his congregation and he feared repercussions against the church.

“We did a lot of good over the years. I baptized the people, I married them and I buried them. It was sheer delight to foster this church and a bitter disappointment to step down because I love the Jesus story, I love preaching it. Jesus has been my rock through all of this,” he said, a tinge of sadness in his voice.

CHURCH DILEMMA

Like many mainstream denominations, the Lutheran church in the United States is grappling with sexuality issues, including how to deal with homosexual clergy.

In 2007, after considering several proposals on the issue, a national Lutheran assembly voted not to change church policy. At that time, the assembly encouraged regional bishops to use their discretion in situations like Wagner’s.

Wagner said he grew up in Minnesota in a conservative community that never allowed for differences. By age 11 or 12, he recalled that he knew he was “different.” It wasn’t the kind of thing you admitted, so he decided to repress his emerging attraction to males.

Wagner also had a deep love of God and a desire to preach the Gospel to others. He attended Gustavus Adolphus College south of Minneapolis-St. Paul. That’s where he decided to enter the ministry and where he was ordained 34 years ago.

He also married and had two children, whom he dotes on. Twenty-five years after his marriage and just before he took over at God’s Love, he finally admitted to his wife that he was gay. He moved to Newtown alone, but said he has remained close to his former wife and his children.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE

The Rev. Laura Ingersoll, assistant pastor at God’s Love, said many people wanted Wagner to stay, but the nature of the issue “made it obvious” that his ministry would take a back seat to his sexual orientation. She said the congregation is still trying to come to grips with the issue.

“I know that God’s Love is filled with good people really trying to understand what God is saying to them about this. We have every hope that the congregation is going to emerge stronger for have gone through this,” Ingersoll said.

Church Vice President Lisa Smoots called Wagner a “wonderful” pastor and said she’ll miss him.

“He was very capable of helping us find God. He was supportive, consistently available, very warm and loving. I’m sad that he’s leaving. I wish him much happiness.” she said.

Several congregants who demanded Wagner’s ouster were contacted by the Courier Times but all refused to comment.

For now, Wagner said he will step away from the ministry and look elsewhere for a job. He said he holds degrees in psychology and music and is, by nature, people-oriented.

“I’ll continue to go to church in Manasquan because my sense about church is that the institution does more good than harm,” he said. “I just wonder now that, after 34 years, and hearing all the good things that people said about me, what was my offense?

“Yes, I was partnered,” Wagner said. “I think that’s better than if I was dating, behaving like a wild man.”

________________________________

elwood mcquaid , THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 14, 2008

________________________________

An interesting contest seems to be heating up as the world paves a road to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The American religious Left has felt compelled to issue a series of documents slanted toward the Arab and Palestinian points of view, urging the powers that be to muscle Israel to accede to demands that will place Israelis in a virtually untenable position regarding their future security.

Signatories to these documents propose that they speak for the majority of evangelical Christians and, therefore, are in a position to pontificate on the direction the United States and other Western powers should take in (1) determining the future shape of the new Middle East and (2) correcting what they claim are the egregious malefactions of the Israeli government and its friends in the Zionist evangelical camp.

Their criticisms are based on the concept that Israel’s day is over, both biblically and historically. Consequently, Israelis have no more right to the land than their Muslim/Arab antagonists. Theologically, this position is popularly known as Replacement Theology, which claims that God’s promises to the heirs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were conditional and therefore abrogated by Israel’s disobedience. So the church stepped in as the true “Israel of God” and possesses the spiritualized, redefined covenants of promise.

From this lofty, self-ascribed position, modern Israel is seen as a squatter on property it seized from militarily inferior Palestinians who should receive it back, so much so that Israel has been called an apartheid state equal to South Africa, which practiced legal racial segregation and suppressed human rights from 1948 to 1994.

ZIONIST Christians (those of us who believe the land promises to the Jewish people are irrevocable-biblically, historically, morally, and legally) are written off as an illegitimate theological mutation, unworthy of serious consideration. Furthermore, we are accused of being anti-Palestinian political meddlers who say, “Israel right or wrong.” This point of view elicits a number of responses that are perfectly in order considering the seriousness of the accusations.

First and foremost, on the matter of believing God’s biblical promises regarding Jewish rights to a homeland in Eretz Yisrael, we are guilty as charged. The birth of the church as God’s grace gift to the Gentiles did not contain a deed to property in the Middle East. Nor does it give Christian leaders, as some have wrongly concluded, a mandate to dictate what land is actually His land.

Second, the accusation that we are anti-Palestinian is totally without foundation. The Palestinians are caught in the middle of a conflict created and maintained by the manipulative mismanagement of their leaders who act in their own behalf, disregarding the needs of their people. The most unfortunate are Palestinian Christians. Witness the exodus of Christian Arabs to the West and Europe in recent years. Some have gone so far as to blame this evacuation on Israel and economic oppression and despair caused by the continual “occupation.”

Hardly mentioned is the fact that the Christian exodus from the Middle East is a response to the Islamic drive to exterminate Christians and Jews from the region.

Criticism of Israel’s 8,000 settlers in Gaza was a popular theme for many years. If the Jewish infiltrators were eliminated from the Gaza, the mantra went, Palestinians could elevate their social and economic status, which would change their lives and lifestyles. So the Jews left, at great cost. The result? Gaza became a staging area for terrorists; Hamas rules the street; and Christian Arabs are hunted, assassinated, and forced to find safe haven somewhere other than Gaza.

With regard to the charge of meddling in politics, let it be said that Christian Zionism is not primarily a political action movement. It is not the legitimate province of outsiders, however benevolently motivated, to dictate the political policy of a foreign government. The Israeli people are perfectly capable of determining the course their nation should pursue. That said, there is a point where politics and biblical, prophetic realities converge. This is not a matter of dictation but observation; and there is no doubt that current events, when compared with scriptural predictions, help us discern where we are and where history is heading.

For Israelis and the Jewish state, the issue is survival within secure, recognized borders. And for Palestinians, Christians, and others, it is the right to pursue productive and tranquil lives without fear of radical Islamist discrimination.

The writer, a pastor, is a veteran leader of the Christian Zionist movement in the US.

________________________________

________________________________

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1200308085560&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull <http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1200308085560&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull>

Like most Protestants, Methodists honor but do not typically pray to the Virgin Mary. But an official with the United Methodist lobby office in Washington, D.C., apparently makes an exception for the “sassy sister savior” when she is redefined to embody the Religious Left’s political ideals: a Mary socialist.

Neal Christie, who is the Assistant General Secretary of the United Methodist Board of Church & Society, offered up his Marian liberationist prayer as part of his agency’s special holiday message. Merry Christmas from a Virgin Mary who more resembles Winnie Mandela than the Jewish mother of Jesus! Christie began:

Sassy sister-savior,

You bare in your body our cathedral,

dust of the earth, promise of new birth,

One who will choose to live water borne and water boarded.

The Virgin Mary of the Gospels left no recorded remarks about the Roman Empire’s less than sterling human rights record. But she evidently has very strong views about the Bush Administration’s “torture” policies, among many other issues dear to the Religious Left. Christie’s prayer continued:

Pacing the perimeter of Manger Square,

and lock-down, ramshackle refugee camps everywhere,

you sigh as the global North grows dim with its seasonal addiction to desire,

you laugh at our myth of self-isolation,

the lie that where your life ends mine begins.

What are all those “refugee camps” around Manger Square? Probably they belong to persecuted Palestinians, who after 60 years still supposedly have no place to go. Why are these victims still homeless? Is it because the Arab world never wanted to resettle them, preferring instead to showcase them as a living argument against Israel’s existence? No, the liberationist Virgin Mary is instead setting herself against the “Empire” and its “client states,” who are the real authors of global suffering. No doubt on bended knee on Capitol Hill, Christie kept praying:

So when today’s bloated Herods run wild like malaria,

hunkered down behind a poverty of overabundance,

offering backdoor escape for predatory lenders and backroom invaders,

financing Empire’s client-state dictators;

Famously, another more prominent Religious Left spokesman Jesse Jackson compared King Herod to then-Vice President Dan Quayle at the 1992 Democratic Convention. But Christie seemed to liken the infanticidal puppet of Rome more broadly to America as global hegemon: corrupt, predatory, and militaristic. The litany of his prayer went on:

When Herod makes the White House and Congress a backroom playhouse;

when a prosperity gospel gives up nothing and ordinary folk give up their lives to war,

and domestic lynching passes as state sanctioned torture;

when the growing poor are siphoned through waste management systems,

and a generation of children is withheld access to health care, when backstabbing of immigrants becomes national sport,

and today’s Herods retreat in glee,

You come again to sandpaper our hearts to sensitivity,

and bare the first fruit of the Spirit.

Who knew that the Virgin Mary was so very politically outspoken?! Her recorded words in Scripture are largely confined to thanking God for her role in the Incarnation. Millions of Christians frequently recite her words of praise towards the Almighty:

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

But in the Religious Left version of Mary’s concerns, the mother of Jesus is more concerned about President Bush’s veto of proposed enlargements in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The congressionally approved increases would have extended federal subsidies of medical coverage to children of families making $80,000 a year. But everyone knows that the Virgin Mary favors socialized medicine and views increases in SCHIP as an important incremental step. After all, Mary did exclaim in her sacred exhalation:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Traditional believers of course understand the “He” of this Scripture as God. But the Religious Left often instead prefers to think of Big Government, and not the Lord, as the ultimate dispenser of justice and mercy. Perhaps Christie should have saved himself the trouble of addressing Mary and instead prayed directly to a divine personificaton of The Welfare State.

The Virgin Mary of Scripture and history, who witnessed her son’s unjust execution by the state, could indeed have issued a seering political critique of the rulers of her day. Instead, she was more concerned about the transcendent and the eternal, joining with her son’s disciples to perpetuate a Gospel of salvation and holiness, not intense political activism.

In vivid contrast, the Religious Left always strains to reduce Christianity down to a lobby campaign for the domestic statist causes du jour. And its “prophetic” international stances routinely condemn America and its allies but almost never cite genuine perpetrators of torture and oppression. Maybe the Religious Left should ponder Mary’s authentic words:

He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.

________________________________

Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy <http://www.ird-renew.org> .

Controversy continues to swirl around the predominantly Religious Left and Evangelical Left response to “A Common Word Between Us and You,” the statement by 138 Islamic authorities in October.

The Muslim declaration was relatively moderate and invited dialogue with Christians. Mostly left-leaning religious studies faculty from the Ivy League organized “Loving God and Neighbor Together” as a “Christian Response.” It offered regrets for the Crusades and the War on Terror, while eagerly accepting the invite to dialogue with Islam. The Muslim statement, of course, offered no apologies for Islamist conquests or terror.

Predictable Evangelical Left activists such as Jim Wallis signed as well as more moderate Evangelicals, including the president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) Leith Anderson and the NAE’s increasingly left-leaning Washington spokesman, Richard Cizik. Rev. Anderson hoped that his signature would be “especially helpful to Christians who live and minister in Muslim-majority countries.” And he likewise expressed concern that “not signing could be damaging to these Christian brothers and sisters who live among Muslims.”

On January 3, a publication of James Dobson’s conservative “Focus on the Family” criticized evangelicals who endorsed “Loving God and Neighbor Together.” It quoted Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler, who slammed the statement’s “naiveté,” including the Crusades apology. “I just have to wonder how intellectually honest this is,” he said. “Are these people suggesting that they wish the military conflict with Islam had ended differently - that Islam had conquered Europe?”

Similarly in the same publication, conservative evangelical Gary Bauer accused endorsing evangelicals of having “left the (card) table without their pants - that is, they’ve been taken and may not even realize they’ve been taken.” Religious liberty advocate Patrick Sookhdeo was quoted as saying: “I find it difficult to understand how senior evangelical leaders in the West can join hands with other Christians who actually are betraying the Christian faith (and) their Christian brothers and sisters in the Muslim world.”

In response to the Focus on the Family critique, “emerging church” guru Brian McLaren vigorously responded with his own op-ed for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners. He likened the troubles between Christendom and Islam to an unpleasant domestic dispute between spouses who are in need of good counseling. “When you have a conflict with your wife where both you and she have made mistakes, do you only agree to acknowledge your own faults if she will also acknowledge hers,” he wrote in defense of the Christian apology for the Crusades and War on Terror. “If you say, ‘Yes, I may have made a small mistake, but you made even bigger ones,’ do you expect this to lead to a better relationship?” Oddly, McLaren asked conservative evangelical critics: “If Muslims apologized for their faults, would you then be willing to dialogue with them in a respectful way?” Surely even he knows that such a public admission by Islamic authorities is highly unlikely. Even Muslim clerics and scholars who privately admit to Islamic failings would place themselves in physical danger by declaring so publicly.

McLaren wondered about his fellow Christians: “How can we not apologize for our sins? Should we claim we have no sins? Or should we knowingly refuse to acknowledge them? Isn’t the humility to confess sins a Christian virtue?” In an analogy that would surprise persecuted Christian minorities in Islamic countries, he portrayed Muslims as ostracized outsiders in need of Christian inclusion: “I’m sorry when anyone feels alienated by those of us who try to follow Jesus’ command to be peacemakers and to treat others as we would be treated, but didn’t Jesus, when faced with a choice of reaching out to those considered untouchable outsiders by the Pharisees, side with the excluded?” Defending the urgent need for interfaith dialogue, McLaren warned against leaving “the field to religious extremists and hawkish politicians who have proved themselves highly willing to resort to terrorism and war?”

Was McLaren implying moral equivalence between the U.S. and al Qaeda’s radical Islamist allies? If so, he would not be entirely alone among many signers of “Loving God and Neighbor Together,” who are desperately anxious to separate themselves from U.S. policies or conservative evangelicals who support them. Many of these signers are pacifist absolutists and genuinely see no ethical distinctions between terrorist strikes and a U.S. military response to them.

The NAE’s Leith Anderson admitted “there were lines in the Christian letter that were not quite what I would write” and “sometimes we all sign onto things that are not all that we would like them to be.” But he hoped that the Christian response to the Islamic overture would foster “mutual respect between the two largest religions on the globe” and broader religious liberty. “It is not good to live in either ignorance or isolation,” he concluded.

But the predominantly Religious Left organizers of “Loving God and Neighbor” do not represent the only salvation from “ignorance” or “isolation.” As head of a group professing to represent over 20 million evangelicals, surely Anderson could have organized his own Christian response that did not rely on left-leaning Ivy League faculty or Jim Wallis’s Sojourners. Anderson expressed fear that Christians in Muslim lands might suffer if he declined to sign. Endorsing Christian apologies to Islam in order to protect Christians from being persecuted or killed by Islamic authorities or mobs hardly bodes well for constructive Christian-Islamic dialogue.

Religious liberty scholar Paul Marshall has written: “The [extreme Islamist] people engaged in persecution are neither stupid nor uneducated…. We will not understand persecution if we think it is a mere misunderstanding to be resolved through more education and chatty conferences” (Their Blood Cries Out, p. 220). But many on the Religious and Evangelical Left fervently believe in “education and chatty conferences,” equating the West’s struggles with radical Islam to a family squabble needing a geopolitical therapy session. The Muslim scholars and clerics who organized “A Common Word Between Us and You” merited a better response than what Brian McLaren et al. have offered.

________________________________

Mark Tooley <mailto:mtooley@ird-renew.org> is director of United Methodist Action at the Institute for Religion and Democracy <http://www.ird-renew.org> .

The history of the United States runs through Philadelphia. It is there that the American Revolution was born. However, a new revolution threatens to take hold of Philly, a Muslim one. It is led by one of Philadelphia’s favorite sons, singer/songwriter/producer Kenny Gamble (a.k.a. Luqman Abdul Haqq), who has a master plan to renovate a once great part of the city using taxpayers’ money. While on face value his intentions appear to be worthy, Gamble’s revitalization plan for Philadelphia has sinister implications, leading to the question: Will Philadelphia remain “the City of Brotherly Love” or will it become a city of Muslim Brotherly hate?

Most of those attending the conference were people unknown to the non-Muslim world. But one in particular has been in the public eye for decades.

Kenneth Gamble is an icon within the music business, in part responsible for over 170 platinum and gold albums and songs, including “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Love Train,” and “Me and Mrs. Jones.” As stated by John A. Jackson, in his A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul, by the end of 1974, Gamble along with his partners Leon Huff and Thom Bell “were the top three soul producers in the pop music industry.”

Question: When Universal Companies states that it started in 1993, does it really mean that the United Muslim Movement started then? And if the answer is yes, does that then mean that the two groups are really one and the same? This leads to concern number two, that not only is Universal Companies in existence to form an all Muslim Philly enclave, but that it is being done with the blessings and money of the city and the state of Pennsylvania.

In June of 1975, Gamble and 18 others were indicted in a payola scandal, in which the Justice Department accused Gamble’s record label of offering bribes in return for airplay. In the end, he was fined $2500 <http://www.warnerchappell.com/wcm_2/featured/featuredDetails_2.jsp?featuredTalentId=238&talentId=1122793118> . Today, while he is still tied to the music business – he will be inducted into the 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – Gamble has sought out new avenues to deal in. Unlike before, though, his present ventures are tied to a radical form of religion, one that puts a Muslim Brotherhood organization, MANA; a black supremacist group, NOI; and his own Islamic organization, the United Muslim Movement (Universal Companies), on center stage. Why would the local and state government get so involved in something that could prove potentially dangerous for its citizens? Is it blind ambition or is it money for money? Has Kenny Gamble learned from the past or is this 1975 all over again? Regardless of the answers, if things continue as they are going, very soon the city of Philadelphia will be experiencing its first taste of Sharia law

Joe Kaufman is the Chairman of Americans Against Hate <http://www.americansagainsthate.com/> , the founder of CAIR Watch <http://www.americansagainsthate.org/cw/> , and the spokesman for Terror-Free Oil Initiative <http://www.terrorfreeoil.org/> .