I passed on savaging a post that CP Editor Richard Land did for the Fourth Of July… I didn’t need filler material… but apparently, the comments section got lit! At long last, the idea that religious tolerance can exclude the devil is on the table!
*sniff* Good-bye, Christian Post comments section. We’ll never know why they suddenly got rid of you. Too soon? My bad.
Freedom without choice is no true freedom at all
h ttps://www.christianpost.com/voices/freedom-without-choice-is-no-true-freedom-at-all.html
By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor
Wot dis? If you can’t choose evil then you aren’t free?
It is not often I am surprised by comments that are generated by my columns in The Christian Post. Over the years I have read, as you would imagine, literally thousands of various opinions, agreements and disagreements with the ideas I have articulated and the arguments I have made on literally hundreds of issues.
And he wasn’t often surprised? That’s called an echo chamber, Dick. The ‘Net might be 90% noise but you can’t stop the signal. You can only refuse to hear it.
So, imagine my surprise at being taken aback by some comments generated by my column, “The Extraordinary Meaning of July 4th for America and the World,” I frankly thought that praising the Declaration of Independence and its meaning would not have been terribly controversial.
However, several of our readers took exception to my praising the unique birth of human freedom published on July 4, 1776.
Ooh, this is going to be good. This is how male feminists talk right before they pop.
Meanwhile, that date was the birth of a war, not the birth of Freedumb For Humanity. More at the end.
One reader declared:
“It was never the founders intent to promote irresponsible freedom. The freedom we enjoy in our Constitution and supporting Declaration of Independence was formulated within the context of reverence and submission to God on an individual basis. In those times it was the one true Christian God.”
Another critic goes even further, assuming that I am glorifying “this ‘FREEDOM’ even though it blasphemously proclaims that it is …a human right to worship ANY gods, that it proclaims … right for each to define good and evil in their own eyes. It is clear that you have placed the ‘light of the torch of FREEDOM’ above the LIGHT and 1 Truth of the 1 & only God.”
Imagine my surprise. My first response is that our forefathers bequeathed us a great and noble thing — an understanding that our freedom and our rights came from our Creator and that God created us with the right to govern ourselves according to His revelation of Himself and His character to us.
Surprise at what? The blatantly obvious truths, that the Framers didn’t mean to protect devil worship and freedom shouldn’t be a license for evil? If our freedom comes from Christ, and we choose against Christ, then how could we possibly continue to be free?
As usual for a Yankee, Land means freedom in the sense of “not a Negro in chains”. Never mind that Christianity is not opposed to slavery. Remember when Apostle Paul ordered a slave to return to his master? (What Christianity did do, is ruin the economic incentive for slavery as a tool of exploitation.) Are you free to dissent against the State or defend yourself from a home invader? No, but you still aren’t a Negro in chains!
He also gave us, beginning with Adam and Eve, the freedom to choose right from wrong, understanding that wrong choices would bring disastrous consequences.
They did EVIL, not “wrong”.
My question to my critics is this: “What would you have in place of our constitutionally guaranteed freedom?”
Blasphemy laws. Standing extradition orders for non-heritage ethnics. Capital punishment for devil worship. And that’s just the religious side. God’s Plan for the wicked is to hunt them down and PUNISH THEM FOR WICKEDNESS.
Would you have the Founding Fathers dictating to us which particular God (Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist or Deist) we must worship and the manner in which we are to perform that worship?”
Trick question, there’s only one God on that list. Even Deism admits a (Christ-esque) God exists, just not His moral authority. Let me fix his question:
Would you have the Founding Fathers dictating to us which particular God (Christ, Satan, Gaia, Allah, Kali, Molech, Baal, Mammon, Sorath, Kylo Ren) we must worship and the manner in which we are to perform that worship?”
Yes. Absolutely. We were a Christian nation. Not a Christ & Satan nation. Not a druidic pagan child-sacrificing Marxist nation of Somalis fresh off the Mayflower.
My god is Christ Jesus. Your god is also Christ Jesus whether you want Him or not, because there’s only one God. You’re “free” to defy Him but man, it’s gonna suck to be you once God’s patience runs out.
Why is Dick being this intentionally obtuse? Nobody debates the merits of the Anglican god versus the Methodist god. He’s ducking the very complaints he cited.
After all, nine of the original 13 states had tax-supported state churches and our forefathers did not follow their lead.
You should listen to yourself, Dick. Our forefathers imposed state churches worshiping Christ Jesus. But you, YOU want us to have the option to freely worship Beelzebub:
True freedom leaves a man or a woman free to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences without interference from the civil magistrate.
THAT IS SATANISM. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” As I’d just said in a recent post, God requires submission to government…
…because…
…it’s government’s job to punish evil. As defined by God.
If the police don’t punish a man who sacrifices a chicken to an idol, then who will? It’s got to be somebody because that is an act of EVIL.
I see anarchists worshiping their hairdos more devoutly than I see Christians worshiping Christ. The California CROWN Act, look it up.
Our second president, John Adams, said in 1798, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (John Adams, “Letter from John Adams to Massachusetts Militia,” Oct. 11, 1798.)
Adams understood that our Constitution was based on Judeo-Christian values combined with Enlightenment ideas of self-government.
That’s… that’s…
He actually said it.
Richard Land admits his Christianity is based on Judaism and the Enlightenment. One of which was a Godless replacement of Christianity, and the other of which is still the Synagogue of Satan.
It’s an improvement.
Land’s forefathers worshiped the Goddess Columbia. And maybe Land still does?
Shantiom is the author of a self-help book on dating, but still, that’s a perfect description of the American goddess. (I believe she’s a descendant of Princess Mumtaz Mahal, who’s also got nothing to do with today’s topic, but you’ve heard of her tomb, the Taj Mahal.)
Now that I think about it… a bitch swinging a sword is STILL a perfect symbol of FedGov.
You cannot force people to be pious or devout. And, you have no right to coercively interfere with another man’s relationship with God.
Mr. Land, you have no right to tell me what my rights are when you don’t even understand the concept. The Bill of Rights are restrictions on government power; they are not individual entitlements.
I don’t have the entitlement to punish an evil man, but if the government refuses to act, then I become free to do so. Meanwhile, people absolutely can be forced to practice a religion they don’t believe in. Covidism, look it up. There has always and forever been coercion in religion. We can debate its appropriateness… we cannot debate its existence.
This IS good. We’re getting at the very heart of Western Civilization’s rot. The Enlightenment began by freeing us from Christianity, now Land tells us we are free just after the Plandemic proved how free we AREN’T.
As the great Baptist Roger Williams put it so eloquently in the early 17th century while facing the state church in Massachusetts Bay, for any man to coercively interfere with another man’s faith is “soul-rape.”
The great PURITAN, he means. Williams’ story begins as a Puritan pastor who thought his people were being too harsh on the neighboring Amerinds. Being the outspoken type, he was exiled to form a new community specifically for religious freedom and the welfare of not-white Christians.
He was baptised a Baptist a few years after that, so Land is technically correct, and Roger became an early proponent of Separation of Church and State… spending his years defending the natives from the encroachments of his fellow white people…
Does Land have a single favorite saint, who did not betray his own blood or “liberate the slaves”? Does he say “Jesus” and think “William Wilberforce”?
Where is this Separation of Church and State, anyway? It would be really useful now that literal satanists are running the District of Columbia. I never stopped hearing about separation of Church and State when the Church was strong. Now that the State is strong… crickets.
All attempts by government to dictate religion always ends in disaster, conscience abuse, and dictatorship.
Democracy much, Mister Land?
I can see it in you… all the decades of propaganda that liberated the woman, imported the foreigner and licensed the depraved. All of it compressed into one single generation singing one unified, shrill note of LIES.
“Who cares if we’re doing evil? We’re FREE to do evil, that’s what matters! And I’ll defend that freedom with every army of NATO!” After which, apparently, Ukraine will have the freedom to speak Russian.
When you Cuckservatives finally meet Christ… He’s not going to be ANYTHING like a Hasidic rabbi OR a fat, black woman. Just so you have a clue, how much your “faith” is a programmed lie.
And after all, God never wants coerced worship. He gave Adam and Eve a choice. He gave His chosen people a choice. He could have forced them to obey. He did not. He wanted a voluntary compliance and loving worship.
Are we still talking about Methodists versus Presbyterians?
Mother: “They forced my children to attend Drag Queen Story Hour! Now my boy is claiming he’s a girl!”
Land: “Now, now, my dear, it’s perfectly acceptable that sometimes people worship Christ in a different way than you. These drag queens, were they Anglicans or Episcopalians?”
Mother: “They said something about Aztec spirit guides and mescaline.”
As the Apostle Paul exhorted the Ephesian Christians to “walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” (Eph. 5:2)
The Jews are inciting a nuclear exchange between the Christian West and the Christian East, but at least our irradiated corpses will be a sweet-smelling aroma to God. We should not judge another’s conscience!
In the early 17th century the English Baptist Thomas Helwys wrote The Mystery of Iniquity in which he informed the King of England, James I, that he was just a man and should have no coercive control over another man’s relationship with his God, thus authoring the first published plea for religious freedom in the English language.
Did King James say anything about coercive control over another man’s relationships with vulnerable young boys? Dead serious question.
Land is one of those two characters. Let’s continue.
However, the answer is not for any one group to try to impose what they believe the correct religion is on the people. The last thing that anyone should want is government-sponsored or government-mandated religion. The experience is like being embraced by a python which squeezes all the life out of you. The empty cathedrals of the state churches in Europe bear stark testimony to that truth.
But government-umpired religion, that’s totally different. Oops, that was a spoiler…
Our Declaration and our Constitution free our people to be God-honoring, Bible-believing followers of Christ, but also allows them to go their own way. That is the two-edged sword of freedom.
Okay, I’ve made up my mind. He’s Grima Wormtongue. “We should let people worship evil because Christ lets people worship evil”? This is not a Christian speaking. Deluded or otherwise.
The confessional statement of my personal faith tradition, Southern Baptist, The BaptistFaith & Message, puts it quite eloquently and succinctly: “God alone is Lord of the conscience and He has left it free from the doctrines of man which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it.”
This statement makes a critically important distinction. While we shall be free from the dictates of man, we are responsible to God. “Human beings are not really autonomous. We will one day answer to God for our beliefs, actions, thoughts and words.” (Charles S. Kelley Jr., Richard Land, R. Albert Mohler Jr., The Baptist Faith & Message, 2007), pp. 163-164.
Wait, what? “The Baptist Creed says I’m right” and “I wrote the Baptist Creed”? The smarter entryists don’t sign their own work.
The statement is a lie. God judges the soul, yes, but man judges the action. Ever since Genesis 9:6. “If a man sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.”
What does it matter, if people use freedom to do evil? Let’s make like a REAL Baptist and thump the Bible!
“…Certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our ONLY Sovereign and Lord.” Jude 1:4
Looking at YOU, Richard Land! Your work proves you a false Christian and infiltrator!
I can go one better. No devout Christian uses the phrase “my personal faith tradition”.
I can go two better. Just two posts ago, I fisked a Christian Post article by a self-described feminist. I noted at the time that such an outspoken witch should never have been given a voice on Christian media, which begs the question of who gave her that voice. CP’s executive editor, perhaps?
Freedom is a God-given right. He gave us the ability to choose right over wrong, and even after the fall of man He redemptively acts to empower us to choose the right through the life-giving power of His Son.
That’s another lie. How is it that God gave us the freedom to choose along with punishments if we don’t choose what we should? Meanwhile, the reason Christ had to die, which I assume is the “life-giving power” he mentions, is because we don’t have the freedom, or choice, to save ourselves.
I see unbelievers who choose to do right. I see self-described Christians who choose to do evil. The difference in “freedumb to choose” is obviously not Christ.
Genuine and true Christianity has flourished under the freedoms set in place by the Declaration and the Constitution, like it has in no other milieu.
Bullshit, Dick. You don’t even have the freedom to believe there are only two genders anymore. You don’t have the freedom to demand your wife’s loyalty that she freely vowed to you. Just a couple years ago, you weren’t even free to enjoy fun and oxygen.
Land looks at modern America, and he sees a success story of “freedom” and “democracy” and “the will of the Enlightened, Judeo-Christian founders”. Maybe it is a success story by Enlightenment’s standards, but I suspect it’s more of a success story for Mr. Land. If it works for his people then it’s good. The rest of us are free to do as we’re told. Jeebus would want that.
Government should be an umpire, or referee, making sure everyone plays fair, with no cheating in attempts to intimidate or suppress minorities.
Again, that’s Satanism. The Godless rebel sitting in judgment of God. “Only Government can make sure everybody plays fair.”
The government should not be a judge, a sponsor, or a censor for one religion over another or no religion over religion.
And again! “The government must not favor Christ over Satan.” The latter is, of course, perfectly happy to be acknowledged only as God’s equal. Demanding equity can wait until next week.
This leaves men free to pursue the truth according to the dictates of their own consciences.
Yeah, free to pursue the truth like it’s a meaningless fashion statement. “Does this faith tradition make my butt look fat?” Land’s attitude towards religion is the exact same as the Chinese Communist Party’s attitude towards religion: anything you want, subject to the State.
“You’re a Buddhist? That’s wonderful! But no hating on homos. Because their truth says no. You want to protect your kids from predators? So sorry, but their truth says yes. Don’t hate me just because I’m unbiased like that.”
“You’re a Christian? That’s wonderful! But stop claiming that Jesus is the Son of God. That’s offensive, and your truth is not allowed to offend me.”
“You’re a thief and a murderer? Welcome home, brother! You wouldn’t believe the credulous idiots I’ve had to associate with lately.”
Will this mean competition for hearts and minds in the marketplace of ideas? Yes. What’s the problem?
Evil going unpunished.
I did not see Elijah avoiding a confrontation with the prophets of Baal. He said, “You pray to your gods and I will pray to mine, and let’s see whose prayers get answered.”
Then the people freely chose to slit the throats of 850 false prophets, and Elijah’s prayers got answered. Good times. By the way, half of those were prophets of the goddess Ashtoreth.
Let us go forward with the confidence of Elijah. We serve the one true God, the one who answers prayers.
The one true God established the one true moral code. That moral code is mandatory for all humanity, condemning the devil’s works… stealing, murdering and deceiving… wherever they happen. It’s true that people cannot be forced to worship Christ directly, but notice that’s “cannot” rather than “should not”.
So, here we are. Editor Land is shocked, SHOCKED that some commenters think freedom shouldn’t sanction wickedness or false gods, and he invoked the malware he himself wrote into Southern Baptist theology to blow squid ink at our ability to discern his evil.
Why would he do that? The “Cult of Lincoln”.
h ttps://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15363
22 October 2018
The Official Right has a different interpretation of American history than most normal white people. Blacks, of course, fixate on slavery and segregation, so their view of American history is through hostile eyes. Whites generally accept the conventional narrative. If you ask a normal white American to tell the story of America, he will start with something about how the Puritans came to America to escape religious tyranny. Once the colonist got things going, the King tried to tax the colonists, so there was a revolution.
The Official Right has a different view of American history. They look at the Founding as an imperfect result. First and foremost, they view the tolerance of slavery, and the enshrining of it in the Constitution, as a great sin. Rather than embrace the principle of liberty for all, because all men are created equal, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution created a compromise. While all citizens were free and equal under the law, slavery created a class of people who were not citizens.
The phrase “all men are created equal” was meant in the context of class, not race. Kings, serfs and colonists are all men. Money doesn’t make you more of a man than the poor. The phrase was never meant to imply that blacks can do math, or if you prefer, that white men can jump.
In the view of the Straussians, the intellectual movement based on the writing and teaching of Leo Strauss, the Constitution was not just a flawed document, but an immoral one, because it violated that core principle of equality. From this perspective, the Civil War was a purification of the country, removing the origin sin of slavery and forming a new Union, based in equality and universal liberty. For the Official Right, America was reborn in the Civil War and Lincoln was the Moses who ushered in the new republic… For the Official Right, the American story starts with the Gettysburg Address.
A big part of this is due to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who became something of a cult leader for the neoconservatives. His framing of the Civil War as the second founding, allowed the neocons to see themselves as proof of the concept. The original founding excluded them from the narrative, while the second founding not only included them in the story of America, it made them proof of its righteousness. Lincoln’s America was not just for the founding stock. It was for whoever could get control of it.
Of course, the old WASP side of the Official Right was also willing to embrace this notion of the second founding. Since northern conservatism was mostly just a clean up crew that followed Progressivism around, the story of the second founding made their unwillingness to oppose the Left seem noble. Since Reconstruction, the role of what passes for conservatism has been to fill the void after every great spasm of Progressive activism overturned the old order. The Official Right’s job was to make it all work again.
The problem with this telling of history is it assumes a core immorality of the founding stock and the institutions they created. It also locks in the notion that it is the role of Northern reformers to be the guardians of civic morality. The Left need only appeal to the notion of universal equality and liberty and their opponents were disarmed. After all, the party of Lincoln, if it stands for anything, stands for universal equality and liberty. The conservatism of Harry Jaffa is nothing but a complex apologia for Progressivism.
And so does Land revealed himself a child of the devil and Columbia by demanding equality and liberty even from God. He calls it Christ’s freedom and is upset that some Christians think it should result only in devotion to Christ.