People of faith have good reason to fear those atheistic forces in our society that strive to expunge every trace of religion from public life. The excesses of our judicial system in this regard are quite well known, and need not be detailed here.
Yet, many of these same people don’t seem to realize that the inaction of other branches of government against this onslaught—and even horrific instances when they aid and abet it, including allowing a forced abortion on a teenager—is really very logical. There IS no place for religion in public life, since religion is completely incompatible with our current form of government—an intrusive socialistic oligarchy. Despite the existence of two major political parties, the end result of every election has always been the same: more government and less freedom.
Since religion, at the very least, gives us a different way of looking at the world, it is a serious threat to the current power structure. Until recently, it was unquestioned that human rights were derived from God, or absent God, were simply part of the natural law. Nowadays, a large precept, although usually not stated as directly as this, is that all of these same rights are derived from the government. The proliferation of civil rights laws, definitions of hate crimes, and effete harassment statutes are only the obvious examples. The existence of a confiscatory tax system, whereby people talk more about what they get to keep, rather than what is being taken from them, is another slightly more subtle manifestation.
One more illustration of the freedom-killing government leviathan, misallocating untold billions in resources, and creating massive amounts of crime where it never existed, is the so-called War on Drugs. In the past 80 or so years, did you, your ancestors, or your elected representatives for that matter, ever vote on initially going forward, and then continuing with reckless abandon this absurd enterprise? The fruits of this tragic and misguided effort, besides being an affirmative action and welfare program for law enforcement agencies and the courts, have been wanton destruction, affecting especially those less fortunate classes that these programs were supposedly designed to protect. Clearly, if alcoholic beverages are legal, given all the negatives, then no rational argument can be proffered in favor of drugs being illegal.
What would Jesus do about drugs? While this specific issue is not addressed in the Gospels, of course, Jesus does take on many problems of society, including adultery, divorce, revenge, greed, and false prophets, in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew Chapters 5-7). His answers are always based on faith and dependence on God. There simply are no passages where He recommends that Caesar or the Jewish authorities get more involved in the lives of the people, for any “good” reason.
However, the mere non-existence of these and other passages, used by the “Christian” Left to justify their misguided positions is never seen as an impediment. Which brings us to those who would destroy religion from within.
As if the Episcopal Church needed any more controversy, in June, 2003, after venue shopping three times, V. Gene Robinson became the nation’s first gay bishop, in New Hampshire. Showing a real spirit of emulating the suffering servant, Robinson left his wife and two young daughters, to live with a man, in 1986. In a mind-numbing disconnect at the time, Rev. David Jones, rector of St. Paul’s in Concord, N.H., said he was thrilled with Mr. Robinson’s selection even though he recognizes that the Bible denounces homosexuality.
Now, less than two years later, this same bishop is backing Planned Parenthood, urging this organization to “…target people of faith to promote abortion rights…” It is difficult to imagine the most ardent proponent of unlimited abortion invoking God in the taking of innocent life. To an unrepentant hard-core atheist, these matters would be mutually exclusive.
The Catholic Church is still reeling, and rightly so, from the pedophile scandals, but what Robinson is doing here is the equivalent of a Catholic bishop endorsing the North American Man Boy Love Association.
How did this happen? Under a climate of the most perverse political correctness, where nearly everything is allowed (except dissent to political correctness) standards are abolished. Why worry, they say, if no one is hurt? I expect that Robinson’s wife and daughters were hurt by his desertion, even as he comforts the abortionists:
“I know, in the end, that I’m going to heaven, and so are you. You and I can do this work no matter how hard it gets, because we know we’re going home.”
It’s one thing for him to assert that he “knows” he’s going to heaven, reflecting mindless pseudo-theology at its most extreme, but it is a whole other matter to sanctify a group of miserable abortionists that he hardly knows at the same time. If everyone is going to heaven, why have any churches at all, why even have Scripture? A more fundamental misreading of Christianity is hard to imagine.
St. Paul’s epistles mentioned threats and problems both inside and outside the Church. We too can take comfort—cold comfort—that little has changed in nearly 2000 years.