That’s Right Nate

Friend of the blog Jack Kimble got in some trouble yesterday when he posted this seemingly innocuous post on twitter:

There’s a war going on between traditional America and those who would like to take Christ out of The 4th of July 3:36 PM Jul 3rd via web

Wow, was he attacked unmercifully by the secular humanist mob that tends to congregate at these social networking sites.  Long time enemy of this site Roger Ebert immediately retweeted the post.  Soon after, Shannyn Moore who is better known for her constant attacks on Sarah Palin and the good folks at BP also was retweeting Kimble’s comment.  What I want to know though, is Representative Kimble really off base?  I mean when he suggested that shrimp, oysters, and crawfish would be unharmed in the BP spill because they had shells he was simply wrong, but in this case I don’t think he is.

Think about you traditional 4th of July.   Maybe, you’ll be lucky and there will be a good patriotic movie about American soldiers blowing something up.  Then there are parades, barbecues, and fire works.  It seems like all the Christian imagery has been removed from the day.  As long as you are shooting the fireworks up in the air, would it be too much to ask to have fireworks shot off in the shape of Christ’s face.   According to Congressman Kimble, fireworks were first used to create loud noises and bright lights to get God’s attention.

According to Kimble, “When Marco Polo brought fireworks back from China to Italy, they were immediately turned over to the Papacy.  Gunpowder was very rare and fireworks were only used in religious services such as Christmas and Easter.   In fact, that is why to this day Papal guards do not carry guns.   It is also why firecrackers are sometimes called Roman Candles.”

So, if you consider myself or Congressman Kimble to be square so be it.  The point remains that the religious imagery has almost been completely stripped from July 4th.  Let’s bring it back to it’s original meaning before it’s too late.

I love National Prayer Day and I have as long as I remember.   A prayer is a very powerful thing and not something to be used lightly.  As Spider-man taught us with great power comes great responsibility.  I figure that I only have a couple of prayers I’m going to get off before the almighty is going to cut me off and move on to another worshiper.  I make sure not to pray for things like a million dollars, which I know is too greedy and will instantly be rejected.  However, I also try and avoid things like world peace, home for puppies, kitties, and orphans, or Jeb  Bush to run for President–I figure somebody else is taking care of the common stuff so I’m not going to waste my time on it.

I figure with most people praying for stuff, most good causes are covered.  Therefore, I like to use my prayers against bad causes instead.  I’ll pray against Nancy Pelosi, President Obama, Teachers Unions, The Minnesota Twins, Caffeine Free soft drinks, Demi Moore  and so on.  Just as Jesus did, I would like to share a prayer with you that I like to use when praying against politicians.

A Conservative’s Prayer of Hope

Oh Lord, you are so great, so absolutely powerful,
I don’t need to tell you that we are all in awe down here.
You who were the first Tea Partier kicking tax collectors from the temple.
You who showed self reliance with loaves and fishes.
In your wisdom please answer my prayer.
As you sent down many scourges to the Egyptians to help Moses
Could you please inflict Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Oabama, and Alan Grayson with something bad.
It could be burning rashes or maybe some sort of small rodent thing.
Also, I would like to see Joyce DeWit act again–it doesn’t have to be a movie.  TV is fine.
In you name I pray.  Amen.

It’s simple, direct, and to the point.  That is just the sort of thing that God loves to hear.   You can copy this prayer or make one of your own.  I hope you all had a great National Prayer Day!

Some people believe that rather than being judgmental, God is all loving.  However, you have to believe that by now God had a love/ hate relationship with Oral Roberts who died yesterday at the age of 91.    Their contentious relationship began in 1977 when a 900 foot tall Jesus appeared to Oral and told him to build the City of Faith Medical Center and guaranteed it would be a success.   Roberts did what he was told and supposedly God was pleased.

God realized that Oral was a man who could get things done and Jesus appeared to him in person, not as a vision, to tell him to find a cure for cancer.  Unfortunately, 26 years later and Jesus must have gotten quite impatient.  In fact, God threatened to kill Roberts in 1987 if he didn’t raise an $8,000,000 ransom.   Fortunately, Roberts was able to raise the money, which he used to create scholarships for City of Faith.  Unfortunately, Roberts had to shut down City of Faith two years later.   To say God was peeved would be an understatement.

Also, in the late 1980s God was dragged into the whole Jim Bakker scandal when Roberts claimed that he had direct revelation from Jesus that Bakker was innocent.   This despite the fact that God has always preferred to avoid the limelight and work instead through intermediaries and burning plants.   With Roberts dead, he clearly has a lot to answer for.   He has left his ministries in the capable hands of his son, Richard “Anal” Roberts who will presumably carry on his father’s good works.   Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, Jesus could not be reached for comment.

Easter is an amazing time of year that is often neglected for Christmas.  We all celebrate the holiday in our own way, but it would be nice for everybody in this world regardless of religion or denomination to get together and remember what unifies us–that Jesus Christ died for our sins, that his appointing Peter to lead the church in no way made him Pope, and that we can all be saved if we come to Jesus and ask him to change our sexual orientation, political affiliation, or religions denomination.

The Swedish celebrated Easter this year, the way they celebrate everything–with Legos.   Their giant 6 foot tall statue of Jesus took the parishioners of a church in Vasteras, Sweden one and a half years to build and over 30,000 pieces.   It is quite impressive to look at, but I would like to remind them that if they used a good old fashioned American erector set, they could have made a Jesus that walked and would have probably been more inspirational.

Halfway around the world in Australia, artist Mitch Mitchell has used his sculpting talents not to honor Jesus as those Lego sculptors in Sweden had, but to mock Christianity by creating a statue of a naked woman on a cross.   Needless to say, God sent his only son to save us, not his only daughter.   I’m not saying that a woman couldn’t have done the job so please don’t email me hate mail, but if a woman was capable of saving the world as Jesus did,  God probably would have had a daughter too.   Anybody who has seen Mel Gibson’s wonderful movie on the life of Jesus, knows that he was brutalized at the end of that movie.  It is ridiculous to think that a smaller and frailer woman would have been able to stand up to that kind of punishment.

Regardless of your family’s religion I wish you and your family a wonderful holiday.  I’ve been a bit slow with my posting this week, but I hope to be up to a fuller schedule for next week.

The next Republican up for a name change?

There has been a move afoot among conservative circles.  I was reading my copy of Christianity Today this morning and I noticed that Gary Bauer and several other conservative evangelicals no longer want to be known as the religious right because it has come to be associated  “with a hard-edge politics and intolerance.”  The term which was first penned by Jerry Falwell has become a perjorative term because people use it to describe a narrow minded and hypocritical ideology.   For that reason, conservative evangelicals are looking for a softer, more friendly way to describe their narrow minded and hypocritical ideology.

Now, I admit that as a conservative evangelical myself I frequently here this term used as a put down.  “Terms like ‘Religious Right’ have been traditionally used in a pejorative way to suggest extremism,” Focus on the Family Vice-President of Media and Public Relations Gary Schneeberger said. “The phrase ‘socially conservative evangelicals’ is not very exciting, but that’s certainly the way to do it.”

Now, I’m not one to question Focus on the Family for anything having to do with Public Relations, but that term really strikes me as being boring and awkward.   We need a term to refer to ourselves that has the pizzaz of Up With People while still having the sense of superiority of the term Moral Majority.   American Taliban worked until Pete Sessions co-opted that name for the Republican Party.     I’m going to stick with Right Wing and a Prayer myself.

In other news, military contractor Blackwater has decided on the new name Xe (pronounced Zee) believing that the Blackwater name was hurting their image because it was far too easy for the company’s critics to google and learn about them.  With name changing to be all the rage in Republican circles, the odds on favorite to be next in line appears to be our  Former President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Movies like Groundhog Day have helped to secularize Candlemas.

Like many people this season I enjoyed the heartwarming story of how Christianity’s message was spread using the Christmas Carrol The Twelve Days of Christmas.  There are a lot of seemingly secular holidays and traditions in our society that have a Christian tradition behind them.  In the middle ages Christians throughout Europe were persecuted and in many countries the teaching of Christian doctrine was forbidden.  The Christians of the time being men and women of good faith looked for a way to pass the story of Christ’s resurrection down to their children.

The day which the Europeans called Candlemas Day was full of symbolism.  For those of you that need a refresher, on February 2nd the groundhog comes out of his burrow and looks around.  If he sees his shadow there will be 6 more weeks of winter.  If not there will be an early Spring.  This story was used to teach children of how Christ exited the tomb after 40 days.  Those 40 days are represented by the 6 weeks.  The shadow represents the shadow of sin.  Of course Spring represents the new life that Jesus calls us all to.

I suppose the obvious question is why a groundhog?  The groundhog was chosen because the European groundhog is considered a noble animal and the combination of white and gray fur can sometimes give the appearance of a robe like Jesus’s burial robes.  Also, the early Christians needed an animal that hibernated and the only two animals native to Europe that hibernate are the bear and the groundhog and you sure wouldn’t want to be waking up a bear for this.

For many centuries, European Christians used this holiday on February 2nd to keep their faith alive in the face of great persecution.  When the earliest settlers came to Pennsylvania they brought Candlemas with them.  Unfortunately, much like in our own times there was a battle over Candlemas between those for whom it was a sacred religious holiday and those who wanted to call it Groundhog Day and remove all religious significance from the day.  Sadly, Groundhog Day won that war and much of Candlemas’s religious significance was lost.   My goal is this year to remind everybody of the religious significance of Candlemas.

We must decide if we will remain at the kiddy table with the Indians or move up to the head table with the religious.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal a lot of people were worried that the quality of reporting in the newspaper might go down.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Today there was a great article by Daniel Henninger which places the failure of economy where it clearly belongs – on the secularization of Christmas.  I was a little disappointed that he didn’t mention Thanksgiving, but I’ll get into that later.  As Henninger put it, “A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.”

i have to admit I’ve felt alone on the front lines of the culture war lately.  Even Bill O’Reilly’s Christmas Reading List has been replaced by a “Holiday” Reading List.  Today, my ex-wife got a letter home from my daughter’s school wishing her family a Happy Turkey Day.   What hope do we have raising a God fearing child when her own school is secularizing Thanksgiving?

“It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions,” states Henninger making a strong case that the cause of the economic downturn is the Northern Atheists who control the banking industry.   Perhaps, it is time to put Southern religious people in charge of our country.

The Reverend James Dobson of Focus on the Family has thrown down the gauntlet at Barack Obama saying, “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,”

As usual, Rev. Dobson is right.  The criticism stems from comments that Obama made to a Christian group in 2006.

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.

I believe the answer is obvious.  If it is in the Bible that is the law that Christians should obey.  I personally refuse to eat shrimp or wear cotton/polyester blends.  By interpreting the Bible literally we’re left with an interpretation we all can agree with and get behind.  The problem liberals have is that they try and pick and choose which laws they’ll follow.

In March I first reported on the criminal activity taking place out of the Triple Rock Baptist Church when Obama was a “community organizer” and church member back in the 1980s upon his first arrival in Chicago http://thatsrightnate.com/2008/03/12/obama-scandal-threatens-nominations/ .  I have been lucky enough to talk with a “Yvette” a choir member at that church at the time who has since left.   

According to Yvette, the Reverend James was quite a powerful personality.  Many people came under his sway including a young Obama who she described as a polite young man, but eager to earn the Reverend’s favor.  The reverend had a call and response style frequently challenging members, “Have you seen the light?”  The reverend had little trouble getitng his followers to see…or do whatever he told them.

Two church members were brothers who had equally long rap sheets. In fact, one had just been released from prison.  The church was in need of funds and the Reverend gave them a mission to raise money for the church.  Obama had in fact introduced these two to the Reverend though it is unclear whether it was out of misinformed liberalism or knowingly turning a blind eye to their criminal activities to gain Reverend James’ favor.

In a misguided attempt to raise money for the chuch, these two individuals defrauded a tavern near the Wisconsin state line, blackmailed several victims, broke and enterred a shopping mall causing thousands of dollars in damage, and sabotaged a car which led to the death of two men, and led the police on a high speed chase which led to injuries to several police officers and destruction of several police cars.   The amazing thing is that Yvette says that illegal money was passed along to Obama who got it to the church.  The two brothers clammed up and the illegal funds were never recovered.

It wasn’t long after this that Obama left Triple Rock and found Jeremiah Wright.  Whether he was soured by the illegal activities or not, the point remains he was apparently an active participant in them.  The crimes commited over 20 years ago and the brothers were punished.  Reverend James and one of the two men have died.  However, with Obama running for President I hope that people will look into this further.

I have been a John McCain supporter for several months now since it became obvious that the real conservative candidates had no chance to win the nomination.  Today I find myself devestated by the sacking of both of the spiritual advisers to McCain’s campaign.  I still believe that McCain is the Jesusiest candidate, but without the support of religious leaders like Pastor Hagee and Pastor Parsley McCain finds himself running a very secular campaign.

The first candidate sacked was John Hagee.  For years he has been speaking the plain truth against the Catholic Church after an audio recording surfaced in which the preacher said God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.  I guess I should have been impressed that McCain didn’t distance himself from Hagee’s “Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon” comment.   Still, Hagee was the first man of God sacrificed on the altar of public opinion.

What is unusual about Hagee’s belief that God sent Hitler to unite the Jews in Israel is that Hagee had also claimed the his Catholic education was responsible for Hitler’s anti-semitim.  Perhaps, by showing that the Catholic Church was doing God’s work Hagee was trying to ease the distrust between himself and Catholic leaders.

Reverend Parsely sees Islam in much the same was as Hagee sees Catholics.  He calls Islam an anti-Christ religion and Muhammed the “mouthpiece for a conspiracy of spiritual evil”.  He also stated that he believed the United States was created to destroy Islam.

In any event, I’m very disapointed McCain has sacrificed religion for political correctness.  I know that before accepting their endorsements McCain probably didn’t have enough time to research or even google their beliefs, but he has known them for awhile now and should have stood with them as fellow Christians.  Hopefully, they will replaced by equally conservative religious leaders.