Peter Hitchens, a columnist for papers in the UK, writes the following about the abortion “cult of death” in his country. (His reference to the death of a child this last week is referring to the death of 6-year-old Ivan Cameron, son of Tory leader, David Cameron. There was an outpouring of sympathy and respect for the Cameron family, grieving the loss of their severely disabled child.) Hitchens writes:

Cult of death that sacrifices babies for teenage kicks

We used to despise primitive peoples for their human sacrifices. But we are little better, only more discreet. We ruthlessly sacrifice babies on the modern high-tech altar of personal pleasure or ambition. Why mention this now, in the week when we all got so emotional about the death of a child?

Well, sometimes, the apostles of the sexual revolution accidentally let slip what they really think. Ann Furedi, head of an abortion organisation, last week declared that the disturbing increase in teenage abortions is ‘positive’.

She said, in words so shocking I couldn’t absorb them the first time I read them: ‘The fact that half of the teenagers in this position felt able to end their pregnancy in abortion is actually a positive sign. This means more young women now know how to get the care they need and that if they have other plans for their teenage years aside from motherhood, they felt more able to make that choice.’

Anybody who has been involved in procuring or undergoing or performing an abortion has crossed a moral boundary and will ever afterwards find it incredibly difficult to go back. The more of these sacrifices there are, the more this negative cult of death spreads…

Here’s an excellent summary of current concerns regarding the Fairness Doctrine, or something like it, from a columnist at US News and World Report.

There is some good news today regarding the freedom of churches to educate and inform on moral issues in the political realm. Here’s the story from WorldnetDaily.com.

On a related subject, being overtly Christian is becoming more difficult all the time in the UK, as this article reports.

The horrors of the Democratic Party Death Machine just keep rolling out of Congress. Here’s a report from Lifesite News on the latest atrocity committed with your money and mine. God bless America, right? God has already spoken on America’s future, and all Obama’s horses, and all Obama’s men, can’t put America back together again.

A fawning media pundit on CNN wrote glowingly of Obama’s address to the nation as his “Morning in America speech”, likening him to Ronald Reagan. I have news for the Obama-messiah worshippers. It’s not morning in America. It’s about 5 minutes until midnight, and the wise know it.

Building upon an earlier Slice post this new article from Apprising Ministries takes a look at a couple of reasons why seriously off-the-rails evangelicalism is essentially impotent in reaching people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Fox News is reporting today on Sen. Boxer’s attempts to get the ball rolling on the toxic UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I have personally been warning about this treaty since 1994. In the next couple of days, I am republishing, as a free e-booklet, my 1995 book on the subject, Parent Police: The UN Wants Your Children. Hats off to Fox News for letting the public know about this treaty that will have the force of law in the United States once ratified. If you don’t want the UN granting your child autonomy rights; freedom of access to information, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and so forth, visit ParentalRights.org to learn more about the UNCRC. Obama and cohorts have pledged to see this ratified. With the Senate in the hands of the Democrats, ratification is highly likely unless there is a huge outcry.

There are many over-grown boys leading the professing Church today, acting like fools and profaning God’s name, in His name. God will never use them because they are serving a god made in their own image (Psalm 50:21), and not the true and living God. But what kind of men does God use?

Horatius Bonar, writing the preface to John Gillies’ Accounts of Revival, describes true men of God as possessing the following nine characteristics:

1. They were in earnest about the great work on which they had entered: “They lived and labored and preached like men on whose lips the immortality of thousands hung.”

2. They were bent on success: “As warriors, they set their hearts on victory and fought with the believing anticipation of triumph, under the guidance of such a Captain as their head.”

3. They were men of faith: “They knew that in due season they should reap, if they fainted not.”

4. They were men of labor: “Their lives are the annals of incessant, unwearied toil of body and soul; time, strength, substance, health, all they were and possessed they freely offered to the Lord, keeping back nothing, grudging nothing.”

5. They were men of patience: “Day after day they pursued what, to the eye of the world, appeared a thankless and fruitless round of toil.”

6. They were men of boldness and determination: “Timidity shuts many a door of usefulness and loses many a precious opportunity; it wins no friends, while it strengthens every enemy. Nothing is lost by boldness, nor gained by fear.”

7. They were men of prayer: “They were much alone with God, replenishing their own souls out of the living fountain, that out of them might flow to their people rivers of living water.”

8. They were men whose doctrines were of the most decided kind: “Their preaching seems to have been of the most masculine and fearless kind, falling on the audience with tremendous power. It was not vehement, it was not fierce, it was not noisy; it was far too solemn to be such; it was massive, weighty, cutting, piercing, sharper than a two-edged sword.”

9. They were men of solemn deportment and deep spirituality of soul: “No frivolity, no flippancy . . . . The world could not point to them as being but slightly dissimilar from itself.”

HT: Thoughts on the Way

In light of my post about Pastor James MacDonald’s glowing praise for pro-abort, Barack Obama, I want to contrast that kind of leadership with real moral leadership. It does not come from a Protestant evangelical. It comes from the Archbishop of Denver. I have asked this before, and I will ask it again. Why are a handful of Roman Catholic bishops and the Pope the only voices being heard across the nation on the life issue and our current President’s affection for death? Well, let me answer the question. The mainline “Protestants” are the ones running Planned Parenthood clinics and defending abortion. The evangelical Protestants, having failed to end abortion despite their millions of members and unbelievable resources, have decided to turn to issues like global warming instead. Some, of the emergent variety, have actually decided that abortion isn’t that big of a deal anyway and have decided that if they can’t beat them, they can find common ground with the pro-death crowd by trying to “reduce” abortion.

There are a handful of committed and godly pro-life Christians who are active in every way possible to oppose this evil. But recognized Protestant leaders like Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and Franklin Graham are largely AWOL on the issue of abortion and the sanctity of human life. That leaves the Catholic leadership to take a stand, including the Archbishop of Denver who made headlines today with the following:

24-February-2009  — Catholic News Agency
Denver Archbishop Warns against “Spirit of Adulation” Surrounding Obama

Toronto, Canada, Feb 23, 2009 (CNA).- Canadians packed St. Basil’s Church in Toronto on Monday evening to hear Archbishop Charles Chaput speak about how Catholics should live out their faith in the public square. He warned that in the U.S., Catholics need to act on their faith and be on guard against “a spirit of adulation bordering on servility” that exists towards the Obama administration.

The public lecture by Archbishop Chaput took place on the campus of the University of Toronto at St. Basil’s Church and was attended by an overflow crowd of more than 700 people.

After giving a sketch of the basic principles in his New York Times Bestseller “Render Unto Caesar,” the archbishop offered his insights on the need for an honest assessment of the situation of the Church in the public square.

“I like clarity, and there’s a reason why,” began the archbishop. “I think modern life, including life in the Church, suffers from a phony unwillingness to offend that poses as prudence and good manners, but too often turns out to be cowardice. Human beings owe each other respect and appropriate courtesy. But we also owe each other the truth — which means candor.”

The Denver prelate then provided his critique of President Obama.

“President Obama is a man of intelligence and some remarkable gifts. He has a great ability to inspire, as we saw from his very popular visit to Canada just this past week. But whatever his strengths, there’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope and change. Of course, that can change. Some things really do change when a person reaches the White House. Power ennobles some men. It diminishes others. Bad policy ideas can be improved. Good policy ideas can find a way to flourish. But as Catholics, we at least need to be honest with ourselves and each other about the political facts we start with.”

Yet this will be “very hard for Catholics in the United States,” Chaput warned.

According to the archbishop, the political situation for Catholics is difficult to discern because a “spirit of adulation bordering on servility already exists among some of the same Democratic-friendly Catholic writers, scholars, editors and activists who once accused pro-lifers of being too cozy with Republicans. It turns out that Caesar is an equal opportunity employer.”

Looking ahead to the coming months and years, Chaput offered four “simple things” to remember.

“First,” he said, “all political leaders draw their authority from God. We owe no leader any submission or cooperation in the pursuit of grave evil.”

“In fact, we have the duty to change bad laws and resist grave evil in our public life, both by our words and our non-violent actions. The truest respect we can show to civil authority is the witness of our Catholic faith and our moral convictions, without excuses or apologies.”

In a reference to the messianic treatment the Barack Obama received from some Americans during the presidential primaries, Archbishop Chaput delivered his second point: “in democracies, we elect public servants, not messiahs.”

Noting that Obama actually trailed in the weeks just before the election, the Denver archbishop said that this places some of today’s talk about a “new American mandate” in perspective.

“Americans, including many Catholics, elected a gifted man to fix an economic crisis. That’s the mandate. They gave nobody a mandate to retool American culture on the issues of marriage and the family, sexuality, bioethics, religion in public life and abortion. That retooling could easily happen, and it clearly will happen — but only if Catholics and other religious believers allow it.”

The third point to focus on when the beliefs of Catholics are challenged is that “it doesn’t matter what we claim to believe if we’re unwilling to act on our beliefs,” Chaput counseled.

“The fourth and final thing to remember, and there’s no easy way to say it,” remarked Archbishop Chaput, is that the “Church in the United States has done a poor job of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years.”

“And now we’re harvesting the results — in the public square, in our families and in the confusion of our personal lives. I could name many good people and programs that seem to disprove what I just said. But I could name many more that do prove it, and some of them work in Washington.”

American Catholics need to realize that many in the current generation haven’t just been “assimilated” into the American culture, but have in fact been “absorbed and bleached and digested by it,” Archbishop Chaput asserted.

If this realization doesn’t happen, the coming generations will continue on the same path and “a real Catholic presence in American life will continue to weaken and disappear,” said Chaput.

Citing the example of “unhappy, self-described Catholics who complain that abortion is too much of a litmus test,” he stated, “We can’t claim to be ‘Catholic’ and ‘pro-choice’ at the same time without owning the responsibility for where the choice leads – to a dead unborn child.”

The archbishop also addressed the “abortion reduction” argument being made by some in politics.

“We can’t talk piously about programs to reduce the abortion body count without also working vigorously to change the laws that make the killing possible. If we’re Catholic, then we believe in the sanctity of developing human life. And if we don’t really believe in the humanity of the unborn child from the moment life begins, then we should stop lying to ourselves and others, and even to God, by claiming we’re something we’re not.”

“Catholic social teaching goes well beyond abortion,” Chaput noted. “In America we have many urgent issues that beg for our attention, from immigration reform to health care to poverty to homelessness.”

Winding his talk down, the Archbishop of Denver remarked on the misunderstanding of the word “hope.”

“For Christians,” he explained, “hope is a virtue, not an emotional crutch or a political slogan. Virtus, the Latin root of virtue, means strength or courage. Real hope is unsentimental. It has nothing to do with the cheesy optimism of election campaigns. Hope assumes and demands a spine in believers. And that’s why – at least for a Christian — hope sustains us when the real answer to the problems or hard choices in life is ‘no, we can’t,’ instead of ‘yes, we can.’”

###

The vacuum of godly, moral leadership in the Protestant evangelical world has left the moral leadership in the West to the Roman Catholics. There is absolutely no excuse for this. As for the Archbishop of Denver, thank you. At least someone is saying it. At least someone sees this. At least someone is pointing out the obvious and defending the preborn, and while evangelicals are conducting sex campaigns and motocross stunts, at least someone with an intact moral compass left is willing to let his voice be heard publicly in defense of life.

James MacDonald, pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel, wants you to know that he’s thankful for our new President. As the blood of butchered children, 50 million of them, soaks America’s soil, it is a telling thing that a supposedly evangelical pastor is thankful for a President who has now, with the stroke of a pen, required taxpayers to pay for this butchery overseas as well.

Mr. MacDonald joins a long list of religious clergy who have, down through the centuries, been complicit with the death agenda. Whether it was the religious leaders who paid Judas 30 pieces of silver to deliver up our Savior, or the German clergy who found hope in the visage of Germany’s new leader named Hitler and who refused to decry his slaughter of the Jews, or whether it was the Orthodox clergy in Russia who worked, hand in hand, with the KGB to round up believers worshiping in apartments who obeyed God rather than men, or whether it is the emerging left apostates who cheerlead the most virulently pro-child killing President in US history, they are all the same underneath. They are traitors to the innocent and to God. I stand with the babies, Mr. MacDonald, and no goat herder American pastor will make me thankful for a man whose hands contain the blood of murdered children.

At Herescope, Pastor Larry DeBruyn addresses the connection between greed and spiritual deception. After seeing this firsthand last summer with Word of Faith shyster, John Avanzini, I can heartily concur. I will also say that most false prophets have a financial motive, and there always seem to be hordes of people willing to buy what these crooks are selling.

What a ridiculous headline this is in the Christian Post today: Faith-Based Groups Victims of Government Cutbacks. These aren’t faith-based groups at all, these are government-based groups with their snouts out at the public trough. When the great god “Government” cuts back, they are then “victimized.” These people are victims of their own faithless, Christ-free philosophy of “ministry” that depends on the largesse of taxpayers instead of the riches of heaven to meet needs.

I wonder if the 12 Apostles staged Greek-style wrestling matches to draw young men to Christ? No record of that anywhere in the Scriptures. Chariot races are also not mentioned anywhere in the book of Acts as a method drawing a crowd to hear the Gospel. All the Apostles had was the Holy Spirit who worked through their preaching to save the lost. That was all they needed.

Pastors today don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t exist to them. That’s why they behave like fools in ever more desperate attempts to draw a crowd. Here’s a pastor in South Dakota who says that the church is having a hard time attracting young men. That’s because the “church” was never intended to attract young men or anyone else. The Holy Spirit alone  draws through Spirit-empowered preaching. Such preaching is absent today in our prayerless, man-centered churches, and that’s why pastors are reduced to becoming jesters and exhibitionists to draw a crowd.

Well, not in so many words, yet. This piece takes a look at the latest post by Jones “Who Was/Is Jesus?”

Bud Kennedy, a leftist reporter for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, published a possibly actionable hit piece on Brannon Howse and Pastor Bob Pearle of Birchman Baptist Church in Ft. Worth after a recent Code Blue Rally. On Tuesday’s Crosstalk, Pastor Pearle and Brannon Howse will respond to the outrageous misquotes, factual errors and general leftist hysteria on the part of Mr. Kennedy.

Tune in live at 2pm Central or listen to the archive any time.

It looks like the Epicopals are trying to outdo their apostate cousins, the United Methodists. Imagine a Christian Bishop with a Buddhist ordination. Absolutely classic. These Episcopals let their elaborate Bishop’s headgear cut off the oxygen to their brains, methinks.

I reported last week that the Fox News Channel had carried the ads for Maitreya’s emergence. I spoke this afternoon with the North Hollywood headquarters of Share International and would like to clarify that the 30 second commercials are airing on CNN, MSNBC, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, not the Fox News Channel. I am sorry about the factual error.

I spoke with the London headquarters of Benjamin Creme’s Share International organization. The woman I spoke with was friendly and helpful and told me that the emergence of  “Maitreya”, the world teacher and christ figure, was so, so close. A star is going to appear shortly, they say, that will shine night and day. It will herald the appearance of this world teacher on national television in the U.S. (He will not reveal himself by the name “Maitreya”, however.)

After a short interview with a member of China Aid, who will fill in details regarding the collusion of the TSPM church in China with the government in the persecution of believers there, I will play clips from several recent commercials that have aired in the US regarding the emergence of this anti-Christ figure. The woman on the line in London this morning told me that this will be the most exciting thing ever to happen in the history of the world. She told me she, like everyone else there in the office in London, is a volunteer. They are that committed to this anti-Christ figure’s coming.

My response today is to worship the one true Christ, the living Son of God, who sits at the Father’s right hand, interceding for us. All praise and all glory today to Jesus Christ, at whose name every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.

You can hear the Crosstalk Show live at 2pm Central time or listen to the archive later.

Here’s a real shocker. China’s official (communist sanctioned) Protestant Church, known as TSPM, is officially collaborating with the government to persecute house churches. Maybe Franklin Graham can explain his own widely hailed participation with the communist “church” when he preached at a communist “megachurch” back in May of 2008. Graham was warned repeatedly by China Aid and other human rights groups about TSPM, but he, along with Luis Palau, have ignored the warnings. The house church believers are paying the price for the Americans’ complicity and legitimizing of the communist front church. America’s pretty boy preachers are doing unbelievable harm to those believers who struggle to worship the Lord in freedom in China.

A “secular Bible study” with rules against proselytizing the Buddhists, Hindus, atheists and other assorted rebels in attendance. Only the United Methodists could come up with something like this.

This article from the Scripps-Howard News Service gets a Slice salute today for articulating pretty much everything I’ve been saying for the last 2 decades about evangelicalism.

I have lived the evangelicalism that the article talks about. The fads mentioned like the Left Behind series, the WWJD bracelets and so forth are only the tip of the iceberg. As a child growing up in a home where my Dad was Milwaukee’s Youth for Christ Director, the fads I witnessed around me were endless. I remember the One Way stickers everybody had on their cars with the yellow finger pointing upward, then there were the “I’ve Found It!” bumper stickers that followed shortly afterward. I remember the atrocious Living Bible paraphrase taking the evangelical world by storm, the wildly popular “Late Great Planet Earth” movie and book by Hal Lindsey, the Thief in the Night series, the golden Four Spiritual Laws booklet for witnessing, the traveling singing groups (as a child, my sister and I traveled with one across the country) with funky outfits, colored gel lights and songs like, “I’ve found (thump of the bass) HAP-Pi-ness, I’ve found (thump) PEACE of mind, I’ve found (thump) REAL contentment, perfect (thump) LUV sublime…I’ve found (thump) happiness all the time, wonderful peace of mind, since I found the Lord!”

I don’t think anything could beat the 60’s and 70’s in evangelicalism for wacky and embarrassing fads, bad theology and pathetic attempts at cultural relevance….unless it’s 30 years later as pastors ride motorcycles on stage at church, act like morons in YouTube videos, hold sex campaigns, and so forth and so on.

Interesting that the world sees these attempts as pathetic as well. The article mentions the salvation scalp collectors on a soul-winning campaign. I once had a pastor of sorts visit me at VCY America, and he showed me a notebook from his last evangelism sortie to the local mall. Row after row of names filled the notebook. “These are the ones we got saved in the last few weeks at the mall with our church,” he told me. He was visiting because he had been thrown out of the mall, and he wanted me to do a radio show so the managers would let him and his cohorts back in. When he described the church’s method of evangelism and what they defined as “saved”, I was wholly grateful to the security team at the mall for throwing them out. Best day’s work they ever did.

Evangelicalism has been and is a mess because it long ago departed from the Bible. That is ironic, in that evangelicals, more than any other group, carry Bibles of every description around with them. With about 150 different versions of the Scriptures now, it doesn’t even help to tell evangelicals to sit down and actually read the Bibles they carry. They all come up with a different interpretation. After all, the Joel Osteen Guy Smiley Commentary Bible and the John MacArthur Study Bible are not going to have the same notes, are they?