Religious Left

Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shall Support the Welfare State

May 3, 2012May 6, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Larry Elder –
As a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush took heat for supposedly saying something like, “God wanted me to become president.” He never said that. But no matter. Here comes another yet another Bible-banging religious conservative “taking his marching orders from God.” Apparently, if you feel God endorses a particular path, God wants you to keep the news to yourself.

Religion, to many liberals, is a sign of weakness, a demonstration of the inability to reason for oneself. With the Bible telling him what to do, how to think, what to believe — why, such a person is downright scary. Recall Obama explaining how small-town Midwesterners deal with difficult economic times: “They get bitter,” as the then-presidential candidate put it. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them … as a way to explain their frustrations.” [Read more…]

Rev. Ragsdale Goes to Congress: Time to Expose Counterfeit ‘Christianity’

March 19, 2012March 26, 2012 by editor-main

Katherine Ragsdale abortion advocate — Rev Ragsdale at rally passionately promoting Abortion as 'pro-family'

by Deacon Keith Fournier –
The unbroken teaching of the Christian Church has been – and continues to be – that every procured abortion is the taking of an innocent human life.

Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale is the “go to” witness these days for the radical abortion on demand lobby. She not only makes for good optics when she wears that clerical collar, she feigns outrage that anyone would attempt to stop any abortion for any reason. After all, she has now openly identified her position that abortion is a “blessing”. She has the audacity to defend this position as consistent with the Christian faith she claims to profess.The early Church lived through similar examples of apostate leaders claiming the authority of the Church. ..

On Thursday March 8, 2012, Rev. Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, the President and Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appeared in a clerical collar to testify in the United States House of Representatives. Her testimony was an example of the counterfeit which now claims to be Christianity. [Read more…]

Obama: Abortion Enables ‘Our Daughters’ To ‘Fulfill Their Dreams’

January 23, 2012January 23, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Fred Lucas –
President Barack Obama says the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is the chance to recognize the “fundamental constitutional right” to abortion and to “continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”

The 1973 U.S. Supreme Court nationalized abortion law, prohibiting states from deciding on the matter. In his written statement, Obama acknowledged that abortion has been a divisive political issue.

Obama, while serving in the Illinois State Legislature and as president of the United States, has taken a hard line on abortion rights.

In his statement on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, Obama said it reflects the broader principles of America. [Read more…]

Too Many Christians are Socialists

December 6, 2011December 9, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Bonasera –
A recent poll conducted among 1500 adults confirms what we have long suspected: even Evangelical Christians support statism. The polling group — Public Religion Research Institute — determined that social issues, like abortion, are proving to be less important to Evangelical voters when compared with economic issues like unemployment. Apparently the economy trumps infanticide even among those who have been historically pro-life.

This shouldn’t come as too great of a surprise to any readers of this site. The allure of statist control is a familiar refrain trumpeted by the mainstream media. It was only a matter of time before conservative Evangelicals should begin to believe the lies. What should come as a surprise though, is that Democrats see this as an opportunity to pull voters their way for 2012. [Read more…]

Whom Would Jesus Indebt?

September 7, 2011September 8, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Timothy Dalrymple –
One of the gravest dangers of the Budget Control Act passed yesterday is that it could provide Americans with a false sense of security. Washington has finally taken action. The crisis has passed. The sky is brightening, the trees are parting before us and — we’re out of the woods. Right?

Alas, but no. Not only are we deep in the dark heart of the forest, but we’re still walking in the wrong direction. The pace may have slowed, but the trajectory has not. The immediate cash-flow crisis has passed, but the long-term solvency crisis remains. We are still borrowing enormous amounts of money, still selling our children into debt slavery through our own spending insanity. While the Budget Control Act (best summarized by Keith Hennessey) is intended to reduce the deficit (the difference between expected revenues and planned spending, or the amount we have to borrow in order to spend what we want to spend) in the years to come, it does not reduce the debt (the amount the federal government owes). It slows — by a little — the rate at which the debt grows, but the debt is still astronomical and still swiftly growing. [Read more…]

The Church as the Bride of Caesar

August 30, 2011August 31, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Fr. Robert A. Sirico –

It is telling that the Washington Post report on the religious Left’s Circle of Protection campaign for big government describes the effort as one that would “send chills through any politician who looks to churches and religious groups as a source of large voting blocs,” because, in fact, this is not an honest faith-inspired campaign to protect the “least of these” from Draconian government cuts, as claimed. It is a hyper-political movement that offers up the moral authority of churches and aid organizations to advance the ends of the Obama administration and its allies in Congress.

The Circle of Protection, led by Jim Wallis and his George Soros-funded Sojourners group, is advancing a false narrative based on vague threats to the “most vulnerable” if we finally take the first tentative steps to fix our grave budget and debt problems. For example, Wallis frequently cites cuts to federal food programs as portending dire consequences to “hungry and poor people.” [Read more…]

The Wacky World of Liberal Fundamentalism

August 25, 2011August 25, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Robert Weissberg –

The candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Bible-affirming Christians, predictably have ignited the liberal media’s zeal for exposing their allegedly odd if not wacko religious beliefs (see here). Support for some version of creationism, a faith in the efficacy of prayer, and actual belief in scriptural condemnation of homosexuality (among other religious views) are taken as prima facie evidence of presidential unsuitability. To be sure, millions of Americans (assumed to be ill-educated trailer-court denizens with rotting teeth and beer guts) may share these odd inclinations, but, at least according to liberal pundits, holding them betrays a lack of intellectual sophistication plus an aversion to modern science. Such antediluvian fundamentalism should, say the experts, have gone extinct with the Scopes Monkey Trials.

Ironically, liberal attackers are guilty of far greater unscientific dogmatism, sloppy thinking, and mind-boggling confusion but fail to notice it thanks to a manufactured respectability that deters — if not forbids — close inspection. [Read more…]

Christian Church facing a revolution that is shaking its foundations: the gay revolution

August 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Albert Mohler –
The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.” [Read more…]

On Redistributing Wealth

July 31, 2011August 1, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by James V. Schall, S.J. –
Greed, some say, is the main reason the poor are poor. It isn’t. We rarely take a close look at envy. Because someone is rich, it does not follow that he is therefore greedy. A poor man is free to be both greedy and envious. Envy is as much a generator of extra work as want, perhaps more so.

Mandeville’s famous notion, that our vices not our virtues cause prosperity, has a point. Usable wealth must first be produced and made available. The primary causes of wealth production are brains, effort, and virtue. The world was given to us in a raw state to see what we would do with it, yes, for one another.

At first sight, the oft-repeated lament that the world’s goods need to be “redistributed” for the benefit of the poor seems logical. Usually behind this apparently innocent approach is the idea of the limitation of the world’s “goods.” If the world’s resources are “limited,” then we need to establish a system of control of human behavior, of our “desires.” [Read more…]

Charlie Rangel’s Misunderstanding of Christ and Charity

July 18, 2011July 20, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by William Sullivan –
The left is desperate to coerce Americans into embracing the president’s platform of increasing taxes on the wealthy to redistribute to the downtrodden, slothful, and all those between who stand to collect. So Charlie Rangel appealed to a largely Christian nation, “What would Jesus do?”

The hypocrisy here is so obvious that it need not be discussed in detail. Suffice it to say, when and where progressives draw the line on Christian influence in legislation tends to compromise any faith they claim to have. Asking this question about the current budget debate but not about, say, the morality of tax dollars serving to mutilate and siphon unborn babies from their mothers’ wombs is suspicious to say the least. If conservatives cite Christ’s teaching to protect unborn lives from a progressive agenda that indiscriminately allows for their destruction, it is panned as the archaic ravings of crackpots. Yet when Christ is referenced as a template of charity to advance the progressives’ redistributive agenda, nothing could be more pertinent to American values. [Read more…]