Communism

Jesus Christ and the Social Problem

Jesus Christ and the Social Problem by Archimandrite Georgios Kapsanis –
The more that people are cleansed of the passions, the greater their capacity for real communion with God and other people.

Those who take a romantic and external view of the human person transfer wickedness from the person onto society, which is why they proclaim that any improvement in society will bring with it an improvement in people. But, without denying the importance of social effects on people, we Orthodox prioritize the transformation of the person through repentance and divine grace.

It’s a grave error to want to change society without first striving to change ourselves. It is, at the very least, naive to believe that a change in a few social institutions will also bring about a change in people even if they don’t repent. [Read more…]

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Five Reasons Socialism Is Not Christian

Socialim is Not Christian and Promotes Evil by Julie Roys –
Jesus confronted the money-changers and challenged believers to give to the needy. But, would he support socialism?

Increasingly, Americans think he would. In fact, a recent Barna poll found that more Americans think Jesus would prefer socialism (24%) than those who believe he would prefer capitalism (14%). The other 62% responded neither or not sure, but the poll still reveals a disturbing trend.

Last Saturday, Micah Conkling, a Christian writer and podcaster, argued on my radio program that socialism is the political and economic system that best fulfills the Golden Rule. Not surprisingly, Conkling is a Millennial, the most pro-socialist generation America has ever known. [Read more…]

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Political Correctness, Progressivism, and Present Day Bolsheviks

Political Correctness, Progressivism, and Present Day BolsheviksExcerpts from multiple posts by Fr. Johannes Jacobse in the comments section of “It’s a Brand New Age” blog post. Some edits made to transform multiple individual comments by Fr. Jacobse into a cohesive stand-alone article. Special care was taken to preserve the original meaning of the author.

– Fr. Johannes Jacobse
Political correctness is the cultic aspect of Liberalism and Progressivism mostly because it attempts to control thought through language. It’s Orwell, but on a deeper level Dostoevsky and even Nietzsche. The markers are easy to spot especially the cruder terms — racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, white privilege — anything to shut down discussion and censure thought. Language is used promiscuously, laced with moral opprobrium and other self-justifying blather. It’s intimidation, like the Brownshirts or Bolsheviks.

The corruption of language is both a cause and effect of the moral inversion [Read more…]

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The Bible and the Poor: Jesus Did Not Preach Communism

The Bible Jesus Christ and the Poorby Robert Klein Engler –

In light of the continuing misunderstanding of Pope Francis by the progressive media, it’s time to reconsider the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark 14:7, “For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you wish you may do them good; but Me you do not have always.”

This verse is echoed by verse 15:11 in Deuteronomy, “For the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land.’”

What on earth does this mean? The poor you will always have with you. How can that fact stated by Jesus be, when the progressive ideology and the advocates of social justice argue that it’s government’s job to abolish poverty and further income equality?

Maybe Jesus was referring to the “poor in spirit?” They could always be with us and that would not argue against a government from taxing and redistributing wealth. We know income equality may not bring happiness. You could make as much on your job as your neighbor, and still be poor in spirit. [Read more…]

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Are All Ideologies Evil?

Communism is evil soviet propaganda by Steven Jonathan –

One of the finest American teachers acquiesced a few years ago to be my mentor. I am a stranger to the good man, but he agreed to answer my questions because he is in possession of a proper understanding of the nature of a true teacher, a public figure whose work is ultimately for the benefit of the common good. I go to him every few months with my most pressing quandaries. A while back I asked him to teach me about the nature of ideology. He fired off a small collection of ideas asserting that all ideology is evil and he explained why. Surely ideologues would object and, while calling for sophistical distinctions, would be formulating a semantic bait-and-switch scheme that passes for “truth” in these dark and deceitful times.

What is ideology?
According to Merriam Webster ideology is “1: visionary theorizing 2a: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.” If we limit ourselves to the shallow dictionary definition, it may serve our purpose in drawing reasonably sound inferences about the nature of ideology. [Read more…]

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The Left Is Deconstructing The Middle Class

Leftists Socialists communists democrats by Jack Curtis –
A lasting legend from Russia’s Communist Revolution illustrates the attitude of the Progressive Left toward the middle class: the examination of rounded up citizens by the revolutionaries. If a captive’s hands weren’t calloused, he was executed. That doesn’t fit America; better to enlist the citizens in the deconstruction. Though slower than the Russian approach, that hasn’t proven difficult; the left’s programs are popular with voters.

America’s middle class is a historical anomaly, a result of combining British government and jurisprudence; classical liberalism; a disparate stream of immigrants and an entire new, unexploited; and a lightly governed continent where the prior occupants were no barrier. Add to that an industrial revolution. Though seldom discussed in public now, the resulting huge, educated, propertied, and politically powerful middle class is seen from the left as an obstacle, an impediment to the reshaping of American society desired by Progressives. In short, it accumulates and retains too much of the political power, property, and wealth that Progressives prefer in the hands of government. [Read more…]

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Atheism’s Gifts to Humanity: Guillotine, Gulag and Gas Chamber

Atheism Gifts to Humanity: Guillotine, Gulag and Gas Chamberby Joseph Pearce –
Guillotine, Gulag, and Gas Chamber. These are the glorious gifts that atheism has bestowed on a world grown tired of God.

There are lies, damned lies, and neo-atheist polemics. One of the most egregious examples of such godless mendacity is the claim that religion has been the cause of most of the wars that have blighted humanity throughout its blood-stained history. In a world with “no religion”, so the argument runs, there would be “nothing to kill or die for”. Such nonsense is only believable if we remain willfully ignorant of the lessons of history.

Almost all wars have been the consequence of human selfishness (a synonym for godlessness) and have been carried out according to the principles of that proto-secularist and incorrigible atheist, Nicolo Machiavelli. Although secular rulers have sometimes used religion as an ethical and ultimately ethereal veneer to justify their actions, war has almost always been the consequence of Machiavellian realpolitik. This includes the so-called wars of religion, most of which were fought by power-hungry princes eager to impose their egocentric wills on their neighbours. [Read more…]

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The Left Learned Wrong Lessons from Nazism

Radical Liberals Leftistsby Dennis Prager –
The only way to understand what is happening to America in our time — and for that matter, in Europe since World War II — is to understand the left.

And one way to understand the left — and its enormous appeal to many decent people — is to understand what it learned from World War II and the Nazi experience. The lessons people draw from history go a long way toward explaining how they view the world and how they behave.

Unfortunately, virtually everything the left learned from the unique evil known as Nazism has been wrong.

The first lesson was that the right is evil, not merely wrong. Because Nazism has been successfully labelled “right-wing,” virtually every right-wing position and leader has been either cynically or sincerely characterized by the left as a danger to civilization. That is why the right is so often labelled fascist and compared to Nazis. Vast numbers of people in the West truly believe that if the right prevails, fascism will follow. [Read more…]

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Thanksgiving: We Should Be Thankful for Private Property

Thanksgiving Thankful for Private Propertyby John Stossel –
Had today’s politicians and opinion-makers been in power four centuries ago, Americans might celebrate “Starvation Day” this week, not Thanksgiving..

The Pilgrims started out with communal property rules. When they first settled at Plymouth, they were told: “Share everything, share the work, and we’ll share the harvest.”

The colony’s contract said their new settlement was to be a “common.” Everyone was to receive necessities out of the common stock. There was to be little individual property.

That wasn’t the only thing about the Plymouth Colony that sounds like it was from Karl Marx: Its labor was to be organized according to the different capabilities of the settlers. People would produce according to their abilities and consume according to their needs. That sure sounds fair. [Read more…]

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If You Like Your Tyranny, You Can Keep It

ObamaCare Tyranny Leftist Tyrannyby Daren Jonescu –
2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism. Just when you thought no one could top Hillary Clinton’s agonized “What difference, at this point, does it make?” — perhaps the most concise account of the leftist strategy of incremental subversion ever recorded — along comes President Obama’s revelatory time bomb, set ticking back in 2009 for detonation on October 1 of this year: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

With her “What difference” outburst, Clinton told the world what the progressive elite think of their subjects. They think you are stupid, morally shallow, and have the attention span of three year olds — exactly as progressive schooling and entertainment are designed to make you. Hence they need only wait you out, until the haze of time dulls your capacity for outrage about whether your leaders knowingly took the phone off the hook as your fellow citizens called for help with killers closing in on them. [Read more…]

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Solzhenitsyn: The Courage to be Christian

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Courage to be Christianby Joseph Pearce –
“In these dark days in which the power of secular fundamentalism appears to be on the rise and in which religious freedom seems to be imperiled, it is easy for Christians to become despondent. The clouds of radical relativism seem to obscure the light of objective truth and it can be difficult to discern any silver lining to help us illumine the future with hope.”

In such gloomy times the example of the martyrs can be encouraging. Those who laid down their lives for Christ and His Church in worse times than ours are beacons of light, dispelling the darkness with their baptism of blood. “Upon such sacrifices,” King Lear tells his soon to be martyred daughter Cordelia, “The gods themselves throw incense.”

It is said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church and, if this is so, more bloody seed has been sown in the past century than in any of the bloody centuries that preceded it. Tens of millions have been slaughtered on the blood-soaked altars of national and international socialism in Europe, China, Cambodia and elsewhere. [Read more…]

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ObamaCare: Obama Lied, Our Health Coverage Died

ObamaCare: Obama Lied, Our Health Coverage Diedby Neil Munro –
President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times.

The videos show Obama promising 300 million Americans that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.”

But that’s not what he really said, Obama announced Monday in a speech to about 200 Organizing for Action supporters, gathered at the St. Regis hotel in D.C. “What we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he told Obamacare’s political beneficiaries and contractors.

That claim is not supported by his videotaped statements, which don’t include any mention of his new “if it hasn’t changed” exception. [Read more…]

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Promoting Tyranny: What Democrats Really Care About

Radical Liberals Leftistsby Tom Trinko –
We know Obama loves the poor because he’s been hell-bent on making more of them since the day he was elected.  All of Obama’s policies have been about increasing government power, and none of them have been about helping Americans get jobs.

Even though the only product of Obama’s economic policies has been a massive increase in poverty and dependency in America, Obama continues to either demand more of the same or ignore any attempt to bring those the Obama economy pushed into poverty back into the American economic mainstream.  With real unemployment running at 14%, Obama is telling us how great therecovery is.

To understand what motivates Obama, it’s important to understand a critical aspect of liberalism: liberals are all about a will for power, not about caring for the poor. [Read more…]

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Leftist Policies Trap the Poor in Cycle of Poverty – The Mindset of the Left

Welfare state: Immoral and irredeemable by Thomas Sowell –
The political left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid is this claim?

Leaders of the left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?

If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much relationship to reality? [Read more…]

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Christ Was Not a Communist

Jesus Christ Was Not a Communistby Bill Flax –
Christians desire to live virtuously with beliefs grounded in love, truth and justice. However, for many churches, justice has been perverted from its biblical meaning — conformity to God’s statutes — into a quest for egalitarianism. Truth — consistency to the character and will of God — has lost its clarity. Love has been reduced into a mere emotion. Many mainline denominations afford more certainty to atheists in academia and media than Scripture.

Many Christians abandoned Scripture, embarrassed by its teachings anywhere they differ from what passes for progressive, nuanced or sophisticated thought. Paul warned against being deceived by the world’s philosophies (Colossians 2:8), but many mainline churches were overrun by the same leftist ideologies that overran every other facet of America’s intellectual current. Babel rises anew.

Salsman perceives this but mistakes its foundations. The religious left and, more frequently, irreligious opportunists transform Christ’s teachings from the spiritual to the political/economic. They even interpret the gospel through the decidedly un-Christian lens of humanistic socialism. [Read more…]

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