Monday, January 31 2005
Genocide… It’s worth a little disrespect
Bret McAtee @ 10:15 pm

The first thing you have to envision is a mid size gymnasium in a Christian School. At one end of the Basketball court, about 20 feet high, tacked or stapled to a white stucco background, is a normally sized Christian flag. One really has to squint in order to see it since the white Christian flag blends into obscurity against the white stucco background. At the other end of the Basketball court is a huge American flag that looks like it is trying to make it into the Guinness book of World records as the most tacky American flag ever put in a gymnasium. Technically, it is not a flag, but something that looks like it was made out of a giant Lincoln Logs kit, replete with a do it yourself red, white, and blue spray painting manual. I kid you not … you could put 6 Christian flags inside the parameters of this American “Flag.” A blind man doesn’t have to squint to see this thing.

Next comes the music. I think they used a phonograph with a vinyl record. At least the recording of the Star Spangled Banner sounded like something that was pressed when Kate Smith was still trim and in her prime. Around me stood a couple hundred earnest God fearing Christians singing at the top of their sanctified voices, and there was my son and I, definitively not standing, trying to ignore the fact that we weren’t being ignored.

I’m sorry. I just don’t get it. Really, it is not like that I haven’t tried to get it. Here we are as a nation killing 4000 unborn babies a day and Evangelical Christians want to get all choked up while singing the National Anthem? Here we are trying to make Iraq safe enough so they too can start safely killing babies in their freshly minted Democracy and people want to cast a quick glance at the seated forms of my son and I and whisper … “Psst, Hey Martha, check out that cranky Reformed Pastor. He and his son aren’t standing again for the National Anthem.” Well, excuse me if I get in the way of your warm patriotic fuzzies. There they were pounding out at the top of their lungs … “The land of the free and the home of the Brave,” and nobody could see the irony and hypocrisy in that?

Look, we have no more business honoring this flag and the country for which it stand or singing its Anthem than German Christians had saluting the Nazi Flag and shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ as it passed by. To those who believe that we should snap to attention every time the flag gets unfurled I want to have a couple questions answered. At what point in a holocaust does one decide things have gotten so out of control that one can no longer be a proud American? How many bodies must be offered up to Molech until lines about ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ begin to curdle in your vocal chords?

Yes, yes … I know … I have been told a thousand times. Thinking that way isn’t nice and actually making those views known to people hurts their feelings. “Besides Pastor”, (so the routine goes) “what kind of witness are you if you sit down while the National Anthem is being played or while the colors are being posted?”

More Irony.

We stopped putting our flag out some years ago. I used to love to put it out. I guess it was in 2001 that it all hit the fan for us. It was a growing thought for various reasons the few years before that, which only exploded into absolute dislike of the symbolism when 9-11 happened.

So all the things that Bret mentioned in the above article I can understand and totally agree with as well.

I held a dear affection for the flag, but not for the Empire Strikes Back flag, the older flag, when it had less stars, when “secession” was considered a fine plank to be in any states “constitution”. When the country called These United States was a union of separate states united for reasons that most cannot even fathom today. I somehow had Old Glory shining in my eyes and that clouded my vision of the flag of my lifetime.

My vision was restored and I saw the ugly flag, and hide it in our hall closet now. I want to throw it away, but since I taught myself proper flag ettiquette so many years ago, I am loathe to destroy it, though I deeply want to.

I need no flag, but an older flag (reproduction of one) I WOULD fly, if I had one. I’m picky and refuse to consider a NYLON flag though, so I have no flag, with reproductions in fine fabrics being quite pricey. It’s just a flag. It would be a rebel symbol without being considered “racist” by most But symbols are not to be worshipped, it would only be a symbol of holding to retro-1800 views of sort. It wouldn’t be a fad, as so many are flying one since 9-11. It wouldn’t be a patriotic-nationalistic-pride thing flying a flag. It would be me standing tall and not being ashamed to say what I think.

But I can do that WITHOUT a flag. A do so gladly.

The military is one thing, bad enough. But abortion, it’s the killing of the innocent. The life that God gives is plucked from womens wombs by men and women who call themselves “doctors”. What is the first oath they take? Hmmmm. Maybe they just don’t do that anymore, or they just consider themselves above it.

This country has so much blood on it’s hands, so-called wars, and abortion, the killing of our young, the unborn, and the young men and women in the military.

Men and women are responsible for the murders of the unborn. Not just doctors, not just women, but regular men and women together conspire, and some are pregnant, some provided the seed, some are doctors. They all consent to kill together, sometimes with or without the consent of any of the mentioned parties. It’s just SO ACCEPTED today. It’s horrific.

You folks that grew up in this country after Roe vs. Wade was put into play may or may not understand the severity of it. It’s always been this way, you may think. No, in my lifetime it happened, I was small but have known about it, the before and after. So many things have culminated in my lifetime. The last century has been feather in Lincoln’s cap.

I didn’t watch the Inauguration Ceremonies on TV yesterday. All I did was see a bit of the poof-poof on Fox & Friends early in the morning, and then again this very morning, the morning after.

The article I have below is from backwaterreport.com. Posted yesterday. And it firstly has the right quote. The sort of thing that Fox & Friends was talking about, showed a small clip of P. Bush saying something like that … and I was ready to turn OFF the TV. They were talking about it as if it’s GREAT, bowing to Bush and basking in his glow.

To be so 80′s … gag me with a spoon …

“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Oh, really? What policy? Is is able to stand up and be reviewed favorably under the United States Constitution? Nah, bet it’s not. In fact, I KNOW it can’t. Can’t means CAN NOT. Which means “is not able to …” As in, “A dead man is not able to seek God”

I hate the way the country is today. The so-called “Civil War” of the mid-19th Century forged the “union” with force. It hurt the people of both the North and South. Changed things overall for the worse.

Now it’s our “Modern Duty” to force the rest of the world into this same type of thing? Force the countries that the Adminitration deems “necessary… they need to change” …

It’s not that it’s not good to change the world, but that the world mustn’t change through Military Force. How is this any different from Brits in the past? Rome? And all the other Military Mights of History?

Ah, you say it’s different. Only different in angle. Not scope or end. It’s horrible. Death. Who’s?

Yes, some bad men. Some bad women. That’s good, right? Wrong. Who says WE are the ones to do it? What give US the RIGHT? Not our Constitution. We did not form a Country to go around the globe “liberating” everyone else. Let them liberate themselfs if they want to. WE did, didn’t we? In the 18th Century? Then in the next century that Constitution that bound States together was killed and smashed to pieces. Then bits and pieces melted together to form totally new ideas and … the rest is history. They pretend to follow “the original constitution” but really don’t. It’s only a fake front.

That’s why it’s US and THEM. We see the truth, THEY are blind.

Sigh.

God is on High, and His gospel will bring peace. NOTHING else can. NOTHING else will. NOTHING else can even mimic God’s real peace.

I am a postmillenian reformed presbyterian westminster confession, christian agrigarian … INTP

My vision is true. It’s God’s. I didn’t make it up. I got it from His Word.

http://backwaterreport.com/index.php?p=288
Saving the World
by Mark Jurries II

President Bush said today that “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” I won’t waste much time dissecting the various legal problems with this statement and its mindest, (i.e. the lack of a Constitutional mandate to save the world), inasmuch as I suspect that the majority as ya’ll can spot the problems right off the bat. I do wish to address the theological and culture impacts, however.

Firstly, this should not be confused with postmillenialism. I say this because there are those who confuse the current secular Messianicism/Jacobism with postmillenialism. In a nutshell, postmillenialism holds that Christ will expand His kingdom on earth via means we’re not aware of. Hence, as Christians we’re to spread the gospel and raise Godly families, amongst other things.

The mindest of Bush and the neoconservatives, one that was previously held by Northern Unitarians and French Jacobins, is to free mankind through force. The mindset here holds that if man has “freedom”, he’ll be better off. While it’s true that freedom is great for man, it is rarely defined. (Bret McAtee has written a great article about the subject. Read also his Inauguration musings.) To be fair, this isn’t limited to the neoconservatives and liberals, there are a lot of conservatives and libertarians who talk about freedom and liberty without offering much a definition. And were they in power, they’d have problems as a result of that as well.

I attended a lecture by Steve Wilkins once, and he made the point that it used to be that when we wanted to change a country, we would send missionaries. Now we send the Marines. It’s a good thing to wish to be rid of tyrants, but at the same time they have a pesky tendency to replace each other. We threw down a tyrant in Iran, only to get the Shah.

The Middle East will see no peace until it embraces the Gospel. (I include Israel in that, there seem to be some evangelicals who have forgotten that Israel is as pagan as its neighbors.) The military is made to break things, not to fix them and certainly not to build them. The new-world-order types may mean well, but they’ll only become tyrants themselves if they follow this course.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C.S. Lewis

To get back to my original point, postmillenialists would not advocate conversion at gunpoint. The new Jacobins certainly do. Whether or not you’re a postmillenialist isn’t my concern, (though I would hope that you are), but I don’t wish to see the term nor the perception of its ideas sullied by a secular ideology.