Tag: Christianity

Peter Gent refuses to back down:

You are totally and absolutely wrong. I am neither a liar or a deceiver, but I am someone who challenged you accurately on your biblical error, which is important as you stand publicly for Jesus Christ.

You are intelligent, educated, experienced, and knowledgeable in many things, but theologically and biblically you are sometimes problematic and your lack in this area sometimes shows. Everything I said was sound orthodox theology and relevant to the situation. I am sorry if it didn’t fit in with your argument or seemed to invalidate your position, but it appeared that you could not deal with the actual argument, which is too bad, since it is true both biblically and has been accepted within the Church since the beginning.

It is your blog and you do what you want. But know this. In this you are wrong. I am calling you on it. Scream at me all you want but that doesn’t change the facts. You are wrong.

To which I replied:

You are persistent in your stupidity. You simply refuse to accept that there is a difference between a FACT: Jesus broke the law, and a JUSTIFICATION: Jesus was right to do so.

All of your blathering is irrelevant, because all of your blathering is focused on the justification rather than the fact. The claim was that Jesus never broke any law. That claim is conclusively false. Whether he was justified in breaking those laws or not is totally irrelevant.

Nevertheless, he persisted:

Then there are few who are, since I am 142 and have been a Christian for 45 years, am theologically trained, and have been in the wars standing for the faith for a long time. I have never been a churchian as you put it. I am about as far the opposite from that as a professing, believing Christian can be.

Re: Theology has NOTHING to do with straightforward factual claims.

It does when informs the underlying meaning of those factual claims and there is a category error being expressed.

For example: factual claim – Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time. True. But his argument for doing so was that the laws he broke were invalid due to the fact they where not God’s law but accretions (traditions) that had been added to God’s law that destroyed the original intent. In addition, as pertaining breaking the Sabbath, he was the Son of God and as such was Lord of the Sabbath. Those are theological argumenst. So was Peter’s argument before the Sanhedrin about who they should listen to. As a result, Jesus’ actions can only be used to justify breaking laws today if they are in opposition to or violate God’s law. Romans 12 makes this very clear. To use Jesus’ example as a pretext for the breaking of any human law without that qualification is a serious error.  A theological error.

This is amusing. He just admitted what I have been pointing out all along: “Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time.”

There is no theological error. There has never been any “biblical error”. Gent is arguing, irrelevantly, against a strawman of his own concoction. I am not saying that we are justified in breaking any laws we feel like breaking because Jesus Christ was a lawbreaker. I have never said that. I merely pointed out that the gentleman who claimed that “Jesus broke no law in his day” was absolutely, observably, and factually wrong.

I did not offer any argument on the basis of that observation.

This call to love the unlovable and bring near the outcast will touch every Christian heart.

As I was finishing up an embroidery of a Maya Angelou poem while contemplating Jamie Smith’s profound and almost mystical use of parentheses and italics, I almost split my PJs and spilt my latte when I read that not-my-president Trump called the MS-13 “gang” a bunch of “animals.” With deranged determination, I tweeted my #disgust with a hearty #gross at such an outrage and I liked all my friends’ outrage-tweets. The evangelical justice league was assembled and ready for some swift twitter-action. Many evangelical leaders, from tenured seminary professors to pastors in the upper echelons of denominations, courageously denounced Trump’s comment, risking yet again their jobs, standing, and livelihood, which only by the grace of God they’ve kept after many similar risks. (I’m shocked that they still get so many book deals.) Willing to risk it all and die on the hill of human dignity, I stand with them deeply concerned with the language Trump has used to describe MS-13.

As a gospel community, we Christians should always strive to love the unlovable, to lift up the marginalized, and to bring near the outcast. We are to shower people with our gospel love. This is why we vehemently take issue with President Trump’s dehumanization of MS-13. We fully concede that these image-bearers mutilate their enemies’ children and sell young girls into prostitution, but they nevertheless possess inviolable, infinite dignity—a spark of divinity is in every person. No matter how irrational they might be, no matter how lacking in reason and judgment, no matter how devoid of natural human affection, no matter how unfit they are for human civil society, no matter how far they go in extinguishing in themselves the fundamental principles of human relations—they remain fully human. Indeed, they are just as human as you and me, and only by the grace of God are we not one of them.

When we dehumanize people, we lose the gospel. While we of the justice league don’t believe in the social gospel, we do believe that the gospel is social. The gospel declares that all persons are equal—equal in worth, in sin, and in need of grace. The gospel is the great equalizer, for all of us are sinners equally in need of it. Whether you carve your names in other people’s flesh or you fib when you tell your communications intern that his man bun accents his v-neck, we are all equally deserving of one thing: hell. All sins are violations of cosmic justice. We are therefore no better than MS-13. And that’s a good thing, for as Duke Kwon said, “It’s impossible to love someone you disagree with when you secretly believe they need Jesus more than you do.” Don’t get puffed up with pride because you haven’t committed an act of (physical) violence lately.

So true. (sniff) I, for one, feel moved to write a letter to President Trump demanding that more Latin gangbangers, murderers, and sex-traffickers be granted legal residence in the United States, so that we more effectively bear witness to them.

In fact, should we not also prioritize the immigration of cannibals and rapists from Papua New Guinea, out of Christian love?

Bruce Charlton has an epiphany while reviewing a book:

There is a lesson to be learned here. Lachman’s previous stance was broadly ‘agnostic’ – at least, that was the perspective from which his books were written. He seems like a decent kind of man, worked hard, wrote clearly, did useful stuff…

Yet it was always clear that Lachman shared the mainstream ‘anything but Christianity’ kind of reflexive leftist/ progressive/ pro-sexual revolution perspective… which is all-but universal among those active in the perennialist, spiritual, esoteric, neo-pagan, self-help, personal development world.

Here and now, this agnostic stance of suspended judgement is non-viable: things have come to a point; because of the pervasive domination of New Left/ Political Correctness in all major social institutions everyone is incrementally being brought to a fork in the path, a decision yes or no.

I see this all around me. We live in a world of spiritual warfare. It cannot be hidden from, choice cannot be evaded. We cannot ‘keep our heads down’ because everyone is located and they must stand-up and raise their hands (and voices) to endorse and promote the current, evolving Leftist totalitarian narrative in all its respects – or else…

This is why I pay very little attention to atheists, agnostics, and pagans who believe they are opposed to globalism. Their belief is sincere, but they simply don’t understand the true nature of the war that presently engulfs Man. Despite their intentions, I expect that many, not most of them, will ultimately gravitate to the other side when push comes to shove.

Because, at the end of the day, you must either bend the knee to Jesus Christ or to the Prince of this World. You will be forced to choose a side and there will be a price. Standing proudly on your own is an illusion and it was never an option.

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

One is always well-served by paying attention to Mr. Charlton’s observations. He correctly saw through Jordan Peterson as well.

It is all very well for me to call Jordan Peterson an antichrist, and to warn people off taking seriously someone who is a merely a psychotherapist, left-libertarian, atheist… but the rejoinder is that ‘who else’ is there in the modern world getting mainstream coverage that is talking as much common sense?

And the answer is: nobody. Nobody else who has comparable fame and impact is any better than Jordan Peterson  – and yet Jordan Peterson is qualitatively inadequate for the needs of this time: he is a waste of time, a blind alley, a red herring; thus, in our state-of-emergency – he does more harm than good…

For people to regard JP as a significant thinker is evidence that they have no idea of the severity of the situation here and now.  They have no idea of the pervasiveness and depth of corruption in a society that officially advocates and enforces moral and aesthetic inversion; which punishes truth and systematically generates an interlocking structure of lies. We are in a very bad way indeed – advanced en route to self-chosen damnation on a mass scale.

Peter Grant hammers the Catholic hierarchy for its latest massive moral failing:

Every Chilean bishop offered to resign Friday over a sex abuse and cover-up scandal, in the biggest shakeup ever in the Catholic Church’s long-running abuse saga. It marked the first known time in history that an entire national bishops conference had offered to resign en masse over scandal, and laid bare the devastation that the abuse crisis has caused the Catholic Church in Chile and beyond…  The whole report hasn’t been made public, but even the highlights Francis included in his footnotes were astonishing. The gravity of the accusations appeared to lay the foundation for a full-scale Vatican investigation of Chilean dioceses, seminaries and religious orders. Such an investigation was ordered up after a similar 2010 summit that Pope Benedict XVI called for Irish bishops over their dismal record dealing with abuse.

Let me be absolutely blunt about this.  The Catholic Church, as an institution, and its bishops acting as a collective, have lied, are lying, and will continue to lie to the people of God about this problem.  They have no interest whatsoever in resolving it – only in protecting their own power, and the institution of the Church as a whole, and its power and prestige in society.  They do not care about the individuals involved, or the victims . . . or the good clergy who have been tainted with the stench of this scandal.

How can I say that?  It’s very simple.  Actions speak louder than words – and lack of action is, in itself, an action.  The Church, in the United States, in Chile, in the Vatican, and elsewhere, has taken little or no effective, meaningful action against those who were ultimately responsible for this scandal – namely, its bishops and administrators, who routinely concealed the extent of the problem, shuffled offenders around among themselves, and allowed them to continue to offend, rather than deal with the matter.  Even after the scandal blew up, many leaders of the Church continued to try to defend their offices and the institution of the Church, rather than admit that the situation was absolutely indefensible.  Many of the worst offenders were whisked off to Rome and given sheltered employment there, safe from extradition or any legal consequences of their neglect.  Many are still there.

The Church has also failed to act against the breeding-grounds for so many of these problems – its seminaries.

Let this be a lesson to you. No organization is safe, no matter what is professed intentions are. If you do not actively seek to eradicate evil from creeping in, it will do so. There are worse things than SJWs.

Do not seek to defend the Roman Catholic Church. It has manifestly become an institution utterly riddled by evil. Pray for it, demand its reformation, work to restore it, as you see fit, but do not think to defend it. There is no defense of what it has become since the cancer of Vatican II.

This is a usefully informative theological lesson for Christians from a rabbi.

Why Don’t Jews Believe in Original Sin? This is a delicate question, as it exposes one of the fundamental differences between the Christian outlook and the Jewish one…. So what, in fact, do Jews believe?

Consider the terms tov and ra, conventionally translated, as I wrote before, as “good” and “evil.” At every stage of the world’s creation, G-d pronounced it tov before proceeding to the next stage. On the creation of mankind, He pronounced it tov me’od (“very good”), and there is no indication thereafter that He changed his mind.

Ra does not actually mean “evil” in the English sense of the word. Some glimmering of its actual meaning can be ascertained from some of the other ways that the root is used. For instance, in Psalms II, 9 King David beseeches G-d to deal with his enemies: Tero‘em beshevet barzel (“You should smash them with an iron rod”), or in Isaiah XXIV, 19 the prophet begins his description of an earthquake: Ra’o hithro‘a‘a ha’aretz (“the Earth is completely shaken”). From these, we can see that it means something like “unstable, broken, dysfunctional” and therefore “bad.”

Human beings come into this world innocent of anything, but possessed of a capacity for good (commonly termed the yetzer hatov) as well as a destructive capacity, commonly termed the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara presents all the physical urges, the needs and wants, of the physical body which, like everything else in the physical realm, is subject to entropy — that is, it wears out and falls apart. But he is also provided with a soul, whose highest purpose is to control those urges and channel them into positive actions.

To this end, children are provided with parents and other mentors, whose job it is to teach them right from wrong and self-control, so that his soul is capable of taking charge and leading a proper, sanctified life. Until that moment when he is capable of taking over, any “sins” that the child commits are the responsibility of the parent.

So when does a Jewish individual begin to sin? At the age of bar or bath mitzva. These terms mean “son or daughter of the commandments” because on reaching that age, they become subject to the 613 commandments in the Torah, and their parents are no longer responsible for their actions. This landmark occurs when a boy is 13 years old and a girl is 12. One of the most emotional moments of the bar mitzva ceremony comes when the boy’s father pronounces the blessing, baruch sheptarani me‘onsho shel ze (“Blessed is He who has exempted me from this one’s punishment”).

What is the Jewish concept of the satan? Well, we agree with the Christians that he is a mal’ach, conventionally translated “angel,” but there’s nothing “fallen” about him. He works for the same Divine Boss as all the other mal’achim. Think of the satan (the word means “adversary”) as the proctor of an exam. The proctor isn’t actively rooting for you to fail the test; to the contrary, he wants you to pass. But he administers a tough test, to be certain that it tests all your capabilities and that you’ve mastered the material, i.e. the life lessons available from one’s parents and other mentors. If you manage to pass the test, no one is happier than the satan.

Now, my dear Christian reader, combine this doctrine of a very good, unfallen world that has been harmed by the destructive capacity of Man with the mandate of healing the world under the guidance of the angelic proctor with the ultimate aim of bringing it together, and perhaps you will begin to understand what Jesus was talking about and why the concept of Judeo-Christianity is not merely a contradiction in terms, but offensive to Jews and Christians alike.

I’ve never been impressed by WATYF’s incessant posturing, but since he usually remained within more or less within the boundaries of the rules. I mostly ignored him. However, seeing how he was blatantly misrepresenting my positions at John Wright’s blog, I am now banning him from commenting here.

It’s really rather remarkable how dishonest so many self-professed Christian conservatives are about the Alt-Right, particularly the Christian Alt-Right, which they prefer to pretend does not even exist. Because they cannot rationally or scripturally defend either their theological positions or their commitments to various forms of equality, they usually resort to lying about us when they can’t simply ignore us. I’ve indicated WAYTF’s false statements in bold text and his omission of the necessary context in italics.

WATYF
To be fair, Vox’s emphasis on Christianity is just a bit offset by the fact that he says Christ preaches hatred as a virtue and that murder is totes OK (because war).

Benjamin Wheeler
Care to quote him on that? Or did you just think that because he says that not all men are equal that he preaches hatred? That, because he hates war, he wants to prevent it? I didn’t realize that peoples who never meet each other still war.

WATYF
No, I’m not misunderstanding him nor am I drawing an inference from something he said. He has said directly and with no equivocation that hatred is morally good (according to Christianity) and that murder is permissible because we’re in a culture war.

Here is the latest “hatred is good” post where he invokes God to justify his position. Remember, this isn’t just “we should oppose this view”, it’s “we should actively hate these people”.

Benjamin Wheeler
Strange, because all I got from that was the hatred of sin. The rhetoric is merely a vehicle. “I am proud of my wife for refusing to respect Jack and the social mores enforced by his little Safety Council. What is better than a hot blonde hater? Hate is human, and hatred is a human right. God hates deceit, God hates the wicked, and so should we.”

I didn’t realize I shouldn’t hate evil. I should start loving it! Thank you! I didn’t realize how wicked I was not hating sin.

WATYF
Yeah, your rhetoric isn’t going to work on me so don’t bother. I’m obviously not saying anything in your last sentence.

If all you got from that was the hatred of sin then you should read more carefully. He observably *isn’t* just saying, “hate evil”. He’s saying, “hate these PEOPLE because they do evil (or rather, belong to a group that is disproportionately likely to do evil)”. It’s right there in the text you quoted.

Benjamin Wheeler
I know. I’ve got so long to go before I can match Vox.

WATYF
His doesn’t work either. Rhetoric is generally only useful on the stupid and those who can’t control their emotions. It also makes the user stupider the more they use it.

So as I was saying, Vox openly advocates for a version of Christianity that preaches the hatred of entire groups (and individuals) as well as some other rather unchristian “virtues”. Yes, he repeatedly points out how Christianity is a pillar of Western Civilization (which I agree with), but I wouldn’t go to him to find out exactly what Christianity is.

Benjamin Wheeler
Right, but he gets a reaction out of you, since you’re both emotionally offended by him and unable to think past his rhetoric to any points underneath. I’m pretty sure you ignore any dialectic because it’s easier to paint him with a brush thanks to rhetoric.

WATYF
Are you reading anything I’m writing? I’m trying to figure out if you’re still trying to use rhetoric or if you just can’t understand the argument.

I’m not “reacting” to what he’s saying. I’m analyzing it (rather coldly and dispassionately). I’m quite able to “think past his rhetoric” which is why I can present the points underneath, and the points are explicit. People have asked him directly on his own blog to clarify and he has. At first, I assumed it must be some kind of tactic involving irony or whatever, but after enough times where he said it, explained his defense of the position, and confirmed it to people who asked, I saw no utility in assuming the opposite of what was obviously true.

But if you like, you can keep telling yourself that “God says it’s OK to hate people” doesn’t actually mean “God says it’s OK to hate people”. That just strikes me as a decidedly self-deluded way to approach the matter.

You’re not “pretty sure” of anything here. Nothing you’ve said has actually addressed anything I’m actually saying. I started reading Vox over a decade ago when he mostly avoided rhetoric and engaged in dialectic debates on a regular basis. That’s what attracted me to it. Now, it’s almost non-stop rhetoric, all day every day. It’s his blog, so whatever, but the change in the quality of the commenters there is a pretty good indicator of how that shift has affected his readership.

It’s amusing that WATYF claims that it is non-stop rhetoric here. That’s simply not the case. As for the intellectual quality of the commenters, it has naturally gone down as the readership has grown from 3,000 daily to 100,000 daily, but due to my consistently weeding out posers, gammas, trolls, and liars, it is a considerably more honest discourse than one will find elsewhere.

I would much rather have 10 honest commenters of average intelligence than 100 highly intelligent dissemblers and deceivers all trying to push their false narratives on the readers here.

As usual, WATYF is flat-out wrong. God does not just hate sin. God does not just hate wickedness. God hates the wicked. The wicked are clearly people, a subset of the human race set apart by their thoughts and their actions. Now, to the best of my understanding, the wicked are individuals who are not merely sinful, who are not merely weak, who have not merely given into temptation, but are those who have actively and purposefully set themselves against God and hate Jesus Christ. They are described as liars and deceivers and slanderers, among other things.

Should the Christian hate the wicked or should he love them? That is the question that I have yet to see a Churchian answer directly, without equivocation or dissembling or substituting words. And I also have an important follow-up question: is there a difference between sin and wickedness?

Peter Hitchens highlights the sacrifice of a new Christian who became a martyr for the faith:

Last week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been. We often hear it said of soldiers and others that they ‘gave their lives’ in battle. This is true in a way, though many actual soldiers will smile at the expression and mutter that they probably did not have much choice in the matter.

But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket at Trèbes, in southern France, he wasted no time in showing that he was capable of murder. He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages.

He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman.

Arnaud Beltrame calmly offered to change places with her. I believe that he knew as he did so that this might well cost him his life, and that by stepping forward he faced the strong possibility of a horrible and lonely death. Nobody ordered or asked him to do it. It would have been perfectly normal and acceptable for the police to have surrounded the mad killer and waited for him to give in, or kill himself, with the strong possibility that he would also kill his hostage.

Arnaud Beltrame went miles further than he was required to go by the normal rules of life, or even the normal rules of duty and bravery. The daily bargain, under which we behave decently to others and hope for the same in return, wasn’t enough for him. Most of us couldn’t have done what he did. Most of us will never be asked to.

But I very much doubt whether our civilisation would have reached the heights that it has reached if nobody had ever been ready to make such a sacrifice. I believe very deeply that Christian societies are different from non-Christian ones, precisely because all of us know that such selfless courage is the ideal of what we all should be. And I think that Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame did what he did because of the specifically Christian saying ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. This Eastertide it is worth noting that these words are recorded as having been spoken by Christ, shortly before he (knowing what was coming) was dragged off to face a mocking show-trial, torture, beatings and a savage public death. For Arnaud Beltrame had come, quite recently, to embrace Christianity.

Beltrame’s noble sacrifice demonstrates once more that Christianity is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of Western civilization.

If you read here regularly, you’ve probably encountered me dismissing those prone to attempting to divide everything into very simple conceptual poles. This is not to say that pure right and wrong do not exist, or that it is always inappropriate to apply Abelard’s straightforward heuristic of “It is so or it is not so”, merely that one cannot reduce all complex matters to such a simple binary equation.

So, it was interesting to discover, when re-reading a relatively new translation of Siddhartha, to see Herman Hesse portraying the protagonist referring to a concept that is not entirely dissimilar.

I have found a thought, Govinda, that you will think neither a joke nor foolishness, it is my best thought. It says: the opposite of every truth is just as true! For this is so: A truth can always only be uttered and cloaked in words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided that can be thought in thoughts and said with words, everything one-sided, everything half, everything is lacking wholeness, roundness, oneness. When the sublime Gautama spoke of the world in his doctrine, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and redemption. This is the only way to go about it; there is no other way for a person who would teach. The world itself, however, the Being all around us and within us, is never one-sided.

Now, I certainly disagree with the surface meaning of the original thought; the opposite of every truth is simply not true or it would not be the opposite. But while that particular meaning is obviously incorrect, I think the subsequent statements are true in a slightly different sense than Hesse may have intended… or perhaps the translator messed it up somehow. I will have to review the original German to reach an opinion one way or the other. Regardless, that is neither here nor there, the point is that the world observably contains both the truth and the falsehood; to speak of what is necessarily implies the conceptual existence of what is not.

This is the true multiverse; it is conceptual, it is not material. There may be various levels of reality, there may be multitudes of realities in the way that even in our single material reality contains millions of simulated sub-realities and we are no more capable of proving that ours is the bottom turtle any more than an AI-controlled character in World of Warcraft can. But this conceptual whole is relevant for deeper understanding, for just as one cannot understand the concept of white when one has no ability to perceive the not-white of black, one cannot understand the concept of truth unless one is familiar with the not-truth of falsehood.

In the same way, we cannot grasp the essence of grace without an awareness of the not-grace of being sinful, and we cannot understand the importance of Jesus Christ or the reason for his sacrifice without an awareness of evil, both our own and the world’s. This need to know both the truth and the various not-truths in order to understand something is why binary thinking is not merely limited, it is crippling.

And, as he warned, the world continues to hate him and those who follow him.

As Christians around the world prepare to observe the holy weekend of Easter, many will be asked at their services to pray for the persecuted around the world. After years of advocacy groups raising awareness, the plight of the Christians of the Middle East, particularly in the former Islamic State territories, has become common knowledge among American Christians. Yet they are far from the only group that will celebrate Easter this year in defiance of state persecution, mob violence, and repressive cultural norms imposed by groups threatened by the spread of the Christian faith.

Below, six countries where Christians struggle to practice their faith freely against systematic institutional and cultural pressure.

China: Xi Jinping has led a systematic crackdown on “unauthorized” Christianity that has worsened year after year since he became “president” in 2013. Xi has led a movement to “sinicize” Christianity, forcing the legal Christian churches to deliver sermons extolling the virtues of his regime. “Unauthorized” Christianity is deemed a “national security threat,” and Christians who dare worship in their homes face severe law enforcement reprimand.

Venezuela: Dictator Nicolás Maduro and his subordinates have struggled for years to submit the Christian faith to their whims – publishing socialist Christmas carols, identifying their policies with the Gospels, and proclaiming that “Christ is Chavista.”

India: In India, the repression faced by many Christians is not at the hands of the government, but at the hands of violent Hindu nationalist mobs. According to Open Doors, an organization that tracks the persecution of the Christian faithful worldwide, the permissive attitude of a Hindu nationalist government has allowed for the exacerbation of violence against these communities, some of the oldest Christian congregations on earth. In one incident this year, a mob tortured and hanged a Christian pastor after six months of loudly disturbing Sunday services. Local police ruled the death a suicide, triggering thousands to protest for justice.

Nigeria: Nigeria’s population is 40 percent Christian, with many practicing freely in the nation’s south. In the north, however, Christians face severe persecution from jihadist groups like Boko Haram and violence by the majority-Muslim Fulani herdsmen against Christian farmers. The herdsmen are believed to be conducting raids targeting Christians and have killed an estimated thousands of civilians.

Sudan: Sudan, a nation run by Muslim tyrant wanted for genocide, is one of the most repressive states in the world, a Muslim-majority tyranny where Christians face destruction of property and arbitrary arrest if they are too visible. Open Doors ranks Sudanese Christians in the top five most persecuted Christian nationalities in the world.

Indonesia: Indonesian Christians are under growing public scrutiny. While Christians have long coexisted in the world’s most populous Islamic country, they have increasingly fallen victim to radical Islamic mobs.

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.
– Luke 6:22

Many, if not most Christians have been extremely dubious about the legitimacy of the so-called Pope Francis. Now there are serious questions, even among Catholics, that concern whether the man is even a Christian at all:

Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

On the first Holy Thursday, Judas betrayed Christ. And of Judas the Lord said, “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man shall be betrayed; it were better for him if that man had never been born.”

Did the soul of Judas, and those of the monstrous evildoers of history, “just fade away,” as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said of old soldiers? If there is no hell, is not the greatest deterrent to the worst of sins removed?

What did Christ die on the cross to save us from?

The Vatican swiftly issued a statement saying the pope had had a private conversation, not a formal interview, with his friend, Scalfari.

The Vatican added: “The textual words pronounced by the pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”

Sorry, but this will not do. This does not answer the questions the pope raised in his chat. Does hell exist? Are souls that die in mortal sin damned to hell for all eternity? Does the pope accept this belief? Is this still the infallible teaching of the Roman Catholic Church?

This is not Christianity. These are not Biblical teachings. In fact, this is not even religion. This is John Lennon’s Imaginism elevated and amplified by an extremely silly and not particularly intelligent man who has accidentally revealed his true thinking.

The Vatican’s attempt to sweep these uncomfortable opinions under the rug as being non-ex cathedra personal discourse on the part of an individual who merely happens to be the Bishop of Rome is not conclusive, but it certainly is damning by faint and evasive defensiveness.

Pat Buchanan is absolutely right to note the central question this raises. After all, if there is no Hell and there is no sin, then there was never any need for Jesus Christ to die on the cross. And yet, we observe daily the ways in which people are sinful, that evil exists, and that Man needs Jesus Christ.

That being said, don’t even think about trying to divert this into Protestant vs Catholic, Round 475,838. Any commenter who attempts to do so will be summarily spammed.