Friday, April 03, 2015

Matt 24 watch, 255: homosexualist agendas and bully-boy intimidation in Indiana . . . the canaries in the mines are choking

For quite some time, I have been content to let my longstanding remarks on the dangerous trends involved in homosexualist agendas stand.

 However, the recent headlining of the intimidation of a Pizzeria in Indiana is simply atrocious. You may not be interested in radical agendas and the civilisational culture war they are pushing, but sometimes, such a kulturkampf is interested in targetting you.

 Powerline:
Memories Pizza isn’t shut down now because of anything it did. It’s shut down because of what a daughter of the owner said. Crystal O’Connor was minding the restaurant’s business when a reporter asked her whether the business would serve pizza at a gay wedding, a ridiculous hypothetical. Memories Pizza has been punished for her answer.

The upshot is that any business owner in America (or his or her offspring) can be asked hypothetical questions about gay rights agenda items and, if they give the “wrong” answer, will be abused and perhaps run out of business. Even worse, we may not be far from a state of affairs when any employee in America can be grilled about gay rights. Give a wrong answer, and your employer can come under pressure. 

Who will stand up to the increasingly totalitarian tactics of the gay rights movement and its leftist supporters? Religious Christians will, but doing so tends to result in being fined and/or forced out of business . . . [U/D: Cf opinion piece here.]
Let us put this in context, first it is not even a reasonable notion that Pizza would be served at a wedding. Nor is a Pizza parlour sitting on the only supply of food or drink for miles around in a famine; life and health are not at stake here. 

Save, that:
He who would rob me of means to bread,
would rob me of my life;
He who would rob me of my children,
would rob me of my posterity;
He who would rob me of my conscience,
would rob me of my soul.
For shame!

(But, we deal with the shameless . . . )

Sometimes, when truth is obscured and driven out, one of the most powerful things is to state the truth: A is A -- yes, A.

The obvious thing,  is A is A.

Namely, that Christians in our civilisation today, are being targetted because of our Bible-anchored belief that homosexual behaviour is inherently sinful, and onwards, that we do not get to define or redefine marriage, it is part of the God-given and naturally evident creation order for humanity.

In Jesus' words -- in the face of a very similar situation of being challenged with loaded questions publicly posed by opponents:
Matt. 19:1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 

4 He answered, 
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 
7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 

8 He said to them, 
“Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” [ESV]

Whose report will we believe?

We will believe the report of the crucified, buried, Risen Lord:

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel from Slaves4Christ on Vimeo.

 Period.

Likewise, we will believe the report of his Apostle:
Eph 4:17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 

18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 

20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self,[f] which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

And again (is this not, manifestly, what is happening in our day . . . ):

 Rom 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 

19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 

20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[g] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 

 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

[--> in the old days, in Pagan temples:



. . . latterly, too often in science textbooks, media presentations and museums:]




24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 

32 Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
 We can hardly plead that we were not warned about the consequences of clutching an asp of sinful perversity to our bosoms.

 Now, there patently is no credible threat to the core human rights of homosexuals to life, liberty, proper fulfillment of oneself -- and no, the so called "my genes made me do it" concept has long since collapsed -- or property, etc. 

No, this is a brazen latterday witch-hunt that targets the indisputable fundamental rights of Christians to freedom of conscience, association and expression;  with an activist in false clothes of a reporter of news pushing for targets for a media lynching, complete with a howling, death-threat spewing media lynch mob.

This is an outrage, and one that stems from a problem long since highlighted by the prophet Isaiah:
Isa 5:Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood,
    who draw sin as with cart ropes,
19 who say: “Let him be quick,
    let him speed his work
    that we may see it;
let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw near,
    and let it come, that we may know it!”
20 Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
    and shrewd in their own sight!
Is there a way forward? (Apart from, this looks more and more like a Mt 24 hard time? [Prophesies often lay out dynamics, patterns that can play out to one extent or another again and again; sometimes, termed "partial fufillments."])

 A pastor, the Rev. C.J. Conner, has posed a suggestion for the immediate problem:
“We can’t trust our government anymore to uphold the Constitution,” he said. “We can’t trust our government to protect the rights of Christians, or just the right of any individual not to be forced to violate their deeply held convictions, and so we have to be a little bit smarter.”

The pastor, who said that he has been helping churches navigate these issues for decades, recommended that Christians and houses of worship alike take ownership and get back to the “basic Christian understanding of marriage.”

In doing so, he suggested that bakers, photographers and others who provide wedding-related services should engage in exclusive and direct contracts with Bible-believing churches.
While these business owners could still serve the general public — gays and lesbians included — for other occasions related to their services, weddings would only be afforded to contracted houses of worship and their affiliated church members.

“To have them engage in contractual obligations within their faith communities and not offer those services to the general public,” Conner said. “To kind of reclaim the sanctity of marriage, which the church has lost. We’ve done some things to lose some ground on some of these issues by not holding marriage in high enough value.”
 That sort of legal move might work for a time, but at a price; and only until the agenda activists figure out a new line of attack, and another, and another. They are energised by implacable hostility and will only pull back when their power is broken and their ideological scheme lies on the ground in the public square; in shattered pieces of exposed fallacies, myths and policy failure that is so bad it cannot be spun by agitprop experts any more.

 That's what it took to break the agenda of the Marxists.

 So, we have to wake up to a whole dimension of what a favourite "spiritual warfare" passage actually means:
2 Cor 10:3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. 4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ . . .
What are the spiritual strongholds to be destroyed?

 Deceitful arguments, schemes of opinion and linked agendas that are intended to block people from the knowledge of God. Worldview conflict breaking the power of en-darkenment and resulting "chains of mental slavery." Leading, to resenting, resisting and turning from God, substituting myths and false symbols that represent such, that then cause us to spin out of orbit around the truth and right; falling into a tailspin of folly pretending to be wisdom, lies to be truth, wrong to be right, and more. Ending in debasing of mind, heart and life, all pretending to be the truth and the right.

 So, we have a challenge to stand in our day, stand for authentic truth and right in a time where it is obvious that such will be increasingly not only rejected or misunderstood but willfully mischaracterised as evil, scapegoated, targetted and outright persecuted in a wave of jack-booted bully-boy intimidation and outright persecution.

 So, I call attention to an extension of Francis Schaeffer's line of despair analysis:

. . . and to his call to prophetic, intellectual and cultural leadership:
At the first, this will be hard, and we may well pay a price of not only suffering persecution, but given the implacable hostility, there may be bloody persecution. Even, as there was under Nero in Paul's day.

 But at length, the truth and the right will prevail. 

 The time has come to stand and fight. END

 PS: Previous posts and links on the porn-perversion . . . can you imagine, pornography is now regarded as an "industry" . . .  agenda:

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