Monday, October 31, 2016

Matt 24 watch, 298: Chaos hits the US presidential election (650,000 emails' worth), while the onward targetting of Christians begins

Sophia's warning seems to be haunting the 2016 US presidential election, first with Mr Trump's potty mouth "playboy" mentality boasting of sexual prowess and now with a revelation of 650,000 emails being discovered on the computer used by Ms Huma Abedin's husband (in the course of a pedophilia investigation regarding a 15 year old girl).

Drudge's "screamer," last night and up to this morning:


Daily Mail's header (overnight, updated) with bullets -- a very useful approach, BTW -- amplifies:

Swirling in the background are not only issues of state secrecy violations (which had been coming out in the Wikileaks infodumps now amounting to 35,000 emails), but also quite nasty rumours of pedophilia trips in the 650k emails and the like, which spin off the long history of "bimbo eruptions" surrounding the Clintons. (This last may in the end be a payback dirty operation: I see you one groping tape and raise you rumours of pedophilia trips. The emails will likely be months in the vetting before we see redacted releases, as they will have to be assessed for potential secrecy issues and relevance to legal cases.)

All of this goes to underscore the revelations of how broken and bankrupt our civilisation's leadership culture is.

Lesson 1: character counts.

It also tosses the election trends and projections into the waste basket. Mr Trump's odds of winning in the dirty media war election have just risen, and that may well trump the rumours of a nasty November surprise targetting him in the last week. Doubtless, he has saved up his own "killshots" for the last week. (I doubt that the  FBI emails story was in itself a Trump operation. This letter by a very angry retired FBI officer and the implication of near-mutiny in the FBI are much more likely to be triggers, especially if Comey was shown smoking gun emails off the record. His choice then would be, explosion now or worse and uncontrollable explosion by mutiny and leaks later. He picked, explosion now.)

And, it points to a coming wave of attacks on Christian leadership not only in the North but likely here in our region. (The major media have become utterly ruthless and people will be out for revenge. We are handy scapegoats.)

Indeed, here is Michael Brown:
Consider this Oct. 26 headline on Fox News: “State of Georgia demands pastor turn over sermons.”

Yes, “A lay minister who is suing the Georgia Department of Public Health for religious discrimination has been ordered by the state’s attorney general to relinquish his sermons to the government, according to federal court documents.”

In the words of Attorney General Samuel Olens, “Please produce a copy of your sermon notes and/or transcripts.”

And why is the state of Georgia demanding his sermon notes and/or transcripts?

As Todd Starnes reports, “Walsh, a Seventh-day Adventist lay minister, had been hired in May 2014 by as a District Health Director with the Georgia Department of Public Health. A week later, a government official asked him to submit copies of his sermons for review. He complied and two days later he was fired.”

In other words, he was not fired because of any lack of qualification. To the contrary, he was highly qualified for the job.

As noted by attorney David French, Walsh’s résumé included “working for former President Bush and President Obama to combat AIDS, serving as a board member of the Latino Health Collaborative, and starting California’s first city-run dental clinic for low-income families dealing with HIV/AIDS,” but that “wasn’t sufficient to overcome the horror at Walsh’s Christian views.”

Yes, Walsh was fired for the unpardonable sin of preaching against homosexual practice, based on Scripture – and note that he was preaching this to his fellow-congregants, not giving a lecture to his staff . . .
In short, if one has a scripturally grounded moral-theological view on homosexual behaviour as destructive soul-robbing sin, it is already held to be disqualifying, and a sermon from Rom 1 or 1 Cor 6:9 - 11 may be in effect deemed hate speech. 

Let me cite the latter, to make the non-negotiable, Biblically grounded Christian view (backed up by thousands of cases across the ages of gospel-transformed lives) utterly clear:
1 Cor 6:Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality [--> the Greek words identify active and passive roles in such acts], 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. [ESV]
Nor is this just the USA. 

A very disturbing case in the UK, shows how Christian parents are being targetted for objecting to a demand for sex change by their 14 year old daughter:
Interview that will chill every parent: Social workers accuse Christian family of 'emotional abuse and homophobia' because they refuse to let their teenage daughter undergo a sex change at 14
  • Peter and Kate Wilson's daughter was a 14-year-old wanting to be a doctor
  • That was a little less than a year ago, but today, she threatens suicide
  • Social workers believe behaviour shift is due to her wanting a sex change
  • Parents have given a harrowing interview lifting the lid on their experience
By Rebecca Hardy for the Daily Mail

Published: 21:00 GMT, 28 October 2016 | Updated: 07:45 GMT, 29 October 2016


. . . Melissa is surly, rude, self-harms, threatens suicide and is being monitored by social workers, who insist that her sudden change in behaviour [over the past eleven months] can be attributed to one extraordinary fact. 

Melissa, they insist, wants to be a boy.

Not only that, but they are accusing Peter and Kate of ‘emotional abuse’ and ‘homophobic’ behaviour and putting them under extraordinary pressure to call their daughter ‘Mark’ as a first step towards changing her gender.

The Wilsons, who believe their daughter is far too young to make such a momentous decision, fear that if they don’t toe the social services line she will be taken into care.

‘Can you understand how we feel as parents?’ asks Peter. 

‘We’ve known our daughter her entire life, but after meeting her for just a few months the social services say they know her better and she wants to be a boy.

‘They’ve told us if we don’t allow her to be called “Mark” and give permission for her to be assessed at one of these centres that’s pushing the transgender agenda, we’re emotionally abusing her. 

'I said: “It’s not going to happen, not now. When she’s older she can make her own decision, but not at 14.”.

‘She’s not even old enough legally to have a sexual relationship . . .
Notice, in a demonic turnabout, it is suddenly abuse in the minds of activist, agenda-driven social workers etc,  to object to petulant demands for a drastic and unnecessary medical procedure with irreversible consequences. 

And, thanks to vague, ugly, loaded laws and policies, sincere moral objections are suddenly transformed into irrational fears -- that is specifically what the suffix, "phobia" means --  and/or hate.

The hour is late, and our failure to thoroughly engage the discipling the nations challenge across the board in recent generations is coming back to haunt us.

I again put the seven mountains of influence challenge on the table:



We may not be interested in these issues, but as our civilisation spins utterly out of control and becomes stubbornly heedless of warning signs of a march of folly:


. . . these things are very much interested in us. END