This post from JAR at EvC reminds me that I'm getting behind in my project to explore the history of Roman Catholicism as I've been learning so much about it over the last few months, even starting a new blog for the purpose.
I did understand that the state of Maryland was founded as a Catholic state, obvious enough from the name if you think about it, though I didn't know anything about its history beyond that. JAR gives the history as follows:
The second colony to pass laws requiring religious tolerance was Maryland, formed initially as refuge for persecuted Roman Catholics under the Church of England, it passed a Religious Tolerance Act in 1649.
The act was repealed by Governor Claiborne, and appointee of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell but reinstated when the Calvert family regained control of the colony.
But in 1689 though there was a Puritan led Protestant Revolution in Maryland that overthrew the government and set up a Theocracy. One of their first acts was to outlaw Roman Catholicism.
I would like to know more about this but assuming these facts are basically true there's already plenty enough to say:
For starters, the idea of "persecuted Roman Catholics" is ridiculous, Romanist spin right there. They were prevented from having political influence in England and in the Protestant colonies, yes, because whenever they got enough political influence they brought the people under the power of the Pope and became the persecutors in the true meaning of the term of Protestants and others --bloody persecutors, putting people to death at the stake, and under the Inquisition torturing them while keeping them alive as long as possible to suffer the most possible and so on.
The laws prohibiting them from taking part in the political life of England and the colonies were in self-defense, and when they are opposed, as in Ireland when Cromwell sent troops to quell the violence caused by the Romanists, and given just punishment for their rebellions, that is not persecution, that is either the defense of the innocents or simply the rule of law and order. Not that Protestants are completely above committing violence themselves but the fact of the matter is that in the majority of the instances Rome is the instigator and their cruelty is beyond belief in many cases -- which I hope to be able to document eventually. (Meanwhile you can get a lot of it from Chris Pinto or any of the sources I've listed in the margin at my other blog).
Rome of course cries persecution, the vicious wolf complaining about being muzzled and tied up, but today the fanged one is likely to get a sympathetic ear from those who have lost all sense of history or abandoned the Protestantism of their forefathers.
Religious tolerance is not just an open door to powerful people with evil intentions on a political level, it's also a violation of the Commandment against having other gods. A Christian nation must uphold that Commandment and not allow other religions with their other gods to be treated as equal to the one true God -- not persecuted and not deprived of ordinary means of living a peaceful life of course. The Puritans and other Protestants established colonies in America for the purpose of honoring God and it doesn't honor God to give equal place to the religions that deny Him, certainly not to the Antichrist religion of Rome (or of Islam).
What I have been learning about religious tolerance in America is that it was imposed deceitfully on the people by Roman agents trying to regain the power lost in England, and it succeeded here for a number of reasons, the Protestants having let down their guard or not seeing the wolf making its stealthy approach again. There was a time when Protestantism really WAS Protestantism because it recognized the real threat of the Roman false church's designs to put itself in power over all people. There are few true Protestants left these days, and it looks like Europe is shaping up to become another Holy Roman Empire with the Pope pulling the strings behind the scenes. Poor Europe. Poor America.
But they did their work well, convincing people that "religious tolerance" is just freedom for all so that it's the Protestants and Puritans who are hated for "intolerance" while it's the wolf that kills and tortures people for "heresy" that's allowed the freedom.
The Roman Church is the Harlot Church described in the book of Revelation, which used to be recognized widely among Protestants, and the papacy the seat of the Antichrist. They lost much of their power in the Protestant Reformation, and England did manage to keep beating them back as well, but now they're regaining their lost power, and when it's at its full expression it's no less evil than that of Islam -- and Islam used to be recognized as one of the two legs of the Roman Empire too, ponder that as the Holy Roman Empire starts shaping up again!
God help Europe, God help America, God help the world. [But of course this takes me back to what WOULD bring us God's help: Repentance for our falling away from Him. This is all God's judgment, as I've pointed out at all my blogs from the beginning.]
[I did a related post on this subject on Faith's Corner a while back, Poor Poor England. ]
Yeah, I heard a few days ago about the latest evidence of Obama's having been born in Kenya -- that blurb for a book he was writing back in 1991. Quite flatly declared him Kenya-born. Didn't really make much of a blip on my radar screen. So what else is new? We've known this a long time. There have been many smoking gun revelations already, stuff we'd hear about that would then just disappear, immediately buried, aggressively denied. The Kenyan grandmother who said she'd seen him in the hospital when he was born, the Kenyan memorial to his birth out of pride that a son of theirs had achieved so much in America, the mailman who was told by a young foreign student named Obama that he expected to be President one day, the Hawaiian birth certificate that even I could see was forged (I put it up somewhere on this blog. Yawn.) One proof after another makes the news and then just dies.
Truth does not stand a chance in these last days. And all this IS evidence that the last days is exactly where we are.
So Scott Johnsondid a report on it this week, and he's covered all those past proofs going back years, it's all there. He's got his PDF document on it as well as his audio report, so you can print it out if you want to have it all at your fingertips just to convince yourself you're not crazy after all, something to have after they take down the internet and execute Scott Johnson just as they did Andrew Breitbart, then Sheriff Arpaio, and so on, or whatever, there it is. Go for it.
I'm glad there are people fighting this stuff but obviously it's a lost cause. Powerful interests either don't care or they want it this way. There are people who are actually happy to think we have a President from a foreign country, happy to see our Constitution blatantly violated, globalists who can't wait for American sovereignty to collapse altogether. Like the American dollar, soon after the collapse of the Euro, coming up soon on the agenda.
Then Obama's Muslim Kenyan cousin politician (Odinga or something like that?) who murdered Christians by burning them alive in their church building, can come to America and do the same, and Obama will light the torch himself.
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5/25: And, of course, nothing is being made of the new revelation. In any other time this would be an outrage. In these days of putting good for evil and evil for good it's just business as usual.
Somebody posted this video on one of my "favorite" worldly politically correct websites, a Republican Representative giving her view of the gay marriage issue in very emotional politically correct terms. How she wouldn't want to deprive anyone of the kind of close relationship marriage can bring. Her daughter is a lesbian which must contribute much to her feelings on the subject.
I remember a Christian woman from some years ago who likewise embraced the idea of gay rights when her daughter turned out to be a lesbian.
This kind of thinking is very influential these days. We no longer have a Christian worldview shaping our once-Christian culture, even within the churches. Such questions are often decided based on feelings instead, and feelings such as this woman's are often misconstrued as compassion, even "Christian" compassion.
How are we to answer this? Christian opposition to gay marriage is treated by the world as a simple lack of compassion, even as anti-Christian according to the popular notion of what a Christian is supposed to be, as "mean-spirited," as "hatred against love" as I saw it expressed today. When ill-taught Christians join the chorus it becomes very difficult to get the topic onto a genuinely Christian footing and make sense.
I realize that it does not help to get angry as I did in my previous post because this is a problem of worldviews and understanding and the majority of people have no way to understand WHY a Bible Christian would get angry, all they can do is think we're being mean.
Is there any way to explain this that would help? Probably not, but that's no reason not to make the effort.
First, there is a HUGE confusion these days on many issues between how God deals with individuals and how He deals with nations and government. This is a big problem in talking about how America is under judgment, which I keep trying to deal with on these blogs. If we say that 9/11 was God's judgment on America people get indignant about how we are "blaming the victims" when that is not the point at all. It's not about the victims, it's not about individuals, it's about the NATION.
The same problem comes up in discussing an issue such as the head covering for women as spelled out in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. It's very hard to try to make a case for the head covering that doesn't get people upset thinking you're criticizing individual women for not covering their heads, failing at the most basic task of giving grace to others and generally being a legalistic Pharisee. Over and over you may find yourself having to say "But I DON'T think women who don't cover their heads are spiritually inferior," and "No, I am NOT speaking from my own feelings about this, much of what I'm saying actually contradicts my own personal feelings, I am simply speaking from what I understand the apostle Paul to be teaching." I keep being surprised to keep having to deal with this sort of misunderstanding but I guess I shouldn't be. Maybe there is no way to answer it effectively, but obviously it needs to be expected that people will mishear in this way because of worldly influences on our thinking, and this has to be regarded as a major impediment to getting across a Biblical position on it that needs some focused attention.
I may get more into the head covering issue soon because I've been discussing it on a forum recently, I bring it up here only because it has some features in common with our ongoing battle with the culture at large on issues such as gay marriage. The world thinks it's compassion and fairness toward women to allow them to have abortions. They can't seem to absorb the idea that the pregnancy represents an actual human being whose life must be taken in the service of such "compassion."
Likewise, the world thinks it's compassion toward homosexuals to treat them as exactly the same as heterosexuals and extend the rites of marriage to them. They can't seem to grasp the PURPOSE of marriage, which is to sanctify a union that is naturally or at least on principle able to produce offspring. They constantly misconstrue the objection that gay marriage "would destroy marriage" as a PERSONAL objection, like it's going to destroy MY personal marriage, unable to grasp that it's about marriage as a cultural institution that transcends all personal expressions of it, and that what would be destroyed is its cultural MEANING, a meaning that goes back to Creation through all time and all cultures. Apparently such an idea strikes them as too abstract and trivial to take seriously, compared with the much higher value they place on personal feelings and desires.
I watch all this with my teeth on edge, knowing that the nation is digging itself deeper and deeper into the grave by defying God's laws. So I talk about God's judgment coming against America, hoping that will get something across, only to find that the same kind of misunderstanding immediately clouds the issue. "Our compassionate good God would not do that," they say, "God doesn't cause suffering." This is of course why I think the revelations God gave Jonathan Cahn about 9/11 are so important -- which I've been writing about on Faith's Corner -- because they show in irrefutable literal physical facts that it IS God who brought about 9/11 and they teach WHY He did it -- the attitude of defiant independence from God and arrogant self-sufficiency -- and only if this is understood is there any hope of America seeing the light and repenting and thus avoiding the further horrors of further judgment from God. Now that IS God's compassion, showing us how to escape such sufferings. But so far few are listening that I'm aware of.
But America needs also to recognize the particular sins that have been digging us into the grave over the last few decades, the abortions in the tens of millions -- their blood crying out to God as the blood of Abel did -- the sexual sins of every type imaginable including the horrific notion of "freedom of pornography" and "freedom" for every kind of sin and deviation from God's law imaginable.
Truly the culture is in lemmings-to-the-sea mode, blithely tripping to its doom without a clue, thinking we're all making such "progress" in "freedom" when we're really stumbling around in the dark about to fall into the abyss, about to be consumed by terrible destruction, economic disaster, poverty, even starvation, violence from within and without, encroachment by enemies and aliens, because we're aggressively defying God's laws and putting in their place laws that actually reverse them, putting evil for good and good for evil.
And of course the trump card of the unbeliever is always that they don't believe in God and God's law anyway, that's just "religious" foolishness, any disasters have natural causes. Which may make some Christians feel like sinking back into a corner and covering our eyes while they invite their own destruction. Our wonderful powerhouse church seems to bave been deprived of all its power these days, as if there's a blockage in our fuel line from God.
Repentance does have to start with the church and the church isn't doing much in the direction of repenting either for our own deviations from God's rule. Christians who got saved out of this culture also subscribed to all its insanity before being saved, I certainly did, but once born again all that changes completely and now we ought to be able to say something relevant about it. Unfortunately the churches themselves have been falling for the craziness and need themselves to repent.
Yes, God CAN turn suffering and judgment to good purposes for Christians, opportunities to bring people to salvation, for instance, personal spiritual growth for instance, but let's not be naive -- this is not the easy way to bring that about. Judgment means the destruction of the way of life we've all become accustomed to and it's going to be hard to deal with physically, emotionally and spiritually -- for us for sure but more so for the poor unbelievers who have no way to understand any of it and no trust in God to support them, whom we must help when our own resources are lowest. Yes, we have His strength made stronger by our weakness -- if we have the spiritual sense to draw on it, and at the moment the churches aren't exactly spiritually alert.
So, the compassionate lady in the video is defending a position that can only bring doom to this country, just as those American leaders who pronounced the defiance of Isaiah 9:10 that God revealed to Jonathan Cahn were pronouncing God's sentence against America.
Is there any appeal from God's sentence? Is repentance possible at all? Will the churches finally wake up and repent for the sake of the nation? Is there any cure for this blindness or do we just have to sit back and helplessly watch it happen, watch Americans destroy themselves and the nation that once enjoyed great blessings from God?
======= Later; Must add that sometimes I write on such subjects as if the most important thing were what is going to happen to the nation and not to individuals. This is due no doubt to what I said I keep encountering, the misreading of what does apply to the nation as applying to individuals instead. But it does also have to be recognized that saving individuals is more imporant than saving the nation. Saving them from an eternity of suffering for their sins, that is. This is all about sin, sins that are bringing the nation to destruction, but they first of all bring individuals to destruction. The misplaced compassion of the woman in the video is actually condemning her own daughter to death. She may have a wonderfully happy "marriage" with her lesbian partner but a miserable eternity because she was kept from the knowledge of salvation by Christ. Same for all the unfortunate women who have had abortions not regarding it as murder. They need to repent and be saved by Christ who died for them. God will judge the nation only on this earth; but He judges individuals for eternity.
