Taking in Refugees

The Sun-Times (Nov. 22) printed a long opinion piece that tried to make the case for accepting the Syrian refugees.  Turning the page in that same paper, we read that there are 55,000,000 refugees in the world today. 

So why the insistence on taking Syrian refugees?  Why the insistence on taking Muslim refugees?

These refugees are fleeing a civil war.  Christians are being driven out of Muslim lands, being tortured, crucified, beheaded by ISIS, risking imprisonment in other Muslim countries for the slightest or trumped up offenses.

They won’t go to these refugee camps, because they fear for their safety there.

Europe has been taking Muslims for years now, and it is about to break apart from the social division and unrest.  Watch some of the countless videos from Europe on youtube. 

Have we forgotten the purpose of our government?

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, . . . , insure domestic Tranquility, . . . , promote the general Welfare, ….

This government is hellbent on doing everything possible to divide our nation, insure unrest and discord, and promote the welfare of everybody else over its own people.

a response to a newspaper letter regarding religion, terrorism, and the Constitution

A reader (November 20) asked and raised some questions that need to be answered.

The reader suspects “that what ISIS is doing in the name of Islam bears as much relation to the religious tenants [sic] as the man-in-the-moon does.”  I think what he means is that the violence that ISIS perpetrates has nothing to do with Islam.

USA today recently summarized all the worldwide terrorist attacks for the last month.  There were about 30 attacks killing hundreds of people, and they were all committed by Muslims.  It’s a logical fallacy to conclude that Islam caused all these terrorist attacks, but I think it is safe to assume that there must be something about that religion that so many people seem to abuse it and in extraordinary ways.  I think maybe somebody needs to research why so many of the world’s terrorists are Muslim.

The reader also repeats one of the biggest misunderstandings about our Constitution that gives our Founders a bad name.  He says that “the Founding Fathers . . . constitutionally established an entire race as being worth only two thirds as relevant as they themselves.”

Not quite.   Most of the people he is referring to here were slaves.  Those of that race who were not slaves were not counted as 3/5 like the rest.  And the reason why slaves were counted as 3/5 of other people was that slaves could not vote.  And to count slaves as full persons would give slave states a greater representation in government than they should have had.  That would have made it harder to end slavery in the first place.

To make slavery an issue at that time might have resulted in not one new nation but two.   But the South could have remained loyal to the Crown, and in that case the northern colonies probably wouldn’t have been able to win a war for independence by themselves.  So we would still be a colony of England.

The reader ends by remarking that “it is never wise to paint an entire race or religion with the same paint brush.”  The problem is that there are just too many instances of horrible things being done in the name of one particular religion that it seems naïve not to see a link here.

What Should We Think About Islam?

The United States is the midst of a debate about admitting Syrian refugees.  Related to this is also a debate about Islam itself. 

USA Today recently surveyed all the terrorist attacks worldwide over the course of a month, and there were about 30.  I believe all of them were by radical Islamists. 

We are constantly being told that this radicalism has nothing to do with Islam itself, and that we should welcome any non-radical Muslims to our country. 

How should we respond to this statement?

We have heard a lot of rhetoric on both sides of the issue.  I would like to present two points that I have not heard yet.

1)         If you want to see what true Islam is, I would say you need to go to a country that is entirely or majority Muslim.  There are 47 Muslim majority countries in the world.  Are there any of them that you would like to live in?  Especially if you are Christian.  Or Jewish.  Open Doors publishes a monthly list of the countries with the worst persecution of Christians.  This would be killings, imprisonment, torture, etc. merely for the fact of being Christian.  Thirty-seven of the top 50 are Muslim countries.  

I am guessing here, but I think the only reason the other ten countries didn't make the list is because there are too few Christians there to judge.  By the way, the Middle East was largely Christian until the rise of Islam.  No, they did not convert to Islam, at least willingly.  Most were either killed or just fled to other countries.  I suppose Mohammed was a radical and doesn't represent true Islam. 

Are we to assume that  all these countries don’t really represent Islam?  That they are aberrations?  Where are true Muslims to be found?  Are they only the ones who already are living or who want to live in our country?

I venture to say that if Jews compiled a similar list for hostility to Jews, or even a list of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, the vast majority of incidents would be caused by Muslims.

Any group of people living in our country could achieve majority status at some time.  What would our country look like as a majority Muslim country?  How much different would it be from the other 47 Muslim countries in the world?

2)         Muslims have been moving into Europe for several generations now.  How is that working out?  You need just go to youtube and you can find dozens, maybe hundreds of videos, from Europe documenting or telling of changes that you would not want if it were to happen here.  Many of the stories tell of violence.  Not merely crime but violence attributed to Islam.  Is this only committed by a radical fringe?   Then this fringe is too large to be called fringe.

But more importantly it shows that this radicalism, if you want to call it that, is inherent in the system.  While any particular Muslim can be nice, friendly, and a good neighbor and citizen, as their numbers increase, so do the number of those who are called ‘radicals.’ 

But isn’t this the same as saying that any time the population increases, the number of crimes increases proportionally?  Perhaps, but ordinary crime usually involves rapes, murders, and thefts motivated by personal greed, lust, or anger.  Certainly nobody wants any of these. 

But radical Islamic violence seeks the destruction of as many people as possible and not for personal motives but for the sake of the religion.  Misguided or not, once it takes root in a society it’s almost impossible to root out.  

Introducing Muslims into our society has put incredible costs on our law enforcement community as it tracks thousands of potential offenders waiting for them to offend.  Why would we want to do this?  There are millions of people who would like to come here where this wouldn’t be a risk.  Why would we want to jeopardize the lives of our own people?

Merry Christmas

It doesn’t matter whether you think Christmas is a celebration of the winter solstice or the birth of Jesus.  Christmas is a federal holiday in the United States.  It is the one day of the year when the country basically shuts down.  Almost all working people will get a day off from work with pay, regardless of your religion.  And most people, regardless of their religion, will spend the day with friends and family.  So I think it is entirely appropriate in any circumstance to wish anybody in the United States a Merry Christmas. 

American Foreign Policy and the Rise of Islamic Terrorism

A reader (November 17) lambasts American foreign policy in the Middle East but seems to forget why we got involved there in the first place: 9/11.  We made a lot of mistakes there, and I would list different ones than he did, basically because we assumed the people there were more like us than they are. 

Anyway, if we had never gone into Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and ignored Iran, Syria, Yemen, we still would be encountering Islamic terrorism.  We did all this in response to 9/11.  What did we do that was so wrong before that?

Islamic terror is rampant throughout Africa, and we never touched that. 

Islam has an agenda apart from retaliation for our intrusion in the Middle East.  It goes back to its founding in the 7^th century.  Islam was quiet for a while after WW1 when France and England controlled most of their lands.  But as they relinquished control, the beast awoke.  Some people believe that World War III has already begun.

Christianity in a Post-Christian West: a response to Christianity Today

It panged me to read several of the articles in Christianity Today (November) about the relationship of the church and the culture.  They gave me the sense that Christians should feel fortunate to have lived in a country that gave them such generous and unusual religious freedoms and that they shouldn’t have been surprised or alarmed that the culture turned against them.

On the contrary, our country was ‘fortunate’ to have been founded by Christians who created a new kind of government that guaranteed all kinds of freedoms for its people.  I know there is disagreement over the exact nature of the faith of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, but the facts remain that the First Congress among its first acts proclaimed a day of prayer and thanksgiving for our nation, it published Bibles to be used in all the public schools, the Capitol building itself was used as a church for a hundred years after our nation’s founding, and Thomas Jefferson asked Congress for funds to help evangelize the Indians.

Religion, specifically Christianity, and morality were considered by our Founders as essential for the health and happiness of our nation.

The culture in America changed basically because of the government.  The court called supreme ruled that government cannot aid religion (1947) and later removed the Bible and prayer from our public schools (the 1960s), undoing practices in place since well before our nation’s founding, hundreds of years.  This morphed into the removal of all mention of God in schools and public life essentially establishing our country as a secular nation and basically changed the definition of religion from a description of truth and reality to a person’s private beliefs, along the lines of a person’s taste in music or food.

Few people anymore question what the First Amendment actually means by “the establishment of religion.’   (Answer: the creation of a state church as still exists in most of Europe.)  Christians and everybody else blithely accepted the expansion of this principle to include essentially prohibiting any and all mention of God in our public schools and public places and discourse. 

This new definition, or view, of religion removed the idea of religion as a worldview, so nobody questioned that secularism is as much of a religion as Christianity, where government replaces God as the ultimate authority, the people’s lawgiver, benefactor, protector, and savior.  The government is now responsible for solving everybody’s problems and ensuring their welfare and happiness. 

Where were the Christians while all this was going on?  In 1954, Congress passed the Johnson (as in LBJ) Amendment, a little attachment to another entirely unrelated bill that linked tax exempt status and political involvement, and churches afraid of losing their tax exempt status stopped most or all of their political activity, something they had been doing since well before our nation’s founding.

What the early Christians in our country knew that Christians today don’t think of is that we don’t have rulers, kings, or Caesars in our country; we have representatives.  The rules about submitting to our leaders don’t apply here, at least in the way described in the Bible.  Like an employer who hires and fires people according to how the employees contribute to the interests of his company or someone who may hire a lawyer to oversee one’s affairs, government officials essentially work for us.  And discussions public and private about their policies and practices is what responsible people do.  Forbidding tax exempt status to churches who discuss politics and political candidates is a practice that the Church should have challenged and demanded to be changed.

The articles discouraged Christians from thinking that electing the right people will solve their problems.  But Christians more than anybody should know the value of leadership.  Those who know Biblical history know that how the leaders go, so goes the nation.  Moses appointed Joshua, who led the people into the Promised Land.  Joshua didn’t appoint a leader, and the nation couldn’t follow through. 

The pattern is seen over and over through the stories of the kings.  A godly king brought about a revival in the nation.  An ungodly king turned the nation away from God.  It was only when President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage that the courts and the media showed strong support for it, leading to the overturning of 30 State Constitutions prohibiting it and the eventual supreme court [sic] ruling legalizing it.  If he had not done that, gay marriage would still not be legal in our country.  Yes, the institution of marriage had been breaking down for decades, but there was still a public consensus supporting it. 

The Book of Acts seems to paint a new paradigm, where society changes from the bottom up as people turn to God.  Yet even today, as Christians well know, churches thrive or die depending on their leadership.  If Christians won’t lead the United States, we leave it in the hands of the ungodly, and we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcome.

The culture war should be a wake-up call to the Church that it has become irrelevant in a society that for the first time in history was put together in a way that gave it every advantage.  Maybe the Church was unprepared for a political fight or considered it unfitting for the Church, forgetting that our government is not our rulers but our representatives. 

The Church in America sees politics as distractions outside of its area of concern and influence, yet every member of the Church has locks on their doors and fences around their property to protect themselves from theft and intrusion.  And they wouldn’t hesitate to hire a lawyer or call the police when their material property rights were violated.  If their bank was skimming from their accounts every month, they would be in an uproar.  

Loss of rights and freedoms are not as obvious as property encroachments; and, since they happen incrementally, they are often not noted or they are accepted as necessary compromises.

Christians are careful to give their ten percent to the Church as good stewards of what God has given them.  And then they are supposed to let the government take another 50% (add up all the federal, payroll, medicare, state, local, sales, property, gasoline taxes and fees), and they are not supposed to have a say on how that money is spent?

The Church is losing the cultural war in the West, and that is seen as a good thing.  Ooh, now we get to be persecuted! 

But the Church is losing the cultural war in the West, because it failed the culture it lived in.  It showed itself as poor examples, as powerless to help people in their problems, and unable to answer the challenges presented to it, like evolution or moral and cultural relativism. 

It doesn’t make sense to think that we as a Church can and should only help people with their spiritual problems or material problems on a personal basis.  If we are not involved in our school boards and our public policies, we will be presenting ourselves to the world, not as conveyors of the truth, but like a commercial product just trying to increase its market share just to make a name for itself.

A Christian's Responsibility to Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees: A response to an editorial

Should Christians take their kid’s college fund and give it to homeless people?  Should Christians move entire neighborhoods of people from high crime, low income areas to their suburbs so these people will have better schools and a safer place to live?

Yes, America has always been known for being welcoming to immigrants, but we never in our past accepted people just because they wanted to come here.  People were routinely refused admittance if they were illiterate, immoral, subversive, sick, or liable to being dependent on the government.  Now, whether with the illegal immigrants or the new migrants, we are being told to just take them all, no questions asked.

The West’s elaborate and generous welfare system did not exist when we had the mass migrations of the early 1900s.  Before we sent most of our good paying jobs overseas, an increase in population increased demand, and there were always plenty of good jobs for people. 

Now we have the lowest labor participation rates since maybe before World War 2.  We have record numbers of people on food stamps and welfare, and the American dream of children living better than their parents or families where mothers stay home to raise their children are unrealistic for most people.

This mass migration of people to Europe are not all Syrian refugees fleeing war.  They come from throughout the Muslim world, and they want to go to Germany and Sweden primarily, because Germany and Sweden have the best welfare benefits.  Go to youtube and watch all the videos coming from Europe about how things are going there since they have been accepting millions of immigrants, migrants, and refugees from Africa and Asia. 

Sweden is now the rape capital of the world.  Women regularly dye their blond hair black in the hopes they will less likely be a victim.  Where Islam couldn’t defeat Europe and the West in war, they have settled for doing it more slowly by demographics, replacing an aging white population with young Muslims. 

If we were winning them to Christ in the West, this could be an ideal way to win the Muslim world.  They would make the best missionaries to go back.  But we are not.  There are more and more people who are seeing the decline and rapidly approaching death of the West through bankruptcy and demographics.  We no longer know what Western civilization was built on.