Nelson Mandela's description of the Zimbabwean catastrophe wrought by Robert Mugabe as a failure of leadership is a failure either of intelligence or of honesty, or of both. There comes a point at which euphemism turns into untruth; and Mugabe's regime long ago passed the stage of mere human error that the term 'failure of leadership' implies.
The reason most African leaders find it so difficult to condemn Mugabe's rule is that to do so would put in question the whole concept of African liberation. The crimes of colonialism are only too well known; but the crimes of anti- and post-colonialism are still too recent, and too current, to be talked of with frankness by their beneficiaries.
The attachment of the ANC under Nelson Mandela to freedom is comparatively recent, and wholly the result of the downfall of the Soviet Union. Until then, the South African Communist party, which was plus staliniste que Staline, was very powerful, if not preponderant, within it. If the ANC had come to power with the Soviet Union intact - which would have been impossible without a civil war - it would have made contemporary Zimbabwe seem like a garden party.
Moreover, there are still elements within the ANC that would like to move in Comrade Bob's direction. The fact is, for many African leaders of the first and second generation, the impoverishment of the population has been the road to power and riches.
Mugabe has done only what many other post-colonial African leaders have done. A fifth of the Zimbabwean population has fled; but a third of the population of Guinea, under the leadership of another hero of African liberation, Sekou Toure, fled. It would be difficult to say who was the worst liberator: the competition is so stiff.
Africa is the one continent in which, with a few honourable exceptions, there has been little advance or progress in the last forty to fifty years. What Africa desperately needs is liberation from the liberators. But who is to do it without renewing the catastrophe?
Scarlet Letter: A Christian With AIDS
The following is a actual letter I sent to a close Christian friend in 1999, immediately after I was diagnosed with HIV. Since then the HIV has progressed on into AIDS.
Does God Heal Today?
When I was first diagnosed with the HIV virus, I read innumerable articles on it and later suffered from an information overload and depressing confusion. One article would speak in favor of taking the highly toxic HIV/AIDS medicines, and then I'd read another one that spoke against it with just as convincing of an argument.
Brokeback Mountain Blues
I wanted to see it, but I didn't want to see it. I'm talking about the "gay cowboy" movie called Brokeback Mountain (even though I read Jake Gyllenhaal, one of the two major actors - "Jack Twist," wants it to mean much more than that to its audience).
God and the Gays - To Be or Not to Be (Part 1)
Homosexuality.... Is it a matter of choice? Are some born that way? And if so, then how could God condemn it? Or does He? Does it make a difference?
God and the Gays - All That Glitters Isn't Gold (Part 2)
The gay bar scene or high risk promiscuous sex... Is it so happy-go-lucky? Something so sweet and wonderful we'd "wish you were here?" Or is it actually something you wouldn't wish upon your worst enemy?
God and the Gays - Once Gay, Always Gay? (Part 3)
Once gay always gay? How about once an adulterer always an adulterer? Better yet, once a sinner always a sinner (1 Cor. 6:11; 1 John 1:9)? WHO says so?
God and the Gays - Of Vice and Men (Part 4)
Everyone - gay or straight - has the "fire" within (1 Cor. 7:9). Some burn more than others, but it's still there. God understands proper sexual desire and simply commands that we develop His character to control and channel it. He knows our human need to love and be loved, to touch and feel, to give of ourselves totally in a reciprocal relationship.
God and the Gays - A Time to Heal (Part 5)
God calls people from all walks of life and performs a miracle in their minds: they're offered a fresh perspective, given a new outlook, and enabled to try a different approach (Philip. 2:5). Their former "records" aren't held against them and they're started out with a new attitude and identity (2 Cor. 5:17).
God and the Gays - Make Up Your Mind (Part 6)
We can make things easier or more difficult for ourselves. Either you're totally convinced God's way is right and worth living, or you're not sure and continually ride the fence and risk rupture; tormenting yourself and sending out conflicting signals and confusing signs (Matt. 6:24; 7:16).
"Let us make man in our image." Such a Scripture does not support the trinity, but it does support the plain truth that the Word was God and the Word was with God, two Beings with the one sacred name of God/Elohim (John 1:1-2).
"In the Beginning was the WORD (Logos/Spokesman/Revelatory Thought), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God." This clearly reveals TWO Beings who shared the ONE family name of GOD (Ephes. 3:15). God created all things through Yeshua/Jesus who was the Word (Ephes. 3:9).
When the Word became flesh He was "God with us" and thereby became the "Son" and the One who remained in Heaven thereby became the "Father." They had coexisted eternally in a SHARED GLORY (John 8:42, 7:5, 8, 16:27-28). We can either accept or reject Yeshua's revelation of the UNKNOWN FATHER FIGURE whom mankind has never heard or seen. The Word who became Yeshua is the Divine Being who dealt with ancient Israel. They didn't know the Father and most still don't today, and they can't unless the Son reveals Him (John 5:37, 6:44,46, 8:54-55).
And we can either accept or reject Yeshua's explanation/interpretation of what "one" means: unity/united. He said the Father was in Him and He was in the Father (through the Holy Spirit and unity of mind and purpose) and He prayed for the Church of God to express and exhibit that exact same unity and oneness by the Holy Spirit (John 14:11, 15:4, 17:11, 21, 23). Please check out these Scripture references and see that it is so. One Holy Spirit of UNITY AND DIVINE PURPOSE (I Cor. 12:12-20).
The Scripture says "Let us make man in our image," and it says "ELOHIM (not YHVH) made man in His image." It's saying the Word and God made man "in OUR image" and, that as ONE GOD FAMILY UNIT/KINGDOM, the united God made man in HIS image. It elaborates, for our sakes, by also saying Elohim created MAN in His image..."MALE and FEMALE created He THEM" (Gen. 1:27).
So there's a reverse of the singular and the plural, man/them and our/His. This "mystery" is further revealed when it's written in Gen. 5:1-2: "In the day that Elohim (Gods) created man, in the likeness of God made He HIM; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name ADAM." The ONE ADAM FAMILY then had a son, Seth, in "his (Adam's) own likeness, after his image" (Gen. 5:3).
Does this exclude Eve? Wasn't Seth also in her human likeness and image? Yes. For conclusive proof that God PURPOSELY inserted all this into the Genesis account to REVEAL to us later about the ONE GOD FAMILY/KINGDOM, the apostle Paul preaches: "For we [Christians] are members of his [Yeshua's] Body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and they TWO shall be ONE FLESH. This is a GREAT MYSTERY: but I speak concerning Christ and the Church" (Ephes. 5:30-32).
That's how the ONE GOD FAMILY (Elohim with the Father Supreme and the Son gladly subject to His authority - 1 Cor. 15:28) can be and is presently composed of two God-Beings, and is in the conversion process of "bringing MANY SONS TO GLORY" (Heb. 2:10) since Christ was the "FIRSTBORN OF MANY BRETHREN" (Rom. 8:29). Jesus was the PROTOTYPE of a new genus: the Kingdom of God!
It's illustrated that even as MANKIND has shared in Adam's earthy image, we're soon to share in the HEAVENLY image of the Second Adam when we're born again of the Holy Spirit (John 3:3,6 4:24), with righteous character and composition! Mankind after the Godkind! And all through the ONE SPIRIT of God that unites us.
"Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27), "who shall change our vile body that it may be FASHIONED/CREATED like unto His GLORIOUS BODY" (Philip. 3:21), "for we know that when He shall appear, WE SHALL BE LIKE HIM" (1 John 3:2) - we are not going to be dogs or cats, or even angels, we are to be heavenly beings, HOLY SPIRIT-COMPOSED, born again GOD-BEINGS in the one divine family unit/Elohim!
We are presently members of MANkind, huMAN, in the ADAMic Family unit (Gen. 5:2), but God promises we'll soon be changed in the twinkling of an eye, miraculously transformed, and join the HEAVENLY SPIRIT/GOD FAMILY.
We've clearly seen how "two" can be "one" whether in the God Family or in the Adam family. It's right there in the Bible if we'll just believe what we see and read. It's the plain truth of the Bible for those willing to believe what God has revealed.
Those who reject the testimony of the Scriptures (to hang on to vain traditions of men, whether trinity or oneness) are unable to explain what we're to become. Why have we received the down payment/earnest of the Spirit? (Ephes. 1:13-14). What conversion process are we in? (2 Cor.3:18). What are we being converted to if not into the character and composition of the Holy Spirit?
God is spirit. We must be born again of the SPIRIT. Yeshua is the FIRSTBORN of many brethren (Rom. 8:29). We're presently partakers of the DIVINE nature (2 Pet. 1:4). God is our Father, Yeshua is our elder Brother - a family relationship. We're in Adam's human/earthy image now; we're to be in the Second Adam's spiritual/heavenly/divine image soon.
God is reproducing Himself! That's what the conversion process is all about: God became man so man could become God. Mankind was created after the Godkind so after a life of conversion and purification, we can be resurrected to GLORY and share the glory of the Father and Son as born again sons of God (Elohim).
Again, what are we to become? How can you strive to enter the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Gods (Elohim), leaving the human kingdom behind, if you refuse to accept the awesome potential God (Elohim) offers? Take receiving the Holy Spirit and being born again of the Holy Spirit to its logical/biblical end/fulfillment.
When we're glorified God-Beings, worshipping our Supreme Father God in His Kingdom (1 Cor. 15:28), just like Yeshua will submit to the Father as all in all, we'll be immortal Priest-Kings (Rev. 5:10, 20:6), and God will be the "God of Gods" (Ps. 97:7, 136:2). Christ is the King of Kings (we're those kings), and the Lord of Lords (we're those lords), and the Father is God of Gods (we're those Gods/Elohim - Micah 4:5).
We either accept Yeshua's revelation of the UNKNOWN FATHER and His eternal coexistence with Him, and His work as Creator, as the Word, under the supervision of the Father, or we must reject the New Testament.
The Jews know Yeshua's claims and don't water them down to fit their religion. They reject His revelation for now, like most of traditional Christianity, but both Houses of Israel (Anglo-Saxon-Celtics, Western Europeans and Jews as taught by Brit-Am Israel) will get over this stumbling block and soon embrace our transcendent calling to become literal members of the Heavenly Family of Gods (Elohim), higher than the animals and angels - divine (Heb. 2:9-10).
We don't call God the Father for nothing, or do we? We're to be the literal children of God, the Children of the Resurrection (Luke 20:36). What glorious GOOD NEWS!
Condemnation of the rebellion heaped up. The United Nations applied international sanctions intended to cut off Rhodesia from the rest of the world in 1966.
Mr. Smith would not bend. "No African rule in my lifetime," he said. "The white man is master of Rhodesia. He has built it, and he intends to keep it."
As he aged, he remained bitter that, in his view, successive outside powers including the United States, South Africa and most of all Britain had broken promises, betraying Rhodesia’s white minority and its leaders in the name of political expediency.
"And in all honesty, what had Rhodesia done to deserve all of this treachery?" he wrote in his 1996 memoir, "Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal." Returning to his prophecies of economic decline under black majority rule, he added in a 1998 postscript to the book: "I think I can correctly comment: I told you so. History records that my predictions have materialized."
You are banned from TWEB for repeatedly posting racist material after you were warned that this is unacceptable on this site numerous times.
Years of observation and study have taught me to be an honest racist, a realist, without apology. Racism is not the unpardonable sin that politically correct fascists would mislead folks to believe. Dishonest racists would have us deny our God-given differences and foolishly pretend we're all equal when everything proves we're not equal except in our potential to be born again into the Kingdom of God-Beings, and even then salvation is offered first to the Jews (Israelites) and then to the Greeks (Gentiles).
"I will say, then, that I AM NOT NOR HAVE EVER BEEN in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races---that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races which will ever FORBID the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race."
- Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln Was A White Supremacist
After receiving enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination on Tuesday night, Barack Obama said he looked forward to debating John McCain’s very different policies and positions. “It is a debate the American people deserve,” Obama said. “But what you don’t deserve,” he continued, hoping to frame the upcoming presidential debates more narrowly, “is another election that’s governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon—that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize” (emphasis mine).
It remains to be seen how much of a wedge issue Barack Obama’s disturbing association with Jeremiah Wright will be in the upcoming general election. But if it does factor into the outcome, it is he—not his political opponents—who made it a wedge issue.
Suspicious of Racism
Barack Obama began his 1994 memoir, Dreams From My Father—A Story of Race and Inheritance, by describing the events surrounding the day he learned that his father, who abandoned him at the age of 2, had died. Barack was 21 at the time, living in New York. “When the weather was good,” he remembers, he and his roommate would “sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and … watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals [defecate] on our curbs ….”
Evidently, life wasn’t easy for mixed-race students at Columbia University in 1981—even those who lived on the upper east side of Manhattan.
Before college, while living in Hawaii, Barack describes an awkward incident during his high school days, when he invited two white friends to attend an all-black party. Early on at the party, the whites became noticeably uncomfortable and asked if Barack could return them home early. During the ride home, one of them made the mistake of saying he could now better identify with Barack’s sojourn as a minority living in a mostly white society. The comment angered Barack, but he managed to suppress the urge to punch the guy. The impact of the incident, however, etched a deep, life-altering scar on Obama’s mental makeup. “I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implication,” he explained.
We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray [his black friend] had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. … Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.
Not long after the party, adding insult to injury, Barack was shocked to learn that his white grandmother had what Barack believed were predisposed attitudes that were racially insensitive. The revelation jolted him one morning shortly after his grandmother asked her husband, Barack’s grandfather, for a ride to work. The exchange led to an argument which resulted in her finally admitting that she was afraid to ride the bus to work. She had been harassed by a man the day before, she said—and he was black.
“The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure,” Obama wrote.
That night, Barack related the disturbing news to one of his grandfather’s drinking buddies, an elderly black man named Frank. He told Barack that his grandmother’s reaction to the scary incident on the bus indicated that she understood “that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is,” he said. “So you might as well get used to it.”
Just before Barack left for college, Frank passed along his insight regarding the real price of admission.
“And what’s that?” Barack asked.
“Leaving your race at the door,” Frank said. “Leaving your people behind.”
Later, Frank explained, “They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that [nonsense]. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid n- - - - -, but you’re a n- - - - - just the same.”
So off to college Barack went, hoping to find his way in this world, while chasing women, smoking pot and occasionally snorting cocaine.
As an undergraduate student at Occidental, located just outside of Pasadena, Calif., Obama was surprised to hear that most of the black community on campus wasn’t interested in revolt and actually didn’t think about race all the time.
“So why couldn’t I let it go?” Obama asks himself.
He chose his friends carefully while at college—befriending the “more politically active black students.” He wanted to avoid the label of being a “sellout.” He enjoyed spending time with the “Marxist professors” and “structural feminists.” He studied Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to help him better understand how white people learn to hate.
After transferring to Columbia in 1981, he gave up drugs and began to take his studies more seriously. Sobering up, however, did little in the way of suppressing his black rage. “I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion between the races,” he wrote.
“But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well.”
While at Columbia, Barack decided he wanted to be a community organizer—a profession that would allow him to make use of his college experience as a black activist. After a lengthy job search which turned up no leads, he finally got a call from a white Chicagoan who had recently started an organizing drive.
During the interview a week later, after asking Barack why he wanted to be an organizer, the man said, “You must be angry about something.”
“What do you mean by that?” Barack asked.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the man later explained. “Anger’s a requirement for the job.”
Obama accepted the job and moved to Chicago in 1985. He worked within several black neighborhoods around Chicago—Roseland, West Pullman and Altgeld Gardens—communities that had been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs. “I started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job-training programs, or after-school programs for youth, or making sure that city services were fairly allocated to under-served communities,” Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual view of religion deepened.”
Obama’s Spiritual Mentors
In Dreams From My Father, we first meet Jeremiah Wright a little over halfway into the book. But right away, we notice that Pastor Wright is quite unlike all the other deeply flawed male role models who played parts in Barack’s upbringing and education.
Barack has nothing negative to say about his pastor. After meeting him in his office to discuss community organizations, Barack decided to come back for a service one Sunday. As it happens, Wright’s sermon that day carried the same title Obama would borrow for his second best-selling book—“The Audacity of Hope.” In the midst of his message, undoubtedly delivered with the same bombastic style of some of his later, more controversial, sermons, Wright decried the evils of a world “where white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”
The message brought tears to the eyes of Barack Obama. It marked the beginning of an intimate and enduring bond between these two, who seemed to be perfectly matched.
According to the 2004 Sun-Times profile, Barack attended Trinity’s Sunday service every week—“or at least as many weeks as he is able.” The article also identified another long-time associate of the senator’s, a spiritual adviser who helped establish Obama’s moral compass—Michael Pfleger, who, until this week, pastored the St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church on Chicago’s south side.
“I don’t think he could easily divorce his faith from who he is,” Pfleger said of Obama in 2004.
The Anger Is Real
Less than three months ago, when Barack Obama attempted to distance himself from his spiritual mentor and close confidant Jeremiah Wright, the junior senator said his pastor had been misunderstood and unfairly characterized. He said the fact that so many people are “surprised” by Jeremiah Wright’s anger reveals how segregated whites and blacks are during the church hour on Sunday mornings. “[T]he anger is real—it is powerful,” he said in response to Wright’s diatribes. “And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
In his speech, hailed by many in the major media as the best speech on race relations since Martin Luther King, Obama condemned the “controversial” statements of Wright, while maintaining his close personal relationship with the man. “He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Two months after that comment, Obama’s other spiritual adviser, Michael Pfleger, mocked Hillary Clinton’s campaign during a message delivered at Trinity United, accusing the New York senator of believing she deserved the nomination simply because she is white.
In response to yet another religious wedge issue, no doubt sensing that his disturbing associations with Trinity United might undermine his political ambitions, Obama did last week what he should have done in March—what he should have done long before that, in fact—he disowned Pastor Wright and Trinity United. Michael Pfleger’s remarks, he explained disingenuously, had caught him by complete surprise.
One commentator tried to brush aside Obama’s disavowal of Wright’s theology as nothing more than politics as usual. It was political opportunism that prompted him to join the church in the first place, just as it was politically expedient for him to leave the church last week, he explained.
But while political opportunism undoubtedly motivated his departure from Trinity United in 2008, Dreams From My Father reveals an altogether different motivation for Barack heeding Jeremiah Wright’s altar call in 1988, and then maintaining a close, father-son relationship with his pastor for the next 20 years.
Ideologically speaking, the two couldn’t have been more perfectly suited for each other.
How the Anger Will End
“[T]he evidence is overwhelming by now that Trinity United is a front for the hard left,” writes James Lewis, “which is trying to turn American blacks into another angry proletariat …. Radical leftists have been teaching ‘race consciousness’ to black people, just as the old left taught ‘class consciousness’ to impoverished people. The stated goal of Black Liberation Theology is to create racial strife, just as the stated goal of Marxist class propaganda was to whip up class war. This is preaching of race hatred for selfish political ends.”
Herbert W. Armstrong wrote of the same issues back in 1968, when student rebellions and racial violence were rampant on American campuses. In the November 1968 Plain Truth, he wrote:
Look, now, at these sudden emotional flare-ups of student revolt and of race consciousness, prejudice, resentments and hatreds. Why the sudden inflaming of student rebellion? Why have both exploded into violence? …
The underlying cause is, simply, human nature. … Human nature is the underlying cause of the strife, the revolt, the violence. But what has triggered it? …
[I]n most cases I can tell you definitely that these riots and student uprisings have been deliberately planned, intentionally provoked, well organized. …
Today Communists appear on college and university campuses, under the guise of “the new leftist movement.”
That old Marxist movement, he explained, worked to inflame blacks with “emotional resentment against whites,” reminding them of every possible “injustice”—fanning the flames of discontent, bitterness and hatred.
We see the same thing happening today.
As much as Obama might claim to disown Trinity United, and to whatever degree his contentious relationship with Jeremiah Wright affects his campaign, the bitter results of today’s movement to stir racial hatred in America are bound to lead to a racial explosion, just as it did during the 1960s. (Read Chapter Four of Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet to see that this is indeed prophesied.)
Mr. Armstrong, however, went on to give the solution: “These problems will be solved! Our generation shall see world peace!
“But not until human nature is changed! Not until people quit hating one another!”
That time will soon come, he went on to explain, when Jesus Christ returns to this Earth and, by supernatural power and force, brings peace, prosperity and happiness for all! •
***********
"I recently read some of your writing on the topic of the two witnesses. It was very interesting. What is your opinion about these modern day prophets' ability to receive visions and dreams from God? Some teach that God works only through revelation from the Bible and that visions and dreams from God are a thing of the past. What do you think?"
 |
|
| |
| The ancient philosophers taught that man is essentially an immortal, spiritual "soul" housed in a temporary body of flesh—that the real man is not the body, but an invisible, immaterial "immortal soul" that thinks, hears, sees, and will consciously live on forever. At death, according to the speculation of the ancients, the soul leaves the body and journeys to a nebulous realm, possibly paradise or a place of punishment. The body, they correctly observed, goes to the grave. Some Oriental philosophers speculated that the souls of the departed go into other bodies after death and live as animals, birds, snakes, even trees or gnats—or perhaps as human beings. This doctrine, called "transmigration of souls" or "reincarnation," is currently gaining a renewed popularity. But what is the authority for these beliefs? Do they come from biblical revelation? Where did they come from? Where did the Christian-professing churches acquire their present teachings about the immortality of the soul? Consider this candid statement from the Jewish Encyclopedia:
This same article continues:
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, according to this respected encyclopedia, came from pre-Christian Greek philosophers who acquired it from pagan Egypt and Babylon! Notice what Herodotus, the famous Greek historian who lived in the fifth century before Jesus, admitted:
It was the Greek Socrates who traveled to Egypt and consulted the Egyptians on this very teaching. After his return to Greece, he imparted the concept to Plato, his most famous pupil. Compare the present-day doctrine of the churches with what Plato wrote in his book, The Phaedo:
Sounds a lot like ordinary church teaching, does it not? You were probably taught that this same doctrine was totally Christian. You undoubtedly assumed it came straight from the Bible—but it did not. After Plato came Aristotle who perpetuated the theory. Then the poet Virgil (70-19 BC) popularized it throughout the Roman World. But how did this concept become a fundamental doctrine of the vast majority of professing Christians? The introduction of this popular superstition into the churches was a gradual process that took centuries. The early "church fathers" were divided on this subject. As late as AD 160, Justin, the philosopher-turned-professing-Christian, wrote:
Many of the early Catholics indeed knew they did not have immortality within themselves. It was something they yet expected to receive (see Romans 2:7; I Timothy 6:16; I Corinthians 15:50-54). Origen, an early Catholic teacher in Alexandria, Egypt, joined the speculations of Plato with certain parts of the Bible and called his philosophy neo-Platonism. Here is what Origen wrote around AD 200: "Souls are immortal, as God Himself is eternal and immortal"! He openly professed to be a true "Platonist, who believed in the immortality of the soul" (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. IV, pp. 314, 402). Another influential teacher at the close of the second century was Tertullian of Phoenician North Africa. He wrote:
And so the personal ideas of these influential men helped mold the thinking of the entire Christian-professing world. But a few Catholic writers and teachers as late as the time of Constantine condemned the change in doctrine from Christ's teachings to those of Plato. Here is the remonstration of Arnobius against those who were being
After the time of Emperor Constantine—who forced the Roman Empire to accept one universal faith—Augustine, another writer of North African extraction, "sanctified" the doctrine of the immortality of the soul in his book, The City of God. Along came other writers—all under the influence of Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil—who dominated the philosophy of Western "Christian" theology during the early Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225-1274), Italian scholastic teacher and theologian, stamped the doctrine of the immortality of the soul permanently on the Christian-professing world. Fifty years later, Dante Alighieri wrote the immensely famous poem, The Divine Comedy, in which he pictured for the common people his imaginary concepts of hell, purgatory, and paradise—which have been widely believed since that time. But not only did this doctrine become religious dogma in the medieval world, those who rejected this idea became branded as heretics! Just before the Protestant Reformation, the Lateran Council of 1513 issued this decree:
That meant that any who taught the truth were to be turned over to the civil authorities for punishment. And the punishment was usually severe! During the Reformation, some early Protestants tried to cast off the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Martin Luther declared that the Bible did not teach the immortality of the soul (Defense, Proposition No. 27). "Luther held that the soul died with the body, and that God would hereafter raise both the one and the other" (Historical View, p. 344). How different were Luther's first teachings from Protestant doctrine today! Here are Luther's own words, expressed about the year 1522:
Luther's original teachings have never ceased to embarrass Protestant theologians who have since readopted the teachings of ancient Egypt and Greece. William Tyndale, the printer of the first New Testament in English and another of the Reformers, wrote:
That is a very good question! The Protestant Reformers found the people unwilling to change their doctrines. Gradually, the Reformers themselves gave in to popular tradition—tradition which has its roots in pagan philosophy and speculation! And so many churchgoers today believe the doctrine of the immortality of the soul simply because they have unquestioningly embraced the speculations that have been passed down from ancient pagan philosophers! The apostle Paul wrote about this very kind of speculation:
| |
| From | ||
History Nelson Mandela
January 31, 1985 in History
Event: South Africa President PW Botha offers to free Mandela if he denounces violence.
Mandela refused to do so.
Finally, Mandela walked to freedom in 1990 - without denouncing a continuation of violence.
His ANC has remained true to this view; since 1994
300,000 South Africans murdered.
Including 35,000 White South Africans.
Including 3,000 White Afrikaner Farmers.
For this Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Peace and Democracy???????????
The Worlds Greatest “SPIN DOCTOR”