THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
At the Western Conservative Summit, we sat down with Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid. He was a student leader during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, and he was a house church leader in Beijing, until he and his wife, Heidi, were imprisoned for two months in 1996 for “illegal evangelism.” They fled to the US as religious refugees in 1997.
We discuss increasing religious persecution in China against house Christians, underground Catholics, Uyghur Muslims, and Falun Gong practitioners. And we look at how the Chinese Communist Party is exporting its abuses abroad, especially in the United States, to suppress freedom of religion and belief.
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Opinion
Letter to the AmmoLand Editor
What WOULD help is the Press not giving the killers glory. Don't state their names; don't run continuous coverage. Let the killers die with a whimper, not resonate with a bang. But that doesn't drive readership or the TV ratings, so it isn't going to happen.
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- I read the Aug 4th, 2019 New York Post article calling for a Gun Ban by the President. It was, as expected, based on emotion and would have no effect on terror; it would only make millions of normally law-abiding Americans into criminals.
It said, “America is terrified.” Well, after the news running 24/7 stories on shootings and raising the killers to star status, it is no wonder. One of them even explained that it is the status that he was enthralled by and sought. That isn't news to anyone. The press recognized that and agreed not to publicize the names of shooters long ago. That didn't even last until the next shooting. They are complicit in all the shootings because they aggrandize the shooters.
The NYP said, “They just want the killings to stop.” Everybody does. Banning commonly owned rifles won't do it. Even if every gun, of all types, suddenly disappeared, the killings wouldn't stop. The Brits and French are learning that trucks, knives, and fires are now their preferred means of terror. EVIL doesn't care about laws.
The NYP said, “But the Second Amendment leaves ample room for regulating gun rights, just as every other constitutional right has its limits.” This shows that they slept through Civics class, as did a large part of our Judicial system. The Bill of Rights is supposed to be an inviolate constraint on the government. Justice Storey started attacking that when Hamilton complained about how it hindered him. You DO have the Right to shout “FIRE” in a crowded theater if there is a fire. You have the Right to do it if there isn't one, you have to suffer the legal consequences of your actions, though. Something that is in less regard these days.
The NYP made fun of the President for listening to the NRA when it comes to passing common-sense gun laws. They said that it would be, “Far wiser to appeal now to the (much more numerous) Americans who hunt or keep guns for self-defense but are appalled by the endless string of mass shootings.” and that he should, “Come up with answers. Now. Beginning with the return of an assault-weapons ban.” The NRA is only respected by its enemies and politicians. People who actually know anything about it call it Negotiating Rights Away. It has, since its inception, backed all the major violations of the Second Amendment and helped to write most of the laws destroying it. Luckily for the people who are anti-gun, it works well with the ignorant as a paper tiger. The Assault Weapons Ban has been shown, by the FBI, to have had NO effect. That is rarely reported. Furthermore, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting and is only peripherally involved in self-defense, something that is NEVER addressed.
Letters to the AmmoLand Editor: Got something on your mind? Let us know, and you can see it here.
The NYP stated, “The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment protects the right to own “guns in common use.” That doesn’t cover the semiautomatic weapons regularly used only in mass shootings.” The reality is that semi-automatic weapons ARE in common usage and have been for 100 years and more, and are used in self-defense and hunting. It is only recently that they have made the news and been glorified as “killing machines” or “weapons of war.” That happened when people moved into cities and became ignorant of guns. At that point, they became easy to lie to and manipulate, which is exactly what happened.
The place in the article where they finally make sense is near the end, but it too has flaws. The NYP says, “This ban would only be part of the response: Keep improving background checks, find wiser approaches to mental health, get every state to pass a red-flag law (do a federal one, too, even if issuing these restraining orders is mainly the job of state courts). And by all means, do as Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested in last week’s Democratic debate and “double down on the research and find out what really works.”
Most of the killers passed a NICS check, that has proven to be a waste of time, money, and police resources, much like the TSA. Improving mental health resources might help with the problem, but it is unlikely. Red Flag orders are a constitutional disaster and are used as weapons by angry neighbors, political rivals and spouses during divorce proceedings, they are just another form of SWATting rather than a useful method of deterring crime. If REAL research could be done to find an answer to the problem, as opposed to funding the anti-gun forces, that would be very helpful.
What WOULD help is the Press not giving the killers glory. Don't state their names; don't run continuous coverage. Let the killers die with a whimper, not resonate with a bang. But that doesn't drive readership or the TV ratings, so it isn't going to happen.
As a result, law-abiding people will continue to be blamed for the actions of criminals as abetted by the Press, and cheered by the Left.
The NYP is disingenuous at the end where it states, “One of the big reasons that crime has fallen so far in New York City is a crackdown on guns. Their ownership is restricted, and the NYPD is focused on getting illegal ones off the street. Gun control works.” The crime rates have been falling for 40 years. If tough anti-gun laws worked, Baltimore and Chicago would be crime-free, California wouldn't have a gang left in it. It doesn't take much intelligence to see that the truth is elsewhere, but even that seems beyond the Democrats. Antifa, their public service arm, makes it clear that it isn't one of their concerns, especially when some of the killers are Antifa members. They've graduated from repressing Freedom of Speech and attacking lawful demonstrators to attacking ICE and anyone who dares to disagree with them, or even look different. THEY are the true racists.
Neill DeGrasse just got in trouble for stating the truth, something the Left only has a passing acquaintance with. He pointed out things that kill far more people every day but are condoned without thought. That tells us where the reality is, not about saving lives, but about disarming the populace, EXACTLY the point of the Second Amendment.
Do not bow to the heat of the moment or the pressuring and posturing of either cowards or those who betray their Oaths of Office. Your Duty is to defend not just the people of this country, but the Constitution itself. Without the Law of the Land, all our laws and country will fall.
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USA – -(Ammoland.com)- It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019.
In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera — police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials — were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead and wounded.
But for the Democratic presidential candidates, the El Paso atrocity was like a loose football in the Super Bowl. A mad scramble broke out over who would be first and most savage in indicting President Donald Trump for moral complicity in mass murder.
Never let a crisis go to waste is an old political adage.
And this crowd of candidates was not going to let that happen. Yet the naked political exploitation of these horrific acts, before the bodies of many had been removed from the crime scene, was appalling to behold.
Learning in Las Vegas of the slaughter at the Walmart in El Paso, his hometown, Beto O'Rourke flew back that same day and sped to the scene.
Railed Beto, Trump “is a racist and he stokes racism in this country … and it leads to violence. … We have a president with white nationalist views in the United States today.” He called Trump's language about Mexican immigrants “reminiscent of something you might hear in the Third Reich.”
Asked on Sunday by CNN's Jake Tapper if he believes the president is a “white nationalist,” Beto eagerly assented: “Yes, I do.”
Bernie Sanders, asked by Tapper if he agreed with Beto, replied:
“I do. It gives me no pleasure to say this … all of the evidence out there suggests that we have a president who is a racist, who is a xenophobe, who appeals, and is trying to appeal, to white nationalism.”
On the same CNN show, Sen. Cory Booker almost outdid Beto, “I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this … (mass murder in El Paso) because he is stoking fear and hatred and bigotry.”
Booker went on: “We have a president of the United States who is savagely fraying the bonds of our nation by speaking consistently words of hatred, words of division, words of demonization and demagoguery. … He is fueling an environment where white supremacists … are finding more and more license to strike out against the vulnerable, to strike out against the immigrant, to strike out against ‘the other.'”
Booker is saying Trump is rendering moral license to race conflict.
Elizabeth Warren issued a statement: “We need to call out white nationalism for what it is — domestic terrorism. It is a threat to the United States, and we've seen its devastating toll this weekend. And we need to call out the president himself for advancing racism and white supremacy.”
Ironically, The Washington Times reports that the Dayton shooter, who killed his sister and eight others, “described himself on social media as a pro-Satan ‘leftist,' who wanted Joe Biden's generation to die off, hated Trump, and hoped to vote for Sen. Elizabeth Warren for president.”
“I want socialism, and i'll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding,” Connor Betts, the killer, reportedly tweeted.
Not to be left behind, Sen. Kamala Harris said of the president after the slaughter, he's “a racist, there's no question in my mind.”
These attacks, unprecedented in their savagery, testify to a hatred of Trump that is broad, deep and implacable, and unlikely to be constrained before November 2020.
Folks still speak wistfully of a return of the unity America once knew and of a coming together to stand again on common ground.
But where is the evidence for that hope?
If Trump's fabled base is to going to stand loyally by him, and the Democratic candidates are going to unleash this kind of bile against him, whoever wins in 2020 will be not be able to unite us, absent a Pearl Harbor-style attack on this country.
Clearly the issue in the 2020 campaign is going to be Trump.
Is impeachment now back on the table? How can it not be?
Though Robert Mueller found no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, support for impeachment hearings passed the midway mark inside the Democratic caucus in the House last week, even before the horrible weekend.
And if Democrats believe about Trump what their candidates say about him — that he is a white nationalist racist and xenophobe deliberately stoking fear, hatred and violence, whose words and actions call to mind the fascist Italy of Benito Mussolini and Third Reich of Nazi Germany — how can the Democratic leadership credibly not try to impeach him?
Yet, blaming the massacre in El Paso on the rhetoric of Donald Trump is a charge that can come back to bite his attackers. Neither the right nor left has a monopoly on political extremism or violence. And the hate-filled rhetoric of the left this last weekend exceeds anything used by Trump.
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2020 Democrat presidential frontrunner Joe Biden not only called for gun control in response to the shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend — he bragged his administration would ban or confiscate semiautomatic weapons.
“Does anybody think it made any sense that someone is able to walk into a gun store, buy an assault weapon that has multiple rounds or buy an assault weapon that has 100 rounds?” Biden asked CNN’s Anderson Cooper during the Monday interview.
Attempting to clarify his comment, Cooper asked, “So to gun owners out there who say, ‘Well, a Biden administration means they will come for my guns.’”
“Bingo,” Biden responded. “You’re right, if you have an assault weapon.”
Instead of clarifying the leftist “assault weapon” buzzword, believed to be their reference to semiautomatic rifles, Biden insisted they should be forbidden from public use like bazookas and flamethrowers, which have no practical every day self-defense use and are actual military weapons of war.
“The fact of the matter is they should be illegal, period. Look, the Second Amendment doesn’t say you can’t restrict the kinds of weapon people can own. You can’t buy a bazooka, you can’t have a flamethrower,” Biden added.
As we reported, the 2020 Democrat candidates scrambled over each other to call for gun control measures first, but Biden is the first to admit the left’s TRUE intention — nationwide gun confiscation.
In June, the Southern Baptist Convention officially adopted Critical Race Theory — an anti-Biblical worldview that treats every circumstance in society through the lens of racism — as a “useful tool” for analyzing racism in our churches and society. Though many conservatives tried to speak out against it, Resolution 9 was overwhelmingly supported by the messengers present at the convention.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged as an offshoot of Critical Theory, a neo-Marxist philosophy that has its roots in the Frankfurt School and its methods are drawn from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. CRT teaches that institutional racism exists within every structure of society and that these structures are intrinsically designed in such a manner as to protect and preserve “white supremacy” in our culture. Further, CRT does not rely on factual statistics or objective evidence to support the theory, rather it relies on anecdotal evidence and personal experience.
In a recent article published on his website titled Three Ways to Lay Down Your Privilege, Greear pleads with Christians to “lay down their privilege” for the minority.
Everyone who possesses power, in this world or God’s kingdom, possesses privilege. Those in the world use their privilege for their own benefit. Those of us in God’s family, however, have the privilege of laying down our power for the benefit of others.
Basically, Greear implies that the “straight, white, male” Church is wallowing in its bondage of protecting their own power. “My prayer for the church is that we would rejoice in the privilege of laying down power rather than wallowing in the bondage of protecting it.” Of course, there is literally nobody doing this. There is not a single person who is outspoken against the social justice infiltration in the Church who is “wallowing in bondage” to protect their own racially supreme power. It’s an asinine statement. The entire article is ludicrous and simply affirms how far left the denomination has gone.
(Publisher’s comment: One of our problems is, we have not seen the subject of “race” in a doctrinal context and have ignored it as pastors and theologians for fear of being tagged as racist. The word race, racist or racism is not found in the KJV Bible. And yet nothing worse can be said about a person today than to call them a “racist.” It is really an assault on the word of God, who according to the Apostle Paul has declared that God has divided the people of the world into Nations. In his sermon at Mars Hill in Athens he said, And (God) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; But the world despises that message. Just as at the Tower of Babel they want all the world to be on “nation (race). So, they have made up a sin, a crime, called racism and have called it a “hate crime.” Worse even than any other including murder. It is also an attempt to brand the Jew as evil for trying to keep their nation pure and separate, therefore they are branded as, “racist”. But as happens so many times they have played on the ignorance of people because there is nothing wrong with the dictionary meaning of the word race. Webster’s on line dictionary gives the following definition: “The lineage of a family, or continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock. A race is the series of descendants indefinitely. Thus all mankind are called the race of Adam; the Israelites are of the race of Abraham and Jacob…”
We say we are KJV only but are ashamed to use KJV only words. We substitute “people groups” for the word “nation”, and “harlot” for “whore”, and “donkey” for “ass”. But we aren’t embarrassed to wear all kinds of undress see all clothing even to church, and watch all kinds of movies and TV, even in our own living rooms, with far worse language than this. Maybe we should reexamine what the Lord Jesus said when He warned at Mt 24:50 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, Mt 24:51 And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. I’ve been preaching for over seventy years and when I think of how soon I will be meeting my Lord, I shudder at the meaning of that word “hypocrite.” I trust that you do too.)
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Reza Aslan, the former CNN star who ate human flesh and two days ago tweeted that a presidential advisor should be “eradicated,” escalated his rhetoric on Sunday and called for the eradication of Trump supporters.
Aslan, a Sufi Muslim, has expressed a desire to harm others on Twitter for some time, yet the social-media giant has not banned or suspended the leftist Iranian immigrant.
A university professor who purports to be an expert on religion, Aslan lost his gig on CNN two years ago after a particularly vile tweet about President Trump.
The Tweet Responding to Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, Aslan tweeted the following call for the mass murder of Trump supporters:
After today there is no longer any room for nuance. The President is a white nationalist terror leader. His supporters - ALL OF THEM - are by definition white nationalist terror supporters. The MAGA hat is a KKK hood. And this evil, racist scourge must be eradicated from society.
The President is a violent hate leader who daily promotes terrorism against Americans who look like me and my children, so if you’re someone who thinks I should “watch my language” in responding to this racist pig you can go fuck yourself too.
Lost His Job at CNN But advocating violence is nothing new for Aslan. After the media published an entirely false narrative about the confrontation between high-school student Nicholas Sandmann and “Native American elder” Nathan Phillips, Aslan tweeted this:
Oh the joy when that lying, conniving, scumbag, narcissistic, sociopathic piece of s**t fake president finally gets what’s coming to him.
On October 21, 2016, he told conservative Dinesh D’Souza to “go f**k yourself, you adulterous piece of s**t felon.”
He also called Fox talker Sean Hannity a “piece of s**t.”
Those tweets are no longer available.
Biden Joins In Sadly, former Vice President Joe Biden, who knows better, joined Aslan, albeit without the obscenities, in speaking with CNN talker Anderson Cooper.
“This is a president who has said things no other president has said since Andrew Jackson,” Biden falsely claimed, ignoring the record of fellow Democrats Lyndon Johson and Woodrow Wilson. Biden continued:
We went through this before in the ’20s with the Ku Klux Klan and 50,000 people walking down Pennsylvania Avenue in their hats and robes because they decided they didn’t want Catholics coming into the country. We went through it after the Civil War in terms of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy. This is about separating people and the good and bad in his mind. It is about making — it is about access to power. It is a trait used by charlatans all over the world, divide people, divide them and pit them against one another.
Replied Cooper, “If that is the case, I mean, it is a very dangerous game then that he is playing.”
“There is no question it’s a dangerous game,” Biden replied.
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As he signed an executive order on Monday night placing an embargo on Venezuela, President Trump explained why he did so in a letter to Congress:
I have determined that it is necessary to block the property of the Government of Venezuela in light of the continued usurpation of power by the illegitimate Nicolas Maduro regime … [which includes] human rights abuses, arbitrary arrest and detention of Venezuelan citizens, curtailment of free press, and ongoing attempts to undermine Interim President Juan Guaido of Venezuela and the democratically-elected Venezuelan National Assembly.
The extraordinary escalation exceeds previous sanctions against some 100 individuals associated with Maduro’s inner circle. The executive order now blocks anyone — individually or corporately — from doing any business of any kind with anyone associated with the Maduro regime. The escalation applied immediately and is the first time such an embargo has been applied in the Western Hemisphere since President Reagan applied them to the Noriega regime in Panama 30 years ago.
The order threatens supporters of Maduro including Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey with asset seizures if they continue to support the tottering totalitarian regime.
In addition, John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor, said failure to comply with the president’s EO “could affect repayment of [their] debt after Maduro falls.”
Guaidó further defined the far-reaching implications of Trump EO: “Any individual, company, institution or nation that tries to do business with the regime will be seen by the international justice system as collaborating with and sustaining a dictatorship. They will be subject to sanctions and considered an accomplice to [Maduro’s] crimes.”
There is a carrot hidden among the sticks that Trump has been using to remove Maduro. Last week, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross rolled out a post-Maduro economic recovery plan for Venezuela that included fresh sources of credit to the new administration, promises of financial help to rehabilitate the country’s infrastructure, as well as private sources of investment capital to put the country’s oil producer, PdVSA, back on line. Energy production has dropped nearly 90 percent from highs a few years ago, thanks not only to previous sanctions but to mismanagement of the company under Maduro.
Such a rehabilitation would also entice some, perhaps many, of those who have left the country out of desperation to return to their previous positions essential to the workings of a capitalist economy. For some of those estimated four million who left in desperation, such assistance might be too late. Reports are that many are arriving in Colombia looking like escapees from a concentration camp, suffering from grievous late-stage malnutrition that could shortly take their lives.
Such a rehabilitation would be small comfort to those citizens who have lost their lives under orders from Maduro. He has directly ordered the torture and murder of Navy Captain Rafael Acosta, as reported by The New American last month, but Acosta was only one of an estimated 9,000 citizens who have been executed by Maduro’s para-military colectivos and his Special Action Forces. And this doesn’t count those in prison who have been cannibalized by other prisoners due to the acute shortage of food.
The irony is that Maduro has used starvation to subdue his people, while Trump is using the same tactic in an escalating attempt to remove Maduro from power.
In this episode, host Alex Newman brings attention to the annual global summit which takes place in Dubai. The event refers to itself as “a global platform dedicated to shaping the future of governments worldwide.” Though it identifies from a “neutral” standpoint and as a place for “collaborations” to take place, Newman looks behind the curtain to see why we should be leery.
