Christian Nation?

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#006699" TEXT="#080000" background="005fd5a3.jpg"> <div> <I><B>Dependency Answers</B></I></div> <div> <I><B>         </B></I><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000066" FACE="Georgia" ><I><B>  Since 1998</B></I></FONT></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>|     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Dependency Answers"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <bR> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000" background="006d2b03.jpg"> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div>  <img src="HTMLobj-34/aniGif.gif" border="0" align="bottom" width="100" height="55">  </div> <div> <A HREF="id21.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Articles and Resources"><U><B><U>Articles and Resources</U></B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Dependency Answers"><U><B><U>Home</U></B></U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I><B>Christian Nation?</B></I></div> <div> <I><B>Updated September 2006</B></I></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <I><B>Commentary</B></I></div> <div> On the day following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America my fellow countrymen were calling for the total annihilation of Afghanistan or what ever country who's government was responsible for those horrible attacks. The innocent or the guilty it didn't matter. We were demanding our pound of flesh!</div> <bR> <div> That point of view so sickened me that I wrote an editorial for our local newspaper calling for cool heads, non-persecution of ethnic peoples and surgically targeting only the guilty. On September the 13th I was treated with a very cold shoulder. This article will no doubt again cause anger.</div> <bR> <div> Today, June 8, 2002 a national news poll was taken to determine how Americans felt about the continued threat of terrorist attacks against America. 68% of Americans again were calling for mass bombing in any country where it was thought that terrorists were living.</div> <bR> <div> Since 1948 Israel has had to cope with repeated terrorist attacks and attempts of countries such as Syria, Egypt and Iraq to name a few, to drive it's population out of the Mideast. In almost every instance it has been America who has counseled the Israeli Government and citizens to show restraint, pull back, don't bomb and use measured response, political response or no response. America the peace keeper is in sharp contrast to America the hypocrite who now lays claim to not only war rights, but a citizenry who would like to wipe nations off the face of the earth to get at scattered terrorist cells all the while sending messages to Palestine, Israel, India, Pakistan and Kashmir to show restraint and not retaliate against each other.</div> <bR> <div> <B>America the Christian Nation! Wanna run that by me again?</B></div> <bR> <div> It has always been my belief that however a person reacts to any given situation is exactly who that person is and this defines them. What a person does after they've had time to think is not the core of who that person is. Christianity is the core. Everything else is lip service.</div> <bR> <div> In our own homes if we react to each other during arguments with digging, cutting, blaming, loud verbal outbursts, pushing or hitting it is who we are and what we are. When we merely react without thinking through the outcome we are not much higher in the evolutionary structure than a four year old child.</div> <bR> <div> When we are confronted personally with verbal or physical attack and do not hold our ground with a measured response it again defines us and our belief systems. Cowardice is never pretty and Christianity and cowardice cannot mix anymore than bombing and loving can.</div> <bR> <div> Our messages to the world are not appreciated when we act completely counter to what we say. We do not walk our talk in even the broadest sense. We speak of human rights and give favored trading status to China. We speak of human rights and we are in the minority of nations that executes criminals even though execution does not prevent murder as a power of example sentence.</div> <bR> <div>  People kill because they are either demon possessed or simply lack self control. A death sentence will alter neither in the majority of cases. {BTW-If you believe in God you had better believe in Demons.}</div> <bR> <div> We speak of Christian compassion while America's Catholic Church hides the rapes of children for decades and refuses to remove the unfit from their ranks. The shame of the church was more important than the murder of the souls of the innocent.</div> <bR> <div> We talk of a war on drugs while our population consumes the lions share of the total world output of illicit drugs. We say we want drunks off of our roads and yet we have offenders with as many as 20 DUI convictions draw two year prison terms. We commit infanticide and have killed over 44 million babies on the abortion cutting tables. I will never argue the reason. The fact is all that matters-say one thing do another. People taking living breathing human life.</div> <bR> <div> Our financial markets are corrupt to the core and I suspect that our Federal Reserve is a big part of that corruption. Our business's are shown to be corrupt in their highest levels of management cooking books and robbing the masses. Yet we are a Christian nation.....</div> <bR> <div> We take our core industries over seas and pay foreign workers less than a living wage in many, many instances while bringing the products back to our shores for the same prices as American manufactured goods or lower the prices just long enough to wipe out competition.</div> <bR> <div> Our nation still has a very high level of sexual crimes and consumes pornography like a starving pack of dogs with a deer carcass. Gentlemen clubs are popular in every city and prostitution still flourishes. Americans accept it without a blink and nary a protest.</div> <bR> <div> Our media, radio, TV and cinema cannot survive without shock jocks, sex and vulgarity. Yet we hold ourselves up to the world as the preferred model of civilization.</div> <bR> <div> Americans who claim to be Christian by and large don't believe in Demons even as a housewife holds her children's heads under water and drowns them one by one or another mother waves bye bye to her two boys as her car slips below the surface of a lake where the boys drown! Mothers killing their offspring is as unnatural as mothers who marry perverts that molest their children and never raise a hand to help them. We see it so often we have almost become accustomed to it and that is not good.</div> <bR> <div> In our high school kids open fire in their schools killing classmates and teachers alike. Gangs roam our streets shooting innocent people and it is considered a right of passage to murder anyone for the heck of it. Homes are shot up and innocents killed.</div> <bR> <div> We put ourselves on display to the world as a Christian Nation and a model of how the world should be and the vast majority of Americans are wearing blinders and ear plugs to shut out that which they will never own up to and then we wonder why the rest of the world dislikes us so much.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Because The World Hates The Hypocrite and That's What We Have Become!</B></div> <bR> <div> I love my country. I really do. But I want Americans to be who they say they are and do what they say they do or stop grandstanding and actually causing the problems that we say we don't know where they came from.</div> <bR> <div> Don Whiting 2002      </div> <bR> <div> <I><B>Updated October 2005</B></I></div> <div> I'd like to say as Christians that things have gotten a whole lot better in America since 2002 and not worse. But the simple truth of the matter is that chicken hawk American Christians apparently are dragging America down to the level of the terrorists themselves by allowing our soldiers to employ torture to extract information from those in American custody.</div> <bR> <div> You might think as I do that terrorists are the worst humankind can offer this world and they are barbaric, lawless, immoral thugs bent on the destruction of America. They are theocratic fascists for sure. Condemn them I do in the most stringent manner.   </div> <bR> <div> The problem is that we too have become theocratic fascists as well every single time we take a prisoner in our custody and beat, break a leg or arm, set a dog on them, burn them, humiliate and sleep deprive and threaten with bodily harm and yes, even kill them. We have in essence become what we say we are defending against. How can we take a moral high ground while taking a moral low ground?  </div> <bR> <div> In World War II it was unthinkable for American soldiers to kill prisoners in their custody or beat and threaten them. In fact, Japanese Officers and soldiers were tried for such things imprisoned, hung or shot for atrocities committed against our military. Those things were ruled unthinkable worldwide prior to WWII by virtue of the Geneva Conventions. I might add that even the lawless Nazis provided food and shelter to Allied prisoners instead of forced labor, bayoneting them, kicking and beating, starving and torturing as was Japan's policy during that conflict. Our prisoners were mere bugs to the Japanese.</div> <bR> <div> Now Christians turn their collective backs on institutionalized torture by our soldiers and even defend that barbaric practice not realizing that our credibility is being destroyed and every innocent prisoner we release now hates Americans with a burning passion and is very likely to want to get even. As these folks leave these detainment facilities they take with them their experience and tell it like it is to others who may well indeed want to avenge what happened. </div> <bR> <div> Put yourself in their place. They are first told we came to free them and make their country safe for democracy. Then one day by incident or accident they are detained. Then they are questioned and if they know nothing we employ harsher means to pry loose what isn't there. They are held months on end or even years away from jobs, families and isolated.</div> <bR> <div> If they were innocent so what!  They got the same thing the guilty got. If it was a mistake, so what! They had to pay a steep price for being unlucky. Now what must they think of America? What would you think? I know what I'd think and I know I'd hate Americans with my dying breath.</div> <bR> <div> This isn't responsible Christianity at all. No one who advocates torture is a Christian but rather an animal right down in Hell on the same level as a terrorist and no more  fit to live than they are. I truly believe that. You cannot do the same things that your enemy does and be any better than he is nor more fit to walk this earth. A rabid dog is a rabid dog no matter who owns him. In the name of God, in the name of Allah, in the name of George Bush or Osama Bin Laden it all is the same. </div> <bR> <div> Evil is Evil! Wrong is wrong. But I guess when we die we'll see what the truth actually is and I'm betting strongly that God is not impressed with American inhumanity any more than any other inhumanity. I'm betting that hypocrisy will receive the wages of that sin.</div> <bR> <div> I grew up in an America that was a fair minded God fearing nation of a humble, family oriented moderate people. Today we all live in an America of a mostly corrupt market and government system of lies, damned lies, statistics, manipulations, frauds and thefts and of broken promises and unbridled greed. </div> <bR> <div> Take for instance our Federal Reserve in just the last ten years. Knighted Sir Greenspan at the helm of the Federal Reserve with his lending policies powered a stock speculation frenzy and bubble that encouraged fraud and deception every time he spoke on market issues and adjusted interest rates in the 1995 to 2001 period. Result? Market forces adjusted stock prices back to true value and many of our citizens were either ruined or found themselves without the means to retire or even maintain their status quo. It was preventable through tightening interest rates to calm down over-speculation and the inflating of stock prices.</div> <bR> <div> In 2002 the interest rates started coming down again rapidly at a time when Americans were tapped out financially. This encouraged spending and very heavy borrowing against credit cards, homes, home equity causing another huge bubble of inflated asset prices this time in homes and other real estate. He'd done it again!</div> <bR> <div> This time it will be different though. Vastly different I can assure you. Now you cannot simply slip out and file a bankruptcy to escape the damages. This time around all commodities including oil have responded with inflation due to the dollar falling in value like a rock from too much of Sir Greenspan's printed money from being in the system.</div> <bR> <div> In 2002 Greenspan could have left rates alone or raised them in order to encourage saving and the pay down of American debt bringing about investment of American savings into American business as well as power a job creation machine based on solid savings translating into consumer demand.....not USING BORROWED MONEY.</div> <bR> <div> Now we bite the big one again for our government policies. Americans are deeply in debt and a lot of that debt is for homes that are not worth the bubble price they have been driven up to. <I>Now mind you, interest rates could have been changed at any time to stop the inflation. </I>But that was not done. Now bankruptcy laws have become deadly. And as I write this the Treasury Department is about to set new rules concerning minimum payments for credit cards as interest rates and inflation target Americans.</div> <bR> <div> Add in the Katrina Disaster, higher energy prices and what we got from official government monetary policy carried out over the last ten years and what will happen no one in America will want to be a part of. It will be devastating. We will not recover for a decade or more. All imbalances are always corrected by nature and markets are no different. </div> <bR> <div> God protects those who obey his word. He stands in direct line of harm to keep his followers safe. NOT GEORGE BUSH! We never needed the greedy self-serving Alan Greenspans of the world to follow. We didn't need a corrupt fear-mongering fake Christian President to morally bankrupt people with his unholy terror schemes...a man that signed off and out of the Geneva Conventions sentencing even the innocent to torture. We didn't need the lies that put us in Iraq and we certainly didn't do much to stop him at all.</div> <bR> <div> God stands in direct line to protect his followers. His true followers. We seem to forget that all God has to do is step a little to the side and let the consequences of our actions catch up to us. We have failed ourselves and our country as well as our children when we began to dictate what God wants to God himself.</div> <bR> <div> I'll leave you with this.  God forgives all sins, no matter how big.</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I><B>A two-way street</B></I></div> <div> "Come now, let us argue this out," says the Lord. "No matter how deep the stain of your sins, I can remove it. I can make you as clean as freshly fallen snow. Even if you are stained as red as crimson, I can make you as white as wool."</div> <div> Isaiah 1:18 NLT</div> <bR> <div> <B>"Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land."</B></div> <div> 2 Chronicles 7:14 NLT</div> <bR> <div> "The situation referred to in these verses is what we call a "two-way street." We move in humility and repentance toward God, against whom we have sinned. In turn, God moves toward us with forgiveness and restoration. <B>When we obey God, he will send blessing. And when we disobey God, we have the option of humble repentance. Blessings can flow again if our repentance is genuine and not merely a ploy to get "back on God's good side."</B></div> <bR> <div> This two-way principle is also at work in all our human relationships. When sin has damaged a relationship, we can be restored through honest repentance, met with forgiveness. Sometimes, both parties must repent and forgive, because the fault is shared.</div> <bR> <div> from the TouchPoint Bible with commentaries by Ron Beers and Gilbert Beers (Tyndale) p 381</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> Copyright 1998--2005 © DependencyAnswers All Rights Reserved</div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>