SILENCING CONSERVATIVE VIEWS
Here is the video YouTube initially censored. Ironically, the video denounces censorship of opposing views — in this case of those opposing gay marriage and homosexuality.
The video exposes the real goal behind the so-called hate speech laws:
Last week, YouTube – owned by Google, whose corporate motto used to be “Don’t Be Evil” — removed the video, which spotlights how gay rights extremists are using laws in Canada to censor those who disagree with their perspective. [...]
The video created May 16 by [preacher and hard rock drummer Bradlee] Dean to accompany his weekly column published by WorldNet Daily and other news outlets, exposes facts about the hatred and oppression directed at conservative Christians and opponents of gay marriage in Canada by the radical Left toward people of faith, those who hold to traditional marriage.
Among the shocking examples presented of how gay-rights extremists are using hate speech laws to silence conservatives is a ruling by a Canadian official that Christian parents who home-school their children can not teach their children that homosexuality is a sin.
You’d think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story. But ABC, CBS, and NBC don’t judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedoms. They deliver the news according to a simple formula: Does it, or doesn’t it, advance the re-election of Barack Obama?
If it doesn’t, it isn’t news.
On May 21, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sued the Obama administration over its ridiculously narrow idea of how a “religious institution” can be defined under their ObamaCare law. Never has the Catholic Church – or any order, for that matter – undertaken something of this magnitude. It’s truly jaw-dropping that ABC and NBC completely ignored this action on their evening newscasts, while “CBS Evening News” devoted just 19 seconds to this historic event. [...]
Even when CBS mentioned the suit ever-so-briefly, like so many others, they deliberately distorted the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit when it is much broader, a religious freedom issue – and they know it. [...]
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops used the word “horror” to describe what Team Obama is mandating. On the only broadcast show to give Catholics some coverage, CBS This Morning anchor Charlie Rose asked Dolan if the White House misled him on this issue…The cardinal said “I worry, Charlie, that members of his administration might not particularly understand our horror at the restrictive nature of this exemption that they’re giving us, that for the first time that we can remember, a bureau of the federal government seems to be radically intruding into the internal definition of what a church is. We can’t seem to get that across.”
Just days after President Barack Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, pastors and priests around Maryland took to their own pulpits with their reaction– and in some cases– condemnation of the president. [...]
When Obama announced that his position on same-sex marriage had evolved, it outraged some African-American pastors like Pastor and Del. Emmett Burns.
“He has said to his base, African-Americans, ‘I am going against your beliefs and your thoughts,’” Burns said.
He’s so opposed to same-sex marriage, he told church members he will no longer support the president and now predicts Obama will lose the election because of it.
He and many other leaders are pouring their energies into gathering the signatures needed to put Maryland’s same-sex marriage law on the November ballot.
“I think it might be a call to action for people to really express what they believe,” Father Erik Arnold of Our Lady of Perpetual Help said.
In Maryland, some of the strongest opposition to the law has come from the black community– about 30 percent of the population. Some African-American religious leaders are preaching about it
“God said in every home, there needs to be a representation of his glory through manhood and femininity,” Pastor Harry Jackson, Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, said.
Pastor of Baltimore Maryland’s Empowerment Temple, Jamal Bryant spoke with Roland Martin, correspondent on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, today about President Obama’s announcing his support of gay marriage.
“I absolutely, vehemently disagree with the president,” Bryant told Martin. “I agree with his presidency, but with this policy, I do not agree. Marriage is the original institution of the church.
When asked if he will vote for the president again, Bryant said, “I think, given the option I’ve got, which is Mitt Romney, I’ve got no choice.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that her Catholic faith “compels” her to “be against discrimination of any kind” and thus for same-sex marriage.
A reporter asked Pelosi: “Many of the people that are opposed to gay marriage cite their religion as the reason why they’re opposed. You’re a Catholic that supports gay marriage. Do you believe that religion and the idea that you can support gay marriage can be separated? And how do you grapple with the idea that you support gay marriage as a Catholic?”
Pelosi responded: “My religion has, compels me–and I love it for it–to be against discrimination of any kind in our country, and I consider this a form of discrimination. I think it’s unconstitutional on top of that. ” [...]
While opposing “unjust discrimination” against homosexuals, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” and can never be approved and that marriage is the sacramental union of a man and a woman.
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’” says the Catechism. “They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
THE INQUISITION’S HORRIFIC IMAGES ARE LARGELY A MYTH
The alleged sins of Christianity (i.e., the Crusades, the Inquisition) have been vastly overblown. Atheists and anti-Christians have exaggerated the “sins” of the Church to perpetuate the myth that Christians are guilty, intolerant and backward. They want people to believe that Christianity has been detrimental to humanity.
Henry Kamen in his book The Spanish Inquisition argues that the Inquisition was not as powerful or cruel as commonly believed.
Based on thirty years of research, Kamen reveals that there was less terror, bigotry, and persecution associated with the Inquisition than has been previously reported. He reports that the Inquisition did not enjoy widespread popularity, in Spain or the rest of Europe, and that it was used as a device to scare off enemies.
The Inquisition, Kamen points out, “only had authority over Christians.” The idea that the Inquisition targeted Jews is a fantasy. The only Jews who came under the purview of the Inquisition were Jews who had converted to Christianity. There were quite a few of these, as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had issued an ordinance in 1492 expelling Jews from Spain. The only way to stay was to convert. Of course, many Christians suspected that some of these conversos or “new Christians” were not Christians at all. They were Jews pretending to be Christians. Interestingly the main source of allegations against the “new Christians” came from other Jews who were angry about their fellow Jews relinquishing their Judaims. These Jews had no qualms about testifying before the Inquisition courts because as Jews they were exempt from its jurisdiction. Kamen points out that the grand inquisitor himself, Tomás de Torquemada, had known Jewish ancestry.
Inquisition trials, according to Kamen, were fairer and more lenient than their secular counterparts, not only in Spain but also across Europe. Frequently the only penalty given was some form of penance, such as fasting or what we would today call “community service.” How many people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition? Kamen estimates that it was around 2,000. Other contemporary historians make estimates of between 1,500 and 4,000. These deats are all tragic, but we must remember that they occured over a period of 350 years.
[A] team of 30 scholars from around the world…have made their report, an 800-page tome that was unveiled at a press conference in Rome [in 2004]. Its most startling conclusion is that the Inquisition was not so bad after all. Torture was rare and only about 1 percent of those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were actually executed. As one headline read “Vatican Downsizes Inquisition.” [...]
Among the best recent books on the subject are Edward Peters’s Inquisition (1988) and Henry Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition (1997), but there are others. Simply put, historians have long known that the popular view of the Inquisition is a myth. So what is the truth? [...]
The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions. Yes, you read that correctly. Heresy was a crime against the state. Roman law in the Code of Justinian made it a capital offense. Rulers, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw them as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath. When someone was accused of heresy in the early Middle Ages, they were brought to the local lord for judgment, just as if they had stolen a pig or damaged shrubbery (really, it was a serious crime in England). Yet in contrast to those crimes, it was not so easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. For starters, one needed some basic theological training–something most medieval lords sorely lacked. The result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent assessment of the validity of the charge.
The Catholic Church’s response to this problem was the Inquisition, first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184. It was born out of a need to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges…[M]ost people accused of heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.
…During the 16th century, when the witch craze swept Europe, it was those areas with the best-developed inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches’ sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.
Lucian of Samosata* (c. 120 – c. 180 A.D.) was a second century Assyrian satirist who wrote in the Greek language and mocked Christians. He was also a traveling lecturer and a rhetorician concerned with accuracy. Lucian used his mordant wit to scornfully describe and ridicule early Christians. But by doing so, he left writings confirming that Jesus: was real, was the founder of Christianity, was worshiped by the Christians, and was crucified.
Lucian’s work The Death of Peregrinus or The Passing of Peregrinus), 11-13:
This is one of the earliest surviving pagan perceptions of Christianity. Here Lucian satirized the Christians while telling the story of a philosopher sage who at one point becomes a leader of the Christians to take advantage of their gullibility.
“The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day,–the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account…and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.”
HISTORICITY OF JESUS
The Roman historian and senator Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 55 – c. AD 120) wrote about Jesus Christ, His execution, and Nero’s persecution of Christians in first century Rome.
Tacitus’s book The Annals is one of the earliest secular historical records to mention Christ. Tacitus referred to the execution (crucifixion) of Jesus as the “extreme penalty.”
Tacitus’s book The Annals, Book XV, Chapter 44:
Here Tacitus makes a rather unsympathetic reference to Jesus and the early Christians:
And there were sacred banquets and nightly vigils celebrated by married women. But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
