Showing posts with label Lutheran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lutheran. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

The Lutheran World Federation engages in reprehensible moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel

 The Lutherans are "deeply concerned":

(LWI] – The Lutheran World Federation is deeply concerned about the attacks of Hamas on towns and the civilian population in Israel, and the subsequent actions of the Israeli army, which have claimed lives on both sides, and led to injury and mayhem in an already volatile region.     

They condemn nothing. 



Thursday, April 13, 2023

Now your garden is evil: Privileged Swedish communists from Uppsala University say elites' use of water must be altered and redistributed to the poor

 What a shock, right?

From the story "From swimming pools to gardening, the rich’s privileged lifestyles are driving urban water crises, study says":

The study, which was led by Elisa Savelli at Uppsala University in Sweden, proposes a new approach to preserving water resources centered around “altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and water resources more equally.”     

Meanwhile lol:

The entire (100%) population of Sweden has access to a safe-drinking water source. 

GUILTY MUCH? The place is still 60% Lutheran.

But a lot of this is just far-north-garden-deprived envy:

 We English are often caricatured as garden fanatics but we have nothing on the northern Swedes. This gardening obsession is not uncommon up here. In the summer our local snowmobile dealership majors in ride-on lawnmowers. Locals fondle Husqvarnas the same way petrolheads caress Ferraris. Coachloads of northern Swedish townies criss-cross the countryside each summer visiting gardens.


Saturday, July 21, 2018

Jean-François Revel recognized in America's Protestant legacy its key strength in 2003, he just didn't call it that

Nor did the New York Times in his obituary, here, but that's what it is:

In an interview in 1970 with The New York Post after publication of "Without Marx or Jesus," he said his research did not involve talking to political leaders.

"I just looked around, talked to people, to students," he said. "And in the 20th century the information is pretty good, and I read a lot of your press and books."

In the introduction to his "Anti-Americanism" book, Mr. Revel wrote that he found an America "in complete contrast to the conventional portrayal then generally accepted in Europe." In particular, he was impressed with Americans' willingness to address and correct their own faults.

From the Confession of Sins in the Lutheran liturgy:

Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in Your will and walk in Your ways to the glory of Your holy name. Amen.


Sunday, April 5, 2015

Scott Walker's school voucher program is enormously popular with the poor in Wisconsin, but not with the establishment

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported here last May about applications for the school year just now winding down:

Under state law, the 25 private schools that receive the most applications are selected for the statewide voucher program. Because of a tie, 26 schools are selected for the upcoming school year.

Six new participants in the program are Fox Valley Lutheran High School in Appleton, Saint Paul Lutheran School in Bonduel, Winnebago Lutheran Academy in Fond du Lac, Twin City Catholic Educational System in Menasha and Neenah, and Saint Paul Lutheran School and Trinity Lutheran School, both in Sheboygan.

Each of the 26 schools will receive at least 10 voucher slots, with the remaining assigned through a random selection process. ...

A total of 1,000 vouchers are available, up from 500 in the first year of the program. ...

"Once again, applications far exceeded the cap," Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, said in a statement. "For the second year in a row we have thousands of parents — over 70% — on the outside looking in." ...

The statewide program, called the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, is in its second year and is separate from voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine. There are 1,220 students in the Racine Parental Choice Program and 25,397 in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, according fall enrollment data.

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Governor Walker has proposed a complete elimination of the caps for the next two years, expanding the vouchers apparently at reduced amounts, and paying for it all by reducing allocations to the public school system by $150 per pupil in the first year.

School officials are predictably livid, as this story about a day long public hearing at Brillion High School recently reported:

Nearly all of the administrators who spoke opposed the expansion of the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which allows low-income students to attend private or religious schools using a taxpayer-subsidized voucher.

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Here's a novel idea. True "parental choice" would allow the taxpayers themselves to decide which schools their taxes fund. Imagine a check off list on your income tax form or property tax form like they have now for various charitable causes to which you may allocate all or a portion of your tax refund. Let's see how the taxpayers vote to spend their education money. Now that might really upset the establishment.

Let the people decide!

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Sorry Mark Judge, the original punk rockers of Christendom were Lutherans

Why can't Mark Judge write a decent opener? He starts off, here, with this:

"With the takeover of liberalism and secularism in the West, Catholicism is now a subculture."

What he means is:

"With the takeover of the West by liberalism and secularism, Catholicism is now reduced to a subculture."

And it's too bad, too, because the rest of what he writes is worth reading . . . if only he could imagine a subculture. You know, like Lutherans. The original punk rockers of Christendom, who shouted like Joey Ramone 

I don't like sacraments
I don't like celibates
I don't like priests and nuns
I don't like what the pope has done
Well I'm against it

The truth is Catholics could never be punkers and never have been. Being a punker requires being an individual, and saying no to something, like disco and rap, and instead Catholics have been busy for centuries saying yes to everyone and everything, absorbing every culture and every cult under the aegis of their big tent. It's been the secret to their success.

To take only the latest example, they see illegals coming across the border and immediately want to welcome the stranger, give them a shower, a meal and a place to sleep. The protestants see this and want to kick their asses all the way back to Guatemala.

Catholics aren't really against anything, and never have been.

That's why if they get their way, America is finished.

I'm against it. 

Thursday, March 27, 2014

WaPo's Chris Cillizza Doesn't Realize The Voters Already Decided Obama Was Incompetent Way Back In 2010

Yeah, Obama was reelected in 2012 and retained the Senate twice, but the House went Republican in 2010 and stayed that way in 2012 despite all the help the press has given Democrats, which is why they all remain so damn angry.

The only reason the House and Senate flipped Democrat under George Bush was the full court press of the press against him, which in the case of Obama has been completely silent on his Hurricane Sandy debacle, just as it has been on the worst GDP record in the post-war . . . under Obama. Scores of other bungles and idles also apply, from the Macondo Blowout to the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber to the Tsarnaevs to JOBS, and most recently Obama's signature debacle, the rollout of healthcare.gov. In every case the response is the same, learned from the Lutheran catechism: put the best construction on everything under Obama.

By comparison the economy and the country was a paradise under Bush, including the successful implementation of the awful Medicare Part D. GDP was 1.7 times better than it is under Obama, and will be even better than that by the time Obama is through. At least George Bush's liberalism was competent.

Cillizza's laughable commentary here.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Methodism Remains A Grandmother Of Bolshevism

Jewish Lutheran Atheist
Mark Tooley says as much here for The American Spectator:


Methodism, rather than stepping back to reflect on its 30 year initially successful but ultimately failed Prohibition crusade, instead accelerated its political activism. The Methodism Building became the headquarters of America's Religious Left in Washington, D.C., housing radicals of every cause especially from the 1960s onward. It still clung to an uncompromising perfectionism that insisted evil could be banished, and the New Jerusalem established, with the passage of just a few more laws.

Of course, presidents and congressmen no longer "tremble and gobble" before Methodism and its lobbyists, who are largely ignored. Banning handguns, even after 40 years of endorsement by Methodism, will never happen. But maybe other uncompromising idealists and utopians, who believe human nature can be transformed at the stroke of a pen, will heed the lessons of Methodism and Prohibition. 

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Herman Cain Clearly Considers Mormonism To Be Just Another Christian Denomination

In his own words in 2007, here:


The Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Mormons and a few other faiths have three things in common – they believe in Jesus Christ, that He is the Son of God and that He died and was resurrected for our sins.

So what's the problem?

The political pundits continue to try and make Mitt Romney's religious beliefs a big issue as he runs for the Republican presidential nomination. Different denominations of Christianity are just that – different denominations – which means different worship practices of the same fundamental Christian beliefs.

America: where what once was fringe becomes mainstream.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Breivik's Target at Utoya, Gro Harlem Brundtland, A Long-Time Norwegian Anti-Semite

From Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America by Kenneth R. Timmerman (2004):

"The Nazi references emerge frequently and easily in today's Norway, and they are directed mainly at Israel, but also at the United States. At a huge demonstration in central Oslo to protest Israel's independence on April 20, 2002, former Labor Party prime minister Jens Stoltenberg addressed pro-Palestinian groups waving Nazi flags. Without blinking, he endorsed their cause. 'There is one occupant, and one occupier,' he told them. (It was his party, under the leadership of Gro Harlem Brundtland and Foreign Minister Johan Holst, that oversaw the Oslo Declaration of Principles in September 1993.) The former leader of the center-left Center Party, Gunnar Stalsett, now the state-appointed Lutheran bishop of Oslo, addressed a crowd of anti-Israeli demonstrators waving Nazi flags on April 6, 2002. 'He asked that they pull down the swastikas before he spoke,' an Israeli diplomat in Oslo told me. When the crowd kept on waving them, he spoke anyway. ...

"Anti-Israel demonstrations and Israeli 'misdeeds' in the West Bank and Gaza get extensive coverage in a Norwegian press whose brazen anti-Semitism goes way beyond any tolerable expresssion of a political disagreement with Israel. For years, Norwegian reporters and cartoonists have compared Israel to Hitler's Third Reich and have used classical anti-Semitic themes that arguably should be outlawed under Norway's 1975 hate crimes legislation." (pp. 239f)

"Labor Party heavyweights began traveling to Lebanon to pay homage to Arafat. Among them were Thorvald Stoltenberg, the future foreign minister, and Gro Harlem Brundtland. Although she was older than the 1968 generation radicals, Brundtland took them under her wing. Under her leadership, many of the former Socialist Left Party activists joined the Labor Party. She promoted them to the party leadership, while adopting their anti-Israel agenda. In April 1983, when Brundtland headed the Association of Scandinavian Labor Parties, she invited Arafat to visit Stockholm. It was a major diplomatic coup that broadened his support in Europe. After an eight-month initial stint as prime minister in 1981, Brundtland twice returned to power, from May 1986 to October 1989 and, again, from September 1990 to October 1996, when Oslo was negotiated and implemented.

"One of the former Socialist Left Party activists promoted by Brundtland was Einar Foerde, who eventually became head of the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company. Until his retirement in 2001, "Foerde continued the tradition of picking key persons who shared his political views and placing them throughout the NRK," says Jan Gregersen. Another hard-leftist Brundtland brought into the Labor Party fold was Terje Roed-Larsen, the anti-Israel Communist from the Palestinian Front." (p. 245)

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The Atlantic Doesn't Really Care What Kind of Nut Michele Bachmann Is

Just that you know she's a nut.

Joshua Green here thinks she's a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran anti-Catholic nut, even though she's formally separated herself from the group after many years.

The reason surely has to do with theological views she has which are errors according to these Lutherans. Green would like Bachmann to be all about the Lutheran position that the pope is the Antichrist, a position Bachmann has gone on record disavowing.

You'd think Green would dig a little deeper because of that, say at Salon here or especially Mother Jones here, to gain a little wider appreciation for Bachmann's interest in an apocalyptic timetable at the center of which is the state of Israel, and the dispensationalism and millennialism which goes with it, all of which are eschewed by Lutheran interpretation.

Lutheranism is amillennial, and Pauline in its insistence that the Church is the Israel of God, and has replaced it in the world. For Lutherans, the state of Israel is theologically irrelevant. And therefore it is impossible for them that one's relationship to the state of Israel could be talismanic in any way, as Bachmann appears to believe.

For end times enthusiasts like the Congresswoman, the Antichrist is an historical personage who is revealed before the end of the world, not a spirit of error who perennially inhabits the seat of Roman Catholic false doctrine, as the Lutherans believe.

I don't find it surprising at all that Bachmann has parted ways with Lutheranism in the light of these facts. What is surprising is that it took her so long.

She may herself be still quite confused about much of this. Lots of Christians are, and spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure it all out. But who can really say, except Bachmann herself? About that Green is correct.

The political ramifications for Bachmann's presidential run are not inconsiderable, since many of the people on all sides of these issues in the churches are her potential base of support. For fervent believers as many of them are, positions taken on these issues can be fundamentally alienating.

It's fascinating in a way . . . kind of like a train wreck.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

'Conservatives' Compromising with the Devil

Not that I make it my business to follow this sort of thing very closely, but, well, there it is in USA Today:

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger, says in a headline on his website that Palin "throws support behind GOProud." He has posted a clip from Palin's interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in which Palin wonders whether conservatives should reach out to those with opposite views and "allow for healthy debate" on issues. Breitbart is on GOProud's advisory board.

More here, and here.

Sarah Palin knows what side of the bread the butter's on. She isn't going to alienate a big part of her base. Half of the Tea Party is libertarian, which means half of the Tea Party is ok with gay.

As is Roman Catholicism. That's why a Tammy Bruce can fill in for Laura Ingraham, no problemo. That's why Andrew Breitbart and Ann Coulter can be chums.

That's why repeal of DADT was off the radio radar screens on Bill Bennett's show, Ingraham's, Hannity's, etc.

Good Catholics all.

And that's why Elton John was treated so graciously by Rush Limbaugh at his (fourth) wedding.

The Protestantism that gave us that work ethic thingy that Pat Buchanan remembers made America so great?

It's in the rear view mirror and getting smaller every day. Mainline Protestants like the Episcopalians, the Methodists and the Lutherans have all loosened their sphincters for gay and lesbian preachers in their pulpits. Traditionalists have fled in droves to non-denominational churches, or to lonely isolation.

The left doesn't need to trouble itself with dividing the opposition on the right. Its minions masquerading as conservatives are doing the job all by themselves.