Christian influence in politics

Christ's influence left out of politics, is like Christ's influence left out of evangelism. It is unfortunate that so many modern Christians try to lump the scope of Christianity's influence only to specific boxes, such as church involvement, leadership and missionary work. This is completely contrary to how prior generations of Christians thought about their faith.

Biblical illiteracy is rampant throughout society and to our chagrin, even within the Christian world. For the first three centuries of this country (prior to the birth of American Independence included) the majority of Americans knew a substantial bit about the Bible and that could even be said about non-Christians--such as Muslims, Buddhists and Atheists. This is because Christians didn't stop at simply leaving their influence into just Sunday's at church but into every aspect of society--even government. This is evident in the historical sense to a stark degree. Consider the influence that Christianity has had in government and then decide what is worse, Christian influenced government or government without Christ's influence? Here is a tiny portion of what our faith has done to influence government: Outlawing of infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire. (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners  (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia,; granting of property rights and other protections to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim countries today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of bind young women’s feet in China (in 1912)..... This list of Christian's influence on the culture and government is vast and hard to fathom. All we can really say is that without Christian influence on every aspect in society, we lose our Christian reforms we have achieved in 2000 years of influence and ultimately we lose the spread of our faith. When government is maliciously forceful and completely against Christ who ultimately wins? The devil does.

George Washington in prayer

William Wilberforce, Christian who helped end slavery in Britain

It is our duty to spread our wings into every aspect in society. There are billions of people who play video games and yet, we have little influence in this arena. Who has the reigns of society and can impact everyone's lives? certainly Not business's, they can only provide a service or need, it is government that is; it is government that passes laws and restricts freedoms and without Christian influence in government how can people stand on a street corner and talk to others openly about Christ and not be persecuted? It was through a constant vigilance and biblical influence in government that help spark the rise of freedom and our ability to calmly influence our culture towards God. If we leave government to its own will, it will destroy us all and impede our ability to spread the Word and our influence. Without a just government, we are left to minor struggles to influence society about Christ. With a sound, biblically based constitution and Christian statesmen, government restricted to its proper functions and we are able to greater influence our world for the good. Look at common Muslim countries in the Middle East or Communist/Statist countries in North Korea; do we see a lot of Christian influence in a government which treats its citizens as common cattle? Therefore it is imperative that our influence spread into everywhere and then we may begin to see our reforming of society to look closer and closer to our savior Jesus Christ.

Yet Christians who encourage greater Christian involvement in politics need to hear an important word of caution: if we (and I include myself here) ever begin to think that good laws alone will solve a nations problems or bring about a righteous and just society, we will have made a huge mistake. Unless there is simultaneously an inner in people's hearts and minds, good laws alone will only bring about grudging, external compliance with the minimum level of obedience necessary to avoid punishment.


Genuine, long-term change in a nation will only happen (1) if people’s hearts change so that they seek to do good, not evil; (2) if people’s minds change so that their moral convictions align more closely with God's moral standards in the Bible; and (3) if a nation's laws change so that they more fully encourage good conduct and punish wrong conduct.

References - Politics: According to the Bible.

forgotten history: Evil unrestrained in Mao

Che Guevara on left, Mao on right and not sure who the middle guy is.

Stalin on left, Mao on right.

It's never fails to stun me on how people idolize mass murderers like Che Guevara and wear him or other communists as a fashion symbol. We live in an age of ignorance, of biblical proportions. We repeatedly hear in history classes about the atrocities that Nazi Germany as well as Hitler committed and then we completely leave out what communism has done. I wonder if people actually knew what happened in Communism, if they would even change their minds--as it is an unfortunate reality that many will simply state that it wasn't the fault of communism but that it was a particular group or person. How many times does an idea have to be tried, for it to succeed? Has communism not murdered enough people already? ... As an idea "communism" has failed in every area of civilization in which it has been tried. Can we truly learn from our mistakes, if we have no biblical worldview or even a remotely Christian one? From what i have gleaned from history, i do not think we can. We wonder about, without any solid foundations of what is good and what is evil and the results our very dark.

One thing is certain, we have failed to learn from history and as the saying goes and we are doomed to repeat it. We have forgotten our Christian heritage as a nation and the West in general. In history, we speak about enlightenment, when really it should be forever immortalized as an unenlightenment. Another example of our ignorance is the Crusades. Contemporary thought, would have us believe that the Crusades were a bad spot in Christian history. This is egregiously false and it is an unnecessary stain on the Christian faith. Yet, that is a subject, they i may discuss at a later date.

Mao: The Greatest Mass murderer in history. China's forgotten history

These are the character traits of Chairman Mao Tse Tung: narcissist, egotistical, sadist, Satanist, murdering, barbarian. This guy makes Hitler look like Mother Teresa in comparison. 



Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. 
      He was born (26th December 1893) into a peasant family in the heartland of China. His ancestors had lived in that Shaoshan valley for five hundred years. This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (AD 618-906), when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Mao's mother didn't receive a name as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan; she was just "seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called "three-inch golden flower lilies" that epitomized beauty at the time. Mao had a carefree childhood. Confucian classics were what made up most of the curriculum in school and he had an excellent memory and was very knowledgeable in Chinese language and history. Mao's father was always working and disliked how Mao would was being so idle. Mao did not like manual labor; he would tell his father that since he was older, he should do more manual labor. His father once scolded him in front of guests telling him he was useless and lazy--after this Mao fled the house, with his father in tow. He came upon a pond and threated to jump in if his father came any nearer. His father backed down. Once while recalling this memory, Mao laughed and stated "Old men like him didn't want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their weak point, and i won!" 



Mao loved books and history. His view of history is rather scary, to say the least. He thought that whatever happens to spice history up such as great wars, epic murder, sexual depravity and basically anything which could be considered brutal or against the normal culture would be interesting and he wanted to contribute to that type of history by any means possible. Mao often didn't get his way while he made his way to the top of the Communist bloc. He would often have make friends of other Communist party members and then later betray them. Yet he also didn't have many friends. He mostly kept to himself and did whatever he wanted to his wives, other people and to Communist rulers that were even a higher status then him. 



Mao loved killing people. While he was still trying to take over China from the his arch enemy Chiang Kai-Shek (the nationalist party leader--which was rather decent when compared with the Communists) he would go into a village with his Communist troops and then kill a bunch of people by torturing them. Mao was an expert in torture. He literally invented new ways to torture people. Many of his fellow Communists who got in his way would be killed and those who had hurt him personally would often be tortured. The people who made him look bad however would often have their entire family and friends be brought through despicable years of psychological torture as well as any other kind. One of the ways he tortured people was by using barbed wire through the genitals and dragging that person naked through a town. The list of his favorite styles of torture are quite varied and just as gruesome, if not more so. 



The Communists took over control of China in 1949. Mao envisioned himself becoming ruler of the entire world. He secretly harbored this vision throughout his reign. However Mao and the Chinese Communists never would have been able to take over China, if it wasn't for the Soviet Union. The Soviets were funding them constantly with supplies. They were instrumental in establishing a Communist group in 20th century China as well as taking complete control over China. Mao and Stalin were often working together to further enslave the world. It was at Stalin's suggestion that Mao sends his troops into Korea and tries to take complete control over it. Yet Mao was his own man and never did anything except what he wanted to do. Mao helped establish and sustain the Vietnam Communist offensive and Cambodia.



What is more widely known is Mao's starvation of his people in the "Great Leap Forward" which was 5 year plan--a pathetic attempt to gain nuclear weapons. Compared to Russia, China was even further backward in modern weapons as well as modern technology. The Great Leap Forward effectively implemented a war footing for the country and had everyone put virtually every piece of scrap metal that they could find into furnaces which were in everyone's backyard to melt it down for the "cause". Yet the vast majority of these stockpiled metals were useless, because average people had little knowledge about such things. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao toyed with the idea of getting rid of names and identifying people by numbers. More than 30 million people starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and their many people who became cannibals and even eat their own children. During these years many of his advisors were receiving reports of so many people dying, so they talked with Mao but he simply shrugged and replied "half of China may well have to die."

At the age of around 71 Mao started the Cultural Revolution a few years after The Great Leap Forward. Many believe or believed the Cultural Revolution was an attempt by Mao to assert his brand of sadistic/communist beliefs on his country and it was but for him, it was mainly about getting rid of his political enemies behind a country in chaos. Mao first implemented the Cultural Revolution by making his personal beliefs into quotes and made into a book called the Little Red Book which was constantly referred to daily by virtually every citizen in China. There were more Mao badges with his face and his collected works made for China then there were Chinese inhabitants. Mao decreed that students must disobey their teachers, schools, universities, police and all authority. He proclaimed that they their role was to protect Mao and to denounce all culture which resembled capitalist or anything but what Mao advocated. Students were told to condemn their teachers and there were loud speakers placed everywhere that constantly carried hateful rhetoric towards specific groups and it created a nationwide atmosphere of hate and blood lust. Mao advocated that students riot and create violence and that they did. Teachers were brutally dragged in front of their schools, beaten, humiliated and women were raped. This cascaded throughout all China. Suicides were very high. There was no one school in the whole of China where atrocities did not occur. Mao announced his praise for a group of militant teenagers who divided undesirable families and labeled those families "blacks." In a girl's school a headmistress was tortured to death, "blacks" had ropes tied around their necks, were beaten up and forced to say: "I'm the bastard of a bitch. I deserve to die." This model spread throughout all institutions of education. After the terror in the schools Mao urged students to spread out into society and destroy all forms of old culture and that they did. This extreme hatred spread throughout society and many were put into prison or killed for years.





In conclusion, Mao's reign, much resembled the book 1984 and you could even say that it may have been worse. Mao harbored his extreme hatred until his very death (1976). Afterward, the Communists in power began to make the country less murderous and basically into a mixed communist/crony capitalist society. 

References - 
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Love and Agape

Love is a hard thing. I take that back, love is painful and extremely difficult thing. No matter how hard we try, we can never truly love someone perfectly. When i say perfectly, i mean, we make mistakes and therefore, are not perfect. We can never truly love someone by our own, because we do not have the ability to love in a meaningful way all the time; in fact, when taken as a whole, (i mean the world) we tend to fall drastically short of any level in which we could say we are close to being perfect. Yet we see kindness around us, in people. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that some will purposely take a portion out of their day to simply help someone out, give to others or simply say sorry or forgive another. If we are simply born out of a cosmic accident, if we were simply an evolutionary random mutation, how do we account for the fact that some of us (i am speaking of the entire human race), are so selfless in their love for others? Is it not odd to see a species which will sacrifice their meaningless life for another person? I will grant you that there are some animals which do special things, such as when a dog will rescue a person in a fatal situation. This i believe is the exception and not the rule but regardless, if anything, it isn't a choice which is made but simply instinct. The dog has been either trained or it is simply getting its owner out of a perilous situation. Yet taken this a step further, why do we make music and what purpose does music serve in evolution? 

I love music. It brings a joy into my day which is simply beyond my understanding. When i listen to music, i hear the cadence of each song and feel as if i could do anything. As it so happens, those who subscribe to materialistic evolution for the explanation for everything still are baffled by music and they cannot conceive of how music contributes to their worldview. They do not understand how single celled protoplasm's can evolve and become Beethoven or Bach. Do we simply die and then the earth absorbs and transforms our body into itself--perhaps even becoming a tree?  ....Before i go further, i have to point out one of my favorite comedians Dane Cook--who was having a conversation with a stranger and the guy (who was atheist) told him that he when he died, he would become fertilizer for the earth and become a huge beautiful tree--So Dane Cook goes on to say that he hopes he does become a tree. He concludes his story by mentioning how it would be great if a big hefty guy came out and took an axe to that tree, drug him through the woods, threw him into a sawmill and then pounded him down into paper and finally printed the Bible on him.

It is easy to believe in something which does not hold someone accountable for in their life. It is easy to look at the world and see the horrible nature within and then fall into our own little selfish habits to try to intoxicate ourselves into a stupor which may bring us a temporary feeling of good cheer. It is easy to look at a certain area of our life and then see the truth and finally come to change our ways for only a little while. It is even easy to live a life which says you love someone and yet do not replicate that love through thoughts or actions. As C.S. Lewis once said in his book The Four Loves, Agape is the kind of love to replicate, for it is the true love or the perfect love. There are four words in the Greek language which signify a type of love. 
Storgê (natural affection)
Philia (friendship, love)
Eros (attraction, sexual love)
Agape (love, charity).

“In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, it is more blessed to give than to receive” Acts 20:35.

Agape, is the love of God. It can do no wrong to another, because God is just and he has given us the greatest gift of love in his son Jesus Christ.

“To live is to suffer” – Fyodor dostoevsky

Why do we suffer? God paints a perfect portrait of how we were created in his image; we freely disobeyed him and ate from the tree of Good and Evil. We thought ourselves to be God but we were merely his creation. When I state, “we” it literally means we. Because in all of us, is that same root sin, which was in the first couple, Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were a perfect representation of us and therefore when they sinned, we all fell. It is understood that no matter if we were there in that garden, we would have made the same choice, if we had their same knowledge and no prior knowledge as we do now. Therefore we recipients of our own doing and we must freely make the choice to “take the road less traveled” (Robert Frost) or become what we “say” that we hate.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
Adolf Hitler

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” Holden.

We all fight a battle between our sin and God who is trying to speak to us through our struggles. He cannot get through, when we constantly deny him and partake ourselves to temporary pleasures of this world. We must willingly give up our own lives and live for Him. It is the only way we can truly find what Aristotle called Eudemonia (true happiness) and therein an Agape type of love. 

“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” Psalm 8:1

Learning to be a Man

Recently, i have discovered that as a man who confesses Jesus Christ as savior, I don't share many of my savior's qualities. Not that i didn't realize this before but day by day, i see how perfect and majestic he is and how very much i need to grow. In our current culture, we think we are wise because we have fancy degrees and yet we our Biblically illiterate. God does not call us to him and his son, and then stop there. If that was all there was, we would not live in the kind of western world we have now. During the founding of the United States we as a nation taught the bible as the main textbook in schools and it was simply natural to learn that way. We had a literacy rate which was astronomically incredible, because people wanted to know the depths of the bible themselves and not have it be interpreted to them; as it commonly was through the Church of England or that of Catholicism. People became wise through the teachings of the bible and they attributed everything they did through the God's Word. This was how the greatest country the world has ever knew, was created and it is only through the Christian God which can bring it back from the precipice of destruction--of which we currently our heading towards. Our founders applied the Bible to a saving knowledge of our savior, understanding political issues as well as one of our most important arenas of our life; our love life. These were real men and women, who served God in every area of life. They were not perfect and neither are we (though we have allowed our culture to become fairly sinful). Therefore the Bible isn't simply a tool for your salvation but something which should be in every area of your life and thought of in everyday issues.

Through careful study of God's Word, help from books, friends and anything which i can learn from, i want to be a Man that resembles my one true love... Jesus.

"I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go." Psalm 32:8

Blogs and God

Been thinking a lot about starting my own blog for quite a while now but it was Ashley and her blog which really persuaded me into starting my own again. I used to blog from a gaming website for about 4 years but then i stopped after i had become bored with it. It wasn't that blogging wasn't fun but it was that i had begun to depend on gaming as a source for a lot of my happiness for many years. While gaming is fun and i still do play computer games sometimes, i have realized that it is a simple pleasure which cannot bring me true happiness. God has blessed me during my early years and now--as a follower of Christ. I have grown exponentially in the last few months in my faith and with that, i have become simply content with who i am and where i am. Yet i know that i am still very new in my faith and have much to learn. I am excited for that prospect to unravel though. I have struggles during each day but i feel connected to you Father, more than i ever have and happier than for that dependence. People now-a-days depend on many things, including, sex, alcohol and drugs for their happiness. While those things have never really interested me, i do long for at least the first one. If true happiness is to ensue, we must only depend on God. Not on things, relationships or even spouses, we must only depend on God and through that we may begin to understand and practice everything in our lives with a peace and happiness which is everlasting. I don't believe having meaningless casual sex or relationships which go nowhere is worth any of my time. God would have me love others in my singleness until the time he deems it appropriate to provide my wife. If people only knew what joy God can bring, this world would be less broken. It is by trusting in God which brings happiness to each individual. God provides a peace which cannot be described but can only be known if you give yourself to him. Learning to die for Jesus every day is a tough life but life without him is only heartbreak. The superficial relationships and frivolity of our modern culture leads only to destruction; destruction of happiness, destruction of the body and finally the destruction of the soul. A life lived for God, is a life worth living and thank God for giving his Son Jesus Christ!

"I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!" 1 Corinthians 15:31 

"Peace i leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid." John 14:27