Posted on 01/17/2011 12:15:29 PM PST by American Dream 246
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today is a day to reflect on the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King dedicated himself to justice and the struggles of an imperfect world. In the face of fierce opposition, he stood up for the oppressed, and he ultimately sacrificed all for equality and freedom. His was a remarkable life of love and service for all mankind. His work must continue.
With Dr. King’s faith in God and his unwavering hope in a brighter, stronger future, let us recommit today to continuing his work for a more peaceful and just nation.
- Sarah Palin
Sounds like he did a little more than just study it.
“Communists Promoted King
A number of communists who left the party have reported they were ordered to do all within their power to support King’s activities. A black woman, Julia Brown, was a Communist in Cleveland for nine years. She said”
“We were told to promote King, to unite Negroes and Whites behind him, and to turn him into a sort of national hero . We were to look to King as the leader in this struggle, the Communists said, because he was on our side. While in the party I learned that King attended a communist training school, that several of his aides were communists and that he received funds from Communists and took directions from them. He was one of their biggest heroes.”
The U. S. Congressional Record of March 30, 1965 quotes Karl Prussian, an FBI counterspy inside the Communist Party as swearing: “At all of these (Communist Party) meetings Rev. Martin Luther King was always set forth as the individual to whom Communists should rally around... King has either been a member of, or willingly accepted support from over 60 Communist fronts... King accepted support from communist fronts , individuals and organizations which espouse communist causes.””
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Wolves/king_jr-communist.htm
I was wondering the same thing. It's sickening to see the worship all the way around.
Did it every occur to you that you can disagree with someone with being “deranged”.
Yes he does.
Ironic that you are promoting what OTHERS say about MLK; what liars and enemies of the United States, and spies say about an American man who promotes peace, and preaches about Jesus Christ. A man who himself rejected communism. It was these forces who besmirch his reputation that had the most to lose from what MLK jr preached and taught others.
It is ironic that you bring it up on a thread about Sarah Palin, the most lied about and maligned politician today. One who also poses a threat to these very same communist powers.
Whoa, hold on there partner...
“... an American man who promotes peace, and preaches about Jesus Christ.”
***********
King Denied the Bodily Resurrection, Virgin Birth, and Deity of Jesus Christ
In the same sketch, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” King wrote that, although he accepted the teachings of his Sunday school teachers until he was about twelve,
this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type. At the age of 13 I shocked my Sunday School class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. From the age of thirteen on doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.
While it is widely believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. was committed to the “Christian religion,” he was far from it. He denied some of the most fundamental components of historic Christianity. He repudiated the doctrine of the deity of Jesus, and he rejected the concept that the Lord was raised bodily from the dead. King disdained the New Testament affirmation of Christ’s virgin birth, asserting that the early Christians devised a mythological story to account for the moral uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth. His theology has been profusely documented in The Christian News Encyclopedia.
1. In his paper “What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection,” MLK thought that in order to understand the true meaning of orthodox creedal doctrines—like the divine Sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection—the literal element needed to be stripped away in order to uncover the true experiential foundation beneath it.
* MLK believed that doctrine of Jesus’ deity developed due to Greek philosophical influence and because the early church saw him as the highest and the best
* MLK believed that the “virgin birth” was unscientific and untenable; like divine Sonship, this doctrine developed as a way for the early church to indicate how highly they valued the uniqueness of Jesus.
* MLK believed that the doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus was an attempt by the pre-scientific early church to symbolize the experience that they had with Jesus.
2. Read in light of the above, it is clear to me that in the paper, “The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and Psychologically,” MLK is self-consciously identifying himself with classical theological liberalism and rejecting the doctrines of fundamentalism.
* MLK praised theological liberalism. In addition to the denial of the doctrines of divine Sonship, the virgin birth, and the resurrection, MLK points out that there is also a denial of Scriptural inerrancy and the doctrine of the fall.
* MLK scorned theological fundamentalism. MLK seems not to believe in the direct creation of the world by God, man as being in the image of God, the historical account of Adam and Eve, the person of the Devil, the Fall, hell, the Trinity, the substitutionary atonement, and the Second Coming.
3. In his paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” MLK suggests that the doctrines of the early church grew out of the Greek mystery religions and cults which flourished at that time.
4. In an interview with Time Magazine, MLK seems to indicate that it was at Crozer Theological Seminary (the setting for the term papers quoted above) that he saw that the ministry was a framework by which he could express his philosophy of social protest.
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Wolves/mlk_jr-exposed.htm
I think this is a twisting of the faith of MLK jr.
Your argument deals with a paper King wrote in 1949...which he seems to repudiate in his 1954 sermon, “Rediscovering Lost Values”.
King was not always a born again Christian. He became a preacher as a vocation. But, his experiences with death threats, and bombed churches which killed little girls; being beaten and imprisoned, having dogs set on him; straightened out his thinking, and set his eyes on Jesus! He speakes about the long night he spent as he realised that he couldn’t depend on anyone, but Jesus to save him!
Here is another quote from a letter he wrote from Prison, that his followers should heed:
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
And thus the straw men come out in force....
Salute MLK Jr. for the truths he told, and ignore the rest. He was not a god and did not wish to be regarded as such.
There’s room in there for the argument of quite a few fine points....
quote:
“I have been arrested five times and 1960 put in Alabama jails. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not the recipients of threats of death. I have been the victim of a near fatal stabbing. So in a real sense I have been battered by the storms of persecution. I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer bear such a heavy burden, and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But every time such a temptation appeared, something came to strengthen and sustain my determination. I have learned now that the Master’s burden is light precisely when we take his yoke upon us.”
“Salute MLK Jr. for the truths he told, and ignore the rest. He was not a god and did not wish to be regarded as such.”
Correction...
“Be compelled to salute MLK...”
“There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation. So like the Apostle Paul I can now humbly yet proudly say, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God.”
I believe King hit on our problem today, being a “white moderate”....isn’t a good thing! It leads to nothing but a devaluation of our rights! King knew it, and most of us on FR know it as well! King is a great example for us on how to resist Obama and his communist hoards.
Believe what you want.
The evidence is there that he was a communist sympathizer, a theological heretic and a notorious womanizer.
If he had a conversion to true Christianity he sure kept it quite. But he was quite vocal about preaching socialism, and social justice disguised in theological terminology.
There are plenty of examples of Godly and courageous black Christians to follow. MLK Jr. was not one of them.
I won’t honor him.
And I sure as h3ll won’t be forced to honor him.
I hate to say it, but I don’t think I am the one believing “what I want”. I am believing what is the facts. The Bible tells us not to participate in gossip and lies, so I have learned to take a man by what he says. And No, MLK didn’t keep his conversion quiet. He stated it publically, in a sermon titled “why Jesus called a man a fool”:
“So many people have come to feel that on their own efforts they can bring in a new world, but they’ve forgotten to think about the fact that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. And so they end up going over and over again without God.
But I tell you this morning, my friends, there’s no way to get rid of him. And all of our new knowledge will not diminish God’s being one iota. Neither the microcosmic compass of the atom nor the vast interstellar ranges of interstellar space can make God irrelevant for living in a universe, where stellar distance must be measured in light years, where stars are five hundred million million miles from the earth, where heavenly bodies travel at incredible speeds. Modern man still has to cry out with the Psalmist, “When I behold the heavens, the work of thy hands and all that thou hast created; what is man, that thou is mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou hast remembered him?”
God is still around. One day, you’re going to need him. The problems of life will begin to overwhelm you; disappointments will begin to beat upon the door of your life like a tidal wave. And if you don’t have a deep and patient faith, you aren’t going to be able to make it. I know this from my own experience. The first twenty-five years of my life were very comfortable years, very happy years; didn’t have to worry about anything. I have a marvelous mother and father. They went out of the way to provide everything for their children, basic necessities. I went right on through school, I never had to drop out to work or anything. And you know, I was about to conclude that life had been wrapped up for me in a Christmas package.
Now of course I was religious; I grew up in the church. I’m the son of a preacher, I’m the great-grandson of a preacher, and the great-great-grandson of a preacher. My father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my Daddy’s brother is a preacher. So I didn’t have much choice, I guess. But I had grown up in the church, and the church meant something very real to me, but it was a kind of inherited religion and I had never felt an experience with God in the way that you must have it if you’re going to walk the lonely paths of this life. Everything was done, and if I had a problem I could always call Daddy, my earthly father; things were solved.
But one day after finishing school, I was called to a little church down in Montgomery, Alabama, and I started preaching there. Things were going well in that church; it was a marvelous experience. But one day a year later, a lady by the name of Rosa Parks decided that she wasn’t going to take it any longer. She stayed in a bus seat, and you may not remember it because it’s way back now several years, but it was the beginning of a movement where fifty thousand black men and women refused absolutely to ride the city buses. And we walked together for 381 days..... Things were going well for the first few days, but then about ten or fifteen days later, after the white people in Montgomery knew that we meant business, they started doing some nasty things. They started making nasty telephone calls, and it came to the point that some days more than forty telephone calls would come in, threatening my life, the life of my family, the life of my children. I took it for a while in a strong manner.
But I never will forget one night very late. It was around midnight. And you can have some strange experiences at midnight. I had been out meeting with the steering committee all that night. And I came home, and my wife was in the bed and I immediately crawled into bed to get some rest to get up early the next morning to try to keep things going. And immediately the telephone started ringing and I picked it up. On the other end was an ugly voice. That voice said to me, in substance, “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
I’d heard these things before, but for some reason that night it got to me. I turned over and I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I was frustrated, bewildered. And then I got up and went back to the kitchen and I started warming some coffee, thinking that coffee would give me a little relief. And then I started thinking about many things. I pulled back on the theology and philosophy that I had just studied in the universities, trying to give philosophical and theological reasons for the existence and the reality of sin and evil, but the answer didn’t quite come there. I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born about a month earlier. We have four children now, but we only had one then. She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted, and loyal wife who was over there asleep.And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her. And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer; I was weak.
Something said to me, you can’t call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta a hundred and seventy-five miles away. You can’t even call on Mama now. You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about. That power that can make a way out of no way. And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to know God for myself.And I bowed down over that cup of coffee—I never will forget it. And oh yes, I prayed a prayer and I prayed out loud that night.......
And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roll. I felt sin- breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No, never alone. No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
And I’m going on in believing in him. You’d better know him, and know his name, and know how to call his name. You may not know philosophy. You may not be able to say with Alfred North Whitehead that he’s the Principle of Concretion. You may not be able to say with Hegel and Spinoza that he is the Absolute Whole. You may not be able to say with Plato that he’s the Architectonic Good. You may not be able to say with Aristotle that he’s the Unmoved Mover.
But sometimes you can get poetic about it if you know him. You begin to know that our brothers and sisters in distant days were right. Because they did know him as a rock in a weary land, as a shelter in the time of starving, as my water when I’m thirsty, and then my bread in a starving land. And then if you can’t even say that, sometimes you may have to say, “he’s my everything. He’s my sister and my brother. He’s my mother and my father.” If you believe it and know it, you never need walk in darkness.
Don’t be a fool. Recognize your dependence on God. As the days become dark and the nights become dreary, realize that there is a God who rules above.
And so I’m not worried about tomorrow. I get weary every now and then. The future looks difficult and dim, but I’m not worried about it ultimately because I have faith in God. Centuries ago Jeremiah raised a question, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” He raised it because he saw the good people suffering so often and the evil people prospering. Centuries later our slave foreparents came along. And they too saw the injustices of life, and had nothing to look forward to morning after morning but the rawhide whip of the overseer, long rows of cotton in the sizzling heat. But they did an amazing thing. They looked back across the centuries and they took Jeremiah’s question mark and straightened it into an exclamation point. And they could sing, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” And there is another stanza that I like so well: “Sometimes I feel discouraged.”
Edited for length..
Well said. You’re hot here these last couple of days.
Amen, Sister.
You’re like the thin skinned Jews who complain about Christmas being a national holiday.
“You’re like the thin skinned Jews who complain about Christmas being a national holiday.”
HUH???
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