Posted on 07/26/2007 6:41:46 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
The National Council of Churches (NCC) is distressed that not all Christians share its animosity towards Israel.
Preferring not to address its own demographic implosion, the NCC periodically lashes out at more demographically robust Christian movements, especially conservative evangelicals. In its latest fusillade, the NCC denounced the “Christian Zionism” of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which recently convened its second convention in Washington for pro-Israel evangelicals. Newt Gringrich was among the speakers.
“CUFI's position of uncritical support for Israel separates it from the Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and traditional Protestant Churches, all of whom support Israel while at the same time advocate for a Palestinian state,” insisted the NCC’s news release, which mostly quoted Associated General Secretary for International Affairs and Peace Antonios Kireopoulos.
The NCC official asserted that “most Christians” do not share CFI’s stated goals. CFI’s objective, as its website describes, is to increase support for Israel among evangelicals by emphasizing the “the Jewish contribution to Christianity and Israel’s biblical mandate to the land through Bible teachings.”
CFI warns that “with every passing day, the threats to Israel and the Jewish people are growing,” specifically referencing Iran’s nuclear plans and Hamas’ popularity among Palestinians. “Millions of Christians across America have a deep love for Israel and the Jewish people and want to stand with them during these difficult days,” notes the CUFI website, which cites the “threats to Judeo-Christian civilization from radical Islam.”
Speaking unpleasantly about radical jihadists, of course, is unacceptable to the NCC and the Religious Left. "CUFI's ongoing vilification of Islam is also unacceptable," fretted Shanta Premawardhana, an NCC interfaith relations official. "The NCC continues to urge Christians to build relationships with Muslim people, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving, law-abiding people." What the NCC never considers is that refusal to address radical Islamists is no favor to moderate Muslims who are “peace-loving.”
According to the NCC, the CFI has “advocated going to war with Iran,” which is “totally unacceptable,” Premawardhana claimed. "The NCC believes that high-level dialogues with Iran and other Middle Eastern partners is the proper method of dealing with Iran." The NCC believes in high toned denunciations for Christians who disagree with its political agenda. But radical Islamists and other often very savage adversaries of Western Civilization always merit endless respectful dialogue, according to the NCC mindset.
The NCC, like the rest of the Religious Left, prefers to dismiss all pro-Israel evangelicals as “Left-Behind” fanatics whose support for the Jews is merely a crass and self-serving preparation for the end-times. CFI’s “efforts are the latest in a century old apocalyptic movement that began in earnest in the 19th century,” the NCC asserted. “Sometimes called Christian Zionism because of its uncritical support for the State of Israel, it is based on a literal reading of Biblical apocalyptic texts.”
Actually, Zionism and philo-semitism have a long history in Christianity, arguably dating back to the New Testament, whose writers were themselves Jews who followed a Jewish messiah, obviously. But more specifically among Western Protestants, a mystical attachment to the Jewish people and a belief in their connectedness to the land of Israel originated at least with the English Puritans. Zionism of some sort has nearly always resonated among some religionists in America over the last 400 years.
The NCC's founders and early leaders were themselves ardent supporters of Israel. It was not until after the radicalization of the 1960's, and the advent of Liberation Theology, that leftist Protestant prelates suddenly realized that Palestinian insurrectionists were actually God's revolutionary vanguard against Zionist imperialism. Today, the NCC and its allies insist that they support Israel, within its pre-1967 borders. Naturally, these clerics prefer not to acknowledge that those borders are largely indefensible, and that an unrestricted "right of return" for Palestinian descendants would likely erase the Jewish state demographically.
According to Kireopoulos, the CUFI "message differs greatly with what theologians have taught for centuries" about Israel. Apparently, the NCC believes itself a mouthpiece for orthodox theology, instead of the shrinking pulpit for heterodox liberal Protestantism that it actually is. That the restoration of the Jews to Israel may serve some Providential purpose is hardly a belief confined to freakish evangelicals, as the Religous Left, sitting inside its insulated and largely empty churches, prefers to imagine.
"The NCC advocates for a two-state solution, with a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state," declared the NCC news release, sounding so very reasonable. "The NCC has stated the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories is unsupportable. This position is shared by Churches worldwide, and is counter to the position espoused by CUFI."
According to Kireopoulos, "CUFI stands apart from the historic Churches still present in the Holy Land." These churches for Palestinian Christians are "adversely affected by the policies supported by...CUFI." The NCC prelate blamed pro-Israel evangelicals in the U.S. for the plight of Palestinian churches, which are "diminishing and are threatened with extinction."
Of course, the NCC will never mention that Christian populations from throughout the Middle-East are declining, thanks largely to pressures from radical Islam. For the Religious Left, the Islamists themselves are never at fault but are merely the understandable consequence of endless Western oppressions dating to the Crusades. Almost hilariously, Kireopoulos frets about the de-emphasis on Jesus Christ by CUFI's pro-Israel evangelicals.
"The Christian Gospel is clear that salvation came through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ," Kireopoulos intoned. "To supplement this message is to prevert the Gospel" that CUFI claims to preach. Naturally, the NCC and the Religious Left prefer not to mention inconvenient topics such as the resurrection of Christ in their various outreaches to Muslims. In fact, the Resurrection, which for leftist Protestants is typically just a poetic metaphor for social justice, is not a topic on which the NCC typically focuses.
Just as the NCC is almost never interested in persecuted Christians anywhere, except when the supposed perpetrators are Israel and its American evangelical supporters, so too the NCC will not usually cite the Resurrection, except as a polemic against both Israel's Jews and their Christians friends.
Okay, your post really confused me. Are you saying that the NCC is a valid representation of Christianity? So many of these groups are neo-pagan who use “Christian” for leverage. They don’t agree with the Bible or the ancient creeds, or any basic definition of Christianity.
I’m not sure what your definitions of “chr*stianity” and “Biblical Fundamentalists” are either. I thought you were saying one thing, but your subsequent posts make it sound like something else. Can you help me understand what you are advocating?
John Philoponus has just identified the G-d of the TaNa"KH (the Bible) with Ba`al-Zevuv, the lord of the flies. He also attributed the authorship of parts of the Bible to this figure.
Unfortunately for Marcionites, the Jewish G-d created the universe and everything and everyone in it. Everyone's entire life is encoded within the Torah, which was actually written by G-d (whom JP identifies with Satan).
It is you, JP, and not I, who are a hater of G-d, and you are the one who will pay for it when you fall into His Hands.
The True G-d of the "Satanic" TaNa"KH (Bible) is the most beautiful, holy, and exalted being in existence, the author of all life, and "the King of the Kings of the Kings," and I will do my utmost to defend Him from blasphemy--whether by atheists, liberals, progressives, or miserable little heretics from a movement chr*stianity rejected centuries ago. "The spirit of everthing that lives will bless You, O L-rd!"
And please be aware that blasphemy is a capital offense.
John Philiponus is by his own admission influenced by Marcionism, an ancient chr*stian heresy that says the chr*stian "gxd" and the G-d of the Torah are two are two completely different beings. There is an old anti-Semitic, gnostic, and occultist tradition which identifies HaShem as Satan (chas vechalilah!), and JP seems to lean in that direction also.
Both the NCC and authentic traditional chr*stianity are anti-Israel and both despise Fundamentalist Protestants no only for their support of Jewish national restoration but also believing the Bible is totally inerrant. Traditional chr*stianity has long since turned against the Bible.
I’m not sure what your definitions of “chr*stianity” and “Biblical Fundamentalists” are either. I thought you were saying one thing, but your subsequent posts make it sound like something else. Can you help me understand what you are advocating?
I'm advocating that Fundamentalist Protestants leave chr*stianity (which they don't understand and which hates them) and instead embrace the true meaning of the TaNa"KH by becoming Noachides.
[The True G-d of the “Satanic” TaNa”KH (Bible) is the most beautiful, holy, and exalted being in existence, ....and I will do my utmost to defend Him from blasphemy”
And indeed you should defend the True God from blasphemy. It’s blasphemy to attribute to the True God half the things the Talmud and the Tanakh do. You can start by denying the True God could stoop so low as to sanction genocide against His own people : Exodus 32:25-29 (31,000 dead), Numbers 16:1-3, 23-25 (250 dead), Numbers 16:41-49 (14,700 dead), Numbers 25:1-9 (24,000 dead), Judges 20:15-21 (22,000 dead), Judges 20:23-25 (18,000 dead), Judges 20:28, 35-37, 46-48 (25,000 dead), 1 Chronicles 21:2-14 (70,000 dead). This is only against his own people! This says nothing of the total extermination of various Cannanite tribes, or my personal favorite 2 Kings 2:23-25 :
[From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. 25 And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.]
One of your God’s prophets calls down curses on children for taunting him, and your God obliges! Sick and disgusting. And you dare accuse me of blaspheming the True God?
And you explain Jesus going to temple in Jerusalem how?
To cleanse it (throwing out the money changers and stopping the animal sacrifices). Have you ever read what went on in that place before Jesus disrupted the services (both right before His crucifixion and then permanently when He foretold of it’s destruction)? The Talmud gives a full description and it’s like something straight from Paganism/Neo-Satanism.
stopped the animal sacrifices? even according to your writings in acts Paul didn't even do that. upon his arrival in Jerusalem before being arrested you'll remember he shaved his head and took the vow of a nazarite. which includes sacrificing a couple of turtle doves according to Torah. he did claim to be Jewish don't ya know.
Paul is a human being. In his moment of weakness he could have reverted to the old animal sacrifice rituals (they were going on for centuries and were an integral part of Judaism, the NT is full of examples of Apostles attempting to backslide to the barbaric rituals found in the Tanakh and described in the Torah). Old habits die hard. The bloodbath that went on in the Temple was legendary. The heave offerings (with each priest holding a severed part of the animal), the squeezing out of the blood from the offerings heart and spraying it over the alter. I’m sure God was pleased.
That should read “found in the Tanakh and described in the TALMUD”
Actually I was talking about before then. You might want to look at Luke 2:41-47 and Luke 4:16.
You didn’t even make it to the first chapter of Leviticus in your Bible study.
ah ok. The Paul was wrong defense. No prob. I happen to think he was wrong about most things.
Luke 2:41, He was 12 years old for God’s sake. For all we know He could have been asking them what use slaughtering animals and spraying their blood all over the alter has (how can an unthinking animal take on the sins of the offender offering up the sacrifice).
Luke 4:16, it just says here that He read a scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth. Unless I’m missing something here?
Not a problem, I happen to think that a good chunk of the Tanakh and the majority of the Talmud are directly from the mouth of Satan himself. See? We can agree to disagree, that’s the beauty of living in a free country. I’m not forcing my beliefs on you and I don’t hate you for being deceived by the Enemy. The NT itself says there will be a great falling away.
Whop dee friggin doo.
And what you totally fail to realize is that no human being can determine what is right and what is wrong (this is the essence of all liberalism). Right and wrong are determined by nothing other than arbitrary Divine decree. How dare a mere mortal sit in judgement on G-d! And thank you once againf or demonstrating the the chr*stian "gxd" appeals to liberals and rationalists!
And once again, anyone who claims the Jewish G-d is Satan (G-d forbid!) is a classic anti-Semite and doesn't belong on this forum.
Hi Zionist Conspirator, can you please ignore John and answer my honest questions?
[And once again, anyone who claims the Jewish G-d is Satan (G-d forbid!) is a classic anti-Semite and doesn’t belong on this forum.]
Wow, so you can trash Christianity and Christ himself, and it’s ok. But when I likewise register my disgust with the Tanakh and Talmud, I should be banned? Classic.
I don’t mind that you are through with me. It seems we’ll never agree on anything, and I don’t want this to get personal, seeing as I have nothing against you (I just don’t agree with your religious world view).
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