Posted on 08/21/2012 3:36:01 AM PDT by markomalley
My friend the great Fr. George Welzbacher, one of the five smartest people I know, issues weekly a “Pastor’s Page” in his parish bulletin (he is 84 and still pastor of a parish) which always deserve a close read. They are not your typical “pastor’s pages”.
This week this is what he offered. You can find all his pages HERE at the site of the parish.
Pastor’s Page
By Fr. George Welzbacher
August 19, 2012It would seem that, for the first time in the history of our republic, we are witnessing here in the U.S.A. the establishment of a state religion, a religion so crafted as to delight the heart of a secularist, a religion with clearly defined dogmas, compliance with whose demands is to be enforced with all of the coercive powers at the disposal of the federal government. Here are the dogmas of this new faith.
Dogma #1: A woman has the right, the unrestricted right, to make arrangements for the killing of her unborn child whenever such course of action is convenient. [I would add that abortion thereby becomes a sacrament. Shades of Moloch.]
Dogma #2: The chief purpose served by the institution of marriage is the securing of social recognition for romantic attraction, together with the panoply of benefits accruing to such recognition. The begetting of children, together with such subsequent upbringing as will equip them to contribute responsibly to the society in which they will spend their lives, can be dismissed as of marginal importance. Thus every man, should this be his bent, has the right to marry another man, just as every woman, should she be so disposed, has the right to marry a woman. To suggest otherwise, to imply, for example, that a man’s realigning of his reproductive powers to adapt to another man’s digestive tract is in any way abnormal is to be guilty of a hate crime, in exculpation of which no appeal to the rights of conscience shall be allowed, this being an intolerable crime, properly punishable with fines and/or imprisonment.
Dogma #3: The sovereign pontiff in this new state religion is the people’s hero, Barack Hussein, now reigning gloriously in the White House. [Anti-Catholic, pro-abortion, against the 1st and 2nd Amendments (to begin with): The First Gay President.]
Dogma #4: Enemy Number One of the new state religion is, by and large, the Christian faith and, with special intransigence, the Catholic Church. Measures must accordingly be taken to compel the recusant authorities of the Roman Catholic faith to genuflect at the new religion’s altar. (Thus the new Health and Human Services mandate).
* * * * *
All of this represents at least one way of looking at President Obama’s arrogant trampling upon the First Amendment, not to mention his repudiation of God’s Commandments. A formally different but compatible “take” was recently offered by the political commentator Yuval Levin in an essay published in that excellent journal of opinion, The National Review. In his analysis of Mr. Obama’s attack on traditional religion and freedom of conscience Mr. Levin begins by citing the early nineteenth century French political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains to this day a much admired, much consulted and much quoted classic.
In explaining America’s unique vitality and strength, Tocqueville assigns special importance to the vast proliferation of VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS of every imaginable type that channel human energy towards productive ends and stand as a kind of buffer, a PROTECTIVE SCREEN, between the individual citizen and the overreaching state. Mr. Levin argues that the grand aim of the Obama administration has been the systematic demolition of that buffer, that protective shield of free associations, among which first and foremost are the religious groups, America’s churches and synagogues and other God-centered associations.
Here (abridged to accommodate our restrictions of space) is what Mr. Levin has to say.
Due to the marvels of the interwebs, I don’t have to restrict anything. Instead I can simply link you to Yuval Levin’s original article, The Hollow Republic.
Dead on.
After laying out his plans to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the president said this to his audience:
You know, there are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, Well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, “You know what, there’s some things we do better together.” That’s how we funded the GI Bill, that’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet, that’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for president, because I still believe in that idea: You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
This remarkable window into the president’s thinking shows us not only a man chilly toward the potential of individual initiative, and not only a man deluded about the nature of his opponents and their views, but also (and perhaps most important) a man with a staggeringly thin idea of common action in American life.
The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.
But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom. Obama’s remarks in Virginia shed a bright light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more disconcerting.
Again and again, the administration has sought to hollow out the space between the individual and the state. Its approach to the private economy has involved pursuing consolidation in key industries — privileging a few major players that are to be treated essentially as public utilities, while locking out competition from smaller or newer firms. This both ensures the cooperation of the large players and makes the economy more manageable and orderly. And it leaves no one pursuing ends that are not the government’s ends. This has been the essence of the administration’s policies toward automakers, health insurers, banks, hospitals, and many others.
It is an attitude that takes the wealth-creation capacity of our economy for granted, treats the chaotic churning and endless combat of competing firms (which in fact is the source of that capacity) as a dangerous distraction from essential public goals, and considers the business world to be parasitic on society — benefiting from the infrastructure and resources provided by the genuine common action of the state. Of course, the state’s benevolence is made possible precisely by the nation’s wealthiest citizens, but the president seems to see that as simply an appropriate degree of “giving something back.” His words and his administration’s actions imply that he views the government as the only genuine tribune of public desires, and therefore seeks to harness the private economy to the purposes and goals of those in power.
This intolerance of nonconformity is even more powerfully evident in the administration’s attitude toward the institutions of civil society, especially religious institutions involved in the crucial work of helping the needy and vulnerable. In a number of instances, but most notably in the controversy surrounding the Department of Health and Human Services rule requiring religious employers to provide free abortive and contraceptive drugs to their employees under Obamacare, the administration has shown an appalling contempt for the basic right of religious institutions to pursue their ends in accordance with their convictions.
I’m guessing this church will be getting an IRS audit soon.
Audit? That’s not news.
Perhaps an abuse charge or something more spectacular.
This administration has taken the art of Sovietization to a frightening level.
More and more people are stating the obvious: they are now afraid of their own government.
The state religion is government.
Wrong Fr., but close. The new state religion is worship of the Black man; Barry the Fraud is really just a symptom of the religion, not the source. The Black man is the new God-Man replacing Christ; women and other peoples of color are the angels; and the White Christian man is the devil. It’s not being Christian that makes Chick-fil-a a target, it’s being a White Christian man.
The tenets of this state religion must be faithfully mouthed and followed in order to conduct business, teach, assemble, and hold public office.
________________________________________________
Thou shalt accept all manner of sexual deviance as equally valid to biblical, heterosexual marriage.
Thou shalt accept as morally superior the teachings of socialism and tithe unto it 50% of earnings and property.
Thou shalt sacrifice unborn children on the altar of tolerance.
Christians shalt not hold their own God above that of the state. Christians shalt practice only those teachings that do not conflict with Secular Humanism, as Christianity is not immunized by the sacrament of multiculturalism.
Thou shalt bow down to Secular Humanism and serve it, for it is a jealous belief, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the hundredth generation of them that do not serve it.
Thou shalt accept that all people are deserving of equal outcomes and that women and those descended from African Negroes require lower standards and special consideration to be equal.
False witness is only allowable in the furtherance of the religion.
Speaking and teaching against the religion is intolerable blasphemy, yea it be known as hate speech, and punished by all manner of social and legal redresses.
Thou shalt not covet the fruit of thine own labors.
Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote or Presidential decree, wherein those being liberated of their goods shalt be known as the rich, and their bounty as a fair share.
Uhhh not so much sparky. Some of the founders gave it a shot and decided against it.
You have a point. Other demographics are easily rustled around by phony christian “clergy” like Jackson and Sharpton. Therefore their religion is tolerated.
A few years ago I heard Rush read an article (by someone) about how environmentalism was essentially the religion of the Left. I wish I could remember the author; it was an excellent summation on how they’ve substituted so many elements of traditional Judeo-Christian tradition into their beliefs — for example, if you don’t recycle you’re guilty of “sin”; if you don’t “repent” we’ll all be destroyed in the “fire” of global warming, etc. Really wish I could remember the author.
The individual has no value except as a drone for the state.
From La Civiltà Cattolica -predicted by words of Louis Veuillot
“Now I have demonstrated one hundred times in the course of these articles that pagan civilization is a regression for humanity, its liberty entailing the most shameful slavery and the liquidation of the human personality, absorbed by the omnipotence of the God-State. Therefore, even without my saying it, anyone can see by himself that modern liberalism, under the fiction of promoting liberty, tends to destroy it; under the shadow of desiring progress, it desires barbarism….It is not aversion to liberty or sympathies for despotism that lead the Church to fight their wicked efforts….Rather it is the love it feels for true liberty, its native repugnance for all kinds of despotism, the mission it has from God to save the personal independence of man that inspires it, and urges it to such a battle.”- Louis Veuillot
Dogma #1: A woman has the right, the unrestricted right, to make arrangements for the killing of her unborn child whenever such course of action is convenient. [I would add that abortion thereby becomes a sacrament. Shades of Moloch.]
Dogma #2: The chief purpose served by the institution of marriage is the securing of social recognition for romantic attraction, together with the panoply of benefits accruing to such recognition. The begetting of children, together with such subsequent upbringing as will equip them to contribute responsibly to the society in which they will spend their lives, can be dismissed as of marginal importance. Thus every man, should this be his bent, has the right to marry another man, just as every woman, should she be so disposed, has the right to marry a woman. To suggest otherwise, to imply, for example, that a man’s realigning of his reproductive powers to adapt to another man’s digestive tract is in any way abnormal is to be guilty of a hate crime, in exculpation of which no appeal to the rights of conscience shall be allowed, this being an intolerable crime, properly punishable with fines and/or imprisonment.
Dogma #3: The sovereign pontiff in this new state religion is the people’s hero, Barack Hussein, now reigning gloriously in the White House. [Anti-Catholic, pro-abortion, against the 1st and 2nd Amendments (to begin with): The First Gay President.]
Dogma #4: Enemy Number One of the new state religion is, by and large, the Christian faith and, with special intransigence, the Catholic Church. Measures must accordingly be taken to compel the recusant authorities of the Roman Catholic faith to genuflect at the new religion’s altar. (Thus the new Health and Human Services mandate).
Wrong Fr., but close. The new state religion is worship of the Black man; Barry the Fraud is really just a symptom of the religion, not the source. The Black man is the new God-Man replacing Christ; women and other peoples of color are the angels; and the White Christian man is the devil. It’s not being Christian that makes Chick-fil-a a target, it’s being a White Christian man.
They chose barry the gay to lead in their fight to replace God with men ( meaning them ).
The fact is they did not think a black man would be smart enough to pull off what this gay guy has done so that is why they chose a half white and half black man to do the job.
Personally, i doubt there are very many real black men that would stoop as low as this gay guy has done to deliberately screw things up so bad.
I admit i don,t know who they are so i will just call them the masked men but i believe there are a lot of them and i would bet they are mostly white, not your or my kind of white, but white just the same.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Anonymous-God-Confronts-Religion/dp/0758608195
Yes it is an LCMS book, but many of the issues raised are not limited to the LCMS.
In short, we do have a state religion. You are not going to like what type it is.
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