Cheap grace and American hedonism

Patrice Lewis stresses Christians' need to 'work in the vineyard'

" .  . .anyone who objected was intimidated into silence, including many churches. An exception was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who helped found the Confessing Church in Germany. Since he refused to be intimidated into silence, he was imprisoned, sent to a concentration camp and later executed.

"But his words live on, especially his searing analysis of what he called “cheap grace” where he rebukes nominal Christians: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

"Repentance is working in the vineyard. Discipline is working in the vineyard. This is God’s way, not our way. We can’t choose to do whatever we want as long as it feels good and expect to be rewarded for our decisions. We need repentance and discipline.

"Just some rambling thoughts on this Resurrection weekend. May you all be blessed by Jesus’ sacrifice."

Dancing with the Scars

HopeNChange Cartoons

"For the record, Hope n' Change wouldn't want any president of the United States to lose his cool and change his schedule in the face of every terrorist attack overseas. We would, however, like him to make a sincere show of sympathy, anger, resolute leadership and - oh yeah! -not act like a completely spineless dweeb when our allies are suffering and Americans have been injured and possibly killed.

"As a case in point, following the carnage in Brussels and the president's much-criticized appearance at a Cuban baseball game with new BFF Raul Castro, Obama (and his huge entourage) jetted off to Argentina  . . ."

Bill Clinton might look at this photo and think, "Man, next year that'll be me dancing with her!"

The beach in La Jolla; 1911

History Things

"Southern California has an amazing history. Now known for its beautiful topography and large cities, California has long been a crowded and expensive place to live. That wasn’t always the case. Long settled for a thousand years by native American tribes, California was first discovered by the outside world in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Spanish and soon claimed in her name. In 1891 it became part of Mexico till it was “liberated” in the Mexican-American war of 1848. It became the United States 31 state in 1850. The picture above shows that all the way till the early 1900’s, you could find more livestock on the beaches than people, a far cry from the modern California we know today."

CARLOS EIRE: OBAMA’S INGLORIOUS SPEECH

"The second context is the location where the speech was delivered, the so-called Great Theater of Havana, a building stolen from its proper owners and renamed to hide that fact. The Orwellian sleight-of-hand reified by the building’s new name mirrored in many ways what was most significant about the speech: its contrived avoidance of historical facts and present-day realities."

 

Power Line
("NOTE: Interested readers will also want to check out Professor Eire’s “Theater of the absurd in Havana: Dissidents meet with the Great Visitor.' ”)

"Carlos Eire is professor of history at Yale and author of the National Book Award-winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. At Babalú Blog Professor Eire wrote a proposed speech for President Obama in Havana that was posted as“The speech never given, the op-ed never published”.  . . ."Seeking the opinion of Professor Eire on the speech Obama actually gave, I invited him to comment on it for Power Line readers. Professor Eire has graciously responded with the essay below; we are grateful to Professor Eire for the opportunity to publish his thoughts on the speech. Professor Eire writes:"

. . . "In Obama’s thinly disguised Marxist narrative there is a constant dialectic between an imperialist power (the United States) and an unjustly exploited subaltern (Cuba), and in this poisoned relationship, the United States is responsible for most of Cuba’s ills.

"The exploitation, said Obama, began with the Spanish-American War: “The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island — to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba.”

"After that, with “control” over Cuba, the United States could not help but behave very badly. “Before 1959,” said Obma, “ some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.”

"This is pure Castroite propaganda, which all Cubans born after 1959 have had force-fed to them as “history.” And in this false “history,” of course, it is always assumed that the Castro are the heroes who rescued Cubans from all of the exploitation.

"That an American president should parrot such lies tells us a lot about the character of such a president, and the real-world value of his speech to the enslaved Cuban people." . . .

A Gentle Reminder On Who We’re Voting Against

Earl of Taint

Hat tip to American Thinker

Krauthammer: Obama’s ideological holiday in Havana

Charles Krauthammer  "The split-screen told the story: on one side, images of the terror bombing in Brussels; on the other, Barack Obama doing the wave with Raul Castro at a baseball game in Havana. 

"On one side, the real world of rising global terrorism. On the other, the Obama fantasy world in which romancing a geopolitically insignificant Cuba — without an ounce of democracy or human rights yielded in return — is considered a seminal achievement of American diplomacy.

"Cuba wasn’t so much a legacy trip as a vanity trip, vindicating the dorm-room enthusiasms of one’s student days when the Sandinistas were cool, revolution was king and every other friend had a dog named Che.

"When Brussels intervened, some argued that Obama should have cut short his trip and come back home. I disagree. You don’t let three suicide bombers control the itinerary of the American president. Moreover, Obama’s next stop, Argentina, is actually important and had just elected a friendly government that broke from its long and corrupt Peronist past.

"Nonetheless, Obama could have done without the baseball. What kind of message does it send to be yukking it up with Raul even as Belgian authorities are picking body parts off the floor of the Brussels airport?" . . .

OBAMA: 'There's Little Difference Between Communism and Capitalism'...

"Just choose from what works"

. . . "For a more accurate breakdown of how capitalism beats socialism every time, watch the video below." . . .

Infowars  "President Obama has stoked controversy after he suggested to an audience of Argentinian youth that there was no great difference between communism and capitalism and that they should just “choose from what works”."

“ 'So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate,” Obama said.

“ 'Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it really fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works,” he added.

"Obama went on to praise Cuba’s socialist system under dictator Raúl Castro, touting the country’s free access to basic education and health care, although he acknowledged that Havana itself “looks like it did in the 1950s” because the economy is “not working”.

"Obama concluded his comments by arguing that a market-based system “has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis”.

"Reaction to the remarks wasn’t pretty." . . .
Tell me again, why is this man at the top of the presidential popularity list?

Why do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believe they know more about Islam than Muslim clerics?

"When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up."

Andrew C. McCarthy  "One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

"I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?". . .  

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. A graduate of Columbia College, he received his J.D. at New York Law School. For 18 years, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and from 1993-95 he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s command post near Ground Zero. He has also served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an adjunct professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and New York Law School. He writes widely for newspapers and journals including National Review, PJ Media, and The New Criterion, and is the author of several books, including Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotages America.

The Theology of Donald Trump

Michael Horton

"Four words that reveal what his followers really believe."

"I am not a politician, but a minister who teaches theology. As a citizen of this great republic, I have convictions about domestic and foreign policy, but none of that qualifies me to join the fray of political experts and pundits. I am qualified, however, to engage the topic of significant support among self-identified “evangelical voters” for Donald Trump and what this means, not for the country but what it suggests about significant segments of the US church.

"While a theological analysis of other candidates would suggest many equally troubling assumptions of their evangelical followers, no candidate is more identified with the word evangelical as is Trump. The loyalty of his self-identified evangelical followers is especially startling to many.

A more recent exponent of a feel-good gospel, Joel Osteen, has called Donald Trump “a friend of our ministry” and “a good man.” Trump has previously tweeted, “Being associated with Joel is my great honor—he’s a fantastic man!”So when in recent months, it has appeared that Trump appeals to a sizable group of evangelicals, it may be less surprising than all the hoopla suggests. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. hailed him as “one of the greatest visionaries of our time” and a wonderful Christian brother “who reminds me of my dad.” The redoubtable Pat Robertson gushed in an interview with the empire-builder, “You inspire us all.” Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, who has introduced Trump at rallies, says, “We need a strong leader and a problem-solver, hence many Christians are open to a more secular candidate.” . . .

Well, Trump does like both Old and New Testaments equally, and he can find Two Corinthians in the Bible. Somewhere. 

James Comey and Loretta Lynch Hold the Whole Country in Their Hands

Roger L. Simon  "The leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination is under investigation by the FBI on two basic tracks.

"The first is for national security violations regarding her grossly negligent use of a private email server and unsecured BlackBerry (when traveling abroad!) for all her official business as secretary of state, including housing 22 emails on the server deemed so "top secret" that the State Department has refused to make them public.. . . 

"The second, perhaps even more serious, malfeasance is various crimes related to what is popularly known as influence-peddling performed by then-Secretary of State Clinton with foreign nationals and officials in connection with her multi-million, possibly billion, dollar family foundation.  . . .

"This is far and away the most important issue of election 2016. All others pale compared to it. How our government -- FBI and DOJ -- resolves this investigation will affect the very backbone of our country: the rule of law. " . . .

Yet there are those even in the GOP who would possibility vote for Hillary

Wait For The Meaningless Platitudes In The Aftermath Of The Latest Terrorist Attack

"But don’t get too unsettled there is still cause for optimism and hope (not!) – at least the Eiffel Tower is going to get decked out in the Belgian Flag! Of course such a token gesture will be about as effective as the “Je Suis Charlie” nonsense that followed the Paris attacks."

Noisy Room

"Above: Solutions to terror? Eiffel Tower to be lit up in colours of Belgian Flag. What a relief!

"Some people will say this latest attack is unbelievable, and will be asking questions such as why us? The usual platitudes and meaningless twaddle will be doing the rounds. Once the dust has settled the usual media talking heads will be wheeled out, disseminating disinformation and blaming the West.

"The reality is that this latest attack is not unbelievable. This despicable act of terror is believable, inevitable and predictable. Western leaders just don’t get it! The way things are going there will end up being a Europe-wide intifada and the foolish and inept political leaders will still be scratching their stupid heads.

"In his latest platitude, France’s fool in charge Francois Hollande has declared: ‘The fight against terror will be long’. Platitude aside, he’s got that completely wrong. Even if we accept that we are at war with terror, a tactic, the war we’re in will not be long. Thanks to the policies of people like Hollande and his ilk, and his EU, the war will be short and it unfortunately will bring down the Western World just as its perpetrators and enablers intend!" . . .

Remember: this election is mainly about Supreme Court justices!

"If we are going to put Washington on trial this election . . . then the Supreme Court should be at the top of the list, although with the federal bench generally and the hordes of lawyers who feast at our expense on this rotted system."

Make the Supreme Court an Election Issue   . . . "Most nauseating is the spectacle of pundits asking politicians running for federal offices if they will follow "the law of the land" – meaning the decision of the Supreme Court – although all legislative power is granted to Congress, and all power not granted to Congress is reserved to the states.  It is bad enough when regulatory agencies and presidents make law by order.  

"When federal courts do it, then Congress is simply an empty vessel, lacking real power, although it represents the interests of the governed as expressed through elections.

"Why not use the debate over Obama's nomination to the Supreme Court to assert that federal judges do not have the power to interpret the Constitution, void federal laws, or intrude into the rights of state governments?  Why not argue in this election that voters and their elected representatives say what the Constitution means and that the opinions of judges cannot overrule the people and their representatives?  If we are going to put Washington on trial this election – and we should – then the Supreme Court should be at the top of the list, although with the federal bench generally and the hordes of lawyers who feast at our expense on this rotted system." . . .