Irresponsible VT news coverage

April 18, 2007

By Dave Petteys (dpetteys@comcast.net)

It’s unseemly to be holding candle light vigils and to be squabbling over memorials even before the bodies are cold, to say nothing of the tedious 24 hour TV news coverage. But the most outrageous is the national airing of the demented killer’s diatribe!

It is a fact that in sports TV, cameras will NOT cover a streaker should one jump out and dash across a basketball court or baseball field. Why? To discourage others from following suit! Should not this common sense precept be applied to VA Tech style situations as well? The message the media is sending: “if you want your views broadcast nationwide, all you have to do is make a video tape last will and testament and create mayhem!” The killer did follow the publicized Hamas example to a tee.

If the Columbine count was around 15 and the VA Tech count was around 30, does this mean that the next number in the series needs to be 60 in order to get on TV news?

Freedom of speech does have a dimension of responsibility, something the media has apparently cast aside for expediency.

Can America recover its sense of mission?

By Hilmar von Campe (institute4@gulftel.com) It is about time that America and the Western world go back to their roots in order to understand the nature of our organized enemies, and in order to defeat them. Such enemies include the Islamic terrorists. The shallowness of our so-called leaders is appalling in that they do not acknowledge this necessity.

Christian teachings include the concept that mankind’s history is a moving process which culminates in the second coming of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Eschatology is the doctrine concerning the ‘last things’ – the final consummation of God’s purposes in creation and the final destination of individual souls and all of humanity.

This Christian concept was stolen by the fabricators of materialistic ideologies who replaced the divine link to eternity with a secular culmination in their hate-driven ideologies. The National Socialists, generally called Nazis, had a vision of a German national community and a world run by the master race – themselves. The final destination for international socialists, the communist Marxist-Leninists, was defined as a global Socialist and classless society which, however, would be a totalitarian system run by godless functionaries. The destination of radical Islam is a Muslim world where the Muftis rule and no other religion exists. Those who kill unbelievers refusing to convert to Islam are promised awards in paradise.

Followers of these three godless ideologies consider themselves part of a process in which they change the direction of history to reach the final destination. They are groomed to invest their whole existence and life into achieving victory for their ideology. This is also a perversion of the Christian teaching that Almighty God wants the whole person and not just some part.

The West has lost the concept that history is meant to be a movement of humanity toward God. It has eliminated Christian teachings as irrelevant for the political process and has reduced the Christian message to a purely personal affair. American like Western Christians love their comfort and do not want to risk their existence. Western nations and their political and religious leaders therefore do not understand the purpose and motives of their ideological enemies, nor do they understand their mindset. They have their own mindset and mistakenly assume that others think as they do. They don't!

This ignorance leads to dangerous political concepts like believing that we have won the cold war and the Russians now are our democratic allies. The reality, however, is different. Gorbachev, Putin, Yeltsin and all the others are the same dedicated communists as always but have only put democratic labels on their outside.

Similarly fatal is to believe that the Arabic Palestians are the real owners of the land which is “occupied” by Israel, and that peace will be achieved if they get their own government and are given more of “their” land. Ownership and “occupation” is the other way around, Arabls live on land which already thousands of years ago was part of an Israeli state.

Even more dangerous for America is the attempt to form a North American Community. It would destroy our sovereignty and uniqueness, make us a multicultural country with economic reasoning and cripple our mission to carry freedom to the last corner of the world. It is that task which links this nation to the historic movement of humanity toward God. But it needs more than military power.

Freedom without the absolute truth of God as a standard cannot last. Liars are on the wrong side of the ideological battleline. The battle for freedom must be the battle for truth to defeat the power of the lies penetrating our society.

That is the reason why Christians must enter into the ideological, political and moral battle for America, beginning with making the family again the center of our society. Pastor Thomas Merton pointed out that a person “who has meditated on the Passion of Christ but has not meditated on the extermination camps of Dachau and Auschwitz has not yet fully entered into the experience of Christianity in our time.” Author Richard J. Foster comments that this kind of meditation is best accomplished with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Amen! ------------------------------------ Hilmar von Campe is a former Hitler Youth and soldier in the German army. In America he founded The National Institute for Truth and Freedom. http://www.voncampe.com/

Not too late, say Easter believers

By John Andrews (andrewsjk@aol.com) Too late? No, it’s still early. The story is far from over. That’s the good news for a weary world, as Jesus’ followers once again commemorate his crucifixion and resurrection at Passover time two millenia ago. Time and again in this greatest of all dramas, the early returns were overturned. Think about it:

On Palm Sunday Christians remembered their Lord’s triumphal entry to Jerusalem where David once reigned. Was this the long-awaited liberator from foreign oppression? That early hope soon faded. By Good Friday, “King of the Jews” was only a mocking insult on the criminal’s cross where Christ died. But the early reactions that night, his disciples’ defeat and his enemies’ elation, were not the last word either. On Easter morning the tomb was empty and the report was: “He is risen.”

Even then the early expectations didn’t hold. Claims that Jesus’ body was stolen, the authorities’ attempt at a coverup, collapsed when he appeared to hundreds of eyewitnesses. On the other hand, his followers’ hunch that the end times were near didn’t prove out either. History went on and still does. Good and evil still battle, hope and hardship still contend.

But all to what purpose? As Holy Week comes round anew with the spring moon, repeating the cycle of 20 long centuries, skeptics feel justified in asking what’s different, what’s better after all these aeons of religion? Believers in turn feel, or ought to feel, the burden of proof in our assertion that the best is yet to come – it’s still early.

We begin the proof by noting that human experience has a story line. History is not, as some wag said, just one darn thing after another. What’s better in our day because Jesus died and rose in Caesar’s day, say Christians, is that forgiveness and love are in the world more fully. New beginnings are in the world; new life for persons who thought they were at a dead end.

Christ’s followers have a woefully uneven record of living out this promise. Yet he keeps fulfilling it himself, in spite of us. And he does so for the most unlikely people. Even as this suffering servant hung on the cross, when everyone watching thought it was too late, he showed it was still early – speaking with authority to redeem a thief, give his grieving mother a new son, and even forgive his murderers.

The unconditional love that Jesus of Nazareth lavishes on everyone, everyone, is the hardest thing about him for me to imitate, I’ll tell you for sure. The political opponents my column sometimes harshly condemns? He’s fine with them. Marxists and Islamofascists? He cherishes each one personally, err as they may. I am shamed by his gentle patience with each atheist, his tender heart toward each illegal alien.

My Lord is so far ahead of me in the forgiveness department that I blush to call myself one of his men; still I stumble on in his footsteps. He was harder on religious hypocrites than government hacks, tougher on temple profiteers than slum-dwelling prostitutes. Who knew? If we who claim to be his church don’t find ourselves startled and chastened by him every single day, we’d best wake up.

A second chance, a fresh start, a clean slate, the last made first, a new ballgame in the ninth, a God who believes in you even if you don’t believe in him – it sounds crazy, but that’s what Easter means. Yes, the Cross is foolishness, said Paul; but it’s also salvation. For all of us fools who thought it was too late, check the calendar. Holy Week this year began with April Fool’s – plenty early for everything a surprising Savior has in store.

Gooney birds of the intellectual elite

By Dave Petteys (dpetteys@comcast.net) The self-styled intellectual elite are like tropical birds. They sit on their perches in the newsrooms, universities, and magazine editorial offices. They squawk and groom their plumage, believing they are the cutting edge center of the world. But are they?

What I see is an intellectual aviary, confined by almost invisible nets of political correctness. The birds fancy themselves free as they screech and flutter from branch to branch. But they subconsciously know the nets forbid many branches, nets to which they have grown so accustomed, they no longer even see them.

These birds caw, flap their wings and land in unison and excrete on the branches of what they call American empire, the President, and Christianity.

Or they chirp continually about the new Global Warming faith.

Though they say they champion “Freedom”, they refuse to look at the freedom of the Venezuelan people as it is destroyed before their very eyes. Nor can they bring themselves to admit that Castro’s Cuba is the ruthless dictatorship that it is.

The malfeasance and hypocrisy of minority Civil Rights leaders are completely ignored.

Nor will they face up to Radical Islam, since it has fraudulently positioned itself as a persecuted non-Christian minority.

The American people are patient: and wise. But as these brightly colored birds continually bite their keepers, they only hasten the day they are turned out. Outside their Manhattan, University and Left Coast zoos, could they even feed themselves?

Memo to Merrifield on heaven & hell

By Dave Crater (crater@wilberforcecenter.org)

“But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” - Revelation 21:8

“And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell.” - Christ, Luke 12:4-5

“Meantime, down here it looks as if our so-called board will vote to turn over Hunt Elem[entary] to C. Chavez for a charter before the evil twins are forced out by recall!! There must be a special place in Hell for these Privatizers, Char[t]erizers, and Voucherizers! They deserve it!” - Former Colorado House Education Committee Chairman Mike Merrifield (D-Manitou Springs), email to Sen. Sue Windels 12/8/06

Rep. Merrifield is in august company: the Apostle John, exiled on the island of Patmos toward the end of the late-first century reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, and Jesus Christ. Talk of hell flows so naturally from the lips of all three.

So does the specific naming of those who stand to be so consigned. Merrifield even capitalizes the surrogate names of his condemned to emphasize their lostness.

The Apostle John, earlier in the Book of Revelation, foreshadows the writings of the Prophet Merrifield by himself forecasting the appearance of a pair who would be thought evil by their generation, but who are righteous ambassadors of God Himself (Rev. 11:10).

The implication is that the appearance of evil to their generation is a result not of the pair’s own evil, but of the evil in the hearts of the generation around them, who as a result view the uprightness of the pair with a jaundiced, unjust eye.

Why would hell occupy such a prominent place in Mr. Merrifield’s thought? The public education establishment to which he is, er, religiously committed, certainly does not teach the existence of such a place. Neither does it teach the existence of heaven.

Both, according to the secular ideology prevailing among Mr. Merrifield’s heroes and allies, are figments of the human imagination – vestiges of folklore from a less enlightened age. Human beings are, we now know, descendants via Darwin’s natural selection of a primordial single-cell organism, but they can go to hell? If so, it is incumbent on Mr. Merrifield to support the addition of robust teaching on hell to our public school curricula – the future of our children demands it. After all, they could very well grow up to be Privatizers, Charterizers, and Voucherizers, guilty of filthiness beyond any hope of forgiveness, their priceless souls lost to the sinister rebellion of those opposing the very Kingdom of God on the earth and her Faithful Stewards in the Public School System.

A particular curiosity on this score is that at least one of the “evil twins” Mr. Merrifield condemns, Mr. Eric Christen of Colorado Springs, also believes in hell. In fact, much of Mr. Christen’s energy while a member of the District 11 School Board in Colorado Springs was devoted to restoring at least a vestige of spiritual context to a public education district that costs residents of the city upward of $300 million a year and delivers test scores among the lowest in the state. Mr. Christen suggested that a little less attention to secular fads and power politics in education and a little more attention to the ancient idea that we humans and our children are spirits, living life on a short and precarious precipice between good and evil, time and eternity, heaven and hell, might better inform and deepen the whole project.

Oh, and the idea that we humans and our children are spirits also means that the state and its public schools are not the only legitimate stewards of education.

Mr. Merrifield opposes this agenda with, er, religious zeal, even consigning Mr. Christen to hell for supporting it. One can imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth that would have arisen in Mr. Merrifield’s circle of acquaintances, and in the larger political and media class, had Mr. Christen suggested that Mr. Merrifield and Co. have helped turn the latest generation of public school children into unbelieving murderers (Columbine) who are more and more sexually immoral with each passing year (teen pregnancy, abortion, and STDs), dabble not uncommonly in occult spirituality (sorcery), and who easily become accomplished in lying to parents, teachers, and anyone else in legitimate authority over them. Had he said this, we can be certain Mr. Christen would have cemented his already-advanced condemnation beyond even the faintest hope of salvation.

Mr. Merrifield is the worst kind of hypocrite. He uses secular theory and secular language in public to advocate a thoroughly secular education for children under the stewardship of a thoroughly secular education establishment, but uses the most severe religious language in private and when caught, contends in his own defense that he never meant that language to become public.

The episode ought to be instructive for all those who authentically entertain deep convictions about heaven and hell, and who have read the Apocalypse with real understanding. When Christ said elsewhere, “Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned,” He was not, as we are so often told by the political left today, contradicting His own teaching on hell and who would end up there, or contending that just judgment between good and evil, wisdom and folly, is not the prerogative of humankind. On the contrary, He was warning us to be on the alert for, and to avoid being like, those who condemn while they themselves do things worthy of condemnation.

Dave Crater is President and Chairman of the Wilberforce Center for Colorado Statesmanship