Those gifts produced a faith and a love, renewed every Easter for the last two thousand years, that have transformed the world. In spite of the flaws of many individuals who struggled to live up to the transcendent love of God and Jesus, the victory of the eternal love of the resurrection has never been lost.
“The Epiphany of Zebediah Clump” won best “Short Narrative” film, on Sunday, October 7, 2012, at the closing ceremonies of the 3rd Annual Portland Maine Film Festival. The film was written, directed and edited by Peter Falkenberg Brown, a Portland native. The short was Brown’s first film and his directorial and acting debut, starring as Zebediah Clump.
But I was profoundly disappointed and shocked to discover a growing anti-Semitism in the ranks of patriotic conservatives. It caught me by surprise. I did a double-take when I read the words of conservatives blithely stating that a cabal of Jews and the nation of Israel were responsible for just about everything “bad in the world.” I said, “What? What did I just read?”
That freedom applies to all men and women of every race. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not preach hatred toward whites or blacks or any other race, but instead timelessly affirmed that the value of every human being was based on their individual spirit and character. In Dr. King’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he stated...
The Chinese Communist Party is committed to its growth of power at any cost, even if hundreds of millions die. The Epoch Times reported that sometime before 2003, then-Defense Minister Chi Haotian gave a speech to CCP leaders in which he stated:
The forces of freedom are scattered and disorganized. They are attacked across the globe by a foe that seems unstoppable. For more than a hundred years, the Marxist Left has planned and schemed for the downfall of Western civilization and has created armies of devotees that move in lockstep, fueled by the passions of anti-love.
Thus, if it violates our personal morality when someone tries to enslave us, it must then follow that it is immoral for us to enslave anyone else. Can we each admit that this is true? It should seem so, but the reality of enslavement reveals a great divide in the human race. Slavery takes many forms but all of them exist because of an emotional and spiritual deficit in the hearts of the perpetrators and their supporters.
The title of this essay may seem outrageous to some, but I contend that thoughtful, freedom-loving individuals must consider this topic carefully, or indeed, a world of peace and freedom will not grow or be maintained. I’ve written this article for those who know very little about Islam and may not have given this topic any thought until now. For others, bear with me as I attempt to follow a logical path to what I believe is an inevitable conclusion.
In the last three years since Joe Biden was sworn in as President, large numbers of liberals have come to realize that the fanatical members of the hard-left are not their friends, and more specifically, are not the friends of liberty. These liberals have found unexpected common ground with conservatives and yes—even Trump supporters.
I’m not referring to “good-hearted Muslims.” I’m talking about the Muslims who ran the slave trade in Africa, who invaded country after country, turning Christian countries into Muslim ones---by the brutal power of the sword. Check the webpage “The Tears of Jihad,” which documents that Islam has killed over 270 million civilians in the last 1,400 years.
Slavery is the dividing line. The CCP might say that they don’t practice slavery, but enslaving an entire society under a totalitarian system of oppression fits the bill. It’s not just China, of course. North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela, and every other repressive regime in the world can be succinctly labeled as a country of “illegitimate slavers.”
When humans are enslaved or dominated by others, darkness spreads from heart to heart. Yet nothing—nothing at all—can extinguish the light of God that dwells in every human. It is the permanence of the presence of God that offers humanity real and substantial hope in a world that would otherwise descend into tyranny and hell.
The 2021 Global Estimates indicate a total of 6.3 million people are in situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day. This number includes 1.7 million children in commercial sexual exploitation, about a quarter of the total. Gender is a critical determining factor – nearly four out of every five of those trapped in forced commercial exploitation are girls or women.
Those messages were given the weight of professorial documentation in the 1940s and ’50s, starting with Alfred C. Kinsey and Wardell B. Pomeroy. They co-authored the books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Their books have had an enormous impact on sex education professionals, to such a degree that we can accurately state...
Isn’t it safe to assume that YOU think love for others is a Good Thing? Most of us would say YES! Then the next logical step is to reject totalitarian oligarchs of every stripe. Reject the lies and power plays of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. Reject the dictatorial mandates of Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, George Soros, and any globalist who wants you to own nothing . . .
Vast numbers of people around the world, including millions of young people, are adrift in a sea of moral and ethical confusion. Many no longer find any value in religious or spiritual practices and have been unduly influenced by atheistic and humanistic ideologies that are harmful to individuals and to society.
In 2030 and in every year, we must be free. We must not be owned by anyone. Whether we believe in God as the source of our sacred freedoms or not, do we not all agree that each of us must reject the chains of every type of slavery?
If there is no God, and humans somehow evolved from a black and loveless void that had no moral compass, then humans, by definition, are simply animals competing to survive. A void of nothingness can not give birth to a timeless and transcendent set of ethics.
The primary reason is simple. It is valid to criticize anyone and anything because every person has the sacred, inviolable rights of free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, and many other rights that stem from those central concepts. If anyone says that you cannot criticize a person or a topic, then you must vigorously correct that person, for that way lies totalitarianism.
Tonight, I speak in defense of love and freedom. One might think that they need no defense, but tragically, love and freedom are continually under attack. If human beings fail to defend them both, they will lose them both, for they are inseparably intertwined.
You might wonder where Hades is, or what it is. It’s a classical term for what some of you clods call Hell, but we don’t like that term. It’s very bothering and offensive and Hell-phobic, so we’ve decided that you must use the term Hades. We think it might confuse you just a bit, which is always good.
If Democrats were accusing Republicans of fraud, the media would be trumpeting headlines that declared that the 2020 election was an act of treason and insurrection. They wouldn’t have needed to instigate a January 6th so-called “insurrection” so that they could block Trump and other Republicans from running based on the 14th Amendment.
Whatever the genesis of the "pandemic,"the guilty parties are the totalitarians at every level of society who acted against the principles of freedom.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as is typical of all dictatorships, excels at the destruction of the human soul and freedom. The CCP has done its best to make the world afraid of its power, but one tiny country recently said “no.”
With God as our ally and deepest soul mate, we can have confidence that our divinity will grow, fueled by our desire to give more and love more. As Emerson wrote, we can become “redeemers and benefactors.” We can become purveyors of joy and manifest the prayer, “The God in me greets the God in you.” The women in our lives will be overjoyed to watch us flower.
Therefore, let us call out to both pro-lifers and good-hearted pro-choice advocates to go back to the roots of the abortion debate and reexamine all of the premises upon which abortion has been made legal. If the founding assumptions are incorrect, the end result will be deeply flawed and even horrific, as we have seen with the laws and proposals mentioned above.
When I think about all of you, students attending universities where you cannot learn the real truth about the world, I remember the British author George Orwell, who wrote the novel 1984. I don’t think you know about him, but he also talked about the distortion of language and the term Newspeak—the dystopian society’s redefinition of words.
However, as The Emperor’s New Clothes illustrates, we feel pressure to go along with the crowd, even when our deeper wisdom tells us that the offered narrative violates logic, truth, and common sense. Our fear of being persecuted for rejecting a narrative can become intense when the supporters of the so-called truth exhibit an aggressive and violent contempt for those who disagree.
Who will stand to save America? Will you stand? Will your friends and family stand? Will your neighbors, your pastors, your teachers, your leaders step into the breach? Who will stand?
