Mike Spaulding
I live in flyover country as it is affectionately referred to by America’s aristocracy. The morally superior residents of the left and right coasts of America routinely verbalize their disdain for people like me for no other reason than the people who reside in the place I call home reject their foolish blathering as incoherent, irrational, and hypocritical. It seems that this attitude of moral superiority and the behavior that always accompanies it is creeping into the heartland.
A recent edition of the Lima News, the local Lima, Ohio newspaper, reported that Mayor David Berger participated in an event designed to help raise funding to support a Lima tradition of summer known as Square Fair. During the event Mayor Berger gave the “toast” which is a strange way of saying he offered a prayer. Here is the content of that toast as reported by the Lima News:
“To a city and people both smile on my fate. May our pains make us stronger and may our strengths make us great. To our parents and others who came on before, who paved from a swamp this great place we adore, then brought the world oil, locomotives and tanks, neon and engines, restaurants and banks. To the soldiers who fight in wars far from here may they know we continue to hold them all dear. May God guard their actions wherever they roam and see them return to the safety of home. To our children, who venture too far away. And to those, best of all who would venture to stay. May we leave them a city of which to be proud. May their happiness flourish and their riches abound. May their leaders be wise and their troubles be few and more than anything else, may their motives be true. And until such a time as we toil for today, may the Lord bless our efforts and keep trouble at bay. May she smile on this city, this county, this state, and most of all, on you people who help make them all great. To Lima. To Allen County. To Ohio and the USA and all who love her, here and away. Cheers.”[1]
Beyond the fact that this toast was a rambling mess, Mayor Berger made a major misstep in announcing that the Lord had morphed into a woman. Transgenderism in the heavenlies! This came as news to me. I do not subscribe to the Lima News and I do not have television in my home, but the news that our Lord Jesus was a woman was stunning! Why am I just now hearing this?
I am of course being sarcastic. Mayor Berger is one more example among hundreds of people who think that appealing to those in the avant-garde of cultural institutions is good politics.
It is not news that the full court press is on right now for the recognition of Gaia or Sophia as the true God. God is not male, God is female is the mantra of many professing Christians. Pagans have always thought of “Mother” Nature as a real entity, and ancient cultures were hot beds of feminine goddess worship. The point I am making here is that the mayor of a small Ohio community (population ~40,000) took the opportunity during a community fund raising event to declare his belief that Jesus is a she. That is noteworthy.
It is noteworthy in the least because it was a public announcement of didaskaliais daimonioen[2] (doctrines of demons). In 1 Timothy 4:1 the Apostle Paul tells a young Pastor named Timothy that “some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron…”
The methodology of the demonic world is being advanced in our day all across the world. The leftists on either coast as well as the Marxists who have taken over our universities and force fed our youth a feminized and warped fantasy they claim is western history, would be so proud of Mayor Berger for his theological evolution into being a mouthpiece for demons.
MUCH MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
The feminization of God has long been a goal of the various pagan groups around the world, including witches, radical feminists, and assorted New Age adherents. The number of seminars, conferences, workshops, and pagan events scattered around North America alone, attests to the explosion of Gaia/Goddess worship. The word Gaia derives from Greek mythology. She was thought to be the mother of the titans and goddesses of the earth. Goddess worship was prominent in the Greek and Roman empires and America’s youth are still able to learn these mythologies in school today.
It all seems harmless until you begin to investigate what the teaching of goddess worship actually entails. Author Philip G. Davis offers this evaluation:
The tenets of the Goddess religion are to be found in an extended narrative in which the entire history of religion is played out as a gender struggle between an original, positive, affirming religion of female deity and a later, usurping, oppressive and patriarchal set of religions and philosophies based on Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. In this story, the God of the Bible is not joined by the Goddess or even subordinated to her. He is, instead, reduced to being the villainous self-image of sexist, racist oppressors who have supposedly dominated most of recorded history, bringing suffering and degradation to women, children, and the earth itself. The returning Goddess is meant to replace God the Father; this, according to her devotees, is an essential step towards curing the social and environmental ills of our times.[3]
When seen in this light, Gaia worshippers are focused on destroying what they believe is the absolute evil of patriarchy. Men must be overthrown, cast down, relegated to a status far below that of women. Only when men become subservient to women will the earth begin to heal, and human relations across the earth return to what they once were in the imagined utopian past when the Goddess reigned
Even scientists have jumped on the Gaia bandwagon in search of elusive answers to what they proclaim to be pending environmental catastrophes. James Lovelock, an atmospheric chemist, is credited with creating the phrase “Gaia Hypothesis” as a title for his theory of how life on earth emerged given the complexity of the myriad organisms present. Lovelock used the phrase to explain his belief in the interconnectedness of all life found on earth. Scientists espousing the Gaia Hypothesis believe that mankind’s penchant for dominating the earth and its resources must end since the earth is itself a living organism. Stephen B. Scharper writes that:
Whereas traditional Earth scientists maintain that the Earth’s climatic pattern is more geological than biological, and is therefore less robust and more vulnerable to lasting injury, the Gaia thesis purports that the Earth is like a self-regulating animal, and may have organs that are especially important, such as the rain forest and wetlands, which are more vital to the global environment than are other parts of the system (Joseph 1990, 2). In other words, while Gaia may sustain the loss of its “big toe,” i.e., the blue whale, it can ill afford to lose its “lungs,” i.e., the tropical rain forests.[4]
The hypothesis additionally states that only an intellectual paradigm shift of gigantic proportions that recognizes the earth as a living organism will head off a coming ecological disaster. The Gaia Hypothesis is part of the draconian United Nations Sustainable Growth ecological movement which, true to its roots within Goddess worship, sees mankind as the enemy of the earth.
Now, some readers might be tempted to think that I’ve overstated the situation. If that is you then consider these statements from some influential people and organizations:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our duty to bring that about?” The late Maurice Strong, then Secretary General of the UNEP
“In our deeply interdependent world today, the iron rule remains – our world is one, unseparated, and interdependent. It is this world that is threatened by the impact of man’s unplanned, selfish, and ever growing activities.” Kurt Waldheim, former Austrian Nazi and UN Secretary General
“If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” Earth First! Newsletter
“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age.” Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogue
“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet: Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come long.” David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
“Given the total, absolute, and final disappearance of Homo Sapiens not only would the Earth’s Community of Life continue to exist but the ending of the human epoch on Earth would be greeted with a hearty ‘good riddance.’” Dr. Paul Taylor, professor of philosophy, City College of New York.
“If I could be reincarnated, I would return as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” Prince Phillip Duke of Edinburgh, patron of World Wildlife Fund.
“The earth is a mosque.” Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Muslim environmentalist
“The earth has a cancer and the cancer is Man.” Club of Rome
“Nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred: trees are my temples and forests my cathedral.” Mikhail Gorbachev, founder of Green Cross International, Club of Rome member
“Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.” Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University[5]
Clearly there is much more going on within the Gaia-Goddess worship movement than most people understand. The earth has become the goddess to increasing numbers of people angry with the cavalier attitude of some towards stewardship of the earth. But is abandoning reason for fantasy the way to care for the earth?
Christians have also become beguiled by the goddess of environmentalism. For over two decades the National Council of Churches (NCC), comprised of the United Methodist Church, the National Baptist Convention (USA, Inc.), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, have received tens of millions of dollars from leftist progressive organizations and foundations such as the Sierra Club, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Tides Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, and New World Foundation. What do all these organizations and foundations have in common? They give their money with the requirement that the National Council of Churches uses the funds to fuel environmental politics among its members.[6]
Many Christians have become little more than stage props in the war against humanity. The National Council of Churches has sided with the radical environmentalists who decry alleged overpopulation. The necessary remedy according to the NCC is abortion, or what they prefer to call reproductive justice. In fact, the NCC and its member denominations have waded into the so-called culture wars and offered their support for every antichrist position. They support sodomy but call it sexual justice and welfare socialism but call it economic and social justice.
It is no surprise then that the NCC gave full support for the Green Bible, an environmentalist dream of historic Judeo-Christian revisionism, as well as the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). The NRPE is funded primarily by the aforementioned Pew Charitable Trust. The goal of the NRPE is according to then executive director Paul Gorman, the creation of “a distinctly religious response to the crisis of environmental sustainability and social justice.”[7]
The NRPE environmental propaganda is distribute efficiently throughout a majority of Jewish synagogues, Roman Catholic parishes, and hundreds of thousands of Protestant congregations throughout America.
The rise of modern feminism, Goddess worship, and radical environmentalism is easily explainable when you understand that they are really three heads of the same latter day hydra. Many feminists, propagandized ecotheologians, New Agers, and the deceived masses in the NCC churches listed above, see historic, orthodox Christianity as the enemy.
All people including true Christians must wake up to the real danger of Goddess worship. The moneyed elite and their well-funded foundations and trusts are utilizing the political process to establish environmentalism as the state sanctioned religion. If they succeed, individual freedoms and liberties will die. We already see the intelligentsia building their case for the significance of every creature. A tree, a rock, a plant, a turtle, a human being: they are all equal in Mother Earth’s eyes.
May God have mercy on us for allowing this insanity to take root in America. The Environmental Holocaust which will destroy human life is set to be unleashed. Will you stand against it?
[BIO: Mike Spaulding was ordained to the ministry in 1998. Since then he has planted two Calvary Chapel churches – Calvary Christian Fellowship, St. Marys, Ohio, in 1998, and Calvary Chapel of Lima, Ohio, in 2005, where he currently serves as teaching pastor. Mike holds a B.A. in Organizational Management, a Masters Degree in Theological Studies, and a Ph.D. in apologetics.]
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E-Mail Mike Spaulding: drmichaelspaulding@gmail.com
Footnotes:
[1] Sam Shriver, “Toast to the City,” The Lima News, August 3, 2018, p. 1A, 6A.
[2] Didaskaliais daimonioen is a Greek to English transliteration of the phrase “doctrines of demons”. Source: Bible Soft One Touch Software.
[3] Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Company, 1998), p.38
[4] Stephen B. Scharper, The Gaia Hypothesis: Implications for a Christian Political Theology of the Environment, Cross Currents, Summer 1994, p. 209.
[5] All quotations are from R. Mark Musser, Nazi Ecology: The Oak Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Woldview in the Holocaust, (Published by Mark Musser Ministries, 2018), p. 414-416.
[6] James Wanliss, Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion Not Death, (Burke, VA: Cornwall Alliance for the Stewartship of Creation), p. 64, 68.
[7] Ibid, p. 69