Romans 13 And Communism

Resuming my Romans 13 series on a tip from Dr. McGrath---here are some thoughts on the Communists' use of Romans 13:

First off communist states developed differently from theocratic states as atheism seemed to have been a larger underlying principle of communism. This is not to say that there were not religious elements within Communist movements and that all atheists are evil but the facts speak for themselves. Any clear reading of history demonstrates for the most part that communist regimes were hostile to religious expressions. Now atheism in and of itself is the belief that no gods truly exist---but just like all systems of thought, there are extremists---such was the case with communistic atheism. Communist atheists were more or less anti-theists and anti-religion than persons who just happened to believe atheism. Put differently communist atheists were fundamentalist militant atheists in the sense that they were using the civil government to bring about a religion and god-free society---a society that functions without the use of god(s) and religious expressions.

Anyways moving on despite the communists' hostility towards religion, they knew of the potency of religion and the power that it had of control over people. Karl Marx is quoted as saying:

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.[1]

We commonly hear this quote as being: "religion is the opiate of the masses." This just goes to show that even in their hostility towards religions communists recognized the motivational force of religion and in this way the Communists like the Nazis used and abused religion for their own glory. And in the same way that Nazis used and abused Romans 13 Communist regimes did the same:

By then, the Russian people had the moral right to do whatever they could get away with, like the German people under Hitler, like anyone living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The dictators had cancelled the law, which is a contractual agreement, so the people who had been defrauded no longer were required to perform. If you sign a contract to buy a house, and the owner refuses to vacate, you don't need to make payments.

.........

A word should be said about Romans 13. For many years, pulpit pansies in the pay of the powers that would like to be have preached that Romans 13 teaches unconditional obedience to government. Whatever government does, according to this teaching, we have to endure it, because God has installed government for good.

Yes, He has, but since the men who run government are men, the chance is great that they will go bad. That is why God did the job Himself, through His judges, until His children demanded a king. Through Samuel, He warned them what a king would do. He would eat out their substance, etc. When stiff-necked Israelites would not yield, He gave them Saul. Guess what? God was"is"right. Scripture is full of cases of government run amok. When that happens, God sends someone to overthrow it.

King Jabin, the government, was oppressing the people. Jael lulled Sisera, his commanding general, to sleep and then nailed that old boy to the ground with a spike through his temples. Scripture says Jael is "blessed above women." The children of Israel sang about her in celebration of her exploit.

Eglon, king of Moab, oppressed the people. Ehud parked a knife in his belly. His majesty was so fat his belly closed around the knife, so that for a while the coroner couldn't find the cause of death until crime scene investigators showed him the weapon. Scripture says Ehud was a deliverer whom the Lord had raised up.

Wasn't Paul a notorious jailbird? Wasn't Peter? Wasn't Jesus a criminal? He must have been, according to today's pansy preachers, because the government"the Sanhedrin and the Romans"said He was. Didn't He destroy property and use violence when He kicked the moneychangers out? Didn't He break the law Himself?

If you preach that the government can do no wrong and must be obeyed blindly whatever it does, that is where you must wind up. Romans 13 means that you must obey and defer to government as long as it does what God installed it to do. When government stops doing what God installed it to do"stops clearly and incontrovertibly"your obedience is no longer required. Weren't our Founding Fathers criminals?

Is God a Nazi? That is the question. If you subscribe to the preaching of today's pansy preachers, you believe He is. You believe you must obey Hitler because he is the government. You believe you must defer to whatever crimes the government commits because of what some pansy preacher says about Romans 13.

So you see, pal, the fact that you may put your collar on backward or have three first names, etc., cuts you no slack here. And by the way, those pansy preachers revere Martin Luther King, Jr. Wasn't King in the Birmingham jail when he wrote his famous letter from Birmingham jail (if he wrote it)?

Wasn't he there because he defied the government? Which governments does Romans 13 say we must obey? Regular readers will also remember that today's Christianity has been infiltrated from top to bottom by Communists, starting even before World War II. Could that be the reason today's pansy preachers pervert Romans 13? Are they deliberately trying to neutralize the faithful?

Romans 13 was also used against Christian anti-communist resistance movements:

“While the troops of Mahomet II surrounded Constantinople in 1493 and it had to be decided if the Balkans would be under Christian or [Muslim] dominion for centuries, a local church council in the beseiged city discussed the following: What color had the eyes of the virgin Mary? What gender do the angels have? If a fly falls in sanctified water, is the fly sanctified or the water defiled? It may only be a legend, as concerns those times, but peruse Church periodicals of today and you will find that questions just like this are discussed. The menace of persecutors and the sufferings of the underground church are scarely ever mentioned. Instead, there are endless discussions about theological matters, about rituals, about nonessentials….In formerly Communist Russia, no one remembers the arguments for or against child baptism, for or against papal infallibility. They are not pre- or postmillenialists. They cannot interpret prophecies and don’t quarrel about them, but I have wondered very often at how well they could prove the existence of God to atheists.”

—Richard Wurmbrand, Jewish Lutheran pastor from Romania who spent fourteen years in a Communist prison, quoted in Jesus Freaks: Volume II, page 208

See also: The Suffering Church in Russia, Fr. Popielusko and Communist Poland, A New Religion, Minority Rights Abuse in Communist Poland and Inherited Issues*, Martyrs in the History of Christianity and Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice.

My next posting in my series on Romans 13 will be on Romans 13 and the Religious Right and Left...

SnagFilms Film Widget---Arthur Miller And Atheism

Number of Nonbelievers Rising in US

Number of Nonbelievers Rising in US
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP
posted: 7 DAYS 8 HOURS AGOcomments: 1916filed under: National NewsPrintShareText SizeAAA

(March 9) - A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.
Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.
"No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study's authors said.
In the Northeast, self-identified Catholics made up 36 percent of adults last year, down from 43 percent in 1990. At the same time, however, Catholics grew to about one-third of the adult population in California and Texas, and one-quarter of Floridians, largely due to Latino immigration, according to the research.
Nationally, Catholics remain the largest religious group, with 57 million people saying they belong to the church. The tradition gained 11 million followers since 1990, but its share of the population fell by about a percentage point to 25 percent.
Christians who aren't Catholic also are a declining segment of the country.
In 2008, Christians comprised 76 percent of U.S. adults, compared to about 77 percent in 2001 and about 86 percent in 1990. Researchers said the dwindling ranks of mainline Protestants, including Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, largely explains the shift. Over the last seven years, mainline Protestants dropped from just over 17 percent to 12.9 percent of the population.
The report from The Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., surveyed 54,461 adults in English or Spanish from February through November of last year. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5 percentage points. The findings are part of a series of studies on American religion by the program that will later look more closely at reasons behind the trends. The current survey, being released Monday, found traditional organized religion playing less of a role in many lives. Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious wedding ceremony and 27 percent of respondents said they did not want a religious funeral. About 12 percent of Americans believe in a higher power but not the personal God at the core of monotheistic faiths. And, since 1990, a slightly greater share of respondents — 1.2 percent — said they were part of new religious movements, including Scientology, Wicca and Santeria.
The study also found signs of a growing influence of churches that either don't belong to a denomination or play down their membership in a religious group.
Respondents who called themselves "non-denominational Christian" grew from 0.1 percent in 1990 to 3.5 percent last year. Congregations that most often use the term are megachurches considered "seeker sensitive." They use rock style music and less structured prayer to attract people who don't usually attend church. Researchers also found a small increase in those who prefer being called evangelical or born-again, rather than claim membership in a denomination.
Evangelical or born-again Americans make up 34 percent of all American adults and 45 percent of all Christians and Catholics, the study found. Researchers found that 18 percent of Catholics consider themselves born-again or evangelical, and nearly 39 percent of mainline Protestants prefer those labels. Many mainline Protestant groups are riven by conflict over how they should interpret what the Bible says about gay relationships, salvation and other issues.
The percentage of Pentecostals remained mostly steady since 1990 at 3.5 percent, a surprising finding considering the dramatic spread of the tradition worldwide. Pentecostals are known for a spirited form of Christianity that includes speaking in tongues and a belief in modern-day miracles. Mormon numbers also held steady over the period at 1.4 percent of the population, while the number of Jews who described themselves as religiously observant continued to drop, from 1.8 percent in 1990 to 1.2 percent, or 2.7 million people, last year. Researchers plan a broader survey on people who consider themselves culturally Jewish but aren't religious.
The study found that the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Muslim grew to 0.6 percent of the population, while growth in Eastern religions such as Buddhism slightly slowed.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2009-03-09 00:15:36

See also: More Americans say they have no religion, ENDGAME--Emerging Churches Preparing 4 The Collapse of Evangelical Christianity, Al Mohler and the Nemesis of Liberal Theology, Goodbye Evangelicalism? and
Bonhoeffer's Religionless Christianity.

Atheistic Holiday Ad

Holiday Ads Ask, 'Why Believe in a God'?
By ERIC GORSKI, AP
posted: 59 MINUTES AGOcomments: 54filed under: National News

(Nov. 11) - You better watch out. There is a new combatant in the Christmas wars.
Ads proclaiming, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake," will appear on Washington, D.C., buses starting next week and running through December. The American Humanist Association unveiled the provocative $40,000 holiday ad campaign Tuesday.

In lifting lyrics from "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the Washington-based group is wading into what has become a perennial debate over commercialism, religion in the public square and the meaning of Christmas.
"We are trying to reach our audience, and sometimes in order to reach an audience, everybody has to hear you," said Fred Edwords, spokesman for the humanist group. "Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion."
To that end, the ads and posters will include a link to a Web site that will seek to connect and organize like-minded thinkers in the D.C. area, Edwords said.
Edwords said the purpose isn't to argue that God doesn't exist or change minds about a deity, although "we are trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people's minds."
The group defines humanism as "a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism, affirms our responsibility to lead ethical lives of value to self and humanity."

Last month, the British Humanist Association caused a ruckus announcing a similar campaign on London buses with the message: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
In Washington, the humanists' campaign comes as conservative Christian groups gear up their efforts to keep Christ in Christmas. In the past five years, groups such as the American Family Association and the Catholic League have criticized or threatened boycotts of retailers who use generic "holiday" greetings.
In mid-October, the American Family Association started selling buttons that say "It's OK to say Merry Christmas." The humanists' entry into the marketplace of ideas did not impress AFA president Tim Wildmon.
"It's a stupid ad," he said. "How do we define 'good' if we don't believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what's good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what's good, it's going to be a crazy world."
Also on Tuesday, the Orlando, Fla.-based Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal group, launched its sixth annual "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign." Liberty Counsel has intervened in disputes over nativity scenes and government bans on Christmas decorations, among other things.

"It's the ultimate grinch to say there is no God at a time when millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Christ," said Mathew Staver, the group's chairman and dean of the Liberty University School of Law. "Certainly, they have the right to believe what they want but this is insulting."
Best-selling books by authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have fueled interest in "the new atheism" — a more in-your-face argument against God's existence.
Yet few Americans describe themselves as atheist or agnostic; a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll from earlier this year found 92 percent of Americans believe in God.
There was no debate at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority over whether to take the ad. Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the agency accepts ads that aren't obscene or pornographic.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2008-11-11 19:07:10