The Catholic Church and This White House.

Today I submitted the following to the editor of the Press & Sun Bulletin, Binghamton, New York........


"What is at stake is by no means whether our German members of congregations can tolerate church fellowship with Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God, here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not." Bonhoefer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy," by Eric Metaxas


After listening to and weighing what appears to be going on between this White House and the Catholic Church, it is hard not to conclude that the Catholic Church is in the middle of capitulating its long held doctrines in ways that are both strikingly and frighteningly similar to what took place in the early days of Hitler's Germany, with the then strong German Protestant Church. Democrats, it seems, have decided to recast abortion rights issues in different terminology because they are going into an election year. While the Catholic Church has been a strong advocate pro-life advocate, they have not stood their ground in regards to their church's supposed position on contraception. Knowing that abortion is no longer an issue to run on, Democrats are swapping out language. Abortion is being substituted for "contraception", and in doing so have subtly invited the Catholic Church to stand beside them in this "compromise". This is exactly the kind of political shell games that took place in Hitler's Germany, a planned strategy that had one end in sight - to draw certain key church leaders into its utopian dream, and to invite them to share in the power and glory.
Well, they did!

Alyssa Bustamante - What's the word I'm looking for????

   Yesterday, Alyssa Bustamante, now 18 yrs old., was sentence to life in prison for killing her neighbor three years ago. When Elizabeth Olten was 9 yrs old., Alyssa lured her into the woods, strangled her, stabbed her in the chest, slit her throat, then buried her in a shallow grave Alyssa dug a few days earlier. Why? Alyssa told a Missouri State Trooper than she wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone. An experience she later described as "pretty enjoyable." It is being reported that her journal read:"I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed  them now they're dead." "I am kind of nervous and shaky through right now, Kay. I gotta go to church now... lol."

   What can we conclude from from this? Is the "why" asked earlier, and the answer Alyssa gave, good enough? Is it acceptable? Does her reason go deep enough to allow us to arrive at some kind of conclusion that give us closeure? I think not, and I bet you agree. Something is missing! Something is wrong! Something else is going on that we don't understand, something we do not want to face, but deep in our hearts we know. It is a word we do not want to hear, one we are desperately trying to eliminate from our vocabulary and conversations. (Warning, I have careful shown the word to which I am referring by coloring it blue. If the word offends you, you can easily identify it and avoid reading it.).

  Events like these, and a million others, drive us to admit, if we have the courage to be honest, to the presence of a force in our beings we can't control, evict or medicate. Without the honesty required to face the truth, we arrive at the only other conclusion we can,  that some people (Alyssa; Hitler; Stalin; Bashar Al-Assad, President of Syria; Islamic terrorists, etc) are just victims of their environments, who, when placed in different ones, can become better people, like the rest of us, fit for society. If the latter is your conclusion, I have a couple of questions. How does that seem to be working out in the society we are living in today? Are we making progress toward a better, more peaceable and understanding world? The vile or violent thoughts you have from time to time, where do they originate from? Do things seem to be getting better or worse? 

   The conclusion I keep arriving at when I hear of things like this senseless, brutal murder of Elizabeth Olten, is that the biblical doctrine of sin is not only accurate but is also as relevant and applicable as ever in this the twenty-first century of humanity. 

   Without the biblical doctrine of sin it is impossible to satisfactorily answer questions like, "Why?" and "How?" Without an acknowledgement of the presence of sin in every human heart, and some level of understanding about what sin is, where it originated from, and what its' objective is, the heinous acts that man perpetrates upon man become unexplainable, alluding any rational diagnosis, laughing at every man made attempt to provide a cure.

    Hobart Mowrer, who was a president of the American Psychological Associate and Johns Hopkins University, as well as a professor at Yale and Harvard talks about the presence and the problem of sin, and what has happened since modern man has concluded that sin, as a rational explaination for man's deepest problems, is just an old myth that needs to be discarded, no longer having any place in the vocabulary of modern man. Reads the words of this respected educator, who at 76 yrs of age, took his own life. 

   "For several decades we psychologists have looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and we have acclaimed our freedom from it as epic making. But at length we have discovered to be free in this sense to have the excuse of being sick rather than being sinful is to also court the danger of becoming lost. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity. And with neurotics themselves, asking, "Who am I? What is my deepest destiny? And what does living really mean?" In a later article he wrote: “If we merely call it wrong-doing, we do not understand the gravity of what it is to violate some of these moral laws from which we are trying to break ourselves away.”

   Like it or not, the biblical doctrine of sin is actually good news because it alone provides not only the the answer to questions like: "How could Alyssa do such a thing?", "Why would she do it?" "Where did her such thoughts begin that encouraged her to do such a heinous thing?", but a remedy as well.   

   When we refuse to turn and face the possibility of the presence of sin, we end up at the same place the  atheist educator Hobart Mowrer, kept coming to, a conclusion that eventually caused him to start considering the possibility of a malady in humanity that science wasn't qualified to diagnosis or heal. In other words, deny the reality and presence of sin in every human heart, and the "How?", "Why?" and "Where?" become impossible to answer.

   When sin finds a willing host, someone to convince and manipulate, there is no end to the heinous, senseless acts that humanity is capable of committing against itself, and there is no worse or more concluding proof of this than the 20th and 21st Centuries of humanity.     

God’s Grace is......


A mighty rushing wind,
An unseen force,
A still small voice,
Deep and quiet waters.

A torrent of love,
Shattering strongholds of sin,
A balm on the heart,
That heals from within.

More than just favor
That no one deserves,
But power from heaven,
The Spirit, the Word.

What God supplies
That changes the heart,
That sets prisoners free,
A light in the dark.

Not just answers to prayer,
But the origin of pleadings,
My longings for God,
Compelled by His leading.

The Son on a tree
That the Father let grow,
Thorns driven into the brow,
And the blood they let flow.

Much more than just favor
That no one deserves,
God’s grace is the power
Behind every word,
That makes every promise
Living and true,

God’s grace is the way
God’s love gets to you.

Copyright, Gary Little
February 3, 2012