November 11th. One Hundred Years: Christians, What Have We Learned?

November 11^th, marks the 100^th Anniversary of Armistice Day, ending the warfare in 1918.

The Great War. The War to End All Wars. World War I. (It prepared the seedbed for its sequel, World War II. We still live with a century of consequences.)

Conservative Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., called it an unnecessary war. Another called it Satanic carnage.

Stanley Weintraub, in A Stillness Heard Round the World, chronicles the celebrations that broke out on that day. Work ceased, bells rang; sirens and whistles pierced the air. Buildings were emptied and throngs filled the streets, celebrating with cowbells and drums; horns and tin pans. Singing and shouts filled the air. Newsboys shouted, “EXTRA!”

The First Lady picked up her mother and sister and drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, to the delight of the crowds. Orville Wright wrote, “We all rejoice this day…”

All this was on November 7^th, the day of the famous False Truce. And it began all over again on November 11^th.

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”

–Wordsworth 

(The epigraph in Stanley Weintraub’s book.)

On the battlefront, when the cease-fire came, one young lieutenant wrote home of his Marines, “The poor boys, some of them just dropped and cried.”

Few, today, realize that what is now Veterans Day began as Armistice Day—a holiday of thanksgiving for the end of the brutal fighting that ravaged Europe for over four years.

In the 1960s our clueless Congress changed the date to the fourth Monday in October (part of their three-day holiday weekend project). The World War I generation would not hear of it. I remember my grandmother firmly stating that Armistice Day was November 11^th, NOT the fourth Monday of October. After a decade of standing up and speaking out by those who knew the true date and meaning, Congress restored the November 11^th holiday, forty years ago, in 1978.

In his day,  Charles Spurgeon asked, “Why does a peaceful nation bluster and threaten for a few months, and even commence fighting, when in a short time it sighs for peace, and illuminates its streets as soon as peace is proclaimed? The immediate causes differ, but the abiding reason is the same — man is fallen, and belongs to a race of which infallible revelation declares “their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known.”

In the West, November 11^th also marks the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, whose most famous words are, “I am a soldier of Christ. It is not lawful for me to fight.”

***

A Stillness Heard Round the World, by Stanley Weintraub

Oh Holy Night: The Peace of 1914 by Michael Snow

Advertisements

Human Slaughter

The Lord’s battles, what are they? Not the garment rolled in blood, not the noise, and smoke, and din of human slaughter. These may be the devil’s battles, if you please, but not the Lord’s. They may be days of God’s vengeance  but in their strife  the servant of   Jesus may not mingle.(“War! War! War!” May 1, 1859)–Charles Spurgeon

Hiroshima After the Bomb, 1945; 70th Anniversary, August 6, 2015

I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

—Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (to Sec. of War before the dropping of the bomb)

 

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

 

The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

— Major General Curtis LeMay

 

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it …

— Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr

***

 Link to Key Quotes on Christians and war by Charles Spurgeon. Evangelicals ought to have the integrity to read what this giant of the faith said on this subject,

Here:

https://spurgeonwarquotes.wordpress.com/

Family controllers by Step up 4 Children’s Rights·Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Gro Hillestad Thune, a Norwegian lawyer by profession, was a member of the European Commission of Human Rights for 17 years. She is regarded as Norway’s leading expert on human rights, and her name is recognized internationally.

Gro Hillestad Thune, in her article last week, “The child welfare services have become family controllers”, explains that the concern messages that child welfare services receive are often very trivial, and although Norway’s CWS can help people who need help, in many cases, they create more problems than they solve.

According to Thune, the notes that employees make in the pre-schools are very often inadequate and full of errors, that give a totally wrong picture of the child’s situation. They are simply not educated enough to question and ask children about the home care situation.

“A message of concern from pre-school provides an access card to a family. The child welfare services can call them, visit them and demand that they come to the office. They can talk to children and parents separately. They have free passes into family life.

The “interrogations” are often initiated with a number of leading questions, and the children feel compelled to answer something to satisfy the caregivers in the pre-school, and then the imagination is fuelled. Often, what the children are talking about is also misinterpreted. It can have disastrous consequences for the child and the family,” says Gro Hillestad Thune.

 

Norway, Arise

Steven Bennett

(facebook post)

When countries like Romania, Poland and India speak up for their citizens

…in Norway, it usually isn’t long before Norway does the right thing and returns innocent children back to their able and caring parents.

But, what about “pure Norwegian” cases?

A Norwegian citizen was sent a number of warnings from church members because of what she had been sharing, regarding Norway’s Child Welfare System (NCWS), Barnevernet, on facebook.

Some were convinced that this mother was in trouble herself with NCWS. Others told her to stop criticising NCWS, because they believed her family would be targeted and they didn’t want that to happen.

This mother replied to the detractors with some simple questions. Why don’t you join me? Do you think it’s really OK to go after families who criticise NCWS?

The detractors said they believed in the right to express oneself, but with NCWS, this wouldn’t be possible.

The mother again replied, “do you really believe we have the right to say what we think in Norway?”

This mother asked a second time, if they considered joining the uprising or were they willing to let NCWS scare them half to death, and into silence?

She also tried to show the detractors the danger they were in, but they were certain they would stay safe as long as they didn’t criticise NCWS.

It’s all very backwards.

The trouble in Norway could be partly attributed to the infamous Norwegian politeness – the best way to treat people with respect is to leave them alone. This behaviour is very evident when other people are in trouble, so the “politeness” becomes self defense and ignorance and acceptable to leave “those NCWS-families” on their own.

When NCWS make horrendous errors of judgement, many Norwegians still don’t see any reason to do anything. You don’t criticise NCWS unless they are after you personally. And those who don’t know anyone personally who has been targeted by NCWS, still think they are safe, like many other families thought before NCWS knocked on their door.

Norwegians often won’t believe it and act, unless they feel it and see it for themselves.

Time for an uprising?

#Norway #SolveigHorne #ErnaSolberg #StopBarnevernet

[And then there are the careless U.S.A. citizens.]

See also, another Steven Bennett post, A Norwegian Mother Speaks Up

 

 

STAR WARS & Sgt. York

In the aftermath of “Vietnam,” war-weary Americans imbibed a playlist of anti-war movies. All seemed lost for despairing warriors. But, then, STAR WARS burst onto the scene and took the world by storm.

The mud and blood, and the smell of gunpowder and napalm gave way to this cool, clean, antiseptic environment, and lightsabres.

In another time warp, Cap’n Kidd has again weighed anchor. With the huge success of Hacksaw Ridge, amidst the carnage, Desmond Doss emerges as a real-life hero of the faith. As a pacifist Christian who refuses to ‘bear the sword’ with his fellow soldiers, he suffers alongside them, binding up their wounds and rescuing many from death.

But now we sight the Jolly Roger sailing toward us from beyond the horizon. Under the flag of The Gospel Coalition, Cap’n Kidd’s cannons capture our gaze—enter Sergeant York.

Like the sky-writing of an airplane with its contrail, the smoke of these fantastic cannons spells out, “Alvin York, Christian Soldier.”

And, yes, Alvin York, like Desmond Doss, was a devout Christian. And both were awarded the Medal of Honor.

“I always rejoice to find a soldier a Christian, but I always mourn to find a Christian a soldier,” wrote Charles Spurgeon [of Jaws fame (link); this is Jaws 2].

Like Desmond Doss, Alvin York came from a pacifist church. In 1914, Alvin York became a new Christian at a Church of Christ. The Great War would soon deliver him (and thousands of other men) to boot camp where “an officer convinced him that the Bible endorsed a Christian’s participation in a just war.”

[How many times, recently, have we ‘learned’ the lesson of a person, in authority over others, taking advantage and convincing someone under them to do what they did not want  to do?]

On The Western Front in 1918, a month before the truce, the sharpshooter Corporal York earned the Medal of Honor, killing German soldiers the “way we shoot turkeys at home” and capturing over 130 of them.

“But York still struggled with the killings, not entirely sure that God approved of his actions.”–Thomas S. Kidd.

Sgt. Alvin York struggled after the war with the question of giving permission to Hollywood to make a movie about him. He eventually relented in order to support a Bible School. And Gary Cooper won the Academy Award for Best Actor. It was 1941, just in time for WWII.

A big part of the support for WWI came from Christian pastors. (If you would like to get the feel of that, read Mark Twain’s The War Prayer.) Wm. Buckley wrote that World War One was an unnecessary war. It was not a just war. Another described it as “satanic carnage.”

The salt lost its savour. The War to End All Wars and Versailles prepared the seedbed for the rise of a Hitler and World War, Part Two.

Charles Spurgeon [quotes link] concluded his above remark about soldiers with this: “The followers of Christ in these days seem to me to have forgotten a great part of Christianity.”

 

GOTT MIT UNS

[about the author]

 

 

on divorce and its effects

Standing up to the Zeitgeist by the Spirit of Christ. (Be sure to read the linked article.) And for those who would like to be equipped to confront this sin, read this book https://textsincontext.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/love-basics-heresies-divorce-homosexuality-church/

The Other Oracle

I could wish more people could be this honest about the wreckage created by divorce. We’re dealing with some of the effects in my family, and it’s horrible.

C. S. Lewis has a chapter, “Christian Marriage,” in his book Mere Christianity, and he pictures divorce this way:

[Christians] all regard divorce as something like cutting up a body, as a kind of surgical operation. Some of them think the operation so violent that it cannot be done at all; others admit it as a desperate remedy in extreme cases. They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or even deserting a regiment.

It would be a great benefit to society if this became more the perception of divorce, rather than making it easier and regarding it as a supposed boon to the parties…

View original post 3 more words

AGAINST the American Evangelical ZEITGEIST

 

Charles Spurgeon Quotes Link

 

 

 

Semper Fi

Screen shot. Ebook is linked Here  [Link includes for NOOK or PC]