Your Sloppy Thinking Makes Comrade Lenin Spin in His Glass Box

Even though Hurricane Ike is still a Category 4 storm, I have to say that things are going better than expected. It whacked Grand Turk, damaging 80% of the homes. That’s terrible, BUT the population of Grand Turk is under 4,000. We’re not talking about Nassau here. Things could have been a lot worse.

Right now, Ike is going over Great Inagua, in the Bahamas. I haven’t been there; the Bahamas are full of remote islands and industrial islands no one visits, and this is one of them. It’s the site of a huge Morton Salt plant, and the island’s population is under a thousand.

Cuba comes next. Ike is going to miss Haiti, thank God. Maybe the mountains of eastern Cuba will help break it up.

I’m hoping the storm heads for relatively empty forest in the Yucatan Peninsula. Louisiana doesn’t need another hit.

I got a lot of comments on yesterday’s post, in which I pointed out the absurdity of the claim that Jesus was a community organizer. As I noted, one of the main reasons the Jews rejected Him was that He was not a political leader. Based on their understanding of prophecy, they expected a king who would deliver them from Roman rule. Instead, they got a man who was eager to associate with, and preach to, hated Jews who collected taxes for the Romans. No sincere radical agitator (if such a bird exists) would do a thing like that. And while He cared for the poor, He associated with prosperous business owners who had servants. James, John, Andrew, and Peter, for example. They didn’t fish while standing barefoot in ponds. They owned fishing businesses, with hired help. He also healed the servant of a Roman centurion, who probably was not Jewish, as he was a member of the Roman’s household. Jews were not supposed to live with Gentiles. He allowed Martha’s sister Mary to rub expensive perfume on his feet, instead of selling it to help the poor.

I noted that Jesus opposed civil disobedience, and like any Christian who knows anything about the Bible, Virgil understood instantly:

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s…” Not much political activism in those words.

The opponents of Jesus tried to trick Him into endorsing civil disobedience, with a question about paying taxes. And He told them to pay up.

It’s distressing that leftists now claim Jesus as a community organizer, because that’s exactly what His enemies told the Romans. They said He was setting Himself up as king. And that was untrue; even Pilate saw through it. It made no sense at all, in view of dissatisfaction over His unwillingness to be a political figure.

After 2000 years, you would think the enemies of the church could come up with a better, or at least more original, slander.

And leftists, including America’s relatively watery variety, are enemies of the church; a century and a half of history makes that clear.

I read a horrendous story about East Germany. The East German government, like all leftist governments of the time, tried to eradicate religion. The story is in Brother Andrew’s book, God’s Smuggler. The East Germans obtained machinery to harvest wheat, and they were proud of this advance (usually leftists oppose automation, but we’ll let that pass). Harvest time came, and rain came with it. The machines could not be used on wet fields. They required a couple of days of dry weather.

The government put up posters, and in German, they said, “Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.”

And it kept raining, and the harvest was lost, and it became impossible to find bread in East Germany.

The government put out reports criticizing the “lies” about the harvest, saying bread was everywhere. At least the Germans got to read about bread while their bellies rumbled.

Imagine the anti-Christian hostility you would have to have, to put up a poster like that.

And let’s not discuss the Cuban government, which forced clergymen to cut sugar cane–slave labor–because they were considered unproductive members of society.

Anyway, Jesus organized communities about as vigorously as Obama tried to reform the corrupt Chicago machine. Which is where HIS bread came from.