Thomas Brewton

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Worshipping Idols

July 25, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We must reject comfortable ritual and live the Christian life.

Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was preached by Captain Brian Thomas, leader of Stamford’s Salvation Army unit.

An effective Salvation Army leader who desires to lead souls to Jesus Christ can’t mindlessly and endlessly repeat old rituals. In Captain Thomas’s case, that meant dropping the old Salvation Army standard of the brass band playing on street corners to draw the unchurched into church services. Not enough people in today’s circumstances respond.

Instead he went into the low-income housing projects and began bussing children to church services and bussing them back to their homes. Just as did the liberal-progressive educators led by John Dewey early in the 20th century, aiming to destroy our Judeo-Christian heritage and replace it with a socialistic society, Captain Thomas recognized that the future belongs to those who educate our children. They must hear the truth of the gospel in some venue, because our secular public educational system is busily inculcating them with godless materialism.
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Change We Really Need

July 22, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

If Senator Obama’s magic change-wand truly works, the change we need is eradication from our society of the degraded and debauched ethos of liberal-progressive-socialism that led us to inflation and near collapse of financial markets.

It is currently fashionable for liberal commentators to denounce capitalist free markets as the culprit in the housing bubble collapse. That amounts to blaming the existence of law and a judicial system for causing crime.

When massive government intervention wildly distorts the signals and incentives in commercial, industrial, and financial markets, blame lies with the government. In the present crisis, blame attaches principally to nearly unbroken deficit spending since 1929, financed by the Federal Reserve’s expansion of the money supply faster than increases in real production.

Add to this government incentives for citizens to consume goods and services faster than they produce them.
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The Gift

July 21, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Through Jesus Christ we have received the inestimable gift of the Holy Spirit as our counselor and comforter.

Pastor Steve Treash’s sermon this past Sunday at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was on God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit.

Unlike the major imperial religions that appeared in the world before Jesus Christ, Christianity gives believers a personal relationship with God. In earlier religions the ruler was the only connection between his subjects and the gods. From Hammurabi to the Pharaohs, law was promulgated by the ruler in the name of the gods, and social order was handed down from on high through the ruler.

Christianity turned this upside down, making it possible for every individual to gain remission of his sins directly by accepting Jesus Christ as his savior and repenting. To aid repentance and sanctification, God manifested Himself individually to believers as the Holy Spirit.

To describe the gift, Pastor Treash’s main text was Acts 1:1-5.
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Divisive Politics

July 11, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Senator Obama’s campaign is based upon a fantasy: his claimed ability to transcend politics-as-usual and thereby to unite the nation for a common purpose.

It isn’t just that Senator Obama lacks his claimed power. It’s that the secular religion he represents is entirely antithetical to everything that led to the foundation of the United States. The very existence of liberal-progressivism is divisive.

We Constitutional traditionalists were here first. It is the liberal-progressives who are an invading army of conquest, marching under the banner of an alien, Continental European philosophy of atheistic socialism.
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The Socialist Political State in Action

July 6, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Speed and efficiency have never been the hallmarks of the socialist political state.

New York’s slow and extraordinarily costly shamble in rebuilding the World Trade Center after 9/11, now almost seven years ago, is a typical example of socialist state planning. This fiasco is a model for what so-called progressive liberals, led by Senator Barack Obama, intend for socialized strangulation of the entire economy.

In its June 30, 2008, edition, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The rebuilding of the World Trade Center will be pushed back into the next decade and will cost up to $3 billion more than planned. The Port Authority is set to release a report detailing significant delays and cost overruns on construction.

This may be disturbing to taxpayers who foot the bill, but it’s really good news for liberal-progressive-socialist politicians, of whom New York State and New York City have an ample supply.
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More Hypocrisy

July 2, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Senator Obama expresses pious sentiments about family integrity, but actively supports abortion, the practice that is most destructive to families.

Senator Obama has been lauded by the media for his Fathers’ Day speech about family and fatherhood, a pale shadow of Bill Cosby’s earlier and more courageous exhortations. Given the Senator’s consistent advocacy of liberal-progressive-socialist immorality and of even the most gruesome forms of abortion, his speech was the equivalent of an illegal arms dealer praising the virtues of international peace.

But such hypocrisy is not uncommon for Senator Obama, who, like Senator John Kerry, regularly backs away from supposedly firm positions he had earlier espoused. For example, his support for, then backing away from, Rev. Wright’s anti-American, white-hatred preaching, along with his early declaration of intent to hold unconditional talks with Iran’s Ahmadinijad, then beating a hasty retreat when foreign policy experts revealed the idiocy of that tactic.
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No Time For God

June 29, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Everything is better when we obey the Fourth Commandment’s instruction to keep the Lord’s Day holy.

Pastor Steve Treash preached Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut). We need, he said, to ask ourselves frequently what would we have done differently in the past and what we would do in the near future, were we to know that our death was near at hand.

Our answer ought to be to follow the Fourth Commandment, to make more time for God in our lives.

Poets in earlier generations were on the right track. We should take time to smell the roses, we should leave a place in hectic schedules for our family and friends, and we should enjoy the beauties of nature and thank God for them.
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Which Way the Wind Blows With Obama

June 27, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The words of Bob Dylan’s song, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing,” gave the Weatherman Underground its name.

Weatherman Underground members were activists in the Soviet revolutionary sense, aiming to destroy the political and social framework of the United States. Senator Obama, closely allied with the leaders of Weatherman Underground, has worked throughout his career to further Weatherman’s anti-capitalist and anti-American agenda.

He proposes to raise our taxes back to the confiscatory levels of earlier Democrat/Socialist administrations. He proposes to expand the welfare-state, aiming to make us all equally poor, in conformity with the social justice paradigm of equally distributed income without regard to productive work or merit.

Key members of his campaign staff are Weatherman alumni or supporters. Senator Obama was a member for 20 plus years of Rev. Wright’s church, where the reverend repeatedly damned the United States and its white citizens.
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Obama: Bringing Us Together Over Dead Bodies

June 26, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A man like Senator Obama, who is so callous with regard to God-given human life, is unworthy of holding public office.

Read The Audacity of Death in the Wall Street Journal to see the extent to which Senator Obama, a scion of the SDS radicals of the 1960s and 70s, embraces the amorality, if not complete immorality, of soulless, so-called scientific, philosophical materialism.

His indifference to human life comports well with that of the liberal-progressive intelligentsia in the 1930s, who defended Stalin’s barbarity and indifference to human life, so long as it was in the service of the latest liberal-socialist dogma.

The very groups (ACLU and Planned Parenthood) who today promote murder by abortion were, in the 1920s, promoting eugenics in order to reshape society in conformity with so-called scientific socialism. Their supporters, notably Madison Grant, wrote books to support eugenics for breeding an elite society that would promote the scientism and liberal-progressivism that had overtaken Ivy League schools and, at the beginning of the 20th century, had spawned the first degraded generation of American liberals.
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Serving

June 22, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Being a Christian is more than attending church. And it’s not being selective in the ways you choose to follow Jesus.

Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was delivered by Pastor Steve Treash. His subject was “I Serve.”

Christianity is more than just desiring to become a better person. You must be be ready to act when God presents opportunities for you to serve others.

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matthew 20:25-28)

Again in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi:

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. _

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! _

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:1-11)

Christians must be prepared, indeed eager, to serve at home, in the workplace, and especially in the church.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Ephesians 4:15-16)

Serve joyfully and with a full heart.

Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free. (Ephesians 6:7-8)

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. (John 13:12-17)

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Change We Can Believe In

June 18, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

You’d better believe it. Senator Obama and his supporters dislike traditional Americanism, preferring the Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary change expressed in moral relativism.

Senator Obama’s army of followers are energized by inexperienced and immature students and by Baby Boomer anarchists eager to relive their activist days of the 1960s and 70s. They stand opposed to the historical traditions of the United States. Theirs is a world in which change is equated with sensual self-indulgence.

Underlying this vision of change is Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis, applied to politics and social interaction by John Dewey in the early 20th century. Dewey taught Columbia University students that Darwin’s idea of evolution applied to morality as well as biology. This meant, said Dewey, that there can be no such thing as timeless principles of morality. Rules of social conduct are continually undergoing evolutionary change. All that matters is action that gets you what you want.
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Liars

June 15, 2008 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The liars, it turns out, are liberal-progressives, not President Bush.

Read ‘Bush Lied’? If Only It Were That Simple. by Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post editorial page editor. In the editorial dated June 9, 2008, Mr. Hiatt writes:

Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent,” he said…

But dive into Rockefeller’s report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.”

Repeatedly in his summation, Mr. Hiatt quotes Senator Rockefeller’s report as stating,”…The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

…But the phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

Mr. Hiatt’s summation is not to be dismissed as a conservative view point. The Post is, along with the New York Times, one of the premier liberal media voices in the nation.
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News Flash: The Press Omits, Distorts

June 14, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

No surprise, here’s another example of left-wing liberal media presenting only a selected part of the facts in order to mislead readers, when all of the facts are a matter of public record.

An Associated Press article headlined McClellan to testify before House in CIA leak case includes the following sentence:

Plame’s CIA identity was leaked to the news media by several top Bush administration officials in 2003, including Libby and former top White House political adviser Karl Rove. [emphasis added]

In as much as the story first was published by Robert Novak, who had first hand knowledge about the supposed revelation of Valerie Plame’s involvement, let’s let him tell the full story.
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Christianity is Not a Chinese Menu

June 7, 2008 by

<-b>By Thomas E. Brewton

Jesus said simply, “Follow me.” He didn’t say decide for yourself which of my commandments, if any, your personal life style leads you to pick.

Let’s stipulate that I am not equipped to attempt an interpretation of Catholic theology. Nonetheless I believe that all Christians, other than the new-age variety who see no problems with sexual misconduct and similar clear departures from Scripture, would agree that no one should receive communion who is not a believer in Jesus Christ as the resurrected Son of God and the pathway to eternal salvation.

And, as New Testament writers of the Gospel, along with the Apostle Paul in his letters, repeatedly affirm, genuine, transforming faith in Jesus Christ will be manifest in the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Not among those fruits is advocating abortion, which is wanton taking of human life and ultimately destruction of the human family needed to sustain life and society.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr., himself a Catholic, suggests a different approach: a sort of judicial activist interpretation of Catholic doctrine that discovers hitherto unsuspected dispensations hidden within the penumbras of the shadows of church doctrine. His is in the grand tradition of President Bill Clinton’s assertion that it depends upon what the meaning of is is.

Read For an ‘Obamacon,’ Communion Denied.
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Unwritten Constitution Under Assault

May 30, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

In the United States and Great Britain, immigration abetted by multiculturalism is corrupting society’s unwritten constitution, which is the positive embodiment of the spirit that animates a society and gives it a driving force of unity in belief and national aims.

No society can survive without a consensus about right and wrong, about what constitutes moral conduct. That consensus is the unwritten constitution of society, the content that gives meaning to a written constitution, the meat on the bones of the structure of government.

Without that consensus there can be only a disparate group of people with little or no attachment to their new homes. That is what we see increasingly, here and in Great Britain, under the impact of a tsunami of immigration from alien cultures and religions.

Combining this huge flood of immigration with a liberal-progressive ethos of rootless multiculturalism sets the stage for disintegration of American and British societies more effectively than terrorist attacks by Islamic jihadists. No longer is education viewed as a melting pot to teach our history and the principles of our government.
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Dehumanizing Humanity

May 25, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Darwinian evolutionary doctrine and its concomitant faith in the godless political state as the savior of mankind ironically, in practice, reduce human existence to the law of the jungle: survival of the fittest.

Darwinian natural selection has been used repeatedly since 1859 to justify strong-arm political tactics leading to dictatorial tyranny. In National Socialist Germany, for example, Jews were declared unfit to survive, and that declaration was rationalized on the basis of Darwinian “science” and its offshoot, eugenics.

As G. K. Chesterton noted: when men cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything. In that regard, read Lawrence Auster’s HOW DARWIN’S BELIEF IN NATURAL SELECTION CHANGED HIS EXPERIENCE OF LIFE.
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Obama Makes His Case?

May 24, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Senator Obama’s defense by an admiring liberal-progressive columnist amounts to nothing much. The Senator remains an insipid shadow of his liberal-progressive forerunners in foreign affairs.

Peter S. Canellos, the left-wing Boston Globe’s Washington bureau chief, in his National Perspective column for May 20, 2008, depicts Senator Obama as a bold and even heroic voice for sound foreign policy.

Despite the headline –Obama makes case for diplomacy, loud and clear – the writer reports only Senator Obama’s now familiar, vacuous phrases eschewing military force and relying exclusively upon diplomatic negotiations. Most of Mr. Canellos’s column instead concerns Senator Obama’s ripostes to thrusts from Senators Clinton and McCain. The Senator may have dealt effectively with the political debate, but that hardly vindicates what amounts to appeasement of thugs like Iran’s Ahmadenijad.

Mr. Canellos writes:
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War No More

May 22, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

How can liberal-progressives believe that Senator Obama will change human nature sufficiently to bring everybody together in domestic political harmony and world peace?

The implicit belief of liberal-progressives is that their socialist religion will, by equally redistributing income and wealth, fundamentally change human nature. Eliminating socialism’s version of original sin – private property – theoretically will eliminate aggression, crime, and war.

Only capitalist greed, in that religious conception, stands in the way of a harmonious, one-world socialism.

One-worldism, however, leads to moral relativism, because necessarily it both rejects the spiritual dimension of the individual human soul in favor of political collectivism, and it demands rejection of patriotism and pride in one’s own nation and culture. This dogma is hammered into college students today, accounting for the disparagement of American business and the rampant anti-Americanism on campuses. The latter was evidenced in a minor way by the remark of Senator Obama’s wife that in the past she had seen nothing of which to be proud in the United States.
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Labor-Liberal Incest

May 20, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Malformed progeny of the Socialist International are intent upon bastardizing civilization.

The generation who fought the War of Independence and wrote the Constitution understood that all political and economic power resided in the citizenry as individuals and that the people were, with great care and caution, granting certain limited and defined powers to the Federal government.

Liberal-progressives turn the Constitution upon its head and insist that all power resides in the hands of intellectual planners in Washington, DC, who may from time to time deign to parcel out some amounts of their presumably unlimited power to local governments and even occasionally to individual citizens.

A Wall Street Journal editorial shines sunlight upon the shadowy efforts of Congressional liberal-progressives to corrode further the original Constitutional structure guaranteed by the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
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Obama’s Excremental Economics

May 17, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

As prolongation of the 1930s Depression and stagflation in the 1970s demonstrated, Senator Obama’s announced policies are a prescription for economic disaster.

Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way. Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.

The key elements of Senator Obama’s proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar). Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama’s polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.
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Slaves to the Welfare State

May 16, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

New Orleanians born and bred in the welfare-state seem honestly believe that they are not required to do anything to help themselves.

A large number of people, most of whom apparently are residents of New Orleans, have favored me with four-letter-word denunciations of The god That Failed New Orleans.

A common allegation was that I had written that New Orleans deserved its fate. No one, however, cited specifics, for good reason: I wrote nothing to that effect.

For example:

And do they want the levees to break? I guess it depends if you are (as a New Orleans blogger commented to a brain-dead Repug at the link) “a fuckmook” who believes New Orleans deserved it (and there are, sadly, many more like this)…__My thought is that they … don’t care. We’re the last major city port at the mouth of the largest river system in the United States, and they don’t give a rat’s ass. We have some of the best food, culture, history and characters to be found, and are unique unto ourselves in this world, but they pretty much summed it up with Dennis Hastert’s comment: “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

In other words, New Orleanians don’t need to exert themselves rebuilding the city. They’re entitled to have the taxpayers of the nation do it for them, because New Orleans has all sorts of things that cater to sensual appetites.
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Questioning Pagan Gospel

May 14, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A few things for the high priests of environmental paganism to ponder when they next forgather to worship their own egos.

Barton Bennett sent me a link for Dr. Walter Williams’s column reminding us how far from the truth is the junk science that flourishes like maggots in today’s cesspool of educational ignorance.

So far as I know, the self-anointed main stream news media in the United States have ignored one of the principal reasons for the British Labour Party’s crushing defeat in recent local elections: the public’s recognition, at last, of the devastating economic costs of meeting the carbon emissions standards to be imposed by the socialist commissars in the EU’s Brussels headquarters.

To sense the reaction when citizens finally are brought face-to-face with reality, read the following:
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Senator Obama’s Friends

May 9, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

How indicative of his character and beliefs is Senator Obama’s having launched one of his political campaigns at the home of his friends Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?

Who are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? And why would Senator Obama wish to associate his political beliefs with those of Dohrn and Ayers?

Might his friendship with these Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s and 70s be a clue to the voting record that led National Journal to rate Mr. Obama the most liberal member of the Senate?

The New York Times reported on September 11, 2001, ironically, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed:
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Europe: The Dark Continent

May 3, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The light of God’s truth has been snuffed out in Europe, now the least Christian and the most secularized and socialized part of the world.

This week, Black Rock Congregational Church is focusing on worldwide missionary programs and the 20-plus missionaries that the church supports. In that connection, rather than a traditional sermon, we at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) heard a report by Dr. Ted Noble, one of those missionaries. His subject was the appalling decline of Christianity throughout Europe.

Fewer than one percent of Europeans are Christian believers. Elsewhere, especially in Africa and Asia, the percentage is much higher and growing. Europe has become a spiritual wasteland in which people look to the political state for their salvation.
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Cheap Grace

May 2, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Reactions of some nominal Christians to the message of Pope Benedict XVI are nothing more than liberal-progressive-socialistic “toleration.”

In his April 18th column for the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. expresses the misgivings of liberal-progressives who enjoy the ritual of religion, but don’t want to be bothered with following the teachings of Jesus.

Mr. Dionne writes:

The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is “countercultural.” The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that’s not what Benedict is preaching.

That word is the key to understanding how Benedict’s message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of “an increasingly secular and materialistic culture,” as he put it during yesterday’s Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.

Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.

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The god That Failed New Orleans

April 27, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Why does much of New Orleans still look as if the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina had occurred just a few weeks ago?

Huge areas of New Orleans still are wastelands. New Orleans’s liberal-progressive-socialist Senator Mary Landrieu has grabbed far more than her share of Congressional pork. Hundreds of millions of Federal dollars spent for rehabilitation have produced far too little beneficial result. People were without electric power for months; the police department contained more thieves than honest law enforcers; drug-dealing and prostitution remain major enterprises; and the city still retains its crown as the nation’s murder capital. One of the city’s few “legitimate” businesses is casino gambling.

City and state administrations have yet to coordinate rebuilding plans, as politicians fight over who gets what share of the spoils. The best that the city’s Mayor Nagin can do is to demand that the Democratic-socialist Party presidential candidates pledge to send even more pork to New Orleans.

What accounts for this dismal record?
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Regulatory Illusion

April 25, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Today’s clamor for more regulation of financial institutions to prevent another subprime mortgage meltdown is an exercise in self-deception.

Congress, led by Representative Barney Frank, is planning to overhaul regulation of the financial community, and Treasury Secretary Paulson has already proposed a broad program for that purpose.

No doubt, much of what is proposed is needed. But it should be obvious from repeated experience over the decades that regulations alone will not prevent periodic economic booms and busts.

Only by dealing with the root cause will we moderate economic cycles. And that root cause is the ineluctable human tendency to over-expand bank credit when the money supply is artificially enlarged.
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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Media Bias - News - Science - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton

Counterproductive Liberal-Progressivism

April 18, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressive environmentalists are starving the world’s poor.

Liberal-progressives are enthralled with imposing collectivist regulation to satisfy their religion’s “feel-good” agendas.

But the cost of liberal-progressive worship of collectivist abstractions is great. Diverting limited economic resources into less important or less effective uses, inherent in the straitjacket of government regulation, impoverishes the world with lower output. It also results in the loss of innovation inherent in the liberty of millions of individuals to experiment and discover the most effective and least costly ways to solve problems. Liberal-progressive-socialism’s claim that government bureaucrats are better at administering the economy than “greedy” individual workers and private businessmen is repeatedly belied by experience.
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00Publius Contributor - Business - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Media Bias - News - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Unions

Labor Union Perspective

April 14, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

As the proposed trade agreement with Colombia reveals, labor unions are organizations of self-centered greed, which disingenuously cloak themselves with pretense of God, country, and mom’s apple pie.

President Bush, by calling for Congressional approval of the trade agreement with Colombia, is compelling liberal-progressives to choose between the high-flown, one-world internationalism to which they give lip service and kow-towing to organized labor.

Columnist Robert D. Novak described it this way in his April 4th article:
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00Publius Contributor - Family - Morals/Sex - News - Religion - Thomas Brewton

Slavery, Freedom, and Forgiveness

April 12, 2008 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Vengeful anger is spiritual slavery from which we are delivered by Christian love and forgiveness.

Sermons this Sunday and last Sunday at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) were based upon Philemon, one of the shortest books in the Bible. These sermons were parts one and two of a three-part series on the subjects of duty, Christian love, and forgiveness.

Pastor Steve Treash focused today upon the need, and the immense benefit, of forgiving and releasing feelings of anger and revenge that too often we nurture when we believe that someone has wronged us. Last Sunday’s sermon dwelt upon the paradox of physical slavery and spiritual freedom and of the necessity to face up to wrongs we have done to others.
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