Weekly Articles

In the series Twilight, a teen-aged girl meets a mysterious young man who seems to be uninterested in her.  Later this mysterious young man saves her life, revealing his ability to move with superhuman speed and strength.  The girl investigates and discovers that the young man is a vampire; she of course falls in love with him.  This series has become a sensational hit with girls in their teens, and with a surprising number of forty-somethings as well.  The reasons for this have more to do with the false expectations and misplaced priorities of the women in question than with the stories themselves.

One thing I have never understood was the romance associated with vampires.  They are, after all, undead creatures that derive sustenance from drinking blood.  Why is this romantic?  There is the power and the immortality, and I understand the draw of both of those.  But it goes beyond that; vampire stories such as Twilight present women with romantic “bad boy” imagery that is very powerful.  Look at the difference between these stories and those designed more for a male audience, such as Blade or Underworld; the vampire stories designed for men are filled with superhuman action, extensive displays of weaponry, and special effects such as sunlight-immolated vampires.

The romantic themes in stories such as Twilight center on the excitement of a forbidden love, a rescue of a “bad boy,” and a belief in finding a hidden gem that only the woman can reveal.  In terms of the excitement of the forbidden love, it is the Romeo and Juliet of today – except that the new Romeo is already dead when he falls in love!  This is a powerful emotion and one that girls are not being taught to resist, but rather one to which they should give in.  The bad boy image fits perfectly with this forbidden love (and vampires are, after all, bad boys), with the woman being the one who awakens a true and pure love in a roguish but misunderstood heroic figure.  This in turn allows the woman to reveal a gem hidden from all but her discerning heart:  the tenderness and gentleness at the core of the monster.

Add to these themes the lure of immortal youth and immense power, and you have the secret to the siren’s call of the Twilight story.  What reality could possibly compare with this fantasy?  No man is ever going to match up to a tireless, beautiful, and powerful fantasy character.  But there is a story that, if taken to heart, far surpasses the fantasy.

Look at the story of Jesus compared to the story of Twilight.  The vampire, Edward, is distant and reluctant to engage in a relationship; Jesus not only seeks a relationship, but died to put right our relationship with God.  Loving Edward leads to an abandonment of life and an engagement with an immortal death; loving Jesus leads to an entrance into life and an engagement with an eternal life.  While Twilight represents a forbidden love and a hidden gem to be discovered, Jesus presents the only truly satisfying love and the key to revealing the hidden gem within yourself.  While the fictional Edward can exhibit superhuman strength and speed, the real Jesus showed absolute control over this world and the supernatural world as creator.  Loving Edward puts the girl character in mortal danger; loving Jesus frees real people from danger to their immortal souls.

A gauntlet has been thrown down.  Christians are going to have to change their fundamental beliefs or they will risk becoming demonized as bigots and even categorized as criminals.  If this sounds like hyperbole and the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, then you might just have missed what has happened to Christianity in America over the last twenty years.  There is an insurrection at play in the churches of America, conducted by a movement as radical in nature as that of Che Guevara  or Fidel Castro, and acting for the long term to fundamentally alter the basic foundation of Christianity and destroy any ability to resist the new order.  This insurrection has three basic characteristics that enable its proponents to achieve devastating results with relative ease:  compromise, coordination, and collaboration.  The movement that is behind this abominable work is none other than the GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender) alliance.

Compromise

On its website (http://www.ifcmd.info/4.html), the Interfaith Fairness Coalition of Maryland has this as its purpose:  “IFCMD exists to foster a welcoming embrace of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender people in both membership and all positions of leadership in religious life.”  Its logo uses symbols from the following groups and explains each of them from a “this is yet just one more way of looking at things” kind of way:  Atheism/Secular Humanism, Buddhism, Christianity, Druidism, Ecumenicon (a diversity movement), Islam, Judaism, Shamanism, Sufism, Tribalism, Unitarian-Universalism, Unity, and Wicca.  The purpose of this is to show Christianity as just another facet of the same religious coin.  Their website’s caption on Christianity is:

Christianity – The cross of wood, a symbol of sacrifice where the Divine meets the human life in its place of deepest need is pictured here without adornment. In Christ there is no male nor female, bond nor free, all are one.  (http://www.ifcmd.info/4.html)

It is through this Unity movement redefinition of Christianity that the GLBT proponents hope to destroy the Christian’s individual resolve to stand against what is blatant immorality.  And it is apparently succeeding.  An advertisement in the Baltimore, MD periodical b free daily was titled “Maryland Religious Leaders Support Marriage Equality,” with the names of ninety-seven religious leaders from “Baptist, Buddhist, Catholic, Episcopal, Interfaith, Jewish Conservative, Jewish Reconstructionist, Jewish Reform, Lutheran, Metropolitan Community Church, Methodist, Presbyterian, Reformed Church of America, Unitarian Universalist, United Church of Christ and Unity Fellowship Church” organizations.  This makes it sound like almost every church in Maryland is on board.  Except, if you research the names and listed organizations, you find that there are many from the same organization (and even from the same congregation) and that some are from churches formed explicitly for the GLBT community!  The list includes Wicca and Pagan “ministers” as well as a few atheists and “spiritual scientists.”  Their ad stated the following about the rights of churches:

We affirm that the state should not require any religious group to officiate at, or bless, same-gender marriages. However, the state also should not favor the convictions of one religious group over another by denying individuals their fundamental civil right to marry whom they love.  (www.equalitymaryland.org)

Marrying whomever you love is a fundamental civil right!  Wait until the pederasts and bestiality advocates find out about this – of course, they already have and are waiting their turn in line.  And if you think this country will respect your beliefs over the defined fundamental civil rights of another, you haven’t been paying attention.  Federal judges do whatever they want (just ask former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy Moore).

Coordination

This insurrection has been coordinated for the past forty years at least.  Look at what has happened in America to the sanctity of human life!  Mothers can kill their unborn children at will, with the only debate being if tax payers have to fund it:  their right to kill the children is judicially unassailable.   Terrorists (you know, the fun-loving guys that bomb civilians and laugh about it afterwards) are given the rights of American citizens and are afforded comforts and access to our legal system; nothing is given concerning the victims of those attacks except the knowledge that we will be kind and considerate to the people who killed them.  Child molesters are protected within the penal system (some are denied prison and are instead forced into probation because they are too weak to protect themselves).  We prosecute law enforcement officials and debate whether or not the death penalty is constitutional.  Church groups protest and picket in an effort to eliminate capital punishment.  And the rights given to all American citizens is deemed insufficient for those who are alternatively lifestyled; the GLBT types are evidently in need of special rights and privileges not afforded to the rest of us.  That’s why killing a heterosexual male is (possibly) murder, but killing a homosexual male is a hate crime:  it is somehow worse.  This is not by accident, but rather the same people and the same groups tend to support the same things.  And all of them are unbiblical.

Collaboration

Finally, this insurrection is propelled along by the willing collaboration of Christians who are either too ignorant of the Bible to disagree or are too weak to stand against it.  For some reason, Christians seem to need people to think of them as tolerant and open-minded.  We are supposed to be neither!  We should stand against whatever is wrong and we should accept only the truth.  And until we take our stand this way, we will be the willing accomplices of the insurrection against the King of this land:  the God of the Bible!  So I will leave you with the words of Joshua son of Nun:  “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”  (Joshua 24:15 NIV)

-Charles Peterson

It is a commonly accepted fact that predators are necessary for the health and welfare of the preyed-upon species.  When wolves are scarce, elk and deer starve to death because of overpopulation.  When lions are scarce, antelope and water buffalo herds overpopulate their ecosystems.    In fact, this is part and parcel of the theory of natural selection:   nature weeds out the unfit so that only the strongest survive.  Many will, in fact, point to this and say that it is one of the mechanisms of evolution.  They would, of course, be mistaken.

When we look at the creation account in Genesis chapter one, we see that God created a perfect world that was “very good.”  This world predated death, which means that it predated predation and hunting, sickness and death.  Look at the description of the sixth day:

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.”  And it was so.  God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.  Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.  Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”  Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.  They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.”  And it was so.  God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.  (Genesis 1:24-31 NIV)

So then, what happened?  How did we get from everything eating green plants as food, to lions and wolves thinning out the sick and the old from the herds?  Man happened!  Man sinned, and so all creation has been awaiting the day “that [it] will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God,” (Romans 8:21 NIV).  Until that time, death has its way with this world.

There are some who say that man is a part of nature, that we have broken our bonds with the natural order and are thus out of balance.  These people look at epidemics and natural disasters as nature’s way of “culling the herds” of mankind.  These people have rejected God and have chosen to worship the natural world, and are often aligned with the environmental movement.

There are some who say that people are simply a part of the whole, are cogs in the machine of society, and must therefore suborn their needs to the collective good.  Our modern entitlement programs are designed with this in mind.  Take for example the Social Security and Medicare programs:  they require more people to pay into the programs without living to collect the benefits in order to remain solvent!  There is a commonly held misconception that the programs would have been fine if Congress had not raided the “trust funds” over the years; truly, Congress has acted irresponsibly, but the programs by design were never going to succeed because they depend on death.

This country is facing the crisis that it set in motion generations ago by adopting systems that treat people as valuable only in as much as they contribute to society.  We even have people in the political arena making comments about “responsible” health care decisions needing to be made about wasting limited resources on elderly people with little benefit to society.  This is how the world views its elderly people:  worn parts that need to be replaced for the good of the whole.

Our nation is facing its ruin not because our leaders are corrupt (which many apparently are), but rather because our nation has turned away from Godly principles.  Humans are not animals, which need to be removed from the herd when they are old and useless.  No, our elderly should be respected and cherished; they should be cared for and treated with honor.  But just as the worldly agenda seeks to destroy the hope of childbirth and the sanctity of marriage, it seeks to abolish the appreciation we owe those who raised us; in this, it seeks to drive from our hearts the appreciation we owe the one who created us.  Reject the world, and choose God.  And respect your elders.

-Charles Peterson

In the early 1920’s, Charles Ponzi made famous a particularly bad type of “get-rich-quick” scheme:  the Ponzi scheme.  His scheme bilked investors out of tens of millions of dollars (in the 1920s) by promising a 50% return on their investment in 45 days, and a 100% return in 90 days.  He claimed that he was investing their money in international reply coupons:  a postage stamp that was priced at the postage rate in one country and worth the postage rate in whatever country it was used; essentially, he claimed to be buying them cheaply in Italy and redeeming them in the US with a 400% markup.  In reality, he was using new money to pay old, meaning that the money invested by today’s investors would be used not to invest, but to pay the money owed to yesterday’s investors.  Of course, eventually there were not enough new investors to cover the obligations to the old, and so the entire house of cards collapsed.  Ponzi went to prison and many people came to realize that they had foolishly given their life’s savings to a conman. 

People are not so different today as they were in the 1920’s.  Remember Bernie Madoff’s $64 Billion Ponzi scheme?  He fooled Wall Street experts and SEC regulators for years.  People get fooled by these schemes because they forget their common sense:  if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  And the sad part is that there are many great opportunities out there, but most people do not notice them because they are disguised as hard work and disciplined behavior.  Americans have been raised to think they are being “risk-adverse,” when in reality they are “effort-adverse.”  Many immigrants come to this country with very little money and no ability to speak English, and in a few short years wind up owning successful businesses.  But they did not throw their money away on gimmicks, but rather put it to work carefully and intelligently (and put themselves to work, as well).

Modern American evangelism, sadly, has more to do with “get-rich-quick” schemes than with hard work and disciplined behavior.  How many churches build their followings around novelties and gimmicks?  Consider the discipling movement, in which one member exercises control over another member (made famous in the Boston-movement).  How many churches try to reach people through a consumer model?  The “emerging church” movement, emphasizing the “here and now” in a very postmodern way and thereby de-emphasizing questions of eternal salvation is a good example of reaching through repackaging the message (such as salvation through recitation of the believer’s prayer).  How many churches are arranged around a cult of personality, and are centered on one dynamic speaker or celebrity?  There are many churches that face this dangerous road – the Calvary Chapel churches form themselves around the “Moses model” (as they call it), in which a pastor acts as the executive and is advised by a board of elders.

What shall we say, then?  Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?  By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?  Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.  If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.  For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin – because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.  (Romans 6:1-7 NIV)

The sad part is that there is a perfect plan waiting for us.  But our “get-rich-quick” mentality will not let us see it; we want something that costs us nothing or that substitutes for other activities such as entertainment.  But nothing but death can free you from your sins!  Yes, that is right:  you cannot escape the fact that you will die for your sins.  But because of Jesus, you can now choose:  die to your sins through the waters of baptism, or die in your sins when you achieve room temperature (physical death).  The choice is yours:  the con or the Bible.  Choose wisely, but choose quickly.  In the words of the infomercials:  act now, before it’s too late!

-Charles Peterson