Freedom of Worship or Freedom of Religion?

Source of my comments is Mark Steyn's article in National Review this month, titled The Church of Big Government.

President Obama and Hillary have been using the phrase, "Freedom of Worship," and this is suspected to be significantly different than "Freedom of Religion" or "free exercise." Governments don't care how we worship within the four walls of the church or in our homes, particularly, but they care about what we say and do in public --and what we say about homosexuality and abortion in particular --and whether or not we proselytize, evangelize, and try to influence public policy, etc.

Notice how the media jumped on Santorum's 2008 speech about the Devil and his hold on our nation. He was right --but everybody groaned, "O no --he can't get elected with biblical beliefs like that! a literal Satan? Come on!" It was a speech to a Catholic student audience.

Big Brother is the secular god, and he wants to provide everything for everybody --being "my brother's keeper," Obama said. Only thing is, it's not Obama who provides for his brother. In fact it was noted that his brother lives in Kenya, Africa, in a shack on $12 a year with no apparent help from Obama, his real brother, most powerful man in the world--who is comparatively rich.

Steyn notes that the Catholic Church has supported Obama's healthcare plan, failing to realize that "if you agitate for state health care, the state gets to define what health care is." And in Obamacare, the state defines women's healthcare as abortion, pharmaceutical abortion, condoms and birth control. And the Obama's "compromise" states that insurance companies should provide it free since the conscience of Catholic institutions forbids them to do it.

Steyn suggests Obama thinks we are all too stupid to realize that there is nothing that is free. People need to be paid for their labors and products, and the only money the state has comes from tax-payers --not Obama, our Brother's Keeper. The state makes no money; it only spends ours. So Obama would take our money paid to gov't or insurance companies and use it for his idea of women's healthcare--against the consciences of the taxpayers. It's socialistic redistribution of money from have-mores to have-lesses. Which never seems to work. Look at Europe. According to Steyn, both the EU nurseries and churches are empty; their retirees are 50, their students are 30 (living on the gov't) and the Muslims are bursting out of their ghettos gaining all sorts of respect for their consciences (lest they riot as in Afghanistan.)

E.G. England requires booties on sniff- dogs searching for terrorists in Muslim territory, because dogs are offensively unclean to Muslims. We bend over backward to accommodate their religious sensitivities (which is kind of us) but in the U.S., we are comparatively mean to Christians, fining bakers and photographers around $20,000 for refusing to do gay weddings.

Obama admires Europe's secular, socialist government which Steyn says EU leaders happily refer to as a "post-Christian Europe" --or "future post-Christian Europe." But look what's happening there (besides their financial problems) : a man in England named David Booker worked for a church homeless shelter and said to a colleague in private conversation that he didn't believe church vicars should be allowed to marry their gay partners. The colleague didn't object to his comment, but told on him and he was suspended and the hostel announced that "action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff" from the dangerous, insulting idea that vicars (pastors) should not have gay partners.

In Canada, Hugh Owens took out an ad in a Canadian newspaper and they were fined $9000 by the government. That case has worked up to Canada's Supreme Court this year. Meanwhile, no newspaper will ever do what this one allowed Owens to do. He posted the scripture references (not the scriptures) to the verses against same-sex relations.

In 2003, the Vatican issued a ruminative document on homosexual unions. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned Catholic bishops that "distributing the statement could lead to prosecution under the 1989 incitement to hatred Act, and 6 months in the slammer."

Steyn mentioned the minister Ake Green who preached against homosexuality in Sweden and was convicted of "hate crimes" because, in 2002, Sweden criminalized criticism of homosexuality.

As Steyn says, "The state is willing to intrude on core rights--rights to property, rights of association, and even rights to private conversation."

He quotes Henri de Lubac in 1944 who said concerning WWII and its causes: "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true, is that, without God he can only organize it against man." Steyn notes that atheistic humanism became INhumanism in the hands of the Nazis and Communism. What we have in Europe today is "dehumanism" in which a culture is amusing itself to death, he says.

And so it is today that, more and more, the state in the US bullies the churches, the conscientious objectors, the evangelists, the Bible-preachers and believers who would dare try to influence culture and thus the state along the Biblical definitions of morality and life. Even conservative Bible-believers are content to fiddle while Rome burns, buying the church/state separation ideology that squeezes our cultural foundations behind the walls of the church.


"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible