Quran (9:29) - "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the Jizya [the tax for being a Jew or Christian] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
Rep. James Comer: Republicans' Crime Priority Will Be Fentanyl
(CNSNews.com) - Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the incoming chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, says fentanyl, not guns, will be a priority for the next Republican-led Congress.
"I mean, we already have many gun laws on the books," Comer told NBC's "Meet the Press."
"If passing a bill would simply end gun violence, then I think you would have overwhelming support in Congress for that. That's like saying Congress could pass a bill that reduces inflation. That didn't reduce inflation. So, you know, passing bills doesn't solve the problems.
"We have, as Governor Youngkin said, a mental health crisis in America. And I think there's overwhelming bipartisan support to fund better mental health programs and try to increase communication between law enforcement agencies and social services groups to try to better identify these troubled people before they commit crimes."
Comer said gun control has been discussed for all six years he's been in Congress. "It's very difficult," he said.
"You know, the number one priority with respect to crime in America for Republicans is going to be the fentanyl crisis. We talk about terrible gun crimes in America, but we've had over 100,000 deaths because of Fentanyl pouring across our border, which is unsecured right now. That's going to be the top priority for Republicans come January."
Host Chuck Todd continued pressing Comer on recent "massacres" and whether stricter gun laws -- longer waiting periods and red flag laws -- might be part of the answer.
"Well, Chuck, you talk about this a lot on "Meet the Press," but when you look at cities that have the most strict gun laws, like Washington, D.C., Chicago, these are the cities with the highest rate of crimes committed with guns.
“So, you know, just simply passing more bills isn't going to solve the problem. I think we need to get serious about law enforcement. We need to invest in more law enforcement. And again, we need to invest in mental health and try to improve communication between our social agencies as well as our law enforcement."
Comer noted that in rural America, where many people have guns, "there aren't a lot of crimes in these areas. And I think one reason is because potential criminals know that these people are exercising their Second Amendment rights," he said.
"So this is something that's indoctrinated in our Constitution. This is something that Republicans hold, you know, close. And we're going to continue to protect our Second Amendment rights, but while, at the same time, we want to get serious about crime in America, the fentanyl crisis, as well as the looting that's taking place in cities.
"We believe that we need more law enforcement, and we need to respect the -- the law enforcement. We need to have prosecutors that are serious about prosecuting and not letting people off in the name of criminal justice.
"So these are issues that are going to be debated early on in a new Republican majority."
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The War on Christianity Within Christianity
By their fruits you shall know them.
A Russian Orthodox priest friend of mine believes that there’s a war on Christianity being waged in the United States. This war is not only happening in the United States — but internationally as well.
A quick Google search on the topic reveals many reports of increased hostility towards Christianity, especially in the United States. Many of these news items report calls for the destruction of religious statues, most notably of Junipero Serra, the Spanish missionary Philadelphia essayist Agnes Repplier described as “Spain’s gift to America,” a gift that was one “of disinterested benevolence.”
In 2020, a statue of St. Junipero Serra near San Francisco was defaced and pulled down on California’s Indigenous People’s Day. Masked leftist rioters sprayed red paint in the statue’s face before they toppled it.
In Denver of the same year, a statue of St. Jude was beheaded. This was followed by an image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe being toppled in Upland, California.
A parallel attack on religious statues occurred when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) openly condemned St. Damien of Molokai, a Hawaiian hero who devoted a decade of his life to the care of lepers. AOC said that Fr. Damien’s statue in the U.S. Capitol was a part of “colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacist culture.”
In a tweet on August 4, Cortez tried to walk back her words:
“At no point did I say Fr. Damien was a bad figure – in fact, I explicitly stated that my observations weren’t about litigating his or any individual statue. It’s about the fact that a huge supermajority of statues in the Capitol are white men. Barely any women…”
When hearings were conducted back in 2018 for attorney Brian Buescher, a devout Catholic and Knights of Columbus member nominated for the US District Court for the District of Nebraska, Senator Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and then-Senator Kamala Harris, D-California, mercilessly drilled Buescher on his Knights of Columbus membership, asking him about possible conflicts of interest, as if the organization had a game plan similar to that of the KKK. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights also opposed his confirmation.
Worldwide, Reuters reported that 9,488 churches and church buildings were attacked in 2019. Lela Gilbert, Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, writes that, in India, Christian churches are regularly attacked by the Hindu national movement and that in Pakistan as of May 2019, 200 Christians were executed on charges of “insulting Islam or Mohammad.”
In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has worked overtime tearing down Christian crosses. When the CCP instituted new legislation in late 2019 stating that “religious organizations must adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party,” that all but took the soul and substance out of “official” Christianity in that country.
In June 2020, Christianity Today conducted a poll among Catholics to find out what they thought were the most pressing issues facing the Church today. The results were surprising. The most pressing issue for Catholics was human trafficking, followed by poverty, climate change, and the refugee crisis. The persecution of Christians came in last.
The word “persecution” suggests the burning of churches, the arrests of clergy, and the forbidding of church services. But it must be stressed that the beginning stages of persecution are often so subtle that they may not be noticed.
George Yancey, a writer for Belief.net, wrote:
“By a clinical definition of persecution, yes, Christians are persecuted in the US. But I discourage Churches in the US from saying that we are persecuted since what we face today isn’t what most people envision when they think of persecution.”
Yancey goes on to say that while Christians aren’t exactly being beheaded in the USA as they sometimes are in the Middle East, the more openly devout Christians here face growing intolerance, lawsuits, jobs lost, and public disdain. As for being a Christian on the campus of most universities, forget it. Christians are regarded as, at best, uncool, and at worst, hateful and bigoted.
But arguably more concerning than the war on Christianity is the war within Christianity itself. When Christian churches change many of their own traditional dogmas to suit the secular culture, they contribute to their own collapse from within.
Generally, the kind of Christianity being promoted today is a milquetoast Christianity that does not challenge the mores and beliefs of the progressive secular culture – but seeks to blend with it so as not to cause offense. It is the Christianity of liberal Benedictine nuns like feminist social activist Joan Chittster of Erie, Pennsylvania, and scores of others who see Christianity as a kind of United Nations of the soul where the latest social justice cause becomes a tenet of Christian orthodoxy.
This new form of Christianity is changing many Churches and denominations, including Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, a prime example of the infiltration of secular values into the Church can be measured by the actions of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center (OCSC) at the Jesuit-run Fordham University. The OCSC bills itself as a forum for “divisive perspectives on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity,” including, for example, edgy topics like children who may identify as non-binary or transgender.
Orthodox “leaders” such as the always-sassy Sister Vassa of Vienna, host of the cultish “Coffee with Sister Vassa” podcast, might as well be a theological tentacle of the James Martin School of New Theology. Sister Vassa, for instance, loves posing for photographs of herself without her nun’s veil, so that viewers can see that there’s really a flesh-and-blood woman beneath all that Russian Orthodox garb.
The refugee crisis response on the aforementioned Christianity Today poll is a perfect example of how U.S. Catholics are drinking the political Kool-Aid of the Democrat Party. It is also indicative of how the Catholic Church in the United States may be on its way to Milquetoast-ville.
Consider how the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference has issued statement after statement condemning current US policy on the deportation of illegal aliens, supporting sanctuary cities, and condemnations of the infamous southern wall during the Trump administration.
In 2019, millions of dollars from the annual Catholic Peter’s Pence collection were handed over to leftist billionaire financier George Soros’ funding agencies — where they were given to illegal immigrant caravans as they headed towards the Mexican-USA border in 2019.
During the 2019 U.S. Catholic Bishops Annual Assembly, 69 out of 212 bishops voted against language identifying abortion as the pre-imminent issue facing the Church today. Some critics cite this vote as further proof that the American Catholic Church has aligned itself with Democrats.
As my priest friend commented, “They want Christianity to be a nice little charming thing you do at Christmas or Easter…but something never to be taken too seriously.”
This means that the milquetoast Christians and churches who conform their beliefs to those of the ever-changing secular culture gain cultural and political favor over the more openly devout, who become the targets for persecution.
The competing Christianities—real vs milquetoast—have created deep divisions among believers, and a house divided cannot stand.
Thom Nickels
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.
England No Longer a Christian Nation as Atheism and Islam Make Gains – Census
Less than half of people in England and Wales are Christian, the census has revealed, with both atheism and Islam making major gains.
The majority of people in both England and Wales are not Christian for the first time probably since the 7th century AD, data from the 2021 census published on Tuesday has revealed.
According to the information released by Britain’s Office of National Statistics, both England and Wales have lost their status as majority-Christian nations, with only 46.3 per cent of the population of England reporting themselves as being Christian, while only 43.6 per cent of the Welsh population now describe themselves as being adherents to a denomination of Christianity.
While the faith still remains the plurality religion in both countries, it is the first time the total percentage of the population who are Christian has dropped below the 50 per cent mark in modern history, and most likely since the British isles were converted and moved away from Paganism 1,300 years ago. The change is even more pronounced when viewed over longer periods, with today’s 46 per cent of those in England professing to be Christian comparing to 71 per cent in 2001, just 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, the percentage of people saying that they have “no religion” in both nations has spiked significantly, growing from around a quarter of the population of both countries in 2011 to over 37 per cent by the time of recording the census last year.
Islam saw the next largest overall increase, growing in number from 2.7 million to 3.9 million in the decade, a rise of 44 per cent in ten years. In all, Muslims now account for 6.5 per cent of ordinary residents of England and Wales, and in 2001 they were 2.9 per cent.
Smaller religions also saw an increase, with the number of self-described pagans in the country growing by over 15,000 adherents since 2011, and the nations seeing an extra 200,000 Hindus and 100,000 Sikhs.
According to Church of England archbishop, Stephen Cottrell, the results represent a challenge to Britain’s Christian population, with the faith leader saying that church leaders can no longer simply rely on people claiming adherence to the faith even if they are non-practising.
“We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by,” he claimed, saying that the statistic “throws down a challenge to [Christians] not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our part in making Christ known”.
However, while Cottrell says that people still need a “spiritual truth” to guide them, it appears that British Christianity no longer has a monopoly on offering that truth, with Islam really enjoying a strong foothold in many regions.
While 6.5 per cent of the population of England and Wales overall, there are areas of great concentration, with London’s Tower Hamlets borough now being over 40 per cent Muslim.
Other regions, such as Blackburn and Darwen, as well as Luton, have also seen their Muslim populations rise to over 30 per cent of their total since the last census, with trends indicating that more areas of Britain may soon follow over the coming decade.
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