Obama had a more non-denominational message for the audience that also included prominent leaders of non-Christian faiths. The president said that while religion is a source for good around the world, people of all faiths have been willing to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.”
“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
“So it is not unique to one group or one religion,” Obama said. “There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”
Obama called for all people of faiths to show humility about their beliefs and reject the idea that “God speaks only to us and doesn’t speak to others.”
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150205/us—obama-prayer_breakfast-f3b989dcc5.html
Letting President Obama speak at a prayer breakfast is just wrong. This man is openly hostile to Christianity and has appointed likeminded people that choose to wield the power of the State to subjugating people’s religious beliefs to his will. Christianity is the belief that Jesus is Lord; even of the State. Obama on the other hand is a secular humanist that believes that you can believe whatever you like as long as you keep it private and out of the public square and acknowledge the State as Supreme.
Ironically, this is the same conflict that Christians faced in the Roman Empire. Romans proudly proclaimed, “Caesar is Lord” and the Christian belief that “Jesus is Lord” became viewed as treasonous.
Allowing Obama to officiate a traditionally non-denominational Christian event is like the Mormon Chaplain that was on my ship—back in my Navy days—leading the Protestant worship service. We might use similar terms but in fact we were worshipping different gods.
Read the first paragraph quoted above and then read between the lines. What Obama is doing is equating all religions and then saying that anyone who takes their beliefs too seriously is a potential danger to the rest of us.
All religion claims to be the path to Truth. Logically, if religion leads us to Truth and we don’t follow where it leads, how can that be virtuous? The fact that religions contradict each other means that they cannot all be true.
Couple this with Jesus’ statement that “I am the way, the Truth and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by me” (John 14: 6) and suddenly the idea that all religious beliefs are equal can’t coexist with Christianity. Christianity claims to be Truth to the exclusion of all other beliefs.
Obama then invokes the Crusades and Inquisition to prove that Christianity is just as corrupt as all other religions because terrible deeds have been done in the name of Christ. The Church has done bad things and some good ones too over its history. It is the doctrinal and human failures of Rome that led to both the Crusades and Inquisition. Some argue that the Crusades were in part a defensive reaction to Islam but the method of recruiting soldiers employed by the Pope is without biblical warrant. Forgiving sins is Christ’s job not the Pope.
Originally, the Inquisition was a church trial to prevent heresy and uphold orthodoxy. It was used as a way of suppressing movements viewed as conflicting with Roman doctrine. Typically, I think the Spanish Inquisition is in mind when the “I” word is used.
As bad as these things might be, the number of casualties is nothing compared to the number of deaths just in the 20th Century as a result of socialism. Between National Socialism and international socialism, hundreds of millions of people were killed—many by their own governments.
Slavery then gets blamed on Christianity. Ironically, it was Christian folks that were the leaders of abolition of slavery. Yes, people that thought themselves “good” Christians did own slaves but only because they did not have a proper biblical worldview. Some Christians thought better of slave ownership and freed their slaves but this doesn’t fit the narrative. Blacks in America owed slaves too but again we don’t talk about that.
Slavery in the Bible was only supposed to be for a period of up to seven years. Slaves as property can only be found in Exodus and is not portrayed as a “good” institution. Somehow the fact that Muslims in Africa were enslaving their fellow blacks and selling them to Europeans tends to be overlooked in this discussion. Pardon the pun, but the narrative of slavery in the United States has been “whitewashed” by folks with other agendas.
Christians then get blamed for Jim Crow Laws. Really? Not all those good southern Democrats. It was a majority of Republicans and minority of Democrats that passed the civil rights legislation in the 1960’s but somehow the Democrats always get a pass. It was Democrat Governors and Mayors that used Billie clubs, dogs, and water cannons against Blacks in the 60’s but Democrats get a pass. Sorry Barry, Jesus had nothing to do with Jim Crow Laws, only Democrats.
Obama then opined, “There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.” Yes, it’s called a “sin nature”. Scripture warns us “not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought” and elsewhere says “pride comes before a fall”. We are commended to “love one another as I have loved you”. Only when we lose sight of the fact that all men are created in the image of God do we elevate ourselves at the expense of others.
In the last paragraph, Obama asked that we “reject the idea that ‘God speaks only to us and doesn’t speak to others’”. Wrong again. Christians believe that God speaks thru His word—the Bible. God the Holy Spirit is in our hearts to instruct us in all Truth. Whether we listen to God’s leading is a matter of faithfulness.