The Painful Truth About The Worldwide Church of God
 

The Bible proves we are a Christian nation!

Bill Fairchild

The most important thing any one can do is to feel good about himself.  So we need constant reassurance that we are good, moral, virtuous, honest, compassionate, and Christian while we continue to do things that would make us question our moral perfection if we were to stop and think honestly about them.  We go to great extremes to prove to ourselves, from unimpeachable authoritative sources, that we are good and that others are bad if they don’t do just as we do.

One “authoritative” source for many is our country’s Founding Fathers.  If we can find anything that any one of them ever said or did that smells even faintly like something in the Bible, then, since we all know that every word in the Bible is literally true and that it is the unassailable word of the Living God who gives us every breath of air we breathe, then that “proves” that all the Founding Fathers were giant men of God, that they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution under divine inspiration, and that God wanted the USA to be ripped out of the British Empire in the 1780s so we could rule the whole world and bring all the unsaved billions to Christ.

The most “unimpeachable” source for proving any belief is the Bible.  So whenever we want to prove belief X, we scour the Bible, just as some scour all the writings and speeches of our Founding Fathers, looking for something, anything, that smells even faintly like what we are trying to prove.  Voilà!  There it is!  Proven beyond a doubt!  In God’s Word!  IT MUST BE TRUE!  Quod erat demonstrandum!

Our text for today is a verse from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:  “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”  There was, of course, a second half to that verse in Matthew, but I left it out because it has nothing to do with my thesis.  Or it was confusing.  Or it used obscure language.  Or something.  I don’t know. But the first  half of the verse makes me feel really good about what I am trying to prove, so therefore I feel good about myself, so I can stop quoting in mid-verse.

Another verse in the Old Testament tells us that humans naturally tend to judge one another by outward appearance, but that God looks on our hearts.  Now this verse in Matthew tells us humans, who find it impossible to look on another’s heart, just how we can look on someone else’s heart.  And the way to do that is to look at his actions.  If I claim to be X but yet I am doing the opposite of X, then this Sermon on the Mount verse says I am not really, genuinely X.  And you can know for sure whether I am X or the opposite of X by determining if I am doing X or its opposite.

So now we know how to determine if the USA is a Christian nation.  We apply this simple test – what are the fruits of your basic garden-variety Christian nation, what are the fruits of the USA, and are they the same?

Where do we look in history to find all the other Christian nations?  Is there a list in The World Almanac and Book of Facts or any encyclopedia of all the Christian nations?

An even better question is “what is the definition of a Christian nation?”  Is it a nation in which most of the inhabitants are Christians or call themselves Christians, whose head of state is a Christian, or what?

An even better question than that is “what is the definition of a Christian?”  Whoa, maybe we’d better not go there just yet, or we could get into real trouble.  I’ll finish my little article on Christian nations and then you can decide for yourself just what is a true Christian person and, by extension, whether or not you are a true Christian.  Then you will know if you can truly feel good about yourself.

Trying to determine if a whole country is a Christian nation or any given individual is a Christian is a really big problem, because there are two radically different ideas of what constitutes true Christianity.  The first definition is someone who does what Jesus himself said to do in all the places where he is quoted directly.  The second definition is someone who does what all the other people throughout history who have claimed to be Christians have done; in other words, the original theory of Jesus versus the applied and traditional Christianity of Jesus’ so-called followers.  Jesus didn’t tell his followers to force other people to believe in Jesus or else kill them.  He told his disciples to love one another, forgive their enemies, and many gentle things like that.  What about the non-Jesus version of Christianity, though?  How does it act?

The next link in our chain of logic is to learn the history of the early church years, the official Establishment of Christianity by Constantine, the expansion and breakup of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, Medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modern times.  Learning this much history will take many months of reading.  I’ll summarize it all very quickly:  the followers of Jesus slowly grew in numbers for about 300 years, during which time they competed with all the other religions in the Roman Empire and were not singled out for any great persecution, as “pagan” Rome was quite tolerant with all religions; Constantine became the Emperor of Rome and then made Christianity the official state religion; in 325 A.D. Constantine, for purely political reasons that had nothing to do with his own personal religious beliefs, intervened at the Council of Nicaea and made a theological decision in order to put an end to the heresy of Arius, which was one particular source of constant bickering between major factions in Christiantiy; he then moved his headquarters from Rome to Constantinople (later renamed Istanbul) with a weaker political ruler left behind in Rome; the version of Christianity that Constantine chose to support ultimately became the dominant religion throughout Europe as Roman political influence expanded; later emperors began to enforce the new state religion on pain of exile or death; the western branch of the Roman Empire in Rome was conquered militarily, leaving a political power vacuum which was quickly filled by the Roman Pope and all his successors; as Rome’s political power suddenly disappeared, Roman religious power slowly permeated Europe as missionaries went everywhere spreading the new state religion went; thus in a few centuries most of western Europe had been Christianized; since there was now a monopoly of religious beliefs in Europe, the lack of competition caused the inevitable corruption to set in, resulting in growing tyranny of the official church’s leaders over their church members, even extending into outright condemnation of all learning and education; the only people who could even learn to read or write were monks in monasteries, and all they ever wrote were copies of the church’s documents, including the Bible; great oppression, misery, illiteracy, serfdom, squalor, disease, and sufferings of all kinds permeated Europe as the one, true religion was enforced everywhere (Dark Ages); finally humans began to think for themselves again, slowly at first with the Renaissance, then it escalated quickly with the Enlightenment, then revolutions began (in the USA and France, especially), despots were being swept away, the Industrial Revolution began, Darwinism came along that further got men thinking anti-dogmatically, and then Einstein showed how everything was relative and thus nothing was absolute.

So almost any one of the western European nations could be used as an example to see how Christian nations have historically behaved.  Notice I did not say as an example as to how a Christian nation SHOULD behave.  And what did they all do?  Their rulers oppressed the masses of their people, the church was exalted above all else, people were reduced to serfdom, and non-Christians were murdered willy-nilly in their overseas colonization efforts or were enslaved and forced to try to find gold or other riches.  Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania – they all had their turns going to war on each other or sending “explorers” to other far-off lands whose real mission was to bring back vast amounts of plunder for those few investors who financed the expedition.  And along with the exploring conquistadors were sent religious missionaries whose duty was to read to the heathen natives, who had never even seen Europeans before, a magic formula written by a Pope asking them if they wanted to be converted to Christianity (always asked in the Europeans’ language rather than in the natives’ own language), and then any natives who failed to answer properly were instantly deemed to be heathen and thus doomed to death or slavery.  Hey, it was legal!  It said so right there on the explorer’s official copy of the Pope’s decision.  And if it is legal, then it must be proper, valid, moral, Christian, and godly.  The vast majority of all the inhabitants of Central America, South America, and the Caribbean Islands were murdered or worked to death by Spanish expeditions of plunder, enabled “legally” by their accompanying missionaries, exactly as in Stalin’s gulag archipelago.

After the USA was founded in the 1780s, what did we proceed to do?  We acted just as all other “Christian nations” had done for hundreds of years.  We murdered almost all the original inhabitants of North America, stole their land, began a huge slave trade from Africa, and then the white European settlers began oppressing one another when there were no more vast numbers of aboriginal Indians left to oppress.  We legally freed all our slaves but continued for almost another 100 years treating them as if they were still slaves in most ways.

Am I unfairly bashing America?  Do I hate America because I openly discuss its real history?  Am I a terrorist-loving, unpatriotic, ultra-radical, liberal, left-wing, President Bush-hating, Communist swine?  Aren’t all other nations equally guilty?  Of course they are.  I am not condemning only Americans’ historic behavior, I am condemning all people everywhere throughout history who have engaged in senseless butchery, genocide, lying, pillage, plunder, slavery, betrayal, deception, corruption, tyranny, and any and all other evils that are violations of the grand unifying law of the universe to treat others the way you would want them to treat you.  European Christian nations have done all these for 2,000 years, but so have non-Christian nations in other parts of the world.  Christian nations are supposed to know better, though, so they are doubly worthy of condemnation for the rotten example they have been setting.

Someone may argue “But Christianity has improved society over the centuries.  We got rid of slavery in the mid-1800s; women now can vote; we are a much more compassionate and caring nation now.”  Bullshit indeed.  Back in ancient “pagan” Rome and Greece, people were much more equal and free to think than we are now.  The greatest time in all human history for liberty and freedom of thought was in the golden age of Athens.  All religions were equally welcome in ancient pagan cultures.  Women were highly respected in Rome.  There was a great deal of publicly esteemed morality in the early days of the Republic of Rome.  Things went downhill after Rome degenerated into an Empire, and when Rome was taken over by a single authoritarian Christian religion it went downhill much farther and faster.  The ONLY thing that is qualitatively different today than at all previous eras in human history is the sophistication of our weaponry.

Well, since the USA has historically acted the same as all other western European nations who have been Christianized for the last 2,000 or so years, and since you can know them by their fruits, therefore I contend that the USA really is a Christian nation.  In fact, we are the most Christian nation that has ever existed, because we are now exporting our way of war everywhere we can in our futile so-called war on terror, push for globalization the new world order, and mad race to seize all the world’s natural resources for our cheap-energy-addicted nation of dumbed-down sheeple.  What is really happening is that the USA is trying to take over the whole world and force our economic system on everyone else, willing or not.  And we are being led now in this grand Crusade by a fundamentalist, true believer, super-zealous, recovering alcoholic named George W. Bush who is propped up by a handful of wealthy contributors eager to see their investments in the military-industrial complex swell to truly Biblical proportions.  And we are doing this all in Jesus’ name.  If you don’t think that’s true, then go ask our President.  Or read some of his less publicized speeches to religious groups.

Our national fruits reveal our true colors.  And our fruit is very sick indeed, as have been the national fruits of all other “Christian nations”.

Yes, the United States of America truly is a Christian nation.  And shame on us for being so.  What a hideous recrimination for such a wonderful, idealistic, yet gullible collection of people.

Where are the non-Christian pagans now that we really need them to run the place?

 

Bill Fairchild

Plainfield, Illinois

22 JUN 2004

 

 

 

10/26/2006


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