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We've been asking the wrong Question hereReader comment on item: Was Barack Obama a Muslim? Submitted by George (United States), Jun 28, 2008 at 12:26 Now I am Chrystal Clear Obama's Religion. We've been asking the wrong question is Barack a Muslim or a Christian it is both at the same time. BLENDING; MARXISM INTO LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND INTO BLACK LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE NATION OF ISLAM INTO ONE AND THE SAME IN CHICAGO " ALL IS ONE AND ONE IS ALL" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xx9E_G6-EM&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmJoU-Nnntc&feature=related Those clips both shed light and a full understanding of Obama's religion. So now I understand when Obama says he is a committed Christian I know what he means and I also know now that Louis Farrakhan is also a Christian and Jesus and Elijah and a good loving Muslim all at the same time. All is one and one is all . George Here is a brief article on the history of Liberation theology and its roots; Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright's congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." (emphasis mine) If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to nearly every modern person, they would be "class struggle" and "oppressed vs. oppressors." James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King, Jr. All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and painted it black. Liberation Theology vs. Traditional Christianity The teaching authorities of the Catholic Church, have for more than 20 years now, been attempting to stamp out these heretical liberation theologies, denouncing them as vehemently antithetical to the Catholic Christian faith, and have been strenuously combating this Marxist counterfeit Christianity on many fronts within the Church herself. Of course, the Medieval, iron-fisted clamp of the Catholic Church's authority, even within the Church herself, is routinely overstated, and there are renegade priests all over the place (more on another of Obama's spiritual mentors, a liberation theology Catholic priest in Chicago, in Part Two next week). Not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church has no authority whatsoever over those claiming to represent protestant interpretations of the Christian faith, such as Cone and Wright. But it is important to note here that liberation theology, including black liberation theology, has not gone unnoticed by the learned biblical scholars within the Vatican, and liberation theology has been roundly denounced as both heretical and dangerous, not only to the authentic Christian faith, but even more so to the societies which come to embrace it. Just one nugget from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation': "…it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads." Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone's "Christianity" and Farrakhan's "Nation of Islam." They are two prophets in the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as backdrops for their black-power aims. As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power: "As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion'." (p. xii; emphases mine) And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm X: "The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle." (p. xiii) (Ironically, considering the formal Church teaching regarding liberation theologies, this book of Cone's was published by Orbis, owned and managed by The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, a Maryknoll religious entity. So much for the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church.) It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in 1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly: "For the marxist, the truth is a truth of class: there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class." Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the Marxist class struggle, then he is a "white Jesus," and they must "kill him." (Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111) And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation from traditional Christianity itself: "The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about he white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution." Move over Jesus and make way for Cone, Wright and Obama. The revolution is at hand. And presto-chango, once we've followed Marx, Cone, Wright and Obama down the yellow brick road to revolution, Christianity as we've known it for millennia ceases to exist. Obama was raised by his mother, the agnostic anthropologist, to regard religion as "an expression of human culture…not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives." (Audacity of Hope; p. 204) However, when Barack Obama met Jeremiah Wright in the mid-eighties, between his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, he found a "faith" perfectly accommodating to his already well-formed worldview. From The Audacity of Hope: "In the history of these (African people's) struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world." (p. 207) As Obama explains further, it was Wright's (and presumably Cone's, as required of new members at Trinity) peculiar form of Christianity that Obama found palatable: "It was because of these newfound understandings (at Trinity under Wright) — that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice…that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity…and be baptized." Wright's vision of Christianity was perfectly appetizing to Barack Obama; he didn't need to change a thing. Liberation Theology and the New Order of Things James Cone devotes many words in all of his books to instructing his disciples to beware of those resistant to the necessary change in the power structure, warning that, "those who would cast their lot with the victims must not forget that the existing structures are powerful and complex…Oppressors want people to think that change is impossible." (James H. Cone; Speaking the Truth; p. 49) Pope Benedict XVI (writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) give an equally stringent message to Catholics about liberation theology regarding the perversion of the Christian understanding of the "poor": "In its positive meaning the Church of the poor signifies the preference given to the poor, without exclusion, whatever the form of their poverty, because they are preferred by God…But the theologies of liberation…go on to a disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle." According to Pope Benedict's instruction on liberation theology, our understanding of the virtues, faith, hope and charity are subjugated to the new Marxist order: Faith becomes "fidelity to history." We are the ones we've been waiting for, to bring about the final fruition of the class struggle. Hope becomes "confidence in the future." Yes, we can change the world; we don't need God. Our collective redemption comes when we engage in the Marxist class struggle. Charity becomes "option for the poor." All are not created equal. Special political privilege for the oppressed, socialism, will set us free. It's the dawn of a new age. Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". << Previous Comment Next Comment >> Reader comments (1107) on this item
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