My Comments: Is Antichrist going bankrupt? We can always hope so. According to the link below, donations are down, and the Vatican’s pension is majorly in the hole. Things are looking kinda bleak for the seven-headed beast, but something tells me he’ll probably manage to find a way to keep on keeping on.
A bit of history…Many people don’t know this, but Antichrist was financially on the ropes in the early 16th century. Things got so bad that Church-State had to suspend construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome for lack of funds. The report is that weeds were springing up out of the unfinished columns. Definitely not a good look. Bad curb appeal.
This prompted Rome to send out its indulgence salesman extraordinaire, Johannes Tetzel. And it was Tetzel’s hawking indulgences that got a certain Augustinian monk fired up enough to post 95 theses on a church door in Wittenberg. Funny to think that the Lord used the Vatican’s wobbly finances to kick off the Protestant Reformation.
In case you’re wondering, indulgences are still a thing with the Vatican. In fact, as the article below notes, “Pilgrims, lured by the promise of indulgences and spiritual renewal, are anticipated to inject much-needed revenue into the Vatican’s coffers.”
Maybe Antichrist has a 21st-century version of Johannes Tetzel waiting to hawk those indulgences.
Maybe it’s time for another Augustinian monk to do his thing.
A couple of evenings back, I was working on my computer when I noticed the Microsoft “Copilot” icon in the taskbar. It wasn’t the first time I saw it. Microsoft added it to Windows 11 a while back, but I’d never done anything with it.
Unless you’ve been living under a bridge for the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard something about artificial intelligence, or AI for short. Copilot is Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot. The idea behind a generative AI chatbot is that you can ask it questions or make requests by typing in a window. The question or request is called a prompt.
For example, you can ask Copilot to make an image of a sunset just by typing in a prompt that reads “Generate a picture of a sunset.” You can be more specific, too, by adding further detail to your prompt such as “Generate a picture of a sunset with silhouettes of trees in the foreground.”
The Wittenberg Church Door where Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, October 31, 1517.
In two days, we will mark the 506th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door.
Luther wasn’t the first to push back on the theological and political abuses of the Roman Church-State. John Wycliffe in England had done so 150 or so years earlier. Jan Hus, another reformer, was murdered by the Church-State in 1415, just 102 years before Luther’s famous act.
Predating these men were the Waldenses, Italian Christians who left the Roman Church-State and built their own civilization in the valleys of the Alps. According to Wylie in his History of the Waldenses, “When their [the Waldenses] co-religionists on the plains entered within the pale of the Roman jurisdiction, they retired within the mountains, and spurning alike the tyrannical yoke and the corrupt tenets of the Church of the Seven Hills, they preserved in its purity and simplicity the faith their fathers had handed down to them.”[1]
As our nation, as the whole of the formerly Christian West, turns more and more away from its historic Protestant roots and more and more toward tyranny of various stripes, I cannot help but wonder if we twenty-first century Protestants will not have to follow in the footsteps of the Waldenses to escape what appears to be a coming wave of persecution in our own time.
President Joe Biden speaks at a Pride Month celebration on the South Lawn of the White House, Saturday, June 10, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18
If nothing else, Pride Month goes to show that the judge of all the earth is not lacking a sense of humor. In 1999, Bill Clinton declared June “Pride Month” in commemoration of the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. The Stonewall riots were a response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. And yet the Word of God tells us that “Pride goeth before destruction.” This certainly seems to be the case for America in 2023.
To give you a sense of how far America has come, and not in a good way, since 1969 regarding the public acceptance of homosexuality, I’ll refer you to an article in Britannica that notes, “In 1969 the solicitation of homosexual relations was an illegal act in New York City (and indeed virtually all other urban centres). Think about that, In the space of about 50 years, well within living memory, America has gone from a nation where homosexual activity was criminal – even in New York City! – to something like a new Sodom and Gomorrah, where open sodomy not only is tolerated but is even celebrated. And even more than celebrated, its tenants are now imposed from the top down on students and employees. When the rainbow flag is run up the flagpole, we’re all expected to salute, sometimes literally, and woe that that person who refuses.
An old saying from Stalinist Russia was “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” Something like that spirit now exists in America when it comes to Pride Month and the other forced celebrations of sodomy that are the rituals of the new state religion. Perhaps the most surprisingly eager celebrants of sodomy, at least to me, are the corporations. When I was growing up, business was viewed as a bedrock of conservatism. There was no time for radical politics. There were books to be kept and production targets to hit. But that’s not the case today.
John Robbins reported in his 1996 essay “Rebuilding American Freedom in the Twenty-First Century” about how IBM was pushing homosexual ideology on its managers. This was nearly thirty years ago. Today, corporate execs cannot fall over themselves fast enough to show their LGBTQ bona fides. Just last week, a friend sent me a Pride Month message from a company I used to work for. Mind you, this company is headquartered, not in some nutty progressive coastal city, but in the Midwest, the heartland of America. “Celebrating our PRIDE in 2023,” is the title of the message, which drones on with the usual corporate boilerplate about “diversity” and the importance of promoting “inclusion and acceptance” for the “LGBTQ+ community.”
My first thought was that I’m glad I don’t work there anymore. I do not care to be a part of a company that openly promotes gross immorality. Of course, corporate America’s never-be-the-first-one-to-stop-clapping promotion of the immoral homosexual agenda has put many Christians in the position of having to decide where to work and shop. Nearly every business of any size in the U.S. has been absorbed into the sodomite borg. CEOs are scared to death to be seen as unsupportive of sodomy. As a result, whether they personally believe the rubbish themselves, they think it wise to act as if they did and foist the evil LGBTQ agenda on their employees. When I worked for this particular company, I recall having to endure HR videos, one of which featured some guy in a blue dress complaining about how people would make unkind comments to him because he was a guy wearing a blue dress. The message was, you’re supposed to think some guy wearing a blue dress is perfectly normal. And if you don’t think that’s perfectly normal, you’re the problem!
I doubt seriously the corporate big wheels who promote videos of men in blue dresses think they’re doing evil. “Why, it’s just good business,” they probably say to themselves. But that, it seems to me, is evidence of a heart that loves money, and the love of money – not money, but the LOVE of money – is the root of all sorts of evil, as Jesus himself taught. And yet, promoting evil is exactly what they do when they agree to promote the homosexual agenda. These CEOs will have to give an account of themselves to God for this, and I do not want to be in their position.
Then there’s our political class, in particular, the Biden Regime. Just yesterday, Biden held a picnic in celebration of “Pride Month” on the south lawn of the White House. At the gathering, he told the crowd that his administration has their back and would work to counter “callous” and “cynical” bills in Republican-led states. Apparently, this is a reference to a number of states that recently passed laws against the mutilation of children at the hands of the medical establishment. Joe thinks this is terrible and, according to the New York Times, has appointed an official within the Department of Education “who will monitor and address the growing number of local bans on books with references to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Put differently, the Biden Regime wants to force kids in public schools to endure gay pornography as classroom reading material. That’s a long way from “see Spot run.” And I thought it was outrageous that I had to suffer through an HR video getting lectured by some dude in a blue dress! The Biden Regime is truly demonic and is seeking to corrupt the most vulnerable among us with the most vile of sins. May the Lord grant Christian parents the eyes to see that public schools are not the place for their children.
Worth mentioning too is the role of the Roman Catholic Church in promoting sodomy, especially the Jesuits. Prominent Jesuit James Martin asks the question “Can Catholics celebrate Pride Monty” and answers the question “Yes.” That’s not a surprise. In fact, I’d be surprised if a Jesuit were to come to any other conclusion. And although the Roman Church-State officially holds that sodomy is a sin, Rome has historically been one of the greatest promoters of this sin. Here’s what Luther had to say,
More remarkable yet, in the same bull they decided that a cardinal should not keep as many boys in the future. However, Pope Leo commanded that this be deleted; otherwise it would have been spread throughout the whole world how openly and shamelessly the pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy. I do not wish to mention the pope, but since the knaves will not repent, but condemn the gospel, blaspheme and revile God’s word, and excuse their vices, they, in turn, will have to take a whiff of their own terrible filth. This vice is so prevalent among them that recently a pope caused his own death by means of this sin and vice. In fact, he died on the spot. All right now, you popes, cardinals, papists, spiritual lords, keep on persecuting God’s word and defending your doctrine and your churches!
Luther’s Works Volume 47, p.38
Doubtless, the sort of filth Luther describes was going on before he wrote, just as without question industrial scale sodomy has Rome has continued to be a feature – not a bug, but a feature – of Rome right up to the present day as recent headlines continue to attest.
But there is some good news in all this unrelenting homosexual propaganda. Beginning with last year’s slap-down of Disney for its attempt to interfere in Florida’s rather mild law prohibiting schools from spreading homosexual propaganda, several other companies have recently paid the price for promoting sodomy. Bud Light’s parent company and Target are two such examples. Several states have passed laws against transitioning minors, enough so that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – HRC is one of the biggest drivers of the corporate sodomite agenda – issued a “State of Emergency.” The sodomites at HRC simply cannot tolerate state governments passing laws that accord with the Word of God and feels threatened by it. The fact that HRC is concerned shows that perhaps American Christians have had enough and are beginning to effectively fight back
This man does not deserve to die. For he has spoken to us in the name of the LORD our God.
Jeremiah 26:16
Today, I saw the meme above in a tweet from, of all people, Elon Musk. It’s funny, but there’s a serious aspect about it that requires comment. And that’s the connection between the liberties historically enjoyed in the West and the Protestant Reformation. Specifically, I have in mind the relationship between the First Amendment guarantee of free speech in the Constitution of the United States of America and the Protestant Reformation.
Americans rightly believe that the right to free speech is one of the defining characteristics of our nation. It’s our birthright, given by God and guaranteed by our Constitution. But as is often the case, and I include myself here, it becomes easy to take our birthright for granted.
But in the past few years, beginning in 2018 and accelerating with the tyrannical Covid hoax in 2020, the ability of Americans, and of Westerners generally, has increasingly come under pressure.
I mention 2018 because it was in August of that year that the first big strike against free speech on the internet took place with the rapid-fire banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars website from nearly every major social media outlet. It gave every appearance of being a coordinated attack and was extensively covered in the press. I wrote about it myself in this space at that time. Worth noting is that Infowars has as its tagline, “There’s a war on for your mind.” That’s true, and it has always been true. And that war is fought with words and with propositions. If we believe the truth, we live. If we believe the many lies out there in the world, we perish.
In Romans, Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. But what if people never hear the truth of the gospel. How can they believe? This was a major problem in the Middle Ages, ruled as it was in Europe by the Roman Church-State. Rome and her innovations such as the real presence of Christ in the mass blinded people to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Antichrist popes enforced the people’s blindness by torturing and murdering those who dared speak out against Rome’s evil system.
One might say it was Antichrist’s version of cancel culture.
Martin Luther as Hercules Germanicus by Hans Holbein, 1523. “In the picture, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Lyra already lay bludgeoned to death at his feet and the German inquisitor, Jacob van Hoogstraaten was about to receive his fatal stroke. Suspended from a ring in Luther’s nose was the figure of Pope Leo X,” The Reformation Room.
There is no other Head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God.
Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25.6
“I have no idea who Antichrist is.” I don’t remember anything else about the sermon. I don’t even recall the name of the man who preached it. But I do remember it was on a Sunday morning in December 2006 that I heard those words, “I have no idea who Antichrist is,” come from the pulpit of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
I case you’re wondering, no, it wasn’t D. James Kennedy who made that comment. It was a guest preacher, whose name escapes me.
It’s just as well I don’t recall the man’s name who uttered those words. For it seems to me that what he said that Sunday could well be said by most of the professing reformed church, both in 2006 and in 2021. No one, it seems, has any idea who Antichrist is.
It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, to borrow a turn of phrase from Winston Churchill. Or at least that’s how it seems to most Christians today.
Protesters demonstrate Covid lockdowns in Australia, August 21, 2021.
Have I gone Covid crazy?
Sometimes I ask myself this question. There are, after all, a lot of things going on in the world. And it’s not as if Covid, more to the point, governmental overreaction to Covid, is the only problem Americans, and citizens of other nations, face.
In the summer of the Year of Our Lord 2021, Americans face threats from any number of directions. We have an imploding financial system, embarrassment on the world stage due to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Antifa, BLM, an illegitimate and senile President Joe Biden, a government determined to classify its political opponents as enemies of the state, wildfires, replacement migration for the purpose of electing a new people, Critical Race Theory running rampant in our schools, universities, government and corporations, a polarized electorate, and Rome making huge inroads in its influence on our government. I’m probably leaving some things off this list. But you get the point. America is drowning in problems to the point that our national survival is an open question.
So many things to write about. And yet, I find I just cannot let go of Covid.
Why is that?
One reason is that it’s constantly in the news. You can’t get very far in the day, whether you want to or not, without hearing about something Covid related.
A second reason, it’s one of, if not the most, blatant propaganda campaign I’ve ever seen. The lies, they truly are off the charts. Let’s just look at one lie, the many reports that it’s the unvaccinated who are filling up hospitals with serious cases of Covid. Just today, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran such a story titled “Doctors: Vaccines are keeping people alive.” The article tells us that it the unvaccinated who are ending up in the hospital. “According to state and federal data, vaccinated people account for less than 2% of the 19,000 Ohioans hospitalized with COVID-19 this year and less than 1% of the nearly 7,000 who died from the disease.”
Well, that pretty much settles it. Get the vax already! Or you’re gonna die a horrible death!, or kill grandma!, or something!
Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.
Acts 10:34
“My favorite book is the Bible, because it provides the blackprint for man’s salvation.”
The year was either 1989 or 1990, I don’t recall for certain which. After a year away from college, I had returned to the University of Cincinnati (UC) to finish my undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts in the fall of 1989 and would go on to finish the next year.
One day during the school year, my eye happened to catch a display in the lobby of Langsam Library, the university’s main library, with the title “My Favorite Book.” The display was in a glass enclosed case built into the wall. Every quarter – UC was on a quarter system in those days rather than the more common semester system – the display was changed. As it turned out, the “My Favorite Book” display for that quarter was collection of submissions by UC faculty members stating the title of their favorite book and the reason why.
Having a few minutes to spare, I walked over to the display to look it over. Somewhat surprised to see the Bible listed as a favorite, I read the card with the faculty member’s write up, which began with the quote at the top of this page. But it didn’t end there. After so many years, I do not recall the name or position of the faculty member or the exact wording of the rest of his write up on why the Bible was his favorite book. What I do recall, though, was the militant and angry tone he used. There was nothing in his paragraph on the Bible that sounded remotely Christian. Rather, the author ranted on as if he were some left over radical still stuck in the 1960’s. The author, who was apparently black, made it very clear that he did not like white people and used the Bible to justify his position.
Even though I wasn’t a Christian the time, I had grown up in church and knew something about the Bible, enough that I found the author’s use of the Scriptures to promote his clearly hard-core racial agenda deeply disturbing.
At about the same time, there was controversy on the UC campus concerning a few paragraphs in, if I recall correctly, the student handbook. It had been reported that there was language in the new version of the handbook that addressed race issues. The controversy, as I heard it, was over an alleged claim made in the handbook that blacks cannot be racist because they have no power. This claim bothered me as it conflicted with what I had learned growing up. I had always been taught that a “racist” was someone who hated another person based solely on his skin color. Under that definition, anyone, regardless of his background, could be racist. But here was a claim stating that blacks cannot be racist. Somewhat skeptical that any official publication of the University would make such a claim – given how rampant “woke” ideology is on today’s college campuses, I know my skepticism sounds naïve to readers in 2021 – I went and asked for a copy of said offending handbook to see what it said for myself. Sure enough, the report I’d heard was true. It was right there is black and white: blacks cannot be racist, because they have no power.
As had the “My Favorite Book” write up, the language in the handbook disturbed and perplexed me. Not only did the claim fly in the face of everything I had been taught and believed, but it seemed to imply that black people were special class of individuals who were eternally victims incapable of doing wrong, whereas white people, as it were, bore the mark of Cain, eternal victimizers who could do no right.
As I said earlier, at that time I was not a Christian, neither had I ever studied philosophy. Although I was bothered by the assertions I had come across in the two publications, the “My Favorite Book” write up on the Bible and the student handbook, I lacked the needed intellectual tools to analyze and refute them.
Although I didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t come to realize it until twenty-five years or so later, the radical claims I had stumbled across were part of a new intellectual movement, so new that it had not even received a name until 1989, called Critical Race Theory.
Lux Lucet 
Is Anitchrist Going Bankrupt?
Posted in Reformation, The, Roman Catholicism, tagged commentary, Martin Luther, news, Politics, Pope Francis, Vatican News, writing on December 18, 2024| 2 Comments »
My Comments: Is Antichrist going bankrupt? We can always hope so. According to the link below, donations are down, and the Vatican’s pension is majorly in the hole. Things are looking kinda bleak for the seven-headed beast, but something tells me he’ll probably manage to find a way to keep on keeping on.
A bit of history…Many people don’t know this, but Antichrist was financially on the ropes in the early 16th century. Things got so bad that Church-State had to suspend construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome for lack of funds. The report is that weeds were springing up out of the unfinished columns. Definitely not a good look. Bad curb appeal.
This prompted Rome to send out its indulgence salesman extraordinaire, Johannes Tetzel. And it was Tetzel’s hawking indulgences that got a certain Augustinian monk fired up enough to post 95 theses on a church door in Wittenberg. Funny to think that the Lord used the Vatican’s wobbly finances to kick off the Protestant Reformation.
In case you’re wondering, indulgences are still a thing with the Vatican. In fact, as the article below notes, “Pilgrims, lured by the promise of indulgences and spiritual renewal, are anticipated to inject much-needed revenue into the Vatican’s coffers.”
Maybe Antichrist has a 21st-century version of Johannes Tetzel waiting to hawk those indulgences.
Maybe it’s time for another Augustinian monk to do his thing.
Share this:
Read Full Post »