Palm Sunday and the Start of Holy Week

 Today at Townhall.com Kevin McCollough has a post entitled The Madness of Palm Sunday in which he points out that Jesus knew, even provoked his own crucifixion, and yet he did in anyway. Not out of some form of madness, like the people who commit suicide by cop, but out of love.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem, not in secrecy, not under cover of darkness—but in full view of a swelling, electric crowd. They line the streets. They wave palm branches. They throw their cloaks on the ground. They shout, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”

They are celebrating Him like a king.

And they’re right to do so.

This wasn’t random. This wasn’t accidental. This wasn’t Jesus getting swept up in a moment. This was deliberate, calculated, prophetic fulfillment. Centuries earlier, the prophet Zechariah had written that Israel’s king would come riding on a donkey—gentle, humble, unmistakable. And here He was, doing exactly that.

Not on a war horse. Not with an army. But on a borrowed donkey.

Because He wasn’t coming to conquer Rome.

He was coming to conquer something far more permanent.

...snip...

Without the cross, there is no forgiveness.

Without His suffering, there is no healing.

Without His death, there is no life.

The madness of Palm Sunday is that the King is being celebrated by people who don’t understand the cost He’s about to pay for them.

Many people suffer, sometimes seeming unbearable pain. Jesus suffered all that. But his true suffering was the abandonment by the Father. Imagine if your father suddenly abandoned you, said "I don't know you" and turned his back to you. You would be hurt. Now imagine your father is the creator of the universe. This made His suffering so much worse. It makes our suffering seem like a pin prick.

We know how the story ends, and we are both sorrowful, and overjoyed. Please, This week, I urge you to consider this, and to pray on it.

How Should a Christian Vote

 I was reading the American Thinker today when I noticed a very interesting post by Kevin Finn entitled, I'm not a Democrat, I'm a Catholic. Well, first he means he's a Roman Catholic, for we Lutherans are "catholic" as well as other denominations that subscribe to the Apostles and Nicaean creeds. But the Roman church has the most well-developed ideas on how a Christian should vote of which I can think.

As a Catholic (and a sinner in need of redemption and God’s mercy), I can’t support the things that Democrats support. I think cutting off an unborn child’s arms and legs, crushing her skull, sucking out her brains, and then selling her organs for profit is evil. I think chemically sterilizing middle school kids and surgically mutilating their genitals sounds like a plan from the pits of Hell. I think it’s wicked to put graphic pornography in K–12 school classrooms in order to teach underage kids the finer points of rape and incest.

I think it was pure evil to open up the borders and allow millions of unvetted, unvaccinated people to enter. That crowd included uncounted numbers of MS-13; Tren de Aragua; and single, military-aged men from countries hostile to the U.S. I have nothing but revulsion and loathing for Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Hussein Obama, and whoever else was running the country during the last “administration” to cavalierly disregard the 300,000 children who went missing during their tenure. Tom Homan has told us that many of those kids were sold into prostitution and slave labor, although he and his team have managed to rescue roughly half of them so far.

When you put it like that, and that is exactly how it is, a vote for a Democrat candidate is a vote for these evil things. You become, in lawyer talk, an accessory to a crime. You are therefore just as guilty as the one who committed the crime.

The author asked a friend and a Catholic how he justified his vote for Democrats. His friend's reply was "Trump's worse." But is he?

I know! Trump got Glen Simpson and Fusion GPS to fabricate a phony manuscript that falsely implicated Biden of inappropriate ties with Vladmir Putin. Then he fed that document to the media, and used the resulting news stories to justify lying to a federal judge to obtain permission to surveil Biden’s campaign headquarters. Then he used the “Two-Step” rule to expand that surveillance to many of Biden’s staffers. And then he fabricated other crimes and arrested many Biden associates and, with a complicit media establishment, subjected those associates to trials in Trump-friendly courtrooms.

Oops! Sorry! That wasn’t Trump, was it? No, that was Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their party.

You see, Donald Trump and a few conservative members of Congress and some Republican governors want to put an end to all of that. To a leftist, that makes Republicans worse than Democrats.

You can read what Catholic moral theology teaches about how to discern what candidate to vote for. Unfortunately, as Paul said, each of us has fallen short of the glory of God, and all men need God's grace. But the defiance of His law, not through human weakness, but to cynically get votes, says that Pelosi, Biden and others are following the Devil's path, and Christians should not vote for them or people like them.

Women Are Intended to Raise Children Under the Protection of Their Husbands

 I was intrigued by a post at the American Thinker today by Mike McDaniel entitled The Biden CIA didn't like motherhood. This after our church just celebrated another baptism, which I think might be our pastor's favorite duty. What's not to like about women who perform in the manner which God intended?

McDaniel has the story:

But why would the FBI, with tens, even hundreds, of thousands of Islamist terrorists and Chinese spies pouring over the border unvetted and unidentified waste time focusing on Catholics? Those traditional radicals appreciated the Latin Mass, which the DEI dimwits at multiple FBI field offices apparently saw as an imminent threat to America, or at least to the Biden’s Handlers’ Administration. Somehow, I doubt many, if any, FBI agents, spoke Latin.

Bizarrely, the FBI thought those Catholics were somehow aligned with White Supremacists. How they got that idea remains unexplained.

...snip...

The memo, titled “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment,” tarnished females who hold traditional values.

“REMVE”?! Has any sapient being outside the CIA and Biden’s Handlers ever heard, or understood, that acronym? Does such an organization exist? Apparently, the CIA imagined it into existence.

...snip...

So. If you’re a white, traditional American mother who might be “RMVE-sympathetic," even though you’ve never heard that acronym and have no idea what it might mean, and you don’t advocate violence, as most traditional mothers don’t, you “amplify RMVE narratives regarding perceptions of racial and ethnic hierarchy, as well as perceived threats from those they see as advocating multiculturalism and globalization.”

What?!

I will end it there on McDaniel's "What1?."  I suspect that most girls want to get married, have and raise children. It is why God created us male and female. He could have created us male only, don't you know. But he saw fit to create us male and female with slightly different needs and desires. It is only when young women go off to college and are bombarded by the feminazis that they distain their primary calling.

The Greatest Threat To Our Nation Is Islam

 I have been having major health issues, so have not been able to comment on anything, let alone readd as much as I have in the past.  In any case, I have probably said everything that I needed to say.  But if I haven't please go read Eric Utter at the  American Thinker today entitled A Devolutionary War?

Muslims claim to love the LORD but then deny that He was indeed God in the flesh. They even deny that He died and was buried and rose on the third day. This is typical Muslim taqiyya. They lie to Christians. We should recognize that Muslims worship, whether they realize it or not, the Devil.

Utter writes:

The gravest danger to Western countries going forward is the rapid Islamization of their nations. No matter what Keir Starmer, Mark Carney, Catherine Connolly, or Zohran Mamdani say, this is inarguably the case.

Look at the countries from which Muslims come. Look at the U.K., Canada, Ireland, or New York City, three or four decades ago and compare that to what they look like today. Same for France, Germany, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, and others.

It is shocking. It is embarrassing. It is a continually unfolding invasion. It is leading to the rapid devolution of Western nations and the consequent degradation of quality of life, safety, and even character. It is a crime, one for which these nations’ leaders should be held accountable. These countries should look to the American Revolution for guidance on how to protect individual freedoms and counteract invasions and usurpations. So should many more Americans, for that matter.

As for the word "devonutionary" in the title of his article, when was the last time you heard of anything useful coming out of a Muslim nation. They claim algebra was developed by Muslims in the dark ages. Perhaps, but that is a long, long time ago. What Islam brings is death, destruction, and hatred of everything Christiandom has brought forth.

Yes, I think They Are Evil

 As if to answer the previous post, at the American Thinker Monica Showalter has a post entitled At Davos, the WEF now promotes less clothes-washing to save the planet. What is it with these rich freaks, that they want to impose misery on the rest of us?

What is it about the greenie jet-setters of the World Economic Forum flying in on a plume of carbon compounds, and their urge to make life just a little more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for the little guys they claim to know what's best for?

...snip...

It's all part of the leftist urge to make life as wretched as possible for the well-fed average joes of the West.

As I wrote here, they really like this stuff and they're on a tear:

What a sick world this is. Greens have unsuccessfully tried to sell us on all sorts of repulsive things to put into our bodies -- from various versions of soylent green, to "stewmaking" burials, to human compost burials, to recycling urine into drinking water to save the earth, to eating bugs. It's one disgusting thing after another, which these days even includes attempting to coax people into taking public transit. Not too long ago, a Utah official tried to encourage people to eat wild toads to save the environment. Utah teachers were also recently caught teaching CRT in schools behind the kids' parents' backs.

... and ...

It wasn't enough that the greenie left came for our light bulbs, our flush toilets, our guns, our plastic straws, our gas stoves, or our hamburgers.

Now they're coming for our coffee.

Another greenie favorite is going without air conditioning. The New York Times was promoting that last year. I wrote about it here.

Now they want crusty, dirty, smell-it-a-mile-away clothing, all made worse by the greenie practice of going without air conditioning.

To reinforce what I wrote in the last post, yes I think the WEF people are evil, and anyone who supports their insane ideas is supporting evil. Rather than trust in these guys, perhaps put our trust in God?

Are Democrat Voters Evil?

At Hot Air today, David Strom has an article that tells us It's Wrong to Assume Democratic Party Voters are Evil.

One of the frustrations all of us have is that Democratic voters are incurious about why we believe what we believe and why we vote as we do.

They come up with explanations that amount to: we are Naziwhitesupremacisthomophobiccolonialist genocidaires. They watch the pundits on TV, listen to people like President Biden, and read the editorials in Pravda and are convinced that we are on a hair trigger and will soon stalk the land with our scary AR-15s hunting down trans people, brown people, and eventually AWFLs.

The idea is of course absurd, but a lot of liberals have voted for politicians they, at some level, know are insanely liberals because they believe the alternative is a future they fear would be dystopian.

Now, reverse things for a moment. For decades, we understood that liberals see us as evil, and we saw liberals as stupid. But as their politicians have become more and more insane or even evil—what else can you call abortion until birth and sterilizing and mutilating children except demonic?—many of us have concluded that anybody who can be complicit in that evil must be evil themselves.

I see it in the comments. I understand it in my bones. When I hear a liberal talking about trans issues while ignoring the fact that boys are having their penises cut off and girls are having their breasts and wombs removed, it is enraging. Vague handwaving in the face of Mengele-like human experimentation isn't just baffling, but enraging.

So far, his experience is similar to mine. And frankly, I am not sure that ignorance is an excuse for continuing to vote for evil, particularly because so many have in essence closed their eyes, covered their ears, and yelled "nanny nanny boo boo" to avoid hearing the truth. They want to believe that man is basically good, but the truth is man, and everything in the world is fallen.

In the end, what liberals believe is that the world is perfectible with enough money and effort, and their politicians promise to perfect it. They actually believe that Gavin Newsom wants to solve homelessness, that Tim Walz wanted to feed children and provide daycare, and were shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that Biden's brain was pudding. They were told by their trusted elite that he was fit as a fiddle.

It must have been a mistake, because the alternative—a massive conspiracy to deceive the American public—would never be done by their trusted elite.

Your average liberal doesn't want communism or children sacrificed to the alphabet gods. They want peace and prosperity and a "kinder, gentler" world. They don't understand that human beings are fallen—most are post-Christian—and believe the myth that the world is perfectible.

Saint Paul notes that the Word of God has gone out to all creation. Therefore, closing your eyes, covering your ears and screaming so you won't hear it does not relieve you of the responsibility for evil. So, I will continue to think that while these people are not, in themselves, evil, they are still promoting it to the detriment of us all.

About Greenland

 Howard J. Warner has a post at the American Thinker entitled Greenland: How about this for a solution? that proposes a middle ground to America controlling Greenland. I agree with the President here that we need Greenland for security purposes. Looking at a typical Mercator map shows Greenland off to the side of Canada and much larger than it actually is. But if you look at a map looking down on the North Pole, the strategic importance of both Alaska and Greenland becomes obvious.

Now, the Arctic Ocean and Greenland are being actively contested by Russia, China, and of course the United States. Greenland has a population of only around 56k. Clearly it cannot defend itself. Either Russia or China could easily over run it. Denmark cannot defend it either. For that matter, can NATO? Don't make me laugh. As for which of these potential rulers would the residence rather live under. China? Really? Russia is not much better. The U.S. with its long history of freedom seems a much more benevolent. Now, I am the grandson of Danish immigrants, and I have been to Denmark. It's a beautiful country, to be sure, but I am sure glad that my ancestors immigrated here.

In an ideal world, the Greenlanders would be left alone to pursue their independent lives. But we don't live in an ideal world. The Greenlanders find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sorry.