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It is vital to our civilization to avoid the snares of the religious Left
 
By Donald Hank
 
I recently saw an article prophesying that the failures of the religious right's leading politicians will tarnish the image of Christianity because of their unwillingness to follow the Constitution in areas such as human rights, education and border security, and their fuzzy notion of Christianity being compatible with Islam.
 
Although I take this prophecy very seriously, I also believe Americans can avoid falling into this trap if we learn some basic facts about the Left, particularly the fact that it is 100% fake 100% of the time, no exceptions, and that includes the "Christian" Left. I say that with full confidence as a former leftist insider.
 
Therefore I believe one of the chief mechanisms that Satan will use, and has used, to subvert Christianity will be "Christian" Left.
 
That is why I am always alert to the ways and means by which the "Christian" left operates and it is why I first reported on the shenanigans of a group operating out of the first Baptist Church of Charleston South Carolina under the leadership of Dr. Mitch Carnell, who bills himself as a communications expert and has twice run press releases in Christian Newswire pushing the policy whereby Christians are to say nice things about each other.  In my last column, I demonstrate that this niceness idea is not intended to apply to those who disagree with the Left. It is in fact camouflage for subversion of the faith.
 
I challenged Mitch to a debate of sorts by e-mail and in his responses-actually non-responses-he kept repeating the mantra that Christians need to respect each other and that we share the common goal of leading people to Christ.
 
In his last e-mail, he also said neither he nor I was right.  We just had different viewpoints.
 
In these two assertions lies the Christian Left's insidious strategic formula, as outlined by my friend and colleague Olavo De Carvalho in a recent column entitled How to Debate with Leftists to whit (I have extrapolated this to the Christian left):
 
1-Trap the opponent into following the leftist's rules, namely mandatory acceptance of the proposition that both sides, including the left, are sincere Christians,
2-Pay lip service to the idea of "leading people to Christ" but without defining what that means,
3-When you can no longer win on logical grounds, state that neither opponent is wrong so as to prematurely terminate the debate and confuse the opponent.
 
The unwary traditional Christian opponent who falls into this trap is quickly ensnared, can hardly escape and suffers a crisis of faith.  After all, if it were true that the leftist opponent were just a sincere Christian with a different viewpoint, then it would be ungracious to keep arguing. Maybe God is on the side of the Left? And the orthodox Christian knows that we are to "go out into the world and preach the gospel" so he warms up to the sneaky leftist on that point as well. Not only that, as the leftist knows, conservative Christians are bound to some extent by the dictum "judge not that ye be not judged" and he is counting on this to restrain the orthodox Christian from assaulting frontally.
 
But the assumption that the "Christian" leftist bears any resemblance beyond the cosmetic to a traditional Christian is patently fallacious. For unlike traditional Christianity, which starts with God's view of the universe and applies it to man, the Christian left starts with Marx's view of the universe, rewrites the Bible to fit and forces this pap down the hapless victim's throat while reminding him "we're both Christians."  This, of course, cannot be reconciled with Christ's teachings.  It in fact jibes squarely with the parable of the thief in the sheepfold. Further, woe unto the conservative who accepts at face value the suggestion that the leftist who "wins someone to Christ" is in fact teaching that Christ is the way, the truth and the life and that no man cometh unto the Father but through me. The Left does not emphasize spiritual salvation because it secretly disdains the idea, and it leaves ample latitude for all kinds of interpretations of the Bible except traditional ones. It emphasizes instead stamping out hunger and disease through government intervention, relegating soul salvation to the realm of optional mysticism. To the Left, "winning someone to Christ" reduces in principle to teaching people to vote for liberal Democrats.
 
Thus, upon this debate between the Left and the Orthodox hinges nothing less than the future of Christendom.
 
For if Christians concede, absurdly, that neither the Left nor the orthodox are wrong, then any moral code is valid (including Marxism) and we fall into moral relativism, a code that is not only non-Christian, but is precisely pre-Christian, pre-Judaic, even pre-Hammurabic.  To accept this non-code is to negate all of Judeo-Christian culture and civilization and in fact the notion of civilization per se. 
 
Christ without a moral code is not Christ.  Without "go and sin no more," there is no salvation because Christ died to cover the sins of sincere individuals desirous of escaping sin, not to camouflage ongoing sins of the unrepentant.
 
Now it is grotesquely ironic that a person should be a church leader, claiming to be an expert in communication and yet subscribe to moral relativism (all of us are right), especially of the leftwing variety.
 
This is so because the only purpose of communication can be the transmission of useful ideas and information.  If the argument, idea or information is irrelevant, it is not worth communicating and is tantamount to mere background noise in the phone line.  The idea "we're both right" is a totally useless and irrelevant conclusion because it leaves both interlocutors at exactly the same place as before the transmission took place, adding nothing new to the dialogue that could in any way be construed as useful to either party.
 
Teaching people how to communicate this useless conclusion is like teaching people how to drive an empty truck, i.e., one with no payload, and in fact, teaching them that they should never attempt to transport a payload of any kind - just drive an empty truck.
 
No one would sign up for such a vocational course because no employer in the transport business would hire such a driver.
 
Yet presumably, people sign up for Mitch's communication course only to be told that all communication must end up with each interlocutor admitting that his own message (payload) is so useless that the recipient of his message need not change his way of thinking in any way. 
 
In other words:
I'm okay, you're okay, or rather, I'm a loser, you're a loser.  Sorry I bothered to waste so much of your time since my idea is no better than yours.
 
Next time we'll just do a couple of bong hits, sing Kumbaya and go home.
 
But what is happening behind the mask is that the leftist is gradually and subtly separating the orthodox Christian from his core beliefs while holding tightly to his own.  The left wins, the Biblical Christian loses.
 
Yet beyond this microdrama, a real God, not the leftist construct of the deity or the spirit of Karl Marx, wrestles with evil, and at the very end of all the vain struggling, the clever charlatan and his Father fall into the ultimate, eternal trap of their own choosing. And there they are reunited at last with their patron saint Karl.
 
I want to thank my friend Brazilian philosopher Olavo De Carvalho, a man with rare insight into the international revolutionary movement, for alerting me to the pitfalls of debating with the left and for teaching me how to defeat the charlatans by exposing their cunning schemes, giving no quarter and showing no mercy.
 
Donald Hank is a technical translator and staff writer for Laigle's Forum.
 
Contact the author: don@zoilandonsplace.com