Barack Obama seeks the help of God to attract more votes

[WhiskeyGirl]

OBAMA CERCA I VOTI DEI CRISTIANI
del 12 luglio 2008

di TOM BALDWIN

Christian radio stations are broadcasting adverts in which Barack Obama describes how he let Jesus in his life as he knelt before a cross in a Chicago church 23 years ago.

"I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me," the Democratic nominee says, "I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth."

The adverts are being funded by an organisation called the Matthew 25 Network, named after a biblical passage in which Christ promises redemption for those who care for the least and the lost.

Although not formally linked to Mr Obama's campaign, the network is part of a concerted effort to prise off a chunk of a Christian vote that has long been regarded as the more or less exclusive preserve of Republican presidential candidates.

On Saturday, he wrapped up a week in which he had focused on faith, patriotism and service by telling thousands of black Methodists in St Louis: "I won't be fulfilling the Lord's will unless I'm doing the Lord's work". He set out about plans, first unveiled on Tuesday, to expand the federal subsidies of President Bush's faith-based programmes with a $500 million fund for sending disadvantaged children to religious summer camps.

"It is not part of a political strategy," he insisted. "I say it because I believe it - I've always believed it. This is the work we are called to do as Christians."

Mr Obama, who recently held a private meeting in Chicago with almost 40 evangelical and Catholic leaders, is also planning to launch the Joshua Generation Project to attract the votes of evangelicals. This group, like Matthew 25, takes its inspiration from the Bible by putting Mr Obama in the role of Joshua who did what Moses could not by leading his people into the Promised Land.

His strategists acknowledge many Christian voters will still oppose Mr Obama because of his support for abortion and gay marriage. But they also point out that Republican nominee John McCain is struggling to convince the Religious Right of his credentials. They say there is untapped support among those who care about poverty, the Iraq war, climate change and Darfur.

Shaun Casey, a religious adviser to the Obama campaign, says the "moral basket" is now wider than the narrow issues on which many Christians have voted over the past 30 years.

In 2004, Mr Bush took 78 per cent of the evangelical vote - which accounts for at least a quarter of the electorate - and a narrow majority of Catholics. Mr Casey predicts that if Mr Obama can move these margins even by a small fraction then he "will be the next president of the United States".

But he still has an uphill battle. When Mr Obama found his faith in 1985 it was thanks to the Rev Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons - both in style and substance - are anathema to most white Christians.

read more here -

http://www.com-pol.it/risorse/articoli/ras.php?id=143

Matthew 25 Network?  A new kind of 527?

[WhiskeyGirl]

The Only Diet for a Peacemaker Is a Vegetarian Diet

By John Dear, National Catholic Reporter
Posted on July 12, 2008, Printed on July 12, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/91237/

In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., last week to speak at the National Convention of Unitarian Universalists, I met my old friend Bruce Friedrich. We spent eight memorable months together in a tiny jail cell, along with Philip Berrigan, for our 1993 Plowshares disarmament action. A former Catholic Worker, Bruce is now one of the leaders of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He gave a brilliant workshop on the importance of becoming a vegetarian, something I urge everyone to consider.

I became a vegetarian with a few other Jesuit novices shortly after I entered the Jesuits in 1982 and later wrote a pamphlet for PETA, "Christianity and Vegetarianism." I based my decision solely on Francis Moore Lappe's classic work, Diet for a Small Planet, a book that I think everyone should read.

In it, Lappe, the great advocate for the hungry, makes an unassailable case that vegetarianism is the best way to eliminate world hunger and to sustain the environment.

At first glance, we wonder how that could be. But it's undisputable. A hundred million tons of grain go yearly for biofuel -- a morally questionable use of foodstuffs. But more than seven times that much -- some 760 million tons according to the United Nations -- go into the bellies of farmed animals, this to fatten them up so that sirloin, hamburgers and pork roast grace the tables of First-World people. It boils down to this. Over 70 percent of U.S. grain and 80 percent of corn is fed to farm animals rather than people.

Conscience dictates that the grain should stay where it is grown, from South America to Africa. And it should be fed to the local malnourished poor, not to the chickens destined for our KFC buckets. The environmental think-tank, the World Watch Institute, sums it up: "Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat eaters and the world's poor."

Meanwhile, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. (The world's 1.3 billion cattle release tons of methane into the atmosphere, and hundreds of millions tons of CO2 are released by burning forests due to dry conditions as in California or due to purposeful burns to create cow pastures in Latin America.)

And global warming isn't the only environmental issue. Almost 40 years ago, Lappe spelled out the environmental consequences of eating meat in stark relief. But more recently, her analysis received some high-power validation. The United Nations recently published "Livestock's Long Shadow." It concludes that eating meat is "one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." And it insists that the meat industry "should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."

Much of our potable water and much of our fossil fuel supply is wasted on rearing chickens, pigs, and other animals for humans to eat. And over 50 percent of forests worldwide have been cleared to raise or feed livestock for meat-eating. (A recent protest in Brazil denounced Kentucky Fried Chicken for clearing thousands of acres of untouched Amazon rain forest for chicken feed.)

As a Christian, I became a vegetarian because of the Gospel mandate of Matthew 25, "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me" -- because I do not want my appetites to contribute to the ongoing oppression of the world's starving masses. As a Catholic and Jesuit, I want somehow to side with the poor and hungry.

But another issue arises, too, over the decades, I've learned that our appetite for meat leads to cruelty to animals -- chickens pressed wing-to-wing into filthy sheds and de-beaked, for example. And since I've always espoused creative nonviolence as the fundamental Gospel value, my vegetarianism helps me not to participate in the vicious torture and destruction of billions of cows, chickens, and so many other creatures.

The chickens never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything natural. Often they are tormented or tortured before they are slowly killed, as PETA has repeatedly documented in its undercover investigations -- for your chicken dinner or hamburger. (All this is documented on a video narrated by Alec Baldwin, at www.Meat.org.)

(snip)

In his workshop at the Unitarian Universalists convention, Bruce added another beautiful image, the Garden of Eden. The Bible opens with a vision of paradise where God, animals, and humans recreate in peace together. Clearly, the Bible calls us to return to that paradise.

And Bruce reminded us that from the beginning we are directed to be vegetarians. Genesis 1:29 says, "See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food."

Biblical images and justice issues aside, there are medical reasons to stop eating meat. Vegetarian diets help keep our weight down, support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the U.S.'s three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer and strokes.

Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn both have 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease using a vegan diet. Meanwhile, Dr. T. Colin Campbell writes that one of the leading causes of human cancer is animal protein. More, vegetarians are also less prone to developing adult-onset diabetes. And then we have to contend with the spread of Mad Cow disease and Avian influenza. One could almost argue that the human body is not designed for meat-eating.

But for me being vegetarian boils down to peacemaking. If you want to be a peacemaker, Bruce said, reflecting the sentiments of Leo Tolstoy, you will want to eat as peaceful a diet as possible. "Vegetarianism," Tolstoy wrote, "is the taproot of humanitarianism." Other great humanitarians like Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Thich Nhat Hanh agree. The only diet for a peacemaker is a vegetarian diet.

"Not to hurt our humble brethren, the animals," St. Francis of Assisi said, "is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it. If you have people who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity," he continued, "you will have people who will deal likewise with other people."

So it was good to visit with my friend Bruce, and hear once again the wisdom of vegetarianism. It's a key ingredient in the new life of peace, compassion and nonviolence.

John's autobiography, A Persistent Peace, (with a foreword by Martin Sheen), is available Aug. 1. See also: www.persistentpeace.com. John's pamphlet "Christianity and Vegetarianism" can be read online at www.peta.org or free copies of the pamphlet or a free CD of John reading the pamphlet can be ordered by sending an email to VegInfo@peta.org. You can listen to or download John reading the pamphlet at www.ChristianVeg.com. See also: www.johndear.org.

read more here -

http://www.alternet.org/story/91237/

[WhiskeyGirl]

What is Matthew 25 Network?

Preaching to the Choir

Mara Vanderslice has been called the "faith guru" by The Hill in Washington, DC. Her consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, recently formed a political action committee, the Matthew 25 Network, to advocate on Obama's behalf. In the past, Vanderslice has advised her clients not only to downplay their support for abortion rights and gay rights but also never to use the phrase "separation of church and state." Hired by Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004, she ultimately found herself sidelined. "She was a little bit overzealous," the late Father Robert Drinan, a liberal Catholic legend and Kerry adviser, told the New York Times. Vanderslice claimed results two years later in the Congressional midterms. Her clients, she said, citing exit polling, garnered 10 percent more of the evangelical vote than two years before. Whether Democratic gains among so-called "values voters" were a result of Vanderslice's inspired appeals, or simply a reflection of the nationwide backlash against the Republican Congress and Bush's policies, does not deter her from taking credit.
 
As Obama has emerged, he has embraced Vanderslice's tactics. In 2006, during a speech before the Call to Renewal conference, a gathering of moderate evangelicals convened by Rev. Jim Wallis, Obama sought to break with Democratic orthodoxy by attacking unnamed "secularists." "But what I am suggesting is this--secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square," Obama declared. "Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."
Obama tries to present himself as a breed apart from other Democrats, like Kerry--a liberal Catholic who was uncomfortable trumpeting his religion like an evangelical. He hopes his sermonizing before audiences such as Call To Renewal will provide reasons for the Christian right to abandon its hostility to the Democrats and rally to him.

read more here -
http://www.israelenews.com/view.asp?ID=2543

[WhiskeyGirl]

Facebook for Matthew 25 Network -

The Matthew 25 Network is a newly formed national Political Action Committee (PAC) resolved around the Gospel values laid out in Matthew 25.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat,
I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,
I was a stranger and you invited me in,
I needed clothes and you clothed me,
I was sick and you looked after me,
I was in prison and you came to visit me....
I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

- Matthew 25:35-40

We have proudly endorsed Senator Barack Obama for President.

Sign-up at: www.Matthew25.org

We will be running ads in Christian media and lifting up a Christian voice for Senator Obama in the press.

We cannot do it alone. We need your voice and your support. The Right has dominated the religious voice in this nation for far too long. We can set a new course. Together.

How you can help:

1. Invite Folks to Join This Group
2. Sign-up and Donate at www.Matthew25.org

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17292483021

Interesting facebook book page...

[WhiskeyGirl]

Obama has his work cut out for him...imho

Barack Obama: Empty Arguments, Empty Theology

Thursday, July 03, 2008
 
Cory over at the Madville Times (aptly named) disagrees with my statements concerning Barack Obama's denial of Biblical truth about eternal salvation. He does in the same manner he typically uses to disagree with me theologically: bereft of Biblical support.

Obama "doesn't even understand the most basic and foundational tenet of Christianity," Bob fumes, and thus won't appeal to too many "serious" Christians. "Serious," of course, is Bob's code for folks who agree with him that "God doesn't provide an "Oh but I'm not a Christian" excuse to get out of Hell."

So, Cory, can you point me to the Scripture reference where that "Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free" card is found? Or the "Oh but I'm not a Christian" excuse for rejecting God's only provision for salvation?

It doesn't matter what Obama or Bush or the majority says on this issue: what does the Bible say? It doesn't matter whether someone agreed with me, either; do they agree with the Bible?

If you disagree with the Bible, you're disagreeing with the Creator of the universe and the savior of humanity. Even if I was siding with the majority, I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of that one.

On another post at the Madville Times, Cory hypes a group called Matthew 25 Network. This group provides the following as their reason for supporting Barack Obama, a candidate who stands opposed to Biblical positions in almost every area:

We come together as individual believers to support candidates for public office who share the values of the Matthew 25 Network: promoting life with dignity, caring for the least of these, strengthening and supporting families, stewardship of God's Creation, working for peace and justice at home and abroad and promoting the common good.

Since there is no doubt that Obama supports abortion, support euthanasia, socialistic legal plunder, the concept of homosexual "marriage," environmental extremism including the fantasy of anthropogenic global warming, and opposes a strong national defense, it is fairly easy to cut through the Liberalspeak in this statement and discern what they support. Let me reword their statement with some much-needed transparency and honesty:

We come together as individual believers to support candidates for public office who share the values of the Matthew 25 Network: promoting euthanasia and killing defenseless disabled people we find inconvenient, a welfare state that takes money from one person and gives it to another, counterfeiting marriage by allowing homosexuals to use that distinction for their unions, environmental extremism that worships the earth and cuts the legs from under our capitalist economy, working for appeasement of terrorists and other evildoers at home and abroad in promotion of our fantasy that if we prostrate ourselves before tyrants, they will leave us alone.

What a pity that both Obama, Cory and these other mixed-up Christians are so lacking in understanding of the Bible they profess to believe. If they pursued God's truth instead of attempting to wrap Christianity around their Marxist philosophy like Christmas wrap, they would understand that it and socialism, its cousin, are incompatible with the truth about human nature: that humans are fallen, sinful creatures who are predisposed to do evil without the regeneration of Jesus Christ.

They would also understand that killing unborn human beings and the ill and the disabled is murder of innocent human life, created in the image of God.

They would also understand that nowhere in the Bible does God command the GOVERNMENT to take money from one person against their will and give it to another person...but the Bible does command PEOPLE to help other people, and to do so with a discretion almost impossible for government bureaucracies.

They would also understand that God's design for human sexuality is to be expressed between a man and a woman in marriage for life, and that God strongly disapproves of homosexual behavior.

They would also understand that while humans are to be good stewards of the earth, God gave them dominion over it and it is not to be worshipped or served. They might also have faith in a God intelligent enough and powerful enough to create a self-sustaining planet, rather than a fragile one hanging on the razor's edge of cosmic chance as non-Christians believe.

They might also understand that God has delegated authority to human government, both to punish the evildoer within society and to defend citizens from external threat. God expects PEOPLE to be kind to one another and live in peace with one another; when some refuses to do that, government has the duty, obligation, and God-given authority to protect innocent human life from danger, both at home and abroad. This is a doctrine also fleshed out in some depth in the "Just War" doctrine by Augustin and Thomas Aquinas.

If this group of liberal Christians wants to support Barack Obama, despite his anti-Biblical positions, that's their right in a free society. But they really ought to get into their Bibles and find out how God wants them to live...and vote.

By the way, Cory seems to think things like protecting innocent human life and protecting marriage--a fundamental institution ordained by God--from being hijacked by activists are "wedge issues." "Wedge issue" is usually Liberalspeak for "issue we're wrong on and want to minimize in people's minds."

Here's a hint, Cory: opinion doesn't count for anything with God. Not mine, not yours, not anyone's. If you're going to theologically disagree with a Biblical contention, you really need to provide Biblical evidence to the contrary. Otherwise your argument sounds pretty hollow and empty.

Like this one does.

Like Obama does.

http://www.dakotavoice.com/2008/07/barack-obama-empty-arguments-empty.html

[WhiskeyGirl]

Here are links to "Cory" at the Madville Times -

http://madvilletimes.blogspot.com/2008/07/now-playing-in-colorado-springs.html

http://madvilletimes.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-agrees-with-majority-and-bush-on.html

Bob's original article has links to Bible passages to support his views. 

Also another article here -

http://www.dakotavoice.com/2008/07/obama-blows-main-tenet-of-christianity.html

[WhiskeyGirl]

From -

‘Is Barack a Vegetarian,’ ‘Rumsfeld on Chávez’ and Other Stories from a Newspaper in Decline

Of the many who penned critiques of Bacon pathetic article, pride of place belongs to the Post’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, Tom Toles. Take a second to examine the cartoon itself here. The cartoon looks over the shoulder of a typical Tolesian conehead, reading the Washington Post. “Obama’s eating of vegetables fuels rumors about him” reads the headline. Then the text underneath: “Barack Obama doesn’t hide his enjoyment of peas and beans, fueling Internet rumors that he’s a jihadist vegetarian who will take the oath of office with his hand on a slab of damp tofu. He denies the rumors, but sure does eat a lot of vegetables, including tofu at times, and the real significance of the rumors is how they will hurt him if they get repeated enough.” And then the carry-over:

“INSIDE: Are the rumors true? More discussion of them first.”

Toles’s tiny commentator in the corner says “Yea, so much discussion they ran out of space for the word ‘lies.’”

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001811

I never heard the vegetarian rumor before...

[Tylergal]

More propaganda  from the Obama's network.  That's all you have ever posted and yet you complain that someone else would post something of interest.