Thoughts inspired by humanity’s ancient urban urge to converge…
from Michael Yusef
Did I forget to mention, forget to mention Memphis ?
Home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks…
Talking Heads, Cities
Key to the Moon-Bank
“Humankind: be kind – be One!
I am appalled at what’s been done.
Benign intentions must restrain us.
Hate should never entertain us.”
The toad comedian Ban Ki-Moon
croaked a pitiful One-World tune
while gunmen paused, reloaded, armed
checked that they had no comrades harmed –
and then prepared for further battle
against the clueless kuffar cattle.
Ban stood upright to intervene;
surveyed the terrorific scene…
muezzins chanted, mullahs chuckled
swords were sharpened, bomb-vests buckled.
Dhimmi dim-wits went on shopping.
(Are heads in sand less prone to chopping ?)
Hesitating, he cleared his throat,
raised his pitch by a quarter note:
“These acts are most undemocratic
We are saddened; yet emphatic – “
(no one heard his discourse further
drowned by the sound of massive murder…)
“We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.
What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris.”
MORE from Ayaan Hirsi Ali
My Conviction
An endless sentence…
punctuated by the illusion
of periods.
It’s 2015: Love Yourself to Hell
So here we are with the gospel, going to a generation of people who are not only proud, but they’ve turned pride into the virtue of all virtues, who are in love with themselves, and who seek to fulfill every whim, and every desire, and every ambition, and every dream, and every hope; who seek to be everything that they can be, who seek to set value on all that they are, and all that they say, and all that they do. And we confront that culture with the gospel, and at the heart of the gospel is this opening. “So you want to follow Jesus, do you? You want to enter the Kingdom of God? You want your sins forgiven? You want eternal heaven? Then deny yourself and take up your cross and fully submit to Him.” You can’t even get to the submitting part unless you can get past the cross part, and you can’t get there if you can’t get past the part about denying yourself.
To give you a term that you likely won’t forget, I’ll borrow from Martin Luther. Martin Luther, as you know, launched the Protestant Reformation. He was a Roman Catholic priest who came to understand the truth of salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ alone, apart from works, and ceremonies, and all the rest; and so he determined that he would confront the Roman Catholic system, the great monolithic system of error and deception, and he selected 95 different statements, 95 different protests – that’s why we’re called “Protestants” – 95 different assertions that ran contrary to Catholicism. He wrote them down and he nailed them on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
The fourth of his protests, the fourth of his 95 assertions was that a penitent heart, a heart that comes to God and receives salvation is characterized by – here’s his term, “self hate.” Self hate. Quoting from Luther’s fourth statement. “And so penance remains while self hate remains.” He said that self hate was the true interior penitence. “This,” said Luther, “is essential to the gospel.”
