eChurch Christian Blog

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Beck to the Future: Glen Beck Exposes Dangerous Link Between Nazi Eugenics and ObamaCare Reform Experts

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Beck to the Future II: Three Scary ObamaCare “Czars”

Part 3

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Glen Beck says that Germany went terribly wrong from two things: the nation “ran out of money” and it had “crazy people” – the National Socialists – running a centralized bureaucracy that extended its reach into all corners of German society, and particularly in the nation’s universal health-care system.

For Beck, the list of Obama advisors behind health-care reform certainly seems to fit the description of “crazy people.” But Beck is drawing lessons from Nazi Germany and how its nationalized health-care program nourished a cornucopia of horrors that culminated in the Shoah: the destruction of six million Jews and other atrocities of similar magnitude. This horror had its root in Anglo-American eugenics and was founded on one core principle: some lives have more intrinsic worth than others.

During the 1930s, “social progressives” such as Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan, viewed Nazi Germany with admiration, and its health-care policies were considered the envy of the world. Anglo-American eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, heaped praise on the Nazi eugenics program. For most Europeans, National Socialism represented the destiny of Europe. Few shared the opinion of Winston Churchill, the last of the Victorians, who remained constant and outspoken in his conviction that National Socialism represented the end of Christian Civilization and heralded a new chapter of human history guided “by the lights of perverted science.”

Eugenics became discredited in the horrible aftermath of the Second World War, especially among Americans, as many saw Hitler’s “final solution” as a direct consequence of eugenic philosophy. But, as historical memory dims and as President Obama aggressively expands the size and scope of the power of the Executive Branch through his czars, Beck is asking, could America find itself going back to the future?

At one point in going through the facts about Obama’s health care experts, Beck exclaims, “Is it truly crazy to have these conversations?” The special advisors or “czars” surrounding President Barack Obama have resumes that are the stuff of conspiracy theorists and science fiction novelists. But the facts are there; their opinions and attitudes on the value of human life are deeply disturbing. Worse still, Beck says: these men and their ideas are behind Obama’s health-care reform and have power.

“This is the stuff they are now saying out loud. What are they saying behind closed doors when we aren’t there to watch it,” asks Beck, pointing out to his viewers that under the Constitution, these special advisors do not have to answer to anyone but the President himself.

So what will government-run health care become for Americans if it embraces a policy of rationing based on Cass Sunstein’s “Quality of Life Adjusted Years” lead, or Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel’s “Complete Lives System?” Add to the mix John Holdren, the Science Czar, who wrote a book on totalitarian population control. With people like these behind health-care reform, Beck makes the point that the specter of Sarah Palin’s “death panels” looks a lot more real. Especially when it comes to rationing health-care, which Beck says must surely happen under Obama’s proposals.

“Government officials are going to have to be in the position of deciding how to allocate scarce resources,” says Beck.

Why? The laws of supply and demand still apply in health-care. If 50 million are added to the list of insured, that means an added burden on the current supply of primary care physicians and specialists. But with government subsidies and low co-pays, people will also have little incentive to refrain from making unnecessary doctors visits or seeing specialists that they may not need. And that means government, which foots the bill, will have to make those choices.

Germany’s National Socialists and Obama’s health-care reform experts have a key thing in common as Beck makes clear: they both embrace the idea of establishing universal health-care systems on the principle that “quality of life” or usefulness to the collective good of society ultimately matters in the equation of how a human being receives health-care. That is, if they agree that the patient is human in the first place. On that point, John Holdren may have more in common with National Socialists than Americans are comfortable with.

In fact, Beck supposes that understanding Holdren may give some insight into the Green Movement, saying “how many people in the Green Movement think people are a virus?” Beck says that Van Jones, Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” also has a hand in health-care reform as part of Obama’s inner circle. Jones describes himself as a “basically a community organizer with the federal family.”

And while everyone agrees that the heath care system needs improvement, Beck observes that replacing the profit motive of insurance with the power motive of government may not be in everyone’s best interests. The proposed cure could appear more lethal than the disease. The lessons learned from one of the most darkest chapters of human history may provoke Beck’s viewers to “question with boldness” the trajectory of the United States under President Obama and the czars.

“When you start valuing life differently, then you’ve already started down that path,” says Beck, pointing to the experience of Germany, once regarded as a symbol of the future of world civilization.

Beck lays out the facts, but at the end of the day, only the viewer can judge for himself the answer to this question: is America headed back to the future?

I thought this was a rather interesting piece from our friends over the pond. This is not related as such, but has reminded me of my days in the shipping world, when dealing with Marine damage, insurance companies would never pay out for “Acts of God”? The world is quick to cite God when it suits them!

Judge: Kentucky can’t depend, legally, on God for homeland security

by Bob Allen – Associated Baptist Press

FRANKFORT, Ky. (ABP) — A state judge has ruled that Kentucky cannot legally depend on God to keep its citizens safe.

Franklin County Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate ruled Aug. 26 a 2006 amendment to a law establishing the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security that declared “the safety and security of the commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God” an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Attorneys for the Commonwealth of Kentucky argued that all three branches of government have acknowledged the role of religion in public life for more than 200 years and that removing them would create “a wholly secular society completely divorced from religion.”

Wingate said both the federal and Kentucky constitutions “permit a passing reference to Almighty God nestled in the middle” of legal statutes but the law in question “is more than an ephemeral general reference to God.” Rather, he said, the statute “places an affirmative duty to rely on Almighty God for the protection of the Commonwealth.”

That, the judge ruled, made the Kentucky law “exceptional among thousands of others” and transgressed the First Amendment’s requirement that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

“Even assuming that most of this nation’s citizens have historically depended upon God by choice for their protection, this does not give the General Assembly the right to force citizens to do so now,” Wingate ruled. “That is the very reason the Establishment Clause was created; to protect the minority from the oppression of the majority.”

In the lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality, American Atheists, Inc., claimed the law constituted an attempt to “establish religion, endorse belief over non-belief, set up a religious test, [and] indoctrinate Kentucky citizens and state employees in theistic religious beliefs.”

The group said the law would “diminish the civil rights, privileges or capacities of atheists and others who do not believe in a god, or who believe in a different god or gods than the presumed supernatural entity unconstitutionally endorsed by the legislation.”

State Rep. Tom Riner, D-Louisville, a Southern Baptist minister who slipped the “Almighty God” language into a homeland security bill three years ago, told the Lexington Herald-Leader he was unhappy with the judge’s ruling.

Riner, pastor of Christ is King Baptist Church in Louisville, said the law did not mandate that Kentuckians depend on God for their safety but simply acknowledged that government without God cannot protect its citizens.

“The decision would have shocked and disappointed Thomas Jefferson, who penned the words that the General Assembly paraphrased in this legislation,” Riner said.

Edwin Kagin, national legal director of American Atheists, disagreed. In a blog on the group’s website, Kagin called the ruling a win for atheists.

“I think Thomas Jefferson would have been pleased,” Kagin said.

Judge Wingate said he did not subscribe to the atheist group’s belief that the law was an attempt to “Christianize” Kentucky, but he did describe it as “baffling that Christians would seek government endorsement of their respective religion and give a secular government an opportunity to taint an unadulterated church.”

“The Commonwealth’s history does not exclude God from the statutes, but it hasn’t ever permitted the General Assembly to demand that its citizens depend on Almighty God,” Wingate said in his ruling.

Ukraine splinter church seeks independence

By MARIA DANILOVA (AP)

KIEV, Ukraine — A breakaway Orthodox Christian church in Ukraine is pressing its call for recognition as a legitimate entity independent of the Moscow-based church that dominates the faith in the former Soviet Union, officials said Monday.

The appeal comes weeks after the head of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, visited Ukraine and criticized splinter churches seeking independence.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church sent an official request last week to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of the 250 million world’s Orthodox Christians. It said the church “is ready and strives” to come under Constantinople’s jurisdiction as an independent group.

Spokesman Yevhen Zapletnyuk said the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church believes that winning recognition from Bartholomew would will help heal the rifts among Ukraine’s Orthodox believers, many of whom want to come out of Moscow’s shadow.

“We have extended a hand,” Zapletnyuk told The Associated Press. “We believe this is the way to salvation.”

Allegiance in Ukraine’s predominant Orthodox Christian faith is split among three major churches. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and the larger Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate have lobbied Constantinople for recognition as legitimate and independent of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate, which is subordinate to Patriarch Kirill.

Ukraine’s pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko has championed those efforts as part of a campaign to shed Russia’s political, economic and cultural dominance over its neighbor and integrate with the West.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church has some 1,200 parishes and 700 priests in the nation of 47 million, according to the State Committee on National Religions.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate, which broke away after the 1991 Soviet collapse, claims 14 million parishioners and some 3,000 priests, and opinion polls show it is gaining popularity. The Russian-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church claims 28 million followers in Ukraine and more than 9,000 priests.

Global Ecumenical Body to Hold Next General Assembly in S. Korea

By Maria Mackay – Christian Today Reporter

The Central Committee of the World Council of Churches has voted to hold its next General Assembly in Busan, South Korea, in 2013.

After hours of deliberation, the final vote was cast by more than a hundred members of the Central Committee in a secret ballot.

Busan came out on top with 70 votes, followed by Damascus in Syria with 59 votes in favor. There were no abstentions.

Two other contenders, Rhodes in Greece, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, fell out the race for the next venue earlier in the meeting of the Central Committee.

A report by the Policy Reference Committee was read out to Central Committee members prior to the vote. It noted that Syria offered “the opportunity to be present in the cradle of Christianity, a place of uninterrupted Christian witness since apostolic times, as an expression of solidarity with a threatened and dwindling Christian population.”

It added, however, that the Korean church context “holds the possibility of the WCC’s inter-relating with the dynamic spirituality of new and emerging churches of Evangelical and Pentecostal families, as well as for witnessing to the possibilities for reconciliation and the peaceful reunification of divided Korea.”

Welcoming the vote, WCC Moderator the Rev. Dr. Walter Altmann expressed his gratitude on behalf of the WCC to the churches in Rhodes, Ethiopia and Damascus for extending the invitation to host the next General Assembly.

“We are looking forward to the hard work of preparation for Busan … and we are asking for God’s blessing on our Assembly when it takes place in 2013,” he said.

The vote will be seen as a great victory for South Korean churches in the WCC, after South Korean theologian the Rev. Dr. Park Seong-won failed in his bid to become the next General Secretary of the WCC.

Some 7,000 Christians from across the global ecumenical movement are expected to gather for the next General Assembly.

The last General Assembly was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2006.

The WCC is an ecumenical fellowship of 349 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 560 million Christians in over 110 countries.

American Jewish Group Blasts WCC Head for Israel Comment

By Ethan Cole – Christian Post Reporter

The American Jewish Committee, one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations in the United States, denounced a statement made by the World Council of Churches General Secretary the Rev. Samuel Kobia who called Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian territories “a sin against God.”

“Rev. Kobia parrots the same hypocritical statements regarding Israel that the WCC regularly issues, ignoring the root cause of Israel’s presence in the West Bank,” said Rabbi David Rosen, AJC’s international director of interreligious affairs, in a statement issued Friday.

The prominent rabbi pointed to the Six-Day War in 1967 when Israel battled against Egypt, Syria and Jordan to protect the Jewish state from being destroyed. As a result of the war, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Sinai desert and the Golan Heights all fell under Israel’s control. The Sinai Peninsula was later returned to Egypt after a peace treaty was signed.

“Israel does not seek to govern another people,” Rosen maintains. “Rather, Israel has offered in direct negotiations with the Palestinians repeatedly to withdraw from most of the West Bank in exchange for peace and security.”

Kobia, who will step down as WCC general secretary at the end of the year, made the statements while giving his report to the group’s main governing body, the central committee, last Wednesday.

In his presentation, Kobia said the occupation and humiliation of the Palestinian people in Israel-controlled territories is like anti-Semitism in that it is “a sin against God.”

The WCC during its founding assembly in 1948 had declared that anti-Semitism is a “sin against God,” but Kobia last Wednesday asked if the group is “ready to say that occupation is also a sin against God?”

He recalled his experience visiting Palestinians in the areas controlled by Israel and later told reporters about the “dehumanization” of the occupied and occupiers in the territories, according to Ecumenical News International.

“The concern is not only for the victims but also the perpetrators,” he said, referring to Israel.

He talked about the million Palestinians who were forced to migrate after the founding of the State of Israel, the “largest forced migration in modern history,” Kobia noted.

Weeks earlier, the WCC had supported the “just peace initiative” proposed by the United Church of Canada. The church’s proposal states that its convictions would lead it to believe that just peace in the Middle East would require Israel to recognize a fully sovereign state of Palestine that would compose of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as the state of Palestine and other Arab states to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The proposal also says Israel needs to dismantle its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while Palestinians need to end their suicide bombings and other violent attacks on Israel.

The United Church of Canada’s “just peace” ideas are similar to that of the WCC.

Given the history of WCC and Jewish groups, it is not surprising that AJC made such a statement against Kobia. Jewish groups have repeatedly criticized the WCC for their Middle East policies, which the groups see as favoring Palestinians and ignoring the constant terrorism threat against Israel.

On Sunday, Kobia was honored by central committee members with a farewell service in Geneva where the meeting is taking place. His report last Wednesday was his last one to the committee as general secretary.