We all know that Christ and His Apostles taught us to love our enemies, to pray for those who use and abuse us, and to serve those who persecute us. These are the basic fundamentals of a Christian life. But often the how and why have eluded us. This article looks at the Sermon on the Mount as the Manual for How to Be a Christian and explores exactly what Christ meant, why it matters how we live, and how we are supposed to live as His disciples. This is how you be a good Christian.
Tag: nonviolence and civil disobedience
How Vladimir Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Could Destroy Him
In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The outcome seemed inevitable. The Soviet Union was one of the most powerful nations on the planet with a military rivalled only by the United States. Yet, a decade later the Soviet Union was forced to retreat, its army broken and demoralized, defeated by a band of loosely confederated hill tribes. The cost of this humiliation was unbearable, and it shattered the foundation of the Soviet Union’s power. The Soviet Union dissolved as its subject people, seeing its army beaten and sent home with its tail between its legs by Afghani fights, decided now was the time to rebel and regain their independence. The Soviet Union collapsed forever.
These are all warnings that Putin did not heed when he invaded Ukraine. Just as Afghanistan became the graveyard of the Soviet Union, so could Ukraine become the graveyard of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. In an effort to prove Russia’s might, Putin may have just committed political suicide and doomed his entire power structure.
Latter-day Saints Will Never Find Justice In The Legal System
The history of the Church of Christ is full of men and women imprisoned for putting the Kingdom of God before the kingdom of men. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-Nego, Peter James, John, Paul, Abinadi, the brothers Nephi and Lehi, the Prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum the Patriarch, even the Savior Jesus Christ – all of them were imprisoned because they loved God more than men and were loyal to His commandments no matter what the laws of men said. All of there examples, and many more, prove the truth that no follower of Christ can ever expect to find justice in the courts of men. This address from Apostle Lorenzo Snow, on the eve of his imprisonment by the U.S. government for obeying God’s commandments is one of these stories about how a true Christian acts when the demands of men contradict the commandments of Christ.
This Is Why People Obey Evil Governments
The state is an unmitigated and obvious evil. It threatens to beat, cage, or kill anyone who questions it. It violently extorts wealth from even the poorest people. It forces us to pay for the privilege of engaging in even basic purchases. Its regulations wreck the economy and increase poverty. Its police forces abuse, oppress, and murder people domestically while its military forces slaughter people internationally. It destroys property rights and virtually lays claim to the true ownership of all land and wealth within its borders. It attacks, hurts and destroys rich and poor alike. Its leaders are corrupt, oppressive, monsters.
So why is it that so many people are so quick to defend it, serve it, obey it, die for it, and engage in human sacrifice as they send their children to be killed for it?
In this article I answer these questions. This is why people obey even evil governments.
Great Profiles in Courage: William Lloyd Garrison in Baltimore Jail
History is full of examples of great men and women defying society and state to stand for what is right, good, and true against the injustices, corruption, greed, and violence of the world. This is the first in what will be an irregular series designed to help highlight some of these important, powerful, but sometimes unknown stands, the heroes and heroines who took them, and the lessons we can learn to apply in for our lives today.
This first article highlights the experience of one of our heroes, William Lloyd Garrison. He was one of the loudest, clearest, and most powerful voices for the immediate ending of slavery and his newspaper, The Liberator, was the beating heart of the abolitionist movement. But in 1830, when he was imprisoned for libel because he dared to tell the truth about a local merchant’s participation in the slave trade, he wasn’t influential or well-known. So when faced with a court case against a much wealthier corrupt opponent he did what many other poor people did – he went to jail. Rather than back down, recant the truth, and abandon the cause of justice. Garrison chose to go to prison. This is the story of Garrison’s defiance of the law and social custom, his persecution for it, and the lessons we can learn to apply in our own lives as we seek authenticity, justice, and holiness.
The Insidious Ways That Governments Use Propaganda To Control You
Over the last year I have written repeatedly on the different ways that governments utilize propaganda to manipulate the public into obeying those in power even when such obedience violates the individual’s basic humanity, his or her basic human rights. Yet, I am still left me lacking an explanation for how propaganda is used to manufacture the consent of the masses to taking part in a system that is built to profit the very few rich and powerful political and corporate leaders at the top at the cost of all the rest of us.
I couldn’t understand why people have fetishized democracy as if merely having a system of elections would protect people from those in power while ignoring the ideals and values that make democracy anything other than the choosing of a new dictator every four to six years. I could not understand how something like the Deep State/Double Government could develop in the most fervently democratic age in human history.
That changed once I was exposed to the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays. An experienced propagandist himself, having produced propaganda for the US government during World War I, Bernays literally wrote a book about how the government uses propaganda in times of peace to “engineer the consent” of the masses and to secure their obedience to those in power.
In this article I delve into his book and pull out some choice excerpts that can helps us to understand the ways that the masses are indoctrinated with government propaganda without realizing it, how the government uses propaganda to manipulate and control the masses, and what we can do about it. This one is an eye-opener for everyone, no matter what your political or religious beliefs.
Nonviolence In Christianity And The Apostasy From Peace: The Complete Series
In the series of articles gathered herein I accomplished three things.
First, I demonstrated the historic fact of Christian nonviolence by examining the writings of a variety of Christian leaders over a period of 300 years. In all that time not a single Christian leader whose works have survived ever taught anything other than the complete renunciation of violence and war as a central tenet of Christianity, a commandment given by Jesus Christ.
Secondly, for my Latter-day Saint readers I showed similar teachings as taught in our modern beliefs and church leaders. The teaching of early Christian leaders on this subject are not simply applicable to our lives today, they directly relate to what we believe in such a way that our modern teaching echo and are elucidated by these ancient writings.
Thirdly, and finally, I wrote a short explanation of the loss of the truths as Christianity, in a moment of Great Apostasy, abandoned centuries of Christian truth and teaching in order to construct a false and heretical doctrine that would justify the pursuit of power, prestige, and wealth by those who claimed to be Christian but who were in fact heretics and apostates corrupting Christianity into a tool of the state.
If we hope to use the full power of Christianity to help solve the problems of the world we must reject the foundation upon which all injustice is based, violence, and return to truths that made Christianity so powerful to start with, Christ-like love, service, forgiveness, and peace.
The Apostasy From Peace
Having just spent the last month demonstrating the historical fact that Christians practiced a form of what we would today call nonviolence, rejected being in the military, and taught the importance of loyalty to the universal church of Christ over and beyond all worldly political authorities and powers all as part of fulfilling Christ’s commandments to love and serve our enemies and to do nothing but good, even to those who evil to us, we are still left with a singular, important question.
What happened?
How did we get from that to where we are today? How did we get from a faith focused on self-sacrifice, love, and service to one that justifies violence, war, and subservience to the powers of the world in all their evils? How did we go form Christians being literally kicked out of church for joining the military to Christians treating the military as some sort of sacred calling?
This article not only explains how this occurred, but also how this process robbed Christianity of one of its most radically Christ-like and powerful truths and how reclaiming that truth is essential to transforming the Earth and establishing the Zion of Christ.
Nonviolence in Early Christianity, Part 3
In the Fourth Century we continue to see the doctrine of Christ that teaches us to abandon all violence and war is carried forward as Christian leaders continue to preach against paganism and prove the superiority of Christianity through its embrace of nonviolence. Martin of Tours provides a marvelous example of exactly what a Christian should do if ever he (or she) is forced into military service. Athanasius teaches that the way you can tell the difference between a true Christian and an idolater is how they approach violence and war, accurately pointing out the true source of all ideologies that promote contention and conflict. Likewise, the great Christian orator John Chrysostom draws the dividing line between Christian sheep and the savage wolves of the world. And no less than the Council of Nicaea and the Christian manual The Testament of Our Lord both outline the exact punishments to be levied against Christians who engage in military violence or who willfully join the military. Along the way the Latter-day Saint can find direct relationships between the teachings of these ancient Christians and the modern teachings of our church.
Nonviolence in Early Christianity, Part 2
This is the second part in a series tracing the teaching of what we today call nonviolence in ancient Christianity after the end of the biblical era. I pick up where I left off in Part 1, in the mid-Second Century AD/CE and go all the way through the Third Century AD/CE. In the process I cover such topics as tribalism, nationalism, abortion, violence, the role of government, a Christian’s place in government, whether a Christian can hold political office or not, the military – both from the perspective of a soldier who converts to Christianity and a Christian who is thinking about joining the military, justice, political idolatry, the Second Amendment, gun ownership, natural rights, the universal nature of the Church and Christianity, and the hypocrisy of the world’s ideologies. The teaching of these ancient Christians carrying forth the ideals of Christ confront, counter, and dismantle the cunning craftiness of the world’s doctrines through the application of the truths of the Gospel.