Why Pastor RA, Mike Huck-wannabe-president, and Coral Ridge Ministries would take the Palestinians’ cloak and tunic
We quote Pastor RA anonymously as a courtesy, still hoping to make a friend of him. He did us a favor in writing to condemn as false two separate comments we made on stories about Huckabee and Coral Ridge Ministries. All three are flagrant in ignoring Jesus’ words and commands in order to follow their respective ambitions. It is likely that only Pastor RA believes the line he espouses; we think he is the victim of a bad book. Those he defends have long ago left the book behind in search of power and money.
We are a nation of churches, and if pastors taught what the Bible says about peacemaking, no politician or businessman would dare drag us into a war. Warmaking is national economic policy, and most pastors dare not denounce it for fear of losing their tax exempt status. We only ask them to honestly teach what the New Covenant of Christ teaches in the New Testament about peacemaking and love of one’s brothers…all of our brothers, including those who are Muslim. Jesus did not exclude any race.
Coral Ridge Ministries, a once distinguished giant church and radio ministry, is promoting an issue solely for the sake of raising money. Its exaggerated anti-Islamic films make Christ-followers’ blood boil to the point where their checkbooks levitate out of their pocket, even if the accounts are empty.
We have no problem naming Coral Ridge because seven years ago we caught its business management in the act of raising money to free non-existent slaves, which contributors were told would be bought at non-existent “Arab Muslim” slave markets in petroleum rich Sudan. The byproduct of Coral Ridge’s highly successful fund raiser was mutual hatred between Muslims and Christians. Coral Ridge’s new pattern is to capitalize on anti-Islamic fervor by publishing frightening accounts of the evils of Islam and then asking readers and viewers to do their duty and write a check to support the Ministry’s ventures.
Coral Ridge Ministries was founded by Dr. D. James Kennedy, a conservative Reformed Presbyterian by theology, and in no way a Christian Zionist. But long before his death, his corporate style mission was taken over from within, during his long illness. Today Coral Ridge is all about money, and Dr. Kennedy’s wonderful sermons are a prop–recorded speeches from the grave every week on national TV. Many listeners still do not know Dr. Kennedy is dead.
Pastor RA also criticized our coverage of the story about former Baptist Pastor Mike Huckabee, who was carried by the Israel media, where he voiced a policy toward the occupied Philistines that can only lead to extermination and more war. His motive
appears to be power, for he ran well and capably for President in 2008, and is clearly preparing early for the next campaign where he will capitalize on the dreadful economy that the Obama people can only patch over.
Huckabee is a wannabe, and his strategy is to first secure Jewish Zionist confidence, and then the Christian Right vote; as a former Baptist preacher, he is well suited for the task.
Huckabee and Coral Ridge are lost causes, but in Pastor RA and 100,000 pastors like him we find both our greatest problem and our best hope. He sincerely believes what he says and has little in common with those he defends, else he would never take the risk to write to us. I do not know Pastor RA, so I am typing him based on contacts with hundreds of pastors and laymen–
Christians who talk just like him. His position (“its biblical… that no one but Israel owns the land”) is not based on avarice or his own craving for power, but on self-deception absorbed from the Bad Book of Christianity that teaches that the State of Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy, and that Israel‘s needs are more immediate than Jesus’ commands for us.
There is not just one bad book but many, for Judeo-Christianity has made end times writing a big business. False books of Judeo-Christian leaning are epidemic. However the Scofield Reference Bible is, we believe, the terrible root source of corruption of evangelical Christianity, published in 1908 by Oxford University Press, and now in about its fifth update. We have researched and written about this bible a lot. (5)
One who is taught from the Bad Book will eventually find himself placing the interest of Israel ahead of the teaching of Jesus Christ, especially relating to war and peace; the State of Israel has been at war with its neighbors and those it occupies for its entire 60-year existence. One cannot support Israel and its leaders without also supporting war.
Pastor RA’s words brand him as one who supports the two opportunists mentioned above only because they support Israel’s agenda; he supports a false doctrine promoted to control America’s huge Christian church vote. The enormous financial and media attention given to anti-Islamic fervor has probably helped to make his church at least modestly successful in harvesting converts to Christian Zionism. Mike Huckabee and leaders of churches like Coral Ridge fan the flame of race hatred to gain Jewish approval and financial rewards.
Pastor RA writes:
“Study Islam. If you don’t covert or won’t convert, they do want you dead. That has been the truth about that religion of hate since 600 a.d.”
Pastor RA goes on:
“What Huckabee said concerning the Palestinians having a homeland in Jerusalem or anywhere inside Israel being a really bad idea, that’s Biblical. That land belongs ONLY to Israel. Everybody else are [sic] only trespassers. That’s Biblical too. If this is the type of ‘reporting’ you do, unsubscribe me.”
(Signed RA)
The two stories Pastor RA refers to were posted with our comments on Unheralded News last week. (1) (2)
Coral Ridge: —“Somebody wants you dead…Radical Islam is advancing on its goal of world domination … right here in the USA. Even in our classrooms….can’t believe that’s true? …We now have evidence, on video.”
Huckabee:
“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That`s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic”.
Pastor RA’s remarks are typical of Judeo-Christian leaders. He provides no source for his conclusions other than “That’s Biblical”. We would like to see the pastor cut closer to the truth. In fact, we already know where Pastor RA gets his arguments from, that Israel only owns the land of the Philistines. It is from three footnotes on pages 19-20 of the 1967 edition of the Scofield Reference Bible, written by Oxford University Press 19 years after Israel became a state.
Pastor RA probably has a house and a tax-exempt church, and the odds are that some ancient tribe once abandoned or was driven off the land he now occupies. But like the rest of us, he very likely stands on his land title and claims to own the land because he has a deed. The deeded farm land on which I grew up was once Sioux territory, with occasional arrowheads and other artifacts to prove it, and the Sioux were here much more recently than 2000 years ago.
Pastor RA would very likely use his shotgun to defend his home from a descendant of an earlier tribal inhabitant. Yet to him, the Palestinian’s deeds are no good.
What does Jesus’ Scripture say about giving away your neighbor’s property to your political pals? Pastor RA can not make his case based on any of Jesus’ words. Jesus puzzles most of us and exposes our avarice when he tells his followers in the books
of Matthew and Luke, “if someone wants to sue you and take away your tunic let him have your cloak also.”
Jesus’ words may be figurative and symbolic, but they’re not without a sting. He is saying that generosity starts with our own property, not that of the other tribes. Pastor RA seems to have a different interpretation: “if someone takes the coat from your weak and unprotected neighbor, give him also your neighbor’s shirt, shoes and house. We ask Pastor RA to give us just one reference in Jesus’ words to support what he suggests in his letter? I do not expect an answer, because the line and verse does not exist anywhere in the New Testament to support race hatred or justify stealing anyone’s property or
killing them for any reason.
Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist Pastor, still wants to be our President some day, and so it is no coincidence that he, like Pastor RA, is generous to the Israelis with the Philistines’ property. He does not offer his own coat or home to the Philistines to replace what they are losing. Huck-a-wanna-bee-president, like Pastor RA and many Christian Zionists, cites line and verse of what he calls “scripture” to support his Zionist argument that the several million Philistines in Gaza and the West Bank must give up everything they have and leave. But none of his words come from the Christian New Testament, and not a word comes from Jesus himself.
Huckabee’s words, published in Israel in Hebrew and English, say he regards the Philistines of Gaza as the usurpers, though no one can factually argue that they were not there first with developed land, deeds, titles, and keys to the houses, farms, and businesses. (3)
The Israeli claim to Philistine land finds its US support not in its 1947 founding documents, but in footnotes written in a book they do not otherwise believe in–the Bible.
We have heard Pastor RA’s arguments from others, always drawn from the footnotes of pages 19-20 of the Scofield Reference Bible (or an equivalent), which state in part that God gave the land to Israel and will curse anyone who does not accept this. Pastor RA probably considers this Bible with this interpretation of its footnotes to be the unvarnished word of God.
But he ignores Jesus’ words about loving one’s brother and doing kindness to the least of these. Our best hope for America is that he will see the light and change.
Coral Ridge Ministries will not stop raising money until Christ followers stop giving it. It will show its exaggerated anti-Islamic film over TV in the Middle East and engender hatred against Americans and Christians everywhere.
Jesus’ and his disciples, indeed, all those we read about in the New Testament were born, lived, and died under Roman occupation in Judeo and
Today, the Philistines are the natural residents of Judeo and Galilee, occupied by Israel since 1948 with ever increasing military ordinance furnished primarily by the
The remaining two-thirds of pastors and priests, who are not Christian Zionists, should reject both the inhumanity of occupation, and the neo-religious dogma of the Judeo Christians. Is it too much to ask that they speak out for an end to occupation?
The Christian Zionists make themselves heard loud and clear, ignoring Jesus’ words about peace and love of brother. There is no excuse for those who believe Jesus’ words to remain silent. An easy and hardly disputable good stewardship that all military aid (paid for by US taxpayers) to both the Israelis and the Philistines, be stopped immediately. At present,
ORIGINAL POST:
EditorCE: The Neo-Zionists’ fundraiser letter from once conservative Coral Ridge Ministries combines shocking race hatred and fear of Islam with love of Jesus. This ministry was founded by now deceased D. James Kennedy, whose face and films are still
being used by those who defame his good name.
Coral Ridge: —“Somebody wants you dead…Radical Islam is advancing on its goal of world domination … right here in the USA. Even in our classrooms….can’t believe that’s true? …We now have evidence, on video.”
Huckabee is quoted in Unity Coalition for Israel, a pure propaganda wing aimed at US readers: “The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That`s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic“.
ENDNOTES
(1) Huckabee: a Neo-Christian Zionist In Jerusalem http://cp.whtt.org/index.php?news=2&id=3250
(2)FROM A CHURCH: “Somebody wants you dead” http://cp.whtt.org/index.php?news=2&id=3251
(3) Baptist Pastors Struggle Over How to Pray for a Just Peace in Gaza http://cp.whtt.org/index.php?news=2&id=3197
(4) Slavery is a Scam, Says Peter Hammond https://whtt.org/printerfriendly.php?news=2&id=196
(5) Roots of Christian Zionism https://whtt.org/show
