Greetings to all: Have you ever wondered what is the purpose of your life? Do you ever feel that even your closest friends do not understand you in your deepest depths? Almighty God wants you to be restored to hope. Hope comes from worship of a merciful, faithful, righteous, holy, forgiving, just, and loving God.  Or maybe you say, "I'm a positive person. I'm already hopeful.  I don't need to be 'restored to hope'."  This teacher/writer is replying to you that there is hope and there is also Hope with a capital "H."  Hope with a capital "H" is more than enjoying life. It's more than a positive attitude. It is rooted in salvation. 

As a psychology intern in Canada years ago, my supervisor, a psychotherapist specializing in short-term psychoanalysis, asserted to me that "there is no such thing as salvation." He insisted that humanity's cycle of life was rooted and based entirely in natural process.  Though I was myself an atheist, I found myself asserting at the time that there was salvation.  Why was I indignant at his naturalism?  I couldn't understand myself.  Yet, without any impulse to study the Bible, to pray, or to inquire of any clergy, I emphatically stated and was certain that indeed there was something in this universe worthy of being called "salvation."  Since then, I was invited into His kingdom.  I received the call on my life.  I have experienced His saving love, and desire to communicate it to others. We shall reach out to you in friendship and caring.  Jesus, second person of the Trinity, came as the Incarnate God to offer a true path of SALVATION to whomever will receive Him as their Savior and Lord.  In Hebrew, He is "Yeshua." We teach and preach our wonderful and beautiful Savior and Lord under the rubric of "By grace alone, by faith alone, by Christ alone, by Scripture alone, and for the glory of God alone."< 

 

We are now having services at 3:00 pm on Sundays in Brooklyn, NY. Please write for location at philprof3@aol.com.

 

A True Narrative of Jews in Israel

Who is the real David in the Middle East?

July 9, 2014 by Jeff Ludwig  

 In a remarkable article, “Grand Larceny,” Chloe Valdary powerfully reminds the reader that the Palestinian Arabs have succeeded in reversing the true narrative of Eretz Yisrael. They have to a great degree succeeded in convincing people around the world that their land was stolen from them by Israel and the Jews. But Valdary points out that the reverse is closer to the truth. The land that is present-day Israel – including Judea and Samaria – was land that was brutally taken away from the Jewish people after 70 AD, and was only rightfully restored in 1947. The story of Jewish deprivation and suffering for thousands of years is the true story of Middle Eastern “larceny.” Valdary suggests that Israel and the Jewish people need to “re-package” the narrative of the history of Israel to replace the narrative that has gained traction among so many people.

Let us then consider the possible basis for this “new” narrative:

The Romans, Arabs, European Catholics, Seljuks, and other groups persecuted the Jews in their God-given homeland for 2000 years. The Jews remained in the land of their forefathers even though they were officially kicked out by the Romans. A remnant clung to its historical homeland in spite of the so-called diaspora of Jews throughout the world. They endured everything to live and breathe in the homeland of their ancestors assigned as a homeland by Almighty God.2

The ancient Jewish kingdom was dealt a severe blow by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Most of the Jews were taken into exile by the Babylonians. However, the Persians conquered the Babylonians, and recognized that Judea, which included the capital city of Jerusalem, was Jewish land. Under the Persian King Artaxerxes, a large contingent of Jews were allowed to return.3 The Persians in turn were overcome by the Greeks led by Alexander the Great. Alexander recognized that Judea was Jewish land, and showed a lot of respect for the Jewish leadership. Later, other pagan Jew-haters like the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes wanted to wipe out the Jews and the Jewish religion and steal their land, but he was repulsed miraculously by Judah Maccabee and his brothers. The Romans succeeded to power over Jewish land; however, even though they heavily taxed the Jews and treated them as a conquered people, the Sanhedrin (high level rabbinical court) under the Romans still had some authority. Governors, appointed by the Roman Emperors, along with the Roman military legions, had the ultimate governing control.

The great catastrophe for Jewish civilization was having the Second Temple, the center of Jewish spiritual life, destroyed in 70 AD and having precious Judea and Samaria renamed “Palestina” by the Romans and Jerusalem renamed “Aelia Capitolina.” Despite the Roman carnage, a remnant of Jews remained century-after-century clinging to their hope of restoration, but living as a minority and as second-class citizens in the land of their forefathers. What endurance! They demonstrated the perseverance of the brokenhearted.

By the 7th century AD, the violent hordes of Islam took over the lands of the Middle East. Jews, however, continued to live in the same land that had been occupied by Joshua since 1300 BCE. They lived as a beleaguered minority under the Arabs, and endured as dhimmis (second-class citizens). That meant they had to pay a jizya (tax on non-Muslims) and endure humiliations. Constantly the Jewish people were crying out to Almighty God – both the minority of Jews in their ancient land, and Jews living throughout the world – to restore their state, their full citizenship in the land given to Abraham for them, which they controlled for 1500 years.

What a great day for all the minorities of the world when World War I came to an end. After World War I, the rights of persecuted minorities began to be recognized. Just as Czechoslovakia was created for the Czechs and Slovaks, just as the Ottoman Empire was broken up to recognize the claims of Arabs living under their control (the Ottomans were Muslims, but ethnographically were not Arabs), so the British recognized the claims of the indigenous Jewish minority living in their ancient homeland, having lived there since long before the 7th century when the Muslim Arab claims to the land began.

The sweet smell of liberation for minorities and colonialized people was in the air for the first time in history. Jews began to rejoice. But the Arabs, despite their own liberation at that time under temporary British and French mandates, took a hateful look at Jews who had the same aspirations for liberation. Their liberation was okay, but Jewish liberation under the same set of principles was rejected. This abiding rejection of the principle of national self-determination that has been totally accepted beginning with the end of World War I, and continuing at a greater pace after the creation of the United Nations, is the key to understanding the hatefulness of the Arab mindset. If it meant that Jews could achieve self-determination by having only .01% of the land of the Arab nations, that was still too much for those selfish, unprincipled people, even though they hungered for the same goal as those Arab states.

Arab anti-Semitism has caused them to reject national self-determination as it applies to the Jews. Meanwhile, even the national self-determination of Czechoslovakia has been fine-tuned, and that country has been divided to become the countries of Czech Republic and Slovakia. The integrity of Poland after being split by the Nazis and the USSR in 1939 has been restored, and Yugoslavia has become Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo. The Arabs have accepted all these, but they will not accept Jewish self-determination. All the former republics of the USSR have become independent countries, all under the universally accepted principle of self-determination, but the Arabs do not accept Jewish self-determination. The Arab hatred for Israel is not only a rejection of Israel but is rejection of national self-determination, one of the key items of Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and carried forward more strongly by Pres. Roosevelt, Pres. Truman, and their successors, as well as the United Nations. The Arab world should hang its head in shame (but they have no shame regarding non-Muslim principles and rights) as its behavior is disgracing every world leader, and every country that became independent after World Wars I and II.

Israel’s existence is not only a tribute to the tenacity of the Jews who persisted there during the 2000 years after Rome’s expulsion, not only to the prayers of Jews all over the world for 2000 years, but also to the triumph of self-determination as an idea whose time had come. It is thrilling to see the emergence of so many new national entities in the 20th century, among them Israel, India, Pakistan, and the others named above. But the Goliath that is the Arab world would snatch away the wonderful restoration that is Israel. Goliath would kill David. But “David” has already triumphed despite the malevolent intentions of its neighbors. The power to have overcome such overwhelming hatred speaks for itself. If you are for the underdog, an underdog that is exercising the same right as every indigenous people in the world, namely the right to sovereignly govern itself, then you have to praise, honor, and stand up for Israel in every possible way.

1 The Algemeiner, July 3, 2014, http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/02/grand-larceny/#comments

2 For a complete account of the Jewish presence (Yishuv) in the land of present-day Israel, see Jerome R. Verlin, Israel: 3000 Years, The Jewish People’s Three Thousand Years Presence in Palestine, Pavilion Press, 2010 and Jerome R. Verlin and Lee S. Bender, Pressing Israel, Pavilion Press, 2012.

3 See Tanakh, Nehemiah 2:1-10.

 

The Historical Enmity Between Spanish and English Culture

Past antagonisms keep repeating themselves.

January 6, 2025 by Jeff Ludwig  

Newsletter

 

The U.S. border crisis has an historical underlay that is generally disregarded in analyses of the  “illegal migrant crisis.” Unconscious as well as longstanding conflicts impact so-called current events.  Most of the “migrants” are from Mexico, Central and South America, although clearly with the  Biden-manipulated influx we also see cohorts of Chinese, Middle Eastern, and African “migrants.”  [The word migrants is in quotation marks because at one level they are migrants, but they also might  be referred to as invaders, illegal border crossers, Trojan horse warriors sent to undermine the politics  and economics of the U.S., or as pawns in a Democrat Party strategy to undermine Republican  strength in the U.S.]

This writer saw about 20 “migrants” from Bangladesh and Pakistan being interviewed as they trekked into their new life. The interviewer asked them how they got here, and to a man (they were all men) they said they had walked. The interviewer was incredulous and asked, “From Pakistan?! How could you have walked from Pakistan?” But the migrant stuck to his guns and answered with a straight face, “Yes, we walked.” The role of NGOs was not mentioned, nor flights, nor pocket money, nor meals, etc.

Tensions over our Southern border with Mexico extend back to the 19th century. Mexico actually invited Americans to come settle in what was then Mexican territory in what is today northeastern Texas. Sam Houston and various frontiersmen accepted Mexico’s offer, but conflicts arose and Texas became independent of Mexico in 1836, which included the major defeat at San Jacinto of the Mexican forces, led by Santa Ana, by Gen. Sam Houston, who led the Texans. Texas became an independent Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845.

By 1844 President James Polk came into office and was committed to a doctrine of Manifest Destiny which promoted the idea that U.S. territory should expand dramatically across the continent beyond the vast territory that had been added by Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. This ideological position was based on a vision of democratic ideals and rights-based political philosophy that were uniquely American being put in place throughout the North American continent. Manifest Destiny was not a mere power-play ideology as leftists often portray it.

The phrase “Manifest Destiny,” which emerged as the best-known expression of this mindset, first appeared in an editorial published in the July-August 1845 issue of The Democratic Review. In the editorial, the writer criticized the opposition that still lingered against the annexation of Texas, urging national unity on behalf of “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Here the key word is not “power” but “Providence.” This word is now rarely used, but the Founding Fathers and others following them were fond of this word because it communicated a sense of God-wrought expansion of the principles of sound governance based on biblical values that were the hallmark of our founding and success as a nation.

The crisis between Mexico and the U.S. came to a head in 1846 when U.S. troops crossed the Nueces River into the land area between it and the Rio Grande. The U.S. claimed the Rio Grande was the boundary between us and Mexico, while Mexico claimed the Nueces was. Thus, the crossing of the Nueces by U.S. troops was adjudged by Mexico to be an act of war and the Mexican-American War began. Mexico lost the war and about one-third of its territory was taken by the U.S., including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona.

For this writer, the expansion of democratic political ideals claimed by Manifest Destiny actually pre-dates the 19th century and goes back to the adversarial relationship between Spain and England in the 16th century. That tension reached its climax during the reign of Elizabeth I, who was intensely evangelical (Protestant) in her spirituality. Plots were formed against her and after she supported the Protestants in the Netherlands in their revolt against Spain, the opposition of Spain intensified.

Spain directed its fleet (armada) to attack England in 1588. As History.com notes,

Just after midnight on August 8, the English sent eight burning ships into the crowded harbor at Calais. The panicked Spanish ships were forced to cut their anchors and sail out to sea to avoid catching fire. The disorganized fleet, completely out of formation, was attacked by the English off Gravelines at dawn. In a decisive battle, the superior English guns won the day, and the devastated Armada was forced to retreat north to Scotland. The English navy pursued the Spanish as far as Scotland and then turned back for want of supplies. Battered by storms and suffering from a dire lack of supplies, the Armada sailed on a hard journey back to Spain around Scotland and Ireland.

That defeat of the Spanish marked the ascendancy of England as a great power.

Lastly, we should recall the Spanish-American War. Spain resisted the Cuban desire for independence, and this resistance threatened U.S. investments in Cuba at the end of the 19th century. In April 1898, Spain declared war on the U.S., but by December they had lost the war. Under the Treaty of Paris signed in December 1898, Spain renounced all claims to Cuba, ceded Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States and transferred sovereignty over the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.

If we look at our southern border conflict within this wider historical context of a longstanding conflict with Catholic, Spanish-speaking people and English-speaking Protestants, we see a deeper dimension of our so-called “immigration crisis.”  Certainly, the Democrats are looking for more voters who are dependent upon government and will cling to their left-wing programs and superficial philosophy. However, their interest has a deep historical context.

Our differences with the Spanish-speaking world are longstanding and real.

Reader Interactions

 Did Moses write the first five books of the Old Testament?

https://answersingenesis.org/bible-characters/moses/did-moses-write-genesis/

 

America's Declining Sexual Morality (appeared in americanthinker.com March, 2020)

By Jeffrey Ludwig

The decline in sexual morality we see in our era did not begin in the year 2000.  Today's "sexual revolution" is expressed by our being told by the highest court in the land that homosexual marriage can and must be married and by women being encouraged to abort children as a "right."  In today's society, drag queens reading to little children in libraries is considered delightful by many.  Further, vast numbers of people consider one's sex designation psychological and not biological, and, increasingly, parents encourage their little children to "choose" which sex/gender they want to be.  As additional evidence of the "sexual revolution," the overall percentage of children born out of wedlock has risen from 5% in 1960 to about 40% the last three or four years (albeit much higher among black and Hispanic persons).

Tthese trends are the result of a series of developments that have been ongoing for more than 100 years.  Sexual fantasies and desires were depicted by Sigmund Freud as repressed, and in their repressed unconscious influence on the personality, these desires and fantasies were leading to neurotic and psychotic behaviors in society.  Deep sexual needs were being sublimated in creative activities, but many aspects of sexuality, being afforded no legitimate outlets or channels for expression, were wreaking havoc on personalities.

One of Freud's patients, referred to as "the Wolf Man," had a recurrent dream of six or seven wolves sitting on bare branches outside his window.  Although they were wolves, they had foxes' tails.  Applying the method of psychoanalysis, Freud concluded that the Wolf Man had castration anxiety.  Freud claimed to reveal the deep, unconscious significance of the Pleasure Principle in our psyches, thereby freeing us from the excessive rigidity of late 19th-century Western Civilization.

For Freud, the individual decision-making agent exercised his so-called freedom with decisions made by the "I" or ego.  But the identity of the "I" was within the context of the rules of social living.  In Freud's Vienna, those rules expressed Christian values (which included Old Testament prohibitions as well as virtues) integrated in the psyche by the superego.  However, both the ego and the operant rules of the superego were unaware of the unconscious dynamics that were significantly impacting the ego's adjustments to society and to its consciousness of itself.  These challenges emanated from that vast unconscious tier of existence referred to as the id.  In the id lay the repressed memories, dreams, aspirations, needs, lusts, and even attraction to death.  Greater acceptance of one's sexuality (i.e., the Pleasure Principle) was needed.  Further, the psycho-sexual implications of breastfeeding or toilet training also had to be factored into one's makeup.  These influences were wholly unconscious, yet they are the most powerful influences in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our "adjustment" to society.  For Freud, religion conceals rather than reveals the true foundations of morality and our interactions with others.

Influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the post-WWI world of artists and writers unlocked the door to expression of the unconscious and to sexual license as the path of freedom and creativity.  Many notable literary figures did not maintain a married, monogamous, heterosexual relationship "'til death do us part."   These included such notables as Henry Miller, a non-political iconoclast (married five times plus numerous lovers); Gertrude Stein (had a lifelong lesbian partner); Ernest Hemingway (married four times); Ezra Pound (he, his wife, and another woman had threesomes); T.S. Eliot (multiple affairs while his wife was in a mental asylum); James Joyce (had two children with Nora before marrying her); and Sherwood Anderson (married four times).  These great writers constituting the "Lost Generation" felt alienated from Western, Christian socio-political culture as being too bourgeois or too puritanical.  They were more comfortable in a European artistic climate marked by artistic freedom and burgeoning communism in the USSR with its anti-bourgeois rhetoric and policies.

Lara Feigel notes that in post-WWI Russia, "these ideals [anti-bourgeois and anti-family based sexuality] were enshrined in law in 1918 when the new Soviet government ratified its Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship abolishing the inferior legal status of women, eliminating religious marriage, giving children born outside marriage equal rights to those born within it, and making divorce an easy formality.  The author of the Code, Alexander Goikhbarg, looked forward to the time "when 'the fetters of husband and wife' were obsolete and love could be enjoyed freely."  Fourteen years later, in 1932, Alexandra Kollontai, founder of the Soviet Women's Department, wrote a book in which she insisted there was "neither morality nor immorality" in nature, and a sexual act should be recognized as "a manifestation of a healthy organism [much the same] as the quenching of hunger or thirst."  Although the USSR formally reversed its anti-family and pro-abortion position in the mid-1930s, the distaste for the family conceived as a bourgeois institution first stated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 remained as a steadfast pillar of extreme left-wing thought.  The USSR backing off from its anti-family agenda in the mid-nineteen-thirties was more of a practical decision than a change in ideological commitment.

Situation ethics came into being during the 1960s regarding Christian sexual morality with the writings of Joseph F. Fletcher, an Anglican theologian.  Non-marital sexual intercourse could be accepted if the parties believed in Jesus Christ and really loved each other, even if not married.  This view is generally held by liberal churches today, even if it does not appear on their websites under "Our Beliefs."  When this writer attended a liberal United Church of Christ and Congregationalist seminary in the early 1970s, some of the ministerial candidates were shacking up with their girlfriends in the dorms, and no action was taken by the seminary's administration.  Another friend, in the 1960s, pursued his lifelong dream to become an Episcopal priest only to find homosexuality rife in the seminary as the students goosed each other as they went down the stairs to meals.  He then dropped out of the seminary to protect his body, his morals, and his sanity.

The hippie movement with its counter-culture drug and sexually "liberated" mores presented yet another challenge to 2,000-year-old Christian morality.  However, while it attracted a lot of press coverage, this writer does not believe it had the destructive effect on the unity of sex, love, and marriage as did Freudianism, the left-wing assault on bourgeois capitalist culture, and the selfish examples set by some of the greatest creative minds of the post-WWI generation.

To say these developments are a cause for concern would be an understatement.  This breakdown in the moral order regarding human sexuality is not just a difference in values between some sectors of the population and others.  Rather, it is a difference in values between fallen mankind and the Author of the moral law Himself.  If it exists in what formerly was called Christian America, then judgment is likely to follow.  It's as inevitable as the bite of a mosquito buzzing around one's body on a humid day, yet the consequences are far more serious.

AmericanThinker.com Articles By Ptr.Ludwig

 https://www.americanthinker.com/author/e_jeffrey_ludwig/

Jan. 6 Defendants Must Be Given Speedy and Fair Trials

TOPICS:ACLUChristopher WorrellD.C. Dept. Of CorrectionsEnglish LawJan 6Speedy TrialWarden Wanda Patten

POSTED BY: JEFFREY LUDWIG NOVEMBER 16, 2021

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called “insurrection” in Washington DC to protest the Presidential election modus operandi and the results. Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented.  They are not only being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement which is a punishment accorded only the most dangerous criminals.

What are habeas corpus rights?  According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “Habeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. Translated from Latin it means ‘show me the body.’ Habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument to safeguard individual freedom against arbitrary executive power.”  A citizen must be charged and cannot be held indefinitely.  A charge requires a trial, and if found guilty in a trial, there is a sentence for a specific amount of time.

Even Politifact – hardly an unbiased fact checker — relates, “The vast majority of defendants have been released from custody while awaiting trial, but some [my italics] held in jail have been kept in solitary confinement.”  The fact that exact numbers of those held in solitary confinement or for how long is not a matter of public record itself suggests to this writer evasion by the Washington DC jail authorities. However despite the attempt by outlets like Politifact to minimize the problem of solitary confinement, a number of GOP Senators have voiced their concern about this problem, and even the ACLU – certainly not an outreach of the Republican Party – has become involved. However, the Republican Senators who are concerned do not have a specific number. The lack of definitiveness in this area is alarming.

Even saying that “it’s only a few bad dudes” being held without habeas corpus does not dilute the evil that suspension of habeas corpus is.  Only a couple of weeks after seven Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, Pres. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested an individual in Maryland – a state that had not seceded – for advocating secession. The U.S. Circuit Court ruled that Lincoln’s action violated the U.S. Constitution.  Although Lincoln did not rescind his setting aside of habeas corpus, John Merryman, the object of this action was allowed to post bail three monthslater, and was never brought to trial.  Charges of treason against him were eventually dropped.  This was only one case in the context of social turmoil much greater than that of Jan. 6 in Washington DC; yet the Circuit Court and many citizens who supported our fight against the secessionist states still deemed Lincoln’s action to be an overreach.

A crucial law in respect of this right not to be imprisoned without being charged was the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, 110 years before our U.S. Constitution was written.  That law said that no one could be held in prison except for treason indefinitely, and that failure to present the person to be charged to a court would result in officials being fined.  This law was followed by the Declaration of Right in 1689.  Among the many provisions of this 1689 foundational document which became a formative model for our own Constitution and Bill of Rights was the provision “promises of fines and forfeitures before conviction are illegal and void.”  So, the earlier law was updated to include injury to the prisoner that is financial as well as removal of his freedom.

In today’s context, that 1689 extension of the earlier 1679 law extends to the health of the incarcerated person. This applies to the present Washington DC prisoners from Jan. 6 like Christopher Worrell who has non-Hodgkins lymphoma and who has not had necessary surgery on his right hand.  He is being made to suffer over and above the denial of his habeas corpus rights which additional neglect and suffering has, since 1689, also been considered illegal in English law.  Thus, we can see that the Nov. 3, 2021 ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth against Warden Wanda Patten and Director of the D.C. Dept. of Corrections, Quincy Booth that both are in civil contempt for “potential civil rights violations” is a ruling based in English common law going back 332 years! If that is not egregious conduct, what is?

On many MSM outlets, commentators are referring to the Jan. 6 protestors and/or rioters as “insurrectionists,” but so far no one has been charged with insurrection.  Insurrectionist is possibly another word for “traitor” so – going back to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 — it would seem to justify holding someone without charging them.  However, this mindset is gripped by hyperbole. Even if the protestors are guilty of violent actions during their protest, it would be an exaggeration to say they were traitors.  Benedict Arnold a notable traitor during the American Revolution sold us out to the British for 10,000 pounds but was not imprisoned. Jefferson Davis who was President of the Confederacy during the Civil War was imprisoned for only two years and then lived as a free man. Jane Fonda denounced the U.S. role in Vietnam to American soldiers serving in Vietnam, but was never prosecuted, and John Kerry, another anti-American who lied repeatedly about the Vietnam War and about U.S. activities while prosecuting that war, became a candidate for President and is now our climate czar.

Denouncing those in jail as insurrectionists and traitors completely lacks perspective and is an attempt to generate a climate of fear and hatred for those who repudiate the administration of President Joe Biden as unworthy of this great country.

Readers should contact their Senators and Representatives a.s.a.p. to promote the cause of justice, and can link this article to provide the historical and legal context for holding the view that action must be taken to resolve the abuse of power we now see regarding defendants who have been arrested for their actions on Jan. 6.