[Livingfire] I am posting this article to begin a possible discussion about Liberation Theology and why it is NOT Christianity but IS socialism. If it is wrong of me to post articles, please inform me and I will not do so in future. Thanks.
My personal view is that Liberation Theology is of the World and is false Christianity. It is a marxist, socialist, atheist-based worldview and "theology."

Here is the article (from http://www.intellectualconservative.com/):

May 22, 2007

Misguided Christians and Liberals
By Thomas E. Brewton | View comments

Variously known as liberation theology or the social gospel, the belief that the political state has the capacity, as well as the duty, to compel its citizens to follow certain ways of thinking and behavior, is not Christianity, but socialism. Thus, both a Calvinistic political state and a materialistic, socialistic state stand at odds with true Christianity.

Some individual Christians, within Evangelicalism and within Catholicism, believe that society should be channeled into "correct" behavioral patterns by political edict.

Pope Benedict confronted this materialistic doctrine in his recent journey to Brazil. Variously known as liberation theology or the social gospel, the belief that the political state has the capacity, as well as the duty, to compel its citizens to follow certain ways of thinking and behavior, is not Christianity, but socialism.

Father Robert A. Sirico deals with the Pope's endeavor in his May 18th article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Liberating Christianity."

The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:4-5, "My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power."

The political state is men's wisdom. Christianity is God's love for mankind, of which every individual Christian must strive to be a witness to others. It is through the living examples of kindness, respect for others, courtesy, honesty, and moral rectitude, by Christians individually and as members of God's kingdom on earth, that people are most effectively to be led into decent behavior.

Compulsory behavior standards imposed by political statute, whether in a Christian state or under Islamic sharia, do not engender acts of free will. Without following Jesus in free will, we cannot truly reflect God's love. Thus, both a Calvinistic political state and a materialistic, socialistic state stand at odds with true Christianity.

The liberation theology that plagues Latin America has for two centuries been the dominant secular religion of Western Europe. Whether we are religious Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, or Roman Catholics, we can all thank God for the Pope's willingness to ignore popular opinion and combat secular atheism head-on.

At the inception of articulated socialistic doctrine, its philosophers envisioned the political state, via materialistic actions, as the source of earthly salvation for the human race. In the late 19th and early 20th century period, that paradigm became widely accepted in intellectual circles, here and in Great Britain.

Henri de Saint-Simon, the earliest codifier of modern socialism, wrote in "The New Christianity" (1825) that the spiritual content of Christianity should be replaced by the regulatory edicts of the intellectual and professional councils that governed the atheistic and materialistic political state.

The job of those councils was to redistribute wealth, manage all economic activity, and to control the educational system so that only the doctrine of socialism might be taught in the schools. That remains the fundamental program of today's liberal-Progressive-socialists.

Their conception, however, rests upon a fictional vision of the world.

First, the assumption is that, both in Rousseau's imaginings about the original State of Nature, and in the modern world, there is more than enough material wealth to provide every person with a comfortable standard of living, if the political state takes "unjust" wealth from the rich and redistributes it equally among the people.

This, of course, ignores the history of the world, unequal geographic conditions, limited natural resources, and unequal human intelligence and abilities that have always been reflected in shortages of food, shelter, and other resources. The study of economics came into being precisely because human desires always exceed available resources.

The Protestant ethic, leading to capitalism, proved to be the greatest force in world history for raising living standards. (For more details regarding the Protestant ethic, see Liberals vs Evangelicals.

Some people, of course, became better off than others, but the living standards of even the poorest were exponentially improved. People classified today as living in poverty enjoy a standard of living available in the 19th century only to the top ranks of society.

The second fundamental assumption of socialism is that government regulatory councils are smarter and more efficient than private entrepreneurs.

After the political state has redistributed private wealth and placed management of economic activity under the control of its intellectual leaders and bureaucrats, the productivity and efficiency of businesses will increase far beyond the capacities of privately managed businesses. This added productivity will lead to conditions of plenty for everyone, producing a fundamental alteration of human nature. Human needs having thus been satisfied, aggression, crime, and warfare will disappear. InLenin's thesis, at that point government itself will wither away.

Third, when the movement to socialism has been fully implemented in major countries, the intellectuals are to spread it to the entire world. National states will disappear, replaced by a world government that will bring earthly salvation to mankind. Hence liberals' faith in the UN and their judicial advocacy of international law as ipso facto amending our Constitution.

These assumptions can be seen clearly as the political, doctrinal foundation of American liberal Republicans and Democrats.

American religious leaders, along with Christian and religious Jewish political leaders, need to follow the Pope's example.


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Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns.
[email protected]
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

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Eugene

So true, morality can be only taught by God through the Word, Jesus Christ, and by the gift of the Spirit of God.
It seems today the state would tell us that we must accept their "truth" which is no truth at all, The Liberal "church" would tell us we should embrace sin and follow them, but the only one who should have our allegiance is God. No one can lead us but the truth of God as revealed in our conscience. As our Lord said, what is that to you, you follow me.
So let us reject all these things and be willing to suffer even unto death, for the time will come when they will not be willing to recieve true doctrine, but will heap to themselves many teachers having itching ears.....

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Melody

Ever since Friedrich Nietzsche declared "God is dead" and therefore we must "transvalue all values" (i.e., make up our values as we go along), the prevalent idea or worldview of Western Man is that there is no absolute truth, or any truth but that of Science, and not all of Science but only that part of science which is mathematical physics. If something can be described or quantified in mathematical terms and then applied to the physical world (for example, the mathematical physics used in constructing the atom bomb), then it is real and is true, otherwise nothing is certifiably true. Only through mathematical physics is there to be certainty (absolute truth).

The obverse of this is "uncertainty," which means that everything else is based on opinions and polls. This means that unless your faith in God can be quantified or demonstrated through mathematical physics, it is not real. This kind of worldview, eventually, leads to a visceral hatred for and intolerance towards anyone professing that Jesus Christ is the Only Way to the Father and towards anyone proclaiming that what the Bible says is absolutely true and is from God. It means that such perversities as "gay marriage" and abortion are out in the public square as though they are topics to be debated and voted on, as if somehow, in time, killing and perversion have become normal, and that the truth or worth of these matters is to be decided purely by opinion and by voting. In 2004 the voters in several states hands down voted against gay marriage. Next time - who knows? Lawyers went before the Supreme Court a month ago and discussed the pros and cons of infanticide (late term abortion) - and no one is shocked, no one is sick to the pit of their soul that this cannot be, that this is something that could only be normal in a world in which men no longer fear God. It is a world in which every man and woman is a little god, each carrying their "own truth" and each believing that "what is true for you may not be true for me, and vice versa." I spoke to someone at a video store about Jesus Christ and the Truth of Christ. The man responded by saying, "Well, that's true for you, but not for me." He then went on to say that he believed that an African tribal god he had discovered in a book was actually Jesus. This is the attitude and worldview we will deal with until we are finally separated from our bodies at death and meet God face to face. Alice in Wonderland is no longer in Wonderland - She is here with us, among us, right now, and we have become the weird creatures Alice encountered through the Looking Glass.

Nietzsche declared: "This is my truth. What is your truth?" What Nietzsche meant was that there was no true truth, only individual truth. So, truth is based on population. If there are 6 billion people in the world, then there are 6 billion truths.

What this means for us is that no one is supposed to be sure what they believe. Notice how the liberal churches and some conservative churches too, give in to this relativistic falsity when they declare that there are many roads to salvation or when they waver on the issues of abortion or gay marriage. Jesus Christ becomes "one of many gods" and if that is true then there really is no evident need to follow Christ. Why? Because Western Man is in the process of "transvaluing all values." Since the JudeoChristian tradition is considered to be dead along with God, Western Man foolishly starts from scratch and begins to trash old but true values and replaces them with new but false values -- abortion as a good, homosexual behavior as a virtue, all religions equal and all "sacred texts" equally sacred. This is pure foolishness but at the same time it is the working environment of all our universities, our media, our elites, our government.

We Christians, we authentic Christians are at the threshhold of a time when we must truly separate from the world and put forth in the strongest terms possible that Christ is the Truth, that the Bible truly is God's word to us, and that sin is real and that the only way to escape eternity in hell is to give one's soul to Jesus and declare Jesus Christ as one's Lord, Savior, and Judge.

Only if you believe Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow can you survive the coming onslaught of postmodernism, relativism, multiculturalism, marxism, moral equivalence, paganism, atheism, and snot-nosed liberalism. [Excuse me please, guys and gals, while I blow my nose.}

[I have to acknowledge thanks for many of the ideas I used in the above spiel to this websource:
http://www.saneworks.us/]

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Eugene