Young evangelicals moving "left"

I find it kind of offensive to a point that myself a "Young Evangelical" is lumped into this category. it these surveys and others like it that are given way too much weight in the mass media and online venues by all parties & candidates that makes us all look like we havent's a clue, there's a lot of so called "Young Evangelicals" that are simply overlooked because we don't fall into the norm that the older evangelicals and the powers that be want us to.

I personally would not vote for any of the canidates running right now because none of them give a care in the world to the "Young evangelical" generation that they are trying to cohort into voting for them.

I'm staying a-political, and simply focusing on Christ and let the world fall apart on it's own it surely does not need my help or vote to do that

Background on David Rockefeller's private thinktank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
http://www.infowars.com/articles/nwo/cfr_stacks_deck_with_dem_gop_presidential_candidates.htm

and

Dick Cheney (ex-director of CFR) talks to David Rockefeller (short video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbnpN07J_zg

Democrat CFR member Candidates:
Barack Obama (also, Michelle Obama is on the Board of Directors in the Chicago branch of the CFR)
Hillary Clinton
John Edwards
Chris Dodd
Bill Richardson

Republican CFR member Candidates:
Mitt Romney
Rudy Giuliani
John McCain
Fred Thompson
Newt Gingrich
Mike Huckabee (not a CFR member, though he named Richard Haas, president of the CFR, as his adviser on foreign policy)

The Money Masters (documentary, part 1)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6076118677860424204

The Money Masters (documentary, part 2)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7336845760512239683

Reviews of "The Money Masters" documentary from financial experts
http://www.themoneymasters.com/reviews.htm

America: Freedom to Fascism (documentary)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173

About the director of "America: Freedom to Fascism," Aaron Russo
http://www.freedomtofascism.com/about_aaron/about_aaron.html

Spin (documentary)
Spin is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7344181953466797353

About the creator of "Spin," Brian Springer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Springer

"Corporate Media Censorship (part 1)" by Daniel Estulin
http://www.danielestulin.com/?op=noticias¬icias=ver&id=349

"Corporate Media Censorship (part 2)" by Daniel Estulin
http://www.danielestulin.com/?op=noticias¬icias=ver&id=353&idioma=en

QUOTES OF INTEREST, RELATING TO CFR, TRILATERAL COMMISSION, AND BILDERBERG:

"The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for "the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." Harpers, July l958

"This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long - We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
-David Rockefeller speaking at the UN, Sept. 14, 1994

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries." -- David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.

1973, August 10: The New York Times publishes "From a China Traveller" by David Rockefeller, who writes about Communist China: "One is impressed immediately by the sense of national harmony....There is a very real and pervasive dedication to chairman Mao and Maoist principles. Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community purpose. General social and economic progress is no less impressive....The enormous social advances of China have benefited greatly from the singleness of ideology and purpose....The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in history."

1974 - Richard N. Gardner writing in Foreign Affairs (CFR's publication) April 1974 Article entitled The Hard Road to World Order, "In short, the "house of world order: will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great "booming, buzzing confusion," .......but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."

"We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Foreign Affairs (CFR publication) (July/August 1995)

"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order [referring to the 1991 LA Riot]. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government." Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991

I appreciate the comment Donny, and you are very right. Most of the "Young Evangelicals" take the sound-bite road to politics and social issues and forget to do real research and make up their own mind, then somehow the rest of us still get lumped in with them :( sad....

Thank God for Old people.. (I'm so catching flame for that...)

"When "young Evangelicals" become "mature Christians" they move as far away from Leftist ideology as they can get."

I certainly didn't move away from it - I embraced it. It better embodies the "Do unto others" principle than the "Right" seems to.

I would disagree with the above postthat being "Left" embodies more social outreach. because passing a law that gives money to people who won't be fixed by it does not constitute social outreach. Getting off the couch and getting your own person out into the world as the Hands and feet of Christ is what social outreach should always strive to look like, not any one political party or system.

Think of the biblical story of the Samaritan's generosity, when by his standards.. both a extremely "religious" figure (Priest) and also a Levite, and they both passed the beaten man by on the other side of the road, but a Samaritan, whom was looked down upon by both the first two men socially, went and helped the man up and bandaged him and gave the innkeeper 2 months worth of money for him to stay and get well.

It's things like that which embody the model that Jesus laid out for us, not anything else.

my 2 cents

Dear Donny,

You've got it wrong. Jesus did not slam the whores, winos or outsiders. He slammed the Pharisees,the Priests and the keepers of the Law. These were the religious status quo of his day. They would be right at home with the gay-bashing, socialist-fearing, prayer-in-school crowd conservatives who knew what was best for everybody. Why this bunch? Because of their legalistic and intolerant attitude towards the outsider and the people who didn't belong, who didn't look nice and weren't all American shiny and polished. Donny, get out of your judging and hatred. Read the gospels for the first time. It might actually change you.

"devout," not "devoute"

The problem with leftward-leaning Christians is that they are putting their faith in collectivist economic solutions to poverty. And virtually every bit of economic evidence and knowledge built up over the past two centuries points to the fact that collectivist and redistributionist efforts create more poverty, not less.

The textual support (if there is any) for such a result is that Jesus never uttered a word about the government being the engine of poverty elimination. It is up to each and everyone of us, as individuals, to do what we can to help our fellow man. But it is not up to us to force others to do what they can.

Every study worth its salt shows that voluntary charitable efforts trump governmental bureaucracy when it comes to helping the poor, the less fortunate in every way. Studies also show that when the government assumes more of the role of charity, then individuals tend to give and do less on their own.

But more importantly, I think, it is simply morally wrong to force others (which is what a governmentally imposed redistributionist policy does) to "give." It certainly isn't a sign of a more "moral" country that one forces people to give, while another does not.

Force, by its very nature, cannot induce morality. Nobody can ever be made moral through force (which is what government is, in the end). God gave us free will, and it is up to us to exercise it.

If we do not always do what others wish we would, then force may change that temporarily, but experience shows that in the long run it destroys all it touches, both those who are on the receiving end and those who wield it. So, from both a practical and moral standpoint, I would argue that redistributionist policies are wrong.

Folks....

I'm not aware of anywhere in the Bible that talks about Sodomite economic policy despite 30 years of daily study; perhaps someone can enlighten me?

as someone pointed out, 'left' and 'libertarian' historically have been quite compatible with the philosophy preached by the Jesus of the Gospels. Whereas the authoritarian/Right holds on to the Old Testament and, to a lesser degree, Paul, Jesus makes it very clear that each of us is personally, individually responsible for the world around us. What allows great institutions like the Church or a government to flourish is the simple fact that pooling resources ("collectivist" thinking) does things that no individual short of Bill Gates, no matter how well-meaning can; utilize good old Adam Smith/Henry Ford economies of scale. Individual intent matters, but the argument about 'force' becomes somewhat specious when taken to its logical, Straussian conclusion; it merely substitutes one form of force for another - amplifying the economic force of those who put themselves first over those who would be their brothers' keepers. No person of faith - ANY faith - should find this tolerable.

We need to have real discussions in our society about how to solve real problems - not refighting the same zero-sum wars of the past, but moving forward and together in a spirit of humility, charity and gratefulness to God for the bounties He has given us. If you are reading these words, you woke up this morning and you are (probably) neither blind nor poor; God has been incredibly gracious to us without our doing anything to deserve that. Shouldn't we "pay it forward" as best we can? Yes, by all means strive individually to make the world a better place - "see a need, fill a need" - but some "needs" are too big for one person - or an unfocused gaggle of people - to "fill" effectively. Anbody who doubts that wasn't paying attention to the many well-meaning but ultimately futile individual efforts of rich Westerners in the Third World of the 60s and 70s. Any tool can be used, misused or abused - but if we don't use the tools we've been given AT ALL, I fail to see how that is in any way "service to God".

Don't kid yourself, GM Roper...if you don't believe that the law-breaking, war-mongering Bush administration has been a disaster for this country, and if you don't like progressives, you most certainly are right-wing.

It's OK to hate some things which are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus: things like starting wars based on lies, torturing people, violating the oath of office, working to pass laws and rules and regulation which ensure the rich get more while the middle class and poor people suffer...things like that.

Your sound bite Christianity is worse than any sound bite political philosophy.

Jeff, I agree that some needs are too big to be filled by individuals. That's why there are voluntary organizations like churches and the Red Cross, which incidentally have been proven to be more effective than governmental institutions at helping people in need. As for the "futile individual efforts of rich Westerners in the Third World of the 60s and 70s" -- I hardly see how the efforts of Western governments in the present decade have been any less futile.

The West has spent well over a trillion dollars in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to help Africa, when it is clear that pouring money into that region isn't making much of a difference (and, some argue, is merely fueling the corrupt and oppressive regimes that hold sway in many African countries). And this lends further support to my larger point: the Third World nations which have succeeded most at raising their standard of living are those that have adopted free markets and the rule of law.

As for plane: You raise so many issues in a scattershot fashion that I don't have the time to address them all. But here is something to mull over -- is there a moral difference between funding something and banning it (e.g., the Bush administration never banned experimentation with embryos, they merely restricted federal funding)?

PatientWitness: Are you saying there is no moral difference between banning a life-saving operation, and funding it? I would say there is. And do not assume that a single-payer (government-run) health care system, such as in Canada or Great Britain, would rush in and pay for every such operation. When health care becomes free for everybody, rationing becomes even more prevalent.

Incidentally, I'm not an absolute libertarian. I do believe that the government should provide, for instance, health care to those who cannot afford insurance. I believe in a social safety net funded by the government. Where we probably disagree is just how comfortable or extensive that net should be. I think that at some point, it goes too far, both from a moral and practical perspective (as welfare reform demonstrated).

I'm sorry, but if you think this makes sense -- "excluding funding for something is effectively the same as banning that something" -- then there's just no debate. Have you been to the supermarket lately?

As for our health care system, I'm not saying that it is perfect, or that more couldn't be done to help people get insurance. But to have the same people who operate the DMV and the post office run our health care? I don't think so.