Re: [asa] dawkins and unbelief (again)

At 04:51 PM 4/2/2007, David Opderbeck wrote:

>Is Campolo himself often too far out in left
>field? Yes. But I'm glad he and other more
>moderate evangelicals emphasize that our first
>calling in the public sphere is to the poor and oppressed, not to ourselves.

@ "...Campolo warned that Call supporters should
not underestimate the sincerity or generosity of
conservative Christians. "If I checked Jerry
Falwell's people and their per capita giving to
the poor, I bet Jerry Falwell's people would
come- out better than we would. Don't think those
people don't have compassion for the poor." But
Campolo lapsed into more facile liberal verbiage
when he became "prophetic,' about America's
politics: ..." http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/RELEFTCO.TXT

The below is merely one example of what good
intentions of naive people like Campolo --- who
never ask, "what are the consequences of this?" -- wind up doing TO people.

~ Janice ... "For Mugabe, true Christianity has
meant little more than exploiting gullible
leftist church groups in the West for its own chicanery and brutality."

The Religious Left's Monster
By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 2, 2007
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27631

Finally, a Western church official is condemning
the increasingly brutal regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

It has been a long-time coming. The reticence
is due, perhaps in part, to the fact that
left-leaning Western church groups helped to
install Mugabe in power nearly 30 years ago.

Noting his own group’s support for Zimbabwe’s
path to “liberation” in the 1970’s, the head of
the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation (LWF)
is now condemning Mugabe’s “unprecedented
brutality and oppression.” On March 15, LWF
General Secretary Ishmael Noko asked the Africa Union to lean against Mugabe.

“The attacks upon opposition leaders, human
rights workers and journalists are mounting daily
in number and severity,” Noko
observed. “Participants in peaceful
demonstrations and expressions of resistance have
been imprisoned, attacked, wounded and killed,”
he wrote. “The government of Zimbabwe is
prepared to use the instruments of State power
against its own people in complete disregard for
their human rights and for the government's own
constitutional responsibilities.”

Noko also described the “collapse” of Zimbabwe’s
once functional economy, the hyper-inflation, and
the flood of refugees out of Zimbabwe. “The
grievances of the people with regard to poverty,
unemployment, security, and abuse of power
represent fundamental failures of government,”
Noko wrote. “And in addition to destroying his
own people and the image of his country, Mr
Mugabe's actions are destroying all possibilities
for rebuilding the image of African political leadership in general.”

The Lutheran cleric wants Mugabe’s regime to
reverse his “self-destructive course, to cease
its attacks upon its own people, to correct its
failed economic policies, and to reverse its
aggressive isolationism.” Noko recalled that his
LWF had “stood in strong solidarity with the
struggle for freedom and independence for Zimbabwe.”

Many leftist-led Western church groups did
considerably more for Mugabe than simply stand in solidarity.

Starting in the late 1960,’s, the Geneva-based
World Council of Churches (WCC) began funding
Mugabe’s ZANU guerrilla insurrection in then
white-controlled Rhodesia. In 1974, Anglican
bishops in Rhodesia observed with “disgust” that
the WCC had granted 6000 pounds to ZANU.

Pointing to ZANU’s terrorism aimed at both white
and black civilians, the bishops lamented: “Far
and away the majority of these have been
Africans, innocent of any offense and most have
been killed with great brutality. Others have
been abducted, raped, beaten and disfigured.”

By the late 1970’s, Rhodesia’s white minority
regime was negotiating with the non-violent black
opposition for a bi-racial democracy.

But the WCC and other leftist Western church
groups sided with the Marxist guerrilla
movements, like Mugabe’s ZANU, over more moderate
and non-violent black opposition parties. In
1978, the WCC granted $85,000 to ZANU. Methodist
Bishop Abel Muzorewa was elected in 1979 as
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’s first black prime
minister. But even agencies of the United
Methodist Church preferred Mugabe’s Marxist guerrillas to their own bishop.

In 1978-1979, the New York-based United Methodist
General Board of Global Ministries gave over
$5,000 to Mugabe’s ZANU. The Methodist Church in
Zimbabwe understandably complained: “We just
can’t understand why the American church sides
with our enemies. Doesn’t it seem strange to you
that our brothers and sisters…would support
people who want to close our churches?”

United Methodist and WCC support for ZANU and its
partners in the Patriotic Front was not deterred
by the guerilla movement’s atrocities.

Mugabe-allied guerillas murdered seven Roman
Catholic missionaries in 1977 and killed 12
people at a Pentecostal missions post in
1978. That same year, the guerrillas also shot
down a civilian airliner. In response, the WCC
preferred to fault the “regime’s persistent
refusal to negotiate a peaceful settlement with
the Zimbabwe [Patriotic Front] leaders.”

When Mugabe finally took power in 1980, he
thanked a visiting WCC delegation WCC delegation
for its “commitment to the principles for which
you and we have struggled together.”

Eighteen years later, after Mugabe had
effectively squelched what was left of Zimbabwe’s
democracy, the WCC’s Eighth Assembly met in
Harare, Zimbabwe. Speaking before the
applauding delegates, Mugabe thanked the
international assembly of church officials for
their "courageous gesture" 30 years earlier to
start funding his revolutionary movement. "It
marked a great shift from the traditional
acquiescence and even complicity which
characterized the church-colonial state relations
in almost all colonial settings,” declared
Mugabe, who noted that Christian missionaries had
opposed the WCC’s support for him. "Today, when
we look back, we say the WCC helped the local
church re-examine its assumptions of social and
political relations in the context of true Christian tenets.”

Probably Mugabe would believe that the Lutheran
official now condemning his regime’s human rights
abuses is not living up to “true Christian tenets.”

For Mugabe, true Christianity has meant little
more than exploiting gullible leftist church
groups in the West for its own chicanery and
brutality. Maybe at least one or two of those
once supportive church groups will acknowledge
their errors before Mugabe’s notorious regime degenerates any further.

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Received on Mon Apr 2 17:07:15 2007