Protestants From The United States

"We've seen a parade of multinational corporations, financial institutions, Hollywood actors, and even American sports superstars joining a shameless stampede to see who can pander most effectively to a regime that is the reigning world champion of predatory economic behavior, human rights abuses, and even genocide."

"I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came, I don't know which country she comes from, but she's said that she's had tremendous success with hundreds of patients, and I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her."

"Big Tech is censoring Experts and suppressing the CURE. I will not be silenced."

"We are now teaching tolerance to something as vile as homosexuality – even to our grade-school children. This demon has been released to infect our generation. No matter what is said or claimed, most homosexuals are not happy, because there is something programmed in us by Jehovah God himself that makes us inherently know good from evil. This demon will not give peace, that’s why there is so much drug addiction and suicide in the gay community. It’s an antiGod, anti-procreation agenda of the Devil, and we have glamorized it. Now when we do evil, we find a way to make it acceptable. So, the majority have been pushed in the closet while we put up with the blatant display of perverted, vile behavior that is being taught to our children. Instead of the church gathering fire to help these poor souls get delivered, they have been accepted and given free rein in the church. The infestation is increasing because these people release these spirits in the church and in our schools to infect others. You cannot love, counsel or drug a demon. We have been caged!"

"Thank you CNN and let me know when y'all need some of them demons cast out of you. I will gladly oblige. You will feel a lot better. Keep up the good work."

"Yes, I am an Evangelical Christian. I believe the Bible. And I also believe that our earth was created through a process called Evolution. None of these notions contradict. In fact, these all together actually enrich my faith. Evolution causes me to stand in awe before the amazing Creator of the Universe and worship him for his majesty and creativity. And on this, I differ greatly from Ken Ham. Ham does not speak for me nor does he speak for the faith of the vast majority of Christians worldwide. To my non-Christian friends, please understand this. Please know that Christian faith does not automatically equal and anti-knowledge. In fact, for many of us, I think that kind of faith is one that is inherently contradictory to our understanding of who our God is."

"The Jesus I worship doesn’t offer me scientific explanations about the world around me. The Jesus I worship is the being through which all things were created, seen and unseen. He is the Lord of the sciences. He is the creator of the Evolutionary process. My Jesus doesn’t demand that I believe one theory or another about the origins of life. My Jesus is more concerned with the content of our characters and how we love each other than with our position on any scientific, political, or even theological issue. [...] My faith is one that embraces doubt, questioning, exploration, discovery, and science. My faith is not rooted in any doctrine or idea but in a relationship with the God of love. And so when Ken Ham and those of his ilk stand up and proclaim that Evolution and modern science is “opposed to God”, I am left to wonder which God he’s talking about. Because the God I know and worship has always been able to withstand my questions. He is the God who I believe is behind all scientific discovery. But apparently, Ken’s God is not. Instead, the God Ken seems to represent has apparently given us all of the answers to the mysteries of the universe in the Bible and expects us to cease thinking, exploring, and learning. Because the Bible says, we are to believe it, and that settles it. My understanding of God is one that makes God far more expansive than that. My understanding is that the creations of our amazing God go far beyond our ability to comprehend. We will also be discovering. Science will always have new questions to answer. And the more we find out, the more we will be left speechless as we behold the glory of our universe."

"For me, tonight’s debate was incredibly troubling. As I sat and heard Ken Ham argue that belief in evolution can lead to abortion, euthanasia, and killing our grandparents, I felt like beating our heads against the wall."

"Because the version of Christian faith that Ken Ham espoused tonight is not the version of Christianity that I am a part of. Ham’s understanding of what it means that the Bible is God’s inspired word is very different from what that phrase means to me. The presupposition that Ken Ham built his entire argument against Evolution on — that the Bible is God’s inerrant science textbook — is one that the majority of Christians and even Evangelicals reject. I was troubled because tonight it seemed like Ken Ham became the official spokesperson for Christians worldwide. But let me be very clear, Ken Ham does not speak for me or my faith."

"I am an . I believe the Bible is God’s inspired word. I believe that Jesus is God in the flesh who died for the sins of the world and rose again bodily on the third day. And yet, according to Ken Ham in his historic debate with Bill Nye tonight at the , because of my belief in Evolution, I cannot be who I am. I cannot be both a follower of Jesus Christ and someone who believes in the evidence presented by the vast majority of scientists worldwide. Or at least, it is a very unlikely fit. Even though I insist on a model that includes God as the beginning point, the uncaused cause of the universe. Even though I affirm all of the core doctrines of the Christian faith and even though I have had an undeniable experience with Jesus Christ, according to Ken Ham, it must be difficult for me to be a Christian. I am deceived and adhering to one of the greatest Satanic lies ever created. All because I believe what the majority of people on planet earth do — that our beautiful planet is millions of years old and that all of life has common origins and undergoes a process of evolution that helps us to adapt, progress, and survive. Makes sense…"

"Those of us in the Evangelical world understand that Ken Ham represents a very small minority of Christians worldwide. The amount of Christ followers that believe in his version of creationism is waning and the reality seems to be that most millennial Christians are discovering balance between scientific fact and the experience of our faith. These are very exciting times. But tonight, thousands upon thousands tuned in to watch Ken Ham speak for “Christianity” or at least “Evangelical Christianity”, both of which I identify with. Thousands upon thousands were exposed to a man who can barely be called a scientist let alone a theologian who represented the perspective of Christianity against Bill Nye’s scientific agnosticism."

"Guys there started ... laughing. I asked what they were looking at and they told me it was one of their wives posing topless. Out of nowhere I got really angry and I said I would hope that when I'm married that my husband would not be passing around pictures of me topless or nude. Everybody started laughing, but the guy to my left said when I get married I wouldn't show pictures like that to anyone. I was in shock! Later on that day, he and I started talking. He asked me what I did for a living. I said modeling. He asked me what kind and kept prying. Eventually I told him I did pornography. He said he knew already and that my boyfriend had told the guys and then he asked me if I believed in God. I told him yes and he proceeded to preach the Gospel to me. I started crying and he asked me if I wanted to rededicate my life. I said yes. [After that], I didn't do any more shoots and stopped accepting any income from pornogrpahy."

"I didn’t have a relationship with my family, I didn’t have a close relationship with anybody. When people said I was good enough to do porn, I thought I guess I should. Anything I did that was sexually acting out, all of that is because I longed for purpose and meaning. It’s hard for me to get back in my own head because my thinking back then was so irrational, I thought no one cared about me. And I wanted to please these men. … I had a revelation of God and it changed everything. I had to leave the industry, immediately. … Part of my dream has come true, to get married and have a normal life. After all the things I’ve been through, I would never imagine my life like this. I probably sound younger, but I honestly feel like my life has just begun. … Women are getting lured in, sometimes for money, some are single moms or going to school, but they aren’t thinking about what happens down the road. If you think about what your life is going to be after, you wouldn’t make the choice to get into it. That’s what makes me a good fit for the job that I’m in. I’m a survivor."

"Damaged little girls are exactly what the porn industry preys upon and depends upon. It is estimated that 90% of porn performers are sexual abuse survivors and the average age of a porn actress is 22.8 years old."

"I would like to dedicate this book to the hundreds of women and men who died in the porn industry from AIDS, suicide, homicide and drug related deaths. Your voices will be heard now."

"The truth is there is no fantasy in porn. It’s all an illusion. A closer look into the hardcore scenes of a porn star’s life will show you an act the porn industry doesn’t want you to see. The real truth is we porn actresses want to end the shame and trauma of our box office lives but we can’t do it alone. We need you men to fight for our freedom and give us back our honor. We need you to hold us in your strong arms while we sob tears over our deep wounds and begin to heal. We want you to throw out our movies and help piece together the shattered fragments of our lives. We need you to pray for us so God will hear and repair our ruined lives. Don’t believe the big top fantasy. Porn is nothing more than fake sex, bruises and lies on video."

"When people click [on porn], they’re contributing to sex trafficking, they’re contributing to STDs, they’re contributing to people who are mostly alcohol to drug addicts. … most of these girls that enter porn do not really have an education … most of the girls don’t come from, like, healthy families, where they have a healthy self-esteem. … You don’t want people to think you’re weak when you’re in porn; you wanna act like you love it and you love rough stuff, and you love being violated, and called degrading names. It’s all just a pack of lies. People do porn because they need the money, and most of them don’t have other options or education."

"The porn industry was never supposed to happen this way. But 1 out of 4 Americans made it happen. While women and men in porn destroyed themselves with drugs, alcohol and suicide we sat idly by at our computers with “popcorn” in one hand and our mouse in the other greedily clicking away at their lives. May God forgive our evil."

"There can be no mistake more inexcusable and fatal than to doubt, disobey, or neglect the Bible."

"He is cunning, he is mighty, he never rests, he is ever plotting the downfall of the child of God; and if the child of God relaxes in prayer the Devil will succeed in ensnaring him."

"The counterpart of such devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a thoroughgoing opposition to the institutions of culture. To Tolstoy these seem to be founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man's present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identification of true life with personal existence, and, above all, the practice of and belief in violence. Even less than Tertullian does he think that human corruption is resident in human nature; the evil with which men contend is in their culture only."

"Tolstoy ... can center his attack on the conscious beliefs, the tangible institutions, and the specious customs of society. He is not content simply to withdraw from these himself and lead a semimonastic life; he becomes a crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ."

"The monastic movement ... was directed to the achievement of a Christian life, apart from civilization, in obedience to the laws of Christ, and in pursuit of a perfection wholly distinct from the aims that men seek in politics and economics, in sciences and arts."

"In Protestant history the sect has ever been the child of an outcast minority, taking its rise in the religious revolts of the poor, of those who were without effective representation in church or state. ... By its very nature the sectarian type of organization is valid only for one generation. The children born to the voluntary members of the first generation begin to make the sect a church long before they have arrived at the years of discretion."

"Denominations, churches, sects, are sociological groups whose principle of differentiation is to be sought in their conformity to the order of social classes and castes. It would not be true to affirm that the denominations are not religious groups with religious purposes, but it is true that they represent the accommodation of religion to the caste system. They are emblems, therefore, of the victory of the world over the church, of the secularization of Christianity, of the church's sanction of that divisiveness which the church's gospel condemns."

"The ideal which was implicit in Jesus’ teaching became explicit in Paul. Not only did this apostle refuse to recognize the religious differences between the parties of Peter, Apollos, Paul, and Christ, but — what is more important — he showed his converts that in Christ there can be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free, and that with God there is no respect of persons. Recognizing the diversity of gifts he resisted the ever-present tendency to find in diversity the excuse of division."

"Tolstoy ... believed that property claims were based on robbery and maintained by violence. More radical than second-century radical Christians and than most monks, he turned even against the subdivision of labor in economic society. It seemed to him to be the means by which privileged persons such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher order than workingmen, or that their contribution to society was so great that it compensated for their claims."

"The church, as an organization interested in self-preservation and in the gain of power, has sometimes found the counsel of the Cross quite as inexpedient as have national and economic groups. In dealing with such major social evils as war, slavery, and social inequality, it has discovered convenient ambiguities in the letter of the Gospels which enabled it to violate their spirit and to ally itself with the prestige and power those evils had gained in their corporate organization. In adapting itself to the conditions of a civilization which its founder had bidden it to permeate with the spirit of divine love, it found that it was easier to give to Caesar the things belonging to Caesar if the examination of what might belong to God were not too closely pressed."

"The relation of the authority of Jesus Christ to the authority of culture is such that every Christian must often feel himself claimed by the Lord to reject the word and its kingdoms with their pluralism and temporalism, their makeshift compromises of many interests, their hypnotic obsession by the love of life and the fear of death."

"Men must continue to condemn themselves not only for their failure to do what they could, but also for their failure to perform what they could not, for their denial of the absolute good whose categorical demands were laid upon their incapable will."

"The spirit of Jesus revolted against Jewish class distinctions between the righteous few and the unhallowed many He spoke to the outcast poor of the promise of the kingdom."

"The movement of withdrawal and renunciation is a necessary element in every Christian life. ... It is an inevitable answer; but it is also inadequate. ... It is inadequate, for one thing, because it affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. Christ claims no man purely as a natural being, but always as one who has become human in a culture; who is not only in culture, but into whom culture has penetrated."

"Because suffering is the exhibition of the presence in our existence of that which is not under our control, or of the intrusion into our self-legislating existence of an activity operating under another law than ours, it cannot be brought adequately within the spheres of teleological and deontological ethics, the ethics of man-the-maker, or man-the-citizen."

"Everyone with any experience of life is aware of the extent to which the characters of people he has known have been given their particular forms by the sufferings through which they have passed. But it is not simply what has happened to them that has defined them; their responses to what has happened to them have been of even greater importance, and these responses have been shaped by their interpretations of what they suffered."

"It is part of the meaning of suffering that it is that which cuts athwart our purposive movements. It represents the denial from beyond ourselves of our movement toward pleasure; or it is the frustration of our movement toward self-realization or toward the actualization of our potentialities."

"The difference between the radicals and the other groups is often only this: that the radicals fail to recognize what they are doing, and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world."

"The conservation, selection, and conversion of cultural achievements is not only a fact; it is also a morally inescapable requirement, which the exclusive Christian must meet because he is a Christian and a man. If he is to confess Jesus before men, he must do so by means of words and ideas derived from culture, though a change of meaning is also necessary. ... If he is to say what "love" means he must choose among such words as "eros," "philanthropia" and "agape," or "charity," "loyalty" and "love"—seeking one that comes close to the meaning of Jesus Christ, and modifying it by use in context. These things he must do, not only that he may communicate, but also that he may himself know whom and what he believes. When he undertakes to fulfill the demands of Jesus Christ, he finds himself partly under the necessity of translating into the terms of his own culture what was commanded in the terms of another."

"The chief rival to monotheism, I shall contend, is henotheism or that social faith which makes a finite society, whether cultural or religious, the object of trust as well as of loyalty and which tends to subvert even officially monotheistic institutions, such as the churches."

"Faith is at least as much an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of God as sense experience is an unavoidable counterpart of the presence of natural entities."

"Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious soul as well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is part of them."

"The Christian .. cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him. ... He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rejecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and beliefs have taken up residence in his mind."

"Radical Christians are always making use of the culture, or parts of the culture, which they ostensibly reject."

"Faith and God belong together somewhat as sense experience and physical reality do."

"[C]riticism of Islam is often taken to be criticism of Muslims. That is... false. One can criticize the Quranic command to beat disobedient wives without criticizing Muslims. The accusation of Islamophobia... often fails at this point. Islam is not Muslims, and one can criticize Islam while affirming and loving Muslims."

"To answer whether Islam truly is a religion of peace, we must consider what Islam teaches, not just what Muslims practice."

"Most responses I have seen to the present crisis are polarized, either dismissing violent jihad as irrelevant to Islam or asserting that all Muslims should be treated as potential threats. In this book, I hope to clarify both the reality of violent jihad in Islam and a compassionate approach to our Muslim neighbors."

"Hillary Clinton was for the Iran agreement. And I can't support someone who is for the Iran agreement. ... In my case, I'll be writing in General Colin Powell. That, I think, would be the best person."

"We can't have the president of the United States acting like the drug dealer in chief, giving clean packs of money to a ... state sponsor of terror. Those 500-euro notes will pop up across the Middle East. .... We're going to see problems in multiple (countries) because of that money given to them."

"I have spent my life building bridges and tearing down barriers — not building walls. That’s why I find Donald Trump’s belief that an American-born judge of Mexican descent is incapable of fairly presiding over his case is not only dead wrong, it is un-American. As the Presidential campaign progressed, I was hoping the rhetoric would tone down and reflect a campaign that was inclusive, thoughtful and principled. While I oppose the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump’s latest statements, in context with past attacks on Hispanics, women and the disabled like me, make it certain that I cannot and will not support my party’s nominee for President regardless of the political impact on my candidacy or the Republican Party. It is absolutely essential that we are guided by a commander-in-chief with a responsible and proper temperament, discretion and judgment. Our President must be fit to command the most powerful military the world has ever seen, including an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. After much consideration, I have concluded that Donald Trump has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to assume the greatest office in the world."

"I was authorized to do everything that I did."