The right to choose home education in Brazil

The Right to Choose
Home Education in Brazil

Julio Severo


Jornal Hoje, a news program from Globo Television Network in Brazil, reported:

A disappointing and perturbing performance. Brazilians revealed the worst results in a test that evaluated students of public and private schools from 32 countries. The results reveal that reading is not really the Brazilian adolescents’ strong point. In a private school in São Paulo, most of the students read by obligation. Even so, some try to escape the task. There is a justification for so much disinterest. “I prefer to practice a sport”. They are an example of what happens to the most of the Brazilian students. Four thousand and eight hundred students from 15 public and private schools participated in the International Program of Evaluation, responding to Sciences, Mathematics and Interpretation of Text matters. The Brazilian performance was very bad. The reading test was the most important in the general evaluation. The results revealed that more than 40% of the Brazilian students who participated in the tests were not able to understand what they were reading. [1]

The principal reason for the existence of a school institution is its ability to educate. In that ability, as the Jornal Hoje report says, Brazilian public schools — and even private schools, that are usually much better than public institutions — are failing — losing the reason for their existence. But, as if that were not enough, there are also other serious issues. Violence in the Brazilian schools has increased so much that it has drawn attention from the United Nations, that prepared the book Violência nas Escolas (Violence in the Schools), a paper written by UNESCO in 2002 to address exclusively the serious problems in the schools of Brazil. The book addresses everything that is happening at the Brazilian schools: violence against children, fights, sexual violence, use of weapons, robberies and thefts, assaults and other kinds of crimes. The study included public schools in several states of Brazil.

However, the threats to the children in the public education are not limited only to serious violent acts. Other factors indicating dangerous signs for the children’s emotional and psychological health are an environment saturated with anti-Christian teachings and practices and wantonness in the public schools.

That negative tendency in the educational institutions is becoming general in many places in the world. Concerned parents seek alternatives. In the USA, Australia, England, Mexico, Japan and other countries, many evangelical parents decided to take the personal responsibility to educate their own children, becoming members of the respected homeschooling movement.

Those parents have the freedom and right to educate their children at home, for the national laws of their countries protect their natural right to choose in the education area. The public and private schools are also options, but only parents can make the final decision.

However, even if public schools were able to produce satisfactory results in the educational performance of the students, such results could not be used as an excuse to remove from the parents their right to decide the best education for their own children.

If the government really had a genuine interest in the children’s education, its interest would be properly demonstrated through the unmistakable attitude of supporting and defending families in their natural and legitimate right to choose the best education for their children. If the government were in reality worried with the children’s well-being, its main reaction would not be to defend its right to decide the children’s education, even to the point of pursuing, oppressing, humiliating and imprisoning innocent families.

Actually, behind the argument defending supposed democratic principles of the children rights is the reality: a properly camouflaged language defending the state interests and monopoly on the children’s educational formation. With that argument, the government defends intransigently the children’s best interests — that is nothing more than defend the state interests!

However, home education was not, in the past, a strange experience in Brazil. The constitutions of Brazil protected and respected the parents’ priority role in the children’s education, without removing from them their right to choose where and how to educate. Following are some excerpts of past Brazilian constitutions:

Constitution of 1937:
Article 125. The integral education of the children is the most important duty and natural right of parents. The State will get involved in that duty, collaborating, in a main or subsidiary way, to facilitate its execution or supply the deficiencies and gaps in the private education. [2]

That constitution recognized that the function of the State is to collaborate with parents in their educational choices for their children, instead of trying to substitute them or usurp their right to choose.

Constitution of 1946:
Article 166. The education is right of all and it will be given at home and in the school. It should be inspired by the principles of freedom and in the ideals of human solidarity. [3]

LDB (National Education Guidelines and Bases Law) revoked, of December 20, 1961:
Article. 30. The family man or the guardian cannot exercise public function, nor occupy employment in society of mixed economy or company concessionary of public service if he has presented no proof that his child is enrolled in a school, or that the child is being supplied home education.[4]

Dr. Rodrigo Pedroso, a Brazilian jurist, comments: “This attests that the article 166 of the Constitution of that time was interpreted as allowing the education so much in the school as exclusively at home. Therefore, home education is, strictly speaking, a Brazilian juridical tradition that, for some unknown reason, was abandoned without anyone expressing a protest in the National Assembly for the elaboration of the new constitution in 1987”.

Constitution of 1967:
Article 168. The education is a right of all and it will be given at home and in the school; being guaranteed opportunity-equality, the education should be inspired on the principle of the national unit and on the ideals of freedom and human solidarity. [5]

Then, it is evident that the constitutions before the Constitution of 1988 guaranteed freedom for the parents to choose the education at home or in the school. The Constitution of 1988 came, allegedly, as a better, more democratic document, but only very later is that Brazilians woke up for the fact that that modern constitution, elaborated with the help of many leftist parliamentarians, instead of expanding the parents’ rights quietly turned off the home education option. Parents’ right and freedom were usurped by an assumed “right” and “obligation” of the State. The State literally swallowed the rights of the families.

Undeniably, the most important allegation for the elaboration of the Constitution of 1988 was the supposed need to create a national document giving more freedom and rights than the past constitutions. Since the family is the foundation of the society, it was hoped that the family would be more protected in their natural rights. But it was not what happened. By pure irony or tragedy, the hardest measures against the families who want to exercise their right of educational choice did not happen in the past, not even in the military period: they happened in the Constitution of 1988. With the elaboration of that constitution — in which a number totalitarian leftists took part — parents’ rights in the education were weakened in favor of the interests of the State. That new constitution declares what no Brazilian constitution had ever considered, “The Government has the power to take a census of elementary school students, call them for enrollment and ensure that parents or guardians see to their children’s attendance to school”. (Art. 208, paragraph 3.)

Strangely, that paragraph places the State as the exclusive responsible for the children’s educational choice, demanding that all of them to attend an institutional school, if their parents want or not. Concerning that imposition, Dr. Pedroso comments: “As far as I know, ours is the only Constitution in the world dealing with call for school enrollment”.

Later, some senators tried to introduce again in the Constitution the freedom in the education. In February 1996, there was an effort to recover that right, and the Federal Senate itself approved the following text in the National Education Guidelines and Bases Law:

Article. 7 — Parents’ and guardians’ rights are:
I — to enroll their children in the obligatory education and the children and adolescents under their guard, seeing to their school attendance and efficiency, or to assure a satisfactory alternative.

However, cunning minds were able later to suppress the term “or to assure a satisfactory alternative”, eliminating an important freedom that the Brazilian families always had in the past. It is not known how liberals were able to eliminate that alternative, and it is hard to understand the reasons for such a radical attitude, because the practice of home education is not new nor unknown in the Brazilian history, but what is totally new is the radicalism of the tendency that is systematically mutilating and suppressing that natural right of the parents.

Parents have the right to choose the kind of education that they want for their children: public school, private school, religious school or home education. Public schools are, as reported in the Jornal Hoje, failing and leading children to a failed school performance. But even if that serious deficiency were not reality in the public education, families still deserve to be respected in their natural right to choose in the area of the education. In fact, if such deficiency existed in the home education movement, certainly the government would demand the complete elimination of that educational option. However, its attitude toward its own failures — because public schools are the government’s direct responsibility —is always indulgent! The failure of the public education is the failure of the State itself.

The essential purpose of the education has always been the training of the children’s mind in the basic academic disciplines. However, the humanists are increasingly twisting the essential purpose of the education. They affirm that the institutional schools are important because they are the place where the children learn — they learn from humanists a hedonist sex education; they learn from humanists that the man's origin is ape, not God; they learn from humanists that aberrant abnormalities as homosexuality are normal sexual preferences. Now that it is proven that Brazilian children have had less ability to read thanks to those schools, humanists created a strategic and purely imaginative excuse, properly introduced in the laws: the purpose of school is socialize! So, if your son is not able to learn how to read and write satisfactorily, do not worry: At least, he will learn many “things” from his schoolmates!

If then public school is failing in the academic area, at least will it produce results in the area of socialization? From the humanist educators’ point of view, yes, because grouped children receiving the same values eventually live according to their group values. So, for example, in a group of 60 students learning that homosexuality is just an alternative lifestyle, one or two children with biblical education contrary to homosexuality are isolated or eventually they conform to the values of most, transmitted by the teacher.

From the parents’ point of view, the socialization in the school environment puts innocent children in contact with children with problems of drugs and violence. However, the greatest effect of the school socialization is that the parents’ values are explicit or implicitly rejected by the new values from the classroom. Students tend much more, in the group assimilation of the values absorbed in the school environment, to retain what they learned at the school than what they learned at home. So, the new discards the “old”.

From the humanists’ point of view, the greatest benefit of the public school socialization is that that social contact unavoidably distances the students from the sphere of their parents’ values to put them under the sphere of values of the school group, that in a way or another is under school authority, that on the other hand is under state guidance.

If the government really recognized that socialization is important, then it would respect the children’s social contact in the mini-society that is the family. No socialization is as important as the family union. No system of values is more important for the child’s well-being than the family itself. The system of values of the family is more than enough to educate the child in the essential bases. Differently from what state humanists preach, home-educated children will not go without a future.

Following is a list of famous people who were taught at home[6]:

ARTISTS:
Leonardo da Vinci
Claude Monet
John Singleton Copley
Andrew Wyeth
Jamie Wyeth

COMPOSERS:
Irving Berlin
Anton Bruckner
Felix Mendelssohn
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Francis Poulenc

EDUCATORS:
Fred Terman (Stanford University President)
William Samuel Johnson (Columbia University President)
Frank Vandiver (Texas A&M University President)
John Witherspoon (Princeton University President)

GENERALS:
Stonewall Jackson
Robert E. Lee
Douglas MacArthur
George Patton

INVENTORS:
Alexander Graham Bell
Thomas Edison
Cyrus McCormick
Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright

PRESIDENTS:
John Quincy Adams
William Henry Harrison
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
James Madison
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
John Tyler
George Washington
Woodrow Wilson

PREACHERS & RELIGIOUS LEADERS:
John the Baptist
William Cary
Jonathan Edwards
Phillip Melanchthon
Dwight L. Moody
John Newton
John Owen
Charles Wesley
John Wesley
Brigham Young

SCIENTISTS:
George Washington Carver
Pierre Curie
Albert Einstein
Blaise Pascal
Booker T. Washington

STATESMEN:
Konrad Adenauer
Winston Churchill
Benjamin Franklin
Patrick Henry
William Penn
Henry Clay

U.S. SUPPREME COURT JUDGES:
John Jay
John Marshall
John Rutledge

WRITERS:
Hans Christian Andersen
Pearl S. Buck
Agatha Christie
Charles Dickens
Bret Harte
C.S. Lewis
Sean O'Casey
George Bernard Shaw
Mark Twain
Mercy Warren
Daniel Webster
Phillis Wheatley

CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION DELEGATES:
Richard Basset (Governor of Delaware)
William Blount (U.S. Senator)
George Clymer (U.S. Representative)
William Few (U.S. Senator)
Benjamin Franklin (Inventor and Statesman)
William Houston (Lawyer)
William S. Johnson (President of Columbia C.)
William Livingston (Governor of New Jersey)
James Madison (4th President of the U.S.)
George Mason
John Francis Mercer (U.S. Representative)
Charles Pickney III (Governor of S. Carolina)
John Rutledge (Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court)
Richard D. Spaight (Governor of N. Carolina)
George Washington (1st President of the U.S.)
John Witherspoon (President of Princeton U.)
George Wythe (Justice of Virginia High Court)

OTHERS:
Abigail Adams (Wife of John Adams)
Ansel Adams (Photographer)
Clara Barton (Started the Red Cross)
John Burroughs (Naturalist)
Andrew Carnegie (Industrialist)
Charles Chaplin (Actor)
George Rogers Clark (Explorer)
Noel Coward (Playwright)
John Paul Jones (Father of the American Navy)
Sandra Day O'Connor
Tamara McKinney (World Cup Skier)
John Stuart Mill (Economist)
Charles Louis Montesquieu (Philosopher)
Florence Nightingale (Nurse)
Sally Ride (Astronaut)
Bill Ridell (Newspaperman)
George Rogers Clark (Explorer)
Will Rogers (Humorist)
Jim Ryan (World Runner)
Albert Schweitzer (Physician)
Leo Tolstoy
Martha Washington (Wife of George Washington)

Knowing then that home education has produced great leaders and knowing that home education was always an experience and right existing in the history of Brazil, what to do then to recover that right? Firstly, to modify some articles of the current constitution. The article 205 should receive the following composition:

Article 205. Education is the right of all and it will be ministered at home or at school, with a view to the full development of the person, his preparation for the exercise of citizenship and his qualification for work. Sole paragraph. The integral education of the children is the first duty and a fundamental right of the parents. The State will get involved in that duty, collaborating, in a main or subsidiary way, to facilitate its execution or supply the deficiencies and gaps in the domestic education.

Secondly, to replace the ridiculous paragraph 3 of the article 208, which declares, “The Government has the power to take a census of elementary school students, call them for enrollment and ensure that parents or guardians see to their children’s attendance to school”.

The new text should integrally protect the freedom in the education:

“Article 208, paragraph 3. The obligatory fundamental education can be supplied at home by parents themselves, or by teachers contracted by the parents. The law will just define the annual proof of the educational performance, giving freedom for the choice of curriculum or its elaboration, without any political or ideological imposition”.

And as a measure to respect the efforts of those who studied a lot, at home or not, add a sole paragraph to the article 207:

“Art. 207. (…) Sole paragraph. Higher education will be accessible to all, with base in the performance, independently of a previous education at school or not”.

Therefore, all those who were educated will be treated in a same way before the law, independently of the place where they received their education. After all, the important and indispensable thing is education, not the institution.

Acknowledge: I should thank Dr. Rodrigo Pedroso publicly, of São Paulo city, for his disposition to help researching for me the past constitutions of Brazil in the issues regarding home education and offering valuable suggestions for a new text for the current constitution.

© Julio Severo 2005. www.juliosevero.com.br

[1] http://redeglobo.globo.com/cgi-bin/jornalhoje/montar_texto.pl?controle=2637
[2] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/Constituiçao37.htm
[3] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/Constituiçao46.htm
[4] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Leis/L4024.htm
[5] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Constituicao/Constituiçao67.htm
[6] http://www.christianhomeschoolers.com/hs_famous_homeschoolers.html


Other articles by Julio Severo

Abortion: Is the solution not only abuse, but kill?

Targeted By Bias: Evangelicals Who Voted for Bush

The Great Gaffe of Lula Against Israel

The Mark of the Beast: The Tomorrow’s Education

Helping Take Care of the Social Health

Message to President Lula on Israel

Message to President Lula on homosexuality

Growth of divorce among Christians: a biblical perspective

What every Christian should know about Israel

What every Christian should know about Israel

Julio Severo

A short time before Jesus’ ascension to heaven, after his death and resurrection, his apostles asked him their most important question.

So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority”. (Acts 1:6-7 NIV)

That question was troubling them for a long time. After all, they were Jews and they knew God had special promises for Israel, including for its political restoration. And they wanted to know what would happen to Israel. In his answer, Jesus only said that, in the Father’s heart, Israel would have in the future a restoration, as the Father had established with his own authority. After giving that answer, Jesus encouraged his disciples to focus their attention on the tremendous resources God was giving them for them to take the Gospel to the whole world. The church was born with the ability and authority to give a testimony of international impact. Jesus said:

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8 NIV)

The issue of the restoration of Israel was the Father’s business, for him to solve in the future. On that point, the important thing was to turn the attention for the birth of the church — which was not an institution, but a group of men and women chosen and saved by Jesus, impassioned followers committed to Jesus.

Therefore, Jesus guided them to get exclusively involved on that point with the birth of his church, because the restoration of Israel was responsibility of the Father. In the Father’s agenda, the church was then scheduled in the present to be blessed and Israel was scheduled to receive attention, visitations and special blessings of restoration in the future. God had special plans for the church in the present and he had special plans for Israel in the future. The church and Israel have different directions and missions.

Israel, as a nation, could have undergone that restoration during the birth of the church, or even before, but its hardness against God postponed the project of God for them. In fact, because of that hardness, they were, as a nation, dreadfully disciplined. Some time after the birth of the church, the Jews were expelled from their nation, the land of Israel. They stayed almost two thousand years far away from their land. That punishment was a result from their rejection to the Messiah, who had come to save them. However, such strong punishment also reveals God’s cares, because he disciplines those that are inside of his divine projects. “Because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son”. (Hebrews 12:6 NIV)

Because of their stubbornness, the Jews lived almost two thousand years far away from their land — the land God gave them in his eternal alliance with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But such stubbornness will not last forever, because with or without stubbornness, God is faithful and he will fulfill his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Apostle Paul presents an important divine mystery concerning the future of Israel:

There is a secret truth, my friends, which I want you to know, for it will keep you from thinking how wise you are. It is that the stubbornness of the people of Israel is not permanent, but will last only until the complete number of Gentiles comes to God. And this is how all Israel will be saved. As the scripture says, “The Savior will come from Zion and remove all wickedness from the descendants of Jacob”. (Romans 11:25-26 GNB)

The word stubbornness comes from the original Greek word porosis, that means hardening, blindness, insensibility. Such insensibility means that the Jews are living as stones, totally closed, to the Messiah. That cruel blindness makes them refuse Jesus and criticize evangelicals who support the eternal alliance of God with Israel. Progressive, leftist and liberal Jews, in the United States and in Israel — forming a major part of the Jewish population in those nations — try to undermine and attack Christian support to Israel based on Bible promises. They do not accept those promises and they get on well only with leftist or liberal evangelicals. The socialism of those Jews came from their European-born parents and grandparents, who eventually introduced in Israel social practices having everything to do with socialism and nothing to do with the millennial Jewish tradition: kibbutzes and legal abortion. Socialism has an enormous attraction among most of the Jews, who today are closed to God. In fact, Karl Marx, founder of the communist and socialist ideology, was Jewish himself.

Socialist Jews throughout the entire world, as well as all Socialists throughout the entire world, reject the purposes of God. American socialist Jew Tony Kushner declared: “I wish the modern Israel hadn’t been born”. He is author of a homosexual propaganda piece. He also calls the establishment of the state of Israel “for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity”.[1]

Nevertheless, even among evangelicals in these last days there is that kind of hardness. Progressive (socialist) evangelicals, following the stubbornness of the progressive Jews, mock God’s promises for Israel — or believing that the church replaced the nation of Israel or not believing that the whole territory of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jews:

“In the last times people who ridicule God will appear. They will follow their own ungodly desires. These are the people who cause divisions. They are concerned about physical things, not spiritual things”. (Jude 1:18-19 GW)

On the other hand, conservative and orthodox Jews, who are not a majority in the Jewish population in the world, accept the biblical promises, get on well with conservative evangelicals only in the specific issue of the support of those evangelicals to Israel, but they do not accept the evangelical passion for taking the Gospel to the Jews.

In spite of so an insensitive condition of the Jews, God promises that the hardness and stubbornness of the people of Israel will not last forever. When the complete number of non-Jewish people comes to God, then the secret plan of God will come true and supernatural actions of God will lead the Jews and his nation Israel close whom they rejected: the Messiah. God promises that in the last days the Jews will approach the Lord as never before: “Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David their king; and shall fear the LORD and his goodness in the latter days”. (Hosea 3:5 KJV)

The church was born with the grace and the power of the Holy Spirit to take the Gospel to the whole world. And there are also strong biblical promises that in the future, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and his power will be greater. With such an irresistible Spirit, it is correct to think that the church will be able to help God’s project of overcoming the hardness of the Jewish people and also combating the worldwide hate against the Jews. Israel was an instrument used by God to bless the nations with the Messiah and his powerful Word. Jesus came to the world as a Jew, being born in his homeland Israel. He came from among the Jews and he remains a Jew.

“Then a great and mysterious sight appeared in the sky. There was a woman, whose dress was the sun and who had the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was soon to give birth, and the pains and suffering of childbirth made her cry out. Another mysterious sight appeared in the sky. There was a huge red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and a crown on each of his heads. With his tail he dragged a third of the stars out of the sky and threw them down to the earth. He stood in front of the woman, in order to eat her child as soon as it was born. Then she gave birth to a son, who will rule over all nations with an iron rod. But the child was snatched away and taken to God and his throne. The woman fled to the desert, to a place God had prepared for her, where she will be taken care of for 1, 260 days”. (Revelation 12:1-6 GNB)

The woman symbolizes Israel, nation founded on the twelve children of Jacob. The woman brought Jesus to the world and later “she fled” to the desert (that is, she left her land), where she stayed for almost two thousand years.

From Israel came the Messiah to the world, and Israel — suffering divine punishment for their sins — stayed for a long time in the desert of the nations, without support, recognition or respect.

The world was lost in its hostility and hardness against God, but the Gospel brought grace and transformation. Twelve Jewish apostles — not mentioning Apostle Paul, who was also a Jew — were mightily used to transform the whole world. Now, it is the time for the church to let God use her as an instrument to deliver the Jewish people from stubbornness, rebellion and hardness against God and his unchangeable promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God has already begun to fulfill his promises to Israel. Contradicting all human expectations, he worked the national restoration of the nation of Israel in 1948, according to Ezekiel 37, by “resurrecting” a people who were virtually dead and buried in the debris of the History, dispersed among the nations, persecuted and hated. However, that restoration was not total, because important parts of the territory of Israel and of Jerusalem are under occupation of Arabs called Palestinians. For the time being, we await the time when territorial restoration is completed and, especially, that the spiritual restoration begins to happen.

The promises God gave to Israel — of total ownership of its land, of salvation and of spiritual and national restoration — will come true, in the time determined by the Father. All those who are children of that Father cooperate with him in that purpose, praying so that the will of God may prevail.

Therefore, Christians have three priorities in their prayers:

Pray that the Kingdom of God comes and is revealed in this world. That Kingdom is neither the church nor Israel. That Kingdom is the Government of God. (See Matthew 6:10)

Pray that Jesus Christ’s church on the earth is sanctified by the truth of the Word of God and walks and lives like he walked and lived. (See John 17 and 1 John 2:6)

Pray not only for the peace of Jerusalem, but also for the full spiritual, territorial and political restoration of Israel. (See Psalm 122:6)

When speaking exactly about Israel and its future and about the promises of God for the Jews, Apostle Paul declared:

“For God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable”. (Romans 11:29 NIV)

“For God does not change his mind about whom he chooses and blesses”. (Romans 11:29 GNB)

God did not change his alliance with Israel. In that alliance, God himself gives to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the eternal and exclusive right to the land of Israel. The land God gave exclusively to the Jews will always belong to them. And the enemy that hates God and his Word inflames the world with hatred against the Jews, because on them are the eternal promises of God. If Jews want, in their stubbornness and hardness, to accept or not, if the world and the “Palestinians” want to accept or not, the promises of God for Israel will come true.

Therefore, the nations should not waste their opportunities to be useful to Israel, because that nation is in the heart of God. God himself says to Israel:

“For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted”. (Isaiah 60:12 KJV)

During the World War 2, Nazi Germany suffered total destruction because it persecuted and annihilated the Jews. The powerful British Empire was turned into ashes, because England had opportunity to help the Jews, but it chose to hinder them from fleeing to the land of Israel. During the war, no country wanted to receive the Jews as refugees, so that the only option left for them was to return to the land of their ancestors. However, the whole territory of Israel was under British administration, and the English prohibited the Jews from escaping to their own land. Six million Jews were cruelly murdered by the Nazi because they did not have any place where to go.

Of course, during the war many Jews also suffered for their own sins, because they were far away from God and attached to the radical socialist ideology. However, no nation is entitled to “punish” the Jewish people, because God is the only One who can handle them and their sins, as it have always been. Besides, what Nazi Germany did was not to “punish” the Jews, but destroy them, and what England did was not to “punish” them, but prohibit them from fleeing to the only place where millions of Jews could have escaped from destruction — they were not able to do so because of the hardness of the English officials. The cost was high: the British Empire disappeared from the face of the earth.

World War 2 ended decades ago, but the hatred against the Jews did not perish in that conflict. Israel, as never before needs the support and assistance from the nations. And there are blessings of God for those who bless Israel. And if there is a curse for the enemies, what will then happen to the vast majority of the nations that demonstrate hatred against the Jews and their exclusive right to their land? Perhaps nothing is inflaming so much that hate as the Islam and socialism. The Muslim feelings toward Israel are more than known, but in an apparently softer way socialists throughout the world — including socialist Jews in Israel, in the US and in Europe — do not believe, do not accept and do not take seriously the alliance of God with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

We should not worry about the sins of Israel. God has always known how to deal with them, even to punish them. Was not it because of their own punishment that the Jews stayed for almost two thousand years away from their land? And during that period, Arabs invaded that land and today they demand it for them and for the Muslim cause. Those Arabs received the title of “Palestinian”. Palestinian designates the inhabitant from Palestine, a name the Romans vengefully gave to the land of Israel, after they expelled all the Jews, almost two thousand years ago. Palestine, as Romans wanted, means land of the Philistines, the worst enemies of Israel.

The only solution for the cause of the “Palestinians” — which the prince of darkness has been using to spread hatred against the Jews throughout the world — is the Palestinians and the world accepting the unchangeable alliance of God with Israel.

The greatest blessing for Christians throughout the world is not only that God may bless them in their efforts to overcome through prayer the hardness and the rebellion of Israel, but also that sooner or later the Jews and their nation Israel will come to God. All the demons of the hell and all the armies in the world united against Israel will fail, because strong is the Lord who has an eternal alliance with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Word of God prophesies that great nations identified as Gog and Magog will gather all the other countries against Israel. The hatred that will accomplish that satanic purpose is already being sowed in Europe, Latin America, Brazil and other nations, preparing them for the final battle against Israel in the last times.

“And [Satan] will go out to deceive the nations scattered over the whole world, that is, Gog and Magog. Satan will bring them all together for battle, as many as the grains of sand on the seashore. They spread out over the earth and surrounded the camp of God's people and the city that he loves. But fire came down from heaven and destroyed them”. (Revelation 20:8-9 GNB)

You will advance against my people Israel like a cloud that covers the land. In days to come, O Gog, I will bring you against my land, so that the nations may know me when I show myself holy through you before their eyes. “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Are you not the one I spoke of in former days by my servants the prophets of Israel? At that time they prophesied for years that I would bring you against them. This is what will happen in that day: When Gog attacks the land of Israel, my hot anger will be aroused, declares the Sovereign LORD”. (Ezekiel 38:17-18 NIV)

The LORD says, “At that time I will restore the prosperity of Judah and Jerusalem. I will gather all the nations and bring them to the Valley of Judgment. There I will judge them for all they have done to my people. They have scattered the Israelites in foreign countries and divided Israel, my land”. Thousands and thousands are in the Valley of Judgment. It is there that the day of the LORD will soon come. The sun and the moon grow dark, and the stars no longer shine. The LORD roars from Mount Zion; his voice thunders from Jerusalem; earth and sky tremble. But he will defend his people. “Then, Israel, you will know that I am the LORD your God. I live on Zion, my sacred hill. Jerusalem will be a sacred city; foreigners will never conquer it again”. (Joel 3:1-2, 14-17 GNB)

The Christian who loves the Word of God knows what will happen to Israel and its enemies, because God has already revealed us everything in his Word. Then may all those who are the true church of the Lord Jesus Christ pray so that the Kingdom of God comes on Israel, provoking the opening of their hearts. Also pray so that the Kingdom of God comes on the nations, delivering many from the irrational hate against the alliance of God with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And also pray so that the Kingdom of God comes on the Christian churches, waking up many for following exclusively the Father’s will in these last days. The Kingdom of God is the Government of God. May all of us then declare prophetically: “Come, Government of God, on Israel, establishing on that nation everything the Father has already determined for these last days! Come, Government of God, on the nations, destroying their hate against Israel and establishing King Jesus’ will! Come, Government of God, on the Christian churches throughout the world, making them doers of the Father's will in regard to Israel”.

Source: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

[1] http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47804

Abortion: Is the solution not only abuse, but kill?

Abortion: Is the solution not only abuse, but kill?

By Julio Severo

If a pedophile, in his individual abuse, is rightly condemned for his acts, why does government, in his greater collective abuse, not receive also a deserved treatment?

National Congress in Brasília, Brazil, will vote the legalization of abortion in Brazil on December 6, 2005. The secular State is not guided by Christian values, so strange values replace them. Usually, many of those values belong to national and international groups for years planning, working and pressing for the legitimating of abortion in our country, with the complicity of leftist politicians. Additionally, the Ministry of Health and other federal departments have also been following the same direction. Therefore, it is necessary to turn our attention to this matter, for abortion has everything to do with children.

Children are defenseless and vulnerable creatures, and they greatly need our protection and supervision. Families have the highest duty to watch and take care of their children. The role of society is to collaborate with such supervision and care, with total respect to families and their moral and Christian values. The responsibility of the State is not to substitute the families in their essential functions, but strengthen them. The family, not government, is the natural protector of children and adolescents.

The topic children produces so much concern and attention from the public that it is enough for one to mention the word abuse or pedophilia and everyone will gather together to support and help the victims. When cases of pedophilia emerge, the press enters in the picture crying that the State has the obligation of intervening against those crimes, and the government soon shows up before the cameras declaring that it will take energetic measures against the criminals. In fact, the government has been “summoned” by UN and radical groups to drag for its net of abusers all cases its secular worldview judges as abuse, not sparing even innocent evangelical families that, following the biblical ethics, educate their children by a wise application of the corporal discipline. It is the government’s firm goal to prohibit that discipline, stigmatizing it as abuse. The role of the modern State is to interpret, judge and take care of all those cases.

However, that role has been at the least contradictory. The government has all power and authority to prohibit all public incitement to pedophilia and other crimes. Then why does it let the media to spread, with impunity, frequent scenes and programs inciting to sex? Millions of children are daily exposed to that inciting, and the State, so interested in protecting them, is hardly able to lift a finger against the TV industry that gets shamefully rich by its programming that rapes not only the children’s mind, but also all the values respecting and protecting their innocence. Federal measures against immorality in the TV are purely symbolic, with little or no positive effect.

The government has, in general, protected the media role in its incitement to sex. In retribution, the same media remembers unceasingly to give prestige to the State as the greatest responsible for the solution of the pedophiliac cases, as if the government were a Father above all the other fathers: perfect, honest, incorrupt, well disposed. So incitement to sex increases, and also does pedophilia.

However, has the government the final word in those matters? Does only the State know how to judge and decide the children’s well-being? Is the government really a Father above other fathers?

It seems that is what the whole society wants, or is induced to want. Certainly, that is what all the liberals want!

Yet, the government not only does not inhibit the shameful and wild incitement to sex in media, but it also collaborates with all that incitement.

In early 2005, the Lula administration committed itself to distribute condoms for the 10-year-old schoolchildren. Instead of educating children for marriage and for avoiding sex out of marriage, government prefers to stimulate sex without marriage and teach children to avoid pregnancy, as if pregnancy were a disease or a problem and as if sex without marriage were not a problem.

In its matter entitled “Ten-years-old students will receive sex education, says a new federal policy”, Brazilian newspaper Folha Online reported: “In the public health-care services, the order is to guarantee that adolescents may have access to contraceptives and legal abortion… The Code of Ethics prohibits physicians from violating the professional confidential nature of their treatment if the underage boy or girl has the ability to evaluate and solve his or her problem without health risks. The Child and of Adolescent Statute also guarantees the right to physical, psychic and moral integrity”. [1]

Then, according to federal determination, schools will work together with health-care services. Schools have become state instruments to address the sexual issues of children and youth, and the government is determined to protect them from parents’ “interference”. To guarantee that no family may disturb, the Code of “Ethics” prohibits physicians and the school authorities from revealing to parents that a male student is receiving condoms or that a female student is receiving contraceptives or “abortion services”. Under the government ethics, parents having moral and Christian values should be totally kept ignorant of that “assistance” to children.

Summarizing: the State now is the Big Abuser of children and families. But such shameful and fair title is never applied to it, especially by the liberal media. For the time being, only pedophiles are condemned. The secular State goes unpunished.

As if incitement to sex and abuse were not enough, the government, that likes so much to represent itself as the children’s greatest defender, now wants to assume a role that contradicts that image: murderer of children. The National Congress is, under pressure from the Lula administration, ready to vote the legalization of abortion in Brazil. For government, now the solution is not only to abuse, but also kill.

Abortion, differently from what the secular State preaches, is not a right of woman, is not a public health issue, is not a health reproductive or sexual issue, and is not a free choice issue, because only murderers choose to kill. And the Brazilian government wants to make such choice. Faking to respect the women’s right to abortion, the government is fully willing to facilitate that practice and still force public hospitals to carry out what most of pedophiles do not do: to kill children.

The fact is that abortion does not involve only a pregnant mother. Abortion allowed by law involves the intentional destruction of an innocent life. But, unbelievably, the secular State ignores that fact. Its schools stimulate sex out of marriage and teach children to avoid pregnancy, delivering a very clear message: immoral sex is good, pregnancy not. Is it any wonder then its support to abortion?

But no government is entitled to use its hospitals to kill children. To kill is crime, whether committed by a hardcore criminal, a woman, a doctor or government. The voluntary and legal interruption of pregnancy is to kill children in the belly of their mothers. Whoever doesn’t know that abortion kills no longer knows what life is.

Can you really believe that a government involved in support to child sexual abuse and children’s murder deserves the children’s protector role the liberal media imposes on it? Or the State assumes a role guided by moral and Christian values or then it risks later to find in its midst a legion of pedophiles that, tired of “persecution” and the social stigma of their perverted behavior, invaded it in order to take advantage of the state impunity to satisfy their instincts. But, for liberals, to be guided by Christian values is worse than to be invaded by pedophiles!

Firstly, liberals demand a secular State. After such a State is formed according to their image and likeness, the Judeo-Christian values and all other essentially moral values are discarded on behalf of a pluralist ethics and democracy, where a few have some correct notion of what is right and wrong. With the discarding of the Judeo-Christian values, the value of life eventually is submitted and measured by several pressures, interests and trends, bringing in their trail abortion, euthanasia, laws favoring homosexual perversion, etc., — and the role of the State as protector and respecter of innocent life gets lost in the middle of the pluralist maelstrom. The commandment “You shall not kill” has little moral effect in a secular government — perhaps just for distorted and contradictory interpretations. Such a confused State eventually protects criminals and condemns innocent humans, not accepting death penalty for convicted killers, but approving such penalty for defenseless babies through cruel laws allowing abortion.

The Brazilian government today has definitely those confused “values”, because it was “hijacked” by ideologies favoring abortion, feminism and homosexuality. Because of the humanist ideals controlling it, the so-called secular State is not driven by Christian values, nor is able to respect them. Therefore, it cannot respect or promote totally the value of the innocent human life. But it has been struggling for the legalization of abortion. And the experience in Europe and in the United States shows that, after abortion is made legal, the secular State protects it, respects it and promotes it as a women’s sacred right — and millions of European and American babies have been killed in name of that right.

So what does the Brazilian government expect to solve with abortion? Where is to the real government concern with the children’s well-being?

Studies and polls have confirmed that a large majority of Brazilians do not want abortion legal.

If the abortion voting in the National Congress turns out the way the Lula administration expects, the Brazilian people will receive a big bitter Christmas gift.

Source: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

Original title: Aborto: a solução não é só abusar, mas matar? Written originally in Portuguese by Julio Severo and posted in his personal website in Portuguese: www.juliosevero.com.br

[1] http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=10171607&postID=111547180418794850

Other articles by Julio Severo

Targeted By Bias: Evangelicals Who Voted for Bush

The Great Gaffe of Lula Against Israel

The Mark of the Beast: The Tomorrow’s Education

Helping Take Care of the Social Health

Message to President Lula on Israel

Message to President Lula on homosexuality

Growth of divorce among Christians: a biblical perspective

Updating on the abortion voting 29 December 2005

Due to many political maneuvers, the abortion voting eventually did not happen on December 6, 2005. Its date has been arranged and postponed several times.

The abortion subject is the hardest, because the press let the population know nothing, so that the people may not be able to mobilize. Politicians arrange a date and after another for a voting , and later move it so that the pro-life politicians may be taken unprepared in a point or another. As the pro-abortion politicians do not have the approval of the most Brazilians, they appeal to machinations Unfortunately, that is Brazilian politics. A lot of times bills are approved not because the Brazilian people want, but because a political group conspired better....