Sunday, November 30, 2014

Pope says equating Islam with violence is wrong


Pope says equating Islam with violence is wrong

By Julio Severo
According to Reuters, Pope Francis said on Sunday that equating Islam with violence is wrong.
Pope and Turkish mufti
Francis, the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, told reporters aboard his plane returning from a visit to Turkey that it was wrong for anyone to react to terrorism by being enraged against Islam.
Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, caused, according to Reuters, storms of protest throughout the Islamic world in 2006, when he made a speech that suggested Islam espouses violence.
Benedict said he had been misunderstood and apologized.
The Argentine pope has been trying to foster cooperation with ‘moderate’ Islam in order to work for peace. He said that ending poverty was crucial, because he thinks that poverty gives rise to “the recruitment of terrorists.”
In his visit to Turkey, Francis told the mufti twice that Christians and Muslims must ‘adore’ God.
While he was rebuking those who equate Islam with violence and fostering cooperation with ‘moderate’ Islam, it seems that he does not know a famous statement by Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan: “The term ‘moderate Islam’ is ugly and offensive — Islam is Islam.”
It seems also that he does not know that recently Erdogan and his government held an Islamic summit for Latin America, a mostly Catholic region now under the Islamic radar of Turkey.
With information from Reuters, AP and Jihad Watch.
Portuguese version of this article: Papa diz que igualar islamismo com violência é errado
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Saturday, November 29, 2014

White Teen Killed by Black Cop and Black Teen Killed by White Cop and Media Preferences


White Teen Killed by Black Cop and Black Teen Killed by White Cop and Media Preferences

By Julio Severo
Two years ago an unarmed white teen was killed by a black police officer and his death drew no media attention and no national and international protests.
Violent Ferguson protests
According to the Washington Times, Gilbert Collar, a white, unarmed 18-year-old man under the influence of drugs, was shot and killed October 6, 2012, by Officer Trevis Austin, who is black, in Mobile, Alabama. Despite public pressure for an indictment, a Mobile County grand jury refused to bring charges against Officer Austin, concluding that the officer acted in self-defense.
No national and international reaction and media coverage and activism. No protests. No United Nations intervention. Nobody burnt buildings to the ground for the white teen. And if they had done so, the media would have condemned it.
Now compare a similar shooting death on August 9. Michael Brown, a black unarmed 18-year-old man under the influence of drugs, was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, in Ferguson.
A St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer ignited violence and looting in Ferguson and days of protests nationwide against “racial injustice.” The black population burnt buildings to the ground for the black teen, as the media watched without condemning it. The United Nations, which did not intervene for the white teen gunned down, intervened for the black teen gunned down.
There were national and international protests.
Why in America does an unarmed black teen killed by a white cop cause outrage and an unarmed white teen killed by a black cop doesn’t?
Should white populations also burn buildings to the ground to drawn media’s attention for the “racism” of black cops who kill unarmed white teens?
No, because the U.S. media has no idolatry for white people.
Years ago Erik Rush, a black Christian author, wrote a relevant book entitled “Negrophilia,” published by WND. Yet, he was too generous. The Ferguson case shows that the problem in America surpasses negrophilia. It is negrolatry and even reverse racism promoted by a negrolatric media.
If white idolatry in the past of America is condemned today, why should modern-day black idolatry be spared?
The color of the offender or of the cop is irrelevant. An offender shot by a cop should be no cause for racial idolatry or ideological opportunism.
Yet, by the will of a negrolatric and ideologically opportunistic media, an offender can be entitled to special treatment, solely because of his skin color. And a sordidly pro-abortion and pro-sodomy individual can be entitled to presidency, solely because of his skin color too.
In today’s America, does skin color matter more than character’s color?
With information of The Washington Times.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Rising Turkish Menace: U.S. and NATO Ally Wants Islamic Advance in Latin America


Rising Turkish Menace: U.S. and NATO Ally Wants Islamic Advance in Latin America

By Julio Severo
The president of Turkey has re-written history by claiming Muslim explorers, not Christopher Columbus, discovered America.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chief of America’s NATO ally, said November 15 that Islamic sailors found the New World in 1178. He said, “Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus.” Turkey is the only Islamic nation in the NATO.
His theory — which is supported only by Islamic historians — came to light in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslims leaders from Latin America.
The summit was attended by 76 Islamic leaders from 40 countries. Latin America was represented by Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Suriname, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Ecuador, Jamaica and Haiti.
Turkish summit for Latin America
Erdogan brought up the supposed connection in a bid to establish a long history for links between Turkey and Latin America.
The summit’s main theme was “Building Our Traditions and Our Future.
Apparently, Turkey is aiming its Islamic expansionism at Latin America, which does not have a significant number of Muslims. In fact, with Turkey’s aid, Muslims intend an international Islamic confederation.
In a previous conference dubbed “Antichrist Confederacy,” Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), announced in Turkey:
“The Caliphate in today’s age must be established through a number of several states that are governed by Shariah and supported by both, the rulers and the people in the form of a federation or confederation and not as it was in the past.”
His announcement was published throughout the Muslim world, including CNN Arabic version. IUMS represents the largest body of Muslim scholars worldwide.
Before its summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America, Turkey organized the Eurasia Islamic Council meeting, focusing on Islamic expansion in Eurasia.
Yet, Turkish expansionism has never been under the radar of the U.S. and one of the main architects of the U.S. alliance with Islamic terrorist groups, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ben Barrack has said,
“There is clearly a fixation on the part of Brzezinski that controlling Eurasia is key to U.S. dominance. However, what he’s clearly been missing is that Turkey is the country that has been seeking Eurasian dominance while NATO countries continue to view it as an ally.”
Brzezinski’s focus of concern is only Russia. To neutralize Russia, for decades he helped Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. And today America is a backer of the two main sources for the Islamic terror in the world: Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
So while the U.S. and its NATO are focusing on Russia as an Eurasian threat, their only Islamic ally is expanding its Islamic dominance in Eurasia.
Erdogan and Obama
Not only in Eurasia, but internationally. Turkey has also organized the Summit of Muslim African Leaders, the Meeting of the European Muslims, Meeting of the Balkan Religious Affairs Presidents and the World Islamic Scholars Peace, Moderation and Common Sense. Turkey is working very hard for an Islamic confederation.
The only Islamic ally of the U.S. in the NATO is, according to Robert E. Kaplan, reconstructing the Ottoman Empire, with the U.S. military interventions’ aid. Kaplan said,
“Each of these United States military interventions occurred in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire, and where a secular regime was replaced by an Islamist one.”
And during the Ottoman Empire, the land of Israel was under Islamic control for three centuries. Christians also had their lot of suffering under this Islamic empire.
One hundred year ago, Turkey committed one of the worst Islamic genocides against Christians. It was the Armenian Genocide, which has never been recognized by supposedly large Christian nations, including the U.S., Germany and Brazil, which are apparently fearful of infuriating their ally, whose Islamic expansion in the past brought blood-shedding.
Even today, Turkey is involved in blood-shedding. According to WND, “Turkey has supported jihadist groups whose fighters later morphed into ISIS fighters,” who have been slaughtering Christians in Syria and Iraq.
WND also reported, “Turkey is now perhaps the biggest al-Qaida base in the world.”
What will Turkey’s expansionist plans, especially for Latin America, bring for the next years?
I do not know. But in its summit for Latin America, Turkey promised that it is “Building Our Traditions and Our Future.
If you include Bible prophecies, the Turkish picture gets much darker.
According to WND, theologians, both Christian and Jewish, have long interpreted the Antichristian armies of Gog of Magog as coming from the land of Turkey. Some of these theologians are: Hippolytus of Rome (170–235), Moses Ben Maimonides (aka Rambam) (1135–1204), Nicholas of Lyra (1270–1349), Martin Luther (1483–1546), John Wesley (1703–1755) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758).
Do their interpretations about Turkey match the record and behavior of this Islamic nation? If so, will Turkey want to have its Ottoman Empire again? And will it want to invade Israel to reestablish its ownership over the land of the Jews?
The letters of the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation were addressed to the seven churches in Asia Minor — today Turkey. Other important Christian church that disappeared under Islamic Turkey is Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul (former Constantinople). Hagia Sophia was the oldest and largest Christian cathedral (from 537 to 1453) in the world. From 1453 to 1931, Islamic Turkey used it as a mosque.
Yet, if you thought that these Christian tragedies and Turkish Islamic expansionism are old stories, think again.
After 9/11, mosques began popping up across America, and Turkey, with Saudi Arabia, is one of the Islamic nations benefiting from the Islamic terrorist attack.
The government of Turkey is building a $100 million mega mosque, the Turkish-American Culture and Civilization Center in Lanham, Maryland. Would Turkey, or even Saudi Arabia, allow the U.S. government to build a $100 million mega Christian church in their lands?
Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister traveled to the U.S. to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the mosque in 2013. Would Turkey allow a U.S. president to inaugurate a mega church in its nation?
Another important question is: Did Muslims discover America? There is no evidence of it today. But if America keeps its Islamic ally free to advance, it might be impossible to disprove Turkey’s claims in the future that Muslims conquered America.
Today, Turkey helps Islamic terrorist groups slaughtering Christians in the Middle East, wants to conquer America, Eurasia and Latin America and it is advancing unpunished, because it is a NATO and U.S. ally.
Apparently, Turkey will play a major Islamic role in the dark future threatening Christians, Jews, Israel, Latin America and the world. 
With information from WorldNetDaily, DailyMail, Diyanet and GospelPrime.
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Monday, November 24, 2014

Atheist Ed Brayton: Julio Severo is a Brazilian ‘wingnut’


Atheist Ed Brayton: Julio Severo is a Brazilian ‘wingnut’

By Julio Severo
Do homosexuality and population control have something in common? If you believe so, then you are a ‘wingnut’ — a label atheist Ed Brayton used against me, Julio Severo, because I am one of these believers.
Ed Brayton
Yet, I am not the only victim of his attacks. He has also attacked WorldNetDaily, and in a C-SPAN show, he labeled Chuck Norris a ‘moron’ because Norris said that if Obama were elected in 2012, his socialism would lead America to 1,000 years of darkness.
I agree with Norris: America can brace herself for 1,000 years of socialist darkness because of Obama and his party.
Overweight Brayton has a blog entitled “Dispatches from the Culture Wars.” He is also an advocate of evolutionism.
According to Conservapedia, Chuck Norris thinks that most obesity in America is the result of hedonism and that Christians have good reasons to believe that a hedonist lifestyle is a causal factor of atheism. This is another reason overweight Ed Brayton hates Norris.
Brayton has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow was the first openly lesbian anchor to host a major prime-time news program in the United States. He has also been a guest in other liberal shows.
For a lack of arguments and rationality, the only option left for leftist individuals is to resort to name-calling: ‘wingnut,’ ‘moron,’ etc. Also, dirty words are their natural language. How do I know it? The Brazilian secular and Christian Left has used this language when talking about me and my conservative views.
About the American Left, it seems that its adherents are not appreciating the column Matt Barber has given me in his conservative BarbWire.
In his blog, Brayton describes himself, “After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes… and turned to writing… for the voices in his head.”
I have always suspected that socialists have strange voices in their heads — in the Bible’s times, people called this condition ‘demonic possession.’
This time the voices told the clumsy comedian that homosexuality does not reduce birth rates and that, yes, he is an intelligent guy!
His voices have also told him that in the cultural war to spread socialist and homosexualist lies around the world, Julio Severo is another enemy deserving his attacks.
Loathing it or not, at least he is reading my BarbWire column!

Wingnut: The Gay All About Population Control

Julio Severo is a Brazilian wingnut who is now writing for BarbWire, where he makes the incredibly absurd claim that the fight for LGBT equality is really all about reducing the population. Because, silly rabbit, causal connections are for intelligent people, none of which can be found here. Referring to a USAID conference on gay rights around the world last week, he writes:
The conference is bringing together government officials, private funders, business leaders, scholars and homosexual activists from more than 30 countries to increase coordination, cooperation and resources dedicated to promoting the homosexual agenda around the world, and to ensure full inclusion of homosexual activists in political power structures.
The conference is focusing on diplomatic and foreign assistance strategies to address homosexual issues around the world. It is also discussing the best ways to engage faith communities to support the homosexual agenda and to integrate it into development programs.
If Sodom gave the world an untrained and unsophisticated homosexual militancy, America can be proud that she has surpassed Sodom, by giving the world an aggressive, trained and sophisticated homosexual militancy.
Will the U.S. government efforts to integrate the gay agenda into development programs and political power structures succeed? I fear so. Forty years ago, NSSM 200, a highly classified U.S. government document, made it clear that the U.N., the World Bank and many other major international organizations should be used to integrate population control into development and healthcare programs. Population control was presented as “family planning,” but its objective was never family well-being. It was population reduction to meet the U.S. ambitions to seize or save natural resources from other nations for current and future American use. Because of the U.S. efforts forty years, today “family planning” is as natural as marriage itself.
Evidently, now the strategy is to make the gay agenda and its fake marriage as natural as “family planning.”
God turned Sodom into ashes. America is distinguishing herself by making Sodom global and refined. She is spreading the Sodom ashes around the world to sow a new, bigger and global Sodom.
Yes, because obviously if we start treating gay people like human beings with equal rights, everyone is going to immediately going to become gay, stop having children and destroy the species. Because The Gay, according to the Christian right, is the single most alluring thing in the history of ever. It’s so overwhelmingly tempting that we must make the lives of gay people miserable in order to keep people becoming gay. This is what these bigots actually believe.
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Friday, November 21, 2014

Obama’s Immigration Amnesty: Joy for Some and Sadness for Many


Obama’s Immigration Amnesty: Joy for Some and Sadness for Many

By Julio Severo
Obama announced yesterday, November 20, 2014, a major amnesty benefiting millions of illegal immigrants.
Obama is not doing it for kindness. It is similar to “bolsa-família,” a populist family-fund program from the Brazilian government that provides cash to millions of Brazilians. In fact, the government of President Barack Obama thinks that this Brazilian program is very important.
Many of those benefited by Obama’s amnesty are also Brazilians, who are fleeing from the leftist hell in Brazil, but by being aided by Obama, they are also aiding to produce the leftist hell in the U.S.
The handout (family fund) of President Dima Rousseff is bad, but is the handout (amnesty) of President Barack Obama good? After all, what is this story?
Well, Brazilian evangelical and catholic conservatives who are in the U.S. are celebrating Obama’s immigration amnesty. Some of these Brazilians are my friends and I am seeing their celebration.
Yet, American evangelical and catholic conservatives are not celebrating, because they know that this massive handout is Obama’s strategy to solidify the socialist hell in the U.S. Some of these Americans are my friends and I am seeing their sadness.
In this situation, what side would you choose? Would you celebrate with Brazilian evangelical and catholic conservatives who need the immigration amnesty?
Or would you cry with American evangelical and catholic conservatives?
What side would you choose?
What I find most troubling is the Brazilian attitude. They condemn Rousseff’s family fund as a strategy to solidify her socialist power, but they are eager to get Obama’s immigration amnesty, whose strategy is solidify the socialist power in the U.S.
Immigrants granted amnesty today will be the future voters for Obama’s Democratic Party, which is similar to the ruling Workers’ Party of Rousseff in regard to anti-life and anti-family policies.
Even though most of the immigrants, including Brazilians, are against abortion and gay “marriage,” they have relatives who also need the generous immigration amnesty of the Democratic Party, regardless if this party is pro-abortion and pro-sodomy.
What is most important in this situation?
Money and prosperity. When people want them, they do not care about the means to get them.
I watched on YouTube a prank of a handsome young man in a very expensive car. He drove through several streets and offered — just by signaling with his hands, with no word — a lift to several beautiful young women who were walking on the sidewalk. Even though they were suspicious about him and objected that they did not know him, all of them accepted the ride.
Money, prosperity and comfort draw people.
Obama is offering a ride with the car that past generations of Americans worked hard to get.
Brazilian conservatives do not care about the motivations of him who is offering the ride. They want to ride and be a part of the money, prosperity and comfort.
The socialist side that has this power is going to get the support even from Brazilian conservatives. It is what is happening between them and Obama. They say that they are fleeing Rousseff’s handouts, but run for Obama’s handouts and even ask help from Obama, expecting him to deliver them from socialist Rousseff.
What do not money, prosperity and comfort do to people? They forget that they are conservative. But socialists — whether Obama or Rousseff — do not forget what they are.
Family funds, immigration amnesties and other “rides” are part of the socialist revolution sweeping Brazil and the U.S.
Conservatives should stop using clever and even illegal ways to enter the U.S.
Some years ago I was in a prayer meeting in Brazil and the Presbyterian minister asked prayer for a young couple, who was about to travel to the U.S. It was not just a trip. It was a move.
They had all the papers necessary for the trip. They had paid a very large sum to an American group to get fake papers.
They had a very successful trip. Later, they were granted amnesty. Now, they are “American.” Now, they have money, prosperity and comfort.
Did God hear their prayer?
Is God hearing Obama’s socialist “prayers”?
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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Rev. Rick Warren addresses pro-family conference at the Vatican


Rev. Rick Warren addresses pro-family conference at the Vatican

VATICAN CITY (AP) — An American evangelical leader has urged his fellow clerics at a Vatican conference to be true to the Bible's teachings on sex and marriage.
Rev. Rick Warren
The Rev. Rick Warren is among representatives of 14 religions at the conference on the "complementarity" of men and women in marriage and the family. Participants at the gathering believe men and woman have different God-given roles in marriage and the family.
Warren, who pastors one of America's largest Protestant churches, said the Bible defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman. He added, "When God's word is clear, we must not, we cannot, back up, back down, back off, backslide or just give in."
Warren encouraged religious leaders to celebrate traditional marriage and its benefits to men, women and children.
Pope Francis opened the three-day conference on Monday, declaring that children have the right to grow up with a mother and father.
Commentary by Julio Severo: Some of the leaders in this pro-family conference at the Vatican also attended the pro-family conference at the Kremlin in September.
Source: Associated Press, via Last Days Watchman
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End of communism not good for Catholicism?


End of communism not good for Catholicism?

Brazil and its large Catholic population are prisoners of socialism, but the Vatican has been worried (for about 1,000 years!) about the Orthodox Church

By Julio Severo
While the world is celebrating the end of communist tyranny in Europe, its end was not all positive for Catholicism, a senior Vatican official indicated on Monday. According to Reuters through WorldNetDaily, the Catholic official thinks the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago brought religious tensions between Rome and Russia back to the surface. These tensions are much older than the Soviet Union.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, the top Roman Catholic official for inter-church relations, said the re-emergence of Catholic churches in Ukraine and Romania is creating major tensions with the Russian Orthodox Church. For decades during communist tyrannies, these churches were largely suppressed.
“The changes in 1989 were not advantageous for ecumenical relations,” Koch told Vatican Radio.
Koch, who spoke a week after the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, noted that talks on closer ties between Catholic and Orthodox theologians were suspended between 2000 and 2006 because of tensions between the two sides.
Persecution of Christians in the Middle East has brought Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants there together, he said, but behind the Ukraine crisis there is a conflict of interests between the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Russians, who make up two-thirds of the world’s 300 million Orthodox, are wary of the efforts of Pope Francis, who will visit Turkey to meet Patriarch Bartholomew, the Orthodox leader in Istanbul.
Because of his more progressive stances, it is not only Orthodox Christians who are wary about this pope. Conservative Catholics and evangelicals are also worried about his non-conservatism and about how liberals, including homosexual activists, have welcome him.
Problems between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church are not new. Since Orthodox Christians left the Catholic Church and the supremacy of the pope about one thousand ago, their relationship has been hard, even in our days.
Yet, both churches were not supposed to have a so bad relationship, because, in important ethical points challenging Christianity today, they have been champions of truth.
The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have a good stance against abortion, the gay agenda and population control. Of course, they have also theological problems, including the replacement theology, which says that the Catholic Church replaced Israel. Both the Orthodox Church and the Protestant Reformers inherited this theology from Catholicism.
Because of this theology, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and many traditional Protestant churches do not have a good relationship with Israel.
About communism, the senior Vatican official should know that if it has fallen in Europe (I doubt it, because its milder anti-Christian and pro-Islam forms are advancing fast, at least in Western Europe), this is not true about Latin America. In fact, this is not true in the largest Catholic nation in the world: Brazil.
While the Orthodox Church had to be suppressed in Russia and other places in the communist times, the Brazilian Catholic Church never suffered any suppression from a communist rule. On the contrary, after a military rule saved Brazil from a communist tyranny in the 1960s, prominent Catholic leaders defended communist leaders and attacked their opposition.
The most outspoken critic of the 1964-85 Brazilian military rule was Bishop Helder Camara, a liberation theology advocate. He was called “Red Bishop” because of his Marxist stances.
In 1973, Camara was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a U.S.-based leftist organization, the American Friends Service Committee.
According to Dr. Constance Cumbey in her book “The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow,” the Brazilian bishop played a prominent role in international New Age events.
Camara was one of the founders of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (NCBB), the most powerful Catholic organization in Brazil.
For decades, NCBB has kept the Catholic population in Brazil under its Marxist spell and it is credited for having helped to found the ruling Workers’ Party, which has kept Brazil enslaved under its pro-Cuba socialism for 13 years.
In Russia, the most Orthodox nation in the world, the relationship between the Orthodox Church and communism was not easy. In his book “Their Blood Cries Out,” Paul Marshall says, “In the 1920s and 1930s approximately two hundred thousand Russian Orthodox priests, monks, and nuns were slaughtered. A further half million were imprisoned or deported to Siberia.”
While in Russia and other nations the Orthodox Church was violently suppressed to serve communist ambitions, in Brazil no such violence and suppression was necessary. NCBB has voluntarily and wholeheartedly worked to make Catholics and Brazil more communist.
So instead saying that the end of communism was not all good in Russia and Eastern Europe, the senior Vatican official should worry that socialism has never had an end in the largest Catholic flock in the world.
Brazil and its Catholic Church are prisoners of the socialist ideology, especially loved and promoted by the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil, and the Vatican is not helping them when it focuses its attention on Russia. Instead of trying to bring Orthodox Christians to the Catholic fold, the Vatican should try to take Brazilian Catholics from the socialist fold and its liberation theology.
With information from WorldNetDaily and Reuters.
Portuguese version of this article: Fim do comunismo não foi bom para o catolicismo?
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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Decency, righteousness invade Hollywood


Decency, righteousness invade Hollywood

Ted Baehr, with Tom Snyder
Commentary by Julio Severo: I met Ted Baehr in a pro-family meeting and for some days I was able to see his Christian testimony and especially his joy in Christ. He is a great man of God! Men filled with the Holy Spirit as Baehr are making difference in Hollywood. I do not mean Hollywood is light. It is darkness. But in the midst this thick darkness, God has his lights, and Baehr is one of the most shining ones!
Thousands of studies have shown that the mass media shapes the hearts, minds and actions of our children and grandchildren. By doing this, the mass media also is able to create and control the culture, or at least major portions of it. In this manner, the mass media can also control America’s future.
Movieguide has been “the family guide to movies and entertainment” for nearly 30 years now. As such, we try to redeem the values of the mass media of entertainment according to the Bible’s moral and spiritual principles, so that we can transform the United States of America with the good, the true and the beautiful.
We do this by talking with entertainment industry leaders, honoring any good movies and TV programming they do, informing the public at large about the media’s influence, helping families make better entertainment choices, and helping budding filmmakers produce entertainment full of faith and values.
Our strategy for doing this great work has been extremely successful.
For example, since we entered this mission field the number of movies with strong or very strong, overt Christian content or worldviews has increased from only one or two a year to more than 65 per year, including movies based on the fictional works of Christian authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and blockbuster movies like “Spider-Man 3” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” both of which had really explicit, positive Christian content and references.
Also, all of the major studios in Hollywood now have special divisions and/or executives not only handling family movies and animated movies, but also handling faith-based movies like “Fireproof” or “Amazing Grace.”
In fact, last year Roma Downey and Mark Burnett produced “The Bible” miniseries for the A&E Television Networks on cable TV, and this year Fox distributed their “Son of God” movie developed from the miniseries.
In addition, two smaller evangelical, faith-based movies, “God’s Not Dead” and “Heaven Is for Real,” doubled and even tripled the amount of money that previous, similar, successful faith-based movies like “Fireproof” and “Soul Surfer” earned at the box office.
As a result of all this, Hollywood is producing several faith-based, biblical blockbuster movies in the next few years, including “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” remakes of “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur,” “Christ the Lord” and “King David.” Several of the Hollywood studios and filmmakers making some of these blockbuster movies have even contacted Movieguide in an effort to assure that the movies are as reverent and as accurate, but as dramatic, as possible.
Why are these studios and filmmakers doing this?
Because for 30 years, we have been showing Hollywood, with scientific and statistical precision, that entertaining family-friendly and uplifting movies with positive Christian content and values make the most amount of money on average than any other kind of movie.
Hollywood has put these assertions of ours to the test and found them to be extremely reliable.
And, guess what? The financial success of movies like the Narnia and Middle-Earth movies based on the work of Christian authors Tolkien and Lewis and the continued success of movies like “The Blind Side,” “The Passion of the Christ,” “Heaven Is for Real,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “Les Misérables” with Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, “Spider-Man 3,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Man of Steel” has proved us right.
In fact, movies with strong positive Christian content in them are so successful that even the last James Bond movie, “Skyfall,” had some rather overt, positive references to Jesus Christ and Christianity. Not only that, but “Skyfall” is now the most successful James Bond movie ever made!
Of course, we give all the glory for this positive change to God, through faith in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus Christ works through people like us and people like our readers – and also through Hollywood filmmakers.