C cares, of the world

America, Return to God – Ravi Zacharias

All around us ‘Christmas bashing” has gone on. After all, not everybody believes in it, so why should anyone be wished well on Christmas? The ACLU, ever present to eradicate belief from the public square, lent its oppressive muscle to those who denied any government or state agency the freedom to put up a Christmas tree or children singing Christmas carols in school. That is why in Capital Hill, the lighting of the Christmas tree became known as lighting of the “People’s Tree”. One civil libertarian demand a school in NJ that no Christmas tunes be played because it was not just the words that offended his sensitivities but the melodies as well. One well know talk show host said she would be offended if someone wished her “Merry Christmas” This bigotry has come from our culture of tolerance, which allowed cultural liberals to express their views in public while banishing everyone else’s views to their private chambers. So Happy Holidays rolled in on the heels of Happy Turkey day. Is a day coming when someone will be uncomfortable with saying Good morning, because good is a derivative of God and they would not want to offend an atheist?

There is a venomous and brazen anti-Christian attitude now being wielded in the West. How did this come to be? How did it come about that while so-called Muslim scholars do not hesitate to admit that Islam and democracy are not compatible, a Muslim can still have a democratic right to call his festivals by their names, while Christians cannot? How is it that a Muslim in Canada can get away with demanding Shari’a law be introduced into the Canadian legal code but would scream outrage if a westerner in a Muslim country were to ask to be tried by his own legal system. How is it that while Muslim radicals attacked the US, the Koran is required reading at some academic institutions in the West, though the same institutions will mock the Bible? The issue is bigger than just banning Christmas carols. Something has gone radically wrong.

Remember the words of Martin Niemoller who tried to warn those who remained silent to the Nazi atrocities, “First they came for the communists and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.” Those who wipe out the memory of the Christian faith will find out that the logic of their position may one day lead to someone wiping them out as well and there will be no one left to come to their aide, for there will be no one left with reason to speak of loving those who despise you.

So what is the glimmer of hope? I began this essay while I was in Beijing China, where all over the city I saw banners that said, “Merry Christmas” I spent one morning at the Forbidden city. As I walked through the cold with some friends deep in the inner sanctum of the Forbidden city, I saw a small Starbucks with a sign that said, “Merry Christmas” I stopped and pondered, “How odd it is that in the land of Mao where individuals were humiliated for the sake of the “People” I should see a sign wishing me merry Christmas, while in the land where individual freedom is touted as defining the nation’s reason for being, “the people’s tree” won the day.
CHURCH, ATTACK ON

America, Return to God – James Dobson “How can we win this war?”

Your concern and convictions must be translated into action. As Edmund Burke, the English parliamentarian once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Contact your senators and representatives. Write a letter, place a phone call. Register to vote. Do it now. Take part in radio and TV call in programs. Volunteer to teach a class or hold a seminar about marriage and family related issues. Out up lawn signs and distribute bumper stickers proclaiming the sanctity of marriage.

Dr. Corts, former president of the Billy Graham organization told of this story. When he was 16, he and his younger cousins went to visit their grandfather’s farm. They couldn’t wait to get out there and go out into the fields. They wanted to pitch hay and ride on the tractor. It sounded like so much fun. But grandfather was reluctant to let them go. They whined and begged until finally he said to John, “You are the eldest. You can take the kids to the field if you promise not to bring them back early. You must keep them out there until the end of the day.” John said, “I will do that grandpa.” SO they climbed on the hay wagon and the tractor pulled them out to the field. Very quickly, the kids grew tired and started complaining. The work was hot and sticky and they were miserable. They began asking to go back to the house. But John said, “No, grandfather told me to jeep you out here.” By lunch time, they were exhausted. The hay was getting under their shirts and it itched. Everyone wanted to go home. But again John said, “No. Grandfather told me to keep you here.” About 3 o’clock, a large storm gathered overhead. The kids got scared and several were crying. “please,” they begged. “Let us go home!” Still John refused. Finally at about 5, it was time. John loaded all the kids and brought them back. After their baths and meals, grandfather praised them warmly for their work and they felt proud of themselves. That’s when his grandfather said to John, “This farm has been successful through the years for one reason: We have stayed in the field when we felt like coming in. We did what needed to be done, even when we wanted to quit. That is why I wanted the kids to have a satisfying experience of staying with something through the day.”

We are in a very difficult situation now. It is tough. It is hard swimming against the tide of political correctness, the liberal media, the entertainment industry, Congress, the libraries and cultural forces making fun of us. It is not pleasant to be called the religious right, the extremists, fundamentalist right wing crazies. None of us like that. But being ridiculed and marginalized is the price we must pay to defend what we believe. Jesus told us that it would that way. God has called us to stay in the field till the end of the day, and I for one, will do that as long as I have breath in my body.

CHURCH, ATTACK ON

America, Return to God – Thomas Wang

America and the West are showing signs characteristic of pre-exilic Judah. One by one the Western countries are turning away from God. Is America following suit? There are elements working to secularize and paganize America, twisting the meaning of noble and virtuous words:

Tolerance – tolerance of different views including the tolerance of evil, otherwise you are a hate monger

Freedom – free on everything otherwise you are a bigot

Multi literalism – all isms and religions are equal and none could claim as unique

Unity – We will have unity, if you agree with my ideology

Peace – we will have peace when you adopt my lifestyle

Prochoice – In reality it is pro-murder

Love – love is sex and sex is love. One should be free to have sex with anyone, anytime, anywhere and any number, otherwise you are restrictive and archaic

Mozilla Founder

Brendan Eich, the well-known techie who has gotten swept up in a controversy about his support of California’s anti-gay marriage law Proposition 8, is resigning as CEO of for-profit Mozilla Corporation and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it.

Mozilla confirmed the change in a blog post.

“Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves,” read the post, in part. “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.”

In several interviews this week, Eich had insisted that he would not step down from the job he was only recently appointed to, due to the intense backlash over a $1,000 donation he made in 2008 in support of the ballot measure to ban gay marriage.

“So I don’t want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we’ve been going,” he said to the Guardian, for example, yesterday. “I don’t believe they’re relevant.”

Not so, of course. In an interview this morning, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker said that Eich’s ability to lead the company that makes the Firefox Web browser had been badly damaged by the continued scrutiny over the hot-button issue, which had actually been known since 2012 inside the Mozilla community.

“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting,” said Baker, who added that she would not and could not speak for Eich. “The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.”

She said that Eich — who created the JavaScript programming language, among other prominent computing achievements — had not been forced to resign by her or others on its board, which includes prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman.

“I think there has been pressure from all sides, of course, but this is Brendan’s decision,” Baker said. “Given the circumstances, this is not surprising.”

Indeed, those circumstances included vocal protests on Twitter by Mozilla staffers and a call by the OkCupid dating site to not use Firefox.

The controversy has been a difficult one for Mozilla, which could be described as more of a movement than a tech company and which has a very vocal community around it.

It has also resulted in scrutiny of its governance, in which Baker and also Eich — who have worked together for 15 years since founding Mozilla on deeply held beliefs over the development of an open Internet — played a big part.

In addition, three of Mozilla Corporation’s board members — former Mozilla CEO and current Greylock Partners VC John Lilly, former Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs and well-known tech exec Ellen Siminoff — have recently resigned.

But each of their departures seems to have been only tangentially related to Eich’s appointment — though none of them supported his selection as CEO, according to numerous sources, for other reasons — and not to the controversy over Prop 8.

Baker said that she had not known about Eich’s views on gay marriage throughout most of their working relationship, until the donation came to light last year.

“That was shocking to me, because I never saw any kind of behavior or attitude from him that was not in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness,” she said, noting that there was a long and public community process about what to do about it in which Eich, then CTO, participated. “But I overestimated that experience.”

Baker — who became emotional at one point during the interview — noted that she was “doing a fair amount of self-reflection and I am wondering how did I miss it that this would matter more when he was the CEO.”

Preserving Mozilla’s integrity was paramount, she said, especially since “we are heading into a period of global mass surveillance and the role of those fighting against will be more important than ever.”

She added: “This is hard since Brendan is a founder and has contributed so much here. But making sure others continue to join and support Mozilla’s efforts is even more important.”

Baker said there was not another leading candidate for the CEO role as yet, although Mozilla had been conducting an extensive search using Spencer Stuart before the Eich selection, which also included another internal candidate, Jay Sullivan.

“There are certainly very talented people we have talked to, so we are not at ground zero by any means,” she said. “But we are now in the middle of what is clearly a crisis, and this had to happen.”

A crisis indeed, not helped much by a series of Eich interviews this week, in which he declined to apologize and used what can only be described as pretzel logic about how a clearly tolerant community like Mozilla should also support what many now consider intolerant beliefs.

Eich told the Guardian, for example: “So far we’ve been able to bring people together of diverse beliefs including on things like marriage equality. We couldn’t have done this, we couldn’t have done Firefox One. I would’ve been excluded, someone else would’ve been excluded because of me — I wouldn’t have done that personally, they’d have just left. So imagine a world without Firefox: not good.”

He also dragged in a truly bizarre point about people in Indonesia not liking gays marrying to justify his continued leadership. He noted to the newspaper that LGBT marriage was “not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that’s in the future, right now we’re in a world where we have to be global to have effect.”

(Hey Brendan, does that mean we need to just say bygones about some of the virulent anti-women sentiments and laws in some countries, since it’s a Firefox world after all? No, I did not think so.)

“I think I’m the best person for the job and I’m doing the job,” Eich insisted to the Guardian.

Throughout the interviews, it was not hard to get the sense that Eich really wanted to stick strongly by his views about gay marriage, which run counter to much of the tech industry and, increasingly, the general population in the U.S. For example, he repeatedly declined to answer when asked if he would donate to a similar initiative today.

Instead, he tried to unsuccessfully hedge those sentiments and, perhaps more importantly, did not seem to understand that he might have to pay the inevitable price for having them.

Thus, something had to give — and it did.

When asked about worries that the continuing controversy about Eich would have had broader impact, such as negotiations to renew a longtime lucrative contract with Google — which has been a high-profile supporter of gay rights — Baker said that while making this move aligned with that, it was not a factor in Eich’s departure.

“This is more important than business relationships,” she said.