Sabbath 16/12/26/120
Dear Friends
Many will recall that some years ago I said that the forces of paganism would rise again in Europe. Building upon the ignorance and superstition of the European Nazis it would rise and overtake Roman Catholicism until it in turn would be rejected. After great devastation the people would finally turn to the true Faith of God keeping the Sabbaths, and New Moons and the Feasts of God.
We will outline the sequence of this process over the next few weeks and months. The program calendar of events will be updated so that we can all understand what it happening to us on a now monthly basis. This week I will deal with Paganism.
The following is a recent news article regarding the increase of paganism not just in Europe but among the Europeans world wide who are now “coming out of the closet” and declaring their pagan roots and demanding the separation of Christian detail from Pagan festivals.
The Return of Paganism
As Christianity Declines, Superstitions Gain ForceLONDON, FEB. 7, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Like European politicians who continue to block any mention of Christianity in the draft of the continent's Constitution, public officials around the globe increasingly are adopting measures that favor a return to pre-Christian paganism.
Denmark has announced it will allow a group that worships Thor, Odin and other Norse gods to conduct legally-valid marriages, the Associated Press reported Nov. 5. "It would be wrong if the indigenous religion of this country wasn't recognized," said Tove Fergo, the government Minister for Ecclesiastic Affairs and a Lutheran priest.
The 240-member Forn Sidr sought recognition in 1999, said its president, Tissel Jacobsen. About 1,000 people worship the ancient gods in Denmark, Jacobsen said.
Across the ocean, a U.S. federal judge in the state of Virginia ruled in favor of a Wiccan who was barred from saying a prayer to open a Chesterfield County board meeting. U.S. District Court Judge Dennis Dohnal said the board discriminated against Cyndi Simpson when it prohibited her from joining a list of clergy who deliver the invocations, the Associated Press reported Nov. 14.
Wiccans consider themselves witches, pagans or neo-pagans, and say their religion is based on respect for the earth, nature and the cycle of the seasons, according to the Associated Press. The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit on behalf of Simpson after she was turned down by the board.
Wiccans are also active in Canada, where recently they celebrated the winter solstice, the Vancouver Sun reported Dec. 22. Heather Botting, a pagan chaplain at the University of Victoria, told the newspaper that the solstice, marking the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, is a sacred day.
An ex-Jehovah's Witness, Botting was appointed five years ago by university authorities. She is also authorized to perform marriages. At the university interfaith chapel, members of the 30,000-strong student body were able to mark the solstice with dances that paid reverence to stag antlers as symbols of the cycle of life. Revelers dipped a ceremonial knife into a cast-iron cauldron of wine, to symbolize the unity of male and female divinity.
In the Greater Victoria area, population 280,000, more than 1,000 people officially told Canadian census-takers they were pagans, the Vancouver Sun said. Paganism is Canada's fastest-growing religion, according to Statistics Canada. There are 21,080 declared pagans in Canada.
The census figures underestimate Wicca's spread, claims Inar Hansen, vice president of the university's 150-member Thorn and Oak Student Pagan Club. Hansen maintains that tens of thousands of residents on Canada's West Coast practice paganism.
Meanwhile, in the state of Victoria, Australia, a legal battle is being played out between Olivia Watts, a self-proclaimed witch and transsexual, and Rob Wilson, a Christian.
The conflict began last June when Wilson, a council member in the Melbourne-area municipality of Casey, issued a statement warning against a satanic cult that was allegedly planning to take over the area, the Age newspaper reported Dec. 27. Watts, who was named in the statement by Wilson, took the matter to the Equal Opportunity Commission. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal will also look into Watts' case. Watts is getting help from the Sydney-based Pagan Awareness Network.
Rebirth for the Blairs
On Jan. 26 and 27, the Guardian newspaper in Britain published ample extracts from Francis Wheen's new book, "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions." Wheen recounts the rise of gurus, spiritualists and assorted pagan beliefs. One of the most successful modern gurus is Deepak Chopra, who earns around $20 million a year. Since his 1993 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey television show -- which led to sales of 400,000 copies of his book within a week -- Chopra has authored 25 books. He heads the Chopra Center for Well-Being in La Jolla, California. His admirers run a wide gamut, from Michael Jackson to Mikhail Gorbachev and Hillary Clinton.
Wheen also recounts that Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister, is keen on alternative forms of spirituality. Her adventures include inviting a feng-shui expert to rearrange the furniture at 10 Downing Street, and wearing a "magic pendant" known as the BioElectric Shield, which has "a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals" that surround the wearer with "a cocoon of energy" to ward off evil forces. Both Cherie and Tony Blair underwent a Mayan rebirthing experience while on holidays in Mexico in 2001.
Also increasingly popular in England is Kabbalah, an ancient Hebrew philosophy. At London's Kabbalah Center -- whose premises were reportedly paid for by the singer Madonna for 3.5 million pounds ($6.3 million) -- followers can buy books, sign up for a 10-week course, or buy bottles of Kabbalah water, the Financial Times reported Dec. 20.
According to recent figures, fewer than 3% of Londoners are now regular churchgoers. At the same time, non-Christian practices such as Kabbalah, Buddhism, Hinduism and crystal healing are flourishing, the newspaper noted.
"For many westerners, particularly women, it has become the norm to master Buddhist chanting in a meditation class, learn about ancient Hindu philosophies during a yoga class, light an (aromatherapy) candle and say a prayer (to a nameless God) back at home," commented the article. A further sign of the triumph of alternative spiritualities came with the recent appointment of a spirituality editor by the British womens magazine Cosmopolitan.
Christless Christmas
While paganism gains legal protection, Christianity continues to be singled out for exclusion. Last Christmas season, for example, the British Red Cross banned the mention of Jesus from its shops, the Sun newspaper reported Nov. 11. Also barred were Christmas cards with nativity scenes and Advent calendars showing Mary and Joseph and the three wise men.
Meanwhile, the Christmas card sent out by the United Kingdom's culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, featured Hindu dancers and drawings of mosques, the Telegraph reported Dec. 7. What the card failed to show was anything about Jesus or Christmas.
And, in Australia, the Victorian state minister for transport, Peter Batchelor, opted for a Christmas card with an Aboriginal dream scene, without any Christian reference, the Age reported Dec. 19.
Scotland's Parliament also abolished any reference to Christianity in its cards. That was too much, even for self-declared agnostic Jim Sillars, who complained of the move in a commentary published by the Scotsman newspaper on Dec. 3. "Such decisions aren't a matter of showing greater tolerance of non-Christian religions," observed Sillars. "I have yet to meet the Jew, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh who has ever objected to us having Christ as the centre of Christmas. Take Christ out and you have a pagan celebration."
Delving into the reason behind anti-Christian prejudices, Christine Odone, deputy editor of the British magazine New Statesman, commented that the "chattering classes" share a common prejudice against Christians. In an extract of the annual Tyndale lecture given by Odone and published Oct. 28 in the Guardian, she noted that in an era that prizes individual freedom, Christians believe in authority and have a clear sense that there is a right and a wrong.
"Moral certainty grates against the spirit of the age," she observed. And this certainty "throws into relief the brittle edifice that houses the secularist's morals." Re-Christianizing an increasingly pagan society will not be easy.
The Task of Christianisation:
This article was reproduced in the public interest in that it shows the spread of the problem and also the inability of the people to really comprehend the true nature of the problem.
Comments such as the British Red Cross, refusing to allow the mention of Jesus Christ in their activities, shows the basic underlying antipathy among organisations that have been penetrated and undermined in their leadership.
The real problem is the fact that many of the organisations were never Christian in the first place. The mainstream Christian system was never itself properly Christian. Pagans and heathen Mystics penetrated it from the earliest. The Roman Catholics sought to attain power by adopting the practices of their enemies and giving them Christian names. It might be true, as stated above, that Jews, Hindus and Muslims might not have objected to making Christ the centre of Christmas, but the Pagans certainly did object and in fact laughed at the Christians when they were powerless to stop it. However, they kept their festivals because the Roman Catholics had made it perfectly easy for them to do so and retain their power, while making it impossible for the true Christian to keep the faith without severe economic penalty or even death.
The Trinitarian “Orthodox” and Roman Catholic Church had stolen so many of the practices of the heathen that by the fourth century the priests of the god Attis were complaining that the Roman Christians had stolen all their doctrines. The Trinitarians did this for reasons of easy and early power. Originally it was not so. The first bishop of Rome was Linus. He was a British captive and son of the King Caratacus present in Rome where Claudius took his family. He was a Sabbath-keeping Christian. The Church in Paul’s epistle to the Romans has nuances of the family there. The family will be discussed in the Abraham’s Legacy lectures regarding the British Kings and the early Church.
What we should have done was stick to the faith once delivered and the purity and truth of the Bible record. The commercialists have always perverted our doctrines to make money and they always will. That is why the church was described as a whore. It prostitutes its ideals for money.
One cannot imagine that a church, which has a mass for the enthronement of Satan as God as Malachi Martin stated clearly was the case in the Vatican some years back, is actually a valid Church of the One True God under His son Jesus Christ. Martin says he had to write the matter as a novel (see Windswept House).
More importantly, the same features of the pagan witchcraft are and have been endemic in the United States. Grounds exist within the legislative framework of the USA to bring action against it for pursuing the religious structure of Wiccan paganism through its legislative basis. I say, and the facts are, that the legislated public calendar of the United States of America is nothing but a religious calendar of witchcraft and that its holidays fall on the days of human sacrifice of the ancient witchcraft system. By giving them modern names and events, the people are unaware that they are actually an ancient religious system in opposition to Christianity. The government of the United States of America is forcing its people to keep a calendar of witchcraft by deception and the withholding of the true nature of the days involved.
It has more adherents these days and they are now about to come out in the open, and are doing so as circumstances permit. They are now at the stage where they think they have the power to overthrow Christianity. They do have such power. God gave it to them so that they can turn on this apostate whore and destroy it and remove its corrupt system from the world. This is allowed so that they can be exposed and removed and the corrupt system removed as well.
The European system is extensive. The beliefs of the deluded groups in Scandinavia, regarding the ancestor worship of Odin, show the complete ignorance of a people regarding its own history. We will explain who Odin was and what his lineages are. We will explain where they are today and how they feature in the history of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and other Norsemen. Follow these updates on www.abrahams-legacy.org.
The ignorance displayed by Europeans of their own ancestry is due, in no small part, to a devious and dishonest clergy that withholds truth for its own economic ends. The clergy of all types are rotten with wizards and Mystics. They have taken over vast elements of the systems. It is so much so that even Jean Paul I was murdered because he was a threat to their control of the Vatican. The results would be no different if the modern American churches had control over the process, as they would probably have burnt as many books as the Catholics. I will deal with that aspect next week in its prevalence among the Churches of God. Look also at papers such as The Origins of Christmas and Easter (No. 235)).
This new and looming battle with a rising paganism is the direct result of the failure of the people coming into Christianity to repent and absorb the doctrines of the One True God, as kept from the beginning.
What is to happen and how?
Paganism will rise in the entire world system now in Europe, and also in the Americas and elsewhere. It will come to increase at such a rate that it will be endemic by 2012. The Roman system will come into direct conflict with it.
The major conflicts will centre on the paganised environment. The tree huggers will continue as they did in Germany years ago. The tree will be a source of worship and deification. Europe will become a more precarious place and more inhospitable. The ancient religious system, as it is adopted, will force its adherents into direct confrontation with the reality of their own environment. The ignorance of paganism will hamper the ethical and religious development of the nations.
The Tribes were sent into Europe to take advantage of a fertile new area made available by circumstances that had enabled the establishment of a safer and more secure environment. God had enabled them to be placed there so that they could take hold and grow and then spread out to establish vast areas under what should have been ideal circumstances. That European environment will be dismantled over the next twenty-four years.
By 2012 increasing water levels will intrude into the Netherlands placing greater pressure on their shore armaments. Inundation will affect larger areas of Europe and elsewhere. The increasing cold weather problems will couple with the attempted movement of refugees into Europe. Water shortages and drought will increase and wars will increase. As the Pentagon boffins are beginning to realise, although religion is a given basis of the wars of the last days, the real causes are clean water, drought, food and survival.
The Messiah will be sent back to take over the planet by the Jubilee of 2027-8. God acts according to His Calendar and timing and prophecy (see God’s Calendar (No. 156)). The witnesses will precede Messiah (see the paper The Witnesses No. 135)). Between 2012 and 2019 the planet will be brought to an understanding of their shortfalls. The world will refuse to repent and they will kill the witnesses. From that time the world will be brought to account. Between 2015 and 2025 the entire world will be brought to its knees and relocated for the millennial system. By 2025 the nations will be in place for the millennial jubilee.
The process and timing will be explained later.
Wade Cox
Coordinator General
© Copyright 2004 Christian Churches of God, All Rights Reserved
