By Bill Koenig

Secular Humanism

Secular humanism is a humanist philosophy that upholds reason, ethics and justice, and specifically rejects the supernatural and the spiritual as warrants of moral reflection and decision-making. Like other types of humanism, secular humanism is a life stance focusing on the way human beings can lead good and happy lives.
(From the Harvard Magazine December 2005, p. 33).

Humanist Manifesto II – Excerpt from the Preface
Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson (1973).

As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to live and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.

New statements should be developed to supersede this, but for today it is our conviction that humanism offers an alternative that can serve present-day needs and guide humankind toward the future.

Secular Humanism’s Legacy

The following is the very revealing legacy of what secular humanism has brought to America.

The ‘me’ obsession
• What is in it for me?
• Excess pride, ego and narcissism
• Belief that man can influences the earth’s temperatures
• Whatever feels good do it
• An obsession with the rights of one person despite the effect on the population at large
• Excess wants and desires lead to materialism
• Idolatry – worshiping earthly gods
• Image obsession
• A belief that man can solve all the world’s ills (they will never acknowledge man’s sin nature)

Morality
• Liberal college and university professors shaping minds
• No absolute truths/moral relativism
• Moral drift due to no absolutes
• Establishment of laws when one’s “no-absolute” behavior gets out of control and infringes on others
• Loss of common sense
• Civil rights over morality a strategy used by the homosexual agenda
• Homosexual activists are aggressively attempting to force their acceptance into schools, companies, the military and the public
• Homosexuals call others intolerant but they aren’t tolerant of those who oppose them

Leaders
• Washington’s partisanship due to extreme beliefs and turf protection
• Special interests have more say than the American public
• Lack of civility
• Creating dependence on the government
• Socioeconomic and ethnic division due to a dependent mentality
• Excess federal government regulation and taxes

Universal god
• Unity of religions
• Unity to bring earthly peace
• Belief that there are many paths to a universal god
• Oprah Winfrey’s very popular new-age movement focused on man’s deity and spirituality
• Harry Potter books witchcraft
• Seventy percent of America participates in Halloween
• Evil is a state of mind that can be changed with the right influence not an internal battle between good and evil

An entertainment addiction
• Nationwide gambling explosion
• Greed at all levels of life in America
• An ever growing perversity on TV, movies, advertisements and online

Abortion
• Favor abortion – violence in the womb
• Pets have more rights than pre-born children in their mother’s womb

Family
• One of two marriages end in divorce
• Many mothers have chosen to enter the workplace so children can go to good schools and live in safe neighborhoods
• Children out of wedlock
• 30 to 35 percent of children don’t graduate from high school
• A more violent society
• Some schools have turned into war zones
• Record consumer debt
• 13 million US homes have no equity

Despair
• Epidemic of people turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with life and its struggles
• Confusion, disruption and division in our homes, schools, communities and governments
• Lack of righteousness
• Many living lives of despair, hopelessness and desperation
• Lack of civility

Nation is living the consequences of our sin

• Life will get worse and more difficult in America
• The Lord is longsuffering but judgment comes quickly
• Will America call on God’s name and repent for their wicked ways or suffer judgment?

By Bill Koenig

I noticed at the Metro train stop by the White House on Tuesday, January 18 a newspaper called The Washington Diplomat that focuses on the very large diplomatic community here in Washington.

It captured my interest because January’s lead article was entitled “PLO Going Nowhere?”

I started reading the article to get the Palestinian perspective. The person being interviewed was Maen Rashid Areikat, the new head representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United States — headquartered in Washington.

I thought to myself: That name sounds familiar. I looked through the article for his biography to see if he was who I thought he was. Sure enough, he was.

On my return flight from Israel to Dallas in the first week of January 2000, I was upgraded to Business Class on my oversold British Airways flight from Tel Aviv to London. The Lord had arranged for me to sit next to Maen Rashid Areikat of the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department.

Maen told me he was on the way to London for some backroom negotiations with the Israelis.

We talked for the entire length of the five-hour flight. We discovered that we had both graduated from Arizona State University. Maen also received his MBA at Western International University in Phoenix. He talked about how he loved living in Arizona.

Maen is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met — a really good guy.

I enjoyed discussing areas of mutual interest and, especially, hearing his perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what it is like for him and his family to live in the Palestinian territories.

He said he was born in Jericho and attended Catholic schools. He spoke with much sincerity about wanting his family to live in peace and security. He showed no hatred or anger towards Israel.

I thought: If this man were leading the Palestinians, there would be an agreement with Israel such as the ones Israel achieved with Jordan’s King Hussein and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat.

When I read his article (which I link to below), I saw his very sincere and hopeful side. While he seems totally removed from the radical side of the PLO as led by Yasser Arafat, Fatah and Hamas, I also see a person who doesn’t address the fact that Hamas is the greatest threat to his dream of his living in peace and security.

We know Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas redirected millions of dollars of foreign aid to their bank accounts and their cronies. This led to Hamas becoming a force in Palestinian politics, when they met the social needs of the Palestinians while gaining great favor, which led to their capturing 74 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Parliament in the January 2006 election.

As we continue to hear and read of the ongoing tensions between Fatah and Hamas, we realize that Maen’s job is extremely difficult.

I will contact Maen soon. I want to share with him once again the biblical perspective of what is taking place in Israel. He is the kind of guy who will listen. Who knows? He may be the Arab leader who signs the Daniel 9:27 covenant.

The following is the link to Maen’s interview and my final comments:

With widening Israeli-Palestinian gulf,
 PLO envoy clings to statehood dream (Larry Luxner, The Washington Diplomat)

Click here for the full article.

Final comments: This is a Palestinian perspective from a man who was 4 years old in 1967 and whose father was a Palestinian activist.

The key point is that Maen sincerely wants his family and the rest of the Palestinians to live in peace. That dream has been stopped due to a corrupt Palestinian government and Palestinian terror groups.

Furthermore, “Palestine” was not all Arab: It was the home of the Jews of Palestine and the Arabs of Palestine.

Yasser Arafat and the terror groups have done great harm to the Palestinian people. Palestinians are living in refugee camps in many Arab countries and being treated as third- and fourth-class citizens. They have been pawns in the peace process. Many Palestinians would prefer to live in Israeli-controlled cities, not those managed by the Palestinians.

Hamas, the political party that is in control of the Palestinian Parliament, will not recognize Israel’s right to existence and is determined to have full control over all Palestinian property, which includes Ramallah.

Israel is not the Palestinians’ problem and never has been the Palestinians’ problem. Rather, it is their corrupt leadership and refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. They can complain and call for actions against Israel, but it will never solve the Palestinians’ own political problems.

By Bill Koenig

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the former chairman of the Board of Goldman Sachs (a major beneficiary of the AIG and the TARP (Toxic Asset Relief Program) bailout), testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about the handling of the AIG bailout when Wall Street firms and U.S. and foreign banks received $70 billion arranged by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (which Geithner oversaw).

Geithner said if the Federal Reserve Bank of New York hadn’t arranged the AIG bailout, the entire financial system would have collapsed.

Paulson stated, “The decision to rescue AIG was correct, and I strongly supported it.

“Although the road to complete recovery is slow and unemployment is still high, had AIG failed I believe we would have seen a complete collapse of our financial system, and unemployment easily could have risen to the 25 percent level reached in the Great Depression,” he said.

Federal Reserve

The federal government’s bailout of AIG remains controversial because it funneled nearly $70 billion to 16 major U.S. and European banks that had bought credit default swaps from AIG.

Financial companies that received multi-billion-dollar payments were: Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion), Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), Bank of America ($5.2 billion), Citigroup ($2.3 billion) and Wachovia ($1.5 billion).

Big foreign banks also received large sums from the rescue, including Société Générale of France and Deutsche Bank of Germany — which each received nearly $12 billion; Barclay’s of Britain ($8.5 billion); and UBS of Switzerland ($5 billion).

Reuters reported that lawmakers on Capitol Hill have labeled the AIG bailout, in which the New York Fed created a special entity to purchase those securities from the banks at essentially their face value, a “backdoor bailout” for the 16 financial institutions.

The new batch of emails, along with others that have become public in recent weeks, reveal that some at the New York Fed went to great lengths to keep the terms of the bailout private; and the SEC may have played a role in contributing to some of the secrecy surrounding the AIG rescue package.

“The New York Fed was orchestrating what can only be characterized as an extreme effort to ensure that details of the counterparty deal stayed secret,” Rep. Darrell Issa from California, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said through a spokesman. “More and more, it looks as if they would’ve kept the details of the deal secret indefinitely, if they could have.”

The U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve’s bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

Reuters said the request to keep the details secret were made by the New York Federal Reserve — a regulator that helped orchestrate the bailout — and by the giant insurer itself, according to the emails.

The emails were included in the mountain of documents the New York Fed turned over last week to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which held a hearing Wednesday into the AIG bailout and the New York Fed’s role in trying keep the specific terms of that Fed-engineered rescue secret.

The ‘perfect financial storm’

The perfect financial storm was created by enormous greed, Washington incompetence, lack of integrity and conflicts of interest that left the U.S. taxpayers with the trillion-dollar tab while some of the same financial institutions that were saved from collapse are paying out record bonuses for 2009 performance.

How did it happen?

President Bill Clinton, Clinton Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin and Treasury Secretary Larry Sumner stopped an attempt to regulate the financial derivatives market in 1998. Clinton admitted in 2009 that this was likely a mistake.

Two Republicans, former Sen. Phil Graham and former Speaker of the House Tom DeLay, stopped the push for greater regulation and oversight of the securities market in 1998-1999.

President Bill Clinton, along with then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, removed restrictions on banks owning insurance companies in 1999. Were Mr. Clinton and Mr. Summers (now an Obama adviser) motivated by quick profit or by the belief that the reform was necessary to modernize our financial industry?

During Clinton’s term, home loan standards were further relaxed to put more people in homes.

Two of President Bush’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairmen did nothing to stop or regulate Wall Street excesses:

Billions of dollars were spent by financial sector companies on lobbyists who influenced the Clinton and GW Bush Administrations and Congress to deregulate the financial markets.

The Congressional enablers’ judgment was affected by the millions they received in campaign contributions from the financial industry and their lobbyists.

Congress allowed people to buy homes they couldn’t afford.

Financial institutions made massive profits on the packaging of those loans before millions of home mortgages defaulted, leaving massive losses that the U.S. taxpayers were obligated to absorb.

There was an unrestrained Wall Street casino gambling environment.

Major U.S. banks funded wealthy individuals’ leveraged buyouts of companies for fees and a piece of the appreciation, which led to more expensive products and services and companies now strapped with enormous debt.

Federal Reserve policies and lack of oversight exacerbated the problems.

Today, the Federal Reserve refuses to release the details on who received $2 trillion from them since late 2008.

Banks and Wall Street firms were considered to big to fail, so the U.S. taxpayers became obligated to a $700 billion bailout of the mountainous rotten assets of major banks and investment firms — which are making the public swallow their losses to the tune of many hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe much more.

A record $145 billion in bonuses will be paid out by Wall Street and major U.S. banks for 2009 which, 16 months earlier, were on the verge of bankruptcy.

The U.S. federal deficit has now reached $12.327 trillion — or $40,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

Due to the greed of major American banks, large Wall Street firms and their Congressional and White House enablers, a mammoth $5 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus was committed to by the world’s central banks since September 2008.

The American taxpayers were put on the hook for the $700 billion TARP (Toxic Asset Relief Program) bailout for major banks and Wall Street firms, a $770 billion stimulus commitment designed to jumpstart the U.S. economy, while the Federal Reserve committed $2 trillion to financial institutions but refuses to say who received the money.

Beyond that, the worsening finances of both governments and individuals raise the specter of sovereign [nations] debt defaults and may also mean the next leg of the crisis is social, Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum that organizes the Davos gathering, said on Wednesday.

“As a consequence of the debt situation of governments, of the fiscal situation of governments, we will have certainly squeezed public and private households and we will have increased unemployment figures,” Schwab told a news conference this week.

By Bill Koenig

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the leader who agrees to the final biblical peace deal spoken of in Daniel 9:27. No Israeli politician is better known. No Israeli leader is a stronger defender of his nation’s threats.

In his policy speech at the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan University on June 14, 2009, Netanyahu was superb, clever, reasonable and strategic. He attempted a very delicate political balancing act — which, for the most part, seemed to succeed.

He calmed the Kadima Party and the Labor Party with his statement that he favors a Palestinian state, but he offered very challenging contingencies that must first be satisfied.

He satisfied Israel’s right-wing political parties on the statement of a unified (not divided) Jerusalem.

Members of the Likud Party who don’t want to see any of Israel’s biblical land given to the Palestinians were disgruntled about the talk of a Palestinian state, but they appeared satisfied that Netanyahu’s requirements for the Palestinians are all but impossible for them to meet.

He also enjoined Israel’s concerns and the moderate Arabs’ concerns about a nuclear Iran. This was a good strategy.

He said:

By Bill Koenig

Jesus came to earth as the Messiah — the Savior of the world — not a social worker.

Today, many Protestant and Catholic Church leaders are focused on the social gospel and the establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth while virtually never mentioning that salvation is only possible through Jesus Christ or that He will reign for 1,000 years from the New Jerusalem due to their lack of eschatological teachings.

In a review of Dr. Martin Erdmann’s book, Building the Kingdom of God on Earth: The Churches’ Contribution to Marshal Public Support for World Order and Peace, 1919-1945, the reviewer wrote that the kingdom of God [the church] had been stripped of all biblical and theological distinctives and now was virtually identical to the new world order and its political and social agenda.

Today, it is acceptable in major international religious and political meetings to portray Jesus Christ as a social worker, while using words from the Sermon on the Mount to show that Jesus Christ was socially conscious. Furthermore, it has helped lead to a false perception that there are many paths to God.

Yale professor H. Richard Niebuhr in his book The Kingdom of God in America (1937) wrote that Protestant liberalism’s message and social gospel has led to a “God without wrath brought men without sin, into a world without judgment, through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

In today’s ecumenical meetings, the saving of souls from sin was replaced with saving the world from unemployment, poverty, war and injustice. But this is treating the symptoms, not the root cause, which is the heredity and existence of sin in people’s lives.

Oswald Chambers wrote: “Sin dwells in human nature, but the Bible makes it very clear that it is an abnormal thing, it has no right there, it does not belong to human nature as God designed it. Sin has come into human nature and perverted and twisted it. The Redemption of God through our Lord Jesus Christ delivers human nature from sin.”

Henry Brandt stated: “You can have victory over life-dominating sin, based on two biblical principles remarkable in their simplicity: 1. There is no human remedy for sin. 2. The only cure for sin is in Christ.”

We live in a fallen, sinful world filled with people whose only hope is in a Savior named Jesus Christ who took the sins of the world to the Cross on our behalf; and through Him and only Him, is there a promise of forgiveness and an everlasting life.

Convinced but not converted

My wife’s and my former churches as children, Catholic and Episcopalian, respectively, believe that baptism as a very young child is all that is required to be a Christian and to have everlasting life. These and many other Protestant churches believe that it isn’t necessary to be “born again,” and they deny the importance of making a public proclamation of one’s faith in Jesus Christ.

Many religious leaders are convinced, but they aren’t converted. They have conformed to religious dogma, a false piety and discipline; and because they aren’t born again, the Holy Spirit is nonexistent and they haven’t been transformed. And they don’t have a personal and intimate relationship with the Savior of the world.

Isn’t it an irony, yet not a surprise, that their religious beliefs and their political agendas are the main catalysts that will bring these times to completion and Jesus Christ’s return to Jerusalem?

Is this a surprise? Absolutely not: It was predicted in the Bible.