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YOU WILL KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS

 

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[Our friend Viktor in Ukraine wrote this article so you can learn what is really happening there.]

"You will know them by their fruits." Good people bring forth good deeds, evil people produce evil deeds. War is pure evil. There will be so-called patriots in different countries telling people about our national security and our way of life. The news about the war is sanitized: we only learn about one side or the other advancing or retreating, jets being shot down, bases and buildings being bombed, etc. We hardly hear about the real. human side of it.

But war is pure evil – on both sides. Men are snatched from the street and sent to the front, often without any training... and some die the first day. Many civilians die, many are wounded, their homes are destroyed, their farm land is ruined, etc. The tractors sit idle in the fields because there are no men to drive them. The shops are becoming empty because there are no drivers for the trucks to deliver food to the shops. The only people who profit from war are politicians, generals and weapons producers. Every war has a beginning and will have an end... until it starts again and again. War is hell on earth and is the opposite of what Jesus taught our human race.

When war ends, the pain does not go away. Many families lose their loved ones, many of those who survive are seriously wounded either physically or psychologically. Their bodies and souls are injured. Many of the wounded soldiers will become unwanted by the same country that sent them to war. How do you heal and move forward? It is not easy. Even time does not have dominion over it. There are doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, different rehabilitation therapists, but they all have their limits.

In Ukraine, people are very family- and community-oriented, they like to be surrounded by people. Ukrainians do not break a sweat in an elevator when someone gets closer than two feet to them. Often times in a "marshrutka" (route taxi), as one of my driver friends told me, he tries to mix people up: man, woman, man, woman when he ckecks their tickets. People ride shoulder-to-shoulder, interact, talk to each other about everything and everyone, usually not even having an inch of distance between them. By the way, they are not only OK with it, they want it. After they get out of the marshrutka, everybody is happy.

This is how it used to be for millenia. God created a man and woman, not a man and a dog or a woman and a cat, but a man and a woman. Now, it is theraputic when a person feels that he or she is wanted and belongs in society! That is a good start, but where is God in all this? He is not necessarily a person with a long white beard sitting on a cloud somewhere above, extending a finger toward a man, but a loving Father and Creator who loves each and every one of us more than we can imagine.

He is everywhere and within us. In Aramaic, in the Lord's prayer, is says "dwashmeya" twice, Our Father who is everywhere and Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, which is everywhere. What is not do-able for a man is do-able for God our Father. It is no secret that a wound heals much faster when you pray, that is a visible way of an an invisible work of God on our body and soul.

Not all wounded soldiers have families or someone they can go to. When I was in the U.S., I had a friend who joined the army as a ranger as soon as he turned 18. He saw 7 years of war in Afganistan and Iraq. It was not easy to persuade him to stop taking drugs. Everybody who was there had to smoke weed to not go crazy. We communicated and he almost graduated from technical college until he called me one day and said he had to see the world.

I needed to tell him I could trust him more than anybody else around. I asked him to at least graduate as it was his last semester. He looked me in the eye and gave me an answer that I still remember, I have not seen anything but war in my life. I smiled as I realized he was right. I answered, "Go, but let me know where you go so I could get you out if necessary." He did go to see the world, first South America then Asia. Then he organized a rehabilitation organization in DC to help soldiers.

After this war ends, many wounded soldiers will not have a place or someone they can return to. If they end up living on the street, society in general will not necessarily greet them with open arms. In a reabilitation center such as an Agape Restoration Community where several generations, young and old, live in God's love, true miracles can happen. Wherever Ukrainians go, they have to be connected to God, community, and land. Serving Liturgy, cultivating land (at least a garden), and having community all together, is this not the true Kingdom of God here and among us? If you would like to "Donate," please designate your gift for "Ukraine." And please share these special requests: A Personal Note. Thanks in advance!

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"WAR FOR LAND"

 

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Please read "WAR FOR LAND" below. It seems that people have gone mad. They are simply protesting mindlessly, parroting the anti-(whatever politician they don't like) disinformation, the anti-Israel and anti-Ukraine propaganda that is flooding over the internet and outside agitators taking over university campuses; a recent local news item stated that not a single one of the protest organizers at U of Pittsburgh were students there. Please also see this "letter to U. of Edinburgh protesters" written in April 2021 by reknowned Scottish professor of Middle Eastern Studies Denis MacEoin that refutes the current flood of anti-semitic and anti-Israel disinformation.

The current U.S. president proclaimed Easter Sunday this year to be "Transgender Day of Visibility" - see www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/03/29/a-proclamation-on-transgender-day-of-visibility-2024/. What blasphemy! And the decrease in natural reproduction because of transgenderism, homosexuality, and abortion is bringing about the extinction of our population... so, as a leading politician said recently, we need all those illegal immigrants as workers.

The former U.S. president was convicted last week for committing adultery with a porn star, covering it up by paying her hush money, then writing it off as a legal expense, saying – "I didn't do anything wrong." (The local court that tried him had no jurisdiction to handle federal election law violations, and adultery and paying for non-disclosure agreements may not be illegal, but are still immoral and wrong.) Our country has sunk to the depths of moral depravity! And our country continues to print "funny money" for handouts with no goods or services to back it up, resulting now in a deficit of over a TRILLION dollars. Those "freebies" aren't free, they are actually a hidden tax that results in higher prices for goods and services, in other words, inflation.

Meanwhile, some conservatives have taken the insane position of aiding the neo-Stalinist regime in Russia by withholding aid to Ukraine. Stalin once said – "The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." Is that what we think when we watch the evening news: just more boring statistics? Millions of Ukrainians and Russians are being killed, both military and civilians. See this May 29 RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT from the ISW. A friend from Ukraine whom we met at our former church in Madison, WI, was born there and is now a U.S. citizen. He and his wife returned just for a visit in April 2021 but stayed on because of the Covid pandemic lockdowns (no airline flights) and the cost of having their baby in Ukraine versus in the U.S.

Now they are stuck there: as of June 1, men aged 18-60 who were born in Ukraine, regardless of dual citizenship, must not leave Ukraine. He sent me a link to the following YouTube video of the forced mobilization of men in Ukraine: it is entitled "A Veritable Safari" translated from Ukrainian – https://youtu.be/mOCWcQHloHw?si=gCti7kmJ3BiVQvE2. Please also read his report on the War in Ukraine.

The world has gone crazy. Here's my latest essay: WAR FOR LAND

In the C.E (“Common Era” – it’s considered ignorant and bigoted to say “A.D” – Anno Domini in Latin, which means “in the year of our Lord”), it is nevertheless important to realize that modern thinking is still permeated with the Christian ethic of loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you. This ethic is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but is often paid only lipservice, as in calling the spy and war bureaus the departments of “State” and “Defense.”

Various reasons (rationalizations) are given, but the most basic reason for war is to seize the land and its wealth that belong to another country or nation. “The white man’s burden” or “The land of our ancestors” or “Making the world safe for Democracy” or “Lebensraum” or “Denazification” or “Manifest Destiny” or the “fulfillment of Bible prophecy” – all of these reasons have been used to justify land grabs. Ancient Israel once extended up into Lebanon and Syria, and included the territory of Gath (now Gaza) inhabited by the Philistines (now Palestinians). Israel’s leaders, not bothered by Christian ethics, claim that the current war in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria fulfill God’s command to exterminate those people and fulfill Bible prophecies such as in Jeremiah chapter 47. If we believe that the Bible is true, then we must conclude that the "C.E." age of grace is wrapping up.

Other examples: the U.S. of today is the result of wars with the British, the French, the Spanish, and native Indian tribes. These are all normalized by the signing of peace treaties at the end, in which the loser gives up claims to some or all its land. After a war with European powers, the U.S. acquired Florida from Spain in 1819. Texas and southern California were annexed and became states in 1845 after wars with Mexico along with Alaska and northern California, which had been settled as far south as Fort Ross, California, 90 miles from San Francisco Bay by Russians, was acquired from Russia peacefully (of all things!) for $7.2 million in 1867. After the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines became U.S. protectorates in 1898.

We hardly need to mention the many wars in Europe to establish and widen kingdoms and empires – the German, Dutch, French, British, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires to name a few. Ukraine had slipped out from Russian control after World War One. The outcome of that war broke up not only the Russian Empire but also the British, French, Dutch, and German colonies in Africa and Asia. But in 1932-1933 Stalin’s “Holodomor” (literally “starvation plague”) killed 5 million Ukrainians to bring that area back under Russia’s new Soviet empire, resettling the Donbas, the eastern part, with Russians. Now one of Russia’s excuses for its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 is “to protect native Russian speakers” (who were not native to Ukraine three generations ago). In 1938-39 Hitler invaded Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, which precipitated World War Two.

The horrific nature of those wars and all modern warfare includes “total war” – the mass killing of whole civilian populations along with enemy combatants, using methods such as nuclear weapons, poison gas, napalm, land mines, thousands of bomblets in each artillery shell, and gas-air bombs that suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere, causing masses of people to suffocate. This is all justified by calling them “enemy co-belligerents” for co-operating with their own country’s soldiers.

But what would be more natural than for civilians to side with their own fighters in a conflict? Would not the Spanish and Mexican settlers in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California have offered support and shelter to their soldiers? Would not an army make use of secret agents, guerrilla fighters, and partisans all purporting to be civilians, to pave the way for an invasion? Consider the millions upon millions of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S.A.: we know that some of them are foreign agents, but we simply don’t know how many others are. What if this is an elaborate plan to infiltrate our country with trained guerrilla fighters in order to foment an insurrection? Mexico doubtless has many citizens who hold a grudge with the U.S. for seizing so much of its former territory. Could a morally, demographically, and economically weakened U.S. withstand such an attack from within?

You can read and download just this "War For Land" article as a PDF at https://agape-biblia.org/War-for-Land.pdf, and share it!