Just back from church, where Barry said a truth. He hates religion. For religion is about saying that we have virtue, and we can earn our way into righteousness. I began to think that we are all religious, but the kind of religion we believe in has consequences. Consider this woman. She firmly believes in the Palestinian cause, and she has the leftist propaganda services working full time.

A convicted terrorist and darling of left-wing activists has accepted a plea deal in which she will be stripped of her citizenship and be deported.

Rasmea Odeh, 69, will avoid jail time as part of the deal, the Rasmea Defense Committee announced on Thursday.

“Under this current, racist political climate, and facing 18 months or more of imprisonment, as well as the possibility of indefinite detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Rasmea has made the difficult decision to accept a plea agreement,” reads a statement from Rasmea Defense Committee.

“She will plead guilty to Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization, lose her U.S. citizenship, and be forced to leave the country, but will exit the U.S. without having to serve any more time in prison or ICE detention, a victory, considering that the government had earlier fought for a sentence of 5-7 years.”

Odeh’s case has been in limbo since 2014, when a federal judge in Detroit sentenced her to 18 months in prison for immigration fraud for lying on her visa and citizenship forms about her past terrorism convictions and her ties to a terrorist group.

An activist with the Arab American Action Network, Odeh was alleged to be a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terror group. She was convicted in Israel in 1970 of taking part in two bombings the year before, one at a supermarket in Jerusalem and another at the British consulate. Two Israeli students were killed in the supermarket bombing. Nine were injured in the two blasts.

Odeh was freed from prison in 1980 as part of a prisoner exchange. She emigrated to the U.S. in the 1990s and gained citizenship in 2004. She has denied taking part in the terrorist acts and has claimed that she was tortured and sexually assaulted by Israeli police to elicit her confession.

The staunch Muslim believes that he or she has a right to push Islamic law in any country there are Muslims, and that the State of Israel should be destroyed. They want us enslaved in their religion.

However, the staunch leftist is equally religious, and loves to gain approval, and damn people for blasphemy (which they call hate speech) as frequently, if not more so.

I see one difference: the leftist fatwas have the power of the state behind them. Mark Steyn notes that the elite will sacrifice citizens for the right to be called virtuous by this civil religion.

This is the depravity of the political class,” Steyn said. “They’re basically willing to offer up their own citizens, 14-year-old schoolgirls and sacrifice them on the altar of diversity and virtue signaling and the shameless political posturing. You know, as we saw in the Gorsuch hearing — Democrats, particularly, have great empathy in theory but the practical consequences of that poser empathy are what happened to that girl in this school bathroom a few days ago. There is no benefit to the citizens and legal residents of the United States in fetishizing mass illegal immigration. And shame on this county and the state of Maryland for going along with it.”

We need to shun such false religions. And we need to not claim that keeping the law can save us. For we are rotten: from within comes lust, greed, envy, and violence. Our society inflames such, knowing that they are as opiate to the serfs.

Galatians 4:21-5:1

²¹Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? ²²For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. ²³One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. ²⁴Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. ²⁵Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. ²⁶But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. ²⁷For it is written,
“Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children,
burst into song and shout, you who endure no birth pangs;
for the children of the desolate woman are more numerous
than the children of the one who is married.”
²⁸Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac. ²⁹But just as at that time the child who was born according to the flesh persecuted the child who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also.³⁰But what does the scripture say? “Drive out the slave and her child; for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman.” ³¹So then, friends, we are children, not of the slave but of the free woman. ^5:1For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

Ephesians 5:8-14

⁸For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light — ⁹for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. ¹⁰Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.¹¹Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. ¹²For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; ¹³but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, ¹⁴for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,
“Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”

Hebrews 10:4-10

⁴For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. ⁵Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body you have prepared for me;
⁶   in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
⁷   Then I said, ‘See, God, I have come to do your will, O God’
(in the scroll of the book it is written of me).”
⁸When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), ⁹then he added, “See, I have come to do your will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. ¹⁰And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

The first point from the readings is that God hates religion. He hates those who would sacrifice animals or give money or place people at risk in the hope that they can appease the Gods. For there is a spiritual world, and it is fallen: Lucifer and his minions were cast out from heaven, and, since the fall, have callen themselves gods. They set up false religions: you can tell a false religion by the corpses it generates.

The second point is that Evil is always within us. Barry’s illustration was that when he was a kid you bought porn at the local dairy: now you can access it on any internet device. We have an industry (that is legal in NZ) that caters for our lusts… and another one that deals with our gluttony and envy: the mass media.

Within us remains anger, wrath, lust, greed, envy and gossip. We can find ourselves falling into these habits, or more sublty, into the idea that if we don’t do anything deemed wrong we are righteous.

But there is no one righteous in this world but the incarnate Christ, who the religious authorities got killed real quick. We will always have to deal with those sins that tempt us. Without Christ, we are indeed evil, and our religion will increase evil.

In Christ we have freedom, and this we can choose to use for the glory of God. Follow that path, and accept not the narratives of this world and its gods, for they will damn you.