Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is a program designed
to bring you information,
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analysis and
up-to-date facts and figures
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about religious
liberty through the ages
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and around the world,
mostly in the United States.
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My name is Lincoln Steed.
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I've been editor
of Liberty magazine
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for 22 years
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and doing this
program for most of that time.
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Usually I have a guest.
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Today I've decided to self guest
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and some of the
camera crew here have been
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waggishly suggesting that
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it might be trouble
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if I get into an
argument with myself.
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And since I don't get
into arguments with the guests,
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I think we'll be fine.
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But I want to share a
few things with the viewers.
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And some of you have been
with me most of that time,
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for others, you may have
just discovered this program.
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And I hope that
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even in
discovering this program,
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you've figured out of
late that religious freedom,
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civil liberties,
religious liberties,
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issues of conscience
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are front and center today.
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I've lived in the
US for most of my life,
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but I was born and
raised in Australia
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and left there almost at 16.
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I remember turning 16
on the boat coming over.
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There were planes when I was
young, my "children" who are,
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one a teen and the
other in early 20s,
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but still as their age befits,
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they're a little
cynical about their dad.
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And, you know, they
might jokingly say, oh,
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"Did they have
planes when you were young?"
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When I tell my life
story, I sometimes wonder myself
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because we came
to the US in a boat,
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there were planes, but it
was at that crazy stage cheaper
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to take a British ocean liner
in the manner of the Titanic,
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where there was
still the classes
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and the lower classes were
locked in a separate section,
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it was the old
style way of traveling.
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And it was cheaper
than traveling in a plane.
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And the jets, even
though they existed then
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were not quite capable of doing
non-stop flights to Australia
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as they now are.
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The national
airline of Australia
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has an Airbus 380
that does a non-stop
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from Dallas, Texas
to Sydney, Australia.
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Amazing.
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Although I noticed that
if the winds are little off,
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they can't make it and
they have to land short
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somewhere else.
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So, I don't like
that sort of an idea.
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But when I think back I
can remember on the streets,
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outside our house, the
horse drawn bread carts,
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there were
trucks around and cars,
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but they were still
using horse drawn camps
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for certain sales jobs.
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I can remember the
men carrying long sticks,
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saplings down the
street on their shoulder
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and calling out clothes props.
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Australia's a
little behind the US
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although they think ahead,
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because many people would
rather hang their clothes out
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to dry to get that fresh smell,
rather than an electric dryer.
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So, they had a few,
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but it was still where
most people were washing
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maybe by hand,
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certainly with a more simple
mechanical ringer arrangement
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and they needed
those clothes props.
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Another era, I can
remember even as some Americans
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may resonate with the fuller
brush man going door to door.
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But what I most
remember it stuck in my mind
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as a young person with
the issues of conscience.
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I grew up in the
aftermath of World War II,
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and the emergence of a...
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What was seen in the west
is a global communist threat.
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And as I've gotten older,
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I think a lot of
it was political hype.
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It wasn't made up,
but it was twisted in ways
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that were only
just understanding
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that a Russia per
se, the Soviet Union,
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I don't think now was ever a
direct military threat to us.
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It certainly was not likely
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to momentarily visit on us.
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What in the
newspapers in Australia
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would regularly show
as the destruction zone,
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when the nuclear bomb hit
over the general post office,
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they would be
circular lines out of the,
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you know, the
first mile, half a mile
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or something
incinerated, you're gone.
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Then the next one,
you know, badly burned,
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maybe never recover,
then radiation sickness.
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And I remember we
were about 14 miles out
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when I first noticed this
at our division headquarters
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up in the hills,
and that was the zone
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where you would have some
sort of lingering illness.
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And, of course blinded, if you
looked at the light and so on.
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But we felt a little safe
that we were gonna survive,
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but it did trouble me a little.
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And even to this day,
I think it's sort of odd
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that why was that
bomb going to explode
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over the general post office?
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I don't even think
after watching the Iraq War,
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the Middle East War, that
these so-called smart bombs
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are quite that smart.
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Once the killing starts
either the accuracy drops
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or the interest
in being accurate.
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But that was the era that we
lived in this massive threat,
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the communist hordes
moving down into Korea
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and of course,
Indochina and so on.
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And then as I came
to the US as a teenager,
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Australia was
already fighting there.
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The US was, and I was
faced with the double hazard.
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If I stayed in Australia,
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I would be
inducted into the military,
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in the US subject
to the draft here,
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but it was all seemed in a good
cause to stop global communism.
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But what was really
going on unassailably true
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was direct
persecution of Christians,
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particularly in
communist countries.
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Because communism,
if you know nothing else
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about it is the religion
of man and his progress.
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Very few people have
read Marx and Engels.
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You should, it's
not gonna pervert
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a clear thinking person,
but it will convict many people
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who have never thought about it
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before of the
injustice and the inequalities
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and the social strata
that passed for the way things
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should be, but where
people that have power
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and money
squeezed down those below.
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The Bible talks
a lot about that.
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In Revelation it
says, howl you merchants,
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for you have kept
back the wages by fraud.
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And it also says
that those merchants
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are gonna howl with horror,
as they see the great city,
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this industrial
commercial edifice
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that they've erected
toward the end of time,
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they'll see this
disappear and their money,
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their fortune, and
their livelihood disappearing
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in one hour.
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Even if it was one relapse,
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but even a prophetic
hour would just be in days.
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All of it to
disappear like that.
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That's predicted at the end,
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but it's in the context
of great personal abuses
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or abuses against individuals.
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And the persecution of
Christians by communism,
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because religion was
not, not just not necessary.
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It was a counter to communism,
which was the religion of man
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and his perfectibility
and the prosperity
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that would come by
having all things in common.
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Sounds familiar, the New
Testament talks about that,
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but for a different
purpose in anticipation
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of God's eternal kingdom.
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I can remember the
first time my father,
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who was the temperance leader
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for the Seventh-day
Adventist world headquarters.
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And in educating
against alcohol and drugs
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and tobacco in particular,
he traveled the world.
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And many, many
times he was able to get
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into communist countries at the
invitation of the government,
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not as a church leader, not
just to talk to church members,
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but at the
invitation of the governments,
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because they
were very moralistic.
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People have forgotten that,
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the religion of man means
the perfectibility of man.
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The perfectibility of
man means you don't want him
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ruining his mind and his
body by habits and substances
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that are gonna destroy him.
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So they will welcome him
to come in and teach them.
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And I remember the
first time I went with him
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as he was a
guest of the government
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in Bulgaria it was.
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We were picked up at the airport
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by communist officials.
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We didn't know who they
were in a big limousine.
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And we drove from the airport
down to a large not motel,
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hotel in the middle
of Sophia, the capital.
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But along the way, all
down the side of the street
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were these huge
murals, some of them with the,
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you know, the crowds
marching and communist fervor,
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but most of them at
that time were close up
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framed cameos of
the different leaders.
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And I remember
one time my father
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looked at our not the
driver, but our guard.
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And saw it was his picture.
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And dad says, "You
know, what's going on?"
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He says, "Oh,
it's election time."
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And dad says, "Well,
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I certainly wish you
the best in the election."
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"Don't worry, he says,
nobody's running against me."
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So, he was the leader
of, I don't think the country
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at that point, but at
certainly of the communist party
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in Bulgaria, they had elections.
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They were just rather rigged.
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And we think we've
got rigged elections.
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Some people who had nothing
like what was going on there.
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But they had
this moralistic take.
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And during that same visit,
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I remember being
seriously impressed
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by the difficulties
that our members faced.
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We went to church.
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My father never made it secret
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that he was a
Seventh-day Adventist Christian.
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And I don't
believe that we should go
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as Ellen White writing to
Seventh-day Adventist said,
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she says, we're
to unfurl our colors.
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People have a right to
know who you stand for,
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who you represent, unfurl
your colors, don't hide it.
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And my father didn't, and I
can remember they allowed him
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to speak and I'm gonna
read my, one of my editorials,
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my last editorial in
the second half of the show.
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And I do allude
to the same story,
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but they said that he
could bring greetings,
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not allowed to preach to them
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because these were
the scum of the earth
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for the communist regime.
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They only let him
talk to these people
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'cause they were his
fellow church members.
00:11:15.44\00:11:17.27
But in communism, you weren't
always directly persecuted,
00:11:17.31\00:11:20.91
but you were marginalized
because by openly acknowledging
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that you were a Christian,
00:11:25.35\00:11:26.68
you were opting out
of the worker's paradise.
00:11:26.72\00:11:29.48
You were showing that
you were not going to be part
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of this paradise on earth,
00:11:32.15\00:11:34.96
that you were not
gonna be loyal to the state,
00:11:34.99\00:11:37.59
loyal to the party
interests, loyal to the people,
00:11:37.63\00:11:40.10
to your neighbors.
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You were loyal to God.
00:11:41.50\00:11:42.83
You were part of another kingdom
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and their best policy outside
of the persecutions of Stalin
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and a few other despots,
00:11:48.50\00:11:50.11
which certainly under communism,
00:11:50.14\00:11:52.51
but that was an
aberration even of their dream.
00:11:52.54\00:11:56.68
But you know, part of
what was going on there
00:11:56.71\00:11:59.65
was that they thought if
they could isolate Christians.
00:11:59.68\00:12:02.88
Give them a
limited time to meet,
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restrict their
ability to pass on their faith
00:12:05.39\00:12:08.96
to their children.
00:12:08.99\00:12:10.33
If they could keep it sort
of compounded at a distance,
00:12:10.36\00:12:14.60
those people would die
out, lose interest, lose life,
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disappear, and communism would
go towards its grand future.
00:12:17.80\00:12:23.51
And I do
remember clearly my father
00:12:23.54\00:12:28.01
talking for a long time,
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I think it was an
hour bringing greetings.
00:12:30.21\00:12:32.61
And it sounded
like a sermon to me.
00:12:32.65\00:12:34.58
It was a sermon,
but the communists
00:12:34.62\00:12:37.35
were accepting that,
well, this is his greetings.
00:12:37.39\00:12:40.32
And afterwards we met with
the translator and his daughter
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and the translator
with tears in his eyes said
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that this is my daughter,
she comes to Sabbath school.
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She comes to church.
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She's supposed to go
to a school on Sabbath
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and the state is going
to take her away from us
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as they would
and did many times.
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And the thing that I try to tell
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even people in
the United States,
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there are cases and
will be many more cases
00:13:05.35\00:13:08.12
where even here social
services have that same power.
00:13:08.15\00:13:12.32
And if it's
deemed that your religion
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is harmful to the
children and some religions,
00:13:14.59\00:13:17.83
some cultish
beliefs are dangerous.
00:13:17.86\00:13:22.76
And if that's
deemed to be certain,
00:13:22.80\00:13:25.00
they'll take the children away,
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but it was
certainly far more common
00:13:26.47\00:13:28.07
under communism of that era.
00:13:28.10\00:13:29.47
And the threat was real.
00:13:29.50\00:13:31.14
That was
persecution, family breakup,
00:13:31.17\00:13:34.61
and that stuck in my mind.
00:13:34.64\00:13:37.25
And I can remember
making a determination
00:13:37.28\00:13:40.12
that in some way I
would raise an awareness
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of this in the rest of my life,
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and never knowing that
I'd be with Liberty magazine
00:13:44.92\00:13:47.29
or doing a TV
program like this, though,
00:13:47.32\00:13:49.59
it planted in me a
compulsion to speak
00:13:49.62\00:13:53.26
about religious liberty,
00:13:53.29\00:13:55.23
in the larger
context of civil liberties.
00:13:55.26\00:13:58.43
There is a reason
for religious liberty.
00:13:58.47\00:14:01.10
It is not as many people imagine
00:14:01.14\00:14:03.34
just a litany of
court cases and the efforts
00:14:03.37\00:14:06.74
to supposedly
recover what's automatically
00:14:06.78\00:14:10.45
in the US Constitution
or any constitution.
00:14:10.48\00:14:14.02
You know, Paul
used his citizenship
00:14:14.05\00:14:17.92
as a Roman to certain advantage.
00:14:17.95\00:14:20.06
But I could hardly imagine Paul
00:14:20.09\00:14:24.86
making a gospel construct
00:14:24.89\00:14:27.13
that Rome was sort of God's
way of protecting the faith.
00:14:27.16\00:14:31.23
Not at all.
00:14:31.27\00:14:32.60
Rome was opposed to true
belief, just as capitalism,
00:14:32.63\00:14:36.10
even democracy in
its modern human form.
00:14:36.14\00:14:39.04
At best they're
benign toward religion
00:14:39.07\00:14:42.04
because all systems are defunct
00:14:42.08\00:14:46.28
and defective
compared to God's system,
00:14:46.31\00:14:49.18
God's eternal coming kingdom.
00:14:49.22\00:14:51.82
Let's take a break.
00:14:51.85\00:14:53.19
And after the break, I wanna
share that editorial with you
00:14:53.22\00:14:55.49
that I wrote fairly recently.
00:14:55.52\00:14:57.03
I think it's just
barely been printed
00:14:57.06\00:14:58.96
and not knowing
when this will be shown,
00:14:58.99\00:15:01.00
but this is my
swansong statement
00:15:01.03\00:15:03.90
in Liberty magazine.
00:15:03.93\00:15:05.27