Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break,
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I was trying to set
the scene from John,
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the Gospel of John,
where a ruler in Israel,
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Nicodemus came by night
that says to talk with Jesus.
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Of course, by then Jesus
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was making a big
fuss in the land.
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People were following
Him, crowds of people were told
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not just His 12
disciples, not just the women,
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if you read the
gospels, clearly,
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there are a
large number of women
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that traveled with them often
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as well as bringing
them food and sustenance.
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Like one of the followers,
women followers of Jesus
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was the wife of Herod's steward.
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If you read
these books carefully,
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you find an inter relationship
that's quite amazing.
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When Jesus, during his
passion was taken before Herod,
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remember Herod
had heard about him,
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it says, and so he
asked Him to do a miracle.
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Well, he certainly
would have heard about
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Jesus through his steward,
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his top official
in the household.
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And then there was not
just the 70 that Jesus sent out
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throughout the towns
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and villages of that whole area.
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There was, Jesus
was a phenomenon,
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it's quite obvious.
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And here this ruler
in Israel came singly,
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it seems, at
night to talk to Jesus.
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And earlier I said, I
let him off the hook a bit,
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I don't think he
was afraid to see Jesus.
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If he had any fear,
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it might have
been that his fellow,
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fellows on the ruling council
might have sneered at him.
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But he just came
in a natural time
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after the business of the day,
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when people
typically to this day
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in that part of the
world, sit around and talk and,
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you know, have refreshments
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and enjoy the cool
which they couldn't
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during the non-air
conditioned environment before.
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And so Nicodemus came
and asked, and Jesus said,
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you must be born again.
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And it's troubled me greatly
that in the United States
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where there's a lot
of talk of religion,
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which is a sign
of a great heritage,
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because religious
liberty is part of the history
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and indeed even the mythology
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of the founding
of the United States.
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A country that is secular,
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the government is
calculatedly secular,
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but the history
of the United States
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before the
country was even formed
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before the War of Independence,
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there were indeed a
number of Puritan settlements
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that were done for an
overtly religious reason.
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Even in that era,
there were a number of people
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escaping persecution
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from the wars of
religion in Europe.
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And after the United
States was founded even,
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a number of refugee groups
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came from some
overtly religious reasons.
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I live in Maryland.
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And I'm right near
the Pennsylvania border.
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And I can tell you,
there's a lot of Amish
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and Mennonite
people up in that area.
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And, of course, the Anabaptists
and they fled persecution.
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So that part of
the narrative is true,
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even though we're
a secular government.
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But that said,
the religious nature
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of the United States
has changed radically.
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And the efforts now to gain
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what is seen as
religious liberty
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often are a privilege state
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for a certain
particular religious viewpoint,
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not necessarily a
broad waterfront of rights
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for people of faith to
exist in the secular community.
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And what I think is
missing, I've analyzed this
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and looked at it many
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which ways and I've
come to believe that
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what is usually
missing is the spirituality
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that gives
charity and, you know,
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deep religious tint
to religious activities,
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without that it's
just an organization.
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It's just a pressure group.
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It's just a
special interest group.
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And I've listened
to the religious right.
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And they don't talk
much about the new birth,
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a total sea
change in thinking that
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brings a spiritual
"otherworldliness."
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It's not that you're
removed from this world,
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but you're, as the
Bible says your things
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are set up,
your mind is set upon
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the things that are above.
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When that is the case,
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I believe religious liberty
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is advanced a little differently
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than the often
overtly political way that
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we're seeing today
and not talk about that.
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Instead, what is characterized
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a lot of the
religious expression
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in the
political and public sense
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has been talked
about Dominionism.
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The power, the control that
was given to God's faithful,
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they say, starting
with the Garden of Eden
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when dominion over the creatures
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was given to Adam and Eve.
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I read into that form
of Dominion really custody,
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and the obligation
to care for things,
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but Dominionism as
it's written in our era,
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is really people of a Christian
or religious profession,
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having the right to
mind to the heart's content,
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to deny environmental change,
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and say that, you know,
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it's not happening first of all,
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but you know, we'll
do whatever we want to.
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I really don't see
Dominionism able to be
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expressed anywhere
near the way it is now,
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if the emphasis
was on spirituality
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and the new birth,
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and I believe
that's what's missing.
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Over the recent years,
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I've often
reached back into history
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for some of my examples.
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And as a six or seven year old,
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I was very enamored
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with John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress.
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And I think
even on this program,
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I've told about attending
the summer 10th session
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as a child where
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they were
serializing that story.
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Exciting, but I've been taken
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recently to not just
read Pilgrim's Progress,
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but to go and read
John Bunyan's own testimony.
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And he tells there,
how he was a foul mouthed.
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He was a Christian,
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in a general sense enough
to be afraid of the judgment.
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But he fought in the Civil
War on the parliamentary side,
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but alongside the Puritans.
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But he had no real
religion at that point.
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He was foul mouthed, gambler,
cheater, and all the rest.
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But slowly he saw
the attraction in people
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that knew God that had
a heavenly sensibility.
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And he said, he, even though
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he thought he knew the Bible,
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he didn't
understand its root emphasis.
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He didn't understand
the deeper spiritual meaning
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until he met some
poor, simple Christian women,
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talking about the grace of God
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and what He had
done in their lives.
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And then John Bunyan
said, by this, he says,
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my mind was so
fixed on spiritual things
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that it was like a
horse leech at the vein,
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you know, a big horse leech
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sucking the
blood out of the vein.
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And he says, and
crying more, more, more.
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You know, that's what the
Bible is calling us all toward,
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a spiritual hunger
that can be only fulfilled
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when you have the
sensibility that appreciates it.
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Without that religion
is a pernicious force.
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And this is the
greatest irony of our age,
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and age, very much like
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what the Old
Testament talks about
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in the time of the judges,
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when the Word of God
was rare in those days,
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as it says, the
prophets were not obvious.
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The theocracy
is long since gone.
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And it says every man did
what was right in his own eyes.
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When you have the new birth,
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you don't do what's
right in your own eyes.
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You do what is natural,
to someone that's hungering
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and searching
after righteousness,
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to use the Bible term.
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That's what's
needed in the US today.
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And as we head
into great stresses,
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COVID just one of them,
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economic
collapse or an economic...
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Collapse is a strong word,
but an economic wakeup times
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certain to come in
the very near future,
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probably more extreme than 2008.
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As we head into a continued
round of natural disasters,
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that seemed to be
just increasing in severity
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and frequency,
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and they're
draining the treasury,
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something extraordinary
will have to be done
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to keep our society together.
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And something
extraordinary needs to be done
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to defend religious and
other civil liberties in a time
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when it would seem
that all these must be
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thrown out for survival sake.
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In this era, we are
lost on religious liberty
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unless we see it in the context
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of the changed heart and mind
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that comes from a
spiritual, new love experience.
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Else it's just a
mechanical thing that
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the courts can look at and,
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you know, nod
toward and pass it off.
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It also could easily be
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what often
happens in the workplace,
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someone wants the
Sabbath accommodation.
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And under the present
system, it's just as likely,
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since the employer
has the whip hand on this,
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yes, I'll give
you this weekend off,
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but I can't give
you next weekend.
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That's not
religious accommodation.
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And if your heart is overflowing
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with love for God,
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you don't serve Him by halves,
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you serve Him with your
whole heart and your mind.
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And the trick is how to do that
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in an
increasingly secular society,
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a society that is
forgetting its norms,
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and the society
just like Nicodemus,
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that needs to be reminded
that you must be born again.
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Western history and Christianity
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took quite a turn,
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when would be
emperor Constantine said that
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he saw a vision in
the sky of a cross,
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and a voice that said, by
the sign you will conquer.
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You know, that's
the stuff of legend.
00:11:00.39\00:11:02.02
But in the record of history,
00:11:02.06\00:11:04.59
it led Christianity
in quite a dark alley,
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compulsion, state
religion and so on.
00:11:08.13\00:11:11.93
But what was missing from that,
in my view, was any evidence
00:11:11.97\00:11:15.50
that Constantine
had a heart change.
00:11:15.54\00:11:18.71
What we need today
and what's always needed.
00:11:18.74\00:11:22.61
As one writer that I
read, speaking about Christ,
00:11:22.64\00:11:25.11
the Christ we forget, he said,
00:11:25.15\00:11:26.88
we need once more
that living Christ,
00:11:26.92\00:11:29.32
not a crucifix, not as an image,
00:11:29.35\00:11:31.79
but as a living
dynamic presence in our heart.
00:11:31.82\00:11:35.22
With that present,
00:11:35.26\00:11:36.62
any discussion
of religious liberty
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takes its rightful
place in the rights
00:11:38.39\00:11:41.83
and privileges
of the modern era.
00:11:41.86\00:11:43.97
Without it, it's dead.
00:11:44.00\00:11:46.70
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:11:46.74\00:11:49.60