4. Ann, Obama and the IRS aren’t worth losing your freedom over. The only way you can accomplish anything is if you keep your freedom.
And this is the point. What you idiots simply refuse to grasp is that it is I who will be maintaining my freedom while you descend into total, complete slavery. Are you so dimwitted that you cannot understand what is hammered home time after time after time in scripture, and reinforced by the entire Roman Martyrology for two thousand years?
What is freedom? Freedom is to be alive in Christ Jesus. Freedom isn’t keeping your money or your house or your car or your shit. Freedom isn’t going hither and yon whenever you please. Freedom isn’t earthly liberty. Earthly liberty is a mere derivative of authentic freedom, which is Jesus Christ Himself. Reject Christ, and you’re already a slave, and thus earthly liberty will be impossible. That’s why this is happening. This nation has rejected Christ and thus the earthly liberty that WAS a derivative of a Christian culture is now rapidly evanescing. This nation has embraced evil, and with evil inevitably comes chains. Day by day, link by link, this nation is forging its own chains, and it is so far gone that even the Christians are happily embracing the chains, ridiculing and desperately trying to convince those few who refuse to be chained that the only way to be free is to bow down and put on the chains too. Well, to hell with that shit, I say.
Very true. She certainly has a way with words. Miss Barnhardt (I think she will be okay with Miss) reminds me a lot of my wife. She could be one of my wife's sisters, specifically the beautifully crazy one -- wait, that doesn't narrow it to one. Ann even bears a remarkable physical resemblance to wife and two of her sisters when they were Ann's age. I love Ann Barnhardt. I love the fact that she disturbs me. I love the fact that she's a little disturbed. She's obviously extremely intelligent, if somewhat unorthodox in her thinking. I like that, too. When anyone attacks her, I feel like coming to her defense as I would for my daughter.
The gist of her latest righteous rant is that she is not going to pay taxes to support the baby-killing Obama regime. She says she will not back down and will go to jail if it comes to that. She is going to be obedient to Christ and refuse to bow to Caesar. She parallels Polycarp's refusal to worship Caesar with her refusal to support the state with her taxes. This is not hyperbole or bluster on her part. You can read the IRS letter demanding she comply on her site a couple of posts below the "Pagan Idiots" posts.
I believe God can impress and speak to people individually. I think it is possible, even probable that God has impressed this act of civil disobedience upon Ann's spirit and conscience such that she has to obey. The question is, does her stance apply to all of us as Christians? Are we all obligated to follow her lead -- what she would say is Christ's lead, and refuse to pay our taxes until the government stops doing evil things like funding abortions or forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives and violate their sacred beliefs and doctrines? Make no mistake, in my mind, those things are evil. A lot that the government does is not only morally repugnant but a blatant overstepping of the limitations laid down in the Constitution. People's rights are violated every day in the name of the War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Poverty, War on Racism, etc.
People accused of drug crimes have their property ceased without due process. All it takes is the issuance of a warrant. We are paying for that. We are paying for SWAT teams to "dynamically enter" the wrong houses with no-knock warrants, destroying private property and terrorizing innocent citizens. We are paying for police officers who routinely shoot family dogs whenever they enter a residence or otherwise trespass on the private land of citizens. We are paying for my granddaughter's Geometry teacher who does not know anything about Geometry and is unable to teach a course my granddaughter needs to finish high school. You get extra credit if you can guess the teacher's sex and race. Not much, though, it ain't hard.
What isn't outright evil is unbridled stupidity -- all on my dime or the dime of my grandchildren's grandchildren. I understand Ann Barnhardt's thinking. We need to put a stop to this nonsense, and the only way to do it is to starve the beast.
Back in the land of Judea in those glorious days of the Incarnation, the God-fearing Jews faced a similar situation. They were taxed by the godless Romans, and their taxes were used to pay for their own enslavement and oppression. Some wanted to rebel, to rise up against Rome and throw off the yoke. Jesus was seen as a leader, possibly a deliverer. He was quite a hero among the peasantry. He was well-regarded. The Pharisees, though, were troubled by Him. They sought some advantage, some issue they could use against Him. Perhaps taxes, someone suggested. Thus a delegation was sent to the Rabbi to ask His worthy opinion on an unclear point. Is it, they queried, lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?
Jesus did not hesitate. He asked one of them for a coin, studied it a moment, held it up, passed it back to the owner. Then He offered a question in response to theirs, Whose image is on the coin? A delegate responded without hesitation, Caesar's image, of course! Indeed, Jesus said, then give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's.
(As an aside, the scenario in Matthew 17:24-27 in which Peter is told to find the money to cover their taxes in a fish's mouth is different. That is not a government tax but a "tax" imposed by Moses to support the priests and Levites, a temple tax.)
There are people upset over the fact that their taxes go to pay for killing Islamic terrorists. I'm not one of those people. I think of that as an investment in a shared vision -- the terrorists want to be martyred and go to paradise. I'm happy to foot the bill to send them.
On the other hand, I am opposed to the government using my tax dollars to fund abortions, to pay people to sit on their asses and have more out-of-wedlock babies, to provide food, housing, and medical care to people who are already law-breakers for having crossed the border illegally -- you get the picture. In a representative republic, there are going to be some government expenditures we dislike but pay for because the majority is in favor of this or that program. Everybody is going to be unhappy about something the government funds.
I despise income tax. I loathe the IRS. Nonetheless, paying my taxes or filing a return or allowing a chunk of my paycheck to be withheld or paying property taxes or federal gas taxes or whatever is not the same as worshiping the state -- not to me. We always have to beware the slippery slope -- that we are not being asked to directly violate our beliefs -- as the Catholic Church now is by the Department of Health and Human Services ruling. The Church must refuse to go along with the Obama regime with regard to contraceptives, homosexual marriage and anything similar.
Perhaps it is just rationalization on my part, my money, after all, enables people to encourage evil, but it also does some good. In a dilemma such as this I look to Jesus, to the words of Scripture, to my own conscience. There is a line government demands can cross that becomes intolerable. In Romans 13, Paul instructed us to regard government as being established by God, and I think that some government is necessary in a fallen world. We do need something to backstop civilization. However, clearly, government can become and is becoming the main force in destroying civilization. As it attacks the Church (not just the Catholic Church) and traditional values, tears apart families and tries to make a mockery of marriage, government has become an instrument of oppression and destruction wielded by men and women who are antichrists.
We are required to stand up and resist. Whether that means refusing to pay taxes to a rogue government or taking up arms or simply patiently and prudently preparing to wait out a system which will collapse under its own weight is a decision that must be made prayerfully by each individual. Choose wisely.
Follow-up here.
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