In 1929, Josef Stalin signed a law that dealt a devastating blow to religious freedom in Russia. For most of a century, Russian Christians suffered enormous persecutions for their faith. Some estimates suggest that as many as 20,000,000 Christians may have been martyred in prison camps in the 20^th century for holding to their faith. One historian stated that over 85,000 Russian Orthodox Priests were shot in 1937 alone.

Communism, despite its slogans of equality and social utopia, has never come through on its promises. Stalin’s draconian measures were reaffirmed by Leonid Brezhnev’s updated legislation in 1975. A remnant of faithful underground churches remained active, but experienced severe opposition and punishment.

On November 9, 1989, the unbelievable happened. Two years after Ronald Reagan’s famous, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech, the Berlin Wall, separating East and West Germany came down. A new policy of reform and religious liberty was proclaimed in the Soviet Union. And indeed, changes began to happen.

In October of 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev and RSFSR’s Boris Yeltsin (then chairman of the Russian parliament or Supreme Soviet), both introduced new legislation allowing for an opening of religious freedom and liberty of conscience.

Soon, Christian ministries from the West poured into Russia with evangelism and Christian discipleship tools. We must not be deceived, however, into thinking that everything was rosy. During the Clinton administration, a mass immigration occurred as Christians from Russia poured into the United States seeking asylum for religious persecution.

The KGB was still deeply entrenched in positions of power in Russia. They were just subtler and covert. But nonetheless, an unprecedented access to religious materials and Western media became available, and it seemed the door of communism would never close again on the former USSR.

The Noose is Tightened Again

In 1997, a new law was passed governing religion in Russia, but it gave no definition or description of how religious expression and promotion could be administered. Some local regions had laws restricting open expression, but most areas have been relatively open and unharassed.

However, on July 6, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a controversial anti-terrorism law that infringes on many human rights, including religious freedom. It restricts proselytizing of religion in Russia, and imposes heavy fines for violators. The new law applies to all religious groups except for the Russian Orthodox Church (which many religious groups claim has been under the thumb of the Russian government for many decades).

Under the new law, any promotion of Christian faith, outside of an officially recognized church building, would be considered subversive, and would be faced with a fine of up to $780 for an individual, or $15,000 for an organization. It has been reported that this may apply even to evangelizing in homes or over the internet. Foreign missionaries who violate the ordinance would be deported. According to Christianity Today, “The ‘Yarovaya package,’ requires missionaries to have permits, makes house churches illegal,” among other restrictions.

Placing restrictions on religion by means of amendments to a terrorism bill was a clever move on Putin’s part. Who would want to be seen as standing up for terrorism? And, I’m sure it has been argued, religion, after all, has been the driving force between much of global terrorism. Although this measure has been condemned by religious leaders around the world, it is almost certain that Putin and his henchmen will remain deaf to their concerns.

Coming to America?

For the past half century there has been, in America, an increasing push to privatize religion. The courts have reaffirmed the desires of the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, American Atheists, and others, to see all vestiges of public expressions of faith eradicated. What you want to believe in your own personal little heart about God, or the tooth fairy, or whatever you want to call Him or it, is between you and your god. But don’t bring it into the public square.

Systematically, Bible distribution in schools, public displays of the Ten Commandments, nativity scenes on public property, and public prayers in Jesus’ name are all being removed by a left-leaning, black-robed oligarchy.

The New Tolerance

It goes beyond mere privatization, however. Now, there is even a desire to move into the realm of regulating moral conscience. Atheist leader, Richard Dawkins, has suggested that it is child abuse to teach your children to believe the tenets of Christianity as being objectively true.

Many evangelical leaders in America have predicted the coming of religious persecution in America. In his 2014 inauguration speech as President of the National Religious Broadcaster’s convention, Jerry Johnson predicted a move against freedom of speech in Christian broadcasting, on the basis of supposed, “Hate Speech” legislation.

At a national homeschooling leadership conference in Chicago in 2010, Dr. Erwin Lutzer, former pastor of the historic Moody Church in Chicago told the audience they should encourage Christian homeschooling parents they serve to teach their children about the history of religious persecution as a part of their education. Dr. Lutzer has authored a book entitled “When a Nation Forgets God: 7 Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany.” Author and radio host Eric Metaxas describes the book this way: “It clearly and powerfully explains what the parallels are between Germany’s fall from grace and the beginning of our own fall.”

Christian leaders like Dr. Albert Mohler, Russell Moore and others, and even former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scailia have suggested the possible threat to religious liberty posed by the SCOTUS’ decision on same-sex marriage. What happens if a Christian college or seminary is required by law to allow same-sex dating on campus?

We’ve already seen nationally televised court cases regarding Christians who have refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, or Christian county clerks who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The fact is, it is not enough for atheists, homosexuals, socialists and cultural leftists to have their own freedom and equality to believe whatever they believe (a freedom which most Christians fully support). No, they want to ensure that Christians are not permitted to live out their own faith and convictions without retribution. This is the legacy of the New Tolerance movement. The doors of religious liberty are closing once again in Russia, after a brief twenty-six year limited window. Are the doors of our four-hundred year window of liberty closing? Frankly, that answer will be determined by what this generation of Christians in America does in the next ten years.

They say there are no atheists in the foxhole.

Even fewer when death is certain.

None once the final curtain falls.

God’s Word declares, “The fool hath said in his heart ‘there is no God’” (Psalm 14).

For three decades, until his death in 1953, Josef Stalin was the mass-murdering atheist dictator of Soviet Russia.

He was also a fool.

In his 1994 book, “Can Man Live Without God,” famed Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias recounts a story he heard firsthand from British Journalist Malcomb Muggeridge “that stirred [him] then and still does even yet.”

Muggeridge had collaborated with Svetlana Stalin, Josef Stalin’s daughter, on a BBC documentary about her God-hating father. She recounted his last act of defiant rebellion against the Creator: “[A]s Stalin lay dying, plagued with terrifying hallucinations, he suddenly sat halfway up in bed, clenched his fist toward the heavens once more, fell back upon his pillow, and was dead.”

“[H]is one last gesture,” observed Zacharias, “was a clenched fist toward God, his heart as cold and hard as steel.”

In my experience it is something common among atheists: an inexplicable, incongruent and visceral hatred for the very God they imagine does not exist.

Indeed, Romans 1:20 notes, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Yet excuses they make.

Psalm 19:1 likewise observes: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

The manifest intentionality and fine-tuning of all creation reveals design of breathtaking complexity. The Creator is of incalculable intelligence and infinite splendor. As I see it, atheism provides a case study in willful suspension of disbelief – all to escape, as the God-denier imagines it, accountability for massaging the libertine impulse.

Wouldn’t the atheist “suspend belief”? you might ask.

No, the phrase is properly “suspension of disbelief.” It is defined as “a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”

In the case of the atheist, or the “freethinker,” as they paradoxically prefer, that which is unbelievable is that somehow everything came from nothing – that there is no uncaused first cause; that God does not exist, even as knowledge of His being is indelibly written on every human heart and proved by all He has made.

Be they theist, atheist or anti-theist, on this nearly all scientists agree: In the beginning there was nothing. There was no time, space or matter. There wasn’t even emptiness, only nothingness. Well, nothing natural anyway.

Then: bang! Everything. Nonexistence became existence. Nothing became, in less than an instant, our inconceivably vast and finely tuned universe governed by what mankind would later call – after we, too, popped into existence from nowhere, fully armed with conscious awareness and the ability to think, communicate and observe – “natural law” or “physics.”

Time, space, earth, life and, finally, human life were not.

And then they were.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Christian author Eric Metaxas notes:

“The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces – gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ nuclear forces – were determined less than one-millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction – by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 – then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp. … It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?”

Secular materialists claim it can’t be – that such explanation is a “God of the gaps” explanation and, therefore, must be banished from the realm of scientific inquiry. They demand that anything beyond the known natural is off-limits. Atheists attribute all of existence to, well, nothing. It just kind of happened. Genesis 1:1 of the materialist bible might read: “In the beginning nothing created the heavens and the earth.” Even in the material world that’s just plain silly. Nothing plus nothing equals something? Zero times zero equals everything?

And so, they have “reasoned” themselves into a corner. These same materialists acknowledge that, prior to the moment of singularity – the Big Bang – there was no “natural.” They admit that there was an unnatural time and place before natural time and space – that something, sometime, somewhere preceded the material universe. That which preceded the natural was, necessarily, “beyond the natural” and, therefore, was, is and forever shall be “supernatural.”

Reader, meet God.

In short: the Big Bang blows atheism sky high.

Fred Hoyle is the atheist astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang.” He once confessed that his disbelief was “greatly shaken” by the undisputed science, writing that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.”

Albert Einstein, who is often dishonestly characterized as having been an atheist, agreed that God-denial is foolishness. He once said of non-believers: “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

“I’m not an atheist,” added Einstein. “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

Illustrious NASA scientist (and agnostic) Dr. Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) put it this way:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Yes, with time and chance, even science may eventually catch up to God’s Word.

Why do we assume that compromise is a good thing? The word itself provokes a Pavlovian response across Western culture, but is compromise categorically a good thing? By definition, compromise requires all parties involved to meet somewhere in the middle of their respective positions, yet half of Evil is still Evil, is it not? Should we applaud those who compromised with Josef Stalin for their statecraft? How does history view Neville Chamberlain and the lives which were lost as a result of his lack of intestinal fortitude and willingness to compromise? Compromise can be a good thing, but not when two positions are diametrically-opposed. In that type of situation, there is no way to meet in the middle without denying the validity of your own position.

Francis Schaeffer was masterful when he spoke against this fallacy of synthesis or “dialectical thinking”. He realized that our culture has shifted from thinking in terms of thesis/antithesis, preferring to ignore logic and reason in order to embrace synthesis.

So when the nation of Israel states their position to be unequivocal in regards to the safety of their citizens and Hamas states their position to be unequivocal about the annihilation of the nation of Israel, it is idiotic to pretend that the two positions are reconcilable. There is no “compromise” possible since the two positions deny the validity of the other side’s position. Would Secretary Mashed Potato-Face favor an agreement where Israel is half-annihilated? This is synthesis, the attempt to blend together two incompatible concepts.

In this way, and many others, we have abandoned logic and reason for emotion. We take a stand for what feels right instead of what is logically possible. In addition to this emotional governance, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that conflict is a bad word. Progressive ideals have been so fully-assimilated into our culture that we prize progress (e.g. moral and cultural erosion) over principled opposition. Thus we see progressive Republicans asking for compromise and standing with the Left, helping to vilify conservatives for their stubbornness to get into the boxcar. Too often we crave compromise and run from conflict, when we should crave conflict and run from compromise, when the stakes are ideological.

The political climate in America today is not a result of disagreement on policy. This is not a political spat which will blow over in an election cycle or two. This is an ideological war over the future of America and (by proxy) the rest of Western civilization. It’s clear that there is no other “shining city on a hill”. It is us and then….nada.

So when we see the footage and watch the interviews from places like Ferguson and Murrieta, it’s readily apparent that the two sides aren’t even sharing the same ballpark. Those who held the line against immigration anarchy in Murrieta stood for the rule of law, a secure border, and a clear legal immigration policy. How does one compromise on any of those positions without losing the foundation of your position as a whole? Should they settle for adherence to the rule of law every other week? Should they accept a mostly-secure border? Or a moderately-clear immigration policy?

The reality is that one of the worldviews on display in America will win. We will either complete the fundamental transformation into a socialist, progressive state or we will return to our roots of liberty, bucking the whip and chain. So for us to pretend that if we play enough patty cake they’ll give us our Legos back is beyond naïve, it is dangerous. There is only one way conservatism will prevail and that is by fighting this ideological war wherever we encounter resistance. It will undoubtedly provoke hatred.

We’ve seen glimpses of the riotous wrath which bubbles to the surface whenever conservatives dare to draw a line in the sand. When Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin sent salvos across the bow of USS Obama in her nomination acceptance speech, the conservative base was rejuvenated almost overnight. As was the hateful opposition, who dragged her name, family, and career through the mud in order to compromise her candidacy. But Sarracuda is still standing, stronger than ever; as are the principles of Constitutional conservatism. We can either confront Totalitarianism in America, paying the requisite price, or we can kiss the ring of Compromise, purchasing the esteem of total strangers at the cost of our nation’s soul.

This article was originally posted at the ClashDaily.com website.

Hypocrisy, thy name is liberalism. What a difference a few years makes.

Remember when “progressive” media types chided President George W. Bush till they were blue in the face for “going it alone” on Iraq? Well, apparently “going it alone” is totally cool if you have a “D” after your name.

David Corn, Washington bureau chief over at the uber-liberal Mother Jones magazine is disappointed that an increasingly imperialist President Barack Obama wasn’t imperialist enough during his recent State of the Union Address. He’s furious that our already chestless Commander-in-Hearing-Himself-Talk showed off his bona fides in weakness and “let the Republicans off easy.”

Wrote Corn:

Obama didn’t use this opportunity to focus on the reason he has to go it alone: Republicans hell-bent on disrupting the government and thwarting all the initiatives he deems necessary for the good of the nation. Even when he quasi-denounced the government shutdown, he did not name-check House Speaker John Boehner and his tea-party-driven comrades.

What? “All the initiatives” Obama “deems necessary”? “Go it alone”? Yeah, Josef Stalin – affectionately nicknamed “Uncle Joe” by Obama’s hero, FDR – had a lot of initiatives he “deemed necessary,” too. And like Obama, he also preferred the “go it alone” approach.

Seriously, has Mr. Corn never heard of the separation of powers? The president doesn’t get to just unilaterally “deem” laws into effect. He’s the chief executive, not the chief lawmaker. Neither should he be the chief lawbreaker.

Yet here we are and so he is.

More than any other president in American history (yes, Nixon included), Obama has done both – make the “law” and break the law. Just consider, for instance, his unprecedented, arbitrary, capricious and completely illegal “do-whatever-I-want-to-do” shredding of his signature dark comedy: Obamacare.

Get used to it. During last Tuesday’s SOTU Obama announced his intention to keep at it. In fact, he plans to ramp-up the lawlessness.

And why shouldn’t he? A gutless GOP establishment has let him get away with it at every turn. Corn was partly right. He was justified in taking a jab at the speaker of the House. On this we agree: House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) needs to be “checked,” just not for the reasons Corn supposes.

Even some liberals are waking up to the fact that, for the first time, America is living under – as U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) calls it – “the imperial presidency.” In a posting originally titled “Obama: Efforts to rein him in not serious,” the off-the-rails-liberal CNN.com took Obama to task for his autocratic misbehavior (CNN later changed the article title to “President Obama says he’s not recalibrating ambitions.” Amazing what an angry phone call from this White House can do to the Obama-natical state-run media).

Noted CNN:

Once, Barack Obama spoke of what he wanted for his presidency in terms of healing a nation divided. ‘This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,’ he said.

Today, Obama is talking about executive orders and executive actions – with a pen or phone – if a divided Congress won’t or can’t act on an agenda he laid out this week in his State of the Union Address. …

Sen. Ted Cruz described the actions as ‘the imperial presidency,’” continued CNN, “and House Republicans have threatened to rein in the president’s use of executive actions.

‘I don’t think that’s very serious,’ Obama said. …

Right. Most despots don’t take “very serious” efforts to rein them in, particularly when their political opposition has shown neither the courage nor the inclination to do so.

David Corn disagrees. He thinks more despotism is just what the “progressive” doctor ordered. He ended his Mother Jones rant – all but calling the president a weenie: “Obama barely called out Republicans in this speech; he did not exploit this high-profile moment to confront the obstructionist opposition,” he complained.

Au contraire, my corny little friend. Barack Hussein Obama has stored up no short supply of exploitations. Most especially, he has exploited the very people he is sworn to serve.

“We the people.”