After almost ten years of dealing with the brainwashed fanatics trolling our Facebook page every day about abortion and homosexuality we're going to throw some facts out there. We don't need to be wordy because they are simple truths.

A fetus becomes a person when it draws its first breath. The Bible backs that up. Numbers 5 condones abortion via the ordeal of bitter water.

Jesus excused 'eunuchs who were born that way' from his stated marriage laws saying, 'not everyone can follow these laws. Those who can, should.'

Biblical scholars and historians have proved that 'eunuchs who are born that way' are LGBT.

These two issues were a clever ploy from the Father of Lies to rope Christians into the Republican Party, a party whose policies are really the opposite of everything Christ taught.

It's beyond time to start talking back to these liars. They won't bother to read these articles but you should. It's time to arm ourselves with the facts.

As one of our members pointed out:

"Every single argument the US religious conservatives have about social issues has two sides, one of which could be addressed from a progressive, rational perspective. Two sides … every single issue. Their pig-headed evangelical salesmanship is a threat to Democracy."

"Homosexual eunuchs are a normal and natural part of God's wonderful creation. They are accepted and loved by God the way they are. During the time of Jesus Homosexual eunuchs were often physically intact gay men, lesbians and even transgendered people, and he knew it." Here's the article.

When the Bible Commands Abortion - Here's the article.

Meme Credit: Forward

By Charles Toy

I started The Christian Left in 2009 as a Facebook group. In 2010 I converted it to a Facebook page and after numbers started to grow I slowly added an admin team from a few page users eager to participate. That same core admin team is still with me, Rev. Mark Sandlin and Roger Smith. We have many other long-time admin team members but Mark and Roger have assisted in planning and daily operations since I asked them to join me not long after I began.

A ministry and a community began, for people who saw what was taking place and were persecuted for bringing it up.

From the beginning we've proclaimed loud and clear that The "Christian" Right had lost its way. This has always been one of the main motivations of our mission. Long before Donald Trump we've been sounding the alarm that our faith had been infiltrated and taken over by impostors and false teachers. We no longer recognized our faith in our churches. That was profoundly saddening to us.

We've been hammered relentlessly from the beginning about the two fake issues The "Christian" Right invented, marriage equality and women's reproductive justice. The fact is these issues were invented to coalesce a right-wing political movement within the church. The history of how this happened is detailed here.

You couldn't find many people who would agree with us in public. Everyone was afraid to cause hardship for themselves and their families whether it was personal, professional, or both. We took a pounding in the beginning. We still do.

That's starting to change. People are beginning to see the truth and speak up.

Miguel De La Torre, Professor of social ethics and Latino/a studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. wrote a piece in late 2017 that perfectly echoes what we've been saying for almost a decade.

"Christianity has died in the hands of Evangelicals. Evangelicalism ceased being a religious faith tradition following Jesus’ teachings concerning justice for the betterment of humanity when it made a Faustian bargain for the sake of political influence. The beauty of the gospel message — of love, of peace and of fraternity — has been murdered.

Evangelicalism has ceased to be a faith perspective rooted on Jesus the Christ and has become a political movement whose beliefs repudiate all Jesus advocated. A message of hate permeates their pronouncements."

We've probably made every one of those points 1,000 times.

The point of this blog is that perceptions are slowly changing. People are beginning to notice that following the teachings of Jesus has all but vanished in the US for the majority of evangelicals. 82% of them voted for Trump and stay loyal to right-wing extremism every election. Yet they represent themselves as the 'party of God.' The Gospel has been replaced with a cruel right-wing ideology.

You, the members of The Christian left,  have been early pioneers in rejecting the false teaching of The "Christian" Right.

Then this happened:

That's pretty big coming from a former chair of the RNC. We'll take any allies we can get on this point. This is another thing we've been saying for almost a decade.

They lost any authority to preach when they fell prey to reprobate minds precipitated by replacing Jesus with right-wing ideology. It's happened many times in history. The most recent turning away is well documented.

Some have suggested that real Christianity has been forced underground in the US. It wouldn't be the first time.

— The Christian Left is a user supported ministry and community. We've been able to carry out the ministry and maintain the community for almost a decade only through your generous support. Thousands of man hours support the services provided here as well as on or blog, our website, our Twitter page, our broadcast mailing list, our store, our unique apparel designs, our formation of a Super PAC during the 2012 election cycle, ads we've taken out in newspapers and on social media. The list of our activities over the years is lengthy.

Please make a contribution to help us keep it all going by clicking here. 

It's quick and easy and it keeps us able to keep working to serve you.

You member of The Christian Left. You are a pioneer.

We are all pioneers of social media for Christian Progressives and their allies at TCL. No bragging involved. We were the first by a long shot. We broke down the door of Christian Progressive isolation and we're still here after almost a decade! There were a few others back in the day tied to churches, magazines and books. There was nothing like The Christian left.

We created a haven where Christian Progressives and their allies could discuss the issues of the day free from fighting or harassment. Anyone who wanted to be be here was welcome, and still is.

We offer strength, encouragement, prayer, whatever.

350,000 strong! That took 9 years of us showing up every day and being here all day and most of the night.

We hope you keep coming back. You are what keeps the place interesting and attracts more people who think in the sane manner, Godly and progressive, they are similar in many ways.

The teachings of Jesus are simple. They require no Master of Divinity. Read his words often.

He said he was here to teach us a new path and establish a new covenant. Why would we not give his words and actions supremacy? To the surprise of many they revolve around treating one another the way he treated us while on earth, with forgiveness, mercy, loyalty, long-suffering, kindness, service. These are the teachings that honor God. We honor God by at least working on it and practicing the ways Jesus taught.

The business of making health care a privilege for the well off in the United States is messy and confusing. One of our members just explained what Trump did (and didn't do) today, Friday, October 13, 2017.

"This order doesn't even impact unsubsidized premiums directly at all. He is threatening to end subsidies paid to insurance companies to help them comply with their obligation to reduce your out-of-pocket costs.

Insurance companies are required by law to reduce the deductibles and coinsurance payments for low income people (essentially anyone who is eligible for reduced premiums is also eligible for reduced cost sharing). They are still required to do so, even if they do not receive the subsidies Trump is threatening to cut off.

You will still receive the individual ACA subsidy. You will still get the cost sharing reduction on deductibles and coinsurance. Just like you don't pay $1202 now, you won't pay the $1330 in 2018. Your premium subsidies are safe (for now). Your reduced out-of-pocket cap and reduced coinsurance and deductibles are safe (for now).

The indirect impact, though, is that the insurance company can't create money out of thin air. Because it is obligated by law to give you a break, it has to find that money somewhere. The only option is to increase premiums (or leave the market). Many insurance companies increased their rates in anticipation that Trump would carry out his threat, so because of how late he issued the order, there is not likely to be much additional impact this year.

Hope that helps. None of the articles I've run across are explaining it clearly." 

Having done this for almost 9 years now once in a while we come up with something worth preserving here on the blog. Today was one of those days. It's related to things we hear daily from conservative "Christian" trolls.

Conservative "Christian" trolls frequently tell us "There is no such thing as The Christian Left."  That's silly of course and truth be told we're not sure if there's any such thing as a right-wing "Christian." We have a really hard time reconciling right-wing ideology and the words spoken by Jesus.

Another thing they like to harass us about daily is that we discuss politics here. In fact this is a page where Christian progressives (and their allies) can freely discuss political and cultural issues of the day without being harassed. It's a haven and we protect it.

Right-wing "Christians" have been blabbering about politics and culture in the public square forever. The second Christian progressives start doing the same they come here all day and say things like, "I don't see anything Christian about this page. You need to call it 'The Left' instead of 'The Christian Left'"

That is of course ignorant. We post scriptures every single day and anyone can talk about Jesus on any thread we post. In fact we encourage that because right-wing politics is so obviously opposed to the words of Jesus that every post is an illustration of the contrast.

by Charles Toy

Let this sink in. Vladimir Putin “asked” Trump to take Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on a private tour of the Oval Office. Trump complied and the “Russian press” was allowed in but the American press wasn’t.

Russia just hacked our presidential election, breaking in to the DNC computer network and distributing their confidential information with precise tactical timing to cause the maximum political damage. They were sanctioned by President Obama because this kind of cyber-sabotage is an act of war.  Every single US intelligence agency confirmed it was Russia behind these attacks. In recent public hearings James Comey stated that Russia continues to manipulate and sabotage the US political system on a large scale. Trump fired Comey the day before he granted the private tour of the Oval Office to Putin’s Russian officials.  Then he made veiled threats to Comey via Twitter.

A few questions come to mind.

Are you KIDDING me? What the hell is going on?! Why are we giving private tours of the Oval Office to our enemies? How many Russian spies do you think were in that Russian press pool in the Oval Office? What does Putin have on Trump? What do you think Ronald Reagan would think of all this? What actions do you think he would recommend moving forward? Why is every member of the US congressional leadership utterly paralyzed to do anything about this?  Even McCain is walking back his comments comparing all this to Watergate earlier today and is now trying to water down those  statements. Watergate was 5 guys breaking in to DNC headquarters. This was an entire nation with vast resources breaking in to the DNC’s electronic data files and using them to sabotage one party in the presidential election.

Several more developments have recently come to light. It turns out Trump invited Comey over to the White House for dinner the week after he was elected. After spending dinner talking about crowd size Trump told the other two guests, AG Sessions and VP Pence, to leave.  He then demanded loyalty from Comey and dropped big hints that he wanted the Michael Flynn investigation terminated. Comey refused on both counts and went home and typed up a memo detailing the entire encounter. He sent the memo to contacts within the FBI and filed it.

In an interview with Lester Holt last week Trump said that when he fired Comey he was thinking, “This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

During the private Oval Office tour, in an attempt to brag, Trump blurted out information categorized as “Top Secret” and held in a secure “compartment” to which only a handful of intelligence officials have access.  Several news agencies including ABC reported the life of a spy placed by Israel inside ISIS was at risk last night as a result of Trump’s carelessness.

Today, in his commencement address to United States Coast Guard Academy graduates, Trump didn’t even try to take the high road.  On one of the biggest days of their lives Trump made it all about him. Everyone is being mean to him. “Look at the way I have been treated lately, especially by the media,” he said. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

There was one small silver lining in Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad two weeks. Vladimir Putin put the word out that he would be happy to provide a transcript of the private Oval Office tour. Let that sink in.

As you may have heard, A senior member of our admin team has been banned from posting to the Facebook page or interacting with the page in any way, this time for 7 days.

The offense was posting an article about Alex Jones from Right-Wing Watch. The header on the post was simply a quote from the article.

It seems like this only happens if people complain about it to Facebook, which leads us to believe we are being targeted. We have an e-mail in to Facebook about the situation. As you may remember this has happened before. Facebook also says that if it happens enough the ban can be permanent and the page could be taken down.

All the more reason for you to do two things in case we're ever taken down and you want to remain in touch with the community.

First, Sign up for our e-mail list by clicking on the link below,

Second, make secure emergency donation so we can set up an emergency fund if we ever have to do some fast developing. We may have to set up our own website that functions much like Facebook. Emergency secure donations can be made by clicking on the link below. Backup Facebook pages wouldn't help if we were personally suspended from Facebook.

1.) Join Our E-mail List By Clicking Here. You will receive regular e-mails from us as well as instructions of how to find the community if we're ever taken down from Facebook.

Once you join you will receive a welcome e-mail detailing all the various methods of staying in touch with the community and the story about the last time this happened to us.

2.) Make A Secure Emergency Donation By Clicking Here. We will store the funds in a development fund should we ever need to re-build the community from the ground up. We could face building a website that acted much like Facebook.