The 95 Days of Christmas . com

Click the PLAY button below to hear an audio message from MARTIN LUTHER.

Greetings.

I am Martin Luther.

It has been my unique privilege to be permitted to travel through time from my day in 16th-century Germany to your day in 21st century America.

I am filled with awe at what God has done in the world.
You enjoy wealth, luxury, health, and peace that nobody in my day could even have imagined.

I am also filled with sadness at how my work has created much evil as well as good.

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As you know, I nailed 95 propositions for debate on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

This was the customary way of attracting public attention to ideas, and of inaugurating debate among university scholars. These debates were open to the public, and the public was very much interested in such theological debates.

In 1502 the University of Wittenberg was founded and gave a home to many important thinkers, among them Martin Luther (Professor of Theology from 1508) and Philipp Melanchthon (Professor of Greek from 1518).

Today my 95 Theses are etched in bronze on the renovated church in Wittenberg.

During the Seven Year's War (1756-1763) the Castle Church, including the theses door, was severely damaged. The current theses door is bronze and all 95 Theses are inscribed onto it.

The full title of my 95 Theses was "Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences."

Previously, Europe was unified: "The Holy Roman Empire."

During the next few years, after I posted my 95 Theses, many nations became aligned with "the Protestant Reformation" as it was called. Kings, dukes and lords abandoned the Catholic Church, took their serfs and citizens with them, and sometimes declared themselves to be head of their own church.

Nations once-unified became divided over religion and political power.

Protestants began killing Catholics, Catholics killed Protestants, and both Catholics and Protestants killed "anabaptists," who were pacifists and did not believe in any "church-state."

Did I, Martin Luther, create all this?

How would you feel if your words were used to justify the killing of millions of people?

How Luther's Remarks Were Appropriated by Hitler

In Ireland, people calling themselves Protestants, and people calling themselves Catholics, use weapons which can kill dozens of human beings in less than sixty seconds.

These people claim to be "protestants," in some sense following me!

This is not what I was thinking when I composed the 95 Theses.

Imagine that you could travel through time into the future, and discovered that something you had said or written or done had been used as an excuse to mame, destroy, and kill.

How would you feel?

So far, I have said a lot about Ireland.

Now I need to draw your attention to the United States of America.

The U.S.A. has been the greatest source of war, socialism, oppression, and fascism in history. Perhaps not you personally, but "the powers that be" who claim to speak for America.

1848-2008

160 years ago, Karl Marx published "The Communist Manifesto," and his statues still stand in "formerly" communist nations. (Although they are called "former communist nations," nearly all ten planks of the Communist Manifesto are still in place in those countries.)

All ten planks of the Communist Manifesto have been put in place in the United States to one degree or another. Every American alive in 1848 would be shocked to see how communist America has become. No adult American in 1948 (when TIME Magazine observed the 100th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto), could have predicted how socialist America has become -- except those who were working toward that goal.

America's Founding Fathers took taxes seriously. The total of all the taxes imposed on the colonies by Britain was 1% or 2%. Virginia was probably higher: 3%. The Declaration of Independence says that when any government becomes this tyrannical, we have a duty to abolish it.

Joseph Stalin ordered the deaths of tens of millions of people.

But in order to keep the economy afloat, the communists allowed the farmers to keep as much as one-third of the land for themselves, to grow and sell what they could raise, after they finished their duties on the other two-thirds, which belonged to the State Collective.

It was the isolated islands of free enterprise that kept millions of Russians from starvation.

Today the U.S. federal government confiscates two-thirds of everything you earn. By creating new money through the Federal Reserve, the government confiscates purchasing power for the things it wants today, leaving Americans with money which buys less in the future. Massive tax increases have been avoided because over 95% of the value of the dollar has been confiscated by the Federal Reserve. Americans think they are free because the private sector of the economy creates such impressive gains in technology and production. But government regulation of the American economy rivals that of the Soviet Union.

Under My Own Vine and Fig Tree, 1798
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris
c. 1910
Oil on canvas
Virginia Historical Society
Lora Robins Collection of Virginia Art

In 2008, the "American Dream" is a fixed-rate mortgage. In 1798, the American Dream was everyone owning their own property, with no fear of bureaucrats, politicians, regulators, lawyers, or the IRS taking your land or telling you what you could or could not do on your own land. You did not have a fixed-rate mortgage -- you owned your own land free and clear. From January of 2001 to August of 2008, the federal government created almost two trillion dollars in new money, much of it designed to give uncreditworthy people "the benefits of home ownership." But instead of putting this newly-created money directly into the hands of the home-owners, it was given to banks to loan to the poor at interest. Then when they couldn't keep up the payments on their adjustable-rate mortgages, the government took money from you to bail out the lenders.: • Debasing the currency
• charging usury to the needy
• redistributing money from the main street to Wall Street --
everything about this is evil, violating basic Biblical morality, and leading us away from the American "Vine & Fig Tree" Dream.: Yet many of the actors in this drama believe they are "justified by faith."