For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light.

Note: Out of the shadows documentary is the name for the full version of this.

Hacksaw Ridge - Channeling Desmond Doss

Family Guy strikes again at Jesus

By Justin Ashford | December 4, 2016 | 11:44 PM EST

Seth MacFarlane strikes again at Jesus on Family Guy, and just in time for Christmas…how thoughtful.

On FOX’s Sunday night episode “Carter and Tricia,” Peter is speaking with Tricia Takanawa, who his father-in-law is now seeing, and exclaims he wants her to think he's a good son, "not like how Jesus feels about his kid." Clearly MacFarlane is harping on the idea that Jesus was married and had children. Along with that garbage, they also poke fun at His sacrifice and make God seem like a “d-ck” for sending Jesus to die for our sins.

Boy: Dad, I got bullied at school. They flipped up my lunch tray!
Jesus: Oh, that sucks. I wonder if that's the worst thing that ever happened to a guy? Whoa. Whoa! Billy, this guy in this book here-- he's really getting the business-- yikes! Okay, I'm sorry. What happened at school today?
Boy: You're kind of a d-ck, Dad.
Jesus: Huh. I wonder if there's anyone in here whose dad was a bigger d-ck. Wow! Crazy!

Truly disgraceful. I can’t imagine finding the humor in this. But hey, that’s liberal Hollywood. In their eyes, Christianity is nothing but a punchline.           Newsbusters

Christ will not be found at the theater

Many of the amusements popular in the world today, even with those who claim to be Christians, tend to the same end as did those of the heathen. There are indeed few among them that Satan does not turn to account in destroying souls. Through the drama he has worked for ages to excite passion and glorify vice. The opera, with its fascinating display and bewildering music, the masquerade, the dance, the card table, Satan employs to break down the barriers of principle and open the door to sensual indulgence. In every gathering for pleasure where pride is fostered or appetite indulged, where one is led to forget God and lose sight of eternal interests, there Satan is binding his chains about the soul.

     The true Christian will not desire to enter any place of amusement or engage in any diversion upon which he cannot ask the blessing of God. He will not be found at the theater, the billiard hall, or the bowling saloon. He will not unite with the gay waltzers or indulge in any other bewitching pleasure that will banish Christ from the mind.
     To those who plead for these diversions we answer, We cannot indulge in them in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. The blessing of God would not be invoked upon the hour spent at the theater or in the dance. No Christian would wish to meet death in such a place. No one would wish to be found there when Christ shall come.                                Adventist Home p. 515, 516

Mel Gibson’s 'Hacksaw Ridge' puts Seventh-day Adventists in spotlight

From left to right, Julio Munoz, associate communication director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America, Mel Gibson, director of "Hacksaw Ridge," Daniel Weber, communication director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America, and Robert Schenkkan, screenwriter of "Hacksaw Ridge."                 USA Today

Why Adventists should take a trip to the cinema to watch hacksaw ridge

3 November 2016 | Rachel Logan

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Hacksaw Ridge, the much-anticipated Hollywood film starring Andrew Garfield as famous Adventist soldier Desmond Doss, comes out this weekend. In an exclusive interview with Spectrum, filmmaker Terry Benedict, who produced the film, talks about his relationship with Doss, his 2004 documentary The Conscientious Objector, and why Adventists should take a trip to the cinema.

Spectrum Magazine 

Hollywood Star Mel Gibson Helps Rescue ADRA Staff

The ADRA workers wound up stuck on a remote Fiji island.

Posted April 14, 2016 By Josh Dye, South Pacific Adventist Record, with Adventist Review staff

Hollywood actor and director Mel Gibson played an unlikely role in rescuing three female staff members from the Adventist Development and Relief Agency after they found themselves stranded in Fiji.

The women had distributed humanitarian aid in Vanua Balavu, Fiji’s eastern-most island and one of the areas hardest hit by Cyclone Winston, when their flight to Suva, the capital, was abruptly canceled.

It was unclear when the next flight would leave from the devastated island, which is suffering severe water and food shortages after the storm destroyed about 70 percent of all homes in February.

So a local government official hatched an unusual rescue plan. The official arranged for the three ADRA workers to be taken to nearby Mago Island, which is owned by Gibson, and then flown on his private plane to Suva.

The ADRA workers spent the night at Gibson’s home and flew to the capital in the morning.

Gibson was not home at the time of the visit.

Gibson’s U.S.-based publicist said the director had no comment about the rescue.

 The incident was not Gibson’s first brush with Seventh-day Adventists. The Oscar-winning director’s newest movie, “Hacksaw Ridge,” will tell the story of Desmond T. Doss, the Adventist believer who became the first conscientious objector to win the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor. The movie, starring Andrew Garfield as Doss, is expected to be released later this year.

Read: Mel Gibson Considers Movie About Adventist War Hero

The three ADRA workers were determined to fly to Suva after making a harrowing, 30-hour trip on an overcrowded boat to Vanua Balavu. One of the relief workers, Anna Krikun from Germany, said she had feared for her life.

“The boat was so overcrowded and unsafe,” she said. “I was just afraid we were going to sink.”

She and the other ADRA workers delivered about 6,000 packs of Weet-Bix breakfast cereal and So Good soy milk to remote communities that had missed out on earlier food assistance following Cyclone Winston. The food was donated by Adventist Church-owned company Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing.

More than 10,000 people in remote Fiji communities have now received food and personal hygiene kits from ADRA thanks to donations exceeding US$155,000.

Further assistance is being prepared for the South Pacific after ADRA secured funding through the United Nations Flash Appeal ($110,000) and the European Union (€300,000) to provide shelter and hygiene aid.

ADRA and the Adventist Church’s Fiji Mission have been working closely together, with many church volunteers assisting ADRA in distributing aid to remote communities.      AR

How Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey seduced Hollywood

Helen O'Hara 15 March 2016 • 7:00pm

Religious zealots and Illuminati-conspiracy theorists often claim that Hollywood is in league with the Devil, and that most or all of its stars sold their soul to get ahead. They’re wrong, at least in the literal sense (a few souls may have been traded metaphorically). While Satan is a constant onscreen – most recently in this week’s Puritan-era horror The Witch – there’s little evidence that he, she or it is any more popular in Hollywood than, say, carbs.
But that wasn’t always the case. For a brief period in the late Sixties, a man called Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, made inroads in the town and named film stars among his ranks. Hollywood has always attracted ambitious dreamers and open minds, and the combination proved fertile ground for Chicago-born Anton Szandor LaVey when he founded the Church of Satan in 1966. LaVey was an outsize figure in more ways than one, standing 6ft with a cleanly shaven head and a Mephistophelean goatee like a wannabe Ming the Merciless. A high-school dropout, he had travelled with the Clyde Beatty Circus, feeding tigers and leopards as a "cage boy" before graduating to stage magic and hypnosis.
According to his church’s official biography, he “became well-versed in the many rackets to separate the rubes from their money” – which, as training for the founder of a religion goes, is relevant training. A gifted musician, LaVey would play piano at the bawdy shows on Saturday nights and then see much of the same audience when he played at the tent revival meetings the following morning, reinforcing an existing cynicism towards human nature. Eventually he went to college, studied criminology and became a forensic photographer with the San Francisco Police Department. But a growing interest in the supernatural led him towards ghost hunting, rituals and eventually to found his church.
LaVey owned an extremely ugly Victorian house on San Francisco’s California Street, which he painted entirely black and established as his new headquarters. He adopted the motto of British occultist Aleister Crowley, "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" (also a line from Rabelais) and put this solipsistic sentiment at the heart of his new church. He then accessorised with rituals that were largely of his own invention, involving lots in the way of naked women, who lay down and became "altars" for "High Mass", celebrated on a Friday night.
 An early attempt to ignite interest in the church saw LaVey put on nightclub shows with topless "witches" and a bikini-clad "Inquisitioner", something too few religions have tried. Gradually LaVey reduced the theatrics and tried to strike a more dignified pose, or as dignified a pose as one can when wearing a satin-and-horns headdress. Meanwhile he courted publicity relentlessly, granting interviews frequently and keeping his church in the public eye.

Anton LaVey, in a photograph taken from the Church of Satan's Archives Credit: Church of Satan

There were still, according to the accounts of former members, orgies and services of a sexual nature, but it wasn’t just the nudity that attracted newcomers. As with many religions the congregants would plead for intercession, wishing calamity on an enemy or rival, or attempting to invoke financial or sexual success. The crowd tended to be young, well-heeled and curious, as with other new religions growing at the time. For LaVey, Satan was not the adversary to a true God, but the creator himself, and all mankind's other religions merely delusions that hid the true nature of the world, and humanity.
And converts did trickle in. Sammy Davis Jr, the singer, actor and Rat Pack member whose own philosophy of life drove him to try just about everything that presented itself - women, men, religion, drugs - became involved in 1968. He had noticed a gang of lively young people each with a single red-painted nail at The Factory, a nightclub he co-owned, and was invited to go with them to a party he described as “dungeons, dragons and debauchery”.
He was, in other words, introduced to the church at an orgy, of course, and surrounded by writhing bodies the prospect of a religion promoting freedom and the complete absence of guilt must have chimed with the adventurous performer.
During his flirtation with the religion Davis held seats for adherents at gigs, and even tried to launch a Satan-friendly sitcom, 1973’s Poor Devil, which never went beyond the pilot stage. There, Davis played a minor demon offered the chance to move up the ranks if he could win a soul for hell, with Christopher Lee in his full Hammer Horror flow as Old Nick himself. Despite Davis’ best efforts, however, he repeatedly bungled the deal, and eventually let the sinner and his soul alone.
The pilot was terrible, which might have been enough to ensure it never went to series, but protests from religious groups sealed its fate. Soon after Davis took out the nail polish remover, wiped away his own red nail and left the church in 1974, though he maintained friendships there.
The actress Jayne Mansfield, too, was an associate of LaVey. In 1966 Mansfield’s star was on the wane, because what had been boundary-pushing sexuality in the 1950s looked impossibly old-hat to young people who would soon be part of the Summer of Love. At the San Francisco Film Festival, Mansfield heard about LaVey and, always interested in the supernatural, went along to meet him. He was impressed by her charms and invited her to become his High Priestess, later visiting her in Hollywood where they posed for pictures and hung her certificate of membership in her bedroom.

Jayne Mansfield in the Fifties Credit: Rex

Mansfield’s  lawyer and partner, Sam Brody, reportedly mocked the ceremony and was reputedly cursed by LaVey. It’s worth noting that there is no public record or mention of this curse before the car accident where both Brody and Mansfield lost their lives in 1967, but LaVey’s talent for publicity ensured that the legend has lingered.
LaVey's next breakthrough seemed to come with Roman Polanski's film of Rosemary's Baby in 1968, where he played the Devil himself in the rape of Rosemary. It's an uncredited role, but it fuelled widespread curiosity with his church. Ironically the Satanists themselves were sniffy about its storyline: while parts of Ira Levin's book had been informed or inspired by some of LaVey's press – so the latter claimed – the church did not endorse the film's plot. Rosemary's Baby was denounced by the Catholic League Of Decency, and became a huge box-office success.

John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby Credit: Everett Collection / Rex Feature

Suddenly LaVey was besieged by reporters, occult researches and potential adherents. He released a record album, The Satanic Mass, with audio extracts from his then-forthcoming "Satanic Bible" and clips from the "Satanic baptism" he had performed for his 3 year-old daughter Zeena the previous year (she not only left the church in adulthood but denounced it and established a charity to help former cult members, the Sethian Liberation Movement).
The following year, however, the terrifying, ritualistic murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate by the Manson cult put paid to any notion that Satanism might become mainstream. One of the killers, Susan Atkins, had danced as a topless vampire in a LaVey show called the Witches' Sabbath before joining the Manson family.
Another of the victims of that bloody night was celebrity hairdresser, Jay Sebring, who had attended LaVey’s church around the same time as Davis. The sad aftermath of the murders left the church looking pathetic rather than dangerous. While LaVey continued his work and publicity efforts, expansion slowed, and the free-wheeling Sixties attitudes that had tolerated and even welcomed satanism seemed to vanish.

Charles Manson leaves the courtroom in Los Angeles after being found guilty of first degree murder

When LaVey stopped publicising his adherents’ numbers he counted just 7,000 members in the US nationwide, and it seems likely that that was a high point. Yet in the late 1980s and 1990s American society was terrified of a Satanist menace, which met hysteria in cases like the trial of the West Memphis Three. The church wheeled out spokespeople (including Zeena, then a high priestess) to defend their cause, but really to stoke the fires of their waning publicity efforts. Such Satanic noise can only have hurt the case of those three teenage heavy metal fans wrongly convicted of child murder.
A few hard rock stars, notably Marilyn Manson, associated with LaVey in these later years – he didn’t enjoy their music and preferred by this point to stay at home playing classic 40s love songs on his organ – but his organisation was a shadow of even its limited height.
LaVey died in 1997, in a Catholic hospital, and his home was demolished by developers in 2001. The church he founded still exists, though its headquarters were moved to New York's Hell's Kitchen. One of LaVey's successors as High Priest, Peter H Gilmore, now plays down the more outrageous trappings of his predecessor and describes the organisation's membership as "sceptical atheists". That echoes the similarly named and increasingly talked-about Satanic Temple, which focuses on women’s reproductive rights, free speech and counter-protesting the Westboro Baptist Church rather than wearing horns and satin.

That organisation also recently endorsed The Witch for its empowerment of women “under the hammer of theocracy”. Still, the Church of Satan is still active: a website post this week marked International Womens Day with the greeting, “Hail our passionate Satanic witches around the world!”. It may never be a mainstream religion, but LaVey’s brand of boundary-pushing Satanic self-interest lingers on.                     Telegraph

Fox's Tv show portrays satan as a 'good guy'

If late radio legend Paul Harvey were around to update his famous commentary “If I were the Devil,” he might include on his demonic to-do list, “portray Satan as a nice fellow.” Because this is precisely what the Fox network is doing in its new series Lucifer, set to premiere January 25.

Starring actor Tom Ellis as Lucifer, reviewer Valerie David writes that he is a “Brit-accented rogue helping humans while being harassed by angels” and that the show is “redemption for the Devil.” Deadline.com presents the storyline, reporting, “The series follow the story of the original fallen angel. Bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis) has abandoned his throne and retired to LA, where he owns Lux, an upscale nightclub. Charming, charismatic and devilishly handsome, Lucifer is enjoying his retirement, indulging in a few of his favorite things — wine, women and song — when a beautiful pop star is brutally murdered outside of Lux.” One thing leads to another, and Lucifer ends up helping the police solve crimes and working on the side of justice.

Not surprisingly, the show has inspired protests. The organization One Million Moms launched a petition urging Fox to scuttle the series, writing that it glorifies “Satan as a caring, likable person in human flesh.” And Natural News’ Ethan A. Huff minced no words, telling us, “The Lucifer character will be offered up to the masses who watch Fox as a likable character with moral and ethical convictions, fulfilling the biblical account of this insidious demonic entity.... It's only fitting, then, that this modern-day show produced by satanists [sic] would portray Lucifer as a type of benevolent god, since this was always his goal — to take the place of the real God. Whether you believe what the Bible says or not, this is the clear-as-day implication of this upcoming show that will soon be watched by presumably millions of people.”

Of course, French poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote "The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist,” and many today scoff at the idea of Satan as real supernatural being. Even so, note that our culture considers the Devil symbolic of pure evil. As such, perspective is gained by analogizing this matter to something else symbolizing evil in our time: the Nazis.

Imagine a series portraying a “good Nazi” — with a character sporting the typical uniform and a Swastika — and billed as a story of “redemption for the Nazis”? Would we consider this innocuous entertainment or a blurring of the line between good and evil?

And that’s the point. While it seems unlikely that Lucifer’s producers actually are “Satanists,” they assuredly are moral relativists. And such a mindset suffices for evil’s embrace. Apropos to this, an old cartoon in what, if my recollection is accurate, was New Yorker magazine showed the Devil addressing a group of people in Hell and saying (I’m paraphrasing), “There’s no right or wrong down here. It’s whatever works for you.”

Topside in our temporal world, we hear similar messages such as “If it feels good, do it”; occultist Aleister Crowley’s maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”; and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s utterance in Return of the Jedi, “Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” British philosopher Edmund Burke warned that evil would triumph if good men did nothing. But why would we do anything (positive, anyway) if we consider good and evil mere social constructs, changing with “point of view”? And even if we had some vague sense that “ungood” exists, how could we know what to fight for and fight against with good and evil having been so conflated? Why, had Luke Skywalker truly taken Obi-Wan’s relativistic counsel to heart, he might have killed Han Solo and then become Emperor Palpatine’s PR man.

Yet black and white blended to gray is the norm today. Consider, for instance, the CBS program Angel from Hell, which One Million Moms (OMM) tells us is “about a ‘not so good’ guardian angel” and contains “blasphemous content including crude humor, foul language and distasteful dialogue.” In addition it shows the “angel” using profanity in front of children and “then joking that she never promised to be G-rated. The premiere also included the angel hiding liquor in the children's clothes and saying, 'My booze!' followed by a little boy saying, ‘That's so cool!’" writes OMM.  

Or just contrast the original film Cape Fear (1962) with its remake (1991). About a lawyer targeted by a violent criminal he once sent to prison, the original portrays the attorney (Gregory Peck) as a truly virtuous man in the crosshairs of a wicked and distasteful miscreant, well played by Robert Mitchum. In the new version, however, the lawyer (Nick Nolte) is, frankly, a dirtbag. Cheating on his wife, he has a tumultuous, unappealing family life and is generally a weak man, the father every boy neither respects nor wants. In contrast, the criminal (Robert De Niro) is larger than life: He’s clever, smart, and exhibits superhuman mental strength, not even blinking at excruciating pain. In other words, the movie portrays no hero. And presented with a pathetic weak man and a powerful, cool super-villain, whom would teen boys be more likely to emulate? Hey, remember, you can’t really be “good,” anyway, because “good” is a social construct, just a “point of view.” But “power”? That’s certainly real — and alluring.

This is precisely the opposite of the moral training youths received for millennia and is frighteningly dangerous. It was always heroes who were imbued with superhuman qualities, including superhuman virtue (insofar as the civilization in question understood it), an example of such being Lucas McCain of the old show The Rifleman. And in presenting a strong, admirable character whom every boy would want to be and who was the embodiment of virtue, children would develop an “erotic [emotional] attachment” to virtue, as Plato put it, long before they were capable of understanding its moral components in their abstract form.  

Today we’ve turned this on its head. By eliminating virtuous characters and portraying strong, manly ones who are the embodiment of vice, we inculcate an erotic attachment to evil. And “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree” — erotic attachments formed early usually last for life.

One thing Lucifer’s producers did get right is their casting of the main character as “hot as Hell,” as they put it, for the Bible tells us Lucifer is “perfect in beauty.” And therein lies a lesson for all: Beware those who would seduce with beauty, power, money, eloquence, sex — and all the other things that make for great Hollywood fare.       Thenewamerican