The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them. When you find an individual is lying to you, you know that the individual is trying to control you.

=== From: Christopher Sprague <racine@mint.net>
Subject: Bob Jones University endorses murderer of Catholics
Date: 12 May 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <391C7958.F79DD0A@mint.net>
Organization: Catholic Grassroots Apologetics
Reply-To: racine@SPAMMEPLEASE.mint.net
Newsgroups: alt.religion.christian.roman-catholic Ian Paisley, the irascible Irish preacher and politician, is coming to Canada next week to lead a protest against an historic meeting of senior Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops.

Paisley received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University of South Carolina in 1966 and is a regular preacher there. He is revered by BJU as a fearless preacher of God. What is his track record, and what must we think of BJU for endorsing him?

The following is excerpted/adapted from http://inac.org/history/paisley.html The Rev. Ian Paisley is an elected Member of the British and European Parliaments. He is the founder and only head of the Free Presbyterian Church, which has a fundamentalist Christian perspective on most issues.

It has 49 Churches in British Occupied Ireland and 10 abroad. Paisley is also the founder and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

While no Catholic priest has ever been elected to government office in the Republic of Ireland (even though Paisley claims the Republic is controlled by the Roman Catholic Church), numerous Protestant ministers, including Mr. Paisley, have always been prominent in the electoral politics of northern Ireland, "a Protestant State for a Protestant People".

- Political writers Moloney and Pollack describe him as a man of contradictions, "... a Christian minister who incites religious hatred and threatens bloody civil war. He is a constitutional politician who leads coat trailing, sectarian street protests. He clams to believe in democracy yet runs his church like a Protestant pope and his party [DUP] like a medieval despot."

Disputed Divinity Degrees:

He received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University of South Carolina in 1966 and is a regular preacher there. To this day, his actual ordination is the subject of controversy. It was never valid under Presbyterian rules. He obtained a B.A. in Divinity from Pioneer Theological Seminary in Rockville, Ill. in 1954 and an honorary doctorate 7 months later. He received a Masters Degree from Burton College and Seminary in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Both are bogus, disreputable correspondence schools described as "degree mills" by the U.S. Dept. of Education.

- In 1993 he visited the Cub Hill Bible Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland and often tours American fundamentalist churches. He is described as a "fearless preacher of God's word and a contender for the faith once delivered unto the saints." He is also one of the most vicious anti-Catholic hate mongers and is implicated by the actions of his own followers in conspiring to deprive Catholics of their lives, rights and property in the British Occupied Counties of Ireland.

His Position on Catholics:

- In 1956, Rev. Paisley abducted a 16 year old, Maura Lyons, who was in a dispute with her parents about joining the Free Presbyterian Church.

He attempted to use her as an anti-Catholic propaganda stunt and would not tell police where she was.

- In 1959, the Presbyterian Moderator of Ireland was on tour of churches and visited a Catholic priest, the Rev. J. Wilson, whom he had befriended. Rev. Paisley described this act of human friendship as an act of "blasphemy".

- In April, 1958, Rev. Paisley sponsored Juan Arrien, an alleged Spanish ex-priest, who performed exaggerated "mock masses" as part of an anti-Catholic road show. When Fr. Murphy of Ballymurphy protested that a public facility was to be used for this sectarian, anti-Catholic show, Rev. Paisley responded in his magazine, Revivalist, "We know your church to be the mother of harlots and the abomination of the earth."

- On June 17, 1959, at a Belfast rally, he publicly chastised "the men of the Shankill for allowing papists, pope's men, and papishers" to live on the Shankill Rd. Angry crowds went to the addresses called out by Paisley, burned out the occupants and looted their homes.

As religious ecumenism was progressing between Churches and Religions during the 1960s, a Catholic priest actually preached in Westminster Abbey and Protestant ministers were welcomed in Catholic churches, Mr.

Paisley was -- and still is -- wild with recrimination and bigotry at any intra-religious experience or sharing of ideas.

- In keeping with the above attitude, he called Pope John XXIII a "Roman anti-Christ" and his Church the "Harlot of Babylon".

- On June 3, when the Pope died, Paisley roared, "This romish man of sin is now in hell."

- In May of 1968, during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the North, Paisley addressed a mob of 500 loyalists and burned a photograph of Prime Minister O'Neil who was shown to be visiting a Catholic convent the week before.

- After inciting loyalists to burn Catholic families out of their homes, the Rev. Paisley explained the problem to the press: Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners; and the massive discrimination in employment and shortage of houses for Catholics were simply because they breed like "rabbits" and multiply like "vermin".

- William Beattie, a loyal lieutenant of Rev. Paisley, addressed a DUP Youth Group after the Anglo-Irish Accord was signed by the Dublin and London governments in 1986: "We must hire assassins to [kill Catholics] and pay them when the job is done."

On Violence:

- Several founding members and early leaders of the Ulster Defense Association were close confidants and workers for Paisley. Between 1971 and 1976 alone, the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and its front organizations murdered 600 Catholics.

- Freddie Parkinson, a leader of the UDA, stated in 1984, that Paisley was "a tarantula who spreads the venom of further conflict and has been a major contributor to our prolonged tragedy."

- John McKeague, a disciple of Free Presbyterianism, founded the murderous Red Hand Commandos. Billy Mitchel, a gunman for the Ulster Volunteer Force murder squads, was a Sunday school teacher for the Free Presbyterian church.

- William McGrath, founder of a paramilitary group that called for the banning of the Catholic Church, was convicted in 1981 of sexual abuse of children.

- Paisley's most trusted aide in London is Rev. Brian Green, a man with close links to the National Front, a Nazi organization.

- Billy and Gusty Spence, Ken Gibson, Tommy Heron and Davey Payne, leaders of protestant loyalist murder gangs, served as organizers at Paisley's rallies, - In 1969, bombings around the North were falsely attributed to the IRA.

Paisley's bodyguard, Sammy Stevenson later admitted that he and Tommy McDowell, a Free Presbyterian church leader, had conspired to set off the bombs in loyalist districts in order to incite the loyalist community.

On Freemasons:

- "They got their strength from the excreta that runs from the sewer pipes of Hell."

- Once Paisley learned that wealthy Freemasons in America were supporting his churches, he had a vision that Freemasons should be admitted to the Free Presbyterian church.

On Jews:

- "The Unionist party boasts that one of its leaders [Harold Smith] is a Jew. As a Jew, he rejects our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Testament, Protestant principles, the Glorious Reformation and the sanctity of the Lord's day. The Protestant throne and the Protestant constitution are nothing to him."

On Journalists:

- "The whirring multitudes of pestiferous scribbling rodents... who usually sport thick lensed glasses, wear six pairs of ropey sandals, are homosexuals, kiss holy medals or carry secret membership cards of the Communist party... spineless, brainless mongoloids. But, because of it, maliciously perilous as vipers."

On Censorship:

- The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the political wing of the Free Presbyterian Church, passed a resolution at its 1978 annual conference to condemn blasphemous literature like John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men".

On Women:

- Valerie Shaw, secretary of a Free Presbyterian church, discovered sexual abuse of boys at Kincora School by Paisley's close associate William McGrath. She tried to get Paisley to give the matter his spiritual attention for years. When he did not, she left the church.

Since then, no woman can hold official office in the church leadership.

On the EEC:

- Paisley berated the European Economic Community as part of a "papal plot" and the "bride of the anti-Christ." He sought the seat to the European parliament because God told him to "sit amongst the frog eaters [French] and the snail mongers [Belgians]."

On Being British:

- In a debate with Bernadette Devlin in June 1968, Paisley defended himself regarding a position Devlin thought was unfair by stating he "would rather be British than be fair."

Others on Ian Paisley:

- Robert McCartney, a DUP member of the British parliament, stated that "Paisley is a fascist who is more interested in an independent Ulster, a mini-Geneva run by a fifth-rate Calvin, than Union with Britain."

- Freddie Parkinson, imprisoned UDA leader, in an appeal for non-violence by Paisley: "I remember the paramilitary megalomaniac who beckoned us to follow him but who later abandoned us to be scored as common criminals."

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