German Government Rips Down 125-Year-Old Church In Order To ‘Make Room’ For A Coal Mining Pit

While there has been much said about the decline of Christianity in Germany, in a small story, a major church that stood for 125 years was purposefully destroyed to make way for a coal mining operation:

The church in the western German town of Immerath was one of the last major structures to remain standing. Residents have been resettled and the town will be devoured by a massive open-pit coal mine.

Bulldozers and excavators turned the bell towers of a late 19th century church in western Germany into a pile of rubble on Tuesday to make way for a massive open-pit coal mine.

The St. Lambertus Catholic church in Immerath, west of Cologne, was one of the last major structures to remain standing in the hollowed out ghost town

The last church service at what locals call the “Immerath Cathedral” was held in 2013.

Immerath’s 1,200 residents were resettled in 2006 to make way for the massive Garzweiler II open-pit coal mine, which is expected devour the erstwhile town and surrounding countryside by the end of 2018.

The energy conglomerate RWE said it would take another two weeks to remove the church rubble.

The church was finished in 1891 after nearly three years of construction. Destroying it took only two days. (source)

It is true that the plans for turning the town of Immerath into a mining town had been under way for many years, as the German government resettled the 1,200 people in the town in 2006 and the last mass was held in the church in 2013. Clearly this was not a decision made in haste.

However, the actual purposes of mining here are not the issue. What matters here is the principle of what just happened, which is that an entire village and a very large church- a cathedral- was destroyed in order that an industrial operation could take over.

There has been much discussion about the destruction of culture taking place today because the societies of America and western Europe are falling apart at a rapid pace. This is not a simple decline characteristic of the natural ebb-and-flow of all civilizations, for all civilizations go through periods of prosperity and hardship. This decline is a self-inflicted drive into suicidal madness made by conscious choices over long periods of time and to which the degree of the choices made are perpetually worse in terms of severity and enduring effects, and they are being made at faster and faster rates than before.

One only needs to look at a recent situation where homosexual groups threw a veritable hissy fit over the fact that the Supreme Court refused to hear a case that could potentially strike down a Mississippi law which permits businesses and business owners to refuse services to people and groups they believe are immoral. It was not that businesses as a whole were barred from “serving” the LGBT that angered them, but that the LGBT could not forcibly impose their will upon somebody else:

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear appeals on two lawsuits aimed at striking down a Mississippi law that allows businesses to refuse to service same-sex weddings.

In an order list released Monday, the highest court in the nation declined without comment to hear the cases of Campaign for Southern Equality et al. v. Bryant and Barber, Rims, et al. v. Bryant, respectively.

At issue was Mississippi’s House Bill 1523, also called the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.

Social conservatives celebrated the Supreme Court’s allowing the law to stand, with Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kevin Theriot stating on Monday that laws like HB 1523 “protect freedom and harm no one.”

“… we are pleased that the Supreme Court declined to take up these baseless challenges, which misrepresented the law’s sole purpose of ensuring that Mississippians don’t live in fear of losing their careers or their businesses simply for affirming marriage as a husband-wife union,” stated Theriot.

“Those who haven’t been and won’t be harmed by this law shouldn’t be allowed to restrict freedom for others by ensuring dissenters are left open to the government discrimination that has already occurred in states without protective laws like this one.”

In April 2016, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed HB 1523 into law, which prohibits the state from compelling businesses and individuals from supporting or servicing gay weddings.

LGBT groups and their allies denounced the legislation and sued to have it struck down. For his part, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order last year banning non-essential state travel to Mississippi.

Last June, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously in favor of the law, reversing a lower court decision by Judge Carlton W. Reeves blocking the law.

“The governor of Mississippi and the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services appeal a preliminary injunction. Because the plaintiffs do not have standing, we reverse the injunction and render a judgment of dismissal,” wrote Circuit Judge Jerry Smith on behalf of the panel.

Regarding the high court’s refusal, social liberals like Freedom for All Americans CEO Masen Davis denounced the decision, arguing that this “means that LGBTQ Mississippians will continue to face harassment and discrimination.”

“HB 1523 fails to honor the tradition of religious freedom in America — instead, it allows people to use religion as a license to discriminate,” stated Davis, as quoted by The Hill.

“The LGBTQ community remains in harm’s way every single day that this law is in effect, and we are committed to working with our legal partners to strike this draconian measure once and for all.” (source)

As we have noted before, the reverse would not be reciprocated. Shoebat.com proved this three years ago by calling up 13 pro-homosexual bakeries and asking them to make a “traditional marriage cake,” to which all of them refused the request:

Such an idea would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. However, the reality is that the miseries of the present were defined by the actions of the past. The homosexual movement was already being accepted into society even during these times, and it is only in the following decades that its effects would metastize into what is happening today.

However, the issue with homosexual marriage and the state of Mississippi is not over, for it is inevitably a matter of time until a similar case is brought up again. Given how the nation has become increasingly pro-homosexual with each passing generation, it is likely that the law will be overturned at some point in the future. While the decision to overturn such a law as this would be major, the steps leading up to the law being overturned are not, as they would be progressively implemented as decisions made by the people living their individual lives. Rather, small changes build up and then a massive one happens.

The economic writer Chris Martenson calls this the “hockey stick” effect. He argues that change in life is not linear, but resembles an “exponential growth” pattern that can be mapped on a chart with the formula y = x^2:

Change starts small, and then one day after it reached a certain inflexion point, grows exponentially. This is easily measured by human experience in all areas of life. Fore example, a student studies, studies, and studies a concept but does not understand it and feels like he is “getting nowhere.” Then after a few days or even weeks of study, he wakes up, goes to read his books like he always does, and he just “gets it.” This is the effect of such growth.

Likewise, the same can be said about decline. Decline likewise is not linear, but takes the form of inverse exponential decline mapped in a similar way but the reverse. The decline will start slowly, but after it reaches an inflexion point it just continues quickly:

Now one must say that there are many factors which can influence the rise or fall of anything. Namely, the pattern itself does not change but rather the point at which the rise or fall stops before having to begin again. The idea here would be to create a “staircase” effect that does not stop increase or decrease, but cuts the period of growth such as below:

While this chart shows a “death” at the end, human social systems are often more complex than a simple end with decline. Often times, growth or decline, if it cannot be stopped, can be slowed dramatically or even reversed depending upon the conditions afterwards.

There is also a final step here, which is the presence of God, for as God is the author of all knowledge, He can certainly intervene miraculously and change the course of these patterns. What is important to remember is that these patterns mimic natural stages of rise and fall charted to a graph without accounting for miracles or other forms of intervention.

Having said this, we can look at the decline of Christianity in the West in a similar fashion. It is never the “major events” such as the Protestant Revolution, the World Wars of the 20th century, or even the Avignon Papacy that are actually the important events in so far as they are agents of change. Rather, the events are the fruits of a series of processes began and which reached a point at which the effects are visible and manifest in the form of major events. This is not to discount the importance of the events, but to note that it is the process by which the events were able to happen that must be focused on since they form, in a mathematical sense, the functional base that leads to an inflexion point after which change takes place.

In the case of the Avignon papacy, it was not the transfer of the papacy to France that was the issue, but it was the conflicts between the French and Italians with a sense of ethnonationalism and superiority reinforced by smaller events that resulted in the French attempting to illegally move the papacy from Rome.

In the case of Martin Luther and the Revolution, it was not the nailing of the 95 theses or his statements that were the central problem. It was the increase in nationalism that has been taking place all around German-speaking lands in combination with a general decline in the Catholic Faith due to the failure of the priests and bishops to faithfully perform their duties and due to the laity refusing to follow the faith which they claimed to profess. In addition there was an increase in occultism with a redirection of interests away from God and instead towards elevating the self.

World Wars I and II did not happen because of imperial troubles and a “radicalization” of the people. They happened because of ethnonationalist ideas that grew without being stopped for centuries along with the decline of Christian practice and for those who did practice, the equivocation of Christianity with a form of ethnic nationalism devoid of the redeeming power of the Holy Cross.

Homosexuals did not just get up one morning and say “I’m going to demand the entire world give me special rights to force businesses to do my will because I masturbate into the intestines of other men.” They pushed for small changes in society that added up to the acceptance of homosexuality, then the normalization, and now the enforced legality of their whims. It was a series of actions that lead up to smaller events that compounded into larger ones, such as the case of Mississippi above.

Muslims do not just wake up one morning and decide “I’m going to kill some infidels before blowing myself up on a school bus with kids after I drink my morning tea.” Those who partake in these actions often do so after having a long course of study of Islamic theology and history, for they choose to act as such in order to follow in the examples set by Mohammed and his followers as an act of piety and not vanity.

The “refugee invasion” of Europe and the subsequent horrors that many have caused did not happen because some Muslims decided to walk into Europe and just indulge in an orgy of violence. These people were directly trafficked into Europe by the governments themselves, who intentionally refuses to sort through who might be a good citizen and who might be a threat, both in terms of criminal records as well as diseases brought. They gave these people continual welfare, more so than given to citizens of those nations ever seen as to encourage idleness that has been shown in ANY culture will breed crime and degeneracy. When crimes inevitably happened, those involved were repeatedly not prosecuted and even encouraged to commit them again.

Some people say that events just “happen,” like mushrooms popping up on a long overnight. Yet even mushrooms come from tiny spores released from their parent mushroom, and blow through the wind until they land and, when suitable conditions arise to allow for them to germinate, will fruit into a small mushroom.

Nothing ever happens without a cause, for all effects are brought about by a cause even if one does not fully understand the cause or causes which brought about the effect. However, sometimes you can see the cause or causes.

This destruction of a church in Germany in the name of industry and “progress” is one of those causes. Yes, it may have been “permitted” and planned for years in advance, but everybody knows that a mosque in such a situation would never be destroyed. It does not matter that the Church was not being used, but the Church was a sign of the presence of Christianity in that area that is now no more. Instead, there is the sign of government and power in the name of bettering the “people.”

People wonder how could National Socialism rise again in Germany, and as pointed out above, it will not just “pop up.” Rather, it will be small decisions that diminish the role of God in society and elevate industry, nationalism, and the socialist ideas of old in individual cases that when all added together will create the conditions for Germany to rise again as she did of old.

There is no such thing as “too small” or “to insignificant” of an event, for as the Bible state, a little bit of yeast leavens the entire batch, as it is the sum of the small things that add up to one big thing.

You are just witnessing one of those small things.

Kitty Werthmann’s interview of the Nazi takeover of Austria. As she notes, it was not just an event that happened, but a series of small events that became what we now call history.