- BREAKING NEWS! OBAMA VOTERS NOT THE BRIGHTEST! MSM TOTALLY FAILED! Yeah, okay, stop yawning and read about it here. I haven't had a chance to see the video yet, but I hear it's pretty amazing. I'd be interested to see a similar study of McCain voters. (More.)
- Land o' the free, home o' the brave? A private business is sued and coerced into accommodating sexual perversion. Not a happy nor a proud moment in our nation's history. Michelle Malkin adds some observations about this latest incident of "gay" bullying, judicial insanity, and tyranny by lawsuit. (And, to anticipate any catcalls: I'm fairly libertarian on the matter of business. If a business doesn't want to serve wordy middle-aged white guys who like Chicago, that's their affair.)
- I really don't recommend that you read this. I'd be tempted to invite commenter RT to do the honors, since I don't really think I could be sharply acerbic enough. It's a little screed by self-disgraced raised-pinkie elitist Kathleen Parker who, like a dog in a backyard, made her own mark by throwing a fit over unwashed rube Sarah Palin. Now Parker extrudes, in the most self-servingly and mawkishly martyred tones, the opinion that evangelicals are the real problem with the GOP.
- This anti-historical paint-thin idiocy surfaces periodically. Were I, God forbid, a slavishly-respected national "evangelical" leader — and were the issues not so important — I would be sorely tempted to pick a national election and say, "You know what? To all the 'moderates' who feel we're the real problem with the GOP? It's all yours, folks!" And then sit it out, en masse.
- But then I'd have to write a post about what an idiot I was, and how I should repent. Still... it might be worth it. If I thought it'd make a lasting point.
- Blogger's picture function isn't working; I'll try to add some cartoons later.
- Next week, Lord willing, I plan to build on this pair and take a look at the cry of, "Hey, Obama's just a Christian brother, don't be so hard on him!"
Friday, November 21, 2008
Hither and thither 11/21/08
Now some variouses I've picked up:
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14 comments:
I would also remind the Obamagelicals and evangellybean creampuffs that our criticisms against Obama are really his policies. He does add insult to injury by calling himself a Christian and if the Obamagelicals and evangellybeans want to bring up his faith (they never seemed to show the same courtesy to President Bush who also claims to be Christian) then his faith is open game.
Thanks Dan; I appreciate the work you do on these update posts. I think I'm now checking this blog more than Doug Wilson's. : )
I'm dreading a dinner party tonight w/ some people from church. One of them is an really obnoxious Obama supporter and I'm just not in the mood. It's useless to try and talk sense into him- a real pearls before swine thing. Sigh.
That's really awfully nice of you, mdeane; and what a high compliment. Thanks for taking the time to read.
And... my sympathies.
You know what's sometimes more fun in such a situation, though? Just ask questions. "Oh, really? Why? Why do you say that?"
I don't think you'd ask many questions of most Obamophiles before you hit concrete.
DJP: I don't think you'd ask many questions of most Obamophiles before you hit concrete.
"Obamaphiles"...good one.
Can't blame you mdeane for not being in a good mood. It be easier if it was a pagan or atheist or someone who was obnoxious, but an obnoxious Obama professing believer. Just remember as you have seen in some of the links, most of Obama supporters are pretty ignorant. Pity them.
RE: eHarmony - Neil Clark Warren might want to read DJP's "Defining Christian's" post from earlier today. If you read this article from USA Today from 2005 you'll find that he went out of his way to distance himself from Evangelical Christianity (Focus on the Family in particular) in order to build his business. Not that that's unbiblical per se, but when you read this:
But Warren says eHarmony promotes heterosexual marriage, about which he has done extensive research. He says he does not know enough about gay and lesbian relationships to do same-sex matching.
It "calls for some very careful thinking. Very careful research." He adds that same-sex marriage is illegal in most states. "We don't really want to participate in something that's illegal." [cop out of the first degree!]
...Warren says he's not lukewarm about his own faith.
"I am a passionate believer," he says, sitting in the quiet eHarmony headquarters, his former therapy office, lined with bookshelves holding The Joy of Sex, volumes of Freud and everything in between.
But he says his religious beliefs are grounded in humanism and psychology, and he often intertwines the two. "I think there is something very incredible about Jesus. I don't back away from that. At the same time ... the public we want to serve is the world.
Christianity and humanism. Jesus and Freud. The train has left the tracks....
We heard this story on the Moody station on the radio in the car tonight and my 14-year-old ADD kid who hardly stops long enough to breathe, said, "We've really hit rock bottom in this country." I asked him what he would do and he said, "Sell the business."
After reading this USA Today story tonight, I'm thinking, nah, it's probably quite compatible with his desire to "serve the world."
I have one friend I've used the question approach with and it works really well. There's another type of liberal that's more problematic. From my experience they tend to grow up in middle class homes and then go off to college and read Noam Chomsky or someone like that, and 'learn the truth.' They have a real patronizing air- 'we were just like you before we became enlightened.' They would like nothing more then to spend hours pontificating, and usually have tons of factoids that are undoubtably false or at best misconstrued, but are difficult to disprove on the spot. You would have to sink through fathoms of quicksand before hitting the concrete.
You want to know what Americans know about history? Check out ISI.
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/
Honestly, based on the ignorance of the masses, are we surprised by the election results?
Yes, CR, it is discouraging. I expect pagans to have warped thinking, but I'm grieved to find it in so many young evangelicals. It used to make me really angry (and sometimes still does) but more and more I'm just getting profoundly depressed.
Why is this happening? I liked what DW said about it not being something that would incur God's displeasure in the future, but a sign that He is currently displeased with them. I'm trying to extrapolate from that to churches- is a large number of liberals in a church a judgment on bad theology? That would certainly work for the mainliners and emergent types, but my last church was thoroughly orthodox and the pastor had a real gift for expository preaching, and there were still a ton of liberals there.
The other thing I'm struggling with is what to do about it. I don't think Sunday School should become a political debating forum, but what do I do when people use a lesson on giving to parrot DNC talking points?
On E-Harmony...that guy should just stop pretending to be a Christian. I have trouble believing that a true Christian would allow himself to be bullied into supporting such sinfulness...and certainly not without more of a fight. Move the company offshore? Disband the company and create a new one? fight to the end? Let the company go into bankruptcy? I can't believe EHarmony didn't see this coming (the lawsuits). Certainly, they read the news about the homosexuals suing photographers, etc. when they refused to do business with homosexuals.
Doesn't anybody read Genesis and the account of Sodom?
mdeane: The other thing I'm struggling with is what to do about it. I don't think Sunday School should become a political debating forum, but what do I do when people use a lesson on giving to parrot DNC talking points?
hmmm...that does sound tough...that's where the elders of your church come in, hopefully, and say something when someone tries to do that. Hopefully, one or more of them are attending this Sunday school and chiming in on this stuff. In my church, we had a guy that was really into this Robert Schuller positive believism and was saying some stuff and one of our elders chimed in and said some stuff in God-honoring way but really silenced the guy.
Hope your "dinner party" went okay!
I like what Jonah Goldberg said about Kathleen Parker. He sums up my response better than my sputtering about her column:
I don't know what's more grating, the quasi-bigotry that has you calling religious Christians low brows, gorillas and oogedy-boogedy types or the bravery-on-the-cheap as you salute -- in that winsome way -- your own courage for saying what (according to you) needs to be said. Please stop bragging about how courageous you are for weathering a storm of nasty email you invite on yourself by dancing to a liberal tune. You aren't special for getting nasty email, from the right or the left. You aren't a martyr smoking your last cigarette. You're just another columnist, talented and charming to be sure, but just another columnist. You are not Joan of the Op-Ed Page. Perhaps the typical Washington Post reader (or editor) doesn't understand that. But you should, and most conservatives familiar with these issues can see through what you're doing.
Me, I think Goldberg's too nice to her.
(c;
Thanks, Candy.
Ms Parker's quasi-intellectual chatter is a case of bigotry competing with denial in a race to nowhere. Seeing "G-O-D" as "the problem" and associating "arm-band religion" with the "lowest brows" of the Republican party reveals more about the limited intellectual scope of Ms Parker than it does about the party's fate in the last election. To quote her smarter namesake (Mrs. Dorothy Parker) her argument "runs the whole gamut from A to B." Evidently she is unable to conceive of a voter that genuinely believes in Christianity and would allow this belief to inform his or her vote. No, if you claim to vote according to your faith then you are an "armband religionist" and definitely "lowbrow". Moreover, you are a johnny-come-lately (circa 1980) who is dragging the Grand Old Party off in directions never before contemplated and awfully clifflike. Never mind that the historically obvious shift (both within the party and without) has been away from moral values and intellectual rigor and that the voices on the right are not calling for anything new, but rather a return to those values. That conservative voices should call for a holding on to traditional notions of faith, marriage and societal values would, I suppose, come as a shock to someone who is not truly conservative. More than anything else it is the "brand dilution" advocated by the self labeled "highbrow" element within the party that cost us the last election. The enthusiastic response to Governor Palin did not represent a triumph of intellectual sophistication, no successful mass movement ever does, but rather a visceral recognition that Ms Palin stands for (and in fact practices) certain values fundamental to a conservative outlook. Making the Republican party look and act more like the Democrat party (the solution Ms Parker apparently advocates) would engender more confusion than enthusiasm and is a pretty good recipe for failure at the polls, as I believe we have seen. Fundamentally, conservatism is about "conserving" - conserving our morals, our values, our families and our nation. The sooner the self-proclaimed "intelligentsia" of the party get that, the sooner the party will recover from its defeat. Until then, please spare me the egocentric meanderings of the "cocktails and canapes" set. Maybe Ms Parker and her notions look better through the bottom of a highball glass, I don't know. Over here, sober, I have to assume we can do better than selling out our values in return for the illusory promise of a few votes.
"And the nonreligious won't get religion through external conversion. It doesn't work that way."
Keep talking, you just sound funnier.
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