Category: Culture

“… the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal — the extent to which he can recover — seems to me to depend on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist; I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be: ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’”

Brit Hume
Senior Anchor – Fox News
Live Comments From Fox News Sunday

After scraping myself off the floor from hearing anything so explicitly Christian coming from anything or anyone associated with the America’s pravada Journalism industry or a major media out let I said to myself, “There is going to be hell to pay by Mr. Hume for that statement.”

I was right. Ever since Hume said this the “I hate Christ” media has weighed in,

I think it’s rude and crass to drag another person’s private faith into the public square for judgment and belittlement, as Hume did to Woods.

Jay Bookman
Atlanta Journal & Constitution

“But doesn’t it also denigrate Christianity when you do that on a Sunday political talk show. This isn’t church, this isn’t some sort of holy setting, this is a political talk show.

By talking about it (Christianity) on a Sunday political talk show. Doesn’t that minimize the significance of Christianity, when you bring a discussion of Christianity into a conversation about politics?

I do think it diminishes the discussion of Christianity. My Christian friends have said as much, that it diminishes the discussion of Christianity and faith when you have a conversation out-of-the-blue on a political talk show. This wasn’t the ‘700 Club,’ this wasn’t ‘Theocracy Today.’

David Schuster
MSNBC

“The fact that a journalist — and I use that term loosely as it pertains to Hume — would go on a national news show and put down another high-profile individual’s faith should tell all of us that religious bigotry, and bigotry as a whole, is a growing problem in this country.”

Eve Tahmincioglu
Huffington Post

“If Hume wants to do the satellite-age equivalent of going door-to-door and spreading what he considers the gospel, he should do it on his own time, not try to cross-pollinate religion and journalism and use Fox facilities to do it.”

Tom Shales
Washington Post Columnist

Before we move on with more quotes notice the theme running through these quotes. The theme is that the public square is not the place to examine “private beliefs.” The assumption is that the public square should be left sanitized of all religious beliefs. Now, of course that assumption is itself just another private religious belief w/ monumental implication but these people just take it as a given and as the way the world works. The religion of Bookman, Schuster, Tahimincioglu & Shales teaches them that it is the most obvious thing in the world that the public square is not to be infected with other religious beliefs that challenge their unstated but omnipresent religious beliefs — religious beliefs that are controlling the public square.

Indeed, I would contend the reason underneath the foaming and gnashing over Hume’s comments is the reality that such a comment is an explicit challenge of the prevailing religious beliefs that hold hegemony over the public square. Hume, in his comments, has inadvertently attacked the guiding religious fiction of the dominant pagan humanists stranglehold over the public square and as such he must be crushed and Christianity put in its place.

Now oddly enough this attitude of wanting to sanitize the public square does fit in w/ some versions of Christianity. For example, I have no doubt that adherents of R2Kt likely thought that Brit Hume was in bad form. No doubt they believe that Mr. Hume would have better served Christ by appealing to what Natural Law teaches on these matters, leaving Christianity out of it. R2K adherents Lee and Misty Irons believe that the church should not be opposed of homosexual marriages and as such why should Christians like Brit Hume be opposed to Tiger Woods teeing up in every sand pit of every golf course with every hooker in America? If R2Kt has taught us anything it has taught us that the public square is no place for Christians to be pushing a Christian agenda.

What we see here is that the Escondido Hermeneutic w/ its R2Kt ancillary implications requires us to reinforce the dominant religious beliefs that Christ or Christianity has nothing to do w/ Journalism, or the public square. Somewhere in the country there are legions of R2K Christians who are sympathetic to the criticisms of Hume cited above. Somewhere in the country there are boatloads of R2K pastors who are actually thinking, “You know when guys like Hume go off like this it just makes our job more difficult.”

But there are more quotes denouncing Hume that we must turn to. In one of my more favorite ones Tom Shales of the Washington Post steps up again,

“(Hume’s comments) sounded a little like one of those Verizon vs. AT&T commercials — our brand is better than your brand — except that Hume was comparing two of the world’s great religions, not a couple of greedy communications conglomerates. Further, is it really his job to run around trying to drum up new business? He doesn’t really have the authority, does he, unless one believes that every Christian by mandate must proselytize?”

Similarly, Ubermensch Keith Olberman makes comments about ill advised Christian proselytizing in this clip,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfjcV5hTxWg&feature=player_embedded

But again as in the previous quotes the underlying problem with Brit Hume is that he has the gall to take his Christian faith public.

What shall we say in light of all this?

First, we should note that a Christian faith that can not or will not express itself in the public square and will not or can not influence and inform what the public square looks like is a Christian faith that will either die or will be relegated to Christian ghettos that will, strangely enough, measure their success by how well they ape the evil “world.”

Second, we should give up thinking that if we will just play by our enemy’s rules then we will have a chance to convert our enemies. We have for generations played by our enemies rules and what we have gotten by retiring to our safe church zones, and teaching a Christianity that is to be only private, individual and personal, is a dessicated public square that hates us with more passion with each succeeding generation. Now, this may work if one is a pessimillennialist and believes that all of these unconverted people just proves the world is going to get worse and worse before Jesus shows up but for those Christians who believe that the Kings as well as Journalist must kiss the son, retreatism from the public square is no way to leaven this present wicked age with the age to come.

Third, and similar to the paragraph above we have to give up caring if our enemies hate us. We must surrender giving a tinker’s damn if the pagan elites (and some of the Church elites for that matter) hate us for insisting that Jesus is the Lord Christ over every public square of every nation in the world. Indeed, if their hatred is driven by our public square statements that “Christianity can offer forgiveness,” then we are absolutely duty bound to cultivate their hatred. Let the Journalists rage and plot a vain thing. Let the Kings gnash their teeth and hurl invective against us. Let the Church Doctors and Academics ring their hands over our “confusing their gnostic Kingdom with Christ’s corporeal Kingdom” We must simply stop caring and put up with a generation of not being named “TIME Magazine Man of the Year” or being invited to sit at the head table of the annual “I’m More Reformed (Irrelevant?) Then You” conference. While we are contending for the crown rights of King Jesus we must be willing to embrace ignominy and the status of pariah for a generation so that those who come behind us can triumph. This doesn’t mean surrender. This means fighting against majority opinion, both within and without the Church and wearing as medals the wounds that are inflicted.

Fourth, rebuilding a vibrant Christianity will be resisted. Recognize it, live with it, and get on with the task of Reformation. If your family suggests your doing your children a disservice simply point out their obvious error, smile at them, and raise your children. If fellow saints are offended by your insisting that Christians have no business being in a military fighting to implement pagan humanism throughout the world simply point out their obvious error smile at them, and keep on pointing out the painfully obvious point. If fellow saints lob rhetorical bombs at you for insisting that Scripture has imperatives that apply to this world as well as the indicatives that apply to Redemption just politely mock them and get on with pointing out the obvious.

Fifth, earnestly pray and weep over the enemies of the Gospel and of Christianity. While it is certainly true that we must vigorously resist the pagans it is also true that our hearts must be broken not only over their rebellion but also over their lost-ness. We must petition the great benevolent sovereign of the world that the Spirit of Christ might do for them what He did for us and that is defeat them by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ so that they who are now enemies will be friends of the Gospel. Our anger at their attacking Christ must be matched by coursing tears for their lost-ness, their ubiquitous alienation, and for the culture of death they are trapped in.

The Church has, for several generations, followed a path of retreat and appeasement.

This must end.

Yesterday I attended yet another funeral. Funerals, as I have written before, are events that are guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. Indeed, after yesterday’s witness to the bizarre I told my wife that I am resolved that before attending any future funeral I will pop a Xanax. It is either that or not attend or upon attending get up and walk out and leave. I literally can not handle the embarrassment, stupidity, ignorance or sentimental twaddle any longer. If what I’m about to explain is what Christianity has been reduced to I would rather embrace the masculine religion and worship of Odin, Thor or some other pagan deity that hasn’t been castrated then the limp-wristed, lisping, eunuch deity of the Christian clergy that I constantly bump into who are officiating at funerals. I would far prefer a religion that sent me into the afterlife where the officiate lights my funeral pyre then a religion that sends me into the afterlife where the officiate belittles the matters of life and death and heaven and hell.

This member of the clergy perfectly fit the French proverb that, “there are three sexes — Male, Female and Clergy. He opened the service by saying that as the deceased wasn’t religious therefore there wasn’t going to be any ritual or religion at the funeral.

Here are a couple hundred people sitting in set rows, all facing the direction of the speaker, having gathered in honor of the deceased and in support of the grieving family and he says there isn’t going to be any ritual or religion at the funeral? Naturally, I sat their thinking… “Everything going on here is a ritual, — from the grieving widow surrounded and supported by loving family, to the “ministers” presence standing in front of us “speaking,” to the funeral luncheon afterward this whole funeral is ritual you moron.” I freely admit that I don’t understand how anybody, let alone a Christian clergy member, can honestly believe that they can avoid either ritual or religion. One never avoids either ritual or religion. It is never a question of avoiding rituals or religion. It is only a question of which ritual or religion will be embraced. So I had to sit there with this genius Clergy member thinking that if he isn’t explicitly Christian then he will have successfully avoided both religion and ritual. More on this later.

As the service began to unfold the sentimental twaddle began to pile up. I have seen this many times before and all I can observe here is that Americans have managed to turn the funeral into a advertisement for Hallmark’s precious moments. There is no longer any sense of gravitas in the average funeral. There is no longer any sense that at the funeral all in attendance are together standing in the portal between life and death and heaven and hell. There is no longer any sense in the Funeral service that men have come before a God who is not only kind and benevolent but also we have come before a God who is Holy and who is a consuming fire. Funerals no longer elicit the sense of awe associated with the the most important realities of existence but rather they elicit the sense of “playtime” that is associated with Kindergarten finger painting time.

Once we got into the “Christian Message” of the service I got to the “I think I’m going to have a stroke” part of the service. His “message” started w/ quoting part of Malachi 2:10, which says, have we not all one Father Did not one God create us?

From there he said, “This scripture obviously teaches that God is the Father of us all.”

Oh really? Did our Charles “Frickin” Spurgeon ever consider that the pronouns in Malachi 2:10 make a difference? The “We” and “Us” of Mal. 2:10 is significant because the statement here is referring to God’s covenant people. The “We” and “Us” in Malachi 2:10 in context are referring to God as the Father of the covenant people. They are not referring to God being the Father of people regardless of their relation to the covenant.

God is only the Father of people who have Jesus Christ for their elder Brother. God is only the Father of those who trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. All other people are alienated from God and have need to be reconciled. All other people have God as their judge and not their Father.

Our minister then went on to quote part of Gen. 12:3 saying, “all peoples on earth
will be blessed through Jesus.”

From here he implied that obviously everyone here has God as their Father (Mal. 2:10) and is blessed by Jesus (Gen. 12:3). The clear implication is that even though people aren’t religious and don’t have any love for the community of the saints we know that they have God as their father and are Blessed by Jesus. After this statement he talked about how when we all die we all go to heaven.

There was a fleeting comment about God’s righteousness but there was absolutely no connection between God’s righteousness and the need for people to repent and trust Christ. Indeed, I’m not even sure why the fleeting comment regarding Christ’s righteousness was mentioned.

Afterward I caught up with him for a 30 second conversation. I couldn’t handle any longer. I asked him if here were a Christian or Universalist minister. He laughed and said he wasn’t a Universalist. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, perhaps you are a Buddhist, I’m sorry for asking if you were a Universalist.” He said, “Oh no, I am a Christian minister but I am part of a denomination that doesn’t emphasize religion”, and he added that “as the deceased wasn’t religious I was trying to avoid religion.”

Sigh.

I knew that the conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere so I smiled and walked away. I wanted to say to him, “So, you concluded that since the deceased wasn’t religious those listening to you shouldn’t be exposed to the Christian religion either.”

It was clear during the service that this guy was embarrassed by what many people refer to as the “cringe factor” of Christianity. Those things he avoided and which he considered “religious” are the very truths that the Christian “wizards of smart” consider as Christianity’s “Cringe Factor.” He avoided the truths that make people uncomfortable with the Christian faith and then said he was only avoiding religion. He avoided topics like sin, God’s just wrath against sin, God’s Holiness, a bloody cross, propitiation and expiation, and the need for repentance and in my estimation he did all that fully believing that by avoiding all that “religious stuff” it would make it easier for people to accept Christianity.

Pass the sedatives please!

And to finish this piece off allow me to briefly explain why funerals like this drive me insane. A death is one of those few events that has the ability to really unsettle people and to breakup their worldview belief system. At a funeral people are brought face to face with the several realities that many of them spend their whole lives running from. At a funeral people are forced to consider their own mortality. This is especially so for those who are themselves aged. They are sitting there realizing that there death isn’t far off. A funeral forces them to ask once again a question that isn’t merely a exercise in the conundrum, “what will happen to be when I die.” A funeral is the opportunity to answer that question for them in such a way that they might quit running from the obvious answer and embrace Christ. At a funeral there is the potential urgency present in people to actually consider the character of God both as to his Holiness and as to His love.

And at this place … at this event, which has so much potential all we get from clergy today is obscene banalities and gross sentimentalities.

1.) The attempt to bring the aircraft down was done on the day the West celebrates the birth of Christ. The attack was, thus not only an attack on the America, but it was an attack on the Christian faith as well. Now, America hates being thought of as a nation influenced by Christianity but clearly Muslims understand that this is a war between faiths and as difficult as it is for some of us to understand why Islam views America as “Christian” it is none the less the case that they do. The Muslim attack on America on Christmas day is proof that they were not only striking at the nation but also at what they perceive to be the nation’s faith.

2.) When the first news reports came out it was clear that the media was attempting to shield the Muslim connection. For the first 12 hours we kept hearing about the perpetrator being Nigerian but not a peep about how the Nigerian was a Muslim. This desire to tamp down the Muslim connection is consistent with the way the media covered the Muslim mass murderer who shot up the Army base in Texas. There is clearly an attempt by the media and the Obama administration to prejudice Americans against being prejudice against the faith system that is informing those who are seeking to kill them.

3.) Every time there is a terrorist attempt the consequence is to turn the screws on the American people with more and more invasive control procedures. Every time there is a terrorist attempt the consequence is that more power is ceded to the Federal Government to treat American citizens like criminals. However, at no time following a terrorist attempt does the State do anything to genuinely provide the common defense. As one obvious and glaring example, if the State was serious about catching bad guys and making air travel safe they would cease and desist with the silliness of treating a 85 year old white Caucasian grandmother as the same terror risk as a 25 year old Muslim Arab. If the State was serious about catching bad guys they would start profiling with the purpose of singling out flying Muslims for more rigorous shakedowns before boarding aircraft. It seems the only entity that ends up profiting from these failed attacks is the Leviathan State.

4.) Obama, in his nearly one year as President has seldom failed to get before a camera at every opportunity to speak his mind. On this incident though it took Barack Hussein Obama three days before he released a statement. What are we to make of this comparative silence on Barack Hussein Obama’s part? Remember this is the same guy who, after hearing about the Muslim shooting on the Texas Army base could only say, “we must not jump to conclusions.” Between that statement, and his comparative silence in this event, and the current administrations kiss butt attitude towards the Muslim world one can only conclude that our President with a Muslim name favors Muslims more than he does Americans.

5.) Janet “Butch” Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, initially insisted that in light of the Christmas attempted bombing it could be seen that the system worked. This is like saying that a high priced security system worked because someone who just happened to be passing by tackled a departing thief as he was leaving with the loot. It is difficult to imagine Napolitano saying anything more stupid then “this attempted bombing proves the system works.”

6.) The flying public are partly to fault for allowing the state to treat them like sheep. They are not so much concerned about stopping terrorism as they are concerned about “feeling safe.” If they were concerned about stopping terrorism they would begin to demand that their representative quit with the political correctness and would likewise demand legislation to start rolling that would forbid Islamic influence in America. If the flying public were concerned about having their privacy invaded when flying they would tell the Feds to drop all the dragoonish behavior at the airports and start concentrating on those who fit a criminal profile.

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are to weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are to strong.”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe — Immigration, Islam, and the West – p.326

Affirmative action was a foolish policy from the very beginning because,

1.) As Caldwell’s quote above implies, once affirmative action as a policy is pursued, it is nearly impossible to discontinue since special interest groups form around such a policy in order to protect it and to defend it. Such affirmative action special interests groups become roadblocks to ending affirmative action. Such an example of this is seen in the state of California which still has affirmative action programs designed to foster the hiring of non-whites even though non-whites now form a demographic majority in California.

2.) Affirmative action is a subsidy program. Whenever the government subsidizes something they get more of what they are subsidizing. In this case what they are subsidizing are people who are less qualified filling positions that would have otherwise been filled by more qualified people. A continued pursuit of such a policy leads inevitably to a culture that is less competitive with the world than it might otherwise be.

3.) Affirmative action creates and makes race pimping a profitable enterprise. Since affirmative action assumes the inequity of those receiving affirmative action a class of people arise who have it in their interest to professionally lobby in such a way that the putative inferior status of those receiving affirmative action can never be erased. Affirmative action policy creates men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who exist in order to ensure that the perception is that the recipients of affirmative action never cease in being victims that need affirmative action.

4.) Affirmative action communicates to the recipients of affirmative action that they can not compete without the scales being weighted and rigged in their direction. Affirmative action then creates a psychology in the recipient class that perpetuates the very inequity that it was created in order to remove.

5.) Affirmative action communicates to the majority population that those who receive affirmative action are indeed inferior. What else are they to believe given that the premise behind affirmative action is that the recipients of it advance not on the merits of their ability but rather because their inability doesn’t allow them to compete on a level playing field. In this case affirmative action perpetuates the perception of the inequity that it is seeking to address to the point where even if affirmative action was answering the problem of inequity nobody in the non victim class would believe it since the ongoing necessity of affirmative action continues to testify to the inferiority of those who it is extended to.

“Diversity meant rooting out traditions that excluded people and trammeled the liberties of (immigrant) newcomers. All cultures have many such traditions. But while Europeans could easily dismantle their own prejudices, the prejudices of other ethnic groups were, quite naturally invisible to them….

Europeans who considered churches houses of stupidity, sexism, and superstition didn’t know enough about mosques or ashrams to form a judgment, and left them unmolested. They abolished the old and much mocked nationalistic school lessons about the virtues of nos ancetres les gaulois, but absorbed the new lessons about the virtues of other cultures, and the justice and nobility of exotic political causes, with a childish credulity. Immigrants could indulge certain comforting prejudices, myths, and traditions that natives would be disciplined, chastised, and ostracized, or jailed for indulging. Effectively, diversity meant taking old hierarchies and inverting them.

The European obsession w/ Third World ’causes’ was a function of Europe’s new guilt based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people, in a way that Europeans were not….The only nationalist claims that could be made w/o provoking accusations of nationalism, racism or xenophobia were those of foreigners….

Where it interacted w/ immigration, there was an illogic at the heart of diversity. If diversity ‘enriched’ and ‘strengthened’ nations as much as everyone claimed, why would any nation ever want its immigrants to integrate into broader society? That would be drawing down the nation’s valuable fund of diversity…. European leaders defended large-scale immigration in one breath by saying it would make their countries different (through diversity), and in the next by saying it would leave them the same (through integration).”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

America is trodding many of the same paths that Europe has worn down before us.

1.) We have and continue to dismantle our cultural traditions in the rush to be “fair.” However in doing so we have not realized that it is impossible to be w/o cultural traditions. So, in the rush to be culturally neutral (whatever that means) we dismantled our own traditions (marriage is for two people each coming from the opposite sex, Ten commandments posted in the public square, Creches on government lawns, etc.) we have at the same time erected traditions that are familiar to those who we were trying to be neutral towards.

2.) Like Europe we have heaped pejoratives upon the idea of Christian Church, our heroes from our history and being a Christian people. And while doing so we have, though it is hard to believe, quite w/o knowing it, embraced the ideas of being a pagan people, with anti-hero heroes who despise the Christian church. We, (and especially our “leadership”) like Europe, have had a credulity that can only be labeled as childish.

3.) Like Europe, our whole politically correct atmosphere, is one that has given to us a guilt based social order where weakness is a tool by which those who are correct are defeated through manipulation only because they also happen to be in the majority.

The West is failing because it has lost confidence in who it is and the beliefs that made it. For 30 years it has embraced self loathing as a virtue and has prized the hostile stranger and alien over the cherished family member.