Kamala Harris is Indian. Kamala Harris is black. Kamala Harris wants to open the border. Kamala Harris was never the border czar. Kamala Harris was the best border czar ever, and she’s going to keep us all safe. Vote Kamala. Here are some gushingly favorable faux-headlines about her that nobody wrote, ever.
If you can’t keep up with the endless rewrites to the mainstream version of the 2024 election storyline, join the club. My head is spinning and I don’t even watch the news anymore.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Earlier this month, the Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University released its 11th and latest detailed analysis of the results of its January American Worldview Inventory 2020 survey. In a long list of bullet points, CRC Director of Research George Barna noted that, among other disturbing trends, 44% of respondents who self-identify as Christian said they believe the Bible’s teaching about abortion is “ambiguous”, and that 34% said abortion is morally acceptable if it spares the mother from financial or emotional discomfort or hardship.
Tom: The Christian news website Not The Bee (“your source for headlines that should be satire, but aren’t”) took the survey at face value and pushed back hard with a salvo of scripture, and good for them.
The biggest news today is “fake news”.
What is “fake news”? Nobody seems to know. It could be the panicky blandishments of the liberal media. It could be the paranoid pronouncements of the extreme Right. But it could also be the confused babblings of the moderate centre. Nobody really seems to know. The only thing upon which all sides agree seems to be that there’s a lot of it out there somewhere.
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| Is it my imagination, or do those tags in your ears say, “Liar, liar”? |
It was 722 BC, and God had taken Israel off the board.
As a political entity, the northern kingdom would no longer be active in accomplishing the purposes of Heaven. God continued his work, of course, in the lives of individual Israelites and their families dispersed throughout Assyria’s empire.
The writer of 2 Kings gives the nation this eulogy: “They went after false idols and became false.”
But this is how it goes: when you order your world on the basis of a lie, you further the lie and become a liar yourself. And liars are not much use as anything but cautionary tales.
Lots of quotes today.
First up: Media professionals from CBC, CTV, Global News and other major Canadian media outlets made up the panel at this recent seminar, entitled “Journalists and Online Hate”, put on by Ottawa’s Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication. The video of the event commences with a round of self-abasement from the head of Carleton’s journalism program (white, male, middle-aged), who receives applause for calling himself a “fifth generation settler” and apologizes to the panel on behalf of all white, male Canadians.
An inauspicious beginning, and it’s only downhill from there.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Millennials are among the most flat-out gullible people I have ever encountered. For the most part, they wouldn’t know truth if it smacked them upside the head. Their manipulators and peers circulate fiction as fact on social media 24/7. They mistrust everyone except those they should.
Older folks still watch the six o’ clock news and have newspaper subscriptions. They grew up with media reputed to be fairly trustworthy in an age when the illusion could be reasonably sustained that there existed such a thing as journalistic ethics. Many of these are our fellow believers, people of goodwill for whom the habit of giving others the benefit of the doubt is well ingrained.
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In a post last week entitled “A Contradiction in the Church”, the Antemodernist observed that when the Christian community at large is clear and succinct in its condemnation, it is always against a sin that is convenient to hate. As he puts it, “Christians deal with the easy and convenient things, and so leave the important and difficult things growing like cancer.”
Publicly condemning masculine sins — foreign invasions, lust, violence — is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, he suggests. Nobody minds and everybody cheers. But feminine sins — things like cross dressing or the homosexual mimicry of family life — have become virtually untouchable subjects.
I’ll grant him all that and go a step further.
“Have you seen this opinion piece on how the Federal government engaged evangelicals on Covid?”
So inquires a commenter named Ted at Blog & Mablog.
Thanks for passing that on, Ted. But let’s get a couple of preliminary observations out of the way before we parse the article by Megan Basham for DailyWire.com.
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, as the famous adage goes. Your raw materials define what is possible with them.
The same is true of your mental life: you cannot make a good life out of bad imaginings.
Your mind is a scrapbook. Like any scrapbook, it collects fragmentary images of whatever you decide to put in there. Over time you fill it up. And eventually, what you have put into it defines the kind of life you’re going to have. That happens because the ‘resources’ you put into your mental scrapbook become the raw materials for your present attitudes, your frame of reference for present experiences, and the repository of images for your present imagination.
Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out. It’s that simple.
The most recent version of this post is available here.
“... if the popular Christian notion of abstinence is wrong, we have been mentally and emotionally abusing quite literally millions of people.”— Student, to Jerry Walls
“But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell ... it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than deeds.”— Richard Dawkins
“The truth is that there are some so-called Christians who quite closely mirror the Christian characters we watch on television and film. They’re loud and proud and angry in God. They stare down their “opponents” with judgmental eyes and damning language. They protest funerals and vomit epithets at people they’ve deemed sinners.
And on some level, most of us are guilty of some of this type of behavior. Maybe not to those extremes, but we too judge, condemn and feel “better than,” while refusing to admit our own faults. For the more dogmatic Christians and for us, it doesn’t matter that how we behave, how we treat people, how void we are of love and grace is a direct and vicious contradiction of everything the Bible teaches us of God and His ways.”