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This Month's Scripture Verse:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
2 Timothy 3:1-5

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Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Comments Which Conservatives Blog From Their Blogs For August 22, 2017

Aug 2

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost warning Christians not to marry non-Christians because of how one can be uniting Christianity with idolatry when doing so. This appeared in Heidelblog.

There is a very legitimate concern here expressed about not being joined with unbelievers in marriage because one is entering into a 'spiritual relation' with an unbeliever. And yet, believers have no qualms over entering other spiritual relations with unbeliever in other ways. To give an example, unless we have covenant nations today, it seems that patriotism provides another spiritual relation with unbelievers where Christians would face the risk of embracing a syncretism that joins Christianity with idolatry--here we should note that syncretism is what results when we try to pound a square peg into a round hole, both the peg and the hole will be damaged. And not only does patriotism present us with this temptation, so do all of the political and economic ideologies that we have an affinity for.
Of course the remedy to the dangers posed by the different idols we wished to be joined with: we pronounce them as being founded on God's Word. Such is all too a common practice among religiously conservative Christians who want to put their nation or specific ideologies on high pedestals that neither the nation nor any ideology merits. In addition, all too often our pronouncements provide just another example of how we prefer to think of the groups we are in as being special and superior. And that makes us more like pagans than any political or economic ideology we could embrace.
On the other hand, we live among unbelievers and that means that we will be joining them in causes and projects. And to do that we have to find points on which we agree. Living a monastic life is not an option

The trick to not letting the groups we belong to cause us to compromise our faith is to keep a certain detachment from them so we can objectively analyze them using the Scriptures. It is difficult and wrong to be so detached in marriage. Certainly, some Christians will marry non-Christians. At that point, what Paul says about how to live with unbelievers comes into play. But deciding that we can marry unbelievers is not an option we should take. But the rest of us should be careful in how we talk to such believers about their marriages considering the different ways we have found to be in spiritual relations with unbelievers ourselves.

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Aug 18

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on the need for a doctrine of humanity. In that blogpost, Clark describes where he thinks  various secular views and how some Christians fell short in properly understanding humanity. In addition, he linked nazism to Socialism. This appeared in the Heidelblog.

If you understood political ideologies, you would know that Nazism was not a kind of socialism. Nazism campaigned on a 'nation first,' traditional values platform. While the basic tenet of Marxist Socialism was the proletariat dictatorship, neither Lenin/Stalin nor the Nazis even pretended to be socialists. We should note that what we call Communism is merely Bolshevism. What is left out are the Mensheviks. What is left out is how the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Lenin, dismantled the soviets--soviets were peer elected workers committees that made decisions democratically. Marxism revolves around the control exercised by workers and often the Western Christian understanding of the abolition of private property in Marxism is grossly misunderstood.

What is also left out is how the Church has failed to recognize the humanity of people other than was mentioned above. The Western Church has often sided with wealth as it did prior to the French, Russian, and Spanish Revolutions. It does so today as conservative Protestantism, while failing to recognize the change from the Bretton-Woods system of Capitalism to neoliberal Capitalism, supports Capitalism and mistakenly equates of Socialism/Communism, which it often fails to distinguish,  with big government. Has Clark never heard of libertarian socialism? At the same time, it fails to recognize that when a nation increases the size of its military, it increases the size of its government and its power to intimidate or conquer other nations.

And while neoliberal Capitalism has made man into a disposable commodity even more than the previous forms of Capitalism, and while neoliberal Capitalism has allowed great harm to be done to the environment, and while left-leaning democracies were overthrown and replaced with dictatorships in order to install neoliberal capitalist economic systems, such as was done in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, conservative Protestantism has supported this kind of economic system though it has greatly increased wealth disparity both between nations and within nations.

There are some good points made in the article above. And while there is some corporate self-awareness of Christians from the past, there seems to be no corporate self-awareness of how today's Christians of Clark's ilk fail to view their fellow man with the compassion and dignity taught in the Scriptures.

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August 22

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost on Charlottesville. In that blogpost, he talks about ties between both the white supremacists and nazis and antifa with Occupy. This appeared in Heidelblog

This is perhaps the most irresponsible post I've seen on this blog. The attempts to tie Occupy with both the Neo-Nazi participation in the Charlottesville protest and the antifa movement are beyond belief.

The alleged link is found in the person of Jason Kessler. That Kessler's involvement with Occupy doesn't tie Occupy with his current ventures. After all, Clark's source tells of how Kessler stopped participating at the Occupy Movement's encampment at Lee Park after Occupy members made it know that he wasn't wanted there because of his behavior (see http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/kessler-described-as-one-time-wannabe-liberal-activist/article_c072c0a0-83b8-11e7-ae17-6fb7a9eda079.html ).

Clark goes on though with the following:

According to the SPLC, which CNN accords impeachable authority, reports that the murderer was formerly a member of the Occupy movement.

The murderer being referenced to here refers to an unidentified person mentioned in Clark's first paragraph who is part of the white supremacist movement. But tying the unidentified murderer being referenced to Occupy was not backed by the source Clark provides (see https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jason-kessler ). In fact, when one reads the SPLC article Clark references, Kessler appears to be portrayed as an attention seeking, unstable person who has had past run-ins with the law. [should note here that the last line of this paragraph could suggest that Kessler was the murderer being referenced. That is NOT the case. This last line about Kessler simply was inserted because of the previous discussion of the ties between Kessler and Occupy]

Then comes the following statement about antifa and Occupy:

When the two sides clashed, it was impossible to tell them apart. Antifa are, as CNN has conceded, are the same folks who made up the Occupy movement and those who have silenced free speech on campus.

The problem with that statement is that Occupy isn't even mentioned in the source Clark provides (see http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/what-is-antifa-trnd/index.html ). So how can it be linked to antifa or those who try to stifle free speech?

What is tragic here is that the subject of self-righteousness is an important and needed topic to discuss in today's world. So why does Clark engage in such an irresponsible attempt to tie Occupy with both groups that practiced violence in Charlottesville?

Finally, I was member of Occupy. I participated in 3 encampments and was a member of Occupy's Global Justice Working Group in NYC. We attracted a wide variety of people not all of whom represented what Occupy was about. Some of the people who attended our encampments included conservative libertarians, Democratic Party Co-opters, Democrats, and Socialists. We probably attracted some Black Bloc members and other violent anarchists, noting that not all anarchists are violent, but they had to comply with our nonviolent approach to protesting. Many of the people who helped start Occupy came from the Occupy movements from the Mediterranean region such as Greece and some Middle East nations. In addition, we had members from OTPOR, which was the group that played instrumental role in democratically overthrowing the dictator, Slobadon Milosevic) come speak to us on how to relate to the police.
One of the strengths of Occupy was that we emphasized being nonviolent. One of our weaknesses is that we did rely on nonviolently provoking the police so that their responses would get media attention. One of the strengths of Occupy was that everybody's voice was given a chance to be heard in an orderly fashion. And one person could derail any deliberated position statement, proposed policy or procedure by blocking it. This meant that there was no tyranny of the majority forced on the group.

At the same time, I am familiar with antifa having seen them in person. I believe Clark is right when he calls them thugs. I see no resemblance of what was promoted and practiced at Occupy in either how they present themselves or in their tactics. It seems that antifa seems content on reliving the street battles that occurred between the Communists and the nazis in pre-nazi Germany. They also seem ignorant of the fact that they failed back then to stop the nazis. And I really like Clark's suggestion that no one should show up to watch their rallies.

So why is Clark trying to tie Occupy with both the protesters and counterprotesters who engaged in violence at the Charlottesville protest when such a point is irrelevant to what he has to say on self-righteousness?









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