Nov 3
To Jonathan Parnell and his blogpost on what Ministers can do when they suffer from ‘pathological self-criticism.’ This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website
I have been aware of pathological self-criticism because my home life, when I was a kid, fostered it. My father was an alcoholic and my mom had other problems. I know people who grew up in an abusive household who also suffer from pathological self-criticism.
Now the kind of self-criticism my examples refer to may not be the kind of self-criticism being referred to in the article above. But the self-criticism we experience is often pathological.
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Nov 4
Should note that there is a test to make sure one is not a robot when entering a comment on the general Gospel Coalition site. The test for the comment below was to answer the following: 17 - 3 = . I typed in the answer of 14 and was notified that my answer was incorrect.
To Joe Carter and his blogpost that supports President Trump’s military ban on transgendered people. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website.
The problem with Carter's article here is that he merely claims that the presence of transgendered troops will be 'detrimental' to our military. He offers no evidence to support that claim. Thus, he is acting similarly to Trump when he issued the order because Trump issued that order without consulting the military.
And what if the presence of transgendered troops would hurt the morale of the troops, wouldn't we first have to determine how that harm takes place before deciding on whether we should pursue having transgendered troops in the military.
We should be able to study these issues seeing that transgendered troops have been serving in the military. In fact, there are thousands of transgendered troops serving in the military at the current time or very recently with the most famous being Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. He turned over some "confidential" information to Wikileaks including the cold-blooded murder of two journalists as they accompanied what seemed to be, for the most part, unarmed Iraqis. This murder, called Collateral Murder on the web, included not only one of our helicopter gunships firing at these Iraqi escorted journalists, the helicopter also fired at an Iraqi van that clearly was there to pick up the wounded. Such an attack is equivalent to terrorists attacking an ambulance.
Too many of us religiously conservative Christians (a.k.a, flaming fundamentalists) go beyond the preaching of the Scriptures about homosexuality. We go beyond that to blatantly show more than mere hostility to the LGBT community. And Trump's ban on transgendered troops, along with Carter's thoughts in the above article, are examples of that hostility despite the fact that Trump is not a religiously conservative Christian. He is, however, representing many of them with his ban.
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Nov 6
To Mark David Hall and his blogpost contesting the claim that many of our nation’s founding fathers were deists and thus Christianity had a very large role in our nation’s beginning. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog
Articles that try to present the founders of our nation as being overwhelmingly Christians fail in two areas. The first failure comes from the fact that more founders were deists than the person making the claim is willing to admit. Believing in providence doesn't necessarily make one a theist as opposed to a deist. Denying the supernatural, as say Jefferson did when he wrote his own version of the New Testament, doesn't point to any theism I know of unless, as in Jefferson's case, he is a believer in a completely different religion.
Second, just as there is a difference between the legal tax rate and the effective tax rate, so to there is a difference between one's confessed faith and the faith one is living out. And just as we saw with those who confessed to be Christian, their treatment of Native Americans by taking their land or by the owning slaves or embracing of white supremacy contradicted their confession of faith. Or we could look at the event that spurred the writing of The Constitution: Shays Rebellion. For that rebellion, and the accompanying dissent, was a rejection of the rule of the domestic financial elites, many of whom were well represented by our founding fathers who wrote The Constitution. What faith condones the valuing of profits over people as was supported by many of those writing the document? Or what faith makes one the object of their own worship as was done by claiming to be special or acting as if they were superior to others?
This urge to overly Christianize our founding fathers comes from the same source as what led Billy Graham to use celebrities in his crusades: it's a form of authoritarianism. It's a much lighter than other forms, but it still is a form of authoritarianism. For in authoritarianism, truth is determined by one's credentials more than the facts and logic involved in making a claim. And that is what we have here in trying to overdo the association of the faith of our founders with the Christian faith. We are being told to either be less inclined to challenge our founders and what they wrote and said because they were Christians and/or give Christians a privileged position in society in the making of our laws and social mores because the founders were Christians.
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Nov 7
To Joe Carter and his blogpost lamenting the fact that millennials are adopting more favorable views of communism and socialism. This appeared in the Acton blog
I think what is more troubling than the millennial view of communism and socialism is the conservative view of either communism or socialism. Why the conservative view is so troubling is because it makes monoliths out of both communism and socialism when, in reality, they are not. In fact, even though the above article stated there was a difference between communism and socialism, when reviewing the view of millennials of leftist leaders, only communist leaders are listed. In addition, Putin is listed as a communist leader even though the nation he leads is not a communist state. Yes, he was part of the communist regime by being a member of the KGB, but he has not enforced communism on Russia. Instead, he has instituted a government that is works and plays well with oligarchs. In addition, we should note the cozy relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin.
What we should be aware of are the differences between Marx and those who ruled in his name. We should investigate whether tyrants like Lenin, Mao Zedong, Stalin, and so forth really followed Marx in how they ran their nations. There are many socialists of varying types that strongly contend that those leaders were not following Marx. At this point, the conservative definition of Marxism, communism, and socialism is of no help because of its tendency to conflate and define these isms as monoliths. And in defining these isms as monoliths, all-or-nothing judgements are made on these isms rather tying to identify the good and bad points of each ism.
And from the parable of the two men praying, the zeroing in on atrocities committed in the name of Marx while forgetting the atrocities committed by the West whether or not the West includes the United States does not bode well for the spiritual state of the West. For just in the states, millions of Native Americans were ethnically cleansed from the land so that white Christians could have places to live. In addition, we need to remember the millions of Blacks who were killed either in the transport of Africans to America for slavery or in the efforts made to keep slaves in their place and we need to remember the many killed in order subjugate Blacks in society after the Civil War . Now those millions don't include the millions of people the US has killed in its questionable wars and interventions. The number of Vietnam civilians killed by the US during the Vietnam War is in the millions. And those millions don't include the millions of people killed as Western nations built their empires. And we should also note that Nazi Germany was a politically conservative western country that promoted private property, racism, nationalism, and traditional values--restoring traditional values was part of the Nazi Party's campaign platform. And Nazi Germany was also responsible for its own millions of deaths.
Carter's article ends up providing too little information to actually prove its point. To that extent, the information it does provides seems to use a fear out of ignorance to manipulate the opinions of its readers.
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