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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, June 13, 2018

Comments WHich Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For June 13, 2018

June 12

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that quotes Judge Thomas’s warning that the Obergefell decision would infringe on the religious liberty of many Christians. This appeared in the Heidelblog.

We need to ask, when it comes to court decisions about same-sex marriage and religious liberty, the religious liberty to do what? Is it the religious liberty to support discrimination and bigotry? Is it religions liberty to marginalize a group of people because of their sexual orientation?
In the past, the discrimination practiced during Jim Crow was defended, in part, by an appeal to religious liberty.  Christians gave biblical reasons why Jim Crow segregation should be the law of the land. And thus dismantling those laws and that culture infringed on the religious liberty of those whose faith included white supremacy. And dissent against that segregation was sometimes harshly dealt with.

What many of us religiously conservative Christians don't see about ourselves when we agree with Justice Thomas's warning about the Obergefell case is how self-absorbed we have become. We don't see the trials and hardships we have put upon others in the name of our religious liberty. We don't see what others have suffered because of the past exercise of our religious liberty. And the scope of consequences which Thomas assigns to the Obergefell decision greatly exaggerates the significance of the Christian position in the case. And all of that shows our self-absorption.

In addition, we don't see how we have confused religious liberty with religious privilege. That liberty - equality = privilege. And so when we don't support the same rights for others which we enjoy, we are not advancing religious liberty; instead, we are advancing a faith-based privilege status for ourselves. And then we  wonder why we are criticized.


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To Joe Carter and his blogpost that contain 20 quotes from Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address. This appeared in the Acton blog.

Conservative ideologues love to quote Solzhenitsyn as conservative Catholics use to like the quote the Pope: as an infallible source of truth. Why? Perhaps it is because Solzhenitsyn's criticisms against America, and also against Socialism, affirm their own suspicions that the problems with America are because of the contributions of everyone else but themselves. That's not to say that Solzhenitsyn has no legitimate contributions to make. Rather, it is to say that we must not imitate the all too eager acceptance of Solzhenitzyn's every word because Solzhenitsyn was simply a person whose understanding of things is subject to the context of his life experiences.

Three of the main ideas of Solzhenitsyn's remarks, either from what was quoted above or he actual speech, from which the above quotes come, he gave at Harvard (see http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolzhenitsynHarvard.php ) involve materialism's corrupting influence, our misuse of our freedoms, and the losing of our religious heritage. And yet, in all of his speech, Solzhenitsyn seems to lack the awareness of the fact that much of our nation's corruption to do with the ideologies and systems we have embraced rather than having made compromises with outside influences. And that is especially true with our religious heritage. For much of our religious heritage has been about privilege for both whites over Native Americans and Blacks, men over women, as well as the privilege that the American Church has held over society for most of our history and how the use of that privilege has supported a rigid legalistic mindset rather than a fair minded one.
As for our nation's materialism, much of that has to do with our Church supported Capitalist economic system. Here, we might do well to consider Martin Luther King Jr.'s observations about Capitalism to see if they make sense (see http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/aahistory/Pilgrimage.pdf ):

Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity—thus capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism.

And since many of the problems that Solzhenitsyn saw with our misuse of freedoms stem from a Capitalism inspired materialism  and its emphasis on the profit motive, we might find that America's problems have something in common with the Soviet Union's problems. What they share is that they
are both due to 'system failure' even though the two nations employed different systems.

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To Joseph Pearce and his blogpost on being on the right side of history and how progressives and alike are intolerant and believe that nothing can be learned from the past. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative Blog.

The above serves as an all-or-nothing polemic against non-conservatives. And in being all-or-nothing, very few details need to be reported for Pearce to make his point. For example, Pearce only needs to report that Marxist revolutionaries overthrew governments and installed their own tyrannies. What he didn't need to mention were the vast number of corrupt dictatorships opportunistically supported by the West which were targets of these revolutions. What he doesn't need to report is that much of the post revolutionary tyranny was at least a partial result of the pre-revolutionary tyranny.

What Pearce reported was the intolerance of progressives and other non-conservatives. What he didn't need to mention were the atrocities that were the targets of progressive intolerance. After all, America was found white supremacy. That people finally showed a spotlight on that white supremacy and the atrocities committed in its name is seen by conservatives as progressive intolerance. The same applies when progressives and others battle against conservative efforts to marginalize the LGBT community.

And while Pearce makes a point that non-conservatives toss out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to learning from the past, he doesn't account for the fact that Karl Marx intensely studied Adam Smith. He doesn't account for the fact that Rosa Luxemburg implored socialists to examine their own faults. That Luxemburg also called on Christians in Russia to join the Socialist cause. Marx himself said that the abolition of religion doesn't eliminate religion, but presupposes it. His concern was that everyone would have an equal place in the state rather than those from a particular religious group enjoying a privileged position.

The kind of character assassination employed by Pearce is a more civil way of burning books. For what Pearce wants his audience to believe is that conservatives, especially religiously conservative Christians, have everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them. The biblical parallel to people with that attitude is the pharisee from Jesus's parable of the two men praying (see Luke 18:9-14, see  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+18%3A9-14&version=NASB). With overgeneralizations and negligence in reporting  counterexamples to his claims, Pearce is encouraging conservatives to conquer all non-conservatives in society rather than share power with them. And such a compulsion to conquer rather than share power is what Pearce complained  that  non-conservatives were doing in the first place.






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