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For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
I Timothy 6:10

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Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For January 13, 2021

 Dec 16

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that defends the use of labels in categorizing people. This appeared in the Heidelblog

There is a valid use of labels and an all-or-nothing approach to using labels. The latter approach is seen in the pejorative use of labels and the attempt to reduce a person to the label we use. Even a valid of labels do not not try to fully describe a person with a label. Consider the label 'Marxist.' That might describe a person's thinking in general, but it does not even fully describe a person's ideology seeing that, for most if not all Marxists, one has points of disagreement with Marx. Thus a person could be both a Christian and a Marxist provided that that person does not agree with Marx on those points that flat out deny Christianity.

The pejorative use of labels attempts to describe ideas or people as being all bad and its opposite use as being all good. But which ideas or people are all bad or all good? In addition, the pejorative use of labels are often used in ad hominem attacks while some of the complimentary uses of labels are often used to promote an authoritarian acceptance of an ideology, person or group.

Understanding the limits of labels helps us to use them correctly. But to use labels without respecting those limits leads to the misuse of labels.


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Dec 20

To R. Scott Clark on his blogpost that wholly condemns Critical Theory. He cites Carl Trueman as a supporting source for condemning Critical Theory. This appeared in Heidelblog.

The reasoning that the above post intends for us to employ regarding Critical Theory is that of a priori rejection. That since critical theory is so threatening, there is nothing good that can come from it. At least, that is what we would deduce from the above post and its support material.

But the problem that we religiously conservative Christians have is that we tend to use deduction way too much. Here we should note that deduction that can't be supported by inductive reasoning needs to be reexamined. And my my guess is that the above views expressed by both Clark and Trueman are partly contaminated by turf battles for influence and cultural preferences. I have found some of the work by those in the Frankfurt School to be very useful verified by observation. And thus critical theory has something positive to contribute to our understanding of the world.


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Dec 21

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that quotes an article by Clay Routledge that claims that Americans are not becoming less religious, they are merely switching to religions that are pagan in nature. This appeared on Heidelblog.

Link to article cited:
    https://quillette.com/2018/12/27/from-astrology-to-cult-politics-the-many-ways-we-try-and-fail-to-replace-religion/

We might want to consider that one of the reasons, and certainly not the only one, that we have a departure of people from the Christian faith is because of the failures of the conservative Church to interact with society--that is a failure in its political pursuits. Early on, the conservative Church looked to dominate society in terms of its values and pursuits. And indeed it did. And the domination included white supremacy as seen in the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from most of America along with the subjugation of the black race first through slavery and then through Jim Crow. And many in the conservative Church were fine with that while most of the leaders who confronted white supremacy were from anything but conservative churches. Other tenets held to by many in the conservative Church included American Exceptionalism and Capitalism with its materialism.

Today's issues still include white supremacy and systemic racism, the latter of which many religiously conservative Christians are in denial of. These issues also include wealth disparity, climate change, and full equality for the LGBT community in society.  For each of those issues, most religiously conservative Christians favor continuing an old, dying status quo that favors continuing an economic system that sees continued increases in wealth disparity, the denial of man-caused climate change, and duty of society to marginalize, at least to some degree, those in the LGBT community. The problem here is that many Americans rightly understand that such positions are unjust and thus they now wrongly, but understandably, associate these injustices with the conservative Christian faith instead of just with many religiously conservative Christians who are also politically conservative.



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Jan 10

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that claims because social media has been banning some, we might have to learn to get along without it. This appeared in Heidelblog.

The above articles seems to ignore the context of the actions it complains about.

We should note that just as technology makes gives us more abilities, it also makes us more vulnerable. And thus when people use technology that enables social media for destructive purposes, those who own that social media have moral responsibilities to society.

So when people spread false information about the pandemic or use it to coordinate violent attacks on people or the government, why is it wrong for social media to ban those responsible for misusing that media to the extent of harming others?

Plus, I would think that the first take away from this past week would not be the banning of some from that media. And, in fact, it isn't social media that is causing us to fight each other, it ourselves and our ideologies and cults that at doing that.



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