Tag: homosexuality

The Plague of Pietism #1:
Pietism vs Christianity

The Barna Group recently found that 80% of professing Christians do not know how to apply their Christian beliefs to their everyday lives.

This condition is called “pietism.” The NT calls it by another term: carnality.
Pietism divides human existence between the “spiritual” and the “unspiritual” aka the “sacred” and the “secular,” therefore pietist Christians do not believe God’s Word has anything to say about laws, government, economics, education, or popular culture. This results in pietists conforming to most aspects of secular political ideology and pop culture.

Why?

Because they view Christianity as what you do on Sunday and having nothing to do with influencing or controlling every nuance of our daily lives. It also opens them to strong delusion because our psychopathic enemy knows otherwise and is perfectly willing and able to exploit such a crucial weakness to achieve his own ends in both the lives of those pietists as well as the societies in which they live and — most importantly — vote.

As a result, we are observing in our day the results of pietistic Christianity. Because pietists have retreated from functioning as “salt” in popular culture, our cultural and governmental institutions have been annexed and overtaken by pagan men and women openly hostile to Jesus and His followers. Truthfully and tragically, there is little observable difference between pietists and the lost regarding political ideology/party affiliation, voting habits, work ethic, and other controversial hot-button issues such as abortion, secular feminism, Marxism, and LGBTQ.
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Pietism vs Christianity”

The Fundamentalists Strike Back

Today, an article entitled “Christian, You Are Upset About The Wrong Things” was brought to my attention on Facebook by a fellow minister and he requested my evaluation. I started to reply in Facebook, but my answer quickly became too lengthy for that venue, so I’ve written my response in this article.

Propaganda

A favored tactic of propagandists from time immemorial is to over-simplify complex issues, reducing them to either/or choices, saying if you believe “this,” and not “that,” you are wrong because “that” is the only correct view of the matter. In philosopher-speak, this is a logical fallacy called “false dichotomy.”

There is another technique/fallacy called “attacking the straw man” where an imaginary exemplar of some demographic group of people is created in the imagination of the author and then attacked as morally, ethically, and/or theologically inferior/incorrect/reprehensible.

This author’s article reeks of both!

“30,000 kids starving every night and Christians don’t give a s–t” is the opening premise. If I note his foul language and take offense, rather than taking offense at the plight of the poor, I’m wrong? What utter rubbish! Is it entirely possible I care BOTH about the suffering of innocent children AND about the speaker’s use of profanity? In the mind of such an author, that is simply not an option.
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A Requiem for George: A Tragic Cautionary Tale of Addiction — Part 1

My step-brother George passed away on Wednesday, December 17, 2014. He was born just short of being exactly 3-years-to-the-day older than me, making him 64 at the time.
George and I were not particularly close and had little in the way of common interests, though he helped Tess and me immensely by performing our home inspection before we purchased our house as well as working with me to move in the washer and dryer that our parents gave us.
My mom and step-dad met and married in the mid-1980s while in their 60s after my birth father died of his final heart attack in January 1980, so George and I never even lived in the same city during the ensuing 30+ years — in fact it was not until early in the first decade of this century that I first laid eyes on the man. Just before he died, I estimated that we had physically been in the same room for less than 24 hours during our entire lives.
Regardless of how little we interacted, I regarded him as good man, a heck of a nice guy actually, generous with his time and labor. The Jewish term mensch would be entirely accurate. Though he could be a bit taciturn at times, once you got him talking, George was generally fun to be around, with a lively sense of humor and a dry wit. I already miss his wisecracks delivered in that deep gravelly voice of his.

George’s Obituary

The obituary I wrote on my step-dad’s behalf was published in various regional newspapers and is quoted here:
Continue reading “A Requiem for George: A Tragic Cautionary Tale of Addiction — Part 1”