Same data, different conclusions
Graham takes comfort in Trump’s election. “He did everything wrong, politically,” Graham told me. “He offended gays. He offended women. He offended the military. He offended black people. He offended the Hispanic people. He offended everybody! And he became president of the United States. Only God could do that.”
Emma Green, Franklin Graham Is the Evangelical ID
It seems to me that Franklin Graham thinks this proves Trump is okay. I thought then (2017) and think now (March 2025) that it proves God’s judgment is falling on us. And in the end, I’m okay with that. When I pray for America, as I do every morning, my first petition is “Let your judgment be merciful.”
Baptism in the fundagelical world
Brad East, writing in Christianity Today, on baptism, and how his nondenominational students marginalize it:
First, my students see baptism as purely symbolic. It does not do anything. Nothing “happens.” In terms of God’s action or presence, it is no different from any other spiritual practice ….
Bearing in mind that I’ve been out of this world for more than 45 years now, I suggest that they believe that because they’ve been taught it. It’s my second- or third-hand understanding that many nondenominational pastors take a few moments before baptism to explain that it’s purely symbolic and does nothing.
With the same caveat, I do not understand how anyone who purports to have the Bible as their final authority on matters of faith can teach that with so few of them being struck down by lightning as they do. But then I do not understand how scripture-twisting fundagelicals can so reliably make scripture teach something they want to believe — perhaps because it is a repudiation of that the Catholic Church believes.
I’m not going to say (or deny) that Brad East gets to the orthodox understanding in his item, but he gets a whole lot closer than his students have heard.
Porn
The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price. (Source: theatlantic.com/Read the rest)
via News Items
That’s quite a quote, but to my way of thinking it can’t top this one, which carries a weighty moral challenge:
As far as the moral equations of watching porn go, the one that matters is: Are you excited by the obvious abuse of women, or have you learned to countenance that abuse as a necessary cost of your own pleasure? And which of those is worse?
If C.S. Lewis were to write The Great Divorce today, I think one of the vignettes would be of a male wraith from the hell-bus, met in heaven by his beautiful wife, made more beautiful by her heavenly transformation. They would discuss how they had drifted apart in life. He’d try to abuse her again (and fail — of course he would fail in The Great Divorce setting).
He ultimately would decide that he wouldn’t remain in heaven if the price were giving up porn.
And I think that may just be the price.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 