One of the arguments among supposedly decent and religious people for the softening toward and acceptance of very wrong things, including all things LGBTQI, is that we mustn't judge, we don't know what people have been through, we must respect and understand people who struggle. In other words, they are deciding there is no such thing as evil anymore, at least in the cases they decide. There are just some unusual exceptions that we must "first endure, then pity, then embrace." Alexander Pope warned of this trend in humanity a long time ago. This anti-God, anti-Christ philosophy has been creeping up on us a long time and is now in full swing.
One woman tells about an incident more than twenty years ago when she served as Young Women's president in her LDS ward. There were many problems with both promiscuity and drug dealing among the youth. When she pointed out that selling drugs by some of the boys in the ward was totally out of line she was bombarded with scorn from girls and parents. "How dare you criticize! You don't know what they've been through!" were the expressions of impassioned outrage. It was the YW president who had done evil, not the boys illegally selling drugs to other youth at an overnight church youth activity. Here was a classic case of killing the messenger instead of confronting the evil and actually caring about the boys, their temporal and spiritual well-being, along with those they exploited. And that was where it ended. The exception ruled. In this case the drug dealers got away with their evil and the person calling attention to the evil got shamed and ostracized.
The same attitude is now prevailing when it comes to individuals self-identifying as gay or the opposite sex. How dare we judge them? We don't know what they've been through. All they need is love. Who cares what the scriptures say? Therefore, the exception overrides all former rules and becomes the only rule. Yes, they say, we had better go along. Gay marriage? Fine. Gay parenting? Great. Bisexuality? Why not? People of any age impersonating the opposite sex? Sure. Wait a second . . . boys in the girls' showers? Well, we don't know what they've been through . . . If they really think they belong there . . . The girls will just have to adapt. And boys too, if girls want to be boys. In fact, let's make everybody go along. Yes, let's have everybody bow to the exception, no matter how wrong it is.
Or if it gets really confusing let's just pretend that the people who are running things at the moment are people of good will toward all men and it can all be worked out. Somehow. By somebody.
Sorry. Not going to happen.
Among intelligent and civilized people, when it comes to rules and policies and laws, these must be made and enforced for the good of all, not according to the whims of the few. When good general policies or rules or laws are made and carried out on a societal scale, individual wills must bow to these. This is no longer happening. In fact it is the very opposite that is happening. The individual exceptions are winning out over the general rules.
The truth is, all people do not have a feeling of good will toward men. The world as it is includes evil. Evil in people exists. And people who cover up other people's evil are evil too. They are like those three monkeys. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. That's how evil proliferates.
Here at Standard of Liberty we do not tolerate, accommodate, and excuse evil. We do not pretend that where good and evil are concerned there can be fairness. All scripture and all history and all the accumulated wisdom of this wide world shows that good and evil do not peacefully co-exist. One will be harmed and the other punished.
When the evil exception is preferred it becomes the rule. And Good is cast aside.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Where Transgenders Belong
Warning: In our PC world that embraces evil, vice, insanity, and nonsense over reality and true compassion and righteousness, the following is going to sound very harsh. But of course it is right and true and essential, and is the best for everyone.
Where do transgenders belong? Please note that we are not talking about people who are struggling against gender identity problems, are reaching out for help, or at least are not demanding special accommodations or acceptance. We are talking about people who proudly self-identify as the opposite sex (there is no scientific proof), who shamelessly flaunt themselves as the opposite sex in public, and who demand that everyone else officially accept them as the opposite sex and bow to their every whim. Most thinking people agree that transgenders do not belong in opposite sex sanitary facilities, whatever parts they have or don't have at the moment. (Most transgenders do not surgically mess with their genitalia.) But we're not talking restrooms here; we're talking residence, as in where they not only do their business but live and eat and sleep and everything. Where should they be?
Some little children have some degree of gender identity confusion, which could be caused by all sorts of environmental and personality issues, family relationships, peer abuse, sexual abuse, and so forth. Or it could be a sort of childish whimsy, a passing phase, what we used to call tomboyishness/sissyness. Think of all the little kids who go through a stage of pretending they are dogs or cats or the opposite sex. It's called being a child. They don't have the facts of life quite down yet. In fact, almost all children grow out of such stages or confusion. Wouldn't it help if parents and other authority figures encouraged them to develop proper gender identity, that is, masculinity/femininity according to their body and genetics, in order to live a normal and productive life and be a good example to others? Oh, and reproduce?
It should be obvious to everyone in our rotting culture today that children need proper, purposeful, deliberate guidance. It's a culture that actively pushes false and destructive notions about sex and the two sexes, such as that male and female are equal in every way and even interchangeable, that the sex of a person is arbitrarily "assigned" at birth instead of being totally obvious, that gender identity is up to an individual's whims, that promiscuity and pornography are harmless, that gender fluidity, masturbation, casual sex, sexual experimentation, and sexual abuse are healthy to sexual development.
If we want children to develop into mature responsible adults they need to be intentionally taught correct attitudes toward sexuality and proper gender roles based on reality when it comes to the most important things. We're not talking sports or clothes or hair or hobbies or talents or worldly ambitions or careers. We're talking sanitation and health and safety and modesty and chastity and marriage and procreation and morality. Pretty much the birds and the bees. Boys and girls have very different issues in very important areas. For instance, girls and boys have different organs that have different functions. Girls menstruate and boys don't. Boys have wet dreams and girls don't. Boys are generally physically stronger than girls. And so forth. Civilized people make accommodations for these obvious general differences.
No transgender person, no matter to what extent they go to impersonate the opposite sex will ever know what it's really like to be the opposite sex in these important areas.
Older children, teens, and adults who decide to present themselves as the opposite sex have a serious disorder. How cruel it is of our society today to pretend they do not have this serious disorder. It is especially cruel and abusive to the person and to the children and youth they come in contact with.
While everyone is talking about allowing transgenders into the public bathroom of their choice, a serious problem is being ignored. The truth, and the way it has been handled in the past, is that people with stubborn gender identity disorder have been discouraged in it and given professional help. David Pickup, a licensed marriage & family therapist who helps those struggling against transgenderism, says that in every case this disorder is the result of major trauma. This damage must be rooted out. The worst thing we can do is pretend there is nothing wrong. In doing that we are aiding them in their perverse delusion and outlandish behavior and showing absolutely no compassion for horrific abuses they have suffered. In all cases transgenders should be looked upon as abnormal, encouraged towards normality, and offered help. In all cases transgenderism should be seen as a harmful and destructive disorder. In some cases these individuals should be separated from normal society.
We submit that if proud transgenders were faced with treatment/institutionalization as their only options, many of them would straighten up or at least be more private about it. We need to again distinguish between truly emotionally/mentally ill people and pure hedonists/anarchists. If a society gives radical sexual revolutionaries an inch, they will take a mile. But if a society rejects harmful sexual revolutionary ideas and acts, such revolutionaries will fade into the background and no longer be able to exploit the truly ill and confused.
Yes. We've said it. Crazy people belong in places set aside for crazy people, not in public acting as if nothing is crazy. Take "Barbara Satin," for instance, whom Pres. Obama appointed to the President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. (That's very scary right there.) He is 82. For 28 years he has been presenting himself as a woman even though he has a wife whom he now again lives with and grown children. As a friend of ours put it, men make bad women.
Remember Corporal Klinger on the TV show Mash? He flamboyantly dressed himself as a woman in order to get kicked out of the army. But since everyone knew he wasn't really crazy and just wanted out of the army, they ignored it. Of course that whole situation, the cross dressing and the ignoring of the cross dressing, happened on comedy TV 50 years ago. And yes, in those days real life men who dressed as women were considered certifiably crazy.
True transgenderism is a symptom of deep trauma and a gamut of psychoses. As per the homosexual movement juggernaut and all the destruction it is leaving in its wake, this disease has been hijacked and exploited to get gain, and may simply be used today by some as an attention-getting device, act of rebellion, or sexual turn-on for hedonists. There is a sadistic side to sex. Perhaps it drives people crazy. To go to such lengths for any reason has got to be crazy. But really crazy people don't know they are crazy. And yet they can appear to be perfectly normal. Someone once said that sociopaths, including serial rapists and murderers, always appear normal, even extraordinarily personable and popular.
Perhaps huge sections of our whole society, by accepting transgenderism as normal, have gone crazy. Mao Tse Tung and his minions were crazy. Imagine declaring flower gardens and kitchen cooking utensils against the law! Evil is a form of disorder, rebellion, craziness. People get something they want out of evil. Sin is pleasurable. Power is addictive. Love of power can drive people insane. Pride can make people blind to what's right and good. It's the sane, seeing people who must take things in hand, out of real compassion for humanity and to ensure public order and safety.
If we want to be a civilized people we have to distinguish between lunacy and sanity. We have to treat craziness as craziness, no matter what the cause of the craziness.
Where do transgenders belong? Please note that we are not talking about people who are struggling against gender identity problems, are reaching out for help, or at least are not demanding special accommodations or acceptance. We are talking about people who proudly self-identify as the opposite sex (there is no scientific proof), who shamelessly flaunt themselves as the opposite sex in public, and who demand that everyone else officially accept them as the opposite sex and bow to their every whim. Most thinking people agree that transgenders do not belong in opposite sex sanitary facilities, whatever parts they have or don't have at the moment. (Most transgenders do not surgically mess with their genitalia.) But we're not talking restrooms here; we're talking residence, as in where they not only do their business but live and eat and sleep and everything. Where should they be?
Some little children have some degree of gender identity confusion, which could be caused by all sorts of environmental and personality issues, family relationships, peer abuse, sexual abuse, and so forth. Or it could be a sort of childish whimsy, a passing phase, what we used to call tomboyishness/sissyness. Think of all the little kids who go through a stage of pretending they are dogs or cats or the opposite sex. It's called being a child. They don't have the facts of life quite down yet. In fact, almost all children grow out of such stages or confusion. Wouldn't it help if parents and other authority figures encouraged them to develop proper gender identity, that is, masculinity/femininity according to their body and genetics, in order to live a normal and productive life and be a good example to others? Oh, and reproduce?
It should be obvious to everyone in our rotting culture today that children need proper, purposeful, deliberate guidance. It's a culture that actively pushes false and destructive notions about sex and the two sexes, such as that male and female are equal in every way and even interchangeable, that the sex of a person is arbitrarily "assigned" at birth instead of being totally obvious, that gender identity is up to an individual's whims, that promiscuity and pornography are harmless, that gender fluidity, masturbation, casual sex, sexual experimentation, and sexual abuse are healthy to sexual development.
If we want children to develop into mature responsible adults they need to be intentionally taught correct attitudes toward sexuality and proper gender roles based on reality when it comes to the most important things. We're not talking sports or clothes or hair or hobbies or talents or worldly ambitions or careers. We're talking sanitation and health and safety and modesty and chastity and marriage and procreation and morality. Pretty much the birds and the bees. Boys and girls have very different issues in very important areas. For instance, girls and boys have different organs that have different functions. Girls menstruate and boys don't. Boys have wet dreams and girls don't. Boys are generally physically stronger than girls. And so forth. Civilized people make accommodations for these obvious general differences.
No transgender person, no matter to what extent they go to impersonate the opposite sex will ever know what it's really like to be the opposite sex in these important areas.
Older children, teens, and adults who decide to present themselves as the opposite sex have a serious disorder. How cruel it is of our society today to pretend they do not have this serious disorder. It is especially cruel and abusive to the person and to the children and youth they come in contact with.
While everyone is talking about allowing transgenders into the public bathroom of their choice, a serious problem is being ignored. The truth, and the way it has been handled in the past, is that people with stubborn gender identity disorder have been discouraged in it and given professional help. David Pickup, a licensed marriage & family therapist who helps those struggling against transgenderism, says that in every case this disorder is the result of major trauma. This damage must be rooted out. The worst thing we can do is pretend there is nothing wrong. In doing that we are aiding them in their perverse delusion and outlandish behavior and showing absolutely no compassion for horrific abuses they have suffered. In all cases transgenders should be looked upon as abnormal, encouraged towards normality, and offered help. In all cases transgenderism should be seen as a harmful and destructive disorder. In some cases these individuals should be separated from normal society.We submit that if proud transgenders were faced with treatment/institutionalization as their only options, many of them would straighten up or at least be more private about it. We need to again distinguish between truly emotionally/mentally ill people and pure hedonists/anarchists. If a society gives radical sexual revolutionaries an inch, they will take a mile. But if a society rejects harmful sexual revolutionary ideas and acts, such revolutionaries will fade into the background and no longer be able to exploit the truly ill and confused.
Yes. We've said it. Crazy people belong in places set aside for crazy people, not in public acting as if nothing is crazy. Take "Barbara Satin," for instance, whom Pres. Obama appointed to the President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. (That's very scary right there.) He is 82. For 28 years he has been presenting himself as a woman even though he has a wife whom he now again lives with and grown children. As a friend of ours put it, men make bad women.Remember Corporal Klinger on the TV show Mash? He flamboyantly dressed himself as a woman in order to get kicked out of the army. But since everyone knew he wasn't really crazy and just wanted out of the army, they ignored it. Of course that whole situation, the cross dressing and the ignoring of the cross dressing, happened on comedy TV 50 years ago. And yes, in those days real life men who dressed as women were considered certifiably crazy.
True transgenderism is a symptom of deep trauma and a gamut of psychoses. As per the homosexual movement juggernaut and all the destruction it is leaving in its wake, this disease has been hijacked and exploited to get gain, and may simply be used today by some as an attention-getting device, act of rebellion, or sexual turn-on for hedonists. There is a sadistic side to sex. Perhaps it drives people crazy. To go to such lengths for any reason has got to be crazy. But really crazy people don't know they are crazy. And yet they can appear to be perfectly normal. Someone once said that sociopaths, including serial rapists and murderers, always appear normal, even extraordinarily personable and popular.
Perhaps huge sections of our whole society, by accepting transgenderism as normal, have gone crazy. Mao Tse Tung and his minions were crazy. Imagine declaring flower gardens and kitchen cooking utensils against the law! Evil is a form of disorder, rebellion, craziness. People get something they want out of evil. Sin is pleasurable. Power is addictive. Love of power can drive people insane. Pride can make people blind to what's right and good. It's the sane, seeing people who must take things in hand, out of real compassion for humanity and to ensure public order and safety.
If we want to be a civilized people we have to distinguish between lunacy and sanity. We have to treat craziness as craziness, no matter what the cause of the craziness.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
No Problem, Until It Happens to YOU
The problem with liberals and others who just don't fully engage, let's call them apathetics, is that they don't think things through. Life is just going along and, well, they live very superficial existences and don't care much about anything but themselves. They've lost what C.S. Lewis called the primary human value, which is to care about human posterity, that is, the future of humankind in every aspect. That's what people used to do. Think of the founding fathers. They risked everything in order to begin something huge and new they thought would benefit generations to come like never before. This was not to benefit themselves in the here and now as much as to be a blessing to those who would come after, those they would never know. They hoped their careful efforts in establishing a unique country with high ideals and principles, and checks and balances on flawed human nature, would prove to make people free and responsible and productive for hundreds of years or however long it could be upheld and sustained. How's that for selflessness? It's actually a type of Christ.
We remember when we went to Glenn Beck's big rally at the Lincoln Memorial in 2010. The place was packed. It was so exciting to be with people who held similar beliefs about important things. We camped next to a nice family from the midwest and chatted a bit. We had just published our book Chased by an Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality, along with a nondenominational Christian version called Wild Elephant. We offered to send them one as a gift and told them a little bit about it. The father responded, well, no thanks, but if we ever have that problem in our family, we'll know where to find help. Case in point: Nobody cares about what's happening all around them until it affects them directly. This ignorance and apathy is a recipe for the culture rot and societal collapse we are now experiencing.
We were being interviewed about Obama's directive to all schools (which amounts to threatening to defund states which do not allow people, male or female, into the sanitary facilities of their choice) by a nice young man from an ultra liberal local weekly newspaper yesterday. He had no wife or children, just a student, he said. We asked him what he thought about it. He said the issue was of negligible importance. Then we asked him what he'd do if he had a little daughter who went into the little girls' room to be confronted by a strange man. He seemed a bit taken aback. We urged him to think it through, and think bigger, think beyond his own bubble, think into the future.
What we see here is gross ignorance in the form of cemented uninformed opinions. What we see here in this plague of political correctness is an astounding lack of real and lasting concern for humanity, clothed in a selfish, live-and-let-live, totally phony concern for a strange and tiny segment of humanity. What we see here is hypocrisy in the flesh.The short-sightedness and selfishness and smugness and lack of humankindness is astounding. It's as if many people are not growing up into mature adults. Ever.
Let's repeat. Aside from the very real dangers the ignoring of male/female signs opens up, you're not helping a child (or teen or adult) by encouraging gender identity confusion. You're condemning that person to a lifetime of misery and sterility and hopelessness. The great majority of children naturally grow out of such childishness or trauma or confusion, 88-98 percent! But this could change. When authority figures, from the President on down, encourage that confusion, celebrate it and put their stamp of approval on it, even sexualize it in our oversexed pornographied culture, they encourage bizarre experimentation and acting out. The results will be more gender confusion and misery and chaos and harm---on a societal scale. Fact: What is encouraged will increase.
People who think they are islands, that this destruction of the civil society won't negatively impact their comfy private lives, need to open up their hearts and minds and think again.
President Obama, put your your money where your mouth is. We'd like to see you use the women's facilities. Yes, if as U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, male/female bathroom signs are as discriminatory as white/colored signs, you are the same as a racist bigot if you use the bathroom sign that correlates with your genitalia or gender identity.
Males in female shower rooms, the killing of unborn babies, no guns to protect one's family, 18-year-old girls forced to sign up for the draft, no God who loves us and no Christ who died for our sins. It's all great to smug and narrow and perhaps evil people until or unless they see what havoc these travesties and false notions have wrought in their own lives.
We remember when we went to Glenn Beck's big rally at the Lincoln Memorial in 2010. The place was packed. It was so exciting to be with people who held similar beliefs about important things. We camped next to a nice family from the midwest and chatted a bit. We had just published our book Chased by an Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality, along with a nondenominational Christian version called Wild Elephant. We offered to send them one as a gift and told them a little bit about it. The father responded, well, no thanks, but if we ever have that problem in our family, we'll know where to find help. Case in point: Nobody cares about what's happening all around them until it affects them directly. This ignorance and apathy is a recipe for the culture rot and societal collapse we are now experiencing.We were being interviewed about Obama's directive to all schools (which amounts to threatening to defund states which do not allow people, male or female, into the sanitary facilities of their choice) by a nice young man from an ultra liberal local weekly newspaper yesterday. He had no wife or children, just a student, he said. We asked him what he thought about it. He said the issue was of negligible importance. Then we asked him what he'd do if he had a little daughter who went into the little girls' room to be confronted by a strange man. He seemed a bit taken aback. We urged him to think it through, and think bigger, think beyond his own bubble, think into the future.
What we see here is gross ignorance in the form of cemented uninformed opinions. What we see here in this plague of political correctness is an astounding lack of real and lasting concern for humanity, clothed in a selfish, live-and-let-live, totally phony concern for a strange and tiny segment of humanity. What we see here is hypocrisy in the flesh.The short-sightedness and selfishness and smugness and lack of humankindness is astounding. It's as if many people are not growing up into mature adults. Ever.
Let's repeat. Aside from the very real dangers the ignoring of male/female signs opens up, you're not helping a child (or teen or adult) by encouraging gender identity confusion. You're condemning that person to a lifetime of misery and sterility and hopelessness. The great majority of children naturally grow out of such childishness or trauma or confusion, 88-98 percent! But this could change. When authority figures, from the President on down, encourage that confusion, celebrate it and put their stamp of approval on it, even sexualize it in our oversexed pornographied culture, they encourage bizarre experimentation and acting out. The results will be more gender confusion and misery and chaos and harm---on a societal scale. Fact: What is encouraged will increase.
People who think they are islands, that this destruction of the civil society won't negatively impact their comfy private lives, need to open up their hearts and minds and think again.
President Obama, put your your money where your mouth is. We'd like to see you use the women's facilities. Yes, if as U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, male/female bathroom signs are as discriminatory as white/colored signs, you are the same as a racist bigot if you use the bathroom sign that correlates with your genitalia or gender identity.
Males in female shower rooms, the killing of unborn babies, no guns to protect one's family, 18-year-old girls forced to sign up for the draft, no God who loves us and no Christ who died for our sins. It's all great to smug and narrow and perhaps evil people until or unless they see what havoc these travesties and false notions have wrought in their own lives.
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
My Devil Has a Plan
In the fallout from the President's edict that all school sanitary facilities everywhere should allow either sex of person regardless of actual sex, we've been hearing professionals and experienced people on sexuality issues speak out. These are people on our side. What they say is mostly good. But we detect a big problem. Please correct us if we're wrong.
Okay. We get it that clinical therapists, like ecclesiastical leaders, like to say they have compassion for their struggling clients or their struggling congregants. We get all that stuff about love love love, all-you-need-is-love. We also get that it's not enough and it's destructive. There seems to be a blind eye being turned to sin and evil and harm and guilt and accountability. This is an evil in itself. You have to have both charity and knowledge or neither are going to be effective, most importantly if our main concern is with the soul. And not just knowledge of the causal trauma a person who "transgenders" has suffered, which is just about always the case, but knowledge of the evil of this mindset. This is the devil's territory and we're just not hearing it. They decide that every trannie they happen to know and stand in a position to help is a completely harmless individual, so they decide that transgenderism is harmless across the board. Harmless to whom? What about the message the societal acceptance of transgenderism is sending to children, the little sponges?
In recent years it appears that knowledge has been neglected in favor of a watered-down, temporal form of charity. Is it an over-correction? We think so. And over-correction can prove fatal. The religious stance emphasizing sin and punishment and the need for repentance is an embarrassment people now wish to sweep under the rug. Hellfire and damnation are now hugely politically incorrect. Heaven and hell have been replaced by the here and now, as in let's just slide this Bible to the side. They are over-correcting by emphasizing a chicken soup compassion that doesn't really help anybody at all.
No, compassion cannot outweigh truth. And compassion is not necessarily charity. Let's talk about real charity, the pure love of Christ. Charity is not ignorance. Charity is not a weak stand. It is a fully informed knowledge of the whole situation. And then it doesn't fly off the handle with a knee-jerk rejection or condemnation. It is measured and thoughtful and patient. It forgives the repentant seventy-times seven. It seeks to know how best to handle things. It is strongly and correctly informed and strongly concerned with the welfare of the immortal souls of men. Not just comforts in the now. Not just temporal solutions. Not our own accomplishments. Not how much good we do. It deals in eternal truths. As such, charity, Real Love, may appear harsh and be unwelcome to the sinner and to the helper alike.
People purporting to help others (and they may people, but only to a certain extent) are so afraid of appearing uncompassionate---and we submit that some are also so full of their own story and their own magnanimity----that they don't see that they need to tell things as they really are. They are too sentimental. Life becomes a reflection of their own self-righteous or hurt feelings. Wrong. They need to call sin sin, evil evil, guilt guilt. It's not just an individual struggle; it's a culture war, and in this culture war if you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem.
All this across-the-board gushy compassion towards the eternally victimized sexually confused is pretty sickening to a mother whose child was seduced and hurt by such people. It's like telling a parent whose child was killed by a drunk driver to have only compassion for the drunk driver. No accountability. No punishment. No consequences. The drunk driver is just a victim. In fact, let's make him a hero and put his picture on the cover of Vanity Fair. By the way, the mother mentioned here gave no leeway to her child who consequently needed to repent himself and get straightened out. Which he eventually did. The gospel that teaches of sin and repentance and redemption is what works. Better than mere mushy, gushy compassion. Better than anything.
And another thing. All this emphasis on compassion sends a message to the acting out/afflicted. They are getting sympathy, which is something emotionally ill people crave, and so why not continue the disorder? It's working!
We get that professionals and ecclesiastics don't want to use their clients/congregants to further any cause. Right, but isn't God and goodness and truth always worth fighting for? Doesn't God always come first? Wouldn't putting God first be a good thing for their struggling clients/congregants to see them doing?
We think a lot of therapists and church leaders who hang their hats on their unquestionable compassion for the same-sex attracted and transgendered are living in a bubble, a twenty-five-year-old bubble. Whatever ecclesiastical/professional ethics these people hold, it seems that their mindset is in a place where there is no pornography available to children and youth, where there aren't gays as celebrities or main characters in mainstream culture, where teachers in schools don't teach homosexuality as perfectly normal, where schools don't hold gay sensitivity assemblies, where there is no president of the United States celebrating homosexuality and transgenderism and forcing it on school children, where there is no pro-gay internet/facebook, where there are no online predators, no sex addicts, no pedophiles, no perverts, where evil does not exist. These well-intentioned but blind people need to open their eyes. There is such as thing as right and wrong, as good and evil. But no, we have to have compaaaaaaaassssssssion. Nothing's outrageous, nothing's abhorrent, nothing's unacceptable. It's just a pitiable psychological problem. Who cares who these confused people hurt in turn?
"The world as it is includes evil" (Richard Giannone). "The triumph of sin comes with our failure to perceive it" (Roger Scruton). "My devil has a name, a history, and a definite plan" (Flannery O'Connor).
We don't buy this wholesale hazy compassion and as you can see we are in good company. In fact, we're sick of it and on a societal scale it certainly isn't working. It isn't even making a dent; in fact it's playing right into the enemy's hands. The devil is having his vengeful way with God's children.
Has everybody forgotten about tough love? That's what the true gospel of Jesus Christ comprises. Apparently, many well-meaning people think they know better than God, and that's the first step toward the devil.
Okay. We get it that clinical therapists, like ecclesiastical leaders, like to say they have compassion for their struggling clients or their struggling congregants. We get all that stuff about love love love, all-you-need-is-love. We also get that it's not enough and it's destructive. There seems to be a blind eye being turned to sin and evil and harm and guilt and accountability. This is an evil in itself. You have to have both charity and knowledge or neither are going to be effective, most importantly if our main concern is with the soul. And not just knowledge of the causal trauma a person who "transgenders" has suffered, which is just about always the case, but knowledge of the evil of this mindset. This is the devil's territory and we're just not hearing it. They decide that every trannie they happen to know and stand in a position to help is a completely harmless individual, so they decide that transgenderism is harmless across the board. Harmless to whom? What about the message the societal acceptance of transgenderism is sending to children, the little sponges?
In recent years it appears that knowledge has been neglected in favor of a watered-down, temporal form of charity. Is it an over-correction? We think so. And over-correction can prove fatal. The religious stance emphasizing sin and punishment and the need for repentance is an embarrassment people now wish to sweep under the rug. Hellfire and damnation are now hugely politically incorrect. Heaven and hell have been replaced by the here and now, as in let's just slide this Bible to the side. They are over-correcting by emphasizing a chicken soup compassion that doesn't really help anybody at all.
No, compassion cannot outweigh truth. And compassion is not necessarily charity. Let's talk about real charity, the pure love of Christ. Charity is not ignorance. Charity is not a weak stand. It is a fully informed knowledge of the whole situation. And then it doesn't fly off the handle with a knee-jerk rejection or condemnation. It is measured and thoughtful and patient. It forgives the repentant seventy-times seven. It seeks to know how best to handle things. It is strongly and correctly informed and strongly concerned with the welfare of the immortal souls of men. Not just comforts in the now. Not just temporal solutions. Not our own accomplishments. Not how much good we do. It deals in eternal truths. As such, charity, Real Love, may appear harsh and be unwelcome to the sinner and to the helper alike.
People purporting to help others (and they may people, but only to a certain extent) are so afraid of appearing uncompassionate---and we submit that some are also so full of their own story and their own magnanimity----that they don't see that they need to tell things as they really are. They are too sentimental. Life becomes a reflection of their own self-righteous or hurt feelings. Wrong. They need to call sin sin, evil evil, guilt guilt. It's not just an individual struggle; it's a culture war, and in this culture war if you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem.
All this across-the-board gushy compassion towards the eternally victimized sexually confused is pretty sickening to a mother whose child was seduced and hurt by such people. It's like telling a parent whose child was killed by a drunk driver to have only compassion for the drunk driver. No accountability. No punishment. No consequences. The drunk driver is just a victim. In fact, let's make him a hero and put his picture on the cover of Vanity Fair. By the way, the mother mentioned here gave no leeway to her child who consequently needed to repent himself and get straightened out. Which he eventually did. The gospel that teaches of sin and repentance and redemption is what works. Better than mere mushy, gushy compassion. Better than anything.
And another thing. All this emphasis on compassion sends a message to the acting out/afflicted. They are getting sympathy, which is something emotionally ill people crave, and so why not continue the disorder? It's working!
We get that professionals and ecclesiastics don't want to use their clients/congregants to further any cause. Right, but isn't God and goodness and truth always worth fighting for? Doesn't God always come first? Wouldn't putting God first be a good thing for their struggling clients/congregants to see them doing?
We think a lot of therapists and church leaders who hang their hats on their unquestionable compassion for the same-sex attracted and transgendered are living in a bubble, a twenty-five-year-old bubble. Whatever ecclesiastical/professional ethics these people hold, it seems that their mindset is in a place where there is no pornography available to children and youth, where there aren't gays as celebrities or main characters in mainstream culture, where teachers in schools don't teach homosexuality as perfectly normal, where schools don't hold gay sensitivity assemblies, where there is no president of the United States celebrating homosexuality and transgenderism and forcing it on school children, where there is no pro-gay internet/facebook, where there are no online predators, no sex addicts, no pedophiles, no perverts, where evil does not exist. These well-intentioned but blind people need to open their eyes. There is such as thing as right and wrong, as good and evil. But no, we have to have compaaaaaaaassssssssion. Nothing's outrageous, nothing's abhorrent, nothing's unacceptable. It's just a pitiable psychological problem. Who cares who these confused people hurt in turn?
"The world as it is includes evil" (Richard Giannone). "The triumph of sin comes with our failure to perceive it" (Roger Scruton). "My devil has a name, a history, and a definite plan" (Flannery O'Connor).
We don't buy this wholesale hazy compassion and as you can see we are in good company. In fact, we're sick of it and on a societal scale it certainly isn't working. It isn't even making a dent; in fact it's playing right into the enemy's hands. The devil is having his vengeful way with God's children.
Has everybody forgotten about tough love? That's what the true gospel of Jesus Christ comprises. Apparently, many well-meaning people think they know better than God, and that's the first step toward the devil.
Indoctrination Versus True Education
There is a false narrative going around stating that any kind of teaching amounts to indoctrination. Wrong. If that were true then nobody should teach anybody anything. Not anything. There would be no such thing as teaching. So let's clear this problem up.
First let's talk about indoctrination versus academic education. Indoctrination is not the same as education. Indoctrination is a negative term. Education is a positive term. True education is the free and open passing on of accumulated common knowledge, absolutes, experience, and proven facts as accurately as possible, which is implemented founded on objective standards toward human behavior, which standards come from God and only from God. (It can't have evolved from a blob of jelly.) Becoming an educated individual is entirely voluntary. By contrast, indoctrination is a systematic forcing of narrow uncompromising ideologies onto unsuspecting groups. The classic depiction of indoctrination is the repetitive chanting of prepared mantras by closely-controlled school children.
The fact is, ideologies not founded in human experience and God are likely to prove nonbenevolent, that is, destructive, towards mankind (grateful nod to C. S. Lewis). These ideologies are further driven by propaganda. Propaganda, another negative term, is distorted information deliberately disseminated in order to condition and control a population, to gain power over people. Key word: distorted. Propaganda is anything from outright lies to part-truths. It is not the same as emphasizing the positive and good, but it is the same as deliberately hiding the negative or corrupt. A classic book on this topic is Propaganda, the Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul, 1965.
Now about religious education which people are also generalizing and falsely labeling as indoctrination. True religious teaching, whether in a church meeting or the home, should exist in an open, free, and voluntary environment. Nothing other than true principles should be emphasized. There is no place for distorted information when it comes to the immortal soul. All truth, even that which makes a church institution or family look bad, can be used for spiritual growth. For example, if a leader of a church or a family member is found to have done some very bad things, this knowledge can be a learning experience about human nature and a call to repent of idolatry and put one's chief trust not in human beings but in God alone. (It's all in the scriptures.)
It is sad but true that governments, media, and schools are not the only institutions that use tactics of indoctrination and propaganda. Oftentimes people in charge of churches, supposed Christian religious entities, have little faith in God's plan and therefore decide that the regular people below them are not capable of understanding or applying the gospel. They think people are too soft and the gospel is too harsh. Because of this lack of faith they substitute philosophies of men for true principles and entice emotions rather than spirituality, all in order to get the people to merely comply. They tend to focus on human relations, outward performances, and getting along in the temporal world. (Listen carefully and see if this isn't happening in many churches.) Spiritual growth, personal relationships with the Godhead, spiritual guidance, sin, repentance, correction, and divine redemption are not emphasized, expounded, or explored. All too often what is presented and proliferated are human relationship stories, selective anecdotes, warm fuzzies, and efforts to enforce outward, temporal compliance with whatever the current campaign. As such, religious institutions are increasingly secularized. Except for some rote religious expressions and rites, many churches today could pass for self-esteem-building conferences, Kiwanis clubs,the Oprah Winfrey Show, or the Red Cross. Remaining religious expressions may soon be deemed politically incorrect and so become watered down or dropped as we witnessed when visiting Europe where according to the natives their beautiful neighborhood cathedrals are now empty and meaningless architectural icons. No Christ needed. No meat. Just chicken soup. The age-old human failings such as self-interest and fear and pride and unrighteous dominion are sins that stand in the way of true religious teaching and learning.
So yes, the terrible thing called indoctrination is rampant in our society, even in our churches. There is a noticeable lack of education going on, the passing on of real knowledge, spiritual and temporal, unencumbered by self-serving philosophies and ideologies invented and propagandized by men. But whatever you do, don't confuse the two.
First let's talk about indoctrination versus academic education. Indoctrination is not the same as education. Indoctrination is a negative term. Education is a positive term. True education is the free and open passing on of accumulated common knowledge, absolutes, experience, and proven facts as accurately as possible, which is implemented founded on objective standards toward human behavior, which standards come from God and only from God. (It can't have evolved from a blob of jelly.) Becoming an educated individual is entirely voluntary. By contrast, indoctrination is a systematic forcing of narrow uncompromising ideologies onto unsuspecting groups. The classic depiction of indoctrination is the repetitive chanting of prepared mantras by closely-controlled school children.
The fact is, ideologies not founded in human experience and God are likely to prove nonbenevolent, that is, destructive, towards mankind (grateful nod to C. S. Lewis). These ideologies are further driven by propaganda. Propaganda, another negative term, is distorted information deliberately disseminated in order to condition and control a population, to gain power over people. Key word: distorted. Propaganda is anything from outright lies to part-truths. It is not the same as emphasizing the positive and good, but it is the same as deliberately hiding the negative or corrupt. A classic book on this topic is Propaganda, the Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul, 1965.
Now about religious education which people are also generalizing and falsely labeling as indoctrination. True religious teaching, whether in a church meeting or the home, should exist in an open, free, and voluntary environment. Nothing other than true principles should be emphasized. There is no place for distorted information when it comes to the immortal soul. All truth, even that which makes a church institution or family look bad, can be used for spiritual growth. For example, if a leader of a church or a family member is found to have done some very bad things, this knowledge can be a learning experience about human nature and a call to repent of idolatry and put one's chief trust not in human beings but in God alone. (It's all in the scriptures.)
It is sad but true that governments, media, and schools are not the only institutions that use tactics of indoctrination and propaganda. Oftentimes people in charge of churches, supposed Christian religious entities, have little faith in God's plan and therefore decide that the regular people below them are not capable of understanding or applying the gospel. They think people are too soft and the gospel is too harsh. Because of this lack of faith they substitute philosophies of men for true principles and entice emotions rather than spirituality, all in order to get the people to merely comply. They tend to focus on human relations, outward performances, and getting along in the temporal world. (Listen carefully and see if this isn't happening in many churches.) Spiritual growth, personal relationships with the Godhead, spiritual guidance, sin, repentance, correction, and divine redemption are not emphasized, expounded, or explored. All too often what is presented and proliferated are human relationship stories, selective anecdotes, warm fuzzies, and efforts to enforce outward, temporal compliance with whatever the current campaign. As such, religious institutions are increasingly secularized. Except for some rote religious expressions and rites, many churches today could pass for self-esteem-building conferences, Kiwanis clubs,the Oprah Winfrey Show, or the Red Cross. Remaining religious expressions may soon be deemed politically incorrect and so become watered down or dropped as we witnessed when visiting Europe where according to the natives their beautiful neighborhood cathedrals are now empty and meaningless architectural icons. No Christ needed. No meat. Just chicken soup. The age-old human failings such as self-interest and fear and pride and unrighteous dominion are sins that stand in the way of true religious teaching and learning.
So yes, the terrible thing called indoctrination is rampant in our society, even in our churches. There is a noticeable lack of education going on, the passing on of real knowledge, spiritual and temporal, unencumbered by self-serving philosophies and ideologies invented and propagandized by men. But whatever you do, don't confuse the two.
Thursday, May 5, 2016
It Doesn't Take Much to Turn Some People
Gee, some people's supposed values are sure weak and phony. They can't stand up to anything negative. They are just too used to being coddled and flattered and revered and complimented and awarded. Here's an example.
An apparently well-to-do LDS couple involved in humanitarian efforts in Africa gets invited to receive an award from the University of Utah, that is the wife is invited to receive an award along with three other people. Then the homosexualists get wind of it and find out the woman is on the board of the World Congress of Families, an organization that was formed to combat the homosexual movement but which by the way has softened a great deal to the point of barely mentioning the issue anymore. The WCF is one of the traditional values organizations that has been proclaimed "a hate group" by the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center. Does this woman stick to her guns, that is, her values? Or does she cave? You guessed it. She caves. Yes, she resigned from the board of WCF rather than take a little heat from a small group of crafty, tyrannical, and proudly immoral people. Wow. Now that is sad.
Yes, evidently she is one of those who sees only the very surface of things, who is tossed by every philosophical wind, who caters to men rather than to God, who panders to sin rather than miss out on earthly praise, whose powers of discernment have atrophied, who on some issues makes no distinction between right and wrong, who has bought the anti-Christ notion that life is all about human relations and some undefined sort of all-encompassing temporal and sociological "love."
We submit she is one of those utopianists with very strong but erroneous opinions, who get their self-worth from going around showing everyone how they are making the world a better place. This is not Christianity and the world will never be a better place because it's the world, not heaven. A little education can teach you that. Of course we try to help people to improve their temporal circumstances. But as Jesus said, the poor will always be with us. So will the sick and the infirm and the crazy and the depressed and the wicked. The primary thing to do is to share the gospel of Christ: God's love and truth and sin and repentance and redemption. When we use the Lord's solutions, one result may be that people's temporal circumstances may well improve in the process, besides giving everybody involved opportunity for spiritual growth which is essential for eternal life. If we seek the Spirit we'll know the best why and how of helping others.
People who get so caught up in these purely sociological endeavors, however well-meant, are prone to lose sight of the ephemeral nature of mortality. They start to think this is all there is, or rather their accomplishments are all there is. Wrong. So wrong.
Oh my, what some people will sell their souls for! It's the old story of Dr. Faust selling his immortal soul to the devil for a few years of earthly pleasures being lived out over and over again. But this isn't fiction. People are doing this very thing --- in real life.
And don't forget. The homosexualists are not appeased. Whatever people do to appease them is never enough. Despite her immediate renouncing of the WCF, this woman is still on the outs because she used to be affiliated with the WCF. You see,these homosexualists enjoy intimidating/inflicting pain and suffering on others just for the enjoyment of it. This is the nature of homosexuality. It's maladaptive, hurtful, cruel. It's a whole mindset of tyranny over others. And people like this woman would rather step in line and be tyrannized than go to any trouble to be free. That's also human nature.
But wait, it appears she was a phony board member to begin with, or a weak one anyway. Some people will say and do anything just to be somebody they consider "important," no matter what the organization. Again, the human condition. Maybe for her it's not about values at all, unless you call being popular with human beings a value. According to her, she is suddenly all about supporting all kinds of families and says, " . . . I do not want my personal values to be misinterpreted." Again, why was she on the board of the big WCF in the first place, if when it's brought to light she is embarrassed about it? Apparently it was all just for show. They should be glad to be rid of her.
Among other things, what we have here is a failure to be religious being carried out by very outwardly religious people. Jesus soundly condemned this and called it hypocrisy. All religion concerns what we learn here to prepare us for our spiritual condition in eternity. That's what Jesus was concerned with. Everything he said and did was to teach a spiritual lesson for the benefit of our immortal souls. If you care more about the here and now and give little or no thought to the hereafter, there is nothing to stop you from doing the easiest, most man-pleasing, most vain-glorious, most ungodly things in whatever situation strikes you. And yea, verily, you have your reward now, and will reap the consequences later.
Lord help us all.
An apparently well-to-do LDS couple involved in humanitarian efforts in Africa gets invited to receive an award from the University of Utah, that is the wife is invited to receive an award along with three other people. Then the homosexualists get wind of it and find out the woman is on the board of the World Congress of Families, an organization that was formed to combat the homosexual movement but which by the way has softened a great deal to the point of barely mentioning the issue anymore. The WCF is one of the traditional values organizations that has been proclaimed "a hate group" by the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center. Does this woman stick to her guns, that is, her values? Or does she cave? You guessed it. She caves. Yes, she resigned from the board of WCF rather than take a little heat from a small group of crafty, tyrannical, and proudly immoral people. Wow. Now that is sad.
Yes, evidently she is one of those who sees only the very surface of things, who is tossed by every philosophical wind, who caters to men rather than to God, who panders to sin rather than miss out on earthly praise, whose powers of discernment have atrophied, who on some issues makes no distinction between right and wrong, who has bought the anti-Christ notion that life is all about human relations and some undefined sort of all-encompassing temporal and sociological "love."
We submit she is one of those utopianists with very strong but erroneous opinions, who get their self-worth from going around showing everyone how they are making the world a better place. This is not Christianity and the world will never be a better place because it's the world, not heaven. A little education can teach you that. Of course we try to help people to improve their temporal circumstances. But as Jesus said, the poor will always be with us. So will the sick and the infirm and the crazy and the depressed and the wicked. The primary thing to do is to share the gospel of Christ: God's love and truth and sin and repentance and redemption. When we use the Lord's solutions, one result may be that people's temporal circumstances may well improve in the process, besides giving everybody involved opportunity for spiritual growth which is essential for eternal life. If we seek the Spirit we'll know the best why and how of helping others.
People who get so caught up in these purely sociological endeavors, however well-meant, are prone to lose sight of the ephemeral nature of mortality. They start to think this is all there is, or rather their accomplishments are all there is. Wrong. So wrong.
Oh my, what some people will sell their souls for! It's the old story of Dr. Faust selling his immortal soul to the devil for a few years of earthly pleasures being lived out over and over again. But this isn't fiction. People are doing this very thing --- in real life.
And don't forget. The homosexualists are not appeased. Whatever people do to appease them is never enough. Despite her immediate renouncing of the WCF, this woman is still on the outs because she used to be affiliated with the WCF. You see,these homosexualists enjoy intimidating/inflicting pain and suffering on others just for the enjoyment of it. This is the nature of homosexuality. It's maladaptive, hurtful, cruel. It's a whole mindset of tyranny over others. And people like this woman would rather step in line and be tyrannized than go to any trouble to be free. That's also human nature.
But wait, it appears she was a phony board member to begin with, or a weak one anyway. Some people will say and do anything just to be somebody they consider "important," no matter what the organization. Again, the human condition. Maybe for her it's not about values at all, unless you call being popular with human beings a value. According to her, she is suddenly all about supporting all kinds of families and says, " . . . I do not want my personal values to be misinterpreted." Again, why was she on the board of the big WCF in the first place, if when it's brought to light she is embarrassed about it? Apparently it was all just for show. They should be glad to be rid of her.
Among other things, what we have here is a failure to be religious being carried out by very outwardly religious people. Jesus soundly condemned this and called it hypocrisy. All religion concerns what we learn here to prepare us for our spiritual condition in eternity. That's what Jesus was concerned with. Everything he said and did was to teach a spiritual lesson for the benefit of our immortal souls. If you care more about the here and now and give little or no thought to the hereafter, there is nothing to stop you from doing the easiest, most man-pleasing, most vain-glorious, most ungodly things in whatever situation strikes you. And yea, verily, you have your reward now, and will reap the consequences later.
Lord help us all.
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