(Warning: This post got way too long because it really encompasses two separate issues: Deceptive media practices and ignorant, psuedo-religious ideology. Please read this with that in mind.)

I got an email from the AFA today asking me to buy and wear a button in support of traditional Christmas. Reason for the season kind of stuff. Not unusual. But the headline was about a school near Chicago that had “banned Christmas”. That’s a pretty bold statement. I appreciate the AFA but I’m keenly aware that they can get a little carried away in sensationalism, so I always do some background checking on their stories.

Initially, I found a bunch of blogs decrying the Oak Lawn school board for attacking tradition in favor of political correctness. The usual rancor you would expect. But all the rants linked to the same story from Chicago’s CBS affiliate. I read the story and even watched the news video clip and it seemed to me that it was all being over-blown. (Also something I’ve come to expect.)

This story and video report on a school board meeting at which a bunch of white folks say a lot of pretty stupid stuff* and the Muslim mother at the center of the controversy comes off as the most logical and level headed person at the meeting. So I begin to think, “Well, nobody is ‘banning Christmas’ here. It’s just a little Muslim mom asking that her kids be allowed to fast according to their religion. That’s nothing to get all mad about.”

But then, I found an older video which made much more sense. The blog links I had followed were referring to this video of the previous story in which the school did explicitly ban the celebration of “Halloween”, “Christmas”, and any other seasonal religious holiday. It was a knee jerk reaction to the display (and subsequent removal) of some Ramadan decorations. Instead, the school opted for sterile, politically correct “Fall” and “Winter” celebrations.

Now, normally, I would be upset about the religious ban, but the school board made the right decision in the end (according to the later story, allowing Christians and Muslims to celebrate). What I find really disturbing is that the CBS web site clearly replaced the first story with the second, using the same URL to cover up the upsetting story with the soothing one, hiding the story about religion being banned from school with the story in which the school’s “tolerant” final decision is made and the “good, white, Christian folk” are displayed using very poor logic* to condemn the school’s earlier decision.

Is anyone else bothered by the link switching going on here? If I linked to a story about religious intolerance and that link was later changed to a story about religious tolerance, I’d look like an idiot. Perhaps that was the TV station’s intention. Either way, it stinks.

* Now, I want to expand on this “stupid stuff”:

I’m very conservative and very nationalistic. I’m also a very vocal Christan and I tend to stand on the side of keeping Christmas Christian and public. But I really get aggravated when people use poor logic and bigotry to support their point. It makes the rest of us look bad. Here are some quotes from the parents at the school board meeting:

“If Muslims want the school holidays, menus and school traditions to become tailored to their needs or beliefs, then they should go to private school next to their mosque.”

So, tell me, sir: Why aren’t your kids in a Christian school? If your kids are in a public school, you should expect them to be exposed to multiple cultures. If you expect your public school to celebrate Christmas, you should not be surprised when they also learn about Ramadan. Your double standard in unconstitutional.

“They’re trying to take away holidays and stuff for the kids,” said resident Gene Boerema, dressed in a Santa Claus costume.

Wow. You really came out to support your religious beliefs, huh? Cuz we all know that Santa delivered baby Jesus and put him in a brightly wrapped box under a decorated pine tree. A Santa costume at a school board meeting? I think someone just wanted to make the news. People who turn serious issues into a circus really irritate me.

“We’re letting you come here, were honoring you, don’t dishonor us.”

Seriously?! You “let” people of another religion “come here”? What “here” are you talking about? “Your” school? “Your” neighborhood? “Your” country? You may need to brush up on your American history a little bit. “Here” isn’t “ours”. “Here” actually belonged to “them derned Injuns” first and the multitude of people to came “here” from somewhere else, I assure you, were not all Christians. It is very ignorant of you to assume a religion that is foreign to you is foreign to America. Now, if you’re talking about illegal immigrants using tax-payer funded schools and health care, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about Islam as something inherently foreign, you’re only exposing your own bigotry and stupidity.

Ok. I’ve ranted far too long. I’m going to have to let this one be and go take some deep breaths.

I stayed up to the wee hours last night to get the San Antonio mission trip video finished. The short version (for display on websites and as promotion in the church) is done and up on YouTube, as well as MySpace. The pictures are online here, in case you forgot.

I plan to do a longer version with some of the “interviews” and a lot more silliness. So far that’s not going so well. Roxio seems to get grumpy when the video gets to be more than about five minutes. It bogs down and eventually crashes. Maybe someone out on the inkernets knows some tricks that can help me nurse my Roxio through a good ten or twenty minute, DVD quality video.

Anyway. I hope you like the video and maybe you can join us for our next trip!! I’m pretty sure we’ll make another trip to New Orleans next spring.

When we were on our mission trip, a very inebriated gentleman approached some of our kids near the Alamo. Before they had a chance to ask him if he knew Jesus as his personal savior, he introduced himself as Jesus. The Lord and Savior then asked them if they had any weed they’d be willing to part with.

In the news, a man went for a walk in his birthday suit (That means nekkid for your yankees.) around the county court house in Palestine, Texas. (Palestine! Coincidence? I think not.) When police confronted him, he said it was okay because he’s friends with Jesus. Oh! I see. Carry on then.

(As an aside, the journalist gets extra points for this line, “[The police officer] said he had never been exposed to such an incident.” Ahaa! Exposed. Ba-dump tshh!)

And in a story we’ve all heard a million times, some nut jobs in Connecticut claim that Jesus’ image has “miraculously” appeared in the wood grain pattern of their kitchen cabinet. (Insert your own shellac fumes joke here.)

So, what I want to know is this: In countries with different religious backgrounds, does this still happen? Do drunk Indians (towel, not feather) claim to be Shiva before they ask you for some vegetarian doobage? Do Middle Eastern Muslims ever “see” Mohammad’s face in their falafels? Would a French Atheist ever walk around naked and then claim to be friends with no one? Well, I guess that last one is pretty probable, but you get my point.

Is the link between insanity and Jesus a purely American invention?

Strange title, you might say. “MSMT07” is the name of the directory where I am storing all the pictures and videos I took last week during “Middle School Mission Tour 2007”. It was an amazing trip and one in which I grew more than any previous mission trip.

This year was different in many ways. Bill Bray is the high school minister at our church. He’s also the missions coordinator and since our middle school minister quit, he’s also covering that role. The problem was that Bill and our previous middle school minister had planned this year’s mission trips back to back. It made lots of sense as long as we had two youth ministers to handle the task. By the time the trips got here, we did not have two youth ministers. Tammy and I took the lead roles in getting the middle school trip off the ground. Bill, who spent the previous week in Mexico with the high schoolers, only drove as far as San Antonio on the way back and met up with us there. Thus Tammy and I were the defacto youth leaders for the week before the trip and for the drive down to San Antonio.

On top of that, the rest of the high school group pulled into the church parking lot during this year’s dinner theater. We were obviously too busy to perform in the theater this time, but we did serve as wait staff for the event. Tammy had to sneak out during the play and intercept the high schoolers, collecting the supplies that we needed for the middle school trip, which departed the next morning. Busy busy busy.

We focused more on evangelism this year, teaching our youth the key Bible verses to use and how to explain the path to salvation. When Monday night came and we did our usual night on the Riverwalk, we equipped the kids with tracts and instructed them not to “throw them around” and shout “Jesus loves you!” Instead they were to talk to people. Find out their stories. See what they believed. The kids did great, but, naturally, they were nervous and unsure of what to say. So, they asked me to “go first”. I witnessed to our waiter at dinner and later “backed up” the kids as they talked to venders in the mall. I honestly surprised myself with how easily I was able to convey the message of salvation to perfect strangers, answering their questions and leading them with questions of my own. I’ve witnessed to friends before, but these were my first “cold calls” and they went very well.

Tuesday, Bill told us we were going to feed some homeless, so I had been telling the kids all week that we’d be at a soup kitchen. Boy was I wrong. We worked with an inner city church and actually set up folding tables under a bridge in the midst of our society’s forgotten souls. There were drug deals going on all around us. In any other situation, I would be scared to death to have 50 14-year-olds in that kind of environment. But when you’re serving God, peace reigns. I was never scared. Even my germophobia disappeared as I loved on people who were crusted with disease and smelled like… well… like hobos.

As the week went on it became more and more painful to me to realize that all the good work we were doing in San Antonio could just have easily been done in our own back yard. As a friend of mine put it, it’s just like people who go to church on Christmas and Easter (a.k.a. C&E Christians). For them church is an “experience” that is part of their holiday. For us, witnessing and doing God’s work is part of the “experience” of the mission trip and that’s just as wrong as the C&E’s. We should be living God’s work every day, feeding the homeless who live under bridges meer miles from our own church, witnessing to the lost all around us. I have not been doing that and I am strongly convicted to change.

After every mission trip or church camp, I warn our kids that Satan will attack you and try to break down the convictions you gained, the joy you felt, and the lessons you learned. It’s such a regular occurrence that we have a name for it. You come home with “camp high” and within two weeks it’s gone because “real life” has beat you down and stolen your motivation. My “camp high” was under attack even before the week was half over. While I was still on the trip I got some bad news from work. Dave, my good friend and mentor; the “go to guy” for everything I work on, had given his two week notice. When I got back to work, I’d have only a week and a half to try and absorb five years worth of knowledge before I became that “go to guy”. Talk about stress. I managed to finish the week without thinking about it too much, but now that I’m back behind my desk, “real life” is hitting pretty hard.

If you know Christ, please pray that my current “camp high” will not fade, that my convictions to live a mission trip lifestyle will have permanent effects.

I’ve got my pictures from there trip uploaded and will have the video edited soon. While you’re at it, you can also check out pictures from MSMT05 and MSMT06.
God bless you all.

I love my wife. Tammy has been growing a lot over the last year. I don’t mean she’s turned into the fifty foot woman. Well, in a spiritual sense, she’s getting close to that. Tammy is growing in God and it humbles me, amazes me, and thrills me all at the same time. Here’s her latest MySpace blog post. (I’m reproducing it here so you don’t have to log into MySpace to see it.)

Current mood: determined
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Time to share. The Lord has shown me a lot that I feel needs to be shared with those I know.

If you have been going to church lately, Pastor Dennis has been speaking about the 3 chairs. The first chair represents committed Christians whose whole live is devoted to God. The second chair represents compromising Christians who live for God on Sunday, but live for themselves the rest of the week. The third chair represents the lost, people who either don’t know anything about God or who have heard about Christianity, but don’t accept it for whatever reason.

I don’t know about anyone else but these messages have been a kick in the rear for me. I’ve been going in between 1st and 2nd chair for way to long. I have tried to keep running my life on my own instead of letting Jesus take the full reign over my life.

I have been digging into God’s Word more and more since these messages have been planted into my life. The more I have been reading the Word the more the Lord has convicted me of one of the most popular phrases I hear from Christians including myself: “What is God’s will for my life?” In the Word the answer is as clear as it gets. God’s will for every Christian is to reach out to others and spread his love to those who don’t know him. Why is that so hard for Christians? Well the word FEAR is something that I and a lot of other Christians face. We fear rejection and failure more than anything. But you know what? The only thing to fear is God. I read the entire book of Revelation on Saturday and my brain hasn’t stopped thinking about the world, my family, our church, friends who are sitting in the 2nd chair and those who do not know Jesus as their personal savior. I have been dreaming about the war that will take place as the tribulation begins and how many people I know that will be in that war if I don’t do something about it. Our nation is “one nation under God,” but where is God? Our nation is in desperate need of Christians who will stand up and make a difference.

On Friday night I had the opportunity to go to Christ for the Nations in Dallas . They hold a open worship night once a month and it was such an awesome and eye opening experience. As hundreds gathered that night to worship the Lord, the speaker made a very good point. Worship that night was corporate worship but our true worship is outside the walls of the church. As I prayed and worshiped that night I cried out to the Lord about Christians, myself included, that need to stop thinking about themselves and start spreading the love of Jesus.

Over the past week my heart has been turned upside with my 5 siblings who have nothing to do with Jesus. My brother Rich was going to be a pastor and now has nothing to do with Jesus. My sister Kathy was in a tragic accident and the Lord saved her life and she still hasn’t had anything to do with God. My sisters Gloria and Misty, I’m not sure where they are or even if they ever had a time in their lives when they were saved. My closest sister Amy has strayed so far away from the Lord that she is deliberating sinning and has admitted to it. My heart is crying out so bad for my siblings and their families who haven’t heard about the Lord. It’s time that I stop thinking about it and start doing something about it. Approaching them could cause our relationships to end but if I don’t do it who will?

We need to lay down our pride and start getting our lives right with the Lord. The end is coming and it’s time to take a stand. Dig into the Word, memorize the Word. Be prepared with the Word for the events that lie ahead. Be bold!! Be Strong!!

Tammy

I don’t do this often, but I do strongly believe in the power of mass prayer.

Jon Carney works a couple offices down from me and he needs our prayers. Last night (5/15) he wrecked his motorcycle. Friends say he was run off the road by a car. The news says speed was the biggest factor. He hit a concrete divider on an exit ramp and fell onto the highway below.

The word is that he will recover and is in good spirits. He suffered a broken back, hip and ankle and lost some teeth.

Please pray for Jon’s recovery, the doctors treating him, peace of mind, and eased pain and suffering.

There’s been some chatter in the news lately about this Puerto Rican ex-convict who’s gotten rich through blasphemy. An Orlando TV station did a short piece on him, including a video and a slide show.

His web site is in Spanish and has only a small English section. But using Google’s translator, I was able to read a little bit of the site. Essentially, the guy claims to be God incarnate and that his teachings “replace” those of Jesus Christ. His followers joyfully display “666”, the mark of the beast mentioned in Revelation, some even getting it tattooed on their wrists.

It’s amazing to me the lengths to which people we go in order to feel religious, or included, even when ten minutes worth of reading would defeat the whole premise on which they are hanging their spiritual well-being.

I often feel that the success of cults like this shines a spot-light on the fact that the modern Christian church does such a bad job of reaching out to people who are looking for an answer. But I could be wrong. What do you think?

I found a pretty articulate rendition of the case for relativism in Scott Adam’s “Dilbert Blog“. (Caution: He uses dirty words.) Scott feels strongly that free will is a myth and talks about it often. In this post, he (perhaps unintentionally) ties his crusade to defeat the free will myth to his Liberal relativism.

If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.

That’s certainly true, and I don’t deny it. (Liberals are not stupid. I just don’t agree with their solution to the obvious problem.)

You can take any major problem in the world and identify a key culprit who has more certainty than he or she should. For example, Osama Bin Laden is certain that Allah exists, and he’s certain that humans can know what an omnipotent being wants us to do. That hasn’t worked out well for anyone.

How about the problem of discrimination? The root cause is a bigot’s certainty that ethnicity is more important than individual differences. He shouldn’t be so certain. You don’t need to completely change a bigot’s mind to cure discrimination; it would be a huge step to make him doubt he can accurately judge people by their ethnicity.

Ooh! He even used the bigotry concept from my big Liberalism post. He’s putting himself neatly into the Liberal mold.

Again, I agree that making disparaging assumptions about a person because of how they look is a dangerous thing. But I believe even Mr. Adams would agree that, when used intelligently (with discrimination) that sometimes you can, in all correctness, call a spade a spade.

There aren’t many ideas that have the potential to change the world. But the idea that we have no free will has to be on the short list. Once you accept free will as an illusion, it necessarily makes you wonder how certain you are about the rest of your reality. When you lose your own irrational sense of certainty, you are less likely to discriminate, to judge, and to believe a lunatic leader who tells you he’s certain.

Did you catch that? “Your own irrational sense of certainty.” So anyone who is certain about anything is irrational? Even when you are certain that there is no free will? See, he starts off in the right direction (i.e. question authority, question your own assumptions, question your faith), but then he suddenly makes a sharp left turn and assumes that any “certainty” (in other words, any absolute truth) is irrational.

I know, I’m reading into it and putting words into his mouth, straw man, blah blah blah. But the foundation is there. The basic, flawed reasoning underpins nearly everything Adams writes. I love his comic strip. I enjoy his blog. But I disagree with his underlying belief. I agree with the observations, but I disagree with the hypothesis.

The reason Bin Laden is bad is not because he his certain of his beliefs. It’s because his beliefs are wrong. Dogma is not in and of itself evil. You have to look at what the dogma is based on. You have to investigate. A Liberal would say that faith in anything is irrational. I say that blind faith is irrational, but faith is necessary.

You must be willing to inspect your faith. Be willing to test it. The Bible teaches us to be sure of what we believe. That is, don’t just believe. Know what you believe and why you believe it. The Bible says there will be false teachers and because of that, you have to question the authority of any teacher. On this point, Adams and I come a bit closer to agreement.

You can introduce some doubt into your life and still keep your religious faith, morality, and all of the social and psychological benefits you always enjoyed. Faith would be meaningless without a pinch of doubt to give it context. In particular, it would be helpful to doubt that your religious leaders know the mind of God. A little bit of doubt can be a healthy thing.

For a relativist, it is unconscionable to tell someone else, especially someone from a different culture, that they are wrong. Therefore, “multiculturalism” is rampant in Europe, where relativism is god.

Multiculturalism is a sad attempt to treat people delicately and not offend their cultural beliefs. (As long as those beliefs are not Christian. Nobody cares about offending them.) So German courts render verdicts differently for Muslims than for … Infidels?

Rather than jail a man for beating his wife, the German court won’t even grant her a divorce “[b]ecause the woman, as a Muslim, should have ‘expected’ it, the judge explained.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is relativism.

Sinfully stolen from Randy.

Compete article.

I like simple. Simple is good. I like to take complex things and make them simple. I like analogies and metaphors that make complex ideas easy to understand. Most of all, I like to take complex arguments and wash off all the mud and blood and discover the simple, basic, easy-to-understand foundation behind the argument.

That’s what this post is about. Forget about tax strategies. Forget about the war in Iraq. Forget about evolution or abortion or global warming. Let’s get simple. What is the simple foundation of modern liberalism (or Liberalism with a big L)?

I strongly recommend that everyone should watch this video, no matter what your political alignment or religious affiliation (or lack thereof). It’s long (about 30 minutes if you skip the Q&A session at the end) and, because it’s on YouTube, it will take a while to load (I recommend you open it, hit pause, and minimize the window for about 10 minutes before you try to watch it.) but I think it is something everyone should see.

You may not agree with the guy. In fact, you may get pretty angry the longer it goes on, but what he says should at least make you think about (simply) what it means to be liberal and, more importantly, why you are or are not liberal.

Clicky: “How Modern Liberals Think”

Now, if you’re busy like me, I’ll break it down for you, but I still recommend watching the video when you have time.

Liberalism (with a big L) is founded on one simple thesis: Nondiscrimination.

For me to discriminate, I am employing my past knowledge, my up-bringing, my environment, etc. to discern what is “right” and what is “wrong”. This, at its foundation, is bigotry. No one can establish what is “right” because the only way you know what is right is to base it on your personal experience, your personal bigotry. I’ve always called this relativism, but we’ll stick with his terms.

Here’s the extrapolation of this idea that makes it appeal to so many intelligent people:
The attempt to be “right” is the core cause of all that is wrong.
If you don’t insist on being “right” there’s nothing to disagree about.
If you don’t disagree, you don’t fight.
If you don’t fight, there’s no war.
If there’s no war, there’s no poverty.
If there’s no poverty, there’s no crime.
If there’s no crime, there’s no injustice.
Thus any absolute (moral or otherwise) must be to blame for all the hate, war, poverty, crime and injustice in the world.

If you insist that there can be no absolutes (absolutely) then you require me to consciously ignore what I know to be true (because there is no truth). I must allow myself to believe that an 80 year old, white woman is equally likely to blow up an airplane as are six Imams who are shouting, “Allah Akbar” as they hand in their boarding passes. By questioning the Imam, I am discriminating (by definition, making a choice based on some absolute).

The next pitfall in the Liberalism thesis is the assumption that if “right” causes wrong, then wrong must be caused by “right”. Remember that absolutes lead to injustice, therefore any injustice must have been caused by an absolute. If A is rich and B is poor (injustice) then A must have done something evil at B’s expense to become rich. B is poor because B is a victim of A’s evil wealth hoarding. This ignores the fact that A worked hard for ten years to succeed and B spent ten years living on welfare and doing nothing. You must ignore those “facts” because facts imply discrimination. The only solution is to take A’s money and give it to B; equalize; level the field. A rational mind quickly sees that this is actually punishing hard work and rewarding laziness. But again, “rational” means discriminatory.

That was an awfully long post considering I started out talking about being simple, and I didn’t do nearly as good a job as the speaker in the video. I’m sorry. You’re right, which means I’m wrong. And if you think I’m wrong, I’m okay with that because at least in implies that you believe in right and wrong, so your not a relativist.