Tag Archives: Christianity

Jimmy Carter playing God paved the road for radical Islamists playing Satan

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Jimmy Carter informed us back in 1976 that he had “looked on many women with lust” and “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

The fact that a man’s heart or other organs have lusted after many women is not exactly news. The reason men don’t go around broadcasting their lust is because it’s obvious. It would be like saying, I get horny on days that end in a “y.”

But Carter did tell us about his lust – in a formal interview with Playboy, perhaps fittingly. He evidently thought that a man’s lust was newsworthy, if the man was him.

It reminds me of the devil’s temptation of Christ, a story told in three of the four Gospels. The devil failed in his temptation of Christ, but the fact that it happened was Good News-worthy two millennia ago.

Carter was a born-again Christian. (Full disclosure: I am too.) In fact, Carter was a Sunday School teacher. In teaching the temptation of Christ on Sundays and advertising “the temptation of Carter” on Saturdays, he was aware of the parallel he was drawing.

Mind you, I don’t judge a person’s brand of Christianity. That’s beyond my paygrade.

But I do judge their politics. Carter seemed to believe that a New Testament approach could work in international affairs – as in forgiveness and love thy enemy – with the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ah, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When Carter was elected in 1976, the country of Iran was run by a Shah – roughly the equivalent to a Western monarch. The Shah was hostile to communism and generally friendly to the West. Many Iranian students went to Western universities. Women’s rights and human rights steadily improved over the decades of rule by the Shah and his predecessor father.

Carter’s limited experience as the former governor of Georgia and his black and white view of good and evil left him unprepared for the nuances of international geopolitics. In his simplistic syllogism, democracy was good; monarchs were anti-democratic; the Shah was a monarch; and, therefore, the Shah was bad.

In contrast to pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger (whom he despised), Carter was uncomfortable with the notion of the lesser of evils.

And so, when the Shah was threatened, Carter did little to save him. The resulting revolution led to a bloody theocratic state called The Islamic Republic of Iran. Like the Shah’s regime, it was a monarchy except in name, and this time it was led by a monarch – the Ayatollah – who claimed a hotline to Allah (and actually had one to Brezhnev) together with a divine right to rule.  

The Islamic theocrats naturally hated America. They taunted us by holding 53 hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days until the day of the inauguration of the man who defeated Carter’s bid for a second term, Ronald Reagan. (Funny, that coincidence.)

Carter’s sanctimonious forgiveness and love failed to free any hostages. (To his credit, he did attempt a rescue, but it never got off the ground.)

Since the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran has shuffled along in their seventh-century oxcart. They throw gay men off tall buildings, they chop off the hands of shoplifters, and they stone prostitutes to death. They threaten to annihilate Israel, and they are just weeks away from having a nuclear bomb with which to do so.

In this odd world of ours, I sometimes see a bumper sticker reading “What would Jesus do?” I’ve always assumed that the owners of the cars to which those stickers are stuck have no interest in Jesus. They’re instead just trolling Christians. They’re trying to contrast the typically conservative political leanings of Christians with what they regard (unburdened by any actual knowledge) as the liberal leanings of Jesus.

But some Christians are actually guided in their geopolitics by that bumper sticker question – What would Jesus do? Never mind that Jesus spent his entire life in a place without iPhones which could be walked in the long direction in a few weeks and the short direction in a day. These particular Christians believe that Christ taught not just the tools for a relationship with God, but also for a relationship with Taylor Swift, John Maynard Keynes, and the Ayatollahs.

The teachings of Christ are probably harmless in dealing with Taylor Swift. (I know nothing of Swift’s beliefs, and I don’t mean to pick on her.)

However, the teachings of Christ are probably less helpful in dealing with John Maynard Keynes. Can we honestly suppose that Christ had insights into economic questions like how to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, and what the capital gains tax should be, and that those insights are revealed if only we read between the lines of, say, Corinthians?

As for the Ayatollahs, the teachings of Christ are wholly unhelpful in dealing with them. Or in dealing with their jihadi foot soldiers who seek to conquer, enslave, rape, take hostage, behead and eliminate people they regard as infidels by means of suicide bomb vests, airplanes in skyscrapers, and pickup trucks on sidewalks.

The what-would-Jesus-do Christians seem unaware that we already know the answer to their bumper sticker question, “What would Jesus do?”

What Jesus would do is what he did do. He taught love, forgiveness and pacifism. He surrendered and sacrificed himself. He was excruciatingly tortured – naked and humiliated on the cross – that he might rise again to show us The Way.

The madmen of Islam would very much like us, now, to try doing with them what Jesus did with his enemies two thousand years ago. The last Western leader to try that was Jimmy Carter. And here we are.

The Colorado Christian baker wins again – but his tormenters will be back

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The left has hounded artistic Colorado baker Jack Phillips for over a decade. It started back in 2012 when a gay couple demanded that he create a “gay wedding cake” with two figurine husbands on top.

Of course, the gay couple could have gotten their gay cake created by many other bakers. They seem to have chosen Phillips not despite, but because, creating such a object was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Phillips politely said he would happily bake a cake for them, but not a gay cake. That’s an important point. Phillips did not simply refuse to serve the couple on the grounds that they were gay. Rather, he refused to create a special “gay cake” for them.

Phillips thus refused to create an artistic expression that was contrary to his religious beliefs.

The gay couple were something like a couple seeking out a Kosher restaurant, demanding that the Jewish chef cook up an elaborate pork dish, and then contending that they’d been discriminated against when told that pork is not on the menu.

It’s actually worse than that. The gay couple thought Phillips’ beliefs were not just discriminatory, but should be illegal. So, they schemed to establish that as a legal matter.  

First, they brought an action against Phillips before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and won. The case then went to a Colorado appellate court, and they won there too.

Phillips finally filed for review in the Colorado Supreme Court, where all seven Justices are Democrat appointees. Those Colorado Justices refused to even hear the case on the grounds there was zero merit to Phillips’ appeal.

Then Phillips filed for an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the court of last resort in America, and they accept only a few percent of the appeals lodged there.

To everyone’s surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Phillips’ case was worth hearing. Not only that, but after hearing the case they reversed the Colorado decision. They decided that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had exhibited an unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ religious-based actions.

Let that sink in. The U.S. Supreme Court – the highest court in the land – found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and state courts had shown six years of unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ ordinary Christian religious beliefs.

At least they didn’t feed him to the lions. But what happened next was almost as bad, as anyone who’s been a defendant in a lawsuit will tell you.

On the very day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in favor of Phillips, a self-described “devil worshipper” demanded by email that Phillips bake a cake celebrating the devil’s birthday – complete with a dildo on top. (It’s not clear what is bedeviling about dildos.)

As before, Phillips politely explained that he could not bake such a cake because it was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Before then, on the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ appeal of the “gay cake” case, someone came into Phillips’ bakery and demanded that he create a “transgender cake” depicting transgender stuff.

You can see the pattern.

As before, Phillips refused to create the “transgender cake.” As before, the transgender person brought an action before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. As before, he/she won. And as before, the case eventually went up to the Colorado Supreme Court.

This time, the Colorado Supreme Court took the case (perhaps feeling stung by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the Colorado decisions the earlier time).

But the Colorado Supreme Court dodged a decision on the merits. Instead, they dismissed the case on a technicality.

It was a win for Phillips, but it didn’t establish any precedent for other Christian bakers or anyone else who wants protection for his religious beliefs.

Pity the Colorado Supreme Court. They were faced with either (1) defying the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision by ruling against Phillips, or (2) defying their woke principles by ruling in his favor.

Ah, they were torn between the law of the land and the law of the woke. They found a clever way to choose neither.

But trust me, they’ll be back. The devil-worshipping transexuals, the kangaroo state courts and “civil rights” commissions stacked with Democrat appointees, and the rest of the totalitarian wokerati – they’ll all be back, lawless as ever.

They want to outlaw religious beliefs that they don’t believe in, and that’s almost all of them.

Does “accepting” gays mean we have to pay them to mock our religion?

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Twenty-six years ago, the media reported that a young man named Matthew Shepard was beaten and strung up on a Wyoming barbed wire fence to die. The beating and murder were because Shepard was gay.

The perps were quickly found, tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to prison. They’re still there.

It was a good news story about bad news and was widely reported. But it wasn’t true.

It has since been shown that Shepard and one of the perps were in the drug business together. Shepard was due to receive a $10,000 shipment of meth. The perp himself was gay and had been in a gay relationship with Shepard. 

So, it wasn’t a hate crime by a straight Wyoming redneck against an innocent 21-year-old gay guy. It was a drug deal gone bad between two gay lovers.

But never mind that. Gay advocates seized on Shepard’s death as evidence of hatred in the heartland toward gays. His death spurred new federal hate crime laws, where criminally attacking someone becomes even more criminal if the someone is gay. (A friend in the law professor business is fond of saying that it’s impossible to commit just one federal crime.)

The flip side of that, of course, is that criminally attacking someone is now a little less criminal if the person is not gay.

Notably, the hate crime law passed in response to Shepard’s murder was, of course, not in effect at the time of his murder. The perps were nonetheless arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced – a sentence they’re still serving – for committing a crime.

It’s called murder, and the penalties are severe. Regardless of whether you hate the victim.

I’m guessing that you remember the Matthew Shepard story, but never saw the debunking of it. The debunking never got much coverage. Gee, I wonder why.

Fast forward four decades. Now we have the quadrennial spectacle called the Olympics. It’s become a little like the Superbowl. It’s infused with media money that wants to juice it up to sell you stuff.

In the Superbowl, that means a half-time show with celebrities who “accidentally” expose themselves and expensive television commercials that compete for edgy obscurity.

In the Olympics, we of course have doping scandals, but they’re not nearly as interesting ever since East Germany joined the Dark Force of capitalism. We do still have the mini-scandal of men winning women’s events on the pretense that they’re feeling feminine, that day, but that will sort itself out as the real women keep losing to them.

Today’s scandal is that the opening ceremonies included a bit where gay men dressed in drag mockingly imitated Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

For those of you who were raised in the Church of No-religion and went to the College of No-education, the Last Supper is a large mural painted at the end of the fifteenth century on a convent wall in Milan by an Italian who was the quintessential Renaissance Man – a creative genius of art, engineering, science and architecture. It depicts the artist’s imagination of the supper between Jesus and his disciples the night before his crucifixion. It’s considered a masterpiece of art and a treasure of Christianity. It’s worth seeing.

I’m sure the gay Parisian in charge of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics thought the mocking of an icon of Christianity and western culture was very edgy and, therefore, artistic. I’m surprised there wasn’t someone more sophisticated to say “Oh, the mocking of Christianity thing? Hasn’t that been done?”

Because yes, it has. About a thousand times. I suppose it was edgy when an “artist” made a jar of urine with a submerged crucifix and called it “Piss Christ.” But that was nearly forty years ago, for Chrissake. The latest “edginess” is fake nuns in drag at baseball games.

Yawn.

There’s a reason I bring up these stories of Matthew Shepard and this week’s opening ceremonies of the Olympics. (BTW, women’s beach volleyball is more entertaining than most other women’s sports. Superbowl wardrobe malfunctions have nothing on these gals.)

It’s because they raise a question in my mind.

I’ve never had an issue with gays, mind you. A few of my friends and family are gays. I admire the struggle it must have been and the courage it must have entailed.

Anyway, I have enough stuff in my bedroom and my past to avoid judging people for what’s in theirs. (I say these sorts of things just to ensure that I’ll never succumb to pressure to run for political office or even – especially! – to serve on my HOA.)

All that said, there’s something amiss about publicly mocking people’s religion, especially when the mockery is just for publicity, faux edginess, and to sell stuff.

I don’t mock gay people for being gay. Now that would be edgy in today’s culture. Gay people don’t mock Islam or the Prophet. That would be edgy in today’s culture. Nobody mocks transsexuals. That would be edgy.

Why is it OK to dig up the most overused trope of political correctness by mocking Christians and Christianity?

There’s nothing edgy about mocking Christians. It happens all the time now. In fact, it always has. The first mocking of a Christian was of Christ who died a humiliating death after an excruciating torture. Almost all his disciples were later mockingly tortured to death as well.

This mockery of Christianity continued unabated up to the present with fake nuns in drag at baseball games.  

That said, I object to renewed mockery of my Lord and Savior by attention-seeking queers who are being paid to do so with public funds.

I understand that mocking Christians is part of your gig. It apparently gets your rocks off. You insult Christians to the point that they’re angry and hurt, and then you go home (I hope) to get your jollies about it in your bedroom.

I suggest that you masturbate to something else. I remind you that when it comes to mockery, you live in glass houses.

I’m sick and tired of media hatred and censorship of Christians

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Sensational rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud appeared for an interview over the weekend immediately after leading his Houston Texans to a playoff win. The exhausted, battered, victorious 22-year-old opened with these words:

“First and foremost, I just want to give all glory to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

The game was carried by NBC. They posted Stroud’s postgame interview but, predictably, edited out his opening statement – the very statement that the player himself said was “first and foremost” to him and his terrific game.

Stroud is Black. It used to be that liberals tolerated Black displays of religion because they thought such displays were cute, as in Black churches with people dancing in the aisle and shouting “Hallelujah!”

Never mind that such displays were profound and spiritual for the Black participants; liberals condescendingly tolerated them only because they saw them as something like a kindergarten Christmas play.

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