Frankly no. But this is so good we will make an exception
What about “phrasing”?
This is what I get for spending three years in a coma.
Don’t ask me I’ve just spent three years in a coma.
Agree.
I really have not decided if I want to keep hitting that brick wall over and over again, he has demonstrated a remarkable willingness to remain locked into his views. For example in the very next paragraph he stated that I can NOT make a moral or logical argument because I don’t even believe the Bible is true! How is an accident of molecules going to have reason or logic . . . or of all things MORALS if he doesn’t accept the bible as literally true!! (I should publish the entire e-mail chain between us, it will not do any good but it sure would make me feel better!)
I am sure he believes Stephen Foster is a great American hero.
He has often told me he wants to be good friends have good conversations. Which he seems to define as me deferring to his view in all cases and him never reading anything new or even watching a ten minute video. As long as I parrot what he says, I am his best friend- when I challenge his views I am a mass of protoplasm lacking standing to make moral decisions.
Let me assure you – he speaks with the authority of GOD Almighty! (Just ask him!)
Not only equal to God, he has no problem correcting Jesus. Seriously. The first sermon I ever heard him give turned in last third to The Sermon on the Mound. He flashed the first half of a very well known bible verse on the two large screens behind him: "If someone hits you upon the cheek . . .
So then he pauses and says what should we do as Christians when someone hits us? Should we let them continue to hit us? Come on what is your answer?? Turn the other cheek?
NO! You should fight back, you should run away and call the authorities to haul them away. Is it your fault if they go to jail?? NO! They did the crime and they should do the time.
He went on and on, and right after the service I went to him and asked if he was comfortable “misquoting Jesus”. He didn’t seem to care about believers being humble or sacrificing for their faith, or enduring hardship in the name of Christ the Lord. He cared about Christians standing up for themselves, of believers throwing off that passive narrative and asserting their right to be heard in these times of church oppression. (I have conflated two conversations here, part we talked about with others milling around after the service- most of that was said a week or two later when we had our first lunch together.) The thing that pisses me off is that I thought I could really and truly have an honest conversation with him and open his eyes to an even slightly different view of things. What a fools errand that turned out to be. A normal trope of his is that Christians are under serious attack and must fiercely resist efforts of secularization and humanism.
Yes, in south Tempe he routinely speaks in ex cathedra statements.
Part of me wants to believe this must be too ridiculous to be true, but then I consider the original premise of this thread and realize that there is nothing so utterly insane and/or stupid that people will not say and believe it. So - sure, why not.
I have no difficulty believing it’s true. Completely inverting the teachings of Jesus is a standard practice in a large number of “Christian” faiths in the US. Take a look at “prosperity gospel” if you want to see more.
I was just talking about this with some friends the other day. I told them that even as an atheist, this offends me. If it turns out I’m wrong about the whole god thing, one thing I’m certain about is that a whole swath of these “Christians” are going to burn in hell for blasphemy.
And as seen above, the whole time, they’ll be thinking they’re the upstanding, sin-free, moral people.
For reasons I don’t understand, I continue to live in the tiny, dwindling hope that humanity isn’t nearly as horrible as it constantly demonstrates itself to be.
I am not very good at finding things on the internet but I will try later today.
Okay, I found where it was said (within two hours) which I will link below. When I find the moment I will come back in and give you which one it is and a time just before he gets there. It will be interesting to see how well my memory of the sermon is (I know he made that statement because he and I discussed it afterward twice, but I wonder if the rest is as I recall it).
The first twenty or thirty minutes is always music so it might not take that long to find. Watching the first one at about the 30 minute mark he is already speaking about politics and masks.
You’re absolutely correct of course, but logic has no place - absolutely none - in the minds of these folks.
This is why the evangelicals have been so easy to sway and manipulate by the right. They have been trained to NOT think for themselves, and trained to ignore and even mock logical thinking. They’re used to illogical arguments, false premises and poor thinking, so it’s pretty easy to get them to follow the anti-covid train.
For the record, I wasn’t really doubting you. I was just wishing that people like that weren’t so…like that.
I have an acquaintance who only wears a seatbelt because of the promise of a traffic ticket. A lifelong motorcyclist, he quit riding when our state mandated helmets. I would mention that he thinks that the confederates were the good guys, but I don’t want to be banished to the Pit.
Dan
Why is this your pastor? surely there are at least two churches where you live.
Why are people killed in car crashes?
Very rarely, it is because of a safe, trained, sober driver who is paying attention. The majority of the time, it is because someone is doing something unsafe, whether that be excessive speeding, driving under the influence, texting and driving, or not receiving appropriate training.
You don’t have to have outrage against drivers, you just need to have outrage against unsafe drivers, which I do.
To fold it back to his analogy, people who refuse COVID vaccines and/or masks are the unsafe drivers who are endangering everyone else on the road.
I actually had assumed that, but kinda wanted to be a dick to the guy anyway and gain some support and encouragement for my views. Like most things I do to bolster myself it had mixed results.
First of all, he barely mentions the topic at the end of the second video linked above when he announces the entire next week’s sermon would be about turning the other cheek. If I had just read the titles before I invested hours watching videos from a place I was in while it was being said. As my father always said, this lack of attention to detail will be what keeps me out of the big time.
Second, in that second video above, there are some things that might even more demonstrate why became so frustrated. At about 52 minutes in he talks about identities and cancel culture but swings back out of it pretty quickly. But the whole last ten minutes of that second one, from about 57;00 forward he is very political and this is where I get kind of upset that he is using his pulpit to cause trouble and divide us more. If anyone is willing to watch that last ten minutes I would appreciate knowing if you think I am being too petty and judgmental, or am I correct in thinking he is using his religious authority to promote a political agenda.
Okay it is the third sermon in the series (which I will link below) where he gets into turning the other cheek and what that means. I noted some highlights which I will list next and then the link below that:
1 At 28 minutes is roughly where the sermon starts.
2 At about 32 minutes he lays out his premise
3 Around 35:34 he has what I assume is an unintentional joke “Sometimes, we are all Peters” (which I heard as ‘dicks’ in my adolescent mind)
4 At 36 minutes is when he says no that is not what scripture means when it says that.
5 At 37 minutes he talks about how American justice is backward at this time in history.
6 He stops and goes to other topics at about 36 minutes and makes justifications for his view that the Bible does not mean what it actually says.
7 The point he makes at 40:30 strikes me as the opposite of what he is claiming.
8 At 43:20 he sort of states his conclusion or his thesis.
9 at 49:30 I wrote he returned to sanity – I must have agreed with the point he made there or thought he was being more consistent in his beliefs there ???
10 From about 55 minutes forward he goes full on Christian Martyr in this evil secular world and makes me wish the Justice Department was there to ask him what HE thinks the Johnson Amendment means in practice.
I will summarize thus: he does say what I claimed, but it isn’t as absurd as I remember it being. I do think his arguments are a stretch because there are words of Jesus plain as day and he has to do a lot of marching to get to the next step. I do agree there are times to resist, but disagree that hiding or running is the same fighting back (a fallacy he uses often equating two different but similar things as identical). He does go on to say how he would ideally react and I have to admit that I agree with much of that from a Christian point of view (which I am not and is a view I do not hold). I think that portion where he talks about overcoming the initial reaction and being forgiving is not hypocritical - quite the opposite but still in contrast to the response he seems to be suggesting earlier.
I am an unbeliever but I can tolerate hearing most sermons because I treat them like fables with a moral lesson at the end which is sometimes valuable but often times outdated. I go to please friends or family, occasionally to get my nephew a music gig with the worship band. This one friend really, really wanted me to go to her church with her (possibly to be sized up by others there). I went and was polite, after the second week I decided this guy had a lot of influence (fifteen-hundred people a week listen to him) and I thought I could reason with him or at least discuss ideas and concepts with him.
We did well for about a month, but he refused to look at any source or entertain any ideas other than those he espoused weekly (but never weakly). I tried to dazzle him with my knowledge of things biblical which is different but superior to most of the people in his congregation. He often said he liked shooting the breeze with me over spiritual matters because I knew more church history and sources of theological thoughts than his flock who are big on their main scriptures but not very broad in their knowledge of Christendom (at which I am far from being an expert, but still…).
After a while I started to think about what this church really was and decided it might very well be a wholly owned subsidiary of The Heritage Foundation, or Koch Industries, or some other purely political organization posing as a Christian one. My status as an outsider combined with reading portions of The Power Worshipers at the time made that an easy observation to make.
I no longer care about pleasing or impressing the woman, but I had hoped I could reason with the Pastor and get him to encourage his flock to mask and vaccinate. That effort ended with me shown to the door (metaphorically) with an admonition to stop virtue signalling. On that score I cannot tell if he really believes that is what I was doing because of his own views, or if he just wanted me gone before I suggested to anyone else he was a tool of the political right.
He is a great guy to have lunch with and discuss movies and TV shows and the split of the Roman Empire and the purpose of the creeds and the differences between Luther and Calvin. I would have never made him look bad to his flock. But I just could not sit back and watch him forward the agenda of the far right and especially the White Evangelical Republican agenda.
Yes, the drunk drivers of COVID are the unvaccinated.
Call a press conference to announce that drinking Drano will not cure or protect you from COVID and that you are refusing to allow the FDA to investigate it.
Follow it up with a press conference where you emphatically deny that the reports of serious injuries and death from ingesting Drano is a cover up of a promising cure and that you urge your GOP friends across the isle to not make this political but clearly state that ingesting Drano is insane.
I don’t “want them dead”, but I do believe in nature’s “Law of Natural Selection” which, in a nutshell. promotes the survival of the smartest and strongest while culling the weakest and dumbest.
I’ve never believed in that. The entire point of civilization is that the weaker and dumber get a chance to survive and even thrive. It’s not just the “alphas”, the elite.
The thing is, is that these people are not dumb, no more so than average, anyway, I’m sure some are, but certainly not all of them.
What they are are against the notion of civilization. Of working together to accomplish things we cannot accomplish on our own. This has been a tension between those who wanted to live in the towns and those who wanted to live in the hills since the first days of agriculture and animal husbandry. They don’t want to be part of the social contract, and they don’t want others to benefit from it either.
I certainly don’t mind if those who are against the idea of civilization decided to find ways of taking themselves out without harming those around them.
But they still want all the benefits of the social contract, just not the responsibilities. So call them what they are: immature, spoiled children who need to be spanked. Hard.
Heinlein was right. We need Coventry.
Perhaps then state that you are seriously considering laws to make manufacturers and distributors of drain cleaner put their product in safety containers with warning labels on them. And state clearly again that The Government says NOT to ingest large quantities of Drano.