Civil Commotion

Let me say first, that both Paul Young and myself believe that indeed, all of humanity is fallen, broken, twisted, and blind. The disagreement with Tim Challies is how we understand the concept behind the word “depravity.” [emphases in original]

John MacMurray

<< SIGH >>   These people are hopeless, and a belief system premised upon self-loathing is profoundly, inevitably, destructive. There is nothing to be done but stay away from them when you can, and defeat them when they vote.

Here is a sad indicator of how crazy the Republican Party has become: Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon speechwriter, thinks the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in on to something.

Putin’s approval rating, after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin’s appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump’s?

Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.

What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the New World Order established at the Cold War’s end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.

And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.

Though Buchanan’s admiration for Putin is grievously misplaced, he probably is right that America’s evangelicals, who overwhelmingly supported Trump, would prefer a strongman to the discomfiting rigors of democracy. To these people, it appears, better to have a flesh-and-blood strongman who tells them what to do than an Invisible Friend who tells them what to do.

Buchanan is rejecting adulthood, the entire Enlightenment project — as evangelicals have. Seriously: It’s a sad ol’ day when Republican headliners are Russia apologists.

Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has a summer program for children this year that thinking adults will want to keep their kids away from.

VBS 2017 turns your kids into Galactic Starveyors. As kids focus their telescopes on the marvels painted in the sky by the Creator, they will discover the wonder among all wonders–that the God who created everything there is–the knowable and the unknowable, the visible and the invisible–wants a personal relationship with them. Come and learn about the God who is over the moon in love with you.

These people make my head hurt. Do you think they will mention that two of the best-known astronomers of the last century — Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson — are atheists?

No. That will not be mentioned. What they will do is lie to these poor captive children and tell them science upholds their ridiculous tales.

I checked, and the local Baptist church that exemplifies everything educated, decent-minded adults despise about religion is offering the program this summer. That church teaches that the earth is less than 10,000-years old, that Godly people always put Jesus’ pleasure first and their family can have the leftovers, and years ago the lobby contained a kiosk that distributed literature about the gay menace, the wickedness of celebrating Halloween, on and on.

Bah.

Mohler’s harrumphing is wildly misplaced here. The NCAA accepts, as nearly every biologist and doctor on earth accepts, that sexual orientation is innate, that it is set before birth just as eye color and skin color are set. Researchers are confident that they have found the mechanism, too, that orientation varies according to the chemical environment of the mother’s womb. They can’t ethically dose mothers-to-be with varying amounts of estrogen to see what turns-on their children in 20-years, so they are obliged to consult old medical records; so far, that research upholds the hypothesis.

The only moral issue that I can see here is that Mohler is willing to constrict the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of his neighbors in deference to the egregious nonsense written by Bronze Age anonymities.

Ignorance is forgivable, but resolute ignorance is a failure of character — and that’s on Mohler.

Just in case you’ve been wondering, The Orange One is still crazy.

Distract-distract-distract.