Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear them or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.
– Rick Warren, as quoted in the Christian Post, 2 Mar 2012
FoxNews commentator Todd Starnes reports on a LifeWay survey that says 59% of Christians believe they are losing the “culture war.”
“Ten years ago we were talking about who would win the culture war and now we’re talking about how will Christian rights be protected after the culture war,” Ed Stetzer, the president of LifeWay Research told me…
Starnes lists examples of “religious persecution in the United States,” and he starts with the US military: Read more
Over the past two or three years, words that once held specific meaning have been “appropriated” by ideologies, interest groups, or even just ignorant websites and misused — misused to such an extent people seem to be forgetting “that word doesn’t mean what you think it means;” at least, it didn’t.
One of the first was the Latin suffix –phobia, which was eventually used as a tool by the homosexual advocacy movement to brand its opponents “homophobes.” The fact their opponents didn’t have a phobia about homosexuality was irrelevant. A “phobia” brings with it a negative connotation, and the name-calling had the intended effect: Opponents of the imposition of the homosexual agenda were forced to defend themselves; the argument changed to one of labels rather than positions. Pastor Greg Laurie recently addressed the semantics, saying “homophobe” was a useless term:
I hate the word ‘homophobic because I can just as easily come back and say ‘well, you’re biblophobic to say I’m homophobic.
Others have latched onto the semantic trend, resulting Read more
The US House of Representatives recently introduced HR 3600, a bill that would repeal a portion of the IRS 501(c)3 code commonly known as the Johnson Amendment:
The Johnson Amendment was passed by Congress in 1954 [and] states that entities who are exempt from federal income tax cannot:
Participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of – or in opposition to – any candidate for public office.
This portion of law has been used as a tool to prevent churches Read more
A few articles across the internet have posited that CAPT Owen Honors, recently fired skipper of the USS Enterprise, was simply a product of the “military culture.”
As a retired Navy officer, my perspective is that Honors was acting as the custom of the time allowed. If the Navy wants to change its culture, it needs to get the word out on what is to be changed and only discipline future violations.
That’s an interesting perspective from several angles. It seems reasonable that if you permit Sailors (or anyone else) to conduct themselves after a certain fashion, then that conduct becomes “acceptable,” or it is at least perceived to be so. In truth, “allowing” or failing to discipline or prosecute conduct does not inherently make it right, thought it can understandably create a culture of confusion.
In addition, as the writer said above, if the Navy Read more
Former US Marine 2nd Lieutenant Adam Ballard has given his excuse for his lapse in integrity, in which he cheated on a land navigation test: everybody’s doing it, and it was the school’s fault:
Ballard admits his actions were wrong but said they were facilitated by “inordinately lax procedures at [the basic officer school]…”
Over half of the three hundred Marines in our company possessed the same information that I had and that those numbers were comparable, if not more, in all the other training companies past and present…
As noted here often, neither a “culture” that seems to encourage cheating, nor a tangible disadvantage for not cheating are excuses for making the “easier” wrong choice.