Tag: Progressivism

The news, moral decay and the opportunity in all that

On Monday, July 13, 2015

It has been an interesting year. The veneer of good will between warring world views seems to have been ripped open. I ran into three interesting articles this morning when I opened up my browser to read the news. The first article, titled The end of “news” was about once trusted news sources that are no longer read by anyone but extreme partisans because they are no longer worthy of our trust. I found myself nodding my head to this article as I read. I no longer get my news from the AP, NBC, ABC, CBS, the Oregonian, The New York Times or even Fox News. I mourn that. I always loved to read the newspaper over coffee in the morning. The thing is, they no longer report the news. Other news sources break the important stories. I visited the old, reliable news source for a lot of years before I finally gave up. Now I just ignore them.

The second article titled Punch Leftists in the Mouth by Daniel Greenfield of the Sultan Knish blog about how to deal with those who want to tear society down. It is a rework of Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champ’s famous quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Greenfield says it is not good to play nice with people who want to perpetrate evil. I found this interesting because James 4 was the chapter for my daily Bible read today.

Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. –James 4:4

Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. –James 4:17

The last article is a hopeful one. The title of the article is The Sexual Revolution’s Coming Refugee Crisis. The subtitle is Many people are going to be disappointed, and even before they can admit it to others or to themselves, they are going to ask, “Is this all there is?” It basically says that a lot of the bad stuff that has gained approval in our society since the 1960’s cannot sustain itself. God’s rules are being broken and things do not end well when that happens. Many people will come to the end of themselves and start to look for answers outside of popular culture, politics and governments. There is a huge opportunity in that if we remain humble and point these people to something truly good. James 4 has some answers for that, too.

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. –James 4:10

Betty Blonde #368 – 12/14/2009

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Orthodox Christianity vs. the Supreme Court

By Dad

On Sunday, June 28, 2015

In Christianity, culture, Politics

The New York Times, as the old saying goes, is like a broken clock. Even a broken clock is right two times per day. NPR and Time Magazine do not seem to be right quite that often. In fact, I had kind of relegated them both to the same category as purely naturalistic evolution–their chance of getting anything right is about equal to the mythical chance of a tornado assembling a Boeing 747 as it passes through a junk yard or a million monkeys typing at a million typewriters for a million years to duplicate a work of Shakespeare.

I still think NPR is in that category, but imagine my surprise when an article appeared in Time Magazine that perfectly articulated my thoughts on where we stand here in America now that the Constitution has no fixed meaning and can be modified on any whim of the masses. I am not one of those who believes the court’s latest indignity was done on the whim of five out of nine justices. If society was against them, the Supreme Court could in no way make these kinds of changes.

Society at large now defines “marriage” differently than those who hold to orthodox Christian beliefs. Christian, my son, made the statement that this is nothing new, society has been like this for as long as he can remember. Thankfully, his living memory is not that long–less than twenty years. Still, this did not all start with attempts to change the definition of marriage to accommodate homosexuality, but with some equally pernicious evils: the libertine sexual morays of the 1960’s and the acceptance of divorce with neither societal nor legal sanction and diminishing sanction by much of the church. Rod Dreher, the author of the article expresses my feelings about this very well:

…social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But it is also the world we live in today. Dreher goes on to describe the ramifications of all this for professing Christians and how times could get even uglier, but that it has happened before. It is scriptural that evil will ascend before the end. One of these times, when evil is ascending Christ will return. Whether this is that time, only time will tell.

In the meantime, I will consider reading Time Magazine again in a million years or so.

Betty Blonde #356 – 11/26/2009

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Government school teacher decides what is morally best for other people’s kids

By Dad

On Friday, June 26, 2015

In Education, Politics

This article in the Christian Post tells the story of a homosexual teacher of third graders who chose to resign after he colluded with the school’s Assistant Principal to read a book that promoted homosexual marriage to his students behind the backs of the student’s parents. The headline of the article outrageously lays the responsibility for the resignation of the teacher and the Assistant Principal on the parents. A paragraph in the middle of the article explains the real reason they resigned.

Due to the outrage among the parents, Currie and Goodhand felt compelled to issue their resignations last week. And Currie said he felt he could no longer teach at a school located in the socially conservative church community of Efland.

“I’m resigning because when me and my partner sat down and talked about it we felt I wasn’t going to have the support I needed to move forward at Efland,” Currie added. “It’s very disappointing.”

Bad grammar and all, this statement is at complete odds with the title of the article. It was the self-serving feelings of the teacher and the Assistant Principal that caused them to resign, not the justifiable outrage of the parents. The egregious act of indoctrination of young children to accept one side of an extremely controversial topic without first checking with the parents is bad. The arrogance of this government school teacher’s justification for perpetrating this outrage is even more staggering. He said:

I think that anyone who knows me as a teacher would understand that that is an absurd claim,” Currie said. “Every single decision is based on what is best for my kids, not what is best for Omar Currie. I am a champion for my kids. I fight tooth and nail for every single thing that my kids need.

He is so wrong on so many counts. They are not his kids. What is best for the kids in his class, especially when it comes to controversial moral and sexual issues, is not his decision. I am not sure about this government school teacher, but government schools in general have a horrible record relative to the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. They should get their house in order on those subjects and leave the moral and sexual instruction to the parents.

This guy is a product of the horrible education provided to education majors by the teacher education establishment within the university system in this country. Until we clean that house by recruiting higher quality students, getting rid of the rampant political correctness there and dramatically increasing the academic rigor of teacher education programs, we are going to have to deal with this kind of thing. The better option is to just not participate with the government schools by opting for homeschool or private school or, better yet, get the government completely out of the delivery of education. Milton Friedman had the right idea on all this.

Betty Blonde #355 – 11/25/2009

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Losing faith in the “experts”

By Dad

On Tuesday, February 24, 2015

In Education, Homeschool

There were a couple of great articles in The American Interest on the continued growth of homeschooling. The first article talks about the many reasons to homeschool. The last paragraph of the first article on the many reasons to homeschool resonated with me:

We’ve noted before that homeschooling is on the rise as Americans lose trust in the experts that run the American school system. For religious people, that distrust stems from their belief that schools don’t respect their values. Silicon Valley entrepreneurial types think they can disrupt education and create better approaches on their own. According to this piece, African Americans increasingly distrust schools as well. It’s not just because of low expectations either—some families quoted in the piece think their kids don’t get as complete an education in African American history in public schools as they should. Distrust in experts, cultural pluralism, dissatisfaction with current institutions, DIY-ism: some of the biggest trends reshaping America are at play in the rise of homeschooling.

The second article on how the American people have lost faith in the “experts” as blue progressivism has taken control in much of institutional America is quite a good article, too.

Betty Blonde #267 – 07/28/2009

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