Feeling grief and outrage over the Christchurch shooting but equally outraged over the world’s silence towards four entire villages of Christians slaughtered in Nigeria.
Tag Archives: christians
Of What Is Hallowed, Honored, or Human
The complete demise of civil debate in our society today is by far the greatest travesty that the modern sectarian has inflicted upon this Republic. Communication is dead and respect of the individual is crushed beneath it’s corpse. A differing opinion than that of the tolerant tyrant is treated as a cancerous plaque rather than a healthy antidote to a narrow, blinding, self-ingratiating worldview.
Coupled with this stupor is the inability to compartmentalize issues, opinions, and beliefs. This is best represented in the constant criticism of Christians for their support of the President, as if they are embracing Donald Trump as their Prophet, Priest, and Pastor rather than their President. This simply highlights a fundamental difference of perspective for government.
True conservatives do not view government as their god. There is no expectation of the Hallowed that is attached to the government of man. While scripture encourages Christians to honor their leaders, mankind must be keenly aware that infallibility is not vested in the governing institutions of our Republic. This was a strong belief of Founding Fathers and one of the main reasons for establishing this Republic.
Demanding that a politician adhere to the same high standards of morality as that of clergy or even Deity skews purity of character over qualification in much the same way as making the same demands of a carpenter. For both job descriptions, the politician and the carpenter, the Christian is more comfortable with the individual who has coupled exceptional morality with exceptional job qualification, but if, in the completion of the commission of the task at hand, the individual of less than sterling character is more qualified to complete the task than the person of impeccable morality, the most qualified must do the job.
That is not to say that a Christian should condone bad behavior nor is it saying that a Christian is condoning bad behavior by honoring a person’s qualification. As it pertains to this President, the Christian should not demand a flawed man be the shining embodiment of a hallowed saint, yet, by the same token, Christians should not dismiss his moral failings or try by some tortured strangulation of Scripture to extract virtue from blatant sin. The Biblical approach to this President is to honor him by virtue of the fact that the people chose him to be most qualified to deal with the situation our Nation finds itself in right now.
But how could Christians chose him? While I did not chose him, I am a Christian and I can explain the reasoning which is found through out scripture, if one would chose to read it. Its really not so difficult to understand.
First, Donald Trump is not God, a Minister, Priest, or Rabbi. He is our highest ranking public servant. The Christian views spiritual leaders of more importance than political leaders.
Second, the Bible is filled with stories of very flawed individuals who were raised up leadership. Moses a murderer, David an adulterer and a murderer, Jacob a conniving thief, Paul the Apostle a murderer, Peter a coward, and the list could go on. Christians know that leaders are not God but they can be used by him.
Christians believe in redemption above all things. It is the foundation of our faith. Christians are also admonished not to judge a man’s heart but his actions.
So when the President said he was sorry for past behavior, the Bible compels us to forgive as we have been forgiven. While cynics mock faith as blind allegiance, people of faith view the human leader as just that, a human. Through the prism of their faith, they decipher between his qualification and his morality. They have deemed him, however flawed, qualified to be their leader for this time, and, so far, the President has proven their calculations correct.
My Response To The NFL Attacking Georgia
Because the NFL has interjected themselves into the debate on Religious liberty and furthermore has chosen to persecute and advocate against Christians who stand by their convictions of faith and conscience, no matter how unpopular or out-of-style those convictions are, which is their unalienable Constitutional right, I must exercise my own rights, those selfsame unalienable rights, my birthright as an American citizen, and stand beside my brothers and sisters, my fellow citizens in Georgia whom you, the NFL, through misguided arrogance believing the monumental wealth you have acquired from the marketing of the play of a child’s game, combating over a misshapen leather ball, somehow grants you license to trample the basic aforementioned unalienable rights of the very citizens whose monetary and popular support of your game, your product, has granted you the enormous wealth you enjoy and abuse.
I will stand with those you persecute in Georgia and I will no longer watch, purchase, or any way support your product, your business. The NFL should be in the business of football, not trying to bully the citizens of the United States into changing the fundamental structure that has produced and supported the very free society that grants the platform on which a colossal entity such as the NFL can be built.
I have been a football fan since I was a little boy so it is with no small regret that I have severed any ties or support to the NFL. I have deleted all my fan accounts and put my memorabilia in a closet hoping my favorite sport will come to their senses and return to being just that, a sport. Until then, please delete my email account from your list.
We live in a nation where not only are we afforded the right to be controversial and pursue agendas that might make others uncomfortable, but we are also afforded the right to disagree with those agendas and say “no”. Your disdain for that basic unalienable right is more than troubling and in more plain speech, perhaps you should just stick to your business; that is, playing a game with a little leather ball.
With much regret and frustration,
Andy Torbett
Redunculous
No, it is not a spelling error…really. And, no, it’s not a word… yet. It’s just one of my specialty. A word coined to help find the appropriate emotion to attach to a situation. This, the latest of my installments to the Webster’s dictionary, is the combination of the words redundant and ridiculous. I did this all by myself. For some reason, Webster keeps sending back my offerings of literary coinage and asked that I please stop, as it has caused the great patriarch of the book, Noah Webster himself, to turn incessantly in his grave. I guess that would be rather unsettling.
But I like the word. It has an essence to it, the essence of economy. Oh yes, I economized. We all have to nowadays. I took the two most prevalent manifestations of the liberal mind, redundant and ridiculous behavior. I combined them into one word and, now, I can respond to them both at once. I….I….feel so focused.
And quite timely, I might add, because we have had a slew of redunculous behavior swirling around the State of Maine. We just had the Senate President, Justin Alfond, make a speech assuring State workers an increase in the pensions and wages, while the those in private sector, who pay for those wages and pensions with their taxes, can barely put food on the table for their families. This was a follow up to his speech attacking private schools. The Senate President doesn’t seem to be fond of the private sector.
Mr. Alfond suffers from the liberal illusion that Maine people have an unlimited supply of revenue and that we work at our jobs simply to give it to him to disperse amongst his government allies. I have to agree with the great conservative apologist Thomas Sowell who asked, “…why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take someone else’s money.” Alas, I fear Alfond and his allies think its good policy; that is, if you look at the budget they passed. Tax increases to pay for those government employee raises.
Strange, Maine is looking at a $58 million surplus for the closing fiscal year, before these tax increases. So, why, Mr. Alfond, would you want to increase taxes on a struggling economy when you don’t need to? Oh, is that my “greedy” old self, wanting to keep my money in my wallet for my family to use. I’m just so greedy that way.
That leads me to another issue to be resolved. Recently, I criticized those activists, who seem bent on telling people what to do in their own backyards. I feel very strongly about the sanctity and privacy of a person’s private lands. I have been rebuked by some of those activists, saying that if I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do in my backyard then I shouldn’t criticize public government officials.
Let me try to help and clarify the issue. There is a huge difference between private and public issues. I do not criticize any official on what he does in his private home and on his private lands. I have, and will continue to do so, criticized public officials on the actions or inactions in the public tax funded sector. It is the taxpayer’s job, since our dollars fund their public decisions, to critique the exercise of their representative duties.
Secondly, I have been admonished that, because I am a Christian, I should not publicly criticize or rebuke public officials. This individual obviously did not read the story of Jesus cleansing the Temple, nor has he read the accounts of Paul the Apostle rebuking Roman leaders to their very face, also of rebuking Peter to his face. The idea that I should abdicate my God-given liberties for the sake of some contrived sense of propriety and allow myself to be relegated to the doormat of society as a reflection of my faith has no intellectual, Constitutional or, for that matter, Biblical merit. The very conception of such an idea is utterly and unequivocally redunculous.
The Maine Conservative Voice 