Tag Archives: religious freedom

Apr 18 2019

To Like Or Not To Love. That Is The Question

 

A comedian once joked that he loved all of his kids, but there was a couple he just didn’t like. As with all good comedy, the hyperbole is often grounded in truth. To love does not always mean you have to like.

Today relationships seem more littered with eggshells than honesty. Any parent raising children can acknowledge that our love is unconditional, but our children can have behavioral cycles that are just plain unlikable. Parents can explain the reasons we don’t like the child right now, and guide them toward the path of change.

But the modern counselor will tell you to dislike, to critique, and to admonish is to hate. All negativity is to be muted in an all embracing malleable sponge that squishes every action into a mush of acceptability. Defining love as never challenging, never exposing, and never exacting, the new society now is at loss to understand why the new generation of young adults are emotionally paralyzed at the slightest hint of adversity, never acknowledging that they have been programmed to think, if they are not liked, they are not loved but hated.

Ah, then there is the Christian whose words of rebuke are not the loving words of Jesus Christ. The same Christ who fashioned a whip to chase money-changers out of the Temple calling them thieves. He called people liars, hypocrites, dull of wit, slow of heart, children of Satan, and the list goes.

There were lots of people on this earth Christ didn’t like but he loved them all enough to die on cross for them. Christ didn’t accept every act of every person and neither should I. My faith demands that I love all humankind, but I don’t have to like you.

-Andy Torbett

Sep 29 2017

Audible

 

It’s not about the players. It’s not about the protests. It’s about the NFL.

The Roger Goodell NFL has been anything but glorious. For all his assurances of defending the shield, the self-righteous proclamation of the Commissioner has yielded nothing less than the opposite. The NFL shield has now become a tattered, tainted symbol of lawlessness, disrespect, and selfish hypocrisy.

Consider the pattern that has brought the nation to at least a momentary disgust with the most dominant professional sport in the United States. Goodell’s first “defense of the shield” was to ban happy dance celebrations in the end zone. Randy Moss could no longer “moon” Packers fans in the end zone.

Who can forget the improper spinning of the football? This was also regulated. Goodell was determined to make sure that football didn’t spin out of control. (I just couldn’t help myself.)

Then came the minuscule suspension for a player beating his pregnant girlfriend senseless in an elevator. Only after being publicly taken to task by Maine Governor Paul LePage, did the NFL decide to administer a more appropriate suspension. The NFL continues to tolerate repeated domestic violence within it’s ranks.

But then the NFL decided to morph into a political entity. When the sovereign State of Georgia passed legislation to protect the Free Speech and Religious Freedom rights of ministers to refuse to perform gay marriages, the NFL threatened to remove the Super Bowl from their State. In remarkable display of cowardice the Governor of Georgia vetoed the bill, effectively knuckling under to the NFL.

Now the new bully of political spectrum was feeling very full of themselves. They banned socks and shoes that had improper support of the 9-11 tragedy. They banned the support of fallen police officers on NFL helmets. They mocked Christian players for kneeling before the game prayer.

Until now. Now, it works for them. Kneeling now is another way the NFL can throw it’s weight around and tell the fans it doesn’t give a rat’s hairy hindquarters what they think; in fact, the NFL thinks that protesting fans and the President of the United States need to show the NFL, the “proper respect”, Goodell’s own words.

The NFL calls an audible on what expression is allowed and what is not because they have very little to fear in the form of reprisal in the Free Market. Given non-profit status by the Federal Government, with rabid fans who are so addicted to the game they will ignore any disgusting behavior just so they can have their Sunday fix, and a populace whose value system is somewhere between nada and nil, the NFL has very little reason to behave itself and the more reason to throw it’s shoulders at it’s viewers. They will sit there, take it,and wait with bated breath for the next game.

Apr 20 2016

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
Apr 9 2016

A Conduit Severed and A Pendulum Swung

Part Two-A Pendulum Swung

So similar is the dilemma of the battle of religious liberties against the cry for the equitable treatment of the humanities to the lack of knowledge transference that it begs the question of whether the severing of the conduit of knowledge is directly related to the need for those most tolerant of the humanities to facilitate and necessitate the trampling of the religious liberties of their fellow countrymen to achieve their end. But to what end? And could it be the knowledge of our forefathers, a knowledge not transferred, is the reason we can behave so abominably?

Certainly history bears out the truth of this premise. At the genesis of the revolutions of noted social engineers such as Marx and Lenin, of Democratic socialists and Communists, was the fabric of teachings that the old beliefs and morals of their forefathers were outdated, inhibiting, and not capable of embracing the new ways. Disciples were admonished the reject these old ways and embrace what was new. It was this severing, specifically of moral codes, that allowed these brutal uprisings that that typified social democratic revolutions leaving 100 million slaughtered in its wakes.

So now we see another rise of social engineering. Our moral codes once again are seen as the obstacle to its resurgence. Our religions, Our Constitution all paint a negative pall on what many consider progress.

So we have passed laws to protect the perceived rights of those believed aggrieved. Still, it is not enough to pass laws to protect those rights, citizens who do not agree must be forced to agree or face the wrath of government. It is necessary, again, to force acceptance, and the cries from the ghosts of perils pasts call to warn us.

But the Constitution calls a halt, reminding us that no law can be made that prohibits free speech and the free expression of religion. Still states have passed humanity laws assuring the populace that when the Constitution said “no Law” it didn’t mean this law. The need for tolerance outweighs the need for freedom.

Christianity is the culprit now. It’s tenets, the dos and don’ts, have inhibited the “safe places” of so many, so many who just want to be accepted. And Christians will accept them, even if we must use the bludgeon of government to enforce it. “Its time to swing the pendulum against those have oppressed us for so long,” rail the social engineers, the social democrats, again. “Away with the old ways of right and wrong.”

Ah, but the pendulum always swings back. So, what of that? Christianity is the easy target. With its gospel of dos and don’ts it is also the gospel of peace and love. There’s no fear of retribution. But what of those that do not worship God but worship government?

Our founding fathers wrote that no law should be written to prevent religious freedom because they knew that once one law was written to prevent religion, then another would come and another, all in retribution for the other. On and on the pendulum would swing, only settling after untold damage had been done.

Freedom is freedom whether in the home or the market. Freedom inhibited anywhere is not freedom. Its just that simple. Whether a persons beliefs disrupt your “safe zone” or your feelings is not a warrant that cancels their freedom to do so. You just need a stronger “safe zone” or as they said in “olden times”, thicker skin.

A pendulum swung is an energy time not easily recovers

Each energy rails against the swinging to balance the other

But woe is the battle inertia between them until the pendulum calms

Would to God that pendulum stayed settled and never swung at all