Socialism Bible Quotes

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teaching were removed.

So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church.

When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

Many of the seminal social issues of our time - poverty, lack of education, human trafficking, war and torture, domestic abuse - can track their way to our theology of, or beliefs about, women, which has its roots in what we believe about the nature, purposes, and character of God.

The most dangerous of all enthroned lies is the holy, the sanctified, the privileged lie- the lie everyone believes to be a model truth. It is the fruitful mother of all other popular errors and delusions. It is a hydra-headed tree of unreason with a thousand roots. it is a social cancer!

Anyone who says "we must try to understand" those who make life miserable for those undeserving of misery is abiding and abetting a social cancer!

At the time that she came to live with Jesus's mother, Mari [Mary Magdalene] had no inkling about how she would be greeted by her since their cultures were radically different from each other. The pleasure of her surprise was therefore boundless when Jesus's mother heartily welcomed her with open arms, despite the cultural difference in their religious beliefs. In all fairness, Mari did not make it difficult for Mary to accept her; if anything, she invited Mary to teach her the social habits and local traditions of her people down to the most minor detail especially since she would find them very useful later on in her public life with Jesus.

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology.

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature. Dorothy Day, Catholic social activist and journalist

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage.

Thomas Merton said it was actually dangerous to put the Scriptures in the hands of people whose inner self is not yet sufficiently awakened to encounter the Spirit, because they will try to use God for their own egocentric purposes. (This is why religion is so subject to corruption!) Now, if we are going to talk about conversion and penance, let me apply that to the two major groups that have occupied Western Christianity—Catholics and Protestants. Neither one has really let the Word of God guide their lives. Catholics need to be converted to giving the Scriptures some actual authority in their lives. Luther wasn’t wrong when he said that most Catholics did not read the Bible. Most Catholics are still not that interested in the Bible. (Historically they did not have the printing press, nor could most people read, so you can’t blame them entirely.) I have been a priest for 42 years now, and I would sadly say that most Catholics would rather hear quotes from saints, Popes, and bishops, the current news, or funny stories, if they are to pay attention. If I quote strongly from the Sermon on the Mount, they are almost throwaway lines. I can see Catholics glaze over because they have never read the New Testament, much less studied it, or been guided by it. I am very sad to have to admit this. It is the Achilles heel of much of the Catholic world, priests included. (The only good thing about it is that they never fight you like Protestants do about Scripture. They are easily duped, and the hierarchy has been able to take advantage of this.) If Catholics need to be converted, Protestants need to do penance. Their shout of “sola Scriptura” (only Scripture) has left them at the mercy of their own cultures, their own limited education, their own prejudices, and their own selective reading of some texts while avoiding others. Partly as a result, slavery, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia have lasted authoritatively into our time—by people who claim to love Jesus! I think they need to do penance for what they have often done with the Bible! They largely interpreted the Bible in a very individualistic and otherworldly way. It was “an evacuation plan for the next world” to use Brian McLaren’s phrase—and just for their group. Most of Evangelical Protestantism has no cosmic message, no social message, and little sense of social justice or care for the outsider. Both Catholics and Protestants (Orthodox too!) found a way to do our own thing while posturing friendship with Jesus.

...I found myself pondering the specific Christian American obsession with abortion and gay rights. For million of Americans, these are the great societal "sins" of the day. It isn't bogus wars, systemic poverty, failing schools, child abuse, domestic violence, health care for profit, poorly paid social workers, under-funded hospitals, gun saturation, or global warming that riles or worries the conservative, Bible-believers of America." pg33

Parents who spoil their children out of 'love' should realize that they are performing acts of child abuse. Although there are no laws against such abuse--no man-made laws anyway--this spiritual mistreatment may result in as much long-term personal and social damage as the worst physical abuse.

In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family's interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual's happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good - not the individual or the family - and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.

In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust. Branch out. Not only do our beliefs define us, but so does the community of like-minded people who share those beliefs. Christian traditions, denominations, and congregations provide a group identity. We are social animals, so we should not judge our spiritual groups, or those of others, as necessarily a problem. Only when our communities become the defining element of our spiritual lives, packs that protect those boundaries at all costs, do problems begin. That leads to isolation, “us versus them” thinking, and the illusion that “we” are basically right about the Bible and God and “they” aren’t—the kind of wall-building that Jesus and Paul criticized. So much can be learned from

I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?

When God brought the first man his spouse, he brought him not just a lover but the friend his heart had been seeking. Proverbs 2:17 speaks of one's spouse as your "'allup," a unique word that the lexicons define as your "special confidant" or "best friend." In an age where women were often seen as the husband's property, and marriages were mainly business deals and transactions seeking to increase the family's social status and security, it was startling for the Bible to describe a spouse in this way. But in today's society, with its emphasis on romance and sex, it is just as radical to insist that your spouse should be your best friend, though for a different reason. In tribal societies, romance doesn't matter as much as social status, and in individualistic Western societies, romance and great sex matter far more than anything else. The Bible, however, without ignoring the importance of romance, puts great emphasis on marriage as companionship.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me. - Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp

So if you blame Facebook, Trump, or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. For millennia, much of what passed for “news” and “facts” in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons, and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit—yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.

God knew man would evolve. People think some of the Old Testament laws are absurd now because we live in a very different culture, a different time period. They had their problems and we have ours. God is constant but man is not, and he foreknew the ever-changing world his people would have to deal with; therefore, and if there is indeed an omniscient God, a Christ-like figure would be our only rational, possible connection to a constant, holy God throughout the evolution of culture and social law. The only answer that makes sense when it comes to relevance regarding religions and time periods is Christ, and the chances are slim that men could have invented it.

For, as Professor Turner has pointed out, “history originated as myth” and becomes a “social memory” to which men can appeal, “knowing it will provide justification for their present actions or convictions.” If

That, right fucking there, that was what he hated about them. All of them. Their arrogance. That fucking self-satisfied superiority. Their smug assumptions that they understood what was best for everybody, that they couldn't possibly be wrong. For the Bible told them so.

It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a belonging and an escape.

Grandpa Sereno: "There is nothing as dangerous as fear, fear of people who are different than you. Fear is the REAL danger and we must start to put all our efforts into fighting THAT instead of each other. Fight fear not people!!! Let there be light!

We can’t protect or expand the cause of Christ by human political and social activism, no matter how great or sincere the efforts. Ours is a spiritual battle against worldly ideologies and dogmas that are arrayed against God, and we achieve victory over them only with the weapon of Scripture.

The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. The language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language that makes Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to earth. [p.98]

This is why it’s especially important for those of us who come to the Bible from positions of relative social, economic, and racial privilege to read its stories alongside people from marginalized communities, past and present, who are often more practiced at tracing that crimson thread of justice through its pages.

Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?

The business of reading and interpreting the Bible in South Afria is a tricky one! The Bible is everywhere and in the hands of many, including the pain inflictors. ~ Mogomme Alpheus Masoga

We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.

So too, since Christ has in principle defeated the fallen "gods" (principalities and powers) who have for ages inspired injustice, cruelty and apathy toward the weak, the poor the oppressed and the needy (Ps. 82), the church can hardly carry out its role in manifesting, on earth and in heaven, Christ's victory over these gods without taking up as a central part of its missions just these causes. We can, in truth, no more bifurcate social concerns and individual salvation than we can bifurcate the cosmic and anthropocentric dimensions of Christ's work on the cross.

The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible. These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as 'the father of the American Revolution.'... Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe. [The Christian Nation Myth, 1999]

Shimmel: “NEVER TRUST THE GOYIM. They are just like these other weird dangerous people, Messianic Jews! How dare Jews become “Christian-like”, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!

My course is a survey of how readings of the same constant text have varied over the centuries, from the formation of the canon to our present time, dependent on context and subtext. A community in exile will read differently than a community in apparent full possession of all it surveys, with those who have nothing welcoming the promised overturning of the standing order, and those who have much of this world's goods not longing for the end of the age. Depending, then, upon how one reads and interprets, either the Bible is a textbook for the status quo, of quiescent pieties and promises, or it is a recipe for social change and transformation. There are churches dedicated to each point of view, each claiming its share of the good news; but what is good news for some is often bad news for somebody else.

The problem with every sacred text is that it has human readers. Consciously or unconsciously, we interpret it to meet our own needs. There is nothing wrong with this unless we deny that we are doing it, as when someone tells me that he is not 'interpreting' anything but simply reporting what is right there on the page. This is worrisome, not only because he is reading a translation from the original Hebrew or Greek that has already involved a great deal of interpretation, but also because it is such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God. The literalists I like least are the ones who do not own a Bible. The literalists I like most are the ones who admit that they do not understand every word God has revealed in the Bible, though they still believe God has revealed it. I can respect that. I can respect almost anyone who admits to being human while reading a divine text. After that, we can talk - about we highlight some teachings and ignore others, about how we decide which ones are historically conditioned and which ones are universally true, about who has influenced our reading of scripture and how our social location affects what we hear. The minute I believe I know the mind of God is the minute someone needs to tell me to sit down and tell me to breathe into a paper bag.

We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous beings who get to decide who we are going to be, but we are likely much more malleable than we think. We are often defined by the structure that keeps us captive. In some ways our desires are so socially constructed that they can't rightfully be called our own.

The biggest mistake abuse survivors make after leaving their relationship is to shrink. They wallow in sadness and allow the abuser to go on social media sites and post pictures of how wonderful their life is now that you left them. They allow the abuser to win again by showing people they are so over you. This is not okay! I hope every abuse survivor has a marketing campaign of glory and triumph. Don't let the abuser paint the image of you as someone they discarded. Post your comeback story on social media. Invite the world back into your life. The victory is yours. Show the world that you overcame a monster. Show them you won!

In itself this Christian education is partly the product of the retreat of biblical scholarship from the faith community to the academy. In removing themselves to the academy biblical scholars have ceased to engage with the people of the issues of the contemporary faith context. ~ Janet Lees (p. 84). In Reading Other-Wise

Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in the context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.

Sarucha (age 8): "Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!" she exclaimed.

Light has a voice?” Sarucha inquired, amazed.

Sin is not just something I do. Sin is social; it always impacts the whole community.

Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself—no more obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. (Quoting C.E.S. Wood)

The Bible is clear that discrimination exists and that Christians must resist it. Sinful discrimination indeed causes some disparities. But the Bible never goes to the extreme that we find in the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi. In his award-winning bestseller Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi argues that “racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.

The trouble is, we have up-close access to women who excel in each individual sphere. With social media and its carefully selected messaging, we see career women killing it, craft moms slaying it, chef moms nailing it, Christian leaders working it. We register their beautiful yards, homemade green chile enchiladas, themed birthday parties, eight-week Bible study series, chore charts, ab routines, “10 Tips for a Happy Marriage,” career best practices, volunteer work, and Family Fun Night ideas. We make note of their achievements, cataloging their successes and observing their talents. Then we combine the best of everything we see, every woman we admire in every genre, and conclude: I should be all of that. It is certifiably insane.

Social anxiety disorder”—which essentially means pathological shyness—is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology—not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease—if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance.

The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week’s sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up. By toeing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone. These are broad generalizations, and they are unfair, but this is what I was thinking at the time.

Jesus is, and always has been, a person we can expect to be doing things we don't expect him to do, in the places where we don't think he'd be, with the people we didn't think he'd be with. His enemies were those who dedicated themselves to obeying every rule in the Bible. His best friends were sex workers, social misfits, and everyone else the religious leaders had declared were "out." I believe our spiritual journey gets much richer the moment we accept this, and accept that Jesus seems to have not just opted out of our boundary systems entirely, but is actually busy walking behind us and erasing the lines we've drawn.

We must acknowledge that all we have are, at times very differing, interpretations of what Jesus was all about-and these interpretations, as they are collected in the New Testament, have been written in particular situations by men, none of whom questioned the existing patriarchal structure of their societies or of their communities. While some Christ-believing women did challenge certain male-dominated aspects of their church gatherings (see 1 Cor 14:33b-36) it is quite unlikely that they questioned the patriarchal structure of their society, community, and church on a fundamental level. ~ Werner Kahl in Reading Other-Wise, p. 151

A myriad of contemporary social, ethical, and theological questions are not addressed in the Bible, either because they were not part of the world in which the Bible arose or simply because they never come up in biblical contexts.

Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.

YO MAMA SO OLD... Yo mama so old the back of her head looks like a raisin. Yo mama so old her social security number is 1. Yo mama so old when she was a child rainbows were still in black and white. Yo mama so old when she was in school there was no history class. Yo mama so old she has a picture of Moses in her yearbook. Yo mama so old she was a crossing guard when Moses parted the red sea. Yo mama so old she was a waitress at the Last Supper. Yo mama so old she has an autographed bible. Yo mama so old she knew Mr. Clean when he had an afro. Yo mama so old she knew Gandalf before he had a beard.

From its inception patriarchy has relied on salvation narrative to underwrite its program of genocide, ecocide, sexual repression, child abuse, social domination, and spiritual control. This script works beautifully for the dominator agenda because it was deliberately written for it. How can a story about love, forgiveness and divine benevolence endorse the perpetration of evil? This seems impossible and against all reason, until we realize that the story is not what it appears to be. The salvation narrative of the Bible is a story of perpetration, conceived to support and legitimate the dominator agenda. History shows that the religious ideals attached to salvation narrative have consistently been used to legitimate violence, rape, genocide, and destruction of the natural world…In the final balance the people who commit and promote violence and murder in the expression of religious beliefs may be a minute fraction of the faithful, but they are the ones who determine the course of events, shape history, affect society, and threaten the biosphere…To dissociate from the salvation narrative would be the most effective way for peace-loving people to end their complicity in the dominator agenda.

Life with God will overflow any attempts to compartmentalize or contain it. It is not just for those who are 'spiritually inclined.' We are made to live with God at the very center of our lives, transforming our thoughts, actions, decisions, relationships, vocations, communities, and social structures.

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is why so many feel lost.

There is an obvious Great Disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life expressed in Jesus—found real in the Bible and in many shining examples from among his followers—and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to him.

The approach taken to the Bible in almost all Protestant (and now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called the “historical-critical” method. It is completely different from the “devotional” approach to the Bible one learns in church. The devotional approach to the Bible is concerned about what the Bible has to say—especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society. What does the Bible tell me about God? Christ? The church? My relation to the world? What does it tell me about what to believe? About how to act? About social responsibilities? How can the Bible help make me closer to God? How does it help me to live?

Due to their deep conviction of the sovereignty of God, the Word of God was taken very seriously by Calvinists. It became the unconditional norm for faith and life to the believer. The Divine injunction not to add or take away has been scrupulously observed by Calvinism. Thus, a Calvinistic ethic was developed with its high theism. Because God was held to be the absolute sovereign for man's life, it became simply a question of determining the will of God from His Word. Calvinistic ethics is not a system of opinion, but an attempt to make the will of God as revealed in the Bible the authoritative guide for social as well as personal direction.

If you had two weeks to live. How would you treat people and will you speak to people? Government is preparing graveyard. Hospitals are preparing beds. You should be preparing yourself, wash your hands, use your masks, social distance yourself and set your record straight with you maker. Because no one knows the day nor the hour. Matthew 24:36

Have you bought into the lie that “You are what you tweet”? Spend forty days discovering who God says you are. Your identity is not found in how witty or pithy your 280 characters can be. You are a child of God, made in His likeness. Shut down Twitter and open up your Bible. Spend your time digging into the Word and discover who you are there, based on God’s opinion.

These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts.” If you were accused of being a witch back then, you were shit out of luck. Being accused was all it took. Forget “innocent until proven guilty.” Nobody bothered to prove your guilt. Nobody dared to speak up on your behalf, for fear of being called a witch sympathizer. Because if you were seen as the friend of a witch, you were the next one to be accused of being a witch. As soon as a woman was accused of being a witch, she was a pariah without any friends. Nobody wanted to be seen in public with her. The whole village ganged up on her. Everyone was trying to outdo everyone else in their antiwitch fervor: “Look at me! I'm throwing rocks at the witch! Look at how much I hate witches! I am definitely NOT a witch myself!” Whenever I see a social media mob ganging up on a celebrity for supposedly saying something “offensive” it reminds me of the Salem witch hysteria: “That's racist! And me calling you a racist proves that I'm definitely not a racist myself! That's sexist! I shame you! And that means I'm definitely not sexist myself! I shame you for being a bad person. That means I'm a good person! Look at how really really offended I am! That means I'm a really really good person!” According to the bible, Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first rock." But a lot of people seem to think he said: "If you throw rocks at someone else, it proves that you're without sin.

God’s personal, passionate concern for justice and righteousness was the starting place for His people to build them into every part of their culture. The place we should all live from is “justice and righteousness.” Everything we do, from the way we raise our families to the way we run our businesses to our own relationships with the vulnerable, should reflect “justice and righteousness.

For example, the call for equal rights has perverted into “let’s all be the same.” Male and female biological differences are discounted, because “male” and “female” are considered “outdated social constructs,” and while that is partially true, the social construct stance becomes clear reductionism when it totally discounts clear differences in male and female biology (i.e., androgyny is not the same as equality).

The Social Contract became the Bible of most of the leaders in the French Revolution, but no doubt, as is the fate of Bibles, it was not carefully read and was still less understood by many of its disciples. It reintroduced the habit of metaphysical abstractions among the theorists of democracy, and by its doctrine of the general will it made possible the mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot-box. Much of its philosophy could be appropriated by Hegel5 in his defence of the Prussian autocracy. Its first-fruits in practice were the reign of Robespierre; the dictatorships of Russia and Germany (especially the latter) are in part an outcome of Rousseau's teaching. What further triumphs the future has to offer to his ghost I do not venture to predict.

Hate is such a heavy burden to carry. There are those who can't even sleep. They can't wait to log on to their social media accounts, so they can plant the seed of hate to others. Every time you say something . Know you are planting a seed. The question is ,what seed are you planting with your social account? What are you planting when you speak to other people or what seed is planted to you by the people you follow, or the people hang around with. Luke 8: 5-18

All of this means that our Christian position on drinking must be rooted not merely in the negative effects of drinking on the physio-social aspects of life, but primarily in the positive principles and admonitions regarding drinking given to us by God in His Word. The definition of our Christian position on drinking must begin by listening first to what God has to say about it in His Word, and then to what scientific research tells us regarding the effects of alcohol.

What is inherent or intuitively “known within” and what has been taught? Nature or Nurture? Perhaps our “amnesia” is actually our society “telling” us to ignore impressions, intuitions, and feelings that many of us have that could be interpreted as recollections from past lives or contact with the spirit realm. The Western paradigm, like other traditions and societies, will bring us, through the back door, to mass hypnosis and social enculturation, sometimes called education. It is often the process of enculturation, or education and assimilation, that “causes” us to ignore our feelings and intuitions, to essentially forget our 6th sense connected to our higher selves, and divine wisdom. We are strongly encouraged here in the West to put aside childish notions. Not so fast. Forget not that it was Jesus who said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (The Bible, Matthew 18:3)

When Paul heard the word dikaiosune, he immediately interpreted it in the light of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.15 For the prophets, justice had meant social equality; they had denounced rulers who failed to treat the pauper, the widow, and the foreigner with equity and respect. From what Paul had seen in his travels, Roman law had failed to implement justice in this sense; it favored only the privileged few and had virtually enslaved the vast majority of the population.

In editing a volume of Washington's private letters for the Long Island Historical Society, I have been much impressed by indications that this great historic personality represented the Liberal religious tendency of his time. That tendency was to respect religious organizations as part of the social order, which required some minister to visit the sick, bury the dead, and perform marriages. It was considered in nowise inconsistent with disbelief of the clergyman's doctrines to contribute to his support, or even to be a vestryman in his church. In his many letters to his adopted nephew and younger relatives, he admonishes them about their manners and morals, but in no case have I been able to discover any suggestion that they should read the Bible, keep the Sabbath, go to church, or any warning against Infidelity. Washington had in his library the writings of Paine, Priestley, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and other heretical works. [The Religion of Washington]

[S]in in popular Christianity is often understood individualistically, obscuring the reality of “social sin.” An emphasis upon sin most often leads to introspection about what I have done wrong. Of course, such introspection can be helpful, but it clouds the fact that much of human suffering and misery is not because of our individual sins, but because of collective sin. For example, when it is emphasized that Jesus “died for our sins” (and thus for your sins and my sins), our sins are seen as responsible for Jesus’ death. But it wasn’t individual sins that caused Jesus’ death. He wasn’t killed because of the impure thoughts of adolescents or our everyday deceptions or our selfishness. The point is not that these don’t matter. The point, rather, is that these were not what caused Jesus’ death. Rather, Jesus was killed because of what might be called “social sin,” namely, the domination system of his day. The common individualistic understanding of sin typically domesticates the political passion of the Bible and Jesus.

In truth, we don’t have any evidence whatsoever that the Bible or the Quran or the Book of Mormon or the Vedas or any other holy book was composed by the force that determined that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, and that protons are 1,837 times more massive than electrons. To the best of our scientific knowledge, all of these sacred texts were written by imaginative Homo sapiens. They are just stories invented by our ancestors in order to legitimize social norms and political structures.

We listen to rap lyrics, but few study the history. One of the most significant contributions of hip hop. It offers a profound social commentary on the black experience. This is an aspect of the music that is overlooked because most people choose to pay more attention to “the hook” (the catchy repetitive phrase) than the complete body of work. In doing so, the listener misses the message: the essence of the music, the breakdown of the bars. That’s tantamount to someone who is able to quote scripture, but has never read the bible.

Esau sold his birth right, because he wanted a plate of meal. Today, When I look in the news, social media and on the street. I see people doing the same. They are selling their loyalty, trust, love, human rights, freedom, bodies, lives for a plate of meal. They will do or say anything for money , food or alcohol. Free people are selling themselves as slaves, for a plate of meal. They are getting paid to do dirty, bad , evil things. People are paid, to destroy their own future. Never sell yourself shot, if you want peace or a future. Genesis 25:30-34

One of the bad habits that we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume that the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our entertainment, our government, our social relations. The sacred is what God has charge of: worship and the Bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in his place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on.

The cross had touched his heart and will. That was all. It had changed his whole being. He is a living illustration of Paul’s teaching in this very letter. He is dead with Christ to his old self; he lives with Christ a new life. The gospel can do that. It can and does do so to-day and to us, if we will. Nothing else can; nothing else ever has done it; nothing else ever will. Culture may do much; social reformation may do much; but the radical transformation of the nature is only effected by the “love of God shed abroad in the heart,” and by the new life which we receive through our faith in Christ.

WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE property of men. It’s a truth written into social customs, old legal doctrines, some would say it’s written into the very laws of nature itself. In the Bible, women are told that their husbands shall rule over them. Fathers give their daughters away on their wedding day. The new owner is the groom. Much of history is based on the practice. In Europe, kings gave their daughters as peace offerings to other nations. Peasants gave their daughters in marriage to landowners as a means of trading their way out of feudal servitude. In other lands, tribes and clans gave their women as sacrifices to their enemies or gifts to their heroes. A beautiful daughter was prized not because of who she was or what she was capable of, but for what she could be bartered for. The entire marriage ceremony, to this day, is a complicated, ritualized human sacrifice. It is a custom of bondage and ownership. The bride is adorned in the most intricate, delicate and expensive clothing possible. She represents wealth, a high dowry, a prized possession. She is walked down the aisle by her father, the current owner, and delivered, in payment for something, always in payment for something, to her new owner, her groom.

So if you blame Facebook, Trump or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. For millennia, much of what passed for 'news' and 'facts' in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. [...] Some fake news lasts for ever.

A different study revealed another aspect of humanity’s unique spiritual nature—the capacity for malevolence. It appears that only humans among Earth’s creatures harm each other for harm’s sake.[64] The research team housed chimpanzees in cages that allowed them to withhold food from other chimpanzees by pulling on a rope. The researchers found that the chimpanzees would withhold food (in a statistically significant manner) only from chimpanzees that stole their food—not from others. In others words, they showed no tendency toward behavior that in humans would be defined as “spite” or displaced retaliatory anger. The research team concluded that spiteful behavior appears unique to humans. Only humans engage in malicious behavior toward fellow humans for no reason other than the impulse to hurt or harm someone. The team also commented on humanity’s flip side, “pure altruism.” Only humans, not primates, engage in self-sacrificial acts performed to assist or benefit other humans or even animals with whom no social context has ever been or likely will be established. In other words, the study confirmed what the Bible says about humanity’s spiritual nature and condition: humans are uniquely sinful and uniquely righteous among all living creatures.

The culture that created the KJV championed marriage as the ideal state decreed by God. The holy (male-headed) household formed the center of English society, from the household of the urban merchant to the lordly estates of the members of Parliament. Law codes favored husbands and male heirs by excluding women from inheritance, reducing married women to the legal status of children, and elevating marriage as key for securing masculine social rank and authority. Yet early modern biblical scholars found that marriage was puzzlingly absent from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), especially for an institution thought to be championed by God.

words ‘ebed and doulos has been undertaken with particular attention to their meaning in each specific context. Thus in Old Testament times, one might enter slavery either voluntarily (e.g., to escape poverty or to pay off a debt) or involuntarily (e.g., by birth, by being captured in battle, or by judicial sentence). Protection for all in servitude in ancient Israel was provided by the Mosaic Law. In New Testament times, a doulos is often best described as a “bondservant”—that is, as someone bound to serve his master for a specific (usually lengthy) period of time, but also as someone who might nevertheless own property, achieve social advancement, and even be released or purchase his freedom. The ESV usage

Gross Darkness The world is becoming independent. It does what it wants, people behave the way they want to behave. Immorality is seen all over the place, in markets, malls, social media, on TV and so on. But God like in all the previous ages is having His people. People that don't go according to the trend of The World, people that don't go according to the trend of churches but rather people who go according to His Holy Word coming from The Bible. The Bible is revealing things that happened in the past, things that are happening before our eyes and things that will happen after we are gone if there is a tomorrow. What is your aim!? What are you achieving ? You can't be at the middle, you will have to chose to be partaker of God's Kingdom or partaker of satan's Eden (The world and its dogma) . God bless you.

We may never have thought of the Christian life in this way. But in reality, we may be practicing it by relegating our spiritual walk to well-defined religious activities such as church attendance, group Bible studies, and personal times of “devotion.” The rest of our life—whatever else consumes our time—is not part of the journey. It’s a vacation. It doesn’t count. This is contrary to Scripture. In God’s eyes, our journey includes all of our life. We are always on our journey, making decisions and taking steps in one direction or another. Even when we avoid deciding about something, we are deciding, taking a step in some direction—no decision is a decision. Thus our spiritual growth or heart transformation includes all of the activities of our life—work, family life, social life, recreation, physical exercise (if we do it), and so on.

Some historical revisionists have also attempted to diminish the role of God and religion in our nation’s past. A careful examination of the records, however, makes it quite clear that religion was a very important factor in the development of our nation. In 1831 when Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to try to unravel the secrets to the success of a fledgling nation that was already competing with the powers of Europe on virtually every level, he discovered that we had a fantastic public educational system that rendered anyone who had finished the second grade completely literate. He was more astonished to discover that the Bible was an important tool used to teach moral principles in our public schools. No particular religious denomination was revered, but rather commonly accepted biblical truths became the backbone of our social structure.

Before the twentieth century, the phrase pistis Iesou Christou was regularly translated into English as “the faith or loyalty of Jesus.” It did not refer to the faith of ordinary mortals, but only to the “trust” that Jesus had in God when he accepted his death sentence and his “confidence” that God would turn it to good; and God had indeed rewarded this act of faith by inaugurating a new relationship with humanity that saved men and women from the iniquity and injustice of the old order, ensuring that all people, whatever their social status or ethnicity, could become God’s children. But ever since the publication of the American Standard Version of the Bible in 1901, this phrase has regularly been translated as “faith in Jesus Christ,” equated with an individual Christian’s belief in Jesus’s divinity and redemptive act.11 Paul went on to argue that the Torah had not been revealed for

The other approach, probably more widely appealing in contemporary Western culture, is so to fix on the painful circumstances of life that one gives up on faith. The harsh realities of life show that Christian (or other) faith in God is no longer tenable. It might have been once, when one was a child, perhaps in Sunday school. But when one grows up and acquires scientific understanding of how the world works, together with an awareness of increasingly uncertain general prospects—global warming, continuing wars, terrorism, famines, growing disparities between rich and poor, transience of romantic relationships, familial instabilities, social anomie, disillusionment with grand claims about the world, or just existential moments of “Why?” when confronted by needless and innocent suffering—then it becomes clear that “Our God reigns” is empty language that trivializes the realities of the world.

Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threaten not to come to the wedding or they make nasty cracks behind your back. Or worse, if you cross color or gender lines. And once you're married, you're supposed to do only certain things when you make love: the others all have nasty names. When after all, sex itself, in itself, is harmless, and aggression is harmful. Sex never hurt anyone.

After Standard Oil Company founder John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the world, he offered gardening advice to a group of young men at a Brown University Bible study. He told his admiring audience, “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” Rockefeller's audacious winner-take-all metaphor about the American Beauty rose was a description of how Standard Oil had bested its competitors. The clumsy reference to God at the end of the remarks was a meager attempt to morally sanction the ideas of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had recently seduced the robber baron community by adapting scientific ideas like “survival of the fittest” into a loose form of Social Darwinism that defined Gilded Age business.

in this direction-and he has been dead for not more than a quarter of a century. His influence is far more subtle and indirect and yet all-pervasive than Blavatsky. James Branch Cabel's Jurgen used a number of Crowley's ideas and rituals without acknowledgment, and I fancy the current hippie bible, Robert Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land, owes a very great deal to Aleister Crowley, though this too is unacknowledged. But a lot of other people are using his ideas quite freely without feeling obligated to mention his name. Crowley would not have minded this, so intent was he on shaking the foundations and the roofing of the social structure of our age. He challenged unequivocally the basic religious attitudes of our society, stressing the idea of personal experience of God through the pursuit of time-honored paths and techniques. He was also an advocate of the occasional use of the psychedelic drugs as giving one a foretaste of the kind of experience to be aimed

Parenting pressures have resculpted our priorities so dramatically that we simply forget. In 1975 couples spent, on average, 12.4 hours alone together per week. By 2000 they spent only nine. What happens, as this number shrinks, is that our expectations shrink with it. Couple-time becomes stolen time, snatched in the interstices or piggybacked onto other pursuits. Homework is the new family dinner. I was struck by Laura Anne’s language as she described this new reality. She said the evening ritual of guiding her sons through their assignments was her “gift of service.” No doubt it is. But this particular form of service is directed inside the home, rather than toward the community and for the commonweal, and those kinds of volunteer efforts and public involvements have also steadily declined over the last few decades, at least in terms of the number of hours of sweat equity we put into them. Our gifts of service are now more likely to be for the sake of our kids. And so our world becomes smaller, and the internal pressure we feel to parent well, whatever that may mean, only increases: how one raises a child, as Jerome Kagan notes, is now one of the few remaining ways in public life that we can prove our moral worth. In other cultures and in other eras, this could be done by caring for one’s elders, participating in social movements, providing civic leadership, and volunteering. Now, in the United States, child-rearing has largely taken their place. Parenting books have become, literally, our bibles. It’s understandable why parents go to such elaborate lengths on behalf of their children. But here’s something to think about: while Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods makes it clear that middle-class children enjoy far greater success in the world, what the book can’t say is whether concerted cultivation causes that success or whether middle-class children would do just as well if they were simply left to their own devices. For all we know, the answer may be the latter.

Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, has written an entire book, The New Jim Crow, that blames high black incarceration rates on racial discrimination. She posits that prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to a war on drugs that was launched by the Reagan administration in the 1980s for the express purpose of resegregating society. “This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system,” wrote Alexander.4 “What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetrating racial hierarchy in the United States.”5 Liberals love to have “conversations” about these matters, and Alexander got her wish. The book was a best seller. NPR interviewed her multiple times at length. The New York Times said that Alexander “deserved to be compared to Du Bois.” The San Francisco Chronicle described the book as “The Bible of a social movement.

I joined a bunch of Bible studies when I started following Jesus. Everyone around me was in at least one, so I thought there must be some rule or eleventh commandment and I had just missed it. We sat in circles, and I assumed we'd either start making friendship bracelets or start talking about Jesus. We ate chips and cookies, and I heard lots of opinions about every social topic, about whether it's okay to watch rated R movies, and about what words meant in Greek and Hebrew. It wasn't long before I started to feel bored with the whole thing. That's when some friends and I started a 'Bible Doing' group. We read what Jesus said and then schemed ways to actually go and do those things. It might sound strange, but think about it: Jesus never said, 'Study Me.' He said, 'Follow Me.' Jesus invited us to find people who don't have food and to get them something to eat. He said to hang out with people in prison. He said if you know someone who doesn’t have a place to stay, help them find one. He was all about doing things for widows and orphans, not becoming informed about them. Following Jesus is way more exciting than studying Him. Do we need to know the Scriptures? You bet. But don't stop there. Our faith can start to get confusing and boring when we exercise it by debating about it.

It is the lessons that we disagree with that force and challenge us to grow and learn for ourselves, and though the matter of spirituality and the afterlife are VERY grey areas, I hope that the thoughts I have on the matter will enlighten you, force you to reflect on your own beliefs, or piss you off enough to go and do your own research to find out if what I am writing is more relevant to your own life that you would like to believe.        Be skeptical, ESPECIALLY of things you read and things you see on the news. Do your own research on topics you think are relevant to your life. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, at least THESE days they are. This was not so until VERY recently in human history, and it still isn't in many parts of the world. From birth, humans are trained to believe the things that their parents believe and their social group believes. There are some of us that didn't believe, and therefore didn't behave. I got into so much trouble I was no longer afraid to get into trouble, and this gave me freedom and fearlessness of thought that no one else in my school had. I am extremely grateful for the punishments I received for the crime of thinking for myself. I am thankful for being ostracized for being different. The only way to lead yourself out of the imprisonment of outdated modes of thinking and ancient beliefs is to cast away the old system, and them you can start to build.

In every age there are threads of continuity and discontinuity. What may be different from age to age is the political organization, the kind of economy that exists and how it works, the architectural style, the nature of the calamities that occur - such as war, famine, natural disasters, or social upheaval - the dominance or absence of religion, life expectancy, the scope of medical care, and any number of other factors that impinge on daily life. In these areas, life in seventeenth-century America, for example, was very different indeed from life in the twentieth. At the same time, if Christian assumptions can be accepted, life in these two times also shared some things. Human nature has remained unchanged as created and fallen, as has God in his character and purposes, as has the truth of the revelation he has given us in the Bible, as has the significance of his redemptive acts and most importantly the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. These have not changed. They are the threads that are woven through ages that, in many other ways, have no connections with each other at all. They give continuity to life amidst its many jarring discontinuities. For this reason, there is only one Gospel applicable to all people in all places and believed in the same way in every age. If this were not so, Christian faith would mean something entirely different today from what it meant last century, and faith would mean something entirely different in America than in Asia, Europe, or Africa.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

Americans need to get off their cell phones—my sons included. Contrary to what you’re thinking, you can live without them. I promise you can operate and function without them. I don’t have one. You don’t have to have one, either. And while you’re at it, get off your desktop computer, laptop, iPad, tablet, reader, and whatever other mobile devices you own. I’ve never figured out how the computer, the very device that was supposed to revolutionize the way we live and save us so much time, ended up occupying so much of our time. Americans can’t stay off them! The IDC study revealed some alarming facts about Americans. Did you know that 79 percent of smartphone users reach for their devices within fifteen minutes of waking up? A majority of them—62 percent—don’t even wait fifteen minutes! I have an idea: why don’t you grab a Bible and read, or lie there in bed and pray or meditate for a few quiet moments? Hey, news flash, folks: I promise you it’s the only quiet time you’re probably going to get in this busy, busy world. Why don’t you take advantage of a few moments of solitude and slow down, Jack? I’m convinced that the Internet and social media in particular, the very things that were supposed to bring us closer together, have actually distanced us from each other more than ever before. They’re destroying the social interaction among humans. We don’t talk to anybody anymore, and we’ve isolated ourselves, spending most of our time in front of a computer or tapping the screens of our smartphones and tablets. We’ve become robots.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

22. Giving up Distraction Week #4 Saturday Scripture Verses •Hebrews 12:1–2 •Mark 1:35 •John 1:14–18 Questions to Consider •What distracts you from being present with other people around you? •What distracts you from living out God’s agenda for your life? •What helps you to focus and be the most productive? •How does Jesus help us focus on what is most important in any given moment? Plan of Action •At your next lunch, have everyone set their phone facing down at the middle of the table. The first person who picks up their phone pays for the meal. •Challenge yourself that the first thing you watch, read, or listen to in the morning when you wake up is God’s Word (not email or Facebook). •Do a digital detox. Turn off everything with a screen for 24 hours. Tomorrow would be a great day to do it, since there is no “40 Things Devotion” on Sunday. Reflection We live in an ever connected world. With smart phones at the tip of our fingers, we can instantly communicate with people on the other side of the world. It is an amazing time to live in. I love the possibilities and the opportunities. With the rise of social media, we not only connect with our current circle of friends and family, but we are also able to connect with circles from the past. We can build new communities in the virtual world to find like-minded people we cannot find in our physical world. Services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all have tremendous power. They have a way of connecting us with others to shine the light of Jesus. While all of these wonderful things open up incredible possibilities, there are also many dangers that lurk. One of the biggest dangers is distraction. They keep us from living in the moment and they keep us from enjoying the people sitting right across the room from us. We’ve all seen that picture where the family is texting one another from across the table. They are not looking at each other. They are looking at the tablet or the phone in front of them. They are distracted in the moment. Today we are giving up distraction and we are going to live in the moment. Distraction doesn’t just come from modern technology. We are distracted by our work. We are distracted by hobbies. We are distracted by entertainment. We are distracted by busyness. The opposite of distraction is focus. It is setting our hearts and our minds on Jesus. It’s not just putting him first. It’s about him being a part of everything. It is about making our choices to be God’s choices. It is about letting him determine how we use our time and focus our attention. He is the one setting our agenda. I saw a statistic that 80% of smartphone users will check their phone within the first 15 minutes of waking up. Many of those are checking their phones before they even get out of bed. What are they checking? Social media? Email? The news of the day? Think about that for a moment. My personal challenge is the first thing I open up every day is God’s word. I might open up the Bible on my phone, but I want to make sure the first thing I am looking at is God’s agenda. When I open up my email, my mind is quickly set to the tasks those emails generate rather than the tasks God would put before me. Who do I want to set my agenda? For me personally, I know that if God is going to set the agenda, I need to hear from him before I hear from anyone else. There is a myth called multitasking. We talk about doing it, but it is something impossible to do. We are very good at switching back and forth from different tasks very quickly, but we are never truly doing two things at once. So the challenge is to be present where God has planted you. In any given moment, know what is the one most important thing. Be present in that one thing. Be present here and now.

But won’t political involvement distract us from the main task of preaching the Gospel? At this point someone may object that while political involvement may have some benefits and may do some good, it can so easily distract us, turn unbelievers away from the church, and cause us to neglect the main task of pointing people toward personal trust in Christ. John MacArthur writes, “When the church takes a stance that emphasizes political activism and social moralizing, it always diverts energy and resources away from evangelization.”83 Yet the proper question is not, “Does political influence take resources away from evangelism?” but, “Is political influence something God has called us to do?” If God has called some of us to some political influence, then those resources would not be blessed if we diverted them to evangelism—or to the choir, or to teaching Sunday School to children, or to any other use. In this matter, as in everything else the church does, it would be healthy for Christians to realize that God may call individual Christians to different emphases in their lives. This is because God has placed in the church “varieties of gifts” (1 Cor. 12:4) and the church is an entity that has “many members” but is still “one body” (v. 12). Therefore God might call someone to devote almost all of his or her time to the choir, someone else to youth work, someone else to evangelism, someone else to preparing refreshments to welcome visitors, and someone else to work with lighting and sound systems. “But if Jim places all his attention on the sound system, won’t that distract the church from the main task of preaching the Gospel?” No, not at all. That is not what God has called Jim to emphasize (though he will certainly share the Gospel with others as he has opportunity). Jim’s exclusive focus on the church’s sound system means he is just being a faithful steward in the responsibility God has given him. In the same way, I think it is entirely possible that God called Billy Graham to emphasize evangelism and say nothing about politics and also called James Dobson to emphasize a radio ministry to families and to influencing the political world for good. Aren’t there enough Christians in the world for us to focus on more than one task? And does God not call us to thousands of different emphases, all in obedience to him? But the whole ministry of the church will include both emphases. And the teaching ministry from the pulpit should do nothing less than proclaim “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). It should teach, over the course of time, on all areas of life and all areas of Bible knowledge. That certainly must include, to some extent, what the Bible says about the purposes of civil government and how that teaching should apply to our situations today. This means that in a healthy church we will find that some people emphasize influencing the government and politics, others emphasize influencing the business world, others emphasize influencing the educational system, others entertainment and the media, others marriage and the family, and so forth. When that happens, it seems to me that we should encourage, not discourage, one another. We should adopt the attitude toward each other that Paul encouraged in the church at Rome: Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God…. So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother (Rom. 14:10–13). For several different reasons, then, I think the view that says the church should just “do evangelism, not politics” is incorrect.