Sadly most people don’t even realize that the far left are not liberals at all. This is especially true in universities where leftist professors are waging an all out war on liberalism. To the far left, they see liberalism as more of a treat to their ideology than conservationism. Until liberals wake up and understand we are being undermined from within, we will never fight back.
PayPal announced Tuesday it will not hire more than 400 people in Charlotte, North Carolina, after the state repealed anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. “The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture,” the company said in a statement. “As a result, PayPal will not move forward with our planned expansion into Charlotte.”
My Thought: How does this make sense? The City of Charlotte passed LBGT a protections law, then the state (driven by rural concerns) passed a law to invalidate the Charlotte law. Now PayPal is going to punish the people of Charlotte who started the issue by passage of an LBGT protection law because their efforts were overridden.
So is the message for other cities in conservative states to not pass LBGT protections so as to keep from being punished? Of course PayPal doesn’t care one wit for the people of Charlotte, strait or LBGT. They see this as an opportunity to burnish their image. This whole thing is a sad commentary on how real justice gets run over by PR justice.
A Note from the author: Among my other credentials is my ordination to the Gospel Ministry. I worked for several churches and was an assistant-chaplain for the US-Army Reserve. In this blog, I will from time to time make Sunday posts regarding Christianity and Christian churches. This is the first of these posts.
Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the most colorful and iconic figures in US History. He was a buffalo hunter and US Army Scout for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor, but mostly he was a showman. Not a huckster like P.T. Barnum, but a man who brought an amazing display of living artifacts from the “Old West” in a show to people in the eastern United States and Europe. His “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” was the most dazzling show if its day. He had real cowboys and real Indians, and personalities right out of the dime novels, like Calamity Jane. On one hand he was not a fraud, when Annie Oakley shot the ashes off Kaiser Wilhelm’s cigar in one famous show, it was no optical trick. When he said the stoic Native American in his show was indeed the real Sitting Bull, he was. But on the other hand his show was just that, a show. His reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand and is presentation of the cowboys and Indians was pure show biz, and he set the standard image for the look of the American Old West that would become “fact” via movies and television to generations of people throughout the world. But, his presentation was stilted, condensed and dramatized so much as to make it anything but a history lesson. It is very likely that by the early part of the 1900’s Buffalo Bill no longer could tell the difference between the exciting story he had created, or the real life he had actually lived during the Indian Wars.
It was quite a show though.
Fast-forward to the early 1960’s to a gritty industrial city about an hour south-east of Chicago. A young minister from Texas had recently become the pastor of the very traditional 1st Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana. However, this young new clergyman was not a typical pastor who saw his job to minister to the needs of his flock. Rather he had both righteous zeal for his unique brand of Christianity; and he had boundless ambition matched by a vision for what he could achieve. Within a few short years he had purged the congregation of most of its previous leadership and the majority of the members. Then he led the remainder to vote to pull the ¾ century old church out of the American Baptist Convention because it was “too liberal” (i.e. they were supportive of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement among other things). As a brilliant, driven and visionary dictatorial leader of a church freed from all denominational obligations, he was poised to do something spectacular. Continue reading “Buffalo Bill Cody, Jack Hyles and Modern Evangelical Christianity”
One of the great mysteries in life is: How do so many good people do so many bad things?
It is so easy to write off anyone we do not want to address in a meaningful way as being evil and point out their misdeeds negate the good that they might have done. The sad truth is that there is not a soul on earth that could not be so dismissed.
So the question becomes how is that the same humans can on one hand be committed to doing the right thing and still find themselves doing so many things that are hurtful?
I live in the Deep South, the land of churches and southern hospitality and Jim Crow. The people of the Jim Crow world were on one hand generally honest, hardworking, generous and committed to living a Christian life. Yet, they perpetuated an abhorrent system of repression and dehumanizing behavior. My 88 year old mother-in-law is of that generation. Sure, the good church people were not usually the ones that actually committed the lynchings and terror, but they provided cover for those who did. A number of years ago I asked my mother-in-law how she and her peers, after WW2, had justified denying the vote to the black vets returning from fighting the same war their brothers and husbands had been fighting. She did not have to look for an answer, right off she said “Well our blacks just weren’t smart enough to vote.”
Her answer to my question gives me the answer to the question I am asking in this essay. Why do good people do evil things? I propose that fear supported by man’s uncanny ability to engage in self-delusion allows good people to do evil things. Continue reading “How do so many good people do so many bad things.”
The Cognitive Dissident 
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