• “You go to jail if you believe in God and stand fast for your beliefs,” televangelist Pat Robertson said. Let’s unpack that. Here are the rules Robertson asserts:
IF “you believe in God.”
AND you “stand fast for your beliefs”
THEN “you go to jail.”
Pat Robertson explained these rules from his television studio where he freely broadcasts, i.e., not from jail. Therefore:
EITHER Pat Robertson does not believe in God
OR he does not stand fast for his beliefs.
That’s according to Pat himself.
He’s not alone in presenting us with this same syllogistic confession of apostasy — Fox News commentators Mike Huckabee and Todd Starnes have similarly told us that all true Christians are being sent to jail while conspicuously not, themselves, being sent to jail.
There’s still a conclusive two-word rebuttal to all of these preposterous faux-martyrs — a two-word phrase that proves their persecution complex is utter BS: “Fred Phelps.”
• Re: Kim Davis: “She failed, she lost, she was rebuked, she left no mark on the system, she created no legal precedent, she solidified the holding in Obergefell and limited the holding in Hobby Lobby (which is the legal precedent she is relying on for all her statements about her ‘sincere religious beliefs’). The opposition to her position won everything.”
• As Sarah Rasher says, the upcoming lunar eclipse is: A) not a divine portent of the End of the World; and B) gonna be pretty cool.
Our friends over at CharismaNews.com are hyperventilating about “blood moons” — imagining all sorts of significance in a lunar eclipse that coincides with a Jewish holiday. What they seem not to have noticed is that Jewish holidays follow a lunar calendar. Several Jewish holidays are set according to a full moon. Just like lunar eclipses, the holidays of Tu Bishvat, Purim, Passover and Sukkot can only take place during a full moon. So there’s a 1-in-3 chance that any lunar eclipse is going to land on a Jewish holiday. Interpreting that as a sign from God is a bit like saying it’s miraculous that Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday.
Show me a lunar eclipse on Shavuot or Tisha B’Av or Yom Kippur and I’ll concede we’re witnessing something miraculous and portentous.
• “I guess that this was one mugshot that Canadians weren’t expecting from the Conservatives.”
• “South Carolina cops say Walter Scott had cocaine in his system when he was shot dead.” By which they mean, yet again, that it’s totally cool for a police officer to shoot an unarmed citizen in the back, then plant evidence by their dying body instead of calling for an ambulance … just as long as that person was black and allegedly had drugs in his system.
• Police in Ogdensburg are examining security video footage from a local Planned Parenthood clinic that they hope will give them clues about a recent arson in the small city in upstate New York. The twist here is that this time the arson didn’t target the Planned Parenthood, but the First Presbyterian Church nearby, where someone torched a rainbow-painted bench symbolizing the church’s openness to LGBT members of the community (via).
I’m sure once the arsonist is arrested, Todd Starnes will praise them as yet another Christian being unjustly persecuted for their sincere religious beliefs.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In