TBC NewsWatch

BEWARE THE DICTATORS OF VIRTUE

FrontPageMag.com, 5/9/13, “Beware the Dictators of Virtue” [Excerpts]: America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating. 

 Tolerance can only be allocated to so many places. The balance of tolerance and intolerance remains the same no matter how progressive a society becomes. A tolerant society only allocates its intolerance differently.

America today tolerates different things. It tolerates little boys dressing up as little girls at school, but not little boys pointing pencils and making machine gun noises on the playground.

The little boy whose mother dressed him up in girlish clothes once used to be a figure of contempt while the little boy pretending to be a marine was the future of the nation. Now the boy in the dress is the future of the nation having joined an identity group while the aspiring little marine is suspected of one day trading in his sharpened pencil for an assault rifle as soon as the next gun show comes to town.

The Duke of Wellington once said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. What battles will the boys playing on the playgrounds where dodgeball is banned and finger guns are a crime win and what sort of nation will they be fighting to protect?

The trouble with tolerance is that there is always someone deciding what to tolerate. A free society does not tolerate people; it allows them to live their own values. And a tolerant society is not free. It is a dictatorship of virtue that is intolerant toward established values in order to better tolerate formerly intolerable values.

A free society does not tell people of any religion or no religion what to believe. A tolerant society forces them all to pay for abortions because its dictators of virtue have decided that the time has come to teach this lesson in tolerance.

An open society finds wisdom in its own uncertainty. A tolerant society, like a teenager, is certain that it already knows all the answers and lacks only the means of imposing them on others. It confuses its destruction of the past with progress and its sense of insecurity with righteousness.

To the tolerant, intolerance is the most powerful act possible. They solve problems by refusing to tolerate them. School shootings are carried out with guns and so the administrative denizens of the gun-free zones run campaigns of intolerance toward the physical existence of guns, the owners of guns, the manufacturers of guns, the civil rights groups that defend gun ownership and eventually toward John Puckle, Samuel Colt, John Moses Browning and the 82nd element in the periodic table.

None of this accomplishes a single practical thing, but it is an assertion of values. The paranoid mindset that cracks down on little boys who chew pop tarts into deadly shapes, little boys who point pencils and fingers at each other, is not out to stop school shootings, but is struggling to assert the intolerance of its tolerant value system over the reality of violence.

Liberal values are at odds with reality and they are not about to let reality win. In their more tolerant nation, there is more room than ever for little boys who dream of one day setting off pressure cooker bombs at public events in the name of their religion, but very little room for little boys dreaming of being the ones to stop them.

(http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/beware-the-dictators-of-virtue/)

CHURCHES TRUSTED LESS THAN SUPERMARKETS

ChristianPost.com, 5/8/13, “Churches Trusted Less Than Supermarkets” [Excerpts]: Last Thursday was America’s annual “National Day of Prayer.” Hopefully we’re still praying for our country today. Let’s pray that we don’t turn into Great Britain.

According to a new survey, only 17 percent of adults in the U.K. believe the church has “their best interests at heart.” This “trust rating” ranks religious institutions with Google and behind supermarkets. However, young people rank Google much higher than churches, giving the search engine a trust rating of 28 percent.

Is America headed in the same direction?

Just one in five Americans think “our moral compass is pointing in the right direction.” Even fewer think the country’s morals have improved in the last four years. The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans jumped 28 percent in the last decade; the increase was especially pronounced among white men and women, climbing 40 percent between 1999 and 2010.

Is it too late to reverse our nation’s moral and spiritual decline? Not at all.

Our First Great Awakening is usually dated to 1734. Prior to this remarkable spiritual movement, not one in 20 colonists claimed to be a Christian. Samuel Blair, a pastor of the day, said that religion “lay as it were dying and ready to expire its last breath of life.” Critics claimed that Christianity was an outdated, irrelevant European institution. Voltaire’s skepticism spoke for many: “To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.” But colonial Christians refused to back down from their Great Commission calling. Theodore Frelinghuysen prayed for seven years until all the deacons in his church were true Christians, and continued to plead with God for a great spiritual movement in this new land. David Brainerd prayed from tubercular lungs for the salvation of the American Indians. Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian America has ever produced, worked fearlessly for the conversion of his community and society. British evangelist George Whitefield braved the Atlantic Ocean 13 times to preach the gospel across the Colonies.

(http://www.christianpost.com/news/churches-trusted-less-than-supermarkets-95524/#FBAkmVlEmYmX5wdj.99 )

NIGERIAN CULTISTS KILL 23 POLICE OFFICERS

WashingtonTimes.com, 5/9/13, “23 police en route to arrest cult members in Nigeria killed by militia” [Excerpts]: At least 23 police officers en route to arrest members of a religious cult were ambushed and killed by a militia group in the central Nigerian region of Nasarawa. 

Another 17 officers are still missing, BBC reported. They were headed to arrest Ombatse cult members related to charges of forcing local villagers to join their group, police chief Abayomi Akeremale said, in the BBC.

“We decided to send our men to the area to arrest members of Ombatse, including their priest,” the police chief said in the BBC report. “[They] have been going to churches and mosques initiating people into their cult by forcefully administering an allegiance oath to unwilling people.”

The attack took place in the village of Alakyo, BBC reported. No arrests have yet been made.

(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/9/23-police-en-route-arrest-cult-members-nigeria-kil/)