Barney Wiget's Blog, page 50

Kim Jong Un: “Great negotiator… Good personality… Loves his people.”

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“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Isaiah 5:20

I’ll make this brief. My disappointment is so great, if I say too much, I’ll end up saying too much, if you know what I mean.

I applaud at least the symbolism of the Singapore summit this week between the two world leaders. I appreciate that Mr. Trump and Kim Jong Un got together and talked. More times than not talk is a good thing. There’s no hope for getting on the same page if you don’t at least look at the page together. Was it primarily a photo op for both men? Indubitably. Still between camera clicks they talked and I’m for that. BUT…

You knew the “but” was coming didn’t you?

I get why Mr. Trump focused on nuclear disarmament (which Kim will never do, BTW) and not so much on human rights violations in North Korea. One thing at a time, I suppose. But here’s the “but”––– in defense of Kim’s record of inhumanity to man said some outrageous things. On Fox News of all places he blurted out:

“Hey, when you take over a tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have – if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that…”

So, his youth and his tough job explain why he no recourse but to exterminate, enslave, torture, imprison, rape, force abortions, and starve his own people! Thanks, Mr. President for clearing that up. He’s young and inexperienced so he holds over 120,000 of his own citizens in forced labor camps for crimes as innocuous as listening to a radio station not sanctioned by the state.

The president went on to laud the North Korean dictator: “He’s a very smart guy, a great negotiator and I think we understand each other.”

Having executed over 300 people who were a political threat to him, for my money, doesn’t make Kim a “great negotiator,” it makes him a ruthless demagogue. And what does that say about our president that he and Kim “understand each other”? Really? I can’t say that that gives me warm fuzzy feelings for either of them.

Fox News’ host, Bret Baier, pressed him on it a little:

“But he’s still done some really bad things.” To which our president replied: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”

I want to go on record that I have done a lot of bad things in my life, but torturing my neighbors isn’t one of them and it’s not on my bucket list. And even if I were a murderous scoundrel, does that give Kim, in Mr. Trump’s mind, a pass for his atrocities?

Later in a Sean Hannity interview Mr. Trump went on to spread his praise on Kim even thicker, “He’s got a very good personality, he’s funny, and he’s very, very smart… we got along very well… we had great chemistry.”

I don’t know what you would consider to be a “good personality,” but I don’t usually associate it with genocidal maniacs. Kim had one of his own cabinet members killed in front of a firing squad after showing “disrespectful posture” in a meeting. And when one of his generals fell asleep in a meeting, he was executed with an antiaircraft gun! Does our president even know what a “good personality” looks like? And what could possibly make for “great chemistry” between them? That’s the kind of chemistry that has the potential to blow stuff up!

“He loves his people.” OK, now you’re really scaring me! That’s what our POTUS said of Kim to Greta Van Susteren of VOA. Maybe he just meant Kim loves the ones he hasn’t yet jailed, tortured, or murdered for disrespect of his good name!

If he loves his people so much why doesn’t he even love his own family members enough to not murder them? He had his own brother assassinated with lethal chemicals rubbed on his face in an airport. Then he executed his uncle and incinerated his body with flame throwers! If that’s loving his people, I’d hate to see what hating them would look like.

She went on to ask him what he would say to the citizens of North Korea. And I’m not making this up. He said, “Well, I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them (his citizens). He wants to do right by them.” In case anyone has those kinds of “great feelings” for me, please keep them to yourself.

And for you Christian Trump-defenders out there, so delighted with our president claims to prioritize “religious liberty,” you should know that for Christians there’s no country in the world more dangerous than North Korea! If they’re are not killed on the spot, just for possessing a Bible, they’re indefinitely deported to labor camps, the likes of which have been compared to the Hitler’s concentration camps, as political criminals. I guess, for Mr. Trump, religious liberty stops, where everything else stops for him, at the U.S. border.

In case you’re working on your mental jujitsu and chalking Mr. Trump’s speech up to the rhetoric of a great negotiator, I refer you to a few months back, when in stark contrast, he referred to Kim disparagingly as “Little Rocket Man” and threatened “fire and fury as the world has never seen.”

After the summit he told Hannity he believed that his tough talk intimidated Kim to the table. (For the record, I don’t think it had any bearing on it.) “So, I think the rhetoric,” Trump said, “I hated to do it. Sometimes I felt foolish doing it. But we had no choice.” For my record, our president hates belching out bravado like he hates hearing the cheers of “Noble Peace Prize!” in his pep rallies.

So, which tactic––threatening or flattering––is rhetoric? Or are they both just unbridled pomposity? I appreciate neither, especially from the voice box of the leader of the free world.

For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people. Romans 16:18

You know we never used flattery, nor did we put on a mask to cover up greed—God is our witness. 1 Thessalonians 2:5

How To Get To God

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Is Jesus the only way to God? A definite yes! But there’s a difference between different ways to God and different ways God uses to get people to the way.

God is willing to travel any road to find people who haven’t yet found the way. He stubbornly hunts for the hearts of people and even plants his invitations in less than perfect religious soils.

Because he cares about the billions of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists of the world, he slips clues about himself in their systems of worship. Yes, Jesus is the only non-stop flight to the Father; that much is clear. But the Spirit leaves invitations on other flights and in other airports to encourage travellers to eventually board the plane that will take them all the way to God.

He’s the end of all things and the beginning of all things. Everything that’s savingly true leads back to Jesus.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

Concluding Thoughts on Critical Thinking For Christians

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“Habits are something you can do without thinking, which is why most of us have so many of them.” Frank A. Clark

This series of posts turned out to be a little more lengthy than I intended. I tried to be as economical as possible, but there were some things that I just couldn’t omit. So many other things could be said about how to be better critical thinkers. But for now, let me recommend my five brief posts and recap each one with a sound bite:

Critical Thinking For Christians

Sound bite: I fear much of our Christian community has largely lost the art of thinking for themselves and are, in many ways, lazy thinkers. Maybe it’s because they know they were made for another world so they don’t invest enough effort into this one. Or maybe they’re afraid to think too deeply about the world they live in lest they lose their faith, as though God and his Word aren’t capable of standing up to honest examination.

Critical Thinking Christians Don’t Rush to Judgment

Sound bite: Do you see someone who speaks in haste? There is more hope for a fool than for them. Proverbs 29:20 / To answer before listening—that is folly and shame. Proverbs 18:13

Critical Thinking Christians Aren’t Quick To Slap Labels on People

Sound bite: When you call someone “stupid” it’s as though you’re saying that’s all they are. They can’t be smart or perceptive or wise about anything at all. They’re just stupid. That’s their sum total. Though we’ve come to expect this sort of juvenile behavior from some politicians (not naming any names), what’s up with supposed followers of Jesus engaging in such libelous labeling?

Critical Thinking Christians Think For Themselves

Sound bite: Critical thinkers don’t let others do their thinking for them. No, not even FOX News, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, or Bernie Sanders. They don’t just regurgitate their party’s platform, or their denominational affiliation. Not even their pastor can do their thinking for them.

Critical Thinking Christians Think Through Scripture.

Sound bite: We’re all looking at our world through some lens–– our fallen nature lens, our party’s platform lens, what our pastor or favorite Bible teacher says, or something else. But God gave us a Book to read for ourselves, and his Son to embody its message. Our primary loyalty lies with him. We’re Christians first, then Americans. With this in mind we must learn process our preferences, policies, and patriotism through what he has chosen to tell us in his Word and empowered us to do through us by his Spirit.

Please, please, please, my brothers and sisters, use your God given resources to develop a Christian worldview and live into that view in every aspect of your lives, including the sociopolitical. Don’t let a party, or a platform, a politician, or even a pastor do your thinking for you.

Don’t be the kind of “conservative” that mistakes harshness for holiness or the “liberal” that mistakes compromise for compassion. Jesus walked between the two and was both compassionate yet prophetic. Follow Jesus!

You’ve got a mind––open it.
You’ve got a Bible––read it.
You have access to God’s throne––kneel before it!

 

Manna Means…

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“Manna” means, “What is this?” The first manna recipients wondered what it was and how it got there, since it appeared everyday but the Sabbath and satisfied their hunger till the next delivery from the sky.

My wonders have come in a similarly inexplicable way— only enough for the day, never enough to be stockpiled for the future. During this hell of mercy, God has fed me, led me, and sent friends my way when I needed them most, with hope spilling from their pockets.

As I received my daily ration of manna in my wilderness, I knew that I was not on my own, but God was with me, surprising me and supplying me with wondrous provision.

– Originally published in The Other End of the Dark: A Memoir About Divorce, Cancer, and Things God Does Anyway (the profits of which go to Freedom House).

Way to Go(d)

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Even in largely false religious systems, there exists some redemptive quality. Notice I didn’t say, “redeeming,” which would imply that people can be redeemed through a defective dogma, apart from Jesus.

Is Jesus the only way to God? A definite yes! But there’s a difference between different ways to God and different ways God uses to get people to the way.

God is willing to travel any road to find people who haven’t yet found the way. He stubbornly hunts for the hearts of people and even plants his invitations in less than perfect religious soils.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

Critical Thinking Christians Think Through Scripture

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The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. … The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous. Psalm 19

Anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever. 1 Peter 1

In the last several posts we’ve been talking about critical thinking for Christians. (Scroll down for earlier ones if you’re interested.)

Here, I’d like to propose that the chief cause of poor thinking among followers of Jesus is our failure to consistently look through the lens of Scripture in formulating our moral, social, and political opinions.

While I personally take a pretty conservative viewpoint of the Bible I can’t stop now to address the various views of its inspiration. My point in this writing is how we look through Scripture, not so much how we look at it. That’s for another day.

Honestly, I am quite disheartened by how little consideration many believers, who take my same conservative view of Scripture, give to biblical revelation on issues that affect the way they think about the world. Either they don’t read it or they don’t apply what they read to their lives as exiles in this foreign land. They seem to be able to compartmentalize their lives in such a way as to justify a disconnect between what the Bible teaches and their moral, social, and political mores.

Wendell Berry said he didn’t know how or when “it became possible for people to commit their souls to God while participating in an economy dedicated to the swiftest possible extraction and consumption of everything it values in God’s world, with unlimited collateral damage to all creatures, humans included, that it does not value.” I suggest it happens every time we detach the Word from our worldview.

READ: “The Bible Is Your First Stop”

“Most Christian ‘believers’ tend to echo the prejudices and worldviews of the dominant culture in their country,” says Richard Rohr, “with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor.”

Some read the Bible only to find proof texts to back up their preconceived ideas. That’s how “Bible Weaponizers” justified the Crusades, slavery, and all manner of evil over the centuries. They have at their disposal any number of cherry-picked passages to justify support of policies that directly benefit them and their immediate neighbors at the expense of neighbors on the other side of the tracks. They’re more interested in ideas that fit their preferred notions than what is actually true. We need to do more honest, open-minded, worldview-influencing, values-developing, life-transforming reading of Scripture.

READ: “The Weaponized Bible”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve written about sociopolitical themes, based on my potentially flawed understanding of Scripture, and invited people to rebut my ideas rooted in their understanding of the Book. Yet nearly all of the objections I’ve received have sidestepped the Word and employed either party platform mantras or personal partialities.

Since I’m not claiming to be right in all of my interpretations of Scripture I welcome counterpoints from a biblical framework. Since that seldom happens I’m left to think that I’m either right most of the time, or something more likely: Christians are either not familiar with Scripture or they go to someplace else for their politics and how to live in this world. They divorce their politics and social mores from what the Bible says, as though it has no relevance to such things. To me, that’s more than lazy, it’s lethal––to them personally and to the reputation of the Body of Christ in the world.

READ: “How the Bible Sustained Me in the Dark”

Rick Warren confessed that he was driven to re-examine Scripture with “new eyes.” What he found humbled him. “I found those 2,000 verses on the poor. How did I miss that? I went to Bible College, two seminaries, and I got a doctorate. How did I miss God’s compassion for the poor?” He said he prayed, “God, would you use me to re-attach the hands and the feet to the body of Christ, so that the whole church cares about the whole gospel in a whole new way—through the local church?” Lord give us new eyes!

We’re all looking at our world through some lens–– our fallen nature lens, our party’s platform lens, what our pastor or favorite Bible teacher says, or something else. But God gave us a Book to read for ourselves, and his Son to embody its message. Our primary loyalty lies with him. We’re Christians first, then Americans. With this in mind we must learn to process our preferences, policies, and patriotism through what he has chosen to tell us in his Word and empowered us to do through us by his Spirit.

“The statues of the Lord… are my counselors… a lamp to my feet and light to my path.” Psalm 119

I can’t recommend highly enough the seminal book by Ron Sider, written in 1978, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity

Next time I’ll offer some concluding thoughts on thinking Christianly. Until then…

The Culture Clue

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Through what he made directly in creation, God leaves clues about his power. But he doesn’t stop there. He continues to cultivate in us an awareness of his person through the things he creates indirectly, i.e. through people as demonstrated in human culture––art, community, science, traditions, mores, and more.

“The human race as a whole has the image of God in a collective sense—so that the rich diversity of cultures on the face of the earth shows forth the splendor of God in a way that no individual or group does alone,” says Richard Mouw.

Someone defined the term “culture” as “the cultivation of the soul.” We can see how the Creator leaves snapshots of himself in our cultures in order to “cultivate our soul,” and to dispose that soul toward himself.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

A Pinprick in the Bleak

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“Hope is a revolutionary patience… Hope begins in the dark, knowing that the dawn will come.” Anne Lamott

No clock or calendar can tell whether we’re at the beginning, the middle, or near the end of any bleak experience. Unlike the obsidian darkness, which arrived all at once, after six months or so the light at the end of the tunnel appeared as a pinprick in the bleakness, and increased in size at a pace proportionate to the Lord’s timing and my willing.

Oswald Chambers said: “The clouds are but the dust of our Father’s feet. They are signs that he is there. Sorrow and bereavement and suffering are the clouds that come along with God.” I began trying to believe it.

– Originally published in The Other End of the Dark: A Memoir About Divorce, Cancer, and Things God Does Anyway (the profits of which go to Freedom House).

Love’s Lure

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Sharing the hope of a better future may be a more effective way to nudge people toward Jesus than threatening them with the prospect of judgment. Fear of hell may work for some, but the message of hope of heaven, to say nothing of a better future here on earth, is more likely to connect to the hearts of most postmodern people.

I seldom try to scare people with hell or entice them with heaven. I simply offer them Jesus. I want them to fall in love with him, not just use him to avoid the one place in favor of the other. He said he was “the way” to the Father, not just the way to get to heaven. Our gospel is Jesus.

– Originally published in Reaching Rahab: Joining God In His Quest For Friends

Critical Thinking Christians Think For Themselves

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“People have a tendency to stop thinking when it becomes difficult, but it is at that point that thinking becomes fruitful.” Leo Tolstoy
“The skeptic looks at something and says, ‘I wonder.’ The cynic says, ‘I know,’ and then stops thinking.” Dean Nelson

Job’s “friends” bombarded him with lazy-thinking platitudes. At one point, he’d had enough and exploded with: “Doubtless you are the only people who matter, and wisdom will die with you! But I have a mind as well as you, I am not inferior to you.”

Then he posited his own alternative to their cliché-riddled theology: “Does not the ear test words as the tongue tastes food?”

If you think about it, when we’re offered some untested morsel, before wolfing down, we take a small bite. We give it a taste test. If it seems worthy of consumption, we chew it, swallow, and smile. If it’s not, we fake a cough and spit it out in our napkin. (I’ve had some experience along these lines.) Similarly, before gobbling up every bite of news, we should apply the same strategy, i.e., use a little discernment.

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking at Critical Thinking Christianity. For context, scroll down to earlier posts. It seems to me that a lot of Christians were absent from school on the day they covered “Critical Thinking.” When they received Jesus they kissed their brains good-bye and started letting others think for them.

Harsh, I know, but I think it has to be said. Lazy-thinking Christianity translated into public life without the benefit of critical thought is dangerous to the Church, to our citizenry, and to even to our democracy.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying that if you disagree with me ideologically that you’re automatically mistaken and a lazy thinker. To be a critical thinker you don’t have to agree with me. I’m not the standard here. That place belongs to our Creator. You can disagree with me and be quite right. But disagreeing with him is not advisable.

I love conversing with critical thinking people. I’ve even been known to change a view or two when convinced to do so. It’s the lazy-thinking masses on social media who obviously have not thought through their argument and spout the opinions of others that annoy me.

Critical thinkers think for themselves.

They don’t let others do their thinking for them. No, not even FOX News, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, or Bernie Sanders. They don’t just regurgitate their party’s platform, or their denominational affiliation. Not even their pastor can do their thinking for them.

Lazy thinkers only know what they’ve been told. They seldom sit quietly and ponder their faith, their political views, or anything for that matter. They subject themselves only to group-think. They check out and the echo chamber of their party, church, or culture takes the place of objective examination of what is presented to them.

Rather than actually thinking for themselves, lazy thinkers bookmark their favorite website for bullet point rebuttals to everything conservative or liberal, progressive or regressive. They copy their handy dandy list, and paste it into whatever Facebook stream they’re in at the time. Copying and pasting the ideas of others rather than developing their own saves time and makes them sound smart. These bullet point lists of rebuttals, complete with ready-made rants and clichés to objectionable ideologies of any ilk are the lazy thinkers’ BFF.

Lazy thinkers are suckers for alternative-fact-riddled “fake news,” the more outlandish the better. Even though everyone is entitled to their own opinion, everyone is not entitled to their own facts. Fear-mongering claims fill the media like sewage, and undiscerning Christians swallow it up. Yuck! Sorry about the image. But if it walks like and talks like a duck… Especially in these days we all need to be media literate so we can tell the difference between real and made up.

In an attempt to foster critical thinking in their student body, the University of Minnesota published Five Techniques for Identifying Fake News:

Read past the headline
Evaluate the source of the information
Evaluate the actual claims being made
Be skeptical
Fact check from a third party

In other words, pick a few news sources from different perspectives, choose intelligent ones, be discerning, and check the facts so as not to be duped by someone with an agenda. 

In terms of identifying media bias and finding more centrist sources for news I recommend these: Snopes and/or Media Bias Fact Check

Although your mind’s opaque

Try thinking more if just for your own sake

The future still looks good

And you’ve got time to rectify

All the things that you should (George Harrison, 1965)

“Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.” Romans 12:2 (The Message)

Next, we’ll look at how Critical Thinking Christians Think Through Scripture.