All posts by Wintery Knight

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Christians need to know what happens to our rights in secular left nations

This week, I had a conversation with a Christian leader who explained to me that Christians need to avoid getting involved in “culture wars” and “politics”, and just focus on being nice and loving everyone. “Just love everybody” he assured me. “What’s the point of being divisive?” So, I thought it might be a good idea to review what happens to Christians in countries that follow his advice.

Read this article from The Public Discourse. The article just came out this week, and it’s written by Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish parliament.

She writes:

I have been a member of the Finnish Parliament for twenty-nine years. During that time, I have witnessed a dramatic change in the value system undergirding our modern society. From the protection of life to the defense of marriage, the changes we are living through are undeniable, with far-reaching implications for us all. And it’s evident that the general atmosphere toward Christianity grows increasingly hostile every day. Only ten years ago, I could not have imagined that I would soon be summoned to my country’s Supreme Court to defend my religious convictions.

“Has somebody occupied Finland?” My six-year-old grandson asked me this in June 2019 when he saw a giant rainbow flag, the biggest we had seen to date, flying over our home city of Riihimäki, Finland. At that same time, the majority church of our country, the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, officially published its support of a Helsinki “pride” event, which disappointed and shocked many (including me).

Before our very eyes, the church was assuming a position contrary to its own confession that God designed marriage for one man and one woman. If the authority of God’s Word is undermined, the question becomes not only about marriage or gender, but also about the path to salvation and eternal life. Every person, including the LGBT community, has the right to hear the whole truth of God’s Word. While I briefly considered leaving my church, I was convinced that it was better to stay aboard and try to wake up those who had fallen asleep, not jump out of a sinking boat.

This was why I wrote a tweet, in which I directed a question to my church leadership. I wanted to exercise my basic right to free speech to publicly ask how they reconciled their activities with biblical teaching. The main content of my post was a photo of verses 24–27 of Romans Chapter 1, where the Apostle Paul teaches that homosexual relations are sinful. A citizen filed a criminal complaint in response to my tweet, and more complaints quickly followed.

These complaints resulted in eighteen months of police investigation and thirteen hours of interrogations. As a former government minister, sitting parliamentarian, and grandmother, I found the situation unreal. Just a few years before, I had been in charge of the police as Minister of Interior, and now I was sitting in the police station being interrogated, with the Bible on the table in front of me.

And it goes on.

I can’t possibly quote enough of her post to tell you all you need to know. All I want to say is that I’ve been watching how people are responding to Megan Basham’s book. On Twitter, a lot of Megan’s attention recently has been focused on J. D. Greear – a pious pastor who is always trying to be nuanced, sounding good to Democrats, and watering down the Bible’s teachings so he can be popular and well-liked. For pastors like this, Christianity is primarily a vehicle for signaling virtue. They talk about the parts that make people like them, they affirm non-Christians in their rebellion against God. To them, Christianity is not about being faithful, or being an ambassador. It’s not about self-sacrificial obedience at all.

Since Christianity is so easy for these “don’t judge” and “just love everyone” pastors, they have no idea what happens to people who tell the truth (with evidence) about things like abortion, socialism, atheism, feminism, Darwinism, LGBT, etc. They can’t understand it. How could God allow anything unhappy to happen to people who “just love everyone” they wonder.

I brought up the case of Bill Dembski to one of these people recently. Dembski advocated for intelligent design, and was thrown out of Baylor University, because they were committed to naturalistic Darwinism. He said “Dembski got what was coming to him. He wasn’t collegial enough with his Darwinian colleagues”. They don’t think of people who take a hit to their reputations or careers to stay faithful as heroes. They don’t understand them. “Why would you even talk about origins?” they wonder. “Why not just say happy things, instead of knowledge things?”

Anyway, I don’t want any of my readers to be this naive about what happens if we listen to these virtue-signaling pastors at election time. If you let the secular left become the government, then you will lose your liberty to even make a case against the secular left on controversial issues. How do you stop the secular left from becoming the government? You learn how to make an evidential case for the truth claims of the Bible that will be convincing to people who won’t believe the Bible, but will believe the evidence. Even Jesus told people who didn’t believe his words to believe his works. That’s our model.

Whatever it is that the secular left is talking about: global warming socialism, radical feminist misandry, abortion and infanticide, LGBT, etc. you have to be ready with convincing evidence from outside the Bible to convince them that Christian position on these issues is reasonable. Otherwise, they will think we are irrational idiots and trample over our rights. We have to get to work, and step one is to stop listening to people like J. D. Greear, Russell Moore, David French, and the like. They are not interested in providing evidence to non-Christians, and advocating for free speech and religious liberty. They are out for their own happiness and popularity.

Progressive white women report high levels of mental illness in 2020 Pew survey

I have the most amazing video for you to see. It’s a crazy left-wing activist doxing a libertarian lesbian woman wearing a breathe-through mask. First, let’s take a look at the video. Then, we’ll look at a recent survey reported by Pew Research in 2020, which assesses how mentally stable far-left feminist women are (self-reported). Then, I’ll make some comments for unmarried men.

OK, so here is the video, which was shared by the woman who was doxed. So it’s OK for me to share it, since the doxed woman didn’t care about it.

So, is this crazy woman rare? Or is she common?

Progressive white women and mental illness

Feminist web site Evie Magazine reported on the some 2020 findings by Pew Research (left-wing pollster):

A 2020 Pew Research study reveals that over half of white, liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point.

[T]he study, which is titled Pew American Trends Panel: Wave 64, was dated March 2020 — over a year ago.

The study, which examined white liberals, moderates, and conservatives, both male and female, found that conservatives were far less likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues than those who identified as either liberal or even “very liberal.”

[…]White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives.

Here’s the part of the data I thought was most interesting:

White Liberal Women

Who would marry a crazy person?

So, the point about this that I want to make is… who is going to marry these mentally ill progressive white women? Being a good wife and mother takes a certain amount of connection to reality. It takes a certain amount of empathy, compassion, and rationality. These progressive white women don’t have any of that. So, who is going to marry them? I know that there are thirsty progressive men (and thirsty conservative men who fake being progressive), who will go ahead and hit it and quit it. Pump it and dump it. But how many men would commit to someone who’s mentally ill?

And in fact, that’s exactly what we’re seeing with the marriage rates:

Marriage rates in the United States over time

That’s for America, but things are even worse in countries that have slid further toward the secular left edge of the political spectrum.

When you look at marriage rates in Canada and Europe, you understand that men are even LESS likely to choose marriage when they have to pay over 50% of what they earn in taxes. And so the marriage rate is declining. I think young, unmarried women in Canada and Europe want to raise taxes in order to get free stuff from government. Single mother welfare, food stamps, abortions, contraceptives, IVF, breast enlargements, etc. Some feminists are even asking for free cosmetic surgery. With a big enough government, they don’t have to marry at all. Big government leaves them free to play the field, without having to care about finding a good man. But what if taxes get so high that the few good men those women passed over for 40 years simply can’t afford to take on a wife and support multiple children he didn’t father? Paying for things like a stay-at-home wife and homeschooling, etc. is expensive. Men can’t afford a wife, and also pay for goodies for all the single progressive women with mental illnesses.

Conservative men want nothing to do with daycare and public schools – we know that those facilities are dominated by progressive women. And we don’t want trouble from feminist lawyers and feminist judges in the divorce courts. Divorce is very expensive for men. And we may never see our children again. Then there are the progressive white women in the workplace, who get very bitter with men as a result of getting wrecked by bad boys. Even if we find a good wife, we still have to deal with all these progressive white women with mental illnesses in positions of power. Is it worth it to take risks like this? It depends on the reward, I guess. There comes a point where the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Poll: few Millennials describe belief in God as “very important”

Beliefs of millennials and boomers
Beliefs of millennials and boomers

I saw a very interesting article that compared the attitudes of young people about things like patriotism, religion, freedom, etc. The numbers are very discouraging.

So, here’s the article from the Washington Examiner:

The importance of patriotism, faith in God, and having children is significantly lower among millennials and Generation Z, compared to previous generations.

In a new poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, nearly 80% of people aged 55-91 said being patriotic is important to them, while only 42% of millennials and Generation Z, or those aged 18-38, said the same. Thirty percent of millennials and Generation Z said religion was important, compared to the over 75% of baby boomers, with just over 30% of millennials and Generation Z saying it was important to have children.

Areas where the younger generations had placed higher importance compared to boomers were tolerance for others and self-fulfillment, with financial security being almost tied between the two age groups.

I’m sure that everyone has seen other polls showing the decline of Christianity, especially in mainline and Catholic churches. Evangelicals are declining less, but they are still declining.

The reason I linked to this post is because I’ve noticed that some Christians don’t really think that there is anything to be concerned about. Everything is working fine, they say. Whatever we’re doing right now must be working, because there is no decline. We’re winning, and if you think otherwise, then you’re just complaining.

Well, I don’t really know why there is this decline, all I can do is speak from my experiences. I’ve met people through my blog who did lose their faith in college, and I’ve met ex-Christians in my office, too. I asked them what the problem was, and it seems to be that when they were growing up, they often bullied into behaving like a Christian without being able to ask any questions about whether it was true. And then as soon as they got to college away from their parents and pastors, they just dumped the whole thing.

I remember listening to an amazing lecture a while back by Dr. Scott Waller. I think it was a lecture he gave for the Stand to Reason “Masters Series in Christian Thought” in 2003. The lecture was about Postmodernism in the University. Postmodernism is the view that there are no true or false views, especially with “soft” issues like religion and morality. In the lecture, he talked about how a father had sent his devout Christian son to university, and the son had returned an atheist after one semester. I remember Dr. Waller quoting the son telling his parents “I have come to think of my time growing up in this house as the dark period of my life”. The father was very upset. So Dr. Waller told him what to do. He said, you’re going to need to read a few books on the most common questions that your son has, and then work through the answers with him. And he made a little pile of books about common questions that college students ask, and pushed the pile across the table to the father. And the father pushed the books back across the table to Dr. Waller, and said “well, I don’t have time for reading so many books… but could you just talk to him instead?”

Another thing that seems to cause a lot of young people to  leave the faith in college is sex. Now if I were trying to convince someone to be responsible about sex, I’d try to show them studies and statistics to explain why there really are best practices to relationships and marriage. For example, I’d might show them that the number of premarital sex partners increases marital instability, or that sliding into cohabitation early tends to make marriages less stable. But this takes a bit of work, and you have to work through it with the young people. I just don’t know if parents really reason with their kids like this. But in churches, I’ve noticed that trying to make an argument using evidence isn’t very popular. To me, if I were trying to be convincing to someone about something, I would use evidence. It’s just natural to me to make a case if I’m trying to be persuasive. But making a case just hasn’t been a really big priority in the churches I’ve attended.

So, I guess if I had to give any advice to parents of children, or pastors in churches, it would be that Christianity is in decline, and we need to do more than just order people to memorize Bible verses and creeds, go to church, etc. It’s hard for me to know what’s really going on in everyone’s home, and in everyone’s church. But I don’t think that whatever we’re doing in our homes and churches is working to convince young people that belief in God is very important.