All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/

Christian pro-lifer to be sentenced today by female judge appointed by Bill Clinton

Many popular Christian speakers have told me they can’t imagine why it might be an advantage to work with an alias, not get married, not have children, and not expose your personal life to everyone on social media. But the fact is, it’s much easier to say what you really think when no one can punish you. Even people who do make bold stands understand that.

Here’s the article from Daily Wire:

A Christian pro-life father of 11 facing over a decade in prison will be sentenced on Tuesday for his conviction over a peaceful protest in Tennessee at an abortion facility in 2021.

Paul Vaughn, who was convicted of violating the FACE Act and conspiracy against civil rights in January, was targeted by the Biden administration in October 2022 after he participated in a peaceful protest at an abortion facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee in March 2021. He will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger on Tuesday in Nashville. He faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and up to 10.5 years in prison.

I checked, and District Judge Aleta Trauger was appointed by former president Bill Clinton, a radical pro-abortion activist.

This is the key point made by Vaughn:

“It’s real easy for me. I can go and go to battle and go to jail as an individual, and it’s not a big loss,” Vaughn said. “The challenge comes when you’re leading your family through it, when you’re talking to your 3-year-old and your 23-year-old and your other family.”

Yes, that’s how things really work in the real world. It’s admirable to perform these actions and take the hit from the secular left fascists. But it’s harder to do that when you have dependents. Many of the most prominent Christian leaders who don’t have an alias keep well clear of politics. They don’t say anything about abortion or homosexuality, especially then they are married with children. That decision (to marry and have children) actually has a dampening effect on the witness of most Christians.

By the way, I checked up a bit more on the judge. The judge who is handing out the sentence is the same one who found the Christians guilty.

But look at this Nashville NPR:

A federal judge has struck down a Tennessee law that would’ve required businesses and schools to post a warning sign if they allow transgender people to use the restroom that aligns with their gender.

The same judge had granted a temporary injunction against the law, stopping it from taking effect last summer. Judge Aleta Trauger ruled that the law violated the First Amendment rights of trans-friendly businesses.

“Transgender Tennesseans are real,” Trauger wrote. “The businesses and establishments that wish to welcome them are real. And the viewpoints that those individuals and businesses hold are real, even if they differ from the views of some legislators or government officials.”

If the accused people are expecting this radical Clinton-appointee to interpret the law fairly, I think they’ll be disappointed. Radical feminist judicial activists tend to legislate from the bench. Many didn’t get into law in order to understand legal principles and apply laws fairly. Many got into law so they could conduct judicial activism. Many got into law in order to push a political agenda.

One more thing. A lot of prominent Christian leaders support the idea of marrying young. They look at the threats to marriage for men, and they say “just choose a better wife”.

Here are some the threats that men are facing from the decision to get married:

  • most young women are liberal, and therefore not safe for good conservative to marry
  • no-fault divorce is unfair to men, e.g. – alimony, child support and unfair denial of custody and visitation
  • biased application of domestic violence laws
  • church siding with women against men, often in direct opposition to the clear teachings of the Bible
  • false accusations against men, e.g. – at work or at school
  • paternity fraud
  • unfairly severe criminal sentences show bias against men in criminal justice system
  • high taxes, inflation, caused by the welfare state

Choosing the right woman can protect you from some of those threats, but not all of them. Even if you marry the perfect Christian woman, you won’t be safe from a radical feminist man-hating Christianity-hating judge who can slap hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines on you, and throw you into prison for a decade. Maybe Christian leaders could first do something about radical feminists in power before they get on to bullying good men into marriage and parenting. There’s a reason why good men have to be careful about being vulnerable to the wrong people.

How do you respond to the conquests and wars in the Old Testament?

John Berea has an article about it on his web site.

Here’s his overview:

In the Old Testament are the military campaigns of Israel inconsistent with being led by a just and loving God, and inconsistent with his own commands?  Here, I would like to make the case for consistency and justness.

1. The nations of Canaan were evil, harming others, and needed to be stopped.  They had carried out incest with children/grandchildren and performed child sacrifice by fire. (Lev 18:6-30, Deut 12:31, Deut 18:9-10, Psalm 106:35, 37-38)  They launched unprovoked attacks on Israel (Ex 17:8-9, Num 21:1, Num 21:2-23, 33) and even guerrilla attacks against Israel’s “stragglers in the rear of the march when you were exhausted and tired.” (Deut 25:18)

2. Warfare language was likely rhetorical.  There are five reasons to support the rhetorical nature of language such as “completely destroy” (Hebrew תחרימו, literally “ban”) in Deut 20:17.  It likely meant a destruction of armed soldiers, buildings, and religious icons.

  1.  Semitic language professor and NIV, NAB, and ESV bible translator Richard Hess argues that Hebrew “ban” is “stereotypical for describing all the inhabitants of a town or region, without predisposing the reader to assume anything further about their ages or even their genders” and “need not require that there really were children, senior citizens, or women there who were put to death” even when followed by the terms “men and women” (Joshua 8:25) or “young and old” (Joshua 8:25).
  2. In Israel’s destruction of enemies we see phrases like “left no survivor” and “utterly destroyed all who breathed” (Joshua 10:40, Judges 1:8).  But in Joshua 21:12-13 the author has no problem telling us these people were still there afterward: “if you ever turn away and make alliances with these nations that remain near you… God will no longer drive out these nations”.  In 1 Sam 15:3-4 Israel was to “strike down the Amalekites. Destroy everything that they have. Don’t spare them. Put them to death–man, woman, child, infant, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey alike.”  In 15:8 Saul “executed all Agag’s people” and Agag himself was killed in 15:33.  But later in  1 Sam 27:8 we’re told they’re still there and ” had been living in that land for a long time”.  Hundreds of years later in Esther 3:1 we’re even told Haman was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag.
  3. Most verses on the subject speak of “driving out” and “dispossessing” the land rather than language suggestive of genocide.  E.g. Num 33:51-53, in “the land of Canaan, you must drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images, all their molten images,  and demolish their high places.  You must dispossess the inhabitants of the land and live in it, for I have given you the land to possess it.”  It’s the same story in Lev 18:25, Num 23:31-32, Deut 6:19, 9:4, 18:12, Joshua 3:10, and 23:9.
  4. Jer 4:20 suggests inhabitants fled before armies arrived:  “At the sound of the horseman and bowman every city flees; They go into the thickets and climb among the rocks”
  5. Deut 7:22 specifically says that Israel was forbidden to “destroy them all at once” and instead they would be expelled “little by little”.

So either all of these verses contradict one another, or the conquest language was rhetorical.

3. Many of the “cities” were probably military outposts.  For example with Jericho and Ai, Richard Hess argues there are no references to noncombatants (apart from Rahab), no archaeological evidence of non-military use, the term melek (Hebrew מלכי)  for “king” of the cities often meant mean a military leader in Canaan (e.g. in Joshua 2:2), they were located at defensive positions, and Jericho and Ai weren’t described as a large city as Gibeon and Hazor explicitly were.

4. A just God requires wrath.  It’s not possible to have a God who is just but not wrathful–otherwise wrongdoers continue unabated. Paranormal investigator James Randi wrote in Skeptic Magazine, “I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place” yet Dawkins and Hitchens condemn God for judgment against the Canaanites.  Which is it? Ultimately the the problem is we view death as the ultimate judgment, when in the theological context of the bible it’s only a graduation to what’s next with accountability for what we’ve done with what we were given.

The four points are developed with links for support. If you get this question a lot, it’s a good resource to bookmark.

Also, if you’re looking for a short video to share, here is a 6-minute one featuring Frank Turek:

That’s from commenter WorldGoneCrazy. It’s really good.

Playboy bunnies shocked that their own free decisions did not make them happy

I’m seeing a lot of stories in the news lately about how women are unhappy after being given exactly what they asked for. Feminists who wanted to abolish sex differences are mad that biological men are in their spaces. Feminists who demanded preferential treatment in colleges and workplaces are mad that men don’t earn more than they do. And now… the Playboy bunnies are mad.

Story from the New York Post:

“He was a predator,” Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Sondra Theodore, 65, told The Post. “I watched him, I watched his game. And I watched a lot of girls go through [the Playboy Mansion] gates looking farm-fresh, and leaving looking tired and haggard.”

The former Sunday school teacher-turned-1977 Playboy magazine centerfold model began dating Hefner after meeting him at one of his many lascivious mansion parties.

Former Sunday school teacher. Got that? Former Sunday school teacher.

She says that she’s a victim:

“He groomed me and twisted my mind into thinking his way was normal,” she said of Hef… “He introduced me to drugs. I’d never had a drink or a drug before going up to the Playboy Mansion. And my first night there I was handed champagne and the drugs came later, and I was underage.”

So, I have two points about this. I think that Hugh Hefner was a big hero to the secular left, because he helped them to throw off the shackles of sobriety and chastity that were part of America’s Christian past. The secular left wanted freedom from Christianity’s “repressive” rules on dating, relationships, marriage and sexuality, and Hefner gave them what they wanted. I hope we learn a lesson about trusting atheists to tell us what is moral.

Second point is about the women. Did everyone see that post from earlier in the week about the woman who ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, then demanded a bailout from taxpayers? What I would like to see is women make better decisions. It would probably help that they rely more on evidence than on feelings, and call for advisors if they don’t feel comfortable.

We’re not helping women by telling them to “follow their hearts”. People don’t make good decisions when they “follow their hearts”. Even worse is to follow the crowd. Hugh Hefner was in high demand by women when he was young. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s rich, and he’s morally permissive and non-judgmental. A lot of young women wanted all that he had to offer. But just because a lot of women wanted all that, doesn’t mean that Sondra Theodore was right to wish for what what many women desired.

Another thing about the women – I don’t like how they blame men for their own free will decisions. They don’t take responsibility the way that I expect them to take responsibility. They’re saying “It was the man’s fault” instead of asking “why did I choose that man?” I’d like to see women ask themselves these hard questions. Just because these questions feel bad, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be asked. The only way to learn is to take responsibility. If everything is someone else’s fault, then you never change yourself. And you are the one you need to fear the most.

Finally, I don’t think it’s a good message to send our young men that tall, hot, rich bad boys get all the best looking young women. When a young woman chooses a bad man, it’s a signal to all the young men about what is working – what is in demand. Women need to understand that their decisions are being watched, and they are making the world a worse place when they choose to reward secular left psychopaths like Hugh Hefner. He should have been shunned by women – that would have made sure that no men imitated him.