Tag Archives: Disagreement

News

Bank of America fires Dr. Frank Turek for his religious and political views

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Dr. Mike Adams explains how Bank of America discriminates against Christians and conservatives.

Excerpt:

In late May of this year Dr. Turek was hired to present at a meeting of your Global Business Management & Analysis Team within Global Wealth and Investment Management. The title of his presentation was called “Why Can’t You Be Normal Just Like Me?” The presentation helps participants adapt to diverse personalities to improve productivity and relationships—the essence of inclusion and diversity. The meeting was scheduled to take place at your Merrill Lynch facility in Pennington, New Jersey on June 17.

Three days before the event Dr. Turek was abruptly fired by an HR representative. Why? She explained that someone Googled his name and discovered that he had written Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone. Marriage was not the topic of his presentation, nor has it ever been in all his years of working with the bank. Moreover, as his book reveals (although no one at the Bank is likely to have read it), Dr. Turek treats all people with respect, whether he agrees with them politically or not. Nevertheless, in the name of “inclusion” and “diversity,” he was immediately excluded for his political and religious viewpoint. Mr. Moynihan, please answer this question: Do you have to have certain political or religious views to work at Bank of America?

I know you cannot really believe that free speech and religion rights vanish when one works with Bank of America. I know that you cannot believe that all political conservatives, Jews, Christians, Mormons and Muslims should be fired for their deeply held beliefs. But that is how the Bank of America policy of “inclusion” was applied to Dr. Turek. He was fired because of his personal political and religious beliefs—beliefs that are undoubtedly shared by thousands of your very large and diverse workforce. Or is it really diverse?

Dr. Turek was previously fired by the HR people at Cisco Systems for the same reason. Cisco is another company that either silences or fires Christians for their views. No free speech is allowed if it offends certain groups. Bank of America also supports illegal immigration.

How would same-sex marriage affect your life?

BONUS: Frank Turek explains how to talk about the same-sex marriage issue without sounding like a jerk.

Polemics

Responding to the objection: who are you to say?

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This article is from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.

Excerpt:

Today I was thinking about a concept that came up in conversation, a challenge raised to Christians who offer their point of view. The challenge is: “Who are you to say?”

This question it comes up in one of two contexts. The first one is secular. You’ll hear it quite frequently when another person disagrees with your point of view, especially a moral one. They immediately challenge you with, “Who are you to say?”

Taken at face value this is an attack on you . It’s a response that focuses on the person, not the argument. Instead of dealing with a person’s point, you attack the individual in some way. This is called an ad hominem , a type of informal fallacy. An ad hominem might be when you say, “You jerk. You’re just stupid,” or, “What do you know?” or something of that order. It’s a form of name calling.

There are lots of sophisticated ways people use ad hominem that slip by us in addition to the obvious ones just mentioned. “Who are you to say?” is one of them. It’s a challenge addressed to the person and not the argument.

The challenge comes up in a second context, when Christians with positions of visibility challenge those inside the church who disagree with them. They sometimes refer to their attackers as “heresy hunters” to disparage them. (Some, I guess, might have called me that, though I don’t know specifically if I’ve been labeled in that way.) This is the same kind of comment as, “Who are you to say? Who made you in charge? What right do you have to challenge my doctrine?”

This question is completely irrelevant. Here’s why.

Click here for the rest.

I had an answer to this question before I read his article, and now I have a much better understanding of this objection. That’s what you get from Greg Koukl – clear thinking Christianity.

News

Should pastors preach against false ideas and false ideologies in church?

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From Thinking Christian.

Excerpt:

Justin Buzzard tells this story:

About ten years ago I heard Ben Patterson, campus pastor of Westmont College, say something that I will never forget. Ben told the story of a retired pastor who began noticing that his former congregation was sliding away from orthodoxy. The pastor saw this as his fault, noting the one thing he thought he did most poorly as a pastor. The pastor stated, in two sentences, his great failure as a pastor:

I always told people what to believe. My great mistake is that I never told my people what NOT to believe.

It’s possible to be so “biblical” that we’re unbiblical.

I’m referring to pastors, churches, and individual Christians who say, “we’re sticking to the Bible, and we don’t ever need to study anything but the Bible.” The great men and women of the Bible didn’t say that. They didn’t just preach in support of God’s truth. They knew the lies that were current in their cultures, they named those lies—with very contemporary examples—and they exposed what was false about them. When Isaiah ripped apart idol worship so sarcastically in Isaiah 44:9-20, he knew what he was talking about. So those who only study the Bible are failing to follow its example!

I think the reason for this is because the church is so focused on providing a happy music show every week, so that people can feel happy and affirmed, that they would never want to be negative and exclusive. That might make the people in the audience feel offended or excluded. That’s why pastors never set up Christianity as being true in distinction to other views that are false. And pastors surely would not appeal to external evidence from science and history – that might make people who don’t know any science and history feel bad, and spoil their happy feelings. It seems to me that pastors need to get back into the habit of connecting the Christian to real life. False ideas are harmful, and the pastor’s job is to stand up to wolves that might harm his flock – not to ignore the wolves. A very good place to start would be in the area of capitalism and taxation, or maybe in the area of sexual ethics and marriage.