The case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission will be heard before the Supreme Court.
When Phillips designs and creates a custom wedding cake for a specific couple and a specific wedding, he plays an active role in enabling that ritual, and he associates himself with the celebratory message conveyed,” Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall wrote in the brief.
Wall added, “Forcing Phillips to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs invades his First Amendment rights.
With all due respect, Mr. Wall, dragging Phillips in front of the church and forcing him to shout hosannas over the marriage would be forcing him to violate his “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
Saying that he has to treat a gay couple the same as any other customers who wander into his shop (and who, one assumes, are not grilled as to the righteousness of their lives) is not.
“I never thought the government would try to take away my freedoms and force me to create something that goes against my morals,” Phillips told Fox News on Thursday.
Mr Phillips, get over yourself. Baking a wedding cake for a gay couple (or a black couple, or a mixed race couple, or a Muslim couple, or …) is not a test of your morality. It’s part and parcel of being a baker.
This time it’s the National Cathedral, the informal “national church” (and Episcopal house of worship), where stained glass windows commemorating Robert E Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson are being taken down from display.
The discussion around it, what they are thinking of doing with the windows, and what such commemorations truly mean, are all an interesting read.
An interesting breakdown of Colorado data pulled from the recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey of religiosity in the United States. Some 33% of folk in the state and in Denver report no religious affiliation, Denver being the 4th highest rate there after Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco (the national average is 24%).
On a national basis, 58% of unaffiliated identify as “secular” (not religious) and 27% identify as atheist or agnostic; and 16% define themselves as “religious” but not affiliated with any given church.
39 percent of respondents in Colorado identified as white and Christian, down from to 50 percent in a decade ago. Nationally the number has also dropped to 43%, with 30% identifying as white and Protestant; in 1976 the numbers were 81% and 55%.
On the one hand, these are massive changes, and part and parcel of both declining attendance at traditional churches and the increasingly shrill tones from frightened evangelicals seeing these same sorts of shifts affecting even their own congregations (white evangelical Protestants dropped from 23% of the population in 2006 to only 17% this year).
Some of this is due to demographic changes: immigration, population growth among non-white and mixed race populations, and an increasing willingness to identify as something other than white.
But part is due to basic changes in American religion and spirituality, and it become less (I believe) of a social requirement to be part of a given church in order to meet and mingle and fit in.
There are good and bad aspects to any change. There are plenty of folk (self included) who won’t be sad to see more radical Christianist thought losing support in the American population. But losing some of those social common bonds in idiom and morality lessons carries costs unless we are thoughtful about what we replace them with. People carefully considering their beliefs and choosing a non-religious course and ethos is one thing. People who simply fall away from church-going and organized religion because it’s not a thing anyone does any more is quite another thing.
While the stereotype (and not unfounded one) of preachers swaying masses to drive them toward some goal or another has problematic aspects, if those social / moral bonds of organized religion fade away, what will take their place? What already is taking their place?
Report: In religion as in politics, more Coloradans are unaffiliated – Denverite
Maybe we’re not religious, but spiritual. This is our Number of the Week: 33 percent. That’s the portion of Colorado and Denver residents who reported no religious affiliation in a new study from the Public Religion Research Institute. This makes Colorado one of 20 states in which no single religious group made up a larger share … Continue reading “Report: In religion as in politics, more Coloradans are unaffiliated”
The “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” — an evangelical Christian group — issued their “Nashville Statement” the other day on the heels of their group meeting in Nashville, Tenn.
Nashville’s mayor is not at all happy about the nomenclature.
Among those who rebuked the declaration was Nashville’s mayor, Megan Barry. The “so-called ‘Nashville statement’ is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville,” Barry wrote in a tweet Tuesday.
The “Nashville Statement” itself is basically a series of affirmations and denials that boil down to “homosexuality bad, transgenderism bad, marriage between man and woman good, because we think God says so.” Nothing new here, and just what one would expect from an organization founded to reaffirm Biblical gender roles in the home and church and ““to help the church defend against the accommodation of secular feminism”, but it’s nice to see some folk pushing back against being associated with that sort of thing.
Not to take away from the devastation and human suffering going on there — but humans often cope with horror through humor, and these mostly work as commentary around the disaster going on in Texas right now.
(I certainly encourage looking for opportunities to send assistance to folk as the recovery efforts kick in.)
Some of these I know are from previous disasters, but gallows humor doesn’t have to be original. It usually isn’t.
This is a fascinating interview with Terry Heaton, a TV producer who in the 80s and 90s helped get Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network off the ground, building up the 700 Club and all that jazz to become media empires … and deeply entangled with Republican politics. Today, he regrets it.
What’s interesting to me is that this is not a “Guy was in evangelical circles, guy got disillusioned, guy quits God, guy writes a book.” Its partly that (he is, in fact, flogging his new book on the subject), but Heaton hasn’t lost his faith. Instead, he thinks his experience helped him in his belief, by pointing out how easy it is to go from good intentions to less-than-good actions, and to let temporal considerations begin to hold sway over considerations of faith.
Along the way, he talks about Pat Robertson, both his admiration for the man, and where Robertson became a victim of his own success and the need for more.
People wonder why Christians don’t speak out against people working under the banner of their religion to say crazy things like “God sets up all kings and rulers, therefore we are obliged to follow Donald Trump with no question, because if you question Trump then you question God.”
Consider this speaking out. And rejecting in no uncertain terms Ms White’s and Mr Bakker’s conclusions here, both as bad theology in the abstract and rubbish in application.
Hey, I’ve heard that you’re kind of worried about a completely natural and predictable (and long-predicted) astrological phenomenon indicating Something’s Satanic in the World Today. That’s kind of … um … an interesting and challenging point of view. So let’s go look at it.
(Look at the story. Not the eclipse. That could be dangerous.)
Does God have a message for us in the total eclipse of the sun?
If so, I think it would be, “Hey, look, astronomy works. Science works. You can predict when things like this are going to happen thousands of years in advance. There is order to the universe, isn’t that cool?” Which I think is a pretty awesome thing.
The Bible makes it clear that God created the sun and the moon to serve as “signs.” “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens…and let them be for signs and for seasons…’” (Genesis 1:14).
So what is a “sign?” It is something that points beyond itself. It is not reality itself, but simply points to it, like a sign out in front of a restaurant that lets you know you’ve reached your destination. A sign is a symbol, a pointer, a indication, a token of something beyond itself.
Peter echoes Genesis 1 in Acts 2, where he quotes Joel at length. “And I will show wonders in the heavens above, and signs on the earth below…the sun shall be turned to darkness…” (Acts 2:19-20a).
So what happens with the interplanetary bodies, particularly the sun and the moon, are intended to signify things beyond themselves, which invites us to consider what those things might be.
That’s really interesting, Bryan. Especially since we can predict what they are going to do, so we can therefore predict … the signifying of things?
Now in the thoughts I express here, I am not all pretending that I have received some form of revelation from God about the meaning he wants us to attach to a total eclipse of the sun.
But I’ll bet you’re going to try, Bryan.
This is simply an effort to ponder this sign in the heavens and speculate as to its possible spiritual implications.
Why does it have to have spiritual implications? I mean, the sun and the moon are frequently in the sky doing interesting stuff. Is there a spiritual implication around each phase of the moon, or each crater, or each sun spot or solar flare, or how the sun rises and lowers in the sky due to the Earth’s wobble?
Which phenomena are worth spiritual implication pondering, Bryan?
God knew that this precise event would come at this precise moment in our nation’s history, and it is entirely appropriate for us to ponder its significance.
Science knew that this precise event would come at this precise moment in our nation’s history, too. So …
It is intriguing that when God speaks of the role of the sun and the moon in Genesis, the sun is identified as the heavenly body designed to “rule the day,” while the moon is designed to “rule the night” (Genesis 1:19).
Yes, it is intriguing. Because when the sun is up, it’s “day” and when the sun is down it’s “night.” And even though the moon isn’t up all the time at night, it can be up during the day, but it is far less bright than the sun during the day.
Come to think of it, how is that intriguing?
The sun, if it is a symbol of anything, is certainly a symbol of God’s radiant truth, which is intended to reveal, to illuminate, and to enlighten every soul on planet earth. John uses this as a metaphor to describe the advent of Christ. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). Jesus is further described as “the true light, which enlightens everyone coming into the world” (John 1:9).
Well, “light” certainly seems to be an important metaphor here. It’s not clear that we’re talking about the sun as the same metaphor as the Son (unless we’re watching an old Star Trek episode)
The night, on the other hand, is a symbol of spiritual darkness, deception, and error. Jesus himself used this metaphor when he said, “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19).
Again, Jesus is talking about light and darkness, not day and night.
And, um, as you note, it’s a metaphor. Light in the day is important because it provides heat and lets us grow food and helps us see when we’re walking. Darkness means cold, it means danger, it means tripping hazards.
So, yeah, light and darkness are frequent metaphors (and not just in Scripture, Bryan). Day and night are sometimes used as analogous metaphors. But I suspect you’re going to try to make that even, um, clearer.
The path of this total eclipse of the sun is remarkable, in that it crosses over the entire continental United States, almost perfectly bisecting America from the Northwest to the Southeast. And in that path, the sun will be perfectly blotted out, by the ruler of the night, plunging all of America in its path into virtual total darkness.
The path is remarkable because total eclipses are so rare and so often happen where it does. But the path its not remarkable per se, as it is predictable by the motion of the Moon, Sun, and Earth.
Now, what would be remarkable, perhaps even miraculous, would be if the eclipse started precisely on the shore of the United States, and ended similarly on the other shore. Or maybe on the international territory line out at sea. But … it doesn’t. It just does what it does because that’s how it’s set up to do it.
And the sun will not be “perfectly blotted out” or lead to “virtual darkness.” It will get dark, certainly, but it’s not like folk will be going blind or something.
This is a metaphor, or a sign, of the work of the Prince of Darkness in obscuring the light of God’s truth. Satan, and those who unwittingly serve as his accomplices by resisting the public acknowledgement of God and seeking to repress the expression of Christian faith in our land, are bringing on us a dark night of the national soul.
And here I thought you were just going to “speculate as to its possible spiritual implications” (or even that it had any).
I mean, there was a total solar eclipse in March 2016 that was visible across the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and into Australia. Was that a sign of the Prince of Darkness and his servants repressing Christianity in those areas?
We, as God’s people, must resist this eclipsing of God’s light by engaging in spiritual warfare against “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” of which Ephesians 6:12 speaks. We must fight, using the weapons of our warfare, which are “not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4), to resist the encroaching darkness through prayer and proclamation.
We must fight the darkness that we may return this nation to an unapologetic acknowledgement and embrace of the God of the Founders and his transcendent standard for human behavior as enshrined in the Ten Commandments. It is through these two classic, foundational American ideals – reverence for God and for his standards for life – that we can reclaim this land from spiritual darkness.
If you wait for a few minutes, the darkness will go away, Bryan.
Also, we’ve gone from (a) speculation, to (b) assertion, to (c) call to spiritual arms.
I see what you did there, Bryan.
As the Creator of the universe, God has designed the movement of the heavenly bodies such that an eclipse of the sun lasts only for a short season, after which the sun emerges once again in all of its powerful, resplendent, and unquenchable glory. What God will do in the heavenly world we can see can and must be mirrored in the heavenly world we cannot see.
Frankly, I think God designed all of this to flush out the folk who are so insecure in their faith that they feel obliged to apply their personal metaphors to any natural phenomena that occur.
By his grace, may his glorious truth emerge once again from the darkness and fill this land with his pure, unfiltered,and radiant light.
Until the next eclipse. Or, you know, sunset each day. Or even cloudiness.
I mean, really, Bryan. The problem with applying spiritual divination to natural phenomena is that you then have to assert that there have been similar messages in analogous phenomena (all the other total eclipses), or else explain away why not. Also, you have to wrestle with other folk who have their own spiritual interpretations. E.g., “This eclipse is an assurance that the darkness which is passing over this nation through the election and presidency of such a man as Donald Trump will, in the natural course of things, pass, and we’ll be able to stop throwing shade on and mooning our governmental institutions.”
Why is my “speculation” any less valid than yours?
If you are sincere about your prophesying here, Bryan — that God intentionally set up this particular eclipse, in this particular configuration, at this particular moment in our history, for your particular message — I really do think you’re a dolt.
On the bright side, you seem to have stopped talking about Charlottesville. On the down side, it’s because you’ve pivoted to other destructive zaniness.
[Being a look at the @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account, with a glance at the @POTUS account, grouped for your topical pleasure.]
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So the big news the last 24 hours was a major terror attack in Barcelona, and subsequent counter-terrorism activities there. Which apparently was a tremendous relief to you, as it gave you something to Stand Tall and In Charge about, rather than the continuous hole digging of the past week.
The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!
See? That’s how a presidential tweet is done. Compassion, firmness, targeting the behavior being condemned, offering to help. I knew you had it in you, Donald!
Now, if you can just avoid saying something too stu…
Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!
So this isn’t the first time you’ve brought up this story, Donald. And every time you bring it up, people correct you to note that it’s simply not true, or certainly not part of the historical record.
Which is really funny, given that you’ve been trying to convince us this past week that you are very careful about gathering all the facts because you don’t want to say anything that others will later point out as wrong.
While there’s some evidence that commanders in the US Army fighting the Moro insurgency in the Philippines did occasionally use bury pig carcasses with the bodies of dead insurgents, there’s no evidence that Pershing himself did such a thing (though he was aware of it), let alone using magically blood-cursed bullets himself in executions to deter them.
In fact, his stint as military governor was as much about “winning hearts and minds” as about terrorizing the terrorists (who may not have been particularly deterred by such tactics anyway). Pershing negotiated with the Moros, he got the leader of the Ottoman Muslims to reach out to them to ask for peace, he drank tea with them, and he convinced them that, unlike the Spanish, he wasn’t there to push them off their land, just to quell the violence.
Historians have also pointed out that the Moro Wars didn’t actually stop under Pershing’s tenure, and even when hostilities scaled back, violence did continue.
And even that, Donald, ignores your historically bizarre conflation of the Moro conflicts with the outside colonizers of the Philippines (first the Spanish, then the US) with modern terrorist conflict in the Middle East. Suggesting that the Philippine Muslims of turn of the 20th Century had anything particular in common, as motivations, with ISIL or al-Qa’eda, a century later and thousands of miles away is just goofy.
So, to summarize, Donald. (1) There’s no record of anyone using bullets dipped in pig’s blood, (2) there’s no indication that Pershing did anything even resembling that, (3) nobody magically stopped “Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years” (or 25 years, the last time you told the yarn), and (4) the Moros were not ISIL or al-Qa’eda.
Of course, all this ignores your thesis that the only way to discourage terrorists is to be more brutal than they are. Suggesting that summary shooting of prisoners, not to mention humiliating them religiously, is a valuable tactic that the Spanish government should consider, is not only the attitude that got us Abu Ghraib (which ultimately did far more harm to the US than to the Iraqi insurgents), but simply isn’t in keeping with national or international law or the Military Code of Conduct. It’s a warcrime.
For the President of the United States to make such a suggestion shows a fundamental unfitness to be the Commander in Chief. You might want to consider that, Donald.
(Interesting side note: Pershing, one of the great US military commanders, was commonly known as “Black Jack” — but that reference was a softening of the epithet “Nigger Jack”, given to him as a West Point instructor by students who disliked him and because he had held a command in the 10th Cavalry Regiment, a “Buffalo Soldier” African-American unit. Now _that’s_ trivia worth repeating, Donald.)
Then, this morning:
Homeland Security and law enforcement are on alert & closely watching for any sign of trouble. Our borders are far tougher than ever before!
While I realize that DHS would and should be more vigilant after such an attack … it seems a bit odd, Donald, that you had to emphasize that. Are you trying to be reassuring, or are you trying to take on the mantle of National Protector?
The Obstructionist Democrats make Security for our country very difficult. They use the courts and associated delay at all times. Must stop!
So are there any particular issues that have arisen cause by “Obstructionist Democrats” that have led to loss of life — or, heck, even possible loss of life — since you took office? Or are you just doing that fear-mongering thing?
Radical Islamic Terrorism must be stopped by whatever means necessary! The courts must give us back our protective rights. Have to be tough!
And this is most likely just being rhetorical, Donald, right? I mean, “any means necessary” is kind of a broad way to phrase things, esp. after your bullshit tweet about John Pershing. What means are you talking about to “stop terrorism” (which, like “stopping crime,” seems a bit quixotic a goal)? And what means are off the table?
I mean, are we stepping back, for some reason, to the “and kill their wives and children, too” rhetoric you were playing with during the election campaign? What US (or International) laws are you proposing be set aside? What limits on brutality, inhumanity, and destruction are allowable, Donald?
Heading to Camp David for major meeting on National Security, the Border and the Military (which we are rapidly building to strongest ever).
And Camp David? I thought you hated that place, Donald? What, all the banquet rooms at Bedminster already booked?
Of course, a lot of this is simple theatrical posturing on your part, Donald. I mean, you’ve taken a hell of a (largely self-inflicted) shellacking the past week, so it’s not at all surprising that you’d launch into an effort to do the thing that garners you most support: Talk Tough on Terrorism. That’ll bring those mean GOP politicians back into line, right? That’ll distract from your bungling of the Charlottesville situation and all the other problems and scandals circling the White House.
I don’t think it will work, Donald, but I have little doubt it will make things worse.
And because, even in the midst of a National Security Crisis, you can always be distracted by someone saying flattering things about you, you retweeted a couple of messages from radio pundit Hugh Hewitt …
#NeverTrumpers elite MSMers and virtue signalers are persuading themselves that @realDonaldTrump supporters are deserting. They are not. 1.
Hear that, Donald! Your support in California is increasing! Awesome! Now if you can just pick up a few million more votes there, you just might be able to win the state!
Your Social Media Minion also tweeted …
… a retweet of VP Pence condemning the Barcelona attack [on @POTUS].
… about elevating the status of the US Cyber Command to Unified Combatant Command.
David Perdue is the GOP junior Senator from the great state of Georgia. And at the currently-running Faith and Freedom conference, he just suggested Psalm 109:8 as an appropriate prayer for Obama.
'We should pray for him like Psalms 109:8 says: Let his days be few, and let another have his office.'
Perdue is said to be a fairly moderate, nice guy, more focused on business than evangelism — and it's not beyond the pale to suggest that he was using just the literal words there, not implying what the rest of the passage says [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+109&version=KJV]:
6 Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand. 7 When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin. 8 Let his days be few; and let another take his office. 9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. 10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. 11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour. 12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children. 13 Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out. 14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. 15 Let them be before the Lord continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.
But there are plenty of right-wing sites that do emphasize this imprecatory prayer as a literal curse against Obama and his family. And, as the article suggests, it's just that kind of Overton Window shift in rhetoric from "respectable" government officials that makes the rise of Donald "I have no filter between Id and Vocal Cords" Trump so very much not a surprise.
Perdue's spokesperson has responded, “Senator Perdue said we are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and for our president. He in no way wishes harm towards our president and everyone in the room understood that. However, we should add the media to our prayer list because they are pushing a narrative to create controversy and that is exactly what the American people are tired of.”
At the very best, it's in exceedingly poor taste. And if Sen. Perdue isn't aware of the whole of the passage, or of how that passage is being used in a far more vitriolic fashion than his spokescritter claims he intended, then shame on him.
Target is under fire and, ostensibly, a boycott from a half-million conservatives over re-affirming its transgender-neutral policies regarding the workplace (and, gasp, bathrooms). But, as this article points out, if you're going to boycott Target for letting transgender women use the ladies room[1], then there are a lot of other sinful companies you need to be boycotting …
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[1] And transgender men use the gents, though nobody ever seems to get in an uproar over that.
While most of the "religious freedom" noises the last year or two have been about individuals and mom-and-pop stores wanting to deny service to sinners gay people, up at the large organization level it's been religious-owned (or -imaged) companies fighting the previous culture war around reproductive issues.
One story that has flown under the radar for many has been the significant degree to which US hospitals have been taken over by religiously-affiliated organizations, the Catholic Church most prominently: almost half of the largest hospital systems are Catholic "sponsored," translating to 1 in 9 hospital beds being in a Catholic hospital.
This, in turn, has led to a variety of cases, some of them tragic, where church doctrine has trumped medical needs. And while folk in the big cities may have a variety of options to shop between for hospitals[1], in more rural and smaller cities, there may be only one or two hospitals in easy reach, and both may be bound by Church limitations on sterilization, abortion, and birth control.
And this, in turn, has led to a California law suit by the ACLU, now joined in by the 41K-member California Medical Association, against the fifth largest hospital system in the nation, Dignity Health.
'The ACLU lawsuit stems from the case of a Dignity Health patient who was denied a tubal ligation. The patient’s physician agreed to perform the procedure during her cesarean section, but the hospital refused the doctor’s request, citing religious directives written by Catholic bishops that classify sterilization as “intrinsically evil.” The plaintiffs argue that forcing doctors to deny basic health care on the basis of religious objections creates a conflict between the medical well-being of patients and the directives of the Catholic hospital system. They also contend that withholding medical care for reasons unrelated to medicine is illegal in California.'
I will be interested to see where this goes.
—–
[1] Though those options may be illusory, if your physician only has admitting privileges in a few hospitals, or if your insurance is restricted in where it covers treatment, or if you cannot easily tell in advance (without grilling hospital staff) what religious-based limitations your care will be bound by.
Silly White Supremacists. Don't they know that Obama is out to advance the World Muslim Hegemony, not the World Jewish Hegemony? Get your Semitic religious straight, White Supremacists!
(Though I'll say this: some of the people who scoff at paranoids tallying up what percentage of SCOTUS is Jewish and would the be Jewish if Garland — who is, according to the accusation, Jewish — were approved, are some of the same people who were having kittens over what percentage of SCOTUS was Catholic.)
Making predictions based solely on population changes is a dangerous game, since other factors can intervene, but it's one of the few games we have. Based on birth rates in various communities and shifting world demographics …
… By 2050, Muslims are expected to be close to the same proportion of the world population — around 30% — as Christians will be. Both religions will be growing in numbers, largely in sub-Saharan Africa.
… In the US, Muslims will supplant Jews as the largest non-Christian sect, growing to about 10%, with Christianity dropping from about 3/4 to 2/3 of the population, and "Unaffiliateds" growing as a percentage.
… "Unaffiliateds" as a world population, will decrease in proportion, due to higher birth rates among most religious groups.
Whether this is good news, bad news, or just news to bear in mind is left as an exercise for the reader.
Studies continue to show that once you have an idea of causality — that A causes B, usually because you saw A happen and then B happen — it's deucedly difficult to counter that idea, even with later information that A and B are not related.
This makes a certain measure of evolutionary sense — if Thag ate that strange purple flower and then had convulsions and died, the tribe can't afford to keep experimenting to see if the flower is actually safe and Thag already had a fatal illness. Better to print "Purple Flower BAD!" in big red letters in everyone's brain and move on. Sure, that may mean that a useful food source is discarded, but, well, remember poor Thag.
Conversely, Grug was wearing a squirrel-skin hat when he took down that lion. Clearly squirrel-skin hats help against dangerous animals, and we should all wear them, even if that later leads to squirrel bites and rabies. (And if another tribe shows up that doesn't wear squirrel-skin hats? Well, clearly they are a danger and need to be wiped out …)
The same argument can be made for any superstitious ritual, folk remedy, ideological conclusion, etc. The first out the gate to establish a connection between A (buy/pray/do this) and B (good thing!/bad thing!) has a huge advantage. First impressions matter.
The cost, of course, is lost opportunities, lack of pursuit of something that could be helpful (cf. the anti-vax movement), economic loss (e.g., costly quack medications), or secondary harms (rhinos hunted to extinction for their horns, human groups oppressed).
How to combat that psychological quirk in humans? Simply countering the information doesn't necessarily help, especially if there's an emotional stake in it before or after ("I've always liked what candidate X says, so if candidate X tells an anecdote linking A to B, I don't care what some academic study laterclaims in disproving it"). Meta explanations about how to think critically appear to help, but only in a limited way. Human brains have lots of tricks that serve well enough to keep most of us alive; it's the gaps where they don't, or actually hurt us, that are hard to overcome.
Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions
Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute so…
Actually, the article doesn't really go into detail as to how the culture war against Dungeons & Dragons was won or lost, only that today D&D (and its fantasy mindset) have clearly won in culture, and fundamentalists touting the evils of FRPGs don't get segments on 60 Minutes any more.
Which is a good thing, of course.
I never got into RPGs until college, so, like all college students, I was able to deep dive into an indulgent, destructive lifestyle without my parents knowing. (Just kidding, Mom.) I was aware of the anti-D&D crowd, but more as something to mock.
I do have to wonder, beyond the War on D&D, if there was a certain degree to which this cultural lashing out contributed to the gradual discrediting evangelical Christianity in segments of the population. Here were arguably some of the best and brightest in schools pursuing a harmless entertainment (a lot fewer injuries than school sports, certainly), and preachers were publicly railing against their sinful acts and likely succumbing to demonic influence and madness. That sort of accusation doesn't get forgotten easily, and it's not unreasonable to think it would lead a lot of those kids to take the next pronouncements from said preachers a lot less seriously.
How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons
Thirty years ago, a war raged between the dorks who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the conservative parent groups who believed that gaming was debauched at best and Satanic at worst. Lives were ruined. People died. And now that war is over. I still can’t believe we won.
So, for any of those who take this seriously, here's an update on the Grave Communique issued by the Primates at the Anglican Communion Primates Meeting in England yesterday, in which they (more in sorrow than in anger, though, really, kind of peeved) said the Episcopal Church wasn't working and playing well with others and should go stand in a corner for three years.
(I.e., "Ew, they have gay cooties! If we tell them we are quite cross with them and send them to their room, then surely they will see the error of their ways and change their minds about ordaining and marrying gay people. Though we don't want to actually kick them out because they and England are the only ones funding this whole Anglican thang.")
In point of fact, the Primates, and the Primate Meeting, don't have any legal (canonical) basis for doing such a thing, the wording of their communique notwithstanding. We don't have a Pope, the Primates are not a curia, etc.
But that said, to the extent that the Anglican Communion is sort of a social thing (at least amongst the folk dressed in various shades of purple and magenta), then this particular contretemps indicates that those social relationships are strained, and the wording is such that the larger clique in the room is stamping its feet rather loudly. Whether this models what Christ intended for the Church is in the eye of the beholder.
Here, via Jim are some good (IMO) things to read on the subject (if you are interested in Anglican polity from an Episcopalian perspective, which, to be sure, is kind of an interesting but narrow fandom).
