I saw this and couldn’t resist posting it. Who could argue with it? Equality means equal treatment for all, not only for some. See what happens when that ‘tolerance’ the Left insists on never includes tolerating what they don’t like?
If there was a vote in America and the question was:
“Would you support Bruce Caitlyn Jenner or Tim Tebow if you had to vote for one?” And, by the way, I’m quite sure Jenner supports Tebow’s Christianity though many others do not. They can get really rough.
So…a young man who lives his faith openly is ridiculed but a man who becomes a woman in public, with every step chronicled for all the world to see, big money for reality shows on this change, etc., is honored. Personally, I don’t care what Jenner does and I’m sorry for the apparent pain he’s suffered all these years trying to live like a man. But I wish he’d do it in private, among his own family and friends. Maybe Tebow ought to live his faith less on his sleeve, too? I think he’s a great example to young people, but others think Jenner is.
So, if we held that vote, we know Jenner would win by a landslide……..Let’s talk about WHY.
On the Comments page yesterday, Imp and I were talking about what’s wrong with America. Among the scientific discoveries, technological advances, etc (some of which includes Jenner’s ability to become a woman, let’s face it), we’re doing really, really badly in our culture… so many people are on drugs and booze and kids don’t respect their folks and doing well is frowned down upon in school, and name calling is rampant through social media and in Congress, and …well, you know how bad things are getting………when I saw the image above, I thought I’d post it and we could talk…….WHAT IS GOING ON?
P.S.: After I wrote this post yesterday, I watched five minutes of CNN’s Anthony Bourdain last night and I KNOW he’s a debauched kind of guy, and I know it’s ‘cable’ (which is a ridiculous excuse because almost everything anybody watches these days IS cable so it shouldn’t be immune to smut; kids ARE seeing it) but he said “Balls, piss and dick” within those five minutes. On a FOOD SHOW. “Oh, a food show, I get the language! “what?” If WE say we’re offended, we’re backwards and idiots and bigots; he’s ‘cool’ today, it’s COOL and HIP to use language that wasn’t quite so acceptable not that many years ago. This isn’t going away. I’m offended, though I don’t mind it in person AS much….isn’t anybody else?
z
geeez2014
GeeeZ .... 
Now, first of all, I’m not a person of faith. My views on religion are complex and self-contradictory, much like the Bible. I’ve read that book, twice, along with the Qur’an, many parts of the Bhagavad Gita, excerpts and synopses of The Tripitaka and Mahayana Sutras, and other texts and holy scriptures.
My bottom line is that when distilled down to their essences, most religions come up with the same basic tenets: do what you like so long as it doesn’t interfere with the ability of others to do what pleases them; respect your elders for their wisdom; care for the infirm and the children; and avoid the sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, and uselessness.
My grandmother talked with Jesus every day. Carried on long conversations with him. Talked to her flowers, too. And she was perhaps the most giving, caring, loving, nurturing woman who ever walked the planet. The woman who has shared life and domicile with me for 55 years is running neck and neck with her for that title. She’s an old-fashioned, traditional, by-the-book Catholic.
I envy them both their quiet, uncomplicated, unabashed sureness that their faiths, although quite different in many ways, provide. Their beliefs afford them tolerance, trust, charity, hope, kindness, geniality, confidence . . . all the good things that help us through this tricky and dangerous business of being human on a planet with entirely too many humans.
Though commitment to one belief system over another is a state I haven’t yet achieved, I know one thing for certain: I’d much rather live in a society operating on the concepts established by Buddha, or The Beatitudes, or even the first half of the Qur’an (not the later surahs) than one in which “what’s in it for me?” is the question and self-gratification and smug complacency are the answer.
Long ago, around 1952 or so, a teacher in junior high school taught us that a nation is defined by people living together with common culture, common language, common religion, common goals, and common borders. Just don’t see that today in what has become of America. As my mother (who never attended any church in her entire adult life) liked to say, “Most of our troubles began when they kicked God out of the classrooms.”
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Well, I must differ with bocopro on things theological.
Christianity, if called a religion, is unlike others.
The difference in Christianity is that it is not compatible with other religions.
It doesn’t call for the death of other religionists.
It just insists that faith in Christ alone is rewarded with access to the Father.
No other path exists.
Inquisition and other abominations and non-Christian behavior aside, Christianity does not call for the death or punishment of those who don’t believe similarly.
“Most of our troubles began when they kicked God out of the classrooms.”
How true.
This link it to a set of graphs that depict that: http://heartofwisdom.com/blog/when-prayer-was-taken-out-of-school/
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In reading my reply to bocopro, I realized that I said something that did NOT apply to what he wrote. Bocopro did not anything negative about Christianity.
I somewhat agree that a society based on “good religious” teaching might be better than none at all.
A fear of a God who punishes wrongdoers or a hope in a God who rewards good doers would stabilize that society.
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Z: I’m a bit picky perhaps, “but a man who becomes a woman in public” does not describe Jenner.
Portrays a woman in public might be more accurate.
It seems that beyond still having the same chromosomes he had at birth, he balked at having his dangly part removed.
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“I think tolerance is one of those notions that I call ‘notions of disorientation’ — of course it points toward a true problem; of course, the way we use this term in the West, it also mystifies things. For example, I made the simple test: When Martin Luther King, half a century ago, was fighting against racism — for the rights of the blacks — he practically never used the term ‘tolerance.’ We use it today. Why? Because we live in what I call a post-political society: The main problems we have are perceived as cultural problems and so on, and so everything becomes a matter of tolerance.
[But] if you look closely at it, tolerance is a very suspicious notion. It means, yes, ‘let’s tolerate each other,’ but it also means, ‘don’t harass me,’ which means ‘remain at a proper distance from me.’ If you scratch the surface you will also discover that the ‘other’ that more liberal multi-culturalists are ready to tolerate are (what I ironically refer to as) the ‘decaffeinated other.’
You know, we have products deprived of their poisonous substance; decaf coffee, beer without alcohol, fat-free chocolate and so on — and it seems to me that people also want ‘decaffeinated other’; this mythic, holistic ‘good other’ and so on and so on. So tolerance is for me a very confused, disorienting term. I don’t like it so much. I don’t want tolerance, I want military spirit; struggle — but for a good cause…. The only way to light is courageously confronting darkness.”
To my mind it is the nature of that confrontation that is a key question, but I certainly agree that a bland and confused notion of ‘tolerance’ is not strong enough to sustain a society that can deal equitably and compassionately with today’s problems. – Slavoj Zizek
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Lately I’ve been watching “The Brady Bunch” at night on the Me-TV station. It’s corny but it’s a kind of tonic.
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Yeah, Ed . . . having read the Qur’an (in English, of course), my impression is that the first part of it, roughly half, is little more than overt plagiarism of the Torah and parts of the New Testament. That’s logical, of course, because everyone in the region would have known about Abram and Sarai and Yshmael and Isaac, and even Mary and Jesus and Joseph. So Mo couldn’t get away with revising solid historical fact.
The second half contains surahs which abrogate or provide loopholes for much of the good and decent advice and counsel of the first part. IOW, on first glance the little handbook appears to be a sort of stream-of-consciousness knock-off of Judaeo-Christian scriptures presented in no particular order, thereby making it timeless (a neat editorial strategem for keeping it from becoming stale and time-locked).
Christianity went through its bloodthirsty phase with Torquemada and forced conversions and all that. It became bloated and corrupt, power-mad and fervor intoxicated. Unlike Islam, however, it grew up, and much the way Jesus turned JHWH from a vengeful, jealous god into a loving, forgiving one, the Reformation turned it into a reasonable and reliable tool for social support, sanctuary, redemption, and all the other things people long for.
Lamentable that after all those centuries of unnecessary pain and suffering, people finally got it right, and for a happy handful of decades, it leveled the playing field and made life better for the little guy who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But now Western culture is abandoning it, like a town that grew up around an airport beCAUSE of the airport, then shuts the damned thing down because of the noise.
And speaking of things which are incompatible with other things, the epitome is fervent or radical Islam. It is especially incompatible with the American way of life (the original) and completely counter to the whole idea of individuality, free speech, and just about everything else in the Constitution.
Oh, and Jenner is about as much a hero as I am concise and succinct.
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bocopro, the truth is you can never really ‘force’ ‘conversion,’ can you. People are either touched and taken by it or not. And being touched and taken is an utter joy, something I NEVER expected.
FJ..THANK YOU FOR THAT….that guy’s brilliant. I so agree. Funny, Sunday night, I was talking to a dear rabbi friend and mentioned how I thought the name of one of the holocaust museums in L.A., “Museum of Tolerance,” was a terrible name. I told him I had much more than ‘tolerance’ for the Jews; I love many of them, love their history which has informed my faith so strongly, and think tolerance is demeaning. He rather agreed.
Z-Man! Hi there! I’ve said this here before; I LOVE to watch I LOVE LUCY on TV, and I have all the Father Knows Best series on DVD, which I found slow and dull when I first started watching them again about 3 years ago, and then I watched every one, completely taken in by the goodness, the politeness, the love for family, the DECENCY…it was absolutely a SALVE for my soul in these times. I’m 100% with you…. (I do draw the line at Gilligan’s Island)!!!
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Yeah, when my grandmother (everybody called her “Mom,” so I did too since she was raising me and my divorced mother was more like my older sister) talked to Jesus, I’d ask her: “Mom, when you talk to him, does he ever answer?”
“Yes, he speaks to me in many ways.”
“So, you actually hear him.”
“Yes, his voice is in all that I see and hear.”
“But I never hear him, even when I’m standing right next to you.”
“You will, boy. When you’re ready, you’ll hear him.”
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ED, Ed, Ed………I have so often talked here at GeeeZ about the “Graph” I wish I could do that would probably show when God was kicked out of schools (No, he’s never been actually KICKED OUT OF SCHOOLS, children CAN pray in their silent moments as secularists and libs would interject here (and have in the past),
Anyway: there had to be a clear connection with prayer (and, obviously, stronger belief than we have now in kids) and their behavior, and the behavior of their parents.
These graphs reveal that clearly if all their data is correct, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
Can that be an accident, that correlation? I doubt that……..Personally, I know so MANY changed lives from finding faith, their hearts turning to Christ and amazing things happening, that these graphs just speak volumes….
Faith is a private, kind of miraculous thing that happens to some.
Re Jenner, I think my readers got what I meant… no, technically, he has not turned into a woman. But, I can’t be that technical or detailed when I write…. I think the point was made….!! But, thanks.
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bocopro, your grandmother was right. I never thought that would happen to me, believe me!!!
And, no, one doesn’t usually actually audibly ‘hear’ a voice 🙂 (Just to be clear, I said ‘usually’, folks…)
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By the way, Armenians were forced to become Muslims during the genocide of 1.5 million of them in Turkey………..in the very early 1900’s…I hadn’t realized that until recently, though I have read a TON on the subject; novels and non-fiction.
Most did not convert, many stood up to the deaths promised if they didn’t, but some with children did ‘convert’ to keep alive ………. returning to the Christianity of their country, the first Christian nation in the world.
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Z: Funny, I’ll take Gilligan over Brady every day 🙂
And about Jenner, I know you know. I just couldn’t help making the point. Sorry.
God speaks to me in my head. I know it’s Him, because He’s pointing out my unchristian behavior or thought or correcting me. And I wouldn’t do that. 🙂
And we both know He does that with His Word also.
Bocoopro, since the Inquisition et al don’t align with the written Word, I discount it as Christianity and attribute it to a political usurpation (similar as “moderate” Muslims claim Jihadis do with Islam, the distinction being that Jihadis can back their behavior with those later surahs.
I must confess, I never finished the Koran. It was so outrageous that I quit as I felt I was wasting my time. I never thought that I should be learning it to refute it as AOW and others (perhaps you) did.
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Evil has been defined as the absence of good. When goodness is not in residence, absence of goodness takes over. Like a literal doughnut hole – you remove the doughnut and absence of doughnut is what’s left. Your graphic is perfect!
FJ – thought provoking quote. Makes me realize how passive and unproductive ‘tolerance’ is. Until, of course, the rabid fight tooth and nail for ‘tolerance.’ 🙂
I can’t see how Jesus ‘turned’ God from a jealous to a loving being, etc. Jesus was God’s way of showing His characteristics in human form, a form we could see and touch and identify with. The love, the compassion, the healing, the outreach, the generosity, the violent rebuke of religious hypocrisy, and the ultimate consignment of the wicked to a place of ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ That’s Jesus.
This Jesus is the culmination of God’s rescue plan for mankind whom He loved and greatly desired to give a way back to His kingdom. That rescue plan was well underway in the O.T., promised to our first mother, showing the same love, compassion and outreach in His judicious removal of certain human cancers on the landscape, and in His long-suffering tolerance of delaying judgment to give evil men plenty of opportunities to repent. The God who yearned for people to “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression… Let us reason together, says the LORD.”
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What bothered me most about the Qur’an, besides the schizophrenic attitude shift in the later surahs, was the repetition. And I agree that the Inquisition had no more to do with Christianity than ISIS has to do with Islam.
Were you and I reasonably intelligent and educated Hindus in the 15th century, we’d very likely be saying the same things about Christianity that many of us say about Islam today.
All that said, however, I still firmly believe that the world would be better off if it woke up tomorrow thoroughly cleansed of the insidious virus that “moderate” Muslims have allowed their “religion” to become.
Soplice.
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Ed, I’d take anything over Gilligan or Brady 🙂
And yes, of course we ‘hear from Him’….in many ways….
I remember reading the early pages of the koran and thinking how truly beautiful it was….then the truly ugly stuff started. All explicitly done in the NAME OF ALLAH….
I don’t remember much evil done IN THE NAME OF JESUS’ TRUE words…only words interpreted to further along earthly greed and control.
Baysider…yes, it’s certainly is not ‘turning God’ into anything or anybody. That’s pointed out and explained so many, many times in the New Testament, isn’t it…and foreshadowed in the Old…… thanks for that input.
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bocopro “And I agree that the Inquisition had no more to do with Christianity than ISIS has to do with Islam.”
A lot of people think that. I do not. And that’s all I’ll say on that here at the blog pertaining to that precise point. Well, I’ll say this and hope we can move on; reading the New Testament shows differently……..just had to say that…. please let’s get off this now.
I keep praying for moderate muslims to wake up…I hear many good things but not enough “en masse” and not loud enough….but it IS coming. Read any Zuhdi Jasser, for example. There are more, but I’ve heard him speak ,years ago, and he’s excellent.
A reminder of better times in America for all of us is, simply, before 9/11…when who CARED if a Muslim family moved in next door? They were probably kind, clean, nice. It’s only since the push, the demands, the insults to our own beliefs and very lifestyle, after 9/11, that things became suspiciously bad………WHERE are the moderates? They’re either too prideful to admit the truth of the evil Allah propounds or scared…
Please, everyone…let’s talk about the post!
Amazing that Jenner is Lionized and Tebow’s mocked incessantly……..says a lot about our culture..particularly when we consider Ed’s excellent graphs in his link.
thanks, everyone!
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I just heard that Pres Obama compared the treatment of gays in Kenya to Jim Crow and other early racism in America…….I’m not sure he included the word “early” …
He never misses an opportunity to highlight anything negative in our past, does he.
And why other countries must obey HIM or honor HIS viewpoints is beyond me.
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He’s always about promoting homosexuality. I wonder if his homosexuality ever conflicted with his Muslim upbringing. And before that’s challenged, please google Bathhouse Barry.
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Parallel story: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/07/17/inside-editions-zoey-tur-wants-to-see-ben-shapiro-curb-stomped/
On a panel discussing a courage award to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, Ben Shapiro said “The entire discussion is whether we are embracing mental illness and delusion as a society.” @6:14 on the tape. You’ll like the graphic, too.
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I was watching the History Channel a couple of days ago and they were discussing photos that have been taken of other planets and with more coming in all the time. It was interesting that the ages of some of them are much older than our Earth, putting some of our beliefs from the Bible in question. They didn’t mention that at all, just raised questions about some of the ancient carvings in caves, etc. depicting alien looking “people.” There are a lot of structures and monuments around the world that are unexplained, too, like Stonehenge . They covered the possibility of previous visits by aliens. It was very interesting. I only wish we could see what is in store fifty or a hundred years into the future from more pics being taken today but will take many years to arrive here.
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Bay: I love that statement: “Tur is a biological male who identifies as a woman. He is also a special correspondent for Inside Edition.”
Jenner’s voice is so masculine, Scherie was surprised they didn’t fix that too.
Tur looks like a guy in a dress. Which he is.
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Yes, he is. When he challenged Shapiro on genetics earlier on the tape, Ben quickly asked “what about your genetics, sir?” and was told if he didn’t put a lid on it he’d go home in an ambulance while Tur tightly gripped his neck. (Ben’s a bitty guy – so coming from an actual male this was a threat, and on public TV and all.)
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Tur committed an assault when he threatened Shapiro; he committed a battery when he laid hands on Shapiro. I understand Shapiro filed charges. It will be interesting to see which facility Sheriffs Deputies place Tur after his conviction: men’s correctional, or women’s correctional.
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Mustang, it would be, but I’ll bet everyone bends over backwards to avoid that.
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