The Separation of Church And Christmas

The article below is well-motivated and devout but it is theologically naive. Both Sunday (the day of the sun) and Christmas were originally pagan celebrations so one more or less is surely trivial in a Christian life. And we should note Paul's advice in Romans 14:

"One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord"

So specific days do not matter. Only your attitude to the Lord matters. So a devout pastor might well transfer his Sabbath observances to Saturdays when Sunday is inconvenient. A holy Saturday has at least as much scriptural warrant as Sunday

Christmas is a bit tricky for Christians this year. Because of the cyclical nature of the Georgian calendar, Christmas Day will fall on a Sunday. In response to this periodic quirk, many churches are canceling weekly worship services because of Christmas.

This is not satire. The New York Times reports that, according to a survey by Lifeway Research, only 61 percent of nondenominational evangelical pastors will conduct church services on Christmas Day.

The Times article quotes Lutheran Pastor Laura Bostrom saying, “For me, there was a theological decision but also a practical decision,” in deciding not to conduct worship services on Christmas.

Bostrom recalled that very few people attended Sunday services on December 25, 2016, the last time Christmas fell on a Sunday. According to the Times, it didn’t seem right to her “to get home at 9:30 and have everyone wake up and say we have to do this again for such low attendance.”

The Times also quotes StoneBridge Christian Church Executive Pastor Mitch Chitwood, who told the newspaper, “We have to meet people where they are. And where they are on Christmas Day is usually at home in their pajamas.”

Nothing in the Bible instructs us to celebrate Christmas on December 25 (or any day at all for that matter), but that is what Christians have done for nearly 1,700 years. In contrast, we have been called to gather and observe the Sabbath, which is Sunday in Christendom, for roughly 3,500 years.

The net net is that this year, an alarming number of Protestant ministers are consciously forsaking the Lord’s Day, prescribed by God when he gave Moses the 10 Commandments, because they fear low attendance. Is it just me or does this sound nuts?

Christianity in America faces plenty of threats, most coming from the political Left, and ideologues who despise God and the people who worship him. But this particular threat - canceling worship services because Christmas happens to fall on a Sunday - is coming from the Protestant clergy itself.

This year, Christmas Eve services will be held on Saturday night, and church pews will be filled with people holding tiny candles and singing Silent Night, wanting to experience this connection with the Christian faith. But on Sunday, Christmas Day, many people will want to spend their morning opening presents, precluding their attendance at Sunday worship services.

This is unsurprising. People go to church when they want to go to church, and the fact that they go at all is a good thing. But pastors have a higher calling which presumably includes leading their congregation in abiding by God’s commandments and millennia of biblical instruction. Since when did we start cancelling church just because of low attendance on a particular Sunday?

I’ve been going to church long enough to know that attendance ebbs and flows. It typically dips around Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day and other holidays that entice people to take long weekends away from home.

As a boy growing up in rural Minnesota, I remember church attendance dropping off a bit when the Vikings were playing an early game on the road against an NFL rival on the east coast. The opening of deer season was also cause for decreased church attendance. In spite of these distractions, we still had church on Sunday.

Church ministers have a difficult job. It’s not easy being shepherd to a flock of Christians, and parishioners need a lot of pastoral care so they’re never really off the clock. This includes preparing for Sunday services, which is labor intensive for a lot of churches. Whether they be small mission churches that share a physical space for services or mega-churches with sophisticated audio/video systems and thousands of chairs, it’s hard work.

But if there is one duty above all that pastors are called to do, it is to conduct Sunday worship services. Of course there are legitimate reasons to cancel church; blizzards, ice storms and natural disasters can and do result in church closures from time to time. Arbitrary government edicts also closed a lot of churches during the COVID pandemic.

Local pastors aren’t responsible for the appetites of power hungry politicians any more than they are responsible for the weather or the rhythm of the calendar. But they are responsible for how they react to such events. Canceling worship services because Christmas falls on a Sunday drips with irony and must surely delight critics of Christianity. They are laughing at us because a subset of Christian ministers is doing their work for them.

Christmas won’t fall on a Sunday again until 2033. Over the next 11 years, more churches may come to realize the importance of conducting Sunday worship despite the fact that it coincides with celebrating the birth of Christ. They might if enough people have this conversation with their pastors.

https://townhall.com/columnists/scotthogenson/2022/12/21/the-separation-of-church-and-christmas-n2617376

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SPLC Targets Conservative Jewish Journalist, Suggesting He Supports White Nationalism

In the past two months, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has turned its ire to Josh Hammer, the opinion editor at Newsweek, suggesting he supports white nationalism and should be a pariah in polite society. In three articles featuring Hammer, the leftist SPLC repeatedly mentions white nationalism but omits the fact that Hammer is a religiously traditional Jew from a Jewish background.

“Newsweek Embraces the Anti-Democracy Hard Right,” ran the first SPLC headline Nov. 4. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael Edison Hayden slammed Hammer for publishing conservative opinion pieces, noting that Newsweek’s op-ed page published what the SPLC condemned as “bigoted views, like appearing to call for the state to deny adults access to trans-affirming medical care and supporting a ban on all legal immigration into the U.S.”

Hayden went on to condemn Hammer’s support for Blake Masters, Arizona’s unsuccessful Republican candidate for U.S. Senate this year, asserting that Masters “emerged as a favored candidate of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other admirers of fascism.”

The article does not once mention Hammer’s Jewish faith or heritage.

Similarly, the SPLC attacked Hammer in a Dec. 11 story about the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala. The organization drew attention to a small interaction between “a Hatewatch reporter” and Hammer, in which the reporter asked the Newsweek editor if he knew Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigration blog VDARE, whom the article describes as a “white nationalist.”

According to the SPLC, Hammer asked, “He’s right here, right now?” and added, “I didn’t even know he was here! I’m going to say ‘Hi.’”

The SPLC claims Hammer expressed “excitement” about the “infamous white nationalist publisher,” but the article does not include a video that would demonstrate just how “excited” Hammer may have been. The article goes on, however, to claim that when the reporter identified his SPLC affiliation to Hammer, the Newsweek editor “quickly claimed he did not know Peter Brimelow and left.”

Again, the story did not mention Hammer’s Jewish faith or heritage.

The SPLC’s Hatewatch ran another article, “Newsweek’s Place in Radical Right on Display at Gala,” on Dec. 14. This article mentioned that the New York Young Republican Club published a special guest list including the Austrian Freedom Party, which former Nazi Party SS officers founded. The article then recounted the claim about Hammer’s excitement about Brimelow, and raised questions about “Newsweek’s legitimacy.”

Once more, the SPLC omitted Hammer’s Jewish faith and heritage.

Although Hammer is a conservative, Newsweek’s opinion section publishes a broad range of political commentary from both the Left and the Right. For instance, Newsweek published dueling views on Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” one highlighting the “throttling of conservative voices” and the other claiming that “Twitter suppressed a story that wasn’t damaging.” One of Hammer’s deputy opinion editors, Jason Fields, suggested to his “liberal brothers and sisters” that they may want to leave the country in an article claiming that “It May Be Too Late to Save America.”

Laura Goldberg, founder and principal of LBG Public Relations, sent The Daily Signal a statement on behalf of Hammer and Newsweek.

“Josh Hammer does not share nor endorse the views of those published in the opinion section of Newsweek, nor those who participate in events he attends,” she wrote. “Josh Hammer has denounced white supremacist and antisemitic views, such as in a recent podcast episode where he vehemently rejected the views of Nick Fuentes. Any attempt to assign these views to Josh is without merit.”

“Newsweek’s mission is to be a platform for diverse voices and Josh’s work supports that mission,” Goldberg added.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director at the Coalition for Jewish Values, condemned the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attacks on Hammer. Critics such as Menken argue that the SPLC brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups,” putting them on a “hate map” with the Ku Klux Klan.

My book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” lays out the history of the SPLC and how its program to monitor the Klan and other white supremacist groups, Klanwatch, morphed into Hatewatch, the project that attacked Hammer and manages the SPLC’s “hate group” accusations. A former SPLC staffer has claimed that the SPLC’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking northern liberals.”

“The SPLC’s hate map was used to commit a terrorist act over a decade ago, yet the organization continues as it was—targeting conservatives, whitewashing Islamic terrorism, making Jews less safe,” Menken said, referencing a terrorist attack at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Family Research Council.

The rabbi also faulted the SPLC for having “repeatedly partnered with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas that accuses Jews of ‘Islamophobia’ when they oppose terrorism.”

“That the SPLC would target Josh Hammer should surprise no one: He’s both a conservative and a Jew, and the SPLC has evinced bias against both,” Menken said.

The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on why its Hatewatch repeatedly omitted Hammer’s Jewish faith and heritage.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/12/20/splc-targets-conservative-jewish-journalist-suggesting-he-supports-white-nationalism

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Woke Comic Books

Did you know that Superman's son is bisexual? So is Batman's sidekick, Robin, and lots of other superheroes created by Marvel and DC Comics.

The author of the bisexual Superman story says gay people write to say they "burst into tears" when they saw that the characters had become gay.

While it's nice to make LGBTIQ+ people feel more welcome in the world, not everyone is happy.

They became bisexual "out of nowhere!" complains comic creator Eric July in my new video. "They make it seem as if the only way that you can relate to a character is because you're gay and that character's gay, which is nonsense!"

July, who is Black, says you don't have to share the same traits as a superhero to enjoy the character. His favorite was Batman. "I ain't got Bruce Wayne money, and I'm not rich! And I'm certainly not white."

July points out that there have long been gay comic superheroes, like Northstar. But what's new and dumb is that DC and Marvel are changing the identity of established characters.

A new Batman is Black. There's a new Spiderman-like character, except she's a lesbian who uses a wheelchair. Iron Man is now a Black teenage girl. Really.

Maybe this is progress.

"When I was a kid," I say to July, "all the characters were white. It's a good thing more are non-white."

"But they've been just reduced to being an item to pander to certain audiences that aren't really buying into it," July responds.

No, they sure aren't. Marvel and DC had the bestselling graphic novels. Now the best sellers are from Japan. Often, they aren't even in color, yet they outsell Marvel and DC. The American-made books aren't even in the top 20.

"They turned off their audience by ... hyper emphasizing the social justice element." says July.

Marvel made its evil character M.O.D.A.A.K. resemble Donald Trump. They hired leftist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to create a Captain America series. Coates made the villain, Red Skull, a bizarre version of Jordan Peterson.

Instead of just saving lives, today's comic superheroes lead protests. The cover of a Superman comic shows Superman's son leading a school "strike for climate."

It's so stupid! Superman, with all his powers, could solve climate change all by himself. But now he holds a protest sign.

"These guys are writing material for their peers," says July. "So even if the Son of Superman falls completely off the charts like it did, right? It's still a win in their mind."

I thought that capitalism would be a break on the silliest of the woke world. But in this case, they're just sabotaging their own projects. The bisexual Superman series was cancelled after 18 issues.

Marvel came up with two not-so-super heroes named "Snowflake" and "Safespace." Really.

"Snowflake is nonbinary and goes by they-them," says the writer in Marvel's video introducing the characters. Fan reaction to the preview video was pretty bad. Marvel decided not to release Snowflake and Safespace.

I wanted to ask Marvel and DC why they seem fine with losing market share. Aren't their investors angry? Neither company would talk to me.

At least their stupidity gives new opportunities to independent creators like Eric July. He's raised $3.7 million to fund a new superhero comic book, "Isom."

The market will decide if people want to pay for new characters like him.

But July understands something that Marvel and DC apparently no longer do: Capitalism means giving people what they want.

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2022/12/21/woke-comic-books-n2617383

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More Racism from the Non-Racist Left

The Left, of course, shouts “racism” shriller than anyone, but their actions speak much louder than their big mouths. The loudest voice is always the one people hear. But that doesn’t mean it speaks the truth. Look at what people do, not what they say. There is the true measure, and that measure, for the Left, is undeniable racism.

Rachel Maddow recently made the following observation: The GOP wants to "go back to the good old days where everybody was the same color."

Rachel, which was the party of slavery and Jim Crow? But you say we don't want a color-blind society?

No, the Democratic Party, the Left, does not want that. And they are doing everything they can to prevent it, to divide America along racial, and other, lines. The Left’s “identity politics” is inherently racist, and thus they deal with people differently based upon skin color. But such is the source of much of their political power, and if they started treating everybody equally, instead of treating some groups differently, they would immediately lose much of their political influence. And they know it.

Maddow's statement is demonstrably false on several grounds. First, America never had a society "where everybody was the same color," and even in whatever timeframe she is trying to reference, nobody thought such a ludicrous thing. America has always been multi-racial, and minority races were, indeed, considered second-class citizens for much of our history.

That was wrong, but it happened in every multi-racial society in history, and is still the rule, not the exception, around the world today. America isn't unique in its discriminatory history, except that the United States led the world in realizing that discrimination IS wrong and that “all men are created equal.” It took us awhile to get there—overturning thousands of years of historical traditions and customs rarely happens overnight, the rest of the world right now is proof of that—but we did, and far more quickly than Leftist cesspools who have never arrived. Places like Communist China still have gross human rights abuses, and always will, because they ARE Leftist elitists who believe some people, by nature, are superior to others. Go to China and let them call you a "barbarian" or "hairy foreign devil," which is exactly what they think of you, and the way they will treat you.

But treating people unfairly is called "discrimination." We thought we agreed that people should not be judged "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But we do not. Conservatives believe that; liberals do not.

Our Congress passed (and a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it) the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law made segregation and discrimination illegal in America. The idea was, indeed, that everyone should be equal in the eyes of the law, that we wouldn't treat people differently based on their skin color. That remains the law of the land. Some people today (white, black, brown, yellow, red, purple, green, polka-dot) violate that law, but then, some people don't obey our laws against murder, either. We will never cure evil from the human heart.

But, it would indeed be very nice if every citizen in America were, legally, treated as if we were all the same color, instead of giving special privileges to people BECAUSE of their color. White people used to get those privileges before the Civil Rights Act. Again, we call that "discrimination" and some of us now believe that such is wrong. But, from their actions (not their words), Leftists obviously do not believe it is wrong because they continue to give special privileges, or (more often) stay completely away from (see Martha's Vineyard) people of non-white skin color. Who are the racists here?

As is common among hypocrites, Leftists point fingers and shout “racism” in order to cover their own. And when they are exposed, hell’s fury doesn’t equal theirs.

Racism isn't defined by who can shout "racist!" the loudest. Nobody can outshout a left-wing bigot. Racism is defined by actions, and it isn't the Republican Party who is attempting to identify Americans by color today. Yes, it would be very nice if we could have a society where all citizens were treated as if we were the same color, all treated like Americans, all given the same rights and privileges based on law and not on color.

But that would destroy the Democratic Party and the Left.

Sometimes these Leftists--by mistake--expose what they actually think, and Rachel Maddow said we don't want a color-blind society. This is not the least surprising to anyone who listens to what they really say and observe what they really do. The Democratic Party hasn't changed in 200 years. They still believe they are superior to black people and that blacks cannot survive without their help. There is nothing more racist than that.

We need to unite on culture, on all of us being Americans, and quit dividing the country along racial and ethnic lines as the Democratic Party is doing. Joe Biden, by letting all the riffraff of the world across our borders, will continue the racial destruction of the nation, and further, there will soon be no more “America” because there will be nothing that unites us as a people. This is totally in harmony with what Leftism wants.

https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2022/12/21/more-racism-from-the-non-racist-left-n2617394

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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