I never, never, ever again want to hear liberals complaining about a Republican President doing anything recreational. Holy shit.
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The more you liberalize a church, the smaller its membership gets. I say "liberalize" there but it would be more accurate to say "liberalize a church's policies on homogamy and sodomy".
When a church begins to perform gay marriages, it shows that the church has basically abandoned any sense of behavioral standards. It's no longer a place where you worship God; you certainly don't go there to be forgiven for sins because this is a church which no longer recognizes the concept of sin. Such a church becomes a hollow shell of a church, a place which has removed all the inconvenient bits of Christianity and allows people to call themselves Christians without having to, y'know, actually having to be Christians.
And the people who are there to worship God, and not merely to be seen at worship--the people who are actually devout--they understand the difference, and they vote with their feet. They find other churches, other denominations, and go there rather than continue to support an empty vessel.
At the same time that the devout are leaving, there is not a similar influx of homosexuals and liberals, because those demographics are much more likely to be atheist, or else regard organized religion as something for hicks. The result is a church where the leadership thinks it's opened its doors to be inclusive, but instead has merely driven away the people who formerly supported the church.
You can say, "We want to be inclusive!" but the people you are trying to include aren't interested regardless of circumstance. Certainly there are very, very few people out there who say to themselves, "Well, I'd be a Christian if only they would perform marriage ceremonies for gays," especially compared to the number of people who expect their church to take stand against homogamy.
It's a losing proposition, and every church that's tried it has experienced the same result.
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Methinks John Scalzi doth protest too much. In a series of tweets, Scalzi tries to convince people that he really doesn't hate conservatives, but just the "assholes who use conservatism to hide what nasty people they are" (scare quotes mine), because conservatism is evil-nasty-yucky-mean so of course it's a convenient facade for assholes. I mean, if you're not an asshole, obviously you wouldn't be a conservative, right?
The tweets reveal what he really thinks of conservatives and conservatism. He's entitled to his opinion, of course, but I am equally entitled to say, "You know, I don't think I'll buy that book of his because he doesn't like people like me." (Okay, that's a decision I made quite some time ago, but it is reinforced by this latest.)
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We had enough thunderstorm activity overnight that I'm wondering if it's going to be hot and humid today, or just humid.
Forecast is for upper eighties and low ninties, humid, etc--summer weather which has, for the last month, been mostly absent, but of course school has started--but I happened to catch a weather report on TV that added the caveat that if we got a lot of rain that might change things.
Regardless, we got enough rain that I'm not going to be able to cut the grass today. I was looking at the grass yesterday and realized that while it's sort of shaggy it's not really long. It needs cutting, but not badly, and I think it can wait a few more days.
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I've hit a kind of overload with the bad news: Russia, the economy, ISIS, ebola, etcetera. I'm getting fatigued from it all, unable to summon any enthusiasm for commenting on any of it.
Especially the economy--what can I say about it that I haven't already said? It sucks, it's not going to get better until and unless shit's allowed to break, but since the people who would be hurt most by that are the richest and most powerful people in the country, it's not going to be allowed to break until and unless it can't do otherwise.
I was a little kid in the Carter years, but I was old enough to get a sense for what the times felt like, and these times feel approximately the same. What do you do?
Put your nose to the grindstone and don't look up, I suppose. *sigh*