Month: March 2024

Letter to the American Church?

As I mentioned last November, Eric Metaxas wrote Letter to the American Church, asking believers to exercise their faith in the ballot box and in action. Metaxas juxtaposes the American church with the German church up to and during the Third Reich. I have a friend who thinks Metaxas is offbase.

Isn’t what Metaxas is saying just hyperbole? If not, then is the call upon the church loud enough?

The debate on what the church should do is a perennial one. We’re called to exercise our faith and we should put our faith into action. What is too far?

Lewis on politics and faith

So politics and faith:

“The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had — and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a ‘great man,’ but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers. The ‘Gospels’ come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made…

“Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster…

“The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.”

– The Screwtape Letters, 23

China unleashed

The CCP has been sending its young men to “invade” the U.S. southern border. A strange thing since we don’t know the benefit to the Party. These are men in their 20s, which would suggest they may not be married and are therefore free of reliance on the family and on the Chinese government. I don’t know if the Right is correct here. It may not be a military action.

But one thing is for sure: Chinese culture is pulling ahead. While our youth (Gen Z) are drawn into the use of China’s TikTok and other social media, their youth are studying to be engineers. It’s really shameful. Seeing some man on the street videos recently, I am disheartened that we can’t get it together. Gen Z know a lot about what they should speak, but not how.

Other events, like the Chinese selling fentanyl and the spy balloon crossing the continent, point toward the Biden administration either not giving a crap, being careless, or worst of all, doing these things purposefully. I don’t want to say that last one is true, but these actions are evil (fentanyl) or provocative (balloon). One asks why the Chinese are proliferating a drug that is deadly. Wouldn’t it be better to keep your junkies coming back instead of killing them?

It just goes to show that the friendly Chinese are not that.

Musk on wokeness

Still reading Isaacson’s Elon Musk:

“Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool. Trying to shut down Dave Chappelle, come on, man, that’s crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate and no forgiveness? At its heart wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armed with false virtue.”

I would add that it is stifling; can’t breathe.

China EV threat

I am continually flummoxed about the U.S.’s uncommitted actions against the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions here, namely its in-roads to the U.S. technology markets. Now we may have taken notice about the auto industry?

As to data, even though the White House announced a new executive order that aims to prevent “countries of concern,” including China, North Korea, and Russia, from purchasing sensitive data about Americans, I am not optimistic.

We know that China is using slave labor to manufacture various technologies and products. We know that they are propping up their sagging markets through government action. We know that they are not a friendly competitor.

We have to look on them as an authoritarian foe. We have to take action to curb their intrusions. The West as a whole needs to.