Relationship with God

You have perhaps heard Christians say that Christianity is not just some list of rules; it’s a personal relationship with the living God.  That’s true, and very important, but it’s not necessarily intuitive (especially to newcomers or outsiders) what that means; so I thought I’d put together a brief outline to make it a little more concrete.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and I’m not saying this is the only or best possible way to organize it.  There’s a lot of overlap among these categories, and no doubt there are things I’m forgetting.  I would be interested to hear any feedback or additions you might have.

1 — God’s Character

Everybody Blog about Brett Kimberlin Day

Today is Everybody Blog about Brett Kimberlin Day.

Who is Brett Kimberlin?  You might begin with this review of his history from Breitbart.com.

Barrett Toast, Walker Will Coast to Victory

I think I heard Sean Hannity say last week that the Democratic National Committee had written off the Wisconsin recall election as unwinnable, that they thought Walker already had a “lock” on it.  In any case, the word is that the DNC practically refused to spend any money on the race.  Then, as one blogger headlined it, “DNC Shamed Into Helping Wisconsin Recall, Still Not Committing Funds”.

Now a new poll from We Ask America suggests that their fears were well-founded:  It has Governor Walker beating Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by a twelve-point margin, 54 to 42%.

Even if They Fail to Silence You, Leftist Intimidation Tactics Can Ruin Your Life: Brett Kimberlin Is on the Loose

So apparently this guy Brett Kimberlin has quite a criminal record, and when people publicly report on it, he gets them fired, or worse:

Liberals Can’t Understand the Other Guy’s Point of View

If you’re going to disagree with someone, I think it may be pretty important that you understand his point of view.  That doesn’t mean you have to agree with him, by any means—on the contrary, in a way, it’s only after you understand his position that you can truly disagree with it.

Via the Nullspace, self-described liberal Nicholas Kristof calls our attention to an interesting study:

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.

This Just In: No-strings-attached Sex Will Not Make Men Marry You, or Make Them Responsible

Via Wintery Knight, another woman (observing women she has known personally) makes similar observations about feminism and the sexual revolution:

I’ve known many of these women — a great many — and it never ceases to confound me how smart women can be such ridiculous fools when it comes to choosing men.

The People’s Balanced Budget Amendment

Have you taken the Balanced Budged Pledge?

Problem: the federal government keeps spending more than it takes in:

One proposed solution: amend the Constitution to require that the budget be balanced every year.

Washington Post Liberal

In case you ever have occasion to wonder, yes, the Washington Post is definitely part of the liberal news media.  Just take it from their own ombudsman (2005-2008), the late Deborah Howell:

I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

(Emphasis added.)  She also noted that after Barack Obama became the nominee in 2008, he received three times as much front-page coverage (in terms of number of articles) as John McCain.  In her parting column, she observed, “Too many Post staff members think alike; more diversity of opinion should be welcomed,” and advised, “Make a serious effort to cover political and social conservatives and their issues; the paper tends to shy away from those stories . . . .”

Feminist Nightmare

Happy Mother’s Day, the final day of National Offend a Feminist Week.  I don’t know whether being told that they have ironically ushered in a Brave New World of women’s degradation will offend feminists or not, but here goes:

In the wake of feminism and the sexual revolution, our society has degenerated surprisingly far (and continues to degenerate?) toward some kind of pre-civilizational nightmare dystopia in which men don’t respect women, and women don’t even respect themselves, as even those who exploit it will sometimes tell you:

(Blog entry)

The reason why I can string along multiple women is because each woman thinks she’s the girlfriend and the others are just women I have sex with.

Julia

Everyone is talking about this “slideshow” put out by Barackobama.com last week.  It depicts the life of Julia (“who has no face”), a hypothetical woman who is dependent on the government at every stage of life, thanks to the policies of President Obama.  Except that’s presented as a good thing.  The slideshow is a cornucopia of half-truths, question begging, and born-yesterday utopianism.

As an antidote, the Heritage Foundation offers an alternative slideshow explaining why conservative reforms would be better, and exposing the hollowness of some of Barackobama’s arguments.  It doesn’t address everything, either—and I’d prefer much less government than either of them considers an option right now—but it’s an improvement.

China Kills Children, Sells Them as Food

More sensitive readers should perhaps skip this one.

Hollywood Beginning to Remember Forgotten Traditional Values?

A blog featured on the WordPress main page last week reviews a movie with a promising title and subtitle—Young Adult: Everyone gets old. Not Everyone grows up.

Mark Steyn and other commentators have said a lot about our current culture’s harmful tendencies toward self-centeredness and prolonged adolescence.  Steyn made me aware of an interesting recent study:

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

National Offend a Feminist Week

I’m not sure whether it qualifies, but here’s my contribution to The Other McCain’s National Offend a Feminist Week:

Note that I would never have heard of Offend a Feminist Week (much less participated in it) if not for female blogger No One of Any Import, who explains,

Waking Up from Waking Up from History

Via Wintery Knight, in “The Myth of the Flat Earth”, Jeffrey Burton Russell talks about one argument which those who scoff at Christianity (or at the past generally) don’t have available to them:

. . . an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat—especially medieval Christians.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat.

Priebus Says Walker Wins

For whatever it’s worth, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus argues that Governor Walker will probably beat the recall, and that the recall effort will hurt President Obama’s chances in Wisconsin in November:

I think the Democrats in Wisconsin have been unbelievably foolish, and I can’t imagine that the Obama administration is too thrilled with what they’re doing up there. What they’re doing is gambling with the presidency in a major way, and here’s why.

First, Democrats didn’t get their [preferred] candidate to run. They’re stuck with two people who have perfected the art of losing statewide elections. Between Tom Barrett and Kathy Falk, they may have lost more statewide elections than any pair in the entire country.

Of All the Men I’ve Ever Known—He Was One of Them

First paragraph of a Romney fundraising letter I received recently:

I am running for President of the United States and because you are one of America’s most notable Republicans, I want to personally let you know why.

(I’m not.)

Obama Inadvertently Caricatures Liberalism

Is it becoming mainstream not to take the United Nations seriously?  Even the liberal Washington Post, in a recent editorial, offers a scathingly candid assessment:

SO FAR, a U.N. monitoring mission in Syria has had one tangible effect: It has gotten people killed. On Sunday and Monday, monitors toured neighborhoods in the city of Homs and in the Damascus suburbs of Doura and Zabadani. When they left, the areas they visited were shelled, and security forces carried out sweeps in which civilians suspected of speaking to the monitors were taken from their homes and shot or had their houses burned down.