Adventist Media Response and Conversation

Saturday, November 25, 2017

More misinformation from Adventist Today.

One of the things I have been seeing is the incredible swing to the left on Adventist sites like Atoday.org and Spectrummagazine.com. Neither site now publishing anything but Progressive left wing political and religious material. It is published without any type of editorial requirement for truth to be utilized. For example there is an article entitled On Being Offended by Lindsey Painter in which she writes with apparently little regard for facts the following:

Last Thanksgiving Native Americans protested the building of the Keystone Pipeline (and DAPL). For their efforts they were hosed with freezing water in the snow, refused basic amenities and medical treatment, and the pipeline was built anyway. This Thanksgiving what are those Native Americans doing? They are cleaning up the giant oil spill on their land that they feared last year. Are they thin-skinned?
Ignoring the fact that the protestors were mostly not Native Americans the reader must also ignore the fact that the oil leak was not on Native American land and Native Americans are not cleaning it up. As CNN reported:

The spill occurred in the same county as part of the Lake Traverse Reservation. The leak location is not on Sioux property, but it is adjacent to it and has historical value, said Dave Flute, tribal chairman for Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe.

"The spill occurred about 3 miles southeast of Amherst on private land, which Walsh described as a "flat, grassy area for grazing." The company tweeted a picture of the site late Thursday.
 The county is on the top of the state second from the right on the map and Amherst is nearly to the left side of the Marshall County border. The reservation runs through portions of 5 counties. Going back to her article it sounds a lot like that the Native Americans feared a leak would happen if the Keystone XL pipeline was built and then a year later it was built and leaked. Even though this pipeline has been there for years.  This sadly is what passes for intelligent writing in the Adventist Media today. To maintain the fictions these websites write they usually ban or delete comments, because as per their rules it is not civil to disagree with their authors because to disagree or point out errors is disrespectful. Though they are quite accepting of comments that support errors are are posted by similarly misinformed people.

 Image result for Lake Traverse Reservation map

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Megachurch Pastor makes things worse

This is one of those amazing things where someone says the wrong thing and then makes it worse by trying to explain why what they said wrong was the right thing to do. From The Blaze article entitled Millennial megachurch pastor says Christians criticizing him ‘might know a different Jesus’

First on the TV show The View he avoided answering the question on abortion. Then on twitter, he gave a pretty good answer. Which if he had said on The View would have not caused any problems with other Christians. Then in RELEVANT magazine he explained how he could not answer the abortion question from a non-Christian until he told them about Jesus. Which is somewhat strange as in monotheists religions  (Jews, Christians, and Islam)have no problem assigning abortion in the sinful camp. His conclusion was:

“A lot of Christians that don’t know who we are say things like ‘You’re a coward’ and ‘Truth is truth’ and ‘You need to speak out,'” he revealed. “I just say, ‘I think me and you – first of all – might know a different Jesus.’ I think I did what I would always do, which is try to get to know a person. To me, I’m going in there with the intent of pointing to Jesus and hopefully speaking a language the world can understand.”

Did the world understand? Did he really even point to Jesus? Not really, simply answering like he did on Twitter would have been far better. It would have been far better to admit under the pressure of live TV he did not answer well, instead of trying to demean fellow Christians.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Science loses to politics

This is fascinating. Pew Research finds the following:

The survey also finds that Democrats with a bachelor’s degree or more education are more likely than other Democrats to say a person’s gender can be different from the sex they were assigned at birth. About three-quarters (77%) of Democrats with a bachelor’s degree or more say this, compared with 60% of Democrats with some college and 57% of those with a high school diploma or less. No such divide exists among Republicans.

The question itself is amazing. notice this part of the poll question:

"... say a person’s gender can be different from the sex they were assigned at birth." 

Sex assigned at birth? This is simple biology and the sex except in rare endocrinopathies is not assigned at birth but at conception. At birth the sex is noted, it is not assigned. 

What would be interesting would be to see if those people answered the same way if the question said: "a person’s gender can be different from the  biological sex at birth." Or perhaps  "a person’s gender can be different from the genetic sex".

Maybe ask them if their genotype can change if you want it to. 

Around here I often see the Science is Real signs. Strangely it appears for these 77% of Democrats with Bachelor's degrees Science is not so real.  For them what they probably mean is our pseudoscience is real.