BarelyAdventists illogical hypocrites

 One of the pretty correctly titled groups on Facebook is called BarelyAdventist. It is, I think, from the same people who give us Adventist Today and Spectrum online. Lately, they have taken to preaching on their Facebook page, and here is one of their latest declarations.

For decades, the Adventist Church has had people who feel it’s their personal duty to correct everyone else. Emails packed with Ellen White quotes. Whispered critiques in the church lobby about someone’s outfit. Cornering the pastor over sermon points. The assumption is always the same: I am right, and I must set you straight.

“Telling the truth in love” has been distorted. In practice, it often becomes a license to judge, critique, or lecture people you barely know. Love gets a bad reputation. Relationships are damaged. Church becomes a place of fear, not grace.

Here’s the truth: Jesus didn’t go around policing or judging people. Even He, with perfect authority, did not insist on correcting everyone else. You are not Jesus. You are not an Old Testament prophet. Trying to “set someone straight” before even having a relationship with them is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

Start with relationship. Listen. Engage. Care. Only then might someone actually invite your guidance—if it’s truly needed. Correction without trust and connection is not faithfulness; it’s pride in disguise.

Love in Adventism should not be about pointing out every misstep. It should be about showing up, respecting others, and offering help when it’s asked for. That alone could heal far more hearts than a thousand unsolicited “corrections.”

Let's look at some of the logic that this post makes:

For decades, the Adventist Church has had people who feel it’s their personal duty to correct everyone else.

We will see this “everyone” several times in this post. So far, I have never met a person who feels it is their duty to correct everyone else. So this first logical fallacy is the introduction to their post. It is not simply that I have not met anyone who felt it was their duty to correct everyone; it is impossible to correct everyone. So this horrible person in the introduction is not only set with an impossible “duty”; if that was what they actually thought was their duty, they would have to be mentally deranged.

Emails packed with Ellen White quotes

Is that supposed to be a sentence? Let us assume that it is a continuation of the logical fallacy of the first sentence. The person with a duty has packed up what they want to say, hidden behind an email with only Ellen White quotes. If that is their duty to email Ellen White quotes to people, we can assume that indeed it is from a mentally deranged person. But that mentally deranged person who cannot even tell the recipient the reason for the quotes could hardly be said to feel it was their duty to correct everyone with a bunch of quotes from a dead assumed prophet.

Whispered critiques in the church lobby about someone’s outfit. Cornering the pastor over sermon points. The assumption is always the same: I am right, and I must set you straight.

We will move past the other two points because, as we can tell, this is all built from a false view of, at best, a deranged person. It is possible for a deranged person to always feel they are right. Of course it is still not at all likely that even the deranged person is “always” acting with the assumption that that they are always right and that they must set you straight, apparently to the above author it is by packing an email with Ellen White quotes, or whispering a critique of an outfit or simply cornering a pastor to talk about sermon points.

 
Now we are getting to the point of this author's point. Some people do things the author does not like, it is hard for the author to recover from the initial logical fallacy, so for the sake of continuing the analysis, we can assume that that is their concern.

“Telling the truth in love” has been distorted. In practice, it often becomes a license to judge, critique, or lecture people you barely know. Love gets a bad reputation. Relationships are damaged. Church becomes a place of fear, not grace.

Telling the truth in love is not a thing, “speaking the truth in love” Ephesians 4:15. We have Biblical direction to speak the truth in love, but the key is the truth. So to know something is the truth takes a lot more than to regurgitate Ellen White quotes; critiquing an outfit could in no way be considered in the truth category, it is the opinion category. Love, on the other hand, can be classed as permissive to tough love to discipline. That means that something can be done in love in different ways. Certainly, talking to the pastor about a sermon is not necessarily about truth or love. Why is it even included here? Could it be that what this author wants is for people to simply accept what they are told?

Here’s the truth: Jesus didn’t go around policing or judging people.

Are you sure? He cleared out the temple of money changers (John 2:13–17, Matthew 21:12–13) He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers ( Matthew 12:34, 23:33), and He specifically judged those who were of their father the devil. (John 8:44) Of course, Jesus also called Judas a son of perdition (John 17:12). So, Jesus did do it; what the author means by “go around” is kind of meaningless. We also have a lot of sermons on how people should behave, which could certainly be termed policing, as that is a very broad term, especially if you use the idea of community policing or self policing, which deals with relationship building, problem solving, decision making, and trust building.

Even He, with perfect authority, did not insist on correcting everyone else.

Jesus, in his incarnation, would be in the same situation as the first logical fallacy in that Jesus could not correct “everyone”; instead, he taught, but He did not spend his time personally correcting “everyone”.

You are not Jesus. You are not an Old Testament prophet. Trying to “set someone straight” before even having a relationship with them is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

It has taken a while, but we have finally gotten to some truth in the above post. You are not Jesus or an Old Testament prophet. Then it wanders off into nonsense again. Can you set someone straight, for instance, point out their extreme use of logical fallacies without having a relationship with them, of course it is pretty common on the internet, though it may not set them straight, that depends on the person. But it is certainly not the pinnacle of hypocrisy. That pinnacle might be more like teaching others not to sin while publicly practicing the same sins.

I am going to end this here because I think the post is pretty much summed up with hypocrisy. It is worse yet because it is fueled by logical fallacies. It ends by trying to sound caring, but it is really uncaring because if one cares, they actually try to be truthful, even when saying difficult things. That was the focus of Ephesians 4 and a pretty fitting way to cleanse our minds from the BarelyAdventist sophistry.

14Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. 15Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. 16From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

17So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.... 25Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 

Facebooks laughable fact-checking

 So this is an excerpt from the Facebook Fact check on the Literature Review of the lockdowns on covid-19 mortality. Their claim is that it “Independent fact-checkers reviewed the information and said it was missing context and could mislead people.”

Those so-called independent fact-checkers are mostly supported by Facebook and Tik-Tok and some other Leftwing organizations and private donors who donated in 2016. Yes not too updated there are they and they are not at all objective. For example, here they complain about the use of the word lockdown.

“Another point of contention was the paper’s definition of a lockdown. A lockdown is typically defined as a measure that requires people to stay at home and avoid activity outside the home involving public contact. However, the authors defined a lockdown as “the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI)”. Non-pharmaceutical interventions are measures apart from taking medicine and vaccination. This means that simply making isolation for infected people mandatory or imposing a mask mandate would count as a lockdown.”

From the original:

[We use “NPI” to describe any government mandate which directly restrict peoples’ possibilities. Our definition does not include governmental recommendations, governmental information campaigns, access to mass testing, voluntary social distancing, etc., but do include mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above.4]

 Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist and professor at Imperial College London, pointed out that “by that definition, the UK has been in permanent lockdown since 16th of March 2021, and remains in lockdown – given it [remains] compulsory for people with diagnosed COVID-19 to self-isolate for at least 5 days.”

 Samir Bhatt, a professor of statistics and public health at Imperial College London, likewise expressed similar concerns about the definition used in the paper, saying, “The most inconsistent aspect is the reinterpreting of what a lockdown is […] For a meta-analysis using a definition that is at odds with the dictionary definition (a state of isolation or restricted access instituted as a security measure) is strange.”

[Actually the dictionary definition is: “b: a temporary condition imposed by governmental authorities (as during the outbreak of an epidemic disease) in which people are required to stay in their homes and refrain from or limit activities outside the home involving public contact (such as dining out or attending large gatherings)”] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lockdown

That being said, when it came to their analysis, the authors applied the usual definition of a lockdown, as Bhatt pointed out: “The authors then further confuse matters when in Table 7 they revert to the more common definition of lockdown.”

So a table that breaks down the studies by NPI suddenly becomes reverting to the more common definition by having a heading that says: Lockdown(complete/partial).  As usual Facebook fact-checks are garbage!

How invested are you in a belief?

One of the things I have yet to understand is how someone can become so invested in a belief that evidence to the contrary is ignored. This is particularly troubling in religion but also troubling in the world of political beliefs. I had an interesting experience on Facebook with a political liberal. I won’t go into all of the fallacies that the person believed but I will deal with the final belief in the discussion and his response. What is particularly interesting to me in this account is that his belief is very young. In fact it is probably less than two years old, but it was a part of his culture, the people he talked with and the material he read, so much so that he assumed that if anyone did not believe it they were ignorant. Here are the relevant sections of the conversation so you can get an idea of what I am talking about, as when dealing with political liberals the subject turned to Fox news and then to Sarah Palin.

P: “Are you insinuating that Sarah Palin has ANYTHING to offer the political world? I mean she can see Russia from her house. By golly oh gee EH?”

Me: "I mean she can see Russia from her house" That is funny you think a line from Saturday Night Live is really what Palin said. OK it is not funny just sad.”

P: “Dude are you really this insane or just dont pay attention? She actually SAID THIS and it became a SNL skit. LOL wow. Educate yourself. Do some research or at least read some alternative news sources”

P: “It was in an interview that she said this.”

Me: “P, if only your facts could support you. From Entertainment Weekly: "...and where one deft comment can puncture a national campaign (Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin — including the phrase ''I can see Russia from my house,'' which Palin never uttered — redefined the 2008 vice presidential candidate). Can we go to there?"

“You have been politically inaccurate in most all of your comments from the very beginning when you claimed I was wrong on Reconciliation of budgets. What makes me wonder is what you are reading that makes you so sure you are right when you are constantly factually wrong.”

Me: “oops forgot the link to the EW article so you can read it for yourself, the article after all is on Tina Fey.” http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20324126,00.html

P: Everything snl did in the skits about her came from Sarah palins mouth. That was the beauty of it is the comedic value was so high they used her words word for word.

P: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXL86v8NoGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8moOxzlGQ&feature=related
Ok so maybe she didnt say that she could see it from her house. I have alot of respect for women and especially women who are in powerful positions but this woman didnt even have a grasp of what was going on in her own state! There are very smart men and women and very stupid men and women and she is one of the dumbest women on earth.

P: “I am innacurate because I disagree with your position. Just be honest about it.”

P: “oh I forgot to mention that entertainment weekly is hardly a credible political source Ron”

What is interesting to see in this conversation is the certainty that P was right, then when he finally did a little research and found that Sarah Palin had not said the quote he was sure was word for word he could not understand how he could be viewed as inaccurate. It could not possibly be that he was wrong and demonstrably wrong it was that I simply disagreed and that if I was honest I could admit the fault was mine. Even after he found the youtube section of the interview of Sarah Palin he still felt the need to criticize the source I used to correct him. If you actually Google the question the first hit directs you to Yahoo Answers Did Sarah Palin really say "I can see Russia from my house" ?

Yahoo Answers provides us with the segment of the interview which sparked Tina Fey’s comedy:

"GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?

PALIN: Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it's in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along. "

Now think how simple this incorrect understanding of current events is. Based upon recently acquired ideas but they fit the template of the believer…how much more difficult is it to get people to think about religious ideas, things held to for tens or hundreds of years. When a fact can be shown to be wrong the believer in a particular idea will remain wedded to the idea because it is a part of their template of understanding.

That is what we in the Adventist church have to deal with when we deal with Traditional/historic Adventists and that is what many of my fellow Progressive Adventists have to deal with Adventists and other Christians when we ask them to rethink their Atonement theory. So that they don’t have God pouring out His wrath upon Christ who is God as a method for Christ to pay a penalty to God so that God can forgive people. That is probably a 300 year old tradition that came out of a tradition that is 800 years old known as the Satisfaction theory.

The answer I think we most often use is baby steps but how well do baby steps work with those who refuse to question their own beliefs? Somehow we have to teach people how to think critically to actually follow Thomas Jefferson’s advice: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.” A critical thinker is not only critical of other beliefs but willing to think critically about their own beliefs. If your church or school is not teaching you to think critically they are not really doing their job.