More foolish predictions from AToday colunmist

As some of you know who follow this blog the Atoday Columnist Stephen Foster is one of my favorite targets. He is to me one of the greatest examples of myopic traditional Adventism. He presents false information as if it were true and true information as if it were false. Well yes that later could be said of numerous political leftists but since Foster embodies both myopic traditional Adventism and ill informed political progressivism he strikes just the perfect cord of absolute silliness. Unfortunately absolute silliness is becoming all to common in Adventism.

In the past Foster has declared in his comment section of one of his articles that “arbitrary” means making a decision. Therefore since God makes decisions He is arbitrary. It did not matter if I showed him the dictionary meaning as well as the synonyms for arbitrary he would not be moved. So I said he was being disingenuous and he was a mixed up guy. That got me banned from posting comments on Atoday. Well there is no way to educate the editor/moderator at Atoday, so I don't post there anymore as a columnist or commentor. Actually quite happy to no longer have to try and write articles that the editor has to approve, because frankly it is hard to do when the editor knows so little.

For instance in Stephen Foster's latest article he mentions Rick Santorum's statement about nearly throwing up after reading JFK's speech. Foster then quotes a statement from Santorum the day after he made the throw up comment. Yet Foster ignored the Santorum statement that his throw up comment was an over reaction. So it stands in Foster's article as if Santorum had never corrected himself, even if you don't believe him why would you not offer the reader the facts in the matter. Well the reason is because information is not the purpose of the article it is propaganda. And propaganda cares little for the facts. Propaganda is one of the specialties of the political left. I suppose the right will use it to some extent but it appears not to be used nearly as much as the political left. The Editor at Atoday probably did not even know that Santorum had corrected his statement the next day. Because another unfortunate problem of the Traditional Adventists and the political left is that they are poorly informed about current events. Their sources of information are often restricted to those that agree with their ideology, and they rarely hear anything to the contrary.

So Foster puts forth his opinion and his selected retelling of the facts carefully omitting things that don't work toward his preordained conclusions. Though he did kindly note in the first part of his article that if you don't hold to his view of Traditional Adventist Eschatology you will not likely agree with him. Apparently if you agree with him then you will agree with his article. You see how the myopic views work. Their information is not intended to be persuasive to those who may differ but to be persuasive to those who already agree with them. Again something very common in Traditional Adventism and political progressives.

The main import of his article however was put forth in his opening line: “Does anybody continue to believe that things are not lining up according to prophecy?” Prophecy to Foster being his traditional Adventist Eschatology where in the Roman Catholic church rises up and takes over in both church and state relations. Santorum is a Roman Catholic running for President, and Santorum does not think that Religious people should be silent as to the affairs of state. Thus to fulfill the prediction of the 19^th century Foster produces another prediction for what is happening now, even though Santorum has little chance of becoming the Republican candidate and even though Santorum says he will not enforce his religious ideas in the political realm just as he did not do so when he was a Senator. But the prophecy lines up, because the prediction in each case is the same and to most Traditional Adventists prediction is prophecy. But predictions are not prophecy they are interpretations someone has placed upon a prophecy. They are consistently proven wrong. Yet consistently trotted out again and again, because they are at least to the believer never proven wrong because they can always still happen just around the corner.

Bill Maher, stranger to reason

Here is a good view into the mind of a political liberal. It is sad and disturbing but likely thought of by those with limited thinking capabilities to be funny.  Bill Maher said the following on his HBO show:

BILL MAHER: But I bring up the old tale of the poisoned apple -- no, not "Snow White," that's a fairy tale - because the Adam and Eve story is taken literally by half the country and it's no coincidence that the type of tree which god forbade Adam and Eve eating from was the Tree of Knowledge. Rick Santorum homeschools his children because he does not want them eating that f--king apple. He wants them locked up in the Christian madrassa that is the family living room not out in public where they could be infected by the virus of reason. If you're a kid and the only adults you've ever met are mom and dad, and then they're also the smartest adults you've met, why not keep it that way? Why mess up paradise with a lot knowledge? After all, a mind is a terrible thing to open.

You could read that and think it was just an attempt by a mediocre comedian to make a joke. Until you see he includes reason into the equation and ends with a call for an open mind afterall. For what he thinks is reason is simply misinformation. He begins the account by mentioning a poison apple, no poison apple is in the Biblical story; in fact no specific fruit is mentioned at all. Then he intentionally misnames the name of the tree. The name  of the tree in Genesis being the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To him it is the tree of knowledge. God simply did not want Adam and Eve to have knowledge any knowledge apparently. But of course the story is much more relevant than Maher’s misinformation. God did not want them to eat of the fruit and learn what evil was.

Then Maher moves to Rick Santorum who home schools his children. In Maher’s created world if they go out in public they will be exposed to the virus of reason. Reason really, does he know what reason is. Is reason ever the product of intentional misinformation and lies. Do Santorum’s children never go out in public or hear any other voices? What about the Christian Madrassa? That is clever right, a Christian “Muslim school”, that is what madrassa means a Muslim school. Reasonable?

Possibly to the political liberal it is because they can’t argue from facts so they resort to the type of argument Bill Maher uses. And amazingly enough HBO pays him to produce this kind of material! And even more amazingly people watch him and some people think he has some intelligence. This perhaps is true if one does not look very close at anything he says; but if you actually do use reason. Well he does not do too well.

The politics of emotionalism

In my previous two articles (not counting the fun one on American Pie lyrics) I have pointed out the deceptive practices of the political left in relation to the Adventist publications. Those two listed being Adventist Today and Liberty Magazine. I could and should include Spectrum Magazine (see this pathetic example) in this list as well. The troubling thing about this is that it reflects the puerile thinking of the political liberal/progressive who deal little with reality and heavily manipulate emotions. They assume that their listeners or readers are simply too stupid to think for themselves or question what they say, or they think that the reader/listener is just as prejudiced as the author. So they freely interpret usually incorrectly and with so much prejudice that their interpretations look more like arbitrary hatred then real analytical thought.

Since these gatekeepers of Adventist media have chosen to align with the political left and to use the same techniques of the left it becomes important for this blog to begin to deal with these political distortions. In the past this blog has rarely gone into political matters but it seems that they are too important to ignore since they infiltrate the church and it's leadership...even its alternative Adventist media leadership (in my opinion they have destroyed the Progressive Adventist movement).

As a particular example of the emotional manipulation of the political left here is a section from the Martin Bashir show on MSNBC as recounted by the Huffington Post:

MSNBC's Martin Bashir issued some extremely harsh words for Rick Santorum on Tuesday, comparing the GOP candidate to Joseph Stalin and Big Brother from the novel "1984." 
 
In his "Clear the Air" segment, Bashir said that watching Santorum speak before a crowd reminded him of the dictator in "1984," the classic novel about a totalitarian society under state surveillance. Bashir instructed viewers to "spot the similarities" between a clip of Santorum speaking, and footage from the movie based on the novel. 
 
He replayed clips from the film of "1984" featuring Big Brother proclaiming that "forces of darkness" must be wiped off the Earth and demanding the end of a "catalogue of bestial atrocities." Bashir contrasted them with Santorum's calls to end federal funding for contraception, among other things. "For example, he has asserted that the right to privacy does not exist and has equated same sex relationships with bestiality," Bashir added.
He then made his most severe comparison. He quoted a book reviewer who once dismissed Santorum as "one of the finest minds of the 13th century," and took the remark one step further. "If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III," Bashir said.  

You can also see the video of the segment on the Huffington Post site linked above. The similarities between Santorum and the movie 1984 is that the crowd cheers. They cheer in the movie they cheer for Santorum at a speech. Apparently Bashir has never seen any other political speeches or crowds, though you would think with the cheering and chants and fainting that occurred during Barack Obama's campaign he would have seen it at some point. He then says Santorum sounds like a theocrat and the then concludes that Santorum sounds more like Stalin then a Pope. Stalin a rather famous atheist and now I guess a theocrat at least to Bashir.

But what does Bashir report about Santorum? What quotes does he use of Santorum? Answer, none, like the authors referred to in my two previous blogs, no quotes are used, no references given, we are left to accept his interpretation of what someone said, though to Bashir's credit unlike the two previous authors mentioned Bashir at least tells us who he is interpreting, not just giving hints about some candidate running for President. Bashir could have quoted Santorum but he must have felt it was more important to play clips from the movie “1984”. That is emotionalism, and it is childish because it assumes foolish things and simplify complex issues into trite sayings. Is that something that the courts have defined or you can find in the constitution? If I do something in private does that mean I can do anything I want in private? How would you define the right to privacy? You will understand better once you actually see the quote from which Bashir is referring. Then of course you see that it is not as Bashir interprets and that Santorum does not equate homosexuality with Bestiality. Even though they could both be done in private.

From the AP interview with Rick Santorum in 2003:

AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?

SANTORUM: We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality —

AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.

SANTORUM: And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society.

AP: Sorry, I just never expected to talk about that when I came over here to interview you. Would a President Santorum eliminate a right to privacy — you don't agree with it?

SANTORUM: I've been very clear about that. The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that. So I would make the argument that with President, or Senator or Congressman or whoever Santorum, I would put it back to where it is, the democratic process. If New York doesn't want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but that's their right. But I don't agree with the Supreme Court coming in.

Now you may not agree with Santorum's reasoning but at least he is reasoning and not simply trying to manipulate with emotionalism. We can't really allow this kind of journalism or whatever people like Bashir call themselves to continue as it is extremely harmful to thinking people. And even produces a lowering of standards for other media. Of course few people watch MSNBC but Bashir's practices are done just as often in the mainline media and now even in Church media. Maybe not as ham handed as Bashir does on his show but the appeal to emotionalism over honestly dealing with the facts and representing someone else's point of view accurately is all too common.