Commotion in the Pews

My wife and I try to watch only inspirational stuff on Sunday. A couple of internet church services (it helps to have a bunch of pastor friends) and then we dive in to the movie/television world on the internet.

Part of the problem is that the online providers don’t have a big selection of stuff to watch. Amazon, it seems, purposely gives you anything but Christian content when you search for it. There is, however, a wide variety of well tagged Japanese Anime Porn. 

I have thus decided to write and produce my own Christian movie. I have watched too many bad ones to make the same mistakes. Some are easy to miss out on, some are a little tougher.

My movie will be set in Detroit. Nobody sets a Christian movie in Detroit. Probably because it’s not a movie kind of town unless it’s an action thriller. Nobody sets a romance there either.

The story is about a family of six: Mom, Dad, two teenage boys, a tweener girl, and the grandfather who is too arthritic to be on his own, but still mentally sharp – as sharp as he ever was, for he was a bit of a dullard at his peak. In other words, like the rest of us.

Dad and mom both work at good jobs where they are upper end of the blue-collar world. Neither one completed college, but both went for three years before they fell in love and wanted to start a family. Not out of wedlock, but they quit school and went full-time at their part-time jobs so they could have nice things and a couple of kids. It’s worked great so far.

Grampa moved in last year, and since they had a big house (real estate is cheap in Detroit) they had plenty of room for him on the ground floor with his own bathroom. Mom and dad gave up that room and moved upstairs to a room almost as large, and it has been a blessing for Grampa. He’s thrilled to be there and helps the kids with school. They ask for help even when they don’t need it because they love him and want him to feel good. 

None of the kids plays sports, they all just go to school. No drug usage: one of the boys lost a friend to a fentanyl overdose just as they hit “that age” and it scared the hell out of them. They do engage in the usual teenage nonsense, but both the boys know that Detroit can be rough, so they take it pretty easy when out and about.

The tweener girl is like every other kid that age and she loves her dog, a rescue who’s owner died, more than life itself. She’s into 70’s disco, but that’s as strange as she gets. Good kid. 

Every evening, mom and dad have a couple of large vodka’s while they talk about their day. Nobody really gets drunk, and no hangovers ever. They both are faithful and have never cheated. 

Sundays they go to church and then have dinner at a restaurant. They believe in God, love their faith, but they don’t belong to the choir, Opus Dei, or even help sell donuts on Donut Sunday. But they love their pastor and the church and would feel bad if they couldn’t go any longer. 

The story focuses on a three month period of their lives where nothing happens at all. Boring as can be. No spiritual stress, no sexual assault, no robberies, not even a traffic accident – but someone did park too close and bash the passenger mirror off the car mom drives. But they left a note and paid cash for the repair.

Grampa is healthy as a horse.

Nobody is weird. 

The dog is well behaved and rather lazy.

The end. 

The next blog will be the good one: I will try to combine all the tropes used in Christian film into a single movie. It will be awesome.

The title might prompt you to think that I’m advocating increased hostility. Far from it. I’m merely asking that if you are to argue with others, especially on social media, that you do it in an actually persuasive way with valid (truthful) points. 

How would one do this? Let’s start with not putting up graphics posts that say things like: “White  looters  ignored  by  American  police.” The picture shows white people looting a store, carrying out televisions and clothing. Yeah. That’s a great example. Let’s explain.

The reason American police ignored them is because the looting took place in mexico several years ago. American Police weren’t within five-hundred miles. The country is not the United States.

But that doesn’t stop the “If they were black, there’d be dead bodies” kinds of arguments. That’s the same foolish argument that is trotted out any time a white person suspected of a heinous crime surrenders peacefully. I guess we’re supposed to assign a quota to police and enforce it. If a black person is shot by the police (and you should know the numbers before you go ballistic, so go do the research) an equivalent or larger number of white people should be shot to make the numbers balance. 

I guess the argument is that if there is a tragic killing of an innocent black person (one not involved in felonious activity) we need to kill a white person trying to surrender to police. Then the question becomes how many Asian and Latino suspects need to be shot as well? Will we drill down to the point where 1 person of Lithuanian descent must die for every 4 black people? Or, perhaps, we should just execute without trial one Irish woman for every 24 Latino deaths?  I’m going to have to get a better calculator.

The next bit of public discourse is that I’m going to immediately block anyone who posts a tweet, Facebook, Instagram, or other social media post that ends with SMH. (Sweet Merciful Heavens.) This is church-going Christian code for “I’d like to use an obscenity but people won’t let me be in the choir if I do.” Some of the most remarkably stupid and nasty things, almost always unfounded and poorly thought out, are posted with this as the end of the item.

Straw men are next on the list. They are effectively used to make you feel bad because you may not be doing enough in your heart when you read them. An example? Well, of course:

If you say, “All lives matter” does that include:

Syrian refugee lives?

The poorest of the poor in Brazil?

Haitian refugees?

The unjustly imprisoned?

Those who have nothing to eat?

The list usually has one or more items. It can also start with other items such as “Protect the unborn,” or “Diabetes is a tough gig,” etc., and then list all the other tragic things in the world. 

Be honest. Doesn’t that make you feel a bit small and churlish if you think that everyone’s life matters? But what does it mean? If you sponsor orphans, feed the homeless, advocate quietly for justice reform, and shovel snow for the old and ill, are you still a rotten-racist thug who isn’t doing enough? That’s how straw-men arguments work: you take a statement and then turn all possible alternatives against the reader. 

Let’s stop that one cold: you do what you can. Even Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, with all their money, couldn’t address all the injustice and poverty in the world. How could you possibly be expected to handle every bad thing on the planet. More importantly, you are entitled to an opinion. Yes, freedom of speech still applies. Your thoughts are no less valid because someone who can paste clip art into Facebook doesn’t like your philosophy.

How about, instead of demeaning each other, and throwing sharp rocks – or calling out the police on someone because you disagree on Twitter – you rationally engage with factual arguments. I know most are incapable. They are spoon fed by the leftist media and never do their own research. 

That’s a tragedy. They are often the most prolific posters. More importantly, they knowingly post first, so as to get the clicks. They also post inflammatory things from the past just to keep the flames going. I don’t really care if it’s the story of a veteran’s group being denied service at a hotel in 2016, or a kid being hit by a patrol car in 2017 – both are equally in the past and whatever remedy needed to be taken has likely been instituted. When you check, you’ll find out policies have changed, people retrained, others jailed. But that picture that makes your heart swell with outrage is still floating around, waiting to pop up and make others pound their fist. 

And the same thing repeats over, and over. Seriously, if you don’t have a puppy picture, or a family reunion to post a picture of, maybe some of you shouldn’t be on the internet. You (and you know who you are) are the same vicious animals who spread rumors about the Murphy girl being a prostitute back in 1887. You know, those Catholics are all evil.  She was seen with a black fellow – I am sure her parents know….

Yup. Things never change, just the technology and the hate you choose to inflict on your fellow man.

I won’t be long. But for those of you cheering that conservatives are being banned from social media, and that Parler is being taken out of the application stores for Apple and Google, you should remember this:

When they silence the powerful, the average and low have no voice at all.

History is replete with examples where free speech is restricted by governments. It inevitably means people die under the thumb of the authoritarian powers that rise in that silence.

When tech monopolies have the power to control the public square, by dint of federal law exceptions carved out for them, they are truly an extension of the government.

If you value your rights, and I hope you do, you need to fight this every way you can. Because, whether you like it or not, acknowledge it or not, you are next.