A Pact With Satan

For the past few generations we Christians have, metaphorically speaking, made a “pact with Satan”. In order to indulge in the pleasures of the secular world, we have agreed to compartmentalize our religious beliefs and responsibilities, restricting the time and manner of their expression so as not to conflict with the world-at-large. Expressions such as the following are used to illustrate our appeasement:

“Don’t talk about religion in the workplace.”

“Sure I’m a Christian, but business is business.”

“I don’t want to force my views onto others.”

Some of these self-restrictions are useful. For example, standing on a street corner dressed like Robinson Crusoe and screaming that people should repent is a turnoff and should be frowned upon. However, in our efforts to “get along” and to avoid forcing our beliefs on others—or is it really to avoid forcing our beliefs on ourselves—we have virtually compartmentalized Christ out of our lives, making him welcome only in our homes and our churches. Little did we realize that by voluntarily restricting Christ’s presence in our own lives that we have provided anti-Christian forces with the ammunition needed to purge Christianity from our society. An example of how well these forces have succeeded can be found in the recent Supreme Court decision to reject hearing a case involving “a school district's censorship of a kindergartener's choice of literature for a class reading.”

In 2004, during an “All About Me” activity at Culbertson Elementary School in Pennsylvania, parents were allowed to read a passage from their child’s favorite book. Parent Donna Busch wanted to read Psalm 118 because her son, Wesley, chose the Bible as his favorite book. According to Busch’s legal representative, the Rutherford Institute, the principal said “she could not read from the Bible in the classroom because it was against the law and that the reading would violate the separation of church and state." The institute also reported that not only did the teacher offer Ms. Busch a book about witchcraft, witches, and Halloween to read instead, but she also allowed another parent to read a book about Judaism and to teach the children a dreidel game.

The school district supported the decision made Culbertson’s principal, as did a U.S. District Court and a Third Court of Appeals.

Expect this discriminatory judicial ruling to be only the beginning. There are those who seek to bury Christianity alongside Greek and Roman Mythology as relics of ancient history. This legal decision will empower them to push our society further down the slippery slope leading to the outright banning of Christian practices. Think I am being ridiculous or paranoid? A generation ago it would have been unthinkable that a Christian could be prohibited from displaying a nativity on public property. Try doing that today. Do not underestimate the danger of this slippery slope.

Funny thing about pacts with the Devil: they seldom resemble what was agreed to.

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Fat Chance

Fat chance. That is effectively what a Weight Watchers lawsuit asserts about Jenny Craig’s recent advertising claims. In its latest commercials Jenny Craig makes reference to “a study comparing Weight Watchers current weight-loss program and Jenny Craig's pre-packaged meals system.” Weight Watchers argues that no study exists.

What’s that? A company is stretching the truth in its advertising? I am shocked, shocked to find that corporations deceive consumers in their marketing campaigns.

"’It is outrageous that Jenny Craig is trying to trick and fool consumers through this blatantly misleading advertising campaign, which makes clearly false and unsupported claims,” said David Kirchhoff, President and CEO of Weight Watchers.

If Jenny Craig’s commercials are fictitious you cannot blame Weight Watchers for objecting to them; yet, I don’t think it is wise to waste much time and energy on the issue. After all, do any consumers still believe the information peddled by advertisers? I assume there is a tacit “Buyer Beware” agreement between merchants and consumers, so I believe virtually nothing I see on commercials. However, I guess there are others who are more gullible.

Perhaps the two weight-loss system heavyweights can settle this out of court. Otherwise, a judge will decide who is the “Biggest Loser”.

Yeah, that was awful. I know.

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Moderation Does Not Come Naturally

Moderation does not come naturally to humans. We over-eat. We over-drink. We even over-work and sometimes, believe it or not, over-exercise. So it is not uncommon for us to become obsessive-compulsive when defending a concept or goal that society finds worthy, such as treating people as individuals and not stereotyping them as a group. Unfortunately, this passionate devotion to an ideal can often blind us to reality.

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times discussed how alleged Ft. Hood murderer, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, “repeatedly earned favorable performance ratings in spite of mounting concerns about his views and behavior.” The article points to problems with the evaluation system itself, such as a “culture that encourages mainly positive reviews”. Several anonymous officers said the culture “has undercut the usefulness of the system for evaluating officers' strengths and weaknesses”. But let’s not kid ourselves. We all know why Hasan was treated with kid gloves.

In our efforts to avoid labeling people, we purposely ignore evidence staring us in the face. It is safer to hold hands and sing Kumbaya than to risk being called intolerant. The truth is that in Hasan’s case, none of his superiors wanted to risk their own careers by exposing him. In today’s world accusations of discrimination are occupational murder. Many people would rather ignore what they see than be labeled racist, sexist or any other “ist”. So despite being accused of shirking his professional responsibilities as a psychiatrist, proselytizing to patients, and repeatedly expressing his extremist Islamic views, Hasan continually earned a free pass from his superiors. Many would characterize it as a game of “pass the buck”, but it is more accurately a case of “hot potato”.

I have a friend who is a black Roman Catholic priest. He chuckles when he recalls his seminary days. As a seminarian his orthodox views often conflicted with the views of the more liberal clergy who taught his classes. Often their teachings were in opposition to Church doctrine and dogma. My friend would think nothing of berating the teachers for their contrary views, because he knew that as a black seminarian he was, in his own words, “untouchable”. The liberal clergy would make the lives of white seminarians miserable when they expressed similar views and aggressively defended them. My friend knew that a racist label against any of these clergy would ruin their cushy academic lives. So rather than single out my friend, they bit their tongues and moved him along. Whether or not you agree with my friend (as I do) for challenging the liberal clergy, he should not have been treated any differently than the white seminarians. But that is not today’s reality.

40 or 50 years ago the pendulum swung in the extreme direction of allowing racism and sexism. Now it is swinging just as extremely in the opposite direction, classifying anyone who does not subscribe to political correctness as an “ist” to be removed like a cancerous tumor. Perhaps sometime in the near future the pendulum will settle somewhere in the middle . . . although, given our track record for overdoing things that does not seem very likely.

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One Big, Happy Family?

Because of all the money and power we see in Washington, it is easy to forget that politicians are just people, individuals subject to the same petty jealousies, neuroses, and insecurities that affect the rest of us peons. One big, happy family they are not in D.C., even when they are members of the same political party. That is why what I find most interesting in politics is not the machinations themselves, but the personal dynamics behind those responsible for the machinations.

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s recently released book Game Change reveals the behind-the-scenes back-biting inside the Obama-Biden / McCain-Palin Presidential Campaigns. Although the disagreements during the 2008 presidential race were probably no different than those found in past campaigns such as Bush-Quayle and Clinton-Gore, some of the anecdotes in Game Change are nonetheless amusing.

My favorite is the alleged conversation, or confrontation, between former President Bill Clinton and Senator Edward Kennedy regarding Kennedy’s support of Barack Obama—someone who Clinton felt was unqualified. Authors Halperin and Heilemann paraphrase Clinton as sarcastically lecturing Kennedy about how “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

LOL

Perhaps the former president should think twice before flippantly mocking coffee delivers considering the number of Americans who rely on their morning cup of coffee for survival. Who knows how many world wars have been averted and how many important legislative proposals have been passed because of a good cup of java.

Another of the book’s interesting anecdotes reveals Senator Obama’s frustration with his running-mate Senator Joe Biden, following Biden’s prediction that Obama would likely be tested early by the international community if he won the presidential election. Obama allegedly angrily asked his inner circle, “How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?” This question has been asked many times by Americans. My favorite Biden gaffe is when he pontificated about FDR’s television chat with Americans following the 1929 Stock Market Crash. (Psst! Senator! There was no television in 1929 and FDR was not yet president). What interests me, however, about this anecdote is why this particular gaffe so upset candidate Obama. Who was Obama concerned that Biden would tip-off with the warning, the international community . . . or the American people? Did Obama truly believe that the possibility of an “international test” would never have occurred to anyone had Biden kept quiet? I guess our president never read the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Finally, this last anecdote caught my attention because I think it proves that things always happen for the best—even if it is not apparent immediately. According to Game Change Sarah Palin regretted accepting the Republican vice presidential nomination after her interview with Katie Couric: “If I’d known everything I know now, I would not have done this.” Even more disturbing is that McCain’s top aides allegedly questioned whether Palin was mentally stable. Geesh! One thing is certain: if Palin was already having misgivings that early in the campaign, how was she going to handle the attention she would have drawn as vice president? Or even worse, how would she have responded if something happened to McCain and she was forced into the Oval Office? I am sure Palin would not have been the first potentially unstable president, but that probability does not provide me with any comfort.

Game Change has some other interesting tidbits, such as Democratic Senator Harry Reid referring to Pres Obama as a black candidate who does not speak with a “Negro dialect unless he want[s] to have one”, and Elizabeth Edwards basically referring to her husband on numerous occasions as an intellectual midget.

This stuff is better than a prime-time soap.
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Sinking Ship?

You have to wonder whether the adage about rats leaving a sinking ship applies to Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd and North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan. Both have announced that they will not seek re-election. Have these men just had enough of Washington or do they see the writing on the wall with respect to the damage President Obama is doing to the Democratic Party?

Many Americans have expressed their displeasure with the universal healthcare bill and with the secretive process with which it was drafted. According to The Washington Times, “in at least seven states -- Connecticut, Nevada, Ohio, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Colorado -- the Democratic candidate for Senate trails the Republican in the most recent polls. In those states, Mr. Obama's popularity has dropped below the percentage of votes he drew in 2008, and opposition to the health-care-reform bill is deep and wide.”

The President has earned a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted, someone who speaks with a forked tongue. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi said as much Tuesday when grilled by reporters about the healthcare reform bill’s closed-door negotiations. When reminded by the media that candidate Obama said all negotiations should be open to C-Span, Pelosi replied, ““There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail.” Ouch. In other words, even our President’s own party doesn’t know which way he is blowing daily.

Congressional Democrats fear that the President views them as nothing more than vassals, subject to his whims and fancies. And they recognize that come November it will be they who must face the voters’ wrath. Don’t be surprised if there are others in the Democratic Party who choose to follow Dodd and Dorgan and ride off into the sunset when their terms expire.
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Doesn't That Cause Cancer?

The National Institute of Health just released a frightening report declaring that living causes cancer. Dr. Al Armist announced yesterday that a five-year study has proven that those who age increase their risk of cancer exponentially.

Pretty silly, huh?

Admit it. I had you believing it for a moment.

Is there anything over the past 30 years that has not been linked to cancer? Besides those warnings that appear legitimate, such as the dangers of smoking and exposure to pesticides, we have also been given specious, and often contradictory, warnings. Remember when drinking milk was said to increase your cancer risk? Eggs were also listed as taboo. And nothing is more confusing than estrogen. Menopausal women are told that taking estrogen decreases their risk of uterine, ovarian, and possibly even colon cancer, but that it increases their chances of breast cancer. How’s that for a trade? And let us not forget that brain cancer awaits us all because of our cell phone usage.

Well, according to a study by the University of California in San Francisco, CT scans can also be added to the list of possible cancer-causing demons. The study asserts that large doses of radiation from CT scans “may cause 29,000 new cancers a year--and 14,500 deaths.” Although these diagnostic tests can find cancers, repeated exposure to them increases the risk of cancer because of the level of radiation the patient absorbs over time. Radiologists agree that doctors should be better-educated about CT scan dangers, but they also warn that “the risk of getting cancer from CT radiation is still smaller than being in a car accident or getting hit crossing the street”.

How long will it be before those things are declared cancer risks?

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