Just the Regurgitated Pseudo-Facts

I was very busy this week and didn't get on here....too busy living life to blog about it. LOL....

but I was playing around with a few thoughts for Defending the Faith Sunday that I never got around to posting, and then learned on Tuesday of the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell (and the ensuing nasty bashing that pretty much everyone took part in). It was rather ironic that my DTFS topic that I was mulling around had a lot to do with what was so obviously displayed this week on the occasion of the death of Mr. Falwell.

As a pre-Christian in the mid eighties, I had some false assumptions about Christians, Christianity, conservatism, and so forth. Most of my assumptions I didn't come up with on my own. They were just some regurgitated pseudo-facts I had heard along the way that any self-respecting liberal is supposed to repeat until they believe them to be true.


One of those "facts" was that the conservatives are trying to ban free speech and turn us all into mindless drones who can't think for ourselves, and they are trying to suck the fun out of life. At the top of the list of villans in this story stood Jerry Falwell.

I never actually personally heard the guy speak. I only heard from others who heard from others that he was a hate monger bent on the destruction of our free society, and needed to be shouted down until he was ultimately stopped from his evil world domination and subjection plot.

Years later, as a Christian, I still didn't always agree with Jerry Falwell, but I understood where he was coming from and saw his heart--one that was pained deeply by the direction our society is heading and who seemed to care too much about others.

I almost laugh when I hear about how Christians don't think for themselves. It is probably true of some, of course, but it is despite the Biblical commands toward wisdom and understanding and being of a sound mind, not because the Bible advocates any sort of assimilation into a collective conciousness of group-think. If anything, I've noticed how foolish some people sound when they start spouting those sorts of lines about Christians and yet come across as the puppet with someone else pulling the strings.

Talking to a variety of people throughout my daily life, it gives me an eerie feeling to remember the sins of my past when I meet up with some bonehead who, like I once did, throws a temper tantrum and uses foul language as their only defense against the truth of God's word, and who can feel threatened even by a middle aged mom who is speaking quietly about the love of God. Even this past week, as I read some comments about Rev. Falwell's death, and people proving their immaturity by stating that they would be celebrating his death by engaging in acts that they know he would find offensive, all I could think about is "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do". No truer statement has been said--they really haven't thought at all about what they are doing and saying--they are just regurgitating the same tired lines they've learned from others.