Keep Your Heart Three Stacks

I personally have Mr. Dobson, the radio station WMBW and the Moody Bible Institute to thank for making me hate Christian radio and therefore hate Christian music and therefore love jazz and rock music.

Everyday my mom would play that crap on the way home from school and I vowed at the age of 11 that one day I would drive my own car and blast as many kinds of heathen music as I could get my hands on and it worked out pretty well for me.

And also the sexually frustrating stuff and all that.

Josiah,

Per the link, Obama asks, "Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" and then muses, "Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?"

If he asks these questions sincerely, Obama is not "deliberately distorting the Bible." But if he is insincere, the question becomes: "is Obama's 'deliberate distortion' done out of malice or ignorance?"

Honestly, I was surprised you didn't make more of Dobson's "fruitcake interpretation" statement.

Carl

I remember being mildly traumatized by posters in the youth group room that said: "pet your dog, not your date"

The question may be framed in the insincere to make a sincere point, namely that the exercise of determining which passages of Scripture do or do not guide our public policy is a big one, and not simple.

There's little consensus within the Christian community itself as to just how we go about deriving public policy from the Bible, and the discussion/debate has existed since Christ commanded us to "render unto" without doing a very thorough job of explaining just what He meant.

Josiah,

"The question may be framed in the insincere to make a sincere point..."&tc.

That is one possibility I had not considered. And it would morph his statement into an horse of an altogether different colour.

"Somewhere bad people were engaged in lustful activities which Jesus 'clearly' stated were impure"

That would have been me. I read Dobson's books on adolescence, sex and relationships, and disregarded all of his "practical" advice at the time.

"Obama is 'deliberately distorting' the Bible."

On this subject, James Dobson is an authority. He wrote the book(s) on distorting the Bible for capital and/or political gain.

Wow, some serious venom for the Dobson. As a parent I'd say Dobson has done a lot of good for a lot of clueless parents out there. I think a lot of people from our parents generation had no idea how to raise their kids in a christian manner and Dobson gave them some good if not overbaring guidelines to go by.

"Douchebagerry" Josiah? Really? A guy who encourages parents to read the Bible to their kids and to be involved parents. I mean the radio show was always a bit cheesy, but douchebaggery?

Also in regards to Obama, I think his statement was rather absurd and though it not necessarily a distortion it was sort of an inane comment. One bit of public policy that I would argue is framed by not only the bible but a Christian worldview is that of abortion.

Although I will say it annoys me how some parents religiously only allow their kids to see movies that his website/magazine/etc says are wholesome.

My thinking is, if my kid wants to see a movie, I'll watch it and determine if its appropriate.

Some of us parents are too busy working two jobs to help pay the dentist, doctor, shoe, and school bills for our kids, and some of us don't multi-task very well; ergo, we simply don't have the spare time to sit and watch a movie to determine if it's filled with vulgar or too spooky (read that:un-age-appropriate)stuff which might keep my kids up all night and give them bad dreams, or which might introduce to their developing vocabularies a choice new word or two which I would prefer they not use. (They'll learn these words eventually, I'm sure, when they grow up and join the navy and see the world.)I,for one,am grateful for the service Dobson provides. BTW,just because he has a degree from an accredited and well respected institution of higher learning (USC?) doesn't mean he's an ignoramus in these matters. Usually an earned degree kinda helps ya learn to think things through, or at least it supposed to.

Josiah, I saw that you had the fightthesmears.com URL on the sidebar. Check out this article in today's Wash Post on a scientist at Princeton working to locate the origins of the original smears. Very fascinating analysis of gossip in the Internet age.

If you listen to the rest of the speech Obama's point is actually that we should be making policy based on Scripture- he goes on to say that our laws are and always have been a codification of Judeo-Christian morality.

So true!!!!