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So sadly true. Thanks for the refresh.
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Clint is way okay. Donât know Ron Christie.
Other foreign words more related to my thoughts today and conversations I was involved in in the dorm in Munich with friends from places other than here:
Verantwortung was the word we were really focused on.
Mitschuld was the word I think we were yet unaware of, the concept of which, took me many more years to learn.
Unfortunately, Clint canât get us out of this one.
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Except that those are examples of/contain evil artificial chemicals/GMOs/toxins/whatever promoted by the FDA, who are in cahoots with big pharma and the commies (or deep state, or whoever) to indoctrinate you. So maybe, not the best examples for some people.
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âTheologically conservativeâ might be a reasonable term.
A lot of (what I encounter, anyway) seems to stem from a pair of guilty-by-association fallacies: âThose people endorse many things that are wrong [which is accurate], therefore anything they endorse must be wrongâ and âThose people are endorsing what is promoted as what scientists say, therefore the scientists must agree with the other things those people endorse, therefore, the scientists must be wrongâ.
Heâs the BBCâs pet Republican. We all love him. And Iâm to the left of Genghis Khan as we know.
I love MĂźnchen. The Ăź as in the âuâ in human. My vocabâs still good, my grammar. I can still remember lines of Heine and Goethe and street signs, Widerrechtlich geparkte Fahrzeuge werden kostenpflichtig abgeschleppt and my favourite on the pĂźnktlich trains (not as good as Japanese!), Nicht in den Wagen spucken!.. The first German joke I understood was âSprechen sie electrisch?â âJa, perfunk!â.
I love Americana, always have. Just watched The Power of the Dog. Should get every Oscar.
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T. aquaticus âŚthanks for referring us to this article. I would say, after seeing some of it, that it sounds a bit like being on some internet sites. When Biologos urges âgracious dialogue,â it is because usually such is not the case. It just happens that in the case of some scientists, it has gone from the internet and the boor-in-the-bar venting in a corner â to people on the street. I worked with someone years ago who bragged about going up to people on the street, whose background she assumed she could tell from looking at them, and calling them all sorts of names. And she bragged about it. Did not work for her long! But nowadays, such language is everywhere and more open.
And Kendl has a good question.
At the Biologos conference last week, Francis Collins mentioned feeling the same dismay and was disheartened by the response to what he considered answered prayer with the vaccine. You could see the pain of it in his face.
I think the expanded lines of fire that scientists are suffering are what is trying to be addressed by Biologos as the organization spends more time with environmental and other topics. Personally, I think the question of evolution will take a back seat to other issues like bioethics as we move forward.
Harassment of scientists is provoking another type of negative reaction.
We donât have major problems with YEC ideology etc. in Finland. Yet, we have a problem in the heads of those scientists who have worked some time in USA. Some of them are totally allergic to anything that uses the word âChristianâ in the academic context.
One colleague of mine explained how he had adviced the students that plan to spend a year in USA. If they get relevant credit points from a credible university in USA those credit points will be transferred to the Finnish system. According to his advice, there is only one exception. If the university is somehow âChristianâ, then the credit points are not accepted. He said that he personally inspects what kind of university the student is planning to attend and if it seems to be âChristianâ, he says no way, donât go there.
Sad.
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Canât blame him for having reservations, given what goes on over here. What about Catholic universities? (Notre Dame, Fordham, Georgetown, etc.) I doubt these schools teach special âChristianizedâ versions of the sciences.
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I do not know his opinions but I guess that Catholic universities are not counted as âChristianâ in the allergic sense of the word. There are Catholic universities in Europe and elsewhere, I have not heard that these would have provoked any reactions.
The allergy is against US-style âChristianâ universities, not caused by the universities themselves but by Christian persons who are promoting their interpretations in a way that can be seen as harassment or counter-science activity. This activity is associated with schools that do not teach evolution in the way scientific universites do. Other universities are collateral damage.
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IMHO, much of it has to do with the interaction between media and politics. It became more about scoring points for your partisan party than it was about helping the American people. I grew up in the Reagan era, and I canât imagine anyone from that period of time acting anything like what I see now. I also saw the emergence of new media stars during the Clinton years, and I think that was the impetus for what we see now. I really think it was a case of the tail wagging the dog.
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You will be fine in the right area, especially along the East Coast or West Coast.
That reminds me of a Good Faith podcast (David French and Curtis Chang, episode 18) which I heard recently where David Brooks mentioned that becoming a conservative [American] Christian ten years ago was like investing in the stock market in 1929. 
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Iâve had this feeling of disappointment and unease about the US culture for some time. As @beaglelady says, Iâm sure I have a lesser horror to live through in my extremely left coast surroundings, but it isnât purely so and we get the same news sources as everyone else. I think our nearest relatives give us some insight into how we are, especially living in such high numbers. This chimpanzee troop is abnormally large and their behavior correspondingly more violent and cold blooded.
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In the same vein, I think we see the fruition of the realization of many evangelicals of the value of worldly power in getting what one wants. (Sorry I couldnât fit more prepositions in there.) Itâs hard to belong to this group these days. I see a disastrous mingling of worldly power in an attempt to achieve âspiritualâ ends. Itâs like tracking the entire voyage of the Titanic. It canât end well.
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I suspect those âspiritualâ ends are almost university displaced ego drive. Perhaps speaking to Gid in prayer leads to speaking for Him in the less self critical?
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Perhaps âglobalizationâ isnât the panacea that some optimists might wish it to be. Iâm all in favor of people traveling, or through hospitality at least becoming more widely aware of cultures beyond their own. So I suppose I am a globalist in that sense - of wishing that the whole world could learn to behave as a repsonsive-to-each-other community in all the positive senses of that concept.
But perhaps the media has dumped our world into the deep end of that pool while we were still getting used to the water and only beginning to get comfortable with swimming. Younger generations can get their âswimming legsâ operational pretty fast. But older generations (perhaps for both good and bad reasons) have not been so quick - or even able to âjust take in everythingâ the world has to offer. That is a gross over-simplification, since I know there are plenty of young whoâve been too easily radicalized into violence and many old who feel right at home imbibing any and every cross-cultural novelty. But just in general, I think that stereotype does illuminate a trend.
China (and other autocracies) know what theyâre doing when they curtail unlimited internet access. Because the west (for all sorts of reasons - many of them less-than-noble) does want access to our eyeballs, and therefore our minds. And the jury still seems a long, long way out on just how that global social experiment will turn out. Even just within the national borders of one nation (the U.S.) the preliminary results are not all positive. Not all negative either I would insist. But it isnât like we havenât given China lots of fuel for their skepticism about it either. Empires tend not to thrive in the absence of order. Whether one prefers to live under empire or under the messy, dangerous and often subversive chaos of relative freedom - that is a choice which many wish they could vote on with their feet. Some do, and many more attempt it. Somebody of note once said, âwisdom is known by its fruit.â
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Mark are you familiar with Augustineâs concept of Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Man? Itâs the underlying concept that Iâm referring toâjost to make sure we have the same concepts in mind. From a Protestant point of view, mixing the kingdoms up (goals, authority, means, tools, etc.) Is disasterous. For example legislation is not a substitute tool for prayer. The sword is not a substitute tool for service.
Luther does a nice job discussing the concepts in this piece, if you are interested: The Extent of Secular Authority (eBook) | Monergism