‘Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you. You know there are differences. Where is the overlap? In diagnosing a worldview, there are various components to understanding it, as some people have or might put it, to see the map of the world. Some of them are knowledge, ethics, purpose, and epistemology, but among the others, I want to explore two of them, reality and truth, as they relate to celebrity conservatives versus true Bible believers. In general, very often true Bible believers are interested in the celebrity conservatives without their being interested in them. Part of their “fan base” are Christians, who listen to their podcasts and watch their shows. One of the celebrity conservatives, Jordan Peterson, the famous PhD professor, author, and public intellectual and speaker from Canada, doesn’t even call himself a conservative. Celebrity conservatives today might call themselves classic liberals (you can look up classical liberalism). Maybe he really isn’t conservative, but you also shrink your audience if you call yourself one. As well, “liberal” might mean you keep your job and other opportunities. Peterson does resonate with true Bible believers and they listen to, watch, and read him. When I write, celebrity conservatives, I’m especially saying, Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, the late Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Candace Owens. There are many others. There is overlap between their worldviews and the worldview of a true Bible believer. Before Covid hit and also before he had major health issues, my wife and I and another couple got tickets to hear Jordan Peterson in person in San Francisco, sponsored by the Independent Institute. As I was listening to him, I enjoyed many things he was saying. However, I knew he and I did not have the same worldview. I was glad he could say what he did in public, but it wasn’t nearly enough for me either. The celebrity conservatives like him are disappointing. In the last week, I was thinking about the difference between the worldviews of celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers. Even as I write this, I think about how a true Bible believer could even be a celebrity in our world. I don’t think it’s possible. The greater the celebrity status, the more you must be doing something wrong, and that includes evangelical leaders who have their own celebrity. They in part got there through capitulation and compromise. Their greater celebrity doesn’t speak well. The common ground in worldview, I believe, is that there is more proximity between celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers in their view of reality. I would say that they both attempt to function according to reality, even if it means abandoning the truth. The truth and reality do go together. They overlap completely for a true Bible believer, but they don’t for celebrity conservatives. Even actual reality and the reality of celebrity of conservatives don’t overlap identically. To stay a celebrity, like everyone else who isn’t a true Bible believer, celebrity conservatives forsake actual reality and even more so, the truth. Let me explain. I want to use Jordan Peterson as an example. Jesus either rose from the dead or He didn’t. Jesus can’t be the greatest figure who ever lived if He wasn’t truth and He lied about the resurrection. Peterson says that he’s not sure if he believes Christianity, but he tries to live like one. He’s also saying, he’s not committing to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, while living like Jesus did resurrect from the dead. He borrows a reality based upon the truth without actually believing the truth. Other conservatives do that, and it’s easy to see. The world we live in is the real world. Celebrity conservatives more than the mainstream culture try to explain positions according to reality, even if they deny much of the truth or many truths, depending how you want to put that. You may live a reality of Jesus and defend a life that fits His existence and deny the pivotal truth of His resurrection. Peterson does that. Complementarianism is the truth and celebrity conservatives borrow from a complementarian reality without the truth of complementarianism. Gender fluidity proceeds from egalitarianism. God designed men and women differently. That’s the truth. Celebrity conservatives deny complementarian truth while defending a complementarian reality. Let me get more simple. Whether you think he’s a conservative or not, let’s consider President Donald J. Trump as if he were a conservative. Trump operates according to a certain Christian reality that results in Christian support, including from true Bible believers. Trump thinks that one thing is better than another. Certain behavior is wrong. He believes that America as a standard of living better than other countries, which can be and should be protected at the border. This is one of the most fundamental conservative beliefs and it is a reality that borrows from the truth. Former President Trump doesn’t believe the truth, but he functions as though there is truth. He is a realist in that we must have standards. Things won’t be better when we can’t discern the differences of one thing from another. This is a reality according to a Christian worldview. The truth is more important. However, people who eject from reality are much further away from the truth. These either practical or positional nihilists must be rejected for something short of the truth, if that’s the choice. The path to the truth won’t come through their relativism. It can come through someone who at least embraces reality, even if it doesn’t mirror actual reality. The answer for humanity is still the truth. It isn’t the reality of celebrity conservatives.’https://kentbrandenburg.com/2021/09/12/reality-and-truth-celebrity-conservatives-versus-true-bible-believers/
Bible
‘One does not wish to join the pandemic of viral fear whipped up by our political leaders, collusive medical “experts,” and the grossly irresponsible and programmatically ignorant media conglomerate. And yet, there is good reason to fear being inscribed in the category of “the unvaccinated”—the New Jews at risk of disenfranchisement and worse in the increasingly fascist temper of the times.
From my perspective, this is not a frivolous analogy. Growing up Jewish in a small town in the north of Quebec under the sway of an ultramontane clergy, I know what it is to be publicly mocked, prohibited as an undesirable from entering certain local establishments, and fighting my way out of ambushes when walking to school. I am familiar with epithets like maudit Juif (damned Jew), which I heard so frequently that for some time I thought it was one word, mauditjuif—which in effect it was.
Now, as a member of the tribe of the unvaccinated, I sense once again that primal fear of exclusion and imminent violence. As I wrote in an earlier article for PJ Media, my wife and I are under virtual house arrest, prevented from crossing our provincial borders, forbidden to attend a wide range of public activities and venues, including movie theaters, plays, sporting events, gyms, swimming pools, night clubs, concerts, conferences, and university seminars, or to dine in restaurants. I am back in the Quebec of my youth. We are still permitted to walk abroad and to visit the supermarket (masked), but how long these sparse exemptions will last is an open question.
Public intellectual and author Charles Eisenstein has written an extraordinary essay, Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed, in which he anatomizes the ancient narrative of blood libel, of removing pollution from the body social. “There can be little doubt,” he writes, “that some kind of totalitarian program is well underway,” shrewdly conscripting a public that wishes above everything to belong to a pervasive consensus while consigning a portion of the population to a social leprosarium. When corrupt forces hijack group norms, values, rituals, and taboos “through propaganda and the control of information, these good folks can become instruments of totalitarian control.” A form of “violent unanimity” is created, targeting “the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers…ideal candidates for scapegoating,” in this way “investing a pariah subclass with the symbology of pollution.”
This is what is now happening in the current cultural context. We may be observing a kind of ethnic purge in the making, for “this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends.” When politicians get a savor of unlimited and incontestable power, most cannot withstand the allure. It is the devil’s offer to Christ on the domestic plane, and they have neither the character nor the moral fortitude to resist the temptation. The state then proceeds to forge an alliance with the corporate world to enhance its control of the public atrium, knowing that corporations will assist the government in refusing service to medical dissidents. Given the symbiosis between political power and corporate enterprise, we have the core definition of fascism. The issue is complex and hotly contested, but state corporatism remains the crux and organizing principle of the movement, as Paul Gottfried’s excellent Fascism: The Career of a Concept makes clear.
Meanwhile, the multitudes are mobilized and confirmed in their weakness for the comforts of righteous proxy, completing the political trifecta. It is a human-all-too-human phenomenon. The meld between state, business and populace explains why we now find ourselves living in what has come to resemble a fascist collective, a police state in all but name seizing on the COVID event to justify the arrogation of collective authority. As editor Paula Bolyard writes in PJ Media, “The Great American Nervous Breakdown has captured the hearts and minds of a once-sane nation and turned it into a fascist regime in a matter of months.” The same atrocity applies to other Western nations, particularly Canada and Australia. The vaccine passports become the “papers” we are commanded to show in order to demonstrate our ritual purity as loyal denizens of the state.
The vaccine passport is in many places now pretty well a fait accompli. But there is surely more to come. “Imagine needing to go shopping, drive a car, or exit your home,” Eisenstein muses, “The flimsiest pretext will suffice once the ancient template of sacrificial victim, the repository of pollution, has been established.” It appears that a new tyranny, grounded in an act of social cleansing, is in process of announcing itself.
Is there a silver lining in a very dark cloud? As the vaccines become ever more problematic, as new variants continue to emerge accompanied by an endless supply of enforced booster shots, as adverse events continue to mount, as the CDC expediently changes its definition of “vaccination” to account for its perceived inadequacy as a reliable COVID suppressant, and as the vaccinated are shown to be increasingly prone to “breakthroughs” irrespective of disclaimers and despite the enormous proportion of vaccinated individuals, will it gradually begin to dawn on a pharmagandized people that something is genuinely amiss? Will it become evident that guilt can no longer be logically assigned to the minority of “hesitant” and “resistant” when those supposedly immune amount to 70-90 percent of numerous national populations? Will people see through the rite of excommunication we are now witnessing?
And if not, one wonders if a secular version of the Benedict Option is somehow feasible. Will the exiled community of the unvaccinated build a viable alternative to the prevalent cultural hegemony and “construct a resilient counterculture,” to quote Rod Dreher in his seminal book The Benedict Option? Will small “monastic” communities of the independent-minded, local or individually dispersed like flares of reason, spring into existence? Is “going Galt,” as Ayn Rand put it in Atlas Shrugged, a rational option, recognizing that one is being punished not for one’s vices but for one’s virtues and resisting the urge to submit to ideological pressure, even if necessary by isolating oneself voluntarily?
Perhaps the north of Alberta would serve. As “cancelled” Calgary radio celebrity Danielle Smith advises, “You should probably move to a small town…If you are going to be trapped anywhere, Alberta is the best place in the world to be trapped. We have the mountains, arable land for food, abundant energy. When the weight of all this social division reaches the end of its natural life, we will be in the best position to rebuild.” One may speculate.
Finally, we may ask—to adapt the medieval canard against Jews—who is really “poisoning the wells”? The unvaccinated, who are building up natural immunity, or the proponents of an untested, gene therapy injection whose ingredients have not been publicly revealed, which comes with no attendant, legally required product warning, and which has been vigorously contested by a veritable host of medical practitioners and scientists with impeccable credentials? Who are the saved and who are the damned?
This may well be the central issue.’https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/15/reason-to-fear-a-vaccine-mandate-n1479015?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=08b5a1e2f2263b83e918fb56d7a12a3e&recip=26169367
Hebrews 10:23-25 Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) 24 And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: 25 Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
‘An Oklahoma pastor and political candidate says thousands of people have downloaded a COVID-19 vaccine exemption form he’s provided. It’s meant to be signed by one’s pastor. But if another pastor won’t sign it, he says, he will — on certain conditions.
People must like the church’s social media page and give at least a dollar to the church. Then they’ll be his church members.
“If your pastor’s not willing to, then I will sign it for you, but in order for it to carry some weight you would need to become a member of the church,” said pastor Jackson Lahmeyer of Sheridan Church in Tulsa.
Lahmeyer is also challenging U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, in the Republican primary election set for next summer.
Attendance and financial support are the two criteria for membership at Sheridan Church of Tulsa, Lahmeyer said. For online members — and there are thousands, he said — that means liking the church’s Facebook or YouTube page and donating.
“This is nothing new,” Lahmeyer said. The nondenominational charismatic church started accepting online members about four years ago. It delivers its sermons on various social media, or on DVD for elderly homebound members, Lahmeyer said.
“We are much larger online than we are in-house,” he said. The Washington Post reported the church has about 300 members who attend in person.
Lahmeyer’s COVID vaccine exemption form is downloadable from Sheridan Church’s website. His campaign also provides the form by email.
But one legal expert said employers might have grounds to reject it.
“One focal point for those exemptions is always whether the religious belief is sincerely held,” said Robert K. Vischer, dean of the University of St. Thomas law school in Minneapolis. Several ways exist to assess that, he explained.
“But anybody who makes a donation or signs up for a church in order to get an exemption form is going to have a hard time arguing that the belief evidenced by their membership in that church is a product of sincerely held religious beliefs,” he said, “as opposed to a product of their desire to avoid vaccination requirements.”
Moreover, he said, “if your pastor won’t sign it, that might be evidence that the teachings of your religious tradition don’t actually believe that . . . the COVID vaccine conflicts with those teachings.”
The “COVID-19 Religious Accommodation Employee Form” leaves a blank space for the employee to fill in the “religious belief or practice that necessitates this request for accommodation.” A separate space allows the employee to request a specific alternative to vaccination.
Lahmeyer said his kids have had their childhood vaccines and he was not “anti-vax.”
“We’re pro-freedom,” he said, adding he believes vaccination is a personal decision.
Lahmeyer said the form he’s providing was modeled after Oklahoma’s certificate of exemption from school vaccine requirements. That form requires a parent or religious leader to “certify that immunization is contrary to the teachings of the … child’s religion.” It also allows a parent to ask for an exemption if immunization is “contrary to my beliefs.”
Less than 3% of kindergarteners enrolled in Oklahoma public schools and about 5% in private schools received medical, religious or personal-belief exemptions in the 2019-2020 school year.
Lahmeyer said his form left the grounds for requesting an employee exemption up to the individual. “I don’t fill that in.”
He also acknowledged he could theoretically refuse to sign a form based on what the religious objection was. But as of Wednesday, he hadn’t seen any forms yet that he wasn’t comfortable signing.’https://julieroys.com/lahmeyer-pastor-covid-vaccine-exemption-donation/?mc_cid=3050ae9a35&mc_eid=b13d34ad49
“In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.” (Ephesians 1:7)
‘The attributes of God are characterized by the “riches of His grace.” This amazing grace led Him to shed His blood as the price of our redemption.
No wonder men have developed the familiar acrostic for GRACE—“God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense.” “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Paul seems again and again to try to find descriptions for these riches. To the Romans he wrote of “the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering” (Romans 2:4) and of His plan to “make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of [his] mercy” (Romans 9:23). Speaking of God’s mercy, he exclaims, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33).
The inexhaustibility of these infinite depths of grace and mercy led Paul to call these attributes “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8). Desiring that all believers might learn to appreciate the tremendous future they have in Christ, he prayed that “the eyes of your understanding being enlightened,” somehow we might come to appreciate even now “the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints” (Ephesians 1:18).
Yet, marvelously rich and full though His grace is now, there is much more to come. “God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ,…That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-5, 7).’https://www.icr.org/article/12954/?utm_source=phplist9554&utm_medium=email&utm_content=HTML&utm_campaign=September+15+-+The+Riches+of+His+Grace
Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”.

‘Could it be true that we have unwittingly been telling our young people that Christianity is irrelevant?
As I present the evidence for creation and explain to young people the problems with evolution, a similar pattern has emerged with each presentation. While the information is new to them, it rings true. Soon the questions start and they begin to realize that they have been misled by those teaching evolution. Before long, though I have not been encouraging resentment, many of them begin to feel angry that they have been misled by their teachers.
When I have finished, many of them surround me to ask more questions and make comments. The words of one young man sum up why they are so vitally interested. He told me, “I just wish that my older brother had heard this message a couple of years ago. I talked with him a lot, and I just know that if he knew the Bible had intelligent answers, he would not have left the church and hurt my parents so. In fact, until I heard you, I was ready to follow him.”
Other young people tell similar stories. They grew up learning about the creation and Adam and Eve in Sunday school. As they were exposed to evolution, they desperately wanted the Bible to offer an intelligent alternative to evolution. No one was there to offer it to them. Our silence seemed to confirm what evolution suggests – Christianity is outdated. Could it be that through our young people the Lord is telling us that we cannot be neutral or ignorant about the question of origins?’https://creationmoments.com/sermons/questioning-christian-youth-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=questioning-christian-youth-2&mc_cid=549bfdcd1b&mc_eid=00c1dcff3c
As we draw closer to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ there will be more and more apostasy.
‘Same-sex couples can now have their marriage blessed by the Church in Wales after a vote was held.
However, the church will still not marry same-sex couples.
Former Dean of St Albans, the Very Reverend Jeffrey John, supported the change but described it as a “halfway house” that did not go far enough.
The Evangelical Fellowship opposed the move, saying it did not uphold the “standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman”.
But Wales’ bishops said it was a step on the way towards repentance of a history which has “demonised and persecuted gay and lesbian people”.
Individual clergy will be able to opt out of offering blessings to same-sex couples and some conservatives said the change would cause a split.’https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-58427926
Isaiah 29:16 “Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding?”

‘It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body.
At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane.
It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase.
Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye.’https://creationmoments.com/sermons/the-bottomless-suitcase-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-bottomless-suitcase-2&mc_cid=d0ca40c4c7&mc_eid=00c1dcff3c
“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
‘Shortly before his death, Moses restated the law and the covenant between God and His people summed up in the greatest commandment: “Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
Furthermore, Moses claimed that “this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven…Neither is it beyond the sea” (Deuteronomy 30:11-13). Nothing about it was hard to understand. “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14).
Indeed, the evidence that God is Creator, Judge, Provider, and Redeemer is all around us. Our text informs us that “heaven and earth” are witnesses of God’s nature. We have more than enough information than we need in order to respond. In fact, these things “from the creation of the world are clearly seen” so that those who reject are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). Indeed, to ignore the evidence of creation and the Flood, one must be “willingly…ignorant” (2 Peter 3:5). Rejection is foolishness.
“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil” (Deuteronomy 30:15). The choice is between blessing (v. 16) and cursing (v. 19). All lines of reasoning point toward the God of the Bible as the one true God. “Therefore choose life,” as our text encourages us, “That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life” (v. 20). ‘https://www.icr.org/article/12949/?utm_source=phplist9549&utm_medium=email&utm_content=HTML&utm_campaign=September+10+-+Choose+Life
Where will this all end? Now Caesar wants to control who is allowed to go to church and worship the LORD! According to BIG BROTHER New South Wales You MUST HAVE THE VACCINE or YOU are not allowed to go! What other encroachments into our faith will Caesar want?
‘Churches in New South Wales will be required to use a vaccination certificate system once 70 percent of the population have received at least two injections of the COVID vaccine.
From mid-October, churches will be permitted to return to in-person worship on the provision that they only host vaccinated-only services.
Once the target is reached, places of worship must deny entry to any member of the congregation who is not fully vaccinated.
Chris O’Keefe of 9News said the state government has not yet signed off on the roadmap, however, “this is the plan that is being worked on, and it’s likely to be signed off on this week.”
Ironically, the news comes just days after the author’s of the Ezekiel Declaration received a barrage of criticism from certain church leaders for “preemptively” and “prematurely” suggesting the state governments would require a vaccination passport system within the church.
The declaration, an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison opposing the implimentation of a vaxx pass system in Australia, has been signed by more than 2.7k pastors and leaders, and over 21k church members and attendees.’https://caldronpool.com/churches-required-to-use-vaccination-certificate-systems-for-vaccinated-only-worship/
