To merge the church with the amusement park seems like a really bad idea, but there’s a church in North Carolina that’s done it.
Do you get the impression that some churches don’t take the sacraments seriously anymore? That’s what happens when you conform to the world rather than being transformed by the word of God.
It shows a lack of respect.
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. —St. Paul (Romans 12:2)
I wonder what Paul would have said about the recent “Beyonce Mass” at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where 900 people showed up to attend mass with a liturgy “using the music and social philosophy” of that noted sage and pop star and “female-centric interpretations of the Bible,” blah-blah (https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Grace-Cathedral-s-Beyonce-Mass-draws-faithful-12865544.php).
The, er, “church” is proud of its “contemporary culture-themed ministry.” Is this, like, the worst idea that anybody ever had? To conform your church to this world, the untended dumpster of 2018’s pop culture? Yeah, well, it’s one way of fighting “heterosexual aggression,” they say.
Leftids have no concept of the holy, unless you want to think of politics and fomenting culture rot as holy. Imagine needing Jesus Christ and having to settle for Beyonce. If you can think of anything worse than that, don’t let me know.
Liberals always say conservatives mix their religion with their politics and can’t tell the two apart anymore. As is the case 100% of the time, this is projection. You can’t go into a liberal church and find anything transcendent. Only abortion, feminism, race-obsession, far-left politics, and all the rest of the junk and debris of this benighted age. They do what they accuse “the Christian Right” (whoever that may be) of doing; and they do it all the time. They can’t not do it.
They have no king but Caesar.
Well, here we go–the Church of England has ordered its 4,700 schools, serving a million pupils, to allow children “to experiment with gender identity” (http://www.itv.com/news/2017-11-13/church-schools-told-to-let-children-experiment-with-gender-identify/). Can you gimme hallelujah? So if you sent your kids to a Church of England school to protect him from the sex-obsessed Godlessness of public education–well, ha-ha-ha on you.
According to “new guidelines from the church,” children “must be allowed to identify as transgender.” Ultimately, explain the idiots in charge, this will “wipe out bullying.”
Verses from Romans spring to mind. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (1:22). And whatever happened to “And be not conformed to this world…”? (12:2) But of course the one verse today’s geniuses have a real problem with is Genesis 1:27, “[M]ale and female created He them.”
You blockheads. If it really were possible to erase a sin from the earth by writing man-made laws against it, don’t you think someone would’ve done it by now? “Bullying”! You saps are being bullied by a Godless, idol-worshipping world, and you don’t even know it. Because it originates in the human heart and comes out from there, there will always be bullying. Only Jesus Christ can save us from our sins. Allowing kids to “dress up” for school in tutus and firemen’s helmets, while requiring everybody else to pretend they don’t see it, is not going to save anybody.
But as long as you’re conforming to the world, what else matters? You work hard to get the approval of the pagans. And you’re welcome to it. But in the words of an old Caribbean spiritual, “Where you gonna run to, all on That Day?”
Spoiler alert? Actually, this whole review is intended to be a spoiler. This 2016 version of Witness for the Prosecution is just another exercise in postmodern futility and radical despair: totally rancid. You’re better off watching ants crawl in and out of the anthill.
Patty and I are big Agatha Christie fans, and Witness is a famous Christie short story that she later rewrote as a stage play. It has since been made into several movies. This is the latest.
It has hardly any resemblance to the story Christie wrote.
Toby Jones, really a marvelous actor, plays a small-time lawyer who has to defend a seemingly hopeless murder case. Against all odds, he gets his client acquitted. But that’s because he and the jury have been cleverly tricked by the defendant and his accomplice. They really did the murder, they get away with it, and an innocent woman winds up being hanged–none of which is in the original story.
What the writers are up to here is wallowing in total moral confusion. The lawyer does wrong because he tried to do right–get it? Ain’t we smart? We know there ain’t no such thing as right or wrong, and aren’t you a schmo for thinking that there is!
Sophomoric bilge. They think they’ll be taken seriously by heaping tribulation upon their defenseless protagonist. Boy, does the poor guy suffer! Lungs are shot from being gassed in WWI, lost his son in the war, his wife can’t love him anymore, and now he’s got all this evil on his conscience while the real bad guys ride off into the sunset, happy as a pair of clams… Why didn’t they give him a nasty paper cut, while they were at it? Or tie his shoelaces together? Oh, and they finally have him commit suicide. That’ll teach him to seek truth.
As the Good Book says, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22).
This is a movie for interllecturals and other saps.