I have spent most of the day at home. This photo was taken on a evening run trying to catch the light as the sun went down — I was using a film camera but as it ran out switched to my cellphone.
Free Northerner on Matt Forney vs Lena vs LGR Sunshine Mary.
Christians should be unified and avoid division. Rivalries, dissensions, and divisions are the fruits of the flesh. If you have grievances, keep it in the church and follow the biblically-established procedure for settling intra-church conflict. Our dirty laundry shouldn’t be aired for every non-Christian to see and mock.
How is any non-Christian in the manosphere/DE reading of this supposed to take Christians seriously if we engage in petty bickering over, what exactly?
I still have no idea what the actual issue at hand is.
Deep Strength concurs
This is actually an extremely good lesson for the Christian manosphere and related sites. God allows many things to happen. Even bad things among Christians.
Instead of taking sides and promoting sides we should instead be reaching out to one another in an attempt to forgive and reconcile. This includes Christians who are not directly involved with the situation(s) as well in order to provide support and encouragement for the Christians involved to forgive and reconcile.
Pouring more fuel on the fire in order to support your position or your friend’s position does the exact opposite by creating more tension and strife. It’s not about winning an argument. Lay aside the pride and put on humility instead. Understand that, whether you were right or wrong, by arguing you’re hurting other people. By siding you are hurting other people. Being a Christian is not about being right.
There has been fallout here: Sunshine Mary are no longer posting. When we end up in arguments the hurt remains. It is very easy to believe that someone has done something against you — and unless you can hack the traffic of various sites (which is illegal, even if you are the NSA) then you cannot tell what is happening and who said what.
And, since we are not neighbours, we find it hard to reconcile. Looking back, I think deleting a pile of comments was wise, even though my usual practice has been to allow fairly free comments. I was driven by fear of a libel suit at the time, but leaving accusations up has caused damage, and can cause more damage.
Finally, a quick word to the Ballista74 and, who is also shutting down. whose wrote most of Phineas. We need more people who blog and write about the bible systematically, either from the lectionary or serially moving through books in the reformed matter. For the word of God speaks to us anew each day, and if we turn to that we may find some agreement as we meditate and worship God, not the hurts and pains we all have.
If someone errs, we can email. We can talk. And we can listen, suggest options. But we need to continually be gracious, even when we are giving unpalatable truth.
An outstanding argument by Lydia McGrew at What's Wrong with the World, "Choice Devours Itself":
http://t.co/An6dPONdpX
— Sunshine Mary (@SunshineMarySSM) April 23, 2014
Which brings me back to the dilemma I discussed at the beginning. It’s a delicate task to discuss the basics with a prospective convert while not giving the false impression that there is nothing else to living as a Christian besides accepting those bare basics.
It’s a delicate task, but somebody’s got to do it. Perhaps one idea would be to make one’s own opinions well-known in other contexts. If you are discussing conversion to Christianity with someone who can very easily look up your views on-line on various hot topics, he’s going to have little doubt as to what sort of Christianity you are calling him to vis a vis those issues. For a pastor, this sort of thing could be done on a church web site with links to various position papers endorsed by the church.
Ultimately, there is going to be no getting around it: If your prospective convert makes his liberal moral and social views known in conversation, you have to give him some pushback. You have to make it clear that Christianity isn’t going to leave him in a comfortable left-wing bubble on those issues. And if he insists on discussing them there and then, you have to be willing to do so. In this day and age, there is probably something wrong if that doesn’t happen at some point along the way, because the kind of prospective convert I have in mind is almost invariably going to bring up such things. It’s pretty likely that someone who has been influenced by the zeitgeist is going to think that it counts as an objection to Christianity that (he’s heard) Christianity teaches that homosexuality is wrong, or that (hopefully) your church doesn’t ordain women. So it behooves us to think ahead and work out a response that is both gracious and clear.
MT '@JoshuaOFarmer And there's the sunset tonight Auckland pic.twitter.com/zobVA5e1Qh' Bonus points for nice crepuscular rays! #AucklandSunsets
— Local Auckland (@LocalAuckland) April 26, 2014
A point of contention: The reason Society Of Phineas is shutting down is wholly unrelated to the “unity” topic. Also, which posts on the blog did I not write, since you said I “wrote most of Phineas”?
I’ve corrected the text — your comments about repetition are what drove the last paragraph, and any implication that this was a consequence of the most recent fight is removed.
It could be worse. Larry Correia’s wife has had old high school friends ring up and ask if she is safe because leftists are just making shite up.
Well, the repetition was more relating to the manosphere-related stuff.
You can only say so many times how the church is misandric or how the
teachings of marriage are messed up or what have you without it getting
to you.
The paragraph itself was what my “first iteration” was,
and I may go back to that somewhat if/when I start again. But the issue was just some of the
phrasing: “who wrote most of Phineas” – I haven’t had any guest posters
or anything of that sort, so I was wondering where you were getting
“most” from.
The quality of posts at Phineas was/is very, very high. I thought it was a group effort. I clearly was wrong — and since you wrote them all, I can understand wanting a break!
“We need more people who blog and write about the bible systematically,
either from the lectionary or serially moving through books in the
reformed matter. For the word of God speaks to us anew each day, and if
we turn to that we may find some agreement as we meditate and worship
God, not the hurts and pains we all have.”
FWIW, that’s what I decided to do. When I get everything figured out, I’ll open that blog up. Can always use the old one in case I feel I need to say anything of that nature.