Recently there has been a viral op-ed floating around the internet entitled "Would Jesus Wear a Mask". It is written by Pastor John Lestock of Bethel Lutheran Church in Wisconsin. In it, he claims that the Christian duty to imitate Christ compels Christians to mask up for the COVID-19 epidemic.
A friend of mine asked for my take on it. So... here we go.
One idea I've encountered a few times, even from people who lawyers, is that individuals may enjoy religious liberty, but that doesn't apply to for-profit businesses. As soon as a person forms a business which is open to the public, all bets are off. At that point the profit motive is all which is protected by law, and he/she will need to conform to the most secular ethics of the public. Let's call this the "Principle of Public Secular Conformity" (PPSC)
Recently the US Catholic Bishops have voted to produce a document addressing the thorny topic of the reception of communion by politicians who dissent from Catholic teaching. A common complaint against doing this is that such efforts "weaponize the Eucharist" and "politicize the sacrament".
This, I think, is a suspicious complaint. And if I were talking to a person of that persuasion, I'd have a few questions....
The United States has recently gone through (still going through) a tough election season. With abortion seated center stage among the USA's cultural conflicts, that's a prime target for people's political storytelling efforts.
Among those is the following assertion:
"The Republicans bill themselves as the Pro-Life party. But if those fascist morons who call themselves 'Pro-Life' would just look at the national abortion statistics, they'd realize abortion numbers decrease during Democrat presidents, and hardly go down at all during Republican presidents. And that's because Democrats try to increase our social services, which allows people to not choose to abort. What fools!"
Today I want to examine this narrative. Is it true?
Dear Apologist, I was told that the early Church fathers expressed anti-Semitic attitudes. Did they? And what does that mean for us today?
I remember the first time I read the John's Gospel. I was horribly confused by different it was from the other Gospels. How did it fit together with the others?
In fact, it wasn't even clear how Matthew, Mark, and Luke fit together.
Recently I've spent some time laying out the various events and trying to piece them together. The citations marked with a '*' are those which had to be moved out of the sequence in which they appear in their own Gospel.
Here goes:
