Nuff Said: Christmas with The Chosen, Birds aren’t real, Big tech censorship, Gay marriage, Read printed books

Christmas with The Chosen

I highly recommend that you watch The Chosen Christmas special. Our church small group saw it in the theaters last week, and it’s incredible!

Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They?

The NYT has a fun, fascinating article about a Gun Z conspiracy theory that may cause you to get your feathers in a ruffle.

“It basically became an experiment in misinformation,” Mr. McIndoe said. “We were able to construct an entirely fictional world that was reported on as fact by local media and questioned by members of the public.”

Big Tech Censorship

It’s not China. It’s not Russia. It’s here and from some of our most cherished brands. Joel Belz has an excellent commentary in the Sept. 25 issue of World Magazine.

More and more dominant in the news in recent years has been the bullying role of “corporate America.” Some of that perhaps predictably involves the strong-arm actions of giant corporate newcomers like Amazon, Facebook, or Apple. More ominously, it includes historic companies like Coca-Cola, Bank of America, and Delta Airlines.

The irony in all this, of course, is that these huge corporate entities—both old and new—owe their birth, their growth, and their robust history to our core freedoms. Our Bill of Rights has liberated the entrepreneurial spirit throughout our history and throughout the nation.

But that same Bill of Rights is now being gnawed away by the leaders and executives of many of the megacorporations that have benefited from its freedoms. By censoring their opponents’ products and boycotting their rivals’ services, they “cancel” their enemies where marketplace competition used to prevail.

Censorship has moved from the political world. Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson asserted that the Obama administration was the most secretive of any she covered. She was guilted/threatened that if she published a story, she’d “have blood on your hands.”

“Obama is very different,” she said, pointing out that he has ordered eight criminal investigations into whistleblowers, twice the number of all previous presidents combined, and a year ago secretly subpoenaed the phone and email records of reporters at Fox News and the Associated Press. (Source)

Gay marriage

In June 2014, NT Wright – hailed by Time as “one of the most formidable figures in Christian thought” sat down for an interview about gay marriage. In a surreal sense of timing, almost exactly one year later – in June 2015 – the Supreme Court made same-sex marriages legal in all 50 states in Obergefell v. Hodges. Wright had this to say then, and it’s prescient for current culture wars about redefining language and meaning:

When anybody—pressure groups, governments, civilizations—suddenly change the meaning of key words, you really should watch out. If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning National Socialist or Nazi. The Nazis gave those words a certain meaning. In post-1917 Russia, there were whole categories of people who were called “former persons,” because by the Communist diktat they had ceased to be relevant for the state, and once you call them former persons it was extremely easy to ship them off somewhere and have them killed.

There are uneasy parallels to today’s redefining of words like gender and even “vaccine.”

Why you might want to ditch your e-reader and go back to printed books

The response to the COVID pandemic took most schools and homes online. We already struggled with too much screen in our lives, but we’ve known for a while that retention and memory decline when you read things on a screen. This article shares the results of a study in 2014:

Half the readers got the story on a Kindle; the other half got paperbacks; everybody got the same story. But when it came to the test, results diverged: The Kindle readers, it turned out, were far worse at remembering the story’s plot than were the print readers.