I do not visit Facebook very often anymore.
For a long time, I visited Facebook about once a month or less. Then I got into the habit of keeping up with it every day. Then I went back to ignoring it as much as possible. I find it is a time vampire.
However, a couple days ago, I decided to see what was going on there.
Someone whom I “friended” likes to repost pictures from those she follows. And one of her reposts was a poster/photo of Romans 12:2 — Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind …
Ouch, stop squeezing me!
As I grew up in a small independent Baptist church in southern New Jersey, our youth group decided this verse meant to avoid peer pressure and fads and to concentrate instead on things we learned at church. I remember, vaguely, the Living Bible using terms like “don’t be squeezed into the world’s mold” — or that is how we interpreted it at the time.
Sort of ironic, none of us really faced much peer pressure since none of us were part of any “in” crowd. We also knew there wasn’t much chance of ever being part of one of those groups, so there was no reason to give in to peer pressure just to fit in; we knew we wouldn’t fit in no matter what we did. Nor was the issue of fads really an issue for us, since none of us could afford to keep up with the latest fad. We were learning thrift and make-do attitudes in our homes out of necessity not out of any sense of rightness, righteousness or any other morality-based reasoning.
However, since then, the church (as a whole, not any particular local congregation) has decided that peer pressure can be a good thing. If the “right” people exert this pressure, the end result can only be a glorious, right and proper thing. And of course, the only “right” people are those who are as right as you can get.
Hmmmmmm …
Think? Who me?
Giving in to peer pressure, whether to do something right or something wrong, is never a good thing.
Why?
To do so it to ignore the second part of the verse. “Renewing of your mind.” We had decided that meant thinking about Godly and churchy things. Thinking? Really?
My husband constantly runs into people who do not think. They admit it. They repeat what their pastor told them, do not double check the scripture passage and do not consider what they have been told nor what they believe. They accept it as truth with no questions asked because no thought occurs.
When talking to His disciples about the coming anti-christs, Jesus told them “Do not be deceived.” And many will take that literally to mean to not be deceived about anyone claiming to be Christ.
But what about those who claim to speak in His name and for Him, to be passing on wisdom and understanding of His will?
We are told of the Bereans, “these were better than they, for daily they searched the scriptures to see if what we told them was true.”
And even more important is to understand what it means when the story of Jesus’ life as a child finds Him not among the people heading back home after a visit to Jerusalem, but in the Temple ‘discussing’ the Scriptures with the priests. Discussing usually involves thought and deep thinking about the meaning of the subject. And, no, thought about scripture is not the purview of just the scholars, pastors and priests, and deities. It is the right and duty of all who want to live by those scriptures.
How true to scripture is the rhetoric of the Right? How true to the will and desire of God is the platform of the Conservative movement?
Ayn Rand, Heroine of the Conservatives was …
Among other things, Ayn Rand was extremely selfish and anti-Christian. Her selfish attitude grew out of events of her childhood as a child and from growing up Jewish in pre- and post-Revolution Russia and, from a psychological point-of-view, an almost understandable result of those events. [For more about her life and philosophy check out Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller] However, she took her selfishness to such an extreme that when her publisher allotted paper equally to all books and authors they published, she demanded they give her more paper than the others because she was more important than the rest.
However …
Selfishness and the idea that God deals only with the powerful is not Biblical. These are not godly ideals.
What is the gospel that the Great Commission refers to?
Can Man bring righteousness to another person by bringing him Law to follow?
(You can probably guess my answer to that question, can’t you? I will answer it here very soon …)
[The image used in thos post comes from 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vampyr_ill_artlibre_jnl.png]
{Please note — extra space between paragraphs is a problem with wordpress and is not my fault … thus one day I will be migrating this blog to Blogger but I need to get it set up first …}
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