11.07.2008

Fear-Mongering Is a Bad Rhetorical Device

Let me just give y'all a little piece of advice: if you're reading an article about the future of America under Obama's leadership and you find yourself gripped with panic, stop reading the article.

6 comments:

John Dekker said...

Hey, I love the banner pic!

Laura said...

Thanks, JD!

Neil Cameron (One Salient Oversight) said...

Wow. Change of colours. Nice.

WalksbyF8h said...

A lovely blog! I totally agree with your comments and the recipes look quite appetizing. See ya over at PP, soprano!

Anonymous said...

Panic isn't productive, but fear alerts us so we can take action to avoid harmful situations. It's only destructive when we allow it to consume us.

If you are feeling panic over an article, the remedy is to clear your mind and pray for discernment. Ignoring alarming sounding information is not the answer. There are many things about Obama that should alarm Christians. Particularly his social ideas.

We live in very dangerous times and must be informed to fight off the deceivers projects. If we don't fight we may find ourselves unable to spread the Word in the open. Biblical principles may be deemed so called "hate crimes". Many in the West are arguing to do exactly that. Islam definitely wants to do that. The further we allow our society to descend into wickedness the more likely all of us will suffer judgment. By judgement I mean the natural consequences of immoral behavior(poverty,disease,death, lawlessness). Christians will certainly suffer the lawlessness that will come.

Laura said...

Brent, thanks for your comment. I heard recently an anecdote that I thought was interesting. A guy asked a famous pastor if he thought God would judge America for its wickedness, especially abortion. The pastor replied, "Abortion IS God's judgment for our wickedness."

I agree; there are certainly elements of President-Elect Obama's political platform I find alarming, even repulsive, and I am not suggesting that Christians put their heads in the sand and pretend that the Western world is doing just fine. Far from it.

However, what I saw right after the election when I wrote this post, is that a lot of the anti-Obama rhetoric out there is based not on a desire to foster godly action based on right information. It's simply designed to create fear, to foment panic among Christians. It's Chicken-Little politics. THAT is the sort of rhetoric I would urge brothers and sisters in Christ to ignore.

There is enough in Obama's actual platform to cause concern without stooping to exaggeration or misrepresentation. By all means, address his actual policies. Use whatever methods available to expose attempts to limit the rights of American Christians. But to stir up the kind of fear that fails to acknowledge God's sovereignty in human events is to misrepresent God and to put an unbiblical emphasis on the role of the United States in God's plan. The US is not God's chosen nation, and Americans are not His chosen people.

God is on His throne regardless of who is in the White House.