Thump This

I was watching Bill O’Reilly go hard at Laura Ingram the other day. (available on YouTube) It took a while but now I’m going to toss out what it meant to me. The unusual thing is they’re basically both conservatives with very similar views. During the festivities O’Reilly even threw out that she had the best radio show out there; objective, smart, thinking etc. . . . From the other side Laura endlessly commended Bill for his consistency and legitimate perspectives. (“I love you”) So what was the big row over?

During O’Reilly’s discussion on effective tactics to fight out the gay marriage conflict he rules out “bible thumping” as an effective means of debate. The evangelical community was ‘offended’ by this particular statement and O’Reilly was a little ticked that they would respond this way. In fact, he basically said they weren’t offended. Laura was trying to explain the ‘why’ of the offense but Bill was having none of it. It got very heated to say the least. Laura could see why they were offended but Bill was thinking this had to be a ‘secular’ argument, this was blatantly obviously from his view, so why all the stink?

This actually goes to the heart of integration, the law and apologetics. Laura appealed to Bill as both being ‘Catholics’ so he should understand the offense. Bill was working hard at showing he can separate the religious from the secular and argue one without the other as though this was some positive trait. “IT’s ABOUT POLICY!” He basically called Laura a numbskull because she wasn’t distinguishing between the two. Laura facetiously conceded she had no education. The religious should understand that this is a court/secular context and the arguments can’t be defended by thumping on a religious book.

I could see both sides of the conversation and agreed with neither. The religious community should be ticked at Bill. ‘Bible thumping” should mean using the logic and reason from that evidentiary source as the basis for its arguments. Nothing really wrong with that since marriage is really a religious institution and should not be high jacked by the secular world for their perverted purposes.

Laura’s only plea was for Bill to appreciate why they would be offended by his statement which he never did. But Laura didn’t really offer a true resolution either. She basically agreed with Bill’s side and said it was simply a matter of the wording he choose rather than any real offense, meaning his ‘language’ required amending.

My view is that Bible thumping is what is in order but not legalistic bible thumping. (as O’Reilly rightly objects to) Not taking dictums from either the Old or New Testament and hammering those as an argument, but rather using it as an opportunity to show that marriage is religious. If you want to talk about secular ‘civil unions’, that is another matter. I think the fundamental problem is that the secular word is attempting to steal the beauty and magic of the marriage act which only bears those characteristics when it’s executed as God intended. A brief perusal of either book makes it explicitly clear the homosexuality is not part nor parcel of this union.

Bill is primarily talking about civil unions and in that secular arena we need to generate a different type of argument devoid of religious affiliations. (ie. Bible thumping) But that’s the rub, the country was/is great because of the religious/faith core that started it. If you use secular arguments you’ve already lost. Christianity was the basis for the country and culture. Marriage is spiritual and done in/through the church. The non-believers want to say it’s theirs as well, without the acknowledgement of he who created it. And of course that is what happening on every front on every topic. God is being stripped of his authorship of all creation and it’s being replaced by a Satanic man-centered creator, at least in the minds of the lost.

Should we use a secular argument as to why we should continue to call it Christmas rather than a Happy Holiday? Should we use a secular argument to say why life begins at conception? When Thomas put his fingers in the holes in Jesus, was that secular? Secular arguments are atheistic arguments. They deny reality when it has a Christian flavor. They reject the supernatural out of hand. Why is this any better than a bible based argument? I believe O’Reilly’s desire to come across as independent causes him to prefer secular to supposedly religious arguments. In reality there is only one truth and it interconnects throughout everything. But both Laura and Bill’s unsurprising legalistic view of religion, compartmentalizes religion from the world, so their ability to effectively argue from a spiritual perspective is inoperative.

It becomes somewhat obvious at this point why the right wing media is so ineffective at convincing the rest of America who is who in the zoo. They don’t know themselves.