#opinion-peice — Public Fediverse posts

Apologetics: Run, Forest, Run from Contemplative Prayer.

If you go to church, you’ve unfortunately probably heard this said before.

You’re sitting there in the church, listening to the sermon, coffee and a Bible in hand. The pastor is doing a sermon about how we need to trust God or something when he starts talking about Psalm 46:10, where it says: “Be still and know that I am God.” He then springboards off of that to start talking about how we need to start incorporating silence and solitude in our lives, having a few minutes a day with no distractions, no phone, nothing – not even prayer. We just need to dedicate time to sit and wait on God to speak to us and listen to His still small voice.

If you’re like me, if you heard that in church, you would probably confront the pastor, then leave, or skip that step entirely and just walk out. But why exactly is this such a big deal?

Contemplative prayer has become extremely popular in the church over the past couple of years. Many Christians see it as just another way to worship God and to hear God’s voice, by essentially meditating, waiting for God to speak to them by calming themselves and getting rid of distractions. However, this is where we run into the first problem….

Contemplative prayer, by itself, is not a biblical form of prayer, nor is it a biblical form of meditation, as much as passages are often misapplied to make it appear as a biblical practice. In the Bible, prayer is not done by silencing yourself and waiting for God to speak. Prayer is communication with God, which requires – surprise, surprise – communicating with God. Contemplative prayer removes such communication and many writers who promote it even look down upon verbal prayer, even saying that silence is superior.

Similarly, meditation in the Bible is not like meditation in – for example – yoga, where you try to still yourself and your mind. Meditation in the Bible is often speaking of meditating on God’s Word. That means reading your Bible, studying it, thinking about it, praying to God, and worshipping Him. All of that is often missing in contemplative prayer, as it wants you to still your mind and go completely silent.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, we have the far more sinister problem with contemplative prayer: where it even comes from.

According to ex-astrologer Marcia Montenegro, contemplative prayer or centering prayer “[…] has been taught by Roman Catholic monks Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, and Basil Pennington, as well as by Quaker Richard Foster, and is being advocated by many others. There is no one authority on this method, nor is there necessarily a consistent teaching on it, though most of the founding teachers quote medieval mystics, Hindu, and Buddhist spiritual teachers.”

Yikes. But it gets worse. She continues:

According to http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org,

“Centering Prayer [a.k.a. Contemplative Prayer] is drawn from ancient prayer practices of the Christian contemplative heritage, notably the Fathers and Mothers of the Desert, Lectio Divina, (praying the scriptures), The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. It was distilled into a simple method of prayer in the 1970’s by three Trappist monks, Fr. William Meninger, Fr. Basil Pennington and Abbot Thomas Keating at the Trappist Abbey, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.”

It should be added,

“During the twenty years (1961-1981) when Keating was abbot, St. Joseph’s held dialogues with Buddhist and Hindu representatives, and a Zen master gave a week-long retreat to the monks. A former Trappist monk who had become a Transcendental Meditation teacher also gave a session to the monks.” 

The influence of Buddhism and Hinduism on Contemplative Prayer (hereafter referred to as CP) is apparent. Words such as “detachment,” “transformation,” “emptiness,” “enlightenment” and “awakening” swim in and out of the waters of these books. The use of such terms certainly mandates a closer inspection of what is being taught, despite the fact that contemplative prayer is presented as Christian practice.

Themes that one finds echoed in the Contemplative Prayer movement include the notions that true prayer is: silent, beyond words, beyond thought, does away with the “false self,” triggers transformation of consciousness, and is an awakening. Suggested techniques often include breathing exercises, visualization, repetition of a word or phrase, and detachment from thinking.

So not only does this practice go back to a bunch of medieval mystics, but it has also been heavily influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism. Why the heck is this being taught in the church?

But of course, there’s the ever-present rebuttal of, “So what? Sure, it has some questionable roots, but why can’t we redeem it for God? The context is bad, but change the context, and in of itself, it’s fine.”

Ha, ha, ha, no!

Not only is this practice in of itself unbiblical as I explained previously, but we have the fact that it can very easily lead down a dark path. The entire practice of contemplative prayer is to open yourself up to hearing from God, but what happens when that backfires? In the post quoted earlier from Marcia Montenegro, she writes that one teacher of contemplative prayer, Quaker Richard Foster, “even warns about silent contemplative prayer, saying that it is for more mature believers, that “we are entering deeply into the spiritual realm” where we may encounter “spiritual beings” who are not on God’s side. He suggests a prayer of protection in which one surrounds himself with “the light of Christ,” saying “all dark and evil spirits must now leave,” and other words to keep evil ones at bay.” She goes on to compare this to her time in the New Age, “when I was taught to invoke a white light of protection before psychic activity or contact with the dead.”

See the problem here? Contemplative prayer isn’t just a way to connect to God. You’re opening yourself up to all sorts of things, most of which likely don’t want you to know who Jesus is. And to teach this practice as a healthy practice in church to a bunch of people who don’t know how to discern is especially dangerous.

On that note: we also must ask ourselves if as Christians we should even be giving the devil that sort of foothold in our lives. Should we be opening ourselves up to that influence? The answer should be no.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Mormon Monday – Mormonism’s God Makes No Sense.

We’re back to the Mormons again. When I’ll get back to the Flippin’ Fatwa Friday series and finally finish Surah 2, I don’t know, but in the meantime, we’ll talk about the Mormons.

As I’ve mentioned before in a previous post, Mormonism is a henotheistic religion. That means that while they worship one god, they’re open to there being a ton of other gods. In the case of Mormonism, while they worship Elohim (a.k.a. Heavenly Father), they believe that, like Elohim, they can become their own gods after they die. In fact, the LDS church teaches that Elohim was once a man who, through obedience to whoever his god was, got promoted to god after he died.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, the Mormon version of the Trinity makes the problem even worse. According to Mormonism, the Trinity often is defined as three gods who are simply united in purpose. The Trinity is not three persons that make up one godhead as we Christians would think of it.

This poses a unique problem for Mormonism. Mormons claim that their version of God has all the same traits as our God, being omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. However, if their version of God was once a man who got promoted to godhood and now rules this planet with a bunch of other gods ruling their various planets, then he can’t be any of those things. The Mormon god can’t be omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent because he wasn’t always there.

Further, if the Mormon god was created, then it poses the question of “Why don’t we worship the one who created him?” But if that god was created, then it poses the same question, regressing into infinity unless we find the actual creator.

But even worse for Mormonism besides these two glaring problems is the fact that according to The Pearl of Great Price and Doctrines and Covenants the world was not created ex nihilo. They believe that the elements are eternal and that Elohim, with Jesus’ help, just arranged them to create the world.

Weird how that sounds oddly pantheistic, especially when you take into consideration the Elohim was once a normal dude. It also raises the question of who’s more powerful? The matter or Elohim?

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: Feminism has Lost the Plot.

2026 has been a weird year with all the stuff going on in the media and how unhinged everyone seems to be. Yes, society has been unhinged for a while, but it seemed to get even more so this year to the point that every time I see the news, this song plays in my head.

However, one of the most disturbing things that has happened this year is how feminists have really just confirmed that they aren’t trying to ensure that women have equal rights to men but are rather trying to push what I call a woman-supremacist ideology. Let me explain, by showing Exhibit A: the Lindsay Clancy case.

Now, I already did a post on this, but in this case, we have seen a huge double standard. If a man did what Lindsay Clancy did and strangled three children to death, cut himself a few times, and jumped out a window, then claimed insanity to get a lessened sentence, the feminists would be demanding he die. There would be no theories about who really murdered the kids. There would be no videos saying, “Me too…” The guy would be put in jail and that would be that.

But somehow, since the woman did it, the feminists are cheering for Lindsay, posting “Me too…”, and are doing everything they can to “prove” that she’s innocent and Patrick actually killed the kids.

Then there’s Exhibit B: The Cornell Seven case. I understand there’s a lot more stuff coming out about this case, and I’m not saying the men involved are necessarily innocent, but with the stuff coming out about it, it sounds like the lady involved accused them of rape to cover up her own behavior. In so doing, even if the men are not found guilty of rape, already their lives have effectively been ruined, without even a trial to prove them guilty.

This is what I mean by feminism losing the plot. Originally, the feminist movement was meant to secure the same rights for women that men had. The right to vote, the right to hold public office, the right to own a home, to own a bank account independently, the right to work outside of the home, etc. Then, overtime, as we were given those rights, it appears that feminism decided to take a new turn and look for issues where there were none to the point where it just became about securing power for women at the expense of others.

You murdered your kids (born or unborn)? That’s fine. I’m sure you had a good reason for it, like your hormones were out of whack or you didn’t want to be mom yet. Girl power!

You just had an orgy with a bunch of frat boys and now your reputation is being ruined? Go ahead. Destroy their lives without even a trial. The future is female!

You want to essentially be a prostitute and sleep around with everyone or sell your body on OnlyFans to porn addicted men? You go girl!

In looking to give women power for the sake of power, feminism has removed all standards of accountability for women, and in so doing, has simply made it so both men and women suffer. Men are discriminated against, and women are allowed to do evil simply because they’re women.

However, while this is seen as “empowering” by many modern-day feminists, here’s the kicker. This power that women now hold to have no accountability in the culture simply because they’re women has led to the worst type of misogyny: infantilization. Our culture now sees women as many cultures throughout history have seen women: as being fragile, emotional creatures who, mentally, are just above children and far below men. Though feminism touts the “strong-woman” line, it treats women as being governed so much by their emotions and society that they can never be held accountable. They, instead, should be treated like children who don’t know the gravity of their actions. Men, meanwhile, must be treated the opposite way.

How is that not sexist and mysognistic?

If one is a true feminist, they should look at the cases where women act terribly and hold them accountable instead of letting them get away with everything.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Monthly Mormon Monday – Joe Smith’s Whacky First Vision.

Behold! It came to pass that it hast been 6 months since last I wrote of The Book of Mormon, and verily, it came to pass that I began to wonder what to write of for this week, and truly, a Mormon did come into my comments section to tell me what a beauteous religion Mormonism is, and it came to pass that my interest long put on the burner on the back of the stove was once more rekindled in this topic strange.

Hence this post.

There are several directions I can go with Mormonism, such as disproving the idea that it’s a Christian religion, but right now, I want to focus on the history of Joseph Smith’s first revelation, or the First Vision. Every Mormon knows this story. Basically, when Joe was 14, he went to a grove near his family home in New York where he knelt down and prayed, wanting to know what church the true church was. He was then overcome by some dark power but was delivered when God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared and told him not to go to any church, as all of them had been corrupted. This of course was a major event, marking the young Joseph Smith as a prophet of God who would later start the LDS church.

But that version of the story is the standard version written on April 1, 1842. There are eight more versions, all of them with massive contradictions.

In a version of the story written in 1832 by Joseph Smith himself, he records himself to have been 16 years old when he was visited by Jesus alone, and was forgiven of his sins. In this version, he already knew all the churches were wrong and only prayed for the forgiveness of his sins.

In the second version written in 1835, Joseph Smith gave an account of the First Vision to a dude named Oliver Cowdry, saying that he was 17, was only praying to see if God was real, and was visited not by Jesus, not by God, but by a messenger of God. Who this messenger was, we have no clue, but he forgave Joe’s sins. But as though that wasn’t bad enough, that same year, Smith wrote a diary entry recording this event (third version), but said that many angels visited him, not Jesus and God. This diary entry was also the first time the evil power was ever mentioned.

Then, two years later, a fourth version was written, and while this is a third-hand account, it still messes up on key details, saying Smith was 17 and that the visitors were angels. It also makes no mention of the (supposed) revival that was going on that caused Smith to start (supposedly) wondering what church to be a part of. Similarly, in an 1841 third-hand account that was originally given to the writer by Smith’s brother, Smith was 17 and “glorious angel” came to visit him, not God or Jesus.

A year after the 1841 version, Smith then wrote in a letter to John Wentworth about the First Vision. In this version, he doesn’t give his age, doesn’t speak of the dark force that overtook him, and says he was visited by two personages, but they’re identified. A year after that, in 1843, he told the Pittsburgh Gazette his story, but says he was 14 and – once again – never mentions the dark power.

Then, in an 1844 journal entry by Alexander Niebaur, the First Vision story is largely the same as the standard version, but in this version, Joe was simply told not to join the Methodists. He wasn’t told that all the churches were corrupt.

So which one is the right version?

Well, that’s the question that Mormons have to struggle with as all of these accounts differ greatly from each other on key points. Was it an angel, God and Jesus, or multiple angels that visited Joseph Smith? Was he 14, 16, or 17 when it happened? Was he overtaken by a dark spirit and delivered or not? Was he praying for forgiveness of sins, praying to know if God is real, or praying to know which church to attend? Was he forgiven of sins, told all churches were corrupt, or only told that the Methodists were corrupt? Which story should the Mormons believe if there are so many discrepancies coming from credible sources, including Smith himself?

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Is Asking Questions a Sin?

A little bit ago, as my family and I were sitting around the dinner table, we were talking about spiritually abusive churches. If you guys have read my testimony or have even been around since the start of this blog, y’all know that my family has left several churches due to everything from shady to outright spiritually abusive pastors and I have written extensively about those experiences. During this conversation, my dad brought up a sermon by the pastor of the first church we went to (sarcastically dubbed by yours truly as the Church of the Holy Dollar) in which being cynical was painted as a sin.

But let’s define what the heck cynicism is.

If he had meant cynicism as being constantly suspicious of everyone and everything to an unhealthy level, I could see why it might be a sin. However, from how Dad described it, the way the pastor talked about cynicism made it sound more like he was referring to simply being someone who questions things, expresses their doubts, and looks for an answer.

That is not a sin. Anyone who tells you otherwise should be avoided.

In the Bible asking questions is consistently treated as a good thing. Numerous biblical figures questioned God and wrestled with their faith (some even literally wrested with God.) From Abraham, to Moses, to David, to Jesus Himself, people in the Bible questioned God. In the Gospels, Jesus encourages His followers to ask questions (Matt 7:7-8) and encourages them to be discerning (Matt. 7:15-20). Similar encouragement is found in the Epistles, and discernment is even considered to be a gift of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:10.

From this, we can clearly see that expressing doubts, asking questions, and being discerning is not a sin according to the Bible. It is actually treated as a healthy and normal part of the Christian life. So why do so many churches treat it as a sin?

The main reason why this is is because many churches sadly see Christianity as a money-making scheme. Even if they start out with good intentions, all it takes is one egomaniac taking over, or a pastor who gets too big for his britches to start treating the church as his personal piggybank. Anyone who questions the teachings or methods, then, is viewed as a threat to that church, and asking questions, even if you mean well by it, is treated and painted as a sin, even though the Bible never treats it as a sin.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: How I Became a Mossad Agent…

Recently, I posted a short video reacting to Dailywire’s movie, Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel and I got a comment from someone in particular who was quite angry about what I had to say in response to someone commenting “Free Palestine”:

So, apparently, I’m part of the Mossad. I had no clue it was so easy to get in. All I had to do was support Israel. I apparently don’t even have to be Jewish, Israeli, or Messianic Jew. Where exactly my payment for working for Israel is, I have no clue. I keep checking my bank account, but weirdly, I don’t have any shekels. Odd, but I guess it checks out since I’m only now finding out that I’m in their employ.

But how exactly did I get in? Well, like I said, all I had to do apparently was support Israel, and for that, I have to thank the people who support the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. As someone who doesn’t support actual genocide/ genocide attempts, I found it natural to side with Israel in the Israel/Hamas war, as I believe that a country should be allowed to protect its people. Weird, right?

Now, in reality, I’m not actually in the Mossad, as cool as that would be. However, I think this is a hilarious way of really showing how stupid some people are, because this is not the first time I’ve been accused of being paid by Israel for my opinions. It’s a line of logic that relies on the false idea that everyone who disagrees with you must have some ulterior motive in doing so, usually for money. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: The Atonement is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card.

One of the most common criticisms against the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is the idea that it simply gives Christians license to sin and protects it. This criticism has been around for millennia and hasn’t slowed down. In fact, since the advent of the Internet, it almost seems that this argument has more ground to stand on than ever before as we’ve been privier to Christians acting badly and more church scandals have been reported. Many people half-jokingly say that Christianity is a religion where you can have your cake and eat it, too; something where you can feel spiritual and like you’re better than other people, while still acting in sin. However, despite these accusations, what many people don’t understand is that the doctrine of atonement was never meant as a get-out-of-jail-free card for sin. 

Though Christ’s substitutionary atonement on the cross does mean that all your sins are covered, that does not mean that it’s a license to continue sinning. Paul himself addresses this in Romans 6: 15-18, when he writes: “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” 

What this means is that though our sins are covered by Christ’s atonement, as Christians, we aren’t supposed to continue sinning. In fact, we’re obliged to stop sinning out of gratitude to Jesus for His sacrifice. This is further supported by the fact that in order to be saved from your sin, you must accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and you must repent of your sin. While it’s true that none of us will be perfect on this side of eternity, if you are still willfully and consistently sinning against God, are you truly saved? Have you truly repented? 

The Bible answers this question with an emphatic “No.” While there will be times were we as Christians slip into sin, if one isn’t showing the signs of repentance and change in their lives after converting, then it may be that they weren’t saved. It may be that they converted on the outside, but never actually repented. 2 Peter 2:20-22 speaks about this. This chapter deals, in context, with false teachers and what will happen to them, but I think this principle also applies to false converts. They say they’re Christians but don’t repent. Instead of turning their lives around and turning away from sin, they turn in a full circle and continue in sin. According to 2 Peter 2:20-22, it would have been better if those people had never known Jesus Christ in the first place than to have known Him and walked away. 

Another way to think about this is in the form of a story. Imagine you’re camping with a friend of yours or a family member. The area where you’re camping is near a lake with a lot of dangerous animals in it. The person you’re camping with tells you not to go near it because you could get hurt or be killed. However, you ignore their warning and go to the lake where you’re attacked by the animals living in it. Your friend jumps in and saves you, but in the process, is beat up and on the brink of death from saving you. Seeing this, do you, out of gratitude, stay far away from the lake or do you jump back in even though your friend risked his life for you? 

This illustration shows the issue with treating atonement like a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sin is like that lake full of dangerous animals. At the Fall, mankind jumped into that lake, knowing the danger, and not caring. Jesus jumped after us, saved us, and was killed for it. The death that we deserved was taken by Him. To jump back into sin, then, would not only be foolish, but ungrateful. It’s spitting in the face of the one who saved you. 

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unitarians Have a Problem…

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently had the opportunity to talk to some Jehovah’s Witnesses and challenge them about their beliefs. In the days since I talked to them, I have been thinking more about the JW belief system, and something occurred to me. Jehovah’s Witnesses have a unitarian view of God. They deny the Trinity, saying it comes from paganism, and hold that there is only one God – Jehovah – and that the Son is a totally different entity. As for the Holy Spirit, they believe it is an active force, once again separate from Jehovah.

But why does this sound familiar? Where else have we heard something similar?

Oh, that’s right! We’ve heard similar stuff from Muslims, who believe Allah is only one dude, Jesus is not his son, and the Holy Spirit is…something. Some will say the Holy Spirit is the angel Gabriel, others will argue it’s a name for Muhammad, and still others will say that it’s Allah’s spirit, whatever that is. We also see this same issue in other unitarian belief systems.

However, as with the Muslims, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and others like them have two major issues concerning God’s character. First, we have the question of why would God create in the first place? If, according to Muslims, JWs, and others, God is a single entity, then it is not in his nature to be relational. So why should he be lonely? Why should he create anything? In order for him to have any inclination to create, he would have to change his character to one that’s relational, which means his attributes change, something that Muslims, JWs, and Unitarians would all adamantly deny. They all agree that God doesn’t change, yet in denying the Trinity, they force him to change to explain why we’re here.

Second, we have the issue that if God is one, with no other persons, then he is dependent on creation to have various attributes, particularly that of lordship. In the Christian view of the Trinity, we believe that the Trinity has an effective hierarchy, with God the Father at the top. There is lordship in that, which means that God has always been lord even before creation began.

However, if the Unitarian view is true and God’s always been a single entity, then he can’t be eternally lord because in order to be lord of something, you need something to lord over. Thus, he is dependent on creation’s very existence to be able to claim that title.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Jehovah’s Witnesses! Your Translation Isn’t Accurate!

A few days ago, as I was chilling at home taking my Duolingo courses, someone arrived at the door. My mom answered and since she wasn’t feeling well, handed the person off to me. The person in question was a Jehovah’s Witness recruiting people for Bible studies. We talked for about five minutes, I got a copy of a Watchtower magazine, as well as the Bible study pamphlet and we scheduled to meet up the next day. So, in preparation for our meeting, I started calling some of my mentors to learn as much as possible about Jehovah’s Witnesses in the short time I had, watching YouTube videos about them, and looking through their sources.

Holy cow, there’s all sorts of things wrong with them.

I’ll focus on one of the biggest issues I found while scrolling through the Jehovah’s Witness translation of the Bible (the New World Translation): their translation of Colossians 1:15-20.

For those of you who don’t know, Jehovah’s Witnesses have a belief that Jesus was a created being, a “special creature.” They don’t believe He is God but believe that He is the archangel Michael in human form and much of their translation of the Bible is rewritten in such a way as to get rid of anything suggesting that Jesus is God. And, in the case of Colossians 1:15-20, they have rewritten it to make it more accommodating of their beliefs, but that’s where the Jehovah’s Witnesses have dug their own grave, not only when they say that their translation of the Bible is accurate, but also when they try to say Jesus is not God.

According to the New World Translation of the Bible, Colossians 1:15-20 says:

 He is the image of the invisible God,o the firstborn of all creation;p 16  because by means of him all other things were created in the heavens and on the earth, the things visible and the things invisible,q whether they are thrones or lordships or governments or authorities. All other things have been created through himr and for him. 17  Also, he is before all other things,s and by means of him all other things were made to exist, 18  and he is the head of the body, the congregation.t He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,u so that he might become the one who is first in all things; 19  because God was pleased to have all fullness to dwell in him,v 20  and through him to reconcile to himself all other thingsw by making peace through the bloodx he shed on the torture stake, whether the things on the earth or the things in the heavens.

Notice there that the word “other” is added in here. The inclusion of that word, while it doesn’t deny Jesus’ divinity, nor does it deny that He’s could have been a created being, makes the passage more flexible. Without that word, “other,” the passage points in one direction: Jesus being God. It’s this flexibility that Jehovah’s Witnesses depend on when using this passage to say that Jesus was created being, because otherwise, they couldn’t make that argument.

But here’s where it gets tricky for JWs.

While the word “other” is included in their standard New World Translation of the Bible, not only is it not included in standard Bibles (i.e. the ESV, NIV, NKJ, etc.), but it is absent in their own Kingdom Interlinear Bible. It says:

15 ὅς
whoἐστιν
isεἰκὼν
imageτοῦ
of theθεοῦ
Godτοῦ
theἀοράτου,
invisible,πρωτότοκος
firstbornπάσης
of allκτίσεως,
creation, 16 ὅτι
becauseἐν
inαὐτῷ
himἐκτίσθη
it was createdτὰ
theπάντα
all (things)ἐν
inτοῖς
theοὐρανοῖς
heavensκαὶ
andἐπὶ
uponτῆς
theγῆς,
earth,τὰ
the (things)ὁρατὰ
visibleκαὶ
andτὰ
the (things)ἀόρατα,
invisible,εἴτε
whetherθρόνοι
thronesεἴτε
orκυριότητες
lordshipsεἴτε
orἀρχαὶ
governmentsεἴτε
orἐξουσίαι·
authorities;τὰ
theπάντα
all (things)δι’
throughαὐτοῦ
himκαὶ
andεἰς
intoαὐτὸν
himἔκτισται·
it has been created; 17 καὶ
andαὐτὸς
heἔστιν
isπρὸ
beforeπάντων
all (things)καὶ
andτὰ
theπάντα
all (things)ἐν
inαὐτῷ
himσυνέστηκεν,
it has stood together, 18 καὶ
andαὐτός
heἐστιν
isἡ
theκεφαλὴ
headτοῦ
of theσώματος,
body,τῆς
of theἐκκλησίας·
ecclesia;ὅς
whoἐστιν
isἡ
theἀρχή,
beginning,πρωτότοκος
firstbornἐκ
out ofτῶν
theνεκρῶν,
dead (ones),ἵνα
in order thatγένηται
might becomeἐν
inπᾶσιν
all (things)αὐτὸς
heπρωτεύων,
holding the first place, 19 ὅτι
becauseἐν
inαὐτῷ
himεὐδόκησεν
he thought wellπᾶν
allτὸ
theπλήρωμα
fullnessκατοικῆσαι
to dwell down 20 καὶ
andδι’
throughαὐτοῦ
himἀποκαταλλάξαι
to reconcileτὰ
theπάντα
all (things)εἰς
intoαὐτόν,
him,εἰρηνοποιήσας
having made peaceδιὰ
throughτοῦ
theαἵματος
bloodτοῦ
of theσταυροῦ
stakeαὐτοῦ,
of him,δι’
throughαὐτοῦ
himεἴτε
whetherτὰ
the (things)ἐπὶ
uponτῆς
theγῆς
earthεἴτε
orτὰ
the (things)ἐν
inτοῖς
theοὐρανοῖς.

Even according to them, the word “other” is not present in the Greek of this passage.

This is a big deal because it shows two things. Not only can their own translation not escape the fact that, according to Scripture, Jesus is God, but it also shows that they do not have an accurate translation. It shows that the standard New World Translation has been changed from the original Greek to fit the agenda of the Watchtower Society.

This should concern every single Jehovah’s Witness. If your books have been changed and aren’t lining up with the original Greek, then are you even reading the Scriptures as their original author intended them to be read? If they have been changed to fit your doctrine, then aren’t following the doctrines of man, not God? And if so, shouldn’t that make you worry about what God actually wants you to believe?

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel Was as Disappointing as I Feared.

Dailywire’s new movie Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel dropped last Wednesday and, as I promised I would do a review of it, I watched it. And almost everything that I had worried would happen in this movie when the trailer dropped happened.

Now, was the movie entertaining? Yes. I would also say that some of the writing was much better than the original Run, Hide, Fight. However, that’s pretty much the only good thing I can say about this movie.

The way that Run, Hide, Fight: Infidel was marketed was as a realistic portrayal of what could happen if Islam takes over. Dailywire marketed it as a scathing criticism of Islam and as such I hoped that they wouldn’t just reach for the low hanging fruit. I hoped that they would do their research, quote the Quran, hadiths, and maybe even Muhammad’s own biographies to show how evil Islam inherently is. I hoped that they would treat it with some nuance, too, and maybe work in the Shia/Sunni conflict. Since the bad guys appear to be Shia Muslim, it would have been interesting if there was a Sunni character who was having to fight for his/her life to against the Shias. But did Dailywire do any of that?

No.

For the entire 2 hour-long run time, the only actual quote from the Quran present in the movie was from Surah 8:30, where it says Allah is the best of planners. The only other direct quote from Islamic sources was from a hadith about purification, and a passing reference to a hadith about the 12 Imams, and both were misattributed to the Quran.

Why Dailywire did this, I have no clue, especially since they appear to have access to people like Raymond Ibrahim and Michael Jones from Inspiring Philosophy, who are both experts on Islam. Why couldn’t they have called them up and asked, “Hey, what are some good quotes from the Quran or other Islamic sources that we could work into the script?”

Seriously, it would have been so ridiculously easy to quote the Quran and hadiths in this movie in dialogue, someone’s monologue, whatever. The fact that Dailywire didn’t even try to do that but instead grabbed at the Muslim terrorist trope is sad, even if it’s true that Islam has been responsible for half of all the religious wars waged. It’s much easier to argue that you’re being Islamophobic when you make a movie that feels more like a stereotype of Muslims (even if it is based in truth), than if you make a movie that goes out of its way to quote Islamic texts and add nuance that shows more of Islam’s depravity.

Another issue I had with this movie is the fact that they didn’t even try to cite statistics on how Muslims take over countries. They barely touched it, even in the speech Jonathan Major’s character gives. Once again, it’s a detail that makes the movie feel poorly researched, like the only research they did was done on X.

Overall, I would give this movie a 4/10-star rating. The entertainment value was the only good part of it, but it really fails to give what it promised.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Does God Cause Our Suffering?

One of the things I’ve been trying to do in my spare time to keep my sanity and prevent my brain from becoming mush is to continue learning through Hillsdale College. No, this is not an ad for Hillsdale, as much as I enjoy it. I just happen to still have an account with them from school, so I have access to their online courses, and the online course I’m taking right now is the one on The Odyssey (which is nice since I can read the book while taking the lessons.)

But wait. What does this have to do with the topic of this post?

Well, one of the things that was pointed out in the online course about The Odyssey is the fact that one of the biggest themes explored in the poem is the idea of suffering. Is our suffering caused by the gods (or, in a Christian worldview, God), or is our suffering caused by our bad choices? It’s a question that plagues any theist, Christian or not.

Homer takes the latter position. The Odyssey opens with Zeus complaining about humans blaming the gods for their suffering, and the rest of the book goes on to show Odysseus and his crew making poor decisions that lead to massive delays in returning to Ithaca. They escape Polyphemus’ island and instead of just taking the win, Odysseus feels the need to brag about besting the cyclops and reveals his name, allowing Polyphemus to pray specifically for Odysseus’ destruction, leading to Poseidon plaguing him for ten years. Odysseus’ crew open Aeolus’ bag of winds thinking its treasure and blow the ship away from Ithaca. The same crew is also told not to eat Helios’ cattle, yet they do it anyways and all die when Zeus blows up their ship with a thunderbolt. Almost every bad thing that happens to the characters of The Odyssey is caused by their poor choices and disobeying the gods.

From a Christian standpoint, while Greek mythology obviously isn’t true, there is a lesson in here that’s applicable to the Christian life. Homer’s conclusion that much our misfortune comes from our bad choices is something that we see in the Bible. For example, in 1 Samuel, Saul is chosen to be king, and the future looks bright for him until he tries to perform the duties of a priest and sacrifice to God because Samuel was a bit late. For that act of disobedience, he is told that his line won’t extend beyond him and God will replace him with someone else. From there, Saul continues to make a bunch of bad choices that lead to his life getting worse and worse.

Now, this isn’t to say that absolutely everything that goes wrong in your life is your fault. Some things can’t be avoided, like certain cancers or diseases. However, if you’re making poor decisions (i.e. drinking heavily, sleeping around, doing drugs, etc.) then don’t be surprised if you start experiencing issues.

At this point, though, you may be asking: “Well, if God is good, then how can He allow us to go through suffering? After all, doesn’t He love us?”

In the Bible, it’s clear that God allows us to experience the consequences of our sins, similar to how if your kid messes up something, you allow them to experience the consequence of that. A lot of the time, the consequences are there to serve as a kind of wake-up call. If you’re living in sin, often what it takes is for you to hit the bottom to realize what you’re doing is wrong. For example, if your life revolves around drinking and partying, then it may take you sustaining severe liver damage from drinking too much to make you realize your sin. If you’re someone dabbling in the occult, it may take you dealing with terrible spiritual experiences to finally light the fire under your butt to run to Jesus. If your sin is less obvious, and you’re just a random Joe-Shmoe living life, it might take you having a low moment to recognize your sin and need for forgiveness.

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: Tom MacDonald – “The Government”

It’s been a while since I’ve listened to Tom MacDonald, and another bit since I’ve done a music review. I listened to his album Declassified, thought it was okay, liked a few songs, then kinda moved on and last I heard, he went on hiatus for a few months.

But apparently, he’s back with a new single called “The Government.”

Overall, I liked it. For a little bit, MacDonald did seem to be moving in more strictly conservative territory with songs like “The Devil is a Democrat,” but it definitely seems like he’s back to producing music that’s more politically in the middle. The entire song is about how he doesn’t trust the government because both sides are corrupt, politicians don’t keep their promises, and we can’t really trust anything from either side.

It’s bleak, but it’s an important message.

While politically, I would still consider myself conservative, I understand that no matter who is in office, we’re screwed. I still think the Democrats would do a much worse job of running the country than a lot of Republican politicians, but there are also quite a few Republicans that I am not a fan of (looking at you, Victor Marx.) It’s a mistake for anyone to think that just because someone says they’re one party, that everything will be sunshine and rainbows and those people can do no wrong. At the end of the day, people are people, and they will backstab you or do things that are stupid, no matter what party they identify with.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: Pointing Out What Islam Teaches Isn’t Divisive.

On Friday, the 25th anniversary of the horrific 9/11 attacks, I posted an article about how we have forgotten 9/11. In that post, I pointed out that in the time since 9/11 – even though it’s glaringly obvious what religious persuasion the terrorists were apart of and that that religion teaches that violence against non-believers is a good thing – we, the American people, remain painfully ignorant of the threat that Islam teaches. We ignore what the religion actually teaches in its holy books and continue to believe that it’s mainly peaceful, that the only violent Muslims are the Muslims that have hijacked Islam. Heck, nowadays, many on the Left even cheer on the violent Muslims, saying that we deserved 9/11.

However, in response to this post, I got a comment from someone on the Fediverse, who writes:

Blaming 9/11 strictly on the violence of religious fundamentalists is a completely unserious take and just reveals your own lack of nuance in your understanding of the world. It completely ignores 70 years of history the most important of which is asking which world power helped Osama Bin Laden rise to power and then who’s brutality in the middle east inspired unlimited generations of hatred at it.

I’ll give you a hint: it sounds like we both live here.

Further, why is it so hard to believe that not everyone in a religion is a hard-line fundamentalist. That’s something crazy an atheist would say.

“Here in the bible it actually says its good to kill whole races and cultures of people and enslave them. So you must believe this since this is your book! Checkmate theist!” I refused to participate in the Nu-Atheist waves for that s***.

But you and I both know the goal isn’t to be a well informed person if you’re lamenting the Kirk days. You’re clearly just trying to rile up anti-muslim hate instead of giving a s*** about politics that help people. You are simply a free mouthpiece for the same oil industry backers and global capitalists elites that have always pushed this divisive nonsense.

While yes, America unfortunately had a role to play in Osama bin Laden’s rise to power, that does not mean that Islam is off the hook as a motivating factor in the 9/11 attacks. If one is to read the suicide letter of one of the 9/11 terrorists, we clearly see Islam being a leading reason for why he was attacking innocent people. (Video below of ex-Muslim, Apostate of Allah, reading the 9/11 suicide letter.)

https://youtu.be/4zhJAm4gn1Y

The most notable part here is the ninth part of page one, which says:

9- Then, put that in front of your eyes, if you are facing a challenge — how would you act [?] how to steadfast [?] and remember and learn [illegible] it wouldn’t happen to you. It is a challenge from God [illegible] then it will be clear, God willing, God had said “did you think that you will enter paradise and that God knows those who performed Jihad and knows those who are patient”

That there is a clear link to Islam as a motivating factor, with the quote being taken from Surah 3: 142, which talks about participation in Jihad (warfare for Allah) as being one of the biggest tests for a Muslim. Similarly, we also see the hijacker quoting from the Quran in the third part of his letter, which says:

3- Read Surat al-Tawba, and Surat al-Anfal — understand their meanings and understand what God had prepared for the faithful — He prepared an everlasting paradise for the martyrs.

For those who are unaware, Surah al-Tawbah is Surah 9, one of the most infamous chapters in the Quran because it contains the two “Sword Verses”, 9:5 and 9:29. It was one of Muhammad’s last revelations regarding warfare, and it abrogates almost every peaceful verse in the Quran. As for Surah al-Anfal, that is Surah 8, and it too contains violent verses that abrogate earlier peaceful verses in the Quran.

But what does that mean? Is our friend from the Fediverse right when he compares this to the Bible, saying:

Further, why is it so hard to believe that not everyone in a religion is a hard-line fundamentalist. That’s something crazy an atheist would say.

“Here in the bible it actually says its good to kill whole races and cultures of people and enslave them. So you must believe this since this is your book! Checkmate theist!” I refused to participate in the Nu-Atheist waves for that s***.

The answer is that comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges.

While I agree (and even stated something to the effect of this in my original post), that not all Muslims are fundamentalists who look at verses like Surah 9:5 and go out and kill a bunch of people, there is still a large chunk of Muslims who are hardline fundamentalists and do that. The reason for this is because Muslims believe that the Quran is a book for all times and all places. According to them, it is the final revelation from Allah and is a clear guidance and instruction for mankind.

What that means, then, is that unless a verse was abrogated by Allah (replaced with a different verse or new instruction), then Muslims must follow that verse. In the case of verses such as Surah 9:5, as I mentioned earlier, it abrogates previous peaceful verses, and since it was one of Muhammad’s last revelations concerning the matter of warfare and jihad, Muslims treat it as something to be followed to a T. Essentially, the time for following the peaceful verses is over; we need to follow the ones that demand warfare against non-Muslims.

That’s also not mentioning the hadiths. The hadiths (collectively called the Sunnah) are the sayings and doing of Muhammad, and since according to Islam, Muhammad was the perfect person whose example is to be followed, Muslims rely heavily on the hadiths for guidance. That said, many hadiths speak of jihad and encourage Muslims to do it, so those wanting to follow in Muhammad’s example may wish to engage in jihad, especially since it will put them on the fast track to Jannah (Heaven), where they get their 72 pre-pubescent virgins, plenty of pre-pubescent serving boys, and food and alcohol.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that Muslims believe that Heaven is essentially a brothel where all the serving boys (or “youths of heaven”) and the 72 virgins that they get all look like children? Yeah, there are numerous verses talking about that in the Quran, and the only way you’re guaranteed to get there is through dying in jihad.

But what if you’re not Sunni? What if you’re a Shia Muslim and don’t follow the hadiths? Don’t worry. Not only do Shia Muslims still follow the Quran’s teaching about killing non-Muslims, but they rely more on the Sira literature – the biographies of Muhammad – which are also full of all sorts of violent deeds perpetrated by Momo, which they emulate.

Meanwhile, if you compare this to the Bible, you don’t see any similarities. While the Bible does talk about the annihilation of the Amalekites, this is read by Christians as a descriptive verse. The Bible, while a religious text, is also a historical one, telling the story of God’s hand moving through the history of the human race. Thus, with that context, Christians don’t see the killing of the Amalekites as a prescriptive thing, unlike how Muslims would view verses like Surah 9:5 and 9:29.

Pointing this all out is not me trying to be divisive, nor is it about spreading “anti-Muslim hate.” Pointing out what Islam teaches and how it’s historically been viewed and treated by Muslims is not anti-Muslim. It’s simply showing the facts. It’s also, in many ways, pro-Muslim, because it brings up questions about the ethics and morals of Islam that could lead Muslims to realizing that they’re effectively in a cult, culminating in them leaving that religion and finding a better life outside it.

But, if you want to shut down the conversation by screaming “divisive,” “bigot,” “anti-Muslim,” “hate speech,” or “Islamophobe,” go ahead. You are part of the problem of how Muslims and Islam are taking over the West. You can either realize that now, or you can realize that when they’re taking your rights, your money, and, possibly, your head.

https://youtu.be/Fht_qwYuc_4

https://youtu.be/R3ZHa9ROTTY

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog/News: Flippin’ Fatwa Friday – We Forgot 9/11

Before the death of Charlie Kirk, this week would have had one reminder of a day that should stay forever etched in our memory: 9/11. 25 years ago, two planes were flown into the World Trade Center, another was crashed into the Pentagon, and the fourth plane, which was believed to be headed towards the White House or the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after the passengers aboard heroically fought the hijackers. In total, 2,977 people were killed, not including the 19 hijackers who, despite the rantings and ravings of conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens, were Muslim jihadists, not Jews.

After that horrific day, the nation made a promise never to forget 9/11 and the atrocities committed. Yet, 25 years later, we’ve broken that promise. We’ve forgotten, and now a less obvious Islamic threat has arisen with their most powerful weapon yet: ignorance.

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we were reassured that Islam was a religion of peace, and the only Muslims we needed to worry about were the ones that had hijacked it for their own purposes. To suggest otherwise was promptly labeled “Islamophobic.” While it is true that most Muslims in the West are peaceful, if we are to look at the Quran and hadiths, Islam’s most important books, we see that Islam is not inherently peaceful and sooner or later, that will become undeniably obvious.

I have written several posts about this, which you can read here and here. Within Islam, due to verses like Surah 9:5, 9:29, 2:178-129, etc. (full list of verses here) and hadiths like Sunan an-Nasa’i 3097,  Sunan an-Nasa’i 3099, Sunan an-Nasa’i 3098,  Sunan an-Nasa’i 3103, Sunan an-Nasa’i 3106, peaceful Muslims are terrible at following Islam. It’s sadly the Muslims who commit horrible atrocities like 9/11, October 7th, or the British Grooming Gangs who, according to Islam, are doing the will of Allah and are on the fast track to heaven.

This, unfortunately, is the thing that many people are completely ignorant of, and the Muslims have been taking advantage of it. But the other thing that we’ve forgotten that ties into this is how jihad doesn’t just look like blowing people up in the name of Allah. It’s a worldwide struggle to establish an Islamic takeover, and if it’s not done through warfare, it’s done through demographic changes and votes. It’s done through convincing the unbelievers that the Muslims are peaceful, so don’t mind if the demographic changes and you all of a sudden have a Muslim mayor or a Muslim terrorist-sympathizer running for senate.

The most notable example of this has been Zohran Mamdani, in the very place where 9/11 took place. He has ridden this wave of ignorance for his entire mayorship so far, saying that Muslims just want to be treated like normal Americans. While – once again – this is partially true, if you look at what Muslim teachers teach, it’s clear that many Muslims want to take over, and teach a Muslim supremacist doctrine (that, once again is found in the Quran.)

If we do not recognize this, we’re going to get more 9/11s and barely any response. If we do not recognize what happened on 9/11 as being a direct consequence of what the Quran teaches and allow the Muslims to take over, we will see America and the West be taken over by Islam.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: 9/10

@tanukicorner.com

As a bit of an update in the year since I wrote this post, we now all know exactly who the assassin was: Tyler Robinson. Robinson was arrested for the assassination, and now faces 7 charges, including aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, felony discharge of a weapon, and other crimes. If convicted, he could get the death penalty.

In the meantime, people such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson – people who once knew Charlie personally and worked closely with him – have taken his death as an opportunity to spread the most blatantly ridiculous conspiracy theories possible about who really killed Charlie Kirk. In so doing, not only have they made themselves look retarded, but they have also turned the focus away from the actual facts of the case, putting all of the attention on themselves. The only good thing that has come of this particular situation is the fact that people are waking up to how evil these people are and are unsubscribing in droves, but even then, they still maintain huge audiences.

On the bright side, however, while many people still celebrate Charlie’s death, his assassination has woken many Democrats up to the fact that the Left is evil. Many of them saw his death and began taking a second look at their political party. Even without the politics involved, Charlie’s death also inspired countless young people to begin speaking up about what they believe. They saw him – a man who died for his beliefs – and many said to themselves, “If he could do it, so can I.”

So, instead of mourning this man, let’s instead celebrate the life he lived and the lasting impact he had on millions of young people, not just in America, but around the globe.

Blog: AI Ads are Out of Control.

This is not a new observation, but I need to rant about it.

Imagine you’re running errands, driving, working out, showering, doing chores, or doing something else. You’re listening to a YouTube video or podcast, and suddenly some ad comes on. Just listening to it, it’s clear that it’s AI generated, and when you’re able to finally see it as you try to turn it off, it’s the most obvious AI-slop you’ve ever seen. Everyone hates these ads and most would consider them more annoying than the standard ads, yet they keep popping up everywhere.

At this point, the AI advertisements have become an epidemic in our society. No one asked for them, but since it’s much cheaper to generate ads using AI than it is to build sets, hire actors, write scripts, etc. they’re everywhere. From a financial standpoint, they’re understandable, but from an ethical standpoint, they raise a lot of questions.

The first ethical issue with a lot of these AI ads is the fact that a lot of them use animation styles that we know from various animation studios. This makes sense given how AI is trained on existing human work, but it does raise an ethical and legal concern about using these pre-existing animation styles. A lot of AI ads use an animation style that often looks exactly like that of Pixar studios, which makes me wonder where the legal lines are drawn. Sure, they may not be using Disney or Pixar characters, but with how similar the animation is, I have to wonder how long it will be before Pixar copyrights that style. Where’s the line between fair use, derivative content, and copyright infringement?

The second ethical issue I have with AI ads is false advertising. Sure, false advertising is something that’s a problem even with actual humans being involved in the advertisement, but it’s been made much easier with AI. How do I know that the whole gameplay in the ad isn’t as AI generated as the voice over? And once again, where are the legal lines drawn here? How much AI in an ad is considered too much?

Then there’s my third issue with these ads: how ridiculously sexualized they are. If it’s not AI ads for weight loss apps or various mobile games, I sometimes get ads for what’s essentially AI Webtoons, and all of them are highly sexualized. Some of them have been so bad that they should be considered soft-core porn. While I realize that humans have been doing this for years, AI has made it even easier to put out these types of advertisements. To make it more disturbing, too, is the fact that I got more of these types of ads before my Google account figured out that I’m legally an adult. Why is it that I could get these ads when I was still a kid, but not similarly inappropriate ads that have real humans in them? What is YouTube doing?

With how bad these advertisements are and how many moral and ethical lines are crossed with them, there needs to be heavy legislation put in place on what AI can be used for in ads and how it can be used. I think that ads that are more than 20% AI should not be allowed to be made, should not be allowed to use animation styles that are obviously taken from actual animation companies, should contain watermarks if they look hyper realistic, and there need to be tighter controls on sexual content or themes in these ads.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog/News: What is With the Lindsay Clancy Case?

I’ve been pretty touch-and-go with the news lately, but one of the things that I keep seeing every time I go on a quick doomscroll is someone talking about the Lindsay Clancy case.

To sum up this case, back in January 2023, Lindsay sent her husband – Patrick Clancy – out of the house on some errands and while he was gone, she strangled her three children with an exercise band before cutting her wrists and neck and jumping out of the second story window of her house in a suicide attempt. When Patrick returned, he found her lying outside where she had fallen and called 911. While on the phone with emergency services, he went inside and found the children unconscious. When paramedics arrived, resuscitation attempts were made, but two of the kids were pronounced dead at the hospital, and the youngest died three days after the incident.

From that summary alone, it should seem like a pretty cut and dry case that should end with life in prison or the death sentence. But that’s only if we lived in a sane society…and if there weren’t underlying things that the defense is pulling out so she doesn’t get life in prison.

According to Lindsay, after the birth of her first two kids, she began experiencing postpartum anxiety, which worsened after the birth of the second child. She began taking Zoloft for it and trying talk therapy for a while. However, she only did this briefly, and after she gave birth to her third child, planned to resume taking the Zoloft because her anxiety had returned. Then, in September 2022, she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, and prescribed Zoloft by her therapist, but after she complained about insomnia (which is a side effect of that medication), she was prescribed Ativan. She said that while it reduced her anxiety, it didn’t help her sleep, and she had turned to taking Benadryl as a sleep aid. She was then prescribed Buspar but didn’t take it since she didn’t want to try a new medication.

In November of 2022, things worsened as she was prescribed even more medications. During a visit to the ER on November 15, 2022, she was prescribed Trazodone. Six days later, on November 21st, she was prescribed Prozac by psychiatric nurse practitioner, Julie Paul. Four days later, Paul put Lindsay on Ambien, Remeron, and Klonopin. On November 29, she was prescribed with an anti-psychotic called Seroquel by nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta.

From there, things continued to get worse as Lindsay claimed the Remeron was causing her to have suicidal thoughts and severe emotional numbness. She told this to her therapist, Jeniffer Tufts, and to Rebecca Jollotta, but Jollotta testified that she believed it to be part of postpartum depression, not side effects from the medication. Lindsay also reported having hallucinations and calling two suicide hotlines, and Jollotta suggested that she had bipolar disorder, recommending hospitalization.

On December 20th, Lindsay Clancy went to Women & Infants Hospital Rhode Island for a day program to deal with post-partum depression, but was discharged, with hospital staff believing that she had been misdiagnosed and her symptoms were a result of overmedication. She was encouraged to get off the Seroquel and over the next few weeks began tapering off, though she was later put on Ativan and Amitriptyline.

Because of her reported postpartum depression and anxiety that led to her giant cocktail of drugs, Lindsay’s defense is arguing that she killed her children in a fit of postpartum psychosis, and thus, shouldn’t be put in prison. Instead, they’re arguing that she shouldn’t be found guilty of her crimes since she wasn’t in the right state of mind during the murders and should be put in a psychiatric facility.

Of course, this defense ignores that the explanation of insanity from postpartum psychosis does not match her official diagnoses, because while she was diagnosed with postpartum depression and anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, and suggested to have bipolar, she was not diagnosed with psychosis.

However, there is something extremely odd about this case, that, from a Christian perspective does make me wonder. According to Lindsay, on the day that she murdered her children, she reportedly heard a male voice telling her to kill her children and herself. She reports that it became loud and demanding, repeatedly telling her to kill the kids and herself, saying she wouldn’t get another chance to do it, and during the murders, the voice took over and she felt like she had to comply. That detail makes me wonder: is she lying or did she actually hear something? If the latter, was that an auditory hallucination from the drugs messing with her brain, or was she actually possessed?

We may never know for certain, but that detail totally reminds me of the movie Nefarious. It also makes me ask the question: if she was demon possessed, how would the legal system deal with that? Would it be good to put her in jail forever? Would she be treated as insane and put in the psych ward? If she were exorcized or something, what happens then? Anyway…

Besides the question of if she was insane, of sound mind, or possibly possessed, there is something else that’s extremely disturbing about the case, and that’s the Lindsay Clancy supporters.

For some reason, women have been lining up in droves in support of Lindsay Clancy outside of the courthouse where she’s being tried. Online, women have been posting videos with the captions “Same, Lindsay,” “Me too, Lindsay,” etc. talking about their postpartum depression, rage, anxiety, etc. That would be disturbing enough that women are essentially saying that they, too, have had the urge to kill their kids, but what’s worse is that their kids are often in the videos with them. I can understand joking about wanting to kill your kids because they can be annoying, but when you’re saying that with a straight face in defense of a murderer…that’s just creepy.

What’s even worse than that, however, is that it’s seen as a feminist issue. Women online are saying that if Lindsay Clancy is found guilty, then we need to start a whole new feminist revolution for her. I didn’t think the modern feminist movement could get any worse. They already chant for babies to be killed up to the moment of birth and have erased what it means to be a woman. Now, they want a new feminist movement to defend a mentally unstable murderer that they believe should be acquitted essentially because her hormones were out of whack and causing problems.

Never mind the fact that this line of logic can easily be used by men to justify things like rape. An insane surge of testosterone made him do it and caused temporary insanity. He’s innocent. Or how it can be used to argue against women being able to vote or hold public office. After all, if a woman’s hormones can be so powerful that they cause insanity, then why trust women to vote rationally or be in charge of running a district, a city, a state, or even a country?

But the feminists don’t think that far ahead. They’re more interested in seeing what they can get away with. And in the case of Lindsay Clancy, there’s even been a copycat murder in which a woman – Corie Walsh – hanged her two-year-old, and when police arrived, she had self-inflicted wounds on her wrists and thighs. Incidentally, she too was reported to be having a psychotic break and was an avid follower of the Lindsay Clancy case. I’m sure that that murder totally wasn’t done for the attention of fem-nazis online and was actually the result of psychosis.

Overall, this is an interesting case, not just because it raises a lot of questions about the motives behind the murder, but because of what it’s revealed about society at large.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: I Said There are no Secular Schools and that Public Schools Should be Banned…and the Atheist Leftists are Angry.

A little bit ago, I posted an article on here about how there are no secular schools. In that article, I pointed out that no school is truly free of religion or worldviews, and, in the case of public schools, they mainly subscribe to atheism or other forms of secular humanism. As such, in many ways they operate as something with which to mass convert the youth to atheism/secular humanism, and if we actually want this problem solved, then we should abolish the public school system, make private schools and homeschool more accessible, and allow more school choice.

Naturally, however, there are people who vehemently disagree with this position: atheist leftists (who also claim to be anti-fascist, but that’ll come up later.)

But what arguments do the Leftists have to defend the public school system? What airtight defenses do they have for it?

The first defense is, of course, that secularism isn’t a religion, nor is it connected to religion or spirituality. While that might be true in part, it is a worldview that makes many claims that are treated as fact that are in conflict with other worldviews and religions. For instance, secularists often take an atheistic stance on how the world works. However, the issue with this is that the claims made and treated as fact are really theories.

The most obvious example of this is evolutionary theory, which has been challenged in schools for decades. Evolutionary theory is just that – a theory – yet it is treated as fact in every level of academia, with hardly any room for disagreement. When Christians try to teach their theory about how the world was created and support it with evidence, they’re often shot down, threatened with their jobs, and accused of trying to force religion on students. We Christians are accused of indoctrinating students (and, thus, abusing them, according to some people) even though we’re doing just what the secularists are doing – presenting a theory and supporting it with evidence. We believe that creation is a fact just as secularists believe evolution is a fact. So why aren’t we allowed to teach it as a theory in academics? Why can’t we present both sides and let the students make up their own minds? Why is it abuse when we Christians present what we believe as fact as a theory in an academic context, but it’s not abuse when secularists do it and take it so far as to say that it is fact?

The second defense is that religion is essentially just a fairytale, and is not based in fact, so anyone who teaches from a religious point of view should be fired. The first issue with this argument is what do we define as a fairytale? I can just as easily say teaching from a secular worldview is teaching kids a fairytale about how we just randomly came from nothing, and thus, secular teachers should be fired. I could say that teaching that you can be the opposite gender is a fairytale, and anyone who teaches that should be fired. What definition are we working with here?

The second issue with this defense is, of course, the history of how the public school system even started. While we all know about John Dewey and Horace Mann as being some of the most influential figures in the making of our modern public education system, Protestant Christians did a great deal to build it as well. As the Christian Heritage Fellowship writes:

The foundation for public education, however, was first laid in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the years 1642, 1647, and 1648. The three legislative acts of these three years are known as the Massachusetts School Laws and was the first step toward compulsory government-directed public education in the United States. Not long after these three laws were enacted, similar laws were drafted in the other New England colonies. Following the lead of the New England colonies, most mid-Atlantic colonies enacted similar legislation, though in some Southern colonies nearly a century passed before publicly funded schools were established there. The first law regarding education in the New World was passed by evangelical Christians only twenty-two years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.

Why did the Protestant settlers do this? It was because they wanted kids to be well versed, not just in studies like reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. but also in the Bible. They recognized that the ignorance of what the Bible teaches that could be found in the Old World (which was still predominately Catholic at the time) lead in part to various atrocities. They believed that teaching kids the Bible would prevent that. In doing so, Christians literally laid the groundwork for the school system we have today. Had those people who taught “fairytales” as fact never been allowed to teach, perhaps we would not have the system we have today, severely flawed though it is.

Speaking of how flawed the system has become, we get to our third defense: the idea that public schools are good because it shows the world as it is and prevents kids from being brainwashed by their parents, who might not know everything. However, while that sounds good, we should all be wondering what bias our children are taught to view the world through.

It is a well-established fact that everyone has a bias. Our parents have a bias. We have a bias. Our teachers have a bias. Sure, some biases might be rooted more in fact than others, but when one group controls the education and is in charge of teaching your kids their bias, then what happens? Well, more often than not, when your kids spend 8-10 hours a day in school, another several hours on homework, a couple hours on the phone, and maybe thirty minutes chatting with their parents per day, they’re going to adopt the school’s bias.

We have only to take a quick look at the origins of the public school system to see this. Going back to the Protestant origins of our education system, while well-intentioned, the Protestant teachers taught from a Calvinist-leaning viewpoint. While some of this could be chalked up to being what they had, a lot of this was done for a different reason. They sought to lead their Catholic students to Protestantism in the hopes that it would prevent the atrocities committed in the Old World from happening in America. In other words, their schools weren’t just there for learning, but for converting Catholic kids into Protestantism and even back then, it worked.

However, this system worked so well that it had dire consequences. Fast forward to the 20th century. Totalitarianism is on the rise, with communism taking over Russia and fascism becoming popular in Spain, Italy, and Germany. In every case, one of the first things to be taken over were the education systems. In Nazi Germany, for example, homeschooling was outlawed and parents were forced to send their kids to state-run or approved schools. There, their children were indoctrinated into Nazism, and, starting in 1939, all eligible children were required to join the Hitler Youth. Any parents who objected were heavily fined or thrown into prison.

Today, while parents still have school choice, we see disturbing parallels between the two examples I presented and our current system. The main worldview that our public schools teach from is secular, but it’s further mixed with Leftism. Schools have a particular interest to do this as the Teacher’s Union and the Democrat Party have a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours type of relationship. They donate to the Party (more than any other group), and the party passes laws to benefit them, and many of those laws are meant to restrict school choice, especially for homeschoolers. We have just to look at a recent law in Conneticut to see this.

Funny how the supposedly anti-fascist group wants to continue and strengthen something that while starting out with good intentions, has historically been used quite effectively to indoctrinate entire generations into supporting things that have been detrimental to society.

This leads to the fourth argument that public schools give an even playing field for everyone, and therefore, should remain the standard. If by even playing field, supporters of public education mean that it makes everyone equally dumb and controllable, then their defense is true.

It has been shown over the past several years that kids who go to public school are becoming dumber. One in four young adults in the U.S. are functionally illiterate yet are still graduating with a high school diploma. Half of the U.S. population cannot read at an 8th-grade level. About 45% of U.S. high school seniors lack basic math skills. Only 37% of high school students were proficient in science. Only 13% of 8th-graders were proficient in history and 22% were proficient in civics. Yet they’re being passed through the public school system, and graduating, something that teachers are increasingly raising the alarm about.

Meanwhile, private school students and homeschool students have consistently scored better on all points, with homeschoolers scoring above average on academic achievement tests regardless of their parent’s level of education or household income. To illustrate this difference, a friend of the family who is an English professor once said that he could tell immediately who went to public school and who was homeschooled or sent to private school because the public-school kids had no idea what parts of speech were. Meanwhile the homeschooled and private schooled kids understood the assignment and could name various parts of speech.

If you’re worried about society getting dumber, then you should be on the side of school choice and making private and homeschool options more acessible to parents. Not only would everyone have a better education, but it would make the playing field truly equal because there would be more competition. As it is, the private schooled and homeschooled have an advantage in many ways over the public schooled since we actually know how to read, write, do math, understand science, communicate, etc.

But, if you want an “equal playing field” for people at the expense of making society stupid and creating a group of people that can’t critically think and has no diversity of thought, then sure, go for public schools.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Stranger in a Strange Land – Another New Age Expo.

It’s been several months, which means that it’s time for yet another post about my experience at the New Age Expo. Yippee!

This expo was a lot smaller than the one I went to earlier in the year. It was at a different location that was tiny compared to the last one, yet somehow, the organizers managed to shove at least a quarter of last time’s booths into the space. This inevitably made it a cramped maze of booths and tables (mostly revolving around crystals and psychic readings) that made it hard to navigate. And since most of the people there were selling psychic readings and were doing sessions with their clients, I didn’t get the chance to talk to a lot of people. But the ones I did speak with were interesting.

The first person I spoke to was a lady who was essentially selling various talismans, herbs, potions, etc. designed to bring about various things like love, prosperity, inner peace, protection…blah, blah, blah. We had a conversation about energy and how all the things that she was selling give off energy and can help change vibrations. Her reasoning for this belief is that vibrations determine how we sense the world around us, so various things to affect those vibrations will help change our reality and bring us various things.

This is obviously pseudo-science. While there is something to be said about vibrations affecting how we perceive reality, we can’t just tamper with those vibrations to manifest a new reality for ourselves. Sure, the sound of ocean waves or a certain smell may calm us and help us feel better, but they can’t bring about money, love, protection, etc.

Speaking of that, the next person I spoke to was yet another woman who was selling various types of jewelry that were meant to bring about similar things. Essentially, what she would do is have you pick your jewelry, she would perform a ritual over it to give it the power to attract whatever thing you wanted and then put it on you. We had an interesting talk about religions and worldviews and about more holistic approaches to addressing your mental health, and I was able to share the Gospel with her towards the end of the conversation.

Now, we come to the longest conversation I had at the expo. If you remember my post from last time, you will remember that my mom and I spoke to a guy I’m going to call Wyatt. At first, we thought he was a Wiccan, then thought he leaned more Luciferian, and he was claiming that he was God and could help others reach their god-ness.

But that was the conversation we had with him. This time around, I talked to a friend of his who was part of the same group. I’ll call him Jerry.

The conversation I had with Jerry can be summed up as circular and slightly disturbing. According to Jerry, we aren’t God per se but are part of God in a sense and will go back to him at some point. Who exactly God is or what will happen to you after death (Heaven or Hell) in this view, I’m not entirely sure, as he seemed to be intentionally vague about it. He told me they don’t believe in reincarnation, and when it comes to figuring out morality in this life, while it’s okay to life by your code of morals, it’s better to live by God’s code of morals.

What’s God’s code of morals according to Jerry? Glad you asked. It’s whatever seems good to us humans.

This is where the conversation started getting very circular, contradictory, and a bit disturbing from a Christian P.O.V. According to Jerry, the Bible is man-made, Christianity was created by Paul, and what’s good and brings glory to God is essentially just what we would agree on is good. We shouldn’t judge others as some things are between them and God, and if something works for you, then God must approve of it. Why? Because God is good…whatever good is since there is no set standard other than not being a horrible person.

To support this view, Jerry then resorted to a handful of cherry-picked and radically misinterpreted Scriptures, namely the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman, and the verse about knowing good by its fruit.

“But wait!” You might be saying, “Where in the Bible does it say that what’s good is known by its fruit?” The answer is nowhere, or at least, not in the sense that he meant it.

This quote comes from Jesus in Matthew 7:15-20, where Jesus says:

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

You see the problem here? Jesus was talking about false prophets. False prophets in Scripture are defined as those who deny the teachings and commands of God. Sure, they may be doing what seems to be “good,” but ultimately, they are workers of evil, “ravenous wolves.” Jerry, to some, may be doing good in helping them reach his spirituality’s version of enlightenment or healing, but ultimately, he is rejecting God’s commands (like don’t be playing around with the occult, which he is), and selling a counterfeit worldview.

Because of this, since he believes himself to be a worker of goodness who does everything by the power of God (whoever his version of God is), he believes he’s in the right. That’s where it got disturbing for me, as it was clear that he knew at least some of the Bible and was content to twist it as necessary. To some extent, that alone made the conversation almost feel like talking to Screwtape. I’ve seen people twist Scripture before, but to see someone twist it so blatantly to defend their views right in front of me made it hit differently. Add on the fact that he hardly let me get a word in edgewise, and it was even weirder.

Eventually, after about 40 minutes of going in circles, being talked over, and listening to Scripture get twisted into a jumbled mess, I made my exit. At that point, I was so confused by what he was saying because it was so out of left field and tired of going in circles that I decided it wasn’t worth it anymore and moved on. I located my dad and after walking around a bit more, we left.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics/Blog: No. You Cannot be a Christian and a Witch.

It’s the last day of August. We have about another month until it’s officially “spooky season” and about another two months until it’s actually Halloween. But gosh dang it, if Walmart and Costco can start putting out the Halloween stuff already, then I can start talking about witches.

Recently, my For You page on YouTube has had several recommendations for videos talking about the rise of “Christian” witches online. Why I’ve been getting so many recommendations for videos reacting to these ladies, I’m not entirely sure, but I’m not totally unfamiliar with the topic. I’ve known about “Christian” witchcraft for a while now, have even met a few people dabbling in the New Age or occult who identify as some version of Christian, and am very aware of how prevalent it is in the church even if it’s not out in the open. It’s something that annoys me to no end because of how ridiculous it all is.

The crux of the matter – no pun intended – is that calling yourself a “Christian” witch is like calling yourself a Far-Left conservative. The two labels do not mix; they are a total oxymoron.

The reason for this is because the Bible specifically prohibits occult practices, such as various forms of divination, necromancy, spellcasting, etc. In fact, not only does the Bible prohibit such things, but it describes people who do that stuff as “an abomination” in Deuteronomy 18:9-15. Other Old Testament passages echo this sentiment, with Leviticus 19:26 and 20:6 warning to stay from mediums, necromancers, diviners, etc., warning that turning would be unfaithfulness. In the prophetic books of the Old Testament, mediums, necromances, sorcerers, etc. and the groups that rely on them are consistently ridiculed.

But don’t worry. That’s the Old Testament. God was meaner then, so of course He wasn’t tolerant of that stuff then, right? Surely, Jesus was much nicer, right?

Wrong.

While Jesus does talk about who’s going to Hell in the Gospels, the most explicit condemnation of witches/sorcerers is in the book of Revelation, which is the revelation of Jesus Christ to His disciple, John. In numerous verses in Revelation (i.e. Revelation 21:8), Jesus warns that amongst those who will be going to Hell are sorcerers/sorceresses.

It’s also worth mentioning that in the apostles evangelistic efforts, witchcraft was very obviously frowned upon. In Acts 13 – which covers the history of the early church – a sorcerer named Bar-Jesus (a.k.a. Elymas) tries to stop Paul and Barnabas from giving the Gospel to the local proconsul and is cursed with blindness. Also, in Acts 19, it’s recorded that the Christians in Ephesus, after being saved, burned all of their idols and magic books. That’s not even mentioning how many times the Epistles warn that those who practice magic will be amongst the people going to Hell.

From this, it should be pretty clear to everybody that God really does not like people dabbling with the occult because it is spiritual rebellion. Thus, it should be obvious that you cannot be both a Christian and a witch at the same time. Christians, by definition, are followers of Christ, which means that as such, we shouldn’t be dabbling in sin, especially big ones like witchcraft. Even if you’re claiming that you’re not drawing from the elements, other gods, or using spells to curse people, witchcraft in all forms is still forbidden.

So, why is it so popular now to identify as a Christian witch?

I think a lot of it ultimately has to go back to two things: the lack of biblical literacy and the popularity of the New Age and occult in almost everything. From self-help books to psychology to entertainment, the New Age and occult is in everything, and when combine that with a lack of knowledge about what’s in the Bible, you get a bunch of people thinking they found a loophole in their faith that allows them to continue practicing witchcraft, not realizing (or refusing to acknowledge) that it’s an oxymoron.

But why is witchcraft such a big sin? Why can’t we play with magic?

The reason for this is because ultimately, it’s idolatry. Magic requires you to put faith in yourself and your powers over creation, or to put faith in something more obviously posing as a god. In all of its forms, whether people realize it or not, you are not putting your faith in God, the creator of everything, but in yourself and the rest of creation.

Further, magic and the occult is dangerous. If you look at how a lot of it is done with channeling, tarot, energy healing, etc. all of it opens you up to a myriad of possibilities for demonic influence. Sure, it might seem to work for a bit, but ultimately, playing with those entities will destroy you spiritually, if not mentally and physically, too. God forbidding the use of magic, the occult, or witchcraft wasn’t to limit us and keep us subservient, but to protect us from things that want to hurt us.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: The Censorship Has Begun.

I always joked about this happening to my blog but didn’t actually think it could happen.

Yesterday, as I was checking my notifications after work, I came across an email from WordPress letting me know that my review of Magnus Chase: The Hammer of Thor had been removed essentially for being hate speech and violating the WordPress terms of service. The message read:

Hello,
 
We are reaching out regarding the following site on your WordPress.com account:
 
https://tanukicorner.com/2023/07/18/review-magnus-chase-and-the-gods-of-asgard-book-2-rick-riordan-hates-women-spoilers-part-2-3/
 
Please note that publishing content that promotes hatred—or dehumanization—of other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease is prohibited on WordPress.com.
 
This is a violation of our User Guidelines and Terms of Service. As a result, we’ve hidden this content from public view. Please do not re-publish this material, or your account will be suspended.
 
The warning notice placed on the post will automatically be removed when you delete the link to the content in question. If not, please contact us.
 
If you wish to continue publishing these types of materials, you might consider a self-hosted WordPress installation. To transfer your content to a more suitable WordPress host, you can follow this guide. However, keep in mind that other hosts may have similar policies.

Now, if you look up this post, it’s hidden so you can’t read it. Keep in mind that that is a post that has been up for three years and only had three hundred-something views. I wonder if Rick Riordan read it and got pissed.

That said, I have sent an appeal to WordPress requesting that they stop essentially censoring that post given that I never once promoted dehumanizing or hateful rhetoric towards anyone. The post in question was a book review of Magnus Chase: The Hammer of Thor and as such, most of it was complaining about how ham-fisted the representation was throughout the book and how poorly written the characters were (particularly the LGBTQ+ identifying ones). That’s not hateful or dehumanizing, that’s just stating how badly written the book is.

In that post, I also stated the biological fact that men are men, and women are women, no matter what they identify as. Once again, that’s not hateful or dehumanizing, but is scientific fact.

Further, I also heavily criticized a scene in the book in which Alex Fierro (the trans/gender-fluid character) runs to the lady’s restroom after announcing that he needs to pee, as it seeks to normalize not only the erasure of women’s spaces, but also allows for the normalization of something that has led to women’s safety being put in danger. To illustrate my point, I brought up the case in 2021 in Loudoun County, Virginia, in which a male student wearing a skirt entered the girl’s restroom and forcibly sodomized a female student. As though that wasn’t bad enough, he was also convicted of forcing another female student at a different school to perform fellatio on him. I also brought up the case of the Wi Spa, in which a trans-identifying man – who had also been on the sex offender list since 2006 – was let into the women’s section of the spa, where he was walking around naked in front of women and girls with a full erection.

Once again, this isn’t dehumanizing or hateful to point out. Unfortunately, there are people who take the trans/gender fluid/non-binary identity and use it to gain access to women’s spaces for nefarious purposes. For the safety of women, allowing men to use those spaces because they identify a certain way should not be normalized, especially in the context of a kid’s book.

In the meantime, we shall see what happens. I’ve already sent the appeal, and if WordPress has any shred of common sense, they’ll stop disabling that post. If not…I’ll just write a re-worded review of Magnus Chase: The Hammer of Thor.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: Some Changes Are Coming to the Tanuki Corner…

Hello, everyone!

As y’all know from a previous post, I graduated high school this year which means it’s off into the wonderful world of adulthood I go. Yippee! However, in that post I also warned at the end that while I plan to continue writing this blog and working on my YouTube channel, as life gets busier, I may start posting less frequently.

That time has come.

I recently got a job offer and I took it. I will now have a heavier workload and between this blog, writing my book, running my YouTube channel, and trying to balance everything in between, I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for all of that. So, while I’ll keep trying to post three times a week, I may end up posting less frequently.

In the meantime, however, I plan to keep my YouTube channel up and running and hopefully I can get to a point where I can monetize it. So, if I can’t write a blog for some reason, I may start posting some videos here on the blog.

Thank you, guys, for three years of the Tanuki Corner. Though changes are coming, I still plan to write.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: There Are no Secular Schools. Change My Mind.

A little while ago, I wrote a post about how atheism isn’t the absence of religion but is a sort of pantheistic religion in of itself. That post then got me thinking about our schools. Public schools as we know them are “secular.” Sure, they may make allowances for certain religious groups (unless they’re Christian – in which case you may have to jump through a ton of hoops to even be treated fairly), but overall, they teach from an atheistic worldview and demand that you subscribe to it if you want good grades. And if you happen to be a teacher who doesn’t teach from that worldview, then you may get fired or be totally discredited.

Now what does that sound like? Hmm…

Oh, that’s right! It’s a form of forced religious conversion to the religion of atheism.

Because of this, we should no longer continue with the lie that all schools are purely secular and free of religion. They absolutely follow a religion, and their entire point is to proselytize to their students – your children. Try as you might to teach your kid the way you want them to be taught, if you’re sending them to public school, the school will have more influence over what they believe than you ever will.

This also should be seen as a reason to just get rid of public schools entirely and let everything be privately owned. For one thing, if the schools aren’t government owned, there’s less incentive for them to stick with the government approved worldview. For another thing, it also allows parents more choice where they want to send their kids. If they want to send them somewhere that teaches from a Christian worldview, great! If they want to send them somewhere that teaches from an atheistic/secular worldview, fine. If they simply want to homeschool them because it might be cheaper in the long-run and they can choose their curriculum, more power to them!

Overall, no school can claim to be absent of religion. They all have a worldview that they filter things through and then proceed to teach their students. The sooner we realize that, the better it will be for society as we take steps to improve things.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: I Went to Barnes & Noble. Say Hello to Witchcraft.

I haven’t been to Barnes & Noble in a while. Have I wanted to go? Yes. Have I found the time to? No. But that all changed last weekend. For the first time in two years or so, I had the opportunity to pay a visit to my local Barnes & Noble to see what they’re peddling in the Year of Our Lord 2026.

Holy crap, is it bad.

The last time I was at Barnes & Noble, while I wasn’t looking at a lot of stuff except the YA fiction section, I remember seeing quite a few books that were focused on LGBTQ+ outside of just the YA section. But fast forward two years and it seems that while LGBTQ+ is still popular, something else has largely usurped its place on the shelves. That something is witchcraft and New Age.

We are just running at a hundred miles an hour to Armageddon, aren’t we? As a society, we just cannot wait to get there.

Thrown in with the books on psychology, relationships, and philosophy are a ton of books all focused on witchcraft, the New Age, and the occult. Books in this category range from a book by National Geographic explaining what Wicca and the New Age are, the Wicca Bible (which is interesting since Wiccans basically wing everything), the “missing” books of the Bible (i.e. the Gnostic gospels and other apocryphal works), books about numerology, finding your angel name, etc. My mom and I even found a book that was being sold at a New Age expo by some people who were peddling power pyramids. Oh, and they also sold various tarot decks…because of course they did. (I also later found out that you can buy Ouija boards at Barnes & Noble, too.)

But besides the fact that Barnes & Noble is pushing New Age and the occult in the psychology, relationships, and philosophy section, I also need to say something about those sections besides the fact that they pretty much provide you with all the tools you need for a demon-summoning ritual. And that is the fact that, apparently, no one has class anymore. I saw several self-help and relationship books that had the F-word in the title and one book that, I’m not kidding, was called the P-pedia. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the word attached to -pedia. Sure, it does its job at catching your attention, but it just goes to show how we apparently have no class as a society.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

But, of course, you know me. I haven’t yet gotten to the main attraction – the godforsaken YA section and my thoughts on it.

Overall, I think this section might actually be worse now than it was back in 2024. Sure, two years ago it was mainly LGBTQ+ love stories being peddled to children, and while that influence is still definitely there, the occult and the dark romance genre have also made things worse. Not only did I see multiple books being sold there targeted toward young women where the main characters are actual witches and summon demons (I wish I was making this up), but I also came across a book that illustrates almost everything wrong with the publishing industry. That book is called Kingdom of the Feared – a book that was positioned to get people to buy it – and here’s the book’s description:

Emilia is reeling from the shocking discovery that her twin sister, Vittoria, is alive. But before she faces the demons of her past, Emilia yearns to claim her king, the seductive Prince of Wrath, in the flesh. Emilia doesn’t simply desire his body, she wants his heart and soul—but that’s something the enigmatic demon can’t promise her.

When a high-ranking member of House Greed is assassinated, Emilia and Wrath are drawn to the rival demon court. Damning evidence points to Vittoria as the murderer and she’s quickly declared an enemy of the Seven Circles. Despite her betrayal, Emilia will do anything to solve this new mystery and find out who her sister really is.

Together Emilia and Wrath play a sin-fueled game of deception as they work to stop the unrest that’s brewing between witches, demons, shape-shifters and the most treacherous foes of all: the Feared.

Emilia was warned that when it came to the Wicked nothing was as it seemed. But, have the true villains been much closer all along? When the truth is finally revealed, it just might end up costing Emilia her heart.

Two curses.
One prophecy.
A reckoning all have feared.

And a love more powerful than fate. All hail the king and queen of Hell.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stalking the Jack the Ripper series comes the steamy conclusion to Kingdom of the Wicked trilogy.

Already, from the description of the book, you can not only tell that this book is – I’m just gonna say it – demonic, promoting a sexual relationship in Hell between a girl and a literal demon, but you can tell this shouldn’t be in the YA Fiction section or categorized as YA. This should be in the adult fiction section right next to the Playboys since, according to one Goodreads review, this book includes…

Sexual Content-Mentions of groping, intimate touching, trying to take clothes off, two characters go swimming naked (guy and girl), mention of 0rgi3$, passionate kissing, thoughts of sex, innuendos, mentions of prostitution, mention of a threesome, sex, implications of m@$terb@tion, telling someone to m@$terb@te, LOTS of lust, thinking of characters naked, talking about bedding people, mentions of doing someone until they see stars, mentions of using chains during sex, talk about sucking and sucking…(I think you can fill in the blank) and witnessing very public displays of sex in a very derogatory way. (Hence why this was NA.)

Other Goodreads reviews also say that the book starts with smut, the plot also revolves around reincarnation and soulmates, the main character is a witch, and there’s more smut than plot. And according to another reviewer, you can find this book in the YA corner of public libraries. This should be nowhere near there.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, one of the most popular books in the YA section that was on a best-sellers table was a book called Bitten. Like Kingdom of the Feared, this too is a paranormal romance and is described on Goodreads as “Crescent City meets Fourth Wing.” Now, Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros has become notorious online for being smutty, so such a comparison does not bode well for this book, and sure enough, according to the 1-star reviews Goodreads, it’s just as smutty.

Remember, both stories are marketed as being for young adults – 12-18 years old. This is stuff that no 12-18-year-old should ever be reading, period. The fact that it’s even targeted at this age range should make everyone want to burn the publishing companies to the ground because here’s the thing. Before a book is published, it has to go through several people who read it, edit it, and ultimately, give it the green light. For these authors to be writing smut in a book aimed at young teens and then for the agents, editors, and publishers to publish and promote it as YA is beyond disturbing. It’s straight up predatory. It is not only an attack on your child’s innocence, but is an attack on their souls, especially as these books continue to glorify the occult more and more.

At this rate, my advice to parents is if your child wants to buy a book, YA or not, check the 1-star Goodreads reviews to make sure you’re not accidentally handing your child a book full of porn.

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: The Paper – A Worthy Sequel for The Office.

Last month, my family went on vacation and while we were settling in, my brother and I found out that the T.V. in our cabin came with a Peacock subscription, something that we don’t have at home. And thus began our marathon through the show The Paper, a spinoff of The Office that follows a struggling, small newspaper company in Toledo, Ohio.

Overall, I would say that this show is a good sequel to The Office. While certainly not as edgy in its humor as its predecessor, The Paper still manages to capture a more toned-down version of that humor and has a similar overall vibe without feeling like a knockoff. While there are certainly parallels to be found between The Paper and The Office, there wasn’t anything that felt like it was being rehashed for a different decade.

The best place where we see this is in the characters. While the character Esmeralda could easily be compared to Michael Scott, she isn’t so like him that it’s a 1-1 comparison. Her business parter, Tim Key, could also be compared to Michael, but is still distinct enough to feel like his own character. Ned Sampson – the main character of The Paper – can’t really be compared to anyone in The Office, and others, like Mare, Nicole, and Detrick, while having some similarities to other characters, are still their own people.

Another place where we see a difference between The Office and The Paper is in the relationships. The majority of the conflicts in the show come from the relationships between the characters, particularly the romantic ones, and it would be easy to write the show in a way that rehashes the Jim/Pam or Dwight/Angela storyline in some way. However, The Paper‘s relationships, while bearing some resemblance to some of the relationships in The Office, are unique to the characters in them.

However, the romantic relationships are also where I have a bit of a problem with the show. In The Office, the relationship between Jim and Pam was a slow burn. They definitely had chemistry, but it took two seasons for Jim to confess his love for Pam, and another season before he finally asks her out. There’s a long period of yearning that makes it so much more satisfying when they finally get together and get married. Even in the Dwight and Angela storyline, as messed up as it is, it takes a while before they make it official. Meanwhile, in The Paper, we don’t really get that because they rush into it. By the end of Season 1, the two main romantic storylines are already in full swing. Ned and Mare confess their feelings for each other, and the characters Detrick and Nicole are already in a weird relationship. Though there’s a lead-up to the characters getting together, it feels rushed. It’s a bit of a nitpick, and the show can still add conflict to make things interesting, but I still think they could’ve added more episodes to build up tension or something.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: Here’s Why Conservatives Aren’t Winning the Culture War…

For the past few years, Hollywood has been in free fall, producing flop after flop in the name of appeasing the mythical “modern audience.” However, while some may mourn the drawn-out death of Tinseltown, independent filmmakers are thriving as Hollywood lies in hospice, with numerous indie films – such as Backrooms and Obsession – grossing over a quarter billion dollars. But despite the conditions being ripe to take back the culture by writing stories that actually resonate with people, conservatives have been missing the mark. While some have been able to create good stories worth telling, others have fallen into the same vice that has destroyed Hollywood: mediocrity instead of excellence.

Some of the worst offenders here are from the Dailywire, unfortunately. A few years back, they announced that they were going to fight against Hollywood by producing their own movies and T.V. shows, with the capstone of it all being The Pendragon Cycle (which you can read my initial review of here). A lot of people were excited for it, but when the movies and T.V. shows began coming out, they were either mediocre or were obviously made with Dailywire’s fans in mind.

To start with the mediocre, we should look at The Pendragon Cycle. Having read the books and being a total fantasy nerd, I was excited for this show and hoped for the best. Then, after seeing the behind the scenes of its production, my hopes dwindled, and, after watching it, I felt that several hours of my life had been wasted. It was ridiculously overhyped for what it was, with the pacing being atrocious. From looking at the comments, it seems that only the most loyal Dailywire fans enjoyed the show…and the rest agreed that it was terrible.

Then, there’s the stuff that’s bad because it focused too heavily on the message. The best example of this was the movie Lady Ballers, which, in many ways, was the worst movie Dailywire ever produced. Not only is it a comedy that gets less funny the more you watch it, but it trades several storylines that could have made the movie more interesting for low-hanging gags and jokes. Storylines that could have provided more conflict and tension for the characters were thrown out the window in exchange for the message.

That, of course, leads to the main crux of the issue. It’s not that conservatives are incapable of writing good stories – it’s that those with the money to put these movies and T.V. shows out seem content to pander to the pre-existing audience. They put movies out to a fanbase that already is loyal to them and don’t seem to consider the actual quality of it. They do this by either putting in an overt message or just releasing stuff that would be given a B-rating because they know that their customers will likely eat it up.

This inevitably leads to the ultimate problem: mediocrity over excellence. If you aren’t shooting straight into mediocrity by not caring enough to make a movie worth watching, then you’re going there by focusing on the message over everything else. This is the issue that Hollywood has run into time and time again and is part of why it’s struggling to get out of hospice. For too long, Hollywood focused on including some sort of woke message in its movies to appease critics. To this day, Hollywood still panders to those critics because they are its built-in audience. They are the ones who really decide if it gets an Oscar, after all. If they aren’t doing that, however, they’re often making movies that aren’t worth watching because the story itself is stupid.

Conservatives shouldn’t do that if we want to retake the culture.

Instead, conservatives need to focus on quality over quantity, excellence over the message. We should take note of movies that have that have been universally enjoyed, such as Project Hail Mary, which was successful not for any sort of pandering to critics by putting in a message, but was successful because it told a story that resonates with humanity.

Additionally, instead of solely putting movies out on streaming, conservatives should work to get them out in theaters or on other streaming platforms like Fandango. Part of why we’re not taking back the culture is because a lot of people either can’t afford to or don’t want to pay for yet another subscription to watch a movie. Most people would rather get the movie ticket and have the movie theater experience or watch at home for $5 than pay $10 for a movie, plus a bunch of other stuff they aren’t interested in.

Instead of focusing on pandering to an audience that’s already there, conservatives should consider the people outside of their platforms. They need to produce media that appeals to everyone because it’s objectively good. If we don’t do that, then our mission of taking back the culture is doomed before it even began.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Flippin’ Fatwa Friday – Speed Running Surah 2:203-237

Back with speed running Surah al-Baqarah, we’re speed running verses 203-237.

We start off where we left off on verse 203. Until we get to verse 213, it pretty much the usual stuff, where we’re told that Allah doesn’t like mischief or anyone who makes mischief, and that if he’s provided a bunch of signs to prove his existence. However, once we hit 213, we find that the Quran finally gives us some lore. According to the Quran, mankind was once one people under one religion until they started having disagreements, which led to division. To ramify this and make the truth known, Allah sent a bunch of prophets (starting with Noah) to reveal the truth about where they differed, but they wouldn’t listen and continued to split.

But here’s where it gets interesting since according to the tafsir on this verse, Islam is the ultimate truth that clarifies where things are disputed. The issue with that though, is that if we look at the Quran and the Bible, even things that aren’t disagreed on by Jews and Christians get changed randomly by the Quran, for absolutely no reason. If it was sent to smooth over the theological and doctrinal rifts between the two, it just made things worse.

Moving on from that, verse 214 tells Muslims to expect adversity, 215 tells them to give alms, and 216 tells them that not only is jihad (as in fighting unbelievers) necessary, but obligatory. There is absolutely no room for being a peaceful Muslim. You are required to fight according to the Quran. And to further instill fear in Muslims of what will happen if they don’t fight are verses 217-218, which says that if they turn back and reject the faith, they will never get into Heaven. Essentially all their good deeds will be deleted by Allah, similar to how you lose all your XP if you cancel a course on Duolingo.

But don’t worry, the Quran doesn’t linger long on that warning since verses 219-221 hop back to commanding Muslims to give alms, not to gamble or drink, to help orphans, and not to marry unbelievers.

Then we have verses 222-223, which are ridiculously misogynistic. Verse 222 says that women who are menstruating are unclean and are to be treated as such. Now, I wouldn’t totally have a problem with this if it were just taking from the similar command in the Bible, which was meant for a certain time and place, but the Quran’s version of this is universal. Additionally, is the fact that in both 222-223, the Quran tells men that their wives are like a “tilth” (a piece of fertile ground) that they can take when, where, and however they want, as long as they do some good deed for Allah, first.

Handmaid’s Tale much? In today’s vernacular, that would be like calling your wife an oven for making babies (or something worse).

Verses 224-225 warns Muslims not to make oaths in Allah’s name against doing good, acting rightly, or making peace. Then 226-227 hops into what to do if you’ve taken an oath of abstention. Naturally, this only applies to men, and the Quran only says that if a man takes an oath of abstention, he only needs to abstain for 4 months…unless he’s getting divorced. In that case, he can abstain from his wife for as long as he wants.

Speaking of divorce, according to verses 228-233, divorce is completely permissible and you’re allowed to divorce the same woman up to two times. You’re also allowed to remarry, and, if both parties don’t want the kids, you can give them away to a foster-mother until they finish suckling. After that, who knows what will happen since Muhammad abolished adoption. I assume they’d be going back to one of their parents (probably the father), though that would be an awkward conversation.

Finally, verse 234 jumps to what to do if you die and leave behind a widow. After death, they are to wait four months and ten days before moving on. Then it jumps back into divorce, including divorcing someone before the marriage is consummated in 235-237.

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: Persuasion – One of Jane Austen’s Most Underrated Books. (Spoilers)

Last Christmas, one of the books I received was Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which, as the title says, is possibly one of her most underrated books. While we have all heard of Pride and Prejudice, and maybe some of her other stories such as Sense and Sensibility or Emma, most of us probably aren’t familiar with Persuasion, despite it being one of the most heart-wrenchingly written romances Jane Austen ever put to paper.

Set in Regency-era England, Persuasion follows Anne Elliot, the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat whose poor spending habits have landed the family deep in debt. In an attempt to get out of debt, the Elliot family is forced to rent out their estate to some wealthy tenants and move to their new home in Bath. However, the guy renting their estate isn’t just a random guy, but is actually Admiral Croft, who is married to the sister of Anne’s former suitor Captain Fredrick Wentworth, the man whom she was persuaded to break up with 8 years prior to the events of the book. Thus, Anne and Wentworth are forced to reconnect and confront their lingering feelings for each other through a series of misunderstandings.

With that description alone, it is understandable why Persuasion holds such a special place in the hearts of Jane Austen fans everywhere. Whereas most of Austen’s books center around young women falling in love for the first time, Persuasion focuses on an older heroine (Anne is 27) who has despaired of ever finding a husband and believes that Wentworth would never again want her after she rejected him. Thus, instead of the story necessarily focusing on finding a husband (though that’s a big part of it), it focuses more on forgiveness and the rekindling of the relationship between the two, and Anne’s rediscovery of hope and joy after being mired in despair for so long.

Besides that, Persuasion also feels different compared to some of Jane Austen’s other novels in the sense that Austen was in a similar situation to Anne. While her family wasn’t deep in debt and weren’t high-up aristocrats, Austen never married, despite having an attraction to a young man named Tom Lefroy (though the jury is out on whether this was a fling or if she actually liked him), being engaged to a guy named Harris Bigg-Wither (which she ended the morning after he proposed), and supposedly having a romance with a young clergyman in Bath who tragically died shortly after their infatuation began. Whether she actually loved any of these men is a topic of debate, but within Persuasion, it feels as though she wrote from personal experience. The pain that Anne feels at being single and losing her shot feels as though it came from Jane’s own sadness. Though heartbreak appears in several of Austen’s books (i.e. Sense and Sensibility), here, it feels deeper and more cutting, like Jane was writing about something closer to home.

Because of that, the end of the book feels so much more deserved. Yes, the heroines of other works like Sense and Sensibility who go through heartbreak also get endings that feel consistent with their journeys and are well-earned, but because Persuasion is largely about overcoming heartbreak and rediscovering love, the end is that much better. It’s more satisfying to know that Anne has become the person she used to be – hopeful, in love, and beautiful again – instead of despairing.

For the hopeless romantics, Persuasion is a book that expresses romantic longing better than many of Jane Austen’s other works.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: Google Translate Abrogates the Quran…Again.

It’s no secret that the Muslims don’t like me. Scroll through the comments section on my videos and most of them will have at least one Muslim in it insinuating or outright saying I’m fat, ugly, stupid, ignorant, Islamophobic, racist, loose, etc. However, there are some special Muslims out there who, instead of leaving it at personal insults, take it upon themselves to let me know that they are mentally unstable and just make my argument for me that Islam is evil. They do this, of course, by sending me lovely messages about how they’ll “shut me up,” that Allah will strike me down, or insinuating that my head should be cut off.

Remember, guys, I’ve only been doing polemics against Islam for barely a year and already, they want to kill me. I feel very accomplished.

So, in response to a comment I recently got from somebody on this video who says that I’m a female dog and that if I don’t shut up, they will make me shut up, I suppose it’s time to play a little game. If they want to threaten me, then I’ll find out what the Quran really says using Google Translate.

Google Translate Abrogates Surah 1

Praise be to the God of grace, mercy, and truth. We’re asking for feedback. Save us in a peaceful way. in a peaceful and diplomatic manner.

[Author’s Note: After a few more languages it got watered down to: Tupshushe mu in ya muut. mu I’m talking to mu. It is safe.]

Google Translate Abrogates Surah 98

It’s free and easy to find.

Many people believe in the Bible and believe that God does not die before a miracle occurs. They read the Bible to see what can strengthen their faith. Thank you for your trust; Who can argue with this book? They worship God, believe in the truth, pray daily, and give as much as they can. This is the true religion. Who does not believe that there is one God, but there are many Gods? It is a gift from God. Those who believe in God and do good works are very good people. God is in heaven. It’s always there. We should love those who fear God. We should love those who fear God.

Google Translate Abrogates Surah 33:21

We believe in pain. Those who remember Jonah may remember their servant.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Flippin’ Fatwa Friday – Screw It. We’re Gonna Speed Run Surah 2:159-202.

It’s been at least three months since I last wrote a Flippin’ Fatwa Friday post criticizing the Quran. We’ve gotten 158 verses into this thing, though I hoped to be in Surah 3 by now. So, I’m going to switch tactics and instead of going chunk by chunk, I’m just going to speed run a massive chunk of it, picking out the ridiculous stuff so we can finally be done with it sooner.

Starting with Surah 2:159-171, we get a bunch of stuff about Allah’s clear guidance, both as revealed in the Quran and in nature. It talks about how wrong non-Muslims are for not worshipping Allah despite those things, how they’re cursed by Allah and the angels, and how Muslims are to stay faithful to Allah. Real fun stuff.

Moving on from that into Surah 2:172-173, we get some food laws. One would think that the section on food laws would be longer, similar to what we get in the Torah, but no. Instead, we just get two measly verses, which say:

172.O ye who believe! Eat of the good things that We have provided for you, and be grateful to Allah, if it is Him ye worship. 173. He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without willful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful.

Interestingly, the only reason I can think of why these food laws are here is because the Quran is the really bad fanfic of the Bible that tries to be like it but fails miserably. Other than that, I’m not sure why it’s here.

Then we have Surah 2: 174-176, which talks about people concealing Allah’s revelations for profit. These verses aren’t talking about the Quran, but, according to the Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir, are talking about the Jews allegedly hiding verses in the Torah that showed Muhammad to be a prophet. Some Muslims may try to use these verses to show how the Bible has somehow been corrupted, but in the context, it seems that the Quran is talking about them hiding these supposed verses in their oral recitations. It says nothing of the actual text itself.

Verse 177 illustrates how Islam offers a works-based salvation, giving readers a laundry-list of things to do to get in Allah’s good graces. Verses 178-179 talks about equal retribution, but not in the sense that we would think of it. The way we Westerners who have grown up in a world built on Christianity would see equality and justice would be in the sense that all men are made equal in the eyes of God. There is neither slave nor free, man or woman. However, when the Quran talks about it, it’s only referring to equal retribution for your specific group, saying:

178.O ye who believe! the law of equality is prescribed to you in cases of murder: the free for the free, the slave for the slave, the woman for the woman. But if any remission is made by the brother of the slain, then grant any reasonable demand, and compensate him with handsome gratitude, this is a concession and a Mercy from your Lord. After this whoever exceeds the limits shall be in grave penalty.

Surah 2:180-182 talks about what to do with your possessions after you die, and 183-187 talk about Ramadan. I’ve already written a post, on this, which you can check out here.

After that, verse 188 seems to be randomly thrown in, telling people essentially not to usurp other people’s wealth or possessions through various means, before jumping into the topic of times to worship Allah in verse 189 and how to enter a house.

Because how you enter a house is as important to Allah as how you pee. I wish I were joking, but that’s Islam for you.

Surah 2:190-194, however, isn’t so funny, as it commands Muslims to wage jihad. While Muslims will argue that the fighting mentioned here only refers to self-defense in cases of persecution, we need to ask what counts as persecution? Is persecution something that happens when you’re actually being attacked and your life and community is at risk just for existing? Or is it anything that you don’t like, such as mockery, and self-defense on their part? The reason I bring this up is because Islam has had a long history of its followers whining about being persecuted, even though they instigated the attack by mocking or attacking the other side.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, verse 195 then tells Muslims to spend money in the cause of jihad. The Quran literally tells them to finance wars against the infidels.

Finally, verses 196-202 talk about the Hajj, which I’ve also done a post on which you can read here.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog/Apologetics: This is Why Churches Shouldn’t Get Involved in Politics.

As a first-time voter, here are my honest thoughts on this month’s midterms: What the heck is going on? Am I in the right timeline?

First (by order of infamy), we had Graham Platner in Maine running for a spot in the senate with Democrats propping him up, ignoring the numerous rape and abuse allegations against him until one of his former, left-leaning girlfriends said he raped her. This then forced Democrats to try to find a replacement, with the wide array of options including a trans-identifying man. However, they finally settled on replacing Platner with Troy Jackson, a dude who’s now infamous for hooking up with his second cousin.

Second, we have James Talarico in Texas, a man who’s running for Senate, describes himself as a Presbyterian seminarian, and has become infamous for twisting the Bible to his own Left-wing ends. And begging for donations. Lots of begging for money.

Third, we have in Michigan (also running for senate) Abdul el-Sayed, a Muslim who has been stirring up controversy after being called out for speaking only Arabic during campaign events and reportedly paying off people to support him, with el-Sayed paying a Detroit pastor $75K to promote him.

Finally, however, we have a candidate who frankly should be covered more, and that’s Victor Marx.

For those of you who don’t know, Victor Marx is Colorado’s gubernatorial candidate for the Republican party. Seeing as I have already written a post on 99% of everything wrong with this guy (that we know of), I’ll spare you the massive explanation of how shady this guy is, but, in summary, he’s been accused of using his charity for personal gain, lying about his time in the military, lying about his relationship with his father, being abusive towards one of his daughters, lying about another daughter being groped, lying about how many people his charity has actually helped, and having a strange connection with Haitain warlord Jimmy Barbeque, amongst other things.

Despite all of this, however, Victor Marx not only still has the backing of Turning Point USA, but he’s also been endorsed by numerous politicians, and, most concerningly, is associated with several churches in Colorado.

Now, this post isn’t meant to slam any particular politician as I think that what’s happening in Colorado (and some other states) this year really highlights an issue that the church has had for a while. That issue is, of course, not staying out of politics.

This isn’t to say that the church (as in the body of Christ; Christians in general) shouldn’t be engaged in politics or vote. Absolutely, I think that we should engage in politics and vote in line with what the Bible teaches. What I’m saying here is that churches shouldn’t be outright endorsing various political candidates or conflating politics with faith. We’ve seen this with various churches’ endorsement of Trump, and we’re seeing it now with various political candidates running for senate, congress, governor, etc.

The church’s job isn’t to win people to one side of the political aisle or the other. It’s not to preach in the name of the Democrats or Republicans, but to preach in the name of Jesus, who’s above that stuff. As Christians, we’re to make disciples of all men for God’s glory, not for the glory of Trump or someone other politician. If a person votes Republican after converting, great. But it’s not our job to convince them that one side of the political aisle is better. If we do conflate God with politics, not only have we missed the mark, but we’re also risking the reputation of the church when those politicians fail in some way.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog/Apologetics: Being an Apologist Isn’t What You Think It Is…

In my travels through the Christian community on social media, I’ve noticed a trend. Apologetics seem to be on the rise, especially in the polemics field, amongst millennials and Gen Z. More people are becoming interested in it and are wanting to start their own YouTube channels and social media accounts to do apologetics on.

However, while it’s a good thing that more people want to do apologetics and are becoming interested in it, many of them seem to be going into it blind to what the reality is. It appears that many of them see big names such as Frank Turek, Wes Huff, David Wood, GodLogic, and others and believe that apologetics is glamorous, that it will bring them internet fame and fortune and – bonus – it’s all being done in the name of Jesus. But if you strip away the glamour, what you find is much harder.

Everyone should be an apologist to the extent that they can give a reasoned defense of the faith, but apologists aren’t just people who defend the faith from outsiders. Apologists are the guard dogs of the church. We are the ones who start barking when the wolves are near, but more often than not, the wolves are already in the church. Because of that, apologetics becomes one of the most stressful jobs in the church because you will have to call out false teachers, teachers who often have a large following and are beloved by many. Calling them out almost totally guarantees that you will get backlash from fellow Christians.

While that doesn’t sound too bad, getting backlash from other Christians can often hit harder than getting backlash from people outside the church because it makes you realize how truly dysfunctional the church is. Sure, some people can recognize a wolf, but many in the church won’t and may try to shut you down. You suddenly find yourself getting slammed with a similar type of vitriol that you would expect to find outside the church by the very people who say you’re their brothers and sisters in Christ. That type of thing just hits different.

That also leads me to my second point. If you want to become an apologist, prepare to be hated. Depending on what topic you specialize in, your comments section might be better or worse when it comes to trolls, but you will still get them, and you will need to grow a thick skin.

Third, know that if you’re going into apologetics for fame and money, then you’re not only not doing it for a good purpose (and thus, shouldn’t be an apologist at all), but you’re also going to be sorely disappointed. While apologetics is getting more popular, you likely will not have a huge channel following and probably won’t be making a ton of money from it.

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: Rings of Power Season 3 – What Did We do to Deserve This?

For those of you who have been around since 2023, you know that I have an overwhelming hatred of The Rings of Power. Season 1 was especially bad, given how much it flew in the face of Tolkien’s work. Season 2 was similarly bad, but was made slightly better since if you lowered your expectations enough and forgot what they were adapting, it became a very mid fantasy show that had glaring and annoying plot holes.

But now, even after the terrible reviews on both seasons, Amazon for some reason has decided to push forward with The Rings of Power, dropping the trailer for Season 3 last week. And boy, does it look terrible.

To start off with, Celeborn is finally going to be in this season. The reason why this is a big deal is because, in case you forgot, Celeborn is Galadriel’s husband who frankly should have been in the show from the beginning. The only reason why I can imagine he wasn’t is simply because the showrunners wanted to ship Galadriel with Sauron in Season 1, and then with Elrond in Season 2. (Bear in mind that Elrond will later become her son-in-law.)

Then there’s the inclusion of the Nazgul in this season. According to Tolkien Gateway:

Sometime during the Second Age (after the year 1697[note 1]) Sauron gave nine Rings of Power to nine mortal Men. It is said that three of the Nine were great lords of Númenorean race.[2][3]

The bearers of the rings gained great wealth and prestige and became “mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old”. The rings enabled them to turn invisible and see the Unseen. Their lives were prolonged so they seemed unending, but life became unendurable to them. Over time, depending on their native strength and their initial good or evil will, they succumbed to the powers of the rings and the domination of the One Ring. Their bodily forms faded until they became permanently invisible and turned into wraiths.[4]

Known as the Nazgûl, they first appeared around S.A. 2251[5] and were soon established as Sauron’s principal servants. However, the circumstances of this appearance are unknown, as are their actions during the Dark Years, during Sauron’s capture to Númenor, and in the War of the Last Alliance. When Sauron was overthrown in S.A. 3441 at the hands of the Last Alliance, the wraiths faded into the shadows.[5]

Because of this timeline, the inclusion of the Nazgul could have been a good move on the part of the showrunners, but the problem is that Sauron has yet to give the rings to men so far in the show. Thus, while the Nazgul would fit (sort-of) with the timeline, because of how slow this show moves with giving away rings, they’re way too early. The only way the show could possibly ramify this is if they portray the Nazgul as actual flesh and blood men, not as wraiths, and even then, they only came under the complete control of Sauron after they had died.

Third, we have the issue of the continued wizard plotline. In Season 2, a new wizard that terrorizes the hobbits was introduced and apparently, they haven’t gotten rid of him in Season 3. This wizard – that has been dubbed Totally-Not-Saruman – makes no sense for a variety of reasons. First, none of the wizards in general, are supposed to be in the show. They popped up in the Third Age of Middle Earth, not the Second. Second, if the new wizard is one of the Blue Wizards or is Saruman himself, Gandalf should be able to recognize him. Third, if the wizard is one of the istari, then this flies in the face of Gandalf not knowing Saruman was with Sauron in the story and not knowing where the Blue Wizards were or what happened to them. And if this is just a random wizard the show runners made up, then it also doesn’t work since only four wizards were sent to Middle Earth.

Overall, Rings of Power is intent on nuking the legacy of Tolkien’s work while simultaneously becoming a meme. And I will be here to criticize it because why not?

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Debunking Deconstruction – Who Created God?

A very common question that people ask is “Who created God?” We’ve all heard it asked before, from kids and adults alike. In our minds, it’s a legit question, especially since everything around us is created. So, does God have a creator?

The short answer is “No.”

All of this goes to the fact that God is eternal. The Bible constantly talks about this, saying:

“Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” – Psalm 90:2

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” – Isaiah 40:28

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” – Revelation 1:8

“Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” – 1 Timothy 1:17

As I defined it in my post on if the universe is eternal, eternity is a state of infinity. It has no ending and no beginning. It never changes. If the Bible – God’s Word – is affirming Him as the being the everlasting God, then He is saying that He isn’t created because He affirms that He has no beginning.

Until next time,

M.J.

Blog: Are the Jews Still Israelites?

I recently got some comments on a short video from some Muslims who argued that Israel doesn’t belong to the Jews because most of them came from Europe, which somehow means that they are no longer the Israelites or Hebrews of the Bible. Unfortunately, this isn’t a new belief, so let’s debunk this.

To start with, we should define who the Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews are. In the Bible, the terms are often used interchangeably. These are names that were used during different eras in Jewish history, and all refer to the same ethnic group. By that standard, the Jews, by defintion, are technically still Israelites.

But besides that, we need to address if modern-day Jews are still the Israelites culturally when there is so much ethnic mixing. The Jews have been dispersed throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Europe for thousands of years, starting with the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 722 BC. However, despite their dispersion and intermingling with other people groups, Jewish communities still recognized Israel as their ancestral homeland, and preserved their religious practices, texts, and traditions through generations.

Additionally, if we look at other examples of mixed people groups, we see a similar thing play out. For example, look at Native American tribes. Today, it is incredibly rare to meet a Native American who is 100% a member of their specific tribe. Many of them intermarry with other tribes or have married people of other races entirely. Despite this, too, they may still try to keep some of their tribal customs, beliefs, and practices.

Imagine if you tried to say that Native Americans no longer have a connection or right to their territories because very few of them are 100% members of a specific tribe, even if they try to keep the culture of the tribe they identify with alive. You would immediately be called racist and bigoted. So, how come that logic doesn’t apply to Jews?

Further, to say that Jews aren’t actual Israelites because many of them are Ashkenazi (from Eastern Europe) is also stupid on a genetic level. Just because you look a certain way doesn’t nullify your genetics. Your DNA contains thousands of variations, many of which are more common in certain ethnic or racial groups than others. Those variations, when compared to the DNA of other groups, is what allows geneticists to figure out where your ancestors might have been from going back several generations. Even if your great-times-10-grandma was Jewish, your DNA still carries those markers indicating that someone in your family was Jewish. Thus, if we go off of genetics, the Jews still carry those genetic markers and are genetically Jewish, even if they aren’t 100% Jewish.

For an example, in my case, my genetics are very mixed. I may not identify with the Navajo community or look Navajo, but genetically, I am Navajo. To say otherwise denies reality.

Thus, the entire argument that the Jews are no longer the Israelites is absurd both on a genetic and cultural level. But, to make it even worse for Muslims is the fact that this ties into the Islamic Dilemma. If the Bible is correct, then Israel belongs to the Jews. However, if the Bible is corrupted, then the Quran is not only wrong, but history shows that the Jews have a better claim to Israel than the Palestinian Arabs.

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: Hexed – Disney Isn’t Trying to Hide it Anymore.

It used to be considered a conspiracy theory that Hollywood worships the devil. Then it became a joke, and now they don’t even try to hide it. Almost everything you watch in theaters or listen to on the radio has some sort of occult messaging, even if it’s not overt.

Disney is no exception. They have always hidden some aspect of the occult in their movies, but it never seemed to be beyond the usual fairytale antics. In many of the classic movies, it was usually the villains that used magic the most. Unless you happened to delve deep into the occult or you came out of it, you wouldn’t be able to exactly pinpoint the occult themes hidden in the songs and otherwise good moral messaging. But over the years, things have changed. Not only has Disney’s sense of morality changed to fit more progressive ideals, but they don’t even try to hide the occult anymore. The trailer for their new movie, Hexed, is a perfect example of this.

Hexed follows a young woman named Billy who doesn’t quite fit in at her school. She’s a social outcast, dresses somewhat alt (which is funny given that alternative dress is more acceptable today), and seems to be struggling to get through school. But then, she finds out that she has magic powers, and after being expelled, decides to test them out at home, opening a portal to another world full of witches.

Now, as YouTuber and ex-occultist Jac Marino Chen points out, the imagery used throughout the trailer comes straight from the occult, particularly Wicca from what I’ve seen. Throughout the trailer, not only do you see lunar symbolism (which is especially common in goddess worship), but you also see a grimoire or book of shadows, the use of crystals, tarot cards, fairy rings, etc.

Basically, this movie looks like a mix of Hot Topic and a New Age expo.

Now, some of you reading this might think this isn’t a big deal. After all, it’s just a fun movie from Disney, right? It could be infinitely worse, couldn’t it? After all, it could be promoting LGBTQ+ ideology (if it doesn’t already plan to do that.)

While I can see the point of that, and, honestly, it would be about the equivalent of watching Harry Potter, the outright glorification of actual occult imagery is somewhat shocking. Yes, we saw a form of voodoo promoted to a degree in Princess and the Frog (Mama Odie is cannonically a 197-year-old voodoo priestess). Other overt instances of occult imagery have also been found in some of their Halloween short series and movies. (For example, in one short series I remember watching, an episode focused on two teen witches and one of their houses had pentagrams and other Wiccan/Satanic symbols hidden throughout it.) But this is the first time – that I’m aware of – that they have outright unashamedly made a movie geared towards children that appears to promote Wicca and draws directly from that.

[Author’s Note: That’s also not mentioning how, in the wake of the insane success of Netflix’s Wednesday, Disney has reportedly greenlit the production of a show called Coven Academy, which follows witches living in New Orleans.]

Look, if you want to take your kids to see this movie, fine, but here’s the thing. This movie doesn’t just take one or two things from a mix of religions or worldviews. It is straight up taking from actual ritual magic, promoting it, and isn’t even trying to hide it. It makes those things look like fun, like if you’re a social outcast, you’re actually someone special. While this isn’t new, it’s something that, as Christians, we should be careful about. If you let your kids watch this movie, help them watch it with the same discernment you would exercise if you were watching something like Harry Potter. Help them understand where it comes from, what the worldview is, and why it’s dangerous.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Debunking Deconstruction – Why Can’t the Universe be Eternal?

In a conversation I had with an atheist, I was asked the question “Why can’t the universe be eternal, conscious, and all-knowing?” Somehow, this is supposed to show a double standard in Christian thinking since we claim that God is all those things, but don’t believe that the universe can be. Additionally, this line of thinking isn’t just something you see in atheism. It’s something that pops up constantly throughout a myriad of world religions. So why can’t the universe be eternal, conscious, and all-knowing?

To begin, let’s look at the question of eternity define what makes something “eternal.” Eternity is a state of infinity; it’s never ending. It has no beginning and no end. That means that if something is eternal, it can’t have just popped into existence, and it can’t have an end.

With that in mind, we can safely say that the universe isn’t eternal. While there are many theories about how this will happen (such as the Big Crunch), scientists agree that the universe will end at some point. If the universe were to end then, it cannot be eternal. Eternity cannot end. In fact, the universe reaching its end at some point actually proves that it had a beginning. It can’t have always been there.

Then there’s the question of “Can the universe be conscious?” This has been a point of debate amongst philosophers and scientists alike for centuries. However, consciousness is the state of being aware of oneself and one’s environment. It’s the ability to feel emotion and to react to stimuli. If you cut a conscious being, they will flinch and probably get angry. If you cut an unconscious being, they will have no reaction whatsoever.

By that standard alone, they universe can’t be conscious because it does none of that. Sure, some things may induce some sort of reaction (i.e. an asteroid hits another asteroid and they shatter), but does it do anything to react to it on an emotional level? Does it care about what happened? No.

Interestingly, the very suggestion that the universe is conscious rest on something that atheists, in their pursuit of ignoring the supernatural completely, try to frequently deny: the existence of a soul. According to an atheist worldview, there really isn’t much separating us from a rock. Sure, we may be the result of more advanced chemical reactions, but taken to its logical conclusion, according to atheism, everything about us is just from random atoms bumping into each other. There really is no inherent value to us. And technically, if everything is just a mix of random chemical reactions, then can we truly be any more conscious than a rock is?

Consciousness in of itself requires the existence of a soul to separate us from everything else. What that means for atheists is that it could be possible for the supernatural – the thing they deny – to exist.

Finally, there’s the question of “Can the universe be all-knowing?” In order for something to be omniscient, it first needs to be conscious. We’ve already established that the universe isn’t conscious, so the claim that it’s all-knowing is already on shaky ground. Second, an all-knowing entity must be able to know the past, present, and future, which would imply that it lives in a state unencumbered by time – that it’s eternal. Already, we know that the universe is time-bound and can’t be eternal, which, combined with the first criteria, means that the universe can’t be all-knowing. It’s a created thing. Even if I were to give it the benefit of the doubt and said that it has a soul and is conscious to some degree, it can’t be God because it’s not all-knowing and it’s not eternal. It is not the Alpha and Omega.

Until next time,

M.J.

Apologetics: Debunking Deconstruction – Is Free Will a Thing?

As I mentioned last week, I got into a debate with an atheist in my comments section who said that free will can’t exist if God knows everything. He believes that if God knows everything, then we can’t actually choose anything for ourselves, and He is ultimately the one causing people to be sent to Hell. This can be a sketchy topic since answering this question can easily send a person into the theological weeds, but here’s my take.

Ultimately, the answer to this question is that knowing doesn’t equal causing. It is true that throughout the Bible, there are plenty of passages about God knowing what will happen. Take, for instance, Isaiah 46:9-10, where it says:

9Remember the former things, those of long ago;
    I am God, and there is no other;
    I am God, and there is none like me.
10 I make known the end from the beginning,
    from ancient times, what is still to come.
I say, ‘My purpose will stand,
    and I will do all that I please.’

However, there are also a myriad of passages which talk about human responsibility. One example is in Deuteronomy 30:19-20, which says:

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

From this, we can see that while the Bible says God knows everything that will ever happen, it also says that we have a choice between God’s way and our way. Rather than being contradictory, this is more complementary. As an illustration of how this works, imagine that you have a friend who’s wildly predictable. Even when presented with numerous other choices, you know that they’ll go for the same one every time. They’ll pick chocolate over vanilla or strawberry. They always pick plain T-shirts over graphic Tees. They always wear Converse even if Doc Martins are the better choice. You get the picture.

You knowing what they’re going to pick doesn’t mean that you’re causing them to pick that thing. They could still pick any of the other options, they just don’t.

It’s kind-of like that with God. Though He knows everything we’re going to do, He gives us a myriad of opportunities and chances to pick a new path. If you’re a non-Christian, He gives you chance after chance to turn towards Him. If you’re a Christian, He gives you opportunities to obey Him.

Further, not allowing free will isn’t something that’s in line with God’s character. God is all-loving. If He didn’t give us free will, He couldn’t be all-loving because for love to exist, freedom of choice must exist. If Adam and Eve hadn’t been given the option to eat of the tree of good and evil, they could never have had a true relationship with God.

Now, at this point the question of predestination pops up, since the Bible also emphasizes predestination a lot as well. This one has led to a huge debate, with the two major sides being Calvinism and Arminianism. Some Calvinists are more extreme than others on this question, but the overall view on that end is that God’s grace irresistibly draws in those who have been elected by God to be saved. Calvinists teach that we aren’t completely free and can’t really choose God in our sinful state unless we’ve been chosen by Him and regenerated to follow Him. Arminianism, on the other hand, teaches that God’s election is based on foreseen faith, in which case it’s up to us to accept God’s grace or reject it.

[Author’s Note: Personally, I generally lean more towards Arminianism, but try to stay somewhere in the middle on this one.]

Either way you look at it, it’s not an essential of the faith and there are Bible verses to back up both views. On one hand I can understand the Calvinist view since if your heart is hardened against God, it often takes a work of the Spirit to soften it so you can accept Christ. At the same time, however, I also can understand the Arminian perspective that God’s election is based on foreseen faith. Ultimately, though, there’s a great level of mystery to it that we’re likely not going to totally understand in life, but it’s better than the alternative that atheism provides.

Until next time,

M.J.

Poll: Grifter Battle

Blog: Books Are Becoming Temu Quality (And AI is Partially to Blame).

I’ve talked a lot about the declining state of literature on this blog since not only is it deeply concerning to me given my love of literature, but there are also a lot of things that contribute to it. A lot of it comes from the overall decline of our society. As people move away from God and towards hedonism, their stories become more banal until ultimately, the moral core is almost entirely gone. The stories no longer have anything to give them meaning; they’re just there for some brief entertainment, if you can even call it that.

However, the decline of our culture isn’t the only thing causing books to feel like the new version of fast fashion. AI has also – predictably – caused books to feel cheaply written and boring.

AI writing books isn’t something new, though the rate at which AI published books are being printed and put on store shelves is unprecedented. The first AI-written book was published in Japan in 2016. A research team at the Sato-Matsuzaki Laboratory developed a program that used automatic text generation based on over a thousand short stories and essays on how to write. They put in the basic outline of the story and allowed the AI to take over from there. It was then entered in a literary contest, where it was accepted and passed the first round.

Later, in 2017, author Ross Goodwin covered his car in surveillance cameras, microphones, and GPS, and connected it all to an AI. The AI then continuously printed the data out on receipt paper rolls as Goodwin went on a road trip. At the end of it, the data was compiled into a book.

Fast forward a few years to 2021, and the Aum Golly series was released, a collection of poems about humanity written entirely by ChatGPT and GPT-3. The first book was written in 24 hours, and the second was written in half the time.

Since then, AI-generated books have blown up, especially as AI has gotten better, with often detrimental results. One author, Mat Auryn, a California-based author who writes books on witchcraft, has been one of the many authors having to battle AI generated books. After writing his book, Psychic Witch, and publishing it, he soon ran into a book on Amazon called Awakening Your Witchy Intuition and Psychic Abilities by Glinda Porter. After buying it on Kindle and reading it, he soon realized that it was an AI-written plagiarization of his book. He quickly found other books plagiarizing his work that were most likely written by AI. Many of them oddly appeared on Amazon, were taken down, and then reappeared later.

Additionally, AI being used by real authors to generate their stories has become a subject of controversy in the reading community. The most infamous and hilarious example was found in Darkhollow Academy: Year 2, a romantasy novel written by Lena McDonald. Not only was the AI prompt to help revise a passage McDonald had written found, but the prompt also included a request to write it in the style of another romance author. It said:

I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements.

Another embarrassing blunder was found in a romance book called Dark Obsession, which was written by someone called KC Crowne, an author who has over 100 books under his name, all published over seven years. The prompt said:

Certainly! Here’s an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori.

This issue of AI being used to write books has also become such a big deal that over 50 bestselling authors have signed an open letter to publishers demanding that they refuse to publish books that are partially or wholly written by AI. They argue that a robot can’t replace humans since art requires an understanding of the human experience that no robot can really replicate. They also argue that publishing companies need to stand against AI since the language models are trained on pre-existing works, which can almost inevitably lead to plagiarism.

However, while many readers and authors are demanding that AI be kept out of the writing world, the publishing companies sadly have a good incentive not to crackdown on AI-written books. For one thing, AI-written books are cheaper to write, and you can write more of them in a smaller time span than you could with a human author (hence why Amazon is becoming increasingly flooded with AI books).

For another thing, the largest book retailers in the market – such as Barnes & Noble – don’t particularly care if a book is AI or not. Recently, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Durant, came out and said that he is in support of selling AI-generated books as long as they’re clearly marked as such. He’s also said that there may already by AI-generated books being sold in Barnes & Noble stores that they’re not currently aware of.

To make things worse, not only has AI ended up discouraging authors and publishers from writing and publishing books made with actual human creativity for the sake of making a profit, but there’s also a problem with the readers. Thanks to social media and shrinking attention spans, readers don’t read as thoroughly as they used to. Thus, even if the AI-influence is obvious, readers may not notice it due to skimming over it. Or, worse, they simply don’t care. As long as the story is steamy and follows the same addictive plot beats, who cares if it’s written by AI? They get the same high either way.

While not the full reason why writing feels cheap and boring nowadays, AI has certainly contributed to the problem. To be clear, I have nothing against using AI as an editing tool, but if large swaths of your story are generated by AI, then it should have no place in a bookstore. Though I wish that AI would be rejected from the publishing industry entirely, due to how easy it is to use and the efficiency with which it gets stories out there, it likely won’t stop being used to write books.

Until next time,

M.J.

Poll: Memes

Apologetics: Atheism Confuses Me – Is Free Will a Thing?

Continuing our discussion about free will, one of the strangest things about atheism is how much atheists brag about how much freedom they have. Without God, they have total free will and can run around doing absolutely anything they want! They have no one to hold them accountable, unless someone with more guns comes in and demands they act a certain way (i.e. the government), but you know…technicalities.

However, despite this seeming lack of responsibility to any higher power, atheists seem to forget one critical point – atheism can’t support the existence of free will.

Atheists, before you get angry at me and start commenting, hear me out on this.

According to atheism, since God doesn’t exist, everything exists by way of random chance. The universe, the earth, the plants, animals, and yourself are all the result of accidental chemical reactions that continue to this day. That means that you as a person are a conglomeration of a bunch of atoms bumping into each other, forming molecules and creating chemicals that react with each other, doing different things, including fueling your conciousness.

This is where the free will thing starts to come into play. Scientists still don’t understand human consciousness. The closest thing they can get to understanding it is by mapping your brain’s activity, seeing what parts of the brain release what, etc. What actually causes consciousness, though, is still a mystery. It’s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario depending on who you ask and what you’re talking about. For example, if someone’s depressed, are they depressed because of a legit neurological or chemical issue that was already there, or is it caused by them thinking about things a certain way that’s causing their brains to act accordingly? Is it a mix of both? Scientists still aren’t quite sure.

I say this is where the free will thing comes in because according to atheism’s worldview, since everything is matter and is the result of matter running into each other and reacting, then that means everything you do is the result of those chemical reactions. Because of that, you can’t actually decide to do anything. You can’t control what the cells that make up your brain do any more than I can control the weather. And if you can’t control that, then ultimately, you can’t have free will, because free will requires some degree of control.

So, what does that mean? If we can’t have free will because everything we do is a chemical reaction, where does that leave us?

The moral dilemma posed by this aside, the existence of free will is something that can only exist if humans have a soul, if humans aren’t just made up of matter alone. Once we acknowledge that we have a soul, then we must wonder who created that soul? After all, a soul can’t be made of matter or anything measurable. It’s supernatural and points to the existence of the supernatural, which should then make you wonder which God or gods has created that soul.

Until next time,

M.J.

Poll: Live Action Moana

Blog: The Lily Jay Foundation – A Case Study in Why You Should Do Your Research…

Unless y’all are familiar with my channel or have run into the Muslim community online, you have probably never heard of an influencer named Lily Jay. So, here’s an explanation.

Lily Jay is an Australian influencer who originally gained recognition as an actress, singer, and dancer. However, she blew up online when she announced that she had converted to Islam and began using ChatGPT to prove that Islam was true. Of course, everything she claims about Islam is easily debunkable and her actual conversion journey is so confusing and all over the place that there’s doubt about if she’s a real Muslim, but she’s gained great renown in the online dawah scene.

But if she’s not known for her dawah (Muslim evangelism), she’s known for her humanitarian efforts, primarily through her foundation, the Lily Jay Foundation. The Lily Jay Foundation is “a next-generation social enterprise and high-speed humanitarian logistics firm executing rapid aid deployment in global crisis zones. To maintain absolute speed and independence, we operate as a private commercial structure, rather than traditional charity models.” The main places it claims to operate are Sudan and Gaza, though it’s also operates elsewhere, such as in Uganda and Nepal. The services provided to these communities are water and Quran distribution, orphan care, animal sacrifices, and mosque building.

Now, some of this would sound good since its humanitarian care, but in a recent investigation by ABC NEWS Verify, it was revealed that the Lily Jay Foundation is a total scam built on AI.

The investigation started with a video from the Lily Jay where she’s standing in front of some African kids celebrating the opening of an orphanage in Uganda. While convincing at first, if you pay close attention to the video, there are some telltale signs that it’s fake. First, one of the windows in the orphanage moves. The children’s fingers are also distorted in some shots, and the Lily Jay Foundation sign moves, appearing once, then disappearing entirely. In another shot, a Lily Jay Foundation worker’s shirt had an extra “L” added to “Lily.” Honestly, the more I watched the video over, the more I began to notice how almost waxy the AI Lily Jay looked. She looked too perfect compared to her other videos to the point where I started getting uncanny valley vibes from her.

This video wasn’t the only thing that was AI generated or edited. In another video, Jay celebrates a food truck rolling into Gaza, and for a moment, the superimposed Lily Jay Foundation banner flashes over her hand. She also had two images of her supposedly receiving an award for humanitarian efforts in a press release, but when analyzed, it was found that both pictures were generated using ChatGPT thanks to a watermark imbedded in the picture.

Other problems abound with Jay’s foundation, ranging from the fact that her orphanage in Uganda and a bakery in Gaza, don’t appear to exist, and she’s about as transparent as a brick wall about where the money goes.

This, unfortunately, is the type of behavior that should make anyone wary about giving to any charity and it’s not just found in Muslim communities. Whether it’s Lily Jay using AI to make videos for her foundation or it’s Victor Marx making claims that are impossible to prove, the scammers are out there posing as charities solely to get your money. If anything has been learned from this post, it should be that no matter who you are, you should always do your research first before sending money anywhere.

Until next time,

M.J.

Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender Looks Really Good

If you guys have been around since the start of this blog, you know that I love Avatar: The Last Airbender. Sure, I wasn’t there for the initial hype since the show ended before I was born, but I have it on Blu-ray, watched it for the first time when I was in middle school, and it holds a special place in my list of great stories. Even today as a Christian who’s generally more sensitive to the occult and other worldviews being pushed in media, I still love the show for its storytelling and deeper plot threads that endear it to so many people.

That said, when it was announced that ATLA was getting a movie sequel, I was pretty excited and knew it was something I would want to see. A couple years passed and now, we have our first looks at the movie with the official trailer out now.

Overall, the trailer looks intriguing. Granted, I haven’t read the ATLA comics, so maybe I’m saying this out of ignorance, but the history between the events of The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra seems underexplored, especially as characters grow up. The fuller lore is something that people have to figure out by reading the books, so to have a movie exploring that time period could be really good.

However, that said, I have a few nitpicks and concerns.

First of all, it’s being released on streaming instead of theaters. It airs on Paramount+ on July 25th, which sucks since a movie of this magnitude should absolutely be available in theaters. Just think of how awesome the animation would look on the big screen. But alas…I will wait and hope it becomes available on other streaming platforms, like Fandango.

Second, one of my concerns is that the movie is going to have some of the same flaws that the ATLA Netflix adaptation has, namely retconning characters in the name of “the modern audience.” In the original show, the characters had to grow up fast, and in the time they spent on their mission to defeat Ozai, they all became stronger and better characters. Katara and Aang became more confident, Sokka learned what it was to be a man, Toph learned how to be free and accept help from others. Zuko’s character arc was especially important, carrying much of the show though he was largely a side character, to the point where countless video essays have been made about it. Now that the characters have become adults, however, I do have to wonder if the writers will try to undo some of that as the Netflix adaptation did.

Speaking of writers being stupid, my third concern is identity politics being shoved into the movie. This issue in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender is one that goes back to The Legend of Korra and the later comics. In The Legend of Korra, not only is Korra widely agreed upon to be a completely unlikeable girlboss as she embodies every negative aspect of modern feminism, but she’s later strongly implied within the show to be bisexual, something that’s further confirmed in the comics. That said, while the LGBTQ+ movement is falling out of favor today, I doubt that’s going to severely impact Hollywood continuing to shove it down our throats. Within the trailer itself, Zuko comments on another character’s attractiveness, which I hope is meant to be innocuous and not something they intend to make into a larger LGBTQ+ plot point.

With those concerns out of the way, I still think the movie has potential to be really good. I’ll just have to wait until I either get Paramount+ or it gets to other streaming services to watch and review it.

Until next time,

M.J.

Poll: Social Media