Archives for July 2012

When most people demand “tolerance” of others, they really mean they insist that others accept their own positions — and then they’re outraged if positions contrary to their own are actually tolerated.

I keep thinking about that when I read about the gay activists who are leading obsessive boycotts of the fast food chain, Chick-fil-A. For decades, these same gay activists have demanded that everyone show toleration of their sexual orientation. There was a time when gays and lesbians were horribly mistreated by the law. We’re not living in that day, and it’s silly to pretend that we are. (I’ve argued that the state has no business defining marriage and dictating who can marry, so I’m not in a camp that wants to legally define marriage in any particular way.)

Activists are angry with Chick-fil-A because the private company’s owners have given money to Christian groups, some of which have favored efforts to legally define marriage as being between a man and a woman. The activists say this isn’t just a disagreement. No, it’s “hate,” they say. They don’t give any evidence that Chick-fil-A hates anyone. They simply define disagreement with their view as hatred. It’s hard to imagine a more insane twisting of what words really mean.

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Before he was shot at an Aurora theater last Thursday night, Pierce O’Farrill was a proponent of the death penalty. After being hit by three bullets — and believing for awhile that he was dying — O’Farrill says he’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want the death penalty for the man who shot a theater full of people. What’s more, he says his faith leads him to forgive James Holmes.

In a radio interview with syndicated talk show host Todd Schnitt, O’Farrill described the importance of his faith in getting through the ordeal, and he said forgiveness is part of knowing Jesus.

“So the truth is I’m blessed — I’m truly blessed — to have forgiveness in my heart and I do forgive him completely for what he’s done,” O’Farrill said.

In the interview with Schnitt, O’Farrill describes his experience in great detail. It’s the most riveting account I’ve heard of exactly what it was like to be in the theater during the shooting. O’Farrill was hit by a bullet from each of the three weapons that Holmes used. When one bullet hit his arm and broke a bone, he ended up in tremendous pain and he bled a lot. He couldn’t figure out where he had been hit, and he says he thought he was dying. (You can listen to the entire interview in two segments at the end of this article.)

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Many crazy ideas are popular until they’re proven wrong. People once believed the earth is flat. They believed you’d fall off the edge of the world if you went too far. The sun revolved around the earth, of course. And there were dangerous dragons waiting in far-off lands to greet anyone who dared to go there.

People eventually realized that all of these notions were wrong. Sailors proved that you could sail around the world, thus showing that the world was round and you couldn’t fall off the edge. Astronomers figured out that the earth revolves around the sun. After all of this, everybody with a brain realized that the earth wasn’t flat.

Unfortunately, a few insane or stupid people maintain today that the earth is flat. Ever heard of the Flat Earth Society? It really exists. Here’s the group’s website.

In the late 19th century, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed the idea of communism. Although many thinking people rejected the ideas as obviously impossible and contrary to how human nature works, the idea appealed to a lot of desperate people. Starting with the communist takeover of Russia, the idea took over a large part of the globe.

But the idea failed. It didn’t work as promised. Without a market system to supply basic information about how much things were worth and what people wanted, the system fell apart. Central planners couldn’t have enough information and human nature corrupted even the best intentions of the true believers. The Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it the various governments it had controlled and supported.

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