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The advent of video has put the power in the hands of ordinary people, not the mainstream propaganda machine. This ungodly society hates it!
I like the fact that everyone with a phone can video.
People like this alleged pastor show themselves. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Especially when they are filming themselves while being an arse.
Video allows us to see up close, the police, and supremacists, the racists, the homophobes, and the misogynists. Many of them claim to be men of God.
The advent of video has put the power in the hands of ordinary people, not the mainstream propaganda machine. This ungodly society hates it!
The advent of not just video but also social media has democratized all sorts of things, such as news reporting. The problem of course is the same as for all pure democracies: it becomes on the one hand the tyranny of the majority / mob rule, and on the other hand, it cheapens any real value that was ever brought to human discourse by persons of integrity and sober thought. That is why actual journalism gave way to newstainment which is now giving way to so-called "fake news", which is what you are describing: everyone gets to have their own personal echo chamber to hear (or make!) only news they want to hear rather than what's actually going on in the world.
Similarly, writing in general used to be a fairly honorable profession, but now everyone thinks they can do it -- or at least everyone who doesn't have such an aversion to it that they can scarcely respond to emails in more than one-sentence grunts (and we even have Twitter for those folks). As a result, professional writers are less and less valued. You don't have to impress a publisher anymore, you can self-publish. You don't have to bother with editors or others who might correct your work or otherwise bruise your fragile ego. You can spout all sorts of vitriol and hate and still find people who affirm you. There are no gate-keepers anymore; the lunatics are running the asylum.
The open question, then, is whether video or any other medium should be in the hands of "ordinary people". And I'm not making an elitist argument either. I'm not denying that some of the strictures of the past favored the elites, because media was expensive and required the approval of people holding purse-strings. My definition or "ordinary" here is "not vetted in any way" and "not obligated to any sort of conventions of civility or rationality". I think media should be denied in some way to all random comers; they should have to meet some sort of relatively objective standard.
Alas, the only brake on people spewing random BS is how rational and wise people vote with their dollars. What news organizations they actually afford credibility and $$ to. Journalism for example -- good journalism -- requires funding for objective, courageous, independent investigative reporting. Now that it's no longer a badge of honor for major TV networks to fund those loss leaders, the handful of organizations that still have this vision go begging in an Internet world that favors information being zero cost.
I'm not too optimistic, at least in the short run.
Sherry? Might have had too many Jack Daniel chocolates they buy me every year. People used to ask us over for diner and they would ask my wife,'' Does your husband like stew?''
Sherry? Might have had too many Jack Daniel chocolates they buy me every year. People used to ask us over for diner and they would ask my wife,'' Does your husband like stew?''
She replies,'' Does it have whiskey in it?''
He calls me that too - it is an expression of affection rather than not.
Is hat any worse than an atheist yahoo spouting off his God is not real nonsense or putting up billboards?
My thought process has always been to find out first if it's true and second does the knowledge matter.
So the Pastor finds out that Santa isn't real, he thinks it's a sin or something along those lines, so he goes to rectify it. In his eyes, no it's not true and yes it does matter.
In our eyes, no it's not true and no it doesn't matter.
Here's the interesting thing here, why does he think it matters? Because of divine interest. Why don't we think it matters (or why would we not do what the pastor did)? Because we care about other people.
If this is going to be the type of nonsense that the religious are going to come up with, then I will have to answer that yes, I think it is important to make people question their beliefs.
The advent of video has put the power in the hands of ordinary people, not the mainstream propaganda machine. This ungodly society hates it!
LOL! What a dumb statement to make. No, the "ungodly" love it.
The so-called "mainstream propaganda machine" is almost exclusively in the hands of the Christian right; if you had any knowledge of history, you would know that "propaganda machines" are almost *always* a product of the political right. Fascism cannot exist without a robust propaganda apparatus, something we see spewing regularly from such places as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and a plethora of Christian programming on cable television.
Atheists and even world-class scientists *still* can't outright say there isn't a god or even darkly *hint* at it when speaking on the air; if you watch documentaries like I do, you'd see how scientists and authors invariably add some kind of disclaimer to their interviews like, "This doesn't mean there's no God" or "This in no way suggests that God doesn't exist" (even when it does) because they can't risk upsetting the fanatics out there; doing so gets the cable channel in trouble. There goes its advertising revenue!
The advent of video and the internet has *finally* given our side both a voice and a face -- and it's working. Why on earth would an ungodly society "hate" it? Quite the contrary, it's our best weapon and tool for spreading reason and enlightenment.
My thought process has always been to find out first if it's true and second does the knowledge matter.
So the Pastor finds out that Santa isn't real, he thinks it's a sin or something along those lines, so he goes to rectify it. In his eyes, no it's not true and yes it does matter.
In our eyes, no it's not true and no it doesn't matter.
Here's the interesting thing here, why does he think it matters? Because of divine interest. Why don't we think it matters (or why would we not do what the pastor did)? Because we care about other people.
If this is going to be the type of nonsense that the religious are going to come up with, then I will have to answer that yes, I think it is important to make people question their beliefs.
Right. You're the one with pure motives, and everyone else is wrong. How could I be so ignorant?
Your Christian bretheren scream and shout when schools are not required to celebrate Christmas, or when they try and exchange it for a secular and non-partisan holiday celebration.
Don't martyr yourself just yet, Vizio.
And they would be wrong. We should not force non-Christian kids to celebrate the incarnation of God.
But I've never met a kid that whined about having a party at school.
The pastor is a piece of trash it wants to tell the kids that Christmas is about the birth of Jesus which we ALL know is a lie. So he wants to replace a lie with another lie.
I love it!
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Have you been at the sherry old sprout? 
