Want to know what people are looking for on the Web as it relates to the Christian Faith? Most of the posts listed below received their hits as a result of search engine returns. The titles reveal much about what people are searching for in life.
The 25 Most Visited Posts on Cerulean Sanctum through 2017 (from most visited to less visited)
This blog has been in operation since 2003. That’s a long time. And in that time, much has been weathered.
A select few readers know my wife has battled mental illness for going on nearly a decade now. I haven’t talked about it much here, since talking about mental illness in a public space can be something of a death sentence. People don’t understand mental illness, nor do they know what to do when someone is mentally ill, so talking about it brings raised eyebrows and that slow drift away. Stigma—it’s still out there. As is a feeling of helplessness. If it were cancer, people would know what to say and do, but with mental illness, no one shows up at the door with a casserole. The person with the illness may seem fine, but when the visitors go away or the event ends, there it is. The spouse and family see it and live with it, but few others must.
Traumatic events can destabilize someone with a mental illness. We had a series of such in late 2016, which led to much heartache and grief, and my wife’s illness flared up. We’ve been battling back ever since. Doctor changes, medicine changes, and on and on. When your spouse suffers, you suffer. This has meant scant time for side projects and pursuits. And between a son trying to get his driver’s license and thinking about college, my work, household needs, helping my wife battle back, and all the various vicissitudes of life, blogging had to take a back seat. Fact is, almost everything that was not core to daily existence had to.
It’s not that I don’t have pressing thoughts to share. It’s that sometimes, you have to choose your priorities.
Winter and spring were rough, but I hold out hope that summer will be better. Maybe that will free up time for Cerulean Sanctum. God knows I want to write, but God also knows that family matters.
In November 2004, I sat in a movie theater and witnessed one of the most chilling, frightening films I had ever seen: The Incredibles.
“Aw, c’mon, Dan,” you might protest. “That was an animated film for kids. Pixar. Now Disney. How can that possibly be anything but rainbows and unicorns?”
This scene:
The film’s writer and director Brad Bird nailed it:
“And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”
For a while, that narrative played in real life. It was a story the forces that hate God and hate His Church attempted to promote. “If everyone is a good person, and we construct a story we tell that makes everyone good, then no one will be morally or ideologically superior to anyone else. And then we can do whatever we want because we will have killed off religion, especially those that draw distinctions between good and evil.”
It’s an insidious ploy. Problem is, it didn’t work. The reason? Human sin.
You can’t claim that everyone is good if people keep doing heinous things. This especially doesn’t work when certain groups of highly visible people repeatedly are behind those atrocities. The goodness lie can’t stand in a world of fallen people.
Here’s where the flip-side is beginning to creep in…
I’ve noticed a new narrative lately coming from those who are desperate to draw moral and ideological equivalencies so as to excuse themselves, while also taking down any exceptionalism claims by any belief system. It’s a concession that the “everyone is super” narrative failed. What we are now being propagandized with is its opposite.
When Alexander Bissonnette walked into a Quebec mosque and unloaded his weapons into the bodies of the men present, the headline the next day described him with a phrase I’d not seen before in the press: Christian terrorist.
This past week, when Cedric Anderson walked into a California school and started shooting, the press wanted to know why Christians were not denouncing this terror perpetrated by a Christian pastor that left people, including a mentally-challanged child, dead.
Anyone else see what is happening here?
There’s a lie building. And from the perspective of those who tried with the goodness message and failed, it’s a more effective foundation supporting this revised agenda, because fallen people tend not to act good. Therefore, instead of finding cases of wholesale good in any group, find instances of the opposite.
“If we want to establish moral and ideological equivalency, we must show that no one is exceptional. Because if no one is exceptional, then there is nothing exceptional about what anyone believes.”
The implementation as an attack on Christian faith is to find deranged, unstable, violent people who have some slim connection to something someone thinks is Christianity, and paint them as brightly as possible as stellar, A-#1 examples of Christian faith. Then say, “Look at this mass murderer Christian! Christians are just as bad as everyone else. In fact, they may be the real monsters we never realized lived among us.”
You see, Alexandre Bissonnette liked Pope John Paul II on his Facebook page and used an image of a crusader to announce his savage plan to murder.
You see, Cedric Anderson called himself a pastor in public and quoted biblical-sounding things on his Facebook page.
So, of course, these murderers and terrorists are shining examples of orthodox Christians. Orthodox Christians are terrorists too. Look! Look!
Except it’s a desperate lie.
Any 15-minute investigation into Bissonnette showed, if anything, that he is beholden more to an atheistic humanism with roots in rationalist philosophy than to anything Christian. The label doesn’t stick. At all.
Same for Anderson. A con man with a history of weapons and violence charges, who appears to have lied about his military service, had no church behind his “pastorate,” and who espouses some mangling of the Old Testament in a series of Facebook posts—he’s no more an orthodox Christian than Jim Jones.
Thing is, no one tried to draw an equivalency with Jim Jones back in the ’70s. No one looked at the People’s Temple and said, “I can’t see any difference between them and your typical Methodist or Presbyterian church.” Any reporter who tried would have been run out of town on a rail for being so blind and willfully ignorant.
But today? Well, that willful ignorance falls into the rotten “gift” the Web and social media have given us: That if someone says something loudly and often enough on the Internet, that person can find an audience and replace ultimate truth with alternate facts.
Fake news indeed.
This is a real problem for Christian believers.
For us, I don’t see any recourse but to engage this agenda of delegitimizing the Gospel and Christian theology through wide-brushing Christians as morally and ideologically equivalent to those groups that are committing atrocities around the globe. We must confront this forced equivalency and reveal it as the lie that it is. We must draw distinctions between genuine Christian faith and all the perverted forms that people desperate to undermine Christianity are trying to foist on the ignorant as the norm.
Here is one reality we must keep reinforcing. Unlike some other groups out there, terrorists and ideological deviants do not come out of orthodox (small-“o”) Christian churches. Those radicals that may identify (and be identified by outsiders) as “Christian” almost always come out of “churches” with deviant theology that in no way resembles orthodox Christian theology and practice. The distinctions are clear, and anyone should be able to see them if they spend even a little bit of effort to note the difference.
Except those with the equivalency agenda do not want people to do the checking. They figure if they “equivalent-ize” loudly and long enough, people will believe them. Sadly, that seems to work when left uncountered.
All I can say to fellow believers is that we cannot rest and ignore this. If we see someone on the Internet trying to force a moral and ideological equivalency between faiths or belief groups by appealing to examples of “Christians” who commit atrocities, we must speak truth to it.
Again, the most egregious lie is to look for “radicals” and to place them as coming from orthodox church congregations. However, “Radicalized Christians” always come from a “church” with deviant, unorthodox theology, belief, and practice, and almost always glaringly so.
Remember, that to work, this lie must force equivalencies, so it must also operate in the other direction, by excusing non-Christian groups that produce radicals. Fact is, these radicals ARE coming from orthodox versions of that non-Christian group. This is used against Christians by forcing the equivalency that if orthodox examples of these non-Christian groups are producing radicals and terrorists, then orthodox churches are too.
Except this simply is not the case. Radicals do not radicalize in Christian churches that are not preaching radically deviant beliefs.
We orthodox Christians must speak and stop letting outsiders who claim they understand us propagandize lies about us.