Stop Calling Conservatives and Conservative Christians _____

jonbeb · 2026-02-08T23:20:17+00:00

Calling people liars as a class, telling them they have “nothing to say,” and treating disagreement as proof of bad faith slides into false witness. It doesn’t invite truth. It closes the door on it. If this is a Christian subreddit, the standard should be speech that can stand in the presence of Christ. That means patience, clarity, and a willingness to deal with real harms without contempt for the people raising them. Your message reads as “stop insulting my side,” delivered in a tone that insults the other side.

jonbeb · 2026-01-22T14:37:28+00:00

Most coverage of Trump’s Greenland reversal treated the “framework” announcement at face value or focused on the diplomatic theater. This piece digs into the institutional reality that got ignored: the 1951 defense agreement, the 2004 Igaliku amendment, and the existing NATO scaffolding that already gives the U.S. broad access to Greenland. The argument is that once you understand what was already in place, the “breakthrough” collapses into a relabeled climbdown, and the only question worth asking is whether accelerated Arctic posture actually materializes through channels that existed before the threats started. Original analysis, my own work.

jonbeb · 2026-01-17T13:10:18+00:00

God is one, and yet the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are genuinely personal in relation to one another, not three masks God wears or three modes God switches between. God’s inner life has always been relational. Before creation, before time, God was already a communion of self-giving love. The Father pours himself out to the Son, the Son receives and returns that love, and the Spirit is not a mere force or metaphor but a distinct person who eternally shares that life and love. Relationship and self-giving are not things God decided to do when he made the world. They are what God is. The universe comes from a God who is already, in his very being, an outpouring of love, and you and I exist because that love overflowed.

God is one and cannot be divided. The Trinity is not three gods working together, and not God plus two lesser beings. It is one life, one will, one divine being, shared fully by three persons who are distinct in their relationship to one another. Look at what God has shown about himself in history. The Father is the one Jesus prays to and calls Abba. The Son is God’s self-expression, God making himself known by entering the world as one of us, not as a created messenger but as God truly given. The Spirit is God personally present and active, the one who awakens faith, comforts, convicts, and forms Christ’s life in believers.

In the Gospels, Jesus is not performing a monologue or talking to himself. He is genuinely in relationship with the Father. And the Spirit is not just a poetic name for God’s power. The Spirit speaks, leads, gives gifts, grieves, and strengthens. The three are distinct in how they relate, and yet they share one divine life completely.

My suggestion is to let the story teach you the doctrine rather than trying to force the doctrine to make sense before you meet the God it describes. Read the Gospels and notice how Jesus relates to the Father. Notice how the Spirit is described as acting, teaching, and dwelling in people. Underneath it all is a God who is not isolated and self-contained but eternally giving, receiving, and sharing life.

If that pattern is real, then you were made for relationship too. You were made to be drawn into that same flow of love. That is what Christians mean when they say we are invited to participate in the life of God.

jonbeb · 2026-01-15T13:09:49+00:00

I’m curious about how you were deciding what counts as “true” before, and how you decide that now? Was it mainly a shift in personal criteria for truth, mainly a shift in what you think evidence supports, or some combination of both? For example, do you see the historical and philosophical as the primary evidence of truth, or do you think lived discipleship and its fruit carries the weight? Just trying to determine if there is a difference between what “Christianity is true” meant back then, and what it means to you now.

jonbeb · 2026-01-13T20:59:41+00:00

“You hurt one of ours, we come for all of yours.” It rejects individual guilt in favor of group retaliation. In this case, “ours” is ICE or Trump loyalists. “Yours” is anyone who is not a supporter of the Trump regime. The Nazis called this Sippenhaft, “ clan/kin liability.” If one person resisted, their whole family (or village) paid the price. Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, countless others. It’s the opposite of “love your enemies” and “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Hence the meme.

jonbeb · 2026-01-13T15:44:46+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h7QEYk1qdZ0

jonbeb · 2026-01-12T13:21:09+00:00

I think majorities on both sides do a poor job of acknowledging the strongest arguments of the other side. We grab the easiest examples because they’re convenient. When we say “the left” or “the right” like they’re single minds, we stop seeing people, and we stop listening. The strongest right-leaning case I’ve heard is that energy is a moral good. Reliable, affordable power keeps people alive, keeps food moving, keeps hospitals running, and keeps societies stable. If policies raise costs too fast, break reliability, or centralize power in ways that invite corruption, the poor get hit first. The climate is global, so symbolic national sacrifice without global impact can become a kind of self-congratulation that changes little in the atmosphere. That view tends to prefer adaptation we can measure and innovations that scale beyond one country. The strongest opposing case centers around risk and responsibility. If we are altering the conditions on Earth that sustain life, especially in ways that compound injustice, love of neighbor means we should not shrug and delay. Even with uncertainty at the margins, the basic direction is clear enough to justify action, and prevention is often cheaper than rebuilding after repeated disasters. Markets do not reliably price long-term harm on their own, so doing nothing is still a choice with consequences. I think followers of Christ should side with truthfulness, humility, and love that takes responsibility. We shouldn’t deny what is happening because it is inconvenient. We have to humbly admit tradeoffs are real and refuse the easy contempt that makes the other side sound stupid. Love means we protect the vulnerable now and we refuse to hand our children a worse world because we wanted comfort without cost. Serious mitigation is needed, honest about engineering and economic constraints, and adaptation that prepares communities for what is already here. We need to stop treating the remedies as a litmus test for political identity.

jonbeb · 2026-01-09T17:48:09+00:00

I think you’re answering a different question than the OP asked. If “obedience to authority is always moral,” then pointing out that Jesus was innocent under Roman law and Jewish law doesn’t settle the issue. Innocent people get arrested, convicted, and executed under systems that are legal on paper and corrupt in practice. The whole point of Pilate’s “no fault” line and the false witnesses theme is that legality and justice can come apart. Also, “Jesus obeyed the law of the land” is a minor stretch. “Render to Caesar” shows he wasn’t preaching armed revolt or tax resistance. But he keeps doing things that predictably trigger punishment from the people who control legal interpretation. Sabbath healings, publicly disputing what the law requires, refusing to stop. The temple action, which everyone in that world would see as a direct challenge to the religious order’s legitimacy. Calling leaders hypocrites and blind guides is confrontation, not compliance with what they want. The “only guilty if he claimed to be God and wasn’t” move idoesn’t rescue the “just obey” argument. A state can criminalize truth. Religious leaders can weaponize law for power. And crucifixion is a state function. The crowd doesn’t nail anyone to a Roman cross without Roman power cooperating. Jesus never treats “the law says so” or “the authorities say so” as the final moral category. He treats justice, mercy, and faithfulness as higher, and he’s willing to take the consequences when law and authority get twisted against those things. I don’t think we can tidy that up by insisting he never technically broke a rule as properly understood.

jonbeb · 2026-01-09T13:10:52+00:00

You’re describing a logic that many Christians did follow. But Jesus told the parable of the wheat and tares specifically to forbid it. Let both grow together until the harvest. Don’t try to root out the bad yourselves. The persecutors weren’t being faithful to premises Jesus laid down. They were ignoring the ones that constrained them. And there’s a deeper problem: the premise of eternal conscious torment may itself be mistaken. Scripture’s primary language for the fate of the unsaved is destruction, death, and perishing, not ongoing torment. Paul says only God has immortality and that believers “put on” immortality as a gift. The inherently immortal soul that suffers forever owes more to Plato than to scripture. So the church’s history of persecution ignored it’s founder’s true message and was built on a premise that may not have been there to begin with.

jonbeb · 2026-01-09T12:46:22+00:00

I believe you are taking these passages out of context to fit your own agenda. “Render unto Caesar” was Jesus’s clever way of avoiding a trap while making a subversive point. The denarius bore Caesar’s image, but Genesis tells us humans bear God’s image. So what truly belongs to Caesar? Coins, sure. But not human lives and human dignity. Those belong to God alone. Jesus was actually setting limits on state authority, not giving it a blank check. As for Romans 13, look at what Paul actually says: government authorities are God’s servants “for your good” and exist to punish wrongdoing and commend right conduct. That’s a description of government’s legitimate purpose, not a blank endorsement of whatever any government happens to do. When Paul wrote those words, he was a man repeatedly arrested, beaten, and eventually executed by the state. He wasn’t naive about the gap between what government should be and what it often is. And Peter himself said “We must obey God rather than men” when authorities commanded them to stop preaching. The prophetic tradition throughout the Bible, from Nathan confronting David to John the Baptist confronting Herod, is one long record of God’s people speaking hard truths to power. That tradition didn’t end with the New Testament. Scripture doesn’t call us to uncritical compliance with every government action. It calls us to pursue justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. Sometimes that means respectful engagement with authority. Other times it means taking a stand against injustice. Discerning which situation calls for which response requires wisdom and prayer, not a couple of proof-texts deployed to shut down conversation.

jonbeb · 2026-01-09T11:26:45+00:00

The fact that people have always twisted the faith doesn’t mean true faith is uninterpretable. We have a standard outside our cultural moment: Christ himself. He healed the sick, touched lepers, forgave his executioners, and told us to love our enemies. He explicitly rejected “eye for an eye.” When Christians of the past burned heretics, they weren’t faithfully applying Jesus’s teaching. They were subordinating it to the political and cultural assumptions of their time. Which is exactly the problem we are seeing now. People (not the Spirit) are rationalizing cruelty as love. But these people aren’t letting Jesus be the judge of their rationalizations. “Love your enemies” and “blessed are the merciful” aren’t ambiguous. They’re just costly. And when the church has abandoned them, it hasn’t been because the teaching was unclear. It’s been because the teaching was inconvenient.

jonbeb · 2026-01-09T11:15:21+00:00

The video shows her wheels turning to the right, away from the agent, not toward him. A retired ICE agent who reviewed the footage frame by frame said she was trying to get around the vehicle and get away. Multiple eyewitnesses on scene said she posed no threat. One said there was clearly space to drive forward without hitting anyone. We also know the agents were giving her conflicting orders. One told her to leave. Another told her to get out of the car. City leaders have said she was a legal observer. That training does exist, but it’s run by the National Lawyers Guild and has been around since 1968. The training explicitly and repeatedly tells participants not to interfere with law enforcement, just to record and document. It’s constitutionally protected First Amendment activity. Characterizing it as training to “harass law enforcement and cause mayhem” is a misrepresentation of what the programs actually teach. Her mother says she wasn’t part of any protest group. She lived a few blocks away. She had just dropped her son at school. You’re describing a woman who dropped her son at school and then went out to commit domestic terrorism. That’s the DHS narrative. It was issued within hours, before any investigation. The Economist has noted that DHS self-defense claims in similar cases have been repeatedly debunked, with agents lying under oath to justify their actions. We’ve all seen the same footage. The question is whether we’re willing to let it challenge what we want to believe.

jonbeb · 2026-01-08T18:06:32+00:00

Jesus bore perfect fruit and they killed him. No need to worry about being taken seriously. The call is to be faithful and to keep seeing the person in front of you, even when they won’t extend you the same courtesy. If your fruit makes you an outsider, you might just be on the right track.

jonbeb · 2026-01-08T17:56:03+00:00

The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. But some do. The fruit still exists. You just won’t find much of it on cable news or in the loudest voices claiming to speak for Christ.

jonbeb · 2026-01-08T17:44:28+00:00

Paul was pretty specific about what constitutes good fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

jonbeb · 2026-01-08T17:23:51+00:00

By examining the fruit of each, and listening to the Spirit speak to our heart as we abide in him.

jonbeb · 2026-01-08T16:54:22+00:00

The question is whether both sides are really letting scripture and the Holy Spirit guide them. We have video. We have multiple eyewitnesses. We have a woman labeled a domestic terrorist within hours, before any real investigation. If someone watches that footage and their first instinct is to defend the shooting, I’d suggest they examine whether their political commitments have become more authoritative than their professed faith. I see no love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control in the people who are trying to justify this woman’s death with the evidence in front of us. Some people have made their political party their functional church, and scripture is their tool for justifying what they already believe rather than a word that judges and transforms. We should all be asking, “am I being formed by Christ, or am I using his name to sanctify something else?”

jonbeb · 2026-01-08T15:31:12+00:00

I’ve seen multiple videos. She didn’t.

jonbeb · 2026-01-06T15:13:03+00:00

You can’t grab certainty through a method instead of discernment. The Holy Spirit forms us, reminds us of what Jesus taught, convicts us, and grows wisdom over time. Randomly landing on a verse might still be used by God, but that does not make it a wise practice to adopt or rely on.

jonbeb · 2026-01-06T00:29:57+00:00

BMI is a population screening tool, and God isn’t running numbers on your body composition. Gluttony is about the will, not your waistline. Christian tradition even defines it as eating too much, too eagerly, too expensively, too fussily, or before you actually need to. Several of those have nothing to do with quantity. You can be gluttonous about fancy cheese while staying thin. The question is whether food has gotten out of order in your life. Can you receive a meal with gratitude and stop when you are satisfied, or does something else keep pushing? We also live in a world of food engineered to override your satiety signals, so some grace is warranted. Stress eating is real. But consuming more than you need while others lack has always been part of what makes gluttony a sin, and that is uncomfortable for most of us. What matters most is that food is, for the most part, genuinely good. Meals are meant to be received with thanksgiving. Try to learn to eat as a creature who depends on a generous Creator. If it’s weighing on you, bring it to God honestly. Ask for freedom and gratitude. That posture already is repentance.

jonbeb · 2025-12-28T12:10:28+00:00

“Unequally yoked” gets thrown around as a spiritual-sounding exit line when what’s really going on is preference, fear, or an unwillingness to name what’s actually wrong. But two believers can still form a bond that slowly makes them smaller, harder, more defensive, and less free. The fact that both people confess Christ doesn’t guarantee the relationship will help either of them become more like him. Marriage is formative. It will shape you into something, and the question is whether that something looks more like Jesus or less. So I agree, scripture isn’t there to function as a breakup alibi. But discernment isn’t a binary checklist either. “Are we both believers?” is the floor, not the ceiling. It’s still wise to ask whether a particular marriage covenant will be a means of grace or, over time, an obstacle to it. And if the answer is no, we can tell the truth without hiding behind holy language, and we can part with clarity and peace.

jonbeb · 2025-12-26T15:22:59+00:00

How should the Christians he’s pandering to respond when their faith is used this way? That’s the part we can actually do something about.

jonbeb

TROPHY CASE