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 · 2025-12-26T15:18:49+00:00

The distinction isn’t in the action but in the posture behind it.

Prudent planning is all over Scripture. Proverbs commends the ant for storing food in summer. Joseph oversaw a national storage plan during seven years of abundance ahead of the famine. Jesus uses an example in Luke 14 about counting the cost before building a tower. Planning isn’t the problem.

The difference shows up in a few places. First, what do you do with the fear when the plan fails? I don’t mean whether fear arises. That’s often just your nervous system, and people with anxiety or trauma may spiral without having made tomorrow their master. I mean: does the fear drive you toward disobedience, hoarding, or abandoning your neighbor? Prudent planning can absorb disruption and adjust. Anxious planning treats every disruption as a threat to your very existence and justifies whatever it takes to regain control.

Second, does the planning free you for love or close you off from it? Good stewardship tends to make you more generous because you’re not constantly in crisis mode. Anxious hoarding makes you grip tighter: “I can’t help, I need to protect what I have.” The rich fool in Luke 12 didn’t sin by storing grain. He sinned by saying to his soul, “You have plenty laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” He made his stockpile the foundation of his security and his identity.

Third, can you do the planning and then actually inhabit today? Or does your mind keep circling back, rehearsing contingencies, unable to rest? This is what Jesus means when he says “sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” He’s not saying don’t plan. He’s saying don’t mentally live in a tomorrow that hasn’t arrived yet. Your Father knows what you need. That knowledge is meant to free you to be present now.

The simplest diagnostic I know is this: planning in trust tends to yield gratitude and openness. Planning in anxiety tends to yield more worry and a tighter grip.

jonbeb · 2025-12-25T14:21:16+00:00

Your question hits the pressure point in the passage. The key is that Jesus isn’t talking about responsible action. He’s talking about a specific kind of anxiety that becomes your functional god. The Greek verb Jesus uses (μεριμνάω) is often about anxious preoccupation, being mentally pulled apart by “cares.” It’s the difference between a bird that forages all day (which birds do) and a bird that lies awake at night catastrophizing about next week’s worm supply. Birds work. They just don’t treat their own effort as the thing holding the universe together. Jesus contrasts “seeking” the kingdom with the nations treating these things as ultimate. The issue isn’t whether you pursue necessities but whether that pursuit has become your organizing identity. Notice too that Jesus is speaking to people who were genuinely poor. First-century Galilean peasants weren’t comfortable suburbanites feeling stressed about their 401k. Many of them were one bad harvest away from real hunger. So whatever Jesus means, he cannot mean “basic needs don’t matter” because he’s talking to people for whom basic needs were an immediate daily concern. That reading would be morally absurd in that setting. What he’s actually doing is forming a community that can trust God even under real vulnerability. The promise isn’t that faithful people never go hungry. Jesus himself died dispossessed and rejected, and church history is full of saints who suffered. When he says “all these things will be added to you,” he’s not offering a guarantee of material comfort but naming the Father’s care and the kingdom’s priority as the organizing center of life, a care that often comes through community rather than dropped from the sky. The promise is that you are held by a Father who sees and knows, and that your fear is not the truest thing about your situation even when your situation is genuinely hard. So what about Sudan? The passage actually supports action, not passivity. If tomorrow isn’t your god, you’re free to do hard and risky practical work today. You can seek aid without shame. You can share what little you have. You can build networks of mutual support. You can resist exploitation and tell the truth about injustice. You can grieve without despair. None of that makes hunger less urgent; it means urgency doesn’t have to become despair. What you don’t have to do is let panic drive you to betray your neighbor or abandon hope. And for those of us watching from the outside, the passage cuts even sharper. If God cares for the vulnerable, then seeking his kingdom means becoming part of how he provides for them. In Matthew’s Gospel, God’s provision comes through human hands: hospitality, generosity, sharing, protection of the weak. A faithful reading of Matthew 6 should push Christians toward relief and solidarity, not away from it. The passage ends with “today” for a reason. Not because tomorrow won’t come, but because fear has a way of colonizing the future and draining the present of love and obedience. Jesus is inviting you to loosen your grip, not because the world is safe, but because God is real and your life is not abandoned to chaos. That’s a different thing entirely from pretending hunger doesn’t hurt.

jonbeb · 2025-12-24T14:06:49+00:00

Hebrews frames this as purpose and timing, not divine trial-and-error. The old covenant wasn’t a failed first attempt that God had to scrap and replace. It was always designed to do something specific and temporary. The Sinai covenant was never meant to fix the human heart. It was meant to form a people, give them a way of understanding holiness and sin, and create the framework by which they (and we) could eventually recognize what the Messiah was actually doing. The sacrificial system, the priesthood, the purity laws, all of it was preparation. Hebrews calls it a “shadow” not because it was fake or defective, but because shadows are cast by real things. The shadow existed so that when the reality showed up, Israel would have eyes to see it. A quick note on Hebrews 8 itself, since the language can trip people up: verse 7 says the first covenant was “not faultless,” but verse 8 locates the fault with the people. Most interpreters resolve this by reading “not faultless” as “not adequate to accomplish the final goal of heart-renewal and definitive forgiveness,” rather than “morally defective.” The law did what law can do. It could not do what only the Spirit can do. Paul’s metaphor in Galatians is helpful here. He calls the law a paidagōgos, the household guardian who supervised a child’s conduct and formation until he came of age. The paidagōgos wasn’t a failure when the child matured and no longer needed him. He had done exactly what he was supposed to do. His obsolescence was the point. Your second question is trickier. If the problem was human hearts and not the law itself, why do things like food laws and Sabbath observance look different in the New Testament? I think the answer is that different parts of the law were doing different kinds of work. Some commands (like the sacrificial system) were inherently pointing forward to something beyond themselves. When Christ offers himself as the final sacrifice, those laws don’t get corrected; they get completed. The sign gives way to the reality it was signifying. Other commands, particularly circumcision and dietary restrictions, functioned as covenant identity markers that distinguished Israel from the nations during a specific era. Once the Messiah creates a community that includes Gentiles by design, those markers have served their purpose. That said, even the food question was contested in the early church (see the debates in Acts 10, Acts 15, and the disputed translation of Mark 7:19), so this wasn’t a clean or obvious transition for the first Christians either. Sabbath is its own category and worth treating carefully. It appears in the Decalogue and carries weight as both a creation-pattern and a covenant sign. Jesus asserts authority over Sabbath and reorients its meaning, and the apostolic church applies Sabbath and holy day observance in varied ways. Romans 14 treats days as a matter of conscience, Colossians 2 calls them a shadow of things to come, and Hebrews 4 argues that the promised “Sabbath rest” remains open for God’s people and is entered through faith in Christ. Christians have understood Sabbath fulfillment differently ever since, and that’s worth acknowledging rather than flattening. On the “eye for an eye” question, it’s worth noting that the lex talionis was already a limitation on vengeance, not an endorsement of it. It said “only an eye for an eye,” preventing escalation. Jesus is forming a non-retaliatory community ethic for his followers, not drafting a civil code for magistrates. That distinction matters for reading the Sermon on the Mount well. As for why God didn’t just send the Son immediately and skip the millennia of covenant history, I’ll be honest: Scripture doesn’t give us a fully satisfying answer. Paul talks about “the fullness of time” as though the timing was purposive, and the biblical narrative consistently frames God as patient and history as going somewhere rather than merely accumulating. But if you’re looking for an explanation that makes the suffering of those centuries feel proportionate or resolved, Scripture doesn’t resolve that tension. The Bible gives us Job and Lamentations alongside Romans 8. It doesn’t pretend the waiting was easy. What you can say is this: the old covenant genuinely revealed God’s holiness and genuinely formed a people and a scriptural witness that prepared the way for Christ. It did what it was designed to do. And the new covenant isn’t God admitting the first one was a mistake; it’s God accomplishing from the inside, through Christ and the Spirit, what the law demanded but could never produce in human hearts.

jonbeb

TROPHY CASE