Thursday, March 10, 2016

Ham sandwich Christians

One of my favorite sayings is, "A good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich." This means many things-that we have much too many laws, that prosecutors aren't always as noble as you think, and that a good prosecutor can make anyone sound guilty of anything.

We've all met preachy, holier than thou Christians who believe everything is sinful while they casually ignore their own failings and flaws-those people are obnoxious, but easily cast aside and marginalized. Worse than them in some way are the Christians who, while admitting their own faults and sinful behavior-view everything as "evil" or "sinful" in some way.

Look, there are bad things in the world that should be avoided. But someone who is really good at complaining, really good at preaching, can make anything sound sinful. The extreme left does this by reading into things that just aren't there-for example when they say that enjoying the sport of football is promoting violence. The extreme right does this when they say that enjoying football is immoral because the games take place on Sunday. Disney gets this treatment too. The left doesn't like Disney because it promotes "capitalism" and feeds into false gender myths about women and their "Prince Charming". The right doesn't like it because Disney has a "gay day" designed so that homosexual families can go to the parks. Either way, Disney can't win. Neither can football.

A short list of things that were called "sinful" or "evil" while growing up were: the card game Magic, Dungeons and Dragons, the rock band Kiss, rock music in general, outside weddings, Rolling Stone magazine,  the WWE, most video games, comic books, and I'm not kidding about this-Saved by the Bell once because it said the word "Studmuffin".

It's pathetic, really. None of the things mentioned are inherently evil or sinful, and most are actually quite innocent.  When teachers or parents started lecturing us about them-and they did-it showed me that people really do fear the unknown.

As an adult, it shows me that people with too much time on their hands really can indict things that are totally harmless.

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