(A Brief Review of Rough Road to Freedom: A Memoir by Neil T. Anderson; Monarch Book, 2012, $14.99)

Yiddish is a language developed by the Jews in Europe. Yiddish has some interesting sounding words. One of those Yiddish words is the word schmutz. The word schmutz has a range of meanings and can be described as soiled, icky, a mess as in “I have schmutz all over my face”. It is also used of something of inferior quality. If one is having lots of serious problems they might say they have fallen into the schmutz.

Author Neil Anderson is known as The Bondage Breaker from the title of one of his books (see our article “Cure All Bondages” beginning on page 4) . He recently published his biography entitled, Rough Road to Freedom. His forte is deliverance from demons but in a gentle low keyed style euphemistically called by Anderson, “freedom encounters.” There is not a lot of freedom felt when a Christian is told they have a demon inside of them. It is a case of saddling you with a problem that you did not know you had simply because Anderson says so. He eschews being thought of as an exorcist and is against the rambunctious, hollering commanding type of exorcist. Though there is a stylistic difference it is the same game with a different name.

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I’m of two minds about the elf on the shelf. My first mind says “There is something wrong with manipulating children into being good for roughly 25 days by giving them an imaginary elf who tattle-tales on them to another imaginary elf and the amount of “gifts” they receive is contingent on an arbitrary evaluation of their behavior.” (That particular mind is long-winded.)

My other mind says, “Lighten up. Its a cute holiday tradition. Don’t over analyze it. Just have fun watching your kids. Besides Curmudgeonly McCurmudgeonson over there (points to first mind) will just get you in hot water with a lot of stay-at-home moms who need all the help they can get keeping their children from bringing the house down around their ears. An imaginary elf who makes the kiddies act just a bit nicer during the silly season is not a bad thing.”

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I have to admit, this started out to be a very different blog than it ended up. Like many, I was discouraged at the results of the election. Yes, I know that God is in control and uses even government for His purposes but sometimes those purposes are to punish His people or the nations in which His people dwell and they suffer as well. To be perfectly honest I am not a big fan of suffering.

I know that politics is messy business and corruption abounds in the hallowed halls of Congress and the White House. Special interest groups are working hard to persuade the Federal Government to use the club of legislation to beat down the opposition. But that is how government works in a Democratic Republic. We vote for candidates that most closely align with our worldview and values and trust they will at the very least protect us from those who have a different view.

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Everyone on Facebook  seems to be doing this 30 days of thanks where, instead of regaling everyone with cat videos, game invites, or political memes, people provide at least 30 posts engaging in pure thanksgiving. Whoever started this deserves to hold up their Noble Peace Prize right next to the President {insert snark here}. Imagine thousands of people engaging in one of the most human things we were designed to do. I know, I know you can point out the irony that a lot of those people have no more clue about the person they are beholden to than if a Nigerian prince really did need to transfer money to my account and I wanted to thank him. But honestly any exercise of thanks has got to be better than yet another spurious quote from Abraham Lincoln or C.S. Lewis.

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Book Review: Buyer Beware Finding the Truth in the Marketplace of Ideas, Janet Parshall, Moody Press, 2012, 199 pages, $14.99

If you are looking for an informative and stimulating Christian book this one is instructive, thought provoking and practical. Janet Parshall is a columnist, author and radio host. In Buyer Beware she begins by taking us back to the 1600’s and John Bunyan’s classic work, Pilgrim’s Progress. She borrows Bunyan’s Vanity Fair imagery to launch into discussions about our present public square; “Vanity Fair” was and still is a rough place. Surely Christian and Faithful would have preferred the gentle countryside that lay not far beyond the fair. After all, who really wants to go into all that messy stuff – the shouting, the stealing, the lying, the sexual promiscuity, the turning of Truth on its head?

So let’s go visit Vanity Fair together. We’ll visit the booths and see for ourselves what is being bought and sold. Come and study the counterfeit goods being offered in the public square today so that you can better know how to offer the countervailing gift of truth. (Pages, 19 and 21).

Parshall transitions to the Old Testament Jeremiah

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Most often when we think of the consequences of false teaching, we think in terms of eternity. Where will those we care about be after they pass from this world to the next? That is a very big consideration but there are consequences to false teaching and false beliefs in this life which go on largely unnoticed by most in the church or even in culture. Big groups like Jim Jones’ “Peoples Temple” or the deaths of the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX or Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate make a big splash in the news but most are not personally affected and assume something was wrong with those followers. It is easy to take a passing interest and keep moving without much of a thought.

Often harm comes more one at a time with little fanfare. Jehovah’s Witnesses are proud of how many of their children have died due to a lack of a needed blood transfusion which they teach God opposes. These children died one at a time, here and there, with little or no public notice. Any family members who tried to oppose this to save the child are cut off.

Another group, Christian Science

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…the Art of Name-Calling

In the 1930s, Roman Catholic priest and radio commentator Fr. Charles Coughlin discovered a very effective way of discrediting people he considered political threats. He would appeal to the anti-Semitism and isolationism shared by much of his audience by denouncing various individuals as “atheistic Jews” or “imported radicals.” It mattered little to Coughlin that the sources of his “information” were often untrustworthy. He knew that once he used the power of the broadcast medium to slap labels on people, those people would find them very difficult to remove from their reputations.

In the 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph P. McCarthy used the new medium of television to boost his political career by taking advantage of Americans’ fear of Communism. No evidence was too slight, no testimony too tainted, no logic too specious for him to use it to label various individuals as “Communists” or “subversives.” Reputations were destroyed. Careers were ruined. For decades after McCarthy himself was discredited and died his victims struggled to rebuild their shattered lives. McCarthyism has come to be synonymous with intimidation through labeling and blacklisting, and has often been mistakenly portrayed as a “right-wing” tactic. The fact is, however, that McCarthyism is equally useful to demagogues of all political persuasions. In fact, it has become a favorite tool of the left for stifling opposition to their agenda today.

Conservatives are often labeled “Uncle Tom’s,” if they are black, or racists if they are white, for daring to voice opposition to any aspect of the left’s “civil rights” agenda. People who oppose gay “marriage” are labeled “homophobic.” Men and women who oppose abortion on moral grounds are dangerous “extremists,” and so it goes. Thus, opposers are allegedly motivated by “hate” or “fear” rather than rational disagreement. Name-calling, then, becomes a very effective substitute for rationally defending one’s case—legitimate viewpoints are summarily de-legitimized and thinking is short-circuited by knee-jerk reaction to an emotional appeal. Whenever you hear someone slap a label on someone else without providing careful definitions and clear evidence, you are more than justified if you suspect that you may be listening to a propagandist, rather than someone who truly desires to inform the public.

The above quote comes from

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