Are you a tolerant person? By that I mean, would you be willing to accept a persons friendship, even if you do not agree with their lifestyle choice? Can you be different from somebody, and still be their friend? Can you disagree with their belief, without being in a confrontation with that person or group of people?
If the answer to these questions is YES, then you are a tolerant person. If you are a tolerant person, then you and I can relate.
If you can love somebody without the condition that they agree with your lifestyle choice, then you are living by a fundamental Christian value.
When I announce that I am a Christian, I am often asked something like “how do you feel about the LBGTQ community”? To which I reply “I feel the same way about them as Jesus does………. I love em”!
People act surprised that I don’t have hate in my heart. It seems like our society fails to see the difference between feelings for a person, and feelings for a behavior. Yes, a Christian believes certain sexual practices are harmful. Does that mean we cant be friends with people who believe differently? Of course not!
In today’s vocabulary, the conversation of tolerance seems to come up most when dealing with the LBTGQ community. There seems to be a poor understanding of how Christians feel about members of this community, and Christians are labeled as bigots because we hold conservative sexual views based on scripture.
The conversation often implies that Christians are not tolerant of anybody who sins in any way. I believe that Christians should be tolerant of all people, while refraining from engaging in behavior that the Bible calls sin. I do not believe that we are representing Jesus well if we treat anybody poorly, therefore, while we may be different, we can still be friends.
The funny irony is, Christians are now targets for stereotypes and intolerance. Those who claim advocacy of tolerance often are the first to spew hate speech at Christians, even though our position is one of universal love, regardless of if we are different.
For example, I recently promoted a free community dinner. I emailed 30,000 members of my city indiscriminately. In my email, I said nothing about our faith values or position, and the event had no intentions for proselytizing. It is just a friendly community event, for the sake of getting different people in the city together.
This simple invitation got A TON OF HATE MAIL in response. A harmless invitation to a dinner was met with so much hate speech that you would think I must have taken some controversial position. But in reality, it was nothing more then an offer to feed people for free, with no strings attached.
How often have we seen Hollywood celebrities praised as courageous for “coming out” and admitting they’re gay? Isn’t it far more courageous for people to profess their Christian faith in today’s culture?
Hollywood is not a tolerant city. Dominated by activist leftists, it is a culture hostile to dissenting views. We see it in its work product. Most movies and television shows are laced with political messages and politically correct symbolism. The heroes almost always are liberal and promote “progressive” values and causes, and conservatives are depicted as morally degenerate hayseeds or villains. Christians are especially singled out as backward, close-minded crackpots. Of course this is not universally true, but it is becoming the common practice.
It’s doubtful that there’s much of a stigma attached to people who come out as being gay in the Hollywood culture, given the extent to which it showcases and celebrates the gay lifestyle. It seems you can’t watch any TV show these days without an actual or suggested gay sex scene — as if the show’s writers and producers are on a mission to portray homosexuality as more prominent than heterosexuality.
It is easy to notice they are proselytizing and sermonizing the way they do on so many other social and political issues, from the glories of abortion rights to the evils of all things Trump to the intolerance and hatefulness of Christianity. However if a Christian was to promote Biblical values, the content would unlikely make the mainstream, and if it did, it would be condemned by public opinion, based on no factual principal.
This is why it is refreshing when an actor in this environment, such as Chris Pratt, publicly identifies himself as a Christian — the modern equivalent of branding oneself with Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. It is almost guaranteed to bring one into disrepute and ridicule, not to mention that it opens the door to being blacklisted by today’s leftist McCarthyites.
Last year, Pratt committed secular heresy with his remarks when receiving the Generation Award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards. “God is real. God loves you. God wants the best for you. Believe that. I do.” Once he opened up about his faith, the left began to sling its arrows. On Christmas Day, TV Guide published an article on the popular actor, titled “How to Love Chris Pratt Without Hating Yourself.”
After listing some of Pratt’s many professional accomplishments and acknowledging his meteoric ascent, the author lamented, “And yet: despite all this, Pratt remains the most complicated and divisive of the many famous young actors named Chris. When you take a deeper look at Pratt the man and not necessarily Pratt the actor, some of the shine wears off. Although he can be as funny off-screen as he is on … it’s impossible to ignore some problematic aspects of his life off-screen.” Though the writer didn’t directly attack Pratt’s Christianity, she ticked off a series of silly non-sins for which he should be shamed, such as his hunting habits, an allegedly insensitive Instagram post about raising lambs to eat them, giving away the family’s cat before having children, and another Instagram post that supposedly offended the hearing-impaired community because he told his followers to “turn up the volume” and not just “read the subtitles.”
Many readers viewed this as an obvious anti-Christian hit piece, and it probably was. But one thing it was for sure — a display of liberal intolerance and sanctimonious political correctness. Apart from the sniping criticisms of Pratt, the suggestion that you can’t love Pratt without hating yourself is far more revealing about the writer and the leftist mindset than it is about Pratt.
Actress Ellen Page, an outspoken Christian critic, laid into Pratt on Twitter for saying that he’d taken part in a fast with his church and discussing his spiritual side during his appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Page tweeted, “Oh. K. Um. But his church is infamously anti lgbtq so maybe address that too?”
Pratt quickly responded on Instagram, “It has recently been suggested that I belong to a church which ‘hates a certain group of people’ and is ‘infamously anti-LGBTQ’. Nothing could be further from the truth.” He said his church opens its “doors to absolutely everyone.”
Twitter trolls also attacked Pratt for praying (and asking his followers to pray) for comedian Kevin Smith after he had a massive heart attack. One attacker tweeted, “Doctors and nurses save lives not prayer.” Another said, “Great now I won’t enjoy your films as much knowing you’re a Jesus nut.” These are the “loving” types who savage Christianity for not being loving.
The Washington Post’s Drew Goins vilified Pratt in an op-ed for attending his church. Goins didn’t seriously dispute Pratt’s assertion that his church welcomes all people but faulted him and the church because they don’t affirmatively reject traditional Christian orthodoxy by declaring that homosexual behavior is not sinful.
Under cover of false tolerance, leftist activists will eventually ensure that certain biblical passages are deemed hate speech and that affirming one’s belief in the inspiration of Scripture is an admission of hatefulness.
Attacks on Christianity and Christians have grown exponentially. It is laughable to deny that it is going on, and it is sad that more people don’t stand up against it.
Kudos to actors such as Chris Pratt, who are courageous enough and true enough to their faith to refuse to deny Christ, choosing instead to openly profess their belief in him despite the professional risk to their careers.
some content was sourced – httpss://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2019/02/22/kudos-to-chris-pratt-n2542029
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