“Oh, you’re just brainwashed by the woke media.”

Critical thinking skills on both sides are at a low.

“Well, we reelected the rapist.”

It was about midnight. I checked the news on Election Day, and found Donald Trump had been reelected president. That was my first reaction, so that was the first thing I posted on Facebook and Mastodon.

I am, as regular readers of my blogs and social media have kinda figured out, a never-Trumper. I have never voted for him, and never will. Even if his allies overthrow the Constitution, make him president-for-life, have him run unopposed, and threaten to shoot anyone who won’t vote. I wouldn’t vote for the Beast either. (No, Trump’s not the Beast. He’s just beastly.)

Unfortunately many of my fellow Christians refuse to understand my never-Trumper thinking, and assume it’s just because I’m liberal. That any abysmal defects of character Trump demonstrates are simply partisan attempts to make him sound as evil as possible; but in real life, he’s the nicest guy. The smartest guy. The greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Why, better than Reagan. Up there with Washington and Lincoln.

Y’know, eight years ago when Trump first ran for office, a lot of these same people acknowledged that Trump was a slimy huckster, but at least he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Since that time he’s somehow gone from “Could be worse” to “Put him on Mt. Rushmore.” How’d that happen?

Duh; brainwashing. Turn on conservative media and that’s all you’ll hear.

Paganism in old pop songs.

Couplea days ago, work radio started playing “Jacob’s Ladder” by Huey Lewis and the News. The DJ really likes that band. Me… meh, they’re okay. Definitely better than Imagine Dragons. For fun, I like to imagine dragons breathing fire all over Imagine Dragons. The only band I wanna hear screaming, “Thunder!” is AC/DC. But I digress.

If you don’t know “Jacob’s Ladder,” it was written by Bruce Hornsby and his brother. At the time, he didn’t care for his version, so he shelved it for a few years, and let Huey Lewis record it; may as well get some residuals. It’s about how he twice encounters certain off-putting Christian evangelists, and rejects their offers of salvation because he’d rather do it himself—“step by step, one by one, higher and higher… we’re climbing Jacob’s ladder.”

As I recall, Jacob’s ladder (or as Led Zeppelin calls it, the stairway to heaven), was a vision Jacob had of a route from heaven to earth, on which angels ascended and descended. [Ge 28.10-17] Not humans. I suppose if God permitted us to climb it, we could; but if we could, it’d only be possible through God’s grace. Our own efforts wouldn’t get us anywhere.

But that’s what Hornsby (and Huey Lewis and the News, I guess) preferred to the gospel: His own efforts. Good karma. F--- grace.

Although a lot of it, I expect, is the messengers. Verse 1 is about a fat man bugging a fan dancer; verse 2 is about a televangelist begging for money, “and I don’t wanna be like you.” I get that. I regularly see lousy examples of evangelism, and churches full of really creepy people instead of healthy Christians. Still, it takes a lot of chutzpah to think you can save yourself.