Empyreal

Tucker Carlson & GOD:🧵 Tucker says he’s a Christian. But in his attack on Esther he sounds like Richard Dawkins. Let’s unpack this bit of devious blasphemy. Carlson: “[Esther] is the story, among other things, of the genocide of Persians, oh, yeah, 75k Persians. Not just people who committed crimes, but people who were Persian and that’s why they were killed.” He continues: “Esther, maybe not coincidentally, just happens to be the only book in the Christian OT that doesn’t mention God.” Do you see what he is doing here? 1. He deviously leaves out the reason these people were killed: they were plotting to genocide the Jews. Upon discovering this, King Xerxes, a Persian, permits the Jews to defend themselves. (Esther 8:11) 2. The 75k weren’t Persians. They were descendants of the Amalekites, a people who had slaughtered the Jews before. (Deut. 25:17-19) 3. Carlson, however, wants you to think they are Persians — he might as well have called them Iranians — because he’s strongly implying they Jews have a history of genociding “Persians”: they did it in Esther and they’re doing it again now with Trump’s help! 4. Esther isn’t the only OT book that doesn’t explicitly mention God. The Song of Solomon doesn’t in most translations. But it’s beside the point. While none of the names by which God is known are used in Esther, His guiding hand is strongly implied, hence the reason it was deemed consistent with the body of biblical teaching and canonical. But why attack the Book of Esther at all? This is where Carlson tips his wicked hand: he wants to blame the Jews, but he knows that if he’s seen to be openly attacking historic Christian teaching and God himself that he’ll lose the remaining Christians in his audience. So, he separates Esther from the rest of Scripture, reassuring you that it *really* doesn’t belong there anyway, and then relates a heavily redacted version of the events contained in it. He proceeds to condemn Franklin Graham for quoting Esther in support of war on Iran, an Islamic terrorist state, while he dismisses the book to buttress his jihadist agenda. And this is no ad hominem on my part. In the eternal struggle between Israel and Islamic states, this iteration of Tucker Carlson will always come down on the side of Islam. Every. Single. Time. Indeed, it isn’t even just against Jews that he does this. He’s now insisting Sharia is superior to anything the West has to offer. To put it bluntly, Carlson is now an unrepentant Muslim apologist. But what about biblical violence? Even without Esther, much remains: the Flood, the killing of the Egyptian firstborn & the Midianite women, the stoning of Achan and his family, an Angel of the Lord striking down 185k Assyrians, Ananias & Sapphira, etc. In my many public and private debates with atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Peter Singer, and Michael Shermer, they all saw this topic as the headshot on Christianity. I disagree. While such stories rightly make people uncomfortable — they’re meant to — they’re a hard reality check on quaint notions that the biblical God is a cosmic Santa Claus rather than a righteous judge who calls men to account for their deeds. His wrath is real, just, and inescapable. And if you believe, as every Christian is obligated to believe, that the Bible is God’s Word, then you know he wanted these stories included. He didn’t do these things as off-the-books black ops. He did them openly and recorded them as a warning. God wants you to know he’s not a god with whom one trifles. What does Tucker do with these stories? Is God a genocidal maniac? Dawkins says exactly that in the opening line of his book “The God Delusion.” Carlson practically quotes him.

“What’s happening in Iran is the end of the American empire as we know it.” -Tucker Carlson

TRUMP TELLS THE INDEPENDENT THAT HE ISN’T YET READY TO SAY WHAT THE U.S. WILL DO IF THE MISSING CREW MEMBER IS HARMED

Iranian police fire at US black hawk helicopter flying over Iranian territory.