thoughts

I am sure it began long ago, but yet it seems that even during my short life it has increased.  Things that were once taboo in the world when I was a child are now accepted and embraced on the cover of gossip magazines and other popular media.  California passes gay marriage.  Prayer is taken out of the public schools because we have to separate church and state.  Creationism is not taught.  Evolution is the mainstream.
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I realized today with the help of another post that Christians are being persecuted here in America.  I know that they are in other countries and that we are still very lucky to be in the US, but it's starting to bother me about pop culture's view of Christians like me.

With Palin now running as VP it's becoming more evident about the media's belittlement of her religion and beliefs.  Saturday Night Live poked fun at her with mentioning Palin believed that dinosaurs and men walked on the earth at the same time (literal creationism).  On my Facebook under iLike (music) there are blog posts by the musician Moby.  I've never been a fan (and never will be) of his music (he's not very original), but his posts lately have been anti-Palin in nature.  Someone else sent me a link to a video of Sandra Bernhard basically downing Christianity.  Can you imagine if it had been a Christian downing a Muslim?  Within Evangelical Christians there are subsets of beliefs, etc... and apparently the charismatic Christian is even more persecuted, made fun of, and belittled.  Hubby and I were watching TV the other night and the spiritual aspect (the charismatic movement) of Palin's faith was brought up in a negative light.  Her speech made in her church was analyzed and found to be wrong because she asked the church to pray for the soldiers in the war and her statement about "God's Will."

Now Palin's personal yahoo email account was hacked by the son of a democratic Tennessee state representative, Dave Kernell son of Mike Kernell.  Instead of the media reporting this, not much has been said.  Can you imagine the fury of a republican state representative's son doing the same to Biden's email?  Instead the fury is that Palin used yahoo for personal email and conducted some business on yahoo - a nonsecure site.  The focus is what Palin did wrong rather than hacking.  What?  If it had been an FBI site, imagine the fury!  It's just this young guy.

Kernell claims in the message that the motivation for the attack was to see if rumours that Palin had used her personal email account for business, which is not allowed under US law, were true. He claims that after reading every email in the account that this was not the case.

Kernell used a proxy to protect his identity when accessing the account, but the FBI began an investigation to find the perpetrator and had requested the proxy service to hand over its logs.

Oh, OK. He wanted to see if Palin had used her personal email for business? He wanted to see if she was breaking the law by breaking the law himself. I hope he gets punished, but I bet nothing more will be said.

I know I'm in the Bible Belt, but I've always felt a part of the mainstream.  I don't feel that way anymore.  I feel more vulnerable than ever, and I need to delve further into apologetics and standing up for what I believe... no matter how unpopular.