Insight on the News
Justice by Lynching?
● “The most recent social plague,” is what the Brazilian news magazine “Veja” calls a wave of lynchings in Brazil. Near Rio de Janeiro, a furious mob put to death a farmer and his foreman accused of a crime. Within a few days, several robbers and rapists were massacred by infuriated crowds. Some say that people no longer believe that justice will be served through the legal order, and so take the law into their own hands.
However, when taxi drivers in south Brazil hanged a young man whom they thought had murdered a colleague, they later found to their dismay that he was innocent.
While Christians recognize the human incapacity to end crime, they continue ‘in subjection to the governmental authorities.’ (Rom. 13:1) They do not take justice into their own hands. Rather, they look forward patiently to the time when God’s kingdom will wipe out wickedness and introduce true justice earth wide.—Ps. 37:9, 10; Isa. 32:1.
“Drowning in a Swamp of Pop Porn”
● “Listen to the songs your youngsters hear,” columnist Michele Landsberg, writing in the Toronto “Star,” advises parents. She notes that most popular rock and disco music “relies almost exclusively on themes of drug use and grossly explicit macho sex.” Hence the term “pop porn,” or popular pornographic music. She declared that today’s children were “drowning in a swamp of pop porn.” And another writer called such music “red light rock,” since the words were so vulgar that they could be likened to the language used by prostitutes.
Landsberg also said: “I can tell you that the commonplace vocabulary of teenage music is the four-letter word (all of them) and that the common theme is either sneering abuse of women or the hysterical, grovelling pleas from women begging for sexual attack.”
Aside from the desire of commercial interests to make money, there is a more sinister hand behind this enormous campaign to corrupt the world’s youth. The Bible informs us that the Devil knows “he has a short period of time,” and therefore “walks about like a roaring lion, seeking to devour someone.” (Rev. 12:12; 1 Pet. 5:8) Knowing that this world is in its “last days,” he tries to corrupt as many of mankind as he can, just as he did in the days before the global flood.—Gen. 6:1-12; 2 Tim. 3:1-5.
The Broad Road—to Where?
● Roman Catholic theologian Andrew M. Greeley, discussing the “assertion that Catholicism is a religion of rules and you have to keep all the rules to be a Catholic” answers: “It isn’t so, and it never has been.” He observes: “You can break all kinds of rules and still be a Catholic.”
As an example he says: “One may disapprove of premarital promiscuity, as I do. One may think it is sinful, which it may easily be. But it does not therefore follow that those who approve of such behavior, by their approval, lose their claim to be members of the church, nor do those who actually engage in such behavior get thrown out.” Greeley then stated: “The genius of Catholicism has always been to draw a broad boundary and to include as many people as possible within the sheepfold.”
But is this philosophy Catholic “genius” or Scriptural foolishness? Jesus answers: “Enter by the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many there are who enter that way. How narrow the gate and close the way that leads to life! And few there are who find it.”—Matt. 7:13, 14, “Catholic Confraternity.”
Until such persons change their conduct, God’s view is reflected in the following command: “You should not associate with a brother Christian who is leading an immoral life, or is a usurer, or idolatrous, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or is dishonest; you should not even eat a meal with people like that. . . . You must drive out this evil-doer from among you.”—1 Cor. 5:11, 13, Catholic “Jerusalem Bible.”