In a booklet I wrote recently on the politicized culture, I quoted from some relevant comments by Ben Shapiro. He reminds us that when we politicize a sacred space in our culture it is a serious problem. He believes it is serious “because no culture can exist without certain cultural capital—trust—and that trust exists only when there are certain spaces in which we can assume agreement without having to ask.”

When there is shared agreement, there is communication and less friction. If every issue becomes contentious, then the chances for miscommunication increase. Also the cost of transactions increases dramatically.

One of the cultural taboos (until recently) has been the politicization of Gold Star families. Their loved ones have paid the ultimate sacrifice, and they certainly deserve to be left alone to grieve and rebuild their lives. They should not be at the center of politicized statements.

President George W. Bush provides a good example of how to respond. You might remember that he was the target of a Gold Star mother by the name of Cindy Sheehan. Instead of opposing her or reacting to her, he allowed her to make harsh political statements and did not respond.

It is worth remembering she alleged that Bush went to war for oil. She even said that Bush sent her son to die to make his oil friends rich. She even camped out near his home in Crawford, Texas to protest him. He showed character and restraint.

Perhaps there is a lesson for us to learn. In this politicized environment, we need to be peacemakers as people of integrity and civility. We should practice restraint because it is often better to turn the other cheek. Sometimes it is better not to respond or retaliate. After all, that is what is what the Bible tells us to do.

Should private businesses be allowed to decide what products and services they sell? The question seems absurd. Of course, they should be free to decide what products and services they sell to the general public.

Tim Cook, (Apple’s CEO) has been in the news over the last few months. He received the prestigious Free Expression award from the Newseum in Washington, D.C. In accepting the award, he talked about the values of Apple and the need for corporations to have values. That is the reason they banned some apps from the Apple Store that they believed were “offensive or mean-spirited.”

Unfortunately, as David French explains in a recent column the corporate philosophy of Apple doesn’t seem to extend to other businesses. He says you can sum up their corporate philosophy in eight words. “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Last month Apple and a number of corporations urged the Supreme Court to rule against Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop. He and his business exercised the same rights that Apple and the other businesses did in deciding not to bake a cake for a same-sex ceremony.

David French explained the similarity. “Just as Apple was unwilling to use its App Store to express ideas it found offensive, Masterpiece Cakeshop chose not to create a rainbow wedding cake to celebrate a gay wedding. Just as Apple claims that it engages in expression, not discrimination, Masterpiece Cakeshop says it serves all comers, without regard to race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.”

He was not singling out homosexuals. He has served many of them with other baked goods. But he sometimes has to say no. In the past, he has refused to make custom cakes for Halloween, divorce celebrations, and bachelor parties. As perhaps you can now see, Jack Phillips isn’t discriminating on the basis of identity but on the basis of message. Apparently Apple does not understand that and do not see their hypocrisy.

I think we all know that you don’t want to rely solely on an article in Wikipedia for truthful information. It may be a good place to start, but you should certainly check whatever you find with other sources. That was my conclusion in a commentary I did eight years ago.

That advice is even more relevant today because there are Internet trolls that alter and delete information in Wikipedia they don’t like. In a column that appeared in the Washington Times, Robert Knight explained his problems with the American Civil Rights Union’s Wikipedia page. He found that content was deleted and outright errors were inserted.

It gets worse. As a Wikipedia editor he went in to correct the changes. Immediately, they were undone. When he contacted one of the revisers, he was told that because he has ties to the group (he is an ACRU senior fellow) he could not make the changes because he has a conflict of interest.

He was on my radio program recently to talk about this problem as well as the larger problem of various social media outlets that are controlling information. Google searches are manipulated by algorithms that seem favor certain political views. Dennis Prager at Prager U is suing YouTube because the channel has been censoring more than 30 videos as “inappropriate.”

By the way, the problems with Wikipedia are not just over political issues. The Discovery Institute has documented how professors who support the idea of intelligent design are mischaracterized on Wikipedia. One German paleontologist had his English language page completely disappear. It was not a glitch, since the people who did it admitted it was intentional.

All of this is a reminder not to completely trust what you read on Wikipedia. It might provide some helpful introduction and some relevant links. But you need to check what you read.

The tax reform bill making its way through Congress may be a slight improvement over the existing tax code, but just barely. Columnist George Will reminds us that the best solution would be to “repeal and replace the tax code.” There is a bill in Congress that would actually do that but it won’t ever get an up-or-down vote.

The “Tax Code Termination Act” would delete the 4-million-word code as of December 31, 2021 and require that Congress replace it with a new one by July 4 of that year. George Will says it could just as easily be called the “Mitch Daniels Act.’ Daniels was the head of the Office of Management and Budget who wished the tax code “looked as though it had been designed on purpose.”

One statement by George Will in his column got my attention. He says that 62 percent of American households pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. He also added that 45 percent of American households pay no income tax. That’s when I decided to dig into the numbers provided by the Tax Policy Center.

Nearly 36 percent pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes, and an additional 26 percent pay no income taxes but do pay payroll taxes for a total of 62 percent cited by George Will. When you add the 18 percent who pay neither income taxes nor payroll taxes to the 26 percent who pay payroll taxes but no income taxes, you get the total of 45 percent of American households who pay no income tax.

The tax reform bill would double the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for married couples. This change will increase the number of people who will not have to pay income taxes. That will make it even harder to ever get tax simplification because ever fewer Americans will be affected by the tax code.

Is America suffering from Affluenza? Actually that is the title of a book published a number of years ago to define the problems of materialism in general and consumerism in particular.

The authors say that the virus of Affluenza “is not confined to the upper classes but has found it way throughout our society. Its symptoms affect the poor as well as the rich . . . Affluenza infects all of us, though in different ways.” The authors go on to say that “the Affluenza epidemic is rooted in the obsessive, almost religious quest for economic expansion that has become the core principle of what is called the American dream.”

Anyone looking at some of the social statistics for the U.S., might conclude that our priorities are out of whack. We spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on higher education. We spend much more on auto maintenance than on religious and welfare activities. And three times as many Americans buy Christmas presents for their pets than buy a present for their neighbors.

Debt and waste also show skewed priorities. More Americans have declared personal bankruptcy than graduated from college. Our annual production of solid waste would fill a convoy of garbage trucks stretching halfway to the moon. We have twice as many shopping centers as high schools.

The cure for the virus Affluenza is a proper biblical perspective toward life. The only problem is that this virus has infected many Christians. So we need to return to biblical priorities ourselves.

Jesus tells the parable of a rich man who decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones (Luke 12:18). He is not satisfied with his current situation, but is striving to make it better. Today most of us have adjusted to a life of affluence as normal and need to actively resist the virus of Affluenza.

Each year, we take time from our busy lives to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving. Though many holidays have become secular celebrations, this holiday still retains much of its historic religious overtones.

A day of Thanksgiving was set aside by the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony. Life was hard in the New World. Half of the Pilgrims died in the first terrible winter. After the first harvest was completed, Governor William Bradford proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving and prayer. By 1623, a day of fasting and prayer during a period of drought was changed to one of Thanksgiving because the rain came during their prayers. The custom prevailed in New England and eventually became a national holiday.

Religious freedom is one of the lessons of Thanksgiving. In 1606 William Brewster led a group of Separatists to Leiden (in the Netherlands) to escape religious persecution in England. After living in Leiden for more than ten years, some members of the group voted to emigrate to America. Having been blown off course from their intended landing in Virginia by a terrible storm, the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod on November 1620. While still on the ship, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact.

The Mayflower Compact provides the second lesson of Thanksgiving: the importance of political freedom. On November 11, 1620, Governor William Bradford and the leaders on the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact before setting foot on land. They wanted to acknowledge God’s sovereignty in their lives and their need to obey Him.

During this Thanksgiving season, let’s return to the wisdom of the Pilgrims. They valued their freedom and were willing to endure hardship in order to come to this country and freely worship. Let us thank God for these freedoms and be willing to defend them against all who would seek to take them away.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I suspect that you are doing lots of things to get ready for this special day. Let me suggest you add one more item to your to do list. Visit our website and download a copy of my Thanksgiving Quiz.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to gather as a family, but I also believe it can be a great time to teach our children and grandchildren about America’s godly heritage. I created this short quiz to be a conversation-starter around the Thanksgiving table.

We used to go around the table before the meal and ask our children to tell what they were thankful for. After a few years of hearing about how they were thankful for their cat, their doll, their video games, I knew we needed to do something else.

The Thanksgiving Quiz was born out of that frustration. It has nineteen questions and answers on the Pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact as well as some questions and answers about the Christian heritage of America.

Who were the Pilgrims and why did they leave Europe for America? Why did they celebrate Thanksgiving? What is the Mayflower Compact, and why is it significant? What lessons did the Pilgrims learn about work and even free enterprise? How did the Christian faith influence America? These are just a few of the sorts of questions that you can ask around the table and give short answers.

Perhaps it is time to recapture the importance of Thanksgiving. On the bicentennial celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Daniel Webster on December 22, 1820, declared the following: “Let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”

It is my hope this quiz will help your family see the importance of Thanksgiving.

Many of the best selling books over the last decade have been written by the New Atheists. Although you may never meet any of these authors, you will certainly interact with skeptics who use their arguments.

One of the best Christian books to help refute many of the arguments by these New Atheists is the book, Is God Just a Human Invention written by Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow. They answer eighteen of the most-cited arguments used by the New Atheists against religion and especially against Christianity.

One of those arguments is found in the title of the book that God is merely a human invention. Sigmund Freud wrote that religious beliefs are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.” In other words, we project the existence of God based on a human need. It is wish fulfillment. We wish there would be a God, so we assume that he exists.

As McDowell and Morrow point out in their book, there are many good reasons to reject this idea. One objection is that Freud’s argument begs the question. In other words, it assumes that there is no God and then merely tries to find an explanation for why someone would believe in God anyway.

The projection theory can also cut both ways. If you argue that humans created God out of a need for security, then you could also just as easily argue that atheists believe there is no God because they want to be free and unencumbered by a Creator who might make moral demands on them.

It is not surprising to read how many prominent atheists in the past have acknowledged just that. They wanted their sexual freedom and found that required that they reject the idea of God. Paul teaches in the book of Romans (1:18) that fallen individuals “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”

The Bible also has a good explanation for why most people believe in a God. The writer of Ecclesiastes (3:11) observes that it is God who has “set eternity in the hearts of men.”

A commentary in The Hill by Dr. Merrill Matthews had a title that was guaranteed to get your attention: “When ObamaCare Costs More than Leasing a Rolls-Royce.” He was on my radio program recently to talk about that article and many other issues dealing with tax reform.

Matthews was talking to friend who is also a tax policy expert living in Northern Virginia. His friend started looking at his family health insurance options. He was horrified to discover that a CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield gold-level HMO with a $1,000 deductible would cost $2,500 per month.

Most people would rather choose a PPO (Preferred Provider Organization). These allow patients to have more flexibility, but are more expensive. His friend found that a BlueCross silver-level family PPO plan with a $3,500 deductible would cost $2,729 per month. The gold PPO with a $1,000 deductible would cost $3,087.

That got Merrill Matthews thinking. What would it cost to lease an ultra-high end car? A Bentley would costs $2,289 per month. And Aston-Martin DB11 is $2,371. And a Rolls-Royce Dawn is $2,750. In other words, his friend could lease a Rolls-Royce for less than a gold-level Blue Cross PPO policy for his family.

You might suppose that at that price, you could choose which doctors and which clinics you could use. Dr. Merrill Matthews reminds us that the world famous Houston-based M.D. Anderson Cancer Center accepts several insurance plans. But there is one type of insurance it will not accept: ObamaCare.

I have one question: wasn’t the original bill that gave us ObamaCare called the AFFORDABLE Care Act?