I know it’s considered a “major music event” but todays’ edition of the local daily looks like it’s shilling for the LifeLight Festival this weekend.
The festival got a full two-page center spread in the first section of the paper, called a “guide” to the festival. They also got a two-page center spread in the ersatz entertainment supplement. The latter included an interview with evangelist Luis Palau with an entirely uncritical eye. No mention of the fact that he “use[s] fear as a vehicle to amass younger Christians.” I don’t find that approach surprising from someone who says in the first item of his “Statement of Faith” that “the Bible is the verbally inspired Word of God, without error in the original writing, and the supreme and final authority in doctrine and practice.”
I stray a bit, though. This is a big music event. I hope all goes well for the LifeLighters and crew and support their right to to say and do whatever they want at the site with their religious zeal. But were this Ozzfest do you think the Argus would have given it four pages of free advertising? To the contrary, the Argus would have been filled with concerns about and disparagement of the performers in it.
It would be nice for the local daily to show more balance and less pandering to the evangelical religious right.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
