Branded Criminals, Celebrity Convicts

In Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, Allister Heath wrote an inciteful article regarding the recent conviction and sentencing of one celebrity and the allegations made against another:

“Brand and Walliams expose the West’s moral decay: The cult of celebrity is one of the most corrosive pathologies of modernity”

He asks:

What’s wrong with us? Why do we treat luvvies as oracles, celebrities as messiahs, actors as scholars, court-jesters as philosopher-kings? Why have we empowered such a vacuous, hypocritical and unprincipled class to be our moral arbiters, to shame us, to dispense wisdom, to tell us what to think and who to vote for? Why do we pretend that fame, however fleeting or random, somehow imbues its beneficiaries with moral authority, with knowledge, with judgment, experience, insight or extra compassion?

Like an army of pre-programmed drones, they almost all spew the same Leftist mush, post-colonial verbiage and woke poison, and hundreds of millions of the young and impressionable lap it up. They rarely live up to their supposed standards, travelling the world in private jets while bemoaning global warming, frequently treating women like dirt while proclaiming their feminism. They are partly responsible for the prevalence of socialism among the youth and, by pushing the loathsome Israeli genocide libel, for the explosion in anti-Semitism since Hamas’s anti-Jewish pogroms in Gaza.

This is what happens in a post-theistic world. Online gurus, celebrity know-nothings, the famous-for-simply-being-famous and the incessant loud-mouths all replace the wise, the informed, the industrious and the pious. While they routinely lecture the social conservative for his seemingly bizarre commitment to marriage, heterosexuality, church and Bible, below the surface there is a seedy culture of dirty men taking advantage of their influence, power and wealth. Britain has been decaying for years- economically, politically and morally, and this is just one consequence. Brand had some sort of religious conversion in recent years; some think it was just an attempt to steal a few more years’ limelight, but maybe it was real, and this was his past catching up with him, which God has already forgiven. One must ask, then, why did he plead Not Guilty? Is he a victim of judicial miscarriage, or did the jury see through a veneer of spirituality? Whichever it was, he is legally guilty of rape regardless. 

Upholders of our proud, secularist culture do not think themselves guilty of breaking God’s law, because He either does not exist or He is another metropolitan liberal, just like them, enthusiastically nodding when they share their bold opinions and make their great pronouncements. Well, one discovered this very week that even he is not above retribution, and another may also discover this if the allegations are tried. If imperfect, human justice is able to hold them to account, how much more God's?

Go ye, enquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found: for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us. -2 Kings 22:13

Yet also read:

Who is a God likeunto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. Micah 7:18

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