Being in THE Kingdom is Greater than Our Present Kingdom

This #July4th weekend, I'm thankful for the liberties/privileges of being an American, but unquestionably value my faith more than my nationality

I'm not an outlier#Asian #evangelicals are most likely to value religion>being American, ~3x more likely than White evangelicals pic.twitter.com/m8MwTpRhTk

— Joshua Wu, PhD (@joshswu) July 2, 2021

How sad that just 13% of white Evangelicals say their religious belief is more important than being American. One will pass away, one will not. Hold to Christ first and, only then, with thankfulness to Him, be grateful for the freedoms we celebrate this weekend.

A German Take on the NSA

A fascinating op-ed in the New York Times from Malte Spitz:

In Germany, whenever the government begins to infringe on individual freedom, society stands up. Given our history, we Germans are not willing to trade in our liberty for potentially better security. Germans have experienced firsthand what happens when the government knows too much about someone. In the past 80 years, Germans have felt the betrayal of neighbors who informed for the Gestapo and the fear that best friends might be potential informants for the Stasi. Homes were tapped. Millions were monitored.

Those last two, short sentences sound familiar?

Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security Agency's collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single individual; now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data sets. You could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement. You could see which individuals, families or groups were communicating with one another. You could identify any social group and determine its major actors.

All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a conversation, just technical information ”” the sender and recipient, the time and duration of the call and the geolocation data.