ChnMind 2.10 To the Family Belongs Social Welfare

The Deserving Poor and the Family

In The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Avon Books, 1992) Francis Fukuyama argues that modern Athenian liberal democracies represent the highest and last stage of history, in the sense that no further progress (at least in terms of the way society is organised and governed) can be achieved. A modern liberal democracy, he opines, is the acme and pinnacle of human existence.

This is an extraordinarily bold claim, attractive for its optimistic outlook, if nothing else.

One of Fukuyama's arguments for modern Athenian liberal democracies being the highest and therefore the last stage of human social development is that they do not appear to have the seeds of their own dissolution and destruction growing within. There is no antithesis developing within liberal democracies that will result in them being torn apart and breaking down.

On this point, Fukuyama is just plain wrong. It turns out that Athenian liberal democracy inevitably contains the seeds of its own destruction and breakdown, insofar as liberal democracies shows themselves to be pathologically anti-family: modern liberal democracies do only weaken the institution of the family, they work actively to tear it apart. In weakening and tearing apart the family, liberal democracies will eventually break down from inside and experience a severe and irreversible decline and fall. Society cannot be built on a stable foundation without strong family life. We believe in the end that liberal Athenian democracies will be “judged by history” to be unsustainable, containing within them the seeds of their own decline and destruction.

The attenuation of the family as a social institution within modern Athens is everywhere apparent. The evisceration of the family has come from two main directions, both religious: the first is the persistent assertion that the rights of individuals are paramount and more fundamentally important than the institution of the family; the second is the progressive removal of family duties and social responsibilities and clustering those duties and responsibilities in society-at-large—which is to say, in the government. These socially negative tendencies are apparent in every modern Athenian liberal democracy. Their universality proves their inevitability. Individual rights are enthroned over marriage vows. Children's rights are raised above parental authority. The State claims prior rights over the children of all families. It increasingly intrudes into family life, ordering how children are to educated, what they are to be taught, how they are to be raised, and what they are to eat. The result is the institution of the family is becoming increasingly redundant in liberal democracies.

These social pathologies are present in every liberal democracy and their destructive influence has grown enormously in the last one hundred years. The social antithesis of family breakdown is an inevitable outcome to the thesis of modern, liberal, rights-based democracies. The outcome will be the collapse of liberal democratic societies in upon themselves. Liberal democratic societies are unsustainable.

Jerusalem, however, truly does represent the highest stage of human social and political development. It is the City of God; its animus is spiritual—which is to say, of and from the Holy Spirit of God Himself—and its existence is entirely dependant upon God's gracious work of pouring forth His Spirit, drawing people to Himself, conquering their sin, transforming them from the inside out, and building them into true human communities. Because the City of God actually deals with the moral and spiritual corruption of the human heart, the City has no internal antitheses to tear it apart. Jerusalem truly does represent the End of History and the Last Man. Its Lord and Life-Giver is the Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last Man.

Jerusalem restores the Family to its central and rightful place—a position which is grounded upon the command, the designation and the appointment of the Lord Himself. The Family is able to take up its lawful role and responsibility again within the Covenant community. Intrinsic to the Family's responsibilities is to be at the forefront of extending welfare to its members and to the wider community.

The key scriptural passage is found in I Timothy 5:8. “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he had denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.” The Bible emphatically declares that it is the duty of everyone to provide for “their own.” Their “own” in this context means those for whom one has a particular responsibility. The first circle of responsibility is one's own household—one must provide for one's own children and those living under one's roof. The second circle is the extended family: we must have concern for those within our covenant blood lines. The third circle is the community of faith—the community of Christians. We must have regard for any one need within the Church family. The fourth circle is the wider community, including those who do not believe.

These duties are made clear when Paul discusses the case of widows. He is addressing the responsibilities of the Church to towards "widows indeed". It turns out that not all widows should be regarded as requiring the help and support of the Church. It should preferably be only those women who had lost their husbands, and were older, and had no means of support from their families.

Widows are particularly singled out throughout the Scripture as people to be especially cherished and looked after. But the first line of provision must come from her own children and grandchildren. The children are to “make a return” to their parents. This is acceptable with God—that is, this is what God looks for and approves amongst His people. We read: “Honor widows who are widows indeed; but if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to practice piety in regard to their own family, and to make some return to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God.” (I Timothy 5: 3,4) So, the wider Church community has a duty to provide for widows (and, by extension, orphans, indigents, the sick), but only if their immediate family are not able to take care of all the needs themselves.

If anyone becomes a widow, and is younger, the divine instruction is to seek to be remarried, so that she may be taken care of by her husband and she not become a burden on the wider Church community. (I Timothy 5:14). If a woman has dependant widows, it is her duty to take care of them and support them, so that the Church may not be burdened.

The Church, then, is left to focus on those who are widows indeed. (I Timothy 5:16) This expression is very interesting. The Church community will always have to take care of those who are indeed widows—that is, who have no family support, either because their extended family are unbelievers and have deserted their mothers, or because tragedy has struck the wider household, and it has been decimated. But, once again, the primary responsibility for welfare belongs with the Family. It is to be the first line of defence against poverty.

A further key principle with respect to welfare is that those who do not strive to provide for themselves are to be left to starve. This “tough love” is utterly foreign to modern Athens—an evidence of that city's stupidity and reckless folly. Because of residual sin within Jerusalem from time to time there are likely to be those people who busy themselves in the public affairs or the affairs of others and will not take care of themselves. The constitutional documents of the City leave us in no doubt as to how they are to be dealt with:

Now we command you, brethren, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep aloof (avoid) from every brother who leads an undisciplined life and not according to the tradition you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example; because we did not live in an undisciplined manner among you, nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but with labour and hardship we kept working night and day so that we might not be a burden to any of you; not because we do not have a right to this, but in order to offer ourselves as an example a model for you, that you might follow our example. For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order; If anyone will not work, neither let him eat.
For we hear that some among you are leading an undisciplined life, doing no work at all, but acting like busybodies. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to work in a quiet fashion and eat their own bread. But as for you, brethren, do not grow weary of doing good. And if anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take special note of that man and do not associate with him that he may be put to shame. And yet do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.

II Thessalonians 3: 6—15

In these simple, direct words the entire edifice of the modern Athenian welfare state is torn down. Paul, as a full-time apostle of the Lord was entitled to be supported by those to whom he was ministering. This is clearly taught elsewhere in Scripture. However, in order to teach a more fundamental point, Paul relinquished this right, and insisted upon working with his hands, plying his trade, and supporting himself. He did so in order to be an example to the believers. He commands us all, in the Name of the Lord to follow his example and act likewise.

The basic rule of equity is that if a person chooses not to work, he, by that decision, ought to be allowed to starve. Hunger, in the end, will provide the motivation to productive work.

We have watched the lunacy of Athens as it has sought deliberately to ignore this command, setting itself up as wiser than God. Not only has it undermined and dismissed the family in a thousand different ways, it has also sought to replace it, making the government the Uber-family—the source of provision and welfare. The upshot is that now more than one in two mouths in this country depend upon the government for bread. Many of these dependants are living lives of busybodies. In Jerusalem they would be left to starve.

Thus, the concept of the poor indeed, or the deserving poor is central to Jerusalem's constitution. Secondly, the prime responsibility to provide for the poor falls upon their family members, both immediate children and also relatives. The Church stands as a back up, to act when these first lines of provision are inadequate or have failed.

One of the key reasons why modern Athenian liberal democracies will collapse in upon themselves, rotting from the inside out, is found right here. Because modern man has mocked the Living God, because he has turned a deaf ear to the warnings about, and dangers of, the undeserving poor, because he has substituted his own wisdom, attempting to create a vain utopia through the welfare state, modern Athenian society is doomed.

Jerusalem, for its part, has listened carefully to the commands of her Lord. In her streets, state “welfare” is progressively spurned and rejected. It is replaced by familial welfare. In God's City, the Family is the first and essential institution of welfare. God alone is our Provider, and we seek for His provision in His way, on His terms, with His blessing. Jerusalem rejects the statist idolatry of Athens built upon its edifice of pseudo-rights and humanist pretensions.

Georgina Beyers--a Parable of Our Times

Symptoms of the Body Politic

The media today carry the maudlin story of Georgina Beyers, who, since leaving Parliament has been unable to find work, and is contemplating a move to Australia. “She” complains that, although “she” has not been able to forge a new career in “her” first-choice direction of show business, “she” had expected that at the least “she” would be appointed to various state boards, quangos, or other regulatory or advisory bodies funded by tax.

Beyers, of course, claims to be the world's first transsexual in the world to be elected mayor, and the first transsexual in the world to be elected to Parliament. These claims are found on “her” website. We are not clear whether these claims have been recognised by the Guinness Book of Records.

The website also contains the de rigueur self-congratulatory and self-promoting eulogy to “her” political career.

I have retired from Parliament after serving more than seven years as an MP. Achieving everything I set out to do, including ensuring the survival and strengthening of Masterton's hospital, bringing government services back to heartland Wairarapa and the passing of the Prostitution Reform and Civil Unions Acts, has meant I can now look for fresh challenges. I'd like to thank everyone for their support over the years, especially the people of Carterton and Wairarapa.

Beyer has been one of the trophies of Athenian secular humanism. “Her” career to date has been such that she has served as a “poster boy/girl” for pretty much all that Athens stands for. "She" writes:

I was born in 1957, as I grew up I realised I was a woman trapped inside a male body. My book follows my rebirth, the time I worked as a stripper and prostitute in Wellington and Sydney before undergoing a full sex change operation in 1984. Since then my life has changed remarkably, I have worked as an actor, publicist and broadcaster, I was elected to the Carterton District Council in 1993, and became the first transsexual Mayor in the world in 1995.

What are the chances that a former prostitute could be elected a Member of Parliament, or of any parliament in the world, and what if that person were also a transsexual, the odds may seem insurmountable, but I am reported to be the world's first transsexual to hold such a position.
As a result of my election and intense media focus, I have had some unexpected and wonderful opportunities, much of this has come about from the filming and production of my documentary Georgie Girl, produced by Annie Goldson and Peter Wells.

Georgie Girl has been screened on POV in America to an audience of 15 million (potential audience of 250 million), on CBC Canada, Channel 4 in the UK, Scotland, Ireland and SBS in Australia.

Georgie Girl won 5 International Awards:
- Sydney International Film Festival - Audience Award Best Documentary
- San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival - Stu & Dave's Excellent Documentary Award
- Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil (France) - Audience Award
- Queer Doc Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film Festival - Audience Award
- Madrid Gay and Lesbian Film Festival - Best Documentary Public Award
- The Peace Foundation - Media Peace Award

“Her” parliamentary career was not particularly stellar, but “she” records the following:

1999 - 2002 served on the following Select Committees:
Law & Order Select Committee
Local Government & Environment Select Committee
MMP Review Select Committee - now disbanded with its work complete
Primary Production Select Committee
Also served on the following Labour caucus committees:
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade
Māori Caucus
Primary Production & Rural Affairs
Local Government, Environment, Broadcasting and Conservation
Arts Culture and Heritage
Rainbow Caucus Committee
Social Services, Justice Cultural Caucus Committee

Resigned as Mayor of Carterton in March 2000.
2002 re-elected Member of Parliament for Wairarapa with a majority of 6372.

2002 - 2005 served on the following Select Committees:
Law & Order Select Committee
Social Services Select Committee - As Chairperson
Also served on a variety of Labour caucus committees.

2005 re-entered Parliament as Labour Government Member of Parliament (list position 35).

2005 - 2006 served on the following Select Committees:
Chairperson of Social Services Select Committee
Member of Local Government and Environment Select Committee

Resigned from Parliament in February 2007

Now the trophy-”girl” has fallen on hard times. “Her” former colleagues apparently no longer want to know “her”. “She” has been used and tossed out. Not one of “her” former colleagues can find one little quango or tax payer funded perk to toss out as a sinecure or thank you.

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. If one were to laugh, it would be a kind of jeering, cynical affair along the lines of “welcome to the real world.” When the use-by date of a poster “girl” has passed, tough-luck. Join most of the rest of humanity having to struggle to make ends meet—although we are aware that Beyer could not really join most of the rest of humanity. They are busy bearing and caring for children, making a truly serious commitment to mankind. Their economic struggle is likely ten times greater than Beyer's will ever be. The hardest part of their lot is to make do in the face of an insatiable rapacious taxation system required to fund an ever burgeoning bludging state apparatus and its perpetual dependants--a system that Beyer happily endorsed and extended.

But if one were to cry, it would be a kind of tragic painful gasp. Here is a person whose life to this point has represented being given over to one's desires and being dominated by them. The world of Athens cheered and danced—for “she” was living out, like a saint, the very essence of Athenian religion: the idolisation of self, the actualisation of anomie, the very reification of sovereign individualism. And “she” was devoting “herself” to “public service” to prove that when one lives under the dominion of self, success will follow. But it turned out to be all an illusion. “She” has served “her” purposes to Athens; no-one wants a used up sacrifice to the gods. The grave mouth yawns; it will not be denied.

So, Georgina Beyers has become a tragic comedy. In tragic comedies, it is always the tragedy which dominates. The comedic aspects are cynical and bitter. The words of our Lord return to haunt: for what has it profited you, Georgina, if for a moment you gained the whole world, but in the gaining you lost your soul?

In the end, there is no laughter. Only deep sadness and mourning. For does not the Scripture say that the Lord Himself has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. “Turn to Me, turn to Me, for why would you die, O house of Israel?”

Eco Light Bulbs--More Warnings

Let Them Eat Poison

The law of unintended outcomes is alive and well. As soon as the government announces that it intends to ban incandescent light bulbs and replace them with Compact Fluorescent Lamps (to save the planet, don't you know) the stories start to come out about the dangers of these bulbs.

It looks as if the government will end up being complicit in poisoning its own citizens in its reckless pursuit of environmental redemption. We now have a warning (Hat tip:NZ Conservative) from the Fire Service. When the bulbs get to flickering, we are being advised to replace them because it seems as though they might be causing fires. Now that is bad enough. But it gets worse. It turns out that these little environmental saviours are particularly fragile. Why is that a problem, you ask? Because they contain mercury, as we have posted before. Once broken, the mercury is released.

So, the bulbs contain a noxious poison, and they are fragile. Sounds like a winning combination--just the sort of thing a bunch of environmental bureaucrats would seize upon to save the plant. Maybe it is all part of a clever plan to kill off people, which would be the ultimate environmentally friendly act.

Meanwhile, (Hat Tip: The Briefing Room) WorldNetDaily--that despicable oxymoronic right wing news outlet--has come out with a piece even more alarmist. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has studied the effects of broken CFL's and concluded that a broken CFL can spike mercury vapour in a room to 300 times the recommended safety level (as stipulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.) Now, we don't know about you, but that seems to be getting a bit "up there." The concentration of mercury vapours is particularly dense at lower levels in the room--sort of the level a child would be at.

Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League institution, has also published research, the findings of which confirm the Maine Study. So, a private sector and a public sector institution appear in agreement on this one. This has led the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to warn that, "Breaking a fluorescent bulb sends mercury vapor levels to unsafe levels for the elderly, pregnant and young – and those levels remain elevated for days."

The research project in Maine also found amazing variation in mercury concentrations within CFL bulbs. The official received wisdom is that a bulb contains (only!) 5mg of mercury. Of the bulbs tested, the range was from 0.9mg to 18mg! Unborn children, young children and the aged are particularly vulnerable to this noxious poison. The Maine study reported:

It is well established that the developing organism may be much more sensitive than the adult to neurotoxic agents. For example, methylmercury exposure can produce devastating effects in the fetus, including cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, and even death, while producing no or minimal effects in the mother.

Infants and toddlers also have a much higher rate of respiration than adults. Therefore they have a higher exposure to similar concentrations. They also are lower to the floor and therefore closer to the source of the exposure and presumably more apt to obtain a concentrated dose of mercury.

Elderly and unhealthy individuals may already be at comprised health and be more susceptible to mercury effects than a healthy individual. For example, mercury does kidney damage which could exacerbate an already existing kidney disease.

The fact that these fragile bulbs are to be put in homes by force represents a quadruple jeopardy: mercury levels are far too high to begin with; the mercury is in vapourised form; the bulbs are fragile; and the poison of a broken bulb will vapourise in a concentrated living space where the young and the elderly are particularly at risk, leading to it being in-breathed. Remember, once mercury is in the system it never leaves, but builds up and "works" for a lifetime.

We believe it is time for some questions to be asked in Parliament along the lines of whether there is any truth to the rumours that government wants to poison the people, or will it be merely one more unintended consequence. Stop the megalomaniac madness that is leading you to rush into solutions that increasingly appear to have the potential to cause far greater harm. Do some more real work, instead of the normal, "Trust us, we know best" lunacy.

At the very least, make sure that there are large print health warnings in place on the packaging of CFL bulbs. Where is Sue Kedgley when you need her? Oh, yes, that's right. We forgot. She is an ardent advocate of these poison pills. Oh, well, we guess that it is a small price to pay for saving the planet--as long as someone else pays. Good one, Sue.

When a Social Evil is Unnoticed It is Likely Pervasive

The Evil of the Sideways Glance

Envy is associated with the colour green, as in “x was green with envy.” Green is not a threatening colour—although it may connote sickness or nausea. Our culture has given very little thought to envy and its social manifestations and effects. It tends to be regarded as a harmless emotion, something to joke about.

In fact, envy is a terribly corrosive and debilitating state with huge social ramifications. It is related to the worst motivations and attitudes of humanity: resentment, bitterness, anger, pride, anger, and hatred. Envy is present on every hand. In fact, one of the reasons it is not regarded as egregious today is due to its universal presence in modern culture. It is considered a normal part of life. Yet envy betrays and displays the moral and spiritual blight of the human heart more than anything else.

Firstly, envy must be distinguished from jealousy. In popular parlance, they are often confused. Jealousy has to do with militantly protecting what one has; envy has to do with resenting that one does not have. Thus, the Scriptures tell us that the Lord our God is a jealous God. Jealousy, in this context, is clearly holy and righteous. When God says He is a jealous God, it means He seeks to preserve His honour and His glory and the devotion, thankfulness, and love from the creatures He has made, to which He rightfully has title.

Envy, however, is closely related to (although not identical with) covetousness, which is forbidden and condemned in the tenth commandment. Covetousness is an attitude of wanting what belongs to our neighbour. Now, we need to be careful here. There is nothing intrinsically evil or wrong with seeing one's neighbour prospering due to hard work or application and that being a motivation to work as hard and prosper as he has done. This is not coveting: it is rather being humble and following a good example. Moreover, if I see my neighbour has a new car, pride may lead me to go out and buy an equal or better one, so as to “keep up with the Joneses.” This may reflect a stupid vainglorious attitude—which is also evil in its own way—but it is not covetousness. The evil of covetousness comes into play when I not only want what my neighbour has got, but I want it to be taken off him and given to me. Covetousness is an attitude reflecting a zero-sum game: I want what my neighbour has; it has got to be taken off him, so it can come to me.

In the example above, covetousness would come into play if my neighbour buys a new car and is admired as “top cat” in the whole street. So, I go out and buy a better car, not just for reasons of pride and vainglory, but in an attempt to take off him the honour in which he is held in the community, by transferring the same to myself. That is covetousness.

Envy is a particular form of covetousness. Envy adds bitterness and resentment to covetousness. Envy says if I cannot take what my neighbour has, my fall back is that it be taken off him, so that no-one has it. Then I will at least have some satisfaction. Envy rejoices in the suffering of others.

Envy is now institutionalised in our culture. Athens is riddled with it. Envy has become an expression of government policy and rule. If someone is more wealthy, he should be taxed more, at a higher rate, so that he should lose it. The fact that the modern world sees this as justice is the clearest indication that envy is at play. When the community feels that such a policy is right, it has an instinctive appeal to them, it makes them feel better, and it is seen as more fair, clearly indicates that envy is is doing its deadly work. If I don't have, or can't have, no-one else should. If you cannot rejoice inwardly at the success of your neighbour, but are glad that he has to pay proportionally more taxes, envy is at play.

Envy and covetousness are at the heart of all socialist thinking, religions, and philosophies. Rarely have there appeared in human history, political ideologies or policies that seek to make a virtue out of evil. While most political ideologies have evil outcomes in one way or another, socialism as an ideology is intrinsically evil and seeks to make that evil its central raison d'etre. The fundamental doctrine of socialist ideology is that wealth or possessions can only be secured at the expense of the less wealthy. Property is theft. Therefore, it relishes the removal of property from one party to bestow upon another, or the removal of property per se, whether or not distributed to others. Instead of rejoicing at the success of some, it teaches that the success has only come as a result of the exploitation of the less wealthy. Therefore, resentment of my neighbour and his success is not only understandable, it is righteous! Taking his property away from him is just.

If a person were to prosper by kidnapping children and selling them into child prostitution rings, the community would rightly rejoice if that person were brought to justice, and all his wealth stripped away, and used to attempt to compensate his victims. Socialism creates the moral equivalent for the possessing of wealth. But it is envy that is at play, not genuinely righteous indignation. The proof of this is that according to socialism, it would be better if the wealthy were stripped of their goods, so that all were equally poor, whether or not the poor benefited. In the example of the kidnapper, he alone must be punished and his property stripped from him as a punishment. The relative wealth of others in the community is irrelevant.

Covetousness and envy are so corrosive that they make those who start to prosper hateful to an envious community. This leads to a climate where people do not wish to get ahead or stand out, for fear of suffering the rejection and hatred of others. Community rejection, ostracism, and hate for those who show drive, ambition, or a desire to better themselves are all expressions of envy and covetousness. “If I cannot have it, you are not going to either”, is the silent, unspoken mantra. But everyone in such communities knows exactly what is meant, intended, and thought. So they cower, and ambition fades. Envy leads the whole community to have a perverse pleasure at the suffering of everyone around.

One of the clearest, telltale signs of envy is the sideways glance at the neighbour. When one finds oneself measuring oneself against one's neighbour and then mentally belittling him or resenting him, envy has entered the heart. Ad hominem and envy are kissing cousins—envy always produces an attack and belittling of others, particularly when preceded by the sideways glance. This explains why public discourse in our day is largely ad hominem, and why the public love it. They cannot get enough of it. They have an insatiable quest for more.

Covetousness and envy are the greatest moral evils of our age. They are responsible for more hate, violence, anger, resentment and social division than any other moral evil But society as a whole treats these evils with cacophonous silence. That alone betrays just how deeply rooted and pervasive they have become.

Will a Fourth Reich Arise in the West?

The Limits of Western Religious Toleration

We at Contra Celsum believe that in the forthcoming decades religious freedom and toleration is likely to become an issue of significant controversy in the post-Christian world. We also believe that the liberalism of Athens is most likely going to prove acutely illiberal towards the Christian faith, Jerusalem, and Christians. Freedoms which many have taken for granted (self-evident) are likely to disappear. Christians are probably once again going to be persecuted and incarcerated—in the West, no less!

Some will no doubt view this as alarmist talk. But the signs are all there to see for any who want to consider them dispassionately. They are all part of the general trend towards a more intrusive state and a more comprehensive bureaucratic regulation of all of life. Let's firstly consider the historical macro-trends.

When the principles of religious toleration were first seriously promulgated, then finally accepted, in the West (primarily in the UK and the US) it was done within the context of an overwhelming Christian consensus. Freedom of religion meant, in this context, freedom to be a Protestant or a Roman Catholic—and to follow one's conscience in the matter. Extending the same freedom to Jews was a bit more problematic, but eventually it was done. It was a relatively easy step to move to extending the same liberty of conscience to those who wanted to be neither Protestants, nor Roman Catholics, nor Jews.

The position of religious liberty has been formally maintained up to this day. However, real and substantial religious changes have been taking place in the post-Christian West. Primary amongst these is that the West has become post-Christian. There is no longer a Christian social consensus. Unbelief dominates at virtually every point throughout the West, with the possible exception of the United States, but even in that country the case is moot.

Instead, the West has been increasingly dominated by Enlightenment philosophies, religions, and world-views. Fundamental amongst these has been materialism—the doctrine that the sum total of being, of all that exists, is physical matter, coupled with motion. There has been a panoply of different types of materialism: scientific materialism, marxist materialism, communist materialism, socialist materialism, libertarian materialism, evolutionistic materialism—the list could go on. But these are all kissing cousins—variants of the same basic world-view.

In this world-view religion and religious beliefs are regarded variously as myth, idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, empty speculation, social opiate, ignorance, and so forth. In this context, religious belief is regarded as relatively harmless—irrelevant to be sure, but harmless. This has progressively become the new underpinning of the Western tradition of religious freedom: religion is tolerated because it is irrelevant and harmless, rather than because it is right and just. This is the kind of “paternalistic indulgent” school of religious toleration, and it now rules the public square in all Western countries. All that is required for religious freedom to be curtailed is for society or the government to adopt a position that a particular religion is harmful, rather than harmless, and it's all over rover.

At the same time, throughout the West over the past one hundred years there has been an enormous extension of state power. Once the role of the State was restricted to a very few functions and activities in society. Now, in western democracies, the State has become the critical organ for the creation of a near-perfect society. The State is now almost universally held to be responsible for building the ideal society. It educates, teaches, trains, provides, protects, shapes and claims control of anything and everything necessary to create its vision of utopia. Debates between political left and right are reduced to debates over relative degree of state intrusion, regulation and planning. The consensus over the redemptive and messianic prerogatives of the State is broad, deep, and high. Political discourse and debate is now only about the colour scheme and interior decoration of the edifice: is it going to be ornate or minimalist? But there is no debate over the edifice itself—its existence is virtually unquestioned and unassailable, except amongst those on the fringes.

So the Christian religion in the West has been consigned to the private sphere of the psyche, being regarded as a kind of simplistic or primitive throwback to a more ignorant era. Meanwhile the State has aggressively asserted its omnicompetence, but only because of the overwhelming consensus that it was ought to do so. There is a small step between an overwhelmingly materialist world-view and a planned and controlled society. Does not the entire universe consist of nothing more than matter and motion? Society likewise should reflect the same: people (matter) in motion (guided, controlled, pushed, directed) by the Plan. It is only natural. It reflects the natural order of things.

In societies where Christians are in a minority, as at present, the fundamental concern of Jerusalem is to be left alone—to be allowed to continue to live and act conscientiously according to its beliefs. But increasingly the world of Unbelief intrudes into every fabric of life, and therefore into the very fabric of Jerusalem, claiming prior rights, for example, over the children of Christians, stipulating how they are to be raised, educated, and disciplined. Sooner or later Christian parents are going to be in indicted and convicted for raising their children as the Living God commands, contrary to the dictates of the State. Their children are going to be wrenched from them and placed in homes and schools that reflect the prevailing State ideology.

We believe this will be just a harbinger of more to come. In the last three hundred years, materialism has underpinned and spawned some of the most violent totalitarian societies ever seen in human history. The religion of materialism, in its various guises and permutations, undergirded the most bloody century yet seen in all human history. Common to all these militant aggressive societies has been an implacable rejection of religion in general and Christianity in particular.

As Western societies experience decay, as they teeter and totter, more and more controls to combat social evils and problems are likely to be promulgated. The Christian faith would then move from being seen as a harmless irrelevancy to an obstacle and finally to an evil. Persecution will then follow.

We expect therefore that the values of religious freedom and toleration should no longer be taken as a given. Jerusalem should prepare accordingly.

Postscript: Homeschooling in Germany is a crime. (Google "homeschooling Germany" for an overview.) The law proscribing it was a Nazi piece of legislation that has remained on the statute books. The State is now using the law to attack home schoolers. Christian home schooling parents have been fined and imprisoned in Germany, and their children sent for re-education. The courts have ruled that homeschooling is an abuse of custody—that is, it is child abuse by definition. Families have fled Germany as a result. (One starts to get a sense of deja vu. We seem to recall somewhere we seen this before in Germany).

In 1937, Hitler, when introducing the Nazi Ministry of Education stated:

The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.

The German government wrote recently to a people complaining against their children being forcibly removed to state schools: “The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling. . . . You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. . . . In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.”

There goes freedom of religion. The new Reich is starting to look suspiciously like the old Reich. Who would have thought? Who, indeed.

30th Warmest July on Record!

Things are Hotting Up

Yup, things are definitely hotting up. The shrills of global warming who are telling us that our children will not survive, and that, indeed, it is the end of the world, (see for example the indefatigable Mark Lynas of the Guardian) will no doubt up the output to new decibel levels with the latest satellite global temperature report. The July global temperature figures are in and have been published.
It turns out that the month-of-July readings have global temperatures slightly above the long term average line (the anomaly line) by +0.048 degrees. So, should we be worried?
Hardly. As a wise sage observed, one swallow does not a summer make. It turns out that July was the 30th warmest July on record--which is a rather ambiguous way of saying that you have to go back to 1936 to compare. July 1936 was the hottest July on record, a full 2.55 degrees above the global temperature recorded this past month. How does that compute with a world which is supposedly heating up due to man made carbon emissions?
According to the theories of the global warmers, this should not be happening. A July which is cooler than the hottest July by 30 places is an embarrassment. Better go back and re-look at those theories and projections, chaps.

ChnMind 2.9 To the Family Belongs the Children

The Family is Responsible for The Nuture and Instruction of Children

As God's Kingdom, the City of Jerusalem, comes upon earth, the core institutions of the Kingdom (the Family, the Church, and the State) will function increasingly as they should. They respectively will perform more faithfully the roles and responsibilities given to them by the Lord. The outcome will be growth in righteousness and peace: social harmony and prosperity will be magnified.

Our concern, here, is to trace out the roles and responsibilities given by God to the Family. This institution has come under sustained attack over the past forty years. Athens has sought overtly and deliberately to undermine the roles and duties of the Family. As it has done so, and to the degree it has been successful, Athens has experienced social dislocation and disintegration. Society will not be “healed” until the Christian Family once again becomes the norm.

The central responsibilities of the Family can be summarised thus:

1.It is the key institution to bear, instruct, train, and mould children into the Christian faith.
2.It is the institution which is primarily responsible for the education of children.
3.It is the central and primary institution for welfare and charity in society.
4.It is the core institution for the accumulation and transmission of capital (wealth)

A glance at these four key responsibilities confirms just how weakened and emasculated the Family has become in modern Athens. That city has rebelled against the biblical order, and has insisted upon the omni-competent State taking over education and welfare. It has strenuously worked against the role and responsibilities of the Family in these areas. The power of the State has also been used to restrict a family's ability to accumulate and transmit capital through its progressive taxation laws, and the forced re-distribution of wealth. Finally, the State in Athens has also increasingly called into question the ability and responsibility of the Family as the bearer and nurturer of children. The modern pagan state speaks increasingly of children belonging to society, to the government. It uses language like “our children”; it sets up public ministries to oversee the raising of children. Consequently, within the mind and religion of Athens, the Family has become withered at best, broken and dismembered at worst.

But the Church is not without fault either. Firstly, the Church has failed to teach a consistent biblical position with respect to the Family. It has supplanted the Family with itself in that it has oftentimes viewed itself as the primary institution to instruct, train, and mould children in the faith. It has not taught adequately and sufficiently clearly the duties of families to take responsibility for the education of their children; nor has it insisted upon the Family being the primary institution responsible for welfare and charity. Moreover, through a fuzzy and unbiblical platonism, the Church has also failed to teach the duty of the Family to accumulate and pass on capital.

We will look at these four key duties of the Family in greater detail and depth. Most important is the first duty: that of bearing, nurturing, and training children in the Christian faith. The fundamental biblical foundation of this duty lies in the Covenant of Grace. God's mercy and salvation works across, in, and through family lines. God has decreed and ordained that it would be so. But this is not just a blood relationship: it turns out that God deals with households, which may be broader and more extensive than blood ties. Nor is it something which is isolated or restricted to Jewish religion. This way of divine redemption is clearly carried on over into the New Covenant.

We see this in Acts 10:2, where the Scripture says of Cornelius, the centurion, that he was a devout man, and one who feared God with all his household. Cornelius would have had slaves and servants in his household. He may or may not have had children. But in his household, his fear of God had been extended to all those who lived under his roof.

But more than that, the Bible records that when Peter was coming to visit him to proclaim the Gospel to him, and open up the grace of God to the Gentiles, Cornelius had called together his relatives, and his close friends. (Acts 10: 24) They all believed as one, when the Holy Spirit fell upon them. (Acts 10:44). God's grace works in families and households. The same pattern is repeated in the case of Lydia (Acts 16: 15) and the Philippian jailor (Acts 16: 31—34). Lydia had no husband and probably no children, but she was a wealthy merchant and had servants and employees attached to her household. God's grace came to them all. The jailor probably had a wife and children, but would certainly have had slaves. Once again, God's grace came to his entire household.

These things reach right back in time to when the Lord first made His covenant with Abraham. The Lord explicitly said that His covenant was not going to be just with Abraham, but also with all the descendants of Abraham that would come forth from him. (Genesis 17: 1—14) Then later, the Lord specified further what this would mean: He said (of Abraham), “for I have chosen him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” (Genesis 18: 19). The covenant gave a critical role and responsibility to Abraham—to command his household and his children so that they would all keep the way of the Lord.

To the believing Family, then, was given the duty to bear and train children—and the entire household—in the ways of the Lord. It is significant that these duties extend over at least two generations. So, parents have responsibilities not only to their own children, but also to their grandchildren. This is clearly spelled out in Deuteronomy: “only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart, all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.” (Deuteronomy 4: 9). Similarly, in the sixth chapter: “Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgements which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, . . . so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God, to keep His statutes and His commandments . . .” (Deuteronomy 6: 1—2)

In Jerusalem, what is to be taught to children, and who is to teach it are equally important. The duty to see that children are properly instructed falls upon the Family in general and fathers in particular: “For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, that He commanded our fathers, that they should teach them to their children; that the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children . . .” (Psalm 78: 5—6)

Upon the Family, then, falls this great duty to raise up children to adult Christian maturity, so that the forthcoming generation might arise to serve God faithfully in its generation. While the Family may receive help and assistance from others in this task, the “buck” stops with parents. It cannot be handed over to the Church or the State.

It is at this point that we are confronted with one of the great dividing lines between Jerusalem and Athens. If the question is asked, to whom belongs the children, Athens insists that they belong to society at large in the first place. And within society at large, the State is the primary power. Therefore, Athens has come to believe that the children belong to the people, to the community, and finally, therefore, to the State, as the overlord. The authority and competence of parents must always give way and stand aside to the higher and prior claims of the community. The community, through the organs of the State, will tell parents how they are to raise their children, how they are to be cared for, how and when they are to be educated, and in what they are to be educated.

But the Lord of heaven and earth says that the children belong to Him. He has ordained that the parents of children will be held accountable to Him for the birth, nurture, and education of the children. In asserting a false prior claim, the community and the State are rebelling against the Lord Himself. The consequences of such arrogance will be terrible.

As the Kingdom comes, as the Holy Spirit draws near, more and more Christian families will come to take up their biblical duties and responsibilities to educate and train their children. More families will see households as a whole as the key recipient of grace, and will therefore rule and train their children to believe and obey the Lord. They will understand that this is how God has determined that it is to be, and so they will arise, obey and act—even as their father, Abraham did before them. They will deny and resist the ungodly assertions of the community and the State over their own children. They will insist on raising God's children, God's way.

This righteous insistence by parents within Jerusalem provokes a fierce and hateful reaction on the part of many of the powerful within Athens. They sneer one moment, then fulminate the next. They know that he who has control over the children has control over the future. Therefore they are going to do all within their power to wrest children away from their parents as soon as possible, to commence a programme of humanist indoctrination.

So central is this reality to the wellbeing of Jerusalem, it comes as no surprise that the enemies of the Belief would conspire mightily against such things. But they will not prevail. They cannot, for the Lord Himself will stretch forth His hand to ensure that they fail.

Unintended Perverse Outcomes

Good Intentions are Necessary, but Not Sufficient

President Ronald Reagan once quipped that the most terrifying words in the English language were, “We are from the government and we are here to help.” When the State arrogates functions and powers to itself beyond the responsibilities delegated to it by the Lord Jesus Christ, the results (whether in the short or long term) are perverse. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the actual outcome of illicit government programmes is usually the opposite of their intent. It is a living axiom: you don't mess with, nor disregard the Lord. You either build and develop society according to His directions and commands, or you suffer the consequences.

Here are just a few examples of perverse outcomes due to arrogant and illicit State imperialism in New Zealand:

1. Removal of the citizens' responsibilities for, and right to, self-defence and citizens' arrest as the first line of defence against crime, and reserving these powers for a state police force, has resulted in an increase in widespread petty crime, leading to increased lawlessness, and eventually a rising tide of serious crime due to an emergence of a criminal class. Result: suppressing citizens rights in order to fight crime more effectively results in the unintended outcome of more and more crime, with a rising inability of the police to cope.

2. Establishing a state education system in an effort to free compulsory and secular education to all children has resulted in falling educational standards, lower outcomes, growing illiteracy, higher education costs—that is, less education. State imperialism in education has proved to be a massive fraud, resulting in the unintended perverse outcome of growing ignorance and a permanent un-educated underclass.

3. The social welfare system, another enormous and illicit State programme, removes from people the responsibility and duty to provide for themselves and their dependants. The unintended perverse outcome is that State imperialism, in its illicit attempt to redistribute wealth and prevent poverty, has produced a permanent growing underclass enslaved to welfare handouts that is now into its fourth generation, and new families are joining every year.

4. State imperialistic moves to provide for solo-mothers, creating the Domestic Purposes Benefit, have produced an unintended perverse outcome of burgeoning numbers of solo mothers, and of children born to solo mothers. Since the State pays higher benefits according to the number of dependent children, solo mothers are incentivised to have more and more children to multiple sexual partners so that they can increase their income, and buy new wide screen TV's. The outcome—a rapidly escalating population of solo-mothers, and wayward children, all growing up to follow the example of their biological parents.

5. Every supplementary rule, regulation, or bureaucratic intervention to prop up a failing policy, ends up creating a new set of unintended perverse outcomes, usually requiring more regulation, leading to yet another round of yet more perverse outcomes. Consider for example the moves to counter the serial monogamy of men and to force biological fathers who have abandoned their children to contribute to the support of their “whelps” through more strict applications of the law. The unintended perverse result: more fathers moving offshore to escape the dragnet, indirectly lowering the average living standard for all who remain.

6. We have commented often on the perverse outcome of State imperialism with respect to bio-fuels. The unintended perverse outcome is millions more poor and vulnerable people starving and dying—to the point where bio-fuels are now being called a crime against humanity.

We at Contra Celsum are not libertarians. We believe that the State is a divinely instituted, holy, and spiritual institution. It is a true minister of God. But its powers, functions, competencies and responsibilities are extremely focused and very limited. It has a very clearly defined sphere of competence given to it by the Lord's appointment. As soon as the State (and, by extension, the community that endorses its actions) thinks itself wiser than God and steps outside those bounds, it lifts up its high hand against its Lord. By definition, it thereby becomes involved in illicit imperialistic behaviour. The outcome is never salutary. It is always perverse.

New Zealand is one of the more spiritually deadened countries in the modern world. Its hardness to the Gospel is legend. We believe that one of the prime causes of this arrogant spiritual blindness is that from its inception as a modern nation New Zealand the people not only accepted, but demanded, an imperial State.

The reasons are not hard to find. Firstly, European migration commenced at a time when the world-view Enlightenment was making significant inroads into the collective mind of the United Kingdom and Europe. The promise offered by the post-Christian Enlightenment was that nature and society could be known and ruled by rationalistically discovering the “laws of nature” and applying them in systematic "scientific" fashion.

New Zealand was a “virgin” society—a vacuum—so it presented the opportunity to grow a society from the beginning, starting with a blank slate. It was inevitable that such a society would be centrally and bureaucratically planned to a significant degree. Looking to the State as the central planning institution and the key source of capital was likewise inevitable. So, in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, New Zealand was given the appellation: “the social science workshop of the world”. A new rationalistic science was being applied to man, which meant that a central planning facility was required. An imperialistic State was an inevitable outcome.

Secondly, immigrants to New Zealand came to make a new life for themselves where they wanted to surpass the standards of living they experienced in the Old World. But economic development takes capital as well as labour. There was little or no infrastructure or capital to build it. The immigrants had cut themselves off from capital that had been built up through generations in Europe. Requiring what amounted to instant economic gratification, people looked to the State as the source for capital and resources.

The outcome has been a hugely expanded role for central imperialistic government. Such is the statist consensus in New Zealand—a consensus which historian Michael Bassett has called, “socialism without doctrines”—a consensus so deeply ingrained that even the political right can only think in terms of continually and consistently expanding state power. The exceptions have been rare indeed. Most of the vast expansions of State power and bureaucracy in New Zealand have occurred under the aegis of “right wing” or “conservative” governments, and as a direct and indirect result of their policies.

If one reflects on some of the most intrusive, imperialistic State institutions—all with prodigiously perverse outcomes—most have come from policies or actions taken by so-called conservative governments. We cite illustratively (but far from exhaustively) the Resource Management Act (ostensibly intended to promote development, but perversely doing more to impede economic growth than almost any other single piece of legislation); the Children Youth and Family Services bureaucracy (which has done more than any other single governmental institution to tear families apart and undermine parenting in this country); the Health and Safety in Employment Act and its attendant OSH bureaucracy (which has almost singlehandedly squeezed the economic life out of the small business sector with it endless safety manuals, audits, compliance regimes, and related regulatory paraphernalia); and last, but not least, the monumentally stupid Kyoto Protocol. This piece of bureaucratic fantasia was signed up to by a conservative government, and we were one of the few, if not the only, country to include agriculture in our Kyoto commitments.

New Zealand society accepts these intrusive State imperialistic expansions without demurring or question. It is part of what it means to live in this country. But the perverse outcomes just keep mounting. Moreover, the means of change are not at hand. Once a modern democracy has accepted an imperialistic role for the State there is only one way it can go—more and more of the same--as the perverse outcomes mount. It cannot be changed without rejecting the world-view which spawned it in the first place—the humanistic idolatry of the Enlightenment. And that is not going to change any time soon.

More perverse consequences, anyone? At present it is the only offering on the menu. But He Who is enthroned in the heavens is not mocked. He will force us to us eat our own cooking until it becomes utterly loathsome to us, and we vomit it back.

Then, and only then, may we be ready to listen to what the Lord has to say.

When Titans Clash

Antony Flew: Celebrated Convert or Believer in Drag?

Every culture and every “ism” likes its heroes. Not only in sport, but even in intellectual discourse, or matters of public debate, people love the spectacle of the titans clashing. We all love gladiatorial combat. Imagine, for example, how the media would relish a debate between Al Gore and Bjorn Lomborg. They would see their respective hero doing valiant battle on their behalf.

Christians are no exception. We too have our heroes of the faith, our trophies, our Abraham's, our David's, our Luther's. Recently many Christians have been cheered by the the prospect of another heroic trophy joining the ranks. One of the more notoriously intellectual atheists, Antony Flew has recently renounced atheism and pronounced his belief in a god. Now, Flew is 85, and some have churlishly claimed that his newfound belief represents the beginning of senile dementia and is not to be taken seriously. Flew, however, insists that he is of sound mind, and his position is based on inexorable rationalistic logic.

This has got many within Jerusalem excited. They have gotten even more excited because recently Flew has reviewed Dawkins's The God Delusion, and judges Dawkins to be a secular bigot. Wow. This is significant. Flew is a big hitter, once adjudged to be the world's most influential philosophical atheist. We guess that appellation will no long apply, but he appears to have come over to “our side”.

But as they say in the movies, “Not so fast.” We need to be far more discerning and critical here. The naïve credulity of many Christians is unbecoming. Oftentimes we are so desperate for good press that we will clutch at any straw.

Let's be very, very clear. Antony Flew, whatever opinions he holds and whatever beliefs he may have, does not believe in God; the God Who has revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures; the God Who created all things—the entire universe—out of nothing by the utterance of His Word, in the space of six days; the God Who announces things from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not yet taken place, saying that He will do all things that please Him; and the God Who is One in three Persons. He apparently believes in a god. But then the Philistines believed in a god—in fact several of them. The Babylonians believed in Bel and Marduk. They were idolaters, and so, we regret to say, is Antony Flew.

Is this harsh? No, it is simply truthful and realistic. Flew has moved his position to one of being a deist. A deist, Flew tells us, is one who believes in the existence of a god (Flew writes “God”) but not, he tells us, the God of any revelation. Thus, whatever god Flew now believes in, it is not the God of the Scriptures. And to be blunt—but fair—if you are standing upon the holy ground of the Scriptures, you are bound to aver that since Flew does not believe in the God Who has revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures, he must believe in a false god, an idol. An idol is a god of human construction and making. If you are standing upon God's ground, upon His holy Word, and there is no other ground upon which a Believer may stand, there is no other position to take.

Thus, in scriptural terms, Antony Flew remains an idolater. We say “remains” deliberately. All Unbelievers are idolaters—whether they profess belief in a god or not. All atheists are idolaters, believing in some kind of god, personal or impersonal. All Unbelievers believe something to be ultimate. All Unbelievers ground their belief in the mind and heart of Man as the ultimate basis for truth. They will inevitably point to some evidence, some argument, something which they find acceptable, which warrants their ultimate belief.

Richard Dawkins is a prime example. He is a useful illustration of the point because, on the one hand, he denies the existence of any god. He is an atheist. But, on the other hand, the ultimate ground for his position is the ratiocinations of his (and his colleagues') minds. Dawkins worships and serves his rationalistic faculty—which is to say that he worships and serves Man. The world is as Dawkins declares it to be. Further, the entire universe is as Dawkins declares it to be. Dawkins is not only his own self-interpreter, but the interpreter of every human being, the entire human race. He knows infallibly and authoritatively the ultimate truth about every human being that has ever lived or ever will live—or so he claims. He believes the entire human race conforms to “Dawkins-truth”.

Dawkins presumes to proclaim something truthful—truthful in an ultimate sense—about everything. In this sense, Dawkins is claiming omniscience. Further, since his mind and his declaration of “Dawkins-truth” has encompassed the entire universe he is also claiming he has a meaningful omnipresence throughout all reality, past, present, and future. These attributes, of course, are all attributes of deity. Dawkins is an idolater. He worships Man, and, in particular, Man as he is manifested and incarnated in himself.

Oh, and let us not decamp from the altar of Dawkins, without observing that these truth claims to say something universal and meaningful about all reality, about the entire universe, about the universal past, present, and future, are grounded upon the Dawkins-enunciated truth of the ultimate irrationality of the universe. Yes. Incredible, but true. This is why the Scripture says of Unbelievers: “professing to be wise, they became fools.” Could anyone be so stupid? Yes. It is the stock-in-trade of all Unbelief.

Flew worships the same god as Dawkins, albeit now in slightly different dress. His ratiocinations have led him to make similar claims about his own (Flew's) omniscience and his own omnipresence, but the difference with Dawkins is that he has arrived at a position where he wants to project his rationalising outside himself on to a being of some kind—which he calls god. This mental construct forms the useful function of offering an explanation for what Flew cannot explain. The attributes of this god are as Flew reveals them. He who reveals a god on the ground of his own ratiocinations, is god. Flew's world-view or religion has the presumption to think that the infinite mind of god and the finite mind of man are one and the same thing. But this is precisely the same world-view to which Dawkins also holds.

The debate between Flew and Dawkins is inter-mural, not intra-mural. It is a debate between the equally idolatrous. It is an argument over the respective merits of two idols. But Dawkins and Flew have a common ground—common ground that is both deep and broad. Both believe that all meaning, the infallible revelation and interpretation of all being and the whole universe, resides in the mind of Man.

They remain as true seed of the Serpent. Flew, regrettably, is not a hero of the Faith. Neither will he become so, unless it pleases the Spirit to regenerate him from above. But then he will delight to profess the one true God, and Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord.

The S-Files

Poisonous Brew's the Tool, Wherein We'll Play the Stupid Fool

Contra Celsum nominates the Department of Conservation for an S-Award

The Department of Conservation (“DOC”) stubbornly continues to drop vast tonnages of the poison 1080 into New Zealand's forests and waterways. It recently was exposed as being responsible for killing rare and protected birds as a consequence of its malfeasance.

Citation:

The Department of Conservation, believed by many to be the enforcement and execution arm of the NZ Forest and Bird Society, was recently responsible for the deaths of seven kea, killed by one of DOC's infamous aerial 1080 poison scatterings.

The kea is a native parrot that is both endangered and protected. A recent DOC aerial 1080 drop in the area of the Fox Glacier killed about half of a kea population being monitored by DOC. This catastrophe of collateral damage has caused yet another review of the policy of scattering the virulent poison 1080 over the countryside in vast quantities.

The review has produced a draft report stating that 1080 drops have probably been devastating to some populations of kea.

New Zealand is one of the last countries in the world to use 1080 poison. We deploy almost the entire world's production of the poison into our forests and waterways very year. The aerial dropping of 1080 is a bureaucratic, but very crude and primitive, plan to combat possums, stoats, and weasels which cause so much damage to flora and fauna.

The collateral damage from the aerial poison drops is extensive, but details and knowledge effectively suppressed. Deer, dogs, and every other mammal have been damaged by this non-targeted, broad brush, crude approach to possum control. The deathly impact upon bird life is unknown, although anecdotal evidence is considerable. Waterways have been persistently exposed to the poison.

Every so often an “incident” occurs which reaches the media, such as the death of the seven keas. If we, as individuals, killed a kea we would be liable to prosecution and punishment. But government-caused-collateral-damage-deaths are another matter. They are legitimatised by being part of a larger, higher cause.

We do not doubt the deleterious effects of possums. We do not doubt that poisons are an effective means of control. We completely reject, however, the crude, broad-brush methods of DOC which end up scattering the deadly poison far and wide, resulting in enormous actual and potential damage to other species.

Possums, weasels and stoats need to be exposed to appropriate poisons using bait stations that only those animals can access, where collateral damage is kept to an absolute minimum, and the poison is prevented from getting into the waterways. DOC needs to lay aside its crude blunderbus and start putting in the hard yards.

Department of Conservation: S-Award, Class II, for actions that are Stupid, Short Sighted and Stupefied

A New Inquisition

Enough, Already

When will the climate change sceptics stop hounding us with inconvenient truths! The latest from Bjorn Lomborg, former member of Greenpeace.

When it comes to global warming, extreme scare stories abound. Al Gore, for example, famously claimed that a whopping six meters (20 feet) of sea-level rise would flood major cities around the world.

Gore’s scientific advisor, Jim Hansen from NASA, has even topped his protégé. Hansen suggests that there will eventually be sea-level rises of 24 meters (80 feet), with a six-meter rise happening just this century. Little wonder that fellow environmentalist Bill McKibben states that “we are engaging in a reckless drive-by drowning of much of the rest of the planet and much of the rest of creation.”

Given all the warnings, here is a slightly inconvenient truth: over the past two years, the global sea level hasn’t increased. It has slightly decreased . Since 1992, satellites orbiting the planet have measured the global sea level every 10 days with an amazing degree of accuracy – 3-4 millimeters (0.2 inches). For two years, sea levels have declined. (All of the data are available at sealevel.colorado.edu.)

This doesn’t mean that global warming is not true. As we emit more CO2, over time the temperature will moderately increase, causing the sea to warm and expand somewhat. Thus, the sea-level rise is expected to pick up again. This is what the United Nations climate panel is telling us; the best models indicate a sea-level rise over this century of 18 to 59 centimeters (7-24 inches), with the typical estimate at 30 centimeters (one foot). This is not terrifying or even particularly scary – 30 centimeters is how much the sea rose over the last 150 years.

Simply put, we’re being force-fed vastly over-hyped scare stories. Proclaiming six meters of sea-level rise over this century contradicts thousands of UN scientists, and requires the sea-level rise to accelerate roughly 40-fold from today. Imagine how climate alarmists would play up the story if we actually saw an increase in the sea-level rise.

Increasingly, alarmists claim that we should not be allowed to hear such facts. In June, Hansen proclaimed that people who spread “disinformation” about global warming – CEOs, politicians, in fact anyone who doesn’t follow Hansen’s narrow definition of the “truth” – should literally be tried for crimes against humanity.

It is depressing to see a scientist – even a highly politicized one – calling for a latter-day Inquisition. Such a blatant attempt to curtail scientific inquiry and stifle free speech seems inexcusable.

But it is perhaps also a symptom of a broader problem. It is hard to keep up the climate panic as reality diverges from the alarmist predictions more than ever before: the global temperature has not risen over the past ten years, it has declined precipitously in the last year and a half, and studies show that it might not rise again before the middle of the next decade. With a global recession looming and high oil and food prices undermining the living standards of the Western middle class, it is becoming ever harder to sell the high-cost, inefficient Kyoto-style solution of drastic carbon cuts.

A much sounder approach than Kyoto and its successor would be to invest more in research and development of zero-carbon energy technologies – a cheaper, more effective way to truly solve the climate problem.

Hansen is not alone in trying to blame others for his message’s becoming harder to sell. Canada’s top environmentalist, David Suzuki, stated earlier this year that politicians “complicit in climate change” should be thrown in jail. Campaigner Mark Lynas envisions Nuremberg-style “international criminal tribunals” against those who dare to challenge the climate dogma. Clearly, this column places me at risk of incarceration by Hansen & Co.

But the globe’s real problem is not a series of inconvenient facts. It is that we have blocked out sensible solutions through an alarmist panic, leading to bad policies.

Consider one of the most significant steps taken to respond to climate change. Adopted because of the climate panic, bio-fuels were supposed to reduce CO2 emissions. Hansen described them as part of a “brighter future for the planet.” But using bio-fuels to combat climate change must rate as one of the poorest global “solutions” to any great challenge in recent times.

Bio-fuels essentially take food from mouths and puts it into cars. The grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol is enough to feed one African for a year. Thirty percent of this year’s corn production in the United States will be burned up on America’s highways. This has been possible only through subsidies that globally will total $15 billion this year alone.

Because increased demand for bio-fuels leads to cutting down carbon-rich forests, a 2008 Science study showed that the net effect of using them is not to cut CO2 emissions, but to double them. The rush towards bio-fuels has also strongly contributed to rising food prices, which have tipped another roughly 30 million people into starvation.

Because of climate panic, our attempts to mitigate climate change have provoked an unmitigated disaster. We will waste hundreds of billions of dollars, worsen global warming, and dramatically increase starvation.

We have to stop being scared silly, stop pursuing stupid policies, and start investing in smart long-term R&D. Accusations of “crimes against humanity” must cease. Indeed, the real offense is the alarmism that closes minds to the best ways to respond to climate change.
(This piece has been republished from Project Syndicate, which can be found here:

The S-Files

Alexander Solzhenitsyn—A Prophet Born out of Due Time

Contra Celsum has given an S-Award to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a towering giant of the last century and one of the great men of our times.

Citation:

Yesterday, Alexander Solzhenitsyn passed from the sight of mortal men at the age of 89. The Times of London editorialised: “He was the conscience of a nation whose writings exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag and galvanised Russian opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union.” That he was, and that he did.

But he achieved far more and represented yet more still. One of the most unsavory episodes in the post-modern west was the self-willed obsequious blindness, the deliberate obscurantist genuflections towards Stalin and the Soviet Union on the part of most English and American (and New Zealand, for that matter) left-wing intellectuals. There were only few isolated dissenting voices. Amongst them was Malcolm Muggeridge, who, like many naïve left-wing intellectuals toured the Soviet Union as a younger man to see the promise of the future for himself: he was left profoundly disillusioned. Amongst them also was Kingsley Amis, whose son, Martin has chronicled the intellectual turpitude of his father's time in his unforgettable, chilling Koba the Dread. These were but isolated cases.

But Solzhenitsyn shamed the entire left-wing Western intelligentual establishment almost single handed. His recounting of Stalin and the monumental ignominy of his Soviet Russia shamed an entire generation into silence. Who can forget the lacerations of The First Circle, or of The Cancer Ward, or of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which stripped it all bare? Who can forget the tedious and tortuous recitation of the monumental Gulag Archipelago learned first hand from his eight years imprisonment? The fact that the Gulag documented the extreme horror in such matter-of-fact tones made it appear all the more grotesque. There were no intellectual left-wing pretensions about the Soviet Union left in the West after Solzhenitsyn.

Exiled, and eventually making his way to the United States, then settling in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn was invited to speak at commencement exercises at Harvard in 1978. His speech entitled, A World Split Apart, confronted the barren emptiness of the West. He said at one point in his speech:

No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.

And again:

How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

Needless to say, his speech was not well received in the liberal West. He was ridiculed as an antiquated obscurantist. Others took offence that he was enjoying the freedom of the West, yet dared to criticise it. Ad hominem all.

Solzhenitsyn, like the prophets of old, was no idolatrous nationalist, although he dearly loved his homeland. His Russian dusha ached for his people. Like the prophets of old, he condemned not only his own nation for its extreme iniquities, but, using the same measuring stick, he condemned the dominant humanistic materialism he found in the surrounding nations—in the West. Like the prophets of old, his keen penetrating insight discerned the same idolatry present in both East and West—secular materialism. Like the prophets of old, he called men back to God. Consequently, like the prophets of old, he was loved neither in his homeland, nor outside.

Yet, he was truly a colossus of our age. We will not see his likeness again.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: S-Award, Class I for exemplary actions in the course of duty. Rest in Peace.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

It's Always Personal

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Romans 8:28

Christians believe in a universal personal world—which is to say that we believe that all of reality, past, present, and future is shaped by and ordained by God Himself. Further, in common language, we speak of “getting personal” by which we mean some actions or deeds come to one by design, person to person—as a deliberate message from one person to another, personally meant, personally focused, personally orientated. It often refers to something pointed or directed.

With respect to the Living God, Christians believe that God is always personal with every human being. He is always “getting personal” with each individual. Our text tells us that for those who have come to love God, having been called by Him, all that is, all that comes to pass in their lives, is a personal message and ministry from God to them as individual souls. It is universally intended by the Lord, planned by Him, executed by Him, caused by Him for their individual good and well-being.

Three comments need to be made, lest we misunderstand this glorious truth. Firstly, we are called and challenged to receive this truth by faith, not by sight. For many of our circumstances are hard and difficult. The Scriptures also are clear that through many trials and sufferings we enter the Kingdom of God. Oftentimes circumstances don't seem good to us: nevertheless, we are called in faith to believe that no matter how desperate or painful the circumstances or events of our lives, even in all of it, God has ordained every part, all of it, for our good, and therefore as an outworking of His beneficent mercy and goodness toward us. Of course, receiving this by faith helps us to be reconciled and thankful for even the most difficult valleys.

The second comment is that we must beware of frantically searching for the good in every circumstance. Sometimes the good that God intends will be immediately obvious to us. Other times, much less so. We have known immature souls work themselves up into a frenzy trying to discern the good in a difficult circumstance, struggling to see and understand, ending up very dispirited. This is not the walk of faith, but of sight. And sight is often inimical to faith.

Finally, we must not fall into the trap of looking for personal messages from God in our circumstances. That is not the kind of cosmic personalism intrinsic to the Christian faith. That kind of immaturity is a hangover from the superstitions of Unbelief, from pagan days and ways. “What is God trying to tell me?” is a question often found on the lips of young Christians, or of Christians weak in faith, when a difficult circumstance arises. But God has already declared to every Believer His personal messages to each and every one: they are found in the promises and declaration of the Scriptures—which are full, final, and complete.

Therefore, as “all things” in our existences unfold—each a unique cluster of circumstances combining with our unique combination of “nature and nurture”, we are to look not into the secret counsels of God, but to His Holy Scriptures. All of nature and circumstances draws us back to His revealed counsels that we might see the already declares things there more clearly, more perceptively, and more meaningfully.

But the universe is personal for the Unbeliever as well. The circumstances—all of the them—experienced by an Unbeliever represent a personal message from God to each individual. Does an Unbeliever experience the blessings of life—children, health, vitality, success? God is speaking personally to them of His mercy, His patience, His goodness. He is calling them to be thankful for His good gifts. Each Unbeliever has his own personally constructed message, calling him to depart from the life of sin and rebellion, and come to the Lord.

Does an Unbeliever experience great pain and suffering? It is the Lord's personal message to them, warning them that what they are experiencing is a mere foretaste, the barest taste, of the wrath that awaits, if they stubbornly refuse to repent. Or does an Unbeliever experience enslavement to alcohol or drugs? It is a warning, a mere foretaste, of an eternity to come without Christ.

The earth is not a machine, wound up, and left to run on its own. The earth, all of creation, is the outworking of the infinite Personal God. There is nothing absolutely or finally impersonal. Even what appear to us to be the most impersonal or random events, such as the lot, cast in the lap, represents the personal will of God. Every hair on the head is numbered. No sparrow can fall without it being the express and directive command of the Father.

For the Believer, it is all a hymn of love, manifesting the goodness of God for our good. For the Unbeliever, it is all a siren of warning and a hymn of invitation to come to God, turning away from sin before it is too late. All of it. Without exception.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

ChnMind 2.8 Self-Government in Jerusalem

The Universality of Divine Self-Government

The government of Jerusalem cannot be compared to any form of government found in Athens. In the end, government within Athens becomes progressively and literally diabolical.

The history of political philosophy has largely been a record of discussion and debate over the role and responsibility of the civil government. “Government” in this context almost universally means civil government, with the possible exception of medieval and pre-modern Byzantium and Western Europe where the concept of government was extended for a time to the Church.

In post-Enlightenment times, particularly in the Anglo and American traditions, political philosophy has turned around the issue of the respective responsibilities of the state versus the freedoms of the individual. The debate has turned around more or less civil government.

Jerusalem has a very clear and definitive view on such issues derived from its constitutional documents. The Scriptures declare distinct, but limited, roles for the State, the Church and the Family—the core institutions of the Kingdom. We will trace these through in forthcoming essays. But, while the governing role of each and any institution in Jerusalem is holy, but nevertheless limited, government itself is not. Within Jerusalem, government is maximal.

The government of which we speak is divine government: after all, Jerusalem manifests the Kingdom of God. Jerusalem represents the City of redemption where, progressively, all things are restructured and reformed around the reign and dominion of the Lord Jesus Christ. Within Jerusalem all enemies are progressively placed under His feet. Government, divine government, in the City is therefore universal in scope and intent. Consequently, within that great City we are not led to speak of minimal government and maximum individual freedom. We have been taught to speak, rather, of universal, comprehensive, complete Divine government of the City—and therefore limited, delegated government for every human institution.

This is palpably evident throughout the constitutional documents, but a few citations will suffice. In the Lord's prayer, our Lord commands us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10). The coming of the Kingdom of God is sure, certain, and infallibly the pre-determined and declared will of the infinite, infallible, eternal God. Therefore, we are commanded to pray for it, with absolute faith, completely certain that it will come to pass. Moreover, the Kingdom of God is not some ethereal, other worldly, non material kingdom: our Lord makes clear that it is coming upon earth, as the growing crescendo within human history, as all enemies are progressively placed under His feet. This is the great goal that all human history is orientated towards, and is working towards—whether men are aware of it or not.

But notice how the Kingdom is characterised in the parallelism: the coming of the Kingdom is equivalent to God's will being done upon earth, as it is in heaven. In heaven, the government of God is universal, expressed through and reflected in all the myriads of beings, both angelic and human, through all its institutions and structures; through all its ordinances and services. As the Kingdom of God comes upon the earth, the same universal nature of God's government that exists in heaven becomes progressively evident within Jerusalem.

Secondly, the Lord's apostle, Paul tells us that all reality within Jerusalem is being made subject to the Lord Jesus Christ. Within that city, every thought is being taken captive (II Corinthians 10:5) to the obedience of Christ. The government of the Kingdom is so pervasive and universal that, by the Spirit of God, it does what Athenian human powers have never been able to do—which is to govern, direct, control and subdue even the thoughts and intentions of the human heart.

It is a characteristic of God's Word, when animated by the Spirit, that it captures, controls and transforms each human being from the inside out. “For the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword, and piercing as far as the divisions of the soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12). Each Believer is charged with working to bring forth and manifest this divine government in his life. “So, then,” says Paul, “whether we eat or drink, or whatever we do, do all to the glory of God.” (I Corinthians 10:31)

Thirdly, the will of God is manifest in His commandments. The summary of those commandments is given to us by our Lord: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind.” (Luke 10: 27) Heart, soul, strength, and mind represent the totality of our beings: but to leave us with no doubt, the Law of God commands that respectively all of our heart, soul, strength and mind are to express a comprehensive and total love for God. The subjugation of all His enemies includes subduing the enmity which resides in the hearts, souls, and minds of His people. Every part of a person is to be devoted to the Lord.

It is an irrefutable maxim that he who is able to win total control over the human heart, over every thought and intent of the heart, will thereby have won total control over human society.

The Kingdom of God on earth manifests an ever increasing realm of divine government. Within Jerusalem, government is universal. But the most basic and fundamental form of government is within the human heart—and even and especially there the Kingdom has totalitarian claims and its realm is universal. This means that the most fundamental and pervasive realm of government within the Jerusalem is self-government. The most fundamental realm of divine rule in the Kingdom is the human soul willingly, deliberately, and increasingly successfully subjecting itself to the will and commands of God in all things—so that the goals, the motives and the standards of the individual are increasingly conformed to God's commands and God's Word.

Thus, within Jerusalem's walls, divine government is universal and maximal. But the most fundamental and important manifestation of God's rule is in the human heart, that seat of sin, which means that the most fundamental and important manifestation of God's government in Jerusalem is the rule of self-discipline, and of willing self-conformity to the Word of God.

The most important realm of government is government of self. Any society which cannot manifest righteous self-government out of the hearts of its citizens is doomed to ultimate failure and collapse. But Athens, that "alternative" city, the city of Unbelief, to this day has utterly failed to command the thoughts and intentions of the heart. It has tried valiantly. It has spent untold money on universal programmes of education and re-conditioning. It has tried universal propaganda. It has tried totalitarian regimes. It has tried religion. It has tried bribery, intimidation, and threats. All have failed.

Unable to change the human heart, it has failed miserably to produce a realm of willing self-government amongst the governed. Consequently, Athens is doomed to failure and eclipse. He Who sits in the heavens laughs. For He alone can create a new heart. His atonement makes it possible. His Spirit alone can transform His people from the inside out.

Jerusalem is a holy City where the Lord rules. But His realm of government is first and foremost over the thoughts and intentions of each individual heart—for from the human heart are the springs of life itself. That means that the most important governmental realm within Jerusalem's walls is a willing self-government of the soul.

Update on Global Temperatures

Global Temperature Report: June 2008

On 7th July, the Earth System Science Centre of the University of Alabama released the latest global temperature readings for the month of June. As they say in poker, "Read 'em and weep." June temperatures (preliminary):

Global composite temp.: -0.11 C (about 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit) below 20-year average for June.

Northern Hemisphere: 0.00 C (about 0.00° Fahrenheit) above 20-year average for June.

Southern Hemisphere: -0.23 C (about 0.56 degrees Fahrenheit) below 20-year average for June.

May temperatures (revised):

Global Composite: -0.18 C below 20-year average
Northern Hemisphere: -0.05 C below 20-year average
Southern Hemisphere: -0.31 C below 20-year average

(All temperature variations are based on a 20-year average (1979-1998) for the month reported.)

Notes on data released July 7, 2008:

A La Nina Pacific Ocean cooling event continues to drive tropical and global temperatures: Globally, June 2008 was the coolest June since 1999, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

While the La Nina is a tropical event, cool temperatures covered a large portion of the globe. Among the past 30 Junes, June 2008 was the third coldest south of the Antarctic Circle, fourth coolest in the Southern Hemisphere and fifth coolest in the tropics.

The Antarctic continent saw its third coldest June in 30 years, with temperatures averaging -1.53 C cooler than the seasonal norm. Portions of Anarctica south of Australia were as much as 5.5 C (9.9 degrees Fahrenehit) colder than seasonal norms for the first month of winter.

While La Nina has caused global average temperatures to fall by more than 0.7 C (about 1.26 degrees F) since January 2007, June was only the eleventh cooler than normal month since January 1999.

* * * * *

As part of an ongoing joint project between UAH, NOAA and NASA, Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the ESSC, use data gathered by microwave sounding units on NOAA and NASA satellites to get accurate temperature readings for almost all regions of the Earth. This includes remote desert, ocean and rain forest areas for which reliable climate data are not otherwise available.

The satellite-based instruments measure the temperature of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about eight kilometers above sea level.

Once the monthly temperature data is collected and processed, it is placed in a "public" computer file for immediate access by atmospheric scientists in the U.S. and abroad.

* * * * *

Neither Spencer nor Christy receives any research support or funding from oil, coal or industrial companies or organizations, or from any private or special interest groups. All of their climate research funding comes from state and federal grants or contracts.

Seeing the Light

When Solutions Create Worse Problems

These days when you go into a “government” building (schools, hospitals, WINZ offices etc) you are likely to find that all the electric bulbs are now CFL (compact fluorescent lightbulbs) because it is the politically correct thing to do. The government has announced that it is going to ban incandescent bulbs by October next year; the CFL bulbs are supposed to use less energy and every New Zealand household will be forced to use these light bulbs. It will help save the planet, whatever that means.

It now turns out that these bulbs contain inhalable mercury vapour. Mercury is one of the most toxic poisons known to man; it attacks the neural nervous system. There are no “safe” levels of mercury. It is accumulative in the body. The bulbs don't work without the mercury.

When these bulbs break, the mercury spills out in vapour form. It gets into carpets, clothes, footware, curtains, and other surfaces. Every time a vacuum cleaner is used it picks up the mercury particles, which are very small, and sends them out into the air again. The vacuum cleaner acts as a mercury recycling spraying device. Eventually, it gets into humans, and commences its insidious work.

In those work places, where the bulbs are now in wide use, the occasional breaking of a bulb due to accident or malfunction is inevitable. In fact, some users have complained that they appear to be very fragile and break easily. Consequently, people working in those buildings are at risk of exposure. The mercury does not go away.

Below are the current US Environmental Protection Agency recommended “clean-up” procedures in a house if a CFL bulb breaks.

Before Clean-up: Air Out the Room

Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.
Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.

Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces

Carefully scoop up glass pieces and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.

Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.

Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.

Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.

Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug

Carefully pick up glass fragments and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.

Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.

If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken.

Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister), and put the bag or vacuum debris in a sealed plastic bag.

Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding and Other Soft Materials

If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.

You can, however, wash clothing or other materials that have been exposed to the mercury vapor from a broken CFL, such as the clothing you are wearing when you cleaned up the broken CFL, as long as that clothing has not come into direct contact with the materials from the broken bulb.

If shoes come into direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from the bulb, wipe them off with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels or wipes in a glass jar or plastic bag for disposal.

Disposal of Clean-up Materials

Immediately place all clean-up materials outdoors in a trash container or protected area for the next normal trash pickup.

Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing clean-up materials.

Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states do not allow such trash disposal. Instead, they require that broken and unbroken mercury-containing bulbs be taken to a local recycling center.

Future Cleaning of Carpeting or Rug: Air Out the Room During and After Vacuuming

The next several times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window before vacuuming.

Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.

Our advice:

1. If you are working in a building which uses CFL bulbs, insist that they be removed immediately, and replaced with incandescent bulbs. Make it a “health and safety” issue. At the very least, make sure that any accident with a CFL bulb goes into the incident register. Then ensure that the surrounding area is tested for mercury contamination. If there is contamination, insist upon full industrial cleanup of the entire work environment, including, if necessary, a refit of all carpets, curtains, and other furnishings and fit-out; then re-test for mercury levels, once complete. Sue the company for exposing their staff to hazardous substances—in this case, one of the deadliest poisons known to man.

2. If you have CFL bulbs at home, remove them immediately and replace them with traditional incandescent bulbs. Store the CFL bulbs in a safe place where they will not be broken. Do NOT put them in the trash. That will mean that the mercury just goes into landfills. Call the local council and ask them to remove the bulbs safely and dispose of them according to the protocols for toxic waste.

3. If you are thinking of buying a house and find that it has CFL bulbs, turn around and walk out.

What is not yet clear is whether the bulbs leak mercury vapours in other ways. It is possible that they do. In other words, mercury contamination might occur not only when the bulbs break. We know of no indication that this has actually been tested. The official government position is an acknowledgment that the bulbs do indeed contain mercury, but that the bulbs are safe. To our knowledge, no independent scientific testing has been undertaken on that claim. The government appears to have relied upon the assurances of companies manufacturing the bulbs.

Our recommendation is to have nothing to do with these bulbs until they are tested and scientifically scrutinised by independent verified peer-reviewed analyses that encompasses a bulb “life-cycle”, and certified as safe--or at least all the dangers properly disclosed. The analysis must be conducted by bodies independent of those government and political organs promoting their use as part of their campaign against global warming.

Finally, do we not live in a very strange world when governments get alarmed and take urgent action against lead paint in children's toys, yet are forcing by law the use of CFL's in homes, including nursery and baby rooms, risking exposing children to progressive mercury poisoning. Mercury, like lead, once in the body never leaves.