The Beginning of a New Secession?

Slavery and Civil War

Measuring the significance of current events is a perplexing task. Media "headline-ism" and rampant sensationalism do not help at all. The histrionic pronouncement of an apocalypse every day is little short of obscurantism.

So, we have found a deep internal well of scepticism bubbling up when we have heard pronouncements of a global economic apocalypse. But when we consider the implications of the graphic below we wonder whether in the medium term things will indeed be very difficult. The strains upon the US body politic will likely be considerable.

Forecast US Federal Deficit

(Hat Tip: Fairfacts Media)

We recently saw a Democratic strategist being interviewed on Fox. When asked about the size of the deficit, her defence was that the deficit was an unfortunate by-product of the cost of doing all the things which the Obama administration promised to do (and some more besides, we may add). In other words, the huge deficit spending is part of the collateral damage of achieving Democratic goals.

When pressed on the huge burden the government will be putting on future generations, the regime apologist just shrugged and said that they had no choice but to take on that level of debt. Democratic socialism has its price, and it must be paid.

We have blogged earlier on how, over the longer term, the borrower always becomes the lender's slave. The US is clearly going to wane as a world power; its place will be taken by other nations. We are indeed entering a different world order.

Now something else has emerged in the US which gives us pause.

WAKE UP CALL: TEXAS GOV. BACK RESOLUTION AFFIRMING SOVEREIGNTY
Tue Apr 14 2009 08:44:54 ET

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state,” Gov. Perry said. “That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm the states’ rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.”

Perry continued: "Millions of Texans are tired of Washington, DC trying to come down here to tell us how to run Texas."

A number of recent federal proposals are not within the scope of the federal government’s constitutionally designated powers and impede the states’ right to govern themselves. HCR 50 affirms that Texas claims sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not otherwise granted to the federal government.

It also designates that all compulsory federal legislation that requires states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties, or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding, be prohibited or repealed.

Hat Tip: Drudge Report

Resolutions affirming state sovereignty over all powers not otherwise granted to the federal government certainly have strong constitutional warrant. Depending on how the Federal Government responds, this could be a first step towards secession on the part of some states. It was the secession of states, you recall, which led to the Civil War. Impossible in the modern world? Nothing is beyond the pale. We should not discount the possibility.

If the Obama administration were to bring an iron fist out of the velvet glove, all bets would be off. Would there not be an irony in this? Obama, like Lincoln before him, a president from Illinois, prepared to use force to "preserve the Union." Last time the casus belli was the abolition of slavery--the Union denying the state's rights to protect slavery within their jurisdictions.

This time the casus belli would be the Federal government's promulgation of slavery--the Federal Government enslaving its people by huge mountains of government debt and the Federal controls which go with it. This time it would be the seceding states standing up against the Union for abolition of slavery (albeit of the debt-based kind).

It will become more serious if Texas is joined by other states in asserting state sovereignty.

Forthcoming Book

The Doctrine of Scripture

Between Two Worlds has a preview of a forthcoming work on Holy Scripture. It looks interesting and is now available for pre-order. Check it out here.

Scholastic Mythbusters, Part II

The Fetish of Egyptian Chronology

Much of what passes for thorough and objective scholarship in our post-Christian world is nothing less than determined ignorance. The study of the ancient world is an example. It has been afflicted with a raw prejudice against the Bible and its historical accounts. However, even a superficial comparison of ancient historical documents shows immediately that the biblical historical records of events in the Ancient Near East are far fuller, and more detailed, precise, and voluminous than the records of surrounding nations.

But scholarship and the liberal academic complex have steadfastly refused to treat the biblical historical documents as genuine historical accounts. For the past three hundred years they have overwhelmingly viewed them as works of religious propaganda. The biblical records lack objectivity, we are told. They have been written, edited, redacted, and reconstructed by people with axes to grind. Consequently everything in the Bible must be second guessed.

The fact that the historical records of the Scriptures are so full and detailed is taken as an evidence that they are not genuine historical accounts. If they were, well, they would be as patchy and difficult as other non-biblical historical documents of the period. The fact that they are so clear and full is an evidence of their being edited, massaged, re-worked, and altered—for religious purposes. The argument is viciously circular.

The liberal academic complex has proceeded by asserting its own rationalistic autonomy over the biblical documents. The result has been a prevailing antipathy and blind prejudice against the historicity of the Bible for over two hundred years. As scholar after scholar after scholar has repeated the same views and expresses the same cant, over time it has become an undoubted orthodoxy. Yet the foundations of this so-called orthodoxy are worse than the Great Grimpen Mire.

One of the most persistent myths of the Academy has been to elevate the chronology of Egypt to a status of near infallibility, to which all other histories and chronologies, including the biblical chronology, must conform. The chronological structure of Egypt has been used to “rework” the histories of all other ancient near eastern peoples, such that if they do not “fit” or “agree” or “conform” to the Egyptian schema, the records are erroneous or wrong. The status of Egyptian chronology as the fundamental history has functioned like the myth of the flat earth.

This would not be such a problem if the Egyptian chronology were well founded. However, the Egyptian chronology that is widely accepted as academic orthodoxy is based upon the writings of Manetho, a Graeco-Egyptian priest of the second century BC. He presented an Egyptian history back to its beginnings, using the dates and reigns of successive Pharaoh's and their dynasties in Egypt. Manetho's chronology is the spine upon which virtually all scholarship of the ancient near east has been built for the past two hundred years. However, whilst a "complete" chronological record, with its successive dynasties, is convenient for scholars and thereby likely to prejudice them in its favour, it is of little use if the chronology itself is wrong, or is in places a fabrication.

The first issue is to reckon with is the tendency in the ancient world to produce chronological schemas for reasons of propaganda. Clearly Manetho sought to establish the prime antiquity of ancient Egypt, over against the rival (Antiochene or Syrian) claims of his day. This was important because longevity and antiquity in the ancient world established primacy, and Manetho was interested in establishing the primacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The chronology was used to support its imperial claims. James Jordan has argued that,

This is not just an ancient phenomenon. Not too long ago, German historians were diligently falsifying and inventing history in order to prove the seniority and superiority of the Aryan race. The rulers of England have often supported the absurd notion that the English and Saxon races are descended from the “lost tribes of Israel.” Today, the Israeli claim to the land of Palestine is grounded in events 2000 years old.

When the Greek politician Solon visited Egypt in the 6th century BC, he was chided as a citizen of such a youthful culture, and was told that Egyptian history ran back 8000 years. Herodotus was told a century later that Egyptian history ran back 11,340 years before his time.

The Babylonian priest Berossus presents us a dynasty of 86 kings who reigned for no less than 33,091 years. His contemporary, Manetho, produced a similar claim regarding the earliest, divine rulers of Egypt. Manetho expert W. G. Waddell suggests that "the works of Manetho and Berossus may be interpreted as an expression of the rivalry of the two kings, Ptolemy and Antiochus, each seeking to proclaim the great antiquity of his land." [Loeb edition: Manetho, p.x]

Everyone admits that these are fictional exaggerations, but when it comes to Manetho's dynasties, the admission is not so forthcoming. The reason for this blindness is not hard to discern. It lies in the presuppositional hostility of secular scholarship for the Bible. If Manetho cannot be trusted, scholarship must rely much more heavily on the Bible, and that is not regarded as acceptable. . . .

We shall let W. G. Waddell, the editor of Manetho, have the last word: "But there were many errors in Manetho's work from the very beginning: all are not due to the perversions of scribes and revisers. Many of the lengths of reigns have been found impossible: in some cases the names and sequence of kings as given by Manetho have proved untenable in the light of monumental evidence. If one may depend upon the extracts preserved in Josephus, Manetho's work was not an authentic history of Egypt, exact in its details, as the Chaldaica of Berossus was, at least for later times. Manetho introduced into an already corrupted series of dynastic lists a number of popular traditions written in the characteristic Egyptian style. No genuine historical sense had been developed among the Egyptians, although Manetho's work does illustrate the influence of Greek culture upon an Egyptian priest." [Loeb edition, Manetho, pp.xxv-xxvi]

In other words, Manetho's chronology is likely to be notoriously unreliable, particularly with its claims to ancient lineage. Yet scholarship has insisted on using it as the chronology to which all other histories of the Ancient Near East must conform.

Secondly, the histories of all other nations in the Ancient Near East are required to conform to the accredited Egyptian history. Thus, in the case of Israelite history, the standard method of the Academy is to date the Exodus by attempting to fit it into the accepted orthodoxy Egyptian chronology. And guess what--there is nothing in the standard Egyptian chronology that would be consistent with the events of the Exodus (devastating plagues, a slave people leaving, the Egyptian army and its Pharaoh being destroyed) occuring at the time they were supposed to have happened. However, since the Manetho chronology is sacrosanct amongst scholars, they have concluded that the biblical account is wrong, fanciful, mythical, and the work of religious propaganda.

Moreover, the imposition of the Manetho chronology upon all other histories of the region has meant that the dating of events in ancient Greece, Mynos, and Syria is problematic. Recorded events in those other civilisations, such as natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tidal waves, and famines) are compared with the Egyptian chronology and history, and the dating of these events is skewed (usually placed far back in time and made much older than the actual events themselves).

Thirdly, the Manetho chronological schema, in seeking to "prove" the ancient lineage of Egyptian, Ptolemaic civilisation, overlooks the fact that royal lines often bestow multiple names and titles on their kings. For Manetho, each name or title usually meant a distinct person, successively reigning. English history gives apt examples. The Prince of Wales often becomes the king of England. Prince Charles will become King Charles. But for Manetho, in arranging his chronology, this would represent two different people, two different reigns, and possibly in different dynasties. In English history we have two James: the Sixth (of Scotland) and the First (of England). For Manetho, these would be two different Pharaohs.

It was common in the ancient world to endow multiple names and titles on royal persons. It is not uncommon in the modern world. For example, in the case of Swedish royalty, the name of a particular Swedish sovereign could be:

Carl-Gustaf Bernadotte
Crown prince Carl-Gustaf
Duke of Jamtland
King of Sweden
Carl XVIth Gustaf
King Carl-Gustaf
Holder of the Serafim Order
Chief of State
(Lennart Moller, The Exodus Case: A Scientific Examination of the Exodus Story, and a Deep Look into the Red Sea. [ Copenhagen: Scandinavia Publishing House, 2000], p. 78)

If Manetho's method had been employed, each of these would have become separate persons, part of a long dynasty, or possibly in different dynasties. This has led to the insertion of hundreds of years into the orthodoxy Egyptian history which are mythical. They never existed.

This orthodoxy was initially unable to be challenged from within. It was a severe career-limiting move. The first challenges in recent times have come from outside the liberal academic complex, from non-specialists who came to the problem with more open minds. The first of these was Immanuel Velikovsky, whose book Ages in Chaos (London: Sidwick and Jackson Ltd, 1952) was a reconstruction of ancient history from Exodus to King Akhnaton. He discussed documentary Egyptian evidence of a time of plagues, death, devastation, and a slave people in ancient Egypt from the Egyptian records themselves (but of course, according to the conventional academic prejudice, far earlier than the time of the Exodus.) He also drew amazing parallels between the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence between Egypt and Syria and northern Israel and the biblical accounts in the time of Elijah and Elisha--yet according to the conventional prejudice, the el-Amarna correspondence was centuries earlier.

The issue was taken up later by another non-specialist--Donavan A Courville in The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications. (Loma Linda, CA: Challenge Books, 1971) However, these were not credited within the Academy--and were consigned to the realm of idiosyncracy. Thousands of accredited and professional scholars could not be wrong.

In recent years, however, some scholars from within the Academy have begun to revolt. It has been lead by Peter James (Peter James, I. J. Thorpe, Nikos Kokkinos, Robert Morkot and John Frankish, Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Conventional Chronology of Old World Archaeology. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991)

The publisher's blurb had this to say:

The Old World has confronted archaeologists with many riddles, perhaps the most tantalising of which is the Dark Age, an economic and cultural recession so devastating it lasted for 400 years from 1200 to 800 BC. Or did it? The dates for the Near East and Mediterranean are derived from the highly regarded chronology of ancient Egypt, but could not that itself have been miscalculated? This is the pioneering theory proposed by Peter James in an intricate piece of scholarly detective work.

Deciphering the clues from papyri and pottery, he and his team of experts search layer by layer through the excavated treasures of a vast area from Spain to Iran and from Denmark to Sudan, until they reach Egypt, the root of the labrinthine riddle. It is here that they unearth 250 years of ‘ghost history’. Once these are eliminated, fresh perspective is thrown not only on the reality of the Dark Age, but also on the Trojan War, the foundation of Rome, the origin of the Greek alphabet and the Golden Age of King Solomon. Centuries of Darkness is a masterpiece of archaeological reasoning which will revolutionise our view of the ancient world.

But the Academy fights on. The issue here is, assuming the fundamental truth of the Biblical historical records (which we do) why is it that for two centuries scholars have insisted on their unreliability and cling to the authority of Manetho, building up fantastical histories in a completely circular fashion?

The reason is that the more anti-Christian rationalist scholars assert their objectivity and independence, the more they are made subject to fables, myths, and wishful thinking. Man remains a creature: weak, limited, conditioned, derived, and dependant. This includes his rational faculties and abilities. The more he asserts his autonomous independence, the more he becomes unconscious of (or refuses to acknowledge) his limited and finite and conditioned capacities. That, in turn, produces prejudiced and perverted thinking in virtually every area of life. This is why the Bible declares that the Unbeliever is blind.

As we argued in our first post, there is little doubt that one of the reasons the Puritans are hated and ridiculed to this day is due to their faith in the Living God. Whole worlds of myth and untruths have been built up around them by scholars who are willingly conforming to the prejudices of their day. They want the myths to be true. The need the myths to be true.

A similar phenomenon has occurred with respect to ancient history. Since the Scriptures from the outset are assumed not to be true, something else must be. The mind of autonomous man is more fundamental than the Word of God. Scholarship quickly descends into mythmaking, but with a breathtaking insistence upon their impartiality and detachment at the same time! The reality is that if two hundred years of "experts" had taken the time and care to examine their initial assumptions and pre-commitments to the Manetho chronology, as well as their prejudice against the Old Testament, and candidly put these on display for debate and critique, this would never have happened.

All the while the emperor has had no clothes. When scholars turn away from self-conscious dependance upon the Living God, He gives them over to fables and lies.

In Praise of Carbon Dioxide

The Health Police Take a Quantum Leap

We live in a mad, mad world. "Those who hate Me, love death," says the Lord. So, Unbelief is left to run in directions and courses that end up denying life and health to human beings. If you turn away from God, the author and sustainer of life, and break His commandments you end up afflicting and breaking life.

Nowhere is this more evident in the matter of specious anthropogenic global warming. It is a death cult in so many ways.

The following Editorial of the Washington Post gets the point.

Sunday, March 29, 2009
EDITORIAL: Protect us from the EPA

One man's meat may be another man's poison, but the Environmental Protection Agency has taken the idea to an absurdity. EPA has just sent a proposal to the White House that would classify carbon dioxide as a health hazard.

But if there wasn't carbon dioxide around, there would be no plants. And, for that matter, neither would there be any people or pets if we weren't allowed to exhale. The claimed "health hazard" from carbon dioxide is, of course, global warming, yet the data we have seen, such as Stanford economist Thomas Gale Moore's work, show that warmer temperatures and higher incomes are associated with healthier, longer-living people. In case environmentalists haven't noticed, bio-diversity is also much greater when temperatures are higher.

Over history, human civilizations have expanded during warmer periods but declined when it got cold. For a history lesson, we recommend University of California Professor Brian Fagan's excellent book, "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History."

Obviously, higher temperatures support more plant life, and that in turn supplies the food for more animals. If you want more plants, animals, and healthier people, more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures are beneficial and certainly not "hazardous to health."

All sorts of bizarre regulations already are devoted to "protecting" us from warmer temperatures - regulations that do endanger health and safety. Take mile per gallon regulation rules for cars. These rules directly endanger health and life because smaller cars are simply inherently less able to protect their passengers. Then there are mandates for compact fluorescent light bulbs that contain mercury. The EPA itself has extremely detailed and scary instructions about requiring people to leave the area once a bulb is broken. You can't vacuum the spot, and if the spill occurs on a carpet the EPA claims that you should cut out that portion of the carpet and dispose of it properly.

There is little rational discussion on global warming these days. Consider the following questions. A "no" to any of them should logically imply that we should not restrict carbon dioxide.

(1) Are global temperatures rising? They were clearly rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but temperatures just as clearly have not gone up in the last 11 years. Indeed, the more recent numbers show evidence of cooling.

(2) Is mankind responsible for a significant and noticeable portion of an increase in temperatures? Mankind is responsible for just a few percent of greenhouse gases, and changes in greenhouse gases are responsible for just a tiny fraction of changes in global temperatures. The big factor is variations in the sun's energy output. Last December, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a list of 400 prominent scientists who questioned the general notion of significant manmade global warming.

(3) Are increased temperatures "bad"? That answer is hardly obvious. Higher temperatures could increase ocean levels by between 7 inches and 2 feet over the next 100 years. On the other hand, massive areas from Canada to Europe to Russia would be much more habitable than now. We have already noted the other benefits to life.

(4) Finally, let's assume that the answer to all three previous questions is "yes." Does that mean we need more regulations and taxes? No, that is still not clear.

If we believe that man-made global warming is "bad," we still don't want to eliminate all carbon emissions. Having no cars, no air conditioning, or no electricity would presumably be much worse than anything people claim results from global warming. We would want to balance the benefits with any costs of additional carbon dioxide emissions.

One can see government do stupid things daily; the staggeringly harmful course it is already on is breathtaking. But hold on to the gunwales, for the ship of state in President Obama's new environmental era will leave the United States pitching and yawing, with the world much poorer and less healthy because of it.

We feel an urge to paraphrase Winston Churchill. If the human race were to last ten thousand years, they will look back upon us and say, "This was their most ignoble hour."

Meditation on the Text of the Week

If Christ Be Not Raised, We are Most Pitiable

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.
I Corinthians 15:17

The significance of the resurrection of the body of Christ remains a conundrum to many Christians. They see the resurrection as an inessential oddity. This, in turn, explains why so many professing Christians over the past two centuries have been able to abandon a belief in the resurrection of the body of Christ, whilst still claiming to be Christian.

Yet our text definitively and emphatically declares that without the bodily resurrection of Christ, the whole Christian faith is worthless—a chimera, a vanity. The question is begged. Why? There are partial answers to the question, which, though true as far as they go, are yet incomplete. The partial answers appeal to matters of veracity and vindication.

The “veracity” argument is used in our text. Paul and the apostles had proclaimed Christ risen. If God did not actually raise Him bodily from the dead, the apostles would have borne false witness—they would have lied. (verses 14,15) The apostles would have said things about God and His Christ that were not true: therefore, all that they proclaimed on the authority of God would be equally suspect and erroneous. The credibility of the apostles as God's spokesman would be null and void. The faith of the Church would likewise be an empty vanity.

Now this argument draws a clear line in the sand between Christians who believe truthfully and those who claim the faith, yet deny the bodily resurrection of our Lord. If you deny the bodily resurrection, you deny the apostles and the Gospel writers. If you deny them, you deny God and the possibility of saving faith—since saving faith believes that what God has said is true. The emphatic biblical statement that “Abraham believed God and faith was imputed to him as righteousness” cannot apply: therefore, if you deny the resurrection, you are still in your sins.

The “vindication” argument goes further and considers the matter in terms of the atonement and the work of Christ upon the Cross. The undoubted Christian (apostolic) faith is that Christ bore our sins in His body upon the Cross. He bore our guilt and our penalty. He descended in to hell in our place. If God had left Him in hell it would only have been because the atonement was incomplete or inadequate. It would not be finished; Christ would, therefore, have been wrong in His sixth word from the Cross, when He declared: “It is finished”--that is, it is over. It is done.

Therefore, God raised Him up to vindicate the Son and His atonement. His resurrection from the dead declares to His people and to the world that full and complete atonement for the sins of His people had been accomplished and that the wrath of God was fully satisfied against our sins. (This is intimated in Hebrews 1:3: “When He has made purification for our sins, He sat down at the right hand of God.”) The resurrection also declared that Christ Himself was sinless and death could not hold Him. The resurrection is, therefore, at the same time, a vindication of the perfect sinlessness of our Saviour. (Acts 2:24)

But to these considerations, we must add a third. Christ had to be raised bodily from the dead because He came to save His people from their sins and His people are bodily, fleshly and material beings. If He were not to save them in-body, He would not save them at all. If Christ had not been raised bodily, then there is no life for men in the future. That is why Paul declares, “If we had only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied.” (I Corinthians 15: 19) Without a bodily resurrection of Christ, there is no eternal life to come for men.

Now this argument seems strange to many today. But there is a reason it lacks force. It is because ever since the early Church a synthesis between Greek and Christian thought was promulgated which has infected and done great damage to the Church ever since. It is an error we have yet to root out. As Oscar Cullmann has put it: “ . . . down through the history of doctrine to the present day there can be traced a great misunderstanding, upon the basis of which that which is claimed as 'Christian' in reality is Greek.”
Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), p.54.

The root of this heresy or apostasy from biblical Christianity is the belief that the real perfect realm is a timeless mystical sphere where the material and the body has no place. This Greek world view was deliberately revived by the Enlightenment, and its influence continues strongly to this day. In principle, this heresy sees the bodily resurrection of our Lord as a backward step—the vestige of an earthly and primitive mind. In asserting the bodily resurrection of Christ, the apostles were merely reflecting their primitive ignorance of reality. This world-view is quite at ease with denying the bodily resurrection of our Lord—it is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. If there is to be any salvation at all, it will only come through escaping the material and the bodily to the timeless realm of ideas and pure thought—that is, to the realm of the divine. This explains why many modern professing Christians, caught in the thrall of Greek pagan ideas, have been more than willing to deny the physical resurrection of the Christ. It is nought (they say) but a primitive symbol of moving to a higher (non-material) plane of existence. Such make shipwreck of their faith.

When God created the world, and man as His image bearer in it, He created him body and soul. The body is just as much the perfect image of God as man's mind and his soul. Thus, when Christ came forth to redeem mankind and the world, He rose bodily as the first born from death. If He were not to rise corporally from the dead, man would still be shattered, and broken, still under the penalty of sin. His resurrection would not be a resurrection of man. For perfect, sinless man is ever a material and physical being. Christ could not be the Head of a new human race if it were not a material and physical race: for the sinless perfection of the old race lay intrinsically in those corporate aspects.

That is why Paul declares that if we do not continue in eternity as material and corporal beings Christ is of no significance for us beyond this life. We have no hope of eternity. We will cease to exist as the perfect beings God created in the first place.

Thus, the resurrection is the proof that Christ is indeed restoring and saving us in every way. It is proof that His atonement and salvation is complete and total. It is proof that in Christ we are indeed a new creation; the old has passed away, and that all things have become renewed. That is why the resurrection is at the centre of the Christian faith.

Scholastic Mythbusters, Part I

Those Killjoy Puritans

One of the more pernicious myths of our age is that knowledge, particularly "modern" knowledge, is objective. The terms “rational”, “scientific”, “factual”, “objective” and “truth” are used as virtual equivalents. If something is said to be scientific, it is thereby considered necessarily factual, rational, and true. If it is rational, it must be scientific—and so forth.

This state of affairs rests on a stinking morass of decomposing assumptions. But because the grass appears green over the detritus, both the unthinking masses and the professional academics think all is well in the garden. Until, of course, a renegade starts to poke around and discovers the mess underneath.

We can add one more attribute to that which is factual, rational, scientific, and true. In our modern Age, repetition equates to truth. This is why urban legends and conspiracy theories are so persistent. Something incessantly repeated must be credible. After all, we live in the age of Enlightenment.

What this has produced in our modern Age is breathtaking arrogance amongst academics and professional scholars, on the one hand, and a tendency to be fooled or duped, on the other. The more our Age has asserted the primacy of reason, science, facts and truth, the more gullible and ignorant it has become.

Philosophers such as Polanyi and Popper have pointed out that the more truly rational and objective scientists are, the more they are sceptical, doubtful, and questioning. As the quality of scientists and academics declines, assumptions are, well, assumed—unconsciously, and without question. They are treated as beyond doubt, particularly if one wants to get a job in academia and have the respect of colleagues.

In this series of posts we will provide some examples of persistent errors, in unrelated fields, held intact as being true, objective, etc. by scholars and professional academics for years—yet which finally are demonstrated to be just plain wrong. They all beg the question of how scholarship could have failed so dismally, for so long.

Firstly, in the field of music. Percy Scholes, in his delightful and exhaustively researched volume, The Puritans and Music (Oxford: University Press, 1934, reprinted 1969), exposes the prevailing academic prejudice that the Puritans were killjoys who hated and suppressed music, fine clothes, fashion, art, drama, dancing, and opera. He reviews the copious works, all of which make the allegation, and most of which rely upon one another for authority and support (that is, they cite each other as authorities on the subject) on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, consider the following typical assertion:

The Pilgrims or Puritans . . . would have deemed concerts a very heterodox thing. . . . At the very start both Pilgrims and Puritans, although differing on many points of doctrine, united in a distrust of music. . . . The Pilgrims would have abolished it all but for the fact that the ancients enjoyed psalm singing in their religious services. (L C Elson, History of American Music—1915).

To this day, the myth remains powerful.

But it is a myth. Scholes demonstrates that if one lays prejudice and ideological (and probably religious) cant aside and actually studies the period and the historical evidence available from the time, the myth explodes and the Puritans emerge as a music loving, fun loving, boisterous and vibrant people. Scholes writes:

It has been my experience, during the months of study which the book has necessarily entailed, to find that every charge against the Puritans of freakishness or crankiness, when one looks into it, turns out to be empty. The Puritans were, it now seems clear to me, just normal English people of the period, of a particular religious trend of thought. (p.115)

We will cite but two instances. Firstly Oliver Cromwell was actually a great lover of music—Scholes goes so far as to call him an undoubted, genuine connoisseur. At the marriage of two of his daughters (which occurred at the same time) the feasting, the musical performance, and the festive dancing went on to five o'clock in the morning. (Needless to say, Cromwell was a Puritan of Puritans.)

And what of the dark clothes in which modern representations of Puritans are incessantly portrayed? That too is myth. It appears to have arisen because scholars assumed that that is what Puritans ought to have been like. It amounts to a kind of academic and scholarly ad hominem. But the facts are very different. Scholes (p. 105) cites authorities describing the Puritan Vice Chancellor of Oxford (a university which formally had supported the Stuart monarchy.)

The Puritan Vice-Chancellor's dress he (Anthony Wood, 1659) described in detail, and very fine he must have looked walking down the High with his “hair powdred, cambric band with large costly band-strings, velvet jacket, breeches set round at knee with ribbons pointed, and Spanish leather boots with cambric tops.”

This was John Owen, DD, the Independent divine, one of the two or three most eminent Puritan preachers and most learned Puritan authors of the seventeenth century, Cromwell's chaplain in Ireland, the preacher of the sermon to Parliament the day after the execution of the King, of the thanksgiving sermon for the victory of Worcester, and of Ireton's funeral sermon. . . . A Puritan of the Puritans, a man of saintly life, who on the Restoration sacrificed all his career rather than conform against his conscience—and by the way, a flute player!

Well, the evidence uncovered by Scholes is voluminous and both exposes the myth for what it is, and explodes it. But the question is begged: How could so many scholars be fooled for so long? We suspect that in our rationalistic Age it occurs because they believe their own press. They all too often assume scholarly objectivity and proceed blithely to assert as fact what is mere supposition. Self-criticism has waned. Consequently, ignorance has risen.

The Enlightenment, with its deifying of human reason, in its belief that the fruit or produce of human reason was in actuality the voice of god, leads to credulity, error, myth, and ignorance. Post modernism has had a salutary effect in that it has exposed the objective rationalism of the modern world to ridicule—which is appropriate. Just as Elijah, the prophet of the Living God, lampooned and mocked the idols of his day, post modernism has lifted its voice up to mock the hubris of modern rationalism.

But, in the end, post modernism cannot carry the day, for it too is just another idol. It leaves us with a nuclear winter where academics live in holes and shelters, but few things grow.

In our next post, we will take up another modern example of rationalistic myths—this one drawn from the field of ancient Egyptian chronology.

Where has That New World Order Gone?

The Time of the West Seems Over

Remember back to the days of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Remember how politicians spoke grandiosely of a "Peace Dividend"? US President Bush(Sr) proclaimed the beginning of a New World Order. Things were going to change. Humanity was entering a new era.

Forgive us, but we are finding the proclamation of a New World Order passe these days, since hardly a month goes by without some political leader or other declaring yet another one. The latest is Gordon Brown, who in his career has probably pronounced about twenty of them, declaring at the conclusion of the recent G20 meeting that--yes, you guessed it--the world had just entered another New World Order.

Well, actually, the Preacher in Ecclesiastes had already pronounced that nothing was new under the sun. It is not surprising, then, that the New World Order turned out to be pretty much like an Older World Order. The second verse has proved remarkably like the first.

We came across the following prognostication by the late Samuel P Huntingdon the other day--written in 1995, but speculating on what we might be facing in the next few decades. Apparently he was not convinced about "New World Order" rhetoric.

Modernization has generally enhanced the material level of Civilization throughout the world. But has it also enhanced the moral and cultural dimensions of Civilization? In some respects this appears to be the case. Slavery, torture, vicious abuse of individuals, have become less and less acceptable in the contemporary world. Is this, however, simply the result of the impact of Western civilization on other cultures and hence will a moral reversion occur as Western power declines?

Much evidence exists in the 1990's for the relevance of the "sheer chaos" paradigm of world affairs: a global breakdown of law and order, failed states and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world, a global crime wave, transnational mafias and drug cartels, increasing drug addiction in many societies, a general weakening of the family, a decline in trust and social solidarity in many countries, ethnic, religious, and civilizational violence and rule by the gun prevalent in much of the world.

In city after city--Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Shanghai, London, Rome, Warsaw, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Bogota, Washington--crime seems to be soaring and basic elements of Civilization fading away. People speak of a global crisis in governance. The rise of transnational corporations producing economic goods is increasingly matched by the rise of transnational criminal mafias, drug cartels, and terrorist gangs violently assaulting Civilization. Law and order is the first prerequisite of Civilization and in much of the world--Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, the Middle East--it appears to be evaporating . . . .

On a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possible descending upon humanity.
The Clash of Civilizations, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 321.

Nearly fifteen years on, Huntingdon's prognostication appears to be coming true. For a while the world "united" around the Coalition of the Willing in an effort to combat terrorism. The coalition fell apart over the war in Iraq.

The global balance of power is now definitely shifting. The West is in decline. Debt has progressively enslaved it to the creditor nations. In turn, debt in the West has been an inevitable outcome of welfare entitlement rights, which have cut through the moral fibre of Western nations with deadly force. The culture of welfare entitlement rights, universal throughout the West, has sliced through savings habits relentlessly (why save when someone else will provide for you). When savings evaporate, dependence results. It has also fed a culture of instantaneous demand gratification and an expectation of the omni-competence of government to solve each and every problem.

The Western liberal-academic complex has championed this pseudo-culture and bludgeoned the West into subjugation with its pagan human rights philosophies being propagated at every opportunity.

But inner spiritual subjugation inevitably transmutes into external subjugation. So the West is increasingly dependant, first upon its own governments, and then upon creditor nations, which fund their governments. Influence and power wanes correspondingly. Western powers, including the US, are simply unable to afford their military any longer. It is impossible over time to satiate rising welfare entitlement demands and the costs of global military superiority at the same time. Powers like China are now at the cutting edge of military research and technology. Normal service is resuming.

Huntingdon's description is likely to prove remarkably accurate. But will it result in a Dark Age? For some it will. It would be a Dark Age for a globalist or an internationalist or someone who genuinely believes in the rectitude and possibility of a "New World Order". But the decline of the arrogant self-righteous West is not a bad thing in itself. After all, the humanist Western Enlightenment bequeathed to the world the Reign of Terror, two world wars, the Age of Colonialism, Western imperialism, the idolatry of nationalism, National Socialism, the African slave trade, Communist dictatorships, the United Nations, and statism. Only the deeply prejudiced would mourn the passing of its bloody global hegemony.

In the coming phase, nations and governments would do well to mind their own business, return to basic principles, be friends with all, enemies of none, and adopt a foreign policy of strict, armed neutrality. Meanwhile for the covenant people of the Living God, the future remains bright. As Western idols come to "lie broke in the Temple of Baal" we expect people will be freed from their thrall.

It is through the vale of suffering that a rebellious people will finally return to the God of their fathers.

Climate Change Buffoons

The End is Coming

We have been treated to a plethora of doomsday announcements in the media over the past weeks. The occasion was a gathering of "scientists" in Copenhagen in order to increase political pressure upon the UN Global Warming conference to be held in that city later this year.

These modern-day flat earthers, complete with their breathless Chicken-Little siren songs, are becoming just far too predictable. It is hard to keep everybody at the fever pitch of crisis-alarm all the time, and the poor old flat earthers are starting to feel the load.

So, out come some even more histrionic and extreme pronouncements. It is ever worse that we thought, folks. Yes. It is.

So, for those of you who like the horror genre, satiate yourselves on the following:


Toxic Sea:

But a failure or fudge at Copenhagen risks dissipating the momentum built up over a number of years, and there may not be another chance. Hence the increasingly extreme rhetoric from the activists. The latest examples include, for instance, an almost hysterical article in last weekend's Sunday Times headlined "the toxic sea", in which we are warned that the oceans are being turned into "acidified soups" and that we will have to mourn the "tiny marine organisms dissolving in acidified water". The horror story suggests that ocean pH could go as low as 7.3 (from its current approximately 8.1) by 2300. In reality, this means going from very mildly alkaline to just on the alkaline side of neutral (pH 7). Acidified soup? I think not.

One Hundred Months

Prince Charles has chimed in. He has stentoriously informed the world that we only have one hundred months left to save the plant.

Existential in Nature

Here's a beauty. The papers presented at Copenhagen apparently show that climate change is far worse than we feared. It is "existential in its nature and all consuming in its scope . . ." Whoooo. Feel the goose bumps. The full skinny goes on:

The impact of climate change, existential in its nature and all consuming in its scope, will be far more severe and felt far earlier than previously thought.

The latest scientific research presented at this week's meeting of climate scientists in Copenhagen confirms what many had privately feared: we are on track for the worst case scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change two years ago, and the instabilities in the climate system coupled with the fact that many natural carbon sinks are beginning to fail mean that it could be worse still.

All the latest climate science suggests global average temperatures are rising in line with expectations, but carbon emissions are rising faster than anticipated and natural systems are responding more dramatically than expected to even modest temperature rises.

For example, sea levels have risen an average of 3mm a year since 1993, an increase of 50 per cent on the average rate of sea level increase during the 20th century. The rise is faster than expected because previous models failed to anticipate the rate at which glaciers would move into the sea. Based on the current trends sea levels will not rise by between 18cm and 59cm by 2100 as predicted by the IPCC, but by more than one metre putting a tenth of the global population at risk of coastal flooding.

Similarly, new evidence reveals that the world's major carbon sinks, the tropical rainforest, Siberian permafrost and the oceans, are all much more sensitive to even small average temperature increases than previously thought. According to one model a temperature increase of just two degrees would result in 20 to 40 per cent of the Amazon dying off, releasing yet more CO2 into the atmosphere. The worst case scenario predictions that rising temperatures will result in more warming gases being released triggering runaway climate change are already being realised.

All this means that we are currently on track for warming of around five to six degrees by the end of the century. (Italics, ours)

But wait, there's more. Copenhagen has said its worse.

That might sound like hyperbole, but at five to six degrees warmer vast swathes of the tropical and sub tropical regions would become uninhabitable, sea levels would rise by at least a metre putting coastal cities and entire countries at risk of inundation, the rainforests would be effectively wiped out, acidification of the oceans would create giant dead zones, and mass migration would spark near unprecedented levels of global conflict. One scientist predicted the global population could crash to just one billion people - between 2050 and 2100 the world could be literally decimated.

And the really scary thing is that most previous climate studies have been far too optimistic in their predictions. This time, if they are even half right we are on a path towards utter devastation. (Italics, ours)

Utter devastation, huh. Now you have got our attention.

Ok, so let's not get technical, but what is happening here is a few measurements taken recently of sea levels or melting ice has been put into those pesky models, and projected out for a hundred years--and what do you know--calamity, doom, death, and destruction. The end is coming.

Oh, we have an idea. It has been recently reported in the Edmonton Journal that fourteen weather stations on Alberta have recorded their lowest readings since records began in 1880.

This past Tuesday, Edmonton International Airport reported an overnight low of -41.5 C, smashing the previous March low of -29.4 C set in 1975. Records just don't fall by that much, but the airport's did. Records are usually broken fractions of degrees. The International's was exceeded by 12 degrees.

To give you an example of how huge is the difference between the old record and the new, if Edmonton were to exceed its highest-ever summer temperature by the same amount, the high here some July day would have to reach 50 C. That's a Saudi Arabia-like temperature.

OK, let's do a "Copenhagen" and put that little bit of data in our models, and project it out a hundred years. Doom. Doom. The end is nigh. We are all going to freeze to death.

Geo-Engineering

You know things have to be real bad when even the Royal Society gets involved and is prepared to plan for "geo-engineering". No! No! Not that! Not geo-engineering! Yes.

Ok, so what is geo-engineering. Simply put, it is mad scientists at work, having to do mad things because desperate times call for desperate measures.

It means artificial trees and ships spraying droplets into the air. We kid you not. So passes the Royal Society.

The threat of devastating climate change is now so great that some scientists say it is time to investigate a Plan B - geo-engineering on a planetary scale.

Such methods of altering the world’s climate may become necessary, they say, unless emissions of greenhouse gases fall within five years.

Which is certainly not going to happen. So geo-engineering it is, then.

Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction - such as creating artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide, or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth - are coming under serious scrutiny as temperatures and CO2 emissions continue to rise. The issue has become so pressing that the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, is preparing a report on the feasibility of geo-engineering.

Professor John Shepherd, chairman of the working group, said: “Our study aims to separate the science from the science fiction and offer recommendations on which options deserve serious consideration.”

The report is not yet complete but the personal view of Professor Brian Launder, one of its contributors, is that without CO2 reductions or geo-engineering, “civilisation as we know it will end within our grandchildren’s lifetime”.

Oh, no--civilisation is going to end. Our poor grandchildren.

Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University is investigating how ships could spray droplets of sea water into the atmosphere where they would evaporate, leaving tiny salt crystals to rise on air currents into the clouds.

The crystals would act as “nuclei” around which water vapour could condense and thus increase the reflective power of the clouds, bouncing more of the sun’s energy back into space. But critics warn that although such schemes might lower temperatures swiftly, they would have to be maintained for long periods and the side-effects are unknown.

Oh, but then comes the big clanger. Wait for it. There are dangers lurking here.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “Anything that alters the climate in a different way from reducing carbon has inherent dangers because we don’t understand the climate well enough.”

Say, what! We don't understand the climate well enough. But apparently well enough to be absolutely rock solid, one hundred percent gold plated certain that CO2 is causing global warming. How pathetic are these people. They profess certain impeccable knowledge and profound ignorance of the same thing at the same time, and still expect to be treated with respect.

Well folks, its OK because the good old climate flat-earthers are not going to sit idly by. They are planning to beef up their propaganda campaign. Here's an insight into their latest thinking:

To give us the slightest chance of avoiding catastropic levels of climate change we need a far greater sense of urgency than has been displayed to date. Political and business leaders need to act, and they need to act now.

To this end, the scientific, political and business community need to instigate an immediate change in the terminology they are using to describe global warming. Environmental campaigner George Monbiot's suggestion this week that we should substitute the passive "climate change" for the more accurate "climate breakdown" might seem like a semantic side issue, but if adopted widely enough it could have a huge impact.

Well, knock me down with a feather. First it was "global warming" but the clever chappies worked out that you could not rely on the temperatures rising all the time. So they changed the rubric to "climate change"--which worked well for a time because everything that happened in the climate constituted change of one kind or another, and was good for a headline. But after a while that wore a bit thin, since climate is changing all the time, so---- so what? Now, a new rubric. Climate breakdown! Sounds like a professional wresting show. Yup that's it. A huge impact is coming.

These people are propagandists pure and simple. They are a disgrace to professional science. They are the flat earthers of our day. They are beneath contempt. As are all the politicians and leaders who trot supinely and mindlessly in their train.

Letters to the Prince

The Dark Arts of Power

The right wing portion of the blogosphere is aghast and agog over the appointment of Michael Cullen, destroyer-of-other-people's-wealth extraordinaire, to the board of New Zealand Post. Adam Smith canvasses the spectrum of reactions here.

There are two possible scenarios to explain this deed--both of which turn around the person and nature of one John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Scenario one argues that John Key is the most apolitical Prime Minister this country has ever seen. He is running the country like it were a business, with a focused, objective, and detached perspective that measures results and results only. Consequently, the fact that former Deputy Prime Minister Cullen, former political opponent, has called Key a "rich prick" and slandered him in the most extreme derisory language in the past is unimportant. Getting the job done is what is critical. According to this scenario, Key will not be interested in what Cullen thinks of Key or of the new government. He will only be considering whether Cullen could serve effectively as a director of NZ Post (a government owned business.)

There is much to support this view of Key. Having being one of the world's best currency traders means that he had to learn to face up to the markets with brutal realism, dealing with the world as it was, not the world of preference or sentiment. This forces one to be both humble and disciplined. Currency traders who have a view of the world and seek to superimpose it upon their trading, tend to blow up. Traders who put aside their views or relegate them to the back room whilst dealing with what actually faces them day by day, tend to be more successful. In this view, present reality is everything. The past is irrelevant and a distraction.

If John Key is operating in this vein, he will indeed be the most apolitical Prime Minister this country has ever seen-or will ever likely see again. It will also make him the most pragmatic Prime Minister--which of course is a double edged sword.

However, there is another scenario. This represents John Key as the subtle, clever web-weaver, who is thinking three or four steps ahead, and is playing a long, long game. In this scenario, the appointment of Michael Cullen to the board of New Zealand Post is the ultimate payback.

Now before we describe the possible Machiavellian nature of this appointment, we note in passing that there is a body of evidence to suggest that Key plays a very long game. The rapprochement with the Maori party, when there was no electoral reason to do so, is a clear sign that Key is thinking in terms of decades, not the next election. Most acknowledge that this move has probably changed the political landscape in New Zealand for years to come.

But what of the dark arts? Well, NZ Post is in a parlous position. The post is now last century's communication paradigm. Postal volumes are shrinking drastically under competition from e-mail. This is true for postal services globally. It is a dying business, awaiting its coup de grace.

NZ Post, however, has two other businesses which offer some commercial hope. The first is a courier business--which is not dying, since it is not under threat at all from electronic communication. Goods and parcels cannot be sent by e-mail. They have to be delivered--and volumes will continue to rise as commerce increases. Secondly, NZ Post owns a small populist bank--Kiwibank.

The dark arts scenario runs like this: NZ will continue to run far too big a deficit for the next two or three years. Key and his deputy, Treasurer Bill English will use this deficit as a lever to build political and public support for the sale of non-core state assets. This will become a major theme at the next election.

After the election, NZ Post will be split into three operating units. The postal service will be separated to run at a loss, partially funded by the Crown, but with rising postage rates to help minimise the loss, until finally it becomes prohibitively expensive to post anything, and it is wound up.

The courier business (which is a joint venture with DHL) operates in a competitive market. It will be sold off to very willing buyers to reduce the deficit.

Kiwibank will be floated on the New Zealand exchange. It will be floated as a majority New Zealand owned bank, with foreign ownership being restricted. Sold off under a euphoric "buy-New Zealand" campaign, most of Kiwibanks 600,000 customers will become shareholders.

Now picture Dr Cullen (by this time Chairman of NZ Post). His company is hung, drawn and quartered as he watches from the galleries. As Chairman he will have to support the spectacle. He will become an unwilling participant in the sale of state assets, which he patently abhors. He will have to watch as the dirty capitalists make off with the courier business and as his little bank is privatised. But he is unable to oppose the concept of selling it to mums and dads. He has to get out there and promote the sale to the public. Ah, the delicious irony.

Finally, he is left with just a declining moribund postal business, where losses mount by the year. It is eventually shut down as a commercial disaster. So passes Michael Cullen--whose legacy will be failure. Growing old, sitting on the rotting carcass of NZ Post, will be an apt end for the politician who did so much to impoverish New Zealand.

So, which is it? Is Key the ultimate apolitical pragmatist? Or, is he the Machiavellian practitioner of the Dark Arts? Or, both?

Peter Singer: Free Market Homicide

Why Peter Singer Makes the New Atheists Nervous

The following quotation is taken from a recent issue of Christianity Today. It was written by Dinesh D'Souza

Some of Singer's critics have called him a Nazi and compared his proposals to Hitler's schemes for eliminating those perceived as unwanted and unfit. A careful reading of his work, however, shows that Singer is no Hitler. He doesn't want state-sponsored killings. Rather, he wants the decision to kill to be made by private individuals like you and me. Instead of government-conducted genocide, Singer favors free-market homicide.

Why haven't the atheists embraced Peter Singer? I suspect it is because they fear that his unpalatable views will discredit the cause of atheism. What they haven't considered, however, is whether Singer, virtually alone among their numbers, is uncompromisingly working out the implications of living in a truly secular society, one completely purged of Christian and transcendental foundations. In Singer, we may be witnessing someone both horrifying and yet somehow refreshing: an intellectually honest atheist.

Read the full piece here.

Dinesh D'Souza, a former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, is author of What's So Great About Christianity and other books.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Never Has Such Sorrow and Joy Met Together

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face. He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Isaiah 53: 3

In the general human mind there is a “vindication motif” which men find instinctively and intuitively appealing. Aspects of the motif occur when someone is being treated unjustly or in a manner unworthy of their true (hidden) merit or status. They suffer. They are rejected. Then there is the revealing of their true glory or worth (often through the hands of a redeemer or saviour figure). Finally there is the aspect of glory or rejoicing at their vindication.

Children's folk tales are replete with this theme. Cinderella is an example, as is the Ugly Duckling and Snow White. Robin Hood, Dumas's Man in the Iron Mask, Hugo's Jean Valjean, and Tolkien's Aragorn are adult examples. The reason this motif makes appealing and popular literature is due to the vindication motif itself having such powerful traction in the human heart. An intrinsic sense of justice leads us to rejoice in the salvation or restoration of one unjustly treated. But more, there is a resonant joy at a person being restored to that which rightly belongs to them. The world is being put to rights.

The “vindication motif”, so powerful and prevalent in literature, is an echo of the Suffering Servant of the Lord. In our Lord the motif comes to its highest and most absolute expression—not in story or myth, but in historical reality. Firstly, there is the descent into ignominy. Never has any being traveled from such heights to such depths. As Paul said, He did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, for it was His already. But He emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond servant, and being made in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2: 6—8)

But the extent of His degradation was also notorious. Born in abject poverty. Subject to the curses of the Covenant all His earthly life. Worse off than the foxes of the earth and the birds of the air—who at least had a place to lay their heads. A Man who clearly bore the disfavour of God. He was despised of both man and God, and we did not esteem Him.

There are few conditions so hideous or shameful that cause people to turn away, not being able to look. Thus the Suffering Servant was forsaken of both men and God.

Yet the suffering was not deserved. He came as the Son of Man amongst us and He lived and died as a wretch without just cause. He suffered because the iniquity “of us all”, says Isaiah, was laid to Him. Just as the scape goat symbolically had the the sins of all Israel placed upon it, and took them out into the desert, so the Son of Man took and bore the degradation of our sin upon Himself and carried them beyond to gate to Golgotha, there to be sent to Hell in our place.

Then God highly exalted Him, and bestowed upon Him a name above every name, that as the Name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess Him as Lord. Here is the ultimate vindication motif. If our hearts and minds thrill at the final restoration and vindication of a Jean Valjean, how much more at the vindication and glory of our Saviour. We know Him no longer “after the flesh”, to use Paul's phrase, but in His glory—and it brings us great joy and delight.

At last the Son of Man is where He deserves to be. The earth and the heavens have been put right.

But there is something further. He did all these things as our Covenant Head—as our representative. We (that is, His people—those who believe in Him) suffered, were crucified, died, and vindicated in Him. The vindication motif belongs not just to our Lord—the One who was first the Suffering Servant, and then the King of glory—but to us. In Him, God has vindicated each one and raised up each one. We have been restored to the glory that Adam had before the Fall. This is how God now regards His precious people.

Calvary is for us a deep vale of tears, yet at the same time, a place of overwhelming, resonating joy.

It's Official: Deep Calm

"We are Just Not Used to This"

For those of you that follow such things, Nasa has now come out of the closet to announce officially that we are amidst a "deep solar minimum."

Something is happening with the sun--and it is of sufficient magnitude that the last comparable event was a hundred years ago. Such solar minima have occurred in history before. They have all been associated with prolonged cold periods on earth--sometimes sufficiently severe to be identified as "mini-ice ages." We reproduce the official Nasa statement. Deep Solar Minimum

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).

It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.



Above: The sunspot cycle from 1995 to the present. The jagged curve traces actual sunspot counts. Smooth curves are fits to the data and one forecaster's predictions of future activity.

Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It's a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s. Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun; they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and intense UV radiation. Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years: plot.

The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it's right on time. "We're due for a bit of quiet—and here it is," says Pesnell.

But is it supposed to be this quiet? In 2008, the sun set the following records:

A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.

A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.



Above: Space-age measurements of the total solar irradiance (brightness summed across all wavelengths). This plot, which comes from researcher C. Fröhlich, was shown by Dean Pesnell at the Fall 2008 AGU meeting during a lecture entitled "What is Solar Minimum and Why Should We Care?"

A 55-year low in solar radio emissions: After World War II, astronomers began keeping records of the sun's brightness at radio wavelengths. Records of 10.7 cm flux extend back all the way to the early 1950s. Radio telescopes are now recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955: plot. Some researchers believe that the lessening of radio emissions is an indication of weakness in the sun's global magnetic field. No one is certain, however, because the source of these long-monitored radio emissions is not fully understood.

All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.

"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."

Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now. To match those minima in terms of depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.

In a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like." A fleet of spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, the five THEMIS probes, Hinode, ACE, Wind, TRACE, AIM, TIMED, Geotail and others are studying the sun and its effects on Earth 24/7 using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago. Their measurements of solar wind, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields show that solar minimum is much more interesting and profound than anyone expected.

Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of top solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. Pesnell has surveyed the scientific literature and prepared a "piano plot" showing the range of predictions. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.

Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.

But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.


Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

TOTUS Defamed

Unnecessary Leak

There is something eerie about the "Voice of the Free World" needing a teleprompter whenever he speaks. Obama's dependence upon the machine has generated the slogan "There is no POTUS without TOTUS."

Trust the Brits to put the matter in Punch-like perspective.



With acknowledgements to the Blog of TOTUS.

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion?

A Very Modern Condition.

The great guide of the world is fashion and its god is respectability--two phantoms at which brave men laugh! How many of you look around on society to know what to do; you watch the general current and then float upon it; you study the popular breeze and shift your sails to suit it.

True men do not so! You ask--Is it fashionable? If it be fashionable, it must be done. Fashion is the law of multitudes, but it is nothing more than the common consent of fools.

Charles Spurgeon, 1890

Losing Ground

The Declension of Households

In his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966) Samuel Huntingdon points out that Islam has grown faster than Christianity in the latter half of the twentieth century. He believes that in the long run this will continue. Why? Huntingdon's answer is terse: “Christianity spreads primarily by conversion; Islam by conversion and reproduction.” (p. 65)

In recent decades the population in Islamic societies has exploded. Islam is a religion requiring conformity—external conformity. Thus,the children of Islamic households are conditioned to be Islamic. On two counts, Islam has grown adherents more quickly than Christianity. Firstly, Islamic families tend to have more children. Secondly, Huntingdon implies that the children of Christian households are less likely to walk in the faith of their parents.

Are these two factors true? We suspect so. Ought they to be true? Emphatically not.

With respect to the first factor—the greater fecundity of Islamic households—we can observe that strong population growth is often a phenomenon amongst poorer peoples—and most Islamic societies are poor. There are a variety of factors at play here. Oftentimes, the very real prospect of the death of one or more children through sickness or malnutrition leads families to prefer larger numbers of children. Another factor is lack of access to effective contraception. Another consideration is the preference for larger numbers of children so that the parents will be taken care of in older age. Children are seen as the best retirement plan of all. Yet another reason is children represent an unpaid work force in the family business.

It has been shown frequently that when living standards rise, population growth tends to fall. Children are less necessary for economic reasons. People become more focused upon lifestyle and “quality of life” and the bearing and raising of children eventually comes to be seen as a “lifestyle choice” rather than a necessity.

But this should not explain why the population growth amongst Christian families should tailor off. If anything, rising living standards should see larger Christian families, not smaller. Greater prosperity means that Christians can support, clothe, educate, and sustain more children than former generations. They can employ home help if needed. They can put adequate food on the table. They can afford the Christian school fees, and so on.

We would expect Christian families to be larger because the bearing and raising of children amongst Christians is not a preference nor an issue of lifestyle choice. It is a spiritual duty. The divine command to mankind to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth has not been revoked. For Christians who have ceased rebelling against the Lord and have returned to Him, the command to be fruitful and multiply is to be taken seriously and responsibly obeyed, unless prevented or hindered by providences of one kind or another. In the Christian faith, children are vitally important and a great deal is focused upon them.

To the extent that this is not the case amongst Christians—to that extent we fear Christians have become conformed to the spirit of the age rather than to biblical precepts and commands. Children have become "rug rats" rather than a rich inheritance from the Lord. Thus we suspect that falling birth rates amongst Christian households reflects a deeper spiritual malaise.

The second factor implied by Huntingdon is that Christian families fail more often than not to bring up their children so that they, in their turn, walk in the faith of their fathers. If true (and we suspect it is) we need to ask why. For clearly this is not a biblical construct. The Scriptures would teach the exact opposite. God works His grace in and through families and households. “My covenant is with you, and your children” He says to Abraham. “This promise is to you and your children,” says Peter at Pentecost.

Once again, however, we suspect that many Christians are oblivious to these vital truths. They have adopted instead the rampant individualism of the Unbelieving world and become conformed to the spirit of the age. They have come to believe that faith and obedience is an intensely individualistic matter (individualism is one of the defining characteristics of the Unbelieving West) and not a household and family matter. But this is a terrible travesty. Either the Christian faith shapes and condition everyone in the household or it does not. If it does not, the household has conditioned the children to grow up as unbelievers. Either way, the household is the most powerful conditioning institution on the planet. God has made it so.

Christian parents are made and held responsible for the conditioning in the home. Either that conditioning is Christian or it is not. Either children are taught daily how to believe, live, act, pray and serve as Christians or they are not. If they are not, the parents will end up teaching them how not to believe, live, pray, act and serve as Christians. They consequently end up teaching them to live as unbelievers. These are the only two options.

Either way, Christian parents are teaching and conforming their children. The real question is, how are their children being conditioned? To live in faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the Lord?

The High Price of Being a "First World" Nation

Cleaning Up the Home Paddock

The issue of bail has been forefront again, with the revelation that a young man was murdered last year by a career criminal who was out on bail awaiting court hearings for other violent offences.

Haiden Mark Davis, 20, had amassed a dozen criminal convictions and was on bail for aggravated assault and theft the night he stabbed Augustine to death.

A New Zealand Law Society spokesman was yesterday defending the bail system. We were intrigued by some of his argumentation. He pointed out that we were a "First World" country, that was a party to international covenants, agreements and treaties which (effectively) bound us into the present bail system.

It begs the question, What does it mean to be "First World"? It became conventional in the last century to speak of three worlds. "First World" nations were those opposed to the communist bloc and which were democratic and had a Western legal tradition. They also tended to be the most wealthy nations. "Second World" was a term hardly used, but it was more implied. It referred to the international communist bloc and its aligned satellites. Then the term "Third World" was widely used to refer to those nations, non-aligned to either the "First" or "Second" world, mostly southern hemisphere, and mostly very poor. "Third World" became synonymous with backwardness and poverty.

It is a relief to know that New Zealand is a "First World" nation. Actually, the nomenclature is archaic, condescending and worthless. What the representative from the Law Society was trying to convey is that "leading nations" have signed up to basic western legal traditions, such as the presumed innocence of the accused. (Therefore, his argument ran, bail for accused people awaiting trial is a necessary and required institutional presumption of innocence, consistent with our treaties and obligations as a "First World" country.)

But there are many who are now thinking that the burden of being a "First World" country is becoming too heavy to bear. Hubris has dense mass.

We would rather New Zealand ditched all its UN international covenants and agreements and treaties--and, like the Swiss--concentrated upon getting things right at home. It is both arrogant and hypocritical to presume to tell other nations what to do. All UN international covenants are hoist on the petard of self-righteous hectoring. Most are worse than useless--they are actually quite dangerous--since it is only the so-called "First World" countries that care a fig about them.

We would rather that we actually worked at returning to the Western legal tradition in truth, rather than through the filter of hypocritical international covenants.

A speedy trial would be a good start. Justice delayed is justice denied. Our criminal court and justice system is notoriously slow--which, of course, increases the pressure for allowing bail for accused persons. Holding them in prison for lengthy periods awaiting trial does indeed presume against the innocent to a degree.

It is now routine for people to be arrested for crimes, while the police take months to complete their investigations, followed by additional months and months of delay waiting for a court date. This is clearly wrong. The rule should be no bail for those arrested--at least those with prior form, and charged with violent offences--with the principle of habeus corpus requiring a speedy trial. If there are insufficient criminal courts and justices, fund more. (Crime is a growth industry. The Government wants to stimulate the economy. Spend more on the justice system. Help unemployment, dear boy.) The present system allows for a lazy dilatory application of justice--who cares how long it takes. Years in some cases. No harm is being done. The accused is out on bail. There are plenty of other things to keep the criminal justice system busy.

The rule of no bail for accused needs to be supported by another principle: if a case does not come to trial within a certain delimited and defined period, the accused should be released and all charges dropped. That would put appropriate pressure on the police and the justice system to work quickly and more justly. It would also highlight the need to fund adequately the courts and criminal justice system. It would also help force a cut through of the bureaucratic pettifogging which presently bedevils the criminal court system and the Ministry of Justice, where delays are virtually universally acceptable to the courts, and prosecution and defence counsel. What is a few more days, months, and years amongst friends?

Appeals to "First World" status are nauseating. The New Zealand justice system needs to stop pirouetting as a prima donna on the world stage and focus upon our own "Third World" criminal justice system. We need to go back to first principles and conduct a root and branch reform. Forget the window dressing of UN covenants.

Abortion is a Touchstone Issue

Spare Us the Faux Outrage

One cannot help but be sardonically amused at the amount of heat (sans light) generated amongst Athenians over the issue of abortion. It is one of those issues which seems to get them all in a blather, yet one is left bemused as to why this ought to be the case.

We have been treated recently to yet another eructation on the issue--this time over a tragic case in Brazil where the following has been reported (assuming accuracy and truth in the reports): a nine year old child conceived twins through the sexual perversion of her stepfather, who raped her repeatedly. The doctors advised an abortion to terminate the pregnancy. It was subsequently done. The Roman Catholic church excommunicated the doctors, the mother, but not the rapist father. These are the facts as stated and they do not seem to be in dispute.

The Roman Catholic church has been vilified as an institution of medieval ignorance, unfit for the twenty-first century. People who have attempted to present an apologia for the ecclesiastical decisions have been imprecated to Hell.

This is rather ironic. Adam Smith, normally an urbane and reasoned commentator, is obviously very wound up about this issue. He actually excommunicates his opponent (but only if they call themselves a Christian). Presumably damning an opponent to "rot in Hell" is only of meaning to a Christian since an Unbeliever does not believe in the existence of Hell--the place where the Living God punishes sin and unrepentant sinners for ever. Strange. Hell is only existentially relevant to Unbelievers. Christians have been delivered from its maw.

So, let's get this straight. The Roman Catholic church excommunicates some people it believes are complicit in murder and actual perpetrators of murder. This so enrages folk that they in turn excommunicate those who support the action by calling down curses and imprecations upon them, consigning them to damnation.

We at Contra Celsum are not seeking to defend or approbate the ecclesiastical sentence of excommunication nor its administration in this particular case. We do not know enough about it. As for the practice of excommunication itself, the Scriptures command it--so that is sufficient. It neither needs nor requires human approbation. It requires obedience. The Scriptures direct that excommunication is to be applied to notorious public sinners who continue in their rebellious flagrant lifestyles, refusing to repent, yet insisting on remaining in the fellowship of the Church in good standing.

Particular sins do not disqualify one from being in the Body of Christ; persistent, stubborn, wilfulness in public sin does. After all, the Apostle Paul was a murderer; David was both a murderer and an adulterer; Peter was a cowardly denier of the Lord. All repented of their sin and because they were restored to fellowship with God Himself, the Church welcomed them.

So, in the case at hand, we do not know whether the doctors or the mother were repentant or were flagrantly rebellious. Nor do we know whether the step-father was repentant. Clearly incest is explicitly a matter for excommunication, since the man taken in sin in the Corinthian church was guilty of just this gross evil (I Corinthians 5). But these are matters for the Church, not the world; one does not know (and ought not to know) the attitudes and beliefs and testimony of those involved. But from the ground of Scripture, unless one knows those vital components, judgement in the matter is impossible.

Now, Athens gets itself in a tizz over how the Church is populated with sinners--with people who have done terrible things and (to their minds) are unworthy of eternal life. There is an implicit self-righteousness in this. "Since I have not done terrible deeds, the Christian Church is beneath my contempt if it lowers its standards to admit such notorious sinners." Athens cannot get its head around the fact that the Church is a society of repentant, forgiven sinners--many of them gross or terrible sinners.

Athens still works on the principle of human self-righteousness--the false belief that somehow their good works will outweigh their minor peccadilloes and that if indeed there is a god, they will be ok in the great assizes to come. They have closed their mind to the declaration of the Living God that "the soul that sins, it shall die", period. They have probably never realised that "Whoever keeps the whole Law (of God) and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all." (James 2:10) One sin is sufficient; no amount of righteousnesses will ever make up or atone for that which offends the Living God. Sin is "any want of conformity unto, or transgression of the Law of God," and it is infinitely offensive to the Living God.

So wound up has Athens become over these things that the Dominion Post would excommunicate the entire Roman Catholic church, declaring it to be unfit for the world. Others would imprecate and curse people to Hell who seek to defend the actions of the church.

Jerusalem is not phased by this. It is to be expected. Abortion is one of those issues which highlights the divide--the great, unbridgeable divide between the two Cities. Athens is built on the assertion of human rationalism: that which is true is that which can be rationally established where the mind of man is the ground, the arbiter, the determiner, and the interpreter of truth.

In Athens, man establishes the gods. Jerusalem, however, is built on the presuppostion of the Living God. Men can only think rationally and truthfully if they think their thoughts after Him. In Jerusalem, God establishes man.

Thus, in the issue of abortion, Athens seeks to establish rationalistically whether the babe in the womb is a human being or not. It largely concludes that the babe is not a human being; to kill the unborn child, therefore, is not murder. All its outrages and imprecations from that point on depend upon the religious conviction that the unborn child is not a human being. How do we Athenians know that? Because we, Man, assert that it is true. We, Man, are gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves.

Imagine how less strident, less vitriolic and self-righteous would be the pronouncements on the Brazil case if Athens entertained for a nono-second that the unborn twins were actually human souls. "A terrible crime has been committed, the result of which has been the conception of two innocent human beings. Terribly, regrettably, horribly in dealing with the consequences of the crime, we have had to kill two innocent people." At best, if this were the case, Athens would be claiming that it was compelled to do evil that good might come. (As an ethical proposition of course, such utilitarianism would itself stink--but that is another discussion.)

No, the stridency, the indignation, the religious self-righteousness is grounded in the emphatic, undoubted belief that the children in the nine year old's womb were definitively and most certainly not human beings. Why? One what grounds? Because we say so; we assert so; we insist that it is so. We can determine life and death for ourselves. We are the champions of the world! That is Athens in a nutshell. Tawdry? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Irrational? Yes. But in Athens, that is as good as it gets.

So, spare us the faux outrage over the tragic events in Brazil. Spare us your curses, imprecations, and excommunications. We, in Jerusalem, do not belong to your Church of Divinised Human Rationalism. To be sure, and to be truthful, once we did. We used to be card carrying members. We raged and fulminated with the best of them. But we were made to see that it was all terribly wrong. It was nothing more than a subterfuge; a vain attempt to cover over our own hatred and rebellion against the Living God, Who created all things of nothing, and in Whom we live and move and have our being.

Thanks be to God Who sent His only begotten Son to take our place and be imprecated and cursed and sent to Hell for our sin, that He might be justified in forgiving our sin and granting us the gift of eternal life. Thanks be to God that He delivered us from the evil irrationality of human rationalism.