Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Foxy News

By Douglas Wilson
Minister, Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho
First Published in The Washington Post

Inconsistency is part of the price we pay for living in a screwed-up world, and so we naturally want to distinguish the person who fails to fully live up to his own standards, which would be pretty much everybody, and the out-and-out hypocrite, that unctuous televangelist right out of central casting. And so we do make the distinction, but at the end of the day, we should still recognize that this is just distinguishing little hypocrisies from foundational hypocrisies. None of it is what we would call virtuous.

Once we have made this obvious distinction, one of the things we need to do is realize that we often mistake foundational hypocrisies for more garden variety hypocrisies. It is flattering to the self to do this, and so the results we usually get are not that surprising. It was not for nothing that the old cynic Ambrose Bierce defined a Christian as one who believed the New Testament to be a divinely inspired book, admirably suited for the spiritual needs of his neighbor. And nowhere is this issue of inconsistencies more glaring than with the issue of politics and pornography.

More is going on here than simple inconsistency on a personal level. Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"--a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level--we need to start thinking about the politics of porn.

Chesterton once said that "free love" was the first and most obvious bribe that could be offered to a slave. Huxley, in his Brave New World, saw the potent mix of sex and soma. And when the prophet Balaam was unable to curse the people of Israel, he was nevertheless able to offer some tawdry counsel to the king of Moab on the side--with the result that the Moabite women took a stroll through the Israelite camp in their halter tops and tight jeans (Num. 25:1). The end result was not just a large number of Israelite men being personally inconsistent in their very own private lives. The end result was a cultural and political disaster for Israel--the debacle at Baal-Peor (Num. 25:9). In short, there were political repercussions as a result of this very political tactic. The account in Numbers is oblique on the point, but the New Testament clearly credits Balaam with giving the King of Moab a political consultation service, a crash course in sexual tactics (2 Pet. 2:15; Jude 11; Rev. 2:14).

Fast forward to the present. A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And--full disclosure here--I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else.

I was recently was scrolling down a related "conservative" web site (Fox Nation), and near the bottom came upon a photo that plainly notified us all that Pamela Anderson is a member of a race, the human race, that is indeed mammalian. One of my initial thoughts was that it must be really nice to be able to go through life with absolutely no fear of drowning. The Fox News site is not quite as bad as that, but is pretty clearly keeping Balaam on retainer as well. While writing this, I conducted a brief, unscientific survey, and the Fox News site was busy displaying six large breasts with one naked Kardashian thrown in, MSNBC, that noted liberal outlet, had nothing objectionable at all, CNN, bane of the republic, also had none. Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's--with 40 percent off.

What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?

A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.

Which means that if a man is on the take in this way, he can go to a Tea Party and hoick up a hand-made "live free or die" placard all he wants to. He is also attending other demonstrations late at night--and at those other demonstrations, he is saying with every click of the mouse that what he really wishes for is that his grandchildren could be slaves. And the way things are going, he may just get his wish.

Douglas Wilson is the minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College. He has written numerous books, including "Five Cities That Ruled the World, Heaven Misplaced, and Reforming Marriage."

The Truth About Gaza

Just How Hungry is Gaza?

In the splenetic outpouring of opinion over the failed attempt to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, extreme positions have been taken by both sides. On the one hand there were those voices portraying Gazans as living in a national concentration camp, in a situation akin to that faced by refugees in Darfur. On the other hand, some were claiming that Gaza is a holiday camp, well stocked with provisions on every side.

The truth, as often is the case, appears to lie somewhere in the middle. Adrian Blomfeld, writing from Gaza for the Daily Telegraph, sums up the actual situation this way:

Despite its blockade, Israel insists Gazans are not starving and there is no humanitarian crisis. The enclave's poverty is not as bad as the worst parts of Africa but a people struggle to cope amid the rubble left by cross-border strikes.

The reality is that Gaza is oppressed by the blockade. The deliberate objective of Israel is to prod Gazans into rejecting Hamas--which, we recall, was legitimately elected by the people of Gaza. We always get the government we deserve, as they say, and no government can long survive without the consent of the governed. So, the policy of Israel is designed to get the people of Gaza to face up to the inevitable consequences of choosing Hamas to govern them.

Now we have been widely told that Hamas was more favoured than Fatah because the latter was (and is) venal and corrupt and Hamas went about its activities underpinned with basic ethical integrity and an apparent incorruptibility. But Hamas also is committed to the extermination and obliteration of Israel--so to elect Hamas to govern has meant the acceptance of a state-of-war with Israel, like it or not. Israel's objective is to help Gazans come to a position where they do not like being in a state of war with Israel.

Gaza is not eastern Congo, nor is its suffering comparable. Yet by the standards of the Middle East, the poverty is palpable. In a territory the size of the Isle of Wight, 1.5 million people -- 1.1 million of them refugees from previous conflicts with Israel -- often live in conditions close to squalor.

A landscape of ruined buildings, destroyed by Israeli forces, greets the rare visitor who crosses into Northern Gaza through Israel's Erez Checkpoint. Small groups of men toil in the heat to load salvaged bits of masonry, a precious commodity after Israel banned all construction material entering Gaza, onto donkey-drawn carts.

Further south, dilapidated, ramshackle buildings separated by narrow and often fetid alleyways stretch all the way to Rafah, on the border with Egypt. The stench of rotten rubbish, and sometimes sewage, regularly assaults the nostrils.

Occasionally, the monotony is broken by groups of makeshift tents, inhabited by those made homeless by an Israeli military offensive 17 months ago that destroyed or damaged 5,000 houses. The UN's Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) would like to rebuild those houses but Israel has largely prevented cement from entering Gaza, saying it could be used by Hamas to make homemade Qassam rockets.

Mr Netanyahu's government says the persistent launching of those rockets and Hamas's creed of violent resistance has left it with little choice but to adopt such drastic measures.

Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, but imposed its blockade two years later when Hamas violently wrested control of the territory in a civil war with the more moderate Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the pro-American leader of the West Bank.

Unlike Fatah, Hamas refuses formally to recognise Israel's right to exist or to negotiate with it, and has fired thousands of rockets towards Israeli towns, causing about 30 deaths. Israel retaliated with a massive counter-offensive in December, 2008, killing over 1,200 people, many of them civilians.

Although it insists it is not engaged in "collective punishment", Israel's blockade bans both material that could be used to make rockets and all but the most basic humanitarian supplies. Its aim, it says, is to create an austerity regime in Gaza while using the West Bank, with its comparative prosperity, as "a shop window" in the hope of convincing its people to throw off their Islamist masters and choose the moderation of Fatah.

So, whilst it is true there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, neither is it a picnic.

Hamas officials concede that the blockade has not caused a humanitarian crisis in its classic sense.

"There is no starvation in Gaza," said Khalil Hamada, a senior official at Hamas's ministry of justice. "No-one has died of hunger.

Even so, People have been forced to subsist rather than to live. There is no development.

"It is an inhumane siege by any standards, even a brutal one, for it imposes collective punishment on an entire people, whether they support Hamas or not."

So, is Hamas as popular as it once was in Gaza? Is Israel's policy of dividing the Palestinian electorate from a terrorist organization as their government working?

Yet there is no sign that the blockade is substantially weakening the position of Hamas as Israel had hoped.

Talk to Gazans in private and many will say the movement, once praised for bringing law and order to their territory, is less popular than it used to be -- in part because it is now seen as corrupt but also because it is indeed blamed, in part for the blockade.

Yet at the same time Hamas is perceived as more invulnerable. Its spies are everywhere; its rule is often ruthless -- it recently hanged two Israeli "collaborators" -- and few dare publicly oppose it.

But even those disenchanted with Hamas see Israel as the greater transgressor when it comes to the blockade and regard arguments that suggest otherwise as disingenuous.

"It's like trying to convince a child to take a half-shekel coin instead of a one-shekel coin because the half-shekel coin is bigger," the entrepreneur said. "Israel can try to get us to blame Hamas, but it is a conceit most will not fall for."

In many ways, Hamas has actually grown stronger since, unlike many Gazans, it profits from the smuggling tunnels under Gaza's border with Egypt that were built to circumvent the blockade.

The tunnels, which bring in a huge array of consumer goods, are the reason Mr Hasuna can sell creme eggs -- but they are also the reason fewer people can afford to buy them.

Wares that come through the tunnels are expensive, often double their true market rate and Gazans must therefore be selective in what they purchase. Gaza's shops may be full, but for many of its people the shelves are out of reach.

Hamas, on the other hand, makes a tidy sum by charging each smuggler who opens a tunnel GBP 1,900 for the privilege and exacting a levy thereafter.

A key question is this: is Hamas more committed to the peace and prosperity of its subjects, or to the destruction of Israel? Which has a higher priority? If the latter, then Hamas will likely desire the blockade and the current situation to continue, at least for the foreseeable future, for it enables them to get wealthy through exacting exorbitant tariffs. This, in turn, can be used to secure armaments and weapons and maintain control over the population.

Critics in Israel also point out that although Hamas has largely stopped firing rockets onto Jewish territory, the blockade has not stopped it using the tunnels to smuggle in large quantities of weapons. By some reckoning, the movement's arsenal is as strong as it ever has been.

"The blockade has been a failure even if you measure it by the narrow question of whether Hamas has fewer rockets," a leading Israeli columnist, who asked not to be identified so he could speak frankly, argued.

As is usually the case, the actual real-life situation in Gaza and Israel is complex and murky. But it is also true that it could be changed overnight if Hamas were to relinquish its intent to destroy the state of Israel. Unless we keep focused upon that as the all-critical issue things become very confused and murky indeed.

Whilst it is easy to be an armchair general--and no doubt arguably fatuous--we continue to believe that Israel constantly confuses itself and its neighbours by not making this point about Hamas constantly.  We wonder if Israel is truly focused upon the issue, or whether it has become distracted by political games.  Israel should be saying to Hamas, to Gazans, to the world: renounce violence and armed aggression against Israel and the blockade could end tomorrow.  It should be saying it repeatedly. 

Signal Victory

Even the Oxford Union has Got It . . .

The Oxford Union is famous for its debating stage. On the whole, the House favours left wing causes, voting consistently in their favour or disfavour, according to the wording of the particular moot. Recently the House voted overwhelmingly in favour of economic growth at the expense of attempts to combat global warming. It's a pity John Key's attention span does not stretch that far. However, it does signify how far the debate over climate change has, well, changed in the UK.

Anthony Watts provides us with this account of the debate. A reading of it will persuade most that indeed a sea-change has occurred--which has yet to reach our shores, apparently.

Lord Monckton wins global warming debate at Oxford Union
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Anthony Watts

I’m waiting for actual photos of the event from the official photographer, but for now I’ll make do with what can be found on the Internet. For those who don’t know, the Oxford Union is the top of the food chain for scholarly debate. This is a significant win.

The Oxford Union Debating House

Founded in 1823 at the University of Oxford, but maintaining a separate charter from the University, The Oxford Union is host to some of the most skillful debates in the world. Many eminent scholars and personalities have come and either debated or delivered speeches in the chamber. Monckton was invited as part of the formal Thursday debate.

It is described as follows:

The Union is the world’s most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. It has been established for 182 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

Here is a view inside from a previous debate:

Inside the Debating Chamber

Army of Light and Truth 135, Forces of Darkness 110

For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.

Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.

Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if they ever were.

When the Union’s president, Laura Winwood, announced the result in the Victorian-Gothich Gladstone Room, three peers cheered with the undergraduates, and one peer drowned his sorrows in beer.

Lord Lawson of Blaby, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister, opened the case for the proposition by saying that the economic proposals put forward by the UN’s climate panel and its supporters did not add up. It would be better to wait and see whether the scientists had gotten it right. It was not sensible to make expensive spending commitments, particularly at a time of great economic hardship, when the effectiveness of the spending was gravely in doubt and when it might do more harm than good.

At one point, Lord Lawson was interrupted by a US student, who demanded to know what was his connection with the Science and Public Policy Institute, and what were the Institute’s sources of funding. Lord Lawson was cheered when he said he neither knew nor cared who funded the Institute.

Ms. Zara McGlone, Secretary of the Oxford Union, opposed the motion, saying that greenhouse gases had an effect [they do, but it is very small]; that the precautionary principle required immediate action, just in case and regardless of expense [but one must also bear in mind the cost of the precautions themselves, which can and often do easily exceed the cost of inaction]; that Bangladesh was sinking beneath the waves [a recent study by Prof. Niklas Moerner shows that sea level in Bangladesh has actually fallen]; that the majority of scientists believed “global warming” was a problem [she offered no evidence for this]; and that “irreversible natural destruction” would occur if we did nothing [but she did not offer any evidence].

Mr. James Delingpole, a blogger for the leading British conservative national newspaper The Daily Telegraph, seconded the proposition, saying that – politically speaking – the climate extremists had long since lost the argument. The general public simply did not buy the scare stories any more. The endless tales of Biblical disasters peddled by the alarmist faction were an unwelcome and now fortunately failed recrudescence of dull, gray Puritanism. Instead of hand-wringing and bed-wetting, we should celebrate the considerable achievements of the human race and start having fun.

Lord Whitty, a Labor peer from the trades union movement and, until recently, Labor’s Environment Minister in the Upper House, said that the world’s oil supplies were rapidly running out [in fact, record new finds have been made in the past five years]; that we needed to change our definition of economic growth to take into account the value lost when we damaged the environment [it is artificial accounting of this kind that has left Britain as bankrupt as Greece after 13 years of Labor government]; that green jobs created by governments would help to end unemployment [but Milton Friedman won his Nobel Prize for economics by demonstrating that every artificial job created at taxpayers’ expense destroys two real jobs in the wealth-producing private sector]; that humans were the cause of most of the past century’s warming [there is no evidence for that: the case is built on speculation by programmers of computer models]; that temperature today was at its highest in at least 40 million years [in fact, it was higher than today by at least 12.5 F° for most of the past 550 million years]; and that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic [no one has asked them].

Lord Monckton repeatedly interrupted Lord Whitty to ask him to give a reference in the scientific literature for his suggestion that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic. Lord Whitty was unable to provide the source for his figure, but said that everyone knew it was true. Under further pressure from Lord Monckton, Lord Whitty conceded that the figure should perhaps be 92%. Lord Monckton asked: “And your reference is?” Lord Whitty was unable to reply. Hon. Members began to join in, jeering “Your reference? Your reference?” Lord Whitty sat down looking baffled.

Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work, spoke third for the proposition. He said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much “global warming” over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective. In any event, he said, throwing good money after bad on various alternative-energy boondoggles was unlikely to prove profitable in the long term and would ultimately do harm.

Mr. Rajesh Makwana, executive director of “Share The World’s Resources”, speaking third for the opposition, said that climate change was manmade [but he did not produce any evidence for that assertion]; that CO2 emissions were growing at 3% a year [but it is concentrations, not emissions, that may in theory affect climate, and concentrations are rising at a harmless 0.5% a year]; that the UN’s climate panel had forecast a 7 F° “global warming” for the 21st century [it’s gotten off to a bad start, with a cooling of 0.2 F° so far]; and that the consequences of “global warming” would be dire [yet, in the audience, sat Mr. Klaus-Martin Schulte, whose landmark paper of 2008 had established that not one of 539 scientific papers on “global climate change” provided any evidence whatsoever that “global warming” would be catastrophic].

Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as “Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society”. At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, “If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and” – glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box – “measure it!” [cheers].

Lord Monckton said that real-world measurements, as opposed to models, showed that the warming effect of CO2 was a tiny fraction of the estimates peddled by the UN’s climate panel. He said that he would take his lead from Lord Lawson, however, in concentrating on the economics rather than the science. He glared at the opposition again and demanded whether, since they had declared themselves to be so worried about “global warming”, they would care to tell him – to two places of decimals and one standard deviation – the UN’s central estimate of the “global warming” that might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The opposition were unable to reply. Lord Monckton told them the answer was 3.26 plus or minus 0.69 Kelvin or Celsius degrees. An Hon. Member interrupted: “And your reference is?” Lord Monckton replied: “IPCC, 2007, chapter 10, box 10.2.” [cheers]. He concluded that shutting down the entire global economy for a whole year, with all the death, destruction, disaster, disease and distress that that would cause, would forestall just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 Kelvin or Celsius degrees of “global warming”, so that total economic shutdown for 41 years would prevent just 1 K of warming. Adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective.

Mr. Mike Mason, founder and managing director of “Climate Care”, concluded for the opposition. He said that the proposition were peculiar people, and that Lord Monckton was more peculiar than most, in that he was not a real Lord. Lord Monckton, on a point of order, told Mr. Mason that the proposition had avoided personalities and that if Mr. Mason were unable to argue other than ad hominem he should “get out”. [cheers] Mr. Mason then said that we had to prepare for climate risks [yes, in both directions, towards cooler as well as warmer]; and that there was a “scientific consensus” [but he offered no evidence for the existence of any such consensus, still less for the notion that science is done by consensus].

The President thanked the speakers and expressed the Society’s gratitude to the Science and Public Policy Institute for sponsoring the debate. Hon. Members filed out of the Debating Chamber, built to resemble the interior of the House of Commons, and passed either side of the brass division-pole at the main door – Ayes to the right 135, Noes to the left 110. Motion carried.

Slapping Down Nanny-State

Don't Mess in Texas

Texas must be a wonderful place if it has a full complement of judges like this one. If, as they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant, then common sense must be the best breeze to blow away the malodorous scent of soft-despotism.

Read what happened when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sent a complaint to Limestone County Judge Daniel Burkeen about David Cousins, a resident of Thornton, who rented out a cabin to hunters without a proper latrine facility.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sent a complaint to Limestone County Judge Daniel Burkeen about David Cousins, a resident of Thornton, who rented out a cabin to hunters without a proper latrine facility.

The commission wanted the good judge to investigate.

Oh, he will. But he is busy.

“We have had some delay in our investigation of the incidents alleged in the complaint which you kindly forwarded to us,” Judge Burkeen wrote to the commission. “The problem is, we have recently had a rash of reports of cows, horses, sheep and goats defecating at will in pastures throughout the county. On top of this, we suspect that wild hogs, deer and all sorts of other animals are defecating without even trying to find a proper facility. In addition, I have personal proof on my windshield of a mischievous bird defecating in flight. The culprit flew away, but I did get a description. It was red. The gift it left was white.”

Sounds as if they have quite a problem in Texas.

And at the end of his letter, Judge Burkeen properly identified it: “Lastly, please allow us to handle this at the local level, and do not involve the federal government. When it comes to matters of excessive defecation, Washington bureaucrats would only add to our misery. Don’t Mess in Texas.’”

The problem in Texas is the state has this commission that has too little to do, too much power and too much time on its hands.

The letter:

Hat Tip: Patterico.

Letter From America

Government: The Next Bubble to Burst

By: Newt Gingrich, Dan Varroney

The economic collapse of Greece is a wake-up call. The unsustainable combination of a bloated public bureaucracy, high deficit spending and unfunded pension obligations busted Greece's government bubble. Now the birthplace of modern democracy is on the brink of becoming a failed state.

The Bank of England recently warned that the U.S. is on the road to the same fiscal failure as Greece, and the Obama administration's insistence on massive public spending and increasing deficits is the reason.

At this rate, the U.S. government will be the next economic bubble to burst. We've seen similar downturns: the information technology bubble in 2000, housing in 2007 and Wall Street in 2008. If unchecked, America's government bubble will depress our economy with higher interest rates and defaulting state and local governments.

Politicians Aren't Businessmen

The way to stop the government bubble from bursting is through strict fiscal discipline and empowering the private sector with tax relief.

Federal spending alone this year accounts for 25% of our nation's gross domestic product. If you add state and local spending, the number is closer to 50%. No economy can thrive when nearly half of all economic output is directed by politicians rather than entrepreneurs and small businesses.

After big government spending, government employee unions pose a serious threat to America's fiscal health. Over the past 30 years, union membership has declined significantly, from 23% of all workers in 1980 to about 12% today. But the percentage of union members working for government has soared: Over 50% of all union workers in the U.S. are employed by the government compared with only 17% in 1980.

In addition, government workers make about $10 per hour more than the average private sector worker.

And when they retire, taxpayers are on the hook to pay for lucrative pensions promised by a generation of politicians trying to win the next election. America's small-business owners could only dream of providing the type of pensions that government workers take for granted.

The way to stop the government bubble from bursting is through strict fiscal discipline and empowering the private sector with tax relief. Reducing federal spending is an urgent priority. The engine of the American economy is small business, not government.

If the size of government continues to grow, there will be less of free enterprise and less creation of new wealth and new jobs. The American government will primarily function to spread the wealth. Like in Greece, the economy here will fail.

Congress will not make the tough decisions necessary to reduce spending unless we force its hand. When we balanced the budget in the 1990s, we did it with strong controls on spending, real reform of welfare and Medicare, and tax cuts to increase economic growth. This led to four straight years of balanced budgets for the first time since the 1920s.

Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI. Dan Varroney is Chief Operating Officer at American Solutions.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

The Beauty of Quiet Lives

"His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful slave You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' Matthew 25:21

Many people measure a man's power or effectiveness by the noise he makes in the world. . . . Young men, when they start in life, usually think they must make all the noise they can, else their lives will be failures. They must make their voices heard loud above the din and clamour of the world, else they must remain unknown and die in obscurity. But thoughtful, observant years always prove how little real power their is in "the bray of brass." Life is measured by its final and permanent results. . . . It will be seen, in the great consummation, that those who have wrought silently and without clamour or fame have in many cases achieved the most glorious permanent results.

There are great multitudes of lowly lives lived on the earth which have no name among men, whose work no pen records, no marble immortalises, but which are well know and unspeakably dear to God, and whose influence will be seen, in the end, to reach to farthest shores. . . .

Much of the best work we do in this world is done unconsciously. There are many people who are so busied in what is called secular toil that they can find few moments to give to works of benevolence. But they come out every morning from the presence of God and go to their daily business or toil, and all day, as they move about, they drop gentle words from their lips and scatter seeds of kindness along their path. . . .

More than once in the Scriptures the lives of God's people in this world are compared to the dew. There may be other points of analogy, but especially noteworthy is the quiet manner in which the dew performs its ministry. It falls silently and imperceptibly. It makes no noise. No-one hears it dropping. It chooses the darkness of night, when men are sleeping and when no one can witness its beautiful work. . . . In the morning their is fresh beauty everywhere and new life. The fields look greener, the gardens are more fragrant, and all nature glows and sparkles with new splendour.

Is there no suggestion here as to the manner in which we should seek to do good in this world? . . . . "When thou doest thine alms, let not thy left hand know what they right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret." We are commanded not to seek the praise of men--not to do good deeds to be seen of men or to receive reward of them. . . .

Honour is to be sought for Him. We are to seek to be blessings in the world, to breathe inspiration everywhere, to shed quickening influences upon other lives, to impart helpfulness and noble impulse to all we meet, and then to disappear, so that men may not praise us, but may lift their hearts to Christ alone. Florence Nightingale, having gone like an angel of mercy among the hospitals in the Crimea until here name was enshrined in every soldier's heart, asked to be excused from having her picture taken, as thousands begged, that she might drop out and be forgotten, and that Christ alone might be remembered as the author of the blessings her hands had ministered. That is the true Christian spirit. . . .

It is the quiet, unheralded lives that are silently building up the Kingdom of Heaven. Not much note is taken of them here. They are not reported in the newspapers. Their monuments will not make much show in the churchyard. Their names will not be passed down to posterity with many wreaths about them. But their work is blessed, and not one of them is forgotten. . . .

Not a life lived for God is useless or lost. The lowliest writes its history and leaves its impression somewhere, and God will open His books at the last, and men and angels will read the record. . . . And in Heaven they will receive their reward--not praise of men, but open confession by the Lord Himself--in the presence of the angels and of the Father.

Dr J R Miller, Week-Day Religion, 1897

Show Trials--of Children!

When Society Becomes Permanently Puerile

Sometimes things are just so bizarre, so bad as to defy belief. Humanist pride and idolatry is now so reflected, so entrenched in the culture making and culture shaping institutions in the UK that there seem to be few options, but to let it run its destructive course. Even the administration of justice in the highest courts of the land reflect its arrogant ignorance and puerility. How could a once-Christian country have fallen so far, into such degradation?

Overstating and sensationalising the case? Read this latest article by Frank Furedi, and, as they say, you be the judge.

A showtrial of children for being naughty

The conviction of two boys for attempted rape is not only a travesty of justice – it also exposes society’s screwed-up attitude towards childhood.
Frank Furedi

The conviction at the Old Bailey in London of a 10-year-old boy and an 11-year-old boy for attempted rape is bad enough. That the children were convicted despite the fact that the eight-year-old defendant admitted in court that she had made up the story of her ordeal is even worse. But what was worst of all was the very public exploitation of these three children for the purposes of working out adult fantasies.

This sordid spectacle had nothing to do with justice. As the trial judge Justice Saunders acknowledged, the case would have collapsed if the defendant had been an adult, because the evidence provided by the young girl was so inconsistent. That’s another way of saying that in these proceedings, what really counted was not the evidence on offer, but adult prejudices and the imperative of sending the ‘right message’.

What makes this case particularly important is that it exposes the insidious consequences of the disintegration of adult control over children. In recent decades, parents and adults more broadly have come under tremendous pressure not to discipline children. Punishment has become a dirty word in child-rearing manuals, smacking has become stigmatised, and parents who raise their voices to their children are denounced for being ‘emotionally abusive’.

Teachers, too, face tremendous pressure to pretend that they don’t see any misbehaviour in their classrooms. They have very few effective means of disciplining youngsters. Consequently, most of the time children’s behaviour is relatively uncontained by adult behaviour. By the time they are 10 or 11, far too many children know that if they use the f-word in public or misbehave on the streets, the grown-ups around them will pretend that they heard and saw nothing.

The flipside of grown-ups’ paralysis towards containing children’s behaviour is a new reliance on formal processes to compensate for the loss of adult authority. So when the situation with a certain child appears to get out of hand, we issue an anti-social behaviour order or, as in this Old Bailey case, carry out a showtrial. Through such a showtrial, the prosecution can pretend that it is punishing individuals who are ‘criminally responsible’ rather than admitting what it is really doing: disciplining children. As is the case with all showtrials, the aim was not just to punish the so-called offenders but to send a message to a wider audience.

Predictably, this showtrial and the subsequent miscarriage of justice have provoked a debate about the age of criminal responsibility. And of course, dragging 10- and 11-year-old boys into the Old Bailey is utterly wrong. However, this trial raises a far more disturbing issue than the unacceptably low age at which children are treated as criminals these days. It exposes society’s inability to make any meaningful distinction between forms of behaviour that are appropriate between adults and forms of behaviour that are appropriate between children.

British society has become so morally disoriented about childhood that it has lost the ability to make a moral distinction between childhood and adulthood. It looks upon adults as simply biologically mature children, and children as physically underdeveloped grown-ups. This leads to a tragic state of affairs where children’s behaviour is continually interpreted through the prism of adult imaginations. At its worst, contemporary British culture attributes adult motives to children’s behaviour. Consequently, even infants in nurseries are told off for their ‘harassment’ of other kids or for their ‘racist’ behaviour.

Adult obsessions with sex are recycled through the discussion of children. As a result, society tends to sexualise children through interpreting youngsters’ behaviour as if it is driven by adult motives. The adult world – including many child experts and policymakers – often see sexual motives behind normal children’s behaviour. We live in a world where six-year-old children are expelled from school for inappropriate sexual behaviour, where a 10-year-old boy is put on the Sex Offenders’ Register for touching a girl, and where playing ‘doctors and nurses’ is increasingly interpreted as the precursor to an act of sexual violence.

Sadly, ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour’ by young children has become a new policy obsession. Typically, the difference between ‘inappropriate’ and ‘appropriate’ behaviour is in the eye of the beholder. New guidance for social workers says they should recognise that children are at risk from their peers and that they should not interpret sexual play as ‘normal’. Social workers are advised not to have any kind of ‘high threshold’ before taking action. But the truth is that there are a great many forms of behaviour and experiences that are entirely harmless in the context of children’s lives, yet which would take on a more sinister meaning if they were carried out by an adult. Today, officialdom is falling into the trap of rediscovering the dark side of adult behaviour in the playpen.

One final point. This showtrial is not just a classic example of how not to treat children. It is also symbolic of the broader infantilisation of English justice. The spectacle at the Old Bailey had nothing to do with a normal courtroom drama. The transformation of the court into a make-believe primary-school classroom – with specially lowered chairs and break-times for the kids – was fuelled by an adult fantasy that pretend justice is the equivalent of the real thing. The adults played their bit – with the judge leaving his wig and gown at home – as they went through the motions of treating the proceedings as if they were a proper trial. The mothers of the boys sat by their children as if they were waiting in a dentist’s surgery.

But in truth, this make-believe court scene was part of a ritual which criminalises children who play doctors and nurses and which incites eight- and 10-year-olds to act out the role of ‘rape victim’ and ‘sexual predator’ for a watching adult audience. In their hearts, everyone involved in this mock-trial knew that everything about it was fake.

Frank Furedi’s latest book, Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating, is published by Continuum Press.

Woeful Economic Ignorance

No-One Owes Us a Living

Bernard Hickey, writing in the NZ Herald, recently pointed out that NZ banks have tightened up on their lending criteria to businesses recently, despite early signs of economic recovery in this country. Banks are more cautious than ever, it would seem, when it comes to lending to NZ businesses.

But why? Well, apparently the usual suspect is the Reserve Bank's new requirement that a greater proportion of the banks' funding be sourced from New Zealand, rather than those large, hot international wholesale money markets. Then, secondly, Aussie banks appear to be losing their ardour for New Zealand, preferring to expand their business in Asia. So, capital is not as freely available, as it once was.

So far, so good. "Houston, we have a problem" is now an apt status report. But if you go to the comments section of Hickey's article your heart will likely sink at the diatribe of economic ignorance, blameshifting, and populist ignorance that is on offer. An example of the erudition displayed:

What sort of an idiot thinks they can order our now completely Internationally owned banks to suddenly start lending to little old, "flea on the dogs tail NZ" business? (Whats left of it) This ridiculous situation is of the Reserve Banks and our Politicians own making and now they think they can bully international business' into financial risk taking on the bais of our wonderful economic performance.

Hullo? Am I on another planet?

Free market means, free to lend or free not to lend, either way Banks are now free to do what they want, and we are not. Rogernomics always stood for "you will be Rogered in no time at all" and global free market stood for, 3 winners, 191 losers. Why do no economists see what is a very obvious systematic failure. You all sound like Monty Python, This Parrots dead. "No its not, its just pining for the fiords".Ahh, no its dead!

You are just a huge club of bumbleing fiddeling Nero's. Shame on the lot of you.

Yes, dear chap. We are forced to the conclusion that you are indeed on another planet. And another coruscating contribution:

It seems that you suggest that our capitalism without capital should continue. One more decade and again the "capitalists" will run away with cash and WE will have to bail-out the banks again. These "financial experts" must be blind.

The most significant competitor to banks for capital in this country is the government. It is borrowing $240m per week. It is the elephant which is squeezing every body else out of the room. Strange that people always seem to forget that money is subject to demand and supply constraints and that since the Government became a huge borrower, everyone else has become squeezed and capital supply reduces enormously. The banks are no exception. They are being forced to attempt to raise more money in New Zealand while the Government has muscled to the front of the queue and is slobbering at the table, leaving only crumbs for everyone else.

And let's not forget that the insatiable slobbering of the Government for more borrowed money is to maintain a bloated, nannying, regulating, stifling, exorbitant, state-sector bureaucracy--and to maintain welfare hand-outs to middle-class New Zealand. And the Government is "driven" to do this to survive politically. There is no fury to match an electorate when its "entitlements" and hand outs have been cut. New Zealand is one big Ponzi scheme, of the same style as Greece or Spain or Hungary.

Now the Government is hoping that sooner or later the private sector economy will stage a recovery, tax revenues will rise, government borrowing can be pegged back, and we can all move on to better things. But every expansion of Government activity results in weakening the private sector economy by a ratio of roughly one to two, according to Milton Friedman. Thus, every dollar of new Government activity results in a loss of two dollars of economic activity in the private sector. All private lending institutions in New Zealand are choking because the Government is sucking out all the monetary oxygen.

Secondly, railing against "Australian banks" is stupid, populist nonsense. Of course Australian banks--or any bank for that matter--when considering whether to focus investment in Asia versus New Zealand are likely to choose Asia. Why? Because capital is global and mobile and it will flow to where it can get the best risk-adjusted return. And Asia beats us in spades.

The reality is that New Zealand is a very business-unfriendly place. The costs of doing business in this country are very high and getting higher by the day. The vast majority of people who are in business in this country would love to be able to sell up and get out. Red-tape, compliance costs, taxes, rules, regulations, restrictions, environmentalism, not to mention the smothering ETS, all mean that businesses in New Zealand are largely very small, low-margin, high risk, low growth concerns. And that means that capital will remain very scarce in this country. It means that businesses will struggle to get credit. Capital will flow elsewhere to other more positive offshore investment opportunities.

It also means that when banks do lend to businesses they will want to secure their lending against tangible assets, such as property because business is so tenuous and risky here. This generates a vicious circle where businesses feel the need to tie up capital in owner/operated commercial premises to ensure access to operating capital via banks--which has to be one of the most inefficient uses of capital imaginable.

It's no wonder that so many businesses fail in New Zealand. It's no wonder that banks are tightening their lending criteria for businesses. These things are not cyclical--they are structural. They are symptomatic of a far more serious and intractable problem. Either we shrink the government and its smothering regulations fast, or else. If not, would the last person please turn out the lights.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Cutting Off the Buttons

Political Dualism - Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The world around us is an unfolding story. The world around us is not a plastic diorama behind the glass in a museum. The kind of objective truth that the faithful Christian insists upon is not to be found in plastic objects that never move, even if their immobility might be a catechetical aid to the bus tours of schoolchildren who come through.

To change the metaphor, conservatives tend to be Maginot Line defenders, always fighting the last war. Liberals and trendy evangelicals try to help us out of this jam by suggesting that we should busy ourselves with surrendering in the current war. Shouldn't there be more alternatives than this?

Objective truth, final truth, ultimate truth is a sword, but it is not a sword hanging on the wall. It is a sword in a faithful hand, and though it is as rigid and unyielding as the sword on the wall, being made out of the same kind of steel, it looks like it is a living creature -- because it moves in the story. A warrior fights with it in the story. It shines, it flickers, it strikes. How can objective, unchanging truth adapt to the challenges of these our post-modern times? I'll tell you -- by cutting a cool-looking Z on the vest of our post-modern times, and then cutting off all the buttons.

Jesus is king, not Descartes. Jesus is the truth, not Kant. Jesus is the meaning, not Derrida. Jesus is the way, not Darwin. Jesus is a living Lord and Savior, both now and forever. For our au courant brethren, this means that He is not post-anything.

Now in a story, the faithful characters are the ones who finish one episode, prepared for the next episode. They don't believe the concluding episode is the conclusion of the book. Overcoming one challenge is the best preparation for the next challenge.

The blowback against Washington insolence in the elections last night provides us with a good example. Almost everything about it made me happy, but what kind of happy? End of the chapter happy or end of the book happy? If every last incumbent in Washington went down in defeat this coming November, I would be a lot happier -- in the full recognition that two years from now we would still be dealing with the same basic problems.

This is a shock to activists everywhere, who always want to fix things now, and this surprise of theirs is a function, not only of not knowing that we are in a story, but also of having no real sense of how long the book is. If we think we are in a story at all, we think it is a short story, when we are actually in the longest novel ever written, with billions of characters. And we are only about halfway through it, if that.

To extend this metaphor, we should want our efforts, our labors, our plot lines to extend over many pages, and to contribute significantly to the final denouement. But to do this, we have to think on multiple levels, and not just in terms of the immediate battle. In this example, I mean that conservative Christians should be preparing to mount a faithful prophetic witness against the established powers after the progressives are routed (and good riddance, yay) and the conservatives win. If our thinking is, "What do you mean, after the conservatives win? Doesn't the millennium come then?" -- this illustrates our problem.

Ambrose Bierce once defined a conservative as one who is enamoured of the existing evils, as opposed to the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. Each one of these parties can warn you against the "existing" or the "pending" evil, right? But that is because they are only defending their own turf. In our day, we would have to flip Bierce's observation around, because it is the liberals who are the insiders, who run the establishment, and the conservatives who are the outsiders. But the point remains the same. Statist idolaters like President Obamafail do need to be chased off the stage, no question. We can't afford him, for starters.

But what do we think we are actually accomplishing when we do this necessary thing? Without an eschatology to govern the direction of our efforts, our efforts are aimless. And secular eschatologies (of the right or the left) are either damnable or stupid or both. The teleology of all human history, and everything it contains, has to be Jesus Christ. How can we as Christians say that it could possibly be anything else? Now I know there are decent Christians engaged in our political life who don't know this, but they are decent Christians who are in the process of being suckered. And one of my assigned tasks in life is to talk Christians away from the pleasures of being suckered.

H.L. Mencken once trenchantly observed that trying to reform Washington by electing new guys was like trying to reform prostitution by staffing all the brothels with virgins. Now the only way out of this is to think in terms of the teleology of it. The brothel needs something other than new, fresh faces. The brothel needs to become something else. But that is a teleological question. That is eschatology. And no Christian can have any eschatology that leaves Jesus out of it. If Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, then we can turn the brothel into something else. And not otherwise.

Party-line thinkers are always short-term thinkers. Ideologues care only about the moment. When Christians succumb to this kind of thinking, they are still Christians, and they still go to Heaven when they die. But they are playing their roles in this grand story as extras or bit players. The Author of all this can use them wisely and well, and they will rejoice in His wisdom forever and ever. But it would be far better for us to understand more of the story now. It glorifies His name, and it blesses our souls and hearts. And it advances the plot.

How the West Was Gulled

Whatever Happened to Journalistic Cynicism?

When it comes to war a basic rule of thumb is to believe not more than fifty percent of what you hear. So when it comes to the "humanitarian activists" trying to break the blockade of Gaza we all need a good dose of healthy scepticism.

It is immediately apparent that the flotilla was a political propaganda exercise primarily, not a humanitarian aid effort. If it were the latter the ships would have sailed for Ashdod to begin with, docked, unloaded their cargo and allowed the Israelis to enable its transportation into Gaza. So, it was a political stunt cloaked as a humanitarian effort. The latter was contrived to elicit global human sympathy for Hamas and Gaza which it rules.

Secondly, it ought never be overlooked that Israel and Hamas are at war. In a state of war blockades can and do get enforced. Now our fervent wish is that this were not the case. It would be wonderful for Hamas and Israel to reach a state of mutual peace. But alas this is not the case at the moment. Here our sympathies lie with Israel. Much of the Western condemnation of Israel overlooks that it is at war with Hamas. The fact that hostilities do not take place every day does not obviate or nullify the state of being at war. We believe there is no way out of this until Hamas rescinds its policy calling for the destruction and obliteration of Israel.

If the Fijian Government were to adopt a policy that called for the destruction of New Zealand, we would be at war with Fiji whether we liked it or not. Everything from that point on would be different--and rightly so. Being in a state of war would mean that we would need to engage in deeds and acts not allowable or acceptable in peace time. All the hand wringing by other nations would be irrelevant.

Thirdly, the West constantly allows itself to be gulled by very clever and subtle Hamas and Islamic propaganda tactics. For whatever reason the West struggles to recognise that Islamic jihadism is extremely adept and very effective. All too often the West is sucked in. It seems to us that the latest controversy over the "flotilla of humanitarian activists" is a case in point. Andrew Bolt ticks off the evidence.

The Israeli soldiers took over six ships of an “aid” flotilla trying to pierce the blockade that both Israel and Egypt have imposed on Gaza, a territory controlled by the Islamist Hamas.

Only on one of those six ships did the Israelis meet a resistance that clearly - and fatally - caught them by surprise. This was not on one of the ships manned by the Western politicians, aid workers and other useful idiots brought along for camouflage. It broke out instead on the Mavi Marmara, a ship bought and supplied by a Turkish “humanitarian relief fund” known as IHH.

IHH may boast about its good works, but intelligence agencies warn that it is in fact tied to Islamist terrorists. The CIA as long ago as 1996 noted it was linked to “Iran operatives” and gave “support for extremist/terrorist activity”, including in Bosnia.

In 2001, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the prominent French counter-terrorism magistrate, said at the trial of the “millennium bomber” that IHH had played “an important role” in the plot to blow up Los Angeles airport. He said the charity was “a type of cover up” to infiltrate mujahideen into combat, get forged documents and smuggle weapons.

In 2006, the Danish Institute for International Studies reported that Turkish security forces had raided the IHH’s Istanbul bureau and found firearms, explosives and bomb-making instructions, as well as records of calls to an al-Qaida guest house in Milan. The Turkish investigators concluded this “charity” was sending jihadists to Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan, where Australian soldiers serve.

IHH has also been a long-time supporter of Hamas, listed in many countries as a terrorist group.

But this time it planned something more effective than an explosion. It decided to destroy Israel’s moral standing among its more fickle friends. Its Mavi Marmara would now head a flotilla to break through the Israeli blockade of Gaza - or, rather, to provoke Israel into stopping it by force.

IHH head Bulent Yildirim gloated that this would be seen as “a declaration of war” against all the countries that supplied the flotilla’s passengers, which is why so many foreigners, and particularly sympathetic journalists such as the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough, were on board, having been recruited from Australia, Britain, the US and many other countries that IHH and its allies hoped could be turned into enemies of Israel. . . .

Those on board refused offers by Israel that they dock at an Israeli port so their aid could be checked and forwarded to Gaza. They rejected warnings to turn back. They prepared instead for a deadly confrontation.

Arab television showed one woman on board exulting: “We await one of two good things - to achieve martyrdom or reach the shore of Gaza.” Added another passenger, Yemeni professor Abd al-Fatah Nu’man: “These are people who wish to be martyred for the sake of Allah. As much as they want to reach Gaza, the other option is more desirable to them.” . . . .

They got just what they wanted, then, as did Hamas and its chief backer, Iran. Iran, needing attention distracted from its nuclear weapons program, pumped out instant YouTube footage of this Israeli “atrocity”. Meanwhile Hamas spokesman Samil Abu Zuhri called for a global “intifada”: “We call on all Arabs and Muslims to rise up in front of Zionist embassies across the whole world.”

And in capital cities around Australia, we yesterday saw the new front open as angry demonstrators took the streets. So what, you may scoff. A few of the usual hotheads.

But see this time how many of our politicians, journalists and “thinkers” are on the wrong side of this front. See how willingly they’ve surrendered to an Islamist plot more effective than any Bali bomb.

Could the whole thing have been a cleverly constructed propaganda exercise? It seems highly likely. You just have to reflect on how many journalists were embedded on the boats to see the point. Not that this makes it illicit. Propaganda is a legitimate weapon of war. What is not acceptable is that we would be naive enough to fall for the propaganda, in the first place, and not reckon with its deliberately designed manipulative intent.

Neither is it acceptable to overlook that a state of war exists between Hamas and Israel. Incredibly enough the West largely continues to discount this reality, despite the fact that in the same breath it calls for a Peace Process to go forward. Go figure.

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Legalism

Beware the Spiritual Evils of Prohibition

It is clear that the nanny-staters amongst us are busily involved in a reasonably long term campaign to outlaw tobacco use in New Zealand completely. We expect they will be successful. Then we will go through a couple of decades of the consequences of nannying prohibition, and we will find, much to the disappointment and chagrin of the nannyers, that the law of unintended consequences has not been prorogued and that the social evils that burst forth in the era of Prohibition in the United States will have equally burst forth upon New Zealanders a century later. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Christian folk are likely to get caught up in this sort of thing. Below is timely reminder from Justin Taylor, Don Carson, and John Piper explaining why Christians should have nothing to do with any attempts to prohibit the use of alcohol or tobacco by means of legislative fiat or ecclesiastical edicts. For there is another law which has not been prorogued: a generation that is stricter than the Bible, will be followed by a generation which rejects the authority of the Bible outright.

Alcohol, Liberty, and Legalism

An interesting discussion took place in the comments to yesterday’s post on the Guinness Brewing Company. It seems that some think brewing beer is either an illegitimate vocation, and immoral activity, or unwise as a witness for Christ.

It’s not possible in one post to address all concerns. I’d just say, for my own part, that I do not advocate alcohol consumption and I don’t particularly like the taste of alcohol. Further, I find it slightly annoying when those who enjoy adult beverages talk about it a lot. (Sort of like the younger pastors who tend to work into conversation how much they enjoy a good cigar, or the occasional pipe. Good for you, bro!)

But the fact of the matter is that though alcohol can be abused, and is often abused, it is still part of God’s good creation—and Jesus partook of it enough that some falsely accused him of being a drunkard (Matt. 11:19 and parallels), and in fact he created “good wine” at a wedding celebration (John 2:1-6).

One of the reasons I think it’s worth returning to the issue is not because I care about alcohol per se, but rather because this issue is a good test case for hemeneutics, application, and ethics.

Again, with no attempt to be comprehensive, here are a few things that have been helpful to me throughout the years:

A Latin phrase to keep in mind:

abusus usum non tollit (“Abuse does not take away proper use”)

Ryan Kelly explains why Romans 14 has less application to this issue than most people think. Here’s the conclusion:

What we should conclude from all of this is that it is the abuse of a thing that is sin, not its use. Sin is that which violates God’s biblical commandments, not the additions and inventions we make. No man can bind the conscience of another. As Sola Scriptura Christians, our minds, wills, and hearts are directed by God’s revealed will in the Scriptures alone. On issues not forbidden or condemned by Scripture, we cannot invent a morality, or, worse, impose those inventions on others. We cannot be holier than Jesus, can we?

And this from D.A. Carson:

Paul refuses to circumcise Titus, even when it was demanded by many in the Jerusalem crowd, not because it didn’t matter to them, but because it mattered so much that if he acquiesced, he would have been giving the impression that faith in Jesus is not enough for salvation: one has to become a Jew first, before one can become a Christian. That would jeopardize the exclusive sufficiency of Jesus.

To create a contemporary analogy: If I’m called to preach the gospel among a lot of people who are cultural teetotallers, I’ll give up alcohol for the sake of the gospel. But if they start saying, “You cannot be a Christian and drink alcohol,” I’ll reply, “Pass the port” or “I’ll think I’ll have a glass of Beaujolais with my meal.” Paul is flexible and therefore prepared to circumcise Timothy when the exclusive sufficiency of Christ is not at stake and when a little cultural accommodation will advance the gospel; he is rigidly inflexible and therefore refuses to circumcise Titus when people are saying that Gentiles must be circumcised and become Jews to accept the Jewish Messiah. The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, p. 145.

And here is John Piper, a teetotaller and an advocate of teetotalling, putting his young pastoral ministry on the line at Bethlehem Baptist Church in 1982 in order to argue against a provision requiring teetotalling for church membership

I want to hate what God hates and love what God loves.

And this I know beyond the shadow of a doubt: God hates legalism as much as he hates alcoholism.

If any of you still wonders why I go on supporting this amendment after hearing all the tragic stories about lives ruined through alcohol, the reason is that when I go home at night and close my eyes and let eternity rise in my mind, I see ten million more people in hell because of legalism than because of alcoholism. And I think that is a literal understatement. Satan is so sly. “He disguises himself as an angel of light,” the apostle says in 2 Corinthians 11:14. He keeps his deadliest diseases most sanitary. He clothes his captains in religious garments and houses his weapons in temples. O don’t you want to see his plots uncovered? . . .

Legalism is a more dangerous disease than alcoholism because it doesn’t look like one.

Alcoholism makes men fail; legalism helps them succeed in the world.

Alcoholism makes men depend on the bottle; legalism makes them self-sufficient, depending on no one.

Alcoholism destroys moral resolve; legalism gives it strength.

Alcoholics don’t feel welcome in church; legalists love to hear their morality extolled in church.

Therefore, what we need in this church is not front-end regulations to try to keep ourselves pure. We need to preach and pray and believe that “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither teetotalism nor social drinking, neither legalism nor alcoholism is of any avail with God, but only a new creation (a new heart)” (Galatians 6:15; 5:6).

The enemy is sending against us every day the Sherman tank of the flesh with its cannons of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. If we try to defend ourselves or our church with peashooter regulations, we will be defeated, even in our apparent success. The only defense is to “be rooted and built up in Christ and established in faith” (Colossians 2:6); “Strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11); “holding fast to the head from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together, . . . grows with a growth that is from God” (Colossians 2:19). From God! From God! And not from ourselves.

Common Themes

State Sector Unions and the Failure of Democracies

Most Western nations are facing fiscal crises. National, state, local body, and municipal deficits have ballooned as rampant entitlement welfare spending has far outstripped tax revenues. Now, sovereign defaults are conceivable in many cases, likely in some. Government debt paper is no longer a risk-free asset.

Government revenues to fund an ever-expanding monster of more and more entitlements simply cannot keep up. Then the critical tipping point is reached when the productive sector of the economy begins to contract, tax revenues--which already could not increase fast enough to fund the exploding state sector spend-ups--decline, and the fiscal death spiral begins.

How did it come to this? How can it be prevented in future? We believe the current crises are an inevitable end-game of Western democracies. Modern post-Enlightenment Western democracies are built upon electoral bribery and corruption. Political parties compete to bribe electors with government spending and entitlements in exchange for their support. Voters use their suffrage as a right to be sold to the highest bidder on the hustings. Their votes are up for sale every election.

We note the irony present in the brouhaha over the alleged bribe from the Obama administration to a Pennsylvania congressman, Joe Sestak not to run for the US Senate against a Democratic candidate favoured by Obama. Such behaviour is clearly against US federal law. The defence is that everyone does it. Too true. Bribery and electoral corruption has become the name of the game for all Western democracies now.

Societies which are built on such fundamentally unethical political arrangements cannot survive, let alone prosper. Because the state administers justice and backs virtually all it does by the sanction of law and punishment, the fundamental construct of Western democracies, upon which they are all built, is that justice is up for sale and that officials and political leaders and voters willingly conspire together to defraud one class of people and favour another--and when the defrauded run out of money, they all go on ultimately to enslave future generations with massive unpayable debts.

This will not change until a generation arises which accomplishes a peaceful revolution to clean up the current evils and prevent the very possibility of such corruption occurring again. Probably such a revolution would need to exclude by entrenched constitutional structures the very possibility of laws which have regard for relative economic situation or relative wealth of some at the expense of others. It would need to define all laws, acts and policies of redistribution to be necessarily and intrinsically unjust and unconstitutional. Progressive taxation constructs would therefore be excluded from the outset. Moreover, almost all legislatively enforced and sanctioned entitlements would need to be excluded as unconstitutional from the outset. The only entitlements recognised would be the legitimate expectation that government would provide for the common defence against military attack, access to fair and impartial courts, and the just punishment of criminals.

In the meantime, we must do what we can to limit the corruption and bribery and extortion that are so fundamental to Western democracies. Here there are lots of things which can be done. None of them will solve the fundamental flaws, but they can help slow the growth of the monster.

Here is one idea. A common thread in all the fiscal crises now upon us is the disproportionate power of public sector unions which over decades have negotiated and indirectly voted themselves (through the electoral mechanism) bigger and bigger entitlements. Every state government in the US which is in fiscal trouble is suffering under state sector wage increases and state sector pension entitlements that are now out of control and can no longer be financed.

Given that state employees traditionally and historically gave up certain political freedoms by virtue of their responsibility as public servants (such as public disagreement with and organising to oppose government policies) we propose that all state sector unions need to be de-registered and the right of free association be curtailed for all state employees preventing them forming unions in the future. Their inevitable conflicts of interest are just too great. Moreover, because they are not subject to the discipline of market forces as faced by all non-state-sector unions, all state sector unions enjoy quasi-protected status which allows them to be successful in negotiations, even though demands are unreasonable, in ways that private sector unions cannot. Moreover, governments are all too often soft-negotiators since they are not spending their own money, but the people's. It is far too easy for venal cowardly governments to capitulate to state sector union demands for the sake of domestic peace, lest political and public support be lost.

It is now apparent in Greece and in New Zealand that state sector unions have been a significant factor in promoting reckless government spending through cosseted wage bargaining with the state.

De-registering all state-sector unions will not solve the intrinsic problems of all Western democracies. It would just curtail the rate of decline. But it would be a very useful step to take.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

A Moral Code Must Be Out of Reach

Atheism and Apologetics - The Rage Against God
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, May 31, 2010

In Chapter 10 of The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens nails down the loosest board on the side of atheism's house. So to speak. Unfortunately for atheism, this does not repair the house, but rather causes the whole thing to fall down.

According to Peter, the atheists "have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute, a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter" (p. 141). That is it in a nutshell. The current consensus is not the same thing as a moral code, and willingness to abide by the current consensus in order to stay out of jail is not the same thing as submitting to a moral code.

Christopher Hitchens wants to say that our morality is innate, and he thinks that this gives him a non-relativistic basis for morality. But the problem is that our internal workings evolved right along with the rest of us. What happens when our innate instincts evolve into something else entirely? Don't we have to go with the flow?

Peter is not distracted in this chapter by Christian failures and inconsistencies. This is just what we would anticipate if what the Bible says about humanity is true. Christians sin because they are people, not because they are Christians. God is in the process of saving screwed up people. It is no objection to this gospel-scheme to point out that the people He is saving are screwed up people. Exactly so. 

Christianity is without doubt difficult and taxing, and all of us fail to emulate the perfection of Christ himself. But we are far better for trying than for not trying, and we know that there is forgiveness available for honest failure (p. 144).

Or, as the apostle John put it, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.

And of course, to my great delight, Peter brought up the philosopher Heidegger, not in order to laud some incomprehensible pomo-thingy, but in order to point out that he was a Nazi, and had said that "the Fuhrer, and he alone, is the present and future law of Germany" (p. 148). So much for Heidegger.

Returning to the point that morality is non-existent if it is within our capacity to alter or adapt, Peter says this about the atheist pretence to not be able to grasp this point.

I should have thought that those who are serious about their unbelief would be relieved by this logic and glad to concede it. If they know, or are reasonably certain, that there is no ultimate authority and no judgment issuing from some unalterable law, they are instantly and quite extraordinarily free (p. 148).

So why are they so reluctant to grant this "astonishingly simple point" (p. 148)?

Might it be because they fear that, by admitting their delight at the non-existence of good and evil, they are revealing something of their motives for their belief (p. 149).

One last comment. This is not an illegitimate ad hominem, or a form of what C.S. Lewis called Bulverism -- showing the reasons why someone might have come to hold to a position, instead of refuting the position itself. What Peter points to here would be appropriate, for example, if a bunch of death row inmates were debating the existence of executioners. Those stoutly maintaining the negative might need to have their possible reasons for doing so pointed out to them. That would not be an unreasonable intrusion.

Darwinist Self-Deception

Round and Round in Self-Serving Circles

Darwinism rapidly evolved into a cosmology, which is a theory of everything. A theory that explains everything that exists can never be falsified. Its successive iterations (social Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, neo-neo-Darwinism) simply illustrate the religious, non-scientific nature of the Darwinian cosmology. The version of evolutionism is changing all the time: what changes not is the cosmology itself--that matter is ultimate and is randomly auto-existent. When scientific experimentation and evidence calls into question the currently prevailing version of evolution, the version adapts and changes like a wax nose. What never changes is the underlying, framing cosmology. The reason is that the cosmology is religious in nature and that science always conforms to the religious paradigm in which it operates.

Reading Darwinists is tiresome because with a straight face they claim a scientific foundation, on the one hand, whilst qualifiying, bending, re-interpreting, reshaping, redefining, and adapting so that everything fits their deeper truth-commitment, their cosmology, on the other. But the fit is always incomplete and prejudiced. Scientific scepticism is readily supplanted by a willing credulity. The bubbles keep escaping.  What this shows is that to the Darwinist mind, the cosmology is far, far more important than the science. The latter is the garb of hypocritical self-respectability, not substance.

Take the following quotation as an illustration of the point:

Evolutionary thinking is particularly useful in illuminating our view of childhood in the realm of facultative adaptation—a sort of "if then" proposition built into our genes. Evolution and genes sometimes say, This is how it must always be, but often they say, If in such-and-such an environment, respond with this adaptation, but if in this other, very different context, respond with that one. Sometimes the consequences are dire for children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, have shown that abuse and neglect, up to and including killing children, are almost 100 times more likely in households with an adult male who is not genetically related to the child. Nothing, I think, could make it clearer that evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments. Yet this well-established fact about violence committed against children, independent of socioeconomic status and shown across national boundaries, should lead us to a new ways of thinking about abuse prevention. They can be subtle, not draconian, but they should recognize the facts.
(Melvin Konner, How Childhood Has Evolved, The Chronicle Review. (Emphasis, ours)

Observe the self-deceitful, sleight-of-hand. "Evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments" . . . And the question is, Why? Genetic "evidence" shows that a certain kind of person is predisposed to murder the children in his household. Surely, "scientific" rigorous evolutionary theory would say that this is entirely appropriate and consistent with the theory. But no. Moral and legal judgments must suddenly intrude, and reject the murder of children. Why? Ah, well, even broader cosmological arguments kick in and claim that moral and legal constructs, whilst not embedded in genes, are also part of the gradual evolution of the species to higher plains. Really. And the scientific evidence for that is . . .?

But, further, the inescapable reality is that when Konner and evolutionists talk about moral and legal judgements that would, in this case, be inveighed against a foster parent killing a non-genetically descended child, there can be no fundamental absolute moral or ethical or legal condemnation of such an act from within the Darwinian cosmology. There is only the reality of conflict upon which evolutionary processes proceed. The murderous parent is (presumably) protecting his genetic strain. In this case the criminal justice system is the challenger. In order to proceed higher, combat must take place. If the erstwhile criminal succeeds and gets off scot free, he has advanced the race (or at least his particular genetic strain) and called into question the validity of the current moral and legal code, which would have been proved impotent and weak in this case. Surely. Thus, the evolutionist who appeals to the "higher superiority" of legal and moral codes which must be set against the genetic codes, is simply and comprehensively begging the question. In a universe where matter is ultimate and is randomly auto-existent, the notion of a "higher superiority" of anything is egregious question begging.

Legal and moral codes exist, which, according to the Darwinian cosmology, means that they, too, have to be the product of evolutionary development. But if they are successfully broken and overcome, that too is a development, a step forward, a progression. Darwinian evolution is not uniform and linear. Within the evolutionary process there are many blind alleys. For the evolutionist, today's moral and legal codes may be (and probably are) one of them. No evolutionist can gainsay without being guilty of duplicitous special pleading.

So, the insistence that "evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments" is an egregious deceit in the light of Darwinian cosmology. To pretend otherwise is contemptible sophistry. You cannot have it both ways. Ah, we long for the good-old-days when Darwinists were more honest and self-respecting. But as for scientific objectivity, it long ago self-defenestrated in favour of an irrational, internally contradictory religion.

Fighting On Today's Battlefronts

Getting the Battlefield Right

Luther once famously remarked that if Christians are busy fighting battles that Satan is not waging we are being unprofitable servants. Consequently, it is possible for Christians in our day to be busy tilting at windmills in a Quixote-esque farce.

What are the battlefields of our day upon which all faithful Christians need to be found fighting? Here is Douglas Wilson's take.

Now, with this said, what issues are fundamental in our day? This is key -- one of the common mistakes is that of thinking that the decisive point in the 16th century has to be the decisive point today. This is yet another failure to read the narrative right. Principles are constant, but plot points aren't. But, lest this point be mistaken, as it always is, our Protestant fathers in the 16th century were right to take the stand they did, and the pope and his Council were wrong.

However, the fact that I cheer for one side over the other at the battle of Gettysburg does not mean the battle of Gettysburg is still being fought. We are at a different place in the war; the terrain is different and the circumstances are different. The uniforms are different – but the long war is always the same.

Surrendering a place that is currently being contested, and justifying this surrender because you are a sound military historian, and understand who was in the right at Gettysburg, is folly and cowardice. Attacking others in your army who are courageously fighting where the current battle is raging, and all because you suspect that they are not as sound as they could be on Gettysburg, is more folly and more cowardice.

But before moving on, let me affirm, once more, three basics. I embrace the five solas, I whoop until hoarse for the five points of Calvinism, and I heartily lament Jeb Stuart's ill-fated ride around the battle.

Where is the battle now? What are the issues that threaten the purity of the gospel now? Where are the compromises now?

The real rot that we must contend with begins with Darwin, not Bonaventure, and any and all accommodations with Darwin. Darwin gave modernity the mechanism it needed to throw off the authority of God's Word, and the sovereignty of the Lord Christ. Darwin is foundational to the secularist modernity project, but there is more. He is also foundational to the postmodern goo cauldron that is our culture today, and every form of what I have called pomosexuality. It is striking that postmodernists never want to be post-Darwinian. The whole thing, modernity and postmodernity, is part of one sustained play in the football game.

And this is why theistic evolution is a big deal, and this is why compromises with every form of gender bending is a big deal. And this is also why a large number of people who are “contending for the gospel” . . . aren't really.

Descending into Farce

High Dudgeon and Low Ethics

The gyrations of the Dynamic Duo in defence of the new Emissions Trading Scheme ("ETS") tax are descending into farce. First up in a duet is Environment Minister, Nick Smith pontificating grandly to the party plebs in Northland over the weekend. You know his cause has to be in deep horse stable-detritus when he has to invoke--wait for it--Gallipoli.

The challenge I give back to you is: when our Anzac troops went to Gallipoli, and when we've got our New Zealand troops in Afghanistan, do we really think those New Zealand troops in Afghanistan are going to make a world of difference to the final outcome there?

No, we don't. But what we do say, as New Zealanders, and what those Anzacs said in the tradition of New Zealand, is we as a country believe in doing our fair share.

How reckless, naive, and stupid can the government be? Has it escaped the notice of our grandiloquent Environment Minister that the cost of Gallipoli to this country was enormous--horrendous even? And doing our "fair share" meant sacrificing a generation of young men on the altar of military stupidity built on arrogance and false pride?

Gallipoli was not in any way a "fair share". The actual cost to this country was proportionately more than that paid by any other. And for what? Well, Nick has nailed it--for no purpose whatsoever. It did not contribute at all towards the winning of World War I. Except that we felt good about ourselves--well our politicians felt good about themselves. They were not the ones bleeding and dying.

Yet, for other reasons not intended by our historically perspicuous Environment Minister, the comparison of the ETS to Gallipoli is remarkably apt, but not for those enunciated so grandly by Nick Smith. Gallipoli was a stupid gesture. So is the ETS. Gallipoli was enormously costly to this country. So will be the ETS. Gallipoli was meaningless in winning the war--futile and empty. So will the ETS be as far as global warming is concerned. New Zealand paid a cost greater than any other nation involved in Gallipoli. It will do so again with respect to the ETS--which is why the Wall Street Journal has lampooned it as an act of incredible folly on the part of New Zealand, since we alone, of all nations, have decided to go the "comprehensive" route, going boldly where no nation has gone before. Fair share, indeed. Yes, the ETS will be another Gallipoli.

But Nick went on to evoke ethics in an attempt to paint the ETS as a moral crusade.

Dr Smith said proceeding with the ETS was also about "honouring our word to voters, to investors and to the international community".

"It's also important we honour our word to foresters. Both National and Labour Government's exhorted them to plant trees with the promise they would receive the benefit of the carbon credits," he said.

Let's deal with the last bit first. The Government has made promises and commitments to foresters. If the Government were to back out now on the ETS, foresters would be up the creek without a paddle, since they had gone ahead on the back of Government promises and planted forests.

Well, we are sure that there are genuine foresters out there who saw the opportunity to make a quick buck at the taxpayers expense. In fact, we are told that all over rural New Zealand farmers are busy cleverly exploiting and rorting the system, letting land return to scrub as the new cash crop--since the Government is about to bestow upon them money from on high for teatree. How different is this, really, from the subsidies to farmers under Muldoon that led to thousands upon thousands of acres being "converted" out of scrub into farmland, schemes which then crashed and burned once the government was forced, under dire economic straits, to remove the guaranteed price supports, which caused the bubble in the first place? In the end, governments cannot keep their "word" when they engage in economic lunacy. In the end the damage is too great. Unintended consequence of your folly, Nick?  A vast expansion of scrubland throughout New Zealand. Time, Nick, to back out now. It is only going to get worse from here.

And forests are indeed a totally empty gesture when it comes to carbon output. Chris De Freitas of Auckland University exposes the charade in an article in the NZ Herald.

Research by the former Forest Research Institute showed that, in the end, only 12 per cent of the carbon temporarily stored by forests has a life expectancy of longer than five years.

In forests used solely for pulpwood, most of the end products will be broken down by decay within five years. Even some of the short-term benefits will be lost if fossil fuels are used to process the wood.

But don't let the facts get in the way of a good story, Nick. We all love a bit of farce.

Ah, but it feels good to be so moral, to have taken the ethical high ground on the global stage, despite no other nation being so stupid. So, Nick having gyrated a high jig subsides allowing the other member of the Dynamic Duo, Prime Minister John Key to begin his dervish. Mr Key is also on-song with high morals and ethics.

Mr Key repeated his commitment that if the 2011 review of the scheme finds that "the rest of the world isn't doing more, we'll slow it". (Emphasis, ours)

Say, what? We could back out of the ETS in 2011? What about all those commitments that your duet partner was just crooning about--you know, to foresters, and investors and the "international community"? Ah, Mr Key and Mr Smith--you are either being disingenuous or you have given up on sense and sensibility. You have become an embarrassment.

If it would be the right and moral thing to do to wind back the ETS in 2011, it would be equally the right and moral thing now. If you would be prepared to "break your world" to foresters in 2011, why not in 2010? So, let's get rid of the gilded lily of high morals and ethics. It is a charade. Be honest. The only reason you are proceeding with the ETS is your arrogant stubbornness. To channel moral principles and ethics in its defence is shameful.

You disrespect us all when you parade as the Dynamic Duo of high farce.