Earthquakes Focus the Mind

Impotence of Flower Power

When we descend into the vortex of natural disasters the mind tends to focus. Essentials and trifles become sharply distinguished. So it has been with the earthquake in Christchurch.

It is almost unheard of that a quake measuring 7+ on the Richter Scale has not resulted in any fatalities. Now, to be sure, this was probably helped by the fact that it occurred in the early hours of the morning when most folk were relatively safely tucked up in bed. We say "relatively".   But zero loss of life is singular nonetheless.

Contrast the Haiti earthquake where hundreds of thousands of people died. The strength of the quake and the proximity were roughly parallel to the Christchurch quake. What produced such a stark and amazing difference in outcomes?

Jesse Dykstra is a PhD student in the Natural Hazards Research Centre at Canterbury University. He provides an explanation. First, the situation in Haiti:

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, and does not benefit from stringent building codes. Construction practices are substandard and earthquake-proof buildings are few. An estimated 250,000 residences were destroyed or severely damaged in Haiti, leaving nearly 1 million people homeless. Even such important buildings as the Presidential Palace and National Assembly did not withstand the severity of the shaking. The collapse of buildings in Haiti led to tens of thousands of people being buried under rubble, or trapped inside unsafe structures.

Essential services were decimated. Infrastructure vital to the disaster response was severely damaged, meaning that people could not get the help that they needed in time. The loss of hospitals, major roads, rail links, harbours, and communication networks severely hampered rescue and relief efforts. Without sufficient aid, thirst, famine, looting, and eventually disease took a terrible toll.

Greenism and the environmental movement would celebrate Haiti because of its relatively very low carbon footprint, its closeness to nature, its lack of dependence upon fossil fuels, its simple lifestyle. Haiti would be a role model, one expects, for the superior kind of lifestyle that would save the planet if only everyone would adopt it. Christchurch, on the other hand, would represent everything that is evil, unsustainable, and bad about the modern world.

The relatively small amount of damage in Christchurch (at least compared to Haiti) allowed emergency services to mobilise and respond quickly to the earthquake. Hospitals remained operational throughout. Some essential services were damaged, but the Christchurch City Council responded quickly to water and sewerage disruptions, while electricity and communications providers worked effectively to get their systems back online. Most of Christchurch already has running water, working sewers, electricity and communications restored. This is a tribute to the preparation of the region, and reflects New Zealand's strong commitment to disaster planning and preparedness.

What Christchurch had accomplished in the way of preparedness is a function of economic prosperity and wealth. Without it, a society simply cannot afford to prepare and build the infrastructure that would protect when calamity strikes. Without wealth and financial resources people cannot get the education that is necessary to enable such protections to be put in place. A society can only achieve these things if they have a huge carbon footprint.

We have looked into the future of Greenism and we have seen Haiti. In the face of this reality, Greenism appears as superstitious and naive. It is flower power at its ignorant puerile worst.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Ready or Not 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Suppose that an American daisy-cutter bomb had been dropped on Mecca, and blew up their sacred rock. Suppose further that through a series of circumstances, a Southern Baptist gentleman proposed building a Christian chapel on the lip of that crater. We would be justified in suppposing this man to be any number of things, but one of the things he emphatically would not be is a moderate.

The fact that he would not be a moderate would not make him a terrorist, of course. It would just make him not a moderate. He would be doing something provocative, and he would be doing it on purpose. If he denied being provocative, this would simply make him a dishonest non-moderate. A real moderate would have stayed home.

Our secularists tend not to see this because they have made the fatal mistake of believing their own propaganda. All religious differences, they think, are mere denominational differences, and they are prepared to unbend liberally when it comes to such denominational distinctives, considered as such. They say, for example, that a free country should allow their Christians to debate whether to baptize with heads upstream or downstream. And then, with a patronizing pat on the head, we are sent on our way in order to debate how many angels our faith community thinks could fit on the head of a pin.

Religion, to them, is false, irrelevant, and pie-in-the-skyish. That being the case, they will treat forays by believers as believers into the political realm as blasphemous outrage, or as impossible contradiction. As a general rule of thumb, it is an outrage when Christians do it, and impossible when Muslims do it.

But on the eve of the Spanish Armada, a Roman Catholic Englishman could not be simply treated as one who believed in Purgatory, for example. Being a Catholic in that setting was a political act. When John of Leiden ascended to the throne of David in the Munster rebellion, to be an anabaptist within a fifty mile radius was a political act. We think that different churches are all listed in the yellow pages, so that we can know what time their services are, and that's it. But it is anachronistic to impose that mentality on those periods of (most of) history when politics and religion mingled in public together. The two cannot really be separated.

The rise of the secularist heresy, and the voluntary quiesence of Christians in the West, created an optical illusion. It looked like politics and religion were separated, when what had actually happened is that secularism established her religion, but with a stripped down liturgy and creed so that people would believe that it was somehow a-religious. "Perhaps if we call it secular, then people won't notice how pervasively religious it is."

This technique was brazen, and it is the kind of thing that can sometimes work . . . for a time. It is like Christians calling their churches "non-denominational." But Grace Chapel, a designated non-denominational place of worship, is also, as it turns out, denominated (named) as Grace Chapel. Abraham Lincoln once asked how many legs a sheep would have if we call the tail a leg. Five, the answer came back. No, he replied, calling the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. Calling it secular doesn't make it secular.

Secularism pretended for a time to be neutral about the basic religious concerns, and it was actually anything but neutral. Creating a religion of man is not the same thing as abandoning religion. And so after a time, the pretension wears thin, the contradictions start working their way to the surface, the old alliances and treaties are violated, and the old immanent gods no longer answer when we cry out in their temples.

This is why it is a political act to be a Muslim in America today. To be a Christian in America today is also a political act. It cannot be depoliticized by any ecclesiastical wish or theological whim. Meredith Kline has no wand to wave that will make any faithful Christians fit into this collapsing secular order. This is because our secularist overlords have lost their faith in the ghosts of Jefferson and Voltaire, and have also lost the doctrinal rigor of their convictions, and are wobbling along as best they can. In this crisis of secularist confidence, to be a Christian at all is a political act of defiance. The same goes for the Muslims -- because secularist idols can be challenged by other idols, as well as by the true God. The Muslims, however, have been quicker to see the situation, and quicker to exploit it than have Christians.

If the secularist state could somehow continue on, unruffled, for the next three centuries, a lot of Christians could continue on with their compromises with it. Sure. And if the sky fell, we would all catch larks.

But that is not our situation. Bricks are already falling out of their wall. Their towers are already swaying back and forth. The corrosive acids of their relativism have eaten away all the strength of their three-hundred-year-old mortar. Many of us do not yet see this. So? When the walls of Jericho fell down, I dare say that there were more than few Israelites who were caught flat-footed. But ready or not, here we come.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

There's Work to Be Done; Each of Us Must Do It

Now Jehoshaphat . . . walked in the way of his father Asa and did not depart from it, doing right in the sight of the Lord. The high places, however, were not removed; the people had not yet directed their hearts to the God of their fathers. (II Chronicles 20: 31--33)

The Kingdom of God reached its high water mark in the reign of Solomon, "the Younger". Following Solomon's later unfaithfulness to the Lord, the Kingdom split after his death. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was substantially lost to the faith from that point, finally being destroyed by Sennacherib in 722 BC. The Southern Kingdom of Judah limped on for another century or so.

Judah had a mixture of good and bad kings. Jehoshaphat was one of the more faithful, God fearing kings. But so often we read a litany of even relatively faithful kings accepting idolatrous religion and worship and tolerating its admixture with the worship of the one true Living God. The "high places" were altars to idol gods scattered throughout Judah.

The declension of the Davidic line occurred for at least one very pressing reason: it made the hearts of the faithful long for the coming of David's promised greater Son, Messiah who would be utterly true to His God and Father and who would keep covenant perfectly all the days of His life. Every admixture with idolatry, every compromise, every expression of unfaithfulness in the Kingdom and the kings of Judah made the longing and yearning for Messiah deeper and more desperate.

We, now, are privileged to live in the days of Messiah. He has come forth. The promises of God in Him are yea and amen.  He has taken the throne of David. He sits forever upon that throne in the heavens. He works, rules, and judges tirelessly to remould, remake, and perfect the Kingdom of God--which, as He taught us--is the matter of seeing God's will done upon earth as it is in heaven. No longer are we cast down in spirit when our rulers and the powers of this world turn away from God and His Christ. For Messiah rules and He will deal with each one. No longer do we need to accept unfaithfulness and defalcation, for Christ rules in heaven and all enemies are gradually being placed under His feet.

In the history of His Church since Pentecost we have seen, as in the line of David's house, admixtures of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, of true worship of the true God mixed with idolatry and unfaithfulness. But our longing and our labour to put these things right, whilst similar to the great reformers and prophets under the Old Covenant, is different in this one great respect: we no longer yearn for the coming forth of Messiah. He has come and He is now filling up the earth with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. This work is infallible, sure, and certain for God has given Him the Kingdom, having accepted the perfection of His death and resurrection on our behalf. Therefore, feet are surer, hands are steadier, and hope is stronger.

But we must understand that God is not served by lies. There remains in far too many places a toleration of idolatry in the Church, just as in Judah of old. It will not do.

When a man mixes idol worship with the fear of the Lord he invariably and inevitably commits this great sin: he measures and balances and restricts and proscribes the Lord in his heart and mind, as he divides his loyalty and genuflects to, and makes room for, false gods. The root of the sin lies here: he is measuring God and making God, as it were, conform to the desires of his heart, rather than wholeheartedly submitting to God and accepting that God measures him, not the reverse.

This determination to measure God and make Him conform to our feeble reasoning lies at the root of much of the present weakness and enervation in the modern Church. We would believe about God only what makes sense to us. We would progress toward God by understanding before we believe. This makes God the servant and we the master. This makes God the creature, and we the creator.  Whereas Augustine rightly declared that he believed in order to understand, an idolatrous rationalism has so infected the modern church that we have become as Judah of old. We would worship God, but only according to the way and precepts of our rationalistic consent, only if we keep the altars on the high places of our hearts and minds firmly in place.

It is the spirit of the age, and the Church has become all too unfaithfully devoted to it. The Church in the West remains fundamentally syncretisic--as it was during the days of the kings in Judah. But Messiah will never, ever accept it--not in the life of an individual believer, and not in His Church.

Casting out the idolatry by which we pay respect and homage to other authorities and powers must be done. It must be done in individual hearts and minds, person by person, believer by believer. It must be done in our families. It must be done in our congregations and places of worship. It is what the Lord commands us to be about. The high places of our hearts and minds, our families and our communities, and our holy places of worship must be removed and we must direct our hearts to King Jesus--and King Jesus alone. All else flows and cascades down from that.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Jesus. Reason. Soap. 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, September 04, 2010

We are discussing mere Christendom as a construct for civilization. Since we have been here before, it is, more accurately, a construct for a renewed civilization.

How is this necessary? C.S. Lewis once famously observed the wishful thinking of unbelievers.

In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful (The Abolition of Man).

Notice that Lewis is talking about a collection of people, a culture, a society. We do this, and still expect to find that. We cut down our trees, and we wonder where the apples all went.

We must come to recognize that the true and living God is the giver all of all good gifts. If it is good, He gives it. If He didn't give it, it isn't good, and we shouldn't want to keep it. When believers argue against the idea of Christendom, the form of the argument usually goes something like this. "If we honor God in this way, won't these bad things follow?"

Now I am quite prepared to acknowledge that when a society dishonors God through pretended honor, then horrific things follow. That would be bad, and we shouldn't do it. But then the argument comes back again -- well, then, is it worth the risk? But this question places us in the position of arguing that our only two options as a society are gross hypocrisy and overt rebellion. Surely, that can't be right . . . but maybe that's just the preacher in me talking.

So, then, God is the giver of good, and it is the responsibility of man, in his collective capacity, to recognize this appropriately. We bow our heads over the Thanksgiving turkey, but it is also necessary for the president to say, on behalf of all of us, that we are grateful to (the true) God for His kindness. It is never fitting for us to skip that part, or to negate it through hypocrisy. God has poured out His goodness upon us.

"If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (Matt. 7:11)

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (Jas. 1:17).

God is truly kind to us all, and nothing bad can come from us honoring that kindness, and giving glory to God for it. Find me a place in the Bible where the people are urged to keep God far away from their thoughts, and to make sure that if a freeling of gratitude creeps over them, to make sure to express it in the privacy of their own homes, or in a suitably zoned house of worship. As the prophet Jeremiah might have said, if confronted with folly on as high an order as this, "Give me a break."

In order to keep our culture from unraveling, from coming apart in tatters, we need to acknowedge Jesus. It is because of our refusal to acknowledge Jesus that the demons of postmodernism have come to haunt our halls of learning. Postmodernism is simply ancient sophistry, nothing more and nothing less. It is great at popping the balloons of arbitrary Platonisms, but after the fun of doing that, the floor is covered with little bits of spent balloons, and there is nothing left to do except start the orgy.

So our society must have Jesus. And if we honor Him, then we can have other good gifts -- gifts that are currently slipping from our grasp. We must have Jesus if we want science and reason. Yes, I know that many contemporary Christians have added their voices to the current clamor against science and reason, but this is just a function of such Christians getting hoodwinked by sophists. That's what sophists do best. Simple Simon went to the fair, and simple Christian goes to the deconstruction workshops at the teachers' convention.

Another gift we must continue to lose unless we learn to honor Jesus is the gift of soap, here used as synedoche for personal and cultural cleanliness. When Jesus leaves the region, it is not long before the unclean spirits return. Just as deaf and dumb spirits render the afflicted deaf and dumb, so filthy spirits render the afflicted filthy. One of the consequences of our culture's slide away from the true faith has been a marked rise in Christians making their peace with various forms of uncleanliness -- in food prep, in personal hygiene, with tattoos, in dumping litter, in sexual practices, or how they keep their living rooms and yards. And before someone rushes to offer the counter-example of enviro-activism, it should be said that such environmentalism is often just a feel-good compensatory move. There is frequently an inverse relationship between how clean the environmentalist wants the mountain streams to be and how clean the environmentalist himself is. I went to one of the very first environmental "teach-ins" at Ann Arbor, and walking out of the colliseum afterwards I was struck by how trashed the place was.

Jesus. Reason. Soap. Mere Christendom.

Entitlements, Lifestyle and Consumption

Waiting for the Big One

The IMF recently cheered us up with the news that New Zealand is one of the best countries in the world when it comes to fiscal prudence. Sure our government debt levels have risen recently as surpluses have turned to deficits, but compared with most other nations in the world, we are not too bad.

(T)he IMF staff report released yesterday found New Zealand had the second smallest government debt out of the 23 advanced economies it analysed, suggesting the country's budget would be well-placed to deal with future shocks.

The Washington-based institution examined a country's "debt limit" based on its historical track record and its current debt level, which it describes as the "fiscal space".

"Among the advanced economies, Australia, Denmark, Korea, New Zealand and Norway generally have the most fiscal space to deal with unexpected shocks," the report said.

But the picture darkens when personal debt is taken into account. In macro-economics parlance there are three segments making up national debt: government (or fiscal); corporate; and personal. Relatively speaking NZ government debt is not too bad. Corporate balance sheets also are relatively strong, with debt levels generally quite constrained. But personal debt exposure is another story.

The NZIER has reported that on average Kiwis are spending $45 per week less than they were: apparently it is going into reducing house mortgages and other personal debts. This is a good sign, although as the NZIER points out, it is not so positive for retailers. Bernard Hickey informs us that NZ household debt to disposable income hit an extravagant peak of 159% in 2008. It has since come back down somewhat--although we are a long way from being out of the danger zone.

New Zealand's household debt to disposable income hit a peak of 159 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008, right at the time of the Global Financial Crisis. Since then it has been trending down as New Zealanders chose either not to take on any more debt or chose to repay debt.

Reserve Bank figures show many New Zealanders either left their mortgage repayments at relatively high levels, even though interest rates had fallen, or 'downsized' their houses and repaid debt. Leverage is reducing. It has a long way to get back to 'normal' levels of around 100 per cent, which is widely seen as the sustainable maximum for any government or household.

To get back to around 100 per cent, New Zealand's household sector would have to repay around NZ$45 billion of debt over the next five to seven years.

The Reserve Bank has a graphic of the rapid increase in household debt over the past twenty years which is worth a thousand words.

Households moved from debt levels of 60% as a percentage of disposable income in 1991 to 160% in 2008.  This is dangerous territory. 

The question is, why have household debt levels risen so rapidly and so dangerously?  We believe there have been at least three fundamental drivers. Firstly, a steady diet of media pablum from the US and the UK, coupled with New Zealanders travelling in those countries, has painted the picture of the "good life" and what "living the dream" really means.  New Zealanders living standard expectations rose completely out of step with our economic productivity.

Secondly, a deep, pervasive sense of entitlement.  This is now so deeply ingrained in New Zealand culture that it will take over thirty years to eradicate it and replace it with something more honourable and civilized. 

Thirdly, buttressing this ingrained sense of entitlement is the belief that if one falls short on the living standards to which one is entitled then "others" must provide.  In some places this is called socialism.  In others, envy.  Expecting others to provide what we believe we are entitled to is found in almost every segment of society.  In government circles it is manifested in our national defence doctrine: we expect that other nations will come to defend us if we face any military threat.  The government actively encourages the idea that it will organise society so that the "rich" will sustain the "poor"--thereby encouraging everyone to look to others as a way to get ahead.  Business constantly looks to government for regulation, help, assistance, and support so that it can prosper in the way to which believes it is entitled.  Employees get very restive when jobs are not available: what is wrong with a society that does not have on-tap the position to which I am entitled by dint of study, qualifications, or sheer existence? 

But governments can only provide so much.  When our window on the world painted a picture of a living standard significantly beyond our own, and government failed to deliver the "good life" as we now defined it and measured it in comparison with other countries, then the next-best application of the "others" doctrine undergirding our sense of entitlement was to borrow.  Debt became the short cut to realising our perceived lifestyle entitlements.  So New Zealand households borrowed way beyond their abilities to service and repay out of disposable income in the nineties and noughties.

The follies and dangers of this course was disguised by the fact that almost everybody was doing it.  It was not just the effect of a herd instinct; it was also that a pyrrhic perception of wealth was conjured up due to borrowed money being translated into rising house prices, which sustained an appearance of wealth.  Borrowing seemed like a no-risk path to wealth.  Borrowing to buy houses which inevitably and constantly increase in price gave the appearance of prosperity--for a time.  But no longer.

Is our household de-leveraging permanent? Not at all. The ethic of entitlement is as strong as ever. The implicit envy of the "others" doctrine is unchanged. Successive socialist governments will ensure that it stays n the forefront.  "Normal service" will resume shortly. We expect that within two or three years we will return to the borrowing-to-consume lifestyle with a vengeance. Households will feel the need to make up for lost time. The only thing to prevent this, in our view, is for the rest of the world to realise just how much our economy is on a knife-edge. If overseas savers decide to fund us no longer and our currency plunges to more rational levels, then interest rates will rise substantially and a consumption or lifestyle recession with a big "R" will be upon us.

Our pick would be for the former outcome. But the wise will be warned. They will decline, this time, to join the herd and will continue to reduce debt as fast as they can. As they said after the Christchurch earthquake, sooner or later the big one will hit.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Seven Things for Christians to Not Sip at the Tea Party

Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, September 02, 2010

I think it goes without saying that biblical Christians will vote in November in a way that favors basic pro-life issues, supports a return to some form of fiscal sanity, and rejects all attempts at legislative gender-bending. So much goes without saying. So I am not so much concerned about how our folks vote, for voting out the rapscallions can be edifying on a personal level, and instructive for the kids to boot. I am talking rather about how conservative Christians might get themselves invited to a rally, and then be tempted to get swept up into all the throw-the-bums-out excitement, losing track of some things that would be better not to lose track of. So . . .

1. Keep your head. We are living in a time when politicommotions are running high, and the pushback against socialist lunacy is likely to be rowdy and vigorous . . . but angry mobs do not constitute permission from God to stop obeying Him for the duration of the rally. If you are called to fight, then gird up the loins of your mind (1 Pet. 1:13).

2. Conservative forms of postmodern relativism are no better than the other kinds. History happened the way it did, and advocacy history for our side, celebrating whatever makes us feel better about ourselves, is no better than having the light bulb invented by a Zulu chieftain during Black History Month, and by Edison the rest of the year. I mean, co-opting Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. as champions of conservatism is enough provocation to make St. Francis kick three or four puppies. If some conservative rally a century from now has a big banner of Obama at it, then perhaps it wouldn't be too far off to suggest that somehow, somewhere, somebody slipped a cog.

3. Do not make the mistake of thinking that anything that makes the socialists, liberals, progressives, and commies froth at the mouth must be biblical. What they are advancing is evil, sure enough, but that doesn't mean that everyone who fights them must be good. Evil forces fight other evil forces, evil forces fight confused forces, and evil forces fight good forces. So you could be fighting evil, and still have the odds of you being a good guy be two to one against.

4. Always act, and never react. Action needs to proceed from a biblically based framework of political principles, and not from faux outrage over the fact that your gored ox is not covered by Medicaid.

5. Don't support any political movement in such a way that eliminates your ability to protest the inevitable compromises that will follow in the train of electoral victory, such compromises being undertaken and advanced by Republicans ten minutes after the election. Ten dollars says that after the election, which will be a good night for Republicans, a few leading Republicans will come out almost immediately and say that they don't actually want to dismantle Obamacare piece by piece, in order to throw it into the Chesapeake piece by piece. The only way effectively to counter this will be by throwing congressmen into the Chesapeake, as a way to help them get the tar and feathers off.

6. Take note of the fact that pastors, theologians and writers alive today, who actually embody the principles held by the Founders, will usually not be allowed anywhere near the microphones, at least not while the television crews are still there. I have a cartoon from The New Yorker hanging on my bulletin board, where a school teacher in a flower power dress is saying to the kids, "'Give me liberty or give me death.' Now what kind of person would say that?"

7. Above all, beware the idolatry of a Christless civil religion. The American civil religion has the kind of pantheon that can fit lots of statues around the base of that dome, and Christians must not bow down to any of them. We are Christians and the worship of a generic Deity is prohibited to us. There is no way to the Father except through the name of Jesus. But there are manifestations of the American civil religion that are seductive to evangelicals. And so we must be told, again and again, little children, keep yourselves from idols (1 John 5:21).

Laughable

A Demi-God Has Spoken

To many in the West, Stephen Hawking is a demi-god. In the rationalist mindset of the Enlightenment those deemed to be the most brilliant or intelligent are honoured above all. If you happen to be a materialist scientist to boot, let alone a physicist then one's status and place on the Olympian heights is assured. So it is with Hawking. The fact that he suffers such physical impairment only serves to underscore the semi-divine quality of pure Reason--a theme close to the heart of the Enlightenment.

Hawking, along with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, has written a book to "explain" how existence came into being. It is all to do with his quest for a meta-theory of everything. Not yet published, we have been confined to reviews and excerpts, which we acknowledge to be dangerous. We may be rushing to premature judgment, but assuming that the reviews and excerpts are accurate and faithful, Hawking's latest book, The Grand Design will show that Hawking is indeed a very, very foolish man.

Firstly, like all Unbelievers Hawking believes that all reality (which he now assures us must be conceived of as billions of universes) exists by chance. Randomness, brute chance, is the ultimate reality, period.

Secondly, he assures us that not only our universe, but all possible universes came into existence spontaneously, out of nothing. While he is forced to adopt language such as "creation" he is pleased to proclaim to the world that the existence of a creation does not require a creator. Creation was spontaneously ex-nihilo. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something," he says. How can that be? Well, things like that could happen in a random multi-verse.

Thirdly, he insists on stealing and using entirely inappropriate language--the use of which implicitly denies and undermines the case he is trying to make. He speaks of the "law" of gravity, and of natural laws in general. He utilises concepts such as "necessity" and "requirement". Catch these howlers: "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." (Emphasis, ours.)

In other words, even as he strives to construct, describe, and argue for a spontaneous random existence out of nothing, he denies thereby his case. It is like the child who wants to deny the existence of hammers and nails by nailing up billboards to that effect. Every constructed and uttered sentence must presuppose the omnipotent God Who created all things out of nothing and controls and governs every sub-atomic particle in the creation, as well as all non material reality. To presuppose God in order to deny Him is folly indeed. It is childish.

Either Hawking is aware of this and accepts the irony, being too embarrassed or unable to deal with it, or he is unaware of it. Either way he is not to be commended.

Has not God spoken truly: "the fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God'"? (Psalm 14:1)

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Ice Cubes and a Slice of Lemon 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, September 06, 2010

If we are talking about reading, writing, and ciphering, the state of government education in the United States is appalling. But if we reflect on what Hunter Baker points out in his The End of Secularism (p. 18), that more Americans believe in the virgin birth than believe in Darwinism, the failure of state education appears to be a cause for celebration. We still have a good deal to work with.

John Adams wrote somewhere that our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people, and that this very same Constitution is "wholly unfit" for any other kind of people. Amen. But . . .

Enter Glenn Beck. He began educating himself on what the Founders taught about the foundations of civil liberty, and discovered that they were not secularists. God was necessary, and so Beck started to teach that God was necessary. This is why his rally at the Washington Mall was a "restoring honor" rally, with God as the foundation, and not a partisan political rally. A lot of evangelicals were involved in this, and Russell Moore has some really good thoughts on what a farrago of confusion it all is.

But I would want to add something to Moore's concerns (with which I fully agree). Remember that Beck is in motion. He is reading and learning as he goes. If he keeps on going, right out of Mormonism and into an orthodox form of the Christian faith, he wouldn't be the first reformer this kind of thing happened to. If something like that happened, then I would be more than happy to keep cheering him on. But if it does not happen, then I am confident that what he is doing will be just one more flash-in-the-pan event, of the kind that our religious organizers are so good at.

Why? Because Beck is a Mormon, all his appeals to "God" will of necessity be appeals to a place-holder god, a thin, generic god, the god on our money. But the god of American civil religion is not a god who speaks. He has no opinions, no laws, no revelation. He has no son, and he sent no mediator. He can be safely appealed to by all parties, or blithely ignored by any party. As long as Beck is trying to convey constitutional content, he cannot support it with contentless theology. Just as King James once said, "No bishop, no king," so I say, "No Creed, no Constitution." If Beck wants to love the Constitution, he needs to learn to love the Creed. He needs to become a Christian. And instead of giving up in despair over the frightful muddle all this represents, orthodox believers need pray that he does become a Christian. Why not? God has a sense of humor.


At his rally, Beck referred to the "black regiment" that he had with him, referring to the many clergymen who were at the rally. This name came from Presbyterian preachers in the American War for Independence who were known as the black regiment because they preached in black Geneva gowns. But because Beck has gathered men who are okay with his Mormonism, at best he has a light gray regiment. But the need of the hour is not pearly gray Franciscans, but black robed Calvinists. We need thunder and lightning in our pulpits, and not a light drizzle.

A word "God" that encompasses both the deity of Mormonism, who used to be a man just like us, and the triune Creator of Heaven and earth, worshiped by orthodox Christians, is for all intents and purposes a worthless word. It is a thin word, not a thick one.

Salvation for nations is religious, and it needs to be religiously thick. We cannot be saved by thin religion. We cannot be saved by a religion the theological definitions of which will not stand up under five minutes of questioning.

And, as it turns out, this problem goes back to Adams. He rightly held that our republic was founded on "reason, morality, and the Christian religion" without "the monkery of priests." But though this was right, Adams himself was beginning to move toward Unitarianism, the granddaddy of all the errors of American civil religion. Adams said that Christianity was necessary, while he was drifting out of it. But we need Jesus Christ, the only-begotten of the Father, raised for our justification, and we most certainly do not need a Generic Fomenter of Uplift in the Sky.

The mistake we made was this. If we want and need a "mere Christendom," then we need to keep that Christendom from becoming sectarian. But when you pour a diluting agent into your theology willy nilly, unless you take care, the dilution will affect the essential aspects of the Christian faith, like the death and resurrection of Jesus, and not just the relative unimportance of the debate between supralapsarians and infralapsarians.

Mere Christendom needs to be thin when it comes to the differences between Lutherans and Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, and so on. But it needs to manage to do this without thinning out the contents of the Apostles Creed. It needs to be thick there.

The centuries old movement toward a thinner civil religion has moved us from a founding of Calvinistic Scotch to a glass of tepid water. Beck has put some ice cubes in the water, and a slice of lemon, and everybody is freaking out as though it were twenty-year-old Scotch.

The Gospel According to Tuku Morgan

Tainui, Animism and Forthcoming Penury

Tuku Morgan is the chairman of Te Arataura Waikato-Tainui. As such he is involved in the investment and divestment of Tainui assets. He has made an impassioned plea for New Zealand not to sell land to foreigners. Tainui, he says, will not be selling any land to foreign owned interests. (NZ Herald, 30th August, 2010)

Good for them. If the tribal authorities own the land on behalf of the tribe they are free to sell to whomever they choose. The tribe has a private property right in the assets, after all. But Mr Morgan goes further. He makes his argument on the basis of Taunui's religion and wants to see the same principles and practice of ownership be extended to all New Zealand. He informs us that, “There are strong cultural and spiritual elements to our belief that land ownership must remain in the hands of New Zealanders.” Now Tainui are entitled to their own established religion; but he wants to see the principles and beliefs of his tribal religion extended to govern the behaviour of all New Zealanders. That is wrong. Such religious imperialism must be firmly resisted.

Mr Morgan explains that land is sacred in Tainui's religion, (which, he asserts, incidentally to be the religion of all Maori, not just Tainui). He writes: “Maori continue to regard their land as taonga tuku iho, a treasure. Land gives us our identity, our kotahitanga, our tino rangatiratanga.” Ancient Maori animism is well documented. Mr Morgan continues to hold to those beliefs in asserting that land somehow gives him and his tribe and his race identity. If we were to ask, Why not your BMW? or your house? or your flat screen TV?--why don't these possession likewise give you identity? no doubt Mr Morgan would reply that there is something distinct and mystical about land in a way not shared by other material assets. It is related to the ancestors and to the gods and through them Mr Morgan and his colleagues are able to relate to their ancestors and their gods.Land apparently serves as a channelling talisman in Mr Morgan's animistic religion.

One presumes, those Tainui who have left their tribal land and migrated overseas must have lost their identity, their kotahitanga and their tino rangatiratanga. They presumably are able to be regarded as human beings, but, one assumes, no longer Tainui, no longer Maori.


Some might argue that primitive Maori socialism is also at work here. Property, goods and possessions are not really owned by the individual, but by the collective (past ancestors, present living tribal members, and descendants to come) and therefore must never be sold. But no, Mr Morgan quite explicitly makes a distinction between land and other property. When speaking of foreign trading partners and investors, he is quick to point out that Tainui is keen to buy and sell with the best of them.

Waikato-Tainui has established relationships with foreign partners. We want to reach out and be part of a vibrant global community. We will draw on the skills and resources of overseas partners as they will benefit from ours. But land sales will never be part of those relationships. A key element of . . . our 50-year inter-generational strategic plan for the social, cultural, and economic advancement of Waikato-Tainui, is to grow the tribal estate—to reclaim for our tamariki and mokopuna and for their tamariki and mokipuna, the lands of their tapuna, their ancestors.

“We are doing that block by block, acre by acre, piece by piece. It is a long and drawn-out process—to reverse the alienation of a people from its land—but we are determined. (Emphasis, ours)

He goes on to explain that for the tribe, land, unlike other assets and property, is owned under the principle of guardianship. He writes: “We do not 'own' it as individuals. We are merely caretakers for those generations who went before, and those yet to follow.”

So, in Waikato-Tainui's mind, land is in a special category. It can be bought, but never sold. Meanwhile, stadia, hotels, businesses, commercial buildings can be bought and sold at will—as Tainui have done. That kind of property can definitely be “alienated” from the people by being sold off.

It is clear that land ownership for Tainui is a religious matter. Once again—they are entitled to their beliefs and particular religion. It is a false religion, but they are entitled to it. It is economic nonsense, but there you go.

To explain, let's explore just three aspects. Let's assume for a moment that Mr Morgan's religion is the truth and that the land occupied by their ancestors really does control and shape his person. Let us also grant for sake of argument that such land can never be owned individually but is collectively owned by the Tainui—including all past generations, those presently living, and those yet to be born. Does this principle also apply to the land occupied by the Waikato-Tainui ancestors before their migration to New Zealand? And if not, why not? And if so, then Tainui has a far bigger problem than their present alienation from land in the Waikato.

Secondly, why has Mr Morgan confused individual ownership and corporate ownership of property with transactions of property? Why does he imply land must owned corporately and inter-generationally (and therefore never be sold), but all other property can be bought or sold by the tribe at will? Surely all tribal assets such as hotels and so forth can be bought and sold, but, he would agree, remain corporately owned. Purchase and sale simply is exchanging one form of ownership for another, or exchanging one form of property for another. But all tribal assets must be held in perpetuity for the tribe? And if not, why not? Why would land be placed in a special category of ownership—never to be sold, once purchased? Why can tribal assets such as hotels be sold, but land never?

But, if it were true that land really did determine the personhood of individual people—or Tainui believes that it does—then surely Tainui should sell up all their other assets as soon as possible to buy up as much land as possible—to ensure a greater identity and personhood of tribal members.

And herein lies the economic folly of what Mr Morgan is proposing: the market value of any asset is determined by what people are willing to pay for it. Mr Morgan wants Tainui to buy land, then remove it from sale forever. This means that the market value of the land falls overnight to nothing. That which can never be sold is often said to be priceless—but in fact, it is worthless in an economic and market sense. If Tainui pursue this fifty year strategy seriously the tribe will end up in penury. It will have a huge land bank with which it can do very little. Waikato-Tainui will succeed to poverty—and so the cycle will repeat. This is what animism always produces.

The smart Waikato-Tainui will have nothing to do with such nonsense. The idea that such folly should be extended to all New Zealand must be rejected out of hand. Mr Morgan and his colleagues have a right to take the tribe to penury if they so choose. They have no right to argue, even insist, that the rest of the country must likewise be afflicted with their false religion and its attendant economic nonsense.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Woe to the Pastors

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, August 31, 2010

In the beginning are the words. Behind and underneath every civilization are the foundational words. Those words can be false and idolatrous, but when they are believed, they still serve in a foundational way. When they are not believed, that culture has entered a sacrificial crisis. Smoke still ascends from their temples, but no one really believes in the gods anymore. The sacrifices don't work, and the populace continues to unravel. "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Ps. 11:3).

Then others come, preaching strange gods, and there is pressure to make a switch -- because human cultures have a deep and undeniable need for efficacious sacrifice. Abandoning ineffectual gods, proven to be such, for ineffectual gods, not yet shown up as failures, can seem like an improvement.

The Ground Zero mosque is an opening gambit, an appeal to secularist America. If Allah is God, then follow Him. And of course, the materialist laughs this idea to scorn -- look at the relative size of the armies and navies, look at the GDPs, look at our cultural achievements. And so the importance of faith is neglected. What is greater -- momentous achievements with no faith following, or tiny achievements supported by blind, unyielding faith? Which one will give way to the other. As Chesterton put it, a man who stands for nothing will fall for anything. The same thing goes for cultures.

There are counter appeals, pulling in an opposite direction, of course. And we can see this kind of thing with the Glenn Beck rally at the Washington Mall this last week end. Those who are contemptuously dismissively of such things are only showing that they don't know what makes human beings tick. People don't just want a full belly -- they want answers. They want to be oriented. They want to be centered. And we don't need to see them getting the right answers to be able to see the hunger for answers.

But we are Reformed. We can't be bothered with providing gospel answers to a starving nation. Let the Mormons do that. The sheep are scattered, and the task of gathering them looks perilously like work. It is too much work to even look like a false shepherd. "My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them"(Ez. 34:6). When Jesus saw the multitudes in this condition, His heart went out to them (Matt. 9:36). Our theologians take it upon themselves a radical two flock theology, postulating an earthly flock that we don't have to pay any attention to, and a heavenly flock that doesn't need any attention from us. It works out just fine, and here we are with a book of thick theology, and a fine cigar.

Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock; Therefore, O ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them (Ezekiel. 34:7-10).

Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD. Therefore thus saith the LORD God of Israel against the pastors that feed my people; Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the LORD (Jeremiah 23:1-3).

And so there you have it. Woe declared upon the pastors.

IPCC Slammed, But . . .

Business as Usual

Some integrity at last! The Daily Express has summarized a report by a disinterested international panel of scientists called the InterAcademy Council which has evaluated the methodology of the UN Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”). The IPCC, you recall, is the UN body which has led the charge on attempts to jawbone, bully, bribe shame, and blackmail nations into accepting an international treaty on climate change.(The New York Times summary of the Report can be found here.)

The IPCC had cast a cloak of “science” over its conclusions to bolster its credibility. Yet it has now become clear to all but those who will not see that its “threat assessments” were more the conjurings of propagandists than objective scientists. The InterAcademy Council, led by Howard Shapiro of Princeton, independently evaluated the procedures and governance of the IPCC and concluded that it has been guilty of schoolboy procedural errors.

Amongst the findings and conclusions are:

-The need for the IPCC to differentiate between the relative uncertainty of scientific claims. Obviously some claims and evidence are more clear and certain (more probable) than others. The IPCC needs to make clear when its prognostications are tendentious and speculative.

-All conflicts of interest need to be managed properly and ethically. This is a slap at the Chairman on the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri (amongst others) because of his financial and business connections with entities standing to benefit commercially were the nations of the world collectively to agree to combat climate change by taxing nations and funding entities purporting to combat global warming.

-Misleading and deceptive statements in the IPCC report were identified and condemned. Some authors were found reporting high confidence in “some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach 'high confidence' to the statements.”

-The IPCC did not listen to the criticisms of peer reviewers, often ignoring them, weakening them, or editing them out of the reports. “The response to the discovery of errors was slow and inadequate,” the Council concluded.

One recommendation of the Council was that a Chairman of the IPCC should not preside over more than one Climate Change status report. Surprise, surprise. Dr Pachauri has rejected this recommendation outright, insisting that he is going to stay working on the next IPCC assessment, due to be published in 2013—2014. It would appear that the self-serving corrupt UN, unlike the climate, never changes.

Letter From America

Obama’s Manichean World

(President Obama is one of the worst political figures in living memory when it comes to pronouncing how things will be, what his massive bills and laws will and will not do, without having any clue as to when, why, or how his promises will be fulfilled. Naive and stupid appear to be apt sobriquets. Reckless and irresponsible also appear apt. Mona Charen documents one of the President's follies.
JT)

How the HAMP program is using taxpayer money to subsidize irresponsible behavior.
Republished from National Review Online August 27, 2010

Mona Charen


President Obama has a weakness for thinking in categories. For someone who provokes swoons among liberals for his great intellect, he has repeatedly evidenced an unsophisticated, one might even say simple-minded, view of the world: Workers good; bosses exploitative. Borrowers good; lenders bad. Patients good; insurance companies bad. Again and again, the president and his spokesmen have justified their expansions of government power as efforts to help those who “through no fault of their own” find themselves in difficulties.

Many politicians traffic in this kind rhetoric during campaigns, but President Obama has institutionalized it in policy.

One of those reifications — the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — now stands revealed as a failure.

Recall that in February of 2009, President Obama proposed to solve a “crisis unlike we’ve ever known.” It wasn’t, the president insisted, that anyone had made poor decisions. “It begins with a young family. . . . They save up. . . . They choose a home that feels like the perfect place to start a life. They secure a fixed-rate mortgage at a reasonable rate, and they make a down payment, and they make their mortgage payments each month. They are as responsible as anyone could ask them to be.” But then someone loses a job, or a spouse has his or her hours cut, or a child becomes sick.

The president’s $75 billion program guaranteed that homeowners with Fannie or Freddie mortgages would be eligible for refinancing to lower rates if their mortgages were between 80 and 105 percent of the home’s worth. Other borrowers facing foreclosure would be able to refinance their mortgages down to 31 percent of their monthly income. Didn’t this mean that taxpayers who didn’t buy too much house or who paid their mortgage bills on time would be subsidizing those who did not? No, the president insisted. “I want to be very clear about what this plan will not do: It will not rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans. It will not help speculators. . . . It will not help dishonest lenders who acted irresponsibly, distorting the facts and dismissing the fine print at the expense of buyers who didn’t know better. And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”

The president never explained how the Treasury Department would differentiate “responsible” borrowers from “speculators,” because in fact it could not. Tea-party protesters were not fooled. They carried placards saying “Honk if I’m paying your mortgage.”

In March of this year, the Obama administration, tacitly acknowledging HAMP’s failure, proposed new rules that would give jobless homeowners a three-month break on mortgage payments and offer more incentives to lenders to modify mortgages. While the administration had boldly predicted in 2009 that HAMP would save 3 to 4 million homeowners, only 434,716 had seen their monthly payments permanently lowered as of July. A much larger number, 616,839 were booted from the program during the same period, usually for failing to make payments on time. As the Los Angeles Times noted in March, “The modifications, while delaying the foreclosure process, did not appear to be a long-term solution. About 52 percent of those with modified loans defaulted again after nine months.”

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP, for those who speak Washingtonese) blasted the program in a July report:

Treasury’s refusal to provide meaningful goals for this important program is a fundamental failure of transparency and accountability that makes it far more difficult for the American people and their representatives in Congress to assess whether the program’s benefits are worth its very substantial cost.

The American people are essentially being asked to shoulder an additional $50 billion of national debt without being told, more than 16 months after the program’s announcement, how many people Treasury hopes to actually help stay in their homes as a result of these expenditures, how many people are intended to be helped through other subprograms, and how the program is performing against those expectations and goals. Without such clearly defined standards, positive comments regarding the progress or success of HAMP are simply not credible, and the growing public suspicion that the program is an outright failure will continue to spread.

In contrast to the Obama morality play, the foreclosure crisis was not a conspiracy of the rich and powerful against dutiful homeowners reliably making their monthly payments. It was the result of multiple follies by government, bankers, and individuals. President Obama’s instinct to insulate people from the consequences of their bad decisions (and yes, sometimes bad luck) amounts to subsidizing failure. The results are coming in daily — persistent high unemployment, an anemic recovery, and billions upon billions of wasted taxpayer money.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.

Idolatry and Maori Child Abuse, Part II

The Destiny of Those Maori Remaining in New Zealand

We have spoken of the great Maori diaspora—many of whom have left New Zealand to escape the pervasive influence of Maori whanau culture, which hangs as an albatross around their necks. We believe it to be an indirect cause of the high incidence of child abuse amongst Maori today.

The problem with whanau culture is that it elevates the whanau above the nuclear family, thus undermining the roles and responsibilities of parents to their own children. It represents a rejection of God's command that a man shall leave his parents and shall cleave to his wife when he marries. In modern Maori culture, whanau claims regularly supersede and trump the legitimate claims of children upon their own parents. This, in turn, entices and tempts far too many Maori parents to look to their extended families to take over what it is their responsibility to provide for their own children. This has led to the neglect of Maori children, since passing responsibility over to the whanau for one's children fails far too often. The extended family has not soul to damn and no butt to kick. All too often no one couple ends up standing as a strong tower of refuge for vulnerable children. Shared parenting all to often produces neglected children who slip through cracks.

A third reason for such an appalling record of child abuse within Maori communities is state welfare. Sir Apirana Ngata is reported to have said, when social welfare was first introduced by Michael Savage, that “this will be the death of our people”. To be sure, it has been the death of a good many pakeha as well. But Maori have proved particularly susceptible to its deadly effects. We believe the reason is the combination of secular state welfarism with Maori whanau culture. Maori extended families and whanau socialism easily combine with the ideology and values of state welfarism to make a destructive and deadly cocktail. Sir Apirana Ngata was right.

The whanau socialist model was already in place when European Fabian socialism was institutionalised in New Zealand in the nineteen-thirties by the first Labour government. Because whanau socialism already undermined private property rights, and forced many Maori families to look to the whanau for economic support and sustenance, it was a small step for Maori to extend this beyond their extended family to the government. Hence Maori to this day have been strong supporters of socialist political doctrines and institutions. Their culture leads them to regard national social welfare as intrinsically right and therefore receiving support from other people not only an ethnic right, but a fundamental civil right as well. Maori are culturally inclined to socialism and progressive political and economic doctrines fit hand in glove with Maori cultural beliefs.

Those who argue that it is relative Maori poverty which inclines them to socialist doctrines over-simplify the case. Relative Maori poverty continues entrenched first and foremost because the economic demands of the whanau keep many Maori families in a state of poverty and dependency. In such a culture if any Maori family prospers, their economic obligations to their blood relatives rise. Consequently children rapidly become dependent upon “others” and when the increasingly impoverished whanau will not provide, Maori naturally look to the state. It is just exchanging one form of socialism for another.

Welfare dependent families, which are disproportionately represented in the Maori population, often reproduce their welfare dependency, binding the next generation to degradation and destruction. Husbands and fathers as providers become an optional extra. Women become the dominant adult in such families because welfare is normally dolled out by the State through and around the power matrix of mother or the woman who happens to be the designated care-giver du jour. In such a degraded state, children easily become an economic tool, a means of extracting more money from government. Welfarism leads to inter-generational cycles of poverty, which causes and results in the neglect and abuse of children. Throwing more money at the “problem” is the worst possible thing that could be done. It is also the most naïve, simplistic, and stupid.

Does this mean that Maori are beyond hope? Not at all. This is not primarily an ethnic or cultural problem. It is a spiritual problem. Religious constructs have pervasive cultural consequences. False and wrong religious constructs normally have pervasively bad cultural consequences. But Maori are not beyond the grace of God; His hand is not shortened that it cannot save. There is a great need in our day for biblically informed teachers to help Maori Christians, in this particular instance, reform their ethnic cultural inheritance around the constructs of the Scripture, to enable the development of a reformed Christian Maori culture and a reconstruction of biblical families. This will necessitate a rejection of aspects of the whanau culture and a reformation of those aspects which are redeemable. The need is great.

It is from the Church and the Believing community that the answers and help will come, not from more government-extorted welfare and a paradigm of victim-entitlement. Let us pray for the Lord to raise up Maori leadership which will completely reject the ungodly claims of whanau upon Maori families and the much vaunted “Maori way of doing things”. Such racial and ethnic pride is completely unbecoming true faith in God. Maori long ago tragically decided they would adapt the pakeha's God to their own way of thinking. Maori must reject such pernicious idolatry.

Let us ask God to raise up Maori who will call for Maori to repent of their Unbelieving cultural assault upon biblical marriage and family. The idol of whanau-uber-family must be broken and Maori must do it—in faith, with their eyes upon the Lord, not upon the State.

One final word—some may be wondering whether Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church might be the first signs of a reformation within Maoridom back to biblical faith. We fear not. Without discounting or denigrating whatever good Destiny may have done, we believe it is right at the point of neglecting to reject the idolatry of whanau culture that Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church have failed the Maori people. To our mind they have simply substituted the blood whanau culture for an ecclesiastical whanau culture. The prior claims of the ecclesiastical whanau—which has elided across from the ethnic whanau culture—continue to undermine the biblical insistence on the primary authority of the nuclear Christian family.

To this extent we believe Destiny represents a false dawn and a pseudo-reformation. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot give the old household idols a new coat of paint and claim, thereby, that you are serving the Living God. The God of our fathers, it will do us all well to recall, commands first and foremost that there will be no other gods brought into His holy presence.

May it please God to be gracious to the people at Destiny and lead them to understand this. May He also once again remember mercy to those Maori who remain in New Zealand.

Letter From America

The Last Refuge of the Liberal
Labeling all opponents “bigots” allows the Left to forgo real debates.

Charles Krauthammer
August 27, 2010 12:00 P.M.
Republished from National Review Online

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

● Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness, and debt, as represented by the tea-party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

● Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

● Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

● Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage, and reject a Ground Zero mosque.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless, and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the Left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) Illegal immigration should be illegal; (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty; and (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible ground for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence of a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 the Washington Post Writers Group

Idolatry and Maori Child Abuse, Part I

Whanau Culture's Collateral Damage

There was a small furore inside the Wellington beltway two weeks ago when Paula Bennett, Minister of Social Development had the temerity to suggest that Maori elites and the controllers of millions of dollars of Maori assets had a responsibility to commit more resources to looking after their own Maori children. The reason is that whilst representing around ten percent of the population, Maori account for 50% of the children identified on government roles as being at risk—which is to say, they don't have parents or caregivers that either parent or give proper care.

The risible response of the Green co-leader Turei was to accuse the Minister of racism. Such a response must be dismissed contemptuously. But, it begs the question: why are Maori children at such risk? Always the reasons are complex. We do not mean this sarcastically. Life is complex; all human culture is complex; it is exceedingly thick, with layer upon layer of reality (as God has wonderfully ordained it to be). Turning a culture so that it moves in a different direction is a complex undertaking—too complex for any one agency to achieve. Impossible for government agencies—for God has not ordained such tasks for government.

In general, however, Maori elites and those who control the power structures within Maoridom are agreed on where the problems lie and what the solution must be. To them the solution is monocular and straightforward: more money. Or, to be more precise, more of other people's money. Money poured forth is the simplistic naïve materialist solution offered. Yet the majority of non-Maori power elites would agree. So, the only debate in our society over the solution to the plight of Maori children is how much money of other people's money can be delivered, and by whom. The right generally argues for lesser amounts, citing the weak economy, national debt levels and so on, whilst the left always argues for more. The Maori party, in turn, always argues for much, much more.

It is noteworthy that the recent brouhaha was, once again, over money. The Minister of Social Development was arguing for more money for at risk Maori children—but was trying to source it from Maori elites (those tribal leaders who control the billions of dollars in various tribal settlements for historical grievances genuine and manufactured). For some reason, beyond the ken of rational people, this was deemed racist.

Why does Maoridom have such an appalling childcare record? (We generalise, of course. There are many salutary and excellent Maori parents, and fine Maori families. Sadly, however, they are relatively smaller in proportion to their population than non-Maori ethnicities.) Why?

Whilst the reasons are legion, there are at least three which we believe are the more pernicious. The first is the degradation of the nuclear family at the expense of extended family or whanau. Maori apologists have hailed their whanau-culture as a point of great superiority over pakeha culture. The paradigm of the extended family, we are told, means that every child grows up within a community of blood relatives, aunts and uncles, cousins, and more distant blood relatives. The whanau culture creates a bond of responsibility to many children, not just one's own. Children ostensibly grow up within a far wider and richer group of adults and children. Any weakness in parents can be compensated by the influence of the wider whanau.

Western culture is seen as inferior at this point, for the nuclear family is believed to be narrow, isolated, restricted and shallow. It does not have the breadth, colour, depth, and richness of an extended family structure.

To be sure, an extended and strong community, whether based on blood or other bonds should be a great blessing—but, and it is a colossal “but”, the extended community in the long run is destructive unless it takes up its roles and responsibilities upon the foundation of strong nuclear family structures. A true oneness of the community can only be sustained upon the solid ground of many strong nuclear families. When the community is misshapen to where it substitutes for a nuclear family, the outcome is most often destructive.

The problem is that the extended family has no soul to damn and no butt to kick. The whanau concept, as currently manifested within Maoridom, does not hold birth parents primarily accountable and responsible for their children. A major reason so many Maori children are neglected is that it is impossible to hold a community accountable for their care; there is no primary caregiver by definition. Thus, the Maori concept of whanau has in general become a hindrance to the proper care of children. Until Maori acknowledge that God gives children to parents first and foremost, and only to the community secondarily and indirectly, and that He holds birth parents responsible and accountable, and until Maori reform their whanau culture accordingly, high rates of child abuse amongst Maori will likely continue.

A second major cause of putting children at risk is the concept of whanau socialism—which of course is related to the first. Maori parents are inculcated in the heinous idea that commitments to whanau supersede their duties and commitments to their own children. So, when somebody dies all are obligated to attend the tangi, often taking days off work; all are obligated to contribute. Maori parents are continually needing to expend their cash and assets upon extended family obligations—most often at the expense of the care and provision for their own children. And when such impoverished families get into strife, whanau socialism makes it acceptable to cast them upon the whanau for care and help—as a sort of payback or return for having been a dutiful whanau member.

Many Maori have migrated to Australia for this reason: to escape the perpetual impoverishment that comes from the never-ceasing demands of the extended family upon their income, time, resources, and assets. The obligation to “share” and pay koha are often overwhelming. Until Maori cleanse their culture of such notions, and build their communities upon the principles of the sanctity of private property; the rejection of theft and immoral expropriation of the property of others; a rejection of whanau claims upon the income and assets of extended family members, and affirm the fundamental truth that commitments and duties to one's own children are more important than duties to one's whanau, high rates of neglect of children will continue.

The latter principle of commitment to one's marriage and family being more important and a higher priority than commitment to one's extended family is, of course, derived from the beginning of the human race, where God declared and commanded that a man, in marriage, should leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife. The modern whanau socialist model at root constitutes a rebellion against this divine plan and command. Evil consequences always flow when individuals and cultures think themselves smarter than the Living God.

God will not be mocked—and the truth of this is showing up in the incidence of child abuse amongst Maori.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Debt as a Basic Human Right 

Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, August 28, 2010

I heard a commentator say the other day that we need to keep the Federal Reserve around, known hereafter as the Fed, because don't we always need a lender of last resort? I mean, what are we going to do without a lender of last resort?

Well, maybe we might not borrow trillions of dollars that will not be repaid to anybody. Maybe something like that would happen.

The shift between the old conception of human rights (e.g. the right not to be messed with via various forms of tyranny) and the new conception of human rights (e.g. the right to free dental care) was a momentous shift. It represented a change from the government needing to recognize that God had endowed each citizen with certain inalienable rights, to the notion that the government should become the god of each individual citizen, with federal corn making the young men cheerful, and federal new wine doing the same for the maids.

From this we have progressed to the next stage -- the idea of debt as a basic human right. In the old view, the government could respect the rights of its citizens simply by refraining from certain things. Refusing to charge someone falsely doesn't need to be funded. Neither does allowing people to keep and bear arms, and so on. But when the government takes on the responsibility of being the environment in which we live and move and have our being, the government, not being able to create that environment ex nihilo like the real God can, is forced to find a base of tax revenue, one that it can twist like a dishcloth. This is because all the rights that some people now have are rights that somebody else has to pay for. In these new-fangled schemes, there's always something.

When the deficiencies of this new theology begin to be manifest, one recourse is to tax a bunch of people who can't protest, for the compelling reason that they are not born yet. The mechanism for doing this is called "borrowing like a crazy man," and the end result of this kind of thinking is that access to debt is assumed to be a Basic Human Right.

Consider the drive to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans available to everybody. There it is: indebtedness as a basic human right, just like that free dental care, and free lasik eye surgery, and free chocolate milk for everybody. And now we always need a lender of last resort. Why? Because we must never allow anyone or anything to come to the place when their desire to be in debt can be denied. For debt is now the very air we breathe, just like real freedom used to be.

Deconstructing Evolutionism

The Evolutionist's Dilemma

In his important book, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Stephen Prickett explores the way supposedly objective science is subject to and influenced by narrative or just-so stories. This phenomenon is recognized by the more self-aware scientists. He cites the French physicist, Bernard D'Espagnat, who:

insists that we must never lose sight of the narrative impulse in science: even to put what are essentially mathematical concepts in language is to creative (sic) narratives—or in his terminology, to “allegorize” them. “Texts in which the early stages of the Universe are described in terms of thermal agitation of particles in collision, but with no indication that such language is purely and simply allegorical, are unacceptable,” he insists, “even when they are written by eminent physicists.” (Ibid, p.24)

Eminent physicists writing allegory.  What happened to the stone cold sober objectivity of the hard scientist?  He also cites Stephen Jay Gould, another scientist who is self-aware of the “intrusion of 'unconscious literary assumptions' into 'just-so stories'.

Astute scientists understand that political and cultural bias must impact their ideas, and they strive to recognise these inevitable influences. But we usually fail to acknowledge another source of error that might be called literary bias. So much of science proceeds by telling stories—and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognise what we are doing. We think we are reading nature by applying rules of logic and laws of matter to our observations. But we are often telling stories—in the good sense, but stories nonetheless. (Ibid, p. 24)

He then refers to Gould's account of the evolution of the horse, which has been a favorite example of evolutionary “progress” over the years, ever since it was first used by T. H. Huxley in 1870. Prickett then comments:

Gould's story of the creation of the “story of the horse” is an excellent illustration of our capacity for apprehending a loose mass of data in terms of a narrative. Indeed, it is clear that for him our tendency to tell stories may be one of the conditions of consciousness and intelligence itself. It is, quite simply, the way the human mind works. (Ibid, p.25)

He again cites Gould himself:

Any definition of this (human) uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If the propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge . . . (Ibid, p. 25)

Thus, science cannot proceed without telling stories, narratives, allegories, and tales. This is inevitable because science cannot proceed without scientists—and scientists, being human, are compelled to construct reality in terms of stories and narratives. It is the way we are made. Without stories there can be no meaning, period. “Practising science is just as much a matter of 'telling stories' as the plays of Shakespeare or the cycles of the Old Testament. They are simply different kinds of stories, not a different kind of knowledge.” (Ibid, p.26)

Prickett then focuses upon the meta-narrative of evolutionism, and looks at the way the language is used betrays the literary and imaginary foundations of the theory, albeit that such language and use of language is a contradiction of the theory itself.

Again, the story of the horse is revealing. . . . (T)he narrative of development told . . . is one of hierarchy and “progress”. In other words, an idea of purpose has been illegitimately smuggled into a series of changes which should be seen as the products of a strictly random variation coupled with enhanced survival and reproduction for a tiny number of those mutations—the process of “natural selection”. The fact is that it is very difficult to talk about natural selection without using purposive language. Almost any evolutionary writing (including Gould's own) is full of purposive language and metaphors. . . . Now it is possible to argue, as some have done, that such “purposive” language to describe evolution is merely a convenient shorthand. It enables us to make a point in three words rather than three carefully colourless sentences. This is very likely true, but to distinguish between mere “shorthand” and a way of thinking that is irredeemably purposive is not easy. We like a story to have a point, a meaning, a moral—or, at the very least, an ending. Unlike the “story of the horse”, as told by Gould, which, because it has a point to make, provides fascinating reading, “the story of the horse”, told in properly sober and correct Darwinian terminology, has none of these things. Strictly speaking, there is no “meaning” to the sequence of events, merely a number of contingent influences we can only guess at. (Ibid, pp 27,28)

Prickett uses another example, this time from a “recent and highly regarded book on sociobiology, Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue. The emphases in the passage that follows are Prickett's:

“When a T cell starts to multiply it is conscious of nothing and it is certainly not motivated by some urge to kill the invader. But it is, in a sense, driven by the need to multiply: the immune system is a competitive world in which only those cells thrive that divide when they get the chance . . . . So attacking the foreign invader is, for these cells, a by-product of the normal business of striving to grow and divide. The whole system is beautifully designed to the the self-interested ambitions of each cell can only be satisfied by each cell doing its duty for the body.

In the early 1970's, a biologist rediscovered the Alchian-Williams lesson. John Maynard-Smith had never heard of the prisoner's dilemma. But he saw that biology could use game theory as profitably as economics. He argued that, just as rational individuals should adopt strategies like those predicated by game theory as the least worst in any circumstances, so natural selection should design animals to behave instinctively with similar strategies.

Natural selection has chosen it to enable us to get more from social living.”

That Ridley does not mean us to take the italicized statements literally is made clear by the first sentence of the first extract. But from there on the anthropomorphic phrases flow thick and fast, and we are rapidly left floundering as to the exact boundary between metaphoric and literal. . . . My point is not that Ridley is writing badly—quite the contrary. In fact, he makes his points vividly and clearly. His dilemma is a universal one. To illustrate the problem, try re-phrasing each of those passages in totally non-purposive, non-metaphorical language. (Ibid, p.28)

A critical factor here is that purposive language and metaphors of intelligent purpose and design in T-cells are constantly implying the opposite of chance or randomness or stochasticity.

Such fundamental problems over the terminology of evolution have led one literary scholar, A.D. Nuttall, to offer his own, not entirely tongue-in-cheek “refutation” of Darwinism. It goes like this. There are actually two forms of Darwinism currently in circulation, a “strong” form and a “weak” one. The “strong” form is the correct account we have just outlined. It is rigorously non-directional and purposeless, not to mention exhaustive in the sens that it claims to account for all living phenomena. The “weak” pays lip-service to the “strong” form, but quietly allows that other factors might also have an effect. In practice is permits purposive language and imagery in its narrative, and is thus much more intelligible and easy to apply. As we see in the examples above, it is, in fact, the form in everyday use, not merely with the general public, but even among working biologists when off-guard. The problem with this “weak” version is that it is not really Darwinism at all. It is a covertly purposive theory which depends upon and is validated by the “strong” theory which it actually undermines. (Ibid, pp.29,30)

At this point, Prickett gets very close to the evolutionist's dilemma, as formulated by Karl Popper. If evolution were true, it could never be described, said Popper. And if it can be described, it must, therefore, be untrue. Prickett shows how evolutionists—and indeed the dominant powers-the-be in the West—have attempted to wriggle off this skewer. The “strong” form version of evolution is impossible to formulate in human language, both logically and literally. The only way out of the dilemma is to resort to the “weak” form version which draws upon and deploys concepts, images, metaphors, and narrative devices which cannot possibly be true or have any bearing, registration, or basis in “strong” form evolutionary reality. It is like using metaphors of sensory perception to describe the existence and experience of someone permanently comatose. If the metaphors were to have any meaning or positive point of reference for the one comatose, then he could not possibly be in a state of perpetual unconsciousness.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

That Old Conveyor Belt of Time 

Liturgy and Worship - Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, August 28, 2010

In our prayers for reformation and revival over the years, we have asked God to move in remarkable ways, and He has been pleased to grant many aspects of our requests. But as God has done wonderful things in our midst, He has been pleased to do it over time, over the course of years. And again, we are enormously grateful.

But if we study previous periods of revival and subsequent declension, we can see a feature at work there that we must also take account of. A good example of this would be the periods of revival during Jonathan Edwards’ ministry there. The problem is the problem of time, generations, and young people. God does a remarkable thing, and those who experience it know the significance of what God has done. But that old conveyor belt of time is constantly moving, and cannot be slowed down for anything, and the young people growing up in the aftermath of this work are easily disposed to take it all for granted, or to ignore what has happened, or to assume that they can just coast on the strength of what has happened, and get really serious about Jesus later on.

And so this exhortation is directed at the young people in our midst, those in high school and college. Do not mistake how God reckons these things. The place which you occupy means that more is expected of you, not less. The place you occupy means that double the labor will get the same results, and so contributing just half the labor means the results will be a spiritual disaster. The place you occupy means that you all need to learn a lot more about how we got here than you currently know.

Towards a Recovery of Biblical Worship, Part II

The Importance of a Sacred Place

A third current undermining worship is a prevailing misconstruction of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Worship under the Old Covenant operated under types and shadows —many of the practices and duties foreshadowed the redemption which came forth in our Lord (Colossians 2: 16—17; Hebrews 10:1). Worship under the Old Covenant reflected a time of immaturity, whereas under the New Covenant God's people have been able to “grow up”, graduating from the schoolroom of the ceremonial law to the reality in Christ (Galatians 3: 24—25).

Moreover, worship under the Old Covenant was geographically centric—revolving around the land of Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular, where God established His presence and Name. In the New Covenant, the land of promise has expanded to encompass the entire world: therefore, there is no one central location of worship any longer. Our Lord clearly and explicitly announced that this was to be the case (John 4: 21—24; Matthew 18:20).

Thus, the types and shadows which pointed to Christ's coming and redemption have been dismantled in the New Covenant. Moreover, the rules and regulations and institutions of worship centred around the temple have been transformed into universal application and are to be carried out everywhere and in every place where believers gather.

It is vitally important to grasp that the movement from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant was thus not a progress from the outward to the inward, but an intensification of both the outward and the inward aspects of holy living and worship. Thus, the deep inner longings for God revealed in the lives of the psalmists under the Old Covenant are to be intensified and universalised in the New Covenant. When the Sons of Korah declare in Psalm 84, for example, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts. My soul longs, yes faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the Living God.” (Psalm 84: 1—2), in the New Covenant, these expressions and longings are made more full and intense and complete (including the involvement of the entirety of personality—soul, heart, flesh, as in the text) and the dwelling place of God where He meets with His people is in every place where they gather in His Name to worship. For that place and that gathering we are to long and yearn.

One of the most egregious trivialisations of public worship in our day is manifested in the loss of a sense of a holy place. The holiness of the place derives from the public worship which takes place there, not from the place in itself. Thus, when Paul and Silas went to the riverbank outside Philippi when Jewish people gathered regularly for worship, that open air venue was a holy place. When people gather in house churches, or lease school halls, or classrooms the same applies. Thus, we believe it to be a spiritual and holy practice formally to consecrate the space so to be used for public worship. The fact that for the remaining six days it will be used for common or profane activities matters not at all. The appropriate liturgical forms and prayer for such a service of consecration would be the consecration of the first temple by Solomon, as recorded in II Chronicles 6 and 7.

It is when God's people understand the import of this service and this consecration and use these prayers of consecration as they sanctify their house churches or the school buildings or commercial premises in which they gather for worship, that they will take great strides in recovering the central importance and holiness and glory, and greatness, and power of public worship.

When the congregation gathers for worship believing in the holiness of the place in which they gather—that God has established His Name and presence there, and that He promises to hear and respond to His people as they gather there in a way more profoundly and powerfully than at any other time or place, then public worship will rise rapidly up the priority list to the very top.