Not a Tame Lion

Beyond Our Questions, our Judgment

In the aftermath of the second Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, "official" Christian spokesmen were exercised to assure people that God, the Living God, had nothing to do with earthquakes. They defalcated. Their theodicy was that their god was absent. In the likely face of outrage, church officials revealed that they worship, in fact, the idol god of eighteenth century Deism, not the God of Scripture.

A piece written by Chris Trotter (the left-wing commentator) appeared in the Christchurch Press. We reproduce it in full, as an antidote to the official nonsense.  And, what does it tell us about our age when a left-wing, non-Christian, neo-Marxist shows he has a better understanding of the Bible than "official" Christians?  God will have His glory attested to, even if it has to come out of the mouth of Balaam or Balaam's ass. 

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Reflections On The Christchurch Earthquake:

Not A Tame Lion

Chris Trotter

WAS GOD PRESENT in Christchurch on 22 February 2011? It’s a question many New Zealanders have wrestled with over the past month, and the tragedy which engulfed Japan on 11 March has given it added urgency.

Officially, we’re a secular nation, yet Census data confirms that more than half of New Zealanders retain a belief in God. That belief is sorely tested by natural disasters. If God was present in Christchurch on 22 February, why didn’t He prevent the earthquake?

But, in posing this question aren’t we separating God from the natural world? Seating Him on a divine throne beyond this earthly realm? Requiring Him to demonstrate his mastery over his own creation by, in this case, countermanding the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates?

Yes, we are. But we can hardly be blamed for doing so. Because, when all is said and done, this is the view of God we have inherited from the Bible. He is the maker of heaven and earth and if it pleases him to command the sun to stand still, or the oceans to o’ertop the world, then it will be so. He is Jehovah, “I am that I am”, the God Charlton Heston (in the role of Moses) invokes when Pharaoh’s army traps the Israelites against the margins of the Red Sea.

“Behold His mighty hand!”, Charlton cries, and low, the waters of the sea are parted.

There are, of course, plusses and minuses to the Jehovan conception of divinity, as the celebrated author, C.S. Lewis, well understood.

In The Horse and His Boy, one of his Chronicles of Narnia, he makes it clear that his own rendering of the Jehovan God – the golden lion Aslan – is not a pet to be called for and dismissed at our convenience. On the contrary, he is an altogether dangerous being. As one of Lewis’s characters indignantly observes: “He’s not a tame lion!”

And, yet, it was to a rather tame deity that the Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, Peter Beck, appeared to be appealing in the aftermath of the earthquake. In answer to the question: “Where was God on 22 February?” he responded:

“God is in all these people. God is in the midst of all this. God is weeping with those who weep. God is alongside those who are finding the energy to just keep going. God is in the people who are reaching out and seeking to sustain one another. God is about building community, about empowering people.”

And, when a journalist demanded: ‘Yes, but where was God was when offices pancaked and burned and hundreds died?’

He replied:

“Well, we live on a dynamic, creating planet that’s doing its thing. For whatever reason, our forebears chose to build this city on this place. They didn’t know we were on this fault line. God doesn’t make bad things happen to good people. We make our own choices about what we do.”

Doing its thing?! What exactly is the Dean trying to say? That the natural world is a conscious entity? That it has its own volition and (God save us!) its own agenda? And did Cantabrians, thanks to the poor choices of their “forebears” simply find themselves in this “dynamic, creating planet’s” way? And was Jehovah, in fulfilment of some hitherto undisclosed self-denying ordinance, required to turn his face from the imminent suffering of Cantabrians and keep his mighty hands in his pockets?

If so, then God has a rival – a divine competitor in the omnipotence business. And the Dean is in flagrant breach of the Nicene Creed, the first article of which states, unequivocally: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”.

Perhaps the Dean should return to his Bible and ponder the God that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. The God that gave man counsel from the whirlwind, and moved before the Children of Israel in a pillar of fire. Perhaps he should consider the God that laid Jericho low and sent fire from heaven to consume Sodom and Gomorrah. A red God, a wrathful God, a jealous God. The God that was ready to drown the whole world. The God who, when his son, nailed to a cross, cried out “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, remained silent.

Shock and awe. These words have been sullied by the Pentagon’s bloody hands. Yet it is only in those moments when all our human conceits are battered down and laid to waste that we, shocked and awestruck, come close to understanding Jehovah as the authors of both the Old and New Testaments understood Him.

Was God present in Christchurch on 22 February? Oh yes, He was there. And He is with us always. Beyond our questions; beyond our understanding; beyond our judgement.

Not a tame lion.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Homosexuals and Unionists

Labour Party Consuming Itself

Damien O'Connor, Labour Party MP has publicly stated what has been unspoken common knowledge for some time. The NZ Labour Party is now a fringe political grouping. It is broke. Its membership is non-existent. Tired and demoralised would be an apt description.

But how does it rejuvenate? After all, National languished for nine years in the wilderness whilst Helen Clark suffocated the nation with a real-life imitation of Mrs Doubtfire. Then National eventually came back and, as they say, captured the middle ground.

One can understand the miasma. The Left believes that all good things begin and end with Government action, which loosely translates as spending tax payers money, or debt-funded electoral bribery. Unfortunately, their former Finance Minister "spent it all" as he so crudely boasted in the House. Now, the cupboard is bare. National is acting like traditional New Zealand governments do--which is to practise socialism without doctrines, albeit in a more mild form than Labour. Labour's only plank is to criticise the current government for not spending more. Since National's spending is debt funded, Labour apparently wants even more national debt--which is a clanger in the ears of reasonable and thinking folk, now leery of debt.

So Labour is served by a cluster of parliamentary hacks incapable of thinking their way out of a wet paper bag, locked in to the mindless mantra of "more spending" as the only way to proceed, which, for once, lacks political traction. If ever there was a time to introduce new blood into the ranks it would be now--but of the right ilk. We mean by this "ordinary New Zealanders". But Labour is so far gone that it is reduced to seeking rejuvenation amongst unionists and homosexuals.

Damien O'Connor has stated publicly what the electorate has known for some time:

Labour MP Damien O'Connor has hit out at his party organisation, saying its candidates list was drawn up by "a gaggle of gays and self-serving unionists" who gave "straight shooters" little chance of success. Labour yesterday released its party list, which includes at least seven new names who could enter Parliament this year.

Mr O'Connor, the electorate candidate for the marginal West Coast-Tasman seat, said he withdrew from the party-list process before the final meeting. "I wouldn't trust them. Between a gaggle of gays and some self-serving unionists, I'm not sure that a straight shooter such as myself would be given a fair deal."

Labour needs to appeal again to "straight shooters". But its fascination with sexual perversity and class warfare remains too strong, overriding all else.It continues to seek out "our kind of people" which speaks volumes about just how tangential a political party it has become. 

Proverbs

Democracy

"Democracy is two coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch."
Anon.

This explains why democracy in the West has led to an ineluctable drift into soft-despotism. Too many coyotes voting to feast upon sheep.

You Call Those Cuts

Ouch, That Hurts

In the US, the Congress has the constitutional power of voting taxpayer's money to fund the government. If Congress fails to pass a budget authorising funding, or if the Senate fails to approve that budget, or finally if the President does not also put his signature to it, then the government is de-funded and has to shut down.The US defaults on its debt and China takes over. 

The Republican Party controls the Congress; the Democratic Party the Senate and the presidency. The Republican Party wants to reduce the huge government deficit by cutting spending. The Democrats want to attack the deficit by raising taxes and reflexively oppose spending cuts. Consequently, at least until the next election in 2012, the threat of government shutdowns due to money drying up will loom periodically.

Over the weekend just such a shutdown was averted by all agreeing to a stop-gap budget. It involved some $40bn in cuts to federal government spending. Mr Obama described some of these cuts as "painful" and something he would rather not have done. Nevertheless, he also claimed that the spending cuts represented the largest annual spending cut in the history of the United States. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Party leaders clinched an agreement, including about $US38.5 billion in extra spending cuts, after intense political bargaining, barely an hour before the federal government effectively ran out of money at midnight on Friday (2pm yesterday, local time).

''This agreement between Democrats and Republicans, on behalf of all Americans, is on a budget that invests in our future while making the largest annual spending cut in our history,'' Mr Obama said after a long day of tense negotiations averted a potential political crisis.

''Some of the cuts we agreed to will be painful … and I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances. But beginning to live within our means is the only way to protect those investments that will help America to compete for new jobs,'' he said.

"Beginning to live within our means" sounds great. What it actually represents, however, is that acutely dangerous phase in a polity where political rhetoric and framing has replaced reality. Below is a graph representing the reality.

In three years of fiscal wreckage, Obama has outspent them all.  The vaunted historic "painful" cuts amount to shaving a few hairs of the biggest deficit ever recorded in the history of the world.  The cuts--those painful cuts--have not reduced the deficit at all.  They have only slowed somewhat the pace of increase of the debt.  It is like a household that has been overspending by fifteen hundred dollars a week cutting back to overspend by fourteen hundred and ninety seven dollars.  Anyone that claims this as a political victory has lost perspective.  Anyone who suggests that it represents "beginning to live within our means" is, as they say, living in an alternate "reality".


Sarah Palin has it right:

Let’s look at the numbers. We have a $1.5 trillion deficit this year. We’re paying $200 billion a year on our interest alone. That’s half a billion dollars per day on interest. And our $1.5 trillion deficit means that we’re borrowing $4 billion per day just to keep afloat. So, we pat ourselves on the back if we cut a billion dollars here or a billion there in discretionary spending, as we borrow $4 billion a day and pay half a billion a day in interest. The deficit for the month of February alone was the highest in our history at $223 billion. That’s more than the entire deficit for the year 2007. And there’s no end in sight. We’re not heading towards the iceberg. We’ve already hit it. Now we’re taking on water. We must find a way to get back to harbor to repair our ship of state before it’s too late.

The caterwauling amongst the Democrats over these minor scrapes rather than genuine spending cuts was both histrionic and appalling. When the Republican Congress starts to put together its budget for 2012--which is going to represent some real and meaningful cuts to government spending--the faux-outrage will likely be heard over the entire world.

In order for the US to put its fiscal house in order at least two things are critical. The first is that the Commentariate needs to give up the idea that government spending is the fundamental and most important driver of economic growth. The second is that conservatives need to relinquish or repudiate the notion that the US, via its military, must ensure that the world is "safe for democracy" and return to an older, more humble notion that its vital interests are only those which abide reside within its own geographical borders. In other words the US needs to come once again to regard itself as an ordinary nation, not an idolatrous geo-political messiah. Only then will true cuts to government spending become feasible. Neither condition is likely to emerge.

Ergo, things will likely get a whole lot worse before the turning of the tide.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

War! What Is It Good For? Absolutely . . . Actually It Does Do Some Good Things

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, April 07, 2011

I got a thoughtful letter from a friend asking about the war motif that runs through a bunch of our stuff here in Moscow. My dad's formative book is called Principles of War.  There is the Canon Press tag "Publishing Is Warfare" that we have had around here for a few decades now. There is New St. Andrew's motto which being translated means "For the faithful wars shall never cease." We have that darn Van Tilian antithesis underfoot all the time. I had that Collision with Hitchens. My commentary on Hebrews is called Christ and His Rivals. The cover of Future Men has a couple of boys just a rasslin. What is this, Wilson Agonistes?

I suppose it would be useless to deny that this is a common theme in what comes out of the suite of ministries here. I actually would not want to deny it -- but I am most eager to frame it. Unless such a "warrior" mindset is contextualized rightly, it will soon devour itself. If men have been at war too long, they don't know what to do when the peace treaty is signed . . . so they hire themselves out as mercenaries. The fighting must continue because that is the only skill set they have.

With that in mind, here are a few thoughts for Christians who consider themselves, as we most certainly do, to be involved in a spiritual war, in a constant, total war.

1. Solzhenitsyn rightly said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. When you put on the breastplate of righteousness, one of the first things you learn is that there is a treacherous sneak inside the breastplate. So it is important not to fall into a simplistic approach that conveniently locates the bad guys over "there." It is more complicated than that.

2. The point of fighting is to win the peace. The Church Militant will not be bored in Heaven, siting around with nothing to do. The Church Militant will have won through to Heaven, and will know what to do when it eventually gets there. In the words of the spiritual, "gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside." In the words of Isaiah, we will study war no more -- and this will be a blessing, not a grief.

3. With the antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent having been established by God in the first few pages of our history,  we take that as a fixed given. Warfare describes the way the world is, and is not a state of affairs chosen by us. Sheep don't have to declare war on the wolves. Were the sheep to issue such a declaration, that would not be the beginning of the antipathy between them. Given how sheep think, however, it might be the beginning of an ovine awareness of the war. Within the Church, it is far more common for flatterers and false teachers to say, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, than for them to say, "War, war," when there is no war.

4. An essential part of maintaining balance in all this is recognizing that the apostle Paul's argument concerning body life applies to armies and navies as well. This means it applies to spiritual armies and spiritual navies. Anybody who demands that everybody "think strategically like an admiral or general" is . . . well, he is not thinking strategically like an admiral or general. You need cooks, and drivers, and mathematicians, and technicians, and mechanics, and snipers, and navigators, and to demand that everybody drop what they are doing to do what a strategist in the Pentagon is doing misconstrues the nature of war. When the bugle blows indistinctly, nobody gets ready for battle. But when it blows distinctly, thousands move swiftly to do completely different things. It is important to remember that many of the things that are done may not look like fighting.

5. But being aware that we are on a constant war footing does not create a licence to abolish all the things the enemy would love to abolish, were he to win the conflict. What would the devil love to take away from us were he to win the war? To surrender those things preemptively is actually to surrender the war. In this conflict, you can't lose your merry warriors without losing the war. To surrender those things for the sake of beating him is actually losing to him. I refer, of course, to music on the front porch, reading to the grandkids, lovemaking, cold beer, picnics in the sunshine, rained-out picnics, green beans with pistachios in them, cigars that spread their rich aroma across the deck like a benediction, hiking . . . all of these things (and thousands more) are psych-ops for the devil. They are also psych-ops for the fussers in our own ranks. Grendel hated the glorious song of the scop that could be heard coming from Hereot. The joy of the Lord is our strength. Laughter is war.

Trying to Win Unbelief's Approval

As Irrelevant as the Outer Mongolian Dung Beetle

As Unbelief grows stronger in our Western culture, which languishes under the curses of the Covenant, Christians are finding out first hand the enmity that exists, by Divine placement and decree, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.

A natural response is for Christians to seek peace. The response is biblical in some important ways. Paul says, as far as it is possible, live at peace with all men (Romans 12:18). But more often than we would care to admit the search for peace with Unbelief comes at the expense of the Gospel. Modern Christians want to assure Unbelievers that the Living God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their lives. When this is taken out of a proper biblical context, it makes the Gospel anodyne. It also does nothing to remove the enmity that exists between Belief and Unbelief.

We saw an example of this in much of the public Christian commentary on the Christchurch earthquake. Official Christians emphatically affirmed that the earthquake was not an act of God. Bad news for insurance companies then who routinely attempt to avoid paying out on damages caused by such divine acts. But more seriously what on earth were these erstwhile representatives of God trying to say? If the earthquake was not an act of God, who then caused it? Did amorphous, impersonal nature cause the earthquake? Did the Devil? Did it happen without the express will and purpose of God? If so, then of all people, Christians are the most pitiable on the earth.

We are sure that these official Christians were attempting to communicate that, despite the earthquake, God still loves the people of Christchurch. To suggest otherwise would be to invite their anger and wrath--which Christians would rather not face. But when living at peace with all men leads us to hide the truth something is terribly wrong. Maybe we should remember that several times during His public ministry the Lord Himself--the Prince of Peace--so outraged his listeners that they sought to kill Him. Maybe we should consider that His death occurred because the High Priest and his fellow conspirators hated and despised the Christ for what He said. Maybe we should bear in mind that our Lord clearly told us that if the world hated Him it would also hate us. Maybe we Christians should just harden up, become more faithful to our Lord, and expect the inevitable loathing and anathema, counting it as nothing.

Modern Christians have forgotten, or have preferred not to hear, that the Gospel is bad news before it is good news. Or, to put it another way, the Gospel only becomes good news when people realise just how wretched and lost they truly are. Without that realisation--which the ancient divines called "conviction of sin", the Gospel is not good news at all--it is an irrelevance at best, a provocative nuisance, at worst. Why tell me God loves me when I could not care less? As useful and relevant to tell me the outer Mongolian dung beetle has nocturnal habits. Quaint, but an irrelevant waste of breath.

In John 3:36 we are told that, "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." Now that is very bad news indeed. Christians generally don't want to say this to Unbelievers, even though they know it is true, because they fear the opprobrium and wrath that would descend upon their head.

Now, to be sure, there is an appropriate time and place for all speech. But when it is time to speak of our relation to the Living God, we must not fail to remind our listener that he abides in and lives under the wrath of God as long as he remains stubborn, independent, and unrepentant. The good news, the Gospel, is that today God will yet be merciful, if he repents of his slights toward God, and seeks His forgiveness offered in Christ. But, tomorrow? Who knows.

This message, this Gospel, cost the Lord His life. Far better that we stand in His steps, instead of lusting for the approbation and approval of Unbelief.

The Reasonableness of Global Warming Scepticism

Extraordinarily Good Lecture

Prof. Dr. Vincent Courtillot

"State" Insurance Makes a Comeback

The Dangers of Being a Commercial Not-For-Profit

Private property is theft--or so said French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon way back in 1840. The implication is that public property is much more righteous.

The antipathy to private property lives on today. Actually, that's an understatement. It does not live on--it has triumphed. Most Unbelievers, and more than a few Believers, think that in a choice between the government owning, say, a power station and a private company, state ownership is superior and will produce superior results.

One animus of the prejudice against private ownership is that a private business exists to make a profit--therefore, it needs to charge more than actually required to produce its goods or services, which in turn means that its customers are being "ripped off" or stolen from. Privately owned businesses, therefore, exploit their customers. Ergo, private businesses are intrinsically evil, being institutions of exploitation and theft.

Now this is all nonsense, of course, but the truth or validity of an argument has never been allowed to get in the way of a "good story".

One device put forward to counter the purported implicit thievery of all private business has been the co-operative. Often times co-operatives eschew profit making and simply circulate cash back into the business. Customers are supposed to get a better deal from this. Prices are supposed to be lower. Another version of the co-operative idea is a mutual company--most often found in the insurance industry. Here the "noble idea" is that the policy holders "own" the company, which means that all trading surpluses are supposed to be put back into the company, thereby lowering premium costs for consumers. Win-win, non?

"We don't take a profit, so our trading surpluses drop straight to the policy holder's bottom line". AMI, the Christchurch based mutual insurance company which has just gone (virtually) bankrupt, used this argument--as all mutual's do. But it turns out (at least according to its critics) that it has been undercharging its policy holders for years (to fulfil the promises of a mutual having lower premium charges), while taking enormous risks in an aggressive expansion drive. According to the NZ Herald:

Bitterness has emerged against cash-strapped AMI Insurance for undercutting rivals' policy premiums then being forced into a $500 million Government bailout.

Competitors lashed out at what they said was a cheapskate business which grew too fast, took ridiculous risks, undercharged, failed to accumulate enough capital and was then hammered by the disaster. "They price everyone else out of the market with their stupid rates and then go running to the Government for a handout. Now it's just another socialist free ride for the people of Christchurch after AMI has been run like a cheap shop," said one angry insider.

There at least two great weaknesses in mutual companies. Firstly, over time they tend to disguise the true costs of doing business. Not under compulsion or obligation to make a profit, all surpluses (theoretically) get ploughed back into the company's operations, so that the company becomes bloated and wasteful of capital.

A profit making company intrinsically has a far higher discipline riding it. In the end, the owners of the business will only approve re-investing profits into the business, rather than distributing them to the owners, if the business will produce a greater return on those re-invested profits than the owners could earn in their own endeavours. This means that everyone is far more focused upon what the true costs of doing business are, and what the actual returns any new investment will generate. If the returns are likely insufficient, profits are unlikely to be reinvested. In a mutual, profits are reinvested willy nilly, without rigorous discipline.

The second core weakness in the mutual ownership structure is that when additional capital is needed--as is the case with AMI now--it has no-one to turn to. No investors, no shareholders, no real "soul-to-damn, butt-to-kick" owners. Moreover, no new investors, since any new investors will not be allowed to own the company.

So AMI has had to go begging to the Government. And the Government has "had" to bail them out since that is our system of mixed market socialism in New Zealand. If the problem is big enough the Government will end up owning it.

Now there is a straightforward solution to the inherent flaws in mutual insurance companies. The regulators ought to require a significantly higher level of capital reserves for all mutual companies on the ground that such companies cannot access capital markets for fresh capital in the event of a significant calamity. Such change would be a good outcome from a bad mess.

In the meantime, we also hope that the government will take full ownership rapidly, sell off the saleable parts of the business, and wind the rest down.

Profit is not theft. It is not a dirty word. It is the canary in the coal mine that alerts everyone to weakness and commercial dangers.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

In Burkas in No Time

Culture and Politics - A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, April 04, 2011

We are now seeing another round of international silliness, in which we can clearly see (if we are looking straight at it) just how social justification works. A Florida pastor with a whopping two dozen parishioners recently burned a Koran, which set off a round of riots in Afghanistan. These riots ended with with some U.N. workers getting murdered, and senators calling for an investigation of Koran-burning. Lindsey Graham says, "Freedom of speech is a great idea, but we are in a war." It is great to have such a thundering defense of our freedoms from the Republicans.

When this sort of thing happens, social justification means you start pushing in terms of it. And when you do, you push in one of two directions. You either push in the direction you want to go, or you push whomever you believe to be pushable, with the hope of refining the questions about steerage later.

For example, nobody says about the rioters in Afghanistan that they should chill, because we have lots of unstable pastors over here, and if they don't stop beheading people over there, we might have some more Koran burnings over here. No, that's not the direction we push.

When the Danish cartoon fiasco broke, there were plenty of liberals who wouldn't stand with the cartoonists (i.e. wouldn't publish the cartoons), but the transparent motive in this back-away move was fear. Nobody called the cartoonists goons, or dopes, or any of the other things that we might with impunity call the Florida pastor. No, the cartoonists were noble and courageous, and perhaps a bit too zealous for freedom. This distinction was made because editorial cartoonists still have a significant amount of social justification, albeit still behind rampaging Muslims looking for a random innocent bystander to behead. For those keeping score, Pentecostal pastors in Florida who burn Korans have no capital in the social justification bank.

But tell me, all ye who pontificate within the Beltway, why is drawing Mohammad as a bombhead an act of noble free speech courage, while burning a Koran is the work of an irresponsible bigot? Is it because one happened on an editorial page, which is your church, and the other happened in an actual church, which isn't?

And this is why Graham's statement is so ridiculous. If we really were in a war, we wouldn't be handling airport security the way we do -- we would actively and openly profile the passengers. If we were in a war, as in the Second Big One, we wouldn't have made the troops in Europe speak respectfully of Mein Kampf, or wear swastika arm bands, to keep from offending the locals. If we were at war with Hitler again, and some twerp with personal problems in west Texas burned Hitler in effigy, nothing bad would have happened to him because nobody would ever have heard of it.

We are not at war with radical Islam. We are at war with American liberties in the name of fighting radical Islam. This is not said, as some on the libertarian right might do, because I believe radical Islam is not a real threat. It is a real threat, and ought to be fought. But it has to be said that the general gang of Republicans in support of the "war on terror" are about as serious in that endeavor as they have been in their efforts to reduce the deficit. And if Republicans fight radical Islam the same way they have fought overspending, we should have all our wives in burkas in no time.

Classroom Fun

Moral of the Story

A teacher gave her class of 11 year olds an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.

The next day,the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.

Ashley said, 'My father's a farmer and we have a lot of egg laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the car when we hit a big bump in the road and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess."

What's the moral of the story?" asked the teacher. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket!", Ashley said. "Very good," the teacher replied.

Next little Sarah raised her hand and said, "Our family are farmers, too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. One day we had a dozen eggs, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks, and the moral to this story is,"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched'.

"That was a fine story, Sarah", said the teacher.

'Michael, do you have a story to share?" "Yes. My daddy told me this story about my Aunt Shirley. Aunt Shirley was a flight engineer on a plane in the Gulf War and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whisky, a machine gun and a machete.

She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn't break and then she landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete until the blade broke. And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands."

"Good Heavens", said the horrified teacher, "what kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?"

"Stay the heck away from Aunt Shirley when she's been drinking."

Question Begging on a Grand Scale

Smugness

The problem with evolutionary psychology lies not with what is probably an over-simplified view of evolution, but with what is certainly an over-simplified view of psychology, and, above all, a naive sense of the inevitability of contemporary Western values. Stephen Prickett, Narrative, p.233..

In the West, evolutionism is the dominant cosmology. It has developed, if you would excuse the pun, into the proposition that mankind is ever spiralling upward into bigger, better, and higher stages of development or being. Man, we are told, has now taken of his own evolutionary development, so that he is no longer subject to chaos or brute chance. As the highest evolved being, man is now self-determining. Along with this goes the naive assumption referred to by Prickett. Vaunted Western values are superior and higher than even the value of other human beings.

A more sober evolutionist would entertain the possibility--even the probability--that dominant Western values may, in fact, lead to its extinction. Not being sufficiently fit-for-purpose, so to speak, the West may well self-destruct. Given demographic population decline it is almost inevitable. In any event, a consistent evolutionist, particularly the common garden-variety type who posits billions upon billions of years for the process to have got to where we are today, would seriously entertain the prospect that mankind as a whole will not survive, being not sufficiently fit. The more consistent evolutionist would acknowledge that no-one could ever know.

The priggish self-satisfied populists of evolutionism in the West, who put themselves and Western values forward as exemplars of human sophistication and advancement, are engaged in naive question-begging on a grand scale.

Rag Tag

"It's My Gun"

As the imbroglio in Libya looks like turning into a no-win stalemate, the Guardian provides us with a realistic assessment of the rebels. After reading this, one is reminded of the Powell doctrine: "if you break it, you own it". It looks as if America's third war is going to drag on a while yet.

After reading the piece below, another adage springs to mind: "act in haste, repent in leisure".

Undisciplined Libyan rebels no match for Gaddafi's forces

If there's an ammunition shortage, no one has told Khalif Saed. He was firing off a large machine gun welded to the back of a pick up truck, sending the contents of the heavy belt of bullets darting through the weapon and in to an empty sky.

It's a regular enough occurrence on the open desert road along which Libya's conflict has swung back and forth through this month. Sometimes the stream of fire is celebratory, as earlier this week when it was falsely claimed that Muammar Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte had fallen.

In recent days it seems to be more out of frustration as the rebels were forced back in the face of Gaddafi's attack. What it was not was aimed at was the enemy.  Asked why he was shooting when the revolution's military leadership has appealed for discipline and its fighters not to waste ammunition, Saed said simply: "It's my gun."

It isn't. He concedes that he seized it from a military base in Benghazi as Gaddafi's forces fled at the beginning of the revolution. But it says much about the state of the loosely organised rebel militia which foreign governments are now considering arming.

The revolutionary leadership is pleading for the west to send heavier weapons so that it can compete with Gaddafi's better armed forces amid reports that both sides in the conflict are running short of ammunition.

On the ground, rebels appeal for bigger rocket launchers, artillery and more air strikes. They are less concerned about claims of an ammunition shortage, which they do not necessarily see after seizing piles of rockets and shells from Gaddafi's army when it was retreating earlier this week. "We need what Gaddafi has," said Ghanem Barsi at a rebel checkpoint. Like many revolutionaries, he blamed their difficulties on weaponry rather than training and tactics. "We need Grads [rockets] like Gaddafi has. We need tanks like Gaddafi has. We need weapons that can kill his rockets and tanks."

The rebels' military spokesman, Colonel Ahmed Omar Bani, has claimed that "countries across the world" have offered weapons. He declined to reveal which governments and what kind of arms although he did say there was a desperate need for anti-tank weapons and radios because of chronic communications problems.

However, Bani did admit that no arms or ammunition have arrived as yet, including from neighbouring Egypt, which the rebels initially looked to as a source of practical support in part because of geography but also because there was a sense of revolutionary solidarity.

The Egyptians' reluctance may be shared by other governments as the rebel leadership faces some difficult issues that are likely to cause even the most sympathetic countries to pause.

The revolution lacks an organised military structure in spite of several attempts to stamp its authority on the volunteer army. Discipline is bad. Few of the fighters have proper military experience and they would need training in the use of weapons such as artillery. But the revolutionaries have made a strong point of saying they do not want foreign troops on Libyan soil.

The revolution's de facto finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, claims that there are 1,000 trained fighters among the rebels but there is little evidence of it on the battlefield where the anti-Gaddafi forces appear capable of advancing only when the way is cleared by foreign air strikes.

The problem is not solely the rebels' lack of more powerful weapons. In the past two days their disorganisation has shown as they have been badly outmanoeuvred by better-trained forces that have outflanked them with sweeps through the desert. The revolutionaries lack any cohesive defensive plan. Instead they fire wildly at the enemy and argue among themselves about what to do next and who should be giving orders before turning and fleeing.

Indeed, the rebels have seized a significant number of large weapons abandoned by retreating Gadaffi forces including a handful or more tanks this week after air strikes around Ajdabiya sent the government's army fleeing. But the tanks have yet to be put to use on the battlefield in part because of a lack of expertise in fighting with them.

The lack of control over Libya's rebel army also raises questions about how it might behave as an occupying force were it to take over a town such as Sirte which has not risen up in support of the revolution and where the Libyan leader is believed to retain some support.

Killings of alleged mercenaries in Benghazi, the rebels' de facto capital, as well as the large numbers of young men who have assumed an authority over ordinary citizens apparently only granted by their guns, will raise questions about how an ill disciplined and unaccountable force will behave on taking control of a potentially less welcoming city.

It would be embarrassing, to say the least, if even some of the rebels armed by Britain or the US were to carry out the kind of atrocities the west says it is intervening in Libya to prevent.

There must be an additional concern that any weapons sent to the revolutionaries could end up arming Gaddafi.

The rebel performance in recent weeks has amounted to rapid advances followed by almost as speedy retreats. It is one thing for the revolutionaries to jump in to their cars and pick-up trucks and race back tens of miles through the desert.

But large guns or armour cannot move at that speed, as has been demonstrated by the rebel capture of Gaddafi's abandoned tanks. It might take only one concerted push by government forces of the kind seen over the past two days for them to swallow up any new foreign weapon shipments and then turn them on the revolutionaries.

A Noble Tradition

Book Burning and Guilt

There is a long, respectable tradition of book burning in the Christian church.  We read in the Book of Acts that when the Gospel of our Lord began to take hold of large numbers of families in Ephesus that a widespread fear began to fall upon that great pagan city.  As people came out of the horrors of pagan magical practices and were made sons and daughters of God through believing in Christ they disclosed and confessed the things they had been involved in before conversion.

So convicted were they of the evil of pagan witchcraft and magical rites that they brought all their books of magical practices--that is books of secret arts, rites, spells, curses, sexual deviancy, and demon respect--and burnt them publicly.  It was some bonfire--around fifty thousand pieces of silver's worth.  (Acts 19: 17-20)  On the assumption that a piece of silver represented about an ounce, in today's debased coin that would represent a bonfire of around NZ$2.6m dollars worth of books going up in smoke. 

Now, of course, this was not a political stunt.  It was a public act of repentance and turning away from evil.  Since doubtless those books represented a dead past, and since for many there would be demonic powers associated with the books, burning them was not just an act of repentance and consecration, it was also to help secure liberation, in the same way that a converted alcoholic might systematically rid his house of alcohol, lest he fall under its thall again. 

So there is nothing wrong with book burning per se--although pseudo-intellectuals would disagree, seeing any rejection of any book an act of cultural philistinism.  The liberal intellectual prides himself on his urbane openness of mind towards any human thought or creation, except of course any criticism of his liberalism which is very definitely not to be tolerated. 

Some of the great libraries of antiquity have been destroyed, either through natural catastrophes such the destruction of Pompeii in AD79, or through human device such as the burning of the library at Alexandria during the invasion of Mark Anthony.  Without doubt these represent great historical loss.  There was nothing intrinsically evil in the books of magic burned in Ephesus.  Separated from the pagan cultural practices, and the demonic powers incarnated therein, the burned books could have provided much insight to scholars in our day of the nature of religion in the Roman Empire. No doubt it would be a tale of debasement, degradation, and evil--but it would be a tale that could be told without threat or danger--and one that would well prove helpful and cautionary.   

But in the situation and circumstances of Ephesus as people were coming out of captivity to the Devil into the freedom of Christ, destroying their magic books was the right thing to do.  However, it was not without political consequences, for the account in Acts goes on to tell us of a riot in that city that occurred afterwards as silversmiths found their market for shrines of the goddess Diana was shrinking due to the number of people becoming Christians.  The silversmiths, led by one Demetrius, took offence at the "offence" given to the goddess and led a riot that threatened the city itself.  (Acts 19: 23-28)

Fast forward to the present.  A pastor in the US orders the burning of the Koran, wanting to call attention to its prescription for evil violence.  As a result, some Islamic folk in Afghanistan take offence and murder some UN aid workers.  In response some excited members of the Commentariate in the US accuse the pastor of committing murder.  Yet again blood libel rears its head. 

But let's think this through more sensibly.  We know neither the pastor, nor his motivations, but we assume that members of his flock were not recent converts coming out of Islam who had previously been captive to the teachings of the Koran.  The situation, then, was different--very different--from that real serious book-burning in Ephesus two millennia ago.  It is likely that it was done to make a public point about the Koran.  Now even here we ought not to rush to judgment.  There are numerous instances of God's servants publicly enacting scenes to get a point across to an audience.  One thinks of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Hosea for example. 

A relevant question to ask is, Which of the commandments did this pastor break?  Well, possibly he is guilty of gratuitous offence to Islamic believers--but even here the case needs to be made carefully, not just asserted.  We are conscious that any Christian witness might be so labelled as gratuitous offence to Unbelievers, leading to demands that Christians be silenced. 

As to the murders that transpired as a reaction to the pastor's order of Koran burning we must be very, very clear.  The responsibility for that breaking of the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not murder, rests totally with the perpetrators.  Anyone who suggests otherwise is guilty of blood libel. Aaron Worthing at Patterico makes the point very well in a piece entitled, "Don't Burn the Bible, or This Kitten Gets It!" by making reference to Abraham Lincoln who, when campaigning for the presidency, was libellously accused by his opponents. 

In 1860, long before he was the Republican nominee for President, he confronted fears that this union would break if the nation dared elect a Republican president, addressing his remarks to the South:

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is [clever]. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “[Give me your money], or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

(Old-timey slang replaced with modern language.)  The metaphor works perfectly.  What the robber demanded of Lincoln—his money—was his own and he had a clear right to keep it.  But it was no more his own than my God-given right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion is my own, and the threat of death to extort Lincoln’s money, and the threat of death to strangers to extort my silence, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

Or, put another way, any suggestion that the pastor was guilty of murder because of his acts is as stupid and duplicitous as the suggestion that Lincoln was guilty of murder because he was killed for refusing to give up his money to a thief demanding with menace.  Yet this is precisely what Joe Klein, a nationally recognised journalist/commentator has argued in Time Magazine:

But there should be no confusion about this: [Pastor] Jones’s act was murderous as any suicide bomber’s. If there is a hell, he’s just guaranteed himself an afterlifetime membership.

Really.  On this basis, Paul would be guilty of inciting a rioting in Ephesus, Jeremiah guilty of Nebuchadnezzar's sack and execution of thousands in Jerusalem, former Moslems who become Christians would be guilty of their own murders when they are honour-killed, and our Lord would be guilty of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.  Methinks, Mr Klein that you had better repent before the Hell which you interdict upon the head of the pastor falls upon you.  Blood libel is no trifle.  May our Lord have mercy upon you and bring you to your senses before it is too late.

Geert Wilders on Muhammad

Time to Unmask Muhammad

Posted By Geert Wilders On March 31, 2011

Editor’s note: Below is an English translation of an op-ed piece that Geert Wilders published in the Dutch magazine “HP/De Tijd” on March 30, 2011.

To know why Islam is a mortal danger one must not only consider the Koran but also the character of Muhammad, who conceived the Koran and the entirety of Islam.

The Koran is not just a book. Muslims believe that Allah himself wrote it and that it was dictated to Muhammad in the original version, the Umm al-Kitab, which is kept on a table in heaven. Consequently one cannot argue with the contents. Who would dare to disagree with what Allah himself has written? This explains much of Muhammadan behaviour, from the violence of jihad to the hatred and persecution of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims and apostates. What we in the West regard as abnormal, is perfectly normal for Islam.

A second insuperable problem with Islam is the figure of Muhammad. He is not just anyone. He is al-insan al-kamil, the perfect man. To become a Muslim one must pronounce the Shahada (the Muslim creed). By pronouncing the Shahada one testifies that there is no god that can be worshipped except Allah, and one testifies that Muhammad is his servant and messenger.

The Koran, and hence Allah, lays down that Muhammad’s life must be imitated. The consequences of this are horrendous and can be witnessed on a daily basis.

There has been much analysis of Muhammad’s mental sanity. In spite of all the available research, it is rarely mentioned or debated. It is a taboo to discuss the true nature of the man whom one and a half billion Muslims around the world regard as a holy prophet and example to be followed. That taboo must be breached in the West, and here in the Netherlands.

Ali Sina is an Iranian ex-Muslim who established the organisation for apostates of Islam Faith Freedom International. In his latest book he posits that Muhammad is a narcissist, a pedophile, a mass murderer, a terrorist, a misogynist, a lecher, a cult leader, a madman, a rapist, a torturer, an assassin and a looter.  Sina has offered 50,000 dollars for the one who can prove otherwise. Nobody has claimed the reward as yet. And no wonder, as the description is based on the Islamic texts themselves, such as the hadiths, the descriptions of Muhammad’s life from testimonies of contemporaries.

The historical Muhammad was the savage leader of a gang of robbers from Medina. Without scruples they looted, raped and murdered. The sources describe orgies of savagery where hundreds of people’s throats were cut, hands and feet chopped off, eyes cut out, entire tribes massacred. An example is the extinction of the Jewish Kurayza tribe in Medina in 627. One of those who chopped off their heads was Muhammad. The women and children were sold as slaves. Confronted with the lunacy of Islamic terrorists today, it is not hard to find out where the lunacy comes from.


In Vienna the women’s rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was recently sentenced to paying a fine for insulting a religion by calling Muhammad a pedophile. However, that is the truth. Numerous hadiths contain testimonies by Muhammad’s favorite wife, the child wife Aisha. Aisha literally says: “The prophet married me when I was six years old, and had intercourse with me when I was nine.”  According to the historian Theophanes (752-817) Muhammad was an epileptic. Epileptic crises are sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, perspiration form the forehead and foaming at the mouth, the very symptoms which Muhammad displayed during his visions.

In his book “The other Muhammad” (1992) the Flemish psychologist Dr. Herman Somers concludes that in his forties the “prophet” began to suffer from acromegaly, a condition caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland, a small organ that is situated just below the brain. When the tumor in the pituitary gland causes too much pressure in the brain, people start to see and hear things that are not there. Somers’s psychopathological diagnosis of Muhammad’s condition is: organic hallucinatory affliction with paranoid characteristics.

The German medical historian Armin Geus speaks of a paranoid hallucinatory schizophrenia. A similar analysis can be found in the book “The Medical Case of Muhammad” by the physician Dede Korkut.
In his book “Psychology of Mohammed: Inside the Brain of a Prophet” Dr. Masud Ansari calls Muhammad “the perfect personification of a psychopath in power.” Muhammad had a unhinged paranoid personality with an inferiority complex and megalomaniac tendencies. In his forties he starts having visions that led him to believe he had a cosmic mission, and that there was no stopping him.

The truth is not always pleasant or politically correct. On the basis of the research referred to above it can be argued that the Islamic creed obliges one and a half billion people around the world, including the one million living in the Netherlands, to take Muhammad as their example. There is no turning back once one has become a Muslim. For even though article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to “change his religion or belief,” in Islam there is a death penalty for leaving the faith.
Anyone who voices criticism of Islam and Muhammad is in grave personal danger – as I have experienced. And whoever attempts to escape from the influence of Islam and Muhammad risks death. We cannot continue to accept this state of affairs. A public debate about the true nature and character of Muhammad can provide insight and support to Muslims all over the world who wish to leave Islam.

Apostates are heroes and more than ever they deserve the support of freedom loving people all over the world. Party politics should not be at play in this matter. It is time for us to help these people by exposing Muhammad.

Geert Wilders is an MP in the Netherlands. He is the Chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV).

Re-published from FrontPageMag.com

More Swamps Than Christchurch

The Liquifaction of the Left

One of the most destructive carnards concreted into the mind of greenism and environmentalism is the proposition that natural resources are fixed, finite, and limited. Once gone, they are gone forever. Therefore, conservation of said resources is a moral imperative.

Statists warm to this proposition reflexively, that is, without thinking. To conserve on a grand scale requires big government: to regulate, limit, control, restrict, order, prescribe, proscribe, and ban. Without such a big intrusion into the lives and endeavours of citizens, disaster will fall upon the entire race. Therefore, statists join the moral crusade. Advocating for big-brother government suddenly makes one morally good. Saving the planet and saving humanity has a nice moral ring to it, making big government itself a moral imperative.

Socialists likewise find the proposition of limited resources needing to be conserved a convenient doctrine. It justifies pre-emptive property rights of the state over private citizens. It also gives moral cover to advocating for more government taxation and expropriation to fund things like "green industries" and "green energy". You just have to take a glance at President Obama's "new" energy strategy. Instead of "drill, baby drill" it is "spin, baby, spin", referring of course to the windmills he is spending billions of dollars worth of citizen's property to manufacture and deploy.

So, we have the ideological Grand Coalition of our times: greenists, environmentalists, statists, and socialists. Ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for "the Left".

There is one small problem. This monumental intellectual and political construction is built upon a simple fallacy, known as the fallacy of composition. It beggars belief that in a world self-proclaimed to be so smart and so rational that the very same wise-in-their-own-estimation are actually operating with a grand intellectual and political edifice built on more swamps than Christchurch, or more volcanoes than Auckland.

The fallacy of composition assumes or asserts that the attributes of the parts must sum to the attribute of the whole. In this case, since each specific natural resource is clearly finite, natural resources as a whole must, therefore, be finite. Once you explode this childish error, the modern moral edifice for greenism, statism, and socialism is largely exploded, revealing beneath the actual rictal grin of an immoral lust for control and power over the earth and mankind. Babylon redivivus.

So, let's explode the fallacy. It was neatly done by Sheik Yamani of OPEC when he ironically opined that the steam age did not end for lack of wood (a finite natural resource); the coal age did not end for lack of coal; nor will the oil age end for lack of oil. Technological advances made steam and coal redundantly superfluous. The whole is gloriously far more than the sum of the parts in this case.

To change the analogy: imagine a dining room table on which a finite number of apples is placed every evening for the meal. More and more people come to eat every evening so it is obvious that the size of everyone's meal will reduce, assuming everyone gets a turn at the table. Until one evening, the table has not just apples, but oranges on it. Then pears are added. Then . . . you get the point. While each of the foods is finite and limited, by being able to add more types of foods, the supply of food becomes functionally limitless. The attributes of the part are not necessarily the attributes of the whole. Schoolboy error.

At this point the Grand Coalition usually retreats to moral mutterings about the need to be prudent, and careful, and risk-averse. All of those Yamani examples are in the past. We face the future. The planet is at stake. It more prudent to conserve rather than consume, we are gravely told. In fact the opposite is more likely. The more society conserves, under the nannying aegis of the Grand Coalition insisting on what's best for us all, the less likely replacements are to be found through technological innovation, enterprise, creativity, and skills. In other words the Grand Coalition's doctrine of finite resources requiring conservation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Grand Coalition gets for us all what it has asked for.

Now we know there is currently no shortage of oil in the world. But there is an actual shortage of supply because the Grand Coalition insists upon restricting it. Facing the apples on the table, believing that starvation awaits, the Coalition insists on reducing the number of apples available and putting some into storage (for when the apples run out). The only people benefiting from this nannying prudishness are the apple growers, who find that the price of their apples rises and rises, because they are now in "shorter" supply. "See, we told you that was going to happen," shriek the harridans of the Grand Coalition.

The Wall Street Journal has just provided us with a perfect case study of the myopic, ignorant stupidity of the Left and the great damage they do to mankind. It is a case of technological innovation that looks to make oil increasingly redundant. It is but one illustration of how, when it comes to natural resources, the whole is very definitely far greater than the sum of the parts.

In the early 1980s, George P. Mitchell, a Houston-based independent energy producer, could see that his company was going to run out of natural gas. Almost three decades later, the results of his effort to do something about the problem are transforming America's energy prospects and the calculations of analysts around the world.

Back in those years, Mr. Mitchell's company was contracted to deliver a substantial amount of natural gas from Texas to feed a pipeline serving Chicago. But the reserves on which he depended were running down, and it was not at all clear where he could find more gas to replace the depleting supply. Mr. Mitchell had a strong hunch, however, piqued by a geology report that he had read recently.

Perhaps the natural gas that was locked into shale—a dense sedimentary rock—could be freed and made to flow. He was prepared to back up his hunch with investment. The laboratory for his experiment was a sprawling geologic formation called the Barnett Shale around Dallas and Fort Worth. Almost everyone with whom he worked was skeptical, including his own geologists and engineers. "You're wasting your money," they told him over the years. But Mr. Mitchell kept at it.

The payoff came a decade and a half later, at the end of the 1990s. Using a specialized version of a technique called hydraulic fracturing (now widely known as "fracking" or "fracing"), his team found an economical way to create or expand fractures in the rock and to get the trapped gas to flow. . . .

As late as 2000, shale gas was just 1% of American natural-gas supplies. Today, it is about 25% and could rise to 50% within two decades. Estimates of the entire natural-gas resource base, taking shale gas into account, are now as high as 2,500 trillion cubic feet, with a further 500 trillion cubic feet in Canada. That amounts to a more than 100-year supply of natural gas, which is used for everything from home heating and cooking to electric generation, industrial processes and petrochemical feedstocks. . . .

In the energy industry, use of the new technology quickly gathered speed. The know-how was applied across North America, in such shale formations as Haynesville, mostly in Louisiana; Eagle Ford in South Texas; Woodford in Oklahoma; Horn River and Montney in British Columbia; Duvernay in Alberta; and the "mighty Marcellus," the huge formation that spreads from Pennsylvania and New York down into West Virginia.

Gas output rose dramatically, and the anticipated shortfall turned into a large surplus. As the volume rose, the inevitable happened—prices came down. Substantially. Today, natural-gas prices are less than half of what they were just three years ago.

Suddenly there are not just apples on the table, but now oranges. This pattern has been repeated for centuries. The only impediment is the wowsers of the Grand Coalition, who believe they know what is best for us all. Bless their little cotton socks.

When Christians realise the entire edifice of the Grand Coalition rests upon a basic schoolboy error in inductive reasoning the more distasteful the niggardly faux morality of the Grand Coalition becomes. Moreover, as Christians come to understand and believe in the superabundant generosity of the Living God manifested in the reckless, prodigal, super-abundance of His creation for our exploitation and enjoyment, the insult to the injury becomes detestable.

The Road to Hell

Paved With Good Intentions

Have liberal intellectuals learned nothing from Iraq?

David Rieff
March 23, 2011 | 12:00 am
Excerpted from The New Republic

Had the purpose of an air exclusion zone over Libya been solely to protect the people of Benghazi and of other insurgent-controlled areas in the east from being massacred by Colonel Qaddafi’s advancing forces, opposing it might still have made intellectual sense, but it would not have made moral sense, which is what should count most.

Qaddafi had promised a slaughter in the evening before the United Nations authorized the Western intervention, and there was no sane reason not to take him at his word. . . .

But from the beginning it has been clear that while this intervention has been couched in the language of humanitarianism and of the global good deed, invoking the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.N.’s new doctrine that is supposed to govern those instances when outside powers must step in militarily to prevent tyrants from killing their own people, the more important goal has been to support the insurgency, which is to say, to bring about regime change. Had it been otherwise, the bombing could have been halted once the Libyan government attack on Benghazi had been halted. Instead, it goes on, with various French, British, and American politicians and military officials at odds mainly about how much (not whether) the bombing campaign should be widened, and whether Colonel Qaddafi is himself a legitimate target for assassination from the air.

So much for the hope that Iraq and Afghanistan might actually have taught the West anything lasting about trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun. Instead, it is as if Iraq, which, in the United States, was initially welcomed by most liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike as a war of liberation, had never happened, and, instead, we have traveled backward in time. Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism? If you don’t, well, don’t worry: If the war in Libya is any indication, you’ll have the chance to live them all over again.. . .

It is tempting to say that what is taking place here is some sort of Freudian “return of the repressed.” But in reality, the infatuation of liberal elites in the West with humanitarian war was barely shaken by Iraq. Many of the same activists who either opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, or soon recanted their support for it, campaigned ardently for a military intervention in Darfur. . . . Two of the most prominent among those who called for Western military action in Darfur played crucial roles in persuading their respective governments to start bombing in Libya. Grotesque as it may sound, though he held no government appointment, Bernard-Henri Levy played a greater role in France’s decision to spearhead the bombing campaign, which involved at least one instance of French aircraft flying close air support for a rebel column, than did the foreign minister, Alain Juppe. Samantha Power, whose book, A Problem From Hell, about the failure of the United States to prevent or halt genocide in the twentieth century, has been the touchstone for American liberal interventionists since its publication (it was a favorite of the late Richard Holbrooke), is in government, where, to give her her due, she will finally be in position to help put these ideas into practice.

This war—let us call it by its right name, for once—will be remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, and cheered on by intellectuals. The main difference this time is that, particularly in the United States, these intellectuals largely come from the liberal rather than the conservative side. . . .

But in humanitarian war, which its supporters nonetheless continue self-servingly to refuse to think of as being war, that is, as something that invariably involves the slaughter of innocents even when this slaughter takes place in a just cause (and for all the talk of “smart” weapons, war from the air is particularly prone to kill civilians), the moral good intentions of those who would wage it is somehow thought to trump all other considerations. Again, this war is no longer about protecting the people of Benghazi, if it ever was. That goal was accomplished on the first day and NATO planes could have continued to protect it as they did in Kurdistan between the end of the First Gulf War in 1991 and the beginning of the Second in 2003. Rather, it is about overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi and installing the insurgent leadership in Benghazi in his place.

Why Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, or David Cameron feel that who rules Libya is any of their affair, and why they were more intent on securing the (grudging) assent of the Arab League than the assent of their own legislatures, shows just how misguided the doctrine of humanitarian intervention really is. These leaders are more intent on imposing democracy by force than in honoring the democratic judgment of their parliaments at home. As a result, what we are left with is the angelic Caesarism of the “empire of the good”!

And all with the nihil obstat of an intellectual class whose good intentions are not the solution to Power’s “problem from hell,” but rather the problem itself. Humanitarian savagery from 15,000 feet or from a missile-bearing submarine is still savagery. And the road to hell is still paved with good intentions.

David Rieff is a contributing editor for The New Republic.

We'll Take It

One Small Victory

Over the past ten years we have seen the unpalatable sight of Western nations kowtowing to Islamic interpretations of human rights. Much of the Islamic propaganda has focused upon free-speech rights--in the West. Like much of Islam in general, the argument has represented an inverted doppelganger of historical Western freedoms which, as Rodney Stark has shown in The Victory of Reason, are derived, from the doctrines and teachings of the Christ.

The Islamic propaganda campaign was kicked off by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran when he issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, in which he called for "all zealous Muslims to execute quickly" Rushdie, the alleged defamer of Muhammad and the Koran. In the hands of Islamic strategists, this quickly morphed into a call for the West to uphold the general thrust of Khomeini's fatwa, by linking speech or actions which defamed religions with free speech rights. "How did that happen?" we hear you ask. By Islamic inversion--a tactic that has been oft employed.

The development of individual liberties in the West arose out of the Christian doctrine of man being created in God's image, which necessarily implied the fundamental equality and equal worth of all human beings. Out of this arose derived doctrines of individual rights and the sovereignty of the individual against institutions, governments, and ecclesiastical structures. Whilst the sovereignty of the individual was not absolute, it certainly meant that the individual had liberty of conscience and was free to believe and think as he chose--whilst acknowledging God would hold him accountable for it. Christ, not man, was Lord of the conscience.  Therefore, in the West, influenced by historical Christendom, individual free speech and liberty of conscience rights were increasingly recognised.

But the modern Islamic propaganda campaign inverted this to focus upon the free speech rights of corporate entities, rather than individuals. This campaign has been pushed aggressively in the West by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It amounted to a demand that the West accept to some degree Islamic blasphemy laws into its own legal structures. Society had to protect--in particular--the free speech rights of Islamic minorities in the West, which meant Western nations had a duty to ensure that Islam and Islamic institutions were beyond criticism--for officially tolerated criticism of Islam implied official defamation of Islam. If Islam were defamed, it was tantamount to blasphemy against the prophet, which in turn violated the conscience of all Islamic people, thereby attacking their liberties of conscience and the liberty of Islam in the West. In a word, "hate-speech" was intolerable.

Yes, we know, the inversion throws up some mighty tortuous logic--but that is the way of it.

The sad part is that the powers and establishment, the media and the commentariate, the UN, national governments and so on pretty much bought this line of Islamic reasoning. They were gulled into it. It was a case of no longer believing in anything in particular, so the West fell for everything. Thus passes multi-culturalism.  The OIC focused upon the UN Human Rights Commission. Once its campaign gained traction there, the sentiments spread with lighting speed through the Western media, intellectual elite, and chattering classes. The OIC called for the Human Rights Commission to condemn any expression which could be construed as a "defamation of religion"--in particular, Islam.

The Human Rights Commission went along with this joyfully. Nina Shea takes up the narrative:

In 1999 and 2000, the anti-blasphemy resolutions were adopted by consensus, with, inexplicably, the U.S. joining in. In 2001, the West began to vote against them, but, as a “public” appointee to the U.S. delegation in Geneva in 2001, I was told by the State Department to stop debating the issue with my Egyptian counterpart, who led the drafting committee — it was just too sensitive. Without Western support, each year, until now, OIC resolutions to this effect have passed in what purports to be the premiere global human-rights forum.

The resolution’s popularity peaked with the 2005–06 Danish cartoon crisis. Speaking for the OIC, Pakistan typically introduced these resolutions, arguing in words calculated to appeal to Western liberals: “Unrestricted and disrespectful freedom of opinion creates hatred and is contrary to the spirit of peaceful dialogue and promotion of multiculturalism.” Non–OIC members, even democracies, voted for the resolution. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour signaled their support. Emboldened, the OIC began introducing the concept in other U.N.-sponsored fora, such as the General Assembly itself, where “defamation against religions” resolutions have easily passed.

Since 2007, however, support in the UN has declined--to the point where this year Pakistan did not even introduce the resolution to condemn "defamation of religion". Now, we are not at all confident that this is the end of the matter--probably, if truth be told, it more represents a respite. It will return with a vengeance into the refined and rarefied halls of the UN. But for the moment, we will accept the breathing space with thankfulness.

The coup de grâce for the resolution was the murder this month of Pakistan’s renowned minister of minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, because he opposed his own country’s blasphemy laws. His murder followed that of Punjab governor Salman Taseer and the death sentence given for blasphemy to a Christian mother of five whom Taseer had defended. It was now impossible for even the Human Rights Council to ignore the disgrace of the blasphemy laws of Pakistan — the main sponsor of its blasphemy resolutions all these years.

It will come again--and it is still alive and well in Europe.

The defense of the right to speak freely in the West about Islam, and within Islam, is far from over — last month, an Austrian court convicted Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff of “defaming” the Islamic prophet Mohammad during a political-party briefing.

And then there is Canada where folk like Mark Steyn are under Star-Chamber-like sanction. But, nevertheless, as Elizabeth Bennett might say, recent progress at the UN does represent a small accomplishment.   

The Need of a Clear Trumpet

His Greatest Failure as a Pastor

Justin Buzzard:

About ten years ago I heard Ben Patterson, campus pastor of Westmont College, say something that I will never forget. Ben told the story of a retired pastor who began noticing that his former congregation was sliding away from orthodoxy. The pastor saw this as his fault, noting the one thing he thought he did most poorly as a pastor. The pastor stated, in two sentences, his great failure as a pastor:

I always told people what to believe.
My great mistake is that I never told my people what NOT to believe.

Update: You can listen to Patterson’s whole talk here: “Courage in Christian Ministry.” It’s a bracing, sobering, encouraging talk, conveyed out of personal trial and much grace. It’s well worth your time.

This post is taken from Justin Taylor's blog.

For the Long Haul

Digging In

". . . the compilers of The Book of Common Prayer provided 'Tables for Finding Holy Days' all the way to AD 8400! Clearly they were digging in for the 'long haul,' and did not expect an imminent "rapture" of the Church."

David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 497

One of the most debilitating and enervating beliefs in Christendom has been the idea of an imminent end to human history and the soon coming of our Lord in His final advent. We know of folk who all their adult lives have lived with a (false) expectation that the Final Advent was imminent--just around the corner. Usually this is tied up with periods of unrest in the Middle East and perceived military threats to Israel. Since the Middle East is currently in some turmoil, the syndrome of Armageddon has burst forth once again amongst the gullible and poorly taught.

In our library we have a volume entitled Armageddon Now. It traces all the identifications of the Anti-Christ that have been made through the twentieth century--from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Henry Kissinger. How many times do folk have to be wrong before self-critical reflection sets in?

The hypothesis of an imminent return of our Lord has also been ascribed to Jesus Himself and the Apostles. Now this creates an implicit, severe theological problem. If an imminent return is taught in Scripture by the Apostles and our Lord Himself--as many modern scholars allege--then clearly both our Lord and the Apostles were mistaken. Subsequent history proves them so. Last time we checked, we are now in the 2011th Year of our Lord. If the writers of the New Testament expected an imminent Final Advent in the generation of the apostles, and now a period of two millennia has elapsed, then clearly they were wrong, mistaken, and error prone.

This very same argument was frequently used by liberal, unbelieving scholars in the twentieth century to cast doubt upon the historicity and reliability and authority of the Scriptures. It is an argument that many professing Christians who do believe the Bible teaches an imminent, soon-to-be Final Advent find hard to address.

Yet the idea of an imminent return of our Lord has not been part of the Church's teaching historically. It has broken out from time to time--for example, the Anabaptist radicals at the time of the Reformation espoused the notion of End Times soon to be. But as Chilton's reference to the Book of Common Prayer makes clear, such an idea is an aberration and contrary to a long tradition of historical theology.

The simple fact that so many prophesiers, who have proclaimed that the Final Advent of our Lord is just around the corner, have been proved wrong by subsequent events should cause all but the most wilfully blind to experience a deep angst of scepticism coupled with an openness to return to a more solid exegesis of the relevant Biblical texts.

For the record, we believe that our Lord's words on His return are impeccable and infallible and without error. Secondly, we believe that His Apostles, inspired by His Spirit, were equally infallible, when speaking of the times and seasons of His coming. Thirdly, both our Lord and His Apostles believed and taught that He would soon come to judge Israel and destroy the temple and its apostate religious service--which occurred indeed within a generation of the resurrection of our Lord, as He foretold. This was indeed an Advent of our Lord, although not the Final Advent, which is yet to come. As our Lord informed the High Priest, ". . . hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven . . ." (Matthew 26:64)

Fourthly, whilst this historical judgement may well foreshadow the great cataclysms of the Final Advent, the Scriptures themselves say nothing of the length of time that will elapse until its occurrence. In fact, not only do the Scriptures makes clear that no man knows that time, and that it has been kept from men by the express purpose of God (thus, one of the "secret things" referred to in Deuteronomy 29:29), but that our Lord gave many indications that it was a long, long time away.

In the meantime, we have His commission to go forth and disciple the nations, teaching all to observe everything that the Lord has commanded. Last time we checked, we have only made the barest beginning in this great, global, universal task. One of the great problems with false doctrines of an imminent return is that it introduces a short-cutting urgency into the Church, which necessarily involves neglecting some, if not a great deal, of the responsibilities and duties commanded by God.

In the Kingdom, doing things fast does not mean they are done well. In fact, the reverse is more likely the case. Try forging the character of a child in thirty seconds. More like thirty years are required.

Digging in for the long haul is the ticket.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

You Can Look Them Up On Your Phone

Money, Love, Desire - The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, March 29, 2011

When it comes to modern conveniences, many Christians are confused about the relationship of their hot and cold running water, say, to the worldview that we inherited from the Enlightenment, the outlook of modernity. If we reject the Enlightenment (and who shouldn't?), does that mean we must be relegated to the grass huts?
Put another way, is it possible to be modern without being a modernist? Sure, sez I, and let me 'splain. Wealth is a gift from God, and pride is bequeathed to us from the devil. Is it clearer now?

The birth of the modern age, measured in terms of conveniences, technology, wealth, medical advances, and so on was largely a legacy of the Reformation. But the Bible teaches that whenever a gift is given, there will immediately be a temptation arising in our hearts to steal the glory and gratitude that should go to God alone. That temptation will say, fundamentally, that we owe none of this to God, and that we did it all ourselves. That attitude is what we call the Enlightenment. That is modernist hubris, technocratic arrogance, and purblind puffery.

"When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest . . . thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:10-18).

This is the sinful pattern. God gives wealth, man takes credit for himself. If someone else later on comes along and blames man for creating all this wealth, and demands that we have ourselves a little "social justice" around here -- and what a wretched little phrase social justice is -- he is just creating an extra layer of sedimentary silliness. And by this point, we don't need any extra layers.

The Enlightenment is not to be credited with Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Smith's discovery that no one man is capable of manufacturing a pin, Newton's discovery of what objects in motion tend to do, or Watts' admirable divvying up of energy into units of horsepower. God gave us all those things. We must thank God for them.

Seeing the inevitable abuses of wealth that follow after a humanistic grabbing of credit for it, and reacting away from the whole thing entirely, is simply foolish. If it is a good thing, as my smart phone is a good thing, then God is to be thanked. If it is a sinful thing, like thinking that man does things he can't do, then we should abandon our folly, repent of our sins, and return to the gospel of grace that undergirds all God's statutes and laws. And if you don't know where those passages are, you can look them up on your phone.

The Evils of Doing Good

"Values Based" Wars Are the Most Frequent and Bloody of All

America's third war is underway. Don't be fooled by the legerdemain of President Obama "passing the football" to a NATO coalition, so that it appears not to be an American war. The US effectively controls NATO because it leads NATO. So we have Iraq, then Afghanistan, now Libya.

Back in the "good old days" there had to be a clear and present danger to the United States in order to justify war. In this regard, Afghanistan was the most legitimate, since it harboured and provided a base of operations for Al Qaeda, which had just murdered three thousand people in New York.

Somewhere along there came a new war-doctrine in the West, espoused most forcefully by Tony Blair. David Rieff, writing in the New Republic, puts it neatly:

Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism?

Then came Iraq. War was justified because Saddam Hussein constituted a clear and present danger to someone (neighbouring countries, most likely), what with weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the brutality of the regime was evident. People really were dying in the torture chambers--in large numbers. In the jingoism of the moment, few noticed the subtle, but significant shift from the justification for Afghanistan to Iraq.

Then came the "surge" which was said to be the key to US victory in Iraq. Whilst the "surge" would have helped, let none be in any doubt: the only reason the US were able to claim victory was that Sunni and Shi'ite factions stopped fighting the US and turned their guns on Al Qaeda operatives instead. That happened because Al Qaeda made itself odious in the eyes of both factions, since it regarded both as traitors to Islam and equally worthy of extermination.

Meanwhile, the mission in Afghanistan shifted from rendering Al Qaeda impotent (which should have been done within a few months, followed by a speedy withdrawal) to "nation building". Same mission as Iraq, now. The objective is to make both Iraq and Iran into secular Western-style democracies, with the same philosophical intellectual urbanity of, say, the secular West.

Then comes Libya--the third war. At first it was justified on humanitarian grounds: stopping Gaddafi from slaughtering the inhabitants of Bengazi. Each time, the justification for war has both expanded and diminished. First it was protecting American lives, then countries in the Middle East, now civilians and insurgents in a country not remotely connected with the US. But also the threshold for was has gone down: now it was to protect civilians and citizens of another country from their own government. (At this point, the US has "justification" for armed aggression against just about every government on the planet.) But, now that the inhabitants of Bengazi have been protected, the "mission" has morphed into more familiar territory: the overthrow of Gaddafi--regime change--in order to install yet again another western-style democracy this time in Libya.

Humanitarianism is a bloody, bloody doctrine. It is also a wicked idolatry that will be broken into pieces by the Living God. Humanitarianism is an attempt by Western elites and its commentariate to establish the beneficent empire of man over the world. It is in the name of Man that the US and Europe has gone to war repeatedly. It is the Tower of Babel redivivus: "come, let us make a name for ourselves".

Now at this point, an objector usually says, "Well, with Gaddafi closing in on Bengazi with blood on his mind, what would you do?" The very question betrays the problem. Why presume that one needs to do anything? What basis, what ideology, what religion must one appeal to in order to justify interference or action in behalf of those not citizens, not those one's government has been charged by God to protect and defend? Whatever the justification, know for sure that it will not be remotely Christian. For Christianity cannot, cannot be spread by the sword.

Not that Christians and Christian countries would never bear a sword. Christianity does not teach pacifism with respect to the state. But bearing the sword must never be living by the sword. For a truly Christian nation, bearing the sword must only ever be a police and judicial action to defend one's own citizens from murderous aggression, and to execute the aggressors. It is a limited and strict application of the divine mandate given to the civil magistrate in Romans 13--only in this case the evil doer would be the aggressive foreign power, whose servants must be put to death as long as they attempt to do evil, murder, maim and destroy the lives and property of our citizens.

Going to war in order to do good, especially good in the name of Man, is doomed to an unceasing exaction of blood. As C. S. Lewis put it:

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."