Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

With My Customary Mildness 

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Those conservatives who believe that the threat of same-sex marriage is coming solely from places like the gay pride parades of San Francisco aren't paying close enough attention. A lot is going on, in the legal world, in the entertainment industry, in the crazy vanguards, and elsewhere. There is in fact a lot of pressure building up in the Republican Party -- from the secular libertarian right -- to accommodate itself to the new norms of "social tolerance."

Christians who are Christians first, and are only politically engaged as a result of this prior commitment, need to get ready for this. There are certain basic confusions that Christians have to get rid of in order to be prepared for this debate.

Victimhoodery Run Down

A Peculiar Man

The politics of guilt and condescension parades victims everywhere.  "Victims here, victims there and not a tear to drop", wrote Coleridge.  Or he would have if he were living in our age of Victimhoodery. 

Unfortunately every now and then someone comes along who refuses to be a victim, to blame someone or something else for his plight.  When it happens it is like seeing a light in a dark place.  How strange, we muse.  How untypical.  How unlike the spirit of the age.  What school did he go to? 

Take the case of  bus collision victim, Tim Brown.  Poor old Tim walked into a bus in Wellington on Willis Street in Wellington, snapping his foot, ribs, lung, arm and shoulder.  Lawsuits beckon.  Victimhoodery about to explode forth like a Mt Tongariro eruption.

Ah, no.

Euro Break Up Being Priced Already

Watching the Smart Money

One of the issues being discussed at this blog is the survival of the Euro.  It is obvious that financial markets get really jittery when the break-up of the Euro portends.  Equally obvious is the relief rallies in markets when the risk-du-jour fades and the survival of the Euro is assured for another week or so.

What is often missed is that the smart money has already decided the Euro is going to break up.  When we refer to "smart money" we don't mean the billions upon billions traded daily in global stock markets and bond markets.   We mean instead the banks, investors, and companies putting real money (their own capital) at risk in actual trading of goods and services in Europe.  These participants are dealing with reality as best they are able to discern it, not speculation, rumours, or apocalyptic visions.

A recent article in The Blaze by Becket Adams looks at what the "smart money" is doing in Europe.

The Humanist Millennium

Dashed Hopes and Bitterness

God does not exist.  Evil is not intrinsic to the soul of man.  The cosmos is evolving.  Man can take control of his own evolution and perfect himself.  These were the doctrinal foundations upon which the West built its Tower of Babel at the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.  These same doctrines remain regnant in the West to this day. 

Back in the day combating evil had two main fronts of engagement.  The first focused upon human conditions.  Improve the external conditions and mankind would be made more perfect.  The second front was an overt attempt to alter human beings themselves by means of psychology, eugenics and education.

The campaign to improve the external living conditions in order to perfect mankind had two main lines of attack.

The Californication of the US

It's the Debt, Stupid

"a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums." Wall Street Journal

Sarah Palin congratulates Romney on Ryan

 This from Sarah Palin on the announcement of Paul Ryan as Romney's running mate:

Congratulations to Mitt Romney on his choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. 

President Obama has declared that this election is about "two fundamentally different visions" for America. Goodness, he's got that right. Our country cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama's fundamentally flawed vision. We must now look to this new team, the Romney/Ryan ticket, to provide an alternate vision of an America that is fiscally responsible, strong, and prosperous--an America that understands and is proud of her exceptional place in the world and will respect those who fight to secure that exceptionalism, which includes keeping our promises to our veterans.

When I think about the direction our country is rapidly drifting in, I can't help but look at California as a cautionary tale.

Political Perfectionism

Sanctified Pragmatics

We posted yesterday on the tendency of Christians to slide toward zealotry in political affairs.  For many this leaves them in a position of non-engagement.  The binary, all-or-nothing approach means that "nothing" wins every time.  They have a hard time coming to terms with the imperfections of earthly kings and kingdoms. 

Jim Jordan has written a helpful piece in Gary DeMar's blog for those Christians who are saying, because candidate Romney is not a Christian, but a Mormon they cannot in good conscience support him. 

Sideswipe

Ineffectual Wowsers

. . . The next step, if the Government follows Australia's lead, is to allow cigarettes to be sold only in identical packets - probably a dirty brown, featuring pictorial health warnings even more gruesome that those they already carry. The manufacturer's brand would be permitted only in small type somewhere.

When this rule came into force across the Tasman, a French manufacturer put a line on sale in Europe featuring a kangaroo on the packet and the legend: "Popular in Australia." So much for fun.

John Roughan
NZ Herald

Navigating the Swamp

Of Kings and Christian Perfection

In matters political many of the most fervent Christians find themselves "conflicted"--for understandable, but  not excusable, reasons.

Here are some of the conflicts: God calls us to an absolute, unconditional loyalty to Him, whereas all political or democratic options are full of putrefying compromise.  To support even one of them seems disloyal to God. 

Secondly, God's prophets spoke to power without fear or favour, without compromise or bending.  In our post-Christian world there is no room allowed for such messengers from God.  Christians have been ostracised and exiled.  Therefore, let's not participate--until Jesus returns and makes everything right.

Letter From Australia (About White Conservative Males)

Born, or Made Sceptical?

The Climate of Opinion

by Steven Kates

August 9, 2012

Quadrant Online

"Robert Manne may well see in James Hansen a reborn St Francis of Assisi but all I see is another Uri Geller. He may see climate scientists as the most noble and selfless conclave since the Knights of the Roundtable but what I see are a bunch of rent seekers looking for the next government grant."

Robert Manne knows no more about climate science than I do. It’s been an issue since the 1970s and I have been following it with the kind of interest anyone following political issues is apt to take. And the more it rose to become one of the centrepieces of the left, the more I kept a watchful eye on how it would develop. Manne has now written an article in The Monthly for August, “A Dark Victory” with its subtitle the actual main point, “How Vested Interests Defeated Climate Science”.

Man the Measure of All Things

Established Religion

In a previous post we made reference to C.E.M. Joad's testimony as to how his generation rejected the doctrine of original sin.  As G. K. Chesterton once famously observed, when people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they begin to believe in everything.  So it proved true in the Twilight Generation in Britain that lived in the first part of the twentieth century.

Writes Joad:

The early years of the twentieth century were years of achievement and of hope of yet greater achievement; indeed, the era which came abruptly to an end in 1914 was one of the most confident and successful in the history of mankind.  [C. E. M. Joad, The Recovery of Belief, (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 47]

What were the dominant beliefs of the time?  What had replaced the belief in Almighty God?  The first was a near universal belief amongst intellectuals and the literati in creative evolution.

The Witness of Les Mis to A Lost Generation

The Implacability of Law, the Wondrous Gift of Grace

Justin Taylor asks an interesting question about the testimony of Les Miserables to our modern culture.  (We recall reading somewhere that Les Mis was the favourite book carried in the saddlebags of officers in the Confederacy.  It remains one of the finest novels in the Western literary corpus.)

We are eagerly anticipating the release of the movie in December (see the trailer below), along with The Hobbit, of course. 

Les Misérables

In recently watching the first few numbers from the 10th anniversary of the musical Les Misérables, I wondered: in contemporary culture is there another example of something so popular where the Christian themes are so numerous and explicit?

See, for example, the number of themes you can identify in these first 10-15 minutes:

More PC Madness

Stupid "Rules"

What a bizarre world we live in.  Do-gooding and the drive to protect people from the consequences of their actions have led to a society where common sense has long since gone awol and acting "correctly" rules.  The idiocy of it all.  The administrative bureaucratic society run wild.

This from Stuff:

Inevitability

Political Psy-Ops

There has been a bit of back and forth over poll numbers in the US for the two respective presidential candidates.  Here is a perspective from Dick Morris:

The Turning of the Tide

 It's Not Pretty

One of the Christian doctrines most offensive to modern Unbelief is the doctrine of sin--and in particular, original sin.  If ever there was a truth which Unbelief rails against, this would be it.  Yet it is a truth which is demonstrated before our eyes and in our experience every single day. 

It is true that Unbelief has had its prophets who have insisted upon the universal depravity of humanity--such as Shakespeare, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dostoevsky and Conrad.  Whilst these have moved our Unbelieving generation it has not been towards the truth.  Rather these prophets serve to galvanise to a greater effort of insisting upon man's perfectibility.  Evil is external.  It is circumstantial.  Rarely is it acknowledged to be intrinsic to the heart of man. 

C. E. M. Joad, writing in the early 1950's reflects on the antipathy of his generation to the doctrine of human depravity and how it was his generation that saw the turning of the tide into Unbelief.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

No Mandate for Either One 

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 06 August 2012

The presidential election, of course, has the capacity to be a disaster on wheels, either way it goes. But let me sketch a quick scenario in which it could be a good thing -- either way.

One of my assumptions in this thought experiment is that in the gubernatorial races, in the Senate races, and in the House races, it is going to be a bloodbath for the Democrats. There are various good reasons for supposing this but, I hasten to add, we don't know for sure. Sometime soon I will go into my reasons for thinking this likely, but for now my happy thought experiment scenario either way depends upon it.

If this happens, and Obama is re-elected, then it will not at all be like his first two years in office, when he had control of the Congress, and a mandate "to do something." In this scenario, he would be hog-tied.

A Sting in the Tail

What Louisa Wall Does Not Want Us to Know

In a recent post on the oxymoronic "homosexual marriage" we pointed out that the private members bill, currently before the New Zealand Parliament, purports homosexual marriage to be a fundamental human right. 

Of course the assertion that homosexual marriage is a human right received a major setback recently when the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that same sex marriages were not a human right.  Oh dear, never mind.  Better not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. 

A central concern of the Court was that if homosexual "marriage" were ruled to be a human right, Christian churches would necessarily end up being persecuted and prosecuted.

Gadflies Wanted

Climate science needs gadflies

Matt Ridley
Author of The Rational Optimist
(This article was published on Matt Ridley's blog; it was also published in the Wall Street Journal.)

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the third in the series on confirmation bias.
I argued last week that the way to combat confirmation bias-the tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than a judge when assessing a theory in science-is to avoid monopoly. So long as there are competing scientific centers, some will prick the bubbles of theory reinforcement in which other scientists live.

For constructive critics, this is the problem with modern climate science. They don't think it's a conspiracy theory, but a monopoly that clings to one hypothesis (that carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming) and brooks less and less dissent. Again and again, climate skeptics are told they should respect the consensus, an admonition wholly against the tradition of science.

Last month saw two media announcements of preliminary new papers on climate.

Avoiding the Inevitable

Not a Pretty Sight

Only a fool tries to avoid the truly inevitable.  A wise man will face up sharply.  In our days we are governed by men who are fools.  They are trying desperately to avoid the inevitable.  Their one excuse is that the voters want them to.  They know full well that if they faced up to the real economic situation facing New Zealand and the rest of the developed world there would be riots in the streets and they would be voted out at the first opportunity.  

Their approach, therefore, has been to practise the equivalent of palliative care.  Maintain huge deficit spending increases, trim back at the edges, sell a few assets so we can temporarily pay off a bit of debt, make the patient feel as comfortable as possible, and wait.  Hope for a recovery that will allow us to trade our way out of the recession, thereby avoiding a genuine depression.  Kick the toxic can down the road for our children and grandchildren to deal with.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Alan Bollard sounded almost plaintive yesterday as he lamented the parlous state of affairs.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

One of Those Yellow Rattlesnake Flags 

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 05 August 2012

As we continue our discussion of politics (and economics) in the name of Jesus, I want to pick up on at least a few things that have arisen in the comments.

When it comes to reasoning from Scripture, applying the word of God to our lives, there are two ways of reasoning -- inductive and deductive. Inductive moves from the particular to the general, and even if the particular is in Scripture, it makes sense to see this process as a move away from the authoritive word. This means that the further you get in your applications, the further out on the skinny branches you find yourself.

I think this is still a legitimate way of proceeding, depending on the issue, but taking care should be the name of the game. But what I have been arguing for is a deductive approach.

Sounding More Fair and Smelling More Foul

It's an Orc-ish Thing

Homosexual marriage is the oxymoron of the decade, maybe the century.  Chronicler J R R Tolkien records that in the history of Middle Earth the orcs were created as an attempt by the Dark Lord, Sauron to replicate the elves.  The issue turned out to be a degenerative infamy.  So with homosexual marriage. 

As long as the remnants of the realm of the Dark Lord linger in Middle Earth attempts will be made to replicate the glory and realm of the one true King.  How should servants of the King respond?  In part, with unrestrained derision at the oxymoron.  Those who think they can disregard the divinely created order and succeed deserve to be mocked.  There can be few things more asinine.

Letter from Australia (About Little Green Lies)

Great green lies never die - they merely get recycled  

Miranda Devine 
Sunday, August 5 2012
The Daily Telegraph

YOU would think the last thing we need is another environmental tax but the great green beast is never satisfied.

The latest feel-good eco-furphy to be foisted on us in the cause of saving the planet is a proposed 10-cent slug on all glass and plastic drinks containers, described as a recycling “deposit”.  The Greens have introduced legislation into federal parliament to try to force states to impose the container tax, which the Australian Food and Grocery Council estimates will add $1.8 billion a year to the price of milk, juice, soft drink and beer. It would cost average families an extra $300 a year or $4 more for a case of beer.

At first glance it might seem an attractive proposition, despite the cost.

Israel, Iran and Just War

Augustine Was Right

Regular readers of ContraCelsum will know that we are both strongly anti-war, and strongly war, at the same time.  We believe that to maintain the capability to make war--and under certain conditions actually go to war--is one of the fundamental duties of the state.  A state is denying its responsibilities if it fails to do so.

The Christian faith has long maintained the doctrine of "just war".  Some have objected to the concept being artificial, since to have a "just" war implies that some body actually would sit over the nation-state to determine whether its warring was just or not.  Others, running with the objection, have argued that the doctrine of just war necessitates a global body, like the United Nations, sitting in judgment upon the war-making of nations to assess whether each nation respectively is acting justly.  The International Court of Justice in the Hague has been constituted partly in the attempt to ensure that all wars are justified; where they fail to comply, legal and criminal consequences for national and military leaders can follow. 

When Augustine mooted the doctrine of a "just war", however, he was not so much implying nor requiring some "uber" state to sit in judgement upon nations.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Book of the Month/August 2012 

Engaging the Culture - Book Review
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 01 August 2012

This month's book selection is part of a larger series, and if this first one that I read is anything to go on, I want to commend the whole series. The series is new from Crossway, edited by David Dockery, and is entitled "Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition." The book I read is by Gene Fant, and is called The Liberal Arts: A Student's Guide. This book has two things going for it. First, it is a very fine introduction, and the second is that it is an introduction to something that really needs to be introduced.

The S-Files

Reverberations From the Kahui Twins' Inquest

ContraCelsum is pleased to announce an S-Award has been given to Coroner Garry Evans.

The citation has been written by Rosemary Mcleod, opinion writer for the Dominion Post:

I do have a hero in the legal system just now, though. It's coroner Garry Evans, who last week presented his findings, after an inquisitorial investigation, into the case of the Kahui twins. He laid the blame for their deaths on their father who, as we all know, was tried and found not guilty of their deaths.

Letter From the UK

Global Warming? Yeah, right 

By James Delingpole
The Telegraph
July 29th, 2012

 

Have a look at this chart. It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the much-anticipated scoop by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That?

What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the US government body in charge of America's temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

Charlie's Law

Sanctimonious Twaddle

One of the most offensive things about the Left to many people is its habitual sanctimonious self-righteousness.  The Left has a "holy people"--poor, working (aka exploited) classes--and it has an evil people--those with assets and money. 

The self-righteousness is so deeply ingrained many on the Left are no longer aware of it.  When it bubbles up yet again, gales of mockery and derisive laughter burst forth from those outside the "true faith".  Here is the latest example of the type.

Charles Chauvel--Labour MP--has proposed "Charlie's Law", as in "he's a right Charlie".  He has suggested that when it comes to disclosure of  lobbying interests, left wing lobbyists should be carved out because they are too holy and righteous to be thus impugned.  We kid you not.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Chick-fil-A and the Attack of the Tyrannatots 

Culture and Politics - The Bible, Culture, and Race
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 29 July 2012

The outlines of the latest Free Speech Clown Car Review are pretty familiar by now. Dan Cathy, the COO of Chick-fil-A, was asked his opinion on homosexual marriage, and he, being a good Christian man, said he was agin it. This should not have been an astonishment, for it has pretty much been the mainstream position of Western civilization from Moses down to the Obama of about three months ago. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as the fellow said, and so who cares anymore? That man with all the chicken has clearly DEVIATED, and he must be CORRECTED.

Now boycotts are things that folks like to do from time to time, and we do not like to deny them their little amusements. But boycotts are harder to pull off than they look -- conservatives face-planted with their boycott of Disney, and the homobifiers now are unlikely to establish in the minds of the general populace any necessary connection between "gay oppression" and the eating of chicken sandwiches.

This being the case, enter gummint coercion.

Unbelief Under Threat

Shout Loudly

We live in an era when Unbelief is vehemently opposed to the Christian faith.  Yet never have the claims of Unbelief (secularist, rationalist, materialist, evolutionist) been so vacuous, so self-defeating, so stupid.  This is more than a state of being "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  It is a fury borne out of the frustration of a vacuous soul. 

Modern Unbelief is premised upon an angry prejudice against the Living God.  In the early centuries of the Enlightenment there was a characteristic smugness,  hubris, and disdain of religion in general, but of Christianity in particular.  Christians were nothing more than ignorant, superstitious dolts.  As Unbelief went along its not-so-merry way its foundations began to crumble.

Letter From America

Prisons and Sentencing

It appears that conservatives in the United States are starting to rethink crime and punishment in that country.  Christians are at the forefront, it seems--and not because they are soft on crime.  It's because issues like the appropriateness of the punishment for the crime have come to the fore, as have issues over the ruination that prisons bring to young men incarcerated over small offences.

An historical parallel is not hard to find.  Witness the transportation of convicts to the Antipodes  for offences we now deem minor.  Throwing such people into prison because of a "zero tolerance" to crime has replicated the mistakes and injustices of  British justice in the nineteenth century.

Waking the Dead

I . . . Found Myself a Christian

The name of one Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (August 12, 1891 – April 9, 1953) lies in obscurity today.  The reasons are not hard to find.  Back in the day--the "day" of the twilight years between World Wars I and II--Joad was active in prosecuting socialist, pacifist, and eugenics causes.  He was a member of the intellectual elite in Britain that took the perfectibility of man seriously.  At the height of his public popularity he was as famous as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell.

But, he had one great lacunae--towards the end of his life he became a Christian. To an Unbelieving  generation this was unforgivable.  That one of their heroes, an uberman, should defalcate to the other side was an inexcusable betrayal.  Hence Joad now lies in obscurity.  Who ever now would mention him alongside Shaw or Russell?

Christians, however, should never forget such things.