Growing Up--Or Not

"Youth Culture" is an Oxymoron

For my generation, peer anxiety was experienced only physically.  If a group were gathered in the hallway, on the playground, or on the bus ride home, we did not wish to be excluded from it.  But adolescents today are wired to one another "twenty-four seven" as they say.  Adolescents today can be excluded (or feel they are excluded, which is as bad) not only from physical gatherings, but also from electronic gatherings  They can be left out of IM, text messages, MYSpace, Facebook, cell calls, YouTube videos, and so forth.  They never really leave their adolescent friends or adolescent gossip to meet adults; they are imprisoned in an electronic society of adolescents, condemned and consigned to the social equivalent of Lord of the Flies.  As Mark Bauerlein puts it [in his book, The Dumbest Generation]:

Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.  Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact.  Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or speace wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms.

Biblically, the goal of youth is to leave it as rapidly as possible.  The goal of the young , biblically, is to be mature.  "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways."  (I Corinthians 13: 11)  Biblical wisdom literature encourages the young to respect and emulate their seniors, not rebel against them.

My generation tragically rejected such wisdom, and appears incapable of perceiving or repenting of its own unbiblical paedocentrism.  We think, perhaps sincerely (though dull-wittedly), that we are "concerned for youth", when we are actually concerned to preserve the cultural abnormality of youth culture . . . . and erroneously believe that we cannot minister to the one without embracing, condoning, or promoting the other.

. . . . To "reach" the young by propagating youth culture would be analogous to Jesus' "reaching" the rich young man by giving him money.  Money was part of that particular sinner's problem, part of the reason he needed to be reached.  Extended adolescence is part of what our youth need to be delivered from. [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010), pp. 160-162.]

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

And Slew the Little Childer 

Liturgy and Worship - Church Year
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 15 December 2012

Whenever you have to deal with something like the Connecticut shooting, something that simply crushes the heart, it is important to think carefully before speaking or writing. This is not the time to be debating gun control, drone attacks in the Middle East, and it is certainly not the time to be drawing ham-fisted comparisons to the abortion carnage. The reason for this is that the parents who are broken over this were parents who had chosen life, not parents who hadn’t. This does not mean that abortion is irrelevant to this tragedy, for it certainly is not, but we want to make sure we locate it as a clear point of gospel relevance.

Otherwise we just come off as opportunists who are just looking for a chance to haul the topic of conversation over to a particular hobby horse. But in the aftermath of something sick like this, we need to reconnect with the permanent things. If we don’t point to transcendental realities in a time like this—gospel truths—then we might as well sign a peace treaty with the darkness now.

I have often said that nativity sets should include a set of Herod’s soldiers—that is as much a part of the Christmas story as the shepherds, or the star, or the wise men.

Pop Contemporaneity

A Prisoner in a Dark Place

There have been plenty of warnings about the dangers of ignorance of one's heritage and history.  George Santayana's aphorism is notorious ("those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it").  In our recent experience tyrants have arisen deliberately attempting to remake the past exert greater control over a compliant population in the present (think Soviet and Eastern European Bloc communism).  We see it before our eyes as Islamic fundamentalists attempt to obliterate the cultural heritage of former civilisations in order to exert more extreme and complete control over their subject peoples.

The Scriptures are replete with injunctions, exhortations, and warnings not only not to forget the past, but also to reckon with it, and live in terms of it.  In the past, God's people see revealed His faithfulness to them; they also see the outcome when a generation arises which forgets what has gone before and what He and our forbears have respectively done.  It is our duty to observe, learn, and act appropriately.

Unfortunately and dangerously there are many modern Christian confessions which glory in a studied ignorance of the past.

Getting the Perspective Right

Like a Blind Man Trying to Understand Color 

Justin Taylor|
December 7, 2012


Herman Bavinck once wrote that “If God were to speak to us in a divine language, not a creature would understand him.” We could say that it’s like a blind man trying to understand color—as illustrated in the video below:

 
HT: 22 Words
But thanks be to God that he has graciously condescended to speak to us, in a sense, from the ground up, using what we can see, touch, hear, and feel to explain eternal and invisible things. Bavinck continues:

But what spells out his grace is the fact that from the moment of creation God stoops down to his creatures, speaking and appearing to them in human fashion. This is why all the names by which God calls himself and allows us to call him are derived from earthly and human relations. (Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2: God and Creation [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006], 100)

And yet this doesn’t mean that everything revealed is fully comprehensible. So the next time you’re tempted to think that certain things in God’s Word can’t be true or are irrational because they can’t be fully explained, just remember that perhaps it is like a blind man trying to understand color.

It's All About Love, Part II

Big Fat Red Herrings

In the "debate" between TV breakfast host Rawdon Christie and Bob McCoskrie (together with the sniggering court jester) the issues of human rights and discrimination loomed large.  The whole piece was set up by some homosexuals asserting that they were "in love" and that not to permit them to "marry" was discriminatory. 

Christie then turned on McCoskrie and demanded that he concede that by arguing against the right of such people to "marry" he was propagating active discrimination against homosexuals.  This is an accusation which McCoskrie failed to handle well.  It is a nettle which he should have grasped with both hands.  More importantly he should have insisted that his opponents grasp it as well.

You can watch the TVNZ Breakfast clip here:
http://tvnz.co.nz/breakfast-news/nigel-latta-and-bob-mccoskrie-debate-marriage-equality-video-5264957 

Firstly, he should have pointed out that Louisa Wall's Bill, which permits homosexual "marriage and which is now before the Parliament of New Zealand, is a thoroughly discriminatory document.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Our Little Piggy Hearts 

Money, Love, Desire - The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 05 December 2012

As we are now in the midst of farcical fiscal cliff negotiations, with the Republicans being lame and the Democrats being eeeevil, I thought I should handle this as a teachable moment. We should take these teachable moments whenever they arise, for there will be fewer and fewer of them as the clouds of economic lunacy settle in.

The president insists on raising the tax rates on the richest among us, saying that they can afford to "pay a little more." This is objectionable, on the surface, in two ways. Let me just mention those briefly, and then move on to a third place where it is doing real damage.

It's All About Love, Part I

Conceding the Field of Battle

Bob McCoskrie of FamilyFirst NZ recently appeared on TVNZ's breakfast show (along with a sniggering court jester) to discuss the homosexual "marriage" controversy  with showhost Rawdon Christie.  You can watch the clip here, if you wish.


http://tvnz.co.nz/breakfast-news/nigel-latta-and-bob-mccoskrie-debate-marriage-equality-video-5264957 

Now FamilyFirst does stirling work and we in no way wish to undermine McCoskrie.  However, we do need to talk about arguments and tactics and how to debate in a world dominated by touchy-feely-human-righty type thingies.  McCoskrie conceded at the outset that when it comes to homosexuals it is "all about love".

Vanity of Vanities

Scientists Call Foul on Ban Ki Moon

The United Nations has always been a sorry affair.  Its every failing is reflexively exploited as another argument for the UN to have more power and influence and control over peoples of the world.  Its vast removal from those it would govern necessarily means that the UN will always be a club for elites who profess to know what is good for us better than we ourselves do. It is a sorry, yet dangerous, institution.

Ban Ki Moon, the current Secretary General, is an ardent provocateur for the global government overreach required to deal with the global problem of man-caused global warming.  He would never have gotten the job had he not been.  This problem is just too big for nation states to deal with, don't you know.  Therefore the expansion of powers by the UN is essential.  Global warming is, thus,  an ideal pretext for the aspirations of the internationalists.

Ban Ki Moon, consequently, continues to mouth hasty generalizations and platitudes about climate change that have little congruence with truth and fact. Bigger things are at stake. Now, according to the Financial Post, 125 scientists from around the world have called his bluff:

Deadly Fun

For Your Ears Only, Mein Fuehrer 

Disinformation has been a deep art of warfare for time immemorial.  The old aphorism, "the first thing to die in war is the truth" has a general application, but using fiction as a weapon against the enemy is in a different class entirely. 

It is difficult to overestimate the crucial contribution misinformation made to the defeat of Hitler and the Axis Powers.  It turns out that the British contribution was influenced by a novelist who wrote spy stories.  It was a case of life imitating art.  Dennis Wheatley was a spy thriller writer whose main character, Gregory Sallust was in deadly action against the Nazis.  Wheatley was quick to market, writing stories set in events just four months prior to publication, in some cases.

Then Churchill hired him as part of the Deception Team.

Fundamental Dishonesty

Having One's Cake and Eating It Like a Famished Mongol

We appreciate the work of Mark Steyn in constantly putting before us the sheer size of the US fiscal deficit.  If ever there was a case of people turning a wilful blind eye, this is it.  Steyn refuses to allow us to ignore the quantum of the deficit and the doom it represents--or the fundamental dishonesty that surrounds the political debate.

Kindly Note the Impending Bankruptcy

The Perils of Pauline
Mark Steyn
National Review Online

Last year, our plucky heroine, the wholesome apple-cheeked American republic, was trapped in an express elevator hurtling out of control toward the debt ceiling. Would she crash into it? Or would she make some miraculous escape?

Yes! At the very last minute of her white-knuckle thrill ride to her rendezvous with destiny, she was rescued by Congress’s decision to set up . . . a Super Committee!

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, form a committee. Those who really can’t, form a Super Committee — and then put John Kerry on it for good measure. The bipartisan Super Committee of Super Friends was supposed to find $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction by last Thanksgiving, or plucky little America would wind up trussed like a turkey and carved up by “automatic sequestration.

Protesting Too Much

Weakness of Idols on Display

Auckland has seen another violent protest by the same old faces.  This time it is protesting against free trade agreements.  The NZ Police took the brunt of the assault.  This from the NZ Herald: 

Police have condemned "violent" protesters who attacked two police officers and set fire to cardboard boxes as they tried to force their way into free trade negotiations.  A handful of police and SkyCity security staff were overwhelmed by more than 150 protesters, forcing the on-the-ground commander to call in reinforcements from around Auckland.

"Police staff moved in to prevent escalation and two officers were separated, attacked and kicked numerous times. Fire appliances were called to the scene to help," police said in a statement. "Two arrests were made. One of these arrests was a female that stomped on a constables head."

The usual suspects attended: John Minto (perpetual, serial, promiscuous protestor), Jane Kelsey (lecturer, Auckland University), Cathy Casey (Auckland City Councillor), Catherine Delahunty (Green MP) along with the mob.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part VI

The Persistence of Philosophy

[Part VI of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

The positivist tradition in philosophy gave scientism a strong impetus by denying validity to any area of human knowledge outside of natural science. More recent advocates of scientism have taken the ironic but logical next step of denying any useful role for philosophy whatsoever, even the subservient philosophy of the positivist sort. But the last laugh, it seems, remains with the philosophers — for the advocates of scientism reveal conceptual confusions that are obvious upon philosophical reflection. Rather than rendering philosophy obsolete, scientism is setting the stage for its much-needed revival.

Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself.

Integrating into the Void

Marriage Progressively Meaningless and Empty

One of the unintended, but real consequences of the acceptance of homosexual "marriage" is that the state will end up so inflating the concept of marriage that it will eventually become meaningless (at least in official parlance and practice).

Here is an example of the inflation to which we refer:  The Guardian reports that a homosexual marriage campaigner is arguing that heterosexuals are going to be face discrimination  in the UK--but not for reasons that you might expect:

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part V

The Eclipse of Ethics

[Part V of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Perhaps no area of philosophy has seen a greater effort at appropriation by advocates of scientism than ethics. Many of them tend toward a position of moral relativism. According to this position, science deals with the objective and the factual, whereas statements of ethics merely represent people’s subjective feelings; there can be no universal right or wrong. Not surprisingly, there are philosophers who have codified this opinion. The positivist tradition made much of a “fact-value distinction,” in which science was said to deal with facts, leaving fields like ethics (and aesthetics) to deal with the more nebulous and utterly disparate world of values. In his influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), the philosopher J. L. Mackie went even further, arguing that ethics is fundamentally based on a false theory about reality.

Evolutionary biology has often been seen as highly relevant to ethics, beginning in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism — at least as it came to be explained and understood by later generations — was an ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism with reference to the natural “struggle for existence.” In the writings of authors such as Herbert Spencer, the accumulation of wealth with little regard for those less fortunate was justified as “nature’s way.” Of course, the “struggle” involved in natural selection is not a struggle to accumulate a stock portfolio but a struggle to reproduce — and ironically, Social Darwinism arose at the very time that the affluent classes of Western nations were beginning to limit their reproduction (the so-called “demographic transition”) with the result that the economic struggle and the Darwinian struggle were at cross-purposes.

Partly in response to this contradiction, the eugenics movement arose, with its battle cry, “The unfit are reproducing like rabbits; we must do something to stop them!”

Waste of Time, Money, and Space

 Round and Round the Doha

One of the things we have always appreciated about Greenpeace is their measured language.  It's a rare thing to encounter eco-warriors (or warriors of any sort, for that matter) speaking in reasoned tones.  Greenpeace have never been guilty of hyperbole, of exaggeration, or anything remotely approaching distortion.  Yet Greenpeace always manages to tell it like it is.  Here are a few classic examples of its mature style and responsible panache:

"Exxon hates your children"
"This is about human survival"
"An Open Letter to Barack Obama: We Are Running Out of Time"
 "Politicians need to cut the crap and cut the carbon!"
"Typhoon hits Philippines, will this be another warning for politicians"

All the above were tweets from Kumi Naidoo, who is self-styled as:  "Activist. Humanist. Speaking truth to power. Greenpeace International Executive Director."

 So how is the great carbon proliferation in Doha going?

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part IV

The Eclipse of Epistemology

[Part IV of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

Hawking and Mlodinow, in the chapter of their book called “The Theory of Everything,” quote Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” In response, Hawking and Mlodinow offer this crashing banality: “The universe is comprehensible because it is governed by scientific laws; that is to say, its behavior can be modeled.” Later, the authors invite us to give ourselves a collective pat on the back: “The fact that we human beings — who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature — have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.”

Great triumph or no, none of this addresses Einstein’s paradox, because no explanation is offered as to why our universe is “governed by scientific laws.”  Moreover, even if we can be confident that our universe has unchanging physical laws — which many of the new speculative cosmologies call into question — how is it that we “mere collections of particles” are able to discern those laws? How can we be confident that we will continue to discern them better, until we understand them fully?

A common response to these questions invokes what has become the catch-all explanatory tool of advocates of scientism: evolution.

Feminists and the Flatter Pyramid

 Divided Loyalties

We have recently seen a minor brouhaha over the participation of women in the workplace: more specifically, the participation of women in leadership roles in commerce and business.  The NZ Stock Exchange is deeply concerned to the point where it is going to require listed companies to disclose the number of women in senior management roles and their salary differential with males, and the number of women who serve on the respective Boards of Directors.

Yada, yada, yada.  We predict nothing much will change, but the constant will be a bout of collective handwringing every twelve months or so, coupled with a bit of a media beat-up.  The feminist meme is also unchanged: women are victims of discrimination in the workplace; leadership of companies is controlled by a sexist old-boys'-network; women are repressed due to systematic pay discrimination and they lose interest in their careers.  It's wrong.  It's evil.  It's unjust. 

New Zealand is not alone.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part III

The Eclipse of Metaphysics

[Part III of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

There are at least three areas of inquiry traditionally in the purview of philosophy that now are often claimed to be best — or only — studied scientifically: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Let us discuss each in turn.

Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow open their 2010 book The Grand Design by asking:

What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.

Comeback Kid

Geography Becomes Cool

Confession is good for the soul, we are told.  So first up we need to confess that throughout our schooling years, geography was always a bit of a mystery.  Tacked on to the subject of history as part of "social studies", geography was always a strange subject, hard to nail down.

It appeared to have no cohesive unifying principles, reflected by the following universal dinner party experience: when you ask someone next to you, "What do you do for a job," and he or she replies, "Oh, I am a geographer," you nod sagely but really have no idea what they do.  Admit it.  We have all experienced this.  Actually, come to think of it, we have never met anyone who professes to be a geographer, which says a great deal. 

But we may need to rethink our prejudices.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part II

The Abdication of the Philosophers

[Part II of  The Folly of Scientism by  Austin L. Hughes

Originally published in The New Atlantis ]

 
If philosophy is regarded as a legitimate and necessary discipline, then one might think that a certain degree of philosophical training would be very useful to a scientist. Scientists ought to be able to recognize how often philosophical issues arise in their work — that is, issues that cannot be resolved by arguments that make recourse solely to inference and empirical observation. In most cases, these issues arise because practising scientists, like all people, are prone to philosophical errors.

To take an obvious example, scientists can be prone to errors of elementary logic, and these can often go undetected by the peer review process and have a major impact on the literature — for instance, confusing correlation and causation, or confusing implication with a biconditional. Philosophy can provide a way of understanding and correcting such errors. It addresses a largely distinct set of questions that natural science alone cannot answer, but that must be answered for natural science to be properly conducted.

These questions include how we define and understand science itself.

Salem Lives On

Modern Witch Trials

We have discussed previously the rash of unsafe prosecution and conviction of adults accused of child molestation--falsely and completely unjustly, as it later turns out.  In New Zealand we had our own horror trial in Christchurch (the Christchurch Civic Creche case) where adult caregivers were accused (and one convicted) of the most bizarre and horrendous crimes against children on the basis of child testimony.  It was all a crock.  (For the expose tour d'force, see Lynley Hood's, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case.  Publisher: Longacre Press, 2001.  Reviews of the book can be found, here.)

Yet at the time, and to this day, parents and others involved swear black and blue that the children were telling the truth (despite some of those children publicly recanting their testimony as they grew older).  This phenomenon was not isolated, but similar cases occurred in the United States, the UK, and in Europe.  Researchers have compared the hysteria to that on display in the witch trials of Salem in the seventeenth century.

The Overreach of Stupid Science, Part I

The Folly of Scientism 

Austin L. Hughes

When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practising scientists themselves were uncomfortable.

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth.

Media Controls

It's OK When The Good Guys Want It

One would have thought that folk would be viscerally reactive to any proposal to extend state power and control.  After all New Zealand participated in two World Wars ostensibly to defend against state tyrannies of various kinds.  We have witnessed in our recent past the death of approximately one hundred million people throughout the twentieth century as a result of state power, oppression, and vicious persecution of citizens and people the State did not like.

Yet the West remains remarkably sanguine about the powers of the State.  The reasons for this myopia are probably facile.  "We won the wars, so states becoming bloody and tyrannical applies to those who were defeated, not our government.  We and our government are the good guys."  Or, "our government would never become tyrannical: we are a democracy."  Or, "Western governments are devoted to protecting the rights of the poor and underprivileged; they are antipathetic to those tyrants that killed millions." 

Meanwhile whilst sleeping peacefully in our beds, the powers of Western government have grown exponentially: we respond by nodding peacefully in our slumbers.  But every now and again a litmus issue arises and we see just how tenuous our freedoms have become.

Modern Secular Capitalism

A Diet of Darwinian Dogs

All human actions are grounded in ethics, one way or the other.  There is no such thing as an amoral act or deed.  Christianity declares to the world the doctrine of the ubiquity of ethics.  This is a message that does not sit well with Unbelief.  Ever since the Fall men have been trying to wriggle out of being pinned to the wall and having to account by spiting out all the butt ends of their days and ways. 

One stratagem has been to claim vast realms of amorality where ethics and morality are deemed not to apply. But the Word of God is unequivocal: all things lie bare and exposed before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to deal (Hebrews 4:13).  What is done in the darkness will be proclaimed in the light.  Unbelief recoils at these truths.  It would assert that there are enormous swathes of human action which are so unimportant that they are sub-ethical.  It would claim, on  the other hand, that some things are so vast and big that "ordinary" ethics do not apply.  And when it comes to oneself, Unbelief asserts a host of mitigating circumstances and rationalisations to explain away any wrong doing, whilst deflecting blame on to others, or to circumstances. 

The dismal science of macro-economics is one example of a "big area" deemed too important to be subject to ethics.

Letter from the US (About Child Murder in the UK)

State Infanticide in Britain

We are all too familiar with the murder of helpless babies within the womb.  Now it is being extended.  New born babies are being murdered in the UK--all "legally" of course, under the loving embrace of the National Health Service. One UK doctor has become a whistleblower.

This report is republished from The Blaze:

UK Doctor’s Horrifying Admission Reveals How Sick & Disabled Babies Are Put on ‘Death Pathways’, Deprived of Food & Fluid for 10 Days 

Sick children and even disabled newborn babies, are reportedly being discharged from NHS hospitals in England only to die  slowly at home or in hospices in an unfathomable manner. The innocent children are being put on controversial “death pathways,” once only thought to have involved elderly and terminally ill adult patients.

Soft Racism From the Top

 Whanau Ora's Legacy Is Taking Shape

An opinion piece critical of a flagship Maori Party policy, Whanau Ora has appeared in Stuff.  More specifically, Andrea Vance has taken the responsible minister, Tariana Turia to task over her handling of the policy. 

A core concept of Whanau Ora is commendable.  It bulk-grants tax payer money to Maori social groups and organizations and devolves to them the responsibility to spend it appropriately, whilst holding them responsible for outcomes and performance.  Decentralization, making decisions closer to the coal face, is much more preferable to centrally controlled decisions made by (inevitably) incompetent bureaucrats more interested in ticking boxes and ensuring forms are filled out correctly than in actual outcomes.  In almost all instances decentralisation and devolvement of authority and responsibility is preferable.  But to be successful it is often more costly requiring a highly disciplined process of checks and balances.  The quid pro quo is that usually decision making in a properly managed decentralised model is of a much higher quality and order. 

But. . . .

An Idol of the Academic Tribe

Why Darwinist Materialism Is Wrong

Alvin Plantinga
November 16, 2012

Reprinted from The New Republic

A review of: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

By Thomas Nagel  (Oxford University Press, 144 pp., $24.95)

I.
ACCORDING TO a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now.

Restlessly Driven

Why Object?

The longer the debate goes on about whether a "carve out" clause is needed in the homosexual "marriage" bill presently before a Select Committee of the NZ Parliament, the more we become convinced it is essential.  "We thinks they (who don't want an exception clause) doth protest too much."  The more homosexual marriage protagonists protest, the more it becomes apparent that that religious people will inevitably be deemed in breach of the Human Rights Act if they refuse to participate or have anything to do with the solemnisation of homosexual "marriage". 

Moreover, the issues are broader than marriage solemnization by a Christian marriage celebrant.  What about church buildings?  Plenty of non-Christian couples seek to hire church buildings for their wedding.  Would churches be deemed to be in violation of the Human Rights Act if they decided not to allow homosexuals to use their building for their "ceremony" even if they had their own state-certified celebrant?  (This has already become an issue in Canada.)

Bob McCoskrie – National Director, Family First NZ has written an opinion piece on the matter in response to Louisa Wall's objections to a carve-out clause:

Letter From China

 When Humour is Forbidden Strange Things Happen

We are all aware that The Onion plays it straight--at least as far as its face is concerned.  It recently awarded the new Korean Dictator the appellation "Sexist Man Alive".  Read the spread here.

The kicker is at the end of the article, where we read: "UPDATE: For more coverage on The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People's Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades."

True.  The People's Daily, which can never play it straight, illustrates how a steady diet of propaganda will eventually tie the bowels up in knots.  It assumed The Onion was playing right back down the wicket and decided to produce a stunning cover drive to the boundary.   It produced its own extensive spread of Kim Jong-Un cultish adoration, with not a funny bone in sight.

The Coming of the Kingdom

Building Civilization

Human societies can tear themselves apart.  Or they can cohere and build themselves into a civilisation.  What makes the difference?  The overwhelming consensus amongst the Commentariat is technological prowess, material gadgets, and wealth make a people civilised.  Thus, nations and societies are measured and ranked in terms of GDP and living standards.  Such things may be the fruit of a civilised community but they are not its foundation.

Nor are material goods and technological skills the things which enable people to cohere into a voluntary community.  You cannot build a civilisation upon smart phones.  This may seem puzzling until one recalls that smart phones can be used to detonate explosive devices on the roadside.  As poet, Paul Simon put it: