Letter from the UK (About a Conscience Clause for Christians)

Judge Who Sided With Gay Couple over Christian B&B Owners Now Accepts Religious Rights

by Kit Eastwood 

21 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

The Supreme Court judge who ruled against a Christian couple who refused a room in their bed and breakfast established to a gay couple appears to have performed an about-face in her decision on the case.

Thought it is too late for these particular defendants, Baroness Hale's recent comments claiming there should be a 'conscience clause' in law for religiously motivated breaches of anti-discrimination law may set an interesting precedent for the future.

The case erupted when in 2008, B&B owners Peter and Hazelmary Bull accepted a booking for a double room from Steven Preddy, believing him to be coming with his wife. When Preddy arrived at the Chymorvah House in Cornwall, to the surprise of the religious hoteliers, he was instead accompanied by his gay partner Martyn Hall. 

The proprietors made it clear they could not give Preddy and Hall a double room due to religious reasons and proceeded to turn them away. Subsequently, the gay couple was awarded £3,600 in compensation, after court proceedings which found the Bulls to be in breach of anti-discrimination law.

Daily Devotional

June 26

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

God's plan is sure

It is God Himself who gives us life, and the body in which we live it; and if He has done that we can draw this deduction, that His purpose with respect to us will be fulfilled. God never leaves unfinished any work He has begun.... And therefore we come back to this, that there is a plan for every life in the mind of God. We must never regard our lives in this world as acci­dental. No. "Are there not twelve hours in the day?" Christ said one day to His timorous and frightened disciples. And we need to say that to ourselves. We can be certain that God has a plan and a purpose for our lives, and it will be carried out.

So we must never be anxious about our life and about its sustenance and its support.

Rules for the Plebs

Living Well Above the Herd

There are few things more likely to stir up cynicism and disgust than "leaders" who moralistically lecture everyone about their duties and responsibilities, whilst they themselves live irresponsibly (by their own declared rules).  Hypocrisy always has a nasty smell. 

We are all familiar with "celebrities" who hector the world about poverty, global warming, and a host of other fashionable causes, only to live ostentatious lifestyles which loudly proclaim they believe themselves to be above their particular set of moralistic rules for the rest of humanity.  We are familiar with the carbon footprint of one Al Gore--dedicated warrior against global warming--whose extravagant lifestyle and business dealings put the lie to his pontificating.  Gore is a "do as I say, not as I do" kind of chap. 

The Greens in general are notorious for this kind of dissembling.  Greenpeace has hit the news recently over just such hypocrisy.

Letter From the UK (About Fiddled US Temperature Data)

The scandal of fiddled global warming data

The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record 

By Christopher Booker

21 Jun 2014

The Telegraph

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models.

Daily Devotional

June 25

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

You are here!
(red arrow-label affixed to London Underground maps)

It is not the time of your entry into the Kingdom that matters but the fact that you are in the Kingdom. ... How foolish it is to mourn the fact that we were not in earlier, and to allow that to rob us of the things we might be enjoying now. It is like a man going to a great exhibition and discovering that there is a long queue. He has come rather late. He arrives at the exhibition but he has to wait a long time, he is about the last to get in. What would you think of such a man if, having got in through the door he simply stands at the door and says, "What a shame I wasn't the first to get in, what a pity I wasn't in earlier" ? You laugh at that, and rightly so, but... you are probably laughing at yourself, for that is precisely what you are doing spiritually. "O that I have left it so late." My friend, begin to enjoy the pictures, look at the sculpture, enjoy the treasures. What does the time of your entering matter?

The fact is that you are in, and the exhibition is there, all spread out before you....

The NewSpeak of Global Schooling

Behind Common Core

By Mary Jo Anderson
Crisis Magazine

The philosophy in the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of government in the next.  — Abraham Lincoln

 [A]t the request of educators I wrote the World Core Curriculum, the product of the United Nations, the meta-organism of human and planetary evolution.   — Robert Muller, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General

The education reform known as Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for grades K-12, adopted by forty plus states and more than half of the U.S. dioceses, is designed to produce a universal “work force ready” population prepared to self-identify as “global citizens.”  Many education professionals have been critical of CCSS. But even they may not know the philosophical reason why financiers like Bill Gates have bankrolled the Common Core system. The same sources of funding for Common Core in the United States are promoting similar methods and aligned texts world wide through the auspices of the United Nations.

Daily Devotional

June 24

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Don't cripple your present by thoughts of your past

[Some people] are crippled in the present as the result of looking back into the past ... to the fact that they spent so much time outside the Kingdom and are so late in coming into it... to be miserable in the present because of some failure in the past is a sheer waste of time and energy. The past cannot be recalled and you can do nothing about it... The world in its wisdom tells us it is "no use crying over spilt milk." Well, quote that to the devil! Why should a Christian be more foolish than anybody else? ... We must never for a second worry about anything that cannot be affected or changed by us. It is a waste of energy.... But let us go further and realize that to dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present.

... It is always wrong to mortgage the present by the past, it is always wrong to allow the past to act as a brake upon the present. Let the dead past bury its dead. There is nothing that is more reprehensible, judged by common canons of thought, than to allow anything that belongs to the past to cause you to be a failure in the present.... The people I am describing are failing in the present. Instead of living in the present and getting on with the Christian life they are sitting down bemoaning the past. They are so sorry about the past that they do nothing in the present. How wrong it is!

Spiritual Depression, p. 80, pp. 82-3

---

“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

The Christian Heritage of Justice

 Being Treated Fairly Before the Court

It is a great boon to live in a just society--and, no, we are not thinking of the faux "justice" of egalitarianism, now so very popular amongst the ignorant and those riddled with the canker of envy.  Rather, we have in view the system of justice which enables citizens to seek redress or get their actions judged properly and fairly.

Justice is often difficult to define. The traditions of English common law, however, have developed over many centuries the concept of a fair trial and the principles which undergird it.  F.E. Dowrick [Justice According to the English Common Lawyers (London: Butterworths, 1960)], courtesy of a series of lectures by Lord Denning, has provided a summary of the essential principles which make up a fair trial.

Letter From America (About Essential Truths)

10 Essential Economic Truths Liberals Need to Learn

Jeffrey Dorfman

Forbes

5th June 2014

Jeffrey Dorfman teaches economics at the University of Georgia.  In this article he presents ten economic principles or verities, which, he says, "liberals" need to learn.  Synonyms for "liberal" would be "left wing", "progressive", or, in the case of New Zealand, an apt synonym would be "general population", such is our adulation of bad economic principles.

1) Government cannot create wealth, jobs, or income. Because government has to take money from somebody before it can spend it, there is no economic gain from anything the government does. Money collected in taxes or borrowed would have been either spent or invested in the private sector. Any jobs government claims to have created are only in place of other jobs the same money would have produced if people had been allowed to spend it themselves.

It is possible for government to own businesses which trade like any other company in the private sector.  These may make profits, can, therefore, grow in size and capital base and add jobs as a result.  These are truly exceptions to the general maxim that governments cannot create wealth, jobs or income.  And Dorfman's general point remains true: government enterprise comes into existence by expropriating property from citizens in the first place.  Governments are unable to create wealth from nothing; in the first instance governments must appropriate property from tax payers.  

2) Income inequality does not affect the economy. Poor people do spend more (or all) of their income while people with higher earnings save some of their income. However, saving is as good for the economy as consumer spending (or better). The basic identity is that national income equals consumer spending plus investment plus government spending on goods and services plus net exports. To make investments, money first must be saved; so savings contribute to national income, too. In fact, savings that lead to increased capital (a company borrows it to build a factory, for example) will lead to higher national income in the long run because the capital can produce income year after year.

Daily Devotional

June 23

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

The need of Christian discipline

[The Psalmist] is very sorry for himself. There is nothing wrong with his life. He is a very good man. But he is being very hard pressed, he is being dealt with very unfairly, and even God seems to be unfair to him. That is how he thought about himself while he was outside the sanctuary. But inside the sanctuary all this is changed."... So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee" [Psalm 73:22]. What a transfiguration! What an entirely different view of himself! And it is all the result of his thinking being put right, and made truly spiritual....

This man ... not only reveals his honesty and his sincerity, and the truthfulness that was so essentially a part of his make­up, but also—and this is the thing I want to emphasize—he displays an understanding of the nature of the spiritual life.

In these two verses [21-22] we have this man's account of his repentance.

We learn what he said to himself about himself and, in particular, about his recent conduct. It is, indeed, a classic example of honest self-examination.

Why the Fuss?

A Bit of Bribery and Corruption Makes the World Go Round

There has been a long tradition in the West against bribery, followed by the inevitable corruption of judges, rulers, and officials.  But billions of people in the world live in jurisdictions where bribery is simply the way things are done.  For centuries the Chinese have used "fragrant grease" to get officials and administrators to deliver what they are seeking.  Bribery and corruption are common in India, where it is regarded as "paying--or tipping--in advance". 

Every so often a non-Westerner enters a Western jurisdiction and attempts the age-old practice of bribery and public wrath and condemnation is called down upon his head.  We have seen this very thing in New Zealand over recent days.  The opposition Labour Party has been fulminating against the government, accusing it of taking bribes to favour a certain Chinese investor who has become a New Zealand citizen.  Corruption, corruption, corruption has been the cry.  Well it may have been.  But, sadly for the Labour Party, it has now emerged that it too has apparently been equally corrupted by the same Chinese immigrant, who, in the past has given money to Labour, as well as the current administration.  Shame and red faces all around. Oh, dear.  Never mind.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Paideia Principle

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Thursday, June 19, 2014 

The Christian faith is a religion of world conquest, and no, not that kind of world conquest. If we do not believe this, then every form of cultural engagement will be simply a form of slow surrender. It is the way of compromise. You can always tell this kind of person because they are always wrestling with the contours of something or other. And if you don’t believe in the triumph of the gospel, and you don’t want to surrender, then the only safe thing to do is to go the way of the neo-Amish. But there is another approach.

“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).

I want to take a moment to review what we mean by the paideia of God. No doubt many of you have heard me on this topic before, and so I will just take a few moments with some review. But I want to do this so that we can go just a little bit further up, and a little bit further in.

So Paul tells Christian fathers to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. One of the words he uses here is paideia, which for the ancients was a loaded term.

Daily Devotional

June 21

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion,
to give unto them a garland for ashes,
the oil of joy for mourning,
the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness

To "mourn" is ... quite inevitable. As I confront God and His holiness, and contemplate the life that I am meant to live, I see myself, my utter helplessness and hopelessness ....But it obviously does not stop there. A man who truly faces him­self ... is a man who must of necessity mourn for his sins also ... if I bemoan these things in myself, I am truly mourning.

Yet the Christian does not stop even at that. The man who is truly Christian... mourns also because of the sins of others. He sees that the whole world is in an unhealthy and unhappy condition. He knows that it is all due to sin; and he mourns because of it.

That is why our Lord Himself mourned. ... He saw this horrid, ugly, foul thing called sin which had come into life ... and had upset life and made life unhappy.... That is what is meant by mourning in this spiritual sense in the New Testament.... It is the very antithesis of the spirit and mind and outlook of the world, which, as our Lord puts it, 'laughs now'.... It laughs, and says, 'Don't dwell too much upon these things" The Christian man's attitude is essentially different....

Basic Economics

What God has Given, Let Not Man Wrest

The Pope has come out recently, criticizing the market economy.  His public ruminations are, to put it baldly, silly.  He has done our Lord and the Christian faith no honour in this instance.

To go to the heart of the problem, the Law of the Living God grants ownership and protection to the property of those made in His image--aka, human beings.  He prohibits us stealing the property of others (the Eighth Commandment).  He also prohibits us coveting what others have (the Tenth Commandment).  These two commandments, amongst other things, exclude (in the sense of condemning) the rulers, powers, and authorities intruding into the "stuff" of citizens, taking what they see fit, and enforcing distribution to others.

In a nutshell, these two commandments prohibit all forms of socialism--that horribly pagan idea which proposes that society (the community, the governing authorities, the rich and powerful, the Collective, the Politburo, etc.) is the ultimate and final owner of everything and that private ownership rights are always only at the final pleasure of the Collective.  In his decrying the market economy, the Pope was siding with socialistic doctrines whereby some other authority (state, church, "society") has prior ownership of Mrs Smith's garden spade, and can--for whatever reason or pretext--requisition it.

Depravity Without Bounds

Planned Parenthood: Kill Amendments to Ban Sex-Selection Abortions

by Dr. Susan Berry  

17 Jun 2014

Breitbart News

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California have issued a floor alert to members of the California legislature urging lawmakers to defeat all pro-life amendments to budget bills, including any that ban sex-selection abortions or require parental consent for minors to obtain an abortion.

The memo to California lawmakers, dated June 12, speaks on behalf of more than 110 Planned Parenthood facilities in the state and declares California to be a “pro-choice state,” based on a Field Poll from four years ago which they claim found 71 percent of Californians opposed to any further restrictions on abortion.

In addition, the Planned Parenthood affiliates' memo states that any amendments that could restrict abortion are “hostile” to “choice,” and it threatens that lawmakers who vote “on any budget amendments to restrict abortion access may be included on the PPAC Legislative Scorecard.”

To justify their demands upon lawmakers, the Planned Parenthood affiliates cite:

Daily Devotional

June 20

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

The change the Spirit makes

The disciples received [the power of the Holy Spirit] on the day of Pentecost... Peter began to preach immediately with boldness, authority and power, and three thousand were converted. We read in Acts 4 that the authorities could not dispute the boldness with which Peter and John bore witness to the resurrection and said these things. It was nothing but a manifestation of the Holy Ghost. The same Peter who had been so nervous and so apprehensive (indeed, who had been such a coward that, because he was afraid of losing his life, he had denied his own Lord, his greatest Friend and Benefactor), now stands up with boldness ready to confront the whole world and all the devils in hell, and proclaims this Jesus whom he had so recently denied What is this? The authority of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit manifesting His authority in an extra­ordinary manner.

We read later that after these men had been arrested and had become free again, they met together and had a prayer meeting (Acts 4:23-33). When they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness".... Again, in Acts 4:33 we find that "with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus...." What was the secret of their power? That they were able to argue scientifically that resurrection is possible? That they were able to reconcile the miraculous with the scientific? No! It was the authority and power of the Holy Ghost turning these men into living witnesses who were irresistible. 'And great grace was upon them all."

Authority, pp. 83-4

---

“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Greenist Purity

The Horrors of Genetically Modified Food

Genetically modified organisms are seen by many as the avatar of the End.  Terrible evils will be unleashed upon the human race because genes are spliced and foods are made more productive, more nutritious, more technologically supercharged for human consumption.  In New Zealand, the Greens have long campaigned that it must be outlawed with a capital "O".  As it stands, there is a fair old sequence of hurdles to jump before genetic modification is deemed kosher.

The historical reality is somewhat different.  Most food that we consume has been genetically modified in one way, shape, or form.  Take the carrot.

We believe that carrots should be woody and unpalatable and horrid to eat

It never used to be orange until the jolly Dutch genetically modified it in celebration of the House of Orange--and forever after we in the West have been corrupted and physically sickened by this monstrous genetically modified vegetable, unknowingly imbibing craven Dutch nationalism.

Wikipedia provides a brief history of the carrot's genetic modification:

Silly, Febrile Journalists

Abbott Derangement Syndrome

In New Zealand, we are familiar with what has become known as the Key Derangement Syndrome.  The reference is to Prime Minister, John Key.  For a long time, the establishment media and opposition political parties appeared to lose their ability to think when it came to the Prime Minister.  They collectively went agog and aghast whenever Key featured, seeing all kinds of sinister plots, disasters, and repeated faux pas.

Now Australia has been caught in the same syndrome, only this time it is the Abbott Derangement Syndrome.  Miranda Divine documents the nonsense pouring forth from the minds, mouths and scribblings of the media:

Daily Devotional

June 19

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

He that spared not His own Son, how shall he
not also with him freely give us all things?

[Our Lord's] argument [Matthew 6:25] is a very profound and powerful one; and how prone we are to forget it! He says in effect, 'Take this life of yours about which you are tending to worry and become anxious. How have you got it? Where has it come from?' And the answer, of course, is that it is a gift from God. ... So the argument which our Lord uses is this. If God has given you the gift of life—the greater gift— do you think He is now suddenly going to deny Himself and His own methods, and not see to it that that life is sustained and enabled to continue? God has His own ways of doing that, but the argument is that I need never become anxious about it.

Of course I am to plow and sow and reap and gather into barns.

Limping Limpidly

The West's Double Standards

As we write this the Western world is agog with disgust at the brutality of an insurrection unfolding in Iraq.  People are being lined up and mown down.  Others are subjected to public beheadings because they don't believe in the peculiar doctrines of the Islamic Sunni sect.  The West decries such behaviour as medieval by which it means, primitive--that is, ibehaviours that belong to an age which has not benefited from the Enlightenment. 

The West, in its preening desire to be inclusive and tolerant towards all has conveniently forgotten that the historical symbol of Islam is the scimitar.  The ardent Islamic Sunni soldiers now operating in Iraq are simply being consistent.  And, we want to ask the chattering classes and the Commentariat in the West, what could possibly be wrong with that?  Upon what high moral stool is the West sitting whence to declaim such behaviour? 

The established religion of the West is secular humanism, and its philosophy of existence is evolutionism.  But the West has conveniently forgotten that secular humanism and evolutionism is morally neutral at best, vacuous at worst.  Yet still the West clings forlornly to notions of morality, of right and wrong.

Letter From the UK (About Warmongers and A War-wearied Nation)

More Brits Joined Jihad Than Volunteered For UK Army Reserves

By Andre Walker  

17 Jun 2014, 5:08 AM PDT

Breitbart London

More British citizens joined the jihad in Syria and Iraq than signed up for the Army Reserves over the last twelve months, according to the MailOnline. Whilst "several hundred" have gone to fight for militants in the Middle East, only 170 have enlisted for the British Army Reserves despite a major recruitment campaign.

Foreign Secretary William Hague believes that as many as 400 Brits have gone to fight alongside the jihadists of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis). Their activities are now a major concern for the government, as they are likely to return to the UK radicalised and with military training. It is widely believed that these British militants will continue their 'struggle' when they get back to the United Kingdom.

In a statement to the House of Commons on Syria and Iraq yesterday Mr Hague said: "As I have previously told this House, we estimate the number of UK-linked individuals fighting in Syria to include approximately 400 British nationals and other UK-linked individuals who could present a particular risk should they return to the UK."

Shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker said that scale of jihadists from Britain was humiliating for the country because it outstripped the number of Army Reserve volunteers.

Daily Devotional

June 18

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Grace was more abundant

You and I must never look at our past lives; we must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and to magnify His grace in Christ Jesus. I challenge you to do that. If you look at your past and are depressed by it . . . you must do what Paul did. 'I was a blasphemer', he said, but he did not stop at that. Does he then say, "I am unworthy to be a preacher of the gospel'? In fact he says the exact opposite: 'I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful putting me into the ministry.' When Paul looks at the past and sees his sin he does not stay in a corner and say, 'I am not fit to be a Christian, I have done such terrible things'. Not at all. What it does to him, its effect upon him, is to make him praise God. He glories in grace and says, 'And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.'

That is the way to look at your past.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Once Was Blind, But Now I See

Let the sea roar; and all that fill it;
The world and those who dwell in it!
Let the rivers clap their hands;
Let the hills sing for joy together
Before the Lord, for he comes
To judge the earth.
Psalm 98: 7-9

The biblical perspective on the Creation is that first and foremost it belongs to God and exists for His glory.  The inspired psalmist confirms that the entire creation sings hymns of glory to God.  These hymns are heard first by Him.  They are unto Him; His ears reverberate to the glorious orchestra and choir.

The trees, the grasses, the seas and all that is in them, the animals and birds, the sun and the moon--they all sing to God's glory.  When we see them and rejoice in the glory of this created world we see what non-Christian folk struggle to comprehend--we comprehend that the Creation is singing to God and the magnification of His glory before it sings to us.  That makes the Creation even more glorious to our eyes and ears.

If we are listening to a choir singing we may be profoundly moved by the beauty of the music.  When we realise that the beauty is first heard by God Himself, appreciated by Him, and loved by Him before it is known and appreciated by us, the glory of the music becomes more weighty, more significant, more holy.  The services of the choir become all the more valuable in our eyes.

Daily Devotional

June 17

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Blessed are they that mourn

This ... marks off the Christian as being quite unlike the man who is not a Christian and who belongs to the world.... The one thing the world tries to shun is mourning; its whole organization is based on the supposition that that is something to avoid. The philosophy of the world is, Forget your troubles; turn your back on them, do everything you can not to face them. The whole organization of life, the pleasure mania, the
money, energy and enthusiasm that are expended in entertain­ing people, are all just an expression of the great aim of the world to get away from this idea of mourning and this spirit of mourning. But the gospel says, 'Happy are they that mourn." Indeed, they are the only ones who are happy! [see also Luke 6]....

This ... is something which is never found in the world ... this is something which is not as evident in the Church today as it once was and as it is in the New Testament. . . [an] idea has gained currency that if we as Christians are to attract those who are not Christians we must deliberately affect an appear­ance of brightness and joviality ... not something that rises from within, but something which is put on.... I cannot help feeling that the final explanation of the state of the Church today is a defective sense of sin and a defective doctrine of sin.

The Rise of the Secular Clerisy, Part II

Will the Secular Clerisy Triumph?

In Part I of "The Rise of the Secular Clerisy", published here, Joel Kotkin argued that an elite has arisen to  coalesce around a series of propositions and ideas which are now being enforced with regularity.  To espouse a contrary opinion is to enunciate heresy.  The enforcement sanctions used by this new elite have gone beyond mere public opprobrium to sending the guilty to Coventry, and to sacking offenders from their jobs.  Not that their employment had anything to do with the hateful opinions being expressed.  It's just that what they believe is increasingly seen as an anathema. Witness the case of the CEO of Mozilla forced to resign because he happened to give a small donation several years ago to a political campaign opposing homosexual "marriage".   It is getting very close to the ancient punishment of exile. 

In the second part, Klotkin analyses the seat of the power of this new clerisy.  Whilst he is analysing the battlefield as it exists in the United States, we are confident the same patterns and nodes of power are to be found in almost all countries in the West.  The first bulwark of influence and power is found in the nation's bureaucracies, both federal and state. 

America’s Nomenklatura

The Clerisy has thrived during these hard times. Since 1990, the number of government workers has expanded by some five million to some twenty million. That’s four times the number who were employed by the government at the end of the Second World War, a growth rate roughly twice that of the population as a whole.

Letter From the UK (About Obama's Flunkery)

Obama Flunks his Climate Science 101 at University of California, Irvine

By James Delingpole  

15 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

Denying climate change is like saying the moon is made of cheese, President Obama has said in his latest attempt to persuade an unconvinced world that "global warming" is the most urgent crisis of our time.

Obama was speaking to a crowd of around 30,000 at a commencement ceremony at the University of California, Irvine. Justifying the extravagance of his metaphor he said: "I want to tell you this to light a fire under you."
Here are some lines from his speech which explain why those present would be better off ignoring their pyromaniacal president's entreaties.

"I'm not a scientist." Possibly the only factually accurate words in the president's entire speech.

"But we've got some good ones at NASA." "Did have some good ones at NASA" would have been more accurate. Problem is, the organisation that put man on the moon is now in the grip of climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt, successor to activist James "Death Trains" Hansen. In 2012, 49 former NASA astronauts and scientists wrote to protest against the anti-scientific, alarmist position being adopted by Hansen and Schmidt at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). They wrote: "We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data."

Daily Devotional

June 16

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Look at Him, keep looking at Him .

... am I poor in spirit? How do I really feel about myself as I think of myself in terms of God, and in the presence of God? ... what are the things I am saying, what are the things I am praying about, what are the things I like to think of with regard to myself? What a poor thing it is, this boasting of the things that are accidental and for which I am not responsible, this boasting of things that are artificial and that will count as nothing at the great day when we stand in the presence of God. This poor self! That hymn of Lavater's puts it perfectly: "Make this poor self grow less and less," and "O Jesus Christ, grow Thou in me."

How does one therefore become "poor in spirit"?

Defence of Britain Hangs on Skyhooks

Trojan Horse debate: We were wrong, all cultures are not equal

For years, we all turned a blind eye to the segregation of Muslim pupils. Now it is time to stand up to propagators of barbarism and ignorance 

We have been following the "Trojan Horse" issue Birmingham where a group of dedicated, consistent Islamic activists have sought to take control of some public schools by means of infiltration, subterfuge, and dissembling, until it is too late.  They regard this attempt as jihad--a manifestation of holy war.  The matter has become exposed, the government has reacted, and for now, it seems, the effort has failed.  We said at the time that this would shake the British establishment, for two reasons.

Firstly, the establishment for years has told itself and everyone else that Britain is a multi-cultural, tolerant nation.  Thou shalt not judge.  Thou shalt not offend.  Thou shalt accept each and all in good faith--etc. etc.  Secondly, the establishment has chosen to adopt the view that underneath all cultures and religions everyone really is a thoroughly good chap.  Therefore, all cultures are benign, positive, and fundamentally humanist in their ideological framework.  

In this view, Islamic schools would basically be schools where teachers and pupils dressed quaintly, but apart from that delightful oddity, would be champions of secular humanism.  

The Trojan Horse project of an attempted Islamic takeover of some public schools has shaken the toleranzistas up a good deal.  But, ideologically the establishment has nowhere to go.  Long ago it threw out the Christian faith in favour of secular rationalistic jibberish.  It's between a rock and a hard place.  It does not want Islamic schools, but the grounds of its opposition are tenuous indeed.  

Allison Pearson, writing in the Telegraph provides us with an example of the confused melee now on display.

Letter From America (About Oppression on College Campuses)

Colleges Use ‘Anti-Discrimination’ Rules Against Christians

Can school administrators decide who belongs in a Christian group?

By Molly Wharton

June 11, 2014 6:29 PM 

National Review Online

 

Bowdoin College’s evangelical group will no longer be recognized by the college starting next fall. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the college is demanding that any student should be able to run for leadership for any student group, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, but the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship disagrees.

“It would compromise our ability to be who we are as Christians if we can’t hold our leaders to some sort of doctrinal standard,” recent Bowdoin graduate and former leader of BCF Zackary Suhr told The Times.
The incident at Bowdoin has occurred at many other colleges and universities in recent years. While the universities present the absolute non-discrimination demands as an effort to rid their campuses of intolerance and exclusivity, religious students see it as an encroachment on their religious freedom perpetrated by liberal academia who are hostile toward conservative Christianity.

A study done by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research found that college faculty share significantly more negative feelings toward Evangelical Christians than toward any other religious group, with 53 percent reporting that had unfavorable feelings toward Evangelicals.

Daily Devotional

June 14

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

This means you!

The trouble with this type of unhappy Christian is that he does not really believe the Scriptures. You say: "My trouble is that terrible sin which I have committed." Let me tell you in the Name of God that that is not your trouble. Your trouble is unbelief. You do not believe the Word of God. I am referring to the First Epistle of John and the first chapter where we read this: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." That is a categorical statement.... There is no limit to it....

Whatever your sin—it is as wide as that—it does not matter what it is, it does not matter what it was, "if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." So if you do not believe that word, and if you go on dwelling on your sin, I say that you are not accepting the Word of God, you are not taking God at His word, you do not believe what He tells you and that is your real sin.... "What God hath cleansed, that call thou not common" (Acts 10:15)....