Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Resentment)

Merchants of Resentment

Douglas Wilson

August 6, 2014

Blog and Mablog

Is it possible to sow the wind and reap the whirlwind (Hos. 8:7)? Well, of course it is. We live in a world where disproportional effects can follow hard after trivial causes. Not only so, but the disproportional effects can be unevenly distributed. Two toddlers disobey their mothers in exactly the same way, and one of them dies while the other gets a scolding and his family gets a cute story.

It is not my purpose here today to defend the justice of God given the fact of this unevenness. That is another task for another time. I simply want to take that unevenness into account as a fixed given. It happens. Whatever we think of it, we have to deal with it. We have to factor it into our calculations. All mothers warn their toddlers of certain things because some mothers lose their toddlers.

Sometimes the disproportionate effects are the result of sinful, human actions. Sometimes the trivial causes are also sinful, but not nearly as heinous, and other times there is no sin involved at all. The combinations of responsibility are varied and many.

Here is a (made up) example of the former scenario. Suppose a young teen-aged girl has been warned by her mother and father about her circle of friends, and she has been warned repeatedly.

Daily Devotional

August 12

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

One Lord Jesus Christ, Light of Light, Very God of Very God

There He was (Luke 8:22–5), weary and tired, so tired, in fact, that He fell asleep.... Look at Him. There is no doubt about His humanity. He is fatigued, He is tired and weary, so much so that He just falls asleep, and, though the storm has arisen, He still goes on sleeping. He is subject to infirmity, He is a man in the body and flesh like all the rest of us. Ah, yes, but wait a minute. They came to Him and awoke Him saying,
‘Master, carest Thou not that we perish?’ Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the sea, and they ceased and there was a calm ... it is not surprising that the disciples, seeing all this, wondered and said one to another, ‘What manner of man is this! for he commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him’. Man, and yet obviously God. He could command the elements, He could silence the wind and stop the raging of the sea. He is the Lord of nature and of creation, He is the Lord of the universe. This is the mystery and the marvel of Jesus Christ—God and Man, two natures in One Person, two natures unmixed yet resident in the same Person….

Western Double Standards

Siege Warfare and Urban Assaults

There are few military actions more difficult, more deadly, more dangerous, and more risky for non-combatants than house to house, urban assaults.  It is thus inevitable that whenever Israel invades Gaza, as it  recently has, civilians (that is, non-Hamas fighters) would be caught up in the violence of war, and would lose their lives.  To our knowledge there has never been an urban military assault that managed to prevent all harm to civilians living in the city.  This does not make the death of any civilian less tragic.  It is simply a statement about reality. 

In former times, when armies laid siege to a city, they usually followed the laws of siege warfare.  They first of all offered terms of peace to the city.  Surrender the city, or face a long siege.  Everyone knew this was the right thing to do.  It was right for the besieging army, since sieges were usually long, complex, and very costly affairs both in terms of materiel and lives.  It was also the right thing to do for the city, since sieges were most often deadly to the general population.  They usually did not end before thousands died of malnutrition, hunger, and disease.  The final reason for offering terms was that the laws of siege warfare permitted a general slaughter, enslavement, looting all of value, and razing the city to the ground once the city walls had been breached. It was regarded as a just reparation for the costs borne by the besieging army.

Against this background, Israel's activities in Gaza seem excessively moral and highly ethical--the shrieks of outrage in the Western media and Commentariat notwithstanding.

Letter From America (About the Bible)

Mark Noll on Our Changing Understanding of the Bible in America

August 8, 2014

Bible Gateway

Yesterday, Mark Noll delivered a public address in conjunction with the Bible in American Life conference. Noll is a respected scholar of the history of Christianity, as well as the author of the influential Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I thought I’d share just a few of his insights here.

In his address, Noll presented four findings of the Bible in American Life Report that he feels say something particularly important about the way Americans experience the Bible. (If you haven’t done so, I strongly encourage you to read the report’s findings—they’re fascinating and surprising. We summarized some of the key findings here.)

Here are the four findings that Noll held up as saying something particularly important about the Bible in American life.

1. Catholics are reading the Bible outside of worship services more.
The Catholic church has long been accused by Protestants of discouraging people from reading the Bible “on their own,” outside the context of worship services. The Bible in American Life Report found, however, that Catholics are reading the Bible on their own more and more—so perhaps it’s time to retire that old criticism. Noll pointed out that this increased Bible reading among Catholics has coincided with new, and unprecedented, joint actions by both Catholics and Protestants in the public sphere.

Daily Devotional

August 11

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Christ is the only Way

The gospel of Jesus Christ confronts and challenges the modern world with the statement that it alone has the answer to all man’s questions and the solution to all his problems. In a world that is seeking a way out of its tragedy and its troubles, the gospel announces that the solution is already available…. It denounces the fatal habit of pinning our hopes to something that is going to happen, and announces that all that is needed by men, individually and collectively, has been at the disposal of mankind for nearly two thousand years.

For the central message of the gospel is to tell men that everything necessary for their salvation is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the only begotten Son of God. He, it proclaims, is the full and final revelation of God. It is in Him, His life and His teaching, that we see what man is meant to be, and the kind of life that man is meant to live.

Hobbit-Man and Downs Syndrome

Foiled Again

Paleontology has a rich history of frauds and mistakes.  These are most often due to an overriding compulsion to "prove" evolutionism to be true.  The latest is the case of an alleged "proto-human being" who was supposed to be the remains of a Hobbit-like creature, discovered in 2004 on the island Flores in Indonesia.  Big media releases accompanied the startling find.

But now?  Well . . . now it turns our that the undersized proto-human was actually a human with Downs syndrome.  Rats.  There goes the PhD, the book, the movie, tenure, and perpetual celebrity rock stardom.  This, from TheBlaze:

Daily Devotional

August 09

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

God’s accountancy

Sometimes God has been gracious on a Sunday and I have been conscious of exceptional liberty, and I have been foolish enough to listen to the devil when he says, ‘Now, then, you wait until next Sunday, it is going to be marvellous, there will be even larger congregations’. And I go into the pulpit the next Sunday and I see a smaller congregation. But then on another occasion I stand in this pulpit labouring, as it were left to myself, preaching badly and utterly weak, and the devil has come and said, ‘There will be nobody there at all next Sunday’. But, thank God, I have found on the following Sunday a larger congregation. That is God’s method of accountancy. You never know. I enter the pulpit in weakness and I end with power. I enter with self-confidence and I am made to feel a fool. It is God’s accountancy.... He is always giving us surprises. His book-keeping is the most romantic thing I know of in the whole world.

Beware the Yellow Peril

Baser Instincts

In New Zealand we have had our share of muck racking, venal, xenophobic politicians who pander to the worst instincts of the bitter and twisted.  Immigration seems to hit all the right buttons for these closet racists and the populist politicians who exploit them.

Racism is a strong word--sadly overdone in many quarters.  It is not an epithet to be used lightly.  We struggle to avoid its use here.  It's hard to come to any other conclusion, but we will try.  David Cunliffe, erstwhile leader of the motley crowd of divisives, temporarily coalesced under the Labour party banner, has come out opposing the sale of a large North Island high country farm to a Chinese company.  This is normally the political territory of the one or two populist politicians who can find electoral traction few other ways.  Anti-Chinese sentiment--which is racist insofar as it appears to apply to no other immigrant ethnic group or nation--is the final bolt hole of a desperate, cynical politician or one who is a genuine racist.  Now it has become the resort of the Labour leader. 

We prefer to believe the evidence points to a cynical, desperate politician, rather than a genuine racist.  Surely Cunliffe cannot be that degenerate.  Its his desperation that is leading him to play the race card, and the xenophobe card, and any other card, for that matter.

It turns out that China, the Chinese, and New Zealand have a long history.

Letter From America (About Hamas's Tunnel Strategy)

Stories From The Battlefield

Hamas Tunnels Used To Target Israel’s Kindergartens

Mordechai Ben-Menachem

The Daily Caller

27 July 2014

Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24^th) as a mass terror attack.

The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives.  Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.

The IDF recently published the below map showing that tunnels were created in pairs, to empty out on both sides of nearby communities.  The known cost of the infrastructure – each tunnel costs upward of some $1 million – clearly shows that Hamas was planning a coordinated mega-attack.  It must be understood that use of even one tunnel would inevitably trigger Israeli retaliation against the entire network.

A map of a small portion of the tunnels meant to be used 9 weeks from now.

Revelations regarding the planned tunnel attack magnitude played a decisive role in the Israeli government’s rejection of a ceasefire proposed late Friday by Secretary of State John Kerry.  Unbelievably, Kerry actually proposed in his latest “cease-fire proposal” – none of which have been honored by Hamas so far – that Israel refrains from degrading remaining attack tunnels.  This mind-boggling concept would necessarily be rejected by any sane government, of any country.

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

The Politics of the Tithe

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 5, 2014

I think it was Luther who said that a man required two conversions, the first of his heart and the second of his wallet. Have you ever noticed how some people are preeminently quotable, such that all sorts of pithy sayings get attributed to them whether or not they said it? So Luther, or maybe Chesterton, or Churchill, or maybe Oscar Wilde. It fits best with Luther though, so let’s run with that.

I want to begin by summarizing in a paragraph what I understand our obligations with regard to tithing to be, and then to briefly expand on each one of those points.

The tithe is a continuing moral obligation for the people of God (1 Cor. 9:13-14). The lawful recipients of the tithe are those who labor in the ministry (1 Cor. 9:14), the poor (Dt. 14:29), and the merchants who supply the goods for your thanksgiving feasts (Dt. 14:23-29). The tithe is owed on the increase of wealth (Dt. 14:22), not on the wealth itself. The tithe is to be paid on the increase that is brought into your barns, and not on the part of the crop that the locusts ate, which has ramifications for the old net/gross question. And last, the church is to teach authoritatively on the obligation to tithe, but is not to do so in any way that could reasonably be interpreted as a self-serving merchandizing of the gospel (Phil. 4:17).

So let’s work through these.

Daily Devotional

August 08

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

‘... since Jesus came into my heart ...’
Is my life different?

Does my Christian faith affect my view of life and control it in all matters? I claim to be Christian, and hold the Christian faith; the question I now ask myself is, ‘Does that Christian faith of mine affect my whole detailed view of life? Is it always determining my reaction and my response to the particular things that happen?’ Or, we can put it like this. ‘Is it clear and obvious to myself and to everybody else that my whole approach to life, my essential view of life in general and in particular, is altogether different from that of the non-Christian?’ It should be.

The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes. They describe people who are altogether different from all others, as different as light from darkness, as different as salt from putrefaction. If, then, we are different essentially, we must be different in our view of, and in our reaction to, everything. I know of no better question that a man can ask himself in every circumstance in life than that. When something happens to upset you, do you ask, ‘Is my reaction essentially different from what it would be if I were not a Christian?’

Let us remind ourselves of the teaching ... at the end of the fifth chapter of [Matthew’s] Gospel. You remember that our Lord put it like this: ‘If ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others?’ That is it. The Christian is a man who does ‘more than others’. He is a man who is absolutely different. And if in every detail of his life this Christianity of his does not come in, he is a very poor Christian, he is a man ‘of little faith’.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 139–40

Welcome to our Socialist Paradise

The Long Game

New Zealand is a socialist country--at least ideologically.  By which we mean that the grand majority think in socialist categories.  The vast majority of the population endorse the state being the sole educator of children, as well as a state controlled, run and rationed healthcare system,  and one of the most "generous" state welfare systems in the world.  Not surprisingly, almost all social problems and challenges are expected to be solved by the state.  Equally not surprisingly, just on sixty percent of government expenditure goes to health, education, and welfare [1].  The overwhelming majority of the population, if asked, "What must we do to improve social welfare, health, and education in New Zealand?" would argue that the government needs to spend more money in these areas. 

Now, if one asked the "man-in-street" whether New Zealand was a socialist country, he most likely would be offended at the question.  Of course not, he would reply.  That's because the country believes fervently in socialism without doctrines (as historian Michael Bassett put it).  The practices of applied socialism are so entrenched no-one needs defend or advocate for them any longer. The frog in the pot has well and truly boiled, whilst experiencing no discomfort.

Given that New Zealand is a socialist paradise without doctrines and that all political parties without exception live with this reality (even the most conservative and libertarian minor parties seek to make changes only at the margin), how does an professedly socialistic party fare, politically?

Letter From the UK (About Dawkins's Dogmatism)

Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?

Dawkins in 2014 is a man so convinced that he possesses God-like powers of omniscience that he can’t understand why everyone is angry at him for pointing out the obvious

Eleanor Robertson
The Guardian
30 July 2014

Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins proving that if non-conscious material is given enough time, it is capable of evolving into an obstreperous crackpot who should have retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.

“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse,” huffs Dawkins. Seeming to have anticipated, although not understood, the feminist reaction this kind of sentiment generally evokes, he finishes the tweet: “If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

. . . . Dawkins has been arrogant for years, a man so convinced of his intellectual superiority that he believes the one domain in which he happens to be an expert, science, is the only legitimate way of acquiring or assessing knowledge. All of his outbursts in recent years follow from this belief: he understands the scientific method, a process intended to mitigate the interference of human subjectivity in data collection, as a universally applicable way of understanding not just the physical world but literally everything else as well.

Daily Devotional

August 07

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Christ shall give thee light

... there is but one treatment which can heal that diseased eye. We need waste none of our time in trying anything else. We need spend no further money on that which is not bread. We can cease to travel round to the various spiritual spas in our search for health and wholeness. The world has done its utmost to clear its own spiritual eye. Patent after patent has been brought out. Lenses and spectacles of all colours, shapes, and sizes have been offered to us, and have been loudly recommended by great and well-known leaders....

But still mankind cannot see, and continues in sin and in misery. The strain is too deep. The nebulae and the mists are not outside the eye but actually within the organ itself. All our own efforts and all our best remedies leave us precisely where we were. Indeed, we find ... that the experts themselves cannot see, and often end their lives, as did the German philosopher Goethe upon his deathbed, with the cry, ‘More light!’ ... Is there no cure? Are we all doomed therefore to perpetual blindness and darkness?

The Deeper, Greater Cause

Feminism Underpinned by Marxist Ideology

Feminism as an ideological and political movement has largely become a dissolute spent force.  About the only issue feminists continue to get wound up about is abortion.  Any hint that abortion "rights" might be curtailed or reduced will stir up the old militancy and hatreds.  Our intention here is not to debate the fruits of feminism.  Rather, it is the ideological origins of Western feminism that interest us.

A number of folk have observed a strange connection between the ideology of leftist Marxism and feminism.  At one level that is easy enough to understand.  Simplistically, feminists believe women are oppressed; Marxists believe the working classes are oppressed.  Therefore, both Marxists and feminists want to dismantle the power structures of such oppressions.  They are "natural allies".  But which is more important: the feminist or the Marxist materialistic cause?

One clue is provided by the "feminist" response to the oppression of women in Islamic countries.

Letter from the UK (About Wearable Police)

Booze bracelets? 

Even Orwell did not foresee this dawn of the wearable policeman 

Brendan O'Neill
The Telegraph
July 31, 2014

Even with all their dystopian prescience, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell or Philip K Dick did not foresee a future state that would monitor its citizens' sweat for signs of deviant, boozy behaviour. I mean, what kind of swirling mind would it take to think up a system whereby citizens would walk around with sweat-reading gadgets attached to them so that anytime they sunk a pint of beer the authorities would be alerted and could take action?

How about the swirling minds of London's current rulers. Yep, not content with filming our every move on CCTV, and banning the consumption of alcohol on public transport and the smoking of cigarettes pretty much everywhere, London's behaviour-policers masquerading as politicians are now trialling "booze bracelets" to analyse the perspiration levels of certain offenders and let the powers-that-be know if their sweat shows signs of alcohol. Welcome to the era of the wearable policeman, of the ever-present copper on your cuff monitoring your every move.

Starting life in the US, booze bracelets are hi-tech electronic devices that are attached to the ankle or the wrist and can analyse air and perspiration emissions from the skin. Starting today, they are being trialled in four South London boroughs on offenders who have committed alcohol-fuelled crimes and have thus been banned from drinking.

Daily Devotional

August 04

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

The Life of Faith

[Some apparently Christian people] are worried about food and drink; they are always talking about wealth and position and their various possessions. These things really control them. They are made happy or unhappy by them; they are put out by them or pleased by them; and they are always thinking and talking about them. That is to be like the heathen, says Christ; for the Christian should not be controlled by these things. Whatever may be his position with respect to them, he is not finally to be controlled by them ... because that is the typical condition of the heathen, who is dominated by them in his whole outlook upon life and in his living in this world.

This is a very good way, therefore, of increasing our faith and of introducing ourselves to the biblical conception of the life of faith. God’s people, God’s children in this world, are meant to live the life of faith; they are meant to live in the light of that faith which they profess. I suggest therefore, that there are certain questions which we should always be putting to ourselves. Here are some of them. Do I face the things that happen to me in this world as the Gentiles do? When these things happen to me, when there seem to be difficulties about food, or drink, or clothing, or difficulties in some relationship in life, how do I face them? How do I react? Is my reaction just that of the heathen, and of people who do not pretend to be Christian? How do I react during a war? How do I react to illness and pestilence and loss?

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, p. 139

The Justification of Knowledge and Truth, Part III

 Adding Zeroes to Zero

Unbelief has strained over the years to find a suitable and adequate justification for knowledge--the problem of knowing that what we know is true knowledge or truth.  Unbelieving thought--that is, philosophies which reject from the outset the existence of the Living God, His self-revelation in Nature, and the Scriptures--have struggled to find an adequate foundation for truth.  Every rational proposal collapses at some point into irrationalism.

We have seen this to be the case in two leading tendencies attempting to justify knowledge: rationalism and empiricism (see here, and here.)  The third tendency is subjectivism.  This offers the principle that all knowledge and truth is ultimately self-justified by the subject--that is, we who know.  Now there is a lot to commend subjectivism, as opposed to rationalism and empiricism at first blush.  In the first place, logical argument (the champion of the rationalists) often fails to convince.  John Frame describes the problem:

Gun Control

Things Are Not Always What They Seem

Gun prohibitionism appears to rest on unassailable foundations.  The more guns there are in the community, the more people will have access to guns.  The more guns will be used to commit crimes.  Since guns are lethally effective, it is inevitable more people will die, the more accessible guns there are in a society.  And so on.  Persuaded? 

If so, Switzerland will stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Switzerland: Peaceful but... Armed

By Laura Secorun Palet

Acumen

Switzerland has earned its reputation as a safe, neutral nation. Yet it’s hardly pacifist or gun-averse.
In fact, the small and stable country has the highest firearm ownership rate in Europe —

46 guns for every 100 people

— and the third-highest in the world, outdone only by the U.S. (89) and and Yemen (55).

Daily Devotional

August 05

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Living on the bare Word of God

Faith means taking the bare Word of God and acting upon it because it is the Word of God. It means believing what God says simply and solely because He has said it. Those heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11 believed the Word of God simply because God had spoken. They had no other reasons for believing it. Why, for example, did Abraham take Isaac and go with him up that mountain? Why was he on the point of sacrificing his son? Simply because God had told him to do so.

But living by faith means even more than that. It means basing the whole of our life upon faith in God. The secret of all those Old Testament characters was that they lived ‘as seeing him who is invisible’. These men staked all on God’s Word.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Not the West's Finest Moment

Hamas and Israel are at war.  Hamas claims that Israel is shelling civilians and killing them.  The Western media and most politicians accept this at face value and the vitriolic reactionary bile pours forth.  Israel is a child-killing nation.  Hamas said so, and clearly children and non-combatants are being killed. 

The chattering classes and the Commentariat accept Hamas's statements and claims at their face value.  They assume their veracity.  But why?  The old adage has it that when war commences, the first casualty is the truth.  Surely the Western media and its Commentariat would not be so gullible or naive?  Well, unfortunately the West is just that gullible and naive. 

On one level it's understandable.  The vast majority of Western scribes and pundits have never experienced nor lived through a war.  They live in a culture which, due to its Christian vestiges, still values truth telling and condemns deceitful and misleading behaviour.  Politicians and media exposed as liars are usually rejected, losing all credibility.  The Commentariat projects these perspectives and experiences on to Hamas and Israel.

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

America’s Udder

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 29, 2014

The reason we have an immigration problem is not because we are welcoming people to America, but rather what kind of America we are welcoming them to. This in turn has an effect on what kind of people seek to be welcomed here, which then provokes the wrong kind of reaction on our part, and which results in a series of actions and reactions not unlike a child’s party balloon that was not tied off yet but was over-inflated, and then let go.

We have two presenting issues on our southern border. One is the border security itself, and the other is all the stuff we are doing that creates the need for border security in the first place. What we are doing wrong would include, but not be limited to, anchor babies, food stamps, other forms of welfare, free education, and so on. You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you don’t. There are very few things quite as destructive as American good intentions. If we then add to the mix the problems caused by American bad intentions, everything gets really complicated. What would happen to the drug cartels if Americans quit snorting their happy powder? And, incidentally, that problem is not going to be solved by a federal “war on drugs,” what a joke, but rather by Americans doing what previous generations of Christians used to quaintly call “repenting.” A whole host of our “political” problems have no political solution.

Here is my proposed campaign slogan — Open Borders, But No Freebies. If any politician wants to use it, he can have his staff contact my people.

Back to immigration. In the current set-up, conservatives have a point when they say that we need to get control of the border first, and then talk about what to do with the millions of ille . . . oops, almost did a bad thing . . . undocumented ali . . . oops . . . what a klutz I am being this morning . . . undocumented personages. Ah, for the halcyon days when folks could just say wetbacks and nobody minded!

Daily Devotional

August 04

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Living on the bare Word of God

Faith means taking the bare Word of God and acting upon it because it is the Word of God. It means believing what God says simply and solely because He has said it. Those heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11 believed the Word of God simply because God had spoken. They had no other reasons for believing it. Why, for example, did Abraham take Isaac and go with him up that mountain? Why was he on the point of sacrificing his son? Simply because God had told him to do so.

But living by faith means even more than that. It means basing the whole of our life upon faith in God. The secret of all those Old Testament characters was that they lived ‘as seeing him who is invisible’. These men staked all on God’s Word.

More Steps in the Right Direction

Internal Decay and Mounting Indifference

The government in the UK is taking aim at restoring some of its sovereignty which had been traded away by the previous Labour government.  In 1998 Labour passed the Human Rights Act which contained a clause subjecting the UK to human rights decisions made by the European Court.  The Cameron government is planning to reverse that decision, thereby making British human rights legislation the sole preserve of Britain and even giving a possible veto to MP's over controversial EU human rights decisions.

Long overdue, is our response.  It is now becoming more evident that Cameron's recent Cabinet reshuffle has not weakened the drive towards re-establishing British sovereignty.  It appears to have turbo-charged it. This, from the Telegraph:

Unable to be Translated

Learning From Bodies

Nora Calhoun
First Things


The baby in my arms lacks the majority of his brain. He was born just fifteen minutes before this moment, and he is likely to die before another fifteen minutes pass. He has taken no first breath and will give no first cry. He cannot see. He cannot hear. He does not feel the warm weight of my hand as it rests on his chest and belly. I quietly weep and pray as the last gift of oxygen his mother’s body gave him dwindles and his rosy newborn glow fades to gray. His soul gently slips out of his body, and his life ends.

Ability is not what makes death significant. At birth this baby had capacities below that of a healthy fetus at ten weeks. Holding his body, living and then dead, proves to me that it doesn’t matter how early the human heart beats, how early it is possible to feel pain, or when the senses develop. No ability or strength confers human status—not being viable or sentient or undamaged or wanted. Being of human descent is enough; you cannot earn or forfeit your humanity. If this baby’s death does not matter, no death matters.

But bodies speak a different language; they teach in different terms. The images and touch memories of the small body of that severely damaged baby boy whom I held as he died only minutes after being born could not be explained away, caricatured, ignored, or debated.

I have not always seen this so clearly. A gut repugnance and horror of abortion, which I felt from the time I first heard of it as a nine-year-old, kept me from ever being fully pro-choice. But even after my conversion to Christianity at eighteen, I didn’t want to express full opposition to the opinions of almost everyone I knew, my family, teachers, and friends. I wanted to avoid the taboo of “judgmentalism,” widely imputed to those who oppose abortion, and to maintain credibility among the feminist friends I cherished.

Daily Devotional

August 02

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Thou shall be turned into another man (1 Samuel 10:6)

What a miserable thing self is, what an ugly thing, what a foul thing. We are all guilty of this, every one of us, in some shape or form.... Self needs to be exposed for what it is. Sin in its ugliness and foulness needs to be unmasked.... It is the greatest enemy of the soul, and it leads to misery and un-happiness....

That brings me to the cure. What is the treatment? It is to understand the controlling principle of the Kingdom of God ... in the Kingdom of God everything is essentially different from everything in every other kingdom ... the Kingdom of God is not like that which you have always known, it is something quite new and different. The first thing we have to realize is that ‘if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new’. If only we realized as we should, that here we are in a realm in which everything is different! The whole foundation is different, it has nothing to do with the principle of the old life.... We must say to ourselves every day of our fives, ‘Now I am a Christian, and because I am a Christian I am in the Kingdom of God and all my thinking has got to be different. Everything here is different. I must not bring with me those old ideas, those old moods and concepts of thought.’ We tend to confine salvation to one thing, namely to forgiveness, but we have to apply the principle throughout the Christian life.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 128–9

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“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.”

Justification of Knowledge and Truth (Part II)

A Bold Plan for Perpetual Ignorance

How do we know that what we know is actually true?  Wittgenstein and the post-modernists argued that we never will know absolute truth; all we can have is perspectives (including this one).  This has not sat well with traditional philosophers, but it has certainly had a field day in the world of academia.  We now have endless lists of perspectives as subjects for study: queer literature, minority art, feminist politics, proletarian ethics, trans-gender discourse, and so on, ad nauseam.  The end result is lots and lots of insignificant jobs for post-modern academics.  Lots of heat, but not much light.

We have argued that rationalism--one of the traditional justifications of knowledge--elides into tautologies and irrationalism.  The second major tendency to justify knowledge as being true-truth is empiricism.  This is probably the tendency which is most popular today--largely, due to the widespread belief that science (which employs the "empirical" method) delivers the truth.  As Frame explains:

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

A Pretty Firm Grip on the Ears

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 28, 2014

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to preface my remarks with any of these qualifications, but then again, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have our perennial crisis in the Middle East. And so it would be that I would not have to say anything at all . . . in a perfect world.

But here are the qualifications. Israel is a sinful nation, and they need to hear the message of Christ desperately. They are a Western nation, transplanted by Zionists into a troubled part of the world, said transplanting not commending itself to me as having been a good idea. They share the strengths of the West, as well as all the decadent weaknesses. They are in an extraordinarily challenging situation, largely created by the lords of the earth drawing hubristic lines on the map after the First World War. In short, they have a grizzly bear by the ears. On the bright side, they currently have a pretty firm grip on those ears, but the long term prospects are not rosy.

Daily Devotional

August 01

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

The nature of meekness

[Meekness] is not a natural quality. It is not a matter of a natural disposition, because all Christians are meant to be like this. It is not only some Christians. Every Christian, whatever his natural temperament or psychology may be, is meant to be like this. Now we can prove that very easily. Take these various characters whom I have mentioned, apart from our Lord Himself, and I think you will find that in every case we have a man who was not hake this by nature. Think of the powerful, extraordinary nature of a man hake David, and yet observe his meekness. Jeremiah similarly lets us into the secret. He says he was almost like a boiling cauldron, and yet he was still meek. Look at a man like the Apostle Paul, a master mind, an extraordinary personality, a strong character; yet consider his utter humility and meekness. No, it is not a matter of natural disposition; it is something that is produced by the Spirit of God....

A Good News Story

 Progress At Last

Separation and divorce is painful enough for adults, many of whom remain permanently scarred.  In hindsight not a few come to regret their decision to split apart and look back at the conflict and circumstances that led them to that fateful decision, concluding (now) that it was all small change in the grand scheme of things. They regret their immature decisions and hasty actions.  But we have learned that the children of such divorces often are damaged for their entire lives. 

This bad situation is made ten times worse if the divorce is acrimonious.  Far too many divorces have ended up that way, even if the decision to separate initially was reasonably amicable and mutual, due to the involvement of the Family Court.  Courts require lawyers, and lawyers' stock-in-trade is disputation and argumentation, getting the best-deal-no-matter-what for their client.  The resulting anger and bitterness can last decades, inflicting yet far more needless damage upon children. And, not a few lawyers have preferred a long drawn out process because of the higher fee payoff. 

Finally, the NZ government has introduced some reforms which are deconstructing the hostilities.  The Minister of Justice, Judith Collins has announced: