It's Transition, Man

What a Lovely World We Are Building

In every society there are weirdos.  You may think of it as an axiom. Weirdos come in all shapes and sizes.  These days, sexuality is the preserve of weirdos who go to extravagant lengths to deny their genetic and biological makeup and turn themselves into something else (usually the opposite sex).

The chattering classes and the Commentariat have taken to lionising such weirdos.  They are the true heroes and heroines of our age.  In order to stand with them it is demanded of society (that is, you) that it ascribe every kind of civil, freedom, and human rights to such people.  If a male becomes a trans-female it is incumbent upon SS Society and all who sail in her to accord the "trans-her" the rights of females, including access to women's changing rooms and toilets.

The next iteration follows.  Weirdness is catching.  Up pops a fellow who makes no attempt at all to resist or deny his genetic makeup.  Instead this weirdo says, "OK, I am male on the inside and male on the outside, but I don't feel male.  I think of myself as female.  I identify as female."  Sure, says the captain of SS Society, no problem.  So now the guy who is trans-gendered in his mind's eye only is accorded access to female toileting and changing facilities.  And so the weirdo and weirdness rolls.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Book of the Month/April 2016

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog



Back in the eighties, the debate over theonomy and Christian Reconstruction was a “thing.” It is still a thing, and in proof of what I say I offer the evidence that virtually no one thinks so.

The day of common sense shared assumption is clean over. We live in a day when decent folks can find themselves cudgeled by the state for maintaining that we should have restrooms for men and women. Imagine trying to explain our political controversies to Dwight Eisenhower. In order for Christians to open their mouths about any of the current issues, they have to be ready to answer the two great questions of theology, asked on playgrounds everywhere. They are, “Why?” and “Who says?” Bounds

The church is like a college sophomore sinking in his math courses, and who needs to back to the basics of how many two and two make. This book by Joel McDurmon is a wonderful place to start our remedial work. Here it is: The Bounds of Love.

This is an introduction to “theonomy,” God’s law, and there are two great takeaways from the book.

First, he carefully shows that these are issues that all Christians need to deal with. In line with that, he then goes on to show that the theonomic answer to the challenge of Old Testament/New Testament relations is a responsible exegetically grounded one.

Over the years, my joking answer to the question “are you a theonomist?” has been “oh, no. I hate God’s law.” What this reveals (or rather should reveal) is that all Christians are theonomists. We all agree that we should do what God directs us to do in His Word. We differ on the exegesis, and on the hermeneutic that drives much of it. What does God in fact require of us, and how can we know? McDurmon does a good job parsing out how members of different camps are perhaps not as far apart as they think.

Daily Devotional

Bearing Afflictions Lightly

"Look upon mine affliction and my pain; and forgive all my sins."
Psalm 25:18

Charles H. Spurgeon

It is well for us when prayers about our sorrows are linked with pleas concerning our sins--when, being under God's hand, we are not wholly taken up with our pain, but remember our offences against God. It is well, also, to take both sorrow and sin to the same place. It was to God that David carried his sorrow: it was to God that David confessed his sin. Observe, then, we must take our sorrows to God. Even your little sorrows you may roll upon God, for he counteth the hairs of your head; and your great sorrows you may commit to him, for he holdeth the ocean in the hollow of his hand. Go to him, whatever your present trouble may be, and you shall find him able and willing to relieve you. But we must take our sins to God too. We must carry them to the cross, that the blood may fall upon them, to purge away their guilt, and to destroy their defiling power.

The special lesson of the text is this:--that we are to go to the Lord with sorrows and with sins in the right spirit. Note that all David asks concerning his sorrow is, "Look upon mine affliction and my pain;" but the next petition is vastly more express, definite, decided, plain--"Forgive all my sins." Many sufferers would have put it, "Remove my affliction and my pain, and look at my sins." But David does not say so; he cries, "Lord, as for my affliction and my pain, I will not dictate to thy wisdom. Lord, look at them, I will leave them to thee, I should be glad to have my pain removed, but do as thou wilt; but as for my sins, Lord, I know what I want with them; I must have them forgiven; I cannot endure to lie under their curse for a moment." A Christian counts sorrow lighter in the scale than sin; he can bear that his troubles should continue, but he cannot support the burden of his transgressions.

It's Time for Another, Genuine Cultural Revolution

The Good Old Days

China is finding out that you cannot just turn babies off-and-on.  The government was hailed for recently easing the draconian restrictions upon married couples to just one child.  It was a start, but a stuttering beginning, at best.  The social dislocation in Chinese society from the One Child Policy will take decades, generations to redress and put right.  

A recent article in Epoch Times describes how nothing much has changed in a town lauded for its adherence to, and its disciplined alacrity over, carrying out the former "one child" policy.

In the 1980s, the county of Rudong in China’s coastal province of Jiangsu was lauded for its strict adherence to China’s infamous one child policy. Three decades later, the county’s residents are paying the price of the Chinese regime’s efforts at population control.  Rudong County has come under scrutiny recently for having negative population growth for 17 straight years, and for having a rapidly aging populace, according to a report by the semi-official Beijing News on March 29. And the county’s residents haven’t taken to recently instituted pronatalist measures.

The problem is that a social cluster (such as a town) eventually reaches the tipping point of death--the point at which it is not possible to rebuild the town or area.  Like other cities and regions throughout history, living there becomes too hard, or costly, or inconvenient and people move.  The city or town dies.  That's what is happing in Rudong now.

Thrice Condemned

The Language Bears the Truth

Hillary Clinton has left the reservation.  An ardent advocate for terminating the life of the unborn child, she was caught out revealing her soul, her conscience the other day.  She actually used language which shows she knows--and has always known--that the unborn child is indeed a person, a human being.  

In uttering these words she condemned herself and all the pro-abortion lobby.  In response she was condemned by that lobby for her inappropriate vocabulary.  The pro-abortion folks were forced to reveal what vocabulary is acceptable, and what is not.  It demonstrates that the pro-abortion lobby are propagandists of the worst kind.  Only the politically correct, approved lexicon of words may be used.

Finally, Clinton also provoked those opposed to abortion.  She condemned herself.  She was condemned by the abortionists.  She was condemned by the stalwarts fighting against the horror.  It was a genuine trifecta moment.

Daily Devotional

What It Means to Pray for Your Enemy

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44)

John Piper

Prayer for your enemies is one of the deepest forms of love, because it means that you have to really want that something good happen to them.

You might do nice things for your enemy without any genuine desire that things go well with them. But prayer for them is in the presence of God who knows your heart, and prayer is interceding with God on their behalf.

It may be for their conversion. It may be for their repentance. It may be that they would be awakened to the enmity in their hearts. It may be that they will be stopped in their downward spiral of sin, even if it takes disease or calamity to do it. But the prayer Jesus has in mind here is always for their good.

This is what Jesus did as he hung on the cross:

“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

And it's what Stephen did as he was being stoned:

Falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!” (Acts 7:60)

Jesus is calling us not just to do good things for our enemy, like greeting them and helping supply their needs; he is also calling us to want their best, and to express those wants in prayers when the enemy is nowhere around.

Our hearts should want their salvation and want their presence in heaven and want their eternal happiness. So we pray like the apostle Paul for the Jewish people, many of whom made life very hard for Paul,

My heart's desire and prayer to God is for their salvation. (Romans 10:1)

Donald Trump's Embarrassing Reveal

The Great Pretender

One of the reasons Trump has appealed to "straight talking, straight shootin'" conservatives is that he appears fearless.  He tells the truth as he sees it.  He shoots from the mouth and the hip.  He doesn't care who he offends.  To change the metaphor, Trump is the great commander who shouts, "Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes."

At least that's why a lot of mid-America likes him, we suspect.  If so, what on earth are we to make of this interchange with   “Face the Nation” host, John Dickerson of CBS News.

Climate Change Deniers Are an Evil Dastardly Lot

Big Oil Conspiracy


Breitbart London
James Delingpole

Rajendra Pachauri, the disgraced former head of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), has produced an ingenious defence against the sexual harassment charges he is now facing in an Indian court.

It turns out that, no he didn’t pester, bombard with emails, and grope the attractive female employee at his TERI climate research institute.  Rather, the whole thing is the result of an evil conspiracy by climate change sceptics and right-wing think tanks, funded by Big Oil. Apparently they hacked into all his computer accounts and, without his knowledge, sent a series of flirtatious emails and love poems to his unnamed accuser.
>
Pachauri was given generous space to make these extravagant claims by John Vidal, one of the numerous environment editors who works at the Guardian – in this case its Sunday edition the Observer – and who for years has uncritically championed the world-saving, Nobel-prize-winning work down by the IPCC.

He says: “I have repeatedly received death threats anonymously over the years. In recent months I have received these threats over the telephone from numbers that were valid when East Germany was a nation. I am not sure how these people have numbers pertaining to that defunct international code.” He says he suspects strongly, but cannot prove, that there has been a coordinated attempt to destroy him professionally and personally and that money may also be involved. Ever since he was elected to lead the IPCC in 2002, he says the IPCC has been vilified by climate sceptics and rightwing free-market thinktanks, often known to have been funded by powerful fossil-fuel interests.

Daily Devotional

Someday Riding Bareback

To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body?

These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world- shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else— since He has retained His own charger—should we accompany Him?

From Miracles
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Copyright 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Revised 1960, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

The Great Urban Legend Of Our Time

Evidentialism is the doctrine that demands everything one believes must be adequately grounded upon evidence. If no evidence, then belief is irrational.  Whenever we come across such sweeping, grandiose assertions, we find ourselves driven to ask, "By what evidence does that assertion hold true?"  Pray, what is the evidence for evidentialism?  Eerrrr.  Ummmm.  More time, please.

David Berlinski is on to it when he writes:

It is wrong, the nineteenth-century British mathematician W.K. Clifford affirmed, "always, everywhere, and for anyone, to  believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  I am guessing that Clifford believed what he wrote, but what evidence he had for his belief, he did not say.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.  (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 47.]

Fast forward to the Great Collider in Europe.   Naturally, this Collider is most famous because it is the biggest.  Twenty-seven kilometers of underground tunnel to house the great beast--all in an effort to research the tiniest particles in matter.  The biggest to find the smallest.  Looking for evidence.  So that the evidentialist can believe.   But what constitutes evidence?  Instantly, the "picture" becomes exponentially more complex, and less evidential, we may say.

Letter From America (About the Village Idiot)

It’s Time for Conservatives to Blackball Donald Trump

National Review Online
By Ian Tuttle


And just like that, the Republican presidential contest has veered into Todd Akin territory.
In a taped Wisconsin townhall with MSNBC voters, set to air Wednesday evening, Donald Trump says that, if abortion becomes illegal in the United States, the mother involved should be subject to “some form of punishment.”

Here’s the video:



Let me start here, for form’s sake: There is a valid philosophical question here. If you carry out the logic of the pro-life position, what should it entail, legally? As it happens, several leading abortion opponents addressed this question here at National Review in a 2007 symposium. If you’re looking for substantive considerations of this question, give it a read.

But while people are sure to spill gallons of ink on that question, thanks to Trump, it’s irrelevant — because Trump doesn’t mean what he said. Donald Trump has no considered opinion about what should happen in the hypothetical situation in which abortion is completely outlawed. He’s never given it a moment’s thought. Read the transcript of his exchange with Matthews. He’s not substantively “right” or “wrong.” He’s utterly and completely incoherent.

Daily Devotional

Honest Naming

"Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation; and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness."

Psalm 51:14

Charles H. Spurgeon

In this solemn confession, it is pleasing to observe that David plainly names his sin. He does not call it manslaughter, nor speak of it as an imprudence by which an unfortunate accident occurred to a worthy man, but he calls it by its true name, bloodguiltiness. He did not actually kill the husband of Bathsheba; but still it was planned in David's heart that Uriah should be slain, and he was before the Lord his murderer.

Learn in confession to be honest with God. Do not give fair names to foul sins; call them what you will, they will smell no sweeter. What God sees them to be, that do you labour to feel them to be; and with all openness of heart acknowledge their real character. Observe, that David was evidently oppressed with the heinousness of his sin. It is easy to use words, but it is difficult to feel their meaning. The fifty-first Psalm is the photograph of a contrite spirit. Let us seek after the like brokenness of heart; for however excellent our words may be, if our heart is not conscious of the hell-deservingness of sin, we cannot expect to find forgiveness.

Our text has in it an earnest prayer--it is addressed to the God of salvation. It is his prerogative to forgive; it is his very name and office to save those who seek his face. Better still, the text calls him the God of my salvation. Yes, blessed be his name, while I am yet going to him through Jesus' blood, I can rejoice in the God of my salvation.

The psalmist ends with a commendable vow: if God will deliver him he will sing--nay, more, he will "sing aloud." Who can sing in any other style of such a mercy as this! But note the subject of the song--"Thy righteousness." We must sing of the finished work of a precious Saviour; and he who knows most of forgiving love will sing the loudest.

Hoping the Best, Fearing the Worst

Let's Hope We are Proven Wrong

April 1st has come and gone.  And with it, a new government was sworn in Myanmar.  Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy ("NLD") and national heroine, saw an old friend and confidante become President of Myanmar.  Of course Suu Kyi could not, herself, become president because of a characteristic manipulation by the military masters who made a rule (deliberately to block Suu Kyi from becoming President).

Suu Kyi endured decades of house arrest and harassment by military rulers without ever giving up on her nonviolent campaign to unseat them. The constitutional clause that denied her the presidency excludes anyone from the position who has a foreign spouse or child. Suu Kyi's two sons are British, as was her late husband. The clause is widely seen as having been written by the military with Suu Kyi in mind. [NZ Herald]

Despite these, and other tricks, the NLD won 95% support in recent elections.  The challenges facing the new government are prodigious.  Moreover, the military dictatorship has reserved much control for itself.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Biblical Case Against the Minimum Wage

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

As if we needed more evidence, we now have additional evidence that the progressive uplifters of our society are impervious to the claims of evidence. In support of this claim, I would simply point to the fact that California is now poised to join other economic illiterates in adopting a $15 an hour minimum wage.

Those advocating this are either ignorant or cruel. Since this is being done in the name of the poor, I would like to begin by noting that ignorant people can’t help the poor, and the cruel people won’t. The ignorant uplifters actually think that such measures will actually result in extra cash for low-wage works, and such advocates simply need to be escorted to a back room where they can lie down for a bit. The cruel know very well that this won’t help the poor, but rather will hurt them. But that is a small price to pay for the additional power they will acquire in harassing, controlling, and destroying the small business owners who actually supply jobs to the poor.

So I don’t keep you in suspense, here is the biblical case against the minimum wage. “Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him” (Prov. 14:31).

The principal engine of oppression against the poor is fraud.

Entirely Predictable

A New Industry

New Zealand has a grandiose scheme.  It was dreamed up by the former co-leader of the Maori Party, Tariana Turia.  It was supported by the health Nazi's and a legion of do-gooders.  The scheme is to make New Zealand "smoke free" by 2025.  

The key weapon to achieve this idealistic goal is tax.  The government is raising taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products regularly.  This, naturally enough, increases the price of the product in the shops.  Higher price.  Lower demand.  A "smoke free" future beckons.

But, once again, the central planners have overlooked the unintended consequences.  Cigarettes are now so expensive they serve as a hard currency substitute.  Robberies--increasingly forceful and violent--where the object is to grab as many cigarette packets as possible are on the rise.  Why?  Because there is a ready market for them.  They are easy to convert to cash.

The days of being able to swagger into a local dairy and rob the till are fast becoming long gone.  Eftpos and other forms of electronic purchasing has meant that the average contents of the till are reducing by the week.  Not much in there to rob.  But ciggies are becoming an alternative currency--and will become more and more so as the price continues to rise.

It's Mad, Mad, Mad World

The Greatest-Ever Conspiracy Against Humans

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

Climate change is the biggest scam in the history of the world – a $1.5 trillion-a-year conspiracy against the taxpayer, every cent, penny and centime of which ends in the pockets of the wrong kind of people, none of which goes towards a cause remotely worth funding, all of it a complete and utter waste.

Here is an edited version of a speech on this subject I gave last week to the World Taxpayers’ Associations in Berlin.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen; Guten Abend meine Damen und Herren. May I say how grateful I am to Staffan Wennberg and the World Taxpayers Associations for inviting me to speak in Berlin. This is my first time here since 1978.

I was a schoolboy then. I learned my first German: “Was trinken wir? Schultheiss Bier.” Now I’m grown up and married with children even older than I was then. Yesterday I went on a tour and I couldn’t help noticing there seem to have been one or two changes.

When I last came I have to confess that the Wall was the highlight of my trip. So echt Cold War. So Spy Who Came In From The Cold!   I remember taking the U-bahn underneath the wall, passing through the East German side, and seeing empty grey platforms where the train never stopped, and lurking in the shadows grim looking guards with machine guns.

And you know how they say: “If you’re not a communist by the time you’re 18 then you’re heartless and if you’re not a capitalist by the time you’re 40 then you’re brainless.”?   Well I’m afraid I skipped that first stage and went straight to the second. All it took was that little glimpse of East Germany – a place so horrible that if you tried to escape they would shoot you with machine guns – to give me an abiding preference for free markets. Small Government. And low taxes.

Daily Devotional

What Binds the Hands of Love

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. (Colossians 1:3–5)

John Piper

The problem with the church today is not that there are too many people who are passionately in love with heaven. The problem is not that professing Christians are retreating from the world, spending half their days reading Scripture and the other half singing about their pleasures in God all the while indifferent to the needs of the world.

The problem is that professing Christians are spending ten minutes reading Scripture and then half their day making money and the other half enjoying and repairing what they spend it on.

It is not heavenly-mindedness that hinders love. It is worldly-mindedness that hinders love, even when it is disguised by a religious routine on the weekend.

Where is the person whose heart is so passionately in love with the promised glory of heaven that he feels like an exile and a sojourner on the earth? Where is the person who has so tasted the beauty of the age to come that the diamonds of the world look like marbles, and the entertainment of the world is empty, and the moral causes of the world are too small because they have no view to eternity? Where is this person?

He is not in bondage to the Internet or eating or sleeping or drinking or partying or fishing or sailing or putzing around. He is a free man in a foreign land. And his one question is this: How can I maximize my enjoyment of God for all eternity while I am an exile on this earth? And his answer is always the same: by doing the labors of love.

Only one thing satisfies the heart whose treasure is in heaven: doing the works of heaven. And heaven is a world of love!

It is not the cords of heaven that bind the hands of love. It is the love of money and leisure and comfort and praise — these are the cords that bind the hands of love. And the power to sever these cords is Christian hope.

I say it again with all the conviction that lies within me: it is not heavenly-mindedness that hinders love on this earth. It is worldly-mindedness. And therefore the great fountain of love is the powerful, freeing confidence of Christian hope.

The West's Guilt Complex

Brother Luuuuve At Work

It is not an exaggeration to assert that the West is living in denial with respect to Islam.  Our leaders stock-in-trade is to see Islam through the rose-tinted glasses of a weird universalistic humanitarianism.  This cluster of beliefs deserves months on the psychiatrist's couch.  Yet almost all Western politicians are afflicted with it.  The elites are afflicted with it.  The media is afflicted with it.

The base doctrines of this ideology are pretty simple.

First, all men are born free but are everywhere in chains.
Second, all men are born morally pure, but are everywhere corrupted.
Third, the West is guilty of enslaving and killing millions of human beings.
Fourth, evil amongst men results from their being treated badly (predominantly by the West).
Fifth, the existence of evil is intrinsically bound up with economic deprivation.
Sixth, the West's guilt will be assuaged by a universal love of all men (humanitarianism).

When applied to Islam, the thinking runs as follows:
Islam is an ideology born out of oppression and economic injustice.
Insofar as it has corrupt elements and beliefs, they have been caused by Western oppression.
Insofar as it has primitive--even violent--doctrines, they are indirectly the fault of the West.
When Islamic believers are loved by the West, they will convert to humanitarianism.

Politicians like Obama and Merkel are racked with guilt, insofar as they are Western and amongst the privileged elite.  They see themselves as part of the problem, the cause of modern human suffering.

The Failure of Never-Never Land

The Evolution Of Obama’s Middle East Fantasy

Six years ago, Obama had a vision of a 'new beginning' for Islam and the West. But he retreated when hard realities shattered his Middle East fantasy.

John Davidson
The Federalist

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces captured the city of Palmyra over the weekend thanks to heavy air support from Russian warplanes, dealing a blow to ISIS and strengthening Assad’s hold on power. Regime forces, with Russian support, are reported to be continuing the offensive to nearby ISIS-controlled cities. Meanwhile, Syrian opposition forces backed by the CIA and the Pentagon are fighting each other, and the number of U.S. troops deployed to Iraq has increased to about 5,000.

This is what President Obama’s Middle East foreign policy looks like today.


It’s a far cry from the peaceful vision Obama laid out in his 2009 Cairo speech. He spoke then of a “new beginning” for the Muslim world and the West, and the need to “act boldly in the years ahead” to face “shared challenges” in a globalized world. “When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean. When innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience,” Obama said to thunderous applause. “That is what it means to share this world in the twenty-first century.”

One wonders whether Obama thinks the death toll in Syria, now estimated to be at least 470,000, counts as a stain on our collective conscience.

Daily Devotional

On glory

C. S. Lewis

[And this brings me to] the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want?

Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.

That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of he door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.

From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in Words to Live By

The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Serfdom or Oz?

The Plight of the Welfare Beneficiary

New Zealand has tentatively introduced a "responsibility" policy with respect to (some) state beneficiaries.

A tough new policy that chops off welfare benefits for people with outstanding arrest warrants has netted more than 2400 cases since it came into force in July 2013.  The Ministry of Social Development says it suspended 22 NZ superannuation and veterans' pensions, and 2411 other benefits, in the first two and a half years of the new policy up to the end of last December. Suspensions have jumped from 75 a month in the first year of the new policy to 95 a month in the latest half-year. [NZ Herald]

Incidentally, we admire the reporter being right on the cutting edge of social commentary when he or she pronounces that this policy is tough.   One has an arrest warrant; one does not turn up and surrender to the police; state payments get cut until you do.  That's really, really tough.

The policy was part of a broader tightening of beneficiary obligations in July 2013 which also included drug tests for jobseekers and requirements for beneficiaries to enrol their children in preschool from age 3, ensure they attend school from age 5 or 6, enrol them with doctors and keep up with core health checks.

The approach being taken now is that welfare payments are part of a social contract.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Slut-Shaming and the Gospel of Grace

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

In a time when we no longer know what a man is, or what a woman is, it would seem to follow that we can no longer know what the perversions of these offices are. Among many other weirdnesses, we are so far gone that we no longer know what a slut is.

Societies and cultures disintegrate in complicated ways. The pathologies of decadence are built on lies, and lies are always complex. They don’t disentangle easily because they are designed to be tangled.

This is the position we currently find ourselves in, which means we need to be careful as we go. But the need to take care is not an argument for saying nothing because we are up against torrens calumniae, a torrent of slanderous lies. To say nothing is to acquiesce in being swept away, over the falls, and down to the rocky cauldron of nonsense far below. In fact, I think we are already down there, waiting for the ambulance.

Because I am going to argue for something here that will be considered completely outrageous by the sob sisters of feminism, I want to state the conclusion first before turning to any arguments for it. I want every reasonable person to see that every appropriate qualification is built into what I am saying.

Daily Devotional

Scourged In Our Place

"With his stripes we are healed."
Isaiah 53:5

Charles H. Spurgeon

Pilate delivered our Lord to the lictors to be scourged. The Roman scourge was a most dreadful instrument of torture. It was made of the sinews of oxen, and sharp bones were inter-twisted every here and there among the sinews; so that every time the lash came down these pieces of bone inflicted fearful laceration, and tore off the flesh from the bone. The Saviour was, no doubt, bound to the column, and thus beaten. He had been beaten before; but this of the Roman lictors was probably the most severe of his flagellations. My soul, stand here and weep over his poor stricken body.

Believer in Jesus, can you gaze upon him without tears, as he stands before you the mirror of agonizing love? He is at once fair as the lily for innocence, and red as the rose with the crimson of his own blood. As we feel the sure and blessed healing which his stripes have wrought in us, does not our heart melt at once with love and grief? If ever we have loved our Lord Jesus, surely we must feel that affection glowing now within our bosoms.

"See how the patient Jesus stands,
Insulted in his lowest case!
Sinners have bound the Almighty's hands,
And spit in their Creator's face.
With thorns his temples gor'd and gash'd
Send streams of blood from every part;
His back's with knotted scourges lash'd.
But sharper scourges tear his heart."

We would fain go to our chambers and weep; but since our business calls us away, we will first pray our Beloved to print the image of his bleeding self upon the tablets of our hearts all the day, and at nightfall we will return to commune with him, and sorrow that our sin should have cost him so dear.

What Religion is That?

Christianity of Course

A murderer has been arrested in Glasgow.  Police Scotland has labelled the murder a "religiously prejudiced" attack.  We have never heard that term used before, so please excuse our ignorance.  What religion, may we ask?  

The poor victim was Islamic.  Does the term "religious prejudice" indicate that the victim was a prejudiced man, and someone took umbrage and killed him.  Was the perpetrator, then, a Hindu, or a Christian or a Buddhist?

A 32-year-old man has been arrested after a Glasgow shopkeeper was killed in what Police Scotland are treating as a "religiously prejudiced" attack.  Asad Shah, 40, was found seriously injured in Minard Road, Shawlands, at about 21:05 GMT on Thursday. He died in hospital.

The incident happened hours after he apparently posted social media messages wishing his customers a happy Easter.  Police said both Mr Shah and the arrested man were Muslims.  [BBC News. Emphasis, ours.]

A few comments appear to be in order.  The perpetrator was a Muslim.  The victim was a Muslim.  So, it would appear to be a spat between a Sunni and a Shi'ite?  No, nothing like that, it would appear.  Not sectarian violence between rival denominations within the tent of Islam.

It seems that the "religiously prejudiced" attack took place after the murdered man, Asad Shah expressed good wishes to Christians at Easter.

Letter From America (About the European "Project")

Europe Needs To Get Serious About Radical Islam

To stop radical Islamic terrorism, Europeans will have to confront the contradictions at the heart of the European project. They will have to decide if the EU is a state, or not.

John Davidson

The Federalist

The latest news out of Brussels shows that Europe is not prepared to deal with radical Islam in its cities or ISIS cells across the continent. It also shows that to stop radical Islamic terrorism, Europeans will have to confront the contradictions at the heart of the European project.

The reported failures of Belgium’s intelligence agencies to date have been appalling. But given the country’s byzantine legal system and lax security, they have hardly been surprising. The latest news, however, is shocking. It appears the Brussels attacks might have been carried out by the same ISIS cell that struck Paris in November.

A Belgian judge in charge of the investigation into the Paris attacks issued an arrest warrant in December for Khalid el-Bakraoui, who blew himself up at a subway station near EU headquarters on Tuesday. Another man, Najim Laachraoui, may have built the explosive vests used last year in Paris. He was the second man who blew himself up Tuesday at the Brussels airport.  [Emphasis, ours.]

This news comes with the revelation that el-Bakraoui’s brother, Ibrahim, who also blew himself up at the airport, was detained in Turkey last summer and deported to the Netherlands with a warning to Belgian officials that he was a foreign terrorist fighter. Belgium did nothing, and allowed him back into the country. On Thursday, Koen Geens, Belgium’s justice minister, told reporters he had no idea that el-Bakraoui had been deported by Turkey.  [Emphasis, ours.]

Daily Devotional

As Sure As His Son

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

John Piper

God strips every pain of destructive power. You must believe this or you will not thrive, or perhaps even survive as a Christian, in the pressures and temptations of modern life.

There is so much pain, so many setbacks and discouragements, so many controversies and pressures. I do not know where I would turn if I did not believe that almighty God is taking every setback and every discouragement and every controversy and every pressure and every pain, and stripping it of its destructive power, and making it work for the enlargement of my joy in God.

The world is ours. Life is ours. Death is ours. God reigns so supremely on behalf of his elect that everything which faces us in a lifetime of obedience and ministry will be subdued by the mighty hand of God and made the servant of our holiness and our everlasting joy in God.

If God is for us, and if God is God, then it is true that nothing can succeed against us. He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will infallibly and freely with him give us all things — all things — the world, life, death, and God himself.

Romans 8:32 is a precious friend. The promise of God’s future grace is overwhelming. But all-important is the foundation. Here is a place to stand against all obstacles. God did not spare his own Son! How much more, then, will he spare no effort to give me all that Christ died to purchase — all things, all good?

It is as sure as the certainty that he loved his Son!

Christianophobia

The Bible is to Blame

One of the fascinating aspects of public argument is that over time the truth often wills out.   And so it appears to be with the issue of homosexuality.  Finally, some homosexual advocates are confirming what Christians have argued all along: the Bible condemns homosexual beliefs, thoughts, and practices.

For a while the debate was muddied by some fellow travellers arguing that the Bible's condemnation upon homosexuality was not universal.  There were a variety of views proffered in the Scriptures on the matter, we were told.  Moreover, even if some passages condemned homosexuality, other teachings were "higher"--such as the command to love one's neighbour as oneself.  That command meant that one may not condemn homosexual ideology and practice, because after all that's who my neighbour is.  Just as one could not condemn my neighbour because he was of a certain race, so the higher command to love my neighbour forbade condemning him because he was homosexual.

But over time these equivocations wear thin.

A Rare Occurrence

Income For All Entails More Bad Than Good

. . . A NZ Herald Editorial, in which we find ourselves in agreement

The Labour Party appears to be considering a radical new system of social welfare. It would provide everybody with a "universal basic income" from taxation regardless of a person's wealth or ordinary income. People earning more than a moderate income would return their universal payment in tax - probably a great deal of tax. The scheme was outlined to Labour's "future of work" conference just before Easter by a British advocate, Professor Guy Standing. Labour's finance spokesman Grant Robertson says support for the idea is not confined to the political left, pointing out it has also been proposed by economist Gareth Morgan.

Mr Morgan entertains many ideas. The pedigree of this one is certainly left-wing.

Daily Devotional

Restoration of Original And Unfolded Glory

C. S. Lewis

“We know not what we shall be”; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Labour's Follies

The Descendants of Karl Marx Are Alive, But Unwell

Leftist dogma asserts that private property is a form of theft.  The only legitimate owner of everything is "the people", who are represented by the State.  Ergo, the only legitimate owner of all property is the State.  Any private property is temporarily lent by the State to the individual.  The government owns all.

We have had enough collective experience over the past one hundred and fifty years or so to test this idea out.  It has always ended up in grinding poverty for millions upon millions of people, coupled with exorbitant wealth and power held by the officers of the State.  Ethically the idea of universal State ownership of all property is a direct assault on the Eighth Commandment--you shall not steal.  An ideology of universal state title to all property is wicked to the core.

Most leftists are pragmatic realists--at least in the West.  While believing in principle that the State owns all property, they are prepared to tolerate private property ownership for this or that--provided the State maintains the tyrannical power to step in at any time and expropriate private property for its own nefarious purposes.  It's justification is that the wealth of the individual in reality belongs to the People (aka, the State).

It is this ideology which underlies the idea, currently being toyed with by the Labour Party in New Zealand, of a universal income for all adults.