The Smallest Is Not the Simplest

More Time, Please

We have made reference to the discombobulation taking place in the Academy over the speculative theories of Evolutionism.  No-one takes Darwinism seriously any more.  OK--that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the greatest advocates for it these days are more likely to be non-scientists, publicists, politicians or media starlets [using the term in a gender neutral sense.]

The Chattering Classes find comfort and solace in continuing to embrace Evolutionism: scientists not so much.  One reason for the scientific discomfort arises out of the labs where electron microscopes are deployed to investigate living cells.  Electron microscopes represent a technological advance, allowing researchers to study heretofore hidden aspects of living cells.  It has produced an entirely new scientific discipline: microbiology.

The Evolutionist paradigm has (allegedly) primitive lifeforms being simple and basic.  As chance does its wondrous work, eventually the primitive life form becomes more and more complex.  Higher life forms self-evolve into being.  Amazing! said the elephant.  This just-so story, repeated endlessly and illustrated with sparkling pictures of amoeba evolving into glorious racing horses, has to be most certainly true, because it looks so marvellous, glorious, and grand.  It turns out it's nothing more than a fairy story.  But in previous generations scientists embraced it with all the fervour of religious devotees.  Besides, it helped them find work.

Now the disciplines and discoveries of micro-biology have exploded the myths.

In Love With Death

Suicide: The Next Civil Rights Frontier

Only someone tone-deaf to what’s going on in culture will fail to understand how we’re only a few logical steps away from suicide being an act of personal expression.

By Peter Burfeind
The Federalist

One staple of conservative conversation these days is the parlor game of cultural prognostication: What will the lunatics come up with next?

We’ve only tapped the surface of sexual deviancy, so God only knows what’s in store for us there. Diaper-wearing men diagnosed—back when the notion of “disordered behavior” meant something—with paraphilic infantilism? “Dommes” walking their leather-clad coprophiliac slaves on a leash? (I saw an article entitled, “Coprophilia: Symptom, Cause and Treatment” at a website on depression. I thought, “Awww, how cute; so 2012.”)

After last summer’s gay marriage ruling coupled with this year’s transgendered march through the institutions, you can only imagine the flavors of sadomasochistic fetishism lining up to take their turn at the bat. The natural response of “eww” that used to guide social behavior is a microagression, so it’s only a matter of time.

Identity holds a lot of promise for potential wackiness.

Daily Devotional

On Obedience

C.S. Lewis

In obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward and returns.

From The Problem of Pain
Compiled in Words to Live By

The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by 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.

The Layman's Koran

If You Fear Your Wife is Disobedient . . . 

Sura 4 is a long rambling chapter in the Koran, although it bears the title "Women".  At 4.34 we read a "money quotation" which explains so much of Islamic society, social organisation, and jurisprudence.

Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the others, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them.  Good women are obedient.  They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them.  As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.  Then if they obey you, take no further action against them.  Allah is high, supreme.

 The Islamic doctrine of women being inferior to men is grounded in their respective being-in-itself.   Allah made the one superior, the other inferior.  The authority of men over women is grounded in one gender being superior in being than the other.  Then, to this ontological distinction, making males superior to females, is added an additional (economic) justification of male superiority--filthy lucre.  Men spend their wealth maintaining women, so women owe their obedience to men.  Like a slaves.

Daily Devotional

On the Holy Spirit

C. S. Lewis

It is quite right that you should feel that “something terrific” has happened to you (It has) and be “all glowy.” Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean, it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be most operative when you can feel it least.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Words to Live By

The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by 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.

Just a Few More Years Needed

Monopoly Busting Is a Great Calling

If New Zealand charter schools are afforded another six years of existence, we predict that the charter school programme in this country will likely never be shut down.  Unfortunately that is what presently hangs over the heads of the fledgling charter schools in this country because of luddite politicians and their political masters.  

The government schools and education system is controlled by teacher unions.  It is not too much an exaggeration to say that before the Minister of Education can be excused to visit the latrine he/she has to seek permission from the unions.  The teacher unions of course are interested in one thing, and one thing only--protection of their monopolistic patch.  Naturally, the union functionaries couch the matter in different terms.  They speak about quality education, and superior and advanced schools--but in the union view, superior schools can only exist and continue if they are union controlled.  There are no other kinds of schools to be permitted.  Every other kind is a threat, and must be stomped on.

The teacher unions have huge influence over the Labour Party.  That party, along with its pet poodle, the Green Party, has declared that when control of Parliament is achieved, all charter schools will be shut down.

But charter schools by and large, few though they be, are doing an excellent job.

Letter From the UK (About Something Smelly)

Jailed... For a Very Odd Non-crime 

Peter Hitchens
The Daily Mail

In the same way that we have to allow free speech to those we despise, we must be most careful to ensure justice for those who are different from us, and with whom we can’t easily sympathise.

So a nasty shiver ran up and down my spine when I saw that Lorna Moore, a convert to Islam who married a Muslim, has been locked up for a very odd offence.  In fact, I know of no other offence like it in English law. This young mother has been imprisoned for not informing on her husband.


I’ve yet to see any conclusive proof that she actually knew he was planning to join a terror group. Somehow or other, a return ticket to Majorca was taken as evidence that she was planning to run away to Syria with a husband she loathes.

And my English heart revolts at the idea of a wife being forced by law to inform on her husband. This is sinister, totalitarian stuff, alien to everything we stand for.

Those who drafted the 2000 Terrorism Act should be ashamed of enacting it. Can they have meant to lock up this person, so undangerous that she was allowed to be out on bail for three months between conviction and sentence?

Will it be children next, snatched into custody for not sneaking to the police about their parents’ conversations? This reminds me of the nauseating cult of Pavlik Morozov, whom Soviet children were taught to revere because he reported his father to the secret police.

There used to be a statue of this little monster (who was promptly and understandably murdered by his grandfather) in the middle of Moscow.   But while even Vladimir Putin doesn’t encourage such things nowadays, we in Britain are moving towards the all-powerful state, on the excuse of combating terror.

As it happens, Lorna Moore had every reason to do her husband harm if she had wanted to. She went into the witness box (a dangerous thing for a guilty person to do) to say convincingly that she hates her husband, who was given to shoving her head down the lavatory.  To make the matter even more odd, the husband involved hasn’t actually been convicted of doing the thing his wife didn’t tell the police about.

Indeed, he has sent an email to British media saying he isn’t actually in Syria, but in Turkey. Are the rest of us truly free when people can be locked up for such things? I don’t feel so.

Daily Devotional

Faith for the Impossible

He grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. (Romans 4:20–21)

John Piper

Paul has in mind a special reason why faith glorifies God’s future grace. Simply put, the reason is that this God-glorifying faith is a future-oriented confidence in God’s integrity and power and wisdom to follow through on all his promises.

Paul illustrates this faith with Abraham’s response to the promise of God: that he would be the father of many nations (Romans 4:18). “In hope he believed against hope,” that is, he had faith in the future grace of God’s promise.

He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. (Romans 4:19–21)

The faith of Abraham was a faith in the promise of God to make him the father of many nations. This faith glorified God because it called attention to all the resources of God that would be required to fulfill it.

Abraham was too old to have children, and Sarah was barren. Not only that: How do you turn a son or two into “many nations,” which God said Abraham would be the father of? It all seemed totally impossible.

Therefore Abraham’s faith glorified God by being fully assured that he could and would do the impossible.

Tangled Webs

A Kingdom Truly of This World

One of the more interesting questions facing us today is whether the violent struggles between Islamic powers is intrinsic to Islam and Islamic civilisation, or whether it is a recent and temporary phenomenon.  

Efraim Karsh argues that Islam has always had imperial ambitions--right from the very beginning. World-wide empire was its heart and soul.  But, at the same time, it has never been able to escape internecine rivalry and turbulence.  In this light, what we observe today regarding deadly warfare between Shi'ite and Sunni, Alawite and ISIS, is the norm.

He writes:

[Muhammad] tapped into the Middle East's millenarian legacy and ensured its perpetuation for many centuries to come.  From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of never quiescent imperialist dreams.

Hypocritical Soul Searching

Moko's Father Conspicuous By His Absence

Ewen McQueen:
NZ Herald

When young Moko was murdered in all senses of that word, except in NZ law, the country was outraged.  It still is.  Ewen McQueen, however, wonders why there has been no reference to the child's father.




The court has reached its verdict. The marchers have gone home. The politicians and media have done their usual hypocritical hand-wringing. But the question remains - where was Moko's dad?

A father is supposed to be there to protect his children. A father is supposed to be there to help their mother look after the family. A father is supposed to provide for and love his family.

So where was Moko's dad? We have no idea. We have no idea because the question was never asked. It never is. In all the national breast-beating that happens whenever such a tragedy occurs, the real issue is never addressed. Why are so many children left without the care of a natural father? Why have we allowed a relationship culture to become embedded which accepts as normal the regular dropping in and out of relationships and frequent changing of partners? How is this supposed to build strong and loving families?

These are the questions that should be asked. But instead the focus is always on the failure of social agencies, the need for more education or awareness campaigns, tougher sentences or more money to be spent co-ordinating ever more welfare programmes.

Daily Devotional

No Menial Labour

"These were potters, and those that dwelt among plants and hedges: there they dwelt with the king for his work."  1 Chronicles 4:23

Charles H. Spurgeon

Potters were not the very highest grade of workers, but "the king" needed potters, and therefore they were in royal service, although the material upon which they worked was nothing but clay. We, too, may be engaged in the most menial part of the Lord's work, but it is a great privilege to do anything for "the king"; and therefore we will abide in our calling, hoping that, "although we have lien among the pots, yet shall we be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold."

The text tells us of those who dwelt among plants and hedges, having rough, rustic, hedging and ditching work to do. They may have desired to live in the city, amid its life, society, and refinement, but they kept their appointed places, for they also were doing the king's work. The place of our habitation is fixed, and we are not to remove from it out of whim and caprice, but seek to serve the Lord in it, by being a blessing to those among whom we reside.

These potters and gardeners had royal company, for they dwelt "with the king" and although among hedges and plants, they dwelt with the king there. No lawful place, or gracious occupation, however mean, can debar us from communion with our divine Lord. In visiting hovels, swarming lodging-houses, workhouses, or jails, we may go with the king. In all works of faith we may count upon Jesus' fellowship. It is when we are in his work that we may reckon upon his smile.

Ye unknown workers who are occupied for your Lord amid the dirt and wretchedness of the lowest of the low, be of good cheer, for jewels have been found upon dunghills ere now, earthen pots have been filled with heavenly treasure, and ill weeds have been transformed into precious flowers. Dwell ye with the King for his work, and when he writes his chronicles your name shall be recorded.

Vast Edifices of Unbelief Are Crumbling to Powder

Useful Idiots

All Unbelieving thought ultimately operates in vicious circles.  Post-modern philosophers and theorists have done us great service in pointing this out.  The Modern era has made its fortune in the world by both assuming and asserting that human reason is both objective and definitive.  We call this view Rationalism, because it posits the ultimacy of human reason.

Man is the master of all things, and reason rules them all.  Gone is God, revelation, miracles, the supernatural.  None pass the bar of human reason.  None are rational.  They are all myths and vain imaginations of the primitive, untutored mind.  Reason is sovereign.

Unfortunately, this is no longer tenable--even amongst Unbelievers.  Reason now sits as an emperor unclothed.  Enter the post-modernist who irritatingly points out that every rationalist clutches to his bosom a cluster of pre-commitments, assumptions, and values which cannot be established by reason.  The most obvious is the pre-commitment that human reason is the ultimate authority in the universe--a belief that can only be propounded, propagated, and argued for by recourse to reason.  In other words, the reasoning is circular.  It assumes what it needs to prove, and it "proves" by resorting to what it has assumed.

J. Judd Owen, professor of political science at Emory University, has felt this attack upon rationalism keenly.

Letter From the UK (About Baloney)

Nutrition 'Experts' Are Stuffing Us Full of Low-cal Poison


Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday

Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words.  I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion.  Fat doesn’t make you fat. Almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong, says Peter Hitchens

This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes.  Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.

He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse.

Daily Devotional

Vanished

C. S. Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

From A Grief Observed
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

A Grief Observed. Copyright © 1961 by N. W. Clerk, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Preface by Douglas H. Gresham copyright © 1994 by Douglas H. Gresham. 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.

Don't Confuse Us With the Facts

Tiresome Vacuous Canards

The book of Ecclesiastes says, "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.".  [Ecclesiastes 4:9-12]

This teaching is pretty much self-evident, the lameness of committees notwithstanding.  There is safety, strength, protection, and power in numbers.  Since the truth is self-evident what madness has persuaded our culture that sole parenting is OK as a model?  What convinced the Chattering classes, the authorities, the government, the academics, the know-it-alls that one person trying to bring up children will do as well as, or in many cases, better than two adults living with their children?

The downstream effects of marriages breaking apart are legion.  Most of them are bad, or less than ideal.  Therefore, it is no surprise that a recent piece fingers sole parenting as a major cause of child poverty (one of our perennial bugbears in New Zealand).

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About The Essence of Government)

The Most Important Branch of Government

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The foundation of every form of free government—whether in the family, or in civil affairs, or in the government of the church—is self-government. If the people do not have self-control, then you may depend upon it that they will be controlled by outside forces.

It is easy to lament despotism when it pinches, when the taxes are due, when the regulations are onerous. When Pharaoh demands the bricks but supplies no straw, all the slaves lament their slavery. Whenever the bills come due, the whole world is libertarian.

So we need to place two teachings from Scripture side by side. The first is that liberty is the work of the Spirit of God. “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17). And the second passage is this: “But the fruit of the Spirit is . . . self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23). One of the central instruments the Holy Spirit uses to bring about true liberty is by freeing the slaves of immorality from their immorality. He strikes off their chains. But the hymn writer knows what necessarily results from that. I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

A generation of slaves to sin cannot be free.

Daily Devotional

Thundering Words

"Thou hatest wickedness."  Psalm 45:7

Charles H. Spurgeon

"Be ye angry, and sin not." There can hardly be goodness in a man if he be not angry at sin; he who loves truth must hate every false way. How our Lord Jesus hated it when the temptation came! Thrice it assailed him in different forms, but ever he met it with, "Get thee behind me, Satan."

He hated it in others; none the less fervently because he showed his hate oftener in tears of pity than in words of rebuke; yet what language could be more stern, more Elijah-like, than the words, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer." He hated wickedness, so much that he bled to wound it to the heart; he died that it might die; he was buried that he might bury it in his tomb; and he rose that he might forever trample it beneath his feet. Christ is in the Gospel, and that Gospel is opposed to wickedness in every shape.

Wickedness arrays itself in fair garments, and imitates the language of holiness; but the precepts of Jesus, like his famous scourge of small cords, chase it out of the temple, and will not tolerate it in the Church. So, too, in the heart where Jesus reigns, what war there is between Christ and Belial! And when our Redeemer shall come to be our Judge, those thundering words, "Depart, ye cursed" which are, indeed, but a prolongation of his life-teaching concerning sin, shall manifest his abhorrence of iniquity.

As warm as is his love to sinners, so hot is his hatred of sin; as perfect as is his righteousness, so complete shall be the destruction of every form of wickedness. O thou glorious champion of right, and destroyer of wrong, for this cause hath God, even thy God, anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

Rampant Intolerance in Academia

Unbelief Does Not Like Competition

An op-ed piece appeared recently in the NY Times declaiming the overwhelming prejudice against conservative academics that bubbles away in the ivory towers of the United States.  Nicholas Kristof reveals the extent of the problem.

A Confession of Liberal Intolerance

Nicholas Kristof
New York Times

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.  O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.  “Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.  

The extent of the prejudice does not surprise us in the slightest.

Letter To Establishmentarians (Run Your Colours Up the Mast Now)

Why ‘Hillary Is Even Worse’ Doesn’t Cut It

By Charles Murray

National Review Online

I am part of the tiny fraction of the population that deals professionally in public policy from the right. In influence, we are all over the map, from talk-show hosts with audiences of millions (Limbaugh, Hannity) to politicians who directly shape policy (Ryan, McConnell) to academics who write technical papers read exclusively by their peers. We have been dubbed the “Republican Establishment” during this campaign season — bemusing to those like me who have trivial influence and are not even Republicans — but I’ll use Establishmentarians as a convenient label for who we are. This note is addressed to my fellow Establishmentarians, from the Hannities and Ryans to my fellow ink-stained wretches.

Barring a startling turn of events, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. There are good reasons to question his fitness to occupy the presidency, because of both his policy positions and for reasons of character. The standard response among the Establishmentarians who have announced they will vote for Trump is that “Hillary is even worse.” That’s acceptable for people whose only obligation is to cast a vote. Having to choose the lesser of two evils is common in American voting booths. But that shouldn’t be good enough for Establishmentarians.

If we’re going to presume to lecture others about public policy and good governance — as all of us have made a career of doing in one way or another — we need to put our views about Donald Trump on the table now, before the nomination and election. That’s especially true of the False Priests and the Closet #NeverTrumpers — labels that I owe to Jonah Goldberg.

Daily Devotional

When God Goes Against His Will

But they would not listen to the voice of their father, for the Lord desired to put them to death. (1 Samuel 2:25)

John Piper

There are three implications of this text for our lives.

1) It is possible to sin so long and so grievously that the Lord will not grant repentance.

That is why Paul said that after all our pleading and teaching, “God may grant them repentance” — not, “will grant them repentance” (2 Timothy 2:25). There is a “too late” in the life of sin. As it says of Esau in Hebrews 12:17, “He found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears.” He was forsaken; he could not repent.

This does not mean that those who truly repent even after a whole lifetime of sinning cannot be saved. They certainly can be, and will be! God is staggeringly merciful. Witness the thief on the cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

2) God may not permit a sinning person to do what is right.

“But they would not listen to the voice of their father, for the Lord desired to put them to death.” Listening to the voice of their father was the right thing to do. But they would not. Why? “For the Lord desired to put them to death.”

The reason given for why they did not obey their father was that God had other purposes for them, and had given them up to sinning and death. This shows that there are times when the will of God’s decree is different from the revealed will of God’s command.

3) Sometimes our prayers for God’s revealed will to be done will not be done because God has decreed something different for holy and wise purposes.

I suppose that Eli prayed for his sons to be changed. That is how he should have prayed. But God had decreed that Hophni and Phinehas not obey, but rather be slain.

When something like this happens (which we do not ordinarily know ahead of time) while we are crying out to God for change, the answer of God is not: “I don’t love you.” Rather the answer is: “I have wise and holy purposes in not overcoming this sin and not granting repentance. You do not see these purposes now. Trust me. I know what I am doing. I love you.”

Science is Anything But Disinterested In The Truth

Hah! We Fooled You

We have spoken of a paradigm shift possibly beginning to occur within the standard materialist view of the universe.  Scientists find themselves at the Osgiliath cross roads, scratching their heads, wondering which way to go.  They remain, however, strongly convinced and adamantly consensual on one quintessentially certain point: there is no way Christian cosmology can, would, or ever be true.

David Berlinski has a sparkling description of the cross roads.

"Scientists," the physicist Paul Davies has observed, "are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth--the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.  The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.  For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all to convenient 'coincidences' and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist.  Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal."  [Cited in David Berlinksi, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 110f.]

How to account or explain this?  What sophisticated theorems could be devised to confuse the average punter?   Aliens might prove useful.

Pomo's Universal Acid At Work

The End of Absolutes: America's New Moral Code

Research Releases in Culture & Media • May 25, 2016
Barna Group

Christian morality is being ushered out of American social structures and off the cultural main stage, leaving a vacuum in its place—and the broader culture is attempting to fill the void. New research from Barna reveals growing concern about the moral condition of the nation, even as many American adults admit they are uncertain about how to determine right from wrong. So what do Americans believe? Is truth relative or absolute? And do Christians see truth and morality in radically different ways from the broader public, or are they equally influenced by the growing tide of secularism and religious skepticism?

A majority of American adults across age group, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and political ideology expresses concern about the nation’s moral condition—eight in 10 overall (80%). The proportion is closer to nine in 10 among Elders (89%) and Boomers (87%), while about three-quarters of Gen-Xers (75%) and Millennials (74%) report concern. Similarly, practicing Christians (90%) are more likely than adults of no faith (67%) or those who identify with a religious faith other than Christianity (72%) to say they are concerned about the moral condition of the nation. Though measurable differences exist between population segments, moral concern is widespread across the demographic board.

Much less widespread, however, is consensus on morality itself. What is it based on? Where does it come from? How can someone know what to do when making moral decisions? According to a majority of American adults (57%), knowing what is right or wrong is a matter of personal experience.

Daily Devotional

Continually Renewed Shock

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK, whose wife had just died: On bereavement and grieving.

C. S. Lewis

3 December 1959

Dear Master,

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more. They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself. You know what cogent reason I have to feel with you: but I can feel for you too. I know that what you are facing must be worse than what I must shortly face myself, because your happiness has lasted so much longer and is therefore so much more intertwined with your whole life. As Scott said in like case, ‘What am I to do with that daily portion of my thoughts which has for so many years been hers?’

People talk as if grief were just a feeling—as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.

You are probably very exhausted physically. Hug that and all the little indulgences to which it entitles you. I think it is tiny little things which (next to the very greatest things) help most at such a time.

I have myself twice known, after a loss, a strange excited (but utterly un-spooky) sense of the person’s presence all about me. It may be a pure hallucination. But the fact that it always goes off after a few weeks proves nothing either way.

I wish I had known your wife better. But she has a bright place in my memory. . . . She will be very greatly missed—on her own account, quite apart from any sympathy with you—by every fellow of this College.

. . . I shall not be at the funeral. You can understand and forgive my desire, now, to spend every possible moment at home. Forgive me if I have said anything amiss in this letter. I am too much involved myself to practise any skill.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack

The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

In The Beginning

The Slippery Dance Floor 

Historical debates over beginnings and origins have proved fascinating.  Since the nineteenth century it is safe to say that the overwhelming consensus of scholarship and opinion has been to favour the naturalistic (materialistic) world view.  This has led to a cosmology wherein dwells time, space, matter, and energy alone.  Nothing else.

With these assumptions, the world and the cosmos, had to come into being naturally.  In other words, there is no creator.  A prevailing characteristic of this world view is the need of vast amounts of time in order for "natural processes" to produce the breathtaking complexity and size of the cosmos--namely, billions and billions and billions of years.  What is the latest count?  Sixty-five billion years?  [At this point, we make a confident prediction: within ten years from now the "settled" naturalistic scientific consensus will be engaged in a febrifacient re-dating the cosmos to be a hundred billion years or more.  What's a few billion years amongst friends, eh?]

A curiosity amidst the surging rise of naturalism has been the way so many Christians--both Christian institutions and individual believers--have rushed to accept the prevailing, emergent world view of naturalism and the pseudo-science which attends it.  They have sought to re-interpret the scriptures to "fit in with" the brazen, allegedly undisputed facts of the naturalistic paradigm.

One expects that the reason for this curiosity is the widespread, uncritical acceptance amongst Christians of the prevailing theory of fact--namely, the idea that scientific knowledge is objective, proven, and indisputable.

How a Trump Presidency Would Unfold

How Could a Trump Presidency Go Wrong? 

Let’s Count the Ways

A look at the possibilities, from the border Wall to the Supreme Court to Iran.

By Ben Shapiro
National Review Online

In 2008, then-senator Barack Obama announced in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Obama campaigned on supposed practicality and ad hoc politicking. This left his most cynical detractors shadowboxing at the leftist positions they knew that he actually held, even as the media and his supporters tut-tutted such catastrophic thinking.

Then, it turned out, Obama’s detractors were right.

Donald Trump may despise President Obama enough to question his origin of birth (he pulls all the girls’ pigtails, from Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz). But he mimics Obama’s tabula rasa campaign to perfection. He’s an ink blot. When Trump’s detractors point out that Trump has swiveled on every major campaign promise, every major issue, Trump supporters accuse them of going full Rohrshach in Watchmen: Every ink blot, they say, can’t be an image of an atrocity. Some, they say, must be butterflies and clouds.

What, they ask, could go so wrong in a Trump presidency? Here, then, is an attempt to realistically assess what a Trump presidency would look like. My biases are clear up front: I don’t trust Trump. I don’t trust his promises, because he has shown no willingness to hold to them. I don’t trust his ideology, because he proclaims that his guiding star is his own self-assurance. I trust Trump to be Trump: a man of convenience, a thinker of no great depth, a reactionary with no constitutional understanding and a willingness to maximize executive power.

Here we go.

A President Trump would indeed sign an executive order to build a wall with Mexico. After being informed by his advisers that such a wall would actually look more like sections of barrier punctuated by high-tech touch fences, Trump would also quietly concede — he would build the sections that resemble a wall, mostly for symbolic purposes. Trump would probably staff up Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but we’d see no mass deportations.

Daily Devotional

Give All Glory to Christ

"What is thy servant, that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?" 2 Samuel 9:8

Charles H. Spurgeon

If Mephibosheth was thus humbled by David's kindness, what shall we be in the presence of our gracious Lord? The more grace we have, the less we shall think of ourselves, for grace, like light, reveals our impurity. Eminent saints have scarcely known to what to compare themselves, their sense of unworthiness has been so clear and keen. "I am," says holy Rutherford, "a dry and withered branch, a piece of dead carcass, dry bones, and not able to step over a straw." In another place he writes, "Except as to open outbreakings, I want [lack] nothing of what Judas and Cain had."

The meanest objects in nature appear to the humbled mind to have a preference above itself, because they have never contracted sin: a dog may be greedy, fierce, or filthy, but it has no conscience to violate, no Holy Spirit to resist. A dog may be a worthless animal, and yet by a little kindness it is soon won to love its master, and is faithful unto death; but we forget the goodness of the Lord, and follow not at his call.

The term "dead dog" is the most expressive of all terms of contempt, but it is none too strong to express the self- abhorrence of instructed believers. They do not affect mock modesty, they mean what they say, they have weighed themselves in the balances of the sanctuary, and found out the vanity of their nature. At best, we are but clay, animated dust, mere walking hillocks; but viewed as sinners, we are monsters indeed. Let it be published in heaven as a wonder, that the Lord Jesus should set his heart's love upon such as we are.

Dust and ashes though we be, we must and will "magnify the exceeding greatness of his grace." Could not his heart find rest in heaven? Must he needs come to these tents of Kedar for a spouse, and choose a bride upon whom the sun had looked? O heavens and earth, break forth into a song, and give all glory to our sweet Lord Jesus.

New Zealand's Golden Era of Schooling

There's Comfort In Ticky-Tacky

It's not pleasant to be confronted with your own ignorance.  Nevertheless, it is said that confession is good for the soul.  We hope so.  

The other night we watched a NZ taxpayer funded documentary that had all the Trabantish air of superior breeding.  It was about the New Zealand government education system.  Now, we all know this behemoth to be a limping, wounded beast.  But that would be tolerable if the future of the beast looked better than the past.  Alas, some no-name documentary maker assured us not only that the beast was truly gangrenous, but that its glory days were long gone, never to return.

The glory days were the nineteen seventies, in case you missed it.  Well, we most certainly did.  As we mentioned, it is not easy to be confronted with one's own ignorance.

The documentary maker has apparently made dozens of the things--all of which were funded by the well-fleeced taxpayer, and all of which we thankfully missed.  But Bryan Bruce has a commanding screen presence.  He speaks with that avuncular air of a man comfortable in his role of Lord of the Manor, but nevertheless managing to convey an undertone of masterful, menaced authority.  He is not one to be contradicted.  The way he sees things is the way things infallibly are: why else would he be the aristocratic lord.

One blogger, Duncan Greive has had the temerity to offer up a critical review.  We hope his life insurance is up to date.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (Offering a Defense Against Wowsers)

Beyond the Pale Of Self-Respectability

On the Attempted Defenestration of Mablog Through the Overton Window

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

So then first, what is this Overton Window? That window, named after Joseph “Wiki” Overton — who coined the phrase — refers to the range of ideas that are palatable, thinkable, acceptable, or otherwise within the pale, when it comes to public discourse. Outside the window, you’re just a hate-filled weirdo. In the area of the curtains, you’re an extremist but they will still deal with you.

Now we live in unstable times, which means that the window moves around. Some powerful forces want this to represent a drastic cultural remodel, an extreme makeover, and so they want to put the window clear on the other side of the house now. Think about it. Five years ago, how many people even knew what transgenderism was? And yet now we must be seething with hatred because we don’t want some disturbed guy in a Minnie Pearl hat peeing in the same room as our five-year-old daughter.

Daily Devotional

Authentic vs. Phony Faith

Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await him. (Hebrews 9:28)

John Piper

The question before us all is: Are we included in the “many” whose sins he bore? And will we be saved by his coming “for salvation”?  The answer of Hebrews 9:28 is, “Yes,” if we are “eagerly awaiting him.” We can know that our sins are taken away and that we will be safe in the judgment if we trust Christ in such a way that it makes us eager for his coming.

There is a phony faith that claims to believe in Christ, but is only a fire insurance policy. Phony faith “believes” only to escape hell. It has no real desire for Christ. In fact, it would prefer it if he did not come, so that we can have as much of this world’s pleasures as possible. This shows that a heart is not with Christ, but with the world.

So the issue for us is: Do we eagerly long for the coming of Christ? Or do we want him to wait while our love affair with the world runs its course? That is the question that tests the authenticity of faith.

So let us be like the Corinthians who were “awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:7), and like the Philippians whose “citizenship was in heaven, from which also [they] eagerly waited for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20).

That’s the issue for us. Do we love his appearing? Or do we love the world and hope that his appearing will not interrupt our worldly plans? Eternity hangs on this question.

Battered and Broken

How Has It Come To This?

We have posted previously on the sad case of Alan Duff  here.  Alan is an evolutionist, a disciple of Richard Dawkins, and a mocker of the Son of God.  But contradictorily he is also a moralist.  He thinks that some things are right, and some are wrong.  Definitively so.  

For some reason Alan hasn't confronted his own inconsistency and confusion.  He has not realised that he is a walking, talking contradiction.  As the Apache would say, he speaks with a forked tongue.
Every so often Alan thinks and speaks as if there are absolute rights and wrongs.  He speaks with holy anger and passion.  No doubt tomorrow his left hand will remove what his right hand put forward today.  But that's a function of his spiritual blindness.

Alan has written a piece declaiming Maori violence--systemic family violence--in New Zealand.  We would honour him for his plain speaking, his high morality and principled stance--in these matters.  He is responding to the horrific case where two "care-givers" systematically beat a child to death over several days.  He writes:

Real Men Don't Beat Up Kids

Alan Duff
NZ Herald

We can't let Moko Rangitoheriri's death be forgotten - or be a vengeful mob storming the Taupo police cells to lynch Moko's evil killers.

One of many marches around the country took place in Lower Hutt and there were some brave men who spoke out. I quote Anaru Moke: "I was bashed myself. Who wasn't?" He says he's breaking the cycle with his own 11 children. He's a Mob member. Good on him for speaking out. Here's Star Olsen: "I knew I had to say something that was at the pit of my stomach. The hardest word for some Maori males to say is sorry." Including when they just helped torture and murder a child.

It's a waste of breath to scream that vile punishments should be inflicted on Tania Shailer, 26, and David Haerewa, 46. We'd just be drawn into an endless cycle of violence begetting more violence. But we Maori have to ask why we totally dominate statistics in the killing of more than 200 infants in the past two decades. Why us?