Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

On Its Last Leg, and Hopping Around

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, July 03, 2010

In the midst of a teetering secular society, with personal liberty rapidly eroding, to put forward the idea of a mere Christendom (as I am doing) is to invite fears of repressive regimes, religious intolerance, and so on. This is because we still love the name of liberty, but no longer understand what it is or where it comes from.

* * *

Secularism, as a civilization-shaping force, is on its last leg, and is hopping around. The issue is not how many guns we have, or what the GDP is, or any of those indicators. What matters is failure of nerve. Societies like ours go out with a whimper, not a bang, and the forty years before it flickers, blinks, and goes out will be forty years that virtually no one in that society understands. If they understood it, it wouldn't be happening to them.

* * *

Those who do understand what is happening will be easily dismissed as manifest kooks.

* * *

In a Darwinian society, the highest civic value has to be survival, and since we are talking about species, it has to be survival of the group. There is therefore no theoretical ground for our secularist rulers to value individual liberty. The true ground of individual liberty is the recognition that individuals will live forever, in a way that the current regime will not.

* * *

In order for genuine liberty to be extended to non-Christians, it is essential that non-Christians not be allowed to define genuine liberty. The blind should not lead the blind, as someone once taught us, and it is astonishing that even some Christians have been maneuvered into thinking that blind leadership can have any hope of keeping us on the road and out of the ditch.

* * *

The public square cannot be neutral. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar isn't. If Jesus is Lord, the liberties of those who don't believe in Him are far more secure than the liberties of everybody in the hands of a Caesar who answers to no one above him.

* * *

The liberties of the individual are too precious to be left in the hands of a civic agnosticism. To not know why you are extending liberties to the citizenry is to not know why you would be doing anything bad if you took them all away.

* * *

In Christian societies, overreach is a possibility. The Scriptures teach that men are sinners, and men will sin in Christian societies as well as in secular ones. But in secular societies, overreach is not a possibility, but rather a necessity, by definition. If there is no God above the state, then the state becomes god -- the point past which there is no appeal. If there is a God above the state, then hubris in high places will always be dealt with appropriately.

* * *

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. If the Spirit has been exiled, how can we still have what only He can give? How can we reject the Giver, and keep the gift? Those who puff themselves up and say that they can do this thing need to remember -- wisdom is always vindicated by her children.

Burial or Cremation?

Treating The Deceased Faithfully

David Jones, professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has an excellent article in the latest issue of JETS on the topic of cremation, entitled To Bury or Burn? Toward an Ethic of Cremation.

The introduction reads:

In light of the growing interest in cremation, this brief work will attempt to summarize some of the key historical, Biblical, and theological considerations that have been a part of the moral discussion of cremation within the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The goal of this article, then, is to provide the reader with the material needed in order to develop an informed ethic of cremation, as well as to suggest perhaps a general trajectory for the discussion.

The article is replete with biblical and historical information. One of the best pieces on this rarely openly discussed subject we have read. It is a question every Christian will face over the course of life, so resources like this article are invaluable.

You can download the PDF here.

HT: Justin Taylor

Sluggards

Crumbling Ruin

Those humanists who are also capitalists assume that men prefer to work, rather than repose. Because God daily preserves and upholds His creation, they are largely right. Faced with the threat of starvation, most men will find the energy and willpower to work. When offered the opportunity to make progress and improve their lot in life, most will willingly work to achieve it.

But when faced with a choice of payment for work versus payment for doing nothing, many find the choice a bit more difficult. Moreover, receiving "entitlements" can quickly transfer into a lifestyle choice. At root here is an unethical and immoral heart. The biblical character that most comprehensively describes the spiritual state of such a person is the sluggard.

Derek Kidner, in his 1964 commentary on Proverbs, now regarded as a classic in many quarters, writes about the sluggard (pp. 42-43):

The sluggard in Proverbs is a figure of tragi-comedy, with his sheer animal laziness (he is more than anchored to his bed: he is hinged to it, 26:14), his preposterous excuses (“there is a lion outside!” 26:13; 22:13) and his final helplessness.

Kidner identified four features of the sluggard according to Proverbs:

(1) He will not begin things. When we ask him (6:9, 10) “How long?” “When…?”, we are being too definite for him. He doesn’t know. All he knows is his delicious drowsiness; all he asks is a little respite: “a little…a little…a little…”. He does not commit himself to a refusal, but deceives himself by the smallness of his surrenders. So, by inches and minutes, his opportunity slips away.

(2) He will not finish things. The rare effort of beginning has been too much; the impulse dies. So his quarry goes bad on him (12:27) and his meal goes cold on him (19:24; 26:15).

(3) He will not face things. He comes to believe his own excuses (perhaps there is a lion out there, 22:13), and to rationalize his laziness; for he is “wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason” (26:16). Because he makes a habit of the soft choice (he “will not plow by reason of the cold,” 20:4) his character suffers as much as his business, so that he is implied in 15:19 to be fundamentally dishonest…

(4) Consequently he is restless (13:4; 21:25, 26) with unsatisfied desire; helpless in face of the tangle of his affairs, which are like a “hedge of thorns” (15:19); and useless—expensively (18:9) and exasperatingly (10:26)—to any who must employ him. . . .

Kidner continues:

The wise man will learn while there is time. He knows that the sluggard is no freak, but, as often as not, an ordinary man who has made too many excuses, too many refusals and too many postponements. It has all been as imperceptible, and as pleasant, as falling asleep.

The sluggard is an all-to-familiar alter-ego. When the spirit of the sluggard becomes widely disseminated, society fragments and crumbles and the rust never sleeps.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Christian Ministers Must be Men

Swimming Against the Tide, Then and Now

Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, July 14, 2010

"It is very easy for objectors to say that the reason Christian women were not allowed to become religious ministers back in the 'olden time' was because the position of women in society back then would have made the Christian faith disreputable to outsiders if women were allowed to function in this way . . . The problem with this argument is that it is actually the reverse of the truth. The Christian church did not have to exclude women in order to fit right in. Excluding women from the ministry was the odd thing to do. The ancient world was crawling with priestesses, and if Christians had admitted women into their ministry, no one would have raised an eyebrow. The church took the counter-cultural route and did something that made her stand out -- which is, incidentally, what we are being called to do" (Why Ministers Must be Men, pp. 10-11).

Reviewing the Reviews

Credibility, Once Lost, is Gone Forever

It's been a while since we posted on the myth of anthropogenic global warming. To be sure, the die hards are still at it, but we see some evidence that the main stream media have become gun shy and are no longer the shills they once were, trying to make some bucks out of sensationalist headlines pronouncing the doom of all mankind due to the world about to fry.

There has been a severe heat wave in the US and Russia. A year ago this would have resulted in a swathe of faux--journalistic pieces on the harbingers of global warming and how the heat waves were signs of things inevitably to come. Body counts would have made headlines. Governments would have been lambasted for inaction. But now---silence. There's obviously nothing to see here. Move along. Presumably the media realise they were suckered and are not about to make the same mistake again.  Or maybe they have worked out that the public have become predominantly sceptical and there is just not enough money left in the issue. 

But the climate change establishment has been trying to rebuild its credibility. Several official and semi-official inquiries have now been conducted on Climategate and the scientific credibility and ethics of the small cabal of climate scientists who have been at the centre of the propaganda campaign. Patrick Michaels, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reviews the latest investigations and its findings, implying that it has been establishment whitewashing. The evidence for this allegation is pretty damning.

The Climategate Whitewash Continues

Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year's data manipulation scandal. Don't believe the 'independent' reviews.


By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that "Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find."

No links? One of the panel's four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton's school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia "adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity."

This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others—one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community."

Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.

It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia's CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line "IPCC & FOI," "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . . . We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise."

Mr. Jones emailed later that he had "deleted loads of emails" so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, "Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this."

The Russell report states that "On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data." Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]"

Then there's the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: "On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this."

Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann's work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.

But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that "I'll be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: "I think we should stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that "I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute."

Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I'm hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it's becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, Mr. Russell didn't look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That's because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.

Mr. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia from 1980-2007, is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

No Sidelines

Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, June 26, 2010

God has fashioned the world in such a way that we always have to come down to the point. However much we might want to obscure the issues, however much we might build great universities with trained brains to cover everything in a dark mist, however much we reward those pundits who make ample room for our lusts and opinions, at the end of the day, we have to decide if we are going to do it God's way, or not.

Everything we do must be done to the glory of God. If a man argues in favor of a certain form of government, then a Christian must, in the final analysis, argue that God wants him to argue in favor of that form of government. If God doesn't want that, then why is he doing it? If God does want it, how does he know? And if, in his system of theology, God doesn't give a rip, why does he call his system of theology Christian?

So there we are. Say, just for a random example, a Christian wants to argue in favor of a secular government. I know, crazy talk, but sometimes you have to use extreme examples to make a point. That Christian either has to say that God doesn't want government to be secular, but that he, the secular Christian, wants it anyway, which is disobedience, or that God does want secular government, and "let me show you all the places in the Bible where God warns kings and princes about the importance of making sure they never acknowledge Him in any of their ways," which is exegetically incoherent, or he must show us in the Bible that some form of Deism is true, which is false.

Convoluted political theology doesn't like to be pinned down this way, but this is what it amounts to. If Baal is god, follow him. If YHWH is God, follow Him. There are no third party movements on Mt. Carmel. Everybody is in the game, and there are no sidelines. So what's it gonna be?

Ministering in a Post-Christian World

Setting Good Foundations

D A Carson has been one of the more prolific scholar-authors of the past twenty years. He has recently published a work designed to present the Gospel to people raised in ignorance of the Christian faith. It does not fall into the trap of presuming that people have even a modicum of understanding of God, the creation, redemptive history, of Messiah, and His great redemptive works. We believe that increasingly this approach to evangelism and discipling the nations will need to be applied in the biblically-ignorant post-Christian West.

The book is entitled, The God Who is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story. Here is the publisher's description:

It can no longer be assumed that most people—or even most Christians—have a basic understanding of the Bible. Many don’t know the difference between the Old and New Testament, and even the more well-known biblical figures are often misunderstood. It is getting harder to talk about Jesus accurately and compellingly because listeners have no proper context with which to understand God’s story of redemption.

In this basic introduction to faith, D. A. Carson takes seekers, new Christians, and small groups through the big story of Scripture. He helps readers to know what they believe and why they believe it.

Here are a couple of blurbs:

Don Carson’s The God Who Is There is a unique and important volume in many ways. It is neither a traditional systematic theology nor a Bible survey. It unpacks the whole Biblical storyline through the lens of God’s character and actions. As a ministry tool, it can be used for evangelism, since it so thoroughly lays out the doctrine of God, as Paul does on Mars Hill in Acts 17. And yet it also does what the catechisms of the Reformation churches did: give Christians a grounding in basic biblical beliefs and behavior. By all means, get this book!
—Tim Keller

This is a much-needed book. D. A. Carson is one of the few biblical scholars who are gifted to write simply and in a way that captivates. We live in a time when people quickly reject or accept the Bible without even knowing its contents. Carson does a masterful job of explaining the Scriptures so that a person who has never even opened the Bible can understand it. At the same time, those who grew up under its teaching will find valuable and obvious truths that will lead them to greater worship and appreciation of the God we serve.
—Francis Chan

Here is the Table of Contents:

1. The God Who Made Everything
2. The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels
3. The God Who Writes His Own Agreements
4. The God Who Legislates
5. The God Who Reigns
6. The God Who Is Unfathomably Wise
7. The God Who Becomes a Human Being
8. The God Who Grants New Birth
9. The God Who Loves
10. The God Who Dies—and Lives Again
11. The God Who Declares the Guilty Just
12. The God Who Gathers and Transforms His People
13. The God Who Is Very Angry
14. The God Who Triumphs

You can read the Preface and Chapter One online, here

.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

Tolerance as a Christian Virtue

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, June 23, 2010

There are two basic points to make about tolerance as a civic virtue. The first is logical and the second historical.

The logical point is that tolerance cannot be a free-floating virtue. This is because no virtue (or vice either) can be found in a transitive verb. It is not a matter of whether you tolerate, for everyone does, but rather a matter of what you tolerate.

If we were to say that Smith tolerates "x", we do not yet know if Smith is a hero or a skunk. Does he tolerate respectable dissent, responsibly offered? Child porn? Smokers in bars? Trans-fats in restaurants? Ethnic violence? What does he tolerate? This is what Rushdoony used to call an inescapable concept -- not whether, but which. As soon as a man shows his hand, and we know what he tolerates, he is put in a position where he cannot tolerate those who refuse to tolerate what he does.

A wide acceptance of the homosexual agenda, for example, means that a society has to crack down on the "homophobes." Not whether, but which.

This leads to the question of what a "mere Christendom" would tolerate. Every organized society excludes certain behaviors by definition, and is inclusive of others. This is what it means to be a society. Every society has shared values, and it polices those values. When those values are not policed, you have a condition of anarchy, or what the older civic theorists used to call "a state of nature."

This being the case, it is certainly appropriate for people to ask what a member nation of this mere Christendom would tolerate, and what it would not. For those who gain their information about such things from the screechings of the alarmist left, the answer will perhaps be surprising.

Christians invented the most open and tolerant society in the history of the world. Tolerance, as we have known it historically, is a Christian virtue. As preachers of the gospel spread throughout a society, and new life comes to more and more of the population, the preconditions for an open society are being established. The more the law of God is written on hearts and minds, which is what happens under the new covenant, the less necessary it is to have standards of public decency urged upon us from billboards. There were all sorts of things which, prior to the last several generations of general deterioration, "went without saying." Once that consensus is gone, you have to start calling the cops for more and more situations, and freedom starts to erode.

Now some might say in protest that they are quite certain that if evangelical Christians had their way, there would be no more acts of simulated copulation on parade floats in San Francisco, which is quite true. The observer would go on to point that that such open behavior would not fly in the totalitarian hellhole that we call North Korea, and QED. But they fail to note that such frank displays of deranged yearnings would not have flown in America in 1958 either, which was a truly open and free society. All freedom necessitates restraint and, for those who have been following this, the question has to do with who is restrained, and how.

An important part of the how concerns not the identity of those restrained, but their position in that society. This will have to be discussed further in its place, but are those being restrained at the center of that society, or are they outliers? Is the standard enforced with fines ten times a day, or twice every ten years?

Free societies can only function when the authority of restraint is found in the old fashioned virtues of self-restraint and self-control. Free governments presuppose self-government. This is why John Adams said that our Constitution presupposes a moral and religious people -- it is, he said, "wholly unfit for any other." And it is wholly unfit for any other.

All this said, it remains an ineradicable part of the historical record that free societies arose and grew out of Christian societies. I am arguing that there is a connection, and that this is not mere coincidence. I am arguing for a return to the preconditions of civic freedom, and am not arguing for an abandonment of them. Unbelief does not generate free societies. Out of all the explicitly atheistic societies that formed over the course of the last century, how many of them were open and free societies? Ah . . .
For secularists to treat believing Christians as the principle threat to their freedoms would be, were it not so serious, not very serious. But that goes without saying.

So as I envision it, a mere Christendom that would provide more real freedoms for the unbeliever than the current unbelieving society grants to believers. Measured by the Golden Rule, when we evaluate our respective proposals, they have far less to worry about than I do.

But for some, it all comes down to sex. They want to keep the government "out of our bedrooms." What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows, what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms. The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar. And when he does, the usual suspects will be out there on the Sunday morning talk shows, defending it. This is because secularists don't know what real freedom is. Their worldview doesn't have a slot for it.

Media Cheers Convict

A Badly Bent Moral Compass

Media histrionics over the "plight" of Peter Bethune, self-appointed martyr for the white man's burden for whales, have been laughable. Firstly, Stuff initially declared that Bethune was a returning "war hero". This from Kiwiblog:

So much for neutral reporting

The article on Stuff gushes:

New Zealand’s anti-whaling war hero Pete Bethune landed in Auckland this morning, shaken and slightly subdued – but with no regrets.

Excuse me while I vomit.

And people wonder why readers are deserting mainstream media. If this is an example of impartial neutral reporting, then I’d hate to see a biased story.

UPDATE: A few minutes after I posted this, the story was changed from “war hero” to “activist”. Good. But how the hell did such a loaded description get through the sub-editor in the first place?

Then there was the breathless prediction that a "huge crowd" would turn out to welcome the conquering hero home.

A huge crowd is expected to turn out at Auckland Airport this morning to greet the protester when he sets foot back in the country.

The actual turnout? Fifty-five media gropers and three members of the public. Yes, three. Ah, but remember how we used to be told that "two's company, three's a crowd." See, there was a crowd there. We told you so.

Now, we do not mean to disparage Bethune's zeal, his energy, his willingness to "go where no man has gone before", etc. But we need to keep everything in perspective. Bethune is now a convict. He broke both Japanese law and international laws of the sea. He was convicted and sentenced. His judges were exceedingly reasonable and fair. His extremism has driven him to desert his family. He has become involved with an environmental organization which consistently prevaricates, and openly boasts of it. Bethune is unbalanced and has lost his moral compass.

He displays now the hallmarks of a fanatic. His alleged high moral end of "saving whales" apparently justifies any means, criminal or unethical. He is not only misguided: his moral compass has become perverted. There is no honour here. Rather there is room only for pity upon a benighted and misguided soul, together with compassion for his misled and neglected family.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Worship as Haka

Liturgy and Worship - Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, July 10, 2010

As you have been taught before, worship is warfare. But over time, there are some in the church who want to be known as warriors, but do not want an actual fight. What is necessary is to exalt what might be called ceremonies of fighting. This gets the blood pumping, but then you can just call it good. You enjoy the blood rush, and no blood shed.

The Maori used to have an impressive ritual called the haka, a rite of taunting the enemy that they went through before battle. Now the haka is performed before rugby games, and not before an actual battle, but it still impressive. Suppose the next step were taken, and the haka were removed to a concert hall, where gentlemen in tuxes and ladies in gowns could watch in genuine anthropological interest.

God has designed worship so that—unless we have worked it through the grid of our unbelief—it will bring us into conflict with the principalities and powers. When worship is led in this spirit and with this faith, it begins to dawn on many that this might result in an actual battle, not against flesh and blood, but an actual battle nonetheless. We are conservative, and the downside of this is we prefer things tidy. But warfare messes them up. Warfare is unsettling. Wars can be won or lost, and wars might requires sacrifice.

In our day, the great cultural battle is over sex, marriage and family. We are to live as Christians in our homes, and we are to gather here to worship as Christians who live as Christians in our homes. The world knows the stakes better than we do, and the world is more interested in pressing the issue than we are.

And so we are called to wake up, to get up, and to prepare for battle. We are called to declare their secular experiment a grand failure, and to point out that the cisterns they have cunningly devised have the one defect of not being able to hold water.

And so here is the issue. Christ is Lord. We are His body, His church. And His church is designed to function as the center of civilization.

McDonalds Sets the Record Straight

Hypocrites and Public Nuisances

Every so often a corporate will stand up for its shareholders, facing down society's nannies. It is always encouraging to see. In the US, the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, an uber-nannying organization devoted to the promulgation of rules and regulations after its own image, has received a principled slap-down from McDonalds, the fast food chain.

Last month the Centre for Science in the Public Interest threatened to sue McDonalds.

The group called the use of toys to entice kids to eat Happy Meals "unfair and deceptive marketing" that "is illegal under various state consumer protection laws."

"McDonald's use of toys undercuts parental authority and exploits young children's developmental immaturity--all this to induce children to prefer foods that may harm their health," the group's litigation director, Stephen Gardner, said at the time. "It's a creepy and predatory practice that warrants an injunction."

Our own uber-food-nanny, Dr Robyn Toomath who ostensibly is a mouthpiece for the US organization in New Zealand chimed in here as well to add its bit to "protect" us all:

Outside the continent, in New Zealand, the anti-obesity campaigner Robyn Toothmath has welcomed the idea, saying that there are existing proofs and studies that children are attracted to meals accompanied with a toy.

“We’ve had good evidence of this over the years … very successful toys have increased the sales of McDonald’s happy meals – many fold – over the weeks that these toys have been on sale” Toothmath said.

(Its staggering to think that Toomath is turned to as the only non-US campaigner to be asked to give an opinion on this stupid eructation by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest in the US.  Toomath's views have been commented on previously at Contra Celsum. She represents the case for comprehensive, extreme state-nannying, building the case upon a foundation of alleged parental impotence and incompetence.)

In any event, the CEO of McDonalds, Jim Skinner put the "do-gooders" and wowsers firmly in their place:

Forget it, McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner said, defending Happy Meals in the written response sent to the Washington, D.C.-based group. "Internet sites, blogs and network surveys suggest that public opinion is running overwhelmingly against your premise," Skinner wrote. "Our customer websites and phone lines at McDonald's are also busy, with more than nine out of 10 customers disagreeing with your agenda."

The strong public response is uncommon for the company, whose dominance in the fast-food industry makes its a target of a range of activist groups. "CSPI is wrong in its assertions, and frivolous in its legal threats," Skinner said, calling the group's claims "over-the-top rhetoric."

Then came two knock-out blows:

"CSPI's twisted characterization of McDonald's as 'the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children' is an insult to every one of our franchisees and employees around the world," Skinner wrote. "When CSPI refers to America's children as 'an unpaid drone army," you similarly denigrate parents and families, because they are fully capable of making their own decisions. You should apologize."

"Parents, in particular, strongly believe they have the right and responsibility to decide what's best for their children, not CSPI," he wrote. "It's really that simple."

Indeed. It really is that simple. In the meantime, Toomath continues to talk up the merits of banning Happy Meals in New Zealand. The idea that a ban on Happy Meals is needed to protect parents from being undermined and overwhelmed by their children, who are allegedly transformed into voracious, insatiable Happy Meal carnivores by McDonalds's creepy packaging of toys with their food is risible. Skinner is right. McDonalds is not in loco parentis. Nor, let it be said, is CSPI, nor Toomath, nor her ilk.

Those who truthfully respect parental authority will be insisting on parental responsibility from beginning to end. Well done, McDonalds. It's years since we graced your doors to partake of your fare, but we think a congratulatory celebration is in order. We will round up the kids this evening and hit the town.

Obama's Scabrous War

Ann Coulter Sharpens Her Skewers

There has been a brouhaha in the United States recently over sapient remarks by the President of the Republican Party, Michael Steele to the effect that Afghanistan was President Obama's war.

The more rabid on the right took umbrage and called for Steele's resignation, implying that he was a traitor. Afghanistan was the nation's war; since the US military was involved, it behoved everyone to get behind them and support it. Therefore, President Obama deserved and would get the wholehearted support of the right, etc., etc.

In response, Ann Coulter has skewered both left and right. When an opponent ends up in Coulter's cross hairs, ducking is the better part of valour.

Obama hasn't ramped up the war in Afghanistan based on a careful calculation of America's strategic objectives. He did it because he was trapped by his own rhetorical game of bashing the Iraq war while pretending to be a hawk on Afghanistan.

At this point, Afghanistan is every bit as much Obama's war as Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. True, President Kennedy was the first to send troops to Vietnam. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam when JFK was assassinated. Within four years, LBJ had sent 400,000 troops there.

In the entire seven-year course of the Afghanistan war under Bush, from October 2001 to January 2009, 625 American soldiers were killed. In 18 short months, Obama has nearly doubled that number to 1,124 Americans killed.

Republicans used to think seriously about deploying the military. President Eisenhower sent aid to South Vietnam, but said he could not "conceive of a greater tragedy" for America than getting heavily involved there.

As Michael Steele correctly noted, every great power that's tried to stage an all-out war in Afghanistan has gotten its ass handed to it. Everyone knows it's not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands.

Based on Obama's rules of engagement for our troops in Afghanistan, we're apparently not even fighting a war. The greatest fighting force in the world is building vocational schools and distributing cheese crackers to children.

There's even talk of giving soldiers medals for NOT shooting people, which I gather will be awarded posthumously. Naomi Campbell is rougher with her assistants than our troops are allowed to be with Taliban fighters.

But now I hear it is the official policy of the Republican Party to be for all wars, irrespective of our national interest.

What if Obama decides to invade England because he's still ticked off about that Churchill bust? Can Michael Steele and I object to that? Or would that demoralize the troops?

Our troops are the most magnificent in the world, but they're not the ones setting military policy. The president is -- and he's basing his war strategy on the chants of Moveon.org cretins.

Nonetheless, Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney have demanded that Steele resign as head of the RNC for saying Afghanistan is now Obama's war -- and a badly thought-out one at that. (Didn't liberals warn us that neoconservatives want permanent war?)

I thought the irreducible requirements of Republicanism were being for life, small government and a strong national defense, but I guess permanent war is on the platter now, too.

The Duty of Christian Schooling, Part VI

Reaping What Has Been Sown

The Jesuits are reported to have claimed that if they could teach a child for the first seven years they would “have” the child for life. There is a lot of truth in this. And the truth starts to show up as a child comes into the teenage years.

One family and child raising expert, Dr Howard Hendricks used to say to parents: “build a bridge with your children before they turn twelve—for by then, it will be too late.” Sadly, many parents realise this only when time has run out. Christian parents need to know better: to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

As our children grow, in the early teen years it is entirely natural and right—God designed—that our children become increasingly self-aware. It is at this time that they start to think about who they are, what is their place in life, and what life will hold for them. It is the stage of life when they start to consider themselves and who they are as people in their own right, conceptually independent from their parents. This is not a bad thing. It is fundamentally necessary in order for them to become adults, to begin to shoulder independent responsibilities as true servants of our Lord. It is a wonderful and exciting stage in the development of our children.

But it is also the stage at which the seeds sown in earlier years start to sprout. And those seeds will either be beautiful budding grain or nasty weeds. The latter catches many Christian parents by surprise: how did those weeds get there, they wonder? It is at the early teen years that the fruits of sending children to a state secular school start to show. Parents suddenly realise that an Enemy has sown seeds in the lives of their children while they (the parents) were sleeping. (Matthew 13:24—28)

Oftentimes, when Christian parents have decided to send their children to the local state secular school, everything initially seems just fine. Their young children continue to respect them, partake in family devotions, exercise Christian graces, willingly attend worship, and accept the training and correction of mum and dad. They show all the attributes of being Christian children. During this stage, many such Christian parents congratulate themselves on their decision to send their children to the state secular school. After all, most of their fellow Christian parents are finding it a great struggle to pay Christian school fees. Others who are home schooling their children bear a great work load. Yet, there appears to be no palpable difference between their state schooled children and those of their friends who are receiving Christian schooling. But all the while seeds are being sown in the field.

When children grow to the early teen years, seeds sown in the early years sprout up. It is necessary and right that during the years children start to become independent of their parents. But this necessary growing independence can either be godly or ungodly. If it is as God intends and commands, the growing independence of parents will take the form of a deepening sense of God's call upon the child's life—a growing conviction in the young adult's heart that they too must stand before God to give an account of their lives—and they must stand independently of their parents. It is during the stage that children usually begin to become conscious of God's calling for them—of their possible vocations and avocations—and a growing sense of duties and responsibilities in God's Kingdom. It is the stage where they begin to conceive of themselves as eventually being completely independent of their parents, which begs the question of who they will be, and what will they be like, and how they will walk in their days upon the earth.

But it is also at this stage that children are particularly subject to subtle temptations: to conceive of themselves as independent, not just of their parents, but of their parents' God. They can start to frame their own life as being separated from God's Kingdom, and themselves as someone other than a believing and loving subject of the King. When children have been subjected for over seven years, five days a week, to the perspective of a world without God presented by teachers arranged for them by their parents, the temptation to Unbelief usually becomes overwhelmingly powerful. For seven or eight years they have been taught, at their parents' behest, of a world which allegedly exists independently of God and in which God is irrelevant. They have been taught that this is the real world. It is the world which the vast majority of the authority figures in the culture espouse. It is the world celebrated by the rich and famous.

When children have been systematically taught in their early years that the Unbelieving world is the real world, and that the world of the Christian faith is irrelevant at best, misleading and false at worst, it is not surprising that upon coming to teenage years, they will most likely express their own unbelief. Gradual independence from their parents will mean, inevitably, independence from their parents' God. The weeds of Unbelief begin to sprout and bear their terrible fruit.

Now, of course, the world of Unbelief is the false world. It is the world of lies and untruth. But throughout all the years of state secular schooling, the child will have been taught that contrary to what mum and dad have said, in fact it is the real world. And what parents have caused to be sown, will inevitably be reaped in some way, shape, or form. The fruit can show up years later—when it is too late.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

A Decorated Altar is Still a Cold One

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, June 22, 2010

From the very beginning the Christian faith has had to deal with imposters who gain control of the governmental mechanisms of the church, doing so in order to undermine the entire point of the Church. Think, for example, of Diotrephes, who would put out of the church anybody who had even voted in favor of receiving emissaries of the apostles (3 John 9-10). That man had control of the perks of preeminence, he had control of the minutes and file cabinets, he had control of the office keys. The only thing He didn't have was control of the Spirit. The Spirit blows where He wills.

The intention, laid out for us in Scripture, is for the institutional Church to receive the apostles, their emissaries, and their letters. When we get their letters, we in the Church are supposed to open them up and do what they say. Unfortunately, Diotrephes has an online discipleship training program, and his imitators are everywhere. Moreover, his imitators and heirs are, just like he was, entrenched in the Church.

But this should not be a surprise. We are also taught in Scripture that the process of getting from our raggety taggety beginnings to the point where the bride walks down the aisle without spot or any other blemish is supposed to be a long and arduous process. That process is called church history, and it is what we might call the mother of all extreme makeovers. It is not a sign that God's purposes have been successfully thwarted; it is the way He determined to do this. When we grapple with the issues that this creates (and it creates a ton of them), we are simply doing our lessons.

During periods of reformation and revival, the Church really is quickened. She grows and spreads, and flourishes. Now if culture is religion externalized, it is not long before these lively forms of the faith take on an external cultural manifestation. But what happens when the liveliness dies away (as it frequently does), and the forms remain? We have those who love the forms of religion, but who deny the power of it (2 Tim. 3:5). We have heirs of Chrysostom who mutter their way through prayer books; we have heirs of Ursinus who doodle in the margins of their book of discipline, trying to make it into a confessional Book of Kells with their colored sharpies. No gospel sense of righteousness any more, but real pretty.

Another way of thinking about this is that Holy Spirit's fire is the kind of fire that forms and builds its own altars, those altars it comes to rest upon. But what happens when the fire goes out a generation or two later, and the altar is still there? The natural response is to try to fix things by decorating the altar, bringing in embellishments and bronze geegaws galore. But a decorated altar is still a cold one.

Every form of Christendom thus far has been a visible, civic result of a potent visible church. And a potent visible church has always been the result of a vibrant movement of the Holy Spirit, bring the new birth to countless individuals. This new birth is invisible; you can see its effects, but you cannot watch it directly. The fire in the illustration above is the new birth, and there is no other fire.

When the new birth is there, the valley of dry bones becomes the mustering point for a great army. When the new birth is not there, all the arranging, and planning, and fussing that we might be able to do, will not accomplish anything. Ezekiel was told to preach to the bones, not to line up all the femurs in a tidy confessional row. As Dr. Lloyd-Jones said about some ecumenical endeavor or other, "Putting all the corpses into one ecclesiastical graveyard will not bring about a resurrection."

Christendom, by definition, has to do with physical, public embodiment. It is public and external. It can be photographed. But if American Christians succeeded in having the Apostles Creed put into our Constitution, we would not then have a new nation in the new Christendom. We would have something like England, a teetery relic nation from the old Christendom. England is a Christian nation on paper. We cannot fix our problems on paper, or with paper. What we need is fire.

And we cannot have fire without preachers of the gospel who know what they are about. We need preachers who have experienced the new birth themselves, and who know what the Bible teaches about the necessity of it. And we need preachers who have experienced the anointing of the Holy Spirit on their pulpit declarations, who know what real power is. Further, we need more than one of them. Two or three thousand should do it.

We should not have to choose between the fire and the altar. We want both. We want a reformation and revival in the Church, and we want a renewed Church that then does not shrink back from its appointed role in establishing an institutional altar to burn hot on. But in wanting both, at this point in history, we want the fire first. Who wants a collection of cold altars? When the fire falls (as it will), we will have altars enough.

A Woman's Right to Kill

Unmasking The Fanatic

Every so often the truth in all its awful horror emerges into the light of day. The unlocking of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, exposing them to a horrified world is an apt example.

Those of us within Jerusalem believe that the modern atrocity of abortion is Unbelief's awful horror. It is masked and shielded in euphemisms like "pro-choice" and "a woman's right to choose". The latter is the particular preserve of the effete liberal male in Unbelieving societies who abandons reason in favour of faux generosity toward the female abortionist. It's their body, so women have the right to decide" is the vacuous mantra.

But every now and again an abortionist woman tells the truth. Antonia Senior is just such a woman. A writer for The Times in the UK, and an abortionist, has lately pulled back the euphemistic shutters and acknowledged what everyone has always known all along--that abortion is a murderous act.

LONDON, U.K., July 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After contemplating the immense mysteries of human life and sacrificial love in comparison to a woman's "right to fertility control," a writer for the Times of London concludes that attempts by pro-aborts to dismiss the life of an unborn child are a "convenient lie" hiding the fact that, "Yes, abortion is killing.”

“But,” she concludes, “it's the lesser evil."

Columnist Antonia Senior in a June 30 column (available by subscription only) says that, despite the fact that the abortion debate hinges upon whether the unborn child is a unique life or not, women who wish to assert the cause of their freedom from male domination "must be prepared to kill for it."

She concedes that there is no way that the pretence that abortion is not murder can be allowed to continue.

Senior then launches into discussing abortion, which she says "hinges on the notion of life," no matter what other arguments or tactics are employed. "Either a foetus is a life from conception, or it is not,” she notes.

Senior then admits that: "What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a foetus is a life by any subjective measure. My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person — forged in my womb, not by my mothering."

"Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life." "That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable."

This fact, she says, leaves feminism with a "problem," to which she attributes the "groundswell" of young pro-life feminists.

Then in a breathless logical leap over the tallest building she compares pro-abort women to religious martyrs. They believed so strongly in their cause that they were prepared to die for it. Applying this to the abortionist cause she argues that women's rights are so fundamental that pro-abortionists must be prepared to die for them. And if you are prepared to die for something, you must, apparently, also be prepared to kill for it.

Hence, she says, "The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too."

So, religious martyrs were really murderers in disguise. True, they believed so strongly they were prepared to die for their beliefs. This means they were also prepared to kill for their beliefs--presumably those who opposed or traduced their beliefs. That's what it means to be a true believer, according to Senior.

But here we have a description, not of the martyr, but the fanatic. The mask is being peeled off.

Hat Tip: Maria

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Blood Up to the Horses' Bridles

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, June 18, 2010

So what do I mean by mere Christendom exactly?

I mean a public and formal recognition of the authority of Jesus Christ that repudiates the principles of secularism, and which avoids hard sectarianism and easy latitudinarianism both. Easier said than done, but there it is. That is what we have to do, and we have to do it because secularism has run its course, and does not have the wherewithal to resist the demands of radical Islam.

It is possible to argue for this without supporting an "established church," which -- in the form of tax revenues -- I do not support. But in order for this to happen at all, the Church must be established, in the sense that the magistrate has the responsibility to recognize her, convene synods and councils to seek her council, and to listen to her. The magistrate himself has the responsibility, as a public figure, in the discharge of his office, to believe in Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth.

How this could possibly be done is quite tricky, but again, there it is. Different nations would receive "baptism" differently, but in our political tradition it would be by means of something like referencing the truths of the Apostles' Creed in the Constitution. That would make me happy, for starters. In short, I am arguing for a Christian America. I am not arguing for an America that is nominally Christian. I am arguing for this because Jesus rose from the dead, and this trumps any briefs that the ACLU might be able to file.

We have been so well catechized by our secularist masters that the mere assertion of this causes us to start freaking out, anticipating a regime of Reformed ayatollahs, ready to chop off infidel heads at the slightest provocation. Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that this is exactly the kind of rule we will get if we don't discover something with enough backbone to withstand radical Islam. Leaving that aside, we still have to answer the worries caused by the secularist catechism.

They have told us, ad nauseam, that our people were racked with bloody religious strife, back in the times of the 30 Years War, and when we had exhausted ourselves fighting over arcane religious dogmas, the secular state finally arose, and delivered us all from this kind of folly forever. These are the gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Yay.

The problem with this take is that it is simply not true. That fighting was caused by rise of the secular state, and was not in any meaningful sense a religious war. If it really had been religious strife, then what are we to make of the Catholic/Protestant alliances in it, and in the fact of Catholics fighting Catholics?

This is not to say that religous conflict is an impossibility -- people are people, sinners are sinners, and one of the things we do is fight. But the notion that secularism has any virtue in it capable of stopping our bloodletting is beyond ludicrous. Consider the twentieth century, the century of secularism, the century of blood. If we didn't know better, we might say that the 20th century was straight out of the book of Revelation, with blood up to the horses' bridles.

Here is a thought experiment for you. Take a couple of princes from 17th century, one Catholic and one Protestant, and both of them experienced soldiers. Show them, in a vision, the battle of the Somme, the bombing of Dresden, the battle of Midway, the Great Leap Forward, the gulags of communism, and the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. These men would be, in turns, appalled, thrilled, horrified, and appalled some more. But they wouldn't laugh at you until you mentioned that all this was a small price to pay for the deliverance from blood that secularism was providing.

Healthy Scepticism

Beware of Long Term Insurance Contracts

Back in the day some sections or circles of the Christian church ran the argument that insurance was sinful. The reasoning was based on the premise that an insurance contract represented a lack of trust in God's providence and goodness. Purchasing insurance was an unbelieving act.

The argument, although well meant, reflected a fatalistic or deterministic world view that drew upon Islamic theology more than Christian truth. The Christian faith provides strong doctrinal foundations for the rectitude of insurance contracts.

Nevertheless, care and discernment must be used when considering whether to purchase insurance, and what types of contracts to purchase. Careful consideration must be given to the company providing the service, as well as the nature of the contracts themselves. Generally speaking, contracts which offer a one-off lump sum payment are more likely to be honoured than not. Thus, life insurance, lump-sum payments for disability, health insurance, and property insurance are reasonably robust as contracts. But contracts which call for income continuance--that is, purport to provide an annuity stream for a long period of time--should be viewed with a great deal of scepticism.

In the local blogosphere two cases have come up in recent weeks. The first is Whaleoil's ongoing stoush with Fidelity Life which has cost him and his family dearly. The second is Madeleine's war with ACC, which is causing hardship in the Flannagan family. Both involve longer term income payments that the insurance company was obligated to pay, due to illness or injury of the claimant. In both cases the insurance company has taken active steps to renege on their ongoing payment obligations. The modus operandi in both cases has been to use medical "experts" (employed or contracted to the insurance company) to assess the respective injury or illness and determine that the company did not need to keep paying out.

The injured or sick party is immediately placed in a very parlous and weak position. The insurance company has deep pockets with which to purchase "expert" opinion. On its own authority it can terminate or reduce payments. The claimant must take the initiative legally to get the payments reinstated. The process can be long and costly--and by definition usually the claimant is under financial pressure. All the advantage, then, lies with the insurance company.

Income continuance insurance usually has high premium costs and the delivery of the contracted obligation is acutely uncertain. When considering this kind of insurance be very, very sceptical and cynical.

Now, of course, in Madeleine's case it is ACC--an agency of government--which appears to be playing fast and loose. One has no choice about ACC "premiums": they are extracted involuntarily via the taxation system. But this simply serves to reinforce the point: if a compulsory state agency can so easily renege on its obligations through what appears to be very sharp practice, then one should be even more sceptical about self-interested private business corporations.

Weird

Is Obama Living in a Parallel Universe

This piece strikes us as reporting on something that falls into the category of "weird".

In the video below, Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the "foremost" task President Obama has given him is "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." Thus, NASA's primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of "predominantly Muslim nations."

What on earth is going on in the space between Obama's ears?

1932 All Over Again?

Slow Learners

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in The Telegraph, argues that it is starting to look like 1932 all over again. The Great Depression commenced with the market crash of 1929. After the initial shock--layoffs, unemployment, shut downs, stalled economic growth, and so forth--signs of economic recovery in the US and around the developed world, started to re-emerge. Then, due to bad central government policies put in place to "cope" with the effects of the Depression several years later, the real Depression hit in 1932.

We are not at all sure that the parallels between 1932 and 2010 run that close together--but the outcome may be the same.


Here are the arguments advanced by Evans-Pritchard:

"The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession," said Robert Reich, former US labour secretary. "All the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing. Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year. So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing," he said.

California is tightening faster than Greece. State workers have seen a 14pc fall in earnings this year due to forced furloughs. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is cutting pay for 200,000 state workers to the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to cover his $19bn (£15bn) deficit.

Can Illinois be far behind? The state has a deficit of $12bn and is $5bn in arrears to schools, nursing homes, child care centres, and prisons. "It is getting worse every single day," said state comptroller Daniel Hynes. "We are not paying bills for absolutely essential services. That is obscene."

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high. . . .

The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost. . . .

Washington's fiscal stimulus is draining away. It peaked in the first quarter, yet even then the economy eked out a growth rate of just 2.7pc. This compares with 5.1pc, 9.3pc, 8.1pc and 8.5pc in the four quarters coming off recession in the early 1980s.

The housing market is already crumbling as government props are pulled away. The expiry of homebuyers' tax credit led to a 30pc fall in the number of buyers signing contracts in May. "It is cataclysmic," said David Bloom from HSBC.

Federal tax rises are automatically baked into the pie. The Congressional Budget Office said fiscal policy will swing from a net +2pc of GDP to -2pc by late 2011. The states and counties may have to cut as much as $180bn.

Investors are starting to chew over the awful possibility that America's recovery will stall just as Asia hits the buffers. China's manufacturing index has been falling since January, with a downward lurch in June to 50.4, just above the break-even line of 50. Momentum seems to be flagging everywhere, whether in Australian building permits, Turkish exports, or Japanese industrial output.

On Friday, Jacques Cailloux from RBS put out a "double-dip alert" for Europe. "The risk is rising fast. Absent an effective policy intervention to tackle the debt crisis on the periphery over coming months, the European economy will double dip in 2011," he said.

It is obvious what that policy should be for Europe, America, and Japan. If budgets are to shrink in an orderly fashion over several years – as they must, to avoid sovereign debt spirals – then central banks will have to cushion the blow keeping monetary policy ultra-loose for as long it takes.

The Fed is already eyeing the printing press again. "It's appropriate to think about what we would do under a deflationary scenario," said Dennis Lockhart for the Atlanta Fed. His colleague Kevin Warsh said the pros and cons of purchasing more bonds should be subject to "strict scrutiny", a comment I took as confirmation that the Fed Board is arguing internally about QE2.

Perhaps naively, I still think central banks have the tools to head off disaster. The question is whether they will do so fast enough, or even whether they wish to resist the chorus of 1930s liquidation taking charge of the debate. Last week the Bank for International Settlements called for combined fiscal and monetary tightening, lending its great authority to the forces of debt-deflation and mass unemployment. If even the BIS has lost the plot, God help us.

The great mythology that has been passed down to us from the Great Depression era was that governments saved the day. In our case, however, it is government which has caused the problem. Government spending has increased across the Western world recklessly during the "good times". More government spending to stimulate economies under such conditions is useless, to say the least. Governments are now so large, and their deficits so big that additional government spending only serves to garrotte the private sector, not stimulate it.

If there is to be recovery, it will have to come from the private sector--as firms start to expand and hire again. In order to assist this, government will have to shrink (which will lead to much, much higher unemployment). But equally important is government withdrawal from rules, regulations, restrictions, and road-blocks to investment of private capital into business. Thirdly, and as important, government tax rates must drop like a stone.

The UK is doing it wrong. The new government appears to be resolute in cutting government spending and shrinking the size of government overall by starving the monster of fiscal food. It also has embarked on a campaign to cut government regulation and red tape.  However, at the same time it is raising taxes--so it is also killing off the private sector. We endorse the view that in the midst of this crisis we should not worry about the fiscal deficit, provided we are running the right policy mix to expand the economy through private sector investment, enterprise, and energy. The pegging back of the deficit will take time to do, and can only be done upon the shoulders of economic growth coming from an expanding private sector. The UK government is merrily killing off both government and private sectors.

Thus, at the recent G20 meeting, Obama was half right, albeit terribly wrong. Now is not the time to worry about deficits--but Obama was arguing for continued government expansion to stimulate the economy. This is like advocating an addict take more and more heroin to solve his problem. Now is the time to focus upon economic growth in the private sector--which means getting the enormous gorilla of bloated government and its insatiable taxes off the backs of the private sector.

The US is far from achieving this optimal policy setting. Rather, the Federal Government is expanding like a virulent cancer. State governments, however, are shrinking drastically and rapidly. However, taxes are slated to rise in January. What now becomes most critical is the outcome of the Congressional elections in November. It is possible that small-government conservatives will win control in both houses of Congress. If so, it is likely that the tax increases will be stopped, and a meat-cleaver will be taken to the Federal government monster.

Only then will we be likely to see the US economy begin to turn the corner. We need to be very clear that a substantial Republican victory in November will not be sufficient, for the Republican party has led the charge over the past decade for a vastly expanded government apparatus. It will require an electoral victory of small-government republicans and small-government democrats. While there are encouraging signs, at present the jury remains out.

The November US elections are probably going to be the most significant for the US, one way or the other, in nearly a century.

And what about New Zealand. Alas, we too are intent upon slashing our wrists. The New Zealand government refuses to shrink the state sector, content with merely slowing down its rate of expansion. It is borrowing recklessly, expanding the deficit weekly. It cut taxes, only to ratchet them up again indirectly with higher government charges, asinine carbon taxes, and higher GST. Our national leaders are a long, long way from realising that they are the problem, not the solution, to our lingering malaise. And so is the majority of our population.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Crooked Little Hearts

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, June 19, 2010

I believe I have done more than my share of trying to damn and blast the idolatrous notions of American exceptionalism. Americans have ten toes like everybody else, Americans put their trousers on one leg at a time like everybody else, and Americans have crooked little hearts like everybody else. The Founders were exceptional men in that they crafted a form of government which recognized the fatal similarity that exists among all the sons of Adam, and as long as we remembered the reasons for our particular form of government, things were reasonably stable and healthy.

Thus far what I have argued before. All the contemporary arguments I have seen on the right for what they call American exceptionalism are arguments that miss this crucial qualifier.

But having said this repeatedly, what I want to do here is distance myself from those on the left who do not understand that their form of contempt for things American does not constitute a wise alternative to idolatry at all. Those are not the only two alternatives. If someone said that you must either worship your mother or despise her, we would see the problem immediately.

America has been exceptionally blessed. We are in the midst of frittering those blessings away. We are hell bent on forfeiting them as soon as we possibly can. But the prodigal son would not have been repentant if he had tried to deny that he had money from his father to burn. He was misusing what he had been blessed with -- but the blessing was still real.

Those who misuse American exceptionalism try to pretend that they are the only ones in the world who have had these blessings -- which means that they will not learn the lessons of history when it comes to the abuse of blessings. Those who recoil from an ordinary and humane patriotism, as is common on the left, try to pretend that there have been no blessings at all -- and thus they don't have to worry about stewardship of blessings either. If everything we have was stolen from Indians in order to rape the land, then it doesn't make sense to think of our responsibilities in terms of stewardship.


When it comes to the patterns of history and the temptations of fallen human nature, America is not exceptional at all. Read the story patterns of history -- the rise and fall of empires and great nations is one of the oldest stories in the world. Now when it comes to the current roster of the United Nations, I would rather have my grandchildren growing up here than anywhere else. But in growing up here, they have to learn to appreciate what they have been given, and what their responsibilities are in preserving it, so that they have something to pass on to their grandchildren.

This will not be possible for them to do unless America acknowledges Christ. Our exceptional status does not consist of being able to be saved without a savior. Our president, our Supreme Court justices, and our congressional leaders must all kiss the Son, lest He be angry. If His anger falls upon us, then we will perish in the way. Will we have the privilege of having that anger be exceptional? No . . . it is as old as dirt.

Lecture Series on Islam

Islam

BiblicalTraining. org has made available (free of charge) a series of 24 lectures on Islam, by Dr Timothy Tennent. These lectures were originally given at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Dr Tennent is president of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

The course blurb says:

The purpose of this course is to provide an introductory study of the structure, beliefs and practices of Islam. Special emphasis will be placed on a study of the theology of the Koran. The student will read and study the entire Koran along with important selections from the Hadith, Shari`a material and Sufi writings. The actual historical manifestations of contemporary Islam will be explored with a special emphasis on Islam in the African context. Throughout the course there will be a concern to demonstrate how Islamic thought is different from Christian thought and how the gospel can be most effectively communicated to members of the Islamic faith, the second largest and fastest growing religion in the world today.

Lecture content summaries and downloading links are available, here.

Recommended texts are: The Koran, N.J. Dawood, trans., Penguin Books, 1983. Islam: The Straight Path, 3rd edition, John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press, 1998.
The Word of Islam, J. Alden Williams, University of Texas Press, 1984.

You will need to register (free) in order to download and listen to the lectures.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

The Language of Poetry

Poetry and Words

Dr. Michael Flinn

Poetry (and this is true of all literature) makes use of words. If there were no words, there would be no poetry. The reason why there are words is because God himself is the Word (John 1:1). To use a title from one of Francis Schaeffer’s books, He is There and He is not Silent, God speaks. In Genesis 1:3ff we read that God created the world by speaking words. Of course, God’s ability to create something out of nothing merely by speaking words is something that is unique to him. As human beings, we cannot create in this way. But this is not the only way in which God uses words. As Schaeffer indicates in his book, God reveals both himself and his plan of redemption for the world by speaking to his image bearers in language that can be understood by them.

This last sentence needs an important qualification. Although God’s words to man are clear and true, and able to be understood in and of themselves, man has chosen to deny and suppress God’s clear revelation of himself (cf. Romans 1:20,21). The sinful mind is hostile to God and does not (in fact: cannot) submit to God’s laws (Romans 8:7) and it cannot understand the things of the Spirit of God without the Spirit’s enlightenment (1Corinthians 2:14).

Because we human beings are created in the image of the One who made us, we also possess the ability to communicate with others by means of words. God has made us with the ability to express thoughts in language. We can articulate emotions, instincts, concerns and needs. We can speak of beliefs and aspirations and we can express theories and viewpoints. We can express with words not only what is happening in our lives, or what the world is like, but we can also explore why it is happening or why the world is the way that it is and how we feel about the answers we have given to these questions.

In the following post, we’ll explore some of the ways in which poetry uses words.

Poetry and Word Choice

In a novel or even a short story, the author has more time to develop his or her ideas or to “paint a picture” using words. By contrast, in poetry, there is a premium on words. Words are chosen very carefully by the poet. They often evoke or picture something that the reader is expected to think about and “fill in” rather than describe or express something in great detail, leaving nothing at all to the imagination.

As an example, have a look at this well-known sonnet by Percy Shelley, called Ozymandias of Egypt:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal those words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias is another name for Ramses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. The central theme of the poem is the inevitable decline of human empires and dictators no matter how intimidating, perpetual, and enduring they might appear when at the height of their power. Ramses the Great had a monument built to his own greatness. Calling himself “king of kings”, a title reserved for Christ in the Scriptures, he wanted all other great men to look with wonder and awe at his works, knowing with despair that they could never compete with him.

Notice the way in which Shelley describes the scene and the words that he chooses. Egypt is not an ancient land, but an antique land. Antiques are ancient things of rarity and value. The “antique” that is presented in the poem is the monument that was constructed in order to perpetuate the memory of this ancient king and his greatness. But this monument, once a thing of splendour and greatness, is now a “shattered visage”, “lifeless”, a “colossal wreck”. It is a thing of death and decay, broken and worthless. Notice also that what remains upon the statue, etched in the stone itself, is the attitude and demeanor of the king. His “frown and wrinkled lip” and his “sneer of cold command” have been carved in stone by the sculptors who “well those passions read”. These are the things that survive, on the “half sunk” and “shattered visage”. In this way, it is not the king’s greatness that is commemorated in the broken statue, but his futile human pride and the disdain he showed for others. Now the king and his empire are no more. And the only “companion” that the statue has is the “lone and level sands” that “stretch far away”, “boundless and bare”. The sand has survived unchanged across the centuries; the monument, however, is a lonely, pathetic and broken relic.

With his careful choice of words and his graphic word pictures Shelley has expressed in 14 lines of poetry what historians, philosophers and theologians might take chapters or even volumes to describe and discuss. His poem asks us to think carefully about the ideas that it expresses and to interact with them.

Words are also carefully chosen in biblical poetry. As an interesting contrast to “Ozymandias of Egypt”, take, for example Psalm 102:3,10. Here the psalmist writes:

For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers...
My days are like the evening shadow; I wither like grass.

The reader is being asked to think about these verbal pictures: smoke vanishing quickly in the breeze of the day; shadows lengthening as the sun goes down in the evening; glowing embers gradually flickering and dying down; grass withering in the hot sun - and then apply these pictures to the psalmist’s awareness of his life and the passage of time. These verbal pictures are much more evocative and beautiful than a simple description using prose, which might go something like this: “I am not happy. I am discouraged and depressed. There is nothing in the day to interest me. I feel old. I am sick. I feel sad, weak and small.”

Interestingly, even in the midst of his sadness and distressing circumstances, the psalmist can still express himself and his feelings in beautiful poetic language, which in itself is a positive and edifying thing. Ultimately, however, the psalmist’s comfort is in God and in his perfect plan for his people. For this reason, the psalm moves away from contemplation of self to focus instead on the Lord (vss. 12ff). This is the biblical answer to the problem posed by Shelley in his poem. Man’s comfort and consolation in the face of his transience and finitude lies not in self-glorification, but in the eternal Lord and in his sovereign purposes.

Poetry and Word Art

We have already seen how words are carefully chosen in poetry in order to express ideas and evoke (sometimes very beautiful) images in the mind. Further to this, poets often use words, and even carefully place words in a sentence, in order to express their ideas clearly and powerfully. I like to call this word art. For some examples let’s look first at these lines from S.T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

These lines are part of a long poem describing the experiences of a sailor after he shot an albatross at sea. Notice how the words have an accent and rhythm that carries the reader along: “The ICE was here, the ICE was there, the ICE was all AROUND… Notice also the way in which some of the words chosen sound like what is being described. “Cracked” and “growled”, “roared” and “howled” all sound, when spoken, like the sounds made by the ice as it shifts. This is a literary device called onomatopoeia. Finally, notice the rhyming scheme. In every stanza the last word of the second line, rhymes with the last line of the fourth. This explains in part why the word “swound” was chosen. It’s an archaic word for “swoon” or “faint”.

In Hebrew poems, although there are some examples of word play in which the word is chosen for its sound, much more prominent is the use of parallelisms to express ideas. That is: an idea will be stated in a line of poetry, and then restated in the next line in order to show either a similarity of idea or a contrast. Here are a couple of examples:

The cords of death entangled me;
The torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
The snares of death confronted me. (Ps. 18:4,5)

Notice how line 3 expresses a very similar idea to line 1 and the same is true for lines 2 and 4. This is an example of what is called synonymous parallelism.

The wicked borrow and do not repay,
But the righteous give generously. (Ps. 37:21)

Here the lines express a contrast. The wicked do one thing; the righteous, by contrast, do the opposite. This is an example of what is called antithetic parallelism. (Antithetic parallelisms are very common in the Proverbs that express a contrast between the behaviour of the wise person on the one hand and that of the fool on the other, or the righteous on the one hand and the wicked on the other.)

Derek Kidner makes the interesting point that this type of poetry is more readily “transposed” into other languages than other types that require an exact correspondence of rhythm and form in order to retain the poetic element.

It is the striking fact that this type of poetry loses less than perhaps any other in the process of translation. In many literatures the appeal of a poem lies chiefly in verbal felicities and associations, or in metrical subtleties, which tend to fail of their effect even in a related language. The programme notes of any Lieder recital are enough to prove the point! But the poetry of the Psalms has a broad simplicity of rhythm and imagery which survives transplanting into almost any soil. Above all, the fact that its parallelisms are those of sense rather than of sound allows it to reproduce its chief effects with very little loss of either force or beauty. It is well fitted by God’s providence to invite ‘all the earth’ to ‘sing the glory of his name’. (Kidner, Derek. The Psalms, Vol. 1, p. 4.)

Ultimately, we can understand and appreciate this word art because we are made in the image of God, who is the great Creator and “Artificer” of this world.

Poetry and Words of the Soul

More than any other form of literature, poetry often puts into words the thoughts and feelings that are experienced at the level of the heart or the soul. Take a look at this typical selective list of categories in this anthology called the Library of World Poetry (edited by William Cullen Bryant):

Poems of the Affections
Friendship
Compliment and Admiration
Love
Marriage
Home
Filial and Fraternal Love
Parting
Absence
Disappointment and Estrangement
Bereavement and Death
Poems of Sorrow and Adversity
Poems of Sentiment and Reflection
Poems of Fancy
Personal Poems
Humorous Poems

This anthology runs to nearly 800 pages!

The Hebrew poems in Scripture also depict and express a vast array of emotions including joy, sorrow, fear, longing, anger, reflection, praise, etc. These poems, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, clearly and powerfully express what the poet was thinking and feeling at the time:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent… (Ps. 22:1,2)

How many of us, going through some difficult or challenging experience, have found great comfort by turning to the psalms? The psalms put into words exactly what we are thinking and feeling, in both a beautiful and compelling way. Moreover, the psalms take us through the challenging experience and help us to refocus our thoughts on the Lord and to find peace and comfort in him:

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations will bow down before him,
for dominion belongs to the Lord
and he rules over the nations (Ps. 22:27,28)

Precisely for this reason, the psalms are a veritable goldmine for those seeking to offer pastoral comfort and encouragement to others.

Conclusion:

In good poetry, words are never wasted. The poet thinks long and hard about which word to choose, and even where to place it in the line or sentence in order to express his ideas and the beauty of his art. This is true of poetry in every language, including the Hebrew poems that are found in Scripture. Poetry is also the language of the soul, often expressing in a few words, and in a very telling way, feelings and experiences that others can readily understand and identify with. I hope this article has inspired you to read more poems, especially the poems in Scripture, with a new appreciation, and maybe even have a go at writing some poems for yourself.

Letter From America

Terror and Candour

Charles Krauthammer
Published in NRO

The administration’s denial of “radical Islam” is dangerous, dishonest, and demoralizing.

The Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber, the Times Square attacker. On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R.,Texas): Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?

Attorney General Eric Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. . . .
–
Smith: Okay, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people—

Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.

Potentially, mind you. This went on until the questioner gave up in exasperation.

A similar question arose last week in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad: “One has to understand where I’m coming from. . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.”

Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as “SoA”: Soldier of Allah.

Holder’s avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms “jihadist,” “Islamist,” and “Islamic terrorism.”

Instead, President Obama’s National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy — how else do you define those seeking your destruction? — “a loose network of violent extremists.” But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize, and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.

The Pentagon report on the Fort Hood shooter runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan’s Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor.”

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers were of various national origin, occupation, age, social class, native tongue, and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

To deny this undeniable truth leads to further absurdities. Remember the wave of speculation about Hasan’s supposedly secondary post-traumatic stress disorder — that he was so deeply affected by the heart-rending stories of his war-traumatized patients that he became radicalized? On the contrary. He was moved not by their suffering but by the suffering they (and the rest of the U.S. military) inflicted on Hasan’s fellow Muslims, in whose name he gunned down 12 American soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

With Shahzad, we find the equivalent ridiculous — and exculpating — speculation that perhaps he was driven over the edge by the foreclosure of his home. Good grief. Of course his home went into foreclosure — so would yours if you voluntarily quit your job and stopped house payments to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. As the Washington Post’s Charles Lane pointed out, foreclosure was a result of Shahzad’s radicalism, not the cause.

There’s a final reason why the administration’s cowardice about identifying those trying to kill us cannot be allowed to pass. It is demoralizing. It trivializes the war between jihadi barbarism and Western decency, and diminishes the memory of those (including thousands of brave Muslims — Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghan, and Western) who have died fighting it.

Churchill famously mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. But his greatness lay not just in eloquence but in his appeal to the moral core of a decent people to rise against an ideology the nature of which Churchill never hesitated to define and describe — and to pronounce (“Nahhhhzzzzi”) in an accent dripping with loathing and contempt.

No one is asking Obama or Holder to match Churchill’s rhetoric — just Shahzad’s candor.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010, the Washington Post Writers Group.