Two Cheers for Fox News
Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, February 21, 2011
I know that none of the cool kids really like Fox News. But the coolshame won't work on me here because I actually do think that O'Reilly is insufferable, and than Hannity has morphed into an incarnate talking point.
But at the same time, I do get my daily (televised) news doses from Special Report with Brett Baier, a program I find quite helpful. And this leads me to say something in defense of the existence of the whole network. This is a defense that is becoming more and more obvious with each new big item in each news cycle -- the most recent being the appalling behavior of the unions in Wisconsin. We now live in a country where a story like this can break, and you can turn to two different channels and get two completely different perspectives on it. Didn't used to be that way.
I grew up in an America when the news was controlled by CBS, NBC, and, bringing up the rear, ABC. All three were cut from the same beige liberal cloth, and it really was one foundational perspective all the time. Beleaguered conservatives got their information from underground outlets -- speciality book publishers, and low circulation magazines. This was even before talk radio. Now there is the radio, the Internet . . . and Fox News.
Now these new guys have their biases and blind spots, some of them glaring. And some old-timey people on the left lament their polarizing presence, but what they are actually lamenting is the new and unpleasant reality of having to debate people -- something they are clearly not very good at.
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Hearing the Voice of God
Tragedy and Its Aftershocks
The "big one" has hit Christchurch. Few in the entire country will be untouched or unaffected, since we in New Zealand are a little village. To a man each will have relatives, friends, colleagues, and mates in Christchurch. In that sense it is a national disaster.
The meaning and significance of such disasters are always multi-dimensional and multi-faceted. The effects similarly. Some people will find new meaning, purpose and direction in life though this adversity. Others will discover afresh that the "good things" of life are mere trinkets, and will become profoundly thankful again for the basics of food and clothing and shelter. With these they will be content. Others will appreciate family, loved ones, neighbours, and friends in deeper ways.
Still others will find courage that they never knew they had. Some will mourn deeply the passing of loved ones. Some will mend their lives and begin again. Others never will. Many will live in fear of further calamity until the day they die. One of the things that earthquakes do--more than any other calamity, it would seem--is shake the fundaments of life to the very core. Nothing is sure. Nothing is certain. Everything is tenuous. There is no security. If the very earth cannot bear us up and support us, nothing can.
At such times, our thoughts always turn particularly to the saints. "When one suffers, all suffer," is the motto of the Church. It is the spiritual foundation of the secularised "all for one, and one for all". The saints will congregate. They will once again review their lives in the light of eternity. They will remind one another that time is short, and man's days upon the earth are like grass. They will extend hospitality to the needy. They will mourn with those who mourn. They will rejoice with those who have been delivered. Their shepherds will minister the Word of God to them. They will realise afresh that though heaven and earth pass away, the Word of the Lord will abide forever. This tragedy will re-orientate and re-focus their lives in ways that few other things ever would.
It is probable that many will become Christians; they will come to Belief and a saving faith in Christ. They thought they were atheists, or they lived in casual, who-cares agnosticism. But spontaneously, from the depths of their heart, they called out to God, as the very earth shook and the buildings fell. Faced with eternity, they became Believers in an instant, crying out, "Remember me, Lord." Whilst many will have cried out to God and have already since forgotten, pushing out the warnings from their mind, others will have been converted, born again by the Spirit. He moves as the wind. Who can tell whence He came, and where He goes.
Just like the great storm and the roaring flood, earthquakes are the voice of God. He speaks in them and through them, to all who have ears to hear.
The "big one" has hit Christchurch. Few in the entire country will be untouched or unaffected, since we in New Zealand are a little village. To a man each will have relatives, friends, colleagues, and mates in Christchurch. In that sense it is a national disaster.
The meaning and significance of such disasters are always multi-dimensional and multi-faceted. The effects similarly. Some people will find new meaning, purpose and direction in life though this adversity. Others will discover afresh that the "good things" of life are mere trinkets, and will become profoundly thankful again for the basics of food and clothing and shelter. With these they will be content. Others will appreciate family, loved ones, neighbours, and friends in deeper ways.
Still others will find courage that they never knew they had. Some will mourn deeply the passing of loved ones. Some will mend their lives and begin again. Others never will. Many will live in fear of further calamity until the day they die. One of the things that earthquakes do--more than any other calamity, it would seem--is shake the fundaments of life to the very core. Nothing is sure. Nothing is certain. Everything is tenuous. There is no security. If the very earth cannot bear us up and support us, nothing can.
At such times, our thoughts always turn particularly to the saints. "When one suffers, all suffer," is the motto of the Church. It is the spiritual foundation of the secularised "all for one, and one for all". The saints will congregate. They will once again review their lives in the light of eternity. They will remind one another that time is short, and man's days upon the earth are like grass. They will extend hospitality to the needy. They will mourn with those who mourn. They will rejoice with those who have been delivered. Their shepherds will minister the Word of God to them. They will realise afresh that though heaven and earth pass away, the Word of the Lord will abide forever. This tragedy will re-orientate and re-focus their lives in ways that few other things ever would.
It is probable that many will become Christians; they will come to Belief and a saving faith in Christ. They thought they were atheists, or they lived in casual, who-cares agnosticism. But spontaneously, from the depths of their heart, they called out to God, as the very earth shook and the buildings fell. Faced with eternity, they became Believers in an instant, crying out, "Remember me, Lord." Whilst many will have cried out to God and have already since forgotten, pushing out the warnings from their mind, others will have been converted, born again by the Spirit. He moves as the wind. Who can tell whence He came, and where He goes.
Just like the great storm and the roaring flood, earthquakes are the voice of God. He speaks in them and through them, to all who have ears to hear.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
The Secular Humanist State Vs the Liberty of Conscience
It's a No Brainer: the State Wins
The Obama administration has now removed most of the conscientious objection protections for medical personnel who hold some medical procedures to be not only wrong, but evil. Now these are not folk who are seeking to overturn the existing system. Rather they are saying that when the system requires them to perform acts and procedures they conscientiously believe to be evil, they have liberty of conscience not to do so.
The Bush administration put in place liberty-of-conscience orders which ordered federal agencies to accommodate those who refused to participate on ethical grounds. The Obama administration has now removed most of these protections. Here is Al Mohler's take on the matter.
The Obama administration has revoked nearly all of the conscience protections put in place by the administration of President George W. Bush. The policy change came just today, and was released as a new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services. As Rob Stein of The Washington Post reports, “The Obama administration rescinded most of a federal regulation Friday designed to protect health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on personal or religious grounds.”
In this case, “most” means almost all of the previous rule has been rescinded. Stein described the action by stating that the Obama administration had “eliminated nearly the entire rule.” All that remains are protections put in place previously covering medical personnel who object to abortion or sterilization. Gone are all protections for those who object by conscience to abortifacient drugs and “emergency” contraceptives, the treatment of gay men and lesbians, and prescriptions for birth control sought by single women. In these cases, medical personnel have objected that their conscience and understanding of medical ethics do not allow them to facilitate acts and behaviors that are both immoral and unhealthy.
The Obama administration said that the Bush era rule was “unclear and potentially overbroad in scope.” Rob Stein explained the concern this way:
The Bush regulation, if enforced, would have cut off federal funding for thousands of entities, including state and local governments, hospitals, health plans and clinics, if they did not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists or other employees who refused to participate in care they felt violated their personal, moral or religious beliefs.
That wording implies that the normal expectation should be that health programs and providers should not “accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists or other employees who refused to participate in care they felt violated their personal, moral, or spiritual beliefs.”
In other words, the Obama administration is now ready to use the coercive power of the state to force medical personnel to perform acts they consider to be morally wrong and unhealthy for their patients. One obvious implication of this is that the state now finds it necessary to force medical professionals to do what they by conscience do not think is right. Allowed to act by conscience, these medical professionals clearly would not do what the state now requires them to do.
Just imagine how our nation’s founders would consider such a tyrannical trampling of individual conscience by the power of the state. From a Christian perspective, this should serve as a clear alarm for those who suggest that it is paranoid to believe that the state will use similar force to require other acts against conscience. The logic is right here for all to see, and only the willfully blind can deny what this new policy means.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world.
The Obama administration has now removed most of the conscientious objection protections for medical personnel who hold some medical procedures to be not only wrong, but evil. Now these are not folk who are seeking to overturn the existing system. Rather they are saying that when the system requires them to perform acts and procedures they conscientiously believe to be evil, they have liberty of conscience not to do so.
The Bush administration put in place liberty-of-conscience orders which ordered federal agencies to accommodate those who refused to participate on ethical grounds. The Obama administration has now removed most of these protections. Here is Al Mohler's take on the matter.
Conscience Trampled by the Regime
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Obama administration has revoked nearly all of the conscience protections put in place by the administration of President George W. Bush. The policy change came just today, and was released as a new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services. As Rob Stein of The Washington Post reports, “The Obama administration rescinded most of a federal regulation Friday designed to protect health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on personal or religious grounds.”
In this case, “most” means almost all of the previous rule has been rescinded. Stein described the action by stating that the Obama administration had “eliminated nearly the entire rule.” All that remains are protections put in place previously covering medical personnel who object to abortion or sterilization. Gone are all protections for those who object by conscience to abortifacient drugs and “emergency” contraceptives, the treatment of gay men and lesbians, and prescriptions for birth control sought by single women. In these cases, medical personnel have objected that their conscience and understanding of medical ethics do not allow them to facilitate acts and behaviors that are both immoral and unhealthy.
The Obama administration said that the Bush era rule was “unclear and potentially overbroad in scope.” Rob Stein explained the concern this way:
The Bush regulation, if enforced, would have cut off federal funding for thousands of entities, including state and local governments, hospitals, health plans and clinics, if they did not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists or other employees who refused to participate in care they felt violated their personal, moral or religious beliefs.
That wording implies that the normal expectation should be that health programs and providers should not “accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists or other employees who refused to participate in care they felt violated their personal, moral, or spiritual beliefs.”
In other words, the Obama administration is now ready to use the coercive power of the state to force medical personnel to perform acts they consider to be morally wrong and unhealthy for their patients. One obvious implication of this is that the state now finds it necessary to force medical professionals to do what they by conscience do not think is right. Allowed to act by conscience, these medical professionals clearly would not do what the state now requires them to do.
Just imagine how our nation’s founders would consider such a tyrannical trampling of individual conscience by the power of the state. From a Christian perspective, this should serve as a clear alarm for those who suggest that it is paranoid to believe that the state will use similar force to require other acts against conscience. The logic is right here for all to see, and only the willfully blind can deny what this new policy means.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world.
Evolution, Science, and Urban Legends
Superstitions of the Age
The current age thinks itself the best and the brightest. This is an effect, in part, of the reigning paradigm of the current scientific community: evolutionism. This scientific meta-theory propounds that things develop by natural order and law: that is, they evolve to higher and higher planes of existence, from the simple to the more complex and advanced.
Under the influence of evolutionism, each generation tends to consider itself superior and more advanced than those that have gone before. One upshot is the denigration of history to irrelevance. Why study primitives--except to set a backdrop for our comparatively advanced and sophisticated state?
One manifestation of this self-claimed superiority is medical science. Pop-medicine regales us with accounts of how superstitious and primitive the medical knowledge and treatments of former generations was. Implication: we are so much better and smarter now. One example of a medical procedure once widely practised in the West is bleeding. There are many others. "How stupid and ignorant those doctors and medical scientists were," is the overriding discourse.
Conveniently, we overlook the embarrassing implication that generations to come will look back at us and likewise chortle with amusement at the ignorance and stupidity of the medical profession at the "turn of the century". This is not to deny that knowledge via the hard sciences does increase and grow. There is a very important sense in which we now know far more than the "bleeders". The Christian attributes this to the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth, as man fulfils the commands of subduing the earth and making it bring forth and bud, on the one hand, and makes disciples of Christ of every nation, on the other. This is gradual, developmental process is the fruit of God's unfolding human history for His glory and the blessing of His people. It is not the result of the "law" of randomness, as the evolutionist propounds.
The Christian also knows through rigorous historical research that cultures and ages do not necessarily retain the knowledge they acquire. Things known now can be lost to future generations, through wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes and other calamities. It can also result from civilisations crumbling from with--partially at times as a result of scientific and technological error. The Roman's proclivity to use lead pipes almost certainly contributed to the decline of that civilisation.
This raises the possibility that current prevailing medical consensuses may turn out to be profoundly ignorant and damaging to society. Take for example diet. We are threatened, we are told, by a plague of obesity. A new term has entered the lexicon: morbidly obese. Nutritionists, funded by the state, lecture us on what we should eat, and not eat--to escape the scourge. But obesity is just the latest food-related plague. Prior to that it was heart disease.
But what if the dietary preventatives for heart disease (high carb, low-fat diets) actually helped produce an epidemic of obesity? One gets an inkling that future generations will look back at us and conclude that we really were an ignorant lot.
One risk we are very clear about: when science gets married to government campaigns or programmes, the first thing to fly out the window is scientific rigour. The thing is that rigorous scientific research, particularly when dealing with human beings, is inevitably tenuous. It has to end up talking about probabilities and possibilities. Moreover, much current research is statistically based, trying to establish correlations and, from there, causality. For instance: 62% of people with bigger than average eye teeth contract gangrene in rest homes. Ergo, eye teeth size is a likely causal factor for gangrene.
Such research methodology, unless rigorously constrained, is readily subject to fallacious reasoning. But governments require certainty for public health programmes. "Large eye teeth are a danger: get your dentist to reduce their size." Actually, this rapidly translates into state funding of eye-teeth reduction procedures. This food is "bad"; that food is "good". Don't do this; do that. When government, who pay, require emphatic certainty, scientists readily comply. But rigour and integrity have long since flown out the window. The upshot: urban myths substitute for effective cures.
When all this takes place within the prevailing discourse of evolutionism, flattering the age with the idea that we are the best and the brightest thus far, superstition and easy credulity can rapidly become the order of the day.
The current age thinks itself the best and the brightest. This is an effect, in part, of the reigning paradigm of the current scientific community: evolutionism. This scientific meta-theory propounds that things develop by natural order and law: that is, they evolve to higher and higher planes of existence, from the simple to the more complex and advanced.
Under the influence of evolutionism, each generation tends to consider itself superior and more advanced than those that have gone before. One upshot is the denigration of history to irrelevance. Why study primitives--except to set a backdrop for our comparatively advanced and sophisticated state?
One manifestation of this self-claimed superiority is medical science. Pop-medicine regales us with accounts of how superstitious and primitive the medical knowledge and treatments of former generations was. Implication: we are so much better and smarter now. One example of a medical procedure once widely practised in the West is bleeding. There are many others. "How stupid and ignorant those doctors and medical scientists were," is the overriding discourse.
Conveniently, we overlook the embarrassing implication that generations to come will look back at us and likewise chortle with amusement at the ignorance and stupidity of the medical profession at the "turn of the century". This is not to deny that knowledge via the hard sciences does increase and grow. There is a very important sense in which we now know far more than the "bleeders". The Christian attributes this to the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth, as man fulfils the commands of subduing the earth and making it bring forth and bud, on the one hand, and makes disciples of Christ of every nation, on the other. This is gradual, developmental process is the fruit of God's unfolding human history for His glory and the blessing of His people. It is not the result of the "law" of randomness, as the evolutionist propounds.
The Christian also knows through rigorous historical research that cultures and ages do not necessarily retain the knowledge they acquire. Things known now can be lost to future generations, through wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes and other calamities. It can also result from civilisations crumbling from with--partially at times as a result of scientific and technological error. The Roman's proclivity to use lead pipes almost certainly contributed to the decline of that civilisation.
This raises the possibility that current prevailing medical consensuses may turn out to be profoundly ignorant and damaging to society. Take for example diet. We are threatened, we are told, by a plague of obesity. A new term has entered the lexicon: morbidly obese. Nutritionists, funded by the state, lecture us on what we should eat, and not eat--to escape the scourge. But obesity is just the latest food-related plague. Prior to that it was heart disease.
But what if the dietary preventatives for heart disease (high carb, low-fat diets) actually helped produce an epidemic of obesity? One gets an inkling that future generations will look back at us and conclude that we really were an ignorant lot.
One risk we are very clear about: when science gets married to government campaigns or programmes, the first thing to fly out the window is scientific rigour. The thing is that rigorous scientific research, particularly when dealing with human beings, is inevitably tenuous. It has to end up talking about probabilities and possibilities. Moreover, much current research is statistically based, trying to establish correlations and, from there, causality. For instance: 62% of people with bigger than average eye teeth contract gangrene in rest homes. Ergo, eye teeth size is a likely causal factor for gangrene.
Such research methodology, unless rigorously constrained, is readily subject to fallacious reasoning. But governments require certainty for public health programmes. "Large eye teeth are a danger: get your dentist to reduce their size." Actually, this rapidly translates into state funding of eye-teeth reduction procedures. This food is "bad"; that food is "good". Don't do this; do that. When government, who pay, require emphatic certainty, scientists readily comply. But rigour and integrity have long since flown out the window. The upshot: urban myths substitute for effective cures.
When all this takes place within the prevailing discourse of evolutionism, flattering the age with the idea that we are the best and the brightest thus far, superstition and easy credulity can rapidly become the order of the day.
Monday, 21 February 2011
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Eleven Theses on Birth Control
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Yesterday a friend called to chide me (in a friendly way) for the way in which I have not come down definitively on the question of birth control. My reason for this has been that when it comes to families and the size of them, we have more important things to talk about, but I have also recognized that I have had to say something and have done some of that in a couple of my books. But sometimes you have to say something more. So here goes.
1. The rise of our birth control-friendly culture and our abortion-friendly culture happened as twin parts of the same zeitgeist. This was all part of our cultural apostasy, and our rejection of the Christian view of marriage and family.
2. Notwithstanding, the Scriptures say nothing definitively about birth control considered as such. Despite the anti-family bias that created the default assumptions of the world around us, we still have to be careful not to go beyond what is written. We especially have to take care not to go beyond what is written. Slavish following of the world is bad, but so is knee-jerk reaction to it.
3. In making the previous point, I recognize that I am departing from the historic Christian tradition on this issue, both Catholic and Protestant. This means that I differ, not only with the pope, but also with Calvin and Luther.
4. At the same time, because of the world's bias in favor of birth control, the world's representatives are not too scrupulous about distinguishing between forms of birth control that are abortifacients and those which are not. This unfortunately includes some Christian medical professionals who have gotten their training from a medical establishment which doesn't give a rip as to whether the method prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg or prevents the fertilization itself. This is the evil lurking behind the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology redefinition of conception as "the implantation of the fertilized ovum." What this means that someone can now sincerely say that a particular method isn't an abortifacient, although by the older definition of conception, it was. Beware of being misled -- a culture that has killed more than 40 million infants thus far is not going to scruple about a few altered definitions.
5. This said, Christians also have to recognize the intent of a procedure, and not build a dogmatic case on statistical likelihoods alone. It is true that some methods might make it less likely for a fertilized egg to implant in the uterine wall, but it is also possible that other daily activities might do the same thing. Jogging? Weight loss? Oil of Olay? Beats me, I don't know. We need to trust the Lord, and not the periodic worries caused by the great baal of statistics.
That said and acknowledged, all hormonal methods of birth control are known to work in one of three ways. Here they are, from most to least common: (a) suppression of ovulation, (b) obstruction of fertilization, and (c) prevention of the implantation of the fertilized ovum on the uterine wall. Many Christians know that the IUD is an abortifacient (using the older, un-tinkered with definition of conception). But primary intent notwithstanding, there are also dangers with the hormonal methods (the Pill, Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs), Plan B, etc.), dangers that do not exist with barrier methods like the condom, diaphragm, and spermicide. These don't place unborn children at risk of an inhospitable welcome to their first bed.
6. The Scriptures do contain one example of birth control (the example of Onan), but this narrative is complicated by the fact that the whole point of a Levirate marriage was the preservation of a deceased brother's name through a legitimate heir. Onan therefore defrauded his sister-in-law through the instrumentality of an act of birth control, which makes it problematic to say that he was struck down by the Lord for the birth control simpliciter.
7. While the Scriptures don't say anything definitively about birth control as such, they do teach an enormous amount about the blessing of faithful covenant seed. This is one of the three main reasons for covenant marriage -- the begetting of a godly seed (Mal. 2:15). This should be taught and emphasized in the church, and is the only really effective way to counter the world's anti-child bigotry. If this is effectively done, visitors to your church will think you must teach against birth control, and they will think this because of the large teeming population at the three foot level that they can see during fellowship hour.
8. More is involved in raising up a godly seed than to have a man with dogmatic convictions about birth control, matched only by his unwillingness to feed, read to, educate, pay tuition for, bestow upon, and love the results of his dogmatism. There are no promised covenantal blessings for the self-absorbed proprietors of stud farms.
9. Children are a blessing from the Lord, but not an automatic blessing from the Lord. They are a covenant blessing, which means the terms of the covenant must always be believed and remembered. A man with a lazy son is ashamed (Prov. 10:5), and it should be obvious that he would not be more greatly blessed if he had five sons sleeping through the harvest.
10. Pastors and teachers should take special care to make sure their teaching and their practice of discipline line up. It is sometimes easy to say things in the pulpit which, if taken seriously, would necessitate church discipline for any violators. But to be all bark and no bite is a good way to bring the authority of the pulpit into disrepute. Don't call it something you are not willing to treat it as. But the balance here should be determined exegetically, and not by a pragmatic cowardice.
11. As each married couple make their decisions about this, and as pastors help them, they should take care to make careful distinctions with regard to motive, as well as a sharp distinction between principles and methods. We must learn to distinguish between a couple postponing fruitfulness for no reason other than that the worldlings told them they should spend some time surfing together in Argentina first, and a seasoned married couple with six kids who stop having them because their covenantal hands are quite full. It appears that the former do not understand the creation order at all, and that the latter don't have any problem at all understanding it. To focus on birth control in isolation interferes with such essential distinctions from being made.
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Yesterday a friend called to chide me (in a friendly way) for the way in which I have not come down definitively on the question of birth control. My reason for this has been that when it comes to families and the size of them, we have more important things to talk about, but I have also recognized that I have had to say something and have done some of that in a couple of my books. But sometimes you have to say something more. So here goes.
1. The rise of our birth control-friendly culture and our abortion-friendly culture happened as twin parts of the same zeitgeist. This was all part of our cultural apostasy, and our rejection of the Christian view of marriage and family.
2. Notwithstanding, the Scriptures say nothing definitively about birth control considered as such. Despite the anti-family bias that created the default assumptions of the world around us, we still have to be careful not to go beyond what is written. We especially have to take care not to go beyond what is written. Slavish following of the world is bad, but so is knee-jerk reaction to it.
3. In making the previous point, I recognize that I am departing from the historic Christian tradition on this issue, both Catholic and Protestant. This means that I differ, not only with the pope, but also with Calvin and Luther.
4. At the same time, because of the world's bias in favor of birth control, the world's representatives are not too scrupulous about distinguishing between forms of birth control that are abortifacients and those which are not. This unfortunately includes some Christian medical professionals who have gotten their training from a medical establishment which doesn't give a rip as to whether the method prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg or prevents the fertilization itself. This is the evil lurking behind the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology redefinition of conception as "the implantation of the fertilized ovum." What this means that someone can now sincerely say that a particular method isn't an abortifacient, although by the older definition of conception, it was. Beware of being misled -- a culture that has killed more than 40 million infants thus far is not going to scruple about a few altered definitions.
5. This said, Christians also have to recognize the intent of a procedure, and not build a dogmatic case on statistical likelihoods alone. It is true that some methods might make it less likely for a fertilized egg to implant in the uterine wall, but it is also possible that other daily activities might do the same thing. Jogging? Weight loss? Oil of Olay? Beats me, I don't know. We need to trust the Lord, and not the periodic worries caused by the great baal of statistics.
That said and acknowledged, all hormonal methods of birth control are known to work in one of three ways. Here they are, from most to least common: (a) suppression of ovulation, (b) obstruction of fertilization, and (c) prevention of the implantation of the fertilized ovum on the uterine wall. Many Christians know that the IUD is an abortifacient (using the older, un-tinkered with definition of conception). But primary intent notwithstanding, there are also dangers with the hormonal methods (the Pill, Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs), Plan B, etc.), dangers that do not exist with barrier methods like the condom, diaphragm, and spermicide. These don't place unborn children at risk of an inhospitable welcome to their first bed.
6. The Scriptures do contain one example of birth control (the example of Onan), but this narrative is complicated by the fact that the whole point of a Levirate marriage was the preservation of a deceased brother's name through a legitimate heir. Onan therefore defrauded his sister-in-law through the instrumentality of an act of birth control, which makes it problematic to say that he was struck down by the Lord for the birth control simpliciter.
7. While the Scriptures don't say anything definitively about birth control as such, they do teach an enormous amount about the blessing of faithful covenant seed. This is one of the three main reasons for covenant marriage -- the begetting of a godly seed (Mal. 2:15). This should be taught and emphasized in the church, and is the only really effective way to counter the world's anti-child bigotry. If this is effectively done, visitors to your church will think you must teach against birth control, and they will think this because of the large teeming population at the three foot level that they can see during fellowship hour.
8. More is involved in raising up a godly seed than to have a man with dogmatic convictions about birth control, matched only by his unwillingness to feed, read to, educate, pay tuition for, bestow upon, and love the results of his dogmatism. There are no promised covenantal blessings for the self-absorbed proprietors of stud farms.
9. Children are a blessing from the Lord, but not an automatic blessing from the Lord. They are a covenant blessing, which means the terms of the covenant must always be believed and remembered. A man with a lazy son is ashamed (Prov. 10:5), and it should be obvious that he would not be more greatly blessed if he had five sons sleeping through the harvest.
10. Pastors and teachers should take special care to make sure their teaching and their practice of discipline line up. It is sometimes easy to say things in the pulpit which, if taken seriously, would necessitate church discipline for any violators. But to be all bark and no bite is a good way to bring the authority of the pulpit into disrepute. Don't call it something you are not willing to treat it as. But the balance here should be determined exegetically, and not by a pragmatic cowardice.
11. As each married couple make their decisions about this, and as pastors help them, they should take care to make careful distinctions with regard to motive, as well as a sharp distinction between principles and methods. We must learn to distinguish between a couple postponing fruitfulness for no reason other than that the worldlings told them they should spend some time surfing together in Argentina first, and a seasoned married couple with six kids who stop having them because their covenantal hands are quite full. It appears that the former do not understand the creation order at all, and that the latter don't have any problem at all understanding it. To focus on birth control in isolation interferes with such essential distinctions from being made.
The "Peace" of Islam
Pray for Sayed Musa: Afghan Christian Set to Be Hanged within Days?
This in from Justin Taylor
The Daily Mall and others are reporting on Said (or Sayed) Musa. Earlier I had posted a link to his letter from prison describing sexual and physical abuse. Here’s the new report:
An Afghan physiotherapist will be executed within three days for converting to Christianity.You can also read the Compass Direct News report, which begins:
Said Musa, 45, has been held for eight months in a Kabul prison were he claims he has been tortured and sexually abused by inmates and guards.
Mr Musa, who lost his left leg in a landmine explosion in the 1990s, has worked for the Red Cross for 15 years and helps to treat fellow amputees.
He was arrested in May last year as he attempted to seek asylum at the German embassy following a crackdown on Christians within Afghanistan.
He claims he was visited by a judge who told him he would be hanged within days unless he converted back to Islam.
But he remains defiant and said he would be willing to die for his faith.
He told the Sunday Times: ‘My body is theirs to do what they want with.’
An Afghani amputee in prison for his Christian faith since May will face a judge this Sunday (Nov. 21) without legal representation or knowledge of the charges against him, according to local sources.Denny Burk suggests that if you have Twitter, you post one of the following:
Mr. President, speak wisely and boldly, in private if necessary, for Said Musa, imprisoned in Kabul. http://dsr.gd/ezR3jW @BarackObama
Mr. President, please persuade the Afghan govt. not to execute our brother Said Musa. http://bit.ly/bQ5RLQ @BarackObama Prov. 24:10-12
Saturday, 19 February 2011
In Praise of Mess
Gloriously Profligate
The Living God loves mess. The Living God has created a universe that is so diverse, so vast, so thick with complexity and diversity that to the niggard it seems excessive and wasteful. At the same time, the entire universe marches to the beat of one drum--the unifying plan and purpose of God. Theologians and Christian philosophers call this the ultimacy of the One and the Many.
In Unbelieving thought the One and the Many is a "problem"--in the sense of resolving which is ultimate, and which subordinate. Classically, Plato, the idealist asserted the One was ultimate; Aristotle, the empiricist asserted the Many was ultimate. Hence Raphael's immortal painting.
The "problem" of the One and the Many cannot be resolved in Unbelieving thought. The bi-polarity remains. In fact, the one and the many are equally ultimate throughout the creation, because they are equally ultimate in God Himself. God is Triune. He is infinite and absolute Oneness. He is also infinite and absolute "Manyness". Diversity in God is as infinite and absolute as unity.
The creation reflects this equal ultimacy of unity and diversity, albeit not infinitely. Now this might seem all rather abstract, but let us be clear. The Unbelieving world, unable to reconcile these to polar opposites in any meaningful way, engages in an unceasing war upon the creation itself in the attempt to assert the ultimacy of either one or the many. Confronted with law, the Unbeliever will champion diversity, individuality, individual rights, and each man to his own. Confronted with mess and chaos, the Unbeliever will extol rules and the bureaucratic plan to bring all into co-ordinated, structured order and harmony. Has it ever struck any as ironic that the first thoroughly secular culture--the post-modern West--having grounded its Unbelief upon the cosmology of evolution which champions stochasticity as the fundament of the cosmos, then turns around in the same breath trying to rule and regulate everything that moves.
God loves unending diversity, change, newness, unfolding, endless beginnings and endings so that "waste" is everywhere, at least to the ruling and regulating modern bureaucratic mind. Waste is regarded as an evil in the West. But why should it, when the creation as untouched by humanity, displays a rich super-abundant profusion of "waste"? God did not just create a few stars--but billions and billions of them so that they are beyond our experience to know, number, explore, discover and enjoy--even in eternity. When God sends a snowstorm, He sends billions upon billions of intricately patterned flakes, each exquisitely beautiful, only to have them end up next day as inchoate mush. And the next day, He will do it all over again, then again, then again. The more we think about this exuberant over-provisioning and abundance, intrinsic to the very structures of the creation itself, the more we are made to laugh and dance with abandon. We all become Tom Bombadil-like, dancing with joy before the Lord at the glories around us.
But God also loves order, structure, pattern, and plan. He commands mankind to go forth and order and manage the world. To the modern secular pagan this can only mean rules, regulations, laws, and controls in an effort to expunge diversity and impose sameness. The modern Unbeliever hates the manyness, the mess of creation. Threatened by diversity, he seeks to enforce uniformity. The Believer, however, understanding that the One and the Many are equally ultimate, rejoices both in mess and in structured order--at the same time. The "trick" is to know what to structure and what to leave unstructured, what to unify and what to leave gloriously diverse. Only God, the Creator can reveal this to us. Without reading well the revelation of God, in both Scripture and the creation, we will never be able to subdue the creation in such a way that all its diverse instruments will produce one harmonious sound.
To illustrate. A family is blessed with many children, each with diversity of gifts and aptitudes. Resources are scarce. The family can afford to provide tertiary education only to two of the children. The remaining children are given a basic education, then put to work in the family business. The modern secular Unbeliever would find this unjust. It would be unfair. The diversity is offensive. Rules, laws, schemes and institutions must be put in place through the taxations and expropriations of the state to expunge this diversity, this manyness, from society, so that all families and children have the same "rights".
The Christian reasons very differently. There is nothing immoral or sinful in the choices and decisions or rule of this family. Instead the Christian looks to see how the glories of God can shine forth in such a situation. Part of the glory may be in the loving generosity of the wider family to help and assist, or of Christians in their local congregation, or of some anonymous benefactor who wishes to help and assist. Part of the glory may be a manifestation of deep loyalty and love amongst all the children as they grow so that all--including the more advantageously provided--use what they have and have achieved to support each other. A glorious, God-glorifying harmony emerges out of the diversity-that would never have been manifest had the diversity been prevented in the first place.
The rules and regulations of the secular Unbeliever seek to drive these glorious possibilities out of existence, creating instead monochromatic drabness and a civil society which is skin deep. Troubled with pluriformity and the diversities, vagaries, and "waste" of Providence, the Unbeliever wants society to be structured and ordered according to its bureaucratic plan. The outcome is cultural poverty and starvation on a mass scale.
Far better to love God's glorious mess, and labour to bring forth His glory and honour in the mess. Then, and only then, will we be working as God's stewards, in His gloriously profligate creation.
The Living God loves mess. The Living God has created a universe that is so diverse, so vast, so thick with complexity and diversity that to the niggard it seems excessive and wasteful. At the same time, the entire universe marches to the beat of one drum--the unifying plan and purpose of God. Theologians and Christian philosophers call this the ultimacy of the One and the Many.
In Unbelieving thought the One and the Many is a "problem"--in the sense of resolving which is ultimate, and which subordinate. Classically, Plato, the idealist asserted the One was ultimate; Aristotle, the empiricist asserted the Many was ultimate. Hence Raphael's immortal painting.
The "problem" of the One and the Many cannot be resolved in Unbelieving thought. The bi-polarity remains. In fact, the one and the many are equally ultimate throughout the creation, because they are equally ultimate in God Himself. God is Triune. He is infinite and absolute Oneness. He is also infinite and absolute "Manyness". Diversity in God is as infinite and absolute as unity. The creation reflects this equal ultimacy of unity and diversity, albeit not infinitely. Now this might seem all rather abstract, but let us be clear. The Unbelieving world, unable to reconcile these to polar opposites in any meaningful way, engages in an unceasing war upon the creation itself in the attempt to assert the ultimacy of either one or the many. Confronted with law, the Unbeliever will champion diversity, individuality, individual rights, and each man to his own. Confronted with mess and chaos, the Unbeliever will extol rules and the bureaucratic plan to bring all into co-ordinated, structured order and harmony. Has it ever struck any as ironic that the first thoroughly secular culture--the post-modern West--having grounded its Unbelief upon the cosmology of evolution which champions stochasticity as the fundament of the cosmos, then turns around in the same breath trying to rule and regulate everything that moves.
God loves unending diversity, change, newness, unfolding, endless beginnings and endings so that "waste" is everywhere, at least to the ruling and regulating modern bureaucratic mind. Waste is regarded as an evil in the West. But why should it, when the creation as untouched by humanity, displays a rich super-abundant profusion of "waste"? God did not just create a few stars--but billions and billions of them so that they are beyond our experience to know, number, explore, discover and enjoy--even in eternity. When God sends a snowstorm, He sends billions upon billions of intricately patterned flakes, each exquisitely beautiful, only to have them end up next day as inchoate mush. And the next day, He will do it all over again, then again, then again. The more we think about this exuberant over-provisioning and abundance, intrinsic to the very structures of the creation itself, the more we are made to laugh and dance with abandon. We all become Tom Bombadil-like, dancing with joy before the Lord at the glories around us.
But God also loves order, structure, pattern, and plan. He commands mankind to go forth and order and manage the world. To the modern secular pagan this can only mean rules, regulations, laws, and controls in an effort to expunge diversity and impose sameness. The modern Unbeliever hates the manyness, the mess of creation. Threatened by diversity, he seeks to enforce uniformity. The Believer, however, understanding that the One and the Many are equally ultimate, rejoices both in mess and in structured order--at the same time. The "trick" is to know what to structure and what to leave unstructured, what to unify and what to leave gloriously diverse. Only God, the Creator can reveal this to us. Without reading well the revelation of God, in both Scripture and the creation, we will never be able to subdue the creation in such a way that all its diverse instruments will produce one harmonious sound.
To illustrate. A family is blessed with many children, each with diversity of gifts and aptitudes. Resources are scarce. The family can afford to provide tertiary education only to two of the children. The remaining children are given a basic education, then put to work in the family business. The modern secular Unbeliever would find this unjust. It would be unfair. The diversity is offensive. Rules, laws, schemes and institutions must be put in place through the taxations and expropriations of the state to expunge this diversity, this manyness, from society, so that all families and children have the same "rights".
The Christian reasons very differently. There is nothing immoral or sinful in the choices and decisions or rule of this family. Instead the Christian looks to see how the glories of God can shine forth in such a situation. Part of the glory may be in the loving generosity of the wider family to help and assist, or of Christians in their local congregation, or of some anonymous benefactor who wishes to help and assist. Part of the glory may be a manifestation of deep loyalty and love amongst all the children as they grow so that all--including the more advantageously provided--use what they have and have achieved to support each other. A glorious, God-glorifying harmony emerges out of the diversity-that would never have been manifest had the diversity been prevented in the first place.
The rules and regulations of the secular Unbeliever seek to drive these glorious possibilities out of existence, creating instead monochromatic drabness and a civil society which is skin deep. Troubled with pluriformity and the diversities, vagaries, and "waste" of Providence, the Unbeliever wants society to be structured and ordered according to its bureaucratic plan. The outcome is cultural poverty and starvation on a mass scale.
Far better to love God's glorious mess, and labour to bring forth His glory and honour in the mess. Then, and only then, will we be working as God's stewards, in His gloriously profligate creation.
Friday, 18 February 2011
Chrestomathy
The Hope of All the Earth . . . Or Nothing
"Christianity in its origin appealed to a great Messianic expectancy, the source and spring of which . . . is found in the Old Testament itself. The whole Old Testament is prophetic. Its special predictions form only a part, although an organic part, of the prophetic Scriptures; and all prophecy points to the Kingdom of God and to the Messiah as its King.
"The narrow boundaries of Judah and Israel were to be enlarged so as to embrace all men, and one King would reign in righteousness over a ransomed world that would offer to Him its homage of praise and service. All that had marred the moral harmony of earth would be removed; the universal Fatherhood of God would become the birthright of redeemed, pardoned, regenerated humanity; and all this blessing would centre in, and flow from, the Person of the Messiah.
Such at least is the promise of the Old Testament which the New Testament declares to have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus. And if it were not so, then surely can it never more be fulfilled. For not even the most fanatic Jew would venture to assert, that out of the Synagogue would now come to our world a King reigning in righteousness, a Son of David, a Branch of Jesse; and that the present Synagogue would so enlarge itself as to embrace in its bosom all the nations of the earth. And thus, unless the old hope of the kingdom has been realised in Christianity, it can never be realised at all. Then also is the Old Testament itself false in its inmost principle, and false the hope of humanity which it bears. . . .
"And so it still is, that the New Testament without the Old, and the Old Testament without the New, is not possible. . . . And so we all feel it, when in our Christian services we not only sing the Psalter and read the Old Testament, as of present application, but speak of Abraham as "our forefather". "
Alfred Edersheim, Prophecy and History in Relation to the Messiah (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, [1901] 1980), pp.24--26. (Alfred Edersheim (1825--1889) was born and educated in a Jewish home but later converted to Christianity. His perspective therefore is unusually keen and comprehensive on the subject of Jewish history and Old Testament prophecy and its fulfillment.)
"Christianity in its origin appealed to a great Messianic expectancy, the source and spring of which . . . is found in the Old Testament itself. The whole Old Testament is prophetic. Its special predictions form only a part, although an organic part, of the prophetic Scriptures; and all prophecy points to the Kingdom of God and to the Messiah as its King.
"The narrow boundaries of Judah and Israel were to be enlarged so as to embrace all men, and one King would reign in righteousness over a ransomed world that would offer to Him its homage of praise and service. All that had marred the moral harmony of earth would be removed; the universal Fatherhood of God would become the birthright of redeemed, pardoned, regenerated humanity; and all this blessing would centre in, and flow from, the Person of the Messiah.
Such at least is the promise of the Old Testament which the New Testament declares to have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus. And if it were not so, then surely can it never more be fulfilled. For not even the most fanatic Jew would venture to assert, that out of the Synagogue would now come to our world a King reigning in righteousness, a Son of David, a Branch of Jesse; and that the present Synagogue would so enlarge itself as to embrace in its bosom all the nations of the earth. And thus, unless the old hope of the kingdom has been realised in Christianity, it can never be realised at all. Then also is the Old Testament itself false in its inmost principle, and false the hope of humanity which it bears. . . .
"And so it still is, that the New Testament without the Old, and the Old Testament without the New, is not possible. . . . And so we all feel it, when in our Christian services we not only sing the Psalter and read the Old Testament, as of present application, but speak of Abraham as "our forefather". "
Alfred Edersheim, Prophecy and History in Relation to the Messiah (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, [1901] 1980), pp.24--26. (Alfred Edersheim (1825--1889) was born and educated in a Jewish home but later converted to Christianity. His perspective therefore is unusually keen and comprehensive on the subject of Jewish history and Old Testament prophecy and its fulfillment.)
Christian Nations
Can They Be Found?
Over at M&M we have been debating whether the United States is a Christian nation. We issued the following challenge to one of the protagonists who asserted that the US is an overtly Christian nation:
In addition, a family that is Christian must not only make the profession, but must evidence an actual living faith that is transforming the lives of all its members to be more like Christ. Or, to use the modern idiom, it must talk Christianly and walk Christianly. Then we can accurately and fairly speak of a Christian family.
The same principles and tests would hold true for any Christian institution, such as a Christian school, a Christian hospital, or a Christian law firm. Precisely the same tests hold true for a genuinely Christian nation. In order for a nation to be fairly called Christian it is necessary that the nation, as a nation, publicly acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as its Head, as the King over its judges, courts, parliaments, executives. But this is not sufficient. In addition, in national life, the nation must walk the walk, which would require, of course, that the vast majority of its citizens as citizens are Believers and are living out their faith.
Does this mean that in a Christian nation, everyone would be forced to become a Christian? Of course not. You cannot force anyone to be a Christian: it is a contradiction in terms. No-one can force the regeneration of the Spirit which leads to a man being born again. Did not our Lord say that the Spirit blows where He wills? But it does mean that in a Christian nation even Unbelievers will adopt Christian practices and habits because they will have become cultural. When everyone is doing something, others go along for the ride.
Given these litmus tests as to whether a nation is Christian, is there any Christian nation upon the earth today? Clearly not. Are there nations that are more Christian than others? Clearly yes, if we mean by that nations where Christians have freedom to believe and practise their faith, and that as such they have some influence over their local communities.
Will there ever be genuinely Christian nations upon the earth? We believe so--provided you also believe, as we do, that the Lord Jesus Christ will indeed ensure the fulfilment of the Great Commission. Why else would He have been raised to the office, position, and glory of absolute ruler of the heavens and the earth?
Over at M&M we have been debating whether the United States is a Christian nation. We issued the following challenge to one of the protagonists who asserted that the US is an overtly Christian nation:
If you can find one current governing document (Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. at either Federal level or state level), one Supreme Court Decision, one federally funded entity, one public school, one federally funded college or university, one officially sanctioned public prayer, one act of Congress, or one democratic vote on anything anywhere that publicly acknowledges and honours Jesus Christ as Lord of these United States, or college, or state legislature–or whatever, then you may have a point–at least for that one particular public institution that performed an isolated act of obeisance to the King of kings. But to speak of the US as a Christian nation whilst all institutions of public governance are forbidden by law to mention, let alone honour or invoke the Christ, would seem at first glance bizarre. . . .
If you were to observe that there are plenty of Christians in the US and that makes the US an overtly Christian nation, I would observe that there are millions upon millions of Christians in China, but that does not make China an overtly Christian nation in any sense whatsoever.The discussion raises interesting questions. Can any nation accurately be called Christian today? Secondly, what would an overtly Christian country look like? The answer would be quickly to hand if we were to ask: what does a Christian family look like? Two things. Firstly, it is necessary that the family, as a family, profess the Lord Jesus Christ as its head, and profess loyalty and obeisance to Him. This is a necessary condition to being a Christian family. There must be an "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" position taken and proclamation made. But this is not sufficient.
In addition, a family that is Christian must not only make the profession, but must evidence an actual living faith that is transforming the lives of all its members to be more like Christ. Or, to use the modern idiom, it must talk Christianly and walk Christianly. Then we can accurately and fairly speak of a Christian family.
The same principles and tests would hold true for any Christian institution, such as a Christian school, a Christian hospital, or a Christian law firm. Precisely the same tests hold true for a genuinely Christian nation. In order for a nation to be fairly called Christian it is necessary that the nation, as a nation, publicly acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as its Head, as the King over its judges, courts, parliaments, executives. But this is not sufficient. In addition, in national life, the nation must walk the walk, which would require, of course, that the vast majority of its citizens as citizens are Believers and are living out their faith.
Does this mean that in a Christian nation, everyone would be forced to become a Christian? Of course not. You cannot force anyone to be a Christian: it is a contradiction in terms. No-one can force the regeneration of the Spirit which leads to a man being born again. Did not our Lord say that the Spirit blows where He wills? But it does mean that in a Christian nation even Unbelievers will adopt Christian practices and habits because they will have become cultural. When everyone is doing something, others go along for the ride.
Given these litmus tests as to whether a nation is Christian, is there any Christian nation upon the earth today? Clearly not. Are there nations that are more Christian than others? Clearly yes, if we mean by that nations where Christians have freedom to believe and practise their faith, and that as such they have some influence over their local communities.
Will there ever be genuinely Christian nations upon the earth? We believe so--provided you also believe, as we do, that the Lord Jesus Christ will indeed ensure the fulfilment of the Great Commission. Why else would He have been raised to the office, position, and glory of absolute ruler of the heavens and the earth?
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
Gay Marriage as Failure to Launch
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
If the Bible teaches, as it does, that the woman is the glory of the man, what follows from this? Among others things, we find an answer to one of the central challenges of our culture wars -- by which I mean the cultural infantilism of homosexual marriage.
Now if the woman is the glory of the man, if a man turns to another man instead, he is refusing to be glorified. And by the same token, if a woman turns away from a man to another woman, she is refusing to be a glory.
One of the prime characteristics of our generation is that of being in revolt against maturity. This shows up in food issues, in architecture, in our treatment of the elderly, and so forth. And of course, it shows up here, with this issue.
We do not want to be glorified. God's intent for the human race, established first with Adam, and reestablished again in the last Adam, Christ, is the glorification of the human race. That is His settled intent.
This is where God is taking us. This is the whole point of humanity. That being the case, the point of every human life should be to point to this larger point. We are each of us called to yearn in the direction that the whole creation is yearning.
But in our sin we don't want to be glorified, and we don't want any lesser glories that remind us of our ultimate glorification. We want to be left alone, left right where we are. We don't want the risk that comes with the godly ambition to be glorified.
This means that gays and lesbians are therefore not the cool kids. They are the footdraggers, the hangers-back, those afraid of success. They are not the future. They are the embodiment of failure to launch. Now some conservatives might argue that I am minimizing the "abomination" factor (Lev. 20:13). Not at all -- but I am saying that an abomination involves much more than the ick factor. For any human being, created in the image of God, to refuse glorification is appalling. There are heterosexual refusals of glorification too, of course, but homosexuality is a high profile example of this.
The fact that we are created in the image of God is central to this idea of glorification. We are stamped with His image, and the process of glorification of sinners is the restoration of that image, defaced by the Fall. But what did that image consist of originally?
Among other things, Adam was created with a crown. Among other things, Adam was attended with glory. How could it be otherwise, when he was fashioned in the image of the glorious God? Male and female together constitute the image of God in man. This does not mean that those who are unmarried in the providence of God are sub-human, obviously, but it does mean that those men who reject the gift of being glorified, and the women who reject the role of being a glory, are in high rebellion against the blueprint established for us.
The rejection of this glory is, not surprisingly, followed immediately by the pursuit of glory's opposite -- degradation. Because men refuse to glorify God (Rom. 1:21), the end result is that they refuse to imitate that glory. And when they refuse to pursue that glory, what happens? "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections" (Rom. 1:26).
Now someone might object that all this objectifies women, making them trophy wives. Well, yes, rightly understood every wife should be considered a trophy wife. But not one of those plastic ones you got in third grade for winning the three-legged race at the all-school picnic. Rather, a wife rightly honored reflects the gospel in ways that nothing else can (Eph. 5:25-27), and in her triumph she portrays the eternal weight of glory (2 Cor. 4:17) -- as terrible as an army with banners (Song 6:10). A trophy wife, all right, but a trophy well worth having. In order to bear a crown with that kind of weight, a husband has to have (by grace) a strong neck, which means that it cannot be a stiff neck.
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
If the Bible teaches, as it does, that the woman is the glory of the man, what follows from this? Among others things, we find an answer to one of the central challenges of our culture wars -- by which I mean the cultural infantilism of homosexual marriage.
"the woman is the glory of the man" 1 Cor. 11:7).
"A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband" Prov. 12:4).
Now if the woman is the glory of the man, if a man turns to another man instead, he is refusing to be glorified. And by the same token, if a woman turns away from a man to another woman, she is refusing to be a glory.
One of the prime characteristics of our generation is that of being in revolt against maturity. This shows up in food issues, in architecture, in our treatment of the elderly, and so forth. And of course, it shows up here, with this issue.
We do not want to be glorified. God's intent for the human race, established first with Adam, and reestablished again in the last Adam, Christ, is the glorification of the human race. That is His settled intent.
"Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified" (Rom. 8:30).
This is where God is taking us. This is the whole point of humanity. That being the case, the point of every human life should be to point to this larger point. We are each of us called to yearn in the direction that the whole creation is yearning.
But in our sin we don't want to be glorified, and we don't want any lesser glories that remind us of our ultimate glorification. We want to be left alone, left right where we are. We don't want the risk that comes with the godly ambition to be glorified.
This means that gays and lesbians are therefore not the cool kids. They are the footdraggers, the hangers-back, those afraid of success. They are not the future. They are the embodiment of failure to launch. Now some conservatives might argue that I am minimizing the "abomination" factor (Lev. 20:13). Not at all -- but I am saying that an abomination involves much more than the ick factor. For any human being, created in the image of God, to refuse glorification is appalling. There are heterosexual refusals of glorification too, of course, but homosexuality is a high profile example of this.
The fact that we are created in the image of God is central to this idea of glorification. We are stamped with His image, and the process of glorification of sinners is the restoration of that image, defaced by the Fall. But what did that image consist of originally?
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen. 1:27).
Among other things, Adam was created with a crown. Among other things, Adam was attended with glory. How could it be otherwise, when he was fashioned in the image of the glorious God? Male and female together constitute the image of God in man. This does not mean that those who are unmarried in the providence of God are sub-human, obviously, but it does mean that those men who reject the gift of being glorified, and the women who reject the role of being a glory, are in high rebellion against the blueprint established for us.
The rejection of this glory is, not surprisingly, followed immediately by the pursuit of glory's opposite -- degradation. Because men refuse to glorify God (Rom. 1:21), the end result is that they refuse to imitate that glory. And when they refuse to pursue that glory, what happens? "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections" (Rom. 1:26).
Now someone might object that all this objectifies women, making them trophy wives. Well, yes, rightly understood every wife should be considered a trophy wife. But not one of those plastic ones you got in third grade for winning the three-legged race at the all-school picnic. Rather, a wife rightly honored reflects the gospel in ways that nothing else can (Eph. 5:25-27), and in her triumph she portrays the eternal weight of glory (2 Cor. 4:17) -- as terrible as an army with banners (Song 6:10). A trophy wife, all right, but a trophy well worth having. In order to bear a crown with that kind of weight, a husband has to have (by grace) a strong neck, which means that it cannot be a stiff neck.
Ali-G Would Understand
Respek
Only a golfer would empathise and appreciate this obviously true story.
Only a golfer would empathise and appreciate this obviously true story.
Two guys were playing golf. One was about to chip on to the green when he saw a funeral procession near the course. He stopped, took off his cap, and bowed his head to pray. He stood there with his head bowed until the procession passed.
“Wow,” said his companion. “That was very touching. I have never seen that kind of respect from a golfer. Usually guys are too preoccupied with their golf game.”
The guy said, “Well, we were married for forty-seven years.”
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
Damning Indictment
Newsweek's new columnist makes his debut in this week's issue with a cover story on Obama's Egypt debacle and the strategic vacuum it exposes in the White House.
"The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all." Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe's balance of power nearly a century and a half ago.
Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity… and missed it completely.
In Bismarck's case, it was not so much God's coattails he caught as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his own choosing. The wave Obama just missed—again—is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East's most populous country.
In each case, the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did both—some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recommending an "orderly transition."
The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak's cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn't end there. America's two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington's failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration's apparent cluelessness.
The defining characteristic of Obama's foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so.
Newsweek; Bloomberg / Getty Images
Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo's Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the
assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.
This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration's lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign-policymaking have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.
Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. I suspected at the time of his appointment that General Jones was a poor choice. A big, bluff Marine, he once astonished me by recommending that Turkish troops might lend the United States support in Iraq. He seemed mildly surprised when I suggested the Iraqis might resent such a reminder of centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.
The best national-security advisers have combined deep knowledge of international relations with an ability to play the Machiavellian Beltway game, which means competing for the president's ear against the other would-be players in the policymaking process: not only the defense secretary but also the secretary of state and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. No one has ever done this better than Henry Kissinger. But the crucial thing about Kissinger as national-security adviser was not the speed with which he learned the dark arts of interdepartmental turf warfare. It was the skill with which he, in partnership with Richard Nixon, forged a grand strategy for the United States at a time of alarming geopolitical instability.
The essence of that strategy was, first, to prioritize (for example, détente with the Soviets before human-rights issues within the USSR) and then to exert pressure by deliberately linking key issues. In their hardest task—salvaging peace with honor in Indochina by preserving the independence of South Vietnam—Nixon and Kissinger ultimately could not succeed. But in the Middle East they were able to eject the Soviets from a position of influence and turn Egypt from a threat into a malleable ally. And their overtures to China exploited the divisions within the communist bloc, helping to set Beijing on an epoch-making new course of economic openness.
The contrast between the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of strategic thinking. The Iranian revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.
Remind you of anything? "This is what happens when you get caught by surprise," an anonymous American official told The New York Times last week. "We've had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None."
I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration's strategic thinking than this: It never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these things—ranking priorities and gaming scenarios—that a coherent foreign policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his presidency.
These were his words back in June 2009:
"America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."
Those lines will come back to haunt Obama if, as cannot be ruled out, the ultimate beneficiary of his bungling in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains by far the best organized opposition force in the country—and wholly committed to the restoration of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia. Would such an outcome advance "tolerance and the dignity of all human beings" in Egypt? Somehow, I don't think so.
Grand strategy is all about the necessity of choice. Today, it means choosing between a daunting list of objectives: to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran's ambition to become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as an economic rival, to guard against a Russian "reconquista" of Eastern Europe—and so on. The defining characteristic of Obama's foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, "I am not George W. Bush" is no substitute for a strategy.
Bismarck knew how to choose. He understood that riding the nationalist wave would enable Prussia to become the dominant force in Germany, but that thereafter the No. 1 objective must be to keep France and Russia from uniting against his new Reich. When asked for his opinion about colonizing Africa, Bismarck famously replied: "My map of Africa lies in Europe. Here lies Russia and here lies France, and we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa."
Tragically, no one knows where Barack Obama's map of the Middle East is. At best, it is in the heartland states of America, where the fate of his presidency will be decided next year, just as Jimmy Carter's was back in 1980.
At worst, he has no map at all.
Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November.
Hat Tip: Patterico
Egyptian-Style Democracy
Stage Managed by the Army
The West is agog at the "people power revolution" in Egypt. They are certain that this represented a spontaneous, secular, democratic uprising against a tyrant. They are confident that a Westernised, secular Islam will emerge. Islam with a human (that is, Western) face. This, they hope, portends a possible thoroughgoing secularisation and (Western) democratization of the Middle East. No wonder there has been a rush of blood to the head.
We fear that the next few months will see some giant hangovers. If caution is the first step to wisdom in foreign policy, it would seem that foolishness has taken up residence and is not about to be evicted. The Egyptian army has never lost control. The Mubarak regime was its puppet. Egypt's constitution was its creation. Army style "democracy" led eventually to a tyrant. Will it be any different this time?
Caution says, "Not likely". The army runs Egypt and controls the economy. It does face some huge challenges to remaining in this position. It is the economically dispossessed that have risen up. Providing for them will be no mean feat. We suspect that the most favoured option will be Singapore or Chinese-style socialism. But will may mean that the army itself would have to make radical changes to itself, which would be a challenge. The reason is that the army, like the PLA in China, operates as a state-within-a-state in Egypt. The army owns and operates vast swathes of the Egyptian economy. Consider the following:
We expect that the Egyptian military will carefully craft and control the political institutions and processes so that those elected will be tolerable to itself. The outcome will be pretty much as before: "democracy, but not as we know it, Jim".
Hat Tip: Whaleoil
The West is agog at the "people power revolution" in Egypt. They are certain that this represented a spontaneous, secular, democratic uprising against a tyrant. They are confident that a Westernised, secular Islam will emerge. Islam with a human (that is, Western) face. This, they hope, portends a possible thoroughgoing secularisation and (Western) democratization of the Middle East. No wonder there has been a rush of blood to the head.
We fear that the next few months will see some giant hangovers. If caution is the first step to wisdom in foreign policy, it would seem that foolishness has taken up residence and is not about to be evicted. The Egyptian army has never lost control. The Mubarak regime was its puppet. Egypt's constitution was its creation. Army style "democracy" led eventually to a tyrant. Will it be any different this time?
Caution says, "Not likely". The army runs Egypt and controls the economy. It does face some huge challenges to remaining in this position. It is the economically dispossessed that have risen up. Providing for them will be no mean feat. We suspect that the most favoured option will be Singapore or Chinese-style socialism. But will may mean that the army itself would have to make radical changes to itself, which would be a challenge. The reason is that the army, like the PLA in China, operates as a state-within-a-state in Egypt. The army owns and operates vast swathes of the Egyptian economy. Consider the following:
Egypt’s Military-Industrial-Bottled Water-Farming Complex
Suppose driving home from the market in your military-made Hyundai Sonata, turning on your military-made range, which runs off a bottle of military-made natural gas, heating up a can on military-made soup (filled with military-grown vegetables) and washing it down with a military-made bottle of water.
It’s more likely than you’d think in Egypt, where the military is literally into every conceivable industry from tourism to hair-care products. With nearly half a million active duty personnel in the nation and no serious prospect of a war with any of its neighbors, Egypt’s military is a major employer and industrial powerhouse in a nation whose command economy has sparked vast unemployment and growing unrest.
It is the ultimate example of mission creep. Faced with a peace deal with Israel and no other enemies to justify their existence, the military faced threats to cut their enormous budget and set about becoming “self-sufficient.” They manufactured much of their own equipment, even grew their own food.
All of this was pretty easy for a nation with such an enormous supply of poorly paid conscripts, and it didn’t stop there. The military-owned company manufacturing their vehicles made deals with Chrysler, Hyundai and others and went into the car-making business. Other factories started making kitchen appliances. The farms kept expanding until they supplied not only all of the food the military made, but were selling excess on the open market. With nothing better to do, the conscripts started installing telephone lines and paving roads for government projects.
It is a sweetheart deal for the military – the Egyptian poor are forced into military service (for years those who could afford it would simply pay a fine instead) and are farmed out into some military-run industry. Better still those military run industries have zero oversight – they pay no taxes, need no licenses, and the profits from their businesses are entirely “off-book,” going into the military’s coffers to pay for whatever.
And while some career military men griped at the notion of the military spending so little time on, well, military stuff, it also paid off extremely well for the top officers, who not only are in an excellent position to collect on these profits without anyone being the wiser that they ever existed, but are provided heavily subsidized living accommodations.
Needless to say, it was less convenient for private industry, which had to compete with a subsidized rival with foreign and domestic funding and cheap, forced labor. Those with the right connections could count on some cushy government contracts, while the rest were left to struggle.
Interestingly, the US military described this entire phenomenon, in excruciating detail, years ago, praising the Egyptian military’s ability to “employ large numbers of soldiers in meaningful activities” and insisting that military organization is an “ideal type for an industrialized and secularized enterprise,” and insisting it benefited the Egyptian economy enormously.
It was perhaps less obvious when that report was written that this was an unsustainable model, but what is being described is clearly a criminal syndicate operating with legal immunity as a “military” and dominating an ever growing portion of the economy to the severe detriment of competition and efficiency.
After decades of this system, Egypt’s economy is a disaster, with the well-connected living comfortably while the vast majority of Egyptian live in abject squalor, either unemployed or conscripted to serve as cheap labor. Egypt has in many ways become the dystopian society portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano for the poor and uneducated.
Incredibly, however, when the entire crooked system blew up in their face and the massive unemployment and repression led to full on rebellion against Hosni Mubarak, few recognized the deleterious impact the military has had on the situation.
Fewer still realize just how much money the Egyptian military has, as its official budget only includes the $1.3 billion in annual US aid and a few billion dollars in government subsidy. They likely don’t particularly need either, which explains the lack of influence over the Egyptian military’s operations, but just how big this military truly is would be anyone’s guess, as the profits from its assorted businesses are, of course, entirely “off budget.”
We expect that the Egyptian military will carefully craft and control the political institutions and processes so that those elected will be tolerable to itself. The outcome will be pretty much as before: "democracy, but not as we know it, Jim".
Hat Tip: Whaleoil
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
When the Enemy of Your Enemy is the Devil
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, February 14, 2011
Conservative Christian activist, what is missing from GOProd? U are! ("GOProud" is a homosexual group purporting to be conservative activists, ed.) And there is a reason for that.
Recent months have seen a significant shift on the right, as the conservative organization CPAC invited the right wing homosexual group GOProd to participate in its annual parade of candidates and the near future's erstwhile candidates. We shouldn't be too disheartened, because they also invited Donald Trump's hair to come, and an interesting speech that was.
Of course, some social conservatives pulled out, and good on them, while some other interesting things happened as well. Sarah Palin didn't go, but she never does, and at the same time she said that she didn't have a problem with GOProd's participation. Ron Paul attended, and won the straw poll there for the second year running, well ahead of Mitt Romney. Neither did he have a problem with GOProd's involvement. Andrew Breitbart, the very effective agitator of the right, threw a big party for the GOProdders, and it was the social event of the weekend. So, what shall we make of all this? A couple things.
The first is we have to distinguish two very different mistakes that are being made. The paths diverge significantly, and so they are quite a distance apart when they both go over the lip of the chasm. The first is the mistake that Palin and Paul are making -- the libertarian mistake. The assumption is that any kind of personal freedom is good. This libertarian involvement is likely to say something like: "I don't care what those guys do when they are alone. I find it distasteful, but I believe in as few restrictions on the individual as possible." The fact that Ron Paul won the straw poll at CPAC indicates heavy libertarian involvement, and this helps to account for some of what happened.
The other mistake is that being made by those who would celebrate the sodomy itself. The Democratic party is already there -- sodomy is a basic human right, and may soon be a secular sacrament -- and if they don't figure this out, the Republican party soon will be in the same place. This would be the difference between Palin and Paul, both Christians, who would necessarily say that homosexual behavior is sinful, and Breitbart, an atheist, who could not say any such thing. It makes perfect sense why Breitbart would throw that party, and why Ron Paul would go to CPAC but not to the party.
But over time, in any political coalition, the former stance has a tendency to turn into the latter. This is because people don't understand the difference between allies and cobelligerents. Allies are united by a common commander, and cobelligerents are united by a common enemy. In the Second World War, we were allied with Great Britain and we were cobelligerents with the Soviet Union. We were fighting alongside Great Britain for basically the same reasons, and our forces were united under the command of Eisenhower. Off on the eastern front, Stalin and Hitler were fighting one another for completely different reasons.
This distinction is obvious, but in the heat of battle, to point out the obvious is often treated as sedition. People want to assume that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The real principle ought to be the enemy of my enemy is sometimes useful. But when political results become the only thing that matter, then pressure is immediately applied to start telling lies. If Roosevelt had referred to Stalin as "that useful thug giving Hitler fits," no honest man could object. But American propaganda immediately turned Stalin, a man every bit as evil as the lunatic we were fighting, into "Uncle Joe." Churchill once famously said, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Churchill's wit notwithstanding, there is a deep moral trouble there.
The problem is not that Ahab and Jehoshaphat might have found themselves fighting a common enemy at the same time. Funny things happen in this world. The problem was with what Jehoshaphat was required to put up with as the cost of coordinating it. If a homosexual rep in Congress votes against Obama's latest very expensive whatever, I for one will rejoice and thank the Lord for it. Double yay. But if the cost of getting that vote is that I have to stand on a platform somewhere at a Homos and Christians United for Fiscal Sanity rally, deal me out.
When God destroyed Sodom, how were their books in the previous five fiscal years? Was their budget balanced? Who knows? Who cares?
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, February 14, 2011
Conservative Christian activist, what is missing from GOProd? U are! ("GOProud" is a homosexual group purporting to be conservative activists, ed.) And there is a reason for that.
Recent months have seen a significant shift on the right, as the conservative organization CPAC invited the right wing homosexual group GOProd to participate in its annual parade of candidates and the near future's erstwhile candidates. We shouldn't be too disheartened, because they also invited Donald Trump's hair to come, and an interesting speech that was.
Of course, some social conservatives pulled out, and good on them, while some other interesting things happened as well. Sarah Palin didn't go, but she never does, and at the same time she said that she didn't have a problem with GOProd's participation. Ron Paul attended, and won the straw poll there for the second year running, well ahead of Mitt Romney. Neither did he have a problem with GOProd's involvement. Andrew Breitbart, the very effective agitator of the right, threw a big party for the GOProdders, and it was the social event of the weekend. So, what shall we make of all this? A couple things.
The first is we have to distinguish two very different mistakes that are being made. The paths diverge significantly, and so they are quite a distance apart when they both go over the lip of the chasm. The first is the mistake that Palin and Paul are making -- the libertarian mistake. The assumption is that any kind of personal freedom is good. This libertarian involvement is likely to say something like: "I don't care what those guys do when they are alone. I find it distasteful, but I believe in as few restrictions on the individual as possible." The fact that Ron Paul won the straw poll at CPAC indicates heavy libertarian involvement, and this helps to account for some of what happened.
The other mistake is that being made by those who would celebrate the sodomy itself. The Democratic party is already there -- sodomy is a basic human right, and may soon be a secular sacrament -- and if they don't figure this out, the Republican party soon will be in the same place. This would be the difference between Palin and Paul, both Christians, who would necessarily say that homosexual behavior is sinful, and Breitbart, an atheist, who could not say any such thing. It makes perfect sense why Breitbart would throw that party, and why Ron Paul would go to CPAC but not to the party.
But over time, in any political coalition, the former stance has a tendency to turn into the latter. This is because people don't understand the difference between allies and cobelligerents. Allies are united by a common commander, and cobelligerents are united by a common enemy. In the Second World War, we were allied with Great Britain and we were cobelligerents with the Soviet Union. We were fighting alongside Great Britain for basically the same reasons, and our forces were united under the command of Eisenhower. Off on the eastern front, Stalin and Hitler were fighting one another for completely different reasons.
This distinction is obvious, but in the heat of battle, to point out the obvious is often treated as sedition. People want to assume that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The real principle ought to be the enemy of my enemy is sometimes useful. But when political results become the only thing that matter, then pressure is immediately applied to start telling lies. If Roosevelt had referred to Stalin as "that useful thug giving Hitler fits," no honest man could object. But American propaganda immediately turned Stalin, a man every bit as evil as the lunatic we were fighting, into "Uncle Joe." Churchill once famously said, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." Churchill's wit notwithstanding, there is a deep moral trouble there.
The problem is not that Ahab and Jehoshaphat might have found themselves fighting a common enemy at the same time. Funny things happen in this world. The problem was with what Jehoshaphat was required to put up with as the cost of coordinating it. If a homosexual rep in Congress votes against Obama's latest very expensive whatever, I for one will rejoice and thank the Lord for it. Double yay. But if the cost of getting that vote is that I have to stand on a platform somewhere at a Homos and Christians United for Fiscal Sanity rally, deal me out.
When God destroyed Sodom, how were their books in the previous five fiscal years? Was their budget balanced? Who knows? Who cares?
A Tale of Two Maori
An Old Conflict in New Clothes is Welcome Indeed
The Maori Party is supposed to be a broad-tent party, albeit for Maori. It is becoming clearer with each passing day that the tent pegs need to be positioned much, much further apart if it is going to be able to accommodate the divisions now emerging.
These divisions are not new, and they are not particularly or uniquely Maori. We have seen them before. The ideology of socialism--the belief that all means of production, both capital and labour, belong to society as the original and rightful owner--has been around since Karl Marx plied his hand as an Hegelian economist. Socialists rapidly split into two camps: Fabians and revolutionaries. It was a split over tactics and timeframes.
Revolutionary socialists believed that the social ownership of everything--even the soul of man--can only be achieved by revolution, by radical, even total, change. The time frame had to be now--within the current generation. Fabian socialists believed that the social ownership of everything could only be achieved gradually, by thousands of slight iterations where private (non-socially owned) property was gradually removed, and placed under public ownership. The time frame was intergenerational. The tactic was legislating and regulating the socialist state into de-facto existence.
Fabians have been far more successful and influential to the point where both left and right political parties throughout the West argue only over relative degrees of the social ownership of property. They are all Fabians now.
The Maori Party is a socialist party. True: it is distinct in the peculiar racial tinge to its socialism. But it incessantly seeks a redistribution of capital in favour of Maori. But it is being riven by disputes between Fabian Maori socialists and revolutionary Maori socialists. Turia, Sharples and their loyal MP's are Fabians. They are gradualists. They doff the cap to radical doctrines like Maori being installed as the co-governors of the country, but use it merely to extort and argue for "more" to be distributed to Maori. They are patient. They are prepared to see future generations achieve much, much more than they ever have. Passing first this law, then this clause, then this measure, following by that regulation is their modus operandi.
Harawira, however, is a revolutionary socialist. He wants co-sovereignty now. He wants it by radical change. Gradual, incremental changes are compromises which challenge his integrity. Like all revolutionaries it is all or nothing, and it has to be now. Harawira is supported by swathes of urban, educated Maori. They have been educated in the ideology of Maori as Treaty-partner and co-sovereign of the nation. They see the Treaty not as a vassal treaty, but as a contract between co-equals and partners. To them the current situation is firstly unjust. Secondly, they trace all problems confronting Maori to the denial of their co-sovereign status and authority over the nation. Maori will never be truly human, truly "born again" until they get their mana as "big dog" restored. The longer it is allowed to continue, the harder it gets to address the problems. The system cannot be changed gradually; only revolutionary change will achieve Maori power and control over the capital and resources of the country. For these Maori, like the Fabian Maori, it is all about ownership, being sovereign over capital and resources. The dispute is tactical. The argument is over how to achieve control and how much time it will take.
The somnambulant electorate sees Turia and Sharples et al. as pretty much mainstream. They hear echoes of their own Fabian principles and regard them as "one of us". As one very senior National party person said, "Pita Sharples is a class act." In other words, Sharples is seen as being at the centre of the political spectrum. It is why he and his colleagues can work with either the centre left party (Labour) or the centre right party (National), and why they can work with the Maori Party. It is why both major parties can work with the Maori Party. They are all in the broad Fabian socialist tent.
But Harawira and his supporters are not. They are the revolutionary and radical socialists. Co-regency now--which is to say, Maori control over the means of production and labour in New Zealand now--is their creed. "Our way or the highway" is their modus operandi. You see this clearly in the split within Maoridom over the Foreshore and Seabed proposals. Turia argues, "It's the best we can do now." Her Maori revolutionary opponents oppose it because it is "all or nothing, now" and since the proposed legislation is not "all" it is nothing and must not be signed.
The Christian will want none of this. Socialism is an overt and deliberate thumbing the nose at the eighth and tenth commandments. Therefore, it is an ideology directly opposed to God Himself, since it champions the breaking of His holy law. Therefore, not only is socialism (whether Fabian or revolutionary) intrinsically evil, unjust, and the perpetrator of great harm to men, it will inevitably collapse. It is doing great damage to New Zealand, and has done over seventy years. Its result, if allowed to control and continue, will be a "failed state". However, Christians are like Fabians in that they are gradualists. Their perspective stretches out to a thousand generations. But they are also revolutionaries--far more revolutionary than the socialists--in that they look for every man to become a new creature in Christ.
Meanwhile we look at the ructions taking place within the Maori Party and see nothing new there. It is the century old struggle of socialist against socialist, Fabian against revolutionary. Long may it continue. Infighting makes both weaker. Obstacles to socialism are our friend.
The Maori Party is supposed to be a broad-tent party, albeit for Maori. It is becoming clearer with each passing day that the tent pegs need to be positioned much, much further apart if it is going to be able to accommodate the divisions now emerging.
These divisions are not new, and they are not particularly or uniquely Maori. We have seen them before. The ideology of socialism--the belief that all means of production, both capital and labour, belong to society as the original and rightful owner--has been around since Karl Marx plied his hand as an Hegelian economist. Socialists rapidly split into two camps: Fabians and revolutionaries. It was a split over tactics and timeframes.
Revolutionary socialists believed that the social ownership of everything--even the soul of man--can only be achieved by revolution, by radical, even total, change. The time frame had to be now--within the current generation. Fabian socialists believed that the social ownership of everything could only be achieved gradually, by thousands of slight iterations where private (non-socially owned) property was gradually removed, and placed under public ownership. The time frame was intergenerational. The tactic was legislating and regulating the socialist state into de-facto existence.
Fabians have been far more successful and influential to the point where both left and right political parties throughout the West argue only over relative degrees of the social ownership of property. They are all Fabians now.
The Maori Party is a socialist party. True: it is distinct in the peculiar racial tinge to its socialism. But it incessantly seeks a redistribution of capital in favour of Maori. But it is being riven by disputes between Fabian Maori socialists and revolutionary Maori socialists. Turia, Sharples and their loyal MP's are Fabians. They are gradualists. They doff the cap to radical doctrines like Maori being installed as the co-governors of the country, but use it merely to extort and argue for "more" to be distributed to Maori. They are patient. They are prepared to see future generations achieve much, much more than they ever have. Passing first this law, then this clause, then this measure, following by that regulation is their modus operandi.
Harawira, however, is a revolutionary socialist. He wants co-sovereignty now. He wants it by radical change. Gradual, incremental changes are compromises which challenge his integrity. Like all revolutionaries it is all or nothing, and it has to be now. Harawira is supported by swathes of urban, educated Maori. They have been educated in the ideology of Maori as Treaty-partner and co-sovereign of the nation. They see the Treaty not as a vassal treaty, but as a contract between co-equals and partners. To them the current situation is firstly unjust. Secondly, they trace all problems confronting Maori to the denial of their co-sovereign status and authority over the nation. Maori will never be truly human, truly "born again" until they get their mana as "big dog" restored. The longer it is allowed to continue, the harder it gets to address the problems. The system cannot be changed gradually; only revolutionary change will achieve Maori power and control over the capital and resources of the country. For these Maori, like the Fabian Maori, it is all about ownership, being sovereign over capital and resources. The dispute is tactical. The argument is over how to achieve control and how much time it will take.
The somnambulant electorate sees Turia and Sharples et al. as pretty much mainstream. They hear echoes of their own Fabian principles and regard them as "one of us". As one very senior National party person said, "Pita Sharples is a class act." In other words, Sharples is seen as being at the centre of the political spectrum. It is why he and his colleagues can work with either the centre left party (Labour) or the centre right party (National), and why they can work with the Maori Party. It is why both major parties can work with the Maori Party. They are all in the broad Fabian socialist tent.
But Harawira and his supporters are not. They are the revolutionary and radical socialists. Co-regency now--which is to say, Maori control over the means of production and labour in New Zealand now--is their creed. "Our way or the highway" is their modus operandi. You see this clearly in the split within Maoridom over the Foreshore and Seabed proposals. Turia argues, "It's the best we can do now." Her Maori revolutionary opponents oppose it because it is "all or nothing, now" and since the proposed legislation is not "all" it is nothing and must not be signed.
The Christian will want none of this. Socialism is an overt and deliberate thumbing the nose at the eighth and tenth commandments. Therefore, it is an ideology directly opposed to God Himself, since it champions the breaking of His holy law. Therefore, not only is socialism (whether Fabian or revolutionary) intrinsically evil, unjust, and the perpetrator of great harm to men, it will inevitably collapse. It is doing great damage to New Zealand, and has done over seventy years. Its result, if allowed to control and continue, will be a "failed state". However, Christians are like Fabians in that they are gradualists. Their perspective stretches out to a thousand generations. But they are also revolutionaries--far more revolutionary than the socialists--in that they look for every man to become a new creature in Christ.
Meanwhile we look at the ructions taking place within the Maori Party and see nothing new there. It is the century old struggle of socialist against socialist, Fabian against revolutionary. Long may it continue. Infighting makes both weaker. Obstacles to socialism are our friend.
Monday, 14 February 2011
"Weird" Weather
Global Warming Moving From Cult to Science Fiction
This was published in the Boston Herald--normally a newspaper not known as a cheerleader for the global warming cause. Maybe the tide is turning a bit. Still there are "mile to go before we sleep". The ideology of global warming is not dead, only wounded. The demise of the beast would be more arguable had this piece appeared in the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Company. Now that would be an achievement.
This was published in the Boston Herald--normally a newspaper not known as a cheerleader for the global warming cause. Maybe the tide is turning a bit. Still there are "mile to go before we sleep". The ideology of global warming is not dead, only wounded. The demise of the beast would be more arguable had this piece appeared in the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Company. Now that would be an achievement.
Reliable forecast under the weather
Photo by AP
Meet the global weirdos. They’re the ones telling you that all the snow outside is proof that it’s getting warmer. Only, they don’t call it “warming” anymore.
No, that was back in the “Earth has a fever” days. Back when Al Gore was predicting that the ice caps were melting, the polar bears were drowning and Manhattan would sink beneath 20 feet of water “in the near future.”
But then something happened. Since 1998, temperatures have been relatively flat. We’ve got more polar bears than ever, and Manhattan is buried under snow. For a planet-roasting crisis that threatened the human race with extinction, there doesn’t seem to be much actual warming.
So then the mantra became “climate change.” The liberals formerly known as “warmists” began predicting that we would experience fundamental changes in our weather. Scientists at the University of East Anglia — the Harvard of climate change — said snow would be “a very rare and exciting event.” Children wouldn’t know what it was.
As for summers, in the wake of Katrina “change-ist” groups like realclimate.org predicted “global warming will make hurricanes even worse in the future.”
What happened? Nothing. Europe has had three winters in a row of snow and cold temperatures. In the Atlantic, “there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of hurricanes in the last five years,” according to meteorologist Art Horn. “The total energy in all hurricanes around the world has plunged since 1993. The opposite of what was predicted.”
So the new fall back is “global weirding.” The site thedailygreen.com has a “Weird Weather Watch” page. The uber-liberal Huffington Post ran a story in August headlined “Global Weirding”: Extreme Climate Events Dominate The Summer.”
“The extreme climate events all across the globe must say something about whether climate change is already upon us,” the HuffPo insisted. “Extreme is the new normal.”
They quote a professor of “environmental studies and politics” from Oberlin College who says, “More hottest hots, driest dries, wettest wets, windiest wind conditions. So it’s all part of a pattern.”
Gore is on board, too. He’s now merely claiming rising temperatures will “create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters.”
Not “warming,” but “weirding.” Not “heating,” but “havoc.” Which is how global warming can cause more snow, less snow, no snow, avalanches, heat waves, cold snaps, wetter wets, drier dries, gingivitis, delirium tremens and irritable bowel syndrome . . . all at the same time!
Global warming — is there anything it can’t do?
Well, the one thing it apparently doesn’t do is help predict the weather. The UK’s Met Office stopped giving seasonal forecasts last year after mis-predicting warmer winters three years in a row. Meteorologists without a warmist agenda like Piers Corbyn and AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi, on the other hand, continue to pay the bills by making predictions directly contrary to the “weirdos.” Oddly, they don’t have degrees in politics.
For a theory to be scientific, it must be fallible — capable of being proven false. If every weather condition can be used to “prove” global warming simply by being declared “weird,” then it’s not science. It’s a joke.
Which is exactly what the environmental movement has become.
Prime Mincing
Of "Tinkerbell", Bon Mots, Pederastic Economics, and Ad Hominem
Trevor Mallard, Labour MP appears lazy or somewhat intellectually challenged. As evidence we would offer his habitual mode of ad hominem attacks when "arguing" against opponents and their views. As they say, ad hominem is the first refuge of a lazy mind. Not that Mallard is alone in this. Regrettably, ad hominem is the discourse of choice for most politicians--although our current Prime Minister, John Key has shown repeatedly that he is cut from a different cloth, for which we commend him.
In any event, if you are going to insult an opponent, at least it should be funny. The other day Prime Minister Key was on the catwalk modelling rugby world cup kit. He affected a mincing walk. It was a bit lame, if you would excuse the pun. In any event, Mallard subsequently referred to Key as the "Prime Mincer" in the House. That strikes us as quite clever--and funny. Mallard has subsequently been called out for being homophobic. We would say in retort, lighten up. Let's be rid of the killjoy, black-stocking moroseness of political correctness. The studied witty insult can be a great weapon, when used appropriately rather than gratuitously.
Apparently, however, Mallard has form in this area. He previously referred to a homosexual minister opposite as "tinkerbell". We suspect that this betrays his orientation and predilection for ad hominem. Let's be clear. We believe homosexuality to be sinful, an extreme type of fornication. But that does not mean that the entire life and being of a homosexual can be rejected or impugned because of his or her homosexuality.
John Maynard Keynes was arguably one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. These days he is making a bit of a comeback, with increased interest in his published works since the seizing up of credit markets in 2008. Keynes was a pederast. That does not mean that all his academic and professional work was as deeply flawed as his sexual ethics. One simply cannot dismiss Keynes's work as "pederastic economics". We have learnt much from Keynes. For instance his bon mot: "the market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent." So true. So insightful. So easily forgotten by lesser men in the grip of animal spirits.
We have worked with homosexuals, adulterers, serial lechers, serial monogamists, the lascivious and the lewd. Most did good work; some outstanding. To oppose someone's argument or work or contribution because of their sexual ethics is bizarre, to say the least. At the same time, it is equally wrong to reject someone because they believe the libertinism of our day is evil.
Some would retort that human beings are not bifurcated nor compartmentalised. What one believes and does in one area of life will inevitably influence and couch all of one's being. A thief who shoplifts will have an attitude to the property of others that will likely show up in other ways. Possibly. But few are completely consistent in evil--thankfully. History shows us a few exceptions. Stalin would be one. Certainly not mad, but demonic; by all accounts the acme of evil. The vast majority of us human beings remain persistently inconsistent in our wickedness. This is a divine blessing. It is one very important way the Lord restrains evil in society for the good of us all.
The flip-side of this is that because few human beings are as evil as they could possibly could be, we are able to relate to one another in a multitude of complex ways and levels. One can completely reject the gambling habit of one which leaves a family bereft of sustenance, for example, whilst appreciating and approbating his friendly, easy going nature at work. On the other hand, it is impossible to conceive of becoming a "mate" of Stalin, without acting collegially in his evil.
All human societies, however, end up stipulating certain actions considered so gross and so evil that they put the perpetrator beyond the pale of human society. But not beyond the grace and mercy of God--as witnessed by the remarkable work of divine grace which appears to be taking place in our prison's today. That grace is mediated through people who go beyond society's stipulations and see criminals as people who remain made in God's image, desperately in need of God's forgiveness and cleansing through Jesus Christ, His Son and our Lord.
Trevor Mallard, Labour MP appears lazy or somewhat intellectually challenged. As evidence we would offer his habitual mode of ad hominem attacks when "arguing" against opponents and their views. As they say, ad hominem is the first refuge of a lazy mind. Not that Mallard is alone in this. Regrettably, ad hominem is the discourse of choice for most politicians--although our current Prime Minister, John Key has shown repeatedly that he is cut from a different cloth, for which we commend him.
In any event, if you are going to insult an opponent, at least it should be funny. The other day Prime Minister Key was on the catwalk modelling rugby world cup kit. He affected a mincing walk. It was a bit lame, if you would excuse the pun. In any event, Mallard subsequently referred to Key as the "Prime Mincer" in the House. That strikes us as quite clever--and funny. Mallard has subsequently been called out for being homophobic. We would say in retort, lighten up. Let's be rid of the killjoy, black-stocking moroseness of political correctness. The studied witty insult can be a great weapon, when used appropriately rather than gratuitously.
Apparently, however, Mallard has form in this area. He previously referred to a homosexual minister opposite as "tinkerbell". We suspect that this betrays his orientation and predilection for ad hominem. Let's be clear. We believe homosexuality to be sinful, an extreme type of fornication. But that does not mean that the entire life and being of a homosexual can be rejected or impugned because of his or her homosexuality.
John Maynard Keynes was arguably one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. These days he is making a bit of a comeback, with increased interest in his published works since the seizing up of credit markets in 2008. Keynes was a pederast. That does not mean that all his academic and professional work was as deeply flawed as his sexual ethics. One simply cannot dismiss Keynes's work as "pederastic economics". We have learnt much from Keynes. For instance his bon mot: "the market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent." So true. So insightful. So easily forgotten by lesser men in the grip of animal spirits.
We have worked with homosexuals, adulterers, serial lechers, serial monogamists, the lascivious and the lewd. Most did good work; some outstanding. To oppose someone's argument or work or contribution because of their sexual ethics is bizarre, to say the least. At the same time, it is equally wrong to reject someone because they believe the libertinism of our day is evil.
Some would retort that human beings are not bifurcated nor compartmentalised. What one believes and does in one area of life will inevitably influence and couch all of one's being. A thief who shoplifts will have an attitude to the property of others that will likely show up in other ways. Possibly. But few are completely consistent in evil--thankfully. History shows us a few exceptions. Stalin would be one. Certainly not mad, but demonic; by all accounts the acme of evil. The vast majority of us human beings remain persistently inconsistent in our wickedness. This is a divine blessing. It is one very important way the Lord restrains evil in society for the good of us all.
The flip-side of this is that because few human beings are as evil as they could possibly could be, we are able to relate to one another in a multitude of complex ways and levels. One can completely reject the gambling habit of one which leaves a family bereft of sustenance, for example, whilst appreciating and approbating his friendly, easy going nature at work. On the other hand, it is impossible to conceive of becoming a "mate" of Stalin, without acting collegially in his evil.
All human societies, however, end up stipulating certain actions considered so gross and so evil that they put the perpetrator beyond the pale of human society. But not beyond the grace and mercy of God--as witnessed by the remarkable work of divine grace which appears to be taking place in our prison's today. That grace is mediated through people who go beyond society's stipulations and see criminals as people who remain made in God's image, desperately in need of God's forgiveness and cleansing through Jesus Christ, His Son and our Lord.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Comatose California
California is in terminal decline. Its malignant cancers were sixty years in the making. It has degenerated to the stage of hospice care.
We believe the case of Californian (once the eighth largest economy in the world) is salutary. It has much to teach us, assuming we are prepared to learn.
We need to begin sixty years ago, when the notion of Californian exceptionalism was first mooted. California was to be the model of successful progressive modern government. It was the harbinger of the future. It was to lead the other 49 states of the Union to a higher secular humanist plane.
Now, progressivism has proved to be a malignant tumour. There is no cure, no respite. Only a long, slow lingering demise. Steve Rhodes, the writer of the piece cited above, ends by referring to a recent congress he had attended in San Francisco, convened to try to find some cure for the malignancy. The congress, he reports, was full of hippie hope, of palliative care only. He concludes:
Here is a summary of the attending doctor's report, after visiting the hospice:
Terminal is what it is.
We believe the case of Californian (once the eighth largest economy in the world) is salutary. It has much to teach us, assuming we are prepared to learn.
We need to begin sixty years ago, when the notion of Californian exceptionalism was first mooted. California was to be the model of successful progressive modern government. It was the harbinger of the future. It was to lead the other 49 states of the Union to a higher secular humanist plane.
In 1949, Carey McWilliams, the state’s greatest journalist, called California “the great exception” among states: no textbook or precedent existed to explain its monstrous growth, its powerful labor movement, its superb education system, or its abundance-creating, super-exploitative farm system. “California has not grown or evolved,” McWilliams wrote, “so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions.” . . .California was the Golden State. Progressive secular humanism would deliver the gold. Forever.
California’s reputation for being irredeemably liberal began to take hold in the ’60s, when three groups, all in frequent conflict with each other, held sway over the image of the state: liberal administrators, students, and labor. The last of these, relatively powerful ever since the Gold Rush, had developed its strength to the point that corporations tended to submit to its demands, and often suffered grievously when they did not. Professional administrators and politicians meanwhile sought to expand the public realm in prosperous California by any means necessary: agriculture would be heavily industrialized to feed the poor with cheap produce; under the auspices of a “Master Plan” for education, universities would be turned into tuition-free “multiversities”; cities would have their slums cleared for arenas, entertainment complexes, and mega-housing projects. Students, many of whom had served as Freedom Riders in the South, first demanded free speech rights, and then used these rights to demand others.
Now, progressivism has proved to be a malignant tumour. There is no cure, no respite. Only a long, slow lingering demise. Steve Rhodes, the writer of the piece cited above, ends by referring to a recent congress he had attended in San Francisco, convened to try to find some cure for the malignancy. The congress, he reports, was full of hippie hope, of palliative care only. He concludes:
In a more sober moment — it came with the first chill blast of Pacific wind — I realized that the congress had seen the future of California and shuddered; that its platform comprised a message to San Francisco, the only message the city was really prepared to receive: Save yourselves.Why has this happened? As Lady Thatcher said, all socialist regimes end up the same way. Eventually they run out of other people's money. And then they die. Society cannot be built upon a foundation of theft, greed and envy. Progressive secular humanism has no other foundation. Eventually, secular humanism will die out. The pain and cost of its passing will be enormous, but terminate it will, one way or the other.
Here is a summary of the attending doctor's report, after visiting the hospice:
Jerry Brown, a Modern Sisyphus
The new governor must change his state’s philosophy.
California’s new governor, Jerry Brown, must rapidly close a $25 billion budgetary shortfall. Right now it seems almost a hopeless task, since the state’s disastrous budget is merely a symptom, not the cause, of California’s much larger problems.
Take unemployment. It currently runs at 12.6 percent in California, the second-highest in the nation. Take livability. A recent Forbes magazine survey listing the 20 most miserable cities in the nation ranked four California municipalities in the top five.
Take education. California public schools test near rock bottom in national math and science scores. Take the business climate. A recent survey conducted among CEOs ranked California dead last for jobs and business growth.
Take taxes. California has the highest gasoline tax in the nation, and its combined sales-tax and local and state income-tax rates are among the nation’s steepest. California incarcerates the highest number of prisoners in the nation. It costs nearly $50,000 per year to house each one, near the highest per capita cost in the country.
I could go on, but you get the picture: The newly inaugurated Brown has problems well beyond a massive budget shortfall.
Perhaps the state’s problems are not of its own making but arise from a deficit of natural riches? Hardly. California has the most fertile soil and the climate most conducive to farming in the country. Tourists flock to see the beauty of Yosemite, Death Valley, and a 1,000-mile coastline. San Diego and San Francisco Bay are among the most naturally endowed harbors in the world. The state is rich in gas, oil, minerals, and timber. It has the largest population in the nation at 37 million residents. . . .
California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to developing their own sources of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation in which to raise taxes and the easiest in which to pass costly new laws.
The state’s mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California’s Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs — costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.
Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off-limits for new housing construction. Most refined Californians who regulate how the state’s natural resources are used live on the coast far away from — and do not always understand — those earthy people who struggle to develop them.
California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to arrive with legal status, the ability to speak English, or high-school diplomas, and then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico — but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.
Somehow, Jerry Brown must not only change the way Californians act, but also the strange way they now seem to think — persuading the present generation to produce far more private wealth while consuming far less in public funds. Otherwise, the revenue-strapped and reform-minded governor will be little more than a modern Sisyphus — endlessly pushing his enormous rock uphill, never quite reaching the top.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Terminal is what it is.
MacDoctor Counterpunch
Cockroaches Scuttling for Cover
We read MacDoctor's blog regularly. Today he counter-punches the ACC for its deceptive and misleading commentary to a parliamentary select committee. ACC, of course, is the government's monopoly insurance provider for victims of accidents. We remind everyone, particularly overseas readers, that New Zealand's Accident Compensation Corporation it a statutory insurance monopoly that exacts taxes from every New Zealander, primarily through the employer, to fund a no-fault accident compensation scheme. Since it has no competition to keep it honest, ACC is an incompetent, bureaucratic morass.
Now, to be fair, some of this decrepitude is not of ACC's making. The previous left-wing Labour government sought to transform the ACC into a social welfare arm of the state, greatly expanding the range of "coverage" or conditions under which someone could claim ACC payment for medical treatment. This was in response to rising public health care costs. To try to cut costs in vote Health, the "robbing Peter to pay Paul" Labour government decided to shift some liabilities to ACC, which has a capital investment fund, built up over years, to fund long-tail insurance claims. Never trust a socialist when other people's money is lying around. (We do hope our readers in the US are paying attention to this. This is where a public, taxpayer funded health system inevitably leads. Oh, sorry. We recall that the US federal government has already raided and expropriated--err, "borrowed"--Medicare and Medicaid funds for ongoing operational government expenditures. Too late.)
In any event, like all socialist schemes, eventually other people's money runs out. Suddenly, under the economic downturn and recession (in New Zealand we have had a double dipper) the (new, less socialist) government has run out of money and had to start borrowing. Suddenly cutting costs became flavour of the month in government circles--including at the ACC.
As part of the drive to cut costs, ACC started refusing legitimate (lawful) claims. It discovered a new reason for refusal: "degeneration", otherwise known as aging. If not aging, it is a condition where, as a result of an injury, secondary complications emerge. Imagine an accident that smashes a hip. The accident results in a pronounced limp which does further (maybe spinal) damage to the patient. ACC has started to argue that the further damage is a result of degeneration, and not from the original accident. Result: no funding. Bad luck buddy. Enjoy your life of pain. Now, remember that this is health insurance which the patient has involuntarily paid for through the taxation system. Suddenly the state insurance company is acting like a nasty private insurance company. But in this case it is made worse because there is no competition allowed for ACC to help keep it honest.
Well the ACC hierarchy were before its supervising parliamentary committee yesterday and were asked to explain why their rates of refusal due to "degeneration" had risen. Their lame explanation: medical specialists had increased their rates of referral to ACC for funding. Those nasty doctors were making claims they knew would never be approved. Thus speaketh the bureaucrat--who congenitally does not know the meaning of "the buck stops here". Like cockroaches scuttling for cover, they were.
MacDoctor slams this egregious canard for all that its worth, which, to be sure, is substantially less than a brass razoo.
We read MacDoctor's blog regularly. Today he counter-punches the ACC for its deceptive and misleading commentary to a parliamentary select committee. ACC, of course, is the government's monopoly insurance provider for victims of accidents. We remind everyone, particularly overseas readers, that New Zealand's Accident Compensation Corporation it a statutory insurance monopoly that exacts taxes from every New Zealander, primarily through the employer, to fund a no-fault accident compensation scheme. Since it has no competition to keep it honest, ACC is an incompetent, bureaucratic morass.
Now, to be fair, some of this decrepitude is not of ACC's making. The previous left-wing Labour government sought to transform the ACC into a social welfare arm of the state, greatly expanding the range of "coverage" or conditions under which someone could claim ACC payment for medical treatment. This was in response to rising public health care costs. To try to cut costs in vote Health, the "robbing Peter to pay Paul" Labour government decided to shift some liabilities to ACC, which has a capital investment fund, built up over years, to fund long-tail insurance claims. Never trust a socialist when other people's money is lying around. (We do hope our readers in the US are paying attention to this. This is where a public, taxpayer funded health system inevitably leads. Oh, sorry. We recall that the US federal government has already raided and expropriated--err, "borrowed"--Medicare and Medicaid funds for ongoing operational government expenditures. Too late.)
In any event, like all socialist schemes, eventually other people's money runs out. Suddenly, under the economic downturn and recession (in New Zealand we have had a double dipper) the (new, less socialist) government has run out of money and had to start borrowing. Suddenly cutting costs became flavour of the month in government circles--including at the ACC.
As part of the drive to cut costs, ACC started refusing legitimate (lawful) claims. It discovered a new reason for refusal: "degeneration", otherwise known as aging. If not aging, it is a condition where, as a result of an injury, secondary complications emerge. Imagine an accident that smashes a hip. The accident results in a pronounced limp which does further (maybe spinal) damage to the patient. ACC has started to argue that the further damage is a result of degeneration, and not from the original accident. Result: no funding. Bad luck buddy. Enjoy your life of pain. Now, remember that this is health insurance which the patient has involuntarily paid for through the taxation system. Suddenly the state insurance company is acting like a nasty private insurance company. But in this case it is made worse because there is no competition allowed for ACC to help keep it honest.
Well the ACC hierarchy were before its supervising parliamentary committee yesterday and were asked to explain why their rates of refusal due to "degeneration" had risen. Their lame explanation: medical specialists had increased their rates of referral to ACC for funding. Those nasty doctors were making claims they knew would never be approved. Thus speaketh the bureaucrat--who congenitally does not know the meaning of "the buck stops here". Like cockroaches scuttling for cover, they were.
MacDoctor slams this egregious canard for all that its worth, which, to be sure, is substantially less than a brass razoo.
Friday, 11 February 2011
Douglas Wilson's Letter From America
The God of Lent
Liturgy and Worship - Church Year
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Not being numbered among those who observe the days, I was somehow under the impression that Lent was going to start any day now. But checking with Google (another thing the apostolic church did not have), I find that we are still a month out. Far from being Fat Tuesday, this might as well be any old Tuesday, which it is.
But since we have a month, here are some pre-Lenten observations. For those of you who don't observe Lent, I have not found any compelling reasons why you should start, and so you all may continue to wait patiently for my next post on Obama. There's a four-year penitential season for you. But for those who do observe Lent . . . here are some cautions from an outsider. There is a wrong way to do this -- and naturally it is a way that seemeth right unto a (devout) man. Jesus did say that His disciples would fast after His departure (Mark 2:19-20). He did not say that they would fast as though He had never come.
Think of it this way. There is a natural "veer" that conservative Christians have, in which strict is assumed to be biblical. There is a trap here, and allow me to illustrate it this way. Suppose you have an eager young Christian, about ready to graduate from law school. Suppose he has different conversations with his fellow church members in the koinonia chit chat time after church. He has these conversations simply for the sake of making this illustration of mine go.
In these conversations, he tells the folks that he has a job offer from the DA's office, and that he is thinking about becoming a prosecutor. He also tells them that, as it turns out, he is also considering a job working for the public defender. Now, this is a church that believes the Bible, all of it. After these conversations, a number of people he has talked to come back to him later, asking him to reconsider whether or not the job he is considering is consistent with his Christian profession. Which job are all of them talking about?
Right. They are all worried that he might wind up defending the guilty, and they hope instead he takes the job where he would get to smoke the bad guys. They are worried that he will take the job that describes Jesus very well, and want him instead to take the job that suits the devil exactly. Jesus is our Defender (1 Jn. 2:1-2), and the devil is our prosecutor and accuser (Rev. 12:10). The Holy Spirit is the Comforter (John 16:7), and the devil's very name means accusation.
Now I know that accusation can be done honorably, and that there are times when somebody has to do it (2 Sam. 12:7; Matt. 14:3-4). The devil is an abuser of it, as of all things, and there are ways for the devil to get into defense work also, in such a way as to clear the guilty, which God does not do (Ex. 34:7; Num. 14:18). Of course we want godly prosecutors. I know that, and rejoice in it, but it is still striking that conservative Christians are so natural with accusation, and it is so hard for them to rise to the defense.
It is worth pointing out that the godly examples of accusation above were instances where the one accused had the power of life and death over the one who brought the charge to him -- and not the other way around. Prophetic accusation is far more suited to the powerless than to the powerful.
And so what does this have to do with Lent? Just as the devil is the god of accusation, so also he is the god of giving stuff up. No Christian ought ever to fast or abstain from anything until he knows in his bones what the doctrine of demons smells like (1 Tim. 4:1-5; Col. 2:20-23). There are godly fasts (Acts 13:2; 1 Cor. 7:5), and ungodly ones (Matt. 6:16). No Christian ought ever to take up this discipline unless he knows the nature of the chasm that separatese the two. There is an old children's joke that illustrates this principle well: "What is the difference between an elephant and a mailbox?" "I don't know." "Well, I sure am not going to send you to mail a letter for me!" For those who do not grasp what I am talking about here, they are the ones who ought not mail any letters. They ought to give up Lent for Lent.
But again, God wants us to give certain things up too -- things like sin, and self-righteousness, and superstition, and a number of other things that begin with s. He does not want us to give up chocolate, which begins with a c.
So the problem is not that some consider Lent a penitential season. The problem is what many have come to think penitence actually is. For those who observe Lent the way C.S. Lewis would have done, foregoing pleasure to make room for joy, the world could use many more such. For those who simply observe it as part of the cultural furniture of their world -- that's how they grew up -- I have better things to do than to be critical of such customs. There are times when I see someone crossing himself, and I don't think "popish superstition" at all. I just think the third baseman wants a hit. As Freud once put it, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The problem I am discussing arises routinely among those who want to be serious Christians. Who could be against that? Well, me. There are, the pastor said, huge problems that serious Christians cause in the church. The answer is to be serious about grace -- but there are ways to gum that up too.
So it is important to conclude with the observation that this difficulty, this impulse I am discussing is a human one, not an Anglican one. There may be numerous TR Presbyterians cheering me on at this point (for am I not smiting Lent?), but I could write virtually the same post, excoriating the very same evil, with a perverted sabbatarianism in the crosshairs instead. Maybe the Lenten TRs prefer to do Lent once a week, so that there is no time to build up a head of steam for a Mardi Gras every Friday. That would be too much fun for everybody.
So beware. The devil loves it when he is the god of Lent, or of the sabbath, or of anything else we think we are offering to God.
Liturgy and Worship - Church Year
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Not being numbered among those who observe the days, I was somehow under the impression that Lent was going to start any day now. But checking with Google (another thing the apostolic church did not have), I find that we are still a month out. Far from being Fat Tuesday, this might as well be any old Tuesday, which it is.
But since we have a month, here are some pre-Lenten observations. For those of you who don't observe Lent, I have not found any compelling reasons why you should start, and so you all may continue to wait patiently for my next post on Obama. There's a four-year penitential season for you. But for those who do observe Lent . . . here are some cautions from an outsider. There is a wrong way to do this -- and naturally it is a way that seemeth right unto a (devout) man. Jesus did say that His disciples would fast after His departure (Mark 2:19-20). He did not say that they would fast as though He had never come.
Think of it this way. There is a natural "veer" that conservative Christians have, in which strict is assumed to be biblical. There is a trap here, and allow me to illustrate it this way. Suppose you have an eager young Christian, about ready to graduate from law school. Suppose he has different conversations with his fellow church members in the koinonia chit chat time after church. He has these conversations simply for the sake of making this illustration of mine go.
In these conversations, he tells the folks that he has a job offer from the DA's office, and that he is thinking about becoming a prosecutor. He also tells them that, as it turns out, he is also considering a job working for the public defender. Now, this is a church that believes the Bible, all of it. After these conversations, a number of people he has talked to come back to him later, asking him to reconsider whether or not the job he is considering is consistent with his Christian profession. Which job are all of them talking about?
Right. They are all worried that he might wind up defending the guilty, and they hope instead he takes the job where he would get to smoke the bad guys. They are worried that he will take the job that describes Jesus very well, and want him instead to take the job that suits the devil exactly. Jesus is our Defender (1 Jn. 2:1-2), and the devil is our prosecutor and accuser (Rev. 12:10). The Holy Spirit is the Comforter (John 16:7), and the devil's very name means accusation.
Now I know that accusation can be done honorably, and that there are times when somebody has to do it (2 Sam. 12:7; Matt. 14:3-4). The devil is an abuser of it, as of all things, and there are ways for the devil to get into defense work also, in such a way as to clear the guilty, which God does not do (Ex. 34:7; Num. 14:18). Of course we want godly prosecutors. I know that, and rejoice in it, but it is still striking that conservative Christians are so natural with accusation, and it is so hard for them to rise to the defense.
It is worth pointing out that the godly examples of accusation above were instances where the one accused had the power of life and death over the one who brought the charge to him -- and not the other way around. Prophetic accusation is far more suited to the powerless than to the powerful.
And so what does this have to do with Lent? Just as the devil is the god of accusation, so also he is the god of giving stuff up. No Christian ought ever to fast or abstain from anything until he knows in his bones what the doctrine of demons smells like (1 Tim. 4:1-5; Col. 2:20-23). There are godly fasts (Acts 13:2; 1 Cor. 7:5), and ungodly ones (Matt. 6:16). No Christian ought ever to take up this discipline unless he knows the nature of the chasm that separatese the two. There is an old children's joke that illustrates this principle well: "What is the difference between an elephant and a mailbox?" "I don't know." "Well, I sure am not going to send you to mail a letter for me!" For those who do not grasp what I am talking about here, they are the ones who ought not mail any letters. They ought to give up Lent for Lent.
But again, God wants us to give certain things up too -- things like sin, and self-righteousness, and superstition, and a number of other things that begin with s. He does not want us to give up chocolate, which begins with a c.
So the problem is not that some consider Lent a penitential season. The problem is what many have come to think penitence actually is. For those who observe Lent the way C.S. Lewis would have done, foregoing pleasure to make room for joy, the world could use many more such. For those who simply observe it as part of the cultural furniture of their world -- that's how they grew up -- I have better things to do than to be critical of such customs. There are times when I see someone crossing himself, and I don't think "popish superstition" at all. I just think the third baseman wants a hit. As Freud once put it, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The problem I am discussing arises routinely among those who want to be serious Christians. Who could be against that? Well, me. There are, the pastor said, huge problems that serious Christians cause in the church. The answer is to be serious about grace -- but there are ways to gum that up too.
So it is important to conclude with the observation that this difficulty, this impulse I am discussing is a human one, not an Anglican one. There may be numerous TR Presbyterians cheering me on at this point (for am I not smiting Lent?), but I could write virtually the same post, excoriating the very same evil, with a perverted sabbatarianism in the crosshairs instead. Maybe the Lenten TRs prefer to do Lent once a week, so that there is no time to build up a head of steam for a Mardi Gras every Friday. That would be too much fun for everybody.
So beware. The devil loves it when he is the god of Lent, or of the sabbath, or of anything else we think we are offering to God.
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