Grexit

Hard Money, Soft Pledges

"The intractable problem is that many governments do not trust the Greek government to implement a €12bn (£8.6bn) programme of spending cuts and reforms that will be delivered as part of a bailout. Eurozone governments are seeking proof from Athens it can keep its promises, in exchange for agreeing to start talks on a deal.  “The main obstacle to an agreement is trust,” said Pier Carlo Padoan, finance minister of Italy, one of the countries most sympathetic to Greece."  [The Guardian]

Europhiles are between a rock of adamant and a very hard place.  If Greece agrees to the conditions being imposed to keep it in the Eurozone to secure the third grand bailout, only two outcomes are possible.  Either Greece will comply and keep the conditions, or it will not.  If it keeps the conditions, it will face decades of deflation--which is to say that the population will eventually rebel and a revolution will drive Greece out of the Euro, into the arms of whoever else.  Or, it will fail to keep the conditions, proving that the distrust of Greece is well founded--which is to say that more bailouts will be needed.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times and I am the fool.  Europe is well on the way to being branded as the village idiot.

Daily Devotional

 No Preferences

"Sanctified by God the Father."
Jude 1
"Sanctified in Christ Jesus."
1 Corinthians 1:2
"Through sanctification of the Spirit."
1 Peter 1:2

Charles H. Spurgeon

Mark the union of the Three Divine Persons in all their gracious acts. How unwisely do those believers talk who make preferences in the Persons of the Trinity; who think of Jesus as if he were the embodiment of everything lovely and gracious, while the Father they regard as severely just, but destitute of kindness. Equally wrong are those who magnify the decree of the Father, and the atonement of the Son, so as to depreciate the work of the Spirit. In deeds of grace none of the Persons of the Trinity act apart from the rest.

They are as united in their deeds as in their essence. In their love towards the chosen they are one, and in the actions which flow from that great central source they are still undivided. Specially notice this in the matter of sanctification. While we may without mistake speak of sanctification as the work of the Spirit, yet we must take heed that we do not view it as if the Father and the Son had no part therein. It is correct to speak of sanctification as the work of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit. Still doth Jehovah say, "Let us make man in our own image after our likeness," and thus we are "his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." See the value which God sets upon real holiness, since the Three Persons in the Trinity are represented as co-working to produce a Church without "spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing." And you, believer, as the follower of Christ, must also set a high value on holiness--upon purity of life and godliness of conversation.

Value the blood of Christ as the foundation of your hope, but never speak disparagingly of the work of the Spirit which is your meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light. This day let us so live as to manifest the work of the Triune God in us.

Betrayed and Angry

 God as My Enemy

As we argued recently, the Western world is characterised by a near universal belief in personal injury.  Somebody owes me and that "somebody" eventually morphs into the State being obligated.  The system, the government, or society are responsible to put things right in my life.

A corollary is that whatever is lacking or unacceptable in my existence is due to an external cause.  The problem ultimaty lies with others, not me.  If we only had different parents and families, gone to different schools, or been slightly more attractive life would have been so much better.  And on it goes.  It is not surprising, then, that we are seeing more signs of seething, angry discontent in Western society.  It does not take much for hissing, booing, stone-throwing, and imprecatory curses to pour forth into, and take over, the public square.  For, as C. S. Lewis had Screwtape observe, "the more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered."

The seething discontent arising from the belief that others have defalcated in their duty and responsibility toward us  ultimately sheets home to God Himself.  One of the reasons that a modern Western man does not fear God, nor seek Him, is the bitterness which the Unbeliever is nurturing in his heart towards God.  Every sin or failure is seen ultimately to be God's fault.  God has not provided; God has not done what He ought to have done with respect to moi.

Some may observe at this point that such a view assumes that most people believe in the Living God, which the majority it the West clearly do not.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Some Festive Juxtapositions

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

In the web uproar following my comments about sodomy being a far worse sin than slavery, we have noticed a few festive juxtapositions. I am merely a ten-year-old boy throwing a few pine cones at the homohive, and so it is understandable that I follow the subsequent behavior of the bees with some interest and attention. Some of the juxtapositions are striking contrasts between ideological foes, but most are simply representations of the fundamental incoherence that lies at the heart of their worldview. Let me begin with the latter.

All I am doing is making her mend my hoop skirt . . .

1. Now when the adjectivally challenged launch into an attack on my moral probity, one frequently hears something like “you bleepity effing piece-of-bleepity blapping,” followed by the noun. But then it is the noun that provides the nice juxtaposition. I love it when that last noun, the thing that clinches their argument, is “hater.”

2. Another nice juxtaposition has to do with the sudden concern that the mob in front of Lot’s house (angel-rapers, let us call them) have for the reputation of moderate conservative Christians — e.g. the ones who don’t publish blog posts with cayenne pepper in them. Now these very nice Christian people have for a number of years been dismissed as brim-full-o-hate, and their carefully chosen words of love and moral concern are always dismissed as mere hypocrisy. People in this class are fined megabucks for politely declining to bake the cake. “No, thank you.” That’s just the worst, capable of causing over seventy forms of trauma in lesbians made out of rice paper.

Screwtape's Diabolical Advice

God Owes Me--Big Time

"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered."

C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters

The idea that a "legitimate claim has been denied" depends upon a perverted doctrine of human rights.  This doctrine has now been accepted universally throughout the West.  How successful the Satan has been in this instance! 

The idea that "I have a legitimate claim" rests upon a foundation of believing that "I am owed . . . ", which is to say, "People owe me . . ." which in turn is to say, "Society as a whole, or mankind in the abstract, owes me."

Ignoring Rape is to be Guilty of Rape

Islam, Political Correctness, and Child Sacrifice

by Raymond Ibrahim
FrontPage Magazine
July 2, 2015

^{Originally published under the title, "UK Police Knew and Did Nothing to Protect Girls from Muslim Predators."}

According to a confidential report, British police failed to warn the public about Islamic sex trafficking rings for fear of sparking anti-Muslim backlash.

Recent revelations concerning the endemic sexual grooming of British girls by Muslim men demonstrate how crippling political correctness is, and how it complements the most abusive elements of Islamic law, or Sharia.

According to a June 24 report by the Birmingham Mail, as far back as March 2010, West Midlands Police knew that Muslim grooming gangs "were targeting children outside schools across the city—but failed to make the threat public."

A confidential report obtained under a Freedom of Information Act indicates that police were well aware that British pupils were being targeted by mostly Muslim men. Several passages from the report make this clear:

In one heavily redacted passage, entitled 'Schools', it states: "In (redacted) a teacher at a (redacted) that a group of Asian males were approaching pupils at the school gate and grooming them. Strong anecdotal evidence shows this MO (modus operandi) is being used across the force."

The 2010 report also reveals how these "Asian" gangs used victims to target other girls.

Daily Devotional

No Insult to Injury

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

John Piper

What is the basis of our not holding grudges against Christian brothers and sisters who repent?  Our moral indignation at a terrible offense does not evaporate just because the offender is a Christian. In fact, we may feel even more betrayed. And a simple, “I’m sorry” will often seem utterly disproportionate to the painfulness and ugliness of the offense.

But in this case we are dealing with fellow Christians and the promise of God’s wrath does not apply because there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). “God has not destined [Christians] for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).  Where shall we turn to assure ourselves that justice will be done — that Christianity is not a mockery of the seriousness of sin?

The answer is that we look to the cross of Christ. All the wrongs that have been done against us by believers were avenged in the death of Jesus. This is implied in the simple but staggering fact that all the sins of all God’s people were laid on Jesus (Isaiah 53:6; 1 Corinthians 15:3, etc.).

The suffering of Christ was the recompense of God on every hurt I have ever received from a fellow Christian. Therefore, Christianity does not make light of sin. It does not add insult to our injury.  On the contrary, it takes the sins against us so seriously that, to make them right, God gave his own Son to suffer more than we could ever make anyone suffer for what they have done to us.

Demand Rights in the Home

Perverse Parenting

The Facilitator Parent is a consistent extension of our secularist rights-based society.  Secularist rights are not freedom rights, nor civil rights, but demand rights.  "I want or need; you (society) has a duty to provide."  The entire edifice of income and property redistribution by the state is built upon the foundation of demand rights. But the application of demand rights has now moved way beyond material egalitarianism. 

Take abortion.  "I demand autonomous control over my own body.  Because I demand, a human right is at issue.  Therefore, the state has a duty to provide abortion services to meet my demands.  Anything less is unjust."  Demand rights lead to the Facilitator State--in everything.

The same philosophy is now being worked out in parenting and family life.  The role of the parent has changed from a duty of care, involving nurture, food, clothing, love, and paideia--teaching, instruction, admonition, correction, and training for adult life.  Secularist parenting is ditching the (Christian) past and replacing what is now seen as "parental imperialism" with a child-centric demand rights model.  The role of the parent is to facilitate so that the demands, wants, and wishes of the child are duly realised. 

Here is an example of narcissistic demand rights parenting:

Letter From the UK (About the Unexpected Consequences of Greenist Subsidies)

Green Levy Target Dumped as Massive Overspend on Green Energy Looms

BreitbartLondon
by Donna Rachel Edmunds

UK Chancellor George Osborne is expected to scrap green tax targets in the summer budget to be announced Wednesday. The move is designed to bring down the cost of renewable energy as subsidies spiral out of control.

Conservative Members of Parliament have said that the budget should serve as a wake up call and prompt a full-scale review of renewables subsidies.

In May, Breitbart London reported on findings by the Renewable Energy Foundation showing that Britain was on track to massively overshoot its renewable energy targets by £1.5 billion a year by 2020, fully 34 percent over budget.  The overspend was caused primarily by former Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary Ed Davey, who displayed an almost religious zeal for renewable technologies, going against the wishes of locals and the advice of numerous bodies, including English Heritage, to grant permission for a number of renewables projects.

Dr John Constable, director of REF, said of the findings: “The renewables sector overheating created by Mr Davey when he was in charge of DECC has left the new Secretary of State, Amber Rudd, with considerable budget and planning difficulties.”  He advised Mrs Rudd to “cool the industry down immediately” by advising local authorities and the Planning Inspectorate that harm to the local environment should now outweigh contributions towards a renewables target which has essentially already been met.  The government has closed the subsidy scheme a year early in a bid to limit the number of projects and therefore the burden on the public purse, but the REF advised that some already in the pipeline ought also to be scrapped.

Daily Devotional

Stephen Versus Lazarus

C. S. Lewis

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal?

From A Grief Observed
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed. Copyright © 1961 by N. W. Clerk, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Preface by Douglas H. Gresham copyright © 1994 by Douglas H. Gresham. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

What Is Our Policy?

Survival

The period between the First and Second World War in the UK has been dubbed the "Twilight Years"  by celebrated historians.  The country was awash with communist and latterly national socialist sympathisers, with pacifists, with Fabian socialists, with academics entranced by Freudianism, and with eugenicists.  [See Richard Overy,  The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Penguin/Viking, 2009)]

The pacifist sentiment was largely represented politically via the Labour and Liberal parties.  But not exclusively so.  Neville Chamberlain, the architect of the foreign policy of appeasement towards Hitler, professed to be a pacifist.  He led the Conservative Party.  But despite the grip of these strange philosophies and teachings, when it finally became clear to the wilfully obtuse that Herr Hitler was an aggressor and had an ambition to rule Britain by force, the nation and its intellectuals and false prophets came together as one.

When Chamberlain realised that Hitler had deliberately deceived and lied to him, he became resolute in leading the nation in war.  But he was unable to win the universal support of the House of Commons.  Eventually, Winston Churchill was asked to lead a coalition government representing all parties in the House.  Repentant pacifists stood to indicate their support.  All parties laid aside politicking and began to pull together in harness to defend the nation.

Winston Churchill describes the moment:

Who Would Have Thought?

Bakers Mentally Rape Two Lesbians In The "Land of the Free"

[Quotation Marks are Intentional]

Patterico's Pontifications

Power corrupts obscenely and absolutely:

On Thursday, Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian upheld a preliminary finding that sentenced Aaron and Melissa Klein, the Christian bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, to a fine of $135,000 in emotional damages to the homosexual couple they denied service, but also added a new provision forbidding them to speak about their unwillingness to serve a gay marriage.

If you recall, the Kleins owned the now closed Sweet Cakes by Melissa Bakery. They had declined to provide a wedding cake for a lesbian couple back in 2013.  As a result, the lesbian couple claimed 88 symptoms of “emotional distress” in their subsequent lawsuit against the Kleins.

The Kleins had attempted to crowd source for help, but GoFundMe pulled their campaign, and not soon after (when they were questioned about it), implemented a new policy prohibiting campaigns from defending against claims of discriminatory acts.  Ignoring the fact that the Kleins did indeed provide cakes for gay customers when their business was open, Avakian made the following inaccurate assertion:

Daily Devotional

We Beseech You . . . 

"Brethren, pray for us."
1 Thessalonians 5:25

Charles H. Spurgeon

This one morning in the year we reserved to refresh the reader's memory upon the subject of prayer for ministers, and we do most earnestly implore every Christian household to grant the fervent request of the text first uttered by an apostle and now repeated by us.

Brethren, our work is solemnly momentous, involving weal or woe to thousands; we treat with souls for God on eternal business, and our word is either a savour of life unto life, or of death unto death. A very heavy responsibility rests upon us, and it will be no small mercy if at the last we be found clear of the blood of all men. As officers in Christ's army, we are the especial mark of the enmity of men and devils; they watch for our halting, and labour to take us by the heels.

Our sacred calling involves us in temptations from which you are exempt, above all it too often draws us away from our personal enjoyment of truth into a ministerial and official consideration of it. We meet with many knotty cases, and our wits are at a non plus; we observe very sad backslidings, and our hearts are wounded; we see millions perishing, and our spirits sink. We wish to profit you by our preaching; we desire to be blest to your children; we long to be useful both to saints and sinners; therefore, dear friends, intercede for us with our God. Miserable men are we if we miss the aid of your prayers, but happy are we if we live in your supplications.

You do not look to us but to our Master for spiritual blessings, and yet how many times has He given those blessings through His ministers; ask then, again and again, that we may be the earthen vessels into which the Lord may put the treasure of the gospel. We, the whole company of missionaries, ministers, city missionaries, and students, do in the name of Jesus beseech you
"Brethren, pray for us."

The Shire Under Sharkey

Ubiquitous Lists of Rules

The Law of God sets us free.  The law of man crushes us into the gulag.  What we mean by this is that the respective fruits of the Law of God versus the law of man are radically different.  The law of man--at least as we know it in the West--is the law of soft-despotism.  The State adds endless rules and regulations to take more and more control of our lives.

There are examples and illustrations on every hand, but here is one more, to illustrate the point yet again.  In the UK, government schools have been granted the authority to search pupils' lunch boxes to ensure the food provided for them by their parents complies with state rules, regulations, and mandates.  So much for the laws of privacy.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Our Secularist Funhouse and the Impotence of the Gospel

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Our secularist age has had it. Yesterday at the ACCS convention Al Mohler reminded us of Elton Trueblood’s spot-on metaphor, when he said that our civilization was a cut flower civilization. And he said this back when the flowers were still nice looking — we have now come to the point in the metaphor that is a lot more brown, and a lot more of us are curled up petals all over the coffee table. And as Mohler argued, this secularism has no way of repairing itself. The elites have consumed the Christian legacy they inherited, and the prodigal son is wondering how he can possibly afford to host the next bash. He is not quite yet at the point where he wants to eat the pig food, but we can see the trough from here.

At the foundational level, the problem is that we do not want to have Jesus rule over us. We have revolted against God. Behind all the trans-sexual, trans-racial, trans-dictionary foolishness is the central foolishness of a race of sinners that wants to be trans-mortal. We want to live forever, but we refuse the way back to the tree of life that God has established through the gospel. And so we go in big for genetic engineering and sexual weirdness. “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose” (Gen. 6:2). We’re gonna get us some Nietzschean Nephilim. Yeah, whatever. Après moi le déluge.

Daily Devotional

Unafraid of the World of Shades

Charles H. Spurgeon

"Our heart shall rejoice in Him."
Psalm 33:21

Blessed is the fact that Christians can rejoice even in the deepest distress; although trouble may surround them, they still sing; and, like many birds, they sing best in their cages. The waves may roll over them, but their souls soon rise to the surface and see the light of God's countenance; they have a buoyancy about them which keeps their head always above the water, and helps them to sing amid the tempest, "God is with me still." To whom shall the glory be given? Oh! to Jesus--it is all by Jesus.

Trouble does not necessarily bring consolation with it to the believer, but the presence of the Son of God in the fiery furnace with him fills his heart with joy. He is sick and suffering, but Jesus visits him and makes his bed for him. He is dying, and the cold chilly waters of Jordan are gathering about him up to the neck, but Jesus puts His arms around him, and cries, "Fear not, beloved; to die is to be blessed; the waters of death have their fountain-head in heaven; they are not bitter, they are sweet as nectar, for they flow from the throne of God."

As the departing saint wades through the stream, and the billows gather around him, and heart and flesh fail him, the same voice sounds in his ears, "Fear not; I am with thee; be not dismayed; I am thy God." As he nears the borders of the infinite unknown, and is almost affrighted to enter the realm of shades, Jesus says, "Fear not, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." Thus strengthened and consoled, the believer is not afraid to die; nay, he is even willing to depart, for since he has seen Jesus as the morning star, he longs to gaze upon Him as the sun in his strength. Truly, the presence of Jesus is all the heaven we desire. He is at once
"The glory of our brightest days;
The comfort of our nights.

That's Not Islam At All

The One Thing . . . 

One of the ways the ostrichian West has responded to Islamic terrorist attacks in general, and ISIS in particular, has been to argue variants of the following:
"These terrorists attacks have nothing to do with religion."
"They have nothing to do with Islam."
"Islam is the religion of peace; the extremist violence is anti-Islam."

At first blush they have a point.  It is evident on every hand that most violence in the Islamic "world" consists of professing Islamic believers killing and maiming, enslaving and raping other Islamic believers.  Clearly this is contrary to the teachings of the Prophet. 

The Quran clearly states that "(i)f a man kills a Believer [Muslim] intentionally, his recompense is Hell, to abide therein (forever): and the wrath and the curse of Allah are upon him, and a dreadful penalty is prepared for him."  It also states that a Muslim may not take "life, which Allah hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law." [Cited by Jay Sekulow, Rise of Isis (New York: Howard Books, 2014), p.30.]

There are also a series of hadiths (recorded sayings of Muhammad) expanding on this doctrine:

The Blessed Freedom of God's Law

Freedom is What We’re Made For

A Surprising Look at God’s Law

Jonathan Petersen

July 1, 2015
BibleGateway


[This guest blogpost is by Dr. John Dickson (@johnpauldickson). He holds a PhD in history and is the founding director of the Centre for Public Christianity. Dr. Dickson is an Australian speaker, historian, minister (Anglican), husband, and father.  This post is adapted from his recent book A Doubter’s Guide to the Bible: Inside History’s Bestseller for Believers and Skeptics (Zondervan, 2014).]

The Old Testament constantly describes its laws as “life,” “joy,” “blessing,” and true “freedom.” This will puzzle a modern reader, who is used to thinking of freedom as the power to choose any course of action. Surely “thou-shalt-not,” a phrase repeated endlessly in the Ten Commandments, is the epitome of restriction and authoritarianism.

Well, no! This confuses sentence grammar with practical reality.



Of course the Ten Commandments are stated negatively—for the simple reason that only a few things really are forbidden and pretty much everything else is there to be enjoyed.

Daily Devotional

How Well Do You Know God?

“Behold, God is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable.” (Job 36:26)

John Piper

It is impossible to know God too well.

He is the most important person who exists. And this is because he made all others, and any importance they have is owing to him.  Any strength or intelligence or skill or beauty they have comes from him. On every scale of excellence, he is infinitely greater than the best person you ever knew or ever heard of.

Being infinite, he is inexhaustibly interesting. It is impossible, therefore, that God be boring. His continual demonstration of the most intelligent and interesting actions is volcanic.  As the source of every good pleasure, he himself pleases fully and finally. If that’s not how we experience him, we are either dead or sleeping.

It is therefore astonishing how little effort is put into knowing God.  It’s as though the President of the United States came to live with you for a month, and you only said hello in passing every day or so. Or as if you were flown at the speed of light for a couple of hours around the sun and the solar system, and instead of looking out the window, you played a computer game. Or as if you were invited to watch the best actors, singers, athletes, inventors, and scholars perform their best, but you declined to go so you could watch the TV season’s final soap.

Let us pray that our infinitely great God would open our eyes and hearts to see him and seek to know him more.

Startling Discoveries

Healing in His Hands

A startling discovery has been made in the area of public health.  Sometimes things surprise.  At other times, the surprise is so surprisey that one ends up staggering around in the daylight like a sleep deprived inebriate.  We still struggle to believe the scintillating insights delivered by a university health study.  Against all expectation the astute researchers made the completely unexpected discovery that obesity is caused by eating too much food. 

You have to have a PhD in social medicine and a second PhD in public health to enable such rarefied  discoveries to be made. 

When it comes to eating, consumers are biting off more than they can chew.  That's the finding a New Zealand study that confirms the link between energy food supply and the global obesity epidemic.  The findings, published today in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, show that overeating is the driving force behind the global obesity epidemic in high-income countries like New Zealand. [TVNZ News]

The lead researcher was one Stephie Vandevijvere.  Her research is so startling and novel that it made the pages of the World Health Magazine.

Tsunami Warning-Siren Sounds

And Why Not?

Well, that didn't take long.

Montana polygamist family applies for marriage license

MTN News

BILLINGS - Given the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling that same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states, a Lockwood family is now looking to solidify rights of its own. . . . The polyamorous movement is a national push to allow marriage between multiple partners.  Nathan Collier and his two wives, Vicki and Christine, said Tuesday that they are simply looking for equality.  Nathan is legally married to Vicki, but also wants to legally wed Christine.

On Tuesday, Nathan and Christine traveled to the Yellowstone County Courthouse to see if they would be awarded the right to marry under the Marriage Equality Act.   Polygamy is illegal under Montana state law, and recognized as a misdemeanor offense.  "We just want to add legal legitimacy to an already happy, strong, loving family," said Nathan.

Daily Devotional

One State or the Other

On freedom (and predestination)

C. S. Lewis

It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in Words to Live By
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Age of the Sophists

Epistemological Sandcastles

Yesterday we published a piece on a false dichotomy being perpetrated throughout schools and colleges in the United States.  The dichotomy alleges that a proposition is either a fact or an opinion.  It also alleges that an opinion can never be true.  Only facts can be true.  It goes further: morals are statements of opinion, not fact.  Therefore, they also can never be true.

Suppressed in all of this nonsense are the presuppositions of empiricism and materialism.  In other words, materialism and empiricism are presupposed as truths and facts.  Then the implications are worked through to morals, facts, opinions, ethics and so forth.  Naturally, when school children and naive college students are exposed to this kind of sophistry, the presuppositions upon which their whole castle of epistemic sand is built are kept carefully hidden behind closed doors.  Concealing the family secrets is the order of the day. 

Nevertheless, the sandcastle is washed away by a simple question: is the dichotomy that a proposition is either a fact or an opinion, a fact or an opinion?  The only answer possible is that it is an opinion, and therefore, according to the dichotomy itself, is untrue.  Truth, after all, belongs only to those things which can be empirically proven as facts.

In summary, it is scandalous but illuminating that the epistemologies which reign in the secular schools of the United States in these days (that is, pretty much most schools) amount to little more than vacuous, empty sophistry.  Let us remind ourselves that the sophists of the ancient world were radical relativists, synonymous with speciousness and deception.  Nothing much has changed.  Some things cannot change their spots.

Let's get our children into Christian schools so they can be taught to think truthfully and clearly.  Anything less would be a travesty.

Empty Sophistry

Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts

By Justin P. McBrayer

New York Times

 

 

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. So where is the view coming from?

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.

So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts?

Daily Devotional

Mere Adjectives  

On self-suffiency

C. S. Lewis

They [Adam and Eve] wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.

From The Problem of Pain  Compiled in Words to Live By
The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Reign of the PR Meisters

Getting Away With Horrendous Crime For Years

The fruits of Unbelief, nurtured in self-sufficient "we know best" delusions, are devastating.  The curses of the Covenant are never pretty, never noble, never nice.  We have followed the horrible story of authorities in various English towns and boroughs turning Nelson's eye to horrific, systemic crime because they feared being labelled racist or of being accused of exacerbating community tensions.

Behold the cowardly inversion of the childhood proverb: "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me."  In our rebellion against the Lord Jesus Christ, the rotten fruits of Unbelief have made words or labels hurtful--so much so that it is better to witness the vulnerable being tormented with far worse than with sticks and stones, than risk being defamed as a racist.  Cowardice is ever the mark of the Enemy.

Police Withheld Child Grooming Gang Report For Five Years For Fear Of Stoking Racial Tension

by Sarkis Zeronian
BretibartLondon

West Midlands Police withheld a report warning that more than 100 predominantly white children – some only 13 years old – were at serious risk of child exploitation for fear it could inflame racial tension ahead of a General Election. It was finally revealed today, under the Freedom of Information Act, that Britain’s second largest police force withheld the March 2010 document – ‘Problem Profile, Operation Protection’ – which set out how grooming gangs of 75 mainly Muslim men from Birmingham targeted schools and children’s homes across the West Midlands.

Letter From America (About the New God)

Is Supreme Court Declares Itself God

Redefines Marriage and Rights

Ben Shapiro
BreitbartNews

The day after declaring Obamacare magically rewritten and that the lawsuits against discrimination in housing require no proof of actual discrimination, the Supreme Court found a unicorn in the 14^th Amendment.

By a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy under that aforementioned 14^th Amendment (adopted in 1868, when every state in America criminalized sodomy) requires that every state in America grant marriage licenses to men who want to marry men and women who want to marry women, and that every state recognize such licenses from every other state.

By this point, nobody should be surprised that the Supreme Court sees new rights in its Cheerios. As our Supreme Rulers, the Supreme Court can declare what they want to declare, since rule of law died long ago at the hands of leftist deconstruction of language. But this decision is particularly galling to those who believe words have meaning and that government is not God. The Court rejects both of those claims. Words have no meaning; they are merely tools to be used in implementation of the utopian agenda of the far-left. Government is God, a dignity-conferring institution capable of making moral that which religion teaches is sinful, logic teaches is worthless, and societal experience teaches is societally counterproductive.

Naturally, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has made it his lifelong work to read same-sex rights into the Constitution (this, after all is the man who once wrote, based wholly on the authority of the voices in his head, that the Constitution mandates “respect” for sodomy), delivered the majority opinion.

Daily Devotional

Enduring When Obeying Hurts

Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross. (Hebrews 12:2)

What faith performs is sometimes unspeakably hard.

In his book Miracle on the River Kwai, Ernest Gordon tells the true story of a group of POWs working on the Burma Railway during World War II.

At the end of each day the tools were collected from the work party. On one occasion a Japanese guard shouted that a shovel was missing and demanded to know which man had taken it. He began to rant and rave, working himself up into a paranoid fury and ordered whoever was guilty to step forward. No one moved. “All die! All die!” he shrieked, cocking and aiming his rifle at the prisoners. At that moment one man stepped forward and the guard clubbed him to death with his rifle while he stood silently to attention. When they returned to the camp, the tools were counted again and no shovel was missing.

What can sustain the will to die for others, when you are innocent? Jesus was carried and sustained in his love for us by “the joy that was set before him.”

Grace does signify that its objects are undeserving. So I won’t say that Jesus put his hope in grace. I will simply say that he banked on future blessing and joy, and that carried and sustained him in love through his suffering.

Whenever we follow him in this, which we should, that blessing and joy for us is grace — future grace. As a man, modelling for us how to take up our cross and follow him on the Calvary road of love, Jesus entrusted himself to his Father (1 Peter 2:23) and banked his hope on the resurrection and all the joys of reunion with his Father and the redemption of his people.

The Tyranny of the Administrative State

Asinine Tyrannical Law

The administrative state is one which busies itself organising the lives of its citizens.  Granted, there must be a certain body of administrative law.  Road rules, which prevent accidents, are an excellent example.  But more and more secular Western states seek to administer the lives of their citizens by means of endless administrative regulations.

Breaches of administrative law result in fines and eventual imprisonment.  Note that under administrative law the "criminal" might not have done any actual harm to his neighbour's life or property.  His "crime" was that he transgressed an administrative law which had been promulgated to prevent any harm to his neighbour in the first place.  Administrative law is what we call "cocoon" law.  It is preventative in nature and intent.  But the outcome is a progressive statist tyranny, where, in the end, the only part of the human anatomy not regulated by government rules, regulations, and statutes is the rear end.  For every other human function and activity there are bureaucratically promulgated rules and regulations.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About The Red Queen)

Red Queen Rising

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Magblog

After all those unpleasant choking sounds and the consequent demise of our constitutional republic, we are just a short way into the reign of our dear queen, the red one out of Alice. Her principal talent lies in her ability simply to insist on arbitrary authority, with no logic whatever to back it up. So in just the space of a few short weeks, Bruce Jenner identified as a woman, Rachel Dolezal identified as black, and I identified as svelte. Consider the possibilities before us!

Okay, let us treat this thing for what it is — an intellectually crippled attempt to build the Übermensch. This New Future Man has forearms that look like they came right out of 1930’s Stalinist agricultural art, the better to pound you with, and a forehead that appears to be made of brass three inches thick, the better to not think very hard with.

I don’t know what you mean by your way, all the ways belong to me.

Allow me to cite one example before proceeding to some other words of sunshiny encouragement. Here is one tenet of the worldview that is being crammed down our throats, to then be washed down with a fire hose.

The division between male and female is FLUID, and Bruce Jenner can overcome it simply through the power of individual choice. The distinction between the various races of men is also FLUID, and Rachel Dolezal can transcend it simply through the power of her subjective feelings. The Confederate battle flag, however, has a meaning that is apparently FIXED. It only means hatred, and can mean nothing but hatred. Like the law of the Medes and Persians, it resides in a mystery place that admits of no change whatever. It is as though Derrida’s work was all for naught, and I for one am just heartsick about it.

Not really.