Been There But Not Done That?
January 18, 2016 Leave a comment
Mining for God (A Search for Ancient Truth in a Modern World) from Brandon McGuire on Vimeo.
B-A-C-H and The Art of the Faith
January 17, 2016 Leave a comment
The following quotes are sourced from J. S. Bach in Japan:
”What people need in this situation is hope in the Christian sense of the word, but hope is an alien idea here,” says the renowned organist Masaaki Suzuki, founder and conductor of the Bach Collegium Japan. He is the driving force behind the “Bach boom” sweeping Japan during its current period of spiritual impoverishment. “Our language does not even have an appropriate word for hope,” Suzuki says. “We either use ibo, meaning desire, or nozomi, which describes something unattainable.” After every one of the Bach Collegium’s performances Suzuki is crowded on the podium by non “Christian members of the audience who wish to talk to him about topics that are normally taboo in Japanese society—death, for example. “And then they inevitably ask me to explain to them what ‘hope’ means to Christians.” (emphasis added)
“Although less than 1 percent of the 127 million Japanese belong to a Christian denomination, another 8 to 10 percent sympathize with this “foreign” religion. Tokuzen explained: “Most of those sympathizers are part of the elite, and many have had their first contact with Christianity through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.””
The Art of the Fugue
“When Bach died on July 28, 1750, after two botched eye operations performed by John Taylor, a quack from England, his last major work, The Art of the Fugue, remained incomplete. It culminates in a quadruple contrapunctus bearing his signature, for it is formed from the letters b-a-c-h (in German musical terminology b-natural is called “h”)….
The Art of the Fugue is perhaps Bach’s most abstract and intellectually challenging work. Yet its pristine grace led Arthur Peacocke, the English theologian and biologist, to aver that the Holy Spirit himself had written it, using Bach’s hand.”
Hum along with Glenn Gould and let faith arise…
Current Resident
January 9, 2016 Leave a comment
“Americans are right that the bonds of our communities have withered, and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs…” ―Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
“Over the course of the last generation or two, a variety of technological, economic and social changes have rendered obsolete the stuff of American social capital.” ―Robert D. Putnam
“Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America.” ―Robert D. Putnam
“Busy people tend to forgo the one activity – TV watching – that is most lethal to community involvement.” ―Robert D. Putnam
~~~
When was the last time you participated in a community event? When was the last time you attended a village board meeting or a school board meeting? When was the last time you attended a church function? I had to ask myself these questions in the face of my own discontent with things as they and more so out of a sense of alienation from the neighborhood. The Current Resident is being addressed here.
It should be obvious: TV and social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) do nothing to provide social context or human interaction. The virtual reality of electronic devices only provides a momentary piqued interest in a certain topic or worse, entertainment. Social media are employed to reinforce excessive individualism and a false sense of acceptance. It replaces the human element with self-mirrored data bytes which are constantly and instantly cleared from your RAM to make memory available for the next “Breaking News”, news which causes one to hunker down even more so away from community.
One of the harbingers of our current dysfunctional society has been the Millennial drive for the elevated believe-in-self ego. Social media responds in kind to Self.
A common element in schools is for a child not to learn to push himself to learn and therefore enter the civic arena ready to take on responsibility for one’s neighbor, but rather to believe in himself first and foremost– an individualist mantra – and at the same time accept all forms of relativist culture – the good, the bad and the ugly; a collectivist mantra – in the name of diversity and inclusion. In other words, make a child insensitive to another’s ersatz behavior while accepting one’s own ersatz behavior as good. It takes a village…to marginalize and isolate your child into some political identity while doing so in the name of inclusion. An island of Lost Boys and Girls is the result, never a community
Adults add to the loss of community with a lack of knowledge. Languishing with your spouse in front of a TV set is de rigueur these days. Entertainment has supplanted deep thought. Critical thinking about political, economic and world matters is waylaid on the path to finding ourselves. We don’t want to be the needle in the haystack. We want to be asleep on the haystack!
Civic involvement has dropped off dramatically. Oh, yes. We think we are civically involved when we Tweet our opinions. But how lame!
A sense of community via nationalism is strenuously objected to by liberals. Liberals hate flag waving. Liberals see themselves above the mores of tradition, a major component of nationalism. They see themselves standing athwart history yelling “Anything Goes.”
What further fractures communities? Identity studies in colleges and universities (e.g., African-American, queer and feminist studies). America isn’t marginalizing you, you are self-marginalizing! Each of the identity studies seeks to have communities fit around them and not the other way around.
It is interesting to note that for Collectivists self-based individualism is given the imprimatur of personal pronouns (I, me, you) under Randian Objectivist “Me First” letterhead. One glaring recent example: In 33-Minute Speech on Guns, Obama Refers to Himself 76 Times
https://twitter.com/BradThor/status/684467660390821888
In Obama’s “fundamentally transformed” America Self has become preeminent. The nuclear self (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) has replaced the nuclear family and with Glee.
Community Disorganizer: After seven plus years of an administration where self-important executive orders regularly scorn We the People’s representatives, Obama can now be considered the most legacy-of-self, divisive and acrimonious president ever. And where the sixties brought almost 180-degree race and community progress Obama’s retorts have reversed modern history so as to relive it in his terms. The racial divide is pushed by Obama – recreate a problem and then see yourSelf as the answer.
Communities have suffered terribly under Obama’s Self-directed ignorance. Mushroom clouds of community immolation can be seen over decimated cities such as Baltimore. Protesters demand Self to be recognized and Community be damned.
Suffice it to say, our modern society is characterized by excessive individualism spent on a reinforced inbreeding of Self. This is due to a desperate sense of alienation and a deficit of personal relationships. The removal of society’s cornerstone – tradition – occurs during the razing of community so that Self can be built.
And so, for the Current Resident, the real inequality, the real discrimination, the real marginalization, the real greed and selfishness, the real sense of loss in this day and age is life without one another or community.
~~~
And then there is this:
by Daniel Johnson, The New Criterion
The deliberate neglect of our civic virtues has left our institutions hollowed out.
Leszek Kolakowski-The Sacred and Profound
October 31, 2015 Leave a comment
“We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”
– Leszek Kołakowski, Polish philosopher and historian of ideas
Gender In, Gender Out?
October 11, 2015 Leave a comment
From the perspective of having worked with a para-church group that has ministered to free people from the cycle of homosexuality, I would like to address a concern of mine…
Recently I saw a huge sign outside a mega-church that offered a “Biblical” approach to gender. The wording was directed at teenagers. Though seemingly innocuous this is a type of inferred legalism.
When a Church or seminar group puts the word “Biblical” in front of its messaging it is clearly inferring that this is the domain of Christians, that this is what a Christian in this subset must do or be. 
But desired male and female “characteristics” or conformism should never be taught as gilded pages of Scripture lifted out and fashioned into tablets of “Biblical” mandates. One may say that these approaches are just “guidelines” but the word “Biblical” in front of something conveys the idea of de facto Sola Scriptura truth.
As mentioned, in the past I have been around and served in a para-church ministry based on what was termed “gender symbolism issues” (a cautious reference to Carl Jung). The speaker’s main thrust was to employ an admixture of psychology terms, quotes of the Inklings and of Scripture with the application of soul-healing prayer. It all sounded good to me at the time.
Within this context seminar leaders and counselors urged attendees to pray and ask God for the “True Masculine” and the “True Feminine.” But, these prayers, of course, will not be answered because there is no such thing. The best a man or woman can ever become is being Spirit-filled. It was out this time that I came to realize how insidious this kind of psycho-spirituality was.
It is not hard to understand the Christian Church trying to stabilize the culture surrounding it. But, in this case, it is doing so by adding unnecessary “traditions” onto the message of the Gospel. By placing added strictures and burdens regarding the masculine and the feminine, the Christian Church removes itself from the Gospel and becomes, in a sense, the fashion police.
Recall the early Christian Churches of Jerusalem and Galatia which demanded that new Christians follow the strict tradition “soaked” Law along with the teachings of Jesus? Today’s church in similar manner, as I see it, is seeking to propagate men and women of the “Biblically” masculine or feminine tradition. It would appear that the Christian church is in the process of “canonizing” romantic notions of what they consider to be masculine and feminine qualities.
As a former student of Moody Bible Institute and over the course of a lifetime having read through the Bible several times I have yet to find any description of “Biblical” manhood or womanhood.
What is written are what characteristics a man likes about a woman (see Song of Solomon and Proverbs 31) and what characteristics a woman likes about a man (see Song of Solomon). None of these “characteristics” – physical and pragmatic – carry the moral weight of the Ten Commandments. These “characteristics” should never be used to propagate more sons and daughters of the “Biblically” masculine and feminine.
I believe that the Church with regard to its “genderfication” of males and females has become a stumbling block for the weak.
There are those in the church who are perfectly comfortable conveying the macho role that men play in on TV. And there are some in the church who base gender roles on the corn-fed lyrics of country music. There are women’s conferences about “Biblical” womanhood based on Proverbs 31. And there are many more instances of role play.
I have no problem with role play. Role play is a given in relationships. But I have a problem with a rite of conventionality outside of conforming to the image of Christ. This statement may be too much for some people in the church, I understand.
Yet, the weak, the searching, may easily stumble when such stereotyping is placed askance to their faith.
One could say that Proverbs 31 was written by patrician authors who imagined the qualities of an ideal woman to be in relationship with or for King Solomon’s court. Proverbs 31 definitely speaks of a pragmatic woman and not of a physical woman, as does Song of Solomon. (Platonic men would later consider woman’s physical beauty a type of entrapment and something to avoid.)
But in this day and age Christian men also enact Proverbs 31, do they not? Should we delineate gender based on Proverbs 31? My answer is “No.”
Why create extra yokes called the “Biblical Masculine and Feminine” to be placed on people’s necks? Isn’t a “Biblical” manhood and womanhood referenced only at the conjunction of men and women? And, isn’t marriage of man and wife the nexus that is the positive anti-thesis to same-sex anomalies.
Now it is common knowledge that people do not like ambiguity. We demand black and white. We demand inerrancy. And, we demand “Biblically masculine and feminine” males and females. Our minds are wired to alert us to any differences to a norm. When a perceived threat to a norm occurs we seek to reconcile things as quickly as possible.
Any ambiguity comes off as a potential threat to our understanding of how life should be. As related to gender we tend to overemphasize male and female “roles” in order to reduce our anxiety over ambiguity. Here it is, I believe, that some of the fear of non-conformity has grown out the Christian Fundamentalist movement that was raised up in the early twentieth century against the threat of Liberal theologian’s textual infractions. The Conservative Christian world sought to tighten its reins on what is and isn’t “Biblical.” And in so doing it is also now putting a noose around each gender.
Yet, there is no gender typecasting or stereotyping in Scripture, only sacrosanct relationships established and reinforced. And, more importantly, the message of the Gospel offers everyone freedom from fear. This includes freedom from the fear of the ambiguous and the unknown, whether the fear is of material nature or of the fear of gender “status.”
We should not live with the fear of the not being able to follow the letter of the Law and especially as conjoined with the added impedance of “Biblical” gender.
The current falderal about “Biblical” manhood and womanhood are gooey sentimental and romantic notions mandated under the banner of the “Biblically” acceptable. Let’s not go there. Let’s not make the freedom and fun of romantic role play into religious rule pretense. Let’s be free to be men and women without the yoke of the man-made gender laws placed on our necks. And then, perhaps, homosexuals will then feel free to come home and find new hope under the roof of Christ-like relationships.
In my estimation the best how-to books to lead a Spirit-filled life are the Bible and My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. Forget the OTC self-help books and seminars on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. You would be wasting your time and money. Worse, you would most likely seek to adapt to someone else’s notion of what it is to be a man or a woman. Run from this nonsense. GIGO.
~~~
“Jewish Wedding” by Jozef Israels (Dutch, 1824-1911)
The closest we come to “Biblical” manhood and “Biblical” womanhood in the Bible, as I read it, is within the Apostle Paul’s circular letter to the churches at and around Ephesus (Ephesians chapter 5). It is there that he instructs Christians as to how men and women should relate to each other and he does so with equanimity and, more importantly, in the context Christ and His Bride, the Church.
Paul’s circular letter should be read in the context of Ephesus being the protectorate of the Temple of Artemis aka Diana. “There was no other Greco-Roman metropolis in the Empire whose ‘body, soul and spirit’ could so belong to a particular deity as did Ephesus to her patron goddess Artemis.” (Oster 1990:1728) Many in the Greco-Roman world came to Ephesus take part in the seductive sexuality of Diana’s worship, worship which included prostitution. Adored as life givers women were given inordinate prominence. As such, they were placed above men.
Sadly, so many sermons and books and seminars parse out “wives submit to your husbands” and “husbands love your wives”. As I see it, Paul wrote to these churches – churches situated in the context of the worship of the female deity Diana, and specifically this passage to promote a Kingdom view of women as opposed to the Artemis view. In the Spirit’s way, Paul let it be known that women were not to be placed on a pedestal as an idol or to be used– not as a Madonna or as a whore.
Paul writes to the Ephesian church outlining a Kingdom of God view of relationships. Husbands are to love their wives and not submit to prostitutes. Wives are to submit to their husbands and not to those who would put them on a pedestal to worship or in a bed as a prostitute. Paul advances the true characteristics of Kingdom of God people: concomitant respect and love of husband and wife.
More than any pretense of “Biblical” gender teaching, the Scriptures order our relationships as it orders our loves: Love God with all your heart, mind, body and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.
Husbands who love their wives love their closest neighbor and are in fact submitting to the Lord within her.
Wives who submit to their husbands submit to their closest neighbor and do so out of love for the Lord within him.
This gamboling of submission and love resembles, I imagine, the relationships of the Trinity and Their dancing embrace.
Indulge me:
~~~~
Related:
Here’s what culture says: 27 Ways to Be a Modern Man
Added:
Scans prove there’s no such thing as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain
The Atheist Delusion and the Art of Incomprehensibility
September 25, 2015 Leave a comment
The Moral Mixups of an Angry Atheist
“The “New Atheism” movement was launched as a direct consequence of the attacks of September 11, 2001.”
This is the opening statement of the Prologue from Why Science Does Not Disprove God by Amir D. Aczel, PH.D.
According to Dr. Aczel, religion and the acts of militancy creating the carnage of the 9-11 attacks are the raison d’etre for the New Atheists and for their haranguing believers in a God:
“New Atheism is combative, aggressive, and belligerent against people of belief. Its proponents hold that religion is evil, and they state this belief loudly and clearly. Whether they are scientists or not, the new atheists frequently employ science as their tool.”
If you have listened to talks or read the books by the New Atheists Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others, you might come away with the conclusion that science had disproved a need for God.
Restating Dr. Aczel in a familiar art format, the New Atheists have created a collage of “supporting” scientism. First they used bits and pieces of biology and evolution that were familiar to them. Then, they pasted on clippings of quantum mechanics theories. And now they are using a splatter technique, throwing infinite unknown universes with their infinite probabilities at the canvas to finish their collage.
All together I would call this hodgepodge work of Pop Art “The Atheist Delusion”.
The New Atheist’s debate diatribes, their dysfunctional use of science, their avoidance of archeological findings and their animus towards believers in a God are addressed by Dr. Aczel in his book.
From the Introduction, we read of Dr. Aczel’s authenticated cri de coeur:
“The past few years have seen the rapid growth of the idea that God and Science cannot possibly coexist….The purpose of this book is to defend the integrity of science.” (emphsis added)
Dr. Aczel knows first-hand the New Atheist’s agenda via debating with them:
“And these New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett”—are bound together under a powerful common purpose, and continually reinforce each other. The problem with the science in the books and lectures of the New Atheists is that it is not pure science—the objective pursuit of knowledge about the universe.” Rather, it is “science” with a purpose” [I call it “scientism,” as do others]: the purpose of disproving the existence of God.” (emphasis added)
~~~
Something to think about:
What do the ancient Greek “atomist” philosophers (circa 460-270 BC) like Epicurus and Democritus and the On Origin of the Species author Charles Darwin and the New Atheists have in common?
There are at least three issues that frame the writings and dialog of each subset:
1-All of them had the notion that no Supreme Being would exist that would allow judgment and eternal punishment. For example…
Charles Darwin: “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as divine revelation”; “The plain language of the [biblical] text seems to show that men who do not believe and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” -Chapter Eight, “Triumph and the Reversal of Natural Selection”, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson
The New Atheists, speaking as gods, posit that no Supreme Being would ever judge mankind or let evil enter our world. (They are OK, though, with an Epicurean “free will” attenuated by evolution and Social Darwinism and with ignoring murderous dictators, genocide, eugenics, abortion, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc.-all the “damnable” by-products of atheism and Social Darwinism.)
2-All of them used unscientific analogs and personal anecdotes (feelings) to create their “empirical” disavowal and disapproval of God’s existence. There are too many references to list all of them here.
From Paul Johnson’s biography:
“The trouble with [Darwin’s] Descent [of Man] really starts in chapter 5, “On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilized Times.” It is a mass of generalizations.”
According to historian Paul Johnson, Charles Darwin made statements in The Descent of Man and elsewhere that would be considered highly racist, chauvinistic and speculative today.
“Like Dawkins, Hitchens also uses anecdotes from his own life to illustrate the overwhelming viciousness he sees in all religions:” (Dr. Aczel goes on to quote Hitch’s church memories.)
Feelings and sentimentality do not a scientist make.
The New Atheists, from railing on and on about the Crusades and Catholic Priest child abuse to denigrating Mother Teresa to childhood church memories, hope to poison the well of Living Water that a Samaritan women would drink from.
3- None of the above studied anthropology, metaphysics, archeology and mathematics. Instead, they read the tabloids. They wanted to know what people thought about them. Darwin held off publishing On Origin of the Species due to his concern over public opinion.
For your consideration:
Dr. Aczel states that atheism began with the “Atomist” philosophers. This is not so. Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon. The Epicureans mentioned above believed in Roman and Greek deities, to be sure, but they felt that those deities where busy off somewhere else and were always angry with mankind anyway. So, they chose to ignore those gods.
One final note about the book:
Dr. Aczel, as his book clearly reinforces, reasons scientifically that there is a God-in the “broadest possible sense.” But, Dr. Aczel makes no claim saying that God is a personal God or, say, as Francis Schaeffer, founder of L’Abri said in his writings and lectures that, “God is Infinite-Personal”. Dr. Aczel’s book, one could say, is purely academic…and scientifically supports Theism.
Amir D. Aczel holds graduate degrees in mathematics. He is also the author of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In Why Science Does Not Disprove God he notes a significant array of distinguished scientists interviewed in the process of writing his book. And, here are the chapter titles to pique your interest:
Prologue: The Birth of the New Atheism
1-The Coevolution of Very Early Science and Religion
2-Why Archaeology Does not Disprove the Bible
3-The Revolt of Science
4-The Triumphs of Science in the Nineteenth Century
5-Einstein, God, and the Big Bang
6-God and the Quantum
7-The “Universe from Nothing” Deception
8-And on the Eighth Day, God Created the Multiverse
9-Mathematics, Probability, and God
10-Catastrophes, Chaos, and the Limits of Human Knowledge
11-Between God and the Anthropic Principle
12-The Limits of Evolution
13-Art, Symbolic Thinking, and the Invisible Boundary
14-Engaging the Infinite
15-Conclusion: Why the “Scientific” Argument for Atheism Fails
~~~
Added 9-26-2015:
Below, the Hebrew King David (c. 1040–970 BC) speaks about a morally perverse person, an ungodly person, and one who disregards God and any thought of moral adjudication (see above for the modern folly version by the New Atheists). David is not talking about theoretical atheism. The Apostle Paul later references Psalm 14 in his letter to the Roman church (Chapter 3) when talks about the nature of sin:
“For the choir director: A psalm of David. Only fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, and their actions are evil; not one of them does good!” Psalm 14:1
~~~
Cartoon from: http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-moral-mixups-of-an-angry-atheist-125221/
Darwin’s Myopia, Our Dilemma
September 12, 2015 Leave a comment
Darwin’s Myopia, in excerpts:
“Once, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelly “gave me great pleasure” and “I took intense delight in Shakespeare.” -Charles Darwin
~~~
“In his old age Darwin admitted, “I have lost the power of becoming deeply attached to anyone.” He assured Tennyson that there was nothing in his theories to prevent anyone believing in a supreme being. But he did not think about God or the possibility of an afterlife. He closed his mind to speculation about the infinite and concentrated on worms. One is tempted to feel that he deliberately shut his eyes to the ultimate consequences of his work, in terms of the human condition and the purpose of life or the absence of one.” Paul Johnson (emphasis added)
~~~
“It is hard to believe that Darwin himself would have accepted this huge, bottomless emptiness of life. Or, rather, perhaps because he felt it yawning, he averted his eyes from the big issues and focused them on the small: climbing plants, orchids, insectivorous plants, worms. The truth is long before he died, he had lost control over his own theory. The point at which he lost control can be precisely identified. It was when he decided that natural selection, to be of internally coherent, has to be comprehensive and universal. But if this is so, then there is no essential difference between man and any other animal. The differences, however obvious and seemingly enormous, are of degree and not of kind.”
Paul Johnson (emphasis added)
~~~
Enter the paradox, missed by Darwin: “It can more easily be grasped if we see natural selection as destructive as well as constructive-and not only destructive but self-destructive. Once natural selection had created man, it was in its own danger zone. Human beings think…are conscious, and self-conscious.
It is at this stage in evolution that natural selection falters and ceases to work with all its previous triumphalism and certitude.” (emphasis added)
~~~
The above quotes are taken from Historian Paul Johnson’s insightful biography Darwin: portrait of a genius Copyright © 2015
From Johnson’s concise, detailed and deliberative biography we learn that Charles Darwin inherited genius stock-“a classic case of genetic inheritance”. We read of Darwin’s luminous and wealthy patriarchs-of his paternal and maternal grandfathers and of his father. We learn of Darwin’s moneyed care and education upbringing. Self-education would soon become a way of life for Darwin.
Darwin married a godly wife, Emma Wedgwood, a “clever, educated, equable, hardworking, industrious, economical, and, not least, sensitive” woman. Together they had many children together.
Darwin, a lover of botany and the author of On the Origin of the Species, we are told, never involved himself with the study of anthropology. He also never regarded math to any usable extent. Statistics were never his bailiwick.
It is likely that Darwin never met up with and had never studied the Christian Monk Gregor Mendel’s foundational work, a well-read paper on genetics in 1866 and a writing that would support natural selection. Mendel’s pea hybrid work would give birth to the science of genetics.
Darwin, during his Beagle voyage focused on botany, insects, flora and fauna in general and the facial expression of savages such as those of Tierra del Fuego. At home he read the local press. He was deeply concerned about how other people viewed everyone else, scientists in particular, who differed from what he considered church dogma..
Darwin’s s fear of being ostracized on earth with his published work coupled with his revulsion of any thought of eternal ostracization-punishment in hell forever-kept Darwin spiritually self-ostracized from the Creator. He turned away from God and turned inward with a self-defensive mode of living.
At one point Darwin, we read, became enthralled with Thomas Malthus’ theory of overpopulation, an unsubstantiated and later refuted theory. Malthus’ theory would become lifelong dogma for Darwin. At the same time Darwin also denied any Christian accounting of creation.
“Ever since he became a systematic naturalist, Darwin had been an evolutionist. That is, he dismissed the account of Genesis of the separate creation of the species by Yahweh as symbolic and not to be taken literally. They had some way evolved. There was nothing new, surprising or alarming in this.” Others before him held similar views. See Chapter Three, “The Loss of God.”
In the chapter titled “Evils of Social Darwinism” Paul Johnson postulates, and I agree with his assessment, that a hybrid of natural selection-Social Darwinism-has led to all manner of evil: “Those who studied progress were hugely attracted by Darwin’s notion of natural selection as a relentless self-driving machine, “daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation…silently and insensibly working…at the improvement of each organic being…” Darwin’s words “Struggle” and “Survival” would later be found in the works and placards of atheists and agnostics and of German philosophers. The words would be used to secure featherbedding in the humanist realm of law as well as in sociology, psychology and psychiatry. Culture would make the leap of Social Darwinism.
“Struggle” and “Survival” would be the seed words for the monstrous propagandized outgrowths of Fascists and of Socialists and of a Hitler and Marx and Engels and for the crushing rollout of Stalinist Communism.
These same words were used to foment the works of Francis Galton and his sterilization eugenics program, a program practiced in many nations!
Under such a program it would be decided by someone(s) who was “desirable” or “undesirable”. If a person was found “undesirable”, then that person was “unfit to procreate” and then sterilized. Soon, the same eugenics process would be used to decide which races were “unfit to live.” You can take the thread of thought from here.
Today, Progressives want to define life: who is “fit to live” and who is “unfit to live” (e.g., abortion, death panels); who is to benefit and who isn’t to benefit (class and race warfare). Here’s a sample of the Progressive’s rejection of anything that might rattle their cages, written by an apparent Epicurean atheist:
The website Slate, a website where myopia studies itself in the mirror; where intelligence and moral absolutes proudly go to be reprogrammed into “who’s the bigger hypocrite” moral relativism, has a review of Johnson’s book by Mark Joseph Stern.
Incidentally, Slate provides its sycophantic readers with atheistic Progressive hubristic feel-good dispersions and mostly Turkish Delight.
The article written by “red in tooth and claw” Mark Joseph Stern apparently hoped to incite a circle of atheistic humanist commentator wagons around the theory of evolution by using a well-known electric atheist prod-a rant that desperately wanted make the point that the “Bible is wrong”.
Stern wanted to protect the atheist’s raison d’etre-a material world without moral agency (read accountability) and certainly one without Absolutes. A Darwinian Social scientism in lieu of God is more to their liking, more controllable and less scary.
Though mostly accepting of historian Johnson’s overview of Darwin’s life and work, Stern’s feathers are ruffled by Johnson’s interpolation of Darwin’s natural selection. He ends his piece with reassuring hubris: “But no thoughtful reader could possibly tolerate Johnson’s stunning intellectual dishonesty.” The article:
~~
Well, think again Mark Joseph Stern. In fact read the book again. See that in no way does Paul Johnson dismiss or “smear” evolution or natural selection (you stated this in the subtitle of your article).
At the end of the book, Johnson does extrapolate what he sees as the ideological outcomes (Social Darwinism, humanism, nihilism, eugenics, etc.) of Darwin’s natural selection theory, a theory deliberately configured apart from God-consciousness as it was detached from Mendel’s foundational statistics experiments over time. (By way of information, before Darwin someone else would coin the phrase “survival of the fittest”.)
As can be seen by reading Slate and other smug ideological publications, Social Darwinism is now an applied theory that will abide no reference to mankind as created by God. Instead, Social Darwinism must abide with “the will to power”. Slate readers, I fear, would hate the correlation between God and man as much as they do their own shadows (i.e., Paul Johnson’s revelatory deductions) cast on cave walls.
Our Dilemma:
Do we take to heart and flesh the words of Slate and the Progressives and let Social Darwinism and materialism define our lives? Do we, in the same vein, live like animals and subvert reason while claiming “science made me do it” and continue to make “unnatural selections (e.g., homosexuality, abortion)?
Or, do we return to our Creator?
I commend Paul Johnson’s book to you. Read it and discern for yourself.
I believe in God as a theistic evolutionist.
~~~
Other Christians who think like I do regarding Creation:
“Even before Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, many Christians had already accepted an old Earth. One of the first supporters of evolutionary science in America—Harvard biologist Asa Gray—was a devout Christian. Conservative theologian B. B. Warfield also accepted the science of evolution, and both he and Asa Gray rejected the idea that evolution leads to atheism. Even the authors of The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915, accepted an old earth. It wasn’t until a century after Darwin that a large number of evangelicals and fundamentalists began to accept the combination of flood geology and 6-day creation promoted by Seventh-day Adventists.” –How have Christians responded to Darwin’s “Origin of Species”? (emphasis added) Copyright © 2015 The BioLogos Foundation
“Given the stark difference between evolution and six-day creation, many people assume that Darwin’s theory shook the foundations of the Christian faith. In truth, the literal six-day interpretation of Genesis 1-2 was not the only perspective held by Christians prior to modern science. St. Augustine (354-430), John Calvin (1509-1564), John Wesley (1703-1791), and others supported the idea of Accommodation. In the Accommodation view, Genesis 1-2 was written in a simple allegorical fashion to make it easy for people of that time to understand. In fact, Augustine suggested that the 6 days of Genesis 1 describe a single day of creation. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) argued that God did not create things in their final state, but created them to have potential to develop as he intended. The views of these and other Christian leaders are consistent with God creating life by means of evolution.” –How was the Genesis account of creation interpreted before Darwin? (emphasis added) Copyright © 2015 The BioLogos Foundation
@PPact @PPFA @HeyPP Atrocities and the Chasm of Caedas
August 15, 2015 Leave a comment
“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.”
Human Development
Early Epicurean atomist philosophers believed that death was the end that the incorporeal did not continue. That philosophy lived out: what you did in the present bore no moral constraint and there would be no consequence of future judgment except for the really, really bad things done.
The historian Plutarch recorded (via Wikipedia and other sources) that “The slopes of Taygetus have been inhabited since at least Mycenean times….The Spartans threw criminals and “unfit” (weak, sickly, deformed, or mentally retarded) infants into a chasm of Taygetus known as Ceadas or Caeadas (Greek: Καιάδας). In antiquity, male Spartan newborns were abandoned there if deemed unfit after examination for vitality. Recent evidence, found by the University of Athens, discovered remains of adult individuals which appeared to confirm that Ceadas was mainly a place of punishment for criminals, traitors and captives.” Regarding this last bit, it is my opinion that history was rewritten to ‘soften’ the Spartan image and to shore up Greece’s tourism industry which is desperately in need of more money. A newborn’s bones (cartilage-like) are not likely to be found among the ruins.
Now, to Dr. Ben Carson and eugenics (from Greek εὐγενής eugenes “well-born”)”
Those of us in the Kingdom of God must act now- this Saturday! There is a nationwide protest planned!
The humanists, atheists and objectivists call us “Pro-Lifers” as if life itself was a political issue or ideology! As Christians we respect the natural God-given rights of all human beings as expressed in the cogent words of the Declaration of Independence: “truths’, “self-evident”, “Creator” and “unalienable”. l’chaim!
Protest and related links:
Protest locations: http://protestpp.com/protests/
Protest mission: http://protestpp.com/mission/
“Pro-lifers nationwide will protest Planned Parenthood next week”
“Pro-Lifers Organize Planned Parenthood Protests in 180 Cities Nationwide”
The Public Discourse: “American Mistra: Putting the Culture Back in the Culture Wars: The urgency of protecting the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, and the institution of marriage goes hand-in-hand with cultivation of the arts”
“Pro-choice advocates like The National Abortion Federation and StemExpress are seeking legal action against CMP (Center for Medical Progress), trying to incriminate the messenger and downgrade the message.”
https://www.mnnonline.org/news/protestpp-rallies-pro-lifers-nationwide/
“Monica Miller of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society said, “Now is the time for all of us to take to the streets and publicly expose Planned Parenthood for the pro-death organization that it is. I cannot overestimate how important it is for the pro-life movement to take full advantage of the fact that the abortion industry, and Planned Parenthood in particular, has been dealt a huge blow. We need to continue to draw attention to the atrocity of abortion and the incredible heartlessness of, not only killing unborn babies—but that Planned Parenthood further denigrates their murder victims from the sale of their body parts.””
Human development chart provided by:
http://liveactionnews.org/does-nasas-definition-of-life-conflict-with-the-pro-life-position/
Added 8-17-2015:
Born To be Child
-A.F. Branco
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Born To Be Child
~~~
Psalm 139: 13-18
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
Ends Justifying the Means & Dereliction of Duty : “You can’t have one without the other”
August 11, 2015 Leave a comment
“Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero
First: A Dereliction of Dignity
Prior to the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage: “He [Justice Kennedy] explained that “by authorizing same-sex unions and same-sex marriages, New York sought to give further protection and dignity to that bond.” “…”Justice Kennedy can be remembered as the decisive vote for creating same-sex marriage or as the man who gave same-sex couples the opportunity to argue for the dignity of their relationships. It is unlikely that he can be remembered as both.”
Justice Kennedy please take some notes.
[Justice Clarence] Thomas wrote in his dissent that there is no “dignity” clause in the US Constitution — and that, even if there was, the government could not bestow it upon a person or take it away.
Second: A Dereliction of Duty
Marriage: It’s an institute you must not disparage. Yet, the Supreme Court and State Attorneys General (AGs) have disparaged natural marriage. Many state AGs have not done their due diligence for the people they serve. The following video describes their disgrace.
The video does contain a bit of legalese but it is absolutely necessary for Christians to understand what is taking place in the world around them. This video will inform you of the failure of those whom we trusted.
BTW: I don’t have to tell you that the Left preaches tolerance but the Left is the most intolerant group on earth. The Left depends on bullying to get its way.
Dereliction of Duty: State Attorneys General Failing to Defend Marriage Laws in Court
Your Kiss, Your Kiss is On My…One and Only List
August 8, 2015 Leave a comment
Man and wife kissing, again!
Holy marriage between a man and a woman is beautiful to behold…the two becoming one.
~~
Last weekend I attended a wedding just outside Minneapolis. The ceremony was held in a small church.
The bride and groom exchanged their vows before God and before man. They partook of the Eucharist while a soloist sang.
After the pronouncement of “man and wife” the groom threw up his arm in exaltation and shouted, “Yeah!” and then the two kissed.
The reception was held in a nearby country club where these two photos were taken. The pictures are blurry because…you are looking through tears.
“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, He who pastures his flock among the lilies.”
אני לדודי ודודי לי (Ani l’dodi v’dodi li) is taken from Song of Solomon 6:3 and translates, “I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine”.
