Christianity | Cindy Wity

Fear and Loathing in America

July 1, 2012 Leave a comment

I know, I know, I am polemical. I polarize people with my words. I piss people off because I am ever seeking to destroy pretense. And yet at this juncture in my life I understand this irksome gift as a God-given trait that must be used. This does not mean that I am perfect, of course, or exempt. It does mean though that just like the prophets recorded in the Old Testament I cannot remain silent. I am will ever be forthright and forth telling…

*****

Pervasive throughout our land is the avoidance of asking the hard questions. We shun the real questions about life and death, about God, about good and evil, about the body and soul, about reason and revelation and about eternity and time.

Yesterday I happened to watch The Lord of the Rings (LTR): The Return of the King. Putting the above statement into LTR terms, we want to live peaceably in the shire with never having to venture out and deal with the Ring which has consequential power over us. We may say to ourselves, “Why destroy the ring when we can pretend it doesn’t exist? We may have doubts that all that the shire presents to us is all there is to life but we will ignore those doubts in order to avoid conflict and to live peaceably. We choose the immediate surroundings to avoid the dangerous quest that truth demands. We fear what it might take to make the journey. We fear we will lose ourselves on the way and never return to the shire. We fear what it might take to fight the good fight.

We fear conflict. Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid. Our “dialectics” begin with opposites and end in synthesis. We seek conflict resolution, bargaining, harmony and therapy, no-fault divorce, etc. Because of this we find it easier to believe nothing of import so that we do not have to fear disagreement, ostracism or even death for what one believes. And because we do not believe in anything then we cannot be responsible for outcomes.

To choose to believe nothing means that absolute truth is discharged from our lives. Its voice is no longer heeded. In fact its voice is now being drowned out. The commotion that you hear daily is man’s raucous resistance to leaving the shire ~ his tweeting and texting of empty words, the ever streaming pop/rock music filling the void, the Surround sound of ubiquitous blaring entertainment. It is as if men and women were walking around in the dark calling out to each other and never finding the light switch. They have chosen to stay in the purgatory of their fears.

The avoidance of pain and conflict has become our primary goal in life. This is seen in the young voter’s desire for Obamacare. The health care reform is seen by them as in line with their “values”. The reform is also seen as providing a sense of self-esteem in that it affirms the young voters wish to avoid pain and insecurity at all costs. On the surface Obamacare appears to provide security for themselves and for others while in truth it is a compromise of what is good and what is evil – the good being the desire for your well-being and the well-being of others and the evil which is the lie that Obama and the government will somehow provide self-esteem and security for you and others and do it with altruism. Remember, God has now been replaced by social science, social science based on rationalism and egalitarianism (think John Rawls, Laurence Tribe, etc.) all under the banner of “Social Justice.” Rationalism’s,’ “Social Justice” trumps God every time. Social science is now becoming the creator of society’s values, e.g., God is not to be talked about in public but homosexuality must be. All of this in spite of the fact that rationalism without revelation could never create value. As Benedict XVI said in 1969:

“What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational, just as the state that aims at being perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason.”

The avoidance of truth with its inherent conflicts with other than the truth affects our relationships, our sexuality, our creativity, our culture. In place of absolute truth Americans, as mentioned, have latched on to “values.” And our new “value” system has a new way of talking: “lifestyle”, “Be Yourself;” “Be original;” “Let go and be;” diversity;” “I have my rights.” But now “rights” are no longer the natural inalienable God-given rights “of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Now “rights” have morphed into feelings worn on our sleeve. We demand that others accept what we feel and that others be open and tolerant. This is what we value above all else. Right and wrong (and love (read not sex)) no longer have a place in our psyche. “Values” – a synthesis of good and evil dominates our diseased culture. And when we ignore serious questions we create words with synthetic meanings to describe our lives.

“Charisma” is one of those words often heard today. Charisma was once considered a God-given grace but has been used as cover for the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt, political philosopher, notes when talking about Hitler’s appeal.

Allan Bloom, another political philosopher, notes in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, “Charisma both justifies leaders and excuses followers. The very word gives a positive twist to rabble-rousing qualities and activities treated as negative in our constitutional tradition. And it s vagueness makes it a tool for frauds and advertising men adept at manipulating images.” Consider that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both been called charismatic leaders.

In the introduction to his book, Bloom writes about what he sees in the classrooms of higher education:

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes that truth is relative….They are unified only in their relativism and their allegiance to equality….They have been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society…The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness ~ and the relativism that makes it only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings ~ is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point (now) is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.” (emphasis mine)

In a later chapter titled The German Connection, Bloom relates how Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hegel, Weber, Freud have influenced American thinking. Americans, within a “pro-choice” democracy, have assimilated this German thinking sometimes turning it on its head. Bloom writes,

“…there is now an entirely new language of good and evil, originating in an attempt to get “beyond good and evil” and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore. Even those who deplore our current moral condition do so in the very language that exemplifies that condition.”

“The new language is that of value relativism and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.”

…

“Value relativism can be taken to be a great release from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil, with its cargo and shame and guilt, and the endless efforts that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other enjoin. Intractable good and evil cause infinite distress – like war and sexual repression – which is almost instantly relieved when more flexible values are introduced. One need not feel bad about or uncomfortable with oneself when just a little value adjustment is necessary. And this longing to shuck off constraints and have one peaceful, happy world is the first of the affinities between our real American world and that of German philosophy in its most advanced form, given expression by the critics of the President’s speech.”

Here Bloom is referring to the clamor arising when President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” When yet at another time Reagan said that the Soviets had “different values,” this statement was met “at worst with silence and frequently with approval,” thus revealing our loathing of absolutism in the former statement.

At the beginning of the chapter Values, Bloom, relates, “We have come back to the point where we began (in the book), where values take the place of good and evil.” (emphasis mine)

And so like Gollum we place the utmost value on the ring of power, becoming blind to its tyranny over us. Along with the ring we call our values “My Precious.” Under the yolk of temporal “values” and without facing the serious questions of life we lose ourselves, we lose the real. We lose love, romance, culture, art ~ everything meaningful to us.

Love or charity, a virtue which must be constantly worked at, is replaced with easy sex. Consider that in our culture sexual activity is not to be repressed or disciplined but rather it is to be given preeminent unrestrained “value.” Think Sandra Fluke and contraception. Think in-your-face homosexuality. Does America “confirm her soul in self-control” or not?

Romance, apart from truth is portrayed in movie after movie as just a response to nihilism. Nowhere to be found is the expectation, the unrequited desire and the hoped-for revelation of real romance. Without absolutes there can be no true romance.

We are a culture that seeks therapeutic counseling. Yet modern psychology, the sworn enemy of shame and guilt, refuses to talk about good and evil and therefore offers nothing for the soul. Freudian psychology only brings the patient back to repressed sex.

Modern art has nothing of consequence to offer. Consider the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Deafening music, pop or rock, pummels our ear drums daily evoking barbaric passions and depriving the soul of its senses.

Tattoos deface our bodies so as to reveal our disdain for the discipline that purity of mind and body requires. Inking is given the (non-)value of counter-culture and rabble-rousing.

Religion, wherein serious questions are faced, is being replaced by positive thinking as preached from the temples of TV.

In view of the fact that our nation is becoming increasingly devoid of absolutes and truth while at the same time becoming increasingly laced with relativism and sliding scale “values” consider this:

Jesus, the Son of the Living God, says, “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Free from what? Free from fear. All fear: the fear of the unknown, the fear of facing accountability, the fear of death, the fear of loss and personal suffering, the fear of evil. Jesus’ perfect love casts out all fear. Because of this we can face the serious questions of life head-on knowing that He loves us, that He stands with us and that He has gone before us through the same difficult places. Seek Him and He will be found.

Going back to the LTR analogy do you remember how Frodo and Sam and the rest rejoiced that the ring had been destroyed, that their arduous life and death journey had been accomplished? Their courage and resoluteness saved the shire, themselves and Middle Earth even while the others in the shire had no clue as to what was going on. You and I are about to do the same.

Filed under Christianity, commentary, essay, short piece, Writing Tagged with absolutes, Christianity, culture, human-rights, moral relativism, Obamacare, philosphy, politics, social science, society, value positing

Just, Fair and Equal: the Stooges of Progressivism

June 3, 2012 Leave a comment

“Creating a world that is just, fair and equal.” This Progressive mantra was recited again yesterday. I heard it during a television interview of two historians at a history writer’s convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The black historian’s words sounded so right, so full of righteous human endeavor but in reality his words were the sounds of empty utopian piety deficit of any moral context.

A world that is just is a world where every man gives the other his due. Yet government’s redistribution of wealth does the opposite. It takes away from the taxpayer what is due him, his earnings and property and gives to someone else that which is not due him. This confiscation and redistribution of personal property is for no other reason than to turn unequal incomes into equal outcomes. This highway robbery is currently termed “social justice” by progressives today who were yesterday’s socialists.

Here is Josef Stalin, a murderous dictator, talking about his desire to see socialism dominate the world (meaning you and me):

“…Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world …”

St.Thomas Aquinas in his On the Book of Job (8,1) said:

“Justice is destroyed in twofold fashion: by false prudence of the sage and by the violent act of the man who possess power.”

As we see our nation become increasingly secular we see its structure being pulled away from its Judeo-Christian cornerstone. And in so doing we the ‘homeowners’ are becoming displaced and disordered much like furniture during a house relocation. Without realizing it we are becoming objects devoid of human nature, becoming the un-created or the walking dead. Removed from life’s foundation man is devoid of God-given inalienable rights as well. And with out individual inalienable rights there is only left to mankind the justification of totalitarian power, a totalitarian power that promises a “just, fair and equal world.” This secular utopian promise is not new to mankind: Hitler and Stalin among others promoted such ‘worlds’.

Justice can rightly be discussed only within a complete moral context that includes prudence, temperance, fortitude, charity and a host of other God-derived virtues. To replace that moral context with a secular humanism is to presume that God did not create humans. It presumes that God did not create man as a person, as a whole unto himself as a spiritual being that exists for itself and of itself and that wills its own proper perfection. On these grounds secular humanism denies individual God-given inalienable rights in favor of the general ‘good.’ This denial is imposed on us today in our democracy by majority rule – voters enthralled by the secular humanism advocated by the main stream media, by our president and by Democrats in particular are voting to empty man of his individual nature through law and fiat. They are doing so in the name of communal “social justice.” No one seems to notice except a few on the right.

Because of human nature there will always be those in a small camp who think to themselves “every man for himself” and “screw the other guy so I can get ahead.” And likewise, on the other hand, there will always be those who believe that each of us should give up our person, our property and our individualism for the good of the whole. Neither of these political philosophies should ever be put in power. And yet with high-sounding, pious jingoism pumped out by the main stream media propaganda machine the left is now succeeding into promoting the latter. We already know who the willing recepient is: “a sucker is born every day.”

As individuals each of us should act with justice toward our neighbor giving him his due. What is his due? My neighbor is due his inalienable God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I owe him truth. I owe him the same love I give myself. I owe him freedom from coercion. Beyond that the mantras of “social justice,” fairness and egalitarianism become the Godless mind control pumping the ever marching jackboots of rank and file humanism. Once a sufficient numbers of useful idiots and stooges have succumbed to humanism’s opiate effect a sure and complete enslavement of our nation under a totalitarian regime will occur. Welcome to the world of the godless if Obama’s regime is re-elected in 2012.

For a world to be “fair” someone in power has to determine what is fair. Do you really want to use your vote for that kind of self-subjugation? Certainly there is no Biblical a priori for demanding that life must be fair. Where does this understanding of the need for fairness come from? Is there a philosophical argument for fairness? A moral one?

My guess would be that much of the “fairness” allure comes from popular psychology and socialist rhetoric both which absolve people of personal responsibility and seeks to rectify a person’s losses and hardships by pointing blame at others. Class warfare rhetoric is a prime example, as it defines others as being the reason for your lack. More devastating to our culture and its preoccupation with fairness is our nation’s increasingly secular nature, a secular nature of envy and jealousy actively promoted by president Obama in his many “fair share” speeches. Obama is a secularist wolf in Soros’ bought sheep’s clothing.

A world that is “equal” is a world that removes difference for the sake of bringing every one down to the same low common denominator and nothing more. Imagine our government choosing your husband or wife, your doctor, your food, your home and your words based on what is thought to be equal for everyone. Equal-outcome based thinking destroys incentive, destroys each man’s uniqueness, his God-given differences, his inalienable rights and eats away at civic life-like a flesh-eating disease feeding on its host.

According to Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul’s of Today’s Students in the chapter entitled Values “Egalitarianism is conformism…Egalitarianism is founded on reason, which denies creativity”

Imagine a world where there is no creativity and no aspirations only sameness. Imagine being a citizen of North Korea.

Without moral-based justice as an inoculation against greed and envy people would constantly be looking at others to compare themselves with their neighbor. Forget contentment in a world that is egalitarian.

Finally both fairness and egalitarianism, as laws enacted via secular humanist congressmen and presidents voted for, remove individual moral choice (justice) along with charity, fortitude and temperance from life. If the government does your thinking and makes your choices for you then you as an individual are absolved from any moral duty whatsoever. What than is the purpose of the individual? Without you the state becomes the all-powerful meat grinder and you along with everyone else become the human sausage extruded into the casings of humanism. Digest that if you will.

“A government big enough to give you everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have….” President Gerald Ford

Filed under 2012 election, Christianity, commentary, Human Interest, Liberalism, Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, Writing Tagged with 2012 Presidential campaign, Christianity, egalitarianism, fairness, giving man his due, human-rights, inalienable rights, justice, politics, progressives, social justice, society

God Saw That It Was Good and So Do I

May 19, 2012 Leave a comment

This past week I read an engaging book by scientist Francis S. Collins: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As someone who works in the engineering field and as a believer in God the book’s discussion of science and faith being compatible piqued my interest.

Before reading this book I did have the innate understanding that science and faith were compatible and that each discipline reinforced the other with their respective insights and revelations but prior to reading this book I hadn’t seen much credible literature discussing this premise. Currently there appears to be plenty of antipathy between the church and science. So as one might imagine I was excited to purchase the book and evaluate a scientist’s take on the connection. I was not disappointed.

Francis S. Collins, as the back cover bio reads, headed the Human Genome Project and is one of the world’s leading scientists. “He works at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God and Scripture.

Dr. Collins believes that faith in God and faith in science can coexist within a person and be harmonious. In The Language of God he makes his case for God and Science.”

Of special interest to me is the fact that Collins (as I do) accepts theistic evolution. In Chapter Ten he writes:

“This view is entirely compatible with everything that science teaches us about the natural world. It is also entirely compatible with the great monotheistic religions of the world. The theistic evolution perspective cannot, of course, prove that God is real, as no logical argument can fully achieve that. Belief in God will always require a leap in faith.”

The book lays out for the reader in very accessible terms how Collins who was not raised in a Christian home came to his belief in God as a budding scientist in his twenties. The book goes on to discuss why Collins fully accepts theistic evolution as opposed to literal Creationism and Intelligent Design. Based on his own research Collins says the evidence is overwhelming in favor of natural evolution as God’s creative methodology. I would agree.

He then further encourages the church to endorse scientific research as a resource for understanding God’s creation, therefore offering a better understanding of God. In concert with his plea I believe every church leader should purchase this book and read its message. There is, sadly, too much bad information being preached and taught by the Christian Evangelical church regarding creation. This bad information makes the church look rather foolish. Remember Galileo’s row with the church? Being raised an Evangelical I was taught that the earth was created about 6-8000 years ago and that the seven days described in Genesis Chapter One were literal days: Poof, we just showed up on the scene.

As an adult, though, I became skeptical of the Creationist theology but I clung to it because I had heard of no other plausible evidence to the contrary. Evolution was routinely discounted in the Evangelical church. In fact everything I had heard in church told me that evolution was the atheist’s version of the Christian creation. Evolution was also described as a slippery slope which would carry people away from God toward unbelief. And worse, the church seemed opposed to science and science was something I truly enjoyed being involved with. I would later look into Intelligent Design (ID) and had wondered if ID might be the catch-all for my belief in God’s creative act. But I was to learn that ID was flawed theory that did not take into account the nature of God.

My change in thinking occurred a few years ago when I came across the writings of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga from the University of Notre Dame. Spending two and a half hours on a train five days a week over the course of several years I had been able to read and research many different science and philosophy topics. And I did this precisely because I wanted to know more about God, the nature of His being and the world around me. This excited me no end. I don’t read romance novels. I find my excitement by romancing the truth.

Through reading Plantinga’s papers, though sometimes written in difficult philosophical terms, the door of my understanding was opened wide and I accepted theistic evolution as a valid creation methodology. I would encourage anyone to read Plantinga’s papers.

The basics of theistic evolution are clearly delineated in Francis Collins’ book and on the Biologos website. Biologos is the name given to theistic evolution by scientist Collins. Here are the Biologos premises/beliefs from that website:

We believe that God created the universe, the earth, and all life over billions of years. God continues to providentially sustain the natural world, and the cosmos continues to declare the glory of God.

We believe that all people have sinned against God and are in need of salvation.
We believe in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man. We believe in the historical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by which we are saved and reconciled to God.
We believe that God continues to be directly involved in human history in acts of salvation, personal transformation, and answers to prayer.
We believe the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. By the Holy Spirit it is the “living and active” means though which God speaks to the church today, bearing witness to God’s Son, Jesus, as the divine Logos, or Word of God.
We believe that God also reveals himself in and through the natural world he created, which displays his glory, eternal power, and divine nature. Properly interpreted, scripture and nature are complementary and faithful witnesses to their common Author.
We believe that the methods of science are an important and reliable means to investigate and describe the world God has made. In this, we stand with a long tradition of Christians for whom Christian faith and science are mutually hospitable.
We believe that the diversity and interrelation of all life on earth are best explained by the God-ordained process of evolution and common descent. Thus, evolution is not in opposition to God, but a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes.
We believe that God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth, but also as spiritual beings. God established a unique relationship with humanity by endowing us with his image and calling us to an elevated position within the created order.
We believe that conversations among Christians about controversial issues of science and faith can and must be conducted with humility, grace, honesty, and compassion as a visible sign of the Spirit’s presence in Christ’s body, the Church.
We reject ideologies such as Deism that claim the universe is self-sustaining, that God is no longer active in the natural world, or that God is not active in human history.
We reject ideologies such as Darwinism and Evolutionism that claim that evolution is a purposeless process or that evolution replaces God.
We reject ideologies such as Materialism and Scientism that claim science is the sole source of knowledge and truth, that science has debunked God and religion, or that the physical world constitutes the whole of reality.

As a follower of Christ and as someone who seeks to bring people to faith in Him I see it as imperative that Evangelical church leaders (John Paul II accepted theistic evolution) come to grips with science (natural science, quantum physics, genetics, etc.) and to avail themselves of all empirical data and evidences coming out of science research. As I see it the church and science are completely compatible. Therefore, the church must not seek to restrain the hand of God, an evolved-incarnated hand that was once nailed to a tree, a resurrected hand that now reaches out to all of us.

For more information about theism and theistic evolution:

http://biologos.org/

Philosopher Sticks up for God

Alvin Plantinga

*****

Recommended Books about science and faith:

The Language of Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions by Karl Giberson and Francis Collins, Intervarsity Press, 2011

The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in Our Fine-Tuned World by Karl W. Giberson, Intervarsity Press, 2012

Filed under Christianity, Creationism, Culture, Life As I See It, non-fiction, Philosophy, theistic evolution, Writing Tagged with Alvin Plantinga, atheism, belief, BioLogos, Christianity, Creationsim, Francis S. Collins, genetics, human genome, human genome project, intelligent design, Karl Giberson, naturalism, philospohy, religion, research, Science, The Language of God, theistic evolution, theology

When You Wish Upon Obama…

May 13, 2012 Leave a comment

you enter the Disneyland-like fantasy world of smoke and mirrors, the amusement park of progressives. It is there that …

…you live under Chicago style politics instead of the U.S. Constitution.

…you receive Eric Holder – Black Panther style justice which is no justice.

…your liberty is traded for political hype: “Hope and Change’: “Yes, We Can”.

…the extreme Left receives all manner of special interest goodies. The resulting financial shortfall will be devastating (see Greece, Spain, Portugal, California). Our children and grandchildren will receive the enormous debt burden.

…the government becomes a monopoly, a monopoly that cannot and will not be broken down. Because of this the competition of the free market system, a system that works to lower consumer cost and to ensure better quality products and customer service will vanish from the scene. You will have to take what the government gives you or go to a black market.

…under Obamacare you have health coverage (you are fined for not having it) but not health care. You will have bought the lie.

…whatever health care you do receive will be meted out by bureaucrats (czars) who will tell how much, when and what kind of health care you will receive. They will also decide who lives and who dies, who benefits and who goes without.

…you are free when Obama says you are free.

…you will have your “fair share” when you understand that running from and resisting the Tax Man is impossible and you surrender. You then become enslaved and live on Obama’s Progressive plantation.

…the only good energy policy is the energy policy that financially powers the Obama candidacy and his progressive agenda.

…America will become a subset of the European Union. (BHO wants to eventually become the potentate of the world.)

…democracy will become meaningless because you will have ceded your liberty to a small group of people who you will be told have your best interest at heart. Your vote will mean nothing. Czars and bureaucrats will replace your representatives.

…a top down government will break the back of the states and in the process also destroy individual liberty. All of this for the sake of controlling costs, controlling your money and controlling you the citizen.

….Christians will be persecuted. The main stream media (powered by Obama’s political and secular colonialism) will openly attack Christianity as not being inclusive enough, as being too extreme. All this and more while homosexuals will be allowed to teach your children their moral values in the public schools.

…absolute moral truth will be replaced with the increasingly vogue secular religions of fairness, egalitarianism, environmentalism and political correctness. These ersatz religions are based on relativism and humanism. These ersatz religions will become the state religions and be reinforced by those who are in power using the main stream media.

…your voice will be silenced (i.e., the fairness doctrine) by the Obama regime if you disagree with his message. And, if you believe that the fairness doctrine will only neutralize conservatives, you are in complete denial. Totalitarians always direct the conversation. Controlling the message, the ideology and indoctrination are central to controlling the citizen on the plantation. See North Korea. See China. See Stalin’s Russia. See…

…your voice will be silenced in deference to a few well-connected intellectual elites who will be exalted within their “ivory tower” college professorships. Your “worker bee voice” will be not be heard. Instead, your life will become ‘handled’ by these self-promoting social-scientists who receive their power from above.

…America will be divided into those worship the Obamic Vision and those who do not. The race card will be used extensively to promote a divided nation. And, more and more people will claim minority status so as to indemnify themselves against “hate speech”. Class warfare rhetoric will be used to conflate fairness with an unjust confiscation of property

…your whole purpose in life under Obama will be to become a complacent useful idiot, no more, no less. Through taxation you will be required to buy into the BHO lottery: “Hand me your money and your liberty and we will take care of the rest. Yes, we can.”

…the subsequent rioting in the streets that will occur because of all of the above will be quashed by use of the totalitarian forces put into power by you the voter.

When you wish upon Obama you get the president and the government you deserve.

*****

Course correction needed.

Filed under 2012 election, commentary, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, Writing Tagged with 2012 Presidential campaign, balck panthers, centralized government, Christianity, debt crisis, Democracy, democrats, Economics, energy policy, Eric Holder, EU, european union, fairness doctrine, government debt, health care, humanism, justice, Lean Forward campaign, main stream media, moral relativism, Obama, Obamacare, politcal cronyism, politics, progressives, socialism, society, specia interest groups, taxation, top down government

What’s the Unitarian?

May 5, 2012 Leave a comment

It is little wonder that the well-known ‘angry’ atheist Richard Dawkins wrote the anti-thesim book The God Delusion. It is easily understandable especially after one reads the interview (excerpted and linked below) between a Unitarian Minister Marilyn Sewell and another anti-theist atheist the former Christopher Hitchens (Hitch).

As evident from the interview, Marilyn Sewell, a minister, is utterly delusional in her understanding of God and Christianity. And it is blatantly obvious that Hitch has a better understanding of Christianity than this Unitarian minister.

Apparently from her bio Sewell has studied theology but I contend it is not Biblical theology. Her questions and remarks as interviewer reveal her embrace of syncretism – a diversity of false beliefs and humanism blended with the truth of Christianity. Unitarian could be another term for syncretism.

From her eponymous blog we are told that liberal believer and retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland Marilyn Sewell is a former teacher and psychotherapist. She has authored numerous books. Over a period of 17 years Sewell helped grow Portland’s downtown Unitarian congregation into one of the largest in the United States. At this point I must say that the fact that this woman and the Unitarian Church are misleading many is of serious concern to me. I must contend for the truth of Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It troubles my spirit greatly when people like this liberal Unitarian minister use the name of Jesus Christ to preach “another gospel” and not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her message is a mish-mash of new age religion, liberal theology, social justice and cheap grace. The ultimate message becomes half lie half truth: “It’s not what you believe but how you live.” Ergo an embrace of diverse beliefs and social justice activism are at the forefront of Unitarian creeds. As you’ll read, for Sewell just like the Episcopalian minister ghost in C.S. Lewis’, “The Great Divorce” all is metaphor, and therefore, cannot be taken seriously

The deity of Christ, His death on the cross, His atonement for sins, judgement, heaven and hell, all are dismissed as being metaphorical, as not relevant to present human need and too exclusive a message to preach and teach. Clearly this is syncretistic thinking and delusional with regard to the truth. And because of its soft, socially acceptable version of theology the tentacles of Unitarian tenets are quickly creeping into evangelical churches across the nation.

As a follower of Christ I am posting this information expressly to note the deception hidden in Sewell’s misguided words. I have no problem talking about this interview in no uncertain terms. From the public record it can be noted that Sewell is a social activist and polemicist as was Hitch. They are/were each able to dish out pious platitudes at will and certainly, as their backgrounds would support, are/were able to hold their own in conversations regarding issues of faith and God. So here goes.

The interview took place prior to Christopher Hitchen’s January 5^th, 2010 appearance as part of the Literary Arts’ Portland art and lecture series at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Hitch was political columnist for Vanity Fair, Slate, and other magazines, and known for his frequent contributions on the political TV circuit. Hitchens’ pointed attacks against all religion has earned him regular debates across the country, often with the very fundamentalist believers his book, “God is Not Great”, attacks. Sewell, the interviewer, though, knows nothing about the fundamentals of Christianity. It would seem that Hitch is in a joust with Jello.

Here are excerpts from that interview, linked here:

Marilyn Sewell: In the book you write that, at age nine, you experienced the ignorance of your scripture teacher Mrs. Watts and, then later at 12, your headmaster tried to justify religion as a comfort when facing death. It seems you were an intuitive atheist. But did you ever try religion again?

Christopher Hitchens: I belong to what is a significant minority of human beings: Those who are-as Pascal puts it in his Pensées, his great apology for Christianity-“so made that they cannot believe.” As many as 10 percent of is just never can bring themselves to take religion seriously. And since people often defend religion as natural to humans (which I wouldn’t say it wasn’t, by the way), the corollary holds too: there must be respect for those who simply can’t bring themselves to find meaning in phrases like “the Holy Spirit.”

Well, could it be that some people are “so made” for faith. and you are so made for the intellectual life?

I don’t have whatever it takes to say things like “the grace of God.” All that’s white noise to me, not because I’m an intellectual. For many people, it’s gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy. As so far the most highly evolved of the primates, we do seem in the majority to have a tendency to worship, and to look for patterns that lead to supernatural conclusions. Whereas, I think that there is no supernatural dimension whatever. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know about it, the much more wonderful it is than any supernatural proposition.

The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Let me go someplace else. When I was in seminary I was particularly drawn to the work of theologian Paul Tillich. He shocked people by describing the traditional God-as you might as a matter of fact-as, “an invincible tyrant.” For Tillich, God is “the ground of being.” It’s his response to, say, Freud’s belief that religion is mere wish-fulfillment and comes from the humans’ fear of death. What do you think of Tillich’s concept of God?”

I would classify that under the heading of “statements that have no meaning-at all.” Christianity, remember, is really founded by St. Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the most unhappy. If none of that’s true, and you seem to say it isn’t, I have no quarrel with you. You’re not going to come to my door trying convince me either. Nor are you trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to have it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.

Well, probably not, because I agree with almost everything that you say. But I still consider myself a Christian and a person of faith.

Do you mind if I ask you a question? Faith in what? Faith in the resurrection?

The way I believe in the resurrection is I believe that one can go from a death in this life, in the sense of being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life. When I preach about Easter and the resurrection, it’s in a metaphorical sense.

I hate to say it-we’ve hardly been introduced-but maybe you are simply living on the inheritance of a monstrous fraud that was preached to millions of people as the literal truth-as you put it, “the ground of being.”

Times change and, you know, people’s beliefs change. I don’t believe that you have to be fundamentalist and literalist to be a Christian. You do: You’re something of a fundamentalist, actually.

Well, I’m sorry, fundamentalist simply means those who think that the Bible is a serious book and should be taken seriously.

If you would like for me to talk a little bit about what I believe . . .

Well I would actually.

I don’t know whether or not God exists in the first place, let me just say that. I certainly don’t think that God is an old man in the sky, I don’t believe that God intervenes to give me goodies if I ask for them.

You don’t believe he’s an interventionist of any kind?

I’m kind of an agnostic on that one. God is a mystery to me. I choose to believe because-and this is a very practical thing for me-I seem to live with more integrity when I find myself accountable to something larger than myself. That thing larger than myself, I call God, but it’s a metaphor. That God is an emptiness out of which everything comes. Perhaps I would say ” reality” or “what is” because we’re trying to describe the infinite with language of the finite. My faith is that I put all that I am and all that I have on the line for that which I do not know.

Fine. But I think that’s a slight waste of what could honestly be in your case a very valuable time. I don’t want you to go away with the impression that I’m just a vulgar materialist. I do know that humans are also so made even though we are an evolved species whose closest cousins are chimpanzees. I know it’s not enough for us to eat and so forth. We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we’re going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, “the transcendent” or “the numinous” or even “the ecstatic” that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t respond to things of that sort. But I think the cultural task is to separate those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.

Could you talk about these two words that you just used, “transcendent” and “numinous”? Those are two words are favorites of mine.

Well, this would probably be very embarrassing, if you knew me. I can’t compose or play music; I’m not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I’m doing either of these things I realize that I’ve written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn’t absolutely know I had in me… until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it. It was a sense that it wasn’t all done by hand.

A gift?

But, to me, that’s the nearest I’m going to get to being an artist, which is the occupation I’d most like to have and the one, at last, I’m the most denied. But I, think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there’s more to life than just matter. But I think it’s very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.

You know, I think that that might be a religious impulse that you’re talking about there.

Well, it’s absolutely not. It’s a human one. It’s part of the melancholy that we have in which we know that happiness is fleeting, and we know that life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us. But we know that our life is essentially tragic as well. I’m absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, “Well, ah. Why didn’t you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind.” I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

You write, “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and the soul.” You use the word “soul” there as metaphor. What is a soul for you?

It’s what you might call “the x-factor”-I don’t have a satisfactory term for it-it’s what I mean by the element of us that isn’t entirely materialistic: the numinous, the transcendent, the innocence of children (even though we know from Freud that childhood isn’t as innocent as all that), the existence of love (which is, likewise, unquantifiable but that anyone would be a fool who said it wasn’t a powerful force), and so forth. I don’t think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

I wouldn’t argue with you about the immortality of the soul. Were I back in a church again, I would love to have you in my church because you’re so eloquent and I believe that some of your impulses-and, excuse me for saying so-are religious in the way I am religious. You may call it something else, but we agree in a lot of our thinking.

I’m touched that you say, as some people have also said to me, that I’ve missed my vocation. But I actually don’t think that I have. I would not be able to be this way if I was wearing robes or claiming authority that was other than human. that’s a distinction that matters to me very much.

You have your role and it’s a valuable one, so thank you for what you give to us.

Well, thank you for asking. It’s very good of you to be my hostess.

[end of interview]

Note above that after Sewell’s reference to theologian Paul Tillich’s take on God as “an invincible tyrant” and after mentioning Freud’s dismissive take on faith (also well-known to Hitch), she wants to hear from Hitch about Tillich’s concept of God. Listen closely to Hitch’s response:

I would classify that under the heading of “statements that have no meaning-at all.” Christianity, remember, is really founded by St. Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the most unhappy. If none of that’s true, and you seem to say it isn’t, I have no quarrel with you. You’re not going to come to my door trying convince me either. Nor are you trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to have it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.

Wow! The money line: “If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.”

Even Hitch knows that this woman is way off the mark in her ‘theology’. In this case Hitch doesn’t drop famous names from history like Sewell. Hitch cuts to the quick with the truth of the Gospel as he knows it. He quotes from Scripture: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” (I Cor. 15:19).

Hitch has known Christianity from standing outside looking in while. He does not like Christianity’s authority and the abuse of that authority (as I do not).

Sewell, on the other hand, knows the hodge-podge Unitarian philosophy from inside out. She knows all of its labyrinthine pathways leading to the utopian fields of humanism, new age philosophy and God is love-ism. The irony: Unitarian ‘theology’ clearly advocates the contention of atheists that religion is about wish-fulfillment and fear of the unknown.

Here is Marilyn’s take on the conversation from her blog:

“The man is brilliant, but not wise; clever, but not deep; and a fundamentalist, in regard to religion, rejecting any form of liberal Christianity as bogus religion, not to be respected

Hitchens clearly has never studied theology, (This is rich. See my comments above) and most of the comments he made concerning the Bible, Jesus, salvation, etc., were shockingly naïve (Hitch’s knowledge of Christianity trumped yours, Marilyn). Where he has something to offer, of course, is his critique of religion and society, and all of the horrors and nonsense done in the name of religion, which I have no argument with. It’s not exactly news that the Inquisition was a bad thing. And that Catholic priests shouldn’t abuse altar boys. And (his particular nemesis) jihadists shouldn’t blow up innocent civilians.

Hitchens is the ultimate intellectual “bad boy.” He performs. He “debates.” He entertains. All of which he does very well. But this should not be confused with thoughtful discourse. “(I agree with this last paragraph of Marilyn’s)

I would certainly argue from the details of the interview that Hitch knows Christianity well enough to be convicted by its message – but he rejects it outright. Sewell, on the other hand, doesn’t know the truths of Christianity and appears to only embrace the parts of the Gospel that fit with the Unitarian belief in humanism – a theology of a coddling, benevolent and indulgent God who accepts you no matter what.

Gospel truth convicts people of their sin and their separation from God whereas the tepid mollycoddling theology of Unitarianism destroys lives with its abandonment of truth and its good intentions. And as we all have heard, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Or, hell is full of good wishes and desires. In the end Truth matters.

Are you seeking the truth?

To find the truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ read the four gospel accounts that record the life and death of Jesus Christ: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These historical eye-witness accounts are not metaphors as liberal theologians (Sewell, Elaine Pagels and others) would have us accept.

Follow the Truth wherever it leads you and it will eventually lead you to Jesus Christ. He is The Way, The Truth and the Life. I have been on the road of truth with Jesus for many years now. I know Him and he knows me.

Truth and Love go hand-in-hand or not at all.

Filed under Atheism, Christianity, commentary, Diversity, Human Interest, Life As I See It, Progressivism, Scripture, social commentary, Writing Tagged with atheism, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, first unitarian church, God is Not Great, human interest, humanism, liberal theology, Marilyn Sewell, new age religion, new age theoleogy, religion, social justice activism, syncretism, theology, unitarian church, unitarian congregation, unitarian creed, unitarian minister

You’re the Best Particle of Me

April 19, 2012 Leave a comment

Did you know that Intelligently Designed quantum physics provides matchmaking services? You didn’t? Well, recently, I read…

”…that in reality two electrons can really fit into the same energy level because they can have opposite spins. This means that they can both fit into the lowest (symmetric) energy level and, crucially, this level decreases in energy as the atoms get closer together. This means that it is energetically favorable for two distant atoms to move closer. And this is what happens in nature.”

And God saw that it was not good for atom to be alone.

(Two electrons, opposite spins? The atoms get closer together? Yin and Yang, Matter and anti-matter. Grace and nature. Male and female. This fundamental symmetry makes sense at the atomic level and also at the nuclear family level. Hence the mating song “I’ve Got You Under My Spectrascope.”)

“…This preference for two atoms to stick together as a result of sharing their electrons between them is known as a covalent bond.”…

And the preference for two humans (Mr. Spin up and Ms. Spin down) to stick together as a result of sharing their lives in the molecule of marriage is known as intimate bonding.

“…covalent bonding is the reason that you are not a bunch of atoms sloshing around in a featureless blob.”

This explains a lot about my love life! I’ve got your atomic number, buddy.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker make me a match. A little covalence bonding is all I ask.

The above quotes from Chapter Eight, Interconnected, from:

You should know that…

Covalent bonding is universal:

Filed under Christianity, family, Human Interest, Life As I See It, marriage, non-fiction, Physics, prose, Romance, short piece, Writing Tagged with atomic number, atoms, Christianity, covalence bond, da capo press, environment, fundamental symmetry, intelligent design, matchmaker matchmaker, matchmaking, natural marriage, particle physics, quantum physics, quantum universe, realtionships, Science, spin up spin down, The Quantum Universe (And Why Anything That Can Happen Does)

“I Am Thirsty”

April 6, 2012 Leave a comment

“I am thirsty.” These words spoken just before Jesus gave up His spirit on the cross reveal the need for life’s most basic requirement: life-sustaining water for the body and the soul.

The crucifixion’s slow and agonizing death with its depletion of bodily fluids would cause a human body to dehydrate to the point of suffocation. The blood pouring from the Lord’s hands and feet and from His lash wounds would deprive His body of its normal blood flow, blood flow which carried necessary oxygen to all of the body’s organs. Water was desperately needed. Instead, Jesus was mockingly offered a sponge soaked with wine which had turned. After tasting it he rejected the old wine and its numbing effects.

“I am thirsty” indicates the Lord’s need for water but more importantly these words also reveal that the Living Water, God the Holy Spirit, was also leaving the Lord at this point in time. Because Jesus bore the sins of the world He could not have fellowship with His Father and the Holy Spirit until His work of atonement was complete. Until then The Trinitarian Well of eternal fellowship was cut off from the Son of God. In place of this Well, Jesus chose to drink from the bitter cup of God’s will.

King David prophesied about the relational and physical torment that the Messiah was to suffer on the cross. From Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
   Why are you so far from saving me,
   so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
   by night, but I find no rest….

I am poured out like water,
   and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
   it has melted within me.
My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
   and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
   you lay me in the dust of death.

In this act of substitutionary atonement the Lord’s body bore all the sin of all men for all time. On the cross Jesus rapidly became depleted from loss of fluid and, as Psalm 22 tells us, from the loss of Living Water – Jesus was forsaken by the Father and the Spirit. “Because he poured out Himself to death” Jesus became as a barren desert, a desolate place with no water. He was made sin for us.

John’s Gospel account offers the Creator’s context for the words “I am thirsty.”

In the gospel narrative the apostle John relates the true story of Jesus meeting a woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well.

The well and the field surrounding it were gifts from Jacob to Joseph. And you will remember Joseph. He is the one who received good gifts from his father (the coat) and bad treatment from his brothers. I have no doubt that the well was, well, well-known to many who traveled though the area. I’m sure it was on the map of those seeking to quench their thirst, thirst brought about by the day’s relentless heat. John’s account tells us that as Jesus was traveling from one place to another he became tired and thirsty. He stopped outside the town of Sychar at the well to rest.

As Jesus sat down near the edge of the well he told his disciples to go and get some food in the nearby town. It is midday. The sun is directly overhead and the heat is stifling. Jesus had no means of retrieving the water from the well. You can imagine someone being thirstier when they know that water is just out of reach.

As Jesus sits resting a woman from the town of Sychar approaches the well carrying her clay jar (I am assuming some things here.). The woman comes to the well in the middle of the day because, I believe, no one else will be there during the hottest part of the day. She has her reasons for not wanting to be around the other women of the town: she sleeps around.

Jesus, thirsty, asks the woman for a drink: “Will you give me a drink?”

The woman was at a loss as to what to think:

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

From the gospel account:

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (emphasis mine)

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

(Note: The woman, like most of us, wanted to deflect the accounting of her sinful life. Becoming polemical the woman quickly changed the subject and pressed Jesus about a heated religious and geopolitical issue of the day.)

Jesus, having already gotten the woman’s attention by recounting intimate details of her life, responded to her question about true and valid worship as the Source, the well-spring of Truth.

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Water flows through John’s gospel. John the Baptist baptized “with water so that He (Jesus) might be revealed by Israel. In the above passage we learn about Jesus chatting with a woman as he sits next to a well. There He talks about the everlasting living water which wells up inside you if you accept it. In a previous passage John recorded Jesus’s first sign: turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana. In the passage after the Jacob’s well story John tells us about a lame man who had been trying for thirty years to enter the healing pool in Bethesda. The water of the pool would bubble up with curative power whenever the Spirit stirred it. But the man had his excuses for not being well. In a later passage John recounts Jesus walking on the water to meet the disciples in the middle of a lake.

Then one time …

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. (emphasis mine)

Are you thirsty? Are you trying to quench your deepest thirst with the things of this world, things that quickly run ‘dry’ from everyday use? Do more clothes, more electronic gadgets, more Facebook friends, more entertainments, more tattoos, more tipping points, more of anything this world has to offer satisfy your deepest thirst?

The woman at the well had her life of men. She had her connections. She also had her water bucket. She brought this bucket to the well everyday to get the water she needed to survive. The woman could argue religion and politics with the best of them but she was thirsting for something more. She may have wondered “is that all there is?” Is that all that life has to offer someone like me, a woman of Samaria marginalized by my own community and holding on to an unsure belief in an object of worship others are telling me to believe in.

Unknowingly, it was of the True Well of Life that she made her request: “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus responded: If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

We know that drinking water is necessary for life. We listen closely to health programs that tell us to drink several glasses of water a day to sustain our bodies, to help them function properly and to replenish the oxygen our systems need. As you would imagine the quality of water that you drink is critical. Undoubtedly, water that contains filth would do more harm than good. Is the well water you are drinking clean and pure, refreshing and restorative? Or, is it filthy with parasites making you weak and sick?

The water that Jesus offers to you and me is greater and purer than the most abundant compound found on earth: H2O. It is the Living Water of the Holy Spirit. This water teems with Abundant Life, the very oxygen of heaven. Once received its Spirit-life effervescence bubbles up within a person. It then overflows your spirit and converges with the rivers of Living Water that have never stopped flowing throughout all of eternity except for that dark hour when the Gift of God Himself was poured out as a drink offering and He cried, “I am thirsty.”

*****

Shechem’s Archaeology

Filed under Christianity, essay, Life As I See It, Writing Tagged with Christianity, drink offering, faith, god the holy spirit, Good Friday, gospel of john, I thirst, nail wounds, psalm 22 my god, religion, the woman at the well, theology

We seem to forget…

March 4, 2012 Leave a comment

We seem to forget…

What goes around does come around.

To become an American is to be given a gift of liberty. Use the gift wisely. There are many today who have been born American and don’t realize what they have. There are many today who do not have Truth to guide their lives. They have only feelings and sincerity as their moral guides.

As a citizen of the United States you deserve nothing more than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Anything else becomes a demand that grows government and government in turn robs people of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A large government places people under the tyranny of its control first by controlling those you want controlled (unions, environmentalists, animal rights groups, etc. want others to be controlled) and then by controlling you. Government in the “demand” process becomes a slave owner. The Democrat party platform is the best example of a group seeking large government to corral people for “their own good.”

Voting for a Democrat means that you support the party platform: abortion, casinos and gambling as revenue streams, higher taxes (you are the direct revenue stream for political favoritism ala Obama style politics), less return on your money, less control of your life, more government intrusion, government-run health care, European bailouts and bankrupt states (Greece, California, Illinois, etc.), political cronyism ala Chicago style politics, the Greek riots, government controlling others (while pretending that government will never control you), laziness, handouts, the perversion of marriage, more joblessness, more food stamps doled out, more crap at your expense. If you vote for a Democrat you deserve all the consequences. You still need to be spoon fed.

We avoid pain, suffering and difficulty at all costs even though to overcome these onerous things make us feel alive and gives us character. No amount of material possessions owned can do the same for us.

You can’t take it with you and even though class warfare proponents such as Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and yes, Barack Obama, say that you can have it all at another’s expense.

“A good name is more desirable than great riches. A good name should be esteemed more than silver and gold.” (The Book of Proverbs)

A generous man will himself be blessed. It is better to give than to receive. (Jesus)

“A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.” (The Book of Proverbs) How many kids spend their time in pursuit of a useless degree and find out they cannot support either themselves or give to others who are needy. This is not government’s fault. It is their doing, is it not? (see Occupy Wall Street protestors). You reap what you sow and what you don’t sow.

You cannot give what you do not have. Making others give what they have does not fulfill the requirement of you giving to others even if you call it you call it a fancy name – wealth redistribution (“social gospel” for the lazy)

Truth will come to you during your life. Act on it while you can.

Self-pity is a drag on your soul. Unload it at the next trash bin.

Holding a grudge against someone will destroy the person holding the grudge. Destroy it before it destroys you – forgive.

We are forgiven as we forgive others (Jesus).

“There is a path which seems right to a man but the end thereof is the way of death.” (The Book of Proverbs)

“The fool says to himself “There is no God.”” (The book of Psalms)

“The fear of the Lord leads to life.” (The Book of Proverbs)

“He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.” (The Book of Proverbs)

“So God created man in His own image…male and female He created them…God saw all that He made and it was very good.” (Genesis chapter 1)

(Note that homosexuality came after the fall of man and is a perversion of the good that had been made. You should know that those who claim to be “Gay and Proud” will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they will not return to the garden.)

Life is short, especially for the aborted.

Women’s rights do not include destruction of a fetus – a child. Murderers, also, do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (If you have had an abortion, repent and turn to seek God’s mercy.)

Women’s rights already include free contraception: It is a woman’s right and freedom to keep her legs together and to say “No” to sex at any time and at any place. Do be fooled by the Democrats desire to supply you with so-called “free” contraception. And, the Democrats are more concerned with population control and controlling who is born (quality of life) and how many people are born (they don’t want the planet overrun with people who will use up its natural resources.)

In a God-breathed marriage women desire love, men desire respect.

We will all give an account of our lives before our Creator. There is a heaven and there is a hell. Heaven is to be within the dancing embrace of the Trinity throughout eternity. Hell is to be alone forever, constantly thirsty for the living water, constantly in agony as you remember your life.

Like it or not you have free will. Blaming God for your life only makes you a bad rendition of a human. Rejecting your personal responsibility shows your self-indulgent pride. Sadly, there are many who wash their hands absolving themselves of responsibility. They deflect accountability by asking “What is truth?”

“Before his downfall a man’s heart is proud, but humility comes before honor.” (The Book of Proverbs)

The Bible contains the words of God and the factual history of Jesus:

“But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (The Gospel of John)

Filed under Christian character, Christianity, Human Interest, Life As I See It Tagged with abortion, Christianity, creation, democrat party platform, gay, government, Homosexuality, human-rights, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, marriage, politics, quotes, religion, spirituality, the poor, the rich, wisdom, wisdom literature, women's rights

The Verdict Is In For Youcef Nadarkhani

February 22, 2012 Leave a comment

Martyria or faithful testimony

I have been praying over many months for Youcef Nardarkhani, his family and the Christian Church in Iran. A verdict has been reached in his case.

“To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne.” Jesus

The video below is from last October, 2011. It describes what Pastor Youcef is facing in Iran.

Filed under Christianity Tagged with Christianity, Iran, Youcef Nadarkhani

Wrestling with God?

February 5, 2012 Leave a comment

Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011. God rest his free will.

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Out of fear of creating a post too long and drawn out (as it turned out to be) and one that no one may read I will try and summarize as best I can my take on the video posted below. Please view the video first. (You will need several cups of coffee. Hold the scotch.)

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As you will see and hear in the video, Christopher Hitchens’ (Hitch) arguments for atheism (or against theism), after many dead-end asides, were centered on his aversion to having anyone telling anyone what to do. His followers readily know that over the years Hitch has repeatedly taken umbrage on paper or in one-upmanship debates against totalitarianism and against any authoritarian person or religion having a say in his life or in the lives of others. For the record, William Lane Craig (marker 13:59) noted that Hitch despised and hated religion.

Hitch was certainly OK, though, with authoritarian imposition upon others if he felt the cause justified removing other authoritarian figures from the lives of those he thought were oppressed. He, to the horror of the liberal elitists, aligned himself philosophically with G.W. Bush regarding the Iraq war and the war on terror against radical Islamists.

In the February 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, Salman Rushdie penned In Memoriam, Christopher Hitchens: 1949-2011. Rushdie wrote about Hitch’s return to the left:

“Paradoxically, it was God who saved Christopher Hitchens from the right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally, and comically as C. Hitchens could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American conservatism for long. When he bared his fangs and went for God’s jugular, just as he had previously fanged Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, and Bill Clinton, the resulting book, God is not great, carried Hitch away from the American right and back toward his natural, liberal, ungodly constituency.”

As a way of life Hitch sought to stand juxtaposed to the universal rule of law (his own conscience) in an antinomian position while at the same time declaring moral diatribes against religious and political authorities he considered too over arching in their imposition. He also liked to keep his conscience well inebriated and his roving moralist eye ever looking elsewhere ~ looking outside and not within ~ denial and pretense being typical liberal traits.

With atheistic cowardice and hubris, Hitch attacked Mother Teresa, a little old lady. He apparently wanted to feed his prurient desire to neutralize any authority figure (overt or implied) by trying to bring her down several notches in people’s eyes. Why? He claimed she was pushing her authoritarian teachings onto the helpless. He accused her of hypocrisy in her dealings (an easy, self-serving claim for an atheist to make against any Christian). He may have felt threatened by her devotion to an unseen God and her ability to make things happen for others and doing so as a little old lady.

Why would a grown man verbally attack a helpless woman who indeed went about helping others who themselves were under the totalitarianism of poverty and squalor? Maybe Hitch thought she wasn’t helpless. Maybe it was a direct attack against God. It certainly was an act of unmatched intelligential cowardice. To be sure Mother Teresa fought the unseen authorities of this world (the “powers of darkness”) by physically helping the outcast, the hungry and the hurting with an agape-powered love and not verbal hubris.

Hitch, on the other hand, fought the very public “seen” authorities of this world by aligning rhetorically with causes which he felt were important for him. He should have noted that he and Mother Teresa were fighting the same issue ~ human suffering at the hands of others (whether a dictator or a false religion) -from two different sides. Yet, he chose to denigrate Mother Teresa. I believe he did this because he felt threatened by her belief in the unseen God.

Hitch postures that Christians, especially Christian missionaries like Mother Teresa, are hypocrites who say things they know to be true and good but live disconnected lives apart from such truth – their deeds not matching match their words. This argument (?) against God was replayed in his use the La Rochefoucauld quote “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” Yet, this hypocrisy argument folds in on itself if one were to hold any moral standard at all. Perhaps Hitch, a polymath, saw moral laws as “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” (The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe)

Clearly Hitch’s excessive lifestyle (his immoderate drinking, smoking, etc. have been noted elsewhere) made his salacious attacks against God all the more the more forthcoming and lubricious. His lifestyle had also proved his belief in nihilism – life is nothing if not suffering. So he apparently used a “get it while you can” justification to medicate the blows between verbal jousting contests.

His liquid lifestyle also spoke to the fact of Hitch’s drive for “freedom” from any limitation imposed on his person including by his own person – his physiology. He chose against himself again and again. He did this while throwing the world a bone now and then, choosing willy-nilly causes to deflect away any personal soul-searching which might lead to accountability to any higher authority. (see marker 25: 5, If god does not exist then objective moral standards don’t exist – a self-satisfying argument.)

Hitch detested dictatorships of all kinds and he did so while as a potentate of his own world. He would not bend the knee to anyone or to anything. He would fight, as Salmon Rushdie recalled in the same Vanity Fair article remembering his friend, for anyone who was made to do so. Hitch’s rebellion was against dictatorial authority of any kind and not just in the political and religious realm. And he certainly rebelled against authority stated as codified truth – the Bible and the recorded history of the resurrection of Jesus. His moral relativism, stated above, is characteristic of most atheists (and the “ungodly constituency”) since they affirm that no moral standard exists outside one’s self.

In the video Hitch asks the universal question posed to theism: why would a God who was all powerful and good allow suffering? My answer: suffering comes out of created man’s free-will choices in a fallen world. God has allowed it for a time but not forever. Justice will be meted out and suffering will end.

He continues his disbelief: “Why would God spend eons of time in creating a world that he could set up in a blink of an eye?” He went on to say that Christians are now co-opting evolution theory in accordance with the Creation argument, evolution being a position long held by atheists. He “christens” this “tactic” or “style” of argument as “retrospective evidentialism” or as a “second thought.” (marker 37:40)

As a Christian theist I see no conflict whatsoever with science and creation. I believe in theistic evolution-a finely tuned theistic universe, a personal cause of the universe and a theistic objective morality. As scientific evidence becomes available it should be used and not discarded. Beyond scientific proofs, my own belief in God is vindicated every day because I, a rational human being, know that God exists. I continue to pursue Him actively and I submit to His authority. Hitch, on the other hand, fled from any such authority outside of himself and employed his own existentialist belief system where he felt safe from intrusion.

Also in the video, Hitch uses the Creationist argument of a literal seven days to say that we as Christians are basically lunatics to believe such things. Again, I see no conflict with a Creationist’s position of a literal seven days and the theory of relativity which could make thousands of millennia appear as seven literal days.

Hitch takes another jab at Christian theism by invoking his own god-like view point when questioning why God would do what Christian theists believe He did. He balks (and I’ll paraphrase): “…the eons of time that God has created-evolved ~ that all of this fine tuning, mass extinction and randomness is the will of a Creator God (marker 40:21) and that all of this happened so that one very imperfect race of evolved primates might become Christian ~ all of this was “with us in view” is a curious kind of solipsism, a curious kind of self-centeredness.” Hitch jests that he thought Christians were modest and humble, not self-centered with certain arrogance to the assumption that this “was all about us.” And, “The tremendous wastefulness of it, the tremendous cruelty of it, the tremendous caprice of it, the tremendous tinkering and incompetence of it, never mind at lease we’re here and we can be people of faith.” This projection from one who, with a free will, spoke from a self-centered and solipsistic core!

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Creator, was always meant to bypass the wise of this earth: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, “He traps the wise in the snare of their own cleverness.”” (Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church). A priori rebellion coded as cleverness is found in the Mitochondrial DNA of man.

Apart from free-wheeling self-directed solipsism, there is a bounty of sound arguments for theism and William Lane Craig (WLC) highlights them artfully: “No good argument that atheism is true, there are good arguments that theism is true ~ not via social questions or ethics (marker 16:00).

WLC philosophical arguments in quick notation:

Cosmological argument: things exist, not nothing; the universe began to exist not infinite, not eternal ~ Big Bang Beginning, ex-nihilo, a cause by an UnCause beyond space and time; David Hillburg ~ The infinite; there must be a cause of creation. This Being must be uncaused, timeless, space unfathomable & personal and not abstract thought or object; The universe has begun to exist and is not infinite, not eternal (astrophysics concur); Past event are real, there must be Personal creator of the universe, transcendent intelligent mind

Teological argument: (marker 20:00) finely tuned universe ~ mathematically constants (e.g., gravity) not determined by the laws of nature & the arbitrary conditions (entropy, balance between matter and antimatter); any change in these would be the end of life itself (the atomic weak force being altered)

Chance? Odds are incomprehensibly great, life prohibiting universes are more probable

It follows logically by Design ~ intelligent argument, intelligent designer

Moral argument (marker 25: 15): if god does not exist then objective moral standards don’t exist; if God exists then valid and binding; the morality that has emerged proves that god exists ~ via moral experience; we understand that there are things that are really wrong.

Historical fact (marker 27:40): The resurrection of Jesus a historical fact not just a belief; tomb discovered empty eyewitnesses; individuals and groups saw Jesus, appearances to believers and unbelievers; the original disciples believed in the resurrection and Jewish religion believed otherwise about when resurrection occurs; Christian die for the truth of the resurrection (marker 30:26)

Experiential knowledge: The experience of God or claim to know that God exists – properly basic beliefs part of a system of beliefs including the belief of an external world; Context of physical objects; grounded in our experience of God; God immediate reality

Hitch responds (marker 33:16): arguments the same across religions ~ belief in God but differences; presuppositionalists (by faith) and the evidentialists a distinction without a difference.

As you will note Hitch’s arguments are all basically dismissive of Christian belief and are not evidentiary in favor of atheism; note his “rather sweet” dismissal of those who believe ~ that those of faith should have evidence. (Hitch once again conveniently dismisses the facts of the resurrection and the improbability of causation by chance.)

Hitch: “We argue that is no plausible or convincing reason, certainly no evidential one to believe that there is such an entity…all observable phenomena is explicable (marker 42:00); I don’t believe that following the appropriate rituals…

“Even if this deity did exit it doesn’t prove that he cared about us…cared who we had sex with …care whether we lived or died… (marker 42:32)

“Miracles suspend the natural order ~ Christians want it both ways (“promiscuous”) (marker 44:00); The natural order – “It is miraculous without a doubt”

“I have to say that I appear as a skeptic, I doubt these things.” (marker 46:16)

“The theist says it must be true…”Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”;

“Too early in the study of biology…to make these claims.”

Perhaps Hitch, the verbal grappler, was as a sound and fury professional wrestler who was successfully agile at avoiding a real match-up with Truth. But now, the fight has ended, the match is over. All that’s left in the empty corner is a book ~ God is Not Great. His last words?

Filed under Christianity, Creationism, essay, Human Interest, Life As I See It, Non-fiction, Short Piece, Writing Tagged with athesim, book god, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, creation debate, creationism, evolution, liberal elitists, probability, Salman Rushdie, Science, thesim, William Lane Craig

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THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

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ask for the ancient paths,
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-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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