culture | Cindy Wity

Deliver Us From Evil

August 3, 2014 Leave a comment

In previous posts I alerted my readers to the nefarious aspects and fallout from those who embrace evil:

From reading each of these posts you will have noticed that the Evil One will use small amounts of good mixed with a large doses of evil to accomplish his purposes. His ultimate purpose is to steal you away from the “enemy” ~ the one true God.

This enticement to do evil is sardonically portrayed in a portion of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Here Screwtape lectures Wormwood (Screwtape’s disciple of evil) on how to be a competent tempter:

“[The enemy] has filled His world full of pleasures . . . Everything has to be twisted before it is any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses you…)” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The previous posts (listed below) are interspersed with quotes from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters:

A Brave New World or Evil Will Make One Lose Their Head

In this post we learn of evil’s “fundamentally transforming” power. Wicked counsel using the contrivances of moral relativism, pride and grandiosity feeds the darkened imaginations of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. A short review of Shakespeare’s tragedy reveals that breathing the “Fog and filthy air” is toxic.”

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Worker Bees, Outcome Based Education and Our Little Ones

Here, evil is disguised as a consensus building which “fundamentally transforms” our children via the public school system. We read that consensus building can be used to synthesize good with evil.

“By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.” “―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Label Me “In Christ”

The use of labels and political correctness become roadblocks to any conversation that would reveal truth or opinions that would differ from the demanded conformity. The Progressive Left’s political intolerance is shown for what it is: “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out…” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!” Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The People of the “White Privilege” Lie

A White Privilege Conference is held annually in Madison Wisconsin. The conference of hive minded collectivists tell the lie of being born on the wrong ‘side’ of the melanin tracks. We learn of how evil is used to re-label, redefine, classify and ‘inform’ public school teaching.

“Suspicion often creates what it suspects.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Doubly Dead and Uprooted”

In this post Jude (and I) write about false teachers, teachers that synthesize good with evil to create a cheap grace. This cheap ‘grace’ is embraced by many churches, churches which acquiesce to the pressure of the LGBT ‘community for the sake of vacuous “diversity”.

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Tear Down That Anthropocentricity

We learn about evil in its many socio-political forms: humanism, Marxism, collectivism, Progressivism and murderous tyranny ~ each one centered around man’s material needs.

“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, fix men’s affections on the future ─ on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past, and love to the present; fear, avarice, and ambition look ahead.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Pilate was merciful till it became risky.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Whenever all men are…hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Fear and Loathing in America

Allan Bloom, relates, “We have come back to the point where we began, where values take the place of good and evil.”

“If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy’s hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor. This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Exclusion & Embrace in the Garden of Good & Evil

“To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.”

Miroslav Volf
The End of Memory, Remembering Rightly In A Violent World

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Check Your Motives At The Door

In this post are quotes from M. Scott Peck, Psychiatrist & author. He defines evil and antilove.

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Then, evil as religiously practiced by Islam’s Jihadists, by Hamas and under the demented Sharia Law is discussed in

Truth Be Told – Chloé Simone Valdary

…or as revealed by this tweet reply:

https://twitter.com/mushtaqahmed111/status/494472488928428034

“…a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.” ―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Lord, deliver us from evil.

Be encouraged; from the Gospel according to Luke 10: 17-20, the report of the seventy disciples sent out by Jesus:

“The seventy came back exhilarated.

“Master,” they said, “even the demons obey us in your name!”

“I saw the satan fall like lightening from heaven,” he replied. “Look: I’ve given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and every power of the enemy. Nothing will ever be able to harm you. But-don’t celebrate having spirits under your authority. Celebrate this, that your names are written in heaven.”

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

―C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

My next post will uncover more evil, as practiced by Anonymous.

***

Picture attributions:

Above Illustration: The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden – by Gustave Dore

Wormwood picture: The Screwtape Letters Cover: Read by John Cleese

Satan at the computer: http://screwtapefiles.blogspot.com/2011/02/detail-is-in-devil.html

Filed under Christianity, Evil Tagged with C.S. Lewis, Chloe Simone Valdary, culture, ECUSA, evil, Hamas, Islam, moral relativism, PCUSA, politcal, politcal correctness, Sharia law, The Screwtape Letters

A Brave New World or Evil Will Make One Lose Their Head

July 26, 2014 Leave a comment

“Fair is foul and foul is fair

Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

If like me you are a follower of The Way then I don’t have to tell you that we live in an age of ever encroaching evil. The effects: man’s inhumanity to man is shown daily on the nightly news along with the moral relativism which justifies it all. We now “Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

In the U.S. we now are governed and adjudicated by those who want to “fundamentally transform” the world around them. For these morally adrift flotsam and jetsam of embattled truth, the ends justify the means. For them, right or wrong considerations are the millstones which keep them from reaching the distant shores of their island utopias called ‘Freedom’ and ‘Rights’.

Our world in almost every aspect has been turned upside down by moral relativism. One prime example: criminals (and illegal aliens this very day, too) are now considered the victims by many judges.

Unconstrained judges will often base their final decisions on the fatuous reasoning of rationalism’s data merchants, the social scientists ~ ‘scientists’ who paint family background and poverty scenarios with a blind eye to the true victim. The resultant formulation: a sliding scale of ad hoc “social justice” created with a calculus of personal ambition by a judge who is being watched by the attention-seeking liberal media, the ‘acclaimed’ ‘social’ ‘scientists’ and his/her cocktail party sycophants.

Personal responsibility for one’s behavior has been thrown out the window. Such a ‘weight’ would incur too much shame and guilt on the part of the perpetrators of evil. Psychologists, social workers and their ilk want to avoid shame and guilt. And if Rousseau were here today he would say that institutions and authorities are the problem, that man is inherently good. You know better.

Willfully the social do-gooders replace personal responsibility and consequences with an “I’m OK Your Ok” “fog and filthy air” therapy. Mind altering anxiety killing pills are prescribed to deal with guilt. Heaven forbid that a person encounter and understand the consequences of their actions.

Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is an excellent example of the very human tragedy that is the result of good people crossing a line to make evil choices. And, after having read several of Shakespeare’s plays, it would seem that Shakespeare knew more about humanity than any ‘social scientist’ who has ever published. The Bible being unquestionably the authority, The Book, about mankind.

Another writer who understood man’s capacity for evil was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A Russian novelist, historian, dissident and documentarian Solzhenitsyn had first-hand knowledge of evil as he and others experienced it under the murderous tyrant Stalin. From under the clouds of evil, as well as introspectively, Solzhenitsyn observed:

“The battle line of good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”

Moral relativism, a synthesis of good and evil, makes the line dividing good and evil murky. And, in these days of Progressivism’s Pontius Pilate-like questioning, “What is truth?” it has become increasingly difficult to see the delineation between good and evil. The “fog and filthy air” of moral relativism must be seen for what it is ~ the admixture of good and evil.

The opening quote, spoken in unison by three witches, is from the opening of Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act One, Scene 1.

The foreboding first scene takes place on the heather moors of Scotland under a stage setting of “Thunder and lightening.” The imagery throughout the play is of night, of darkness, of man’s dark nature, of blood, of distortion. In other words, the play brings to ‘light’ the evil overcast in men’s souls.

Macbeth, a Scottish General and the thane (a noble) of the village of Glamis in Scotland, is the main character.

In the play’s opening scene Macbeth is the subject of a plot by three witches. He is to be encountered by them in an open field after he has completed a battle. Their reason: the witches want to give Macbeth their ‘prophecies’ right after his victory while the won battle is fresh in his mind and his pride is stoked.

At the end of the brief opening scene that the witch’s animal ‘spirit lords’ call to them and they fly away. Act One, Scene 1 ends portentously. Evil is in the air. The witches are the harbingers.

The play is a tragedy about its eponymous main character facing the battle line within his heart. He begins as a noble and valiant warrior for Scotland. He starts out as good. He knows right from wrong; He fights for the good of all Scotland with all his might. But things begin to change after he returns victorious from a recent battle for Scotland. Macbeth walks into the aforementioned open field with his battlefield companion Banquo. The open field context could appear to them as a broad daylight moment and therefore any ‘truth’ would be clear to see. Yet it is not.

For the three witches this is perfect timing to speak their prophecy. Its appeal goes directly Macbeth’s pride and to his grandiosity after having gained victory on another field.

By telling Macbeth and his companion that they will rule Scotland each in their own way their imaginations begin to run wild. Reason also begins to plot as to how to ‘cross the line’ into royalty. The two men, warriors and servants of the King of Scotland, having just come from battle for their current regent Duncan now hear that they, too, will be regents. They begin to imagine that they are ‘meant’ to have what others have. So, they are told.

After the witches relay their prophecies, Banquo counsels Macbeth (from the No fear translation, Act One, scene 3):

If you trust what they say, you might be on your way to becoming king, as well as thane of Cawdor. But this whole thing is strange. The agents of evil often tell us part of the truth in order to lead us to our destruction. They earn our trust by telling us the truth about little things, but then they betray us when it will damage us the most

What a perfect description of the enticement of moral relativism that leads us to ruin!

To speed up the process of becoming a regent (no time line was given by the witches) Macbeth crosses a line and chooses a path of evil. The evil compounds quickly into greater evil when Macbeth sends a letter to Lady Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth quickly embraces evil after reading the letter from her husband reciting the witch’s prophecies. (She, obviously, like Macbeth, doesn’t consider the source. Moral relativism has a penchant for this.). Lady Macbeth is stricken by the idea of being royalty and invites evil in, desiring to enable her husband to become king of Scotland. In doing so, Lady Macbeth becomes the very image of subjecting one’s self to evil in hopes of achieving ‘gain.’ She embraced the lie that evil brings right to your door step.

Shortly afterward, when she hears that King Duncan will be coming to the Macbeth house, she plots his murder. Her words, again from No Fear Shakespeare, Act One scene 5:

“So the messenger is short of breath, like a hoarse raven, as he announces Duncan’s entrance into my fortress, where he will die. Come, you spirits that assist murderous thoughts, make less like a woman and more like a man, and fill me from head to toe with deadly cruelty! Thicken my blood and clog my veins so I won’t feel remorse, so that no human compassion can stop my evil plan or prevent me from accomplishing it! Come to my female breasts and turn my mother’s milk into poisonous acid, you murdering demons, wherever you hide, invisible and waiting to do evil! Come, thick night and cover the world in the darkest smoke of hell, so that my sharp knife can’t see the wound it cuts open, and so heaven can’t peep through the darkness and cry, No! Stop!”

Lady Macbeth, consumed by evil, question’s Macbeth’s manhood when he waffles considering what must take place for his ‘prophetic’ rule to occur.

The play stages many of the elements and images of evil. Macbeth’s machismo, his masculinity is questioned by an evil embracing wife. There is guilt and paranoia, blood shed, ghosts, complicity in doing evil, delusional thinking leading to madness, remorse leading to suicide, darkness – all the time. Let it be known: evil hates the light of day.

At this juncture in the post I do not want to reveal and dissect the whole storyline or make this post longer than the play itself. I suggest reading the whole play in one sitting. It is a short, fast paced tragedy.

And, I suggest, if you haven’t read Shakespeare’s plays then do what I have done: read the plays from the very accessible, inexpensive series of books called No Fear Shakespeare. As the cover relates: “The Play Plus A Translation Anyone Can Understand”.

Can man remake himself with pills, through better institutions, by labeling himself a “deserving” person or by removing a psychopathic bent from the DSM?

Can man rule in life by crossing the line in his heart from good over to evil? Progressivism, materialism and evil itself would suggest it is possible. Yet, in doing so one is radically and “Fundamentally Transformed” as are the lives of those around them.

Was not Christ tempted by Satan in the same way as we are?

Satan took Jesus to a high pinnacle and showed him the world. Satan said to Christ, “You can have all of this if you give your allegiance to me.” In other words, “Cross the Line. Believe the lie.”

There is no namby-pamby Jesus or cheap Unitarian grace where good is mixed with evil.

When describing the Kingdom of Heaven to his disciples Jesus spoke in parables or similes of real life experiences they would have had. The passage below is from just such a discourse. It is from the Gospel according to Matthew 13: 44-53:

“…Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea, and collected every type of fish. When it was full, the fishermen brought it to shore. They sat down and selected the good ones, which they put into a bucket; but they threw out the bad ones. That’s what it will be like at the close of an age. The angels will go off and separate the wicked from the righteous, and they will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

“Have you understood this?” asked Jesus

“Yes, “they answered….”

You have a choice. Don’t let anyone conjure up excuses for you. You have a choice.

***

A short description of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth from Wikipedia:

Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare. It is considered one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. Set in Scotland, the play dramatizes the corroding psychological and political effects produced when its protagonist, the Scottish lord Macbeth, chooses evil as the way to fulfill his ambition for power.

****

Macbeth picture courtesy of :

http://www.thelowry.com/event/Macbeth-February2010

Filed under Culture, Theater, Theatre Tagged with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, culture, evil, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, moral relativism, play, Progresssivism, Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, theater, tragedy

“Doubly Dead and Uprooted”

April 27, 2014 Leave a comment

The title of this post comes from the following scripture passage, written by Judah.

Judah identifies himself first as a slave of the Lord Jesus and then as the brother of James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Judah is the half-brother of the Lord Jesus.

Judah tells us that he earnestly wanted to write about God’s salvation realized but he turns quickly to the false teaching among his “beloved ones.” These false teachings sprung up in the early days of the church and even while the apostles, the eye witnesses, were still alive.

Beware: false teaching is happening everywhere around us, even more so since the first century AD.

In those days Gnostic teaching of the antinomian type was creeping into the church teaching. The Gnostic “false teachers” viewed the material as evil and the spiritual as good. Thus they cultivated their ‘spiritual’ lives and let the flesh to do whatever it desired to do. In effect, they gave license for all kinds of fleshy lawlessness including acceptance of the sexual perversion of homosexuality as normative within the church of the Lord Jesus.

Gnosticism exists today in all its lawless or antinomian forms within many our churches: Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Evangelical.

Here is Judah’s letter:

The Letter of Judah

Contend for the faith

Judah, slave of Jesus the Messiah, brother of James, to those who are called, the people whom God loves and whom Jesus, the Messiah, keeps safe! May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.

Beloved, I was doing my best to write to you about the rescue in which we share, but I found it necessary to write to you to urge you to struggle hard for the faith which was once and for all given to God’s people. Some people have sneaked in among you, it seems, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation ~ ungodly people, who are transforming God’s grace into licentiousness, and denying the one and only master, our Lord Jesus the Messiah.

False Teachers

I do want to remind you, even though you know it all well, that when the Lord once and for all delivered his people out of Egypt, he subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. In the same way, when some of the angels did not keep to their rightful place of authority, but abandoned their own home, he kept them under conditions of darkness and in eternal chains to await the judgment of the great day. In similar fashion, Sodom, Gomorrah, and the cities round about, which had lived in gross immorality and lusted after unnatural flesh, are set before us as a pattern, undergoing the punishment of endless fire.

However, these people are behaving in the same way! They are dreaming their way into defiling their flesh, rejecting authority, and cursing the glorious ones. Even Michael the archangel, when disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not presume to lay a charge against him of blasphemy, but simply said, “The Lord rebuke you.” These people, however curse anything they don’t know. They are like dumb animals; there are some things they understand instinctively ~ but it is these very things that destroy them. A curse on them! They go off in the way of Cain; they give themselves over for money into Balaam’s deceitful ways; they are destroyed in Korah’s rebellion. These are the ones who pollute your love-feasts; they share your table without fear while simply looking after their own needs. They are waterless clouds blown along by the winds. They are the fruitless autumn trees, doubly dead and uprooted. They are stormy waves out at sea, splashing up their own shameful ways. They are wandering stars, and the deepest everlasting darkness has been kept for them in particular.

Enoch, the seventh in line from Adam, prophesied about these people. “Look!” he said. “The Lord comes with ten thousand of his holy ones, to perform judgment against all, and to charge every human being with all the ungodly ways in which they have done ungodly things, and with every harsh word which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” These people are always grumbling and complaining, chasing off after their own desires. From their mouths come arrogant words, buttering people up for the sake of gain.

Rescued by God’s Power

But you, my beloved ones, remember the words that were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus the Messiah. “In the last time,” they said to you, “there will be scornful people who follow their own ungodly desires.” These are the people who cause divisions. They are living on the merely human level; they do not have the spirit. But you, beloved ones, build yourselves up in your most holy fait. Pray in the holy spirit. Keep yourselves in the love of god, as you wait for our Lord Jesus the Messiah to show you mercy which leads to the life of the age to come.

With some people who are wavering, you must show mercy. Some you must rescue, snatching them from the fire. To others you must show mercy, but with fear, hating even the clothes that have been defiled by the flesh.

Now to the one who is able to keep you standing upright, and to present you before his glory, undefiled and joyful ~to the one and only God, our savior through Jesus the Messiah our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority before all ages, and now, and to all the ages to come. Amen. (emphasis mine)

“Doubly Dead and Uprooted” aptly describes the moral relativism, the lawlessness, of our day. People are uprooted from absolute truth and are just dead tree limbs, blown about by the winds and whims of our “values” culture.

I have written about our culture’s ‘uprooting’ in previous posts.

America’s ‘Devalued’ Moral Currency

Tear Down That Anthropocentricity

Many churches now teach a ‘feel-good gospel’ that is ‘inclusive’ …but also damning.

With the church failing in its mission to make disciples, America is now rebuilding itself on a foundation of sand, of lawlessness, much like Europe has already done. We will soon be washed away. The torrents will come.

My “beloved ones’: Reading Judah’s letter you can’t help notice that as someone who grew up with Jesus Judah understood his half-brother Jesus from his orthodox Jewish perspective to be the anticipated Messiah.

Finally and most important of all, Judah mentions Jesus the “Messiah” over and over again within this short missive. The Kingdom of God on earth began in those days and continues to the present! Judah urged his brothers and sisters in the faith, including us, “to contend for the faith that was once entrusted to the saints.”

(Tree limb picture from Aerophant.com)

Filed under Christianity, Culture Tagged with church, culture, gnosticism, Homosexuality, The Church of Jesus Christ, The letter of Jude, The Messiah

America’s ‘DeValued’ Moral Currency

February 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Pervasive throughout our land is the avoidance of asking the hard questions. We shun the real questions about life and death and about God. We do not want to talk “good and evil.” We glibly talk about body and soul, about reason and revelation, about eternity and time.

The other day 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 without ever having to venture out and deal with the Ring, a Ring which has consequential power over us. We may say to ourselves, “Why destroy the ring when we don’t know for sure it exists? We may have thoughts that all that the shire presents to us is all there is to life. We will go on with our quietude in order to avoid conflict and to live peaceably. We choose society’s ‘safe’ surroundings and its costly ‘insurance’ policies to avoid the dangerous quest that truth demands of us. 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, we fear and we fear again.

We fear conflict. And this is because inherent in conflict are the morals or ethics that each of the disparate parties brings with them. Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid. Our “dialectics” begin with opposites and often end in synthesis or in the exclusion (or boycott) of the ‘other’. We will seek out the ‘no-fault divorce’ of our language from its historical meaning. We give a pass to “Political-Correctness” (PC) because PC talk bypasses truth and goes straight to a word originally devoid of any value in and of itself but now given full political power: “diversity.”

With the acceptance of “diversity,” also a code-word for “whatever” or “it-depends,” moral relativity’s child, lawlessness, increasingly becomes a de facto way to govern and self-govern. Yet, “Wisdom shouts in the street, She lifts her voice in the square; At the head of the noisy streets she cries out; At the entrance of the gates in the city She utters her sayings…”

As we go on and find more and more moral conflicts and in order to avoid angst 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. Nihilism’s union with materialism begets the DNA of nihilism – lives drained of any meaning other than the moment. In fact, we are told duplicitously “to live in the moment.”

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.” (empahsis mine) …

“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 that gives meaning to life.

Love or charity, a virtue which must be constantly worked at, is replaced with ‘sexual rights.’ Consider that in our culture sexual activity is not to be repressed or self-controlled 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 and The Way, the Truth and the Life 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 ultimate 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 God ~ Father, Son and Holy Spirit love us, that They stand with us and that Jesus 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 must do the same.

Filed under Christianity, Culture Tagged with Allan Bloom, Alln Bloom, Christianity, culture, Diversity, education, lawlessness, moral relativism, morals, The Closing of the American Mind, The Lord of The Rings, values

Saving Leonardo and Modern Man From Himself

January 25, 2014 Leave a comment

It has been a while, 2010 actually, since I read this Christian-perspective-of-culture concordance. A certain blog post triggered a memory redux of Saving Leonardo.

The Christian author Nancy Pearcey writes about the dualism behind modern man’s worldview. Her book informs us as to how secularism emerged to be a prominent worldview. She also tells us how she sees that worldview affecting us, destroying our culture. Her desire in writing this book is to make every Christian knowledgeable and aware, prepared to take on the current secular worldview:

“A worldview approach enables Christians to move beyond merely denouncing social ills such as abortion, which can sound harsh, angry and judgmental. And, it equips them to demonstrate positively that biblical wisdom leads to a just and humane society. Protests and placards are not enough. To be strategically effective in protecting human dignity, we need to get behind the slogans and uncover the secular worldviews that shape people’s thinking.”

For starters there is this curious quote at the front of the book and the only reference to book’s title reference, Leonard da Vinci, that I could find aside from a section titled “Da Vinici versus Degas” (regrettably, there is no index at the back of the book):

Leonardo da Vinci

Hence the anguish and the innermost tragedy of this universal man, divided between his irreconcilable worlds.

(Giovanni Gentile, Leonardo’s Thought)

I’m not sure why Pearcey chose Giovanni Gentile’s quote to provide the “Forward” for her book about modern man’s dualistic thinking. Giovanni Gentile was known at one time as the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy. His theories contained rejection of individualism, acceptance of collectivism, with the state as the ultimate location of authority and loyalty to which the individual found in the conception of individuality no meaning outside the state (which in turn justified totalitarianism). Wow! In essence Giovanni Gentile didn’t believe a person could have a thought of his own apart from the state.

In any case, as a student of art, music, literature and science as well as some philosophy and a good bit of theology and being something of a Leonardo da Vinci/Sherlock Holmes type that I am, this book, found on a table in a local book store, caught my eye.

Nancy Pearcey studied under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. She begins her book by referring to a simile Schaeffer used to describe modern man. She writes:

“Using the metaphor of a building, he (Schaeffer) warned that truth had been split into two stories. The lower story consists of scientific facts, which are held to be empirically testable and universally valid. The upper story includes things like morality, theology, and aesthetics, which are now regarded as subjective and culturally relative. Essentially the upper story became a convenient dumping ground for anything that the empiricist world view did not recognize as real. Schaeffer used a simple graphic, which we can adapt like this:

The two-story concept of truth

Values

Private, subjective, relative

Facts

Public, objective, universal

This dichotomy has grown so pervasive that most people do not even recognize they hold it. It has become part of the cultural air we breathe. Consider two prominent examples:

Martin Luther King Jr. ~ “Science deal mainly with facts; religion deals with mainly values.”

Albert Einstein ~ “Science yields facts but not “value judgments”; religion expresses values but cannot “speak of facts.””

As you are well aware by the verbal sparks flying everywhere around us, the dichotomy within our own honed thinking as it engages with others with their hardened dichotomy is like steel striking a flint rock. Truly, the fact/value split has inflicted great damage to our culture. It clearly affects the worlds of politics, education, religion and societal norms such as marriage. Saving Leonardo is a good place to begin your research into how we as a culture came to be this way.

Saving Leonardo gives the reader an overview of the history behind modern man’s fact/value split (shown above as the “lower story” and the “upper story.”). The book presents the two basic worldviews that are prevalent today: Continental and Analytic. These two streams are manifested throughout today’s culture via art, music, literature, movies, politics, education, law, sexual mores, societal institutions and pop culture.

Pearcey uses the following descriptive dichotomies to describe our evolved mindsets:

Facts/Values
Box of Things/ box of the mind
Machine/ghost (Descartes)
Nature/Freedom (Kant)
Formalism/expressionism
Mind (autonomous self)/body (biochemical machine) or in toto, the Liberal view of the human being
Imaginative truth (art)/rational truth (deterministic world of science)

In discussing the Continental worldview Pearcey notes that there are the schools of idealism, Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, postmodernism and deconstructionism.

The Analytic worldview stream, she says, holds empiricism, rationalism, materialism, naturalism, logical positivism and linguistic analysis.

In comparing the two worldviews John Stuart Mill is quoted: “the antagonism already separating the two traditions: The lower story, with its materialism, “is accused of making men beasts” while the upper story, with its irrationalism, is accused of making men lunatics.”

Pearcey notes that culture has reflected the dueling mindsets since their inception during the age of Enlightenment. Artists, composers, writers, dramatists and producers have portrayed the philosophies of their day through their art. Saving Leonardo gives prominent examples of those creative forces that have either mirrored the prevailing thought or who have worked to oppose it.

In brief, you will encounter Hemingway, London, Huxley, Hegel, Duchamp, Picasso, Kandinsky, Darwin, Nihilism, Abstract expressionism, Christian realism, John Cage and a host of others – philosophers, painters, composers and writers who influenced culture from where they stood in the house: the upper story or the lower story.

As an example of the constant interplay between dueling mindsets, the split in thinking, as shown below, shows how those of the Romantic period tried to view their ‘art’ as separate and above the newly arrived scientific fact proposed by Darwinism:

The Romantics’ two-story of truth

Imaginative truth

Creative World (Art)

Rational truth

Deterministic world (Science)

Within a Christian worldview there is no need whatsoever to divide man’s thinking into separate spheres such as spiritual fact versus science or materialism. A Christian man or woman who is whole is a romantic-rationalist. One very good example of such a person would be the Christian apologist and fantasy writer C.S. Lewis. Lewis, as revealed by his writing and talks, had integrated the upper and lower stories.

Pearcey, in the section C.S. Lewis: We Can’t All Be Right, quotes Lewis:

“The Christian and the Materialist hold different views about the universe. They can’t be both right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe.”

(Little wonder that homosexuality is given credence in our culture.)

Saving Leonardo is good starting point for further research. It will certainly pique your interest when the dots start to connect to form our deformed culture right before your eyes.

End thoughts: Unlike Pearcey I do not have an issue with modern music or with modern art. I find them both to be revealing and stimulating each in their own way.

Jazz is not mentioned in this book, as best I can recall. This is a shame. I hear jazz as a very human and creative outlet within our world. I find it rather strange that the author never mentions the spontaneity, sonority and musical improvisation of jazz. I love Bach and Shostakovich and Henryk Górecki. But I also listen to Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk and Wynton Marsalis.

I also listen to the Blues: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, et al. My tastes in music, art and literature run eclectic.

I certainly don’t agree with the author that art has to have unifying narrative to be of value. One of the earliest painters I connected with was Jackson Pollack. I remember seeing a painting of his in a Life magazine article and then later at the Art Institute in Chicago. This was a time back in my junior high school days.

Jackson’s drip paintings reminded me of a brain’s neural network being charged with emotion. Perhaps, his paintings are a one-nanosecond glimpse of a much larger narrative. In any case, art is something you can take or leave as you see fit based on your own life narrative.

There will be places in the book where you will take issue with her opinions, just I did (see below). This is good. Find out why you agree or disagree with her. I urge you to become knowledgeable about the current world view encircling you by reading this book. Form your own Christian-romantic-rationalist worldview to withstand secularism’s pressures.

Nancy Peacey pushes for there to be narrative and a teleological basis to paintings, music and literature. Again, I disagree about the need for narratives.

There will be times of narrative and Newtonian Classical Physics and Bach and Norman Rockwell and Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë where cause and effect and resolution are clearly known. There will also be times of seeming disarray and unknowns and lack of resolution as in Quantum Physics and the music of György Ligeti, John Cage and Schoenberg and the paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock and the poems of Jack Kerouac. We need both. As creators, though, we are all teleologically dependent whether we like it or not. Intelligent design is baked into the pottery.

Jackson Pollock – No.28, 1950. Enamel on canvas

In the final words of the book Pearcey encourages parents to not push their kids into being conservative (keeping things as they are). Rather, she encourages parents to push for “revolutionary” children.

Like the “Forward” quote source I find this curious. From my reading of Saving Leonardo, there seems to be no direct context given for defining her word “revolutionary”. Perhaps she means being an ‘out-side-the-box’ artist, composer or writer. Apparently she hasn’t read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

*******

Point of contention with the book:

The book is divided into two main parts: The Threat of Global Secularism and Two Paths to Secularism. As a side note I became particularly interested in Chapter Three of the book’s Part One. The title of Chapter Three: Sex, Lies and Secularism.

In this section of Chapter Three “Hooking up, Feeling Down” Pearcey begins “Let’s move to the most contentious sexual issues of our day such as homosexuality, transgenderism and the hook-up culture.” She then goes on to say that having an understanding of the two-story dualism of modern thinking will help the Christian in providing a holistic biblical alternative.

Because of her shotgun approach of scoping transgenderism in the same sights as homosexuality, Pearcey does, I believe, relegate transgenderism to be on par morally with acting out homosexually and one-night stand sexuality. I would state emphatically here that transgenderism by definition is not about acting out sexually. Transgenderism is not equal to homosexuality whether as a sexual issue or a gender issue. It IS about gender identity/gender dysphoria and seeking to become a whole person ~ a romantic rationalist. Or, to describe it using her term, it’s being “revolutionary.”

Further information about transgenderism:

The Transgender Moment

A ‘Naturalized’ Woman

The Church and Gender

Other ‘related’ dichotomies: Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Pirsig’s distinction between the “classical” and the “romantic” view is conceptually analogous to Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the constrained and unconstrained visions in “A Conflict of Visions”

Filed under Christianity, Culture Tagged with art, Christian apologist, Christian worldview, culture, Francis Schaeffer, Jackson Pollock, literature, music, Nancy Pearcey, nihilism, philospophy, Saving Leonardo

Afternoon Aliens

September 7, 2012 Leave a comment

Any exhaustive research into my childhood would reveal several close encounters with aliens.

You would learn that these encounters occurred primarily on Sunday afternoons but also sometimes on Saturday nights. You would read that the aliens would slowly pull up in front of my parent’s home and then park right smack in the center of our view, a view framed by our front room picture window. (I wanted to say “frontroom” because it’s the Chicago way.)

For our family Sunday mornings meant going to church – the hell-fire-and-brimstone-preaching-shouted-from-revved up lungs-quivering jowls-and-leaps and-bounds-of-a-Baptist-minister-kind of church. Such a fire-breathing monster would let us know in no uncertain terms that redemption came only by turning from our sins and by walking down the aisle or raising our hand. I did wonder why he didn’t sell exercise videos out in the foyer – “Pilate Your Way Out of Purgatory: Fit and Fundamental Workouts.”

Now my mom and dad are God-fearing people who have always been very hospitable. Often, after a Sunday morning service or an evening service, my folks would invite friends, speakers, missionaries or relatives over for a meal. As I said, this happened a lot.

There were also a few Sundays when my parents decided to have an afternoon home alone with the kids. On those days we would come home from church to the salivating smell of pot roast. The roast would cook while we sat in church pondering our short comings and our eternities. The record will show that I had aromatic visions of pot roast as I turned from sin, walked down the aisle and raised my hand.

Back at home my mother would take the pot roast out of the oven and cover it with aluminum foil. Apparently the fat needed to rejoin the roast in a final cattle roundup. Mom and dad would then prepare the sides – all kid friendly: corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls. And, upon occasion my mother would make butterscotch pudding for dessert. As a devotee of such fine cuisine I sat in the basement far out-of-the-way of the chefs. Down there I watched Warner Oland play Charlie Chan on our B & W TV: “So sorry.”

Besides being wafted to Kid Heaven by the smells I knew that my parents were not just making a scrumptious Sunday meal. They were not going to take any chances with me going far from the straight and narrow. They knew that the way to tether a kid’s soul and keep him close to home was with pot roast and butterscotch pudding.

Well, on one of those blissful Sundays when my tummy was ballooned to its fullest pot roast-iest extent I lay on the floor rolling and reading the funny papers. Nancy and Sluggo. Dick Tracy and Flattop. Brenda Starr and…my brother.

Daryl ever the antagonist always wanted to read the same few square inches of the comics that I was reading. I swear. He would daily invent ways to aggravate me. That day his pointed elbow to my side almost burst me. In retaliation I poked him back and then he poked back harder. This went on for ten minutes until my father said, “You two cut it out or no butterscotch pudding for you.” That settled things for the next five minutes. The thought of Butterscotch pudding had a calming effect on me. An added dollop of whipped cream would also keep me in check – for at least a half-hour.

It was within the cautious serenity of those five minutes that I saw my father suddenly leap up out of his swivel rocker. The Chicago Tribune fell to the floor splayed open. My dad turned to my mother who was sitting on the couch half asleep. With a look of petrified horror he said, “The Gephardts are here!” That was the day I would have my first sighting of aliens in our own front yard.

Absolutely beside himself, my dad thought for a moment: perhaps we could make it look like we weren’t at home. But then he saw the visitors looking at him through the picture window. The alien father on the front lawn was yelling “Hi Bob.” My dad then looked down at his two young children, children who just came home from re-dedicating their lives to Jesus and to pot roast looking up at him. Instantly changing his mind my dad scrambled in two directions at once. In the same step he first bolted toward the kitchen but then turned and flew to the back of the house. Things were put away, hidden from view. Rooms were “straightened.” Food stowed deep in the refrigerator. Our Schnauzer Bobbie took the cue and hid under my bed whimpering. My brother and I hid all of our toys. The quiet afternoon had morphed into the afternoon of the living Gephardts.

Now the Gephardts were good people my folks said, “They’re just a little different.” Yeah, as different as earth and mars I would soon find out.

After greeting the family of five, my dad said he had to get “some things” at the grocery store. An hour later my mother looked concerned, abandoned concerned, angry concerned. As the time crept, my mother sat patiently listening to Mrs. G. wonder out loud if her little “Ronnie was really over the chicken pox.” (I kid, (scratch, scratch) you not.)

My brother and I stood across from the three alien kids, two boys and a girl, and wondered what to do. Mom suggested that we go to a nearby field and play baseball until the FBI had located our father. So off we went.

I can not recall whether it was my brother or whether it was me who was hit in the head with a baseball bat by a Gephardt boy. It must have been me who received the carom because great a swath of my memory has been forever displaced. The oldest kid swung right though an imaginary fast ball which was in fact my head. Let the record show that silly remained intact though. (I have had three concussions in my life: one from a right-handed batter on sugar, one from a concrete wall that halted my fifty yard dash at 55 yards and one as an adult when a humongous lead pipe-carrying truck used my car as a brake – my head bounced around like a pin ball in a Dukes of Hazzard pinball game. Three concussions may explain my David Lynch-like persona, my dream-state reality and my stuttering posts.)

At some point my dad came back from the store with a pie, a cherry pie and a can of whipped cream. He offered to heat it, slice it and even remake it -anything so as to not have to talk to Mr. G who I now know was dead ringer for Randy Quaid. Mr. G sat in our front room – greasy tee shirt, flys buzzing and all. The three G kids all could have walked off a page of the Addam’s Family comic strip. It’s all a blur. On purpose.

Mr. G was a junk collector by trade. He collected “fine” items no longer of use to their owners. He resold his JIT inventory on Maxwell Street. Did we have anything that we didn’t want any more? I imagined that my father wanted to say “Yes, you here.” But my dad, a generous and good man, kept to his busy ways and went looking for a ‘fine item” that would spur Mr. G into immediate sales activity. My dad “sacrificially” retreated to the basement where after a half hour of searching everywhere including a Walter Cronkite newscast he found a lamp on its last light bulb and handed it to Mr. G. who was pleased with his salable good but continued to eye my mom’s china cabinet. My mother seeing Mr. G’s honed gaze locked onto the china cabinet stood up between Mr. G and the cabinet as she continued to talk to Mrs. G. The “over-my-dead-body” look must have told Mr. G all he needed to know. He backed down.

After some warmed cherry pie and coffee and a shake down of each the kids to see if they had taken anything from our rooms we said goodbye to the G’s and to the afternoon. It was now evening. Exhausted we all fell back into the couch to watch a “really big shew.” We had seen the Outer Limits.

Over time the Gs would show up again and again unannounced. Somehow we were ever on their radar though my parents only slightly knew them as neighbors at a previous address in Chicago. But finally these afternoon aliens did stop showing up.

I suspect they stopped coming when our house looked eerily uninhabited: with all the curtains pulled my dad started taking long Sunday afternoon naps on the couch in the dark, cool basement of our house. My mom who loved our dad took us three (by now) perturbing kids for a long drive in the country – all of us far from afternoon aliens.

(Any truth in this account, real or perceived, is totally up to you.)

Filed under Article, family, Writing Tagged with article, culture, family, friends, home, hospitality, humor, writing

Realities From My Father

September 1, 2012 Leave a comment

OK. Tell me why the President of the United States would decide to weaken the work requirements related to welfare?

The obvious answer: political gain. But there may also be a not-so obvious reason.

A President who thinks that eighteen holes of golf is work enough has now decreed that laboring to obtain an otherwise free benefit is no longer required. Yet, free lunches, there ain’t no such thing. You the taxpayer are paying for someone to sit on their ass and collect welfare.

By presidential fiat just months before the November presidential election Obama has told us in effect that he doesn’t want the beneficiaries of welfare to have to strain themselves on the way to the 7-Eleven. Lifting that bottle of Jack or that can of malt liquor is work enough. Am I being cruel? No. You’ve been to the 7-Eleven and seen the line waiting to buy lottery tickets. Is this a generalization? Perhaps, but you can fill in your own eyewitness accounts. Obama by fiat diminishes individual effort and seeks to replace it with the collective effort (to win reelection.

What may not be so obvious a motive for this fiat by Obama, who is rabidly anti-colonialism (see Obama 2012, the movie), is his desire to denigrate the Protestant work ethic in America. Beyond political gain he may have decreed this because of his or his father’s own ill-will towards American missionaries. One can only speculate based on the familial and national dysfunction found in Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father.

Obama may very well have thought that American missionaries who were sent over many years from U. S. churches to foreign countries like Africa brought with them free-market enterprise, capitalism and the Protestant work ethic along with the Gospel. Because of Obama’s learned hatred of colonialism there would be little wonder when later Obama would sit within ear shot of the black liberation theology rants of “Rev.” Jeremiah (“God Damn America”) Wright. For Obama those “colonizing-looking” missionaries may have appeared to be bringing with them the shackles of Americanism. To Obama and Wright those falsely perceived “projected” purveyors of slavery via work ethic are anathema. And from Obama’s speeches one can readily tell that Obama detests anything American and especially the individual effort which produces human flourishing. Work is just to be a caged sideshow event outside Obama’s big circus tent of government. Obama’s Big Government Show does not need you to work. It just needs your ticket to the show (your vote).

This is the screwed up thinking born out of Obama’s father’s dreams. And, it is now America’s nightmare.

I learned about work from my father. He showed by his example how to support himself and his family. There were times when my dad worked at two jobs. He did what he had to do. He provided for his family and for his future. He also paid taxes and donated ten percent of his earnings to our local church. I’ve followed in my father’s footsteps (see my previous post). Obama on the other hand has no idea about what I talking about here.

Obama’s father spent his time drinking and womanizing. Obama’s “founding fathers” Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and mentor Frank Marshall Davis, a radical poet and former Communist, taught Obama how to radicalize what he felt inside.

Obama has learned nothing from his father except how to hate that mechanism that promotes cultural and material exchange and success via the marketplace. He hates the hard work that supports it. He lives in the valley of the shadow of colonialism.

Beyond this, Obama, in Howard Zinn-Noam Chomsky-like fashion defines America as the pompous ass that needs to bow the knee to the ever-gracious world – the same world that spits out Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, Iran’s Ahmadinejad and countless terrorists and tyrants and those who support them. And like Zinn and Chomsky Obama thinks America has a big head. But what Obama and these other “big heads” don’t realize is that they are projecting their own dysfunctional personalities onto America.

Obama sees nothing exceptional about America. He sees America as the throw-away packaging that holds his own political gain.

Obama: why work so hard trying to reach for the stars when you can easily reach for your food stamps in the voting booth?

*****

What does the 2012 Obama Presidential election campaign look like? A collective of special interest groups (big labor unions, homosexuals, women on birth control who can’t afford to pay the five dollars every month to buy it even though they attend prestigious colleges, etc.), limp-wristed faux Indian progressives like Elizabeth Warren, extremely wack radicals like Van Jones, giant ‘plasticized’ Hollywood egos craving attention, Wall Street deep-pocket Super-Pac cronies, Green Energy Money Launderers, Occupy Whine Street-ers and all the disenfranchised “not-ready-to shovel” for their lunch people.

*****

Jesse Lee Peterson speaks w/ Dr. Dinesh D’Souza, NY Times Bestselling author of “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and President of The King’s College. D’Souza’s new film, “2016: Obama’s America” – Love Him, Hate Him, You Don’t Know Him!

Filed under 2012 election, commentary, Political Commentary, Politics, Writing Tagged with 2012 election, american missionaries, black liberation theology, culture, Jeremiah Wright, Obama, politics, protestant work ethic, social responsibility, welfare reform, work ehtic

The “Hate Watchers”

August 16, 2012 Leave a comment

The “Hate Watchers”

Harbingers of exclusion, the “Hate Watchers.”

“Hate Watchers” stew alone, churning inside

Along fault lines long ago buried,

Until,

Projection spews ad hominem, ad hominem miasma,

miasma a lethal dose.

The “other” succumbs under the gaze of the elect,

The “Hate Watchers.”

*******************************************

http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/08/splcs-hatewatch-gives-cover-to-hate/

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/

Filed under poetry, Writing Tagged with culture, Family Research Council, Floyd Lee Corkins II, Hate Watch, LGBT, mental health, Poetry, profiling, society, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, Tony Perkins, violence

Sojourners or So Jesus?

August 3, 2012 Leave a comment

Are you as a Christian morally perplexed by the economic based social justice issues of the day? If so then I highly recommend the following book! And, if you read Sojourners Web Magazine – the Social Gospel’s Mother Earth Magazine – then I really, really, really recommend the following book to you. This book will help dispel the notion promoted by Sojourner’s Jim Wallis that government can be a proxy Good Samaritan. It will help counter the Marxist nonsense you will read on the Sojourner’s web page.

Here is a blurb about the book:

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by The Rev. Robert Scirico, President of the Acton Institute.

Introduction: The End of Freedom

Here are the chapter titles:

A Leftist Undone

Why You Can’t Have Freedom without a Free Economy

Want to Help the Poor? Start a business

Why the “Creative Destruction” of Capitalism is More Creative than Destructive

Why Greed is Not Good – and Why You Can Get More of It with Socialism than with Capitalism

The Idol of Equality

Why Smart Charity Works – and Welfare Doesn’t

The Health of Nations: Why State Sponsored Health Care is Not Compassionate

Caring for the Environment Doesn’t Have to mean Big Government

Sojourners, Jim Wallis: “Republican budget is an immoral document.” What a load of partisan crock! Wallis plies you with this pietistic propaganda so as to pluck at your heart-strings! He’s implying that government has the moral responsibility to determine who gets what in our society. Why on earth would anyone put government in this position? Oh yes, the Evil One would. Jesus never called the government to come and follow Him. Jesus never told government to do anything for the poor. Never. Judas wanted that but Jesus, never. Sadly, though, people, completely ignoring history, subscribe to Sojourner’s brand of Gnosticism – mixing gospel with government. They do so not just at their own peril but also at the peril of the poor.

The U.S. Senate controlled by Harry Reid and the Democrats has not passed a budget in over 800 days. This is morally reprehensible. With no budget there is no accountability to the American people with regard to how taxpayer money is being spent. I don’t have to tell you that when there is no accountability for how our money is being spent then there is a lot of sleight of hand going on.

From a recent Weekly Standard Web Article titled “Just Reminder — It’s Been 800 Days Since the Senate Passed a Budget”

The House Budget Committee on Thursday released a report “demonstrating that economic hardships have been made worse by Washington’s misguided interventions and the lack of a credible plan to lift the crushing debt burden.”

The report, “Debt Overhang and the U.S. Jobs Malaise” comes at a timely moment: it has now been 800 days since the Senate has passed a budget.

“It’s really incredible” said Rep. Todd Young, R-Ind., a member of the House Budget Committee, “Democrats don’t get it. They either have trouble figuring out their priorities or they don’t want to reveal them to the American public. Instead we just get criticism for our plan, which is the only comprehensive plan out there.”

Wallis is a radical redistributive leftist hell-bent on radical redistributive social “justice.” Yet for Wallis and his ilk, true justice, justice for all, is just collateral damage in the war against poverty. It is to be thrown out the window for the sake of putting the poor on a pedestal. And with this shameful idolatry (remember the Israelites worshipping a golden calf – a facsimile representation of God?) comes the same old Robin Hood story – it’s perfectly OK to steal from the rich especially if you can villainize them first. Wallis and Obama know that a sucker (subscriber) is born every day.

You will be told by socialist quacks like Wallis (Marxist ideologues in sheep’s clothing) that voluntary charity doesn’t go far enough, that government needs to be involved.

Remember when the disciples brought a young boy to Jesus in response to enormous hunger needs?:

“Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”

The loaves and fishes freely offered by the young boy went as far as Jesus wanted it to go – to thousands of people! And so too, the widow’s mite. Don’t buy Wallis’ loaves and fishes. They will cost you everything.

The Democrats have done incredible damage to wealth creation, human initiative and human flourishing with their reckless spending and onerous regulations. They tax and regulate people out of business while at the same time building more casinos to strip away money thereby creating more poverty and more economic dependence. I live in Chicago. I see first hand the devastating results of the Dem’s social programs.

Voting for Democrats is like shooting yourself in the foot and also killing the poor person whose neck you are holding down to the ground with the jackboot of your “charity.”

The Republicans are correct – we need economic freedom for people – all people – to thrive. The Democrats redistribute what isn’t theirs to distribute. All private property and human rights are at risk under Obama the Terrible and a Democrat regime.

The Rev. Scirico’s book came out this year. It encapsulates much of what I have been posting about over many months. I have been writing about social justice issues ever since learning that Christians are now recycling socialism under the guise of social gospel.

Here some of those posts:

Just-Fair-Equal: The Stooges of Progressivism

Joseph and the One Percent

When You Wish Upon Obama

The Lord Hears the Cries of the Poor. All Other Listen Up

Course Correction Needed

Outsourcing – a short story

Here is the web site where you will find the Rev. Scirico and others who can explain economics, charity and human flourishing better than Sojourners ever will: http://www.acton.org/

There you will find such topics as:

The Tortured Logic of the Obamacare Law

Black Scholars Give Obama an “F”

Final thoughts:

“No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.” Thomas Sowell, economist

“Barack Obama’s political genius is his ability to say things that will sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says may be to those who have. Shameless effrontery can be a huge political asset, especially if uninformed voters outnumber those who are informed.” Thomas Sowell, economist

Marxists know that when you redistribute money you redistribute values. They stole this knowledge from Christ. So, what values does government redistribute?

If we make government the dispenser of charity will Christ be seen?

Do we give to the poor in the name of Uncle Sam or in the name of Jesus?

Government should not be the middle man between us and our brother. That would be dehumanizing. And, enabling dependence on what is not of God is not compassionate.

When the poor receive alms from us the response we long to hear is “that’s So Jesus.”

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In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson

Filed under commentary, Writing Tagged with Big Government, charity, culture, Economics, human-rights, Jim Wallis, Marxism, materialism, politics, Robert Scirico, social gospel, social justice, socialism, Sojourners, the free market

More of Less?

July 28, 2012 Leave a comment

You have a choice in November. You could choose more of the same deficit leadership or you can choose wisely.

You can choose Obama’s anti-capitalist Marxist socialism which seeks to “materialize” everything in its path including you. Obamacare is only the beginning of this dehumanizing process. You can choose to exalt redistributive materialism to the neglect and hurt of your own soul.

You can choose more bureaucracy and more IRS agents and less control of your own life and property. You can choose to increase government’s monopoly and its power grab of the private sector. You can choose to be just another cog in the collective. You can choose sameness for the sake of egalitarianism.

You can choose Obama’s class and race warfare, a malignant stratifying of people into special interest groups. One civil war in this nation wasn’t enough, right? One nation under Obama? It will never happen! Obama works to polarize the nation, to make some people more favored than others thereby tossing justice by the wayside. You can choose more rancor and strife and less community.

You can choose more voter fraud, more Black Panther intimidation. You can choose more Eric Holder and his Fast and Furious lying. And you can choose more injustice and less rule of law.

You can choose Obama’s devotion to special interest groups such as the environmentalists and his own circle of friends (Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s Solyndra’s buddies, etc.). You can choose favoritism over equal opportunity.

You can choose more homosexuality and with it bullying disguised as “Diversity.” You can choose less family values when you vote for Democrats.

You can choose his “You didn’t build that” rhetoric and decide that you really are too stupid to build anything on your own. You can choose Obama’s shaming you into submission and less his offer of incentives to even try to succeed.

You can choose more abortions and more food stamps and more bureaucracy and more people telling you what to do, what to eat, what to drive and how to spend your money. You can choose endless higher taxes, more casinos, ever-increasing debt. That’s the Obama way.

You can choose to pay for Obama to play more golf so that he can relax while he’s thinking about the millions of people who are out of work. (BTW: Obama has played more than 100 rounds of golf in three and one-half years compared to Bush’s 25 rounds in eight years! And, Obama has had only one cabinet meeting so far this year. It is now the end of July!) You can choose more of same insipid leadership and less vision. Or, you can choose wisely.

Per the unspoken rhetoric of Obama and Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi they are counting on the rich to succeed. They hope the 1% will provide enormous tax revenues to pay for all of their Great Society gambling debts. These Democrats promote class warfare against the very rich believing that the middle class will benefit. But nothing happens in isolation. The middle class will suffer if the very rich are no longer able to invest their money. This type of over-arching economic thinking is lost on the Democrats. They are only looking for the short-term power and money grabs.

These political fat cats want to control free enterprise thereby keeping individuals from creating wealth which aids human flourishing. In so doing they can keep their hands in till. They gain access to their “fair share” in the pea and shell game of government. This is called “Progress” but “political corruption” is its true name.

These snake-oil salesmen, the Democrats, will tell they have a cure for society’s ills: higher taxes. They believe that if they can just throw more money at a problem that the problem will magically go away. This “lets-be-reasonable” irrational thinking is exactly the same type of thinking behind the extensive guns laws passed by the City of Chicago, the strictest gun laws in the nation. Their shot-gun approach to passing guns laws has not resulted in a decrease in violent gun-related crime in this city. Rather, Chicago’s murder rate is the highest in the nation. But the Democrats of the state of Illinois aren’t saying much about that. No. Now they want to throw more gun laws at the bullets. More of less. That is the Democrat’s answer to our dying culture. Maintaining political power is more important than the people on the streets. They march in your parades while backtracking on your best interests.

The only tools in Obama’s “community organizer” bag are raising taxes and blaming others. That’s all you’ll ever get from Obama and the Democrats. That, and more casinos. You can vote for more of the same anemic leadership, more scapegoating and less vision. You can vote for more economic stagnation, more radicalism, more of less.

You can also choose European style top-down government and place yourself at the bottom of another list. You can choose a culture of dependence for yourself and your kids. Our national debt is the insurance policy of our nation’s ongoing slavery to debt. Obamacare is just the name on one of the policy brochures.

With your vote you can choose Democrats and the decline of America. You can choose more of the same devastation to individual liberty. You can choose the monopoly of government.

The Democrat party is the party of less liberty. You can vote for less liberty but in doing so our nation, without your individual dynamic of liberty put to good use, would soon implode and become the vacuum that totalitarianism rapidly fills without ever asking for your vote.

I’ll leave you with this interesting statement from Chairman Mao on April 30, 1971:

“China should learn from the way America developed, by decentralizing and spreading responsibility and wealth among 50 states. A central government could not do everything. China must depend upon regional and local initiative. It would not do [spreading his hands] to leave everything up to him [Mao].

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/harris/1973/02/sincelin.htm

You can choose more of this:

Obama in focus:

Filed under 2012 election, commentary, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, Writing Tagged with 2012 election, Big Government, black panther, Chicag gun laws, culture, current-events, dehumanizing process, economy, Forward Campaign, gambling debts, government, Harry Reid, move forward campaign, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, politics, progrssives, public debt, social isses, special interest groups, The Democrat Party Platform

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THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton

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“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
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“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
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“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
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To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
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“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
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Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
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If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
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“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
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“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
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Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
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“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
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“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
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God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
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From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
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“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
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One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
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“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
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God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
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“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
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“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
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“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
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“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This is what the LORD says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
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