Mark Horne, Author at Kuyperian Commentary

On September 21, 2013 By Mark Horne In Politics Like

What we might learn about education and opportunity from Joe Wright

Humphrey Carpenter describes Joseph Wright (October 31, 1855-February 27, 1930), J. R. R. Tolkien’s most influential college professor:

Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology. He had been employed in a woollen-mill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and wirsing again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a night-school in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition. When he was twenty-one he decided to use his savings to finance a term’s study at a German university, so he took a boat to Antwerp and walked stage by stage to Heidelberg, where he became interested in philology. So this former mill-hand studied Saskrit, Gothic, Old Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old English, eventually taking a doctorate. Returning to England he established himself in Oxford where he was soon appointed Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology. He could afford the lease of a small house in Norham Road, where he engaged a housekeeper. He lived with the native economy of a true Yorkshireman: he used to drink beer which he bought in a small barrel, but he thought that it went too quickly, so he arranged with Sarah the housedeeper that she should buy it and he should pay for each glass as he consumed it. He continued to work without ceasing, beginning to write a series of language primers, among which was the Gothic book that proved such a revelation to Tolkien…

Obviously, Wright was a genius (though it is not clear that anyone would have known that before he started teaching himself to read a newspaper at the age of fifteen). It is not possible to use Wright as an example of the success that everyone can have. I have no intention of doing so.

But what about an illiterate learning to read his native language as a teenager if he wants to? I don’t see why that shouldn’t be possible for a normal or even a slightly below-average individual.

Whenever I hear people talking about the importance of “education” (i.e. childhood and teen schooling) I think about Joe Wright. What are we telling people when we pump out government messages about staying in school? Are we pushing success? In some cases undoubtedly we are. But we are also saying something else: If you can’t make it in school or if you graduate without having basic skills you are done for. You have no chance.

I think this is a self-fulfilling deception. The majority of forces that keep a person from succeeding are 1) his belief that what he is told is right, that he has no chance, and 2) the fact that a diploma (at whatever level) functions as a license to get a job. I don’t want to fix #2 by outlawing it. But I don’t want my tax dollars used to perpetuate the idea either. If we would get rid of minimum wage laws and other barbaric regulations that punish people for paying other people to do work, then alternative paths to productivity would not be barred. People without the piece of paper could prove themselves in other way to employers.

The entire idea of schooling and education needs to be rethought. In the nineteenth-century education was valued and people would go to school when they could… and they would stop and work to help support their families as well. Under that regime of freedom, the US as an economy and culture did not stagnate but grew tremendously.

We act like this bureaucratic, tax-fed, legally-constructed road we have created is some kind of universal path to prosperity. It isn’t. We need to kick over the fences.

Applying this idea to just one problem, I constantly hear that some zip codes are ruled by horrifying public schools where graduates are not even literate. I hear from the same sources in the same context that the drop-out rate is a scandal.

No. Willingly attending a useless dead-end skinner box ruled by bell signals for moving into the next room is the scandal. No one should put up with it.

Preaching to those “drop-outs” that their lives are now doomed is crocodile tears. Their lives don’t have to be doomed. Stop trying to doom them. Point out the value of education and encourage them to find both jobs and means of learning to better themselves.

I do worry about one potential pitfall in what I am saying. Telling a person that they can still succeed in the future can lead a people to think they don’t need to work hard “yet.” Obviously, that is a foolish attitude. That kind of attitude is addictive with the “success” always staying in the future. I don’t mean to encourage such sloth in any way.

(cross-posted)<>combomaphack.com

On September 19, 2013 By Mark Horne In Scribblings Like

Mark Horne: Mish, Occam’s Razor, & Conspiracy Theory

From Mike “Mish” Shedlock’s Global Economic Trend Analysis blog this morning:

In response to “Bubbles Ben to be Replaced by Calamity Janet”, reader “Robert” responded via email “Try thinking of the Fed not as headed by inept persons, but as run by persons whose deliberate intention is to bring about the sort of destruction it is in fact bringing about.”

I replied “Don’t buy it. I am not a believer in such conspiracy theories. But I am a big fan of Occam’s Razor: The simplest workable theory is most likely to be correct. In this case, the simple theory is: They are economic idiots.“

Mish may be right, but I question his claim that he is obviously the one following Occam’s Razor.

If Agent A does Act B which will foreseeably bring about C then the simplest explanation is that A wants C to come about.

Right?

Positing massive stupidity on the part of A seems to me to be the needless multiplying of “entities” that I thought Occam warned us not to do.

Any thoughts?

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On September 16, 2013 By Mark Horne In Scribblings Like

Mark Horne: Will anyone in the Religious Right rethink their position on “amnesty” based on this?

Pastor of Proclamation Presbyterian Church (PCA) is forced to leave the country against his will.

For the record, I am not in favor of “amnesty.” If we abolish all the evil immigration laws (a redundant description) and apologize for ever having any such laws, retroactively decriminalizing people moving to where they can best find economic prosperity, then there will be no one left to receive “amnesty.”<>

On September 14, 2013 By Mark Horne In Politics 1

The cry for American world “leadership” shows us that C. S. Lewis was right about punishment

lewis cohen One of my favorite essays by C. S. Lewis is his piece collected in God in the Dock on “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” You can read it in the internet graveyard here (by “graveyard” I mean Angelfire; my older readers will understand). Lewis viewed himself as defending the traditional view of punishment–people were punished if and when and to the extent that they deserved to be punished. Lewis’ view leaves me with questions about the history of punishment in Christian lands, but I think his basic thesis holds up.

The “humanitarian” view, which Lewis criticized, is actually two views.

You regard a person who has committed an act as sick and in need of healing. Thus you force treatment on him for his own good.
You regard a person who has committed an act as a bad example and public punishment as a way to use him as a deterrent. You do something unpleasant and public to him so others will avoid doing the same act so they won’t receive the same unpleasant treatment.

Of course, both of these effects can be hoped for in the traditional theory of punishment. Lewis just insisted they are secondary and limited. Once you have punished a thief, he is a free man whether or not he has learned not to steal.

What made me think about Lewis’ essay recently is the rhetoric I am hearing about the need for American “leadership.” I confess, I have a hard time using that word when it seems so obvious to me that “leadership” means the frequent and energetic committing of mass homicide in other countries that are no danger to the United States.

But I will leave that aside for another day.

Today I read this piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times: An Anchorless World. An anchor, again, would be a superpower willing to commit mass homicide in other nations when the leaders of those nations disobey the superpower. One might respond that I am being cynical by not mentioning real crimes committed by the target nation. Please read below. An “anchor” is treated as the self-evident need in the world in order to perpetuate civilization.

Again, I will leave aside much of my opinion of the alleged argument in this piece.

What made me think of C. S. Lewis’ essay on punishment was that Cohen’s argument was completely dependent on certainty about the truth of the claim of “…Assad’s devastating chemical weapons attack more than three weeks ago.” Assad attacked “his own people” (who we should now bomb as a reprisal) with chemical weapons.

No he didn’t.

At least, we have barely any evidence and nothing like proof that he did so. The people who are certain of it should be publicly repenting about lying about Iraq since, if Assad is guilty, it was their own past history of deception that has taken away their credibility with the American people. (In which case, all those who sincerely believe in Assad’s guilt should all be publicly condemning the Bush Administration and the collaborators in Congress–Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton chief among them–for destroying the credibility of the US government resulting in our present inability to launch.) Multiple witnesses from the Administrations classified briefings say that it makes them more skeptical of Assad’s guilt, not less.

Why does Cohen not provide his reader with any reason to believe that Assad used chemical weapons?

Back when I read Lewis on punishment I thought his criticism of the second humanitarian theory, the deterrent theory, was an ad absurdum argument.

If we turn from the curative to the deterrent justification of punishment we shall find the new theory even more alarming. When you punish a man in terrorem, make of him an ‘example’ to others, you are admittedly using him as a means to an end; someone else’s end. This, in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. On the classical theory of Punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. That was assumed to be established before any question of ‘making him an example arose’ arose. You then, as the saying is, killed two birds with one stone; in the process of giving him what he deserved you set an example to others. But take away desert and the whole morality of the punishment disappears. Why, in Heaven’s name, am I to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way?—unless, of course, I deserve it.

But that is not the worst. If the justification of exemplary punishment is not to be based on dessert but solely on its efficacy as a deterrent, it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime. The deterrent effect demands that the public should draw the moral, ‘If we do such an act we shall suffer like that man.’ The punishment of a man actually guilty whom the public think innocent will not have the desired effect; the punishment of a man actually innocent will, provided the public think him guilty. But every modern State has powers which make it easy to fake a trial. When a victim is urgently needed for exemplary purposes and a guilty victim cannot be found, all the purposes of deterrence will be equally served by the punishment (call it ‘cure’ if you prefer0 of an innocent victim, provided that the public can be cheated into thinking him will be so wicked. The punishment of an innocent, that is , an undeserving, man is wicked only if we grant the traditional view that righteous punishment means deserved punishment. Once we have abandoned that criterion, all punishments have to be justified, if at all, on other grounds that have nothing to do with desert. Where the punishment of the innocent can be justified on those grounds (and it could in some cases be justified as a deterrent) it will be no less moral than any other punishment. Any distaste for it on the part of the Humanitarian will be merely a hang-over from the Retributive theory.

Back when I read this I was quite naive about how easily or often those in power in modern nation states would be willing to “fake a trial.” I read Lewis’s analysis as purely philosophical or intellectual. I didn’t think the theory would ever actually be practiced.

But here we see C. S. Lewis was a prophet. What do we need in order to justify a world “anchor”? We need more Hitlers. At least, we must have such Hitlers if we are going to keep the pretense of democracy. The people have to be continually frightened into willingness to being made inter-generational debt slaves in order to fund the anchor. Every hesitation to launch a punitive strike needs to be considered another “Munich moment.”

Lies aren’t an accident in American hegemony; they are the essence of it.

Assad is regarded as guilty because he must be guilty for us to attack him and show how we are a source of “stability” in the world. International “norms” must be violated so we can demonstrate that we enforce and uphold them.

But, with Cohen’s fulfillment of Lewis’ critique we now have data that can improve on that critique. Lewis said that the deterrent theory allows the state to portray an innocent man as guilty. But that is not enough. In order to give the public a clear moral lesson, we also need to fake the innocence of guilty men. Some suspect this explains some aspects of the George Zimmerman trial. Whether or not that is the case, it certainly is what Cohen is willing to do for the sake of justifying an attack on Syria:

The hesitancy since the chemical attack has highlighted a lack of U.S. leadership throughout the Syrian conflict. The just cause of rebels fighting the 43-year tyranny of the Assad family was never backed by arming them; and when Islamist radicals moved into Syria, their presence was used to justify the very Western inaction that had fostered their arrival.

While Cohen’s first lie is the pretense we have proven knowledge that we don’t really have, here he is just making stuff up. There was never an actionable moment where we could have armed a mythical faction of pure, democratic, secular rebels and prevented the black hats from “moving in.” This is nonsense. The fact is that, in order to aid the rebels the CIA had to work with the Muslim Brotherhood. This has been going on for more than a year–at least. It is unlikely there was any way to arm only the “good guys” by this method.

(As in the case of Syria, if Cohen was serious about his claims regarding the rebels then he would loudly condemn US/NATO action in Libya which we have given over to Al Qaeda as their happy hunting ground. How are we going to trust an “anchor” that has already lied to us and left a region in such a hellish state by empowering terrorists? Cohen doesn’t want to think about it and doesn’t want us to think of it. As with Iraq, all blame is put on the American people for doubting the US interventionists and none on the interventionists for either deliberately abusing our trust or else just being so incompetent and dangerously stupid that we should never trust them again.)

Beside all this, Assad’s cruel repression has almost certainly been felt most strongly by Syria’s Sunni majority who have been forced to endure a secular regime that allows freedom of religion. The rebels “just cause” and Sunni theocracy are not as far removed as Cohen wants his readers to believe.

The deterrent theory of punishment is virtually the only theory that is ever invoked in foreign affairs. This makes sense since the US works with immoral regimes all the time for the sake of some alleged greater good. The traditional view of justice is not permitted on the scene–except to hide the bankrupt morality of the deterrent theory, just as Lewis predicted.<>yandex статистика а

On September 12, 2013 By Mark Horne In Politics Like

The Gag Reflex: Not “If?” but “In response to what?”

Peter Jones has written on the gag reflex. Personally, I’m still wondering about its usefulness. But, whatever the pros and cons of using the gag reflex as an apologetic tool on the part of a Christian minority in a secular culture, it should be unquestionable that it is always used by dominant cultures (or those that think they are still dominant) to enforce their boundaries. They boast in their reflux so you can feel the social pressure to join them at the vomitorium.

So when you realize that Senator Bob Menendez has no gag reflex for homosexuality, don’t think that means he doesn’t gag at all. He says that Vladimir Putin’s open letter to the US made him want to vomit.

So the gag reflex seems to be a way that societies try to preserve their norms… or how elites try to preserve their power while working to undermine society’s norms.<>rpg mobile game поддержка web ов ucoz

On September 12, 2013 By Mark Horne In Scribblings Like

Mark Horne: Megan McArdle on the origins of the US “hotel” hospitals

She comments on why we can’t save medical costs like Singapore does. The answer is that Singapore did not get government “investment” that traps them in higher costs:

So here’s the problem with looking toward Singapore for cost control: We couldn’t do this even if we wanted to. Multi-bed wards pretty much disappeared from the U.S. after the 1970s. My father, who was a budget analyst in the New York hospital system, notes that this had two causes: first, commissions kept recommending private rooms over those noisy, unsanitary large wards. And second, any new beds you built could be paid for by filling them with Medicare patients at “usual and customary” fees. The result was a hospital-building boom, which is why virtually all hospitals are in new buildings, and why, outside of some emergency wards, you’ve probably never spent time in one of those long wards you see in black-and-white films. “American hospitals are rather like hotels,” I was once told by a British colleague who was defending the honor of the rather more spartan National Health Service.

Cost controls that are relatively easy to implement in advance — by, for example, not building shiny new hospitals filled with private rooms — become impossible once you’ve made certain investments. This problem also afflicts higher education. Say we decided, as a society, to go back to the college costs of the 1970s. We’ll fire all the extra administrators, and to hell with whatever it is they’re doing to promote diversity, improve admissions or direct student life. If their missions are critical, we’ll make faculty take them over and cut back on research. Cafeteria service will go back to the fare of my mother’s day (lamb patties and lima beans twice a week — she lost 20 pounds her freshman year, and she wasn’t heavy to start with). Want to get in shape? Go run around the track, because we’re closing the fancy gym.

We still wouldn’t reach the cost levels of the 1950s, because the buildings are still there. The grounds have to be maintained. Everything has more lights, and the buildings aren’t built to be warm in winter and cool in summer; they’re built on the assumption that they’ll be climate controlled. Frequently the windows can’t even be opened, so it’s going to get awfully stuffy in there unless you turn on the A/C. You can’t shut down the fabulous new fitness center and go back to using the old gym, because the old gym was probably torn down. Unless you want to invest billions of dollars in reconfiguring the nation’s campuses, they’re going to be inherently harder to operate than the campuses of yesteryear.

What I take away from this is that government “success stories” are writing the line “and they all lived happily ever after” before the story is really over. No wonder Keynes final answer (for his lucky generation) was that they would all be dead before the “long run” came.<>

On September 11, 2013 By Mark Horne In Scribblings Like

Mark Horne: What bombing Syria for the sake of “credibility” really means

Essentially, what we are hearing is this:

There is such a thing as a just war.
Waging such wars is essential to the preservation or creation of some great good.
Once a population stops a leader from an unjust war, it is likely that
- The population will oppose a future just war
- Bad guys will think that they are safe because our nation will not wage a future just war.
THEREFORE: We must go ahead and wage this unjust war.

Essentially, the Just War tradition is being used to justify waging unjust war.

The definition of “just war” has already been demonstrated to be far too broad over the last twelve years or so (or perhaps 212!) but this is even worse.

Of course, these enemies of civilization who hold positions of authority in Conservative media and the GOP are completely ignoring the fact that they are siding with anti-Christian, Jihadi, heart-eating, live-girl-dismembering terrorist Sunnis against minority Christians, Shiites, etc. Bashar al-Assad is a brutal killer, which is precisely how he managed to impose pluralism and tolerance on that region. Al Qaeda has always hated his secular regime. We have had lots of brutal killers as allies before—like, for instance, Assad, who helped us by torturing some of the suspects we sent to him less than a decade ago. I’m not approving any of this but just pointing out the hypocrisy.

Our meddling in affairs that are not our business has likely already placed deadly chemical weapons in the hands of Al Qaeda affiliates. US foreign policy has made us more vulnerable, not safer.

But even if all that were not true, obviously this argument for “credibility” essentially justifies anything. It is nothing more than a rationalization for homicide.<>anonymizer-vkontakte

On September 10, 2013 By Mark Horne In Worship Like

Worship: The Time & Place of Personal Integration

One of the Apostle Paul’s most famous descriptions of the church involves an individual human body:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (1 Corinthians 12:12-27, ESV)

One could easily think that Paul is arguing from the premise that every human person is a unified body. In a biological sense that seems self-evident. But the Bible can speak of people as driven or controlled by various body parts. Paul must be arguing here from the ideal human person–the one who has matured. Paul himself is a large part of the Scriptural witness that affirms that human beings are often bodies in which the parts are at war with one another. Thus:

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. (Romans 6:12-19, ESV)

Also:

So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I pummel my body and make it a slave, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:26-27, ESV)

Likewise, James compares controlling one’s speech as “taming the tongue” and further compares such discipline to that of domesticating wild animals (James 3). Notably, James calls such rule or dominion over one’s tongue a form of wisdom, reminding us of Lady Wisdom’s declaration “by me kings reign” (Proverbs 8.15).

Jesus himself warned of how one part of oneself could mislead the rest:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29-30, ESV)

So it seems that while the human person should function as a unity, a person can, in a sense, be a cluster of warring members. While this should not be so, it nevertheless is often true.

One way to think of what is going on is to differentiate between the de jure and the de facto–legal terms for what is officially true and what is true in reality. While we owe much to others, we are each, once we reach maturity (viewed as a legal age) de jure owners of ourselves. But are we de facto masters of ourselves? The concept of self-ownership is a foundation, but it must be used to build self-mastery–from de jure to de facto.

Furthering us in this process is one of the purposes and benefits of regular Church worship. To show how this follows from Scripture, we need to get some basic points about the worship system or sacrificial system that was given by God through Moses.

WORSHIP AS TRANSFORMATION

As we follow Paul’s admonition in Romans 6 and master ourselves into a single whole intent on serving God, we can more and more fully respond to Paul’s summons to worship in chapter 12:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1, 2; ESV)

Sacrifices were cut up by the offerer (not the priest, he simply took the pieces and fed them to the fire). All the appropriate parts had to be offered. (Some were also cut off and thrown away, just as Jesus advised. My working assumption for now is that, in the New Covenant, we are liberated from sin to an extent that we can offer all our parts. Jesus was using an analogy for struggling with sin from the Old Covenant sacrifices but didn’t wanta literal application to our body parts).

I may be wrong, but I think many Evangelicals believe that the fire on the altar that consumed the sacrifices represents God’s fiery wrath on sinners. This is a mistake. The fire on God’s altar represents God himself and his glory and presence. It is true that unrepentant, unforgiven sinners find God’s presence to be torment (thus the imagery from Revelation 14.9-11). But that makes no sense for sacrificial animals that have been washed and had the unclean parts cut away. The sacrificial meat, remember, is treated as holy, not as defiled.

In the sacrificial system established under Moses, the animal takes the curse of sin for the offerer when the offerer kills it. The blood is carried near to God’s presence on the altar to display the evidence that death has taken place and there is no further judgment to come. Then the animal goes up into the altar where it is turned to smoke and goes further up into heaven–into God’s glory cloud like the cloud that came down on Mt. Sinai or that later filled the Tabernacle and still later entered Solomon’s Temple. The cloud that Ezekiel saw and, in a vision, penetrated to see God’s throne carried by Levitical angels.

This, after all, is exactly what happened to Jesus. He is killed. His blood pours out on the ground for all to see. Then he is transformed by the Spirit. He is raised from the dead and then ascends to His Father in a cloud.

One more piece of evidence that burning the sacrifice represents transformation and elevation or ascension, is that the items put in the fire with the animal (incense, cake of bread) is also what is kept inside the Holy Place. The altar was set up outside the doorway of the Tabernacle. The Holy place was the first room on the other side of the entrance where only priests could pass through. So putting the animal on the altar seems to correspond with a priest approaching God’s presence in the Tabernacle. The second room where no one could go but the high priest represented the highest heavens and there were two golden statues of angels representing the Guards in God’s own throne room. So it is no surprise that, when Jesus was taken up in a cloud, two men in white were seen as well.

And by going through this process, Jesus became to us, among other things, “wisdom from God” (First Corinthians 1.30). He was made our Greater Solomon.

Before killing the animal and then putting it through this transformation, the offerer was to place his hands on the animal to appoint it as his representative. So the animals death and “resurrection” are supposed to apply to the worshiper. We are supposed to be transformed by God’s presence in worship. Our minds are to be renewed in wisdom and torn away from the folly of the world’s alleged “wisdom.”

SUMMONING EVERY ONE OF US & ALL OF US

Many times in the Bible God’s people are summoned to gather as one before the Lord’s presence. But what is odd is that we also see in the Bible sometimes a person summons all of himself in the same way he would summon a group of people to gather together.

Bless the Lord, O my soul,

and all that is within me,

bless his holy name!

Bless the Lord, O my soul,

and forget not all his benefits… (Psalm 103.1b, 2; ESV).

David here summons his soul, and then summons more: “all that is within me.”

When God calls us to worship, he calls us altogether (all-together) to gather as a single whole. Just as we are affirmed as one body with fellow Christians as we listen to God’s word, pray to him, sing psalms and hymns, and eat and drink bread and wine together when we “come together as a church” (First Corinthians 11.18), so we are each taken apart by the word of God (Hebrews 4.12) and put back together as new whole person, glorified by contact with the glory of God.

We are, if you will, disintegrated in worship and then re-integrated better than before. And in that transformation, you learn to rule yourself and everything else better by a true wisdom. You are renewed in your mind.

One final comment. I don’t know that we can reduce this transformation process to understanding new truths or some other intellectual process. While hearing good preaching and learning new things is important, it might not happen every week. Does that mean going to church was a waste of time? I have to say no. Even though church can be “done wrong,” we should expect that meeting with God in a special way has power that affects us even if we don’t learn anything new or feel inspired by some aspect of the service.

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On September 2, 2013 By Mark Horne In Scribblings Like

Mark Horne: Murray Rothbard schools us on Afghanistan (except…)

LewRockwell.com has posted this amazing commentary from 1980 by Murray Rothbard analyzing our involvement in Afghanistastan. A sample:

But just as we have been whipping ourselves up to nuking Muslims and to declaring war against “fanatical” Islam per se, we are ready to turn on a dime and sing the praises of no-longer fanatical Muslims who are willing to fight Russian tanks with their bare hands: the heroic freedom fighters of Afghanistan. All of a sudden President Carter has gone bananas: declaring himself shocked and stunned by the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, mobilizing the United Nations in stunned horror, levying embargoes (my how this peanut salesman loves embargoes!), and threatening the Olympics so dear to sports fans around the globe.

The whole column is priceless, but for those of us outraged at Republican support for Obama’s non-war homicides, this portion will produce a special degree of horrified fascination:

The conservatives, the Pentagon, the Social Democrats, the neo-conservatives, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority—all the worst scoundrels in American life—have been yearning to smash detente, and to accelerate an already swollen arms budget and heat up the Cold War. And now Carter has done it—to such an extent that such conservative organs as Human Events are even finding Carter foreign policy to be better in some respects than that of its hero Reagan.

One portion of Rothbard’s commentary needs some correction, but only because Rothbard did not have access to the secret machinations of the Carter Administration:

The reason for the latest Soviet invasion is simple but ironic in our world of corn-fed slogans. For the problem with Hafizullah Amin, the prime minister before the Soviet incursion, was that he was too Commie for the Russians. As a fanatical left-Communist, Amin carried out a brutal program of nationalizing the peasantry and torturing opponents, a policy of collectivism and repression that fanned the flames of guerrilla war against him. Seeing Afghanistan about to slip under to the West once again, the Soviets felt impelled to go in to depose Amin and replace him with an Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal, who is much more moderate a Communist and therefore a faithful follower of the Soviet line. There are undoubtedly countless conservatives and Social Democrats who still find it impossible to conceive of Soviet tools who are more moderate than other Communists, but it is high time they caught up with several decades of worldwide experience.

As far as Rothbard knew, the guerrilla war against Amin had a completely domestic explanation. However, it turns out that, as bad as Amin was, he did not entirely cause the instability. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admitted that the US government was secretly supporting the “no longer fanatical Muslims” before 1980 in order to force the Soviets to intervene.

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

For a few more points of context, you might read my post from March 2, 2013: “Is Islam a World Threat Without Western Money and Government Aid?”<>ключевое слово

On September 2, 2013 By Mark Horne In Theology Like

Jesus is coming soon if, by “soon,” you mean no sooner than 100,000 years in the future

I was getting my hair cut the other day by someone other than my wife, for a change. As a result I got exposed to Christian culture outside my own personal sociological safe room. I am ashamed to say how seldom this happens. Of course, by not “getting out more” I help other Christians form their own little bubbles of idiosyncratic belief and theological naivete.

But not this time. The barber learned, as he cut my hair, that I was a seminary graduate and had pastored in a number of places around the country. So, as he finished up shaving the back of my neck, he let loose with his camaraderie question: “Before I let you go, I have to ask you: Do you think the Lord is coming back soon!”

The sound of his voice alerted me this was, in his mind, a rhetorical question. We were supposed to share in the joy of the soon return of Jesus to earth.

I couldn’t come up with a way to evade his question, at least not in the half-second before hesitation on my part would get awkward. So I said it.

“No, I think we have at least another 100,000 years left.”

He expected not that.

But he should have. The only thing shocking about my claim is that I was giving such a low-ball number. The absolute minimum estimate should be 120,000 years from the time the Ten Commandments were given on Mount Sinai. There God wrote with his own finger.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of generations of those who love me and keep my commandments (Exodus 20).

Many English translations mute this because they leave out the second “generations.” It is true the word does not appear in the text after “thousands.” But it does not appear after “the third and the fourth” either. The reader has to read the implication. Third and fourth generation makes sense. But it makes no sense to then change the comparison to something else. God is promising to cut off wicked generations relatively quickly and bless the righteous for thousands of generation. The suffix is plural, not dual, so three generations is the absolute minimum here. A generation is forty years so:

40 x 3 x 1000 = 120,000

This idea is repeated elsewhere:

Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face (Deuternomy 7.9, 10).

Here we see the passage includes the word, “generations.” It only mentions one thousand of them, but it too contrasts this time span with the relatively quick destruction of the wicked.

So why do we expect the wicked to flourish and the number of generations of the righteous to remain small?

In fact, it is really strained to read the promise of faithfulness to “thousands” of generations as the minimal conceivable number of three. Why not eight thousands? Or twenty-four? Or more? It is possible that, just as God owns the cattle on more than a thousand hills (Psalm 50.10), so he will actually be faithful to many more generations of believers than merely thousands.

According to Paul, now that Jesus has come, there is to be an explosion of grace and salvation relative to the past. As he writes in Romans 5:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So when we read in Esther 8 about a world-wide vindication of God’s people resulting in massive proselytization “from India to Ethiopia,” we should realize that that was rather minimal compared to what is to happen now that Jesus has come and died and risen again. God says he is faithful to thousands of generations, which leaves us with 115 thousand years left.

So God says to expect thousands of generations, and we’ve spent a few generations claiming that we are the last one. Paul writes that life through Jesus is more powerful than sin and death through Adam, and we preach that sin is universal and redemption only for a minority in history.

How does that honor what God says?

With this time frame in mind, I will leave you some of Jesus’ last words on earth:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”