Scribblings Archives - Page 25 of 34

On February 14, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

GKC: Seeing One Woman

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”

Read “The Ethics of Elfland” from Orthodoxy here.<>купить контент для а

On February 13, 2014 By Peter Jones In Scribblings Like

A Week Later: Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye

Here are some links that discuss the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate, which took place on February 4th. Here is a link to the actual debate.

Rick Phillips wrote a great piece at Reformation 21 about how the debate was primarily about assumptions. Both Phillips and the Mohler link below are some of the best.

Here is Al Mohler’s observations on the debate.

Both Ham and Nye’s mistakes are pointed out in this post.

Gary Demar explains how he would debate Bill Nye.

Here is an article that thinks Nye was foolish to debate Ham at all. He is not a friend of Ham, but he makes some interesting points about the nature of debates.

Here is an article that reflects the postmodern attitude that dogmatism of any kind is wrong. Thus this persons thinks both Nye and Ham were wrong. Not because they got their facts wrong, but because they believe in facts at all.

Ben Burlingham has a Ph. D and teaches chemistry. He follows up the debate with some suggestions on how the average person can witness to scientists.<>

On February 4, 2014 By Uri Brito In Scribblings Like

On Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Death

Over at LewRockwell, Laurence Vance observes that the drug war is a war on personal responsibility:

I have read in several places that the man who sold Hoffman the drugs should be found and prosecuted. This is ludicrous. Hoffman was successful, famous, and rich–things that many Americans would kill for. Yet, his personal demons were greater than these things. He is the one responsible for his death and his children now being without a father.

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On January 23, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

C. S. Lewis: The Unraveling of Materialism

Click to buy on Amazon

by Marc Hays

Here’s a portion of the first paragraph of the first essay in Walter Hooper’s collection of C. S. Lewis essays, God in the Dock. This quote is a prime example of Lewisian logic–better known as common sense.

“Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone insists on using the word God to mean ‘whatever the universe happens to be going to do next’, of course we cannot prevent him. But nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what was coming next will be an improvement. Such a belief, besides being unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist. If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of becoming better if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’—it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination as ‘the place you have reached’. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.”

–C. S. Lewis, “Evil and God”, God in the Dock<>

On January 20, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Marc Hays: Whose Rights Are Ultimate? Who Decides?

by Marc Hays

Yesterday being “Sanctity-of-Life Sunday”, I was reminded of a quote by Canadian political philosopher, George Parkin Grant, from His book Technology and Justice:

“Behind the conflict of rights (between the mother and the fetus MH), there is unveiled in the debate about abortion an even more fundamental question about rights themselves. What is it about human beings that makes it proper that we should have any rights at all? Because of this the abortion issue involves all modern societies in basic questions of political principle.

These questions of principle were brought out into the open for Americans, when the Supreme Court of that country made it law that no legislation can be passed which prevents women from receiving abortions during the first six months of pregnancy. In laying down the reasons for that decision, the judges speak as if they were basing it on the supremacy of rights in a democratic society. But to settle the case in terms of rights, the judges say that the mother has all the rights, and that the foetus has none. Because they make this distinction, the very principle of rights is made dubious in the following way. In negating all rights to the foetuses, the court says something negative about what they are, namely that they are such as to warrant no right to continued existence. And because the foetus is of the same species as the mother, we are inevitably turned back onto the fundamental question of principle: what is it about the mother (or any human being) that makes it proper that she should have rights? Because in the laws about abortion one is forced back to the stark comparison between the rights of members of the same species (our own), the foundations of the principles behind rights are unveiled inescapably. What is it about our species that gives us rights beyond those of dogs or cattle?

The legal and political system, which was the noblest achievement of the English-speaking societies, came forth from our long tradition of free institutions and Common Law, which was itself produced and sustained by centuries of Christian belief. Ruthlessness in law and politics was limited by a system of legal and political rights which guarded the individual from the abuses of arbitrary power, both by the state and other individuals. The building of this system has depended on the struggle and courage of many, and was fundamentally founded on the Biblical assumption that human beings are the children of God. For this reason, everybody should be properly protected by carefully defined rights. Those who advocate easy abortions in the name of rights are at the same time unwittingly undermining the very basis of rights. Their complete disregard for the unborn weakens the very idea of rights itself. This weakening does not portend well for the continuing health of our system.” —George Parkin Grant, Technology & Justice 1986

“George Parkin Grant, 1918-1988, has been acknowledged as Canada’s leading political philosopher since the publication of Philosophy in the Mass Age 1959. He was the author of Lament for a Nation, Technology & Empire, and English-Speaking Justice. He taught religion and philosophy at McMaster University and Dalhousie University.” (from the back cover of Technology & Justice)

Here’s a link to it on Amazon.

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On January 11, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Marc Hays: GKC – Something Odd in the Truth

There is little as refreshing or as challenging as reading through Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. It refreshes like breathing clean air; it refreshes like tasting good smoke. I am challenged because I don’t believe I think deeply enough; it is challenging because I don’t believe I think simply enough.

For your Saturday morning reading pleasure, here are the first three paragraphs of chapter VI: The Paradoxes of Christianity:

“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

“It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn’t. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have a heart on both sides. Yet scientific men are still organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are so fond of flat country. Scientific men are also still organizing expeditions to find a man’s heart; and when they try to find it, they generally get on the wrong side of him.

“Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he guessed that the man’s heart was in the right place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.”

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On January 8, 2014 By Joffre Swait In Scribblings Like

12 Days of Christmas Winners

It is our great and tardy pleasure to announce the two winners of our 12 Days of Christmas Book Giveaway!

M. W. Andrews has won the first prize, Bread & Wine and Watch For the Light. Heather Johnson wins a copy of Uri Brito’s The Trinitarian Father.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who entered for supporting our website.<>

On January 6, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Down’s Syndrome: A Gift to the World

by Marc Hays

Below is a link to a video about Tim Harris, a Down’s Syndrome man who owns his own restaurant.

Two thoughts came to my mind as I watched this video:

1.) On a personal level, I may be underestimating my son, Alan, who has Down’s Syndrome. He may be capable of far more than I could ever imagine. He may never own his own business like the man in the video, but regardless of how his gifts are made manifest, I need to be seeking out ways that he can fulfill his ministry in Christ’s Kingdom. The Body has many different members so that all the functions of health are present. In the home, the church, the broader culture– God creates all different kinds of beautiful people, some with an extra chromosome. All in his image. All for his glory.

2.) As a matter of public concern, Down’s Syndrome is commonly used as justification for late term abortions. In the article “Selfish Convenience: Why people abort children with Down syndrome,” Cassy Fiano of lifesitenews.com reports that “among women who receive a prenatal diagnosis (of Down’s Syndrome), 9 out of 10 choose abortion.” This is nothing less than the genocide of a people group. I guess technically it isn’t, but it displays the same heart. While Americans play god, these beautiful people are being murdered in droves and will never have the chance to blossom like the man in the video.

So, that’s the bad news. Follow the link below to some good news: a three minute video about a young man that dances to work and hugs everyone that walks in the door.

http://www.amazingoasis.org/2013/12/restaurant-owner-with-down-syndrome.html

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On January 5, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Still Need A Resolution? Might I Suggest…

by Marc Hays

Happy New Year! Are you still in need of a resolution? Me either, but the new year is an appropriate time to look at where you’ve been, where you are, and where you want to go. As you look at where you want to go, I know a guy who can help you get there, and the world is forever blessed in that most of his insight was, and therefore remains, uncopyrighted. If you know me, then you already know that I can’t make it 5 minutes without recommending that everyone under the sun read Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

If you’re reading this, then you have no excuse not to read, or to listen to, more Chesterton. A desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or even a dumbphone is all you need. GKC’s seminal work, Orthodoxy, is free everywhere…

Online: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130.html

The Project Gutenberg HTML is simple, plain, boring, drab, etc., except that it’s not. You’ll be reading Chesterton. For free. If this is your only access to Chesterton, then jump in and swim around. The water’s nice.

On Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Orthodoxy-Moody-Classics-Gilbert-Chesterton-ebook/dp/B00DEUQ9GW

Don’t like the HTML? Tyr the Kindle App. It’s a free download, so you in very short order you could be on a fresh Kindle App reading G.K.C. for F.R.E.E. There are several free versions available on Kindle, but the address above links to one with a foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson. It ‘s great Foreword followed by a great book. Speaking of Matthew Lee Anderson, check him out at MereOrthodoxy.

On Librivox: https://librivox.org/orthodoxy-by-gk-chesterton/

Librivox describes itself as “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” The above link will take you to a page where you can download the entire book in one swell foop in the form of a ZIP file. Then you can extract it and put it in iTunes or whatever audio software you use. I put this version in my LG nv3 years ago. It’s great to have if your driving, or doing something else where you can’t read, but can listen for a while.

Also, the reader’s name is J. A. Carter. He is fantastic. I’ve listened to him enough now that when I read my hard copy of Orthodoxy in my head, I hear his voice and inflection. It’s pretty cool. Kind freaky, really.

So, do you have a new New Year’s resolution? Here’s a poem to help you remember this very important decision:

You can’t go wrong with G.K.C.

And you can read him now for F.R.E. …E.<>реклама на авто

On January 2, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Pastor attempts to walk on water and drowns

According to allchristiannews.com,

Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation that he was capable of reenacting the very miracles of Jesus Christ. He decided to make it clear through way of demonstration on Gabon’s beach in the capital city of Libreville.

Referencing Matthew 14:22-33, Kabele said that he received a revelation which told him that with enough faith he could achieve what Jesus was able to.

According to an eyewitness, Kabele took his congregation out to the beach. He told them that he would cross the Kombo estuary by foot, which is normally a 20 minute boat ride.

Sadly by the second step into the water Kabele found himself completely submerged. He never returned.

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