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On October 29, 2013 By In Books, Culture, Politics, Theology

Born Out of Never: Happy Birthday Abe

KuyperProfile

October 29th marks the birthday of Kuyperian Commentary’s namesake, namely Abraham Kuyper (29 October 1837 – 8 November 1920), – the Dutch politician and party founder, statesman, prime minister, theologian, educator, linguist, pastor, author, founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, founder and editor of De Standaard (the most popular daily newspaper in the Netherlands), as well as the editor of the weekly magazine De Heraut (the Herald). a A veritable polymath of a man. b

Over at CanonWired, Pastors Douglas Wilson & Toby J Sumpter explore the question: “What’s Does It Mean to Be ‘Kuyperian’?”

http://vimeo.com//15401618

Birthdays are times of reflection and of giving, and those who know me are aware that I like to share things that peak my curiosity and give me joy. And so, I’ll leave this little birthday note with some quotes by and about Kuyper and some links for further exploration into what it means to be ‘Kuyperian’:

“There is not one part of our world of thought that than can be hermetically separated from other parts, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!'” c

“Christianity goes beyond personal salvation. Christianity encompasses everything.”d

“In the midst of corruptions, your duty as an equipped disciple of Christ is to always seek to uphold that which is honorable, that which is lovely and that which is of good report among mankind.” (ibid)

“A Christian culture is established through the education of a Christian populace.”(ibid)

“If there were no other way open to knowledge than through discursive thought,. . . because of the uncertainty . . . which is the penalty of sin, and [because of] the impossibility [of having therefore an objective method to decide] between truth and falsehood,” skepticism would reign.” (Principles 123) e

“Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blot on the honor of your savior. The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work. The government cannot take the place of Christian charity. A loving embrace isn’t given with food stamps. The care of a community isn’t provided with government housing. The face of our Creator can’t be seen on a welfare voucher. What the poor need is not another government program; what they need is for Christians like me to honor our savior.”f

“If you see a thing, you are probably called to it.”g

“What is hell other than a realm in which unholiness works without restraint in body and soul?” h

“Kuyper himself had urged that all human thought be gov­erned by a Christian worldview derived from Scripture. To Kuyper, this worldview was antithetical to every secular ideology, whether philosophical, political, economic, aesthetic, or whatever. Kuyper’s disciples sought to bring the Christian worldview to bear on politics, education, and journalism; naturally, some sought to express it in phi­losophy as well.” ~ Dr. John M Frame i

 <>mega-vzlomстоимость рекламы на авто

  1. TheChristianAlmanac  (back)
  2. http://www.wordmp3.com/stream.aspx?id=5482  (back)
  3. http://www.reformationalpublishingproject.com/pdf_books/Scanned_Books_PDF/SphereSovereignty_English.pdf  (back)
  4. http://www.wordmp3.com/stream.aspx?id=13606  (back)
  5. http://kuyperian.blogspot.com/2004/10/what-does-it-mean-to-be-kuyperian.html  (back)
  6. KuyperPoverty  (back)
  7. “When Abraham Kuyper saw a thing, he acted on it.” ~ Dr. George Grant
    http://grantian.blogspot.com/2013/10/abraham-kuyper.html  (back)
  8. KuyperHolySpirit  (back)
  9. http://www.frame-poythress.org/cornelius-van-til/  (back)

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On October 18, 2013 By In Politics

Evangelical Christians, Deists and America’s Founding

By Thomas Kidd

On New Year’s Day of 1802, the Baptist evangelist John Leland delivered a remarkable gift to the White House: a 1,235 lb. block of cheese. Newspapers called it the “mammoth cheese.” It came from Leland’s village of Cheshire, Massachusetts, sent by evangelical Baptists of New England, to honor their beloved president, Thomas Jefferson. For those familiar with Jefferson’s religious beliefs, the mammoth cheese is both a prodigy and a puzzle: why would devout Christians love this deistic skeptic so much?

The answer to the puzzle of the mammoth cheese goes a long way toward explaining the role of faith in the era of the American Revolution. Americans incessantly debate the place of religion in their nation’s founding. The controversy has resulted from court decisions that have progressively lessened expressions of faith from American public life and schools. Conservative Christians often argue that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that secularization betrays the country’s roots and the intentions of the Founders. Secularists, conversely, argue that most of the leading Founders were Enlightenment-influenced rationalists, and that faith played no formative role in American independence from Britain.

As I show in my book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, the relationship between John Leland and Thomas Jefferson offers a more accurate picture than does the polarized choice of either a wholly devout or wholly secular American Founding. There was real spiritual diversity among Americans in 1776; not as much as one sees today, to be sure, but there was a significant range of beliefs. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find more sharply different faiths than those of Leland and Jefferson. Leland was an evangelical preacher of incredible endurance and commitment, who traveled America’s byways telling thousands of listeners to put their faith in Jesus, the Son of God. Jefferson, by contrast, tried to keep his skepticism private, but in his retirement it became abundantly clear that Jefferson saw Jesus not as the Messiah, but only as a great moral teacher. For Jefferson, Jesus was not divine, and he did not rise from the dead. Jefferson even produced an edition of the Christian Gospels to this effect, with the miracles and resurrection of Christ literally snipped out with scissors.

Given today’s political and religious climate in America, you might assume that Leland and Jefferson would have loathed one another, but herein lies the surprise of the mammoth cheese: Leland and many evangelicals adored Jefferson, in spite of the president’s reputed skepticism. They did so because Jefferson was, along with James Madison, America’s greatest champion of religious liberty, writing Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, adopted in 1786 as a critical precedent to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion and ban on a national established church. Many evangelicals, Baptists in particular, had suffered persecution during the colonial era under the established denominations; nowhere had they suffered more than in Virginia, where even in the early 1770s some Baptist preachers remained in jail for illegal preaching. Jefferson and Madison deplored this sort of persecution, and they agitated for religious liberty, with the support of many evangelicals. The cause of religious freedom made allies of deists and evangelicals.

Did Jefferson envision a secular public sphere, as his liberal admirers might imagine today? Clues to Jefferson’s intentions came the weekend that Leland delivered the mammoth cheese, a weekend, as it turns out, that was one of the most significant in America’s history with regard to church-state relations. For this was when Jefferson sent his famous “wall of separation” letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, an evangelical group of Baptists who, like Leland, admired Jefferson. In his letter, Jefferson reminded them of their common commitment to the principles enshrined in the First Amendment, which built a “wall of separation” between church and state.

The evangelical New Englanders did not interpret “wall of separation” to mean rigid secularism, and indeed, neither did Jefferson. That Sunday, Jefferson attended a church service in the House of Representatives chambers, with John Leland giving the sermon. Whatever “wall of separation” meant to Jefferson, it could include holding church services in government buildings, a practice which Jefferson routinely allowed as president. This does not mean that Jefferson was personally devout, but that Jefferson was generously appreciative of the significance of faith in American public life.

So yes, the leading Founding Fathers were a diverse lot with regard to faith, and some of them, including Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were deists. Franklin actually spoke of himself as a deist, yet he also urged the Constitutional Convention to open its meetings with prayer in 1787. So even the deists were not hostile to the supportive role of faith in America. That openness to religion helped forge the alliance between deists and evangelicals, an alliance that helped secure both the new American nation, and America’s steadfast commitment to religious liberty.

Originally published here.<>новые идеи для малого бизнесареклама товара в интернете

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On October 14, 2013 By In Politics, Pro-Life

When Midwives Become Witches

By Joffre Swait

Midwifery is a noble calling. We’ve had a doula or midwife at four of our five births. The last two births were at home under the care of excellent Upstate South Carolina midwife Elizabeth Randolph. She is strong, competent, thoroughly educated, and very experienced. We have felt very safe in her hands, even during the more difficult birth of our fourth child.

More and more people around the country are turning to midwives, and so more and more women are being trained and apprenticed in this noble, ancient, and wholesome art. Midwives go out as missionaries and charitable workers, saving lives from Mexico to Afghanistan to South Africa, helping to restore and legitimize a calling that statist modern medicine had pushed to the fringes.

But now that the American state finds itself struggling to regulate midwifery away, it is making an unholy pact with witches and the devil. Oh, you thought I was going to say with midwives. No, they’ve made covenant with witches and the devil. Well, let me go back. They’re treating with midwives. Who are witches.

What, you didn’t know that midwives are witches? Historically, many were. Wiccans and open pagans will tell you that the New Testament prohibition against “witchcraft” uses the word pharmakeia, one who uses poisons and drugs. So, they say, it’s not what we call witchcraft, it’s pharmaceutical work. In a way, that’s a load of bollocks, because it casts a modern eye back, pretending that potion-makers didn’t fall under the category of witch then simply because they don’t today. But in a way, they’re quite right. Potion makers is what witches are. Potion-makers, poisoners, and deceivers. Poisoners and deceivers in league with the devil, whether there’s ectoplasm and levitation involved or not.

Much has been made of the connections between midwives and witches in Christendom, and for good reason. There were many many many good midwives throughout medieval Europe. There were also hags, witches, and wild women hiding in groves and back alleys, hunting pennyroyal, hemlock, and mandrake root, making potions to poison babies. These women are still with us today, both the midwives and the witches. And many of these women, the good and the wicked, live in California.

Now witchcraft is becoming law in there.

From October 9th on, there will be in California midwives, and witches calling themselves midwives. Governor Edmund Brown has signed seven bills regarding “women’s health” into law.

The Governor signed the following bills today:

• AB 154 by Assemblymember Toni G. Atkins (D-San Diego) – Permits a nurse practitioner, certified nurse-midwife or physician assistant, who completes specified training and complies with specified standardized procedures or protocols, to perform an abortion by aspiration techniques during the first trimester of pregnancy.

And so California and the United States fall deeper into their compact with Satan. Do not be deceived. All these things are happening around you, and they are not simply “social” or “moral” issues. They are ancient evils. They’re the same evils that give you the creeps when you watch the wrong movie or walk down the wrong dark road. Abortion is the work of devils and murderers, even when it happens in a clinic with a vacuum tube.

indexYes, even under the smell of ammonia and ether.

Many are called to combat this evil directly. Pray to God for their success and the downfall of their enemies. But that is not what all the Church is called to do in the face of these evils. It falls to very few to hunt witches. To most of us falls the better task, the be freemen and goodwives in God’s good kingdom. To build a kingdom where darkness flees the light.

O Christians, and O women, will you not do good for us? Have children. Many children. Become midwives and old wives and wise women and prophetesses. Teach your daughters to be wives and midwives. Give us, O women, the Hebrew women, who saved God’s people from out under the devil’s nose.

(cross-posted at Joffre The Giant)<>раскрутка а в поисковых системах

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On October 7, 2013 By In Politics

Government Shutdown “Unbiblical”

By Joffre Swait

So this is a few days late, but I’ve just gotten around to it. The day after the so-called “government shutdown” began, Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame put out the video above explaining to us all that “what we call ‘correct theology'” meant that the government shutdown was a violation of God’s holy law. Well, he didn’t say that, of course. But he did say it was unbiblical.

“As a Christian, I want to say, shutting down government in unbiblical. Read the thirteenth chapter of the book of Romans. The government’s role is to protect us from evil, to promote the good. We call that ‘the Common Good.’ And Scriptures make clear throughout Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, the book of Kings, that rulers, kings, governments, are responsible for how they treat the poorest and most vulnerable. They’re judged for that by God. Those political extremists…who want to shut down the government are against the poor. They get hostile to the poor because they’re hostile to government.”

There are so many things I want to say in response to this dumbness. Must. Pull self. Together.

Okay. We’ll keep it short.

Let us put to the side any responsibility the government might have to glorify God and submit to King Jesus. Let our eyes slide past any responsibility Christians and the holy Church might have to remind rulers that Jesus is King. Let us focus simply on the commands of the thirteenth chapter of Romans. Be subject. Do not resist. Do good, not evil. Pay taxes. Revenue to whom it is due, respect also, and also honor.

Let us now imagine a political scene in which Christians followed those commands (which, by the way, they do in these here United States). Let us further imagine a scene in which the Church does not insist that our rulers remember God (which, except for the occasional threatened excommunication of Nancy Pelosi, is what it does in these here United States).

In a world like that governments still go bankrupt. Governments still default. Governments can still shut down.

Too many American Christians take Romans 13 to mean “help the government as much as is possible”. There is no such command.

Even without Biblical categories for resistance to government, which exist, why on earth do we suppose we should be helping our governments and rulers in their insanities? If the government votes to shut itself down, let it. What has Washington to do with Jerusalem?

If the government shuts down, you say, maybe evils like abortion and government schools will be defunded. I can get behind that. But what, Joffre, of the poor and oppressed?! Remember what Jim Wallis said about hating the poor! Dear God, what of the poor?!

Exactly. Time for the church to do its job.<>копирайтинг примеры текстовконтекстная реклама в интернете стоимость

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On September 21, 2013 By In Politics

What we might learn about education and opportunity from Joe Wright

JosephWright 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.comпрайсы на seo раскрутку

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On September 19, 2013 By In Politics

A Minimum Wage Thought Experiment

Minimum WageThere are so many things wrong with this article it is hard to know where to begin.  But I will focus on his assertion that if we raise the minimum wage we will have less poor people living on food stamps. He says a lot of things, but this is his main idea. Let’s run a thought experiment since Mr. Creamer has no imagination.  I am going to focus on small business owners. This is the group most likely to be affected by minimum wage and is ignored by Mr. Creamer.

You are the owner of a small company that employs 5 people at $7.25 per hour, the minimum wage.  Each of your employees is paid $290 per week before taxes, thus the wages you pay out weekly are $1450.  Now imagine the minimum wage is raised to $9.00 per hour. This raises your employee’s wages to $360 per week before taxes and the wages you pay out weekly to $1800. The difference here is $350 per week, $1400 per month or $16,800 more per year to pay employees. Where is this money going to come from?  What does Mr. Creamer think the owner is going to do? He doesn’t tell us.  Here are some options:

The owner could cut his own salary and pay the employees more.  In a small business this is probably not feasible. More than likely the small business owner is living on a very tight budget. Sure he has more than the minimum wage worker, but he is also the one putting up the capital and investing the most time into the business. He has the skills and expertise to run his company. Cutting his own salary is not going to happen nor should it happen.

He could fire one minimum wage employee to compensate for the lost revenue. I am not sure how this helps make less poor people.  Instead of five poorly paid people you have four a little better paid and one not paid at all. At best, it seems like a wash.

He could raise the price of his product or service, which would either hurt his business because he sells less or it hurts the buyer because it now requires more money to pay for the same product. It is hard to see how a more expensive product helps the economy, the employees, or the small business owner.

He could pay his employees less than the minimum wage under the table, thus breaking the law and helping his employees break the law.

$16,800 more in forced expenditures per year would kill many small business owners putting more people below the poverty line.  Mr. Creamer is all worried about trying to get the millionaires to pay more. But despite the way he sounds, he has no concern the average wage earner or the average small business owner.  Under his plan these two groups would be destroyed.

When you think about it, which Mr. Creamer clearly did not do, you realize how facile and naïve his suggestion is.  Maybe he should pick up Henry Hazlitt’s book Economics in One Lesson. It might help him think through the big picture instead of just trying to find ways to take money from the rich.<>game rpg online mobileinternet pr

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On September 14, 2013 By In Politics

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

lewis cohenOne 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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

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On September 12, 2013 By In Politics

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

bob menendezPeter 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 gameподдержка web ов ucoz

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On September 9, 2013 By In Politics

Against “Alienationism”

Guest Post by Mark Nenadov

The Isolationists Are Coming!

Western politics has never had an irony deficiency. One recurring irony has been the label “isolationist”, usually applied in attempts to discredit grassroots opposition to war. I would say that my position is more accurately labeled “non-interventionist”.

It’s hard to believe that a politician who supports protectionism, trade embargoes, strict immigration laws, border fences, and unilateral military strikes, can with an absolutely straight face, turn and chuck the “isolationist” grenade at his non-interventionist opponent.

You can take a whole laundry list of things to isolate your country, and that’s fine! But argue against wildly unpopular and non-defensive bombing campaigns? Isolationist!

The Alternative To Non-interventionism is “Alienationism”

I’ll be reasonable. You can call me an “isolationist” under one condition. All I want is permission to bring “alienationist” into common usage.  An “alienationist” avoids being an “isolationist” through actions characterized by a swagger and a lack of caution. They bomb first and ask questions later. This approach, I might add, alienates its populace from peace, freedom, prosperity, virtue, and usually the rest of the world.

An “alienationist” foreign policy is intended to be non-insular, but the unintended consequence is actually isolation and alienation. As Frédéric Bastiat said, there are seen things and there are unseen things. The unseen things are rarely accounted for in strategic calculations. In foreign affairs, however, the unseen becomes seen pretty quickly!

Reviewing recent history, it isn’t hard to see how “interventionism” and “alienationism” are, if not synonyms, at least twins. Intervene often and everywhere, and you will create more enemies than a mosquito in a den of dragonflies. And dragonflies are fierce predators, by the way.

 

Recognizing The Alienationist In The Wild

Here are some helpful memes and traits to help you identify Alienationists.

1. The Giant Slayer. The Alienationist is, if nothing else, a Giant Slayer. Nothing like David. Well, sort of. In 1971, before joining the War Party, John Kerry astutely observed that military intervention becomes “a sort of messianic enterprise”. Contrary to the advice of John Quincy Adams, Alienationists go about “in search of monsters to destroy”. Whether it is Assad or Saddam, there must be some bad guy, often a former ally.

2. The Ticking Bomb Of Destruction. Alienationists usually require something more than mere death to make the masses gasp and reach for their gas masks. People and elected representatives will not became pliable by such “trifles”as reports of conventional warfare. Fearful weapons of mass destruction are required, actual or rumored, preferably rumored. If real, they probably came from the Alienationist! Sort of like the ones that the Reagan administration helped Saddam acquire and use in the 1980’s. Or the nuclear weapons that Iran will have produced by 2004 or 2005 or 2006 or 2007……or 2015?

3. Depersonalization: Pronoun Squeamishness And Euphemisms. When the Alienationist talks about his legislative or administrative accomplishments, he liberally uses the personal pronoun.  However, when the war effort is invoked, he often subtly transforms to collectivism (“our nation”, “our military”, and “our troops”).  Also, the consequences and raw “feelings” of war are masqueraded by devices, including technology (drones) and verbal technology, namely euphemisms (discrete, surgical, defense, deterrent).

4. The International Community Of One Or A Few. Often, illusions of universal consensus are manufactured. And, of course, it must be the world that drew the red line and it must be the international community that is outraged, as we’ve seen in Obama’s Syria rhetoric. The question of the day becomes: If 189 countries have signed the Chemical Weapons Treaty, why do so few support this military action? And why has a close ally, Israel, signed but not actually ratified this treaty against chemical weapons? Ah, details, details!

5. A Friend Of The Devil Is The Friend Of Ours. As long as you are slaying Giants, you can enlist evil Giants on your side. Even Efraín Ríos Montt, the man Reagan once said had “great personal integrity”. Tell that to Guatemala now!

This would be what one might call the “He may be an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” factor.  I suppose you can just call the rascals “freedom fighters” or “revolutionaries”, but hopefully they don’t cross you and become “terrorists”! We see this in the support of questionable rebels against Assad in Syria. And history provides us many other examples, such as FDR’s coverup of Stalin’s crimes, Cold War era support of Bin Laden against the Soviets, and supporting Saddam against Iran.

6. Short And Selective Memory. He who repeats history is doomed to not remember it. Or something like that! There is a chronic inability to see patterns in history and learn from them. In the Alienationist’s book, history starts at a convenient location and, of course, forgets injustices perpetrated by the home team. For instance, when many Americans think of Iran, they start with the hostage situation in the late 1970’s, completely ignoring the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953. And the assistance provided to Saddam in using chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980’s is conveniently forgotten.

Conclusions

We would err if we saw the U.S. as the only “alienationist” country. It’s just a contemporary example. Don’t forget France’s recent bombing campaign in Mali. The French have an extensive history of meddling in Africa and the Middle East.

If our nations trample the Golden Rule and fight without just cause, we should expect to go the way of poverty, culturally, economically, and morally. As A.A. Hodge said, war is “an incalculable evil, because of the lives it destroys, the misery it occasions, and the moral degradation it infallibly works on all sides”.

We’d do well to expose alienationism. A healthy dose of non-interventionist sentiment will be necessary if we are to foster a just, peaceful, and prosperous society.  Bearing the reproach of the “isolationist” label is a small price to pay for this good end. So, sit down with Mr. Twain (isolationist cigar optional) and say to yourself “let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way”.

For more publications and updates on Mr. Nenadov, see Goodreads, Blog, Twitter, Linkedin, Website
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On August 26, 2013 By In Politics

Self-Righteousness & Exploitation: The Welfare State

whited sepulchresA question I have been thinking upon: Should we take Jesus description about the one who does his good works to impress others at face value?

Here is the passage:

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6:1-4, ESV)

By itself this is a straightforward instruction. However, the people Jesus singled out for us to be sure we do not emulate did more than trumpet their help for the poor. They also exploited the poor and looted from them to add to their own wealth.

And in the hearing of all the people he said to his disciples, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” (Luke 20:45-47, ESV/ also Mark 12.40; some MS have it also in Matthew 23).

So the hypocrisy of trumpeting how you help people is much more obvious once your realize that they are victimizing this same group of people, becoming wealthy off them, and then offering them a pittance, and expecting to be thanked and praised for their generosity.

The application to the US welfare state with its political interventions in the economy is obvious: What Jesus attributes to scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, is official US policy. The US government cripples the impoverished and then offers them dependence on measly aid, most of which is used to give a cadre of social welfare bureaucrats a job. (No, I’m not saying it is sinful to apply for a job in a social welfare agency; that kind of legalism would lead to the same kind of traps Jesus diagnosed in Pharisaism.) One example among many can be found by looking at how regressive the Social Security system is. College graduates typically are getting a great deal of largess from the working class, who typically begin working much earlier and dying sooner than college graduates.

Or one can consider the activists leading the campaign for minimum wage law are typically going to be the relatively educated who won’t be forced into unemployment by the change. And as unemployment increases, the same group will lobby for, or boast in, other forms of government aid.

The US economy systematically hurts those in or closer to poverty and officially boasts in the anemic “help” provided by those who benefit from this damage.

Of course, just like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy with the talking cow that presented its body parts for the menu, and then went into the kitchen to slaughter itself, exploiters find ways to train the exploited to cooperate with them and be grateful to them for the privilege. It seems to me we something close to this in Mark’s Gospel:

And in his teaching he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” (Mark 12.38-13.2, ESV)

So notice the sequence:

  1. Scribes condemned for devouring widows’ houses
  2. Widow said to give more than others because she gave all she had to Temple.
  3. Temple condemned to destruction.

While Jesus believed the widow was righteous, the way the text reads does not indicate that he was happy with widows being further impoverished for the sake of the Temple. At face value she devoured what was left of her own house to give to God’s house in the presence of others who got credit for more but actually gave less.

My basic take away from this is that the propaganda of the Religious Left, supporting the welfare state and other economic interventions, is all condemned by Jesus as rank hypocrisy. It is not appealing to generosity or asking for charity. It is offering spiritual pride while it defends and lobbies for the expansion of a system that exploits the victims it boasts in helping.

The fact that such “socially conscious Christians” accuse those who uphold property rights, peace, and voluntarism of “selfishness” is just another layer of hypocrisy shoveled on top of a pile of it.<>racer game daownloadметоды интернет рекламы

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