I've seen a number of back and forths lately (again, as in 2016) as to why Christians ought to stand the election out, or even vote for Biden. If you are interested in deep discussion (as I often am), I'd encourage you to read:
Both articles are good, Piper defends being lukewarm, something I see as eternally perilous. Siimple minds like mine need it simpler:
As Christians, we are called to decrease while Christ increases. We are "in the world but not of the world". We are free to vote for imperfect candidates, fight in wars, serve in corrupt government, and much else. We are both "saints and sinners". Matt 5:13 "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." Be shrewd.
Political candidates are always imperfect. Trump's policies are more Christian supporting - Pro-Life, Pro-Family, not persecuting Christian values ( two genders, marriage being man and woman, etc) . We also can't just be "ambivalent" -- Rev 3:16 "So, because you are lukewarm--neither hot nor cold--I am about to spit you out of my mouth." Choose life boldly.
We can't just "stand this one out: -- Matt 5:13 "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot." We have to SHINE like Matt 5:16 "In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." We can't hide in our basements. Be salty and shine!
Much of what I see posted by "Never Trumpers", some claiming to be Christians, is blatant Virtue Signaling. As Christians, we claim no virtue, we confess we are filthy sinners. Virtue Signaling is pride, and typically it us coupled with proud judgement of Trump and Christians that support him. We can and should prayerfully "discern". Judgment is the Lords.
If your fervent prayer for the best vote leads you to Biden, so be it, judgement is not mine. Peace be with you.
I think the answer is shorter, but a good read, read it. #5 is especially true:
Leftism is their religion, and it is a harsh one. Secular Humanism / leftism is the official religion of the US Government, Universities, etc ... It is the equivalent of pre-reformation Catholicism in Europe. Heretics are at least banished, if not burned at the stake. "Justice is ours" declareth the woke!"
Without "Love They Neighbor" and "Do unto others" being ingrained in your DNA, human nature is that hate is a virtue.
Always sad when I can't find a good review so I can be really lazy -- if you follow the link back to Goodreads, there may be some there now.
National Socialism (Naziism) gave Fascism bad name, as the intellectual elite certainly didn't want to besmirch "socialism" because they wanted LOTS more of it. It turns out that what they actually wanted was and is Fascism, but post Hitler, the marketing was a bit off. A good common man shorthand description of Fascism being "Crony Capitalism" the currently operant but disguised ideology of Western civilization. Big (and ever bigger and more intrusive) Deep State Bureaucratic governments, in league with ever more powerful and government cozy business like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Alibaba (Chinese Amazon, but bigger) ... and the list could go on. Fascism? We're there!
This cabal of power is heavily controlled by the Davos Elite -- guys like Bezos, Gates, Buffett, etc, who collectively own the media (this post has been "fact checked" and may contain information not directly beneficial to Democrats and the Davos Elite, but I repeat myself). Such messages are almost enough to allow sentient people to realize we are not in "Kansas" or America anymore -- however if you do become enlightened, you may get "cancelled".
A nice short definition of Fascism from the book:
Fascism is a worldview. The elements of this worldview derive from romanticism, Darwinism, and existentialism. They are part of the mainstream of Western thought. As such, they were basic assumptions of the intellectual elite of the 1930s. They remain so today.
So what are these Fascists working to accomplish?
This new worldview defined itself against the existing spiritual framework—that of the Jews and their Bible. In rejecting not only the Bible but objective meaning, transcendent morality, and the authority of language itself, the fascists arrayed themselves against the Word.
So why do these Fascists hate Jews and Christians so much?
According to fascist theorists, the Jewish influence—that is, the idea of a transcendent religion and a transcendent moral law—was responsible for the ills of Western culture. The target of the fascists was not only the Jews but the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The book gives a lot more worthy and convincing detail, however the simple truth is that Western civilization is well down the path to being Fascist already, with a lot of pressure to rapidly move deeper into centralized, bureaucratic, godless, religion suppressing, anti family culture. Readers of this blog being well aware of this for a long time. Sadly, very few in the modern world have any clue since education is mostly Fascist indoctrination, and understanding of history / reality is punished. (it isn't "woke", so it has to be "cancelled")
I could quote forever, however I'll leave it at this:
A set of ideas is emerging from today’s academic world that is startlingly reminiscent of what the fascist theorists were saying in the 1930s: individual identity is a myth, insofar as identity is really determined by culture and ethnicity; laws and social conventions are only masks for power; human-centered values are part of a corrupt Western civilization; the transcendent meaning of reason, objectivity, and language is an illusion.
Probably of most interest as an anchor for finding a bit about excellent works by both Chesterton and Lewis, however useful in itself.
My favorite find from the book ... something I think I've heard before, but did not adequately understand:
In Augustine's sermon "On The Pure Love of God", he says:
"Imagine God appeared to you and said he would make a deal with you. That he would give you everything you wished, everything your heart desired except one thing. You could have anything you imagine, nothing would be impossible for you, nothing would be sinful or forbidden But you shall never see my face." Why Augustine askes, did a terrible chill creep over your heart, unless there is a love for God, a desire for God? In fact, if you wouldn't accept that deal, you really do love God above all things. You just gave up the whole world ... and more, for God."
A bit later: "Once again, love has instructed understanding. The fear of the Lord has been the beginning of wisdom".
To begin to understand the importance of the "Face of God", reading the "Face of God" by Scruton would be time well spent. Scruton covers the "subject / object" issue very well. Why is the experience of the face of another human so special? Through that "little i", our soul detects a glimpse of the ultimate "I AM".
Modern man's desire to "be God", through science, through technology, through "progress" to some ill-defined utopia (more likely to be Hell if he arrives) ... ANYTHING BUT GOD! Because in his heart he knows he loves God and his very nature desperately wants to year "well done, my good and faithful servant". However, like a 2 year old, he wants to "DO IT MYSELF"!
Even though his endless searching is increasingly obviously only getting him depression, addiction, suicide, broken families, hatred, tribalism, etc ... and at his life's end, the terrible separation from the only source of life and joy.
A worthy book, but I would recommend reading especially Lewis first, and also some key Chesterton. I'm fairly well versed on Lewis, this book convinced me I'm woefully ignorant on Chesterton,
This post contains links to a couple of books on the Russia Hoax. There is no question the Russia Hoax makes Watergate look like a grade school prank. The Democratic Party and the Media colluded to try to prevent Trump being elected, and then continued their collusion to attempt to overturn his election, and THEN, most amazing of all, THEY GOT CAUCHT and because of ??? changing the subject? continued media DNC collusion? the American people being so disinterested?????
It's like the magician making the rabbit disappear, only for many (a majority?) of Americans, the two years of hoax never happened. They not only don't admit a trick was pulled on them, they don't admit they were present for the show!
Sadly, as we have now all too requently seen, Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc are also part of the magic show. "We have decided to not allow any more posts exposing the Russia Hoax!
This is a documentary based on one of the best books written about the Russia hoax. It does a good job telling the story and giving it dramatic shape. It may be the closest we come to the administration of justice in the biggest scandal in American political history by far. Unlike just about everything that comes out of Hollywood, including documentaries, the story it tells is true.
When I sought to post my review, it was rejected with the following notice: “We apologize but Amazon is not accepting reviews on this product from this account.” I have written Amazon to ask why.
Much as in Quantum Mechanics giving the Newtonian view of the universe a lot of shivers, so mapping the genome and proteins folding are causing significant changes in the Darwin model. This from David Gelernter, one of the demigods of computer science in "Giving Up Darwin":
Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 1040 bacteria—yielding around 1040 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 1077 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 1040x(1/1077)—1040 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 1077—which equals 1 in 1037. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses.
Steven Jay Gould, once one of the preeminent Darwinists was brave enough to look at the developing science of genetics and indicate major change was needed.
His [Gould's] challenge reflects a lively turbulence in the field, and more turbulence is sure to come over the next few years as discoveries from molecular biology flood into evolutionary theory. Gould himself is molding the pieces of the debate into a unified, hierarchical view of evolution that he believes will give scientists a framework for talking about the interplay of great events at the levels of species, populations, individuals and genes.
Isaac Newton created a model of a clockwork universe. In those days there was no reason to look for "why" -- God did it, and his reasons are beyond our comprehension. Biologists envied Physics with it's "perfectly" predictive equations, and no need for the "why" of intention. Darwin was no atheist -- his model was a "how" model like Newton's. "Why" was a question above his pay grade.
Einstein introduced some strange "details" to the Newtonian model that Heisenberg, Bohr, Feynman and others expanded on. Physics, at least at the very small, "rolled the dice" -- it wasn't a "clock", at least not all the way down.
What Gould, Turner, Meyer and others have discovered is that in biology, there strongly seems to be "teleology" (intention / design) all the way down to homeostasis (maintaining a certain temperature, salinity, level of potassium, etc). But WHY? Perhaps we really are "special". The biologists covetousness of physics was really a very grave sin.
Much like the US debt, the definition of "lots" for time and odds has gone up dramatically. In the 1980's Sagan's "billions and billions" seemed like "a lot", now in the age of "trillions and trillions" and even MUCH larger numbers like "10 to the 80th" atoms in the universe, and "10 to the 500th" against us even being here, some wisps of humility have started to creep (slowly) into the "science". Real science was NEVER about "why" it was always about WHAT down to the gnats eyelash.
"Why did the chicken cross the road"? "Because his brain told his leg muscles to move in a pattern adaptively chosen for crossing the road". Or maybe he "wanted to"? A little "Voyage Home" may be instructive.
There is a tendency for many of us with technical / scientific leanings to be somewhat "emotion blind". Lots of exceptions -- Gelernter and Turner for example, but there is a definite bias for in science / tech for determinism, materialism, atheism -- for many in these fields, "something more" is very uncomfortable. It may not even be possible to develop "knowledge" (like an algorithm / equation) for it. Wisdom? That really doesn't compute! The sad truth is that science is proudly psychopathic.
On page 291 we see; "the voice that beckons Richard Dawkins to fulfillment is his own - it is not nature's. The edifice of of modern Darwinism, as magnificent an edifice as the most beautiful cathedral, an edifice as painstakingly built by generations devoted and skilled artisans, is hollow at its core. It is an echo chamber."
A bit later ... "the science of life has become disenchanted with itself". Which brings to mind a quite lengthy, but important book on that topic. "The Secular Age", the age we inhabit. Sometimes called the "Age of Anxiety", since anxiety, meaninglessness, suicide, and other pathologies are at record levels. The ancient world was "enchanted" with God, spirits, ghosts, telos. witches, demons, magic, etc" ... our world is "disenchanted" with numbers, formulas, statistics, random chance, and meaninglessness.
So Darwinian materialism has turned out to not be "adaptive" for human thriving as time has moved on. If you are convinced that you CAN'T believe in intentionality, why not? If you assume you are a random accident, why can't a random accident have a random thought and courage to look at intentionality?
Page 253; "Homeostasis demands certain things however -- among them some form of cognition and intentionality. This leads to the very strange thought that the origin of life is tantamount to the origin of cognition and intentionality. Even stranger cognition and intentionality have to have preceded the origin of cellular life."
Note, this in no way requires the Hebrew/Christian God, it just indicates that there is SOME intelligence required. It could be space aliens, other dimensional creatures, demons, furies -- any number of things that modern man finds more acceptable than God. For the creation of Western civilization, it is very clear that the Hebrew/Christian worldview was far more adaptive than other models. It worked to vastly improve the material quality of life, however life became so materially comfortable, the civilization lost God and meaning.
Hey, Trump has negotiated a peace deal in the Mideast! Who knew? The link at the top points to an old blog entry about the Obama "deal" with Iran, which the press fawned over. It was indeed a "deal" ..; for Iran ... who can forget pallets of cash!
I'm so old I remember the REALLY heavy duty breathless joy in the media over the Jimmuh Carter "Camp David Accords" which was much noise signifying nothing. Carter's "Desert Classic" ... 8 soldiers killed, bunch of expensive equipment abandoned/destroyed, "nothing" accomplished except for a devastating loss of respect for US. "Priceless" for the hate the US crowd at home and abroad.
The media did actually "report it" to maintain the fiction that they are not TOTALY biased!
It's just a worthy video to help understand why it is very costly to do things like lockdowns. How costly? We have very little idea -- almost certainly "Trillions", and LOTS of lives through delayed treatments suicide, depression leading to death, addiction, etc
It is also VERY hard to determine cause of death in many cases. According to CDC, in the deaths they have attributed to Covid, in only 6% of the cases, was Covid the only factor. So the "real number is somewhere between 12Kish+ and 200K+. Thus, "reasonable people" are likely to have wide disagreement on the risk.
A book that is sadly very necessary for our time, especially for Christians. We are being coddled into a soft totalitarianism where compliance is seen as a virtue to be signalled, and the "memory hole" is openly exposed.
As events would have it, we don’t need an American Caesar or the theatrics of a Rubicon crossing. Our political institutions and public consciousness can be, and are being, transformed from the inside out, without any melodrama. The result, says Dreher, will be a comfortable servitude, a “soft totalitarianism,” run by a technocratic, progressive elite, and supported by Big Data and a compliant capitalism. Everyday life will be far closer to the sunny brain-scrub of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the shabbiness and goon-squad brutality of Orwell’s Airstrip One.
When you worship only comfort, distraction, avoiding suffering, and getting more "clicks" on social media, "truth" is extremely fungible.
The chapters in Part One on “Progressivism as Religion” and “Capitalism, Woke and Watchful,” are especially strong. Anyone imagining big business as instinctively conservative need only remember the speed with which corporations jumped on the same-sex marriage and “gay rights” bandwagon. The lavish business support showered on the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is also revealing, since — beneath its calls for racial justice — the BLM agenda is toxic to what most Americans believe. The lesson here is simple: Absent a grounding in broadly biblical principles, corporations follow profits, wherever they lead. In Part Two, the chapters on cultural memory, families as resistance cells, and “the gift of suffering,” make for essential reading.
The book makes a good case that "soft totalitarianism" is more dangerous than the Gestapo/KGB versions because it is harder to spot -- and in the everything digital world, much easier to enforce!
Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit.
Putting on a mask to walk into a restaurant, then taking it off as you sit down shows that "common sense" is dead. Decrying any maskless gatherings of "normal people" (and even making them illegal, and then celebrating maskless riots and massive funerals for George Floyd and John Lewis makes it plain that POWER is what "makes sense" today -- and the "common sense" population needs to get their minds right!
Jonah has largely let his hatred of Trump corrupt his reason, but apparently there is still a spark of sentience his hatred corrupted mind. How he has fallen from when he once allegedly wrote the extremely cogent "Liberal Fascism"! The darkness of hatred is indeed powerful.
A ray of hope beckons in this column. Apparently the erasing of history has awakened a weak ember of his once reasonable rather than hate filled thought!
Yesterday morning, Amy Coney Barrett used the term in its colloquial sense. She said she had “never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.” As Noah Rothman ably lays out, this set off alarms among the cadres of progressive activists and thought police, seeking to paint it as a “dog whistle.” A writer at Slate insisted this cannot be “dismissed as a poor choice of words.” Barrett had let the mask slip, showing her desire to “condemn gay Americans to second-class citizenship once again.” This, despite the fact that the plain meaning of her statement was a full-throated rejection of said desire.
The calumny of being able to label things "Racist Dog Whistles" is a great example of current left wing power - it's a "dog whistle" if the left says it is!
So, the left now displays it's power in real time! If history needs to be rewritten, they can get it done in the nearly "present" -- in the age of total digital, "reality" might be on a "2 min delay" to make certain nobody sees "the man behind the curtain"!
By the end of the day, Webster’s online dictionary modified its definition of “sexual preference” to tell people it was suddenly offensive. Senators who would not have blinked at the term when they read it in the morning paper were, by the end of the day, deeply troubled by Barrett’s bigoted use of a term she employed to renounce precisely the bigotry they claimed was in her heart.
