Of course words are always changing and the ideas behind them shift.  As C. S Lewis pointed out words generally lose their unique descriptive power and degenerate into synonyms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  And Owen Barfield points out that the refreshment of language takes place through poetic connections.  But today we have militant abuse of language to gain power.

What now? Favored races?!

There is no ‘reverse racism’. Now for the first time we have racism, before we had stereotyping an Darwin.

Before, most black people were a certain way and so the whole race was viewed that way. In his attempt to put a gloss on atheism Darwin suggested that things turn into other things, and that the previous things were inferior. Hitler and Planned Parenthood thought they would help this process along.

Phase two was the overreaction to Hitler, which was multiculturalism, but we kept the Planned Parenthood part. And people who opposed this were also called racist, but they too were just generalizing.

But this new thing, of hating people for being white, is racism. It is not generalization gone wrong. It is something else. It is another form of Christian heresy. The problem in the world is not sin, it’s whitey. And the solution is not Jesus dying, it’s whitey dying.

What we really need is the Gospel. We are all one race. And we can all find success under King Jesus. Black people didn’t need to evolve as Darwin thought, they just need the Gospel. And they don’t need to be killed in abortions, they need the Gospel. And if you hate white people you need the Gospel. And the white people forgetting all this need the Gospel.

New Speaker Mike Johnson seems to have offended everyone by suggesting he get’s his worldview from the Bible, the horror. Which is a good sign.  Steven Colbert, supposedly some sort of Christian, mocked him as though applying your faith to your job as a political leader violated the ‘wall of separation’, between church and state.  The strange fact is that our culture holds the tradition of this idea though it’s wrong and based in no fact.  In a sense the tradition is more powerful than the written law.

The phrase isn’t actually in the Constitution, it comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in response to a letter from the Danbury Baptists.  They were concerned that their state didn’t have a codified protection for religious freedom.  As was the case with 11 of the original 13 colonies, they had in effect state churches.  Interesting that Connecticut didn’t really even have a constitution as this point 1802.  What they had was a colonial charter dating back to 1638, which contains a lot of phrases which would make most Christians blush and Colbert would soil himself.  

FORASMUCH as it hath pleased the Almighty God by the wise disposition of his divine providence so to Order and dispose of things that we the Inhabitants and Residents of Windsor, Harteford and Wethersfield are now cohabiting and dwelling in and upon the River of Connecticut and the Lands thereunto adjoining; And well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affrays of the people at all seasons as occasion shall require; do therefore associate and connive ourselves to be as one Public State or Commonwealth; and do, for ourselves and our Successors and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter, enter into Combination and Confederation to gather, to maintain and pressure the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess, as also the discipline of the Churches, which according to the truth of the said gospel is now practised amongst vs; As also in our Civil Affairs to be guided and governed according to such Laws, Rules, Orders and decrees as shall be made, ordered & decreed, as followeth:

In addition the governor had to be a member of a church and had to swear an oath in the name of Jesus Christ.  Connecticut also passed a number of laws which always sited Old Testament verses.  Including the death penalty for sodomy.  This was their basis of law until 1818, when the adopted a constitution of the type we are more familiar with.  That’s 180 years of theocracy.

But back to Jefferson’s response to the baptists.  Jefferson points out that the U.S. Constitution forbids government from establishing a religion or interfering with someone’s practice of religion, and this is the wall.  It does not prevent Christians from applying their faith to their duty as elected representatives.  As if this phrase from the Bill of Rights was meant to keep religiously things out of the government.  If this were the case it would be a violation of the Constitution.

Let’s look at another phrase from Jefferson’s letter: “that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions”.  

So if you think government is supposed to prevent people who believe certain things from being in government for their opinions you are going against Jefferson’s whole point.  But this is exactly what Colbert is demanding and what your governments down to the local level enforce every day.  We can’t have religion in government.  Well at least not orthodox Christianity.  Their secular religion is fine, Mohammedan religion is fine, other paganisms are fine.  Which is the point, by placing tests on opinion they are setting up a religion.  A secular religion, which most Christians are stupid enough to think is not a religion and is somehow divinely and Constitutionally established.

Let’s look at how Jefferson views religion and  how he bookends the letter:  “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship . . . convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

Religious duty is a natural right and has no conflict with social duty.  Social duty, the civil government’s task, as the Apostle Paul points out is to punish evil, not to adjudicate religious doctrine.  The doctrine goes back to Scripture and comes through the tradition of Calvin.  The Baptists echoed this tradition in their letter “that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors”

Which is to say a lot of things Jefferson doesn’t have to say that were taken for granted.  We an English speaking people who basically live in 18th century Christendom and are tired of all the wars of religion in Europe for the last 200 years, establish a government that has minimal power because apparently we need government so the British don’t wipe us out, go and practice whatever denomination of Christianity you want, work hard and don’t do evil.

But we love evil now and mock anyone who dares tell us other wise as unloving.  Or just one of those crazy Christians who actually belives the Bible.  At least Jefferson believed in the moral teachings of Jesus.  These people are apostate in every way and we will see them in hell.  A phrase which applied incorrectly woudl have got me flogged or fined in a more Christian Connecticut. 

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/danburybaptists

https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/american-historical-documents/the-fundamental-orders-of-connecticut/

The Long, Ambiguous History of Connecticut’s Blue Laws

The term AI seems to be all over the place, the richest men talk about it, the ‘smartest’ men talk about it like  everything now using half truths to disguise the reality.  And it pervades entertainment including the latest Mission Impossible movie.  Even though I already saw this movie a decade ago when it was called Age of Ultron.  But the only real wisdom I have seen on the subject comes from Gilbert magazine.  An organization which celebrates the great G. K. Chesterton.  

Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, The Entity. Dead stupid.

Dr. Peter J. Floriani an aging computer scientist and Chesterton super-fan, points out some of the many problems with the currently developing idea of AI.  Basically machines, even complex computing machines don’t have a mind.  And in an attempt to improvise mind by using ‘random’ numbers they do little more than a Ouija-board or a deck of tarot cards.  But that gets one thinking, if they want a machine to have a mind, where do you look?  You can use the combined information humanity has created, i.e. the internet.  But that’s not a mind, it doesn’t create it’s just elaborate stealing like what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing the last couple decades.  It does not adapt, or respond, an certainly is no source of creative energy or the surprise which is innovation as George Gilder points out.  Knowing what has been is no real predictor of the future.  I suppose you could seed the machine with some sort of animal.  But we all know this is no mind, but an elaborate organic mechanical system of it’s own.  Which leads to the central evil of C. S. Lewis’ planetary books.  

C. S. Lewis and J. R.R. Tolkien made a deal one time that Tolkien would write a time novel and lewis would write a planetary novel.  The result was his three books about Ransom, the Philologist.  And the culminate with that other source of mind, the fabled, ghost in the machine, the demonic. We Christians are not materialists, because we are right and the world is not just material.  Lewis rightly predicts that the worship of the machine will inevitably lead to inviting the demonic to inhabit the machine.  And we are back to all the old paganisms.  Which is why his grasp of the underlying philosophical things really happening in the world, served him so well in his day as well as being prophetic for our day.  He had a real mind, using the wisdom of the past, the examples of history and the truth of God’s word to create something, new different, real, true and beautiful.

Machines are just tools used for an end. And we know there are two sides in this battle Matthew 12:30.  If you are not using these tools for good you are using them for evil.  And generally not admitting the source of agency is a sure sign you are concealing evil agency.  The truth of God is not afraid of being in the light, it does not have to pretend it’s source is spontaneous or mysterious or magical.  Because that’s what good is, it’s appreciating, rightly, what God has done for us.  He is the source of all good gifts.  He bestows on us all sorts of blessing including the blessings of mind and the ability to create or sub-create as Tolkien says.  As Lewis and Tolkien did with their tools, the pen.  Men who shunned even the typewriter and would have been appalled by the machines we have today, as I type on my laptop, could see what was really going on in our day better than we can.  That is intelligence that no artifice can produce.  Artifice, the work of men’s hands, the idol.

George Gilder is so right that we need to stop thinking of economics in purely materialistic terms.  An economic system is not resources, it is human ingenuity, creativity applied to resources.  This is the lie of the ‘indigenous peoples’ that we stole their resources.  Or even the Mexicans we ‘stole’ California from,  and so they missed out on Mexican Hollywood as if they would have made the same use of that piece of desert real-estate as the Christians who founded it.   We know what happens to the person not making use or adding information to their resources.  What they have is taken and given to the one who has more.  Mark 4, Matthew 15 and some other places.  

It’s the twisted thinking behind that family who thinks they have a right to all the pharmaceutical intellectual property generated by developed cell lines from some lady who died of cancer years ago.  As if any of them would have achieved the same scientific heights if they had been in possession of the tumor.  The value wasn’t in the tumor, it was in the intelligence they applied to it.  It’s also the basis for many flawed story lines in time travel movies.  Just because you use Google , doesn’t mean you can go back in time and recreate the successful company and become rich.  Just because you work in the mail room of a company doesn’t mean you can run the company and it’s not fair that the CEO makes more money than you.  Your human carcass and the CEO’s may be equal before the law and equally deserving of the same human dignity.  But that does not mean you are capable of achieving the same things.

It’s why intellectual property is protected in the Constitution, because they rightly saw that encouraging innovation is the key to succes and the breath of Christendom.  “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks/

There seems to be a lot of confusion around the law in Uganda and the application of laws in general.  I recently heard Eric Metaxas mention that Uganda had a death penalty for sodomy which was wrong.  This is really amazing.   Their death pentalty is for agrivated sodomy, basically rape or transmission of STDs.  The death penalty for rape is controversial?  What is wrong with you? Should we give them the death penalty for having a death penalty?  

Whereas Metaxas doesn’t go as far as David French in the worship of pluralism, he is still confused.  Why is it ok and right that we don’t punish things which are clearly evil and have been considered criminal by most people groups for most of time?  It’s pluralism to allow pride parades, but it’s not pluralism to let a small African country pass whatever laws they want?  As Kamala Harris says it’s a bigger country (Russia/USA) attacking a smaller country (Ukraine/Uganda), so basically that’s wrong.  In this case it is wrong, but not because of the size.  

Criminializing sodomy is not a human rights abuse.  Sodomy is a human abuse every time it happens.  It is destructive physically and in every other way.  And a culture which supports this is not healthy.  No healthy sane countries legalize sodomy.  Where is the proof that countries that legalize it become more prosperous?  It is the most blatant form of unfruitfulness.  Looking for butt babies, seriously?  Is this that hard to understand?

Metaxas rightly points out that the basis for rejecting racism can only be found in the Christian God.  By whose authority do secularist reject racism? What is their standard? Of course they don’t have one, other than the peer pressure of other evil people around them.  But is this point by Metaxas just a cheap ploy to play to the sentiments of our people who are currently obsessed with race?  Because this same standard applies to all the other laws too, including sodomy laws.  Imposing things on people is what laws do.  If you are not using God’s laws as a basis for your laws, whose standard are you using?  There is only one other option, that is evil.  Just because groups of people agree on it doesn’t make that standard more valid.  This is God’s world, Christ is reigning on hight at the right hand fo the father.  He and his people have passed sodomy laws for as far back as they could, about 1680 years.

Sodomy is illegal in 32 African countries, you know the one place where the gospel is currently growing.  It was illegal in our country until 2003. Did we have an improvement in morality since then?  Is human flourishing taking off because of this new found ‘freedom’?

https://www.drycreekbiblechurch.com/sermons/gospel-first-things

Great sermon yesterday by Pastor Carlson. It made me realize that Jesus wasn’t the only one claiming to be the Son of God, the Jewish leaders were as well. The thing about arrogance is that it’s not arrogant if you can do it. Jesus was the Christ, they were just arrogant. And the war begins over the Old Testament. We should not listen to the Jews, especially today on their views of the OT, because they were wrong Jesus says those scriptures speak of him, and they missed it. And they have defined this new Judaism on this rejection. The old Judaism became Christianity.

Jesus quotes from Psalm 82, “God said to certain leaders of the people, ‘I say, you are gods!” And you know they loved this verse, they thought of themselves as gods. They all claimed to be gods in their heart, they were the chosen people. But Jesus claimed it in public and he backed it up. The whole Psalm is contrasting good rulers from bad. The Pharisees claimed this as their book so here is what their book actually says, it says good rulers hear the cases of the poor and helpless, rather than profiting off of them. These people had been wronged and needed a judge to hear their case and give them justice, this is the last thing the Pharisees would do, and so they proved to be unjust rulers. They favored the wicked. And they also judged Jesus wrongly, while Jesus judged the people fairly, he showed them compassion. He also judged the Old Testament rightly and gave this teaching to the people so that they would not be ignorant and oppressed.

Many Psalms and other ancient poems are written in chiasm a sort of mirrored pattern. And what’s in the middle is usually the focus:

Also we have the idea that God made the world so he could communicate to us. He made the lilies of the field so he could say “consider the lilies of the field” And he put this Psalm in the Bible so he could speak of the Pharisees.

I don’t think I have ever heard anything more disturbing than a rabbi trying to explain away the clear Biblical teaching against sodomy.  It’s his book he says, trust him.  Here we have Dennis Prager doing the same thing with pornography.  Is it any wonder that the world’s pornographers are Jewish?  They don’t see a problem with it.  They read the OT just like the arrogant Jews of Jesus’ day.  It’s a set of rules they can mostly follow.  They don’t need Jesus, they just need a Jew who can give them their rightful place as kings of the world.   Because they are better than everyone.  But take heed lest we fall. You see the same arrogance among the Mohammedans, the Chinese, or even the Catholics.  But it’s also here, many Americans think we deserve to rule the world.  But it doesn’t work like that Jesus rules the world, we just work for him.  Or in our nation’s case, we stand in his way and so he cuts off the tree and grafts in . . . Africa? China?

Conservatives want to talk about biology all the time now. Well biology says you can have children as soon as you have your period. Which is age 11-15 for most girls. Another principal which is culturally almost as fundamental as biological facts, is that marriage is for the protection of children. So what is the basis for the principal that being married from age 11-18 is immoral? Is it in the Bible? I don’t think so. Is it in biology? No.

It seems to be something we just made up. Oh well girls that young are not ready for marriage, they say. Well God seems to think they are. Just like He made them male and female, he made them ready for procreation at whatever age. Maybe we should prepare them better, for the reality of this responsibility. It doesn’t mean they all have to, but it should at least be a possibility.

“And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I made you flourish like a plant of the field. And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment. Your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare.

“When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord GOD, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil. I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk. And I adorned you with ornaments and put bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck. And I put a ring on your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen and silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord GOD. -Ezekiel 16

What is the situation in our culture? We live in a hyper sexualized culture, it is pushed everywhere at a young age. The demand is driven up, but the only legitimate remedy, marriage, is seen as inappropriate until an older and older age. Our cultural idea is generally that you shouldn’t get married until you are done with college which happens at a later and later age, probably something like 22. The average now is 28.6. That leaves ten years for girls to be ran through, trained up by liberal professors(90% are), deceived by media and formed into a creature which has very little use as a real wife. And that’s the low end, many are much older. And this supposed education, otherwise called becoming your own person, training isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be either. A bachelor’s degree today, is probably about the equivalent of the 8th grade education our grand parents received. That puts you at age 13. And we all know this training is more about recruiting feminists to causes than it is making women who love their husbands and their children.

Frances Cleveland, 1886

Even in churches, young marriages are often mocked, though they do happen. We need a better system. Women are more and more likely to get divorced the more people they have slept with and that number grows the more years they are single.

Another growing factor is the way young people despise anyone older than themselves. They have been told their whole lives that old is bad, old is the patriarchy, old people enslaved everyone and they were. . . mean. Which leads to younger women told not to consider older men, you know the best able to care for them and actually support a family. Of course it still happens, but men like Leonardo DiCaprio are ridiculed often for dating younger women.

The only U. S. President to be married while in office was Grover Cleveland. At the time he was 49, he married Frances who was 21. And the country loved her. She was arguably the most beloved First Lady ever. That was only 137 years ago, what happened? Why do we prolong childhood indefinitely? Why do we not build better people more prepared for marriage? Why don’t we incentivize situations that make it possible for families to work?

I think the spirit of Stephen Crowder in rejecting big business deals is the American spirit i. e. the Christian spirit.  It is the spirit that Chesterton often touted as the breath of the renewal that is the eternal revolution.  In order to maintain orthodoxy the church must be ever renewed.  In order to conserve, to keep, things we must be ever changing.  We must renew things that have grown tired.  For ours is not a tired revolution, we live under the, The Holy Spirit.  A fresh wind,  a new song.  The carbuncles of seriousness and business encumber the ship and they must be chipped off if we want to keep the ship.  We must always be making progress towards the old things.  The big business model is a remnant from modernism.  It’s old and tired and unorthodox.  It is devouring everything in it’s maw, the church, the family the individual.  All the wise ‘successful’ business men in the room criticize him for not playing the encumbered game they all play.  

I think we see this most clearly with Rush Limbaugh.  He never played by the rules, he was able to carve out his own way.  It was unique and distinct and beneficial to millions to emulate him in making your own way, utilizing your unique skills.  Create something do something don’t just be a piece of the machinery.  Of course Rush mellowed over time from the raucous pranks and skits and rallies.  But he always went his own way.  The point I am thinking about is how the vacuum he left was soon filled.  It was filled by people clearly unable to go their own way.  It was filled by a uni-party group think which Rush despised most.  Dan and Sean and other people I forgot, clearly have their balls in a vice. They fear losing their power their money whatever.  Rush never did.  He lost football teams, he lost advertisers, he lost friends, but his audience always grew because his message was true.  He was radically taking us back to orthodoxy.

While Levin yells at people instead of doing what he is good at, writing books; while the Shapiro and Kirk cosy up to big Sodomy, so they can raise the big bucks; while Beck paints chalk boards full of giant conspiracy theories; Steven Crowder is the successor to Rush.  He is original, a couple clicks more Christian than Rush, unrelenting, truthful, wise and fun.  He is the man we need.

Of course there is another.  Mark Steyn.  Also creating an orb that is all things good.  His conflicts with CRTV seem to reveal the same things Crowders encounter does.  It’s the same spirit you sadly saw in Big Pro Life.  People fall in love with themselves, their movement, their business model, and forget the purpose they started out to achieve.  The point is not the remain viable, or to perpetuate your brand or not have to worry about where the rent money is coming from.  The purpose is to push back the evil, to win this world for Christ, as far as the curse is found, and to have a joyous time doing it.

Further Reading: Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

Original Pub Domain

Now a New Translation

Original video

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