Echoes in Eternity

Prop 8 went down to defeat (for now) in the courts yesterday. This is a huge case as it will make or break every other state law currently on the books defining marriage as between a man and a woman. If this brick falls, the entire wall is demolished.

Here is a good analysis of the foundational issues at hand.

The more interesting question is why gay marriage is so fashionable. The elites of society strongly support it, and many who nominally oppose it (e.g. President Obama) simply say that in order to protect their political careers. And these people support it so strenuously because it gives them the victim group they need to silence Christians. They are already committed to the philosophical basis of homosexual marriage, and live it out in their lives. They fornicate, commit adultery, divorce, procure abortions, despise masculinity and (especially) femininity, treat children like luxury items, etc… However, this menagerie of sins isn’t enough to explain their views, since these sins are hardly restricted to the modern elite. The crucial difference is that the modern elite is passionately committed to justifying all of it. They do not repent. Far more precious to them than their education or career status, or their fashion, or anything else is their moral superiority. They want to be selfish (especially with regard to money and sex) without feeling guilty. So they embrace the politics and morality of the gesture–saving the planet from global warming by buying a Prius, or shutting down timber mills, or blathering about diversity–while being thorough selfish in their personal lives.

Consequently they cannot bear criticism, whether implicit or explicit. Having no concept of repentance, they cannot admit their sin. The parts of their political and social outlook that they are most passionate about are those that assure them that they have done nothing wrong, and that seek to silence those who say otherwise. And they do seek to silence Christians. It’s no accident that they compare us to those who opposed interracial marriage–they want us banished just as thoroughly.

The opposite of this is not the philosophy of the righteous, but that of the sinner. I don’t want to base my philosophy on my own righteousness, because that’s a very small quantity. Rather, I want to face up to my own sinful nature and actions, and, recognizing that sin in thought and deed is the common lot of man, construct political philosophy accordingly {emphasis added}.

This is astounding. Guess he's never read Acts 10.

Here are several more outrageous stories of the health care (or lack thereof) that Brits receive from their socialized system. Unbelievable. Can't wait til we get that here.

All of the children having surgery the same day as [our son] did not even wear a hospital gown to go to O.R.- they just walked into O.R. wearing their street clothes and had a bib placed around their neck!!!

"Culture trumps politics."

This guy has a brilliant(!!!) piece on how to view the coming election and politics in general.

How do those who love limited government, and believe in the values of our nation’s founding, reconcile themselves to the past, present, and future Republican party?

The issue of the 2000-2008 GOP is an easy one: You don’t reconcile yourself to it. It was an atrocity. On a Presidential level, it should not be too difficult to thank God for John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and call it a day. Congressionally, there is virtually nothing to be thankful for (even the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003 lacked the political will to actually be made permanent, despite the existence of the votes to do so, creating this 2010 debacle that will be the largest tax increase in history). But the present GOP is a different story, and I am not sure what the benefit is in denying it. Not a single House Republican voted for the stimulus bill. The Pelosi-House had to insult heaven and hell to get the ObamaCare perversion passed. And both House and Senate leadership have done a wonderful job (within the political context they presently find themselves in – a problem of their own making) in holding this Obama-Pelosi-Reid disaster in check. For the most part, Republicans always seem to be more Republican when they don’t have any power, and that is most unfortunate.
...
It is not as complicated for me as many are making it. I believe this is a matter of managing expectations. I have already said what I want to about the recent past as well as the present. But when it comes to what can be expected of a future GOP presence in the House and the Senate, I can not imagine why we would expect them to be anything less than an extremely effective thorn in the side of the aforementioned Obama-Pelosi-Reid unholy trinity, and anything more than that same effective thorn. They will not restore the Constitution to its rightful place. And a GOP House majority will not come close to solving all of America’s problems. In the here and now, though, it is the unambiguous superior choice. When I refer to managing expectations, I have to wonder what people are expecting when they vote, and who the real statists are among us. I do not expect the politicians I support to do anything more than try to keep the disaster from getting worse. It is incurable in Washington D.C. The disaster I refer to is an idolatrous culture that has worshiped at the feet of the state {emphasis added}. This is not a political problem, and it is not the fault of politicians (either on the Republican side, or the Democratic side). The culture is in a state of disaster both morally and ideologically. I can understand why the Republican-haters take the position that they do if the expectation were that the Republicans were going to save the culture. But they are not going to, and they couldn’t do so if they wanted to.

More or less we are in a very long-term paradigm where both political parties go back and forth doing much of the same thing. The Republican party is far less likely to accelerate the slide into Euro-socialism, but both parties are still light years away from the limited government world of personal responsibility our founders envisioned. And based on what I observe of cultural responsibility, perhaps this is to be expected. I hope for a Congress that can pass some good legislation in the decades I have left on planet earth. Much more importantly, I hope for a Congress that can block all kinds of atrocious legislation that is sure to be presented in the years and decades to come. And that is pretty much it. The transcendental improvement I work for and pray for in this great country is going to be a cause of political change, but not an effect of it. We have our chicken and egg all mixed up, and it is time we get it straight. Culture trumps politics, and it always will. The present conflict begs for us to be politically involved, to force our leaders to quit redistributing wealth, to seek less burdensome tax policy, and to beg Washington D.C. to get out of the way. We should all do that, and my personal conviction is that for the most part this is best done with Republican options at this point in time.

But the progress we ought to be looking for in a multi-generational context is not going to come from this GOP party. Some of the better congressional Republicans are going to do really good things, and some of the worst ones may end up disappointing. All of it is fleeting. A society that yearns for freedom is the need of the hour; not merely politicians that sometimes have a sort of okay idea of what it is. We have spent 100 years in a love affair with a school system that has almost choked off any semblance of what freedom means. If I could hand-select every single elected official in the Congress tomorrow, OR I could wave a wand and see a private school system become the predominant means of educating our children, I would not even hesitate for a split second to choose the latter over the former. (As an aside, I have often said that I can sort of cope when Christians put their kids in the public school system; it is when conservative Christians do it that I get a bit mystified; but I digress).

My point is not to say that a better educational system is the last best hope, and a Republican Congress is not. My point is that no one single thing represents the remedy to culture’s woes – especially a change in the partisan affiliation of our Congressional representation... Just don’t set your expectation so high that you set yourself up for disappointment. The battle for the hearts and souls of men is not going to be won this November. This is a temporary deal that requires some temporary wisdom. The long term battle is anything but temporary, though, and it requires solutions far more important than any political party has ever been able to offer.

“The people wanted a King”, I Samuel says. For those of us who want a freedom that reflects the unalienable rights of men, a leadership that acknowledges its authority as coming from the consent of the governed, and even a voting population that has some idea what I just said, be patient. And be vigilant.

Whew, July was a slow blogging month, but I have an excuse. :)

Doug Wilson wrote an excellent post on the problems facing parents who either unwittingly want their kids to be in the world and of it and those who desire that their kids be out of the world and not even thinking of it. As Wilson says, in both ditches lies spiritual death.

One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requres some explanation.

The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids -- kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids. What next?! Parents sheltering children! We feed them too.

But here is where the mistake come in. There is a question of degree here. We are not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever. And that's a good thing, too, because it is impossible. There is a type of sin, common to the human condition, that your children will encounter (on a daily basis) on the playground of the finest Christian school imaginable. If you don't send your kids to that school (because of all the sin there), they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all the dirty thoughts between their ears. The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it. You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it.

In short, with this kind of sin, there are two errors -- equally bad. One is to accommodate yourself to the presence of this kind of room temperature sin, in such a way as to assume room temperature yourself. That is the way of spiritual death. The other is to pretend to yourself that the choices you have made have somehow successfully distanced you from all that icky stuff. But it is as close to you now as it ever was, but is now invisible because you have daubed your eyes with a special Pharisee salve. This is another way of spiritual death.
...
Suppose your child is in the classroom of a fine Christian school, one with a great reputation. You know the teachers and administrators, and they really love the Lord. But you know for a fact that two/thirds of the kids in your son's class are all hot about the latest skanky movie. Just last night, after the youth group get together, they all went to see Skanky Movie III, one that has set records for both kinds of box office gross. What will your temptation be? Your temptation will be to think that however well-intentioned the folks running the school might be, the "tone" of the school is not nearly "high enough," and that all these families clearly have poor standards. You regret having to do this, but you are considering pulling your son, wrapping him up in cotton batting for two final semesters of Mom School.

You think the problem is low entertainment standards, when the actual problem is that no Christian parents -- including you -- are teaching their kids what moral leadership looks like. About a third of the kids who went to that movie didn't really want to, and wouldn't have gone if someone in the class -- I am thinking of your son in particular -- had done more than simply studied his shoelaces when the subject came up. You are tempted to think that the others have low entertainment standards, when the real lesson is that your son is not a moral leader. The response ought not to be to do something that will make him even less of one.

I'm working my way through the entire collection of Holmesian literature, and came across this little nugget a couple nights ago.

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of [God] seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” - Sherlock Holmes

This is interesting. I'd like to see Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan added to this graphic. If you think the USA dominates the world now, just wait until we're the only Western country with young(ish) population. Mark Steyn could write a book about this data... oh wait, he already did.

Ted Haggard has started a new church just down the road from his old one, four years after being caught going to homosexual prostitutes for drugs and sex. Based on this Wall Street Journal article about his rapidly growing church, it doesn't sound like he has really understood the gravity of his sin or the freedom offered from the Gospel. In fact, this article combined with some prior comments I've heard from him suggest that he listened to all the wrong counseling in the years since his fall.

Mr. Haggard plays up his new regular-guy image. At the picnic, he asked a friend whether anyone noticed he had said "hell" in the sermon—and not in a Biblical context.

"I cuss now," he said proudly.

Mr. Haggard said he believes people trust him more as a pastor since his spectacularly public fall. Strangers, he said, keep pulling him aside, asking advice about their personal struggles.

"It's amazing. People tell me everything," Mr. Haggard said. "That never happened when we were respectable."

Now, it is certainly true that churches can fall into the trap of viewing the pastor as saint. But this seems more along the lines of the pop cultural idea that authenticity is the most important value in life. As long as you're sincere and genuine, it doesn't matter what you do or say. Of course, such thinking usually ends just short of giving Hitler a pat on the back.

Throughout his "recovery," I've seen and heard little from Haggard that put the focus on anyone but himself... certainly Christ wasn't given much of a nod. May he yet realize where his righteousness truly comes from.

Dr. Dalrymple gave a good speech in Turkey recently. He speaks to the problem of government interference in the everyday choices and freedoms of individuals. For example, the British are in the process of banning smoking in all vehicles (an idea that will unfortunately likely find its way across the pond; though perhaps it will not take root because we have this thing called the Constitution). This is being done under the pretense that some unknown number of children will have their health adversely affected by the secondhand smoke from their parents' cigarettes. Dalrymple rightly points out that according to the tyrannical logic involved, soon smoking in homes will be illegal. He closes with a great plea (albeit with tongue firmly planted in cheek): if public health is really the concern, one should consider the millions of dollars (much of it public money in those countries, like Britain, where taxes pay most health care costs) spent caring for injuries resulting from athletic activities. By the numbers, sports are much more dangerous and injurious than secondhand smoke. So why not criminalize it?

Nathanael Blake has a good post here on how to properly approach all attempts to win someone to the Biblical perspective, be it via Christian evangelism, political arguments, etc. Plus, he includes a quote from the fantastic-yet-short-lived series Firefly.

I can argue, but I’m irritable, and arrogant, and well, as Captain Malcolm Reynolds said of sins, I’m a fan of all seven. Fortunately, it’s not up to me to save civilization. It’s not even up to those meeker souls who are better at moving hearts than my arguments could ever be. It’s up to grace.

It’s always up to grace. We’re always on the losing side, because we can’t know when God will bestow a special grace upon our efforts and enable us to see success. Yet we are graced even in defeat, for we rise again.

Lillian Mae was born Thursday, July 8th, at 2:27 pm. Weighing in at 7 pounds, 5 ounces, she is doing great as is my incredible wife!

This news out of San Francisco should surprise no one. When Wisconsin is banning smoking in public places, the outlawing of pop, candy, and whatever else people enjoy is sure to follow in the liberal bastions of this once-great country. Can anyone spot the Orwellian word in the spokesman's statement?

"It's entirely appropriate and not at all intrusive for city government to take steps to discourage the sale of sugary sodas on city property."

Heading out in a few minutes to go meet the newest little Teich!

A fun and thought-provoking piece by Dalrymple on the topic of the World Cup.

Doug Wilson has a good discussion here on the options open to Christians as it pertains to political engagement.

So here are the options: 1. Jesus doesn't care whether or not nations are explicitly Christian. 2. Jesus is opposed to nations being explicitly Christian. 3. Jesus wants nations to be explicitly Christian.

And here should be our responses to these possibilities: 1. Well, if Jesus doesn't care, that means we have the right to care. So let's make this a Christian nation, shall we? 2. Okay. Let's have a Bible study and find out why "disciple the nations" really means "don't disciple the nations, whatever you do." 3. Yes, Lord.