Thursday, April 30, 2009
Have you heard the latest about Madonna/Lohan/Hilton? Or did you see that Mel Gibson was out publicly with his new girlfriend just days after his wife of 20+ years had filed for divorce? You may not care about celebrities, but you've probably heard the most recent gossip about them. It's impossible to avoid. I don't read the gossip rags or (with an occasional exception) anything resembling a celebrity-following website, but I still somehow pick up all the dirt on the most recent falls from grace. Our society is obsessed with celebrity, which in recent years has manifested itself in reality TV, where the average Joe or Joan can be an instant (yet fleeting) celebrity. And in most cases, celebrities are famous for the most low-brow or unimpressive achievements. If someone knows how to cry on cue just right, or pretend that he is a drug addict, or look good half-naked, they're bound for stardom. Never mind that their personal lives are moral wastelands devoid of any functional understanding of healthy physical or spiritual health.
The danger is to think that this speaks primarily about a problem with our celebrities. Rather, it says more about us, the voyeuristic and gossiping public. How many of the American Idol contestants are clearly participating in the show because of the chance to become famous and openly despise the average lives to which they will return once they are voted out of the limelight (and many don't go gently into that good night)? Since when is being famous (or at least infamous) such a glorious end for which to yearn?
With that in mind, Dr. Dalrymple discusses this topic in a roundabout manner in his latest essay in the New English Review.
The danger is to think that this speaks primarily about a problem with our celebrities. Rather, it says more about us, the voyeuristic and gossiping public. How many of the American Idol contestants are clearly participating in the show because of the chance to become famous and openly despise the average lives to which they will return once they are voted out of the limelight (and many don't go gently into that good night)? Since when is being famous (or at least infamous) such a glorious end for which to yearn?
With that in mind, Dr. Dalrymple discusses this topic in a roundabout manner in his latest essay in the New English Review.
A man called Graham Young poisoned several people, some to death and others only to near-death, in the 1960s and 70s in England without any pecuniary motive, indeed without any obvious motive at all, starting when he was thirteen or fourteen years of age. Among his victims (who did not die) were his father and his sister. It is probable that he poisoned his step-mother (who was devoted to him) to death.
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[One] thing that struck me was the obvious and sometimes openly expressed desire of Graham Young to achieve celebrity by his poisonings. He wanted to be known and remembered as the greatest poisoner in history; he took great pleasure in the publicity that he received, and he was more concerned with the newspaper coverage of his first trial than with the medical condition of his blameless father whom he had poisoned.
He lived at a time of a fundamental shift in our culture. On the one hand he was very old-fashioned; he dressed conservatively, always in a shirt and tie, and with a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit.
...
On the other hand, he matured at the time when the cult of celebrity, for celebrity’s sake, was fast gaining ground. It was a new form of celebrity, disconnected from any solid form of achievement, of which an ability to attract publicity became the sine qua non [the essential aspect of life]. Graham Young was highly intelligent, without the character to stick at anything to achieve something solid, but with a burning desire to be acknowledged as superior, important and outstanding.
When trying to explain why he could not get close to people, he once said to his sister (and she ends her book with these words), ‘You see, there’s a terrible coldness inside me.’ Could a spread of that coldness not help to explain our contemporary preoccupation with celebrity?
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
There is no conclusive proof outside the Bible that God is love, but the Bible is conclusive proof of it. If we give up the Bible, we must give up the doctrine that God is love and all the inferences about all men being saved which universalists have drawn from it. The position of those who hold that God is love because the Bible teaches it and yet reject those portions of the Bible that teach the eternal punishment of the persistently impenitent is utterly illogical and irrational. The Bible is either true or false. If it is false then we have no proof that God is love and therefore no foundation for the hope that all men will be saved. If the Bible is true (as it certainly is), then there is no foundation for the hope that all will be saved, because the Bible expressly declares that many will not be saved. One may take whichever horn of the dilemma he chooses, but in either case Universalism is untrue. - R.A. Torrey
This is awesome news!
It’s finally official: Creed is together once again, about to hit the studio to record a brand new album of music, tentatively titled Full Circle, and planning a summer tour
I like the creative new methods that Christians are using to show the world what Planned Parenthood is really like behind all the politics, lobby groups, and sound bites. Last year, a person called them and asked to donate money so that the number of black people would be lowered by abortion. The PP rep didn't indicate any problem with that idea. Now, recently, a UCLA student is video taping undercover visits to PP centers. Below is one such video showing just how truly concerned PP is for women.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
"Church discipline" has gone out of vogue in recent years within the American church. In the rush to avoid judgment in our world of moral relativism, no one is willing to call a spade a spade in fear of committing the ultimate of sins in our society: hypocrisy and prejudice (of course, these words have lost most of their original meaning). After all, aren't we all sinners deserving of judgment? And that is most certainly true. I am, as the Apostle Paul would say, the worst of sinners, or at least, the worst sinner I know (since I know the depths of my depravity much more clearly than I know anyone else's). And Jesus did say not to judge others (Luke 6:37) or to at least first yank out the "log" of sin from your own life before tweezering out the sinful "speck" in the life of a brother. Paul agreed as well with respect to not judging unbelievers (Romans 2:1). Yet Jesus also commanded us to throw an unrepentant brother out of the Christian community (Matthew 18:15-17). It would seem that perhaps the word "judge" means a couple different things or at least is only to be done with right motives and a clean conscience. We ARE to judge (but only those in the Church (1 Cor. 5:12-13), but ONLY to do so with plenty of humility and only out of love for the person and a desire to see them gain eternal life (James 5:20), thus more of the idea of restoration over discipline.
On the rare occasion that we do see church discipline today, many times it is not done well or in a particularly biblical manner. Jesus' four steps aren't followed or it's done in the wrong spirit or on an inconsistent basis (e.g. an adulterous woman is more severely ostracized than the adulterous man). So it encouraged me greatly to see a community of believers at my church be obedient AND faithful to God by practicing church discipline properly and in the right spirit. Both in the message and at last night's Keystone, Pastor Bryan gave the following three reasons for church discipline:
- Serious doctrinal error that warps the church (Gal. 1:6-9)
- Deep divisiveness that damages unity in the church (Titus 3:10-11)
- Severe, persistent, and unrepentant moral failing (1 Cor. 5:1-13)
What doesn't qualify under these (usually) is something like habitual speeding, smoking, gluttony, etc. In those cases, maybe talk to the person and keep reminding him that he isn't helping his spiritual health (or physical health, as might be the case) by his enslavement to that bad habit, but if he doesn't repent, do as the Dude in "The Big Lebowski" and abide.
And always, do all correction with a broken and humble heart; broken over the sin in the life of your brother or sister and humble due to the sin within your own life or the possibility that but for the grace of God, there go you.
Obviously, the then-upcoming election got a lot of space.
Theodore Dalrymple is perhaps the most astute and careful reader of the writers I've read. He constantly points out hidden agendas or biases contained in news pieces or editorials, showing how, as he says, "human language is a subtle instrument." Never more true is that than in his recent column in FrontPage Magazine.
It is an interesting, though perhaps unanswerable, question as to how much untruth you can squeeze into a single word of one syllable, either explicitly or by implication. However, I came across a very fine example of such compression in the British liberal newspaper, The Guardian, the other day.
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[O]n 17 April, it carried an obituary of a man called Ron Bellamy, written by his wife.
The obituary begins:
My husband Ron Bellamy, who has died at the age of 92, was a dedicated teacher, a Marxist economist and a lifelong communist.
It continues shortly afterwards:
Like so many of his generation, he was deeply affected by mass unemployment, poverty, and the threat of fascism and war, so he joined the Communist party.
It is the second ‘so’ of this sentence that is fascinating. So short a word, so many ambiguities...
Suppose the late Ron had been a fascist instead of a communist, and – as is not very likely - The Guardian had accorded him space for an obituary, would it not have been possible to write the following?
Like so many of his generation, he was deeply affected by mass unemployment, poverty, and the threat of communism and war, so he joined the British Union of Fascists.
At the time he joined the Communist Party, the second sentence would have made much more sense than the first (though still not a lot). The obituary does not give the date that Ron joined the Communist Party, but since he was born in 1916 or 1917 (the precise date of his birth is also not given), it seems likely that he joined at some time between 1936 and 1938. By then, communism in Russia had brought two massive famines causing the deaths of millions, routinely more executions in a day than Tsarism performed in a century (and this from the very first moment of Bolshevik power), the establishment of vast forced labour camps in which hundreds of thousands had already died, and the utter decimation of intellectual life. It is a myth that none of this was known or knowable at the time: on the contrary, it was all perfectly well known, if widely ignored.
...
So it would at the time have made more sense at the time for Ron to become a fascist than a communist; the ‘so’ would have been slightly more compelling, though the explanation of his decision would still have been far from complete. It is intrinsically unlikely that a man espouses a totalitarian doctrine of proved and indisputable viciousness and violence from a love of peace and a dislike of poverty.
Although the author of the obituary was herself a communist, and indeed met her husband through the Communist Party (in 1953), the ‘so’ to which I have drawn attention has a slight exculpatory connotation, as if it is there to head off criticism from anti-communists. Yes, it seems to say, you may criticise Ron for being a communist; but what you have to remember is the economic and political context in which he joined. In that context, any generous-minded and hearted man concerned about the fate of the world might have made the same decision.
But this, if it was meant, is untruthful. The late Ron was a member of the Communist Party for forty years. In 1961, he actually spent a year in the Soviet Union, conducting ‘research.’ That meant he swallowed many things without any of them impinging on him in the slightest: not only the famines, but the show trials, the Gulag, the Great Terror, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the ludicrous cult of Stalin’s personality, the removal of entire populations, the Doctor’s Plot, the show trials in Czechoslovakia, Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Berlin and Hungarian uprisings, to name but a few.
So – if I may still use that tainted word – it is simply not true that the conjunction of circumstances was what determined the late Ron’s political choice for communism, neither at the beginning nor at the end of his life. If it had been true, the late Ron would not have remained in the Communist Party for forty years. It is more probable, indeed, that he was attracted by precisely those aspects of communism that would repel most decent people: its violence and ruthlessness; its suppression of all views inimical to it; its cruel wholesale restructuring of society according to the crude and gimcrack ideas of arrogant, ambitious but profoundly mediocre intellectuals. The late Ron’s personal modesty notwithstanding – I see no reason to disbelieve his wife’s assertion that he was friendly and unassuming, as indeed Stalin, Uncle Joe, was often described as being – what he dreamed of was mass murder, deportations, suppression of people who differed from him, and complete control over the lives of everyone. Many people do dream of these things: most utopians, in fact.
At the very least, the late Ron was, in political matters, a moral idiot. The ‘so’ is subtly designed to disguise the fact.
Last Wednesday, ESPN aired the first in their new "Homecoming" series, beginning with baseball player Josh Hamilton. For those who don't know, he is quite possibly the next great power hitter in professional baseball, and was the top All-Star vote getter in his first full season last year and astounded everyone by his incredible performance in the Home Run Derby (28 homers in one round!). What's really amazing though is his story. He threw it all away over a drug addiction... until he humbled himself and gave his life to Christ. The ESPN hour-long show is very worth watching (it re-airs on ESPN Classic both May 1st and May 3rd, I believe). His testimony is refreshing. Here's a glimpse of it:
Geoscientist Brian Pratt recently wrote a brilliant article to dismantle the global warming hysteria. In it, he wonders why so many physicists have not dealt honestly with the evidence or why the science community has been largely silenced by politicians. He hints at the answer: money and political pressure. Read it all.[W]hen you stop and think about it, the apocalyptic predictions don’t quite make sense scientifically. Alongside the enormity of the sun and what we know of the scale and power of natural processes, to imagine humans being able to make any difference to global climate would seem like the most preposterous conceit.
Even though I consider myself a dedicated environmentalist I cannot accept the claims of anthropogenic—human caused—global warming. My research involves deducing climate back in what we call “Deep Time” – geological eras of millions and billions of years ago - so I think I have enough background to understand the evidence. I know that the factors controlling climate work as an extremely complex, integrated system that cannot be resolved by debate and exchange of opinion.
Therefore the suspicions of any scientist should be aroused by glib assertions like “the science is settled” or “there is a consensus,” because this is not how scientists and engineers operate. Al Gore’s movie and books are so appallingly riddled with mistakes and outlandish exaggerations that they would be laughable if they weren’t taken so seriously by so many.
Legislators have even passed laws declaring CO2 to be a pollutant, seemingly unaware of photosynthesis, respiration and biodegradation. Should I feel guilty that my beer gave off CO2 during fermentation and when I opened it? I need something to cry into when I hear of the measures planned to reduce “carbon emissions”, because of the threat these pose to our already economically fragile society.
Here are the facts, as I understand them: solar heat varies cyclically at different frequencies, from the decades to the hundreds of thousands of years. Atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature are linked, but rather than the former driving the latter, it is the other way around and there is a nearly thousand-year lag in the response.
The oceans are the great sink for CO2. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is not uniform around the globe and regional variations are tied to sea-surface temperature because CO2 dissolves in colder sea water while it degasses from warmer sea water.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, yes, but it absorbs only a very small portion of the infrared spectrum and its capacity to do so declines exponentially with concentration. It’s a fact of physics that the CO2 molecule radiates almost none of the heat it can absorb. Moreover, it is such a trace gas that this effect is negligible, and even less so at the low pressures and cold temperatures high in the atmosphere.
All of this explains why, when CO2 concentration is thought to have been much higher in Deep Time such as during the Paleozoic, the surface of the globe did not overheat and the polar regions were still cold. Water vapour is what insulates the Earth and CO2 concentration has nothing to do with cloud generation. Why, then, have anthropogenic global warming promoters seized upon CO2 as the culprit?
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There has grown a whole industry of taxpayer-funded climate modellers whose equations can’t reproduce last week’s weather let alone past climate change at all, but whose crystal balls universally forecast impending disaster (and of course the urgent need for more research money). Why haven’t physicists pointed out the basic mistakes in the science?
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Moreover, the zealotry of many adherents is frighteningly reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition, fascism and other movements designed to take control and silence dissent. Vicious personal attacks on those who raise valid scientific questions infect the blogosphere, including likening them to Holocaust deniers. Even NASA’s James Hansen, a very vocal promoter of anthropogenic global warming, has been allowed to get away with all sorts of very unscientific and virulent statements, such as demanding that oil company executives be tried for “crimes against humanity and nature”.
Globally averaged temperature data—imprecise, it must be admitted—show that temperature has not risen in the past 10 years: we are not in the midst of global warming at all. The famous “hockey-stick” graph wielded by Al Gore and the IPCC reports that claimed to show a dramatic rise in global temperature in the latter 20th century turns out to be a methodological and statistical chimera. Some have even suggested that it was a deliberate fraud. Temperature fluctuations and regional variations in the last few decades do not track rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.
So, if anthropogenic CO2 is not driving climate change, why do most Western governments—with the notable exception of Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic—continue to fall over themselves in support of the belief of anthropogenic global warming, and try to best each other in promising to cap CO2 production, designing carbon taxes and cap-and-trade legislation, and throwing huge sums of money at alternative energy schemes, CO2 sequestration projects and climatological research? Sure, certain individuals stand to make a lot of money out of these measures, but some of them arguably will amount to economic suicide. Well, what politicians do "passeth all understanding” for most of us in the trenches, but it does illustrate the power of the green lobby and, in my opinion, a dearth of real leadership.
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As James Hutton said in 1795, the Earth has “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” and this holds true for climate change. Does reducing our dependence on fossil fuels justify promulgating scientific lies? I don’t think so. But it is inescapable that coal, oil and natural gas are finite natural resources and when they are burned up they are gone. Period. Profligacy with these precious commodities is what needs to change.
This article succinctly explains why socialism is wrong, especially to Christians.
First, it just doesn’t work. At least not for very long. That’s because people are flawed and, outside of a family, a religious order, or a small group of friends, they will not continually work hard for the ‘greater good’ if they do not receive the fruits of that work themselves. As an economics major in college, I learned that this theory had a name: ‘the free-loader effect’. It is the natural tendency of people to do less and less work when they realize that they won’t see a proportionate decrease in what they can get for it.
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The second reason why I believe socialism is such a bad idea is very much related to the first, but much more important to me as a Christian: it diminishes the dignity of human beings. In socialist societies, individuals grow increasingly dependent on the government for their well-being, and less and less confident that they are capable of and responsible for themselves. This is an inevitable recipe for cynicism, fatalism and depression.
And as the government plays a larger and larger role in the lives of people, it inevitably crowds out faith in God. Not only does this make sense from a logical standpoint, it turns out that it was the intentional design of the men who invented socialism, communism and Marxism. Marx and Lenin were very clear that atheism was key to the success of the socio-economic systems they promoted, and that people should turn to the state for their needs, not to God. This has played out again and again as socialist countries experience a significant drop in the faith of its people, and in great irony, a rapid decline in charitable giving, volunteerism and civic-mindedness.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
I compiled the last few months of posts and pasted them into Wordle to see what words jump to the front. At some point, I'll compile the other months and compare them to this compilation to see if there are any visible changes in words used. Interesting that this one reads "Obama almost God" vertically on the left...
I saw this sad story from Britain today. According to a poll, the most popular song to have played in that post-Christian country is Frank Sinatra's "My Way." That is one of the most depressingly self-centered songs in history, and it speaks to the self-centeredness of a culture that uses that as their final goodbye to life. Without Christ, people live a funeral dirge in life and are narcissistically self-sufficient even in death.
I've lived a life that's full -
I've travelled each and every highway.
And more, much more than this,
I did it my way.
Regrets? I've had a few,
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption.
I planned each charted course -
Each careful step along the byway,
And more, much more than this,
I did it my way.
...
To think I did all that,
And may I say, not in a shy way -
Oh no. Oh no, not me.
I did it my way.
For what is a man? What has he got?
If not himself - Then he has naught.
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way.
Yes, it was my way.
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