Echoes in Eternity

This is a man who should be honored well above the Ted Kennedys and Michael Jacksons of the world.

[UPDATE: More on him here.]

Yesterday

In high school...


In college...

"In the eight years since 911, about 10.4 million Americans have lost their lives through the atrocity of abortion. This was about 1.3 million a year -- over 3,000 a day. Those who perpetrated 911 killed 3,000 in one day, and they perished at the same time. But the ghouls in charge of our judicial system, and the one we elected to appoint new justices to the top of that system, preside over 3,000 deaths a day, every day, non-stop. Just since 911, we have conducted over three thousand 911s ourselves. And just like the terrorists, we have a cloak of self-justification. The only difference is that we need a much bigger cloak.

But keep the distinction between horizontal and vertical in mind. Agreeing that Yahweh had a judgment to bring against Israel, one that He justly brought by means of the wicked Assyrians, is not the same as saying that the Assyrians had the right to do what they did. We are a stiff-necked people, and it is only through the mercy of God that we are not consumed." - Doug Wilson

So Yale University recently had those infamous cartoons which depicted Muhammad removed from a book on the subject because of a "fear of violence." It's informative to think about this: the liberal academia, which constantly tells us that Islam is a religion of peace, won't print some relatively benign cartoons because they are scared of violence. Where does this violence come from? I thought Muslims were peaceful. So you see, while they may protest otherwise, liberal elites are actually the most prejudiced of all against Muslims and in so doing, confirm that which they deny.

Dalrymple has an excellent discussion on the subject of crime and the prevention thereof in the New English Review this month.

In Europe, the United States is often used as a trope for all that is bad about the modern world, and in particular as an example of a savage, unsocial world, a kind of Wild West of the soul, where everyone is selfish, concerned only for his own advantage, indifferent to the fate of others, crassly materialistic, and so on and so forth. Although no European visitor ever claims to have seen such a thing for himself, many Europeans conceive of the United States as a land in which, if a person is injured or falls ill in the street, he is left to die there if he is not privately insured.

I am not myself an idolater of the United States. I do not believe that all that is American is best. It is neither a model to be imitated in all things, nor a model at all costs to be avoided. Its manifest failings are exceeded by its manifest virtues: but it requires discrimination to decide what is worthy of emulation and what of avoidance. Generally speaking, we in Europe get things exactly the wrong way round.

For me, the high imprisonment rate in the United States is a sign of social health, not of social disease. Of course, I do not approve of any miscarriages of justice or of incidents of brutality that occur in American prisons: but when I compare the confidence and resolution with which America faces the problem of criminality with the vacillation in most of Europe (some countries excepted), I cannot help but be struck by the difference, which is all to our disadvantage. The American system, for all its faults, is prepared to draw a line; European systems, on the whole, are not. But my view is exactly the opposite of what most Europeans, or at any rate educated Europeans, and no doubt many Americans, think.
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[S]ocieties such as several western European ones that cannot summon the confidence to set apart those who have persistently shown themselves unwilling to abide by the most elementary rules, and which prevaricate and beat their breast wondering how they and not the law-breakers are really to blame, may truly be described as decadent.

This is what happens when we cede moral and parental authority to the government.

This piece in The Atlantic is brilliant and if you only read one thing about the health care issue, make it this! I'm not sure I entirely agree with the author's solutions (I'd prefer to keep most health care coverage voluntary), but otherwise it's a very sound discussion of the actual problems inherent in the American health care system.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a good piece this week on the global warming topic.

Mark Steyn wrote a brilliant piece this week on the passing of Ted Kennedy and the lack of honest reflection going around about his life.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists.
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We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo [Kopechne] could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.
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When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."
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If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as [some] do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

Doug Wilson has an excellent post on Obama's power grabs (of which the "torture" prosecution is only the latest).

[Obama] is going to do a lot of damage to the nation, and so I would like to lay the full responsibility for this current mess at the feet of Bush/Cheney. In the aftermath of Holder's decision to investigate some of the CIA interrogators, Dick Cheney said that their administration had kept us safe for eight years, etc. But here is the problem with that argument. They didn't keep us safe.

They kept us safe from another attack from Osama, sure, but they did not protect us from Obama. They helped to sustain, create, or grow monstrous government mechanisms that are being used to destroy the nation, and all that was necessary for the destruction to begin in earnest was one election. The mechanisms of big government, which were not rejected or dismantled during the Bush years, were just sitting there, waiting (Ecc. 10:14). They were sitting there invitingly.

Obama has already done more damage to the economy than Osama did. Maybe not on purpose like Osama, but trillions down the drain are still trillions down the drain. And Obama was able to do this damage by doing the same sort of things that Bush/Cheney did, only on a grand scale. And he was able to do these things because Bush and Cheney helped establish in our minds that this kind of governmental swollenness is "just the way it has to be."

But here is a governmental rule of thumb. If you have to create mechanisms of coercion, which is a good, working definition of what civil government is, then you ought to do it not knowing beforehand whether the winners of the next three elections will be honorable or dishonorable men. This is what our founding fathers did. They assumed that American rulers were every bit as capable of being skunks and graspers as rulers throughout the rest of history had been, and they shaped the form of government accordingly. There is a proportional relationship (and a necessary one) between what a government can do for you, and what a government can do to you. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have. Our modern big government "conservatives" are as muddled on this point as anyone, and it is long past time for us to stop listening to them.

This is just absurd.

Yesterday, Tony Jones posted this sad statement on the shape of the Emerging Church. Sad in that it looks like there is little that now separates it from all of the other dying liberal American churches, or for that matter, Unitarian Universalists. Upon reading it, I immediately thought of Titus 1:15-16. One has to be incredibly spiritually warped to deny what God says clearly yet infer where there is no warrant. Reading the entire Bible as a discourse on human sexuality is a disturbing hermeneutical method, to say the least.

Thanks to a good post by Steve M., I got to pondering a question I thought I would pose on here. What makes someone a "good" Christian?

Here is one answer from Ann Coulter: “To believe with all your heart at every moment that God loved a wretch like you so much that he sent his only son to die for your sins.”

What about works? Don't works (like caring for the poor, reading our Bible consistently, praying diligently) factor into whether or not one can be considered a good Christian?

What say you?

Dalrymple also wrote a superb column in The Social Affairs Unit this week on the deep problems with a government that views itself as the parent of the populace. For example, currently in Britain, lawmakers are considering putting cameras in the 20,000 "worst" households (not sure how they decide which ones qualify). Isn't it funny how liberals complain about Cheney wanting to track terrorists domestically and how we should be so much more European, when it is Europe who has no idea what personal freedom means? I have a feeling that most of those same liberals would have no problem with cameras placed in the homes of middle class America (especially the red states).

In essence, it amounts to this: first the government creates the fiscal, economic, and ideological conditions in which social pathology is, if not quite inevitable, at least highly encouraged, and then it limps after it with technocratic solutions that don’t work, but that have the enormous advantage of employing large numbers of people.
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Where once there was duty and self-respect, there is now the social worker and the child-protection officer - the latter terrified of being exposed either as a total incompetent or as an evil cradle-snatcher, or both, since they are not mutually exclusive.

Rather than admit that all its policies have conduced to the development of psychopathy as a pronounced social trait, and therefore reverse them, the government wants to install CCTV cameras in bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms: with what one might call the enforcement apparatus of romanticism, of the view that the greatest freedom which a man can enjoy is the freedom from consequences. But consequences are like nature: though you toss them out with a pitchfork, yet they return.