Apr 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
In the last 10 years the world has had to endure the plague of the “New Atheists.” While not as deadly as those Moses helped visit upon the Egyptians, they are still excruciatingly annoying. Their arguments, such as they are, reveal a type of trite fundamentalism that continually begs the question, over and over and over. But not all atheists are New; one “Old” atheist is British philosopher John Gray, who recently penned a piece for The Guardian titled, “What Scares the New Atheists.”
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Apr 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like “chairperson” and “humankind” strut and preen, where he-or-she’s keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.
We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming institutionalized. If we mean to put things right, we can’t wait much longer.
Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse. (“Thou art the thing itself.” “A plague o’ both your houses.” “Can one desire too much of a good thing?”) The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written “pure simple English.” Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys. It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously.
–David Gelernter in,“We Came in Peace, for All Humankind: A decade of “Social Justice Warriors” waging all-out war against the dictionary.”
Apr 14, 2015 | Uncategorized
Recently I attended an evening gathering where I was introduced to a man finishing his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopskins. When he learned that I am a philosopher and theologian, he began pointing out to me that science is the only discipline that is rational and true. Everything else is a matter of belief and opinion. He told me that if something cannot be quantified or tested by the scientific method (whatever that means), it cannot be true or rational. Unfortunately this opinion is widely shared in Western culture. Science is believed by many to be the only field which is interested in truth and in which beliefs can be rationally assessed. But however widely this opinion may be held, it is nonetheless patently false.
–J.P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, A Defense of Christianity
Apr 11, 2015 | Uncategorized
[T]hat is the problem—accredited social work schools are remarkably averse to actual change, and embrace only those aspects of their students they view as immutable. As long as what makes you different is something you have no control over—your heritage, skin color, or economic background—it is acceptable to CSWE and its dependents. Celebrating a lack of control is celebrating a lack of freedom, and is extraordinarily infantilizing. My friends at school were protected from my opinions, but not from the insidious idea that some opinions do not deserve to be aired. Our training suffered for it. Along with being taught to tolerate everything but disagreement, we were told that people, including our clients, could not make meaningful choices in life. That is bad for social work, bad for education, and, as a reflection of modern liberalism, dangerous for society.
–Devorah Goldman, “The Closing of the Campus Mind:Schools of social work are silencing conservatives.”
Apr 8, 2015 | Uncategorized
By now everyone has likely heard that Indiana has become a hotbed of anti-gay bigotry, and America’s cultural elites are not going to put up with it! The Indiana state legislature passed a religious restoration and freedom act and the governor signed it; then all hell broke loose. According to liberals and gay rights activists the law is “anti-gay” bigotry pure and simple. Of course it is nothing of the sort, but since truth never got in the way of any committed activist, that doesn’t much matter.
You can read an overview by Jonah Goldberg of what the law is not, but I want to point you to a piece by Red State’s Erick Erickson about the real agenda of secular liberals and gay rights activists:
Around the country, gay rights activists have attacked Christians for daring to put their faith ahead of the wants and desires of homosexual marriage advocates. The Christians must be silenced and punished. Their faith cannot be respected. Legislation designed to allow diversity of religion and the free exercise thereof must be stopped and must be decried as discrimination.
The move to put “free exercise” on the same footing with “free speech” must be opposed because most major faiths recognize homosexuality as outside normal behavior. The logical outcome of this will eventually be to reduce free speech. People and faiths are going to have to be shut up for homosexuals to have the veneer of normalcy.
But it won’t stop there. Over time, the gay rights movement will move to pushing churches to marry gays because normally people get married in churches. Over time, it will move to push religious schools to abandon standards on sexuality. Over time, it will mean religious institutions lose their tax exempt status. Over time, it will require Bible believing churches be labeled hate groups and orthodox Christianity be forced to the sidelines. Over time, it will mean that the state must intervene and protect children from parents who want to raise them as orthodox Bible believing Christians.
Essentially, replacing the prohibition on religious tests clause of the Constitution will become an enforcement of a secularism clause. People of faith need not apply for jobs, political appointments, or elected office. People of faith will be the new bigots because their God said “go and sin no more” and dared list homosexuality as one of those sins.
Ultimately, over time, two thousand years of Christianity will be forced to be treated as the deviant lifestyle. You will be forced to pick a side. If you remain true to your God, you will be outside the bounds of acceptable conduct. You will be made to care.
There you have it, Christians are now the deviants. This of course has been the goal all along, to normalize non-Christian (non-Jewish, non-biblical) sexual morality, and demonize anyone who dares embraces traditional sexual morality in the public square. Western cultural elites want people like me securely in the closet where I can believe or think whatever I want, but that’s where such thoughts must stay. This is what Christians get for abandoning the culture a hundred years ago, a mistake many believers understand now more than ever.
R.R. Reno at First Things offers this clear-headed insight into what’s in store for Christians:
Christian leaders in America need to be clear-minded. It’s very foolish to think we can settle into a modus vivendi with the coming gay rights regime. This regime is the political form of the sexual revolution, and like all revolutions, it’s committed to the destruction of the past.
I had to look up modus vivendi, given I’m a product of a public school education and my Latin is a little rusty: an arrangement or agreement allowing conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or until a final settlement is reached. To the gay rights regime conservative Christians are bigots, and there can be no arrangement with bigots; they must be silenced at least, or as Erickson says, be made to care.
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