The January 6 Detainees: The American Gulag

The January 6 Detainees: The American Gulag

Sep 4, 2022 | Politics & Government, Uncategorized

In cast you are not familiar with what’s going on in the American in-justice system under the current regime in Washington, DC, you need to be. It is horrific, sad, and mostly infuriating. It’s almost inconceivable such things are happening in the United States of America, almost. In case you are not familiar with the word Gulag: 

[It is a] system of Soviet labor camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons that from the 1920s to the mid-1950s housed the political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union. At its height, the Gulag imprisoned millions of people. The name Gulag had been largely unknown in the West until the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (1973), whose title likens the labor camps scattered through the Soviet Union to an island chain.

Right here in the good old US of A, the Biden justice department is persecuting political prisoners; that is not supposed to happen in America. And this is far bigger than Donald Trump, regardless of what you think of the man.

If you only get your news from legacy media, you will not know that the January 6, 2021 “insurrection” was a setup by the FBI, and other government actors to take down Donald Trump and discredit the entire MAGA movement. In case you doubt that incontrovertible fact, I would encourage you to go to Revolver News and read and listen to what the facts in fact show to be truth. The corruption of our most powerful law enforcement agency is stunning, as is the entire supposed justice system that runs it.

In case you doubt me, and even if you don’t, I implore you to listen to an interview by Daniel Horowitz did on August 22 with Joseph McBride, a lawyer representing some of the J-6 defendants. The title says is all: “The Sickening Persecution of January 6 Defendants.” From the description:

After today’s show, there will be no doubt we are indeed living in the Fourth Reich. I show how at a time when violent criminals are getting off with a slap on the wrist, those accused of political crimes are being subjected to torture. We are joined by Joseph McBride, one of the lead attorneys for some prominent January 6 defendants, who offers a riveting but sickening presentation about the torture of J6 defendants at the hands of federal and D.C. officials. This was a setup from day one, and the government used it to weaponize law enforcement, the legal system, and society against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their pagan fanaticism. Which is why the same people not only excuse but even encourage real violent criminals, anarchy, and the breakdown of societal order.

You will learn why Gulag is an apt analogy. They may be getting away with this in the short run, but God in his mercy and grace is revealing the leftist Democrat thugs perpetrating this evil for what they are, and in due course real justice will be done.

Uninvented: Did Moses Write the Pentateuch? Let’s Consider Deuteronomy 31

Uninvented: Did Moses Write the Pentateuch? Let’s Consider Deuteronomy 31

Sep 3, 2022 | Uninvented

The word Pentateuch comes from Greek and means simply “five books” and includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (called the Torah in Hebrew meaning teaching, instruction, or law). For most of Jewish and Christian history it was believed these books were written by Moses, and this chapter near the end tells us why. Before we get there and take a little uninvented look at the topic, let’s take a brief look at some history in biblical criticism regarding this topic.

It wasn’t until the mid-1600s, and a Jewish Philosopher named Spinoza that anyone thought to question whether Moses actually wrote these books. This shocked his Jewish community, and along with his philosophy, did not make him popular; he was excommunicated. But once the genie was out of the bottle, it never went back in. The primary motivation causing Spinoza to deny Mosaic authorship goes back to his very convoluted philosophy which wouldn’t allow for things like God’s creation of the universe ex-nihilo (out of nothing), or seas parting, or God revealing and making himself a people by his supernatural divine power. The industry of biblical criticism learned well what Spinoza practiced: a question-begging anti-supernatural bias. Having been influenced by the growing skeptical philosophy of his day, he assumed miracles couldn’t happen. His strange notion of whatever God was wouldn’t allow it. In effect, he rejected the God of the Bible before he ever got to the Bible because philosophy was his Bible, i.e., his ultimate authority.

Having become a Christian as a freshman in college at Arizona State University (44 years ago!), I decided to take a class having something to do with the Bible. I was excited to learn about this Bible I was recently introduced to, and taking a class seemed like a good way to learn more about it. Little did I know I would get my introduction to biblical criticism, and how scholars treated the Bible as just another human book. I’m very stubborn, so it didn’t cause me to doubt the divine inspiration of Scripture. Rather it ticked me off. As green and ignorant as I was as an 18- or 19-year-old, it was apparent to me these critics were completely arbitrary. Knowing nothing about the logical fallacy of question begging, it was clear to me even then that their God-less assumptions made their “biblical criticism” unpersuasive, to say the least. I learned from that class, and much more in seminary, how non-Christian biblical scholars treated the Pentateuch.

Since they “know” Moses didn’t write it, scholars came up with creative and speculative explanations for who might have. The two dominant ways are the documentary hypotheses, and the JEDP theory. These cholars assume the Bible is merely a human document because their worldview demands it. They can’t prove that, nor do they even try, or does it even occur to them they should. To them it’s obvious what those fundamentalist Christians and Catholics believe is crazy, and intellectually unworthy of true scholars. That’s faith; they believe they’re doing “science.” All the while they’re blindly begging the question, majorly!

Most non-Christian biblical critical scholars, and most are not Christian, believe there are some historical events in the first five books of the Bible, but what has come down to us is mostly oral tradition written down during or after the Babylonian exile of the Jews in the 500s BC. It’s comparable to Homer’s Iliad, an epic poem about the Trojan War written in the late 8th or early 7th century BC. There was likely a war between the Greeks and the Trojans, but Homer, if he wrote it, added a religious subtext of the fictitious gods to some possible historical events. Likewise, non-Christian scholars will say there may have been something to do with Egypt and the Hebrews, but we’re not sure exactly what, and whatever came down to the Jews in Babylon, they in effect took what little history was there, and invented the rest. Or something like that.

That’s quite a claim, but is it true? If it is, the Bible is not what it claims to be, and it’s basically a farce. If we look at Deuteronomy 31 with uninvented eyes, I believe we’ll come to a different conclusion. Moses as the author of the first five books of the Bible is far more plausible than speculative theories based on anti-supernatural bias.

As in the rest of the books of the Pentateuch, the chapter is written in the third person, so we read: “Then Moses went out and spoke these words to all Israel . . .” Or, “Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the presence of all Israel . . .” This implies someone else wrote it, and those of us who believe Moses was the author of the Pentateuch don’t think it was he alone who wrote every word, but that he was the primary author. The real author is God, of course, but the man Moses was its physical author. We read:

9 So Moses wrote down this law and gave it to the Levitical priests, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel.

The Lord then said:

19 “Now write down this song and teach it to the Israelites and have them sing it, so that it may be a witness for me against them.

And

22 So Moses wrote down this song that day and taught it to the Israelites.

And finally:

24 After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, 25 he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord:

We are confronted with two choices. Either Moses wrote “in a book the words of this law from beginning to end,” or he didn’t. If he didn’t, everything written in the first five books of the Bible, which all Jews considered “the law,” are myths, fairy tales, or outright lies. They are not history, and thus we can’t trust them as truth. If the non-Christian critical scholars are right, then who cares what these books say. I’m not interested. I have better things to do than waste my time on what are essentially lies. If we trust Jesus and the Apostles, however, then Moses indeed “wrote down this law,” and as Jesus tells us quoting from Deuteronomy 8:

“It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

“It is written” means God said it, that settles it! I think I’ll pass on the biblical critic’s question begging and go with Jesus on this.

Saints & Sinners Unplugged Uninvented Interview

Saints & Sinners Unplugged Uninvented Interview

Sep 1, 2022 | Uninvented

I got my big showbiz break on the Saints & Sinners Unplugged podcast hosted by my friend, pastor Ken Jones of Glendale Baptist Church in Miami. This was my first podcast interview to discuss my new international best seller, Uninvented, and I trust there are many more to come. For six years Ken and three other Miami area pastors have engaged in “Gospel conversations for a modern church desperately in need of returning to the basic message of grace through Jesus Christ.” I knew of Ken from his many years as a staple on The White Horse Inn, and when my best friend moved to Miami and started to go to his church, I got to know Ken and learn of the podcast. They had me on to discuss my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, and decided they could take a chance on me for a second time, for which I am grateful. 

Notable Quotation: Abraham Kuyper’s Prophecy of the 20th Century

Notable Quotation: Abraham Kuyper’s Prophecy of the 20th Century

Aug 30, 2022 | Notable Quotations, Uncategorized

I recently finished reading Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism for the first time. If you’re not familiar with the man, I’ve put a brief bio below. The reason I’m posting this extensive quote is because when I read it, it blew me away. The lectures were given in 1898 at the seminary my wife and I attended, Westminster in Philadelphia. What astounded me was his prophetic prediction the 20th century, and how the coming destruction was well under way by the end of the 19th century. He saw with an amazingly astute moral clarity, the rise of a noxious secularism, and the sad and bloody demise of Christian Western civilization in the 20th century. As he lived through World War I, he experienced the beginning of the end in his lifetime. Reading him is not easy, but it is very much worth the effort. 

________________________

After this manner, then, we in Europe at least, have arrived at what is called modern life, involving a radical breach with the Christian traditions of the Europe of the past. The spirit of this modern life is most clearly marked by the fact that it seeks the origin of man not in creation after the image of God, but in evolution from the animal. Two fundamental ideas are clearly implied in this:

  1. that the point of departure is no longer the ideal or the divine, but the material and the low;
  2. that the sovereignty of God, which ought to be supreme, is denied, and man yields himself to the mystical current of an endless process a regressus and processus in infinitum.

Out of the root of these two fertile ideas a double type of life is now being evolved. On the one hand the interesting, rich, and highly organized life of University circles, attainable by the more refined minds only; and at the side of this, or rather far beneath it, a materialistic life of the masses, craving after pleasure, but, in their own way, also taking their point of departure in matter, and likewise, but after their own cynical fashion, emancipating themselves from all fixed ordinances. Especially in our ever-expanding large cities this second type of life is gaining the upper hand, overriding the voice of the country districts, and is giving a shape to public opinion, which avows its ungodly character more openly in each successive generation.

Money, pleasure, and social power, these alone are the objects of pursuit; and people are constantly growing less fastidious regarding the means employed to secure them. Thus, the voice of conscience becomes less and less audible, and duller the luster of the eye which on the eve of the French Revolution still reflected some gleam of the ideal. The fire of all higher enthusiasm has been quenched, only the dead embers remain. In the midst of the weariness of life, what can restrain the disappointed from taking refuge in suicide? Deprived of the wholesome influence of rest, the brain is over-stimulated and over-exerted till the asylums are no longer adequate for housing the insane.

Whether property be not synonymous with theft, becomes a more and more seriously mooted question. That life ought to be freer and marriage less binding, is being accepted more and more on an established proposition. The cause of monogamy is no longer worth fighting for, since polygamy and polyandry are being systematically glorified in all products of the realistic school of art and literature. In harmony with this, religion is, of course, declared superfluous because it renders life gloomy. But art, art above all, is in demand, not for the sake of its ideal worth, but because it pleases and intoxicates the senses.

Thus, people live in time and for temporal things, and shut their ears to the tolling of the bells of eternity. The irrepressible tendency is to make the whole view of life concrete, concentrated, practical. And out of this modernized private life there emerges a type of social and political life characterized by a decadence of parliamentarism, by an even stronger desire for a dictator, between pauperism and capitalism, whilst heavy armaments on land and on sea, even at the price of financial ruin, become the ideal of these powerful states whose craving for territorial expansion threatens the very existence of the weaker nations.

Gradually the conflict between the strong and the weak has grown to be the controlling feature of life, arising from Darwinism itself, whose central idea of a struggle for life has for its mainspring this very antithesis. Since Bismarck introduced it into higher politics, the maxim of the right of the stronger has found almost universal acceptance. The scholars and experts of our day demand with increasing boldness that the common man shall bow to their authority. And the end can only be that once more the sound principles of democracy will be banished, to make room this time not for a new aristocracy of nobler birth and higher ideals, but for the coarse and overbearing kratistocracy of a brutal money power.

Nietzsche is by no means exceptional, but proclaims as its herald the future of our modem life. And while the Christ, in divine compassion, showed heart-winning sympathy with the weak, modern life in this respect also takes the precisely opposite ground that the weak must be supplanted by the strong. Such, they tell us, was the process of selection to which we, ourselves, owe our origin, and such is the process which, in us and after us, must work itself out to its ultimate consequences.

—Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, Pages 135-137

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) was one of the most extraordinary individuals of his time. A prolific intellectual and theologian, he founded the Free University in Amsterdam and was instrumental in the development of Neo-Calvinism. He was also an active politician, serving as a member of Parliament in the Netherlands beginning in 1874 and serving as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905.

At this intersection of church and state, he devoted much of his writing towards developing a public theology. His passion was to faithfully understand and engage culture through a Christian worldview. The most famous example is his articulation of the doctrine of common grace. His work has influenced countless others, including Francis Schaeffer, Cornelius Van Til, and Alvin Plantinga.

Consideration of the Alternative: Putting Ourselves AND Non-Christians on the Defensive

Consideration of the Alternative: Putting Ourselves AND Non-Christians on the Defensive

Aug 27, 2022 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

I recently wrote a piece about a young man who “de-converted” from Christianity, and in it I made this assertion: “the burden of proof is on everybody!” Non-Christians attack Christianity while assuming Christians are the only ones who need to defend their beliefs. That has been the secular assumption for the last several hundred years, and by the 20th century it became the default position of secular Western culture. And we as Christians all too often play the part, accepting the assumption of the critics. We need to understand everyone, every single person, lives by faith. All people are fundamentally religious, which is one of the reasons I dislike referring to Christians as “believers” and non-Christians as “unbelievers.” There is no such thing as an unbeliever!

The question is, who’s faith is most credible, most plausible, makes the most sense, is most logical, and has the evidence to back up its claims. When secularism became the default plausibility structure of Western civilization, a world devoid of God became the most credible and plausible worldview, and made the most sense for most people (whether God exists or not is irrelevant because as I always say, there are very few philosophical atheists). Whatever they believe, most people are practical atheists, they live as if God didn’t exist.

Western culture in its many varied forms drives practical atheism, be it in education, media, entertainment, government, etc. One example from popular culture makes the point. In most of the shows and movies we watch, all in some way deal with the fallen human condition, which is why they can be so entertaining. However, most leave out the most important piece of the puzzle: God! It’s like going to the beach in the middle of the Sahara Desert; uh, there’s something missing. I can’t watch a TV show or movie where God is ignored without shouting, you’re missing the God part!!! They want me to believe human nature as we find it, as it’s being dramatized on screen, just is, no explanation required. I’m to believe, and assume, no higher answer exists to the continual conundrums that make up the human drama? Mere matter cannot explain it. As Blaise Pascal put it in his Pensées:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

 

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

As Christians we believe man became a freak, and displays such greatness and wretchedness, because he rebelled against his Creator (Genesis 3). No other religion or worldview or philosophy can explain why human beings are the way they are, why we are the way we are. Most don’t even try. That man is “the glory and the scum of the universe” just is. Deal with it. No, I won’t. I want to know not just that we are the way we are, but why. What Paul describes in Romans 7 captures it perfectly: why do I do what I don’t want to do, and don’t do what I want? I know how Paul feels:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

He gives us the answer:

Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

We might call this the apologetic from human nature. I am more confident Christianity is true because human nature is what it is, exactly the way we’ve known it for thousands of years. 

As I wonder sometimes if my Christian faith is justified, if it’s true, and not a colossal multi-thousand-year scam, I always realize if it isn’t, some other alternative must be, has to be. Unlike agnostics and practical atheists, I can’t delude myself into thinking there is no non-religious sphere of existence. Some neutral place where faith is not required. So, doggone it, I need to know why man is such glory and scum, and how he get that way! Lucky dirt cannot explain Hamlet, for example, so please explain to me what can.

The beauty of the consideration of the alternative, is that in addition to being one of the most powerful strategies in Christian apologetics, it is essential for our own personal trust that Christianity is true and real and worth living and dying for. It forces us, and others, to defend the alternatives to Christianity, whatever the issue might be. We don’t just decide not to believe in Christian position X, and then believe in nothing. When we reject X, we must believe in Y, or A, B, C, D, or any other letter of the alphabet. And in case you weren’t aware, there are no in between letters in the alphabet.

It’s rather simple, really, and doesn’t require a theology degree, or masters in apologetics. If someone says they don’t believe in Christian letter R anymore (or Christianity), then we simply ask what they do believe. Then we ask, why do you believe that’s true? Then we wait. We’ll find most people have no idea why they believe what they believe, or that they even believe anything at all! They, like most every secular person, think belief is for religious folks, and since they’re not religious they’ll wonder, why you’re asking them what they believe.

For us, it works the same way. Doubt is a normal part of existence for finite creatures, and those who don’t doubt are not normal. Have you ever met someone who is six trillion on the certitude scale? It’s annoying. For instance, I might wonder if “nature” really is created by God, so I consider the alternatives. Atheistic materialism? Pantheism? Can you think of another alternative? Genesis 1 is far more plausible, especially as we continue to learn about the infinite complexity of creation. Another example is the Bible. Is it God’s inerrant, sufficient, authoritative Word to mankind? I wrote a book called Uninvented to argue that the only alternative, that it is made up, is not the least bit plausible. No matter what the topic is, the alternative to Christianity is not the least bit plausible. Ex-Atheist C.S. Lewis got it right:

I believe in Christianity like I believe the sun has risen not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.