Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Apr 20, 2023 | Culture

We recently visited relatives and spent some time with my wife’s mother and father who both live in elderly facilities, and also visited my mother who does as well. I don’t know how other people respond to being around a lot of older people, but it depresses me. Seeing people aging and their bodies having to endure the ravages of time is not something I can just blow off, like it has no implications for me and everyone around me. I know, they know, you know, we all know, they will be dead soon, but it’s not a pleasant topic to contemplate, so people, old and young alike ignore it. It’s even less acceptable to discuss openly, and if you do, people will think you morbid or negative.

For me, though, the topic is never far from my mind, and I have a story that is so indicative of that. When our granddaughter was about to be born (Jan. 22, 2022), I told my wife, “Just think, in 2100 she’ll be 78 years old!” And she replied, perfectly, “Can you just let her be born first!” It was hilarious. But as I told my daughter, who knows me very well, as soon as Eleanor was conceived, she was condemned to death. And given she isn’t shocked by my Woody Allen like obsession with death, she shook her head in lamentable agreement. But unlike the atheist Mr. Allen, for those of us who trust in the resurrection of Christ, death for isn’t the end, but only the end of the beginning of blissful life eternal with our Savior and all those who have preceded us in Christ. How do we know this? That’s a big question, but before I get to that, we need to establish that our mortality is something we need to think about all the time. I know, it’s a tough sell, but bear with me.

When I’m around much older people (I’m no spring chicken!), like in a retirement community, I don’t think about people much differently than if I’m in a restaurant in a chic part of Miami Beach, for example, where I’m surrounded by young, good looking “kids” in their 20s or 30s who are in great shape. It’s less depressing and easier to get sucked into the illusion that life isn’t a death sentence in such an environment, but it’s a lie, a bold-faced horrific lie that the devil uses to lead people to hell. I can hear Satan whisper in their ears, “Hey beautiful, hey, handsome, isn’t life great now? No need to worry about what happens after this life, get all you can, eat, drink, and be merry because, well, it’s fun!” I’m convinced most young people, I’d say prior to entering their 40s, are under the illusion that death happens to other people, not them. As Fraud argued, human beings cannot imagine their own deaths. It is, literally, inconceivable to us, unless that is, we are reminded of that fact, over and over and over again.

This widespread illusion in the modern world, or should I say delusion, is a “gift” of the secularism we’ve inherited since the seventeenth century Enlightenment. There have been many deleterious consequences of this movement in Western intellectual thought, but the most pernicious is related to epistemology, or how and what we can know. In our secular culture, thinking about or focusing on anything beyond this life is waste of time because, well, we really can’t know anything about it; we are bound, most people assume, to the physical world. This kind of thinking began to seep into the stream of Western thought with the work of Immanuel Kant (1774-1804). Simply put, Kant stipulated that there are two realms, one called the “noumenal realm,” and the other the “phenomenal realm.” The latter is material reality, the one we can know, while the former is the meta-physical realm (above, outside of the material), and beyond our ability to know. (Here is a great short video of R.C. Sproul describing how Kant paved the way for agnosticism, that we can’t really know, which is the faith choice of our age).

Given we are all drenched in a secularism that programs agnosticism into us from birth, most people figure why bother with that after life stuff; we can’t know it anyway, and it’s all guesses and “faith.” Which is why we need to remind ourselves, all the time, that death can find us at any moment. For example, no matter how well we take care of ourselves, what great shape we’re in, how perfect our bloodwork is, an airplane can fall on our house tomorrow, that’s it, we’re gone. Echoing Isaiah, the Apostle Paul says, “God gives all life and breath and everything else,” and he can take that breath anytime he pleases. So it’s best we approach life in humility and treat it as the precious gift it is, one for Christians that will continue forever, a life without pain, sorrow, sin, sadness or death. Yes, that is as inconceivable to us as our own deaths, but that is why faith (i.e., trust) is required, and there are an infinite number of reasons why this faith is justified.

In a recent post where I laid out some of the reasons that compel me to accept the trustworthiness of Christianity, I assert that “everyone lives by faith, which I define as  trust based on adequate evidence. I trust based on more than adequate evidence to me that Christianity is true.” The question is who and what will we trust. I trust the man who rose from the dead, who claimed he was “the resurrection and the life,” and that whoever believes in him will live even though he die, and whoever lives and believes in him “will never die.” Do you believe this? I do. And Isaiah 25 gives us a glimpse into what this promise will look like when it is fulfilled:

6 On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

9 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

This is a program even Woody Allen should sign up for: no more death.

 

School Shootings: The Triumph of Secularism

School Shootings: The Triumph of Secularism

Mar 30, 2023 | Culture

It has happened again, this time at a Christian grade school in Nashville. When I first heard about it, and it was reported a female was the shooter, that didn’t compute. Women are never mass shooters. Then I learned this:

 Three adults and three children were killed and the shooter has been identified as a female, which has shocked many people. She was killed on the scene.

However, unfortunately, things turn even darker. The unconfirmed, but widely reported story is that the shooter is a biological female who identifies as a male. Her name is reportedly Audrey Hale.

The three children were nine years old, one the daughter of the pastor of a PCA church I believe was associated with the school. It is heart breaking and distressing. The Revolver piece I linked to above points out that people who suffer from gender dysphoria, or who are culturally bullied into it, are mentally ill. The woke left pushes the transgender mania as the civil rights issue of our time, and lives are destroyed, mentally, emotionally, and physically. But according to woke leftists, guess who the victim is in this tragedy? That’s a rhetorical question. There is reporting the shooter, who attended the school, was driven by resentment against Christianity. Supposedly she penned a manifesto the authorities have in their possession. We’ll see if they have the guts, and integrity, to release it. Resentment, anger, rage, hate, poison is what the left stokes 24/7, and not just against Christianity, but against any traditional value based on it, and anything associated with Christian Western civilization.

 

As I had finished this post I came across this video of Tucker Carlson on his show talking about how the trans movement is targeting Christians. It’s only nine minutes and I very much encourage you to watch/listen to it. It’s kind of shocking YouTube hasn’t deleted it.

I thought as I prayed for God’s comfort and grace upon that community, and repentance per Jesus himself as the proper response for those who don’t know him, I was angry. This didn’t used to happen in America! Then I thought of our church, which used to be a PCA church, calling for a prayer time last night. I appreciate that, and of course prayer is always necessary, but it’s not enough. I’ve heard our pastor and an elder/teacher disparage the so-called “culture wars,” and that always bothers me. Once in a sermon preaching on the importance of regeneration, the pastor said if we’re focused on the culture wars, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Frankly, that infuriated me. It does so even more now as more senseless violence cut short three precious children’s lives, and three adults in the prime of their lives. Christians lost the culture wars, this is what happens. When Christianity’s influence dominated American culture, “school shootings” did not happen.

The regeneration of the human soul and fighting for the health and flourishing of American culture are not mutually exclusive goals, and I would argue, naturally compatible. Culture wars are not a distraction, but modern conservative Evangelical Christians tend to over spiritualize everything. The great Francis Schaeffer’s life and ministry was dedicated to fighting against a two-story Christianity, the upper story or spiritual reality, and the lower story, the mundane stuff of everyday life. In this take, the upper story is the important area of life where we should focus on spiritual, eternal things. The lower story is not spiritual and thus less important. There is a long history to why we are tempted to view reality and culture this way, Schaeffer even goes back to Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Arguably, it was the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century when saving souls became divorced from Christianizing culture. In fact, the saving of souls should lead to a culture becoming more Christian, whatever culture it is, wherever it is.

The great lie of secularism, however, is the myth of neutrality, that there is a space in culture and politics where religious values are irrelevant, unnecessary, and must be only private because they lead to antagonism and violence. In case we haven’t noticed, all secularism seems to give us is antagonism and violence. Not to mention how secularism gave us progressivism which eventually embraced cultural Marxism that we now call wokism. For decades the left accused conservatives and Christians with being obsessed about sex, about what goes on in people’s bedrooms. That’s a lie. It’s the left that has been obsessed with sex for almost sixty years. From the so-called “sexual revolution” to no-fault divorce to gay “rights” to redefining marriage and now the evil insanity of the transgender mania, it’s always about sex for the left

At the 1992 Republican National Convention Pat Buchanan gave what came to be called “the culture war speech.” He had run against President Bush in the primary because Bush came from the moderate wing of the Party, what we used to call Country Club Republicans. Culture War issues embarrassed them, and Buchanan would have none of it:

Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.

Even though Buchanan endorsed Bush, that wing of the party mocked and ridiculed Buchanan, along with Democrats and their media allies. Guess which word was used most against Buchanan? Divisive. Because he simply identified what had been a fact for decades, a worldview-religious war in this country, he was the bad guy, a narrow-minded religious bigot.

Less than seven years later we had the first of what has come to be called mass school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in April, 1999. According to that ABC news piece I linked to,

If a mass shooting is defined as resulting in the death of four or more people, not including the perpetrator, 175 people have died in 15 such events connected to U.S. schools and colleges.

Buchanan was mocked and ridiculed by American elites on the left and right, but he was absolutely correct: the contest in which we are engaged is for the soul of America. As he says, this culture war is about the kind of nation America shall be. It will either be a Christian nation, as we once were, or we will be a nation where we have to fear for the lives of our children every day we send them to school. There is no in between.

 

What is a Revival? Asbury And What Revival We Need

What is a Revival? Asbury And What Revival We Need

Mar 24, 2023 | Culture

There has been a lot of news recently about a revival at Asbury University, a Methodist school in Kentucky. In The American Conservative, Rod Dreher asks, “An extraordinary movement of the Holy Spirit at a Kentucky college chapel — is it for real?” By real he means “visceral experiences of the presence of God,” and he thinks as many do that this is a movement of the Holy Spirit and is real. I would tend to agree because I don’t feel qualified to determine whether what someone says is God moving in their being is real or not. But that is not my question here. I’m more interested in what revival accomplishes in the place in which it happens. I guess the question really is, is revival merely a personal religious experience, or does it have cultural implications. The answer should be obvious, but for many Christians it probably isn’t.

If we go back to the first great revival in history, and I’m not talking about the first Great Awakening in America in the 18th century, there were societal transforming implications. I’m speaking about the revival that started at Pentecost when God poured out his Holy Spirit because Jesus had accomplished redemption for his people and ascended to the right hand of God, according to the Apostle Paul, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” He also said Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” That means in this life, in this fallen world among fallen people in societies filled with such people.

If we go back to that first great revival we see the beginning of the transformation of Western civilization from fully pagan to Christian in seed form. We might even say mustard seed form. It took almost 300 years until the conversion of Constantine the Great for paganism to begin its slow demise as the dominant worldview in the West. By any measure, a modern person would have to agree the world produced by Christianity is far superior to the ancient pagan world.  Historian Tom Holland, not a Christian, wrote a book about this called Dominion. The subtitle makes the point: How the Christian revolution remade the world. That is what a revival does, it remakes the world. What does that look like? Read Holland’s book and you’ll find out. The spiritual war against paganism goes back to Yahweh calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and the Lord making a holy people for himself in Israel. God’s promises to Abraham would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ 2000 years later, and now His holy people is us!

When “the last days” came upon us with Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension, the war against paganism broke out of a small geographical area in the Roman Empire to encompass the entire earth. When that phrase “last days” is used, most Christians go right to Paul in I Timothy 1:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

Then they look at our culture and conclude this must be the last days Paul was referring to, and it is! But these indications of the last days have been with us in all recorded history. Have people gotten any better or worse in the last several thousand years? Obviously sinful human beings are every bit as sinful today as they’ve always been. But “last days” from a redemptive-historical perspective is the advance of God’s kingdom and the building of Christ’s church by the power of the Holy Spirit. We find prophetic descriptions of that throughout the Old Testament, but we find it defined in two important passages in the New. One is in the first Christian sermon given by Peter at Pentecost in Acts 2:

16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

17 “‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
18 Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.

The other is the first few verses of Hebrews:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

And Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 what Jesus is now doing at God’s right hand, ruling

far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

These are the last days we inhabit. And Paul points out that the purpose of Christ’s rule is the Father placing all things under his feet appointing him to be head over everything for the church. As I often say, God is moving in a mighty way to advance his kingdom and build his church. These are two different things working in symbiosis for the good of God’s people and His glory. So real revival apart from the personal salvation and experience of individuals is going to change the culture in which it happens. Not immediately, but in due course. In addition to the mustard seed metaphor I linked to above, Jesus also used the metaphor of levin in a very large batch of dough. The influence and manifestation of both grow slowly but inevitably.

That inevitable growth is what we as God’s people are part of, and the result of true revival. When God gave man, male and female, and the first Adam, the dominion mandate, they failed. Whereas the last Adam most certainly did not. Christ is now taking dominion of His world through His body, which is in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit (Zech. 4:6). That means our Christianity influences everything we do, literally every single thing. From how we make a living, to how we raise a family, to how we do art, music, politics, business, law, science, health and medicine, entertainment, architecture, education, farming, gardening, everything. And there is no culture war that is not spiritual war. Our pastor once said those focused on the culture war are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He isn’t alone in such sentiment, and he could not have been more wrong.

Christ came to save not just individuals so they could go to heaven, but the world itself, and people in it for a very specific reason. I’ll leave you with the Apostle John in Revelation 5:9-10 who tells us what that is:

9 And they sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
10 and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.”

 

Matt Walsh, Voddie Baucham, The Trans Guy, and the Reality of Stigma

Matt Walsh, Voddie Baucham, The Trans Guy, and the Reality of Stigma

Mar 11, 2023 | Culture

I stumbled on the video below about the drama surrounding Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to some guy pretending to be a woman. You have to see this guy pretending to believe he is actually a sexy woman to believe it. Appropriate words fail when you encounter something so wrong. It’s like watching something so nauseatingly evil that you’re dumbfounded, literally struck dumb, unable to speak. Like watching old films from the end of WWII and the allies coming upon the death camps with piles of bodies, that kind of nauseating. What can you say about such a thing other than feel anger and disgust and a yearning for justice that feels like vengeance. No, I do not believe a transgender male pretending he’s a woman is in any way comparable to genocide. There are obviously gradations of evil, and while these two examples are significantly different on the scale, transgender sin is deeply evil and elicits in us revulsion, and it should!

The reason I decided to comment on this is because it’s a critical cultural moment for the church and America. I encourage you to watch the 13-minute video to better understand the issues I’m addressing. If you watch through to the end you’ll see a touching video of a girl who now wants to be called Mike reading a letter from her grandmother telling her she cannot do that because of Jesus, but affirming how much she still loves her. Walsh is the one who plays the video, so he’s not the heartless monster his critics say he is. Some of these critics while not saying he’s a “monster” do think his tone and words were unfortunate, not winsome, and basically counterproductive. I couldn’t disagree more because the two examples are apples and oranges: the dude playing the woman needs tough love, and the struggling young lady just needs plain old love, and guidance. This gets to the cultural issue.

 

The word stigma was dropped a long time ago as a remnant of a hostile and intolerant religious (i.e., Christian) past in America. The simplest definition:

An association of disgrace or public disapproval with something, such as an action or condition: synonym: stain.

Oh no, we certainly wouldn’t want to do that! Stigmatizing “the other” was so last century before we entered secular Utopia and became tolerant of others’ lifestyles in the 1960s. Now in American culture we’re tolerant of all lifestyle choices, and accept everyone for who they decide to “identify” as. Only, we’re not. Far from it. Let’s use a simple example of why this “narrative” is a lie.

What are the two most common criticisms of Christians? We hate homosexuals (we’re intolerant), now including trans people, and we’re hypocrites.  Even though the first one is demonstrably untrue, and the second one is true of every human being (nobody lives up to their own standards let alone those of a perfectly holy God), what do these accusation do to Christians? Why, they stigmatize them! We’ve seen a growing phenomenon over the last several decades that has become as obvious as a Mount Everest in our midst. Those who are supposedly the most tolerant among us are the most blatantly intolerant people imaginable. It was not too many years ago when liberals were, well liberal. Here is one definition of the word liberal that makes one laugh out loud thinking we used to call these people liberals:

Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym.

The most narrow-minded bigots in America today used to be called liberals. They are more commonly called progressives now, but any honest person would call them communists. As ex-communist and leftist David Horowitz has accurately said, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” This is an especially virulent form of communism, though, informed by a cultural form of Marxism, in popular parlance, wokism. This isn’t the old style communism a la Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s hit man who had a penchant for shooting people in the back of the head, but a more subtle form of political murder. In 2023 we call this cancel culture. Another word for this? Stigma.

In the olden days in America, women who got pregnant out of wedlock (what an antiquated word that is!) were stigmatized. Now this is perfectly normal. When I was growing up the phrase, “living in sin” meant two people not married were living together, and people actually used it. If you used that phrase today to anyone under 40, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. Divorce was an embarrassing reality for some families. A man not having a job and living on the government dole was a disgrace. Those who lived on the street were bums, not “homeless people.” People who got drunk often were drunkards, now their alcoholics and supposedly have a disease. And I could go on.

Now, everything in America has become morally inverted. What was once stigmatized and considered immoral, is considered perfectly “normal,” and morally good. What is stigmatized is anyone who questions the morality of such things, those who do are considered intolerant; they must not be tolerated! Free speech, speaking what you think, is now considered by our progressive, woke cultural elites as “dangerous.” If it goes counter to the accepted moral standards of the woke cultural elites, it is hate. How convenient.

Which brings me to the video and Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to cultural power to the trans guy who claims to be a sexy woman. What Walsh is doing it attempting to re-stigmatize what ought to be stigmatized. In the upside-down, inside-out world of progressive Alice in Wonderland, what should be stigmatized isn’t, and what should not be stigmatized is. There is no moral neutrality in the universe. The idea is a myth of the secular lie. Christians are especially susceptible to the lie because they often buy into the secular cultural stereotype of Christians as Big Meanies who hate “sexual minorities” or some such thing. Those in the video criticizing Walsh as a Big Meanie are blind or naïve, and have no wisdom about the brutality of spiritual warfare in a fallen world.

Which finally brings me to Voddie Baucham, the great Christian culture warrior. At 7:48 and 10:08 in the video, he tells us about the Eleventh Commandment Christian, a phrase I’d never heard before. These well-meaning Christians, he says, believe “that every problem in the world is a result of Christians not being nice enough.” Whenever the “controversial” topics around sex are brought up by Christians or Christian pastors, they die the death of “a thousand qualifications.” As an example, he uses Christian pastors preaching on adultery, and it’s spot on. Pastors would never qualify the evil of adultery so they don’t offend the adulterers in the audience, but on the topic of homosexuality, that’s a different story.

The importance of this cultural moment is that we have two choices as we encounter the cultural hostility to all things Christian the left hates, and that’s pretty much everything. We either call a spade a spade, even if some Christians think that’s “mean,” or the left will continue to try to stigmatize us out of existence. We must culturally re-stigmatize any sex outside of marriage, for example, among many other things. There is no “getting along” with the woke elite. As Ronald Reagan said about the Soviet Union when asked what victory would look like, he answered, “We win, they lose.” The mutually exclusive worldviews of cultural Marxism (wokeness) and Christianity cannot coexist.

The spirit of “the 60s” is at its cultural and political apex; it has no higher to go. But as I argued in my previous post, the fall of the left is inevitable because nothing built on lies can last. It is the examples of Matt Walsh and Voddie Baucham who show us the path to victory and the advance of the kingdom of God.

 

Thoughts on the Global Disinformation Index PSYOP

Thoughts on the Global Disinformation Index PSYOP

Feb 18, 2023 | Culture

It’s a woke world, so nobody who pays attention is surprised there is such a thing as an official “Global Disinformation Index.” Truth be told, I thought it was comical. If we’ve learned anything in the last several years it’s how inept and incompetent the globalist Uniparty elite cabal really is. Not only that, but they are liars who push a “narrative” trying to accomplish their globalist goals of rule by an elite class of overlords who believe in technocracy, or rule by scientific “experts.” Of course, they claim to believe they are doing this for good and noble ends. They also believe the people who are the object of those ends are either too ignorant or stupid to know any better, so they in some way must be made to comply.

Thus some globalist geniuses learned from the Silicon Valley tech giants that only some speech is worthy of being free, and other speech has to be labeled as “disinformation,” whatever that might be. Well, we can be thankful the good folks at the GDI have told us exactly what it is:

GDI defines disinformation as “adversarial narratives, which are intentionally misleading; financially or ideologically motivated; and/or, aimed at fostering long-term social, political or economic conflict; and which create a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting at-risk individuals or institutions.”

Ah, “intentionally misleading.” Of course, these people know beyond a shadow of a doubt what other people’s motives are. Got it. And of course, we couldn’t have anyone “undermining trust in science.” We know now, since the enlightened elites have informed us, that “science” is our savior and must not be blasphemed. The “adversarial narratives” are those which in any way challenge or reject the accepted narrative of the globalist technocratic elite. How convenient! There is an awful lot of fly food coming from our GDI masters made to smell like roses.

One thing in all this pabulum they do get right is that we are in an information war in which the PSYOP is everything. What exactly is that?

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

The most successful PSYOP in the history of the world by far was the Covid scam. Whatever Covid was or is, it was not the bubonic plague—the reaction was not commensurate with the actual threat to public health. The reaction was, however, a test run by the globalist elite cabal for what they’ve called the Great Reset, in the very words of Klaus Schwab. No thanks, Klaus! I like the world of sovereign nation states just fine.

These globalist tyrants will be no more successful at stifling free speech and ideas they disagree with, than they were with “flattening the curve.” It will work as well as masks do in keeping people from getting ill from a cold virus, which is not at all, and be as effectives as a vaccine against a cold virus, which is completely ineffective, when not harmful. All told, the GDI tyrants will fail miserably, they just don’t know it yet. The question is why they will fail. It’s simple: The Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, our primary weapon in this information war.

Prior to the Internet it was much easier for the elite establishment to wage information warfare. When I was growing up information sources were limited to a handful of TV stations, AM and FM Radio, most of which was controlled by the same corporations as television, and newspapers that were mostly part of the same liberal echo chamber. When I discovered I was a conservative in the early ‘80s, it was terribly frustrating. I found the then reliable conservative publications of National Review and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages, but they got bad cases of TDS and are now shills for what I call Con Inc. Then Rush Limbaugh came on the scene on August 1, 1988, and it was positively shocking to hear conservative ideas on the radio. Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed; climate Change Al is a very talented guy. While he was working on the Internet, Fox News was founded in 1996, and left-wing CNN finally had a conservative competitor. But cable is not the Internet, and we’ve seen how Fox has been coopted by Con Inc. and spouts the approved narrative whatever that happens to be, save Tucker who brings in far too much revenue to silence.

One of the best things we ever did was to de-couple from the Matrix by completely stopping any TV watching in our house, and that for me includes no sports. When professional sports leagues started going woke, and accepted all the Covid nonsense, I was done. What a blessing it is to not have to endure television commercials. Whatever advertising we have to endure on the Internet, can easily be skipped or ignored. We can also stream whatever we want to watch and so determine the content. Anyone who still watches cable or television news doesn’t realize how they are being programmed to see things according to “the narrative,” whatever that might be. I’ve learned that whatever “the narrative” is, the very consensus among the media and political elites is likely the exact opposite of the truth. It’s cynical, but necessary.

What’s also necessary is to search out information sources that question “the narrative.” Google, which owns Youtube, completely cooks the books in terms of search results to make sure people see only what they want them to see. It doesn’t mean information contrary to “the narrative” isn’t there, only that it’s really hard to find. The thing is, truth can never be fully, ultimately suppressed, because truth is ultimately incarnational, the very Son of God who is truth itself. Lies are unsustainable and can’t win in the long term. They can cause immense suffering and hardship, but they are ultimately futile. Just as we’re responsible for our own health, we’re responsible for finding truth whatever and wherever it might be, as best as we can discern it.

The reference to the Gutenberg Press and the analogy to the Internet is profound. The elite of the 15th and 16th centuries were the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility. What they wanted people to know, is what they were allowed to know. Then Johannes Gutenberg went and ruined everything with his invention of the first every movable type press in the mid-15th century. Less than a century later printing technology had so improved in quality and pricing that when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the church door at Wittenberg in what he thought was a little internecine Catholic squabble, it took the European world by storm. The 21st century Gutenberg Press is doing the same thing only this time worldwide, and the globalist elites will no more be able to contain it than the Catholic Church and nobles contained the Reformation.

 

Psalm 75: God’s Providence and the Aquinas Nature/Grace Divide

Psalm 75: God’s Providence and the Aquinas Nature/Grace Divide

Jan 7, 2023 | Culture

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As I’ve written here numerous times recently, our tendency is to see history and current events happening “by chance,” as if there is no guiding hand directing people and events, and things just happen. Maybe if there is any guiding hand it’s of a very bad pin ball wizard. But in fact, there is an Almighty guiding hand, the God we read about in our Bibles. We find it easy to believe He directed all things in redemptive history, but outside of the Bible we tend to see history and current events as atoms in the form of people just colliding willy-nilly ending up who knows where. But these words in Psalm 75 don’t allow that interpretation of what happens in our world:

6 Not from the east or the west
or from the desert comes exaltation.
7 It is God who judges:
He brings one down, he exalts another.

Think about the implications of this. Not a single individual goes up or down in the world apart from God’s will, and this means anywhere and everywhere in the world. We call this God’s providence.

I don’t believe this is only at the highest reaches of geopolitical power, like presidents or kings or prime ministers, but who gets the corner office, or becomes a store manager, or gets a job in the first place, or gets the gig with the band, or any number of infinite examples of human relationships. The Apostle Paul put it this way in Acts 17 speaking of God, “He gives all life and breath and everything else,” which is as comprehensive as it gets.

This is important for a variety of reasons, not least of which it is true. God is the sovereign ruler of all things. Most importantly, the entire meaning of history is God advancing his kingdom in Christ, and Christ building his church by the power of the Holy Spirit. This means nothing that happens in our lives (Rom. 8:28) or in the lives of anybody on earth, is insignificant. God is ordaining all that happens, literally every single thing every single second of every single day toward the ends of his choosing (i.e., the advance of His kingdom and the building of His church). I’m guilty at times, and I’m sure most Christians are, of seeing some things as “just happening,” as if they are outside of the telos of God’s designs in the ultimate redemption of the universe. Nothing happens by accident. Jesus uses a bird to make the point:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.

Some people rather than taking comfort from this fact of existence, struggle with trying to understand how God’s sovereign control of all things can coexist with man’s free will and accountability. This struggle has long and deep philosophical roots in Western history. I’ve never had a problem with it because I don’t feel the need to understand how both could be true at the same time because in the Bible they clearly are. We get into trouble when we think we either need to understand what is clearly a mystery of God’s being, or are owed such understanding.

But speaking of the deep philosophical roots, I’ve been listening to a podcast series on Thomas Aquinas from the Ezra Institute. It has helped me to further understand why people in Western secular culture struggle with or feel the need to understand God’s sovereignty vis a vis man’s free will. When I was a young Christian, I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There and learned that Schaeffer was not a big fan of Aquinas. For Schaeffer, Aquinas was the turning point in Western intellectual history, and thus culture, because he tried to synthesize the philosophy of Aristotle with Christianity.

For a long time I’ve tried to understand why some Christians think this was a disaster for Western civilization, and others think it was a good thing. The guys at the Ezra Institute are definitely of the former, and I understand better now why. Simply, what happened was Aquinas created a higher order of things in grace, and a lower order in nature. What ends up happening is a kind of dualism where the upper story is for spiritual things, and the lower story “natural” things. Eventually in Western culture as it secularized, the upper story is either unknowable or only accessible via a “leap” of faith, and “real” knowledge is only available in the lower story or material world. The result was a slowly evolving secularism where God became persona non grata and religion a purely personal matter with no relevance to culture.

The challenge for Christians is that we’re programmed in this dualistic view of things just living in a secular Western culture, even if we know intellectually that God is Lord over all creation, every square inch of it. I often use the example I learned from C.S. Lewis who said that Mary’s virgin birth was just as miraculous as every birth. Prior to reading that several years ago I hadn’t realized how programmed I’d been into seeing certain things as “natural” and other things as super-natural. There is nothing “natural” about any birth, or anything in God’s created material reality.

The Bible doesn’t allow us any such distinction, and intellectually I knew that, but I was still influenced to see things that way. I no longer am. To fight against this secularist tendency one practical thing I do now is no longer refer to the created world as “nature.” When Western culture was thoroughly Christian using the word nature wouldn’t have been a problem because everyone agreed that meant God’s created material reality. But as the 19th century progressed, especially with the physics of Newton in full bloom and the idea of evolution percolating among intellectuals, nature soon came to mean “nature,” as in something in the lower story that runs all by itself. Nowadays if you hear or read a secular person use the word nature, it’s amazing what “nature” can do. Just replace that word with God, and there would be no difference.

In our day we should only refer to “nature” as creation because anytime the word nature is used in our secular culture the assumption is “acts on its own.” If we’re to be salt and light to our dark world, we have to be smart about how we use language and affirm our Creator God every chance we get. The fact of the matter is this, “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . .”

If you like philosophy and this topic interests you, you can listen to the podcast here: Aquinas and the Nature/Grace Divide. It looks like there are nine total episodes, but the one I specifically linked to is about the topic of this post.