Author: VD

CDM requests some examples:

I noticed the Arminian-friendly here argue by philosophical perspectives, and seeming truths. How about backing your assertions up with Scripture? Christians shouldn’t care what one thinks if the Word contradicts one’s humanistic arguments.

Since Greg Boyd already went to the trouble of looking up more than a few verses which demonstrate this, I see no reason to reinvent the wheel.

When the Bible says that God “changed his mind” (e.g. Ex. 32:14; 2 Chr. 21:15; Jon.3:10, Jere. 26:2-3; Joel 2:13-14), I simply do not see anything, in the text which suggests it is intended to be taken as figurative. So too, when God adds fifteen years to Hezekiah’s life after he’s prophetically informed him of his intention to end it immediately (Isa., 38:1-5; 2 Ka. 20:1-6), 1 assume that God altered his plans. The same is true when God says he will reverse his prophesied decision to bless or curse a nation if that nation changes (Jere. 18:7-11). I don’t know how to faithfully interpret this passage unless God really changes his mind. And this, so far as I can discern, implies that the fate of the nation was not from eternity a foregone conclusion.

In just the same way, when the Lord says that he thought Israel would turn to him and expresses disappointment over the fact that they didn’t (Jere. 3:6-7, 19-20), I personally don’t know how to interpret this with integrity without concluding that what Israel was actually going to do was somewhat up in the air at the time God thought this. When the Lord says that he “regretted” the way even decisions which he made turned out, I have to take this as factual (Gen. 6:6, I Sam. 5:12, 35). And when the Lord speaks of the future using words like “if,” “perhaps” and “maybe,” as he frequently does, I don’t know how to acknowledge these words as absolutely authoritative in my thinking- without concluding that the aspects of the future to which he refers is genuinely a “maybe,” not a settled issues (e.g., Ex. 4:1-9; Jere. 38:17-18, 20-21, 23).

It is more than a little ironic that the omniderigistas require a figurative interpretation of the Bible in defense of their orthodoxy. They aren’t generally quite so eager to accept the non-literal argument when it comes to other matters, such as the Revelation or the Gospels.

Jay Nordlinger points out a howler:

Howard Dean, chairman of the National Democratic Committee. He said that Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican, should “stay in Virginia,” where he lives as he works on Capitol Hill. But, Dean cracked, “Santorum is too much of a right-winger for Virginia. How about Venezuela?”

Huh? Does he realize that Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan strongman, is a Castroite?

But then, this is the Democratic leader whose favorite book in the New Testament is Job.

Remember, this is the CHAIRMAN OF THE DNC! The party that thinks they’re smarter. The party that thinks they’re better-educated. The party that thinks they’re morally superior.

I mean, I understand that most Democrats are too maleducated to know that the National Socialists were hard-core left-wingers. I’m used to that level of cluelessness. But to think Chavez, the worker’s champion and ally of Fidel Castro, is a right-winger takes a staggering level of ignorance of world affairs.

Even for a Democrat.

DB questions his own free will:

I was reading your blog awhile ago and was noticing your questioning about God sanctioned governments. I think what is hard for me is trying to take your arguments about something in the Bible seriously when you have openly advocated for “open theism.” Don’t you find it pretty amazing that historical Christianity doesn’t give any credence to “open theism?” With that in mind, how do you square going against guys like Edwards, Bunyan, Owen, Spurgeon, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Packer, Grudem, Sproul, Piper and Lewis? You are basically putting Greg Boyd and Clark Pinnock up against those guys? Did Boyd and Pinnock just wake up one day and say, “You know, these good ol boys for hundreds of years have this whole God’s sovereignty think way wrong! Let me tell the world how the Bible REALLY is!”

Do you think our historic Christian leaders just completely missed the boat on this one? If so, that is a very daunting argument to make considering the above have led some of the most amazing revivals in history such as Edwards and the Great Awakening. I don’t hear anything like that with Boyd or Pinnock or even yourself. Doesn’t there have to be at least some proof in the pudding played out on an evangelical level rather than just sitting around thinking up stuff?

First, Piper has no credibility with me whatsoever. He’s a hand-waver and a name-caller, not someone who engages in substantial debate, and I don’t bother with people like that. Second, DB’s formulation is fundamentally flawed, because God can and will use people who don’t know or understand the first thing about Him or how He works. The fact that God has used an individual in an evangelical sense does not necessarily mean that this individual’s understanding of God is more accurate to any other believer’s. To put this in perspective, Satan almost surely has a better understanding of God and His works than your average minister, and yet the minister is likely to be more effective in an evangelical sense.

One reason that I am rather dismissive of “closed theism” is that its adherents are so quick to baselessly cast aspersions on those who don’t agree to shut off their minds and accept the assertion that God is amusing Himself by playing puppets with humanity. They seem to forget that it is one’s belief and confession in Jesus Christ that saves, not a superior understanding of supernatural operations. Also, given that the Bible states that we see through a glass darkly and are incapable understanding God’s ways, the common wisdom is assured of being more reliably incorrect than it is with regards to purely worldly matters.

I see far more intellectual humility and civility on the part of the open theory advocates than I do on the part of their opponents, whose actions reflect the same sort of anger and fear that one usually sees in those who doubt their own position. This is another factor that makes me more sympathetic to the open side, although I refuse to take a firm stand on it because regardless of what evangelical tradition or my reason might say, it is impossible to know the answer.

Finally, the omniderigence to which the closed theists subscribe is absolutely littered with both Biblical and logical flaws; perhaps one day I’ll have to write a column addressing this. The fact that many of the great evangelists believed that they had no choice but to do as they did does not mean that they were correct to believe so.

I don’t believe God is inflicting my cousin’s child with leukemia, I believe God wants to heal that child and He will if He can find a human agent of sufficient faith. One of Jesus Christ’s most oft-repeated themes was that all things are possible through faith, but Man has so little faith that he usually can’t accomplish anything. I suspect that many people find omniderigence to be comforting because it lets them off the hook for their own failures and the responsibility to confront the evil around them. But why would Jesus tell his disciples to feed the poor, heal the sick and raise the dead if it was God’s Will that the poor be poor, the sick be sick and the dead be dead?

From the Corriere della Sera:

La prima al Milan: Stam e il solito Sheva affondano l’Inter. Massimo risultato con il minimo sforzo. Il Milan si aggiudica con un 2 a 0 il primo round dell’euroderby. Per gli uomini di Mancini, mai veramente incisivi, tutte le speranze sono ora riposte nel ritorno che si giocherà martedì 12 aprile.

The first game to Milan: Stam and Shevchenko, as usual, sink Inter. With a maximum result from a minimum of effort, Milan took a 2-0 lead in the first round of the Euroderby. For Mancini’s men, who were never very incisive, all of their hopes are now resting on the rematch, which will be played Tuesday, April 12.

It was nice to see Chelsea destroying Bryan Munich too. Milan shouldn’t have any trouble reaching the next stage, since one away goal will see them through even in the event of a draw. A Scudetto/Champion’s League double would certainly be a nice way to close out the season.

The Original Cyberpunk shares his digital history in The Ranting Room:

In 1979, I started out with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 and a program called “Electric Pencil,” I believe. That was soon replaced by an Apple ][+ and a program called “Magic Window,” then “WordHandler,” which was one of those truly great, years ahead of its time, and completely forgotten products. I wrote and sold a lot of fiction using that old Apple ][+ and WordHandler, while simultaneously going through a lengthy succession of other Apples — I believe I have 10 of them up in the loft of the garage — before finally coming to the conclusion that there is nothing as worthless as last year’s Macintosh.

I started out with my Dad’s original IBM PC. He built a small technology empire on the basis of the memory board designs laid out in the appendices, so I have reason to be grateful to that first computer. Unfortunately, the games on that PC were few and far between – what was IBM thinking with giving you those particular three colors, Pink, Cyan and White – and they mostly blew anyhow.

A summer computer course was conducted on TI-99/4As, but there was an Apple II in the back of the room on which we used to play Akallabeth, Castle Wolfenstein and Swashbuckler. I was a pirate from Day One, and assembled a notebook full of floppies even before I had a computer to play them on. The local Radio Shack was great, as they’d let us bring our games in and play them on their display Apple II; they racked up at least one sale as my Dad finally bought me an Apple IIe.

I still love that computer. Some of my favorite memories from high school were down in the basement, playing Wizardry, Autoduel, Ultima III and other games. Getting a second disk drive for Christmas was huge, as it significantly furthered our pirate activities. Elephant Memory Systems! I think Big Chilly still has that yellow poster somewhere, although Chilliette won’t let him put it up in his office.

My parents gave me an original Macintosh when I went off to college. I sold that to Big Chilly’s little brother in favor of a CompuAdd 386/25 once VGA came out, the better to play Wing Commander. After Big Chilly and I quit our jobs to start our computer game company, my Dad bought us a brand new Pentium 90 to inaugurate the auspicious new venture and that was the last computer I bought for years, as our relationship with Intel kept us well-supplied with computers after that.

I scored two 500 MHz Dell laptops from The Perfect Aryan Male, who gave me one for a birthday present and sold me the other one for $200 when his megagargantuan employer went under and left him in charge of shutting down offices around the world and selling off the inventory. But a few years later, I finally broke down and bought a 3.4 GHz laptop with a 256 MB Radeon 9700 when I needed faster 3D performance for a certain technology project on which I’m still working.

Last week’s spill is still rendering my Linux partition inoperable, along with my > key in XP, but I’ve got a new keyboard on order and I’m hoping that will repair things. If not, well, I can always add to the list. And, OC, I have to say that knocking out fiction on the Apple II+ in 2005 isn’t lame at all, it’s MEGA-RETRO!

Hit it baby, one more time.

The White Buffalo is keeping track:

You finally won something! You’re somebody now!

He is, of course, referring to my tournament picks, wherein I correctly selected North Carolina to defeat Illinois in the NCAA championship game. I won’t deny a certain sense of satisfaction, but remembering the way in which the WB leapfrogged Chokechain and I to finish in the big NFL pick-16 money turns the victory to ashes in my mouth.

Nate sounds uncommonly liberal today:

The problem I have with your premise is your claim that the Death Penalty is not a deterent.

Since its never been widely, and efficiently used, we simply don’t know.

It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it hasn’t been applied properly. Now, where have I heard that argument before?

The truth is that the death penalty has been applied widely to absolutely no effect in many places. Possession of a firearm was punishable by death in China for decades, and yet a single month’s sweep by the authorities produced over 120,000 weapons… and that’s how many they were able to find.

Suicide bombers are a significant argument against the death penalty’s deterrent effect. But even more powerful is the stupidity argument, which is to say that most criminals are not the brightest bulbs on the planet. They commit stupid crimes because they don’t believe they’re going to be caught. Someone who doesn’t believe he’s going to be caught is inherently impervious to any deterrent effect based on the consequences of being caught.

GH writes:

In your article on the death penalty, I can’t believe you even compare killing someone who has taken the life of someone else with killing “innocent” people as with abortion or tyrannical governments have done. There’s a huge difference between killing someone because they have devalued human life enough to murder someone else and killing innocent people who have not murdered someone else. You can argue about the right to take someone’s life who has murdered, but don’t actually compare the killing of two different categories of people in your argument against the death penalty…. I won’t even go into your arguments about confusing morality with human legislation (are all laws amoral then?) or whether the Bible sanctions government to take a life which show your deep ignorance on what many Christians and theologians believe about how God sanctions the government.

Right, my deep ignorance. The point, my dear GH, is not that I am ignorant of how many Christians and theologians believe how God sanctions the government, but that I suspect they are wrong. If God sanctions all governments, then the answer to the following questions should be clear:

1. Is one morally obligated to obey a legal government order to send a Jew to the gas chamber? To prevent food from being delivered to a region?

2. If one is not morally obligated to obey an immoral government order, has that government lost the sanction of God upon issuing an immoral order?

3. How many immoral orders must a government issue and how many immoral acts must it engage in before the sanction of God is lost. Can a government ever lose the sanction of God?

The thrust of my argument is that since the government is capable of arbitrarily deciding guilt and innocence, it must not be permitted to kill anyone. Once the principle of capital punishment is ceded to the central power, it is simple a small matter of redefining previously innocent classes of individuals as guilty in order for the government to legally kill them. This has been done in the past, it is being done now and it will be done in the future. No amount of airy theosophizing will change this reality; in case it has escaped your attention, the United States of America is not a Christian theocracy.

Right now, only the criminal, the unborn and the cognitively inoperative can be killed with the approval of the US government. Is there anyone who doubts that the cognitively and developmentally disabled will soon be added to that list? Conservative Christians can continue to wring their hands about this while clinging to the death penalty if they wish; if they truly wish to push back the recent advances of the Ahrimaniacs, they would be wise to give it up and embrace a position that is 100 percent pro-life and is built around the principle of defanging the democidists.

They won’t, of course, because if they did, my whacked-out noir prediction would be turn out to be off base. And that just doesn’t happen very often, the S&P 500 aside.

Fecalicious empathizes with an abortionette saddened by an unexpected encounter with reality:

I’ve just started a new job, as editor of coolwomen.ca. As such, I’ve set up a Google news search for any item referring to feminist or feminism.While I expected to receive a fair number of stories that were anti-feminist, I have been saddened by how overwhelming the ratio is. I’d say at least three attacks for every positive or neutral story.

Is there any way to turn this around?

Short answer? No. What’s amusing is that feminists are such mindless herd animals that they have no idea how completely and utterly their foundational ideas are dismissed by most WOMEN. And they have nothing whatsoever to offer men who have not been neutered, which is why they find it so hard to find dates, much less husbands.

Worst of all, they are still, despite their best efforts, women, so they find themselves sexually drawn to the very Alpha males they despise ideologically. Only the supremacy of biology over belief explains how feminist freaks can happily become subservient members of cults with leaders that make Stalin look like a management-by-consensus guy without ever noticing the irony. For a more mainstream example, consider NOW and Bill Clinton. With this constant interior struggle bubbling beneath the surface, it’s no wonder that so many of them come off as total lunatics who can barely complete a sentence without spinning wildly out of control.

No matter how well-reasoned, opposition to their society-killing, scatter-brained ideology is always put down to personal inadequacies, usually a failure to score with women. In fact, every single time I write a column mocking feminism, I’m informed that I’m only bitter because women don’t wish to share their bodies, themselves, with me. Right, because women just loathe Lamborghini libertarians… one self-professed feminist even sent me a picture of herself “to prove that she wasn’t one of those ugly feminists”. (And she wasn’t, she was maybe a six. Maybe.)

That being said, Fecalicious is dead-on with regards to Professor Adams unconventional interpretation of readership as well as his ungainly attempt to segue into a fundraising appeal. And something about Worldview Weekend Branson Family Reunion gives me the shivers as well….

Still, we can forgive the good professor his failure to execute flawlessly in light of the fact that publishing that Canuck’s little hissy fit was good humor.

Professor Mike Adams teaches that electronic information is for sharing:

Hi there! It’s Mike Adams – the guy you were just talking about in your Canadian feminist chat room….

“What can you do to fight such a thing? Townhall’s Doctor Professor Mike Adams, PhD is an inveterate liar who has been accused of making up correspondence from his supposed readership to advance his patently women-hating views (…there is some scuttle-butt going around that he’s in fact a self-hating homosexual who goes on ‘hunting’ trips with another suspected closet case and former-drug-dealer-turned-anti-feminist-mall-preacher/whacko Doug Giles).

I really wish that country had some respect for ethics in public discourse, but it obviously doesn’t.”

Well, now that you are reading the full text of your remarks – remarks you never expected to see broadcast in an internationally-read column – you are becoming painfully aware of the fact that I am not guilty of “making up correspondence” from a fictitious readership. Since anti-male feminist whackos really exist, there’s no need for fabrication.

I found it very interesting that once I started replying publicly to my hate mail, the volume dropped dramatically. People will still occasionally snipe around the perimeter, usually some clueless loser who doesn’t grok the nametag and is nearly wetting himself in his hurry to “out” me. But despite the increasing readership of both my column and this blog, the amount of hate mail is down more than 90 percent from before the first Mailvox appeared on WND.

And on a tangential note, is there any male columnist on the right who HASN’T been accused of being a secret homosexual by leftist lunatics? The inescapable conclusion is that outside of the realm of politics, where one is forced to make alliances where one can find them, the Left regards homosexuality as something extremely undesirable. No doubt this is why left-wing governments have historically placed gays up towards the front of the line for Schiavozation.

I mean, if they’re not going to breed and do their bit in creating the next generation of New Soviet Man or the Aryan master race, then where’s the benefit to society in keeping a bunch of evolutionary dead-ends around?