Tag: Christianity

Economics 102 and remedial Theology

We begin with explaining the economic concept of “opportunity cost” to Jim Hines, John Scalzi, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

In the wake of Scalzi’s Big Book Deal, folks have been saying some rather ignorant or ill-informed stuff about how publishing works. I wanted to address a few of those points here.

Let’s start with the easiest, in which folks over on Theodore Beale’s blog claim that by Tor giving Scalzi a $3.4 million advance, they’re “squeezing out” approximately “523 initial advances to new science fiction authors.” In other words, Beale claims that “Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi have combined to prevent more than 500 authors from getting published and receiving paid advances.”

This is a particularly egregious bit of ignorance coming from Mister Beale, who fancies himself a publisher.

Publishing is a business. As a business, Tor not only spends money on things like acquiring and publishing books, they also earn money by selling said books. Assuming Scalzi shut out 500 authors assumes that Tor is simply pissing away that $3.4 million. This is a rather asinine assumption. John Scalzi has repeatedly hit the NYT Bestseller list, earned a Best Novel Hugo, and has several TV/film deals in development for his work. Tor buys books from John Scalzi for the same reason they buy books from Orson Scott Card: those books sell a hell of a lot of copies, and earn Tor significant profits.

Very often it’s those profits — the income from reliable bestsellers like Card and Scalzi — that allow publishers to take a chance on new and unknown authors.

Let’s count the errors:

  1. Scalzi and PNH have combined to render it impossible for 523 new science fiction authors to break into mainstream publishing through Tor Books. This is a simple fact so long as we know that Tor does not have an unlimited amount of money at its disposal. The fact that Pan Macmillan just canned PNH’s counterpart at Tor UK “following a review of the company’s science fiction and fantasy publishing” should suffice to indicate that Tor’s advance budget is not limitless. The math is straightforward: PNH chose to give one author 13 advances of ~$250,000 per book rather than giving 523 authors $6,500 advances of the sort he gave John Scalzi for Old Man’s War. Any response that doesn’t take this into account is mere handwaving and evasion.
  2. I don’t fancy myself a publisher. I am very pleased to have the privilege of publishing John C. Wright, Jerry Pournelle, Eric Raymond, Tom Kratman, Sarah Salviander, Jonathan Moeller, Rolf Nelson, Martin van Creveld, and William S. Lind, among others. And we expect to announce the publication of several big names from the game industry soon.
  3. Observing that Scalzi financially shut out 500+ authors does not assume that Tor is simply pissing away that $3.4 million. Those authors are now shut out whether Scalzi sells millions of books or none at all. If Tor is pissing away that $3.4 million, it is the authors now being published by Tor who will be shut out in the future. Tor is literally betting their careers on Scalzi. I expect some will like that gamble, others not so much.
  4. The opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone, in a situation in which a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives given limited resources. We’ve already established that Tor’s resources are limited. So, the question is not whether John Scalzi’s next 13 books “sell a hell of a lot of copies, and earn Tor significant profits”, but if those 13 books will sell MORE copies, and earn Tor MORE significant profits, than the books from other authors Tor otherwise might have signed.
  5. Tor bought Scalzi’s various one-and-done appearances on the oft-gamed NYT Bestseller list. The idea that Fuzzy Nation was ever more popular than Old Man’s War
    or sold more copies is downright risible. To cite Tor’s past
    marketing efforts as justification for the new authors it has decided not to publish is a category error. It’s a sunk cost of trivial
    benefit going forward, not that Hines likely knows what a “sunk cost” is. As for the appeal to the Hugo Award, I’m going to give McCreepy the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s sarcasm.

Remember, each new author doesn’t have to outsell Scalzi to generate opportunity cost. The breakeven on units for each book is 2.5 percent of Scalzi’s individual book sales. Assuming the average new Tor writer sells 10,000 books, (and the biggest publisher in SF had better be able to sell that many) that means each of the 13 Scalzi books has to sell at least 402,308 copies for Tor to break even on the opportunity cost from a reasonable unit sales perspective. And each new author who proves capable of selling more than 10k copies only makes the decision that much worse for Tor. You will notice that none of the Scalzi allies attempting to defend the deal ever bother to work through the actual math of it, preferring to rely instead on general phrases like “a hell of a lot”.

However, there are two very real and even significant justifications for preferring 13 John Scalzi
books to 523 new author books even if the future sales estimates tend to favor the latter. Hines doesn’t bring them up, presumably because they highlight my point
about how there are 3.4 million reasons the deal is shutting out new authors. It is more expensive, and
therefore less profitable, to edit, print, and distribute 523 different
authors than one. Even if we use the EFA’s very conservative guidelines and assume an unrealistically low production amount of $5,000 per book, those 523 authors would cost Tor at least $3 million more in production costs than producing John Scalzi’s 13 books will.

Furthermore, there are a limited number of available slots in the retail channels, even for Tor. Barnes & Noble is not going to endcap 500 different Tor books; they probably don’t even carry that many in total. But again, this supports my larger point about how the increased centralization of traditional publishing tends to lock out new authors and midlist authors alike. That was why I stopped even talking to traditional publishers years ago; as a midlist author who sold 30k to 40k copies per book, I knew I was of little interest to them. These days, if you can’t at least threaten six digits in your two chances at publication, you will need to be a gatekeeper’s pet in order to stay in traditional print for long. The dirty little secret of traditional publishing is that its profits are no less dependent upon constant churn than the average stockbrokerage.

And this points to the best part of what increasingly looks like a pretty good deal for Scalzi: he is locking in Tor’s marketing focus on his behalf, although again, at the expense of its other authors. And that, combined with what we have learned about Pan Macmillan’s unhappiness with its editorial product in the UK, leads me to suspect that PNH is feeling the heat from above and has therefore thrown a bit of a Hail Mary in order to buy himself more time.

Since we’re on the subject of openly clueless statements about me at File 770, let’s address two of their creative takes on theology while we’re at it:

CPaca on June 1, 2015 at 3:27 pm said:
VD isn’t a Christian, despite claiming he is. The belief that Satan rules the world instead of God is some form of Christian Gnostic heresy. One has to wonder if Wright is fully aware of who he’s hanging out with.

If this were a science fiction novel, the dialogue would end here, with the Atheist Who Knows the Bible Better than the Bible-Thumping Bigot gloriously triumphing. Of course, this isn’t a science fiction novel, and in fact, their knowledge of Christianity literally doesn’t rise to the level of Out of the Silent Planet. Do they not even understand what “Silent Planet” means? Do they not truly not understand the entire purpose of the Word made flesh, much less the Crucifixion?

The belief that Satan rules the world is the very essence of Christianity!

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’
-Matthew 4:1-11


But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.  When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment:  about sin, because people do not believe in me;  about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer;  and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.
– John 16:7-11

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
– 2nd Corinthians 4:4

Stevie on June 1, 2015 at 3:56 pm said:
I think we agree that VD is not a Christian; I think that VD would happily abandon his not very good grasp of Gnosticism on the grounds of ‘rhetoric’, or ‘Aristotle’, or whatever flavour of evasion he happens to feel like at any given time. Given his obsessive hatred of John Scalzi I suspect that VD cheers himself up by imagining him as ‘left behind’.

Sadly, Wright’s track record as a professed Christian suggests that he doesn’t understand Christianity either; his appalling outburst about Terry Pratchett is wholly incompatible with Christ’s commandment that we should love each other. Wright appears to be under the impression that Christ really didn’t understand being God, and that Wright has much better ideas as to what God actually wants than the reprobate who spent his time with the poor, the sick, the hungry, and consorted with dreadful people like tax collectors…

I can’t abandon what I don’t have. And as for the idea that John Wright’s rejection of the late Pratchett’s euthanasia activism is somehow incompatible with Christianity, that is simply false. Terry Pratchett was not only, as Neil Gaiman described him, a very angry man, he was a very wicked and cowardly man.

You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.
– Hebrews 1:9

But it is true that as a man outside the Church, we should not judge him; God will do that. In any event, the extent and intensity of their hatred for me should suffice to testify as to whether I am a Christian or not.

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.
–  John 15:17-19

Let them hate. I never forget who they hate first and foremost.

Mailvox: a collection of questions

A new reader has a boatload of questions. This is merely the first half. I’ll address the other half later this week:

First time e-mail correspondent here, as well as a reader of your blog for about a month-and-a-half now. My religious beliefs could best be described as “conflicted”, or “confused”, or “I’m not even 100% sure what I believe but I’m trying to find out”. My political ideologies and other personal beliefs are in a similar state of flux, and thus, all four of my questions are asked mostly out of curiosity, partly because I know you’ll give a good answer (Should you choose to respond), and partly because you (unlike quite a few people) cite your sources.

Oh, and I read The Irrational Atheist from front to back. Twice. Once when I was 14, the old man gave me TIA to read, because that was when I was really asking the hard questions about my childhood faith and wondering whether or not the godless teenagers that went to high school with me had a point or not, but it was a bit intellectually above me and I didn’t really absorb the arguments presented all that well. Now, at the tender age of 20, having read the book a second time, I can say with absolute confidence: They really, really didn’t. And having seen what passes for the intellectual atheist, I can also say with the same confidence: Whatever my religious beliefs turn out to be in the future, I certainly never want to turn out like THAT.

1. Given the rather thorny issue of homosexuality, this isn’t really one question but several related ones. I’ve read your beliefs that homosexuality is an evil, but not really much beyond that. (Others have claimed that you said it’s a birth defect, but I’m aware that’s not the case. I recognize a media smear campaign when I see one) So, I have a few questions to pin down exactly what you think about it:

a) Do you believe all evils are inherently equal? b) Do you feel that homosexuality equals coveting your neighbor’s possessions equals adultery equals murder? c)Is there a set hierarchy? d)Or does God judge such things on a case by case basis, acting in the role of The Universal Judge?

e)Do you believe that homosexuality is a choice? The act itself clearly is, but the desire as well? Many gay people that I’ve personally spoken to claim they would have “opted out” if they had been given a choice in the matter, not necessarily out of any love for Jesus Christ (Although there are those that do), but a desire to be normal and get through the day unmolested. f) If the desire is not a choice, if it is something that is designated at birth, then how does this relate to the Christian view of homosexuality, which seems to view it as an active choice that the perpetrator can choose to stop doing at any time?

g) Do you know of any testimonial or historical evidence that indicates that a person who is gay can become straight by means of conversion, prayer, or worship of the Christian God? I am aware of testimony that such prayer and worship that has cured diseases, addictions, psychological issues, ended crippling pain, and even cured physical birth defects like limps or both legs being different lengths. Wouldn’t it then follow, that such a God would be capable of ending a homosexual desire to those who asked? Wouldn’t it then follow that such a God would WANT to do so, to remove evil desires from those who wish to have them removed?

h) Hypothetically speaking, if you had turned out to have a primarily (or even exclusive) male sexual preference, how do you believe this would have affected your belief and worship of Jesus Christ? i) Do you think you would attempt to be chaste? j) Would you still denounce the behavior as evil? k) Would you even renounce your worship of God altogether?

I have no idea what the young man’s reason for asking these questions might be and I don’t see any need for anyone to play any guessing games in that regard. After all, it could be anything from an inexplicable craving for Erasure to an overreliance on the philosophy of Macklemore. I will admit that I found it rather amusing to see how some reacted so badly to the “birth defect” comment, considering that it is the preferred alternative explanation to abnormal sexual orientation being a matter of choice. Any abnormality that renders a living being considerably less fit by virtue of presenting a reproductive handicap, be it physical or psychological, must be regarded as a material defect by anyone who subscribes to TENS, and if we are to believe that homosexuality is determined in the prenatal state, then “birth defect” is exactly what gay activists have been proclaiming homosexuality to be for decades. By literal definition from Wikipedia: “Congenital disorder, also known as congenital disease or birth defect, is a condition existing at or before birth regardless of cause.”

I’d think people would be more considerably concerned that one could also make an alarmingly strong case for high cognitive capacity being a congenital disorder in modern society on this basis, but then, we mustn’t deny the rainbow crowd their dramatics.

a) No. All evils are not equal, either in terms of their consequences or the way in which we are informed God regards them. b) No. In addition to the 10 Commandments being specified, Jesus explained that one Commandment was the most important one. c) There does not appear to be a strictly ordered A-Z hierarchy. d) Yes, as we are told God knows and judges what is in a man’s heart.

e) I believe all actions are choices, though not necessarily conscious and definitely not always rational. And I believe some inclinations are innate. But it’s not a binary situation, as our choices lead to consequential inclinations we would not possess had we made different choices. It’s quite clear, if you happen to know any homosexuals, that some come to their orientation very naturally, others choose it for a variety of reasons, and still others have it thrust upon them by others.

f) This is a misunderstanding of the Christian perspective. We all have evil inclinations. We all experience temptation. What tempts you does not tempt me, and vice-versa. But we are all responsible for resisting whatever temptations happen to call to us.

g) Yes, I have known people who no longer act on their homosexual inclinations and some who say they are no longer troubled by them. Not all of them are Christian, as it happens. I believe in a tantiscient God who can do whatever He decides to do. But we live on the Silent Planet, in a world that He does not rule, a world that is riddled with evil, and so it should be no surprise that evils and misfortunes continue to be inflicted upon us by its ruling power. That’s why we ask, why we pray, that His will be done, on Earth, as it is in Heaven, because for the most part it is not being done that way right now on Earth. (Note to Team Calvin: not now.) If it was, we wouldn’t need to ask for it.

h) Very little, considering that I was a hedonistic pagan agnostic with a Porsche and a record contract. Temptation is temptation. i) Yes. j) Yes. There are plenty of things that I would very much like to do that I have no problem describing as evil and rejecting on that basis. k) No chance.

There is a reason that Christianity is described as the hard and narrow path. It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. Don’t listen to the idiots who claim that Jesus Christ will solve all your problems and make you rich and cure your hangnails if you only say the magic words. They’re just scam artists trying to sell you something. Christianity isn’t Candyland, it is a very dark and terrible vision of a very scary place, of a universe that isn’t merely indifferent to you, but is actively seeking to destroy you, body and soul.

And if that doesn’t better reflect the reality we observe around us than every other philosophical and religious creed you’ve ever encountered, then I have to very seriously question whether you are paying attention to the world around you. To reject that reality because you really, really, really want to nail the hot little brunette in the miniskirt who is making eyes at you isn’t even wrong, it’s category error.

As for the issues of God’s inclination and ability to address orientational temptation, I think you would be much better off listening to this man on the subject than to me:

The wages of apostasy

Shed no tears for the Anglicans. They departed from the Word of God and they are reaping the inevitable harvest of irrelevance:

The Church of England has suffered a dramatic slump in its followers, shocking new figures show. Between 2012 and 2014, the proportion of Britons identifying themselves as C of E or Anglican dropped from 21 per cent to 17 per cent – a fall of about 1.7 million people.

Over the same period, the number of Muslims in Britain grew by nearly one million, according to a survey by the respected NatCen Social Research Institute.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warned last night that unless urgent action was taken, the Church was just ‘one generation away from extinction’.

The number of Anglicans in Britain has dropped from about 10.3 million to 8.6 million, and will raise fresh fears over the future of the Church of England, which has been in decline since the 1960s. Lord Carey, who has warned before about dwindling congregations, said: ‘These figures are a call to urgent mission. I have no doubt at all that the Archbishops, together with the whole leadership of the Church of England, are doing all they can to reverse this trend.’

The current Archbishop, Justin Welby, has also called for the decline to be tackled and is introducing measures to streamline the Church and strengthen its leadership.

I have a simple seven-point plan that will absolutely reverse the trend and revive the Church of England:

  1. Publicly repent accommodation with the world.
  2. Announce the Counter-Accommodation, a house-cleaning movement that throws out every reform and innovation since 1950 and openly rejects the false idea that tolerance and inclusion are Christian virtues or that unrepentant sinners are welcome as members of the Church body.
  3. Excommunicate every bishop and former bishop who voted for the ordination of women.
  4. Excommunicate every bishop and former bishop who voted for the ordination of homosexuals or officiated over a same-sex ceremony.
  5. Defrock every female and homosexual bishop or priest.
  6. Suspend every bishop or priest who publicly endorses social justice, tolerance, inclusivity, or ecumenicism.
  7. Preach the Word of God precisely as it is communicated through the King James Bible.

If the Church of England will not do this, it has no reason to exist and fully merits its extinction. Observe that the long term results have been exactly what the conservatives who opposed these reforms have been predicting all along. When a Christian church rejects the Word of God and hares after worldly approval, it is not long for this world.

And the UK’s atheists probably won’t be too pleased with the Church of England’s demise. I tend to doubt they will find their new Muslim neighbors quite as easy to push around as lukewarm Anglicans.

Christianity: the predictive model

It’s somewhat remarkable that so many people refuse to grant the Bible any credence when it is observably the single greatest long-term predictive document ever known to Man:

 A proposed new law in Denmark could be the first step towards an economic revolution that sees physical currencies and normal bank accounts abolished and gives governments futuristic new tools to fight the cycle of “boom and bust”.

The Danish proposal sounds innocuous enough on the surface – it would simply allow shops to refuse payments in cash and insist that customers use contactless debit cards or some other means of electronic payment.

Officially, the aim is to ease “administrative and financial burdens”, such as the cost of hiring a security service to send cash to the bank, and is part of a programme of reforms aimed at boosting growth – there is evidence that high cash usage in an economy acts as a drag.

But the move could be a key moment in the advent of “cashless societies”. And once all money exists only in bank accounts – monitored, or even directly controlled by the government – the authorities will be able to encourage us to spend more when the economy slows, or spend less when it is overheating.

The idea that “high cash usage” in an economy acts as a drag is absolutely and utterly absurd when examined from the perspective of several economic schools. Even the Keynesian school, which will be in favor of banning cash in favor of more easily manufactured nonexistent numbers, teaches that Savings = Investment. Is getting rid of savings, and therefore investment, really going to strengthen the economy?

What this is really designed to do is to address the problem seen in the chart from yesterday’s post that shows the massive decline in debt growth from 1985 to 2015. As the production of credit money declines with the inability of consumers and corporations to take on more debt, other less productive sources are being tapped to keep the government beast alive. Hence their pursuit of even the coins under granny’s couch.

The real nightmare isn’t the economic abomination of the authorities playing a disastrous push-pull with the entirety of the money supply, though, it is the establishment of the infrastructure for the long-predicted Mark of the Beast. And it would be very interesting to hear a disbeliever explain how such an unlikely creation could have been envisioned so clearly nearly two thousand years ago.

They said it would never happen

But, as we know, SJWs always lie. Persecution is the consequence of tolerance:

Coeur d‘Alene, Idaho, city officials have laid down the law to Christian pastors within their community, telling them bluntly via an ordinance that if they refuse to marry homosexuals, they will face jail time and fines.

The dictate comes on the heels of a legal battle with Donald and Evelyn Knapp, ordained ministers who own the Hitching Post wedding chapel in the city, but who oppose gay marriage, The Daily Caller reported. A federal judge recently ruled that the state’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional, while the city of Coeur d‘Alene has an ordinance that prevents discrimination based on sexual preference….

“Many have denied that pastors would ever be forced to perform ceremonies that are completely at odds with their faith, but that’s what is happening here — and it’s happened this quickly,” Mr. Tedersco said, The Daily Caller reported.

At this point, it is fairly obvious that revolution time is coming. All the moderates who said we just had to go along to get along were wrong all along, of course. Never listen to moderates. They’re just cowardly idiots who will do or say anything rather than stand up for what they say they believe in.

The latest on the ongoing case:

Both sides are standing their ground as a lawsuit filed against the city of Coeur d’Alene by the Hitching Post continues through U.S. District Court.

Lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian rights legal advocacy organization, filed the suit in October on behalf of Hitching Post owners Don and Evelyn Knapp. The civil rights lawsuit claims the Knapps are being forced to violate their religious beliefs and perform same-sex marriages because of the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance.

“The whole problem is that prior to the case being filed, the city was saying the distinction between covered and not-covered was whether or not a business was a nonprofit or for-profit. But after we filed, they changed that statement,” Jeremy Tedesco, ADF senior legal counsel, said. “This ordinance has criminal penalties and jail time if you violate it and because of that, the city needs to have clear guidelines for people like the Knapps who are trying to figure out if they’re exempt.”

The end of shock

This is an amusingly wry commentary on Christianity and those trying to use 1980s shock-marketing tactics in a world where they are decades out of date:

 ‘Dear Charles, How are you?” says the unsolicited publicity email from someone I have never met, “I would love to share this controversial new play with you… you are welcome to talk to the writer… The play discusses Jesus’s exorcism, the atheist prostitute, Mary as a polytheist, a Greek homosexual and Jesus’s involvement in a stoning.” The play – I won’t trouble the reader with its title or venue – is “provocative and radial [sic]”, she tells me. It is “bound to shock many”, she adds hopefully.

I shan’t be taking up the kind invitation. For about 50 years now, almost the only way playwrights and television producers have felt able to treat Jesus is as something that he either probably or definitely wasn’t – a gay rights campaigner, a political revolutionary, the lover of Mary Magdalene, a rock star, a member of the Green Party etc. They have tried, with ever-decreasing success, to stir up his traditional followers into righteous anger against them in the hope that this will attract a bit of attention and so increase their ratings.

Once upon a time, such efforts, despite their crudity and bad taste, may have had some value. I am just old enough to remember the last gasps of an era when Christianity in Britain was often little more than an expression of social respectability. This was a strange way of dealing with the most explosive story in the history of the world, and it deserved to be satirised and challenged. But those days are long, long gone, as dead as men in the City of London wearing bowler hats. The playwrights who think they being are “shocking” and “subversive” are colossally out of date. The religion whose moralistic, puritanical, self-appointed spokesmen badly need challenging today is not Christianity, but Islam. You won’t see many brave new would-be avant-garde plays taking that one on, funnily enough.

I loved that “she adds hopefully”. That was what can best be described as a literary glass dagger, smooth, subtle, and sharp. Anyhow, it was, and is, a mistake for Christians to react angrily towards the blasphemers-for-profit. It can be effective to calmly ban their activities and lock them up, as was done in Christendom for centuries. It can be effective to publicly denounce them, whip them, and stone them, as is done in communities with Sharia-based legal systems. But it is not effective to get angry and attempt to change the artist’s behavior with outrage.

Christendom has already been subverted. There is no power center left untouched by the anti-Christian entryists. Those trying to cash in on being shocking and subversive are simply too late; it is now those of us who reject the shiny, post-Christian secular technotopia who are the subversives. The people of the West have made a terrible mistake in opting for an equal society rather than a free one; in EQUALITY: The Impossible Quest, Martin van Creveld convincingly demonstrates that they will enjoy neither freedom nor equality.

Christians should not be outraged when they are attacked, or when there is no sympathy for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world. We were told this would happen. We were warned that this would be the case. And we were told that if the world did not hate us, we were doing something wrong. So, when Christianity is attacked, when our faith is belittled, when our Lord and Savior is ridiculed, and when our God is blasphemed, don’t be angry. Smile, because the very foundations of your faith are being confirmed right before your eyes.

The Almighty is perfectly capable of defending Himself. He doesn’t need us to defend Him. We need Him to defend us.

He is risen!

24 Now
upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came
unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and
certain others with them. 2 And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.
3 And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.
4 And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:
5 And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?
6 He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
7 Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.
8 And they remembered his words,
9 And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.
10 It
was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other
women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.
11 And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.
12 Then
arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld
the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself
at that which was come to pass.
– Luke 24:1-12

Many wondrous things have come, and will come, to pass. But none is more wonderful than this, the empty tomb.

The everyday battles in which we find ourselves engaged are nothing more than ripples and reflections of this, the one true battle, the centuries-old war between the Prince of this world and the Son of Man. Contemplate how dark and hopeless everything must have looked to the apostles, and to women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, after the Crucifixion. So when things seem dark and hopeless, when you feel outnumbered and alone, when you look at the barbarians rampaging inside the gates and despair at what the future will bring, remind yourself of two things.

The tomb is empty. He is risen.

Happy Easter. 

The Gates of Hell shall not prevail

Christians need to stop their cowardly cowering before the world and start actively following the fearless lead of the apostles and martyrs and crusaders and inquisitors who preceded them:

I spent a long time on the phone last night with a law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools. This professor is a practicing Christian, deeply closeted in the workplace; he is convinced that if his colleagues in academia knew of his faith, they would make it very hard for him. We made contact initially by e-mail — he is a reader of this blog — and last night, by phone. He agreed to speak with me about the Indiana situation on condition that I not identify him by name or by institution. I do know his identity, and when he tells me that he is “well-informed about the academy and the Supreme Court,” I assure you that from where he sits, and teaches, and from his CV, he is telling the truth.

I will call him Prof. Kingsfield, after the law professor in The Paper Chase.

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power…. A college professor who is already tenured is probably safe. Those who aren’t tenured, are in danger. Those who are believed to be religious, or at least religious in ways the legal overculture believes constitutes bigotry, will likely never be hired. For example, the professor said, he was privy to the debate within a faculty hiring meeting in which the candidacy of a liberal Christian was discussed. Though the candidate appeared in every sense to be quite liberal in her views, the fact that she was an open Christian prompted discussion as to whether or not the university would be hiring a “fundamentalist.”

The result could be that religious schools have to start policing orthodoxy in terms of all their hires — a situation imposing standards far more strict than many schools may wish to live by, but which may be necessary to protect the school’s legal interests.

Kingsfield said homeschooling, and homeschooling-ish things (e.g., co-ops), are going to become increasingly important to orthodox Christians, especially as they see established religious schools folding on this issue.

Businesses, however, are going to have a very hard time resisting what’s coming. Not that they would try. “The big companies have already gone over,” said Kingsfield.

“Most anti-discrimination laws have a certain cut off – they don’t apply if you have 15 employees or less,” he said. “You could have an independent, loosely affiliated network of artisans, working together. If you can refer people to others within the network, that could work. You won’t be able to scale up, but that’s not such a bad thing.”

Kingsfield said religious colleges and universities are going to have to think hard about their identities.

“Colleges that don’t receive federal funding – Hillsdale and Grove City are two I can think of – are going to be in better position, because federal regulations force a lot of crazy stuff on you,” he said. “I think it would be really wise for small religious institutions to think hard if they can cut the cord of federal funding and can find wealthy donors to step in.”

Kingsfield said we are going to have to watch closely the way the law breaks regarding gender identity and transgenderism. If the courts accept the theory that gender is a social construct — and there is a long line of legal theory and jurisprudence that says that it is — then the field of antidiscrimination law is bound to be expanded to cover, for example, people with penises who consider themselves women. The law, in other words, will compel citizens to live as if this were true — and religious liberty will, in general, be no fallback. This may well happen.

What about the big issue that is on the minds of many Christians who pay attention to this fight: the tax-exempt status of churches and religious organizations? Will they be Bob Jones’d over gay rights?

Kingsfield said that this is too deeply embedded in American thought and law to be at serious risk right now, but gay rights proponents will probably push to tie the tax exemption on charities with how closely integrated they are within churches. The closer schools and charities are tied to churches, especially in their hiring, the greater protection they will enjoy.

The accreditation issue is going to be a much stickier wicket. Accreditation is tied to things like the acceptance of financial aid, and the ability to get into graduate schools.

“There was a professor at Penn last year who wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education calling for the end of accrediting religious colleges and universities,” Kingsfield said. “It was a Richard Dawkins kind of thing, just crazy. The fact that someone taking a position this hostile felt very comfortable putting this in the Chronicle tells me that there’s a non-trivial number of professors willing to believe this.”

Gordon College has faced pressure from a regional accrediting authority over its adherence to traditional Christian sexual morals re: gay rights.

“Accreditation is critical to being admitted to law schools and medical schools,” Kingsfield said. “College accreditation will matter for some purposes of sports, federal aid, and for the ability to be admitted by top graduate schools. Ghettoization for Christians could be the result.”

“In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure. There’s a question among Christian law professors right now: do you write about these issues and risk tenure? This really does distort your scholarship. Christianity could make a distinct contribution to legal discussions, but it’s simply too risky to say what you really think.”

The emerging climate on campus of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and the construal of discourse as a form of violence is driving Christian professors further into the closet, the professor said.

“If I said something that was construed as attacking a gay student, I could have my life made miserable with a year or two of litigation — and if I didn’t have tenure, there could be a chance that my career would be ruined,” he said. “Even if you have tenure, a few people who make allegations of someone being hateful can make a tenured professor’s life miserable.”

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

I pointed out that the mob hysteria that descended on Memories Pizza, the mom & pop pizza shop in small-town Indiana that had to close its doors (temporarily, one hopes) after its owners answered a reporter’s question truthfully, is highly instructive to the rest of us.

“You’re right,” he said. “Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”

“We have to fall back to defensive lines and figure out where those lines are. It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia,” he added. “But what’s coming is going cause a lot of people to fall away from the faith, and we are going to have to be careful about how we define and clarify what Christianity is…. The most important question for Christians parents to ask themselves is, do we have a vibrant church?,” he said. “Sadly, only a small number of places have them. My family is in one. Our kids are growing up with good examples that they can look up to, and good older kids who hang on because they can stand together.”

Some people taking the Benedict Option will head for the hills, Kingsfield said, but that will be a trivial number, and that won’t be an answer for most of us.

“We need to study more the experience of Orthodox Jews and Amish,” he said. “None of us are going to be living within an eruv or practicing shunning. What we should focus on is endogamy.”

Endogamy means marriage only within a certain clan or in-group.

“Intermarriage is death,” Kingsfield said. “Not something like Catholic-Orthodox, but Christian-Jew, or high church-low church. I just don’t think Christians are focused on that, but the Orthodox Jews get it. They know how much this matters in creating a culture in which transmitting the faith happens. For us Christians, this is going to mean matchmaking and youth camps and other things like that. It probably means embracing a higher fertility rate, and celebrating bigger families.”

It’s time for the church leaders and the heads of Christian families to start learning from #GamerGate, to start learning from Sad Puppies, and start leading. Start banding together and stop accommodating the secular world in any way. Don’t hire those who hate you. Don’t buy from those who wish to destroy you. Don’t work with those who denigrate your faith, your traditions, your morals, and your God. Don’t tolerate or respect what passes for their morals and values.

Religious liberty in America is dead. Well and good. That was a fatal mistake by the other side, because now that they don’t respect our religious liberty, we have no reason or responsibility to respect theirs. Now it’s just a raw power struggle and we have the numbers, we have the indomitable will of the martyrs, and we have the certain knowledge of God on our side.

They have nothing but the carnal desires to which they are enslaved and the Prince of this fallen world, who has already been defeated by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Their world is post-Christian, post-rational, post-modern, post-morality, and post-law. It is absolutely doomed to failure of every kind, beginning with demographics.

So stop cowering. Stop hiding in the closet. Stop trying to play by outdated rules that are no longer in effect. They imposed the new rules on us, now let’s prove that we can play much better by them. What they don’t realize is that those rules were in place for THEIR protection, not for ours. It’s time to teach them the value and importance of religious liberty again.

We are not given a spirit of fear. We are the sons and daughters of the Crusades and of the Inquisitions, institutions so terrible that they strike terror in human hearts nearly one thousand years later. We are the heirs of Christendom. They cannot defeat us and they cannot defeat our Lord. Augustus and the pagan emperors of Rome failed. The Ottoman emperors failed. The French Revolutionaries failed. The Communist killers of Spain, the Soviet Union, and China failed. The post-Christian seculars of the latter-day USA will fail too.


And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Good Friday

The Death of Jesus
 
From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli,[a] lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.”
 
Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. The rest said, “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.”
 
And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
 
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
 
When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”
– Matthew 27:45-54

I was talking to my kids tonight about the Crucifixion. I found it interesting that to them, one of the most convincing and compelling aspects of the whole story is the presence of his younger brother James among his disciples after the Crucifixion.

Only a man without sin could die for the sins of Man. And who would know if a man was genuinely without sin or not better than his younger brothers and sisters.

Tell us more about “Islamophobia”

And the “religion of peace”:

Up to 150 people have been murdered by masked al-Shabaab terrorists who stormed a Kenyan university and shot and beheaded Christians in the worst attack in the country in 17 years.

The group raided the Garissa University College campus shortly after 5am local time yesterday, overwhelming guards and murdering people they suspected of being a Christian.

The death toll rose to 147 last night and the 13-hour siege ended. A total of 79 were injured and 587 were led to safety.

Most of those killed were students but two police officers, one soldier and two watchmen are among the dead.

This marks the imminent end of freedom of religion in the West. Forget Charlie Hebdo. We need Charlie Martel. I expect he’ll appear on the scene as soon as something like this happens at an American university. If there is any justice in the universe, it will take place at a university full of the sort of students who are always eager to insist that groups like al-Shabaab and ISIS aren’t full of real Muslims.

Christians are being beheaded everywhere from the Middle East to Africa and the UK. How much longer are we going to stand for it? And atheists, note that not being a Christian isn’t going to save you. A mere suspicion of it, which is to say, not being a Muslim, is enough to condemn you.