Tag: Christianity

Merry Christmas

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.
– Mark Steyn, Silent Night, December 24, 2011

The secular War on Christmas throughout the West presently serves as a lightweight bookend for the religious War on Christians throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East. In the West, the persecution is still petty, tentative, and small-minded, elsewhere, it is purposeful, murderous and systematic. One cannot equate the banning of Merry Christmas wishes by elected politicians to the banning of Christians from holding elected office, or pretend that atheists co-opting public parks in order to promote nasty anti-holiday messages is the equivalent of violent attacks on Christian church celebrants.

But if the actions are different, the motivations stem from the same source, which is the desire to eliminate Christianity from the world. This is not a new desire; it was already hundreds of years old when the Emperor Diocletian issued the first of his four “Edicts against the Christians” in the year 303. Like the Western anti-Christians, Diocletian did not initially intend for there to be any bloodshed, but hoped that political and legal pressure would be sufficient to cause Christians to apostatize, but his hopes were dashed by the stalwart faith of the empire’s Christians. His fourth Edict, therefore, demanded summary execution of all men, women, and children who were unwilling to offer sacrifice to any of the pagan gods.

Secular culture is no more intrinsically tolerant than Diocletian. Those who consciously adhere to “secular values” understand that they are fundamentally different than, and inherently opposed to, Christian values. While far too many Christians and non-Christians alike believe that it is still possible to arrange society in such a manner that secular values are given primacy in the public while still respecting Christian values in private, both ancient and recent history indicate otherwise. This is particularly true in any society with an activist government that uses fiscal policy and administrative law as tools for social engineering.

Many of the accomplishments of Christendom are being unwound, often by the unworthy heirs of Christendom itself. The increasingly secular British people bitterly complain about the continental subjugation of their once-independent isle even as they simultaneously continue to support the societal secularization that made that subjugation possible. Slaves are being bought and sold in numbers that have not been seen since William Wilberforce led the evangelical charge against the slave trade. As the concepts of individual rights and human liberty arose under Christendom, it is both logically and empirically apparent that they will decline in tandem with the decline of Christianity across the West.

And yet, Christians need have no fear for the future of their faith in the coming years. The Church has survived every persecution, every attempt to stamp it out for nearly two thousand years. It will survive the current secular assault just as it survived the historical Soviet assault. Kim Jong-Il is dead, while the Christians struggling to survive in the concentration camps he established throughout North Korea have not only outlived him, but celebrate the birth of their Lord and Savior today. We pray that their faith will be rewarded and their suffering will be eased; may they pray that our faith will survive our wealth and comfort.

The Truth is. It does not depend upon one man, or seven billion men, women, and children, acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord. All the powers and principalities of the world will exert their fury in vain, all the Gates of Hell will announce their lethal edicts to no avail, as they have already been defeated by the birth of the boy child who is called King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Merry Christmas, and may God bless us all, every one.

Mailvox: heretic!

JimH apparently does not understand the basic concept of “fundamentalism”:

Sorry, I’m new here but it sounds like you wouldn’t agree with most Christian confessions of faith or Christian creeds. Nor could you likely hold office in any Christian denomination. How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian? You would quite possibly be labeled a heretic by many. I don’t know you well enough, but if you’re somewhat rolling your own religion and are as lacking in humility toward the Church as your blog suggests, there are cult-like overtones to your faith. I’d hardly call that fundamental Christianity.

I don’t agree with most of them. That is why I often describe them as a religion called “Churchianity” as opposed to Christianity. “How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian?” It is one and the same; most modern churches are more focused on the man-made edifice they have constructed on top of the Christian faith, be it political ideology, sexual revisionism, or doctrinal inventions.

fun·da·men·tal
adjective
1. serving as, or being an essential part of, a foundation or basis; basic; underlying: fundamental principles; the fundamental structure.

I have no religious regard whatsoever for the various extra-Biblical traditions of the various Christian churches, although I do respect them in the same manner I respect many of the non-religious traditions of Man. But I consider Churchian dogma such as the Trinity, the Rapture, infant baptism, transubstantiation, purgatory, female pastors, bans on alchohol and dancing, Papal infallibility, and Bishop Ussher’s historical chronology to be no more theologically legitimate or Biblically supported than I do the sale of indulgences, Dante’s geography of Hell, or Milton’s history of Lucifer’s Fall.

I have no doubt that some of the very churches that openly violate Scriptural teachings in their organizational structures would call me a heretic. What of it? If an ordained lesbian who subscribes to the Trinity and bides her time awaiting the Rapture by baptizing infants and attempting to revive Prohibition asserts I am a heretic, that merely tends to strengthen my suspicion that she does not worship the same god that I do. It is ironic, of course, that so many atheists like to strike the pose of potential burnee at the stake when history indicates that it was actually Christians who shared my skepticism concerning extra-Biblical dogma that were targeted by murderously inclined church authorities.

How and why should one show any humility towards organizations that teach demonstrable extra- and contra-Biblical falsehoods as the equivalent of Scripture? Consider, for example, that even those Christian scholars who subscribe to the Trinity concept “admit the trinity is not Biblical, did not exist in the Apostolic age, and was developed over a period of 295 years.”

It is even more ironic that what JimH “would hardly call fundamentalist Christianity” is far more genuinely fundamental Christianity than the concoction of Churchian creeds and structures that he considers acceptably orthodox. And adhering to the clear and undeniable teachings of a religious text that was written nearly 2,000 years before one was born is the exact opposite of “rolling one’s own religion”.

As for my failure to subscribe to what most people erroneously call the Nicene Creed, I merely point out that it isn’t even the Nicene Creed, but rather a substantially modified version of that creed produced by the First Council of Constantinople 56 years later. My religious beliefs actually happen to be more in accordance with the actual Nicene Creed than the beliefs of those who confess the subsequent Imperially-approved modification.

The consequence of tolerance

Maximus destroys a conventional atheist defense in the process of pointing out a powerful reason for the appeal of Islam:

Can we come to a conclusion on the historical record between religious and atheist forms of man’s governance in terms of quality of life OVERALL?

I think we can conclude that while religious traditions, using the name of God as political cover, have committed much oppression and tyranny, atheism under the Communist banner committed far WORSE atrocities since they were committed in the name of NOTHING! Nothing, that is, other than a man made philosophy about how he should organize and govern himself outside the purview of God’s divine law since He does not exist. Man governing himself does not seem to have worked out all that well for him when he removed God from the equation.

This takes the common – if absurd – atheist defense of historical atheist crimes and turns it on its head. The fact that the crimes of atheists like Stalin, Mao, and others were not committed “in the name of atheism” not only doesn’t serve as an effective defense of atheism, (as I and many others have pointed out), but was actually a factor in exacerbating the magnitude of the crimes.

But this is actually the less interesting aspect of his piece. He notes that the appeal of religion, specifically Islam, was magnified by the way in which it mitigated the slaughter in Rwanda:

Islam…was a small faith in the country of Rwanda at the time of the genocide, almost non-existent. It is rising now faster then ever, mosques overflowing, and playing a part in healing wounds and bringing forgiveness to that country. Why is Islam growing in Rwanda? In their own words:

During the genocide, Muslims were among the few Rwandans who protected both neighbors and strangers. Elsewhere, many Hutus hunted down or betrayed their Tutsi neighbors and strangers suspected of belonging to the minority.

But the militiamen and soldiers didn’t dare go after Tutsis in Muslim neighborhoods like Biryogo, said Yvette Sarambuye, a 29-year-old convert. ”If a Hutu Muslim tried to kill someone hidden in our neighborhoods, he would first be asked to take the holy Quran and tear it apart to renounce his faith,” said Sarambuye, a Tutsi widowed mother of three who survived the slaughter by hiding with Muslims. “No Muslim dared to violate the holy book, and that saved a lot of us.”

For many Hutu extremists, Muslims were regarded as a group apart, not to be targeted in the genocide.

Muslims take God and the Quran VERY seriously. They don’t have faith or belief…they KNOW God exists and that his word came down to man through the holy prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

You will note that while Muslim Hutus did partake in the slaughter, but when they were confronted by their own religious community and asked to leave Islam because it forbids the killing of innocents, they put down their machetes, at least in Muslim neighborhoods. Islam saved lives…by the Koran alone. In contrast to the Christian majority that the country is now moving away from, the Bible did not save anyone as a holy book:

Although the Christian clergy in many communities struggled to protect Tutsis and often died with them, more than 20 Roman Catholic and Protestant priests, nuns and pastors are facing charges related to the killings. Rwandan courts already have convicted two Catholic priests and sentenced them to death.

The Rwandan church failed in much the same way that the Christian church in the West has failed. We tolerate the unrepentant sinners in our midst rather than doing what is explicitly commanded in the Bible, confronting them, demanding repentance, and expelling them from the church community if they will not do so. And in both cases, the resulting consequence is that people walk away from a faith that is not true to itself.

The church that will not confront the adulterer, the thief, the homosexual, the liar, or the gossip is one that will not confront the murderer either when he appears at their door, demanding the blood of the innocent.

We are bad Churchians

An actual email dialogue:

“I have something else from the bible that I feel is a word for you. Proverbs 27:14.”

“I just feel so blessed by your sharing….”

He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.
– Proverbs 27:14

I don’t know about you, but anytime someone uses the word “blessed” about themselves, Matthew 6:5 insensibly comes to mind. Particularly when they use it multiple times in a single conversation. They tend to strike me as the sort of Churchians who think prayer is a means of communicating with other people in their religious circle.

Mailvox: the search for science-based faith

I’m not sure AD can find what he is looking for, mostly because I don’t believe it exists or even can exist:

Thank you for your blog. I started reading it through WND then over the last several months have learned a lot about being a beta. I was raised in Christian churches and accepted Christ at an early age but looking back I was playing church. After [many] years of a rocky marriage my wife filed for divorce. We hadn’t attended church in about 14 years and I decided to go to a local congregation.

For the first time I’m actually going because I want to learn about having a better Christian walk. The trouble I’m having is I want to know what I’m talking about when I talk to someone, (e.g., ex-wife) about Christ and the Bible. I am no Bible scholar and I only have basic answers to her talking about discrepancies in the gospels and the story of a virgin birth savior being included in other religions.

I believe God’s word should stand up to legitimate scientific scrutiny but I can’t say, “well, it is a fact that this or that original text confirms what the modern Bible translations say.” I really want to know what I’m talking about.

Are you able to direct me to sources so I can start to really know I’m basing my faith on a sound foundation? Maybe I’m not showing faith by asking this question but I think I need to know for me.

This is somewhat outside my area of knowledge, as common misconceptions about TIA to the contrary, I don’t get into apologetics, particularly science-flavored ones. So, it might behoove me to step back and allow the scientists here, particularly Stickwick and the other physicists, to provide any recommended reading. I’ve never paid much attention to the present state of the scientific consensus or considered it to be any sort of truth metric because I am old enough to recall it having been the precise opposite of what it is today in many different areas. No one who recalls the butter-margarine consensuses, the global ice age-global warming consensuses, the steady state-Big Bang consensuses, or the low fat-low carbs consensuses is likely to be overly concerned about what scientists happen to be asserting is absolute truth today. Give them a few years and there is a reasonable chance they’ll be saying something very different, if not the exact opposite. Never forget that scientists do not study history and very few of them even know anything about the history of science.

That being said, Patrick Glynn’s God: The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, wouldn’t be a bad start. It’s nothing I would consider conclusive, but it will disabuse you of the notion that you cannot balance your faith in science with your faith in God.

But a word of warning. It is not so much indicative of a lack of faith to seek a sound scientific foundation for one’s religious faith as it is evidence of flawed reason. As I have demonstrated on numerous occasions in the past, science is not a reliable basis for one’s faith in anything, religious or otherwise, due to its dynamic nature and its intrinsic reliance on human honesty. It is engineering that is truly reliable by virtue of its much more stringent system of material verification of truth claims; only when science has been transformed into engineering can it be considered more or less reliable, and even then, it can be less than perfectly accurate.

Note that at the moment, after decades of “scientific certainty”, science is attempting to ascertain if supra-luminal speeds are possible. The idea science is capable of being used as any position at all on the supernatural beyond the purely philosophical not only defies reason, but history and scientific history as well.

And if religion got things as reliably wrong as science does, no one would believe in it. When science fetishists complain that religion claims absolute truth, they are projecting. It is religion’s room for and acceptance of doubt that accounts for its persistence; it is science’s false pretensions to being the final word on truth that explain why the world has become increasingly skeptical of science and scientists.

Mailvox: answering the inevitable response

Some atheists appear to view homosexuals as comrades in the great struggle against Christianity. In light of this, MD wonders if Christians can be similarly considered to harbor disproportionate inclinations towards pedophilia on the basis of the Catholic priest abuse scandal:

Hmmm. Wonder what proportion of Christian clergy molest children cf general population? . . . Conclusion: Christians more likely to molest children?

To some extent, the answer depends upon your definition of clergy. But in the end, the inescapable conclusion by MD’s metric is not only that Christians are less likly to molest children than the general population, but that gays should not be permitted in the clergy. Now, there are three significant caveats here which I will point out afterwards, but consider:

Clerical abuse
– 4,392 priests and deacons were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.
– The Jay Report stated there were 10,667 reported victims of clergy sexual abuse younger than 18 years during this period. The RCC victims per abuser rate was 2.43
– The 4,351 priests who were accused amount to 3.97% of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
– There were 28,700 active priests in 2005. The historical/current rate is 3.72.

Teacher abuse
– It is reported that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from 1991-2000.
– This indicates an estimated 1,508,000 cases of school children being abused by school employees between 1950 and 2002.
– There were 3.8 million school teachers in 2010. Multiplied by the 3.72 historical/current rate, we estimate 14.1 million teachers active from 1950.

Dividing the 14.1 million historical teachers by the 1.51 million victims, then dividing by the 2.43 victim/abuser rate, this means school children have a 4.4% abuse per teacher rate compared to 4.0% per Catholic priest.

Now, the three problems. The first is that this includes the abuse by school employees who are not teachers without including the non-teachers. Currently, teachers only make up half of the PUBLIC school employees in the country, but that number was historically much lower. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that teachers historically made up about three-quarters of the school employee total, which would lower the teacher abuse rate to 3.3 percent. However, we don’t know if teachers have a higher rate or a lower rate of abuse than janitors, counselors, and administrators. I suspect it is higher, due to low average teacher IQ and the larger amount of contact with children intrinsic to the job, but I simply have no information on this.

Second, the RCC abuse numbers include the victims of priests and deacons, but don’t include the number of permanent deacons. This is because there were only 41 deacons accused of the 12,500 ordained during the period concerned. This gives a total of 122,194 clergy and reduces the RCC abuse rate to 3.6 percent.

And the third problem. 81 percent of the RCC victims were male. All of the abusers were male. This is an astonishing statistical outlier, since in the general population, girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys. The heterosexual abuse rate was therefore 0.7 percent for the clergy compared to 2.5 percent for the teachers.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Christian clergy are 3.6 times less likely to abuse children than the general population unless they are homosexual. The larger part of the clerical problem is not the Church, but Teh Gay. In fact, four-fifths of the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests could have been avoided simply by barring homosexuals from the clergy, just as Christian doctrine has always deemed necessary. And the increasing restrictions on homosexual seminarians is the obvious reason why the rate of clergy abuse has been significantly dropping since the 1980s.

However, due to the increased embrace of homosexual clergy by the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, we can safely conclude that the chickenhawks will be gravitating to these organizations as well as to other gay-friendly institutions that are actively involved with children. It should therefore be no surprise that the Sandusky scandal took place on a college campus and concerned a children’s organization; twenty years before, Sandusky might well have decided he was “called” to the priesthood instead of setting up a “children’s charity”.

Mailvox: is God on our side?

JH wonders:

I have read your coloumn faithfully for years, and have come to admire your level-headed and logical approach to the problems you present.

I have a question. Most social conservatives declare that life begins at conception, thus concluding that all abortions are murder. If you take this stand then you must conclude that America has the blood of 50 million innocent lives on her hands.

What right do we have then to drop bombs on ” ragheads and goat herders ‘ and the like if this is so, and how can we possibly think that God will bless our troops in foreign wars when we can’t possibly be on HIS side?

It is so. And America has no more right to bomb the goat herders of the Middle East than Rome had to invade Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Nor does America have any better reason to believe that God will bless their invading troops than the Romans or the National Socialist-era Germans did. Gott war nicht mit der Wehrmacht, their belt buckles notwithstanding, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a nation whose government increasingly denies and rejects God, a nation that has slaughtered more of its own children behind closed clinic doors than the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites ever threw into the fires, enjoys divine favor.

America was founded on predominantly Christian principles, but she no longer lives by them. She is profligate, gluttonous, murderous, and repressive. She can no longer be reasonably described as either the land of the free or the home of the brave, but rather the land of the fat and the home of the indebted. I concluded some time ago that America was already finished in the historical sense, but it may take some time for most Americans to realize it or for America’s foreign policy to reflect that reality. This is entirely normal, few Britons understood that their empire was in decline until the sun had already set upon it.

It would, of course, be deeply ironic if the neocons were to get their way and America were to eventually learn of her loss of global superpower status not too terribly far from where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost his seven legions and met his death at the hands of the Parthians. Interestingly enough, Crassus, rather like Bush and Obama, failed to abide by the legal forms of making war before launching his ill-fated invasion.

Filling the spiritual void

My, I wonder how and why that could be?

Halloween taps America’s spiritual void

The holiday just keeps getting more popular. Seven in 10 expect to celebrate it in some way this Oct. 31, up from about six in 10 last year, according to a National Retail Federation report. This is the most in the nine years the NRF has been tracking…. Christmas and Easter may be secularized these days, relative to their past, but they remain Christian holidays. People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

But as much as we’d like it to be, Halloween isn’t secular. It is Pagan. There’s nothing else to call a set of ceremonies in which people utter magical phrases, flirt with the night and evoke the dead.

I always enjoyed Halloween as a kid, but we don’t celebrate it since it is virtually unknown in continental Europe. I don’t see anything wrong with kiddy trick-or-treating and I don’t think that most people are actually celebrating it per se. That being said, as the pagan world continues to encroach upon Christendom, don’t be surprised as the celebrations grow darker and more serious.

Pagan worship primarily concerns propitiation. In other words, they are religions based on pure fear rather than repentance, contract, or submission. The West is at most mildly nervous now, the real pagan revival is unlikely to seriously begin until it reaches a state of genuine fear and desperation. And Halloween celebrations will likely prove to be a good means of tracking its development.

So the Pope really is the Antichrist?

I’m not what you’d call a Left Behinder, but I am eschatonically aware and I have to admit, it would certainly be a little ironic if the more extreme Protestants actually turned out to be correct after all:

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said…. It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

No offense, Catholics, but it does tend to look pretty, well, evil, for the Pope to be calling for world government and a one world bank. I’m not saying the case is settled yet, but if the Vatican next announces implanted debit cards with Benedict’s smiling face on them along with the excommunication of anyone who uses cash, well, that will pretty much tend to serve as all the confirmation needed. Especially if it throws in a big, splashy peace agreement with Israel.