For many Americans, this Christmas will be a difficult one. Millions have lost their homes in the past year, millions more have lost their jobs and many of those who are fortunate enough to still own their homes and possess their jobs are deeply in debt. Many families will not be together for the holidays because they can’t afford to travel, they do not wish to be gate-raped or one of their family members is among the 2.3 million who make up the American prison population. It is understandably hard for many Americans to celebrate what has become an increasingly commercial holiday when their prospects for the future look less than rosy.
Tag: Christianity
Christianity and paganism
Being ignorant of history, the secularists of the West are naive in the extreme. Having been raised the fruits amidst the societal inertia of the civilization once known as Christendom, they errantly conclude that the heat will remain once the fires have been quenched simply because it takes time for the embers to die down. Even for the committed and militant atheist, this account of a modern-day Saul’s unexpected conversion to Christianity should underline the central need for civilized religion to compete with the attractions of other religions.
In the course of those days the priest has a vision: he meets the devil who tells him he will become a great warrior. The devil says to increase his power he must continue the rituals of child sacrifice and cannibalism. The initiation is complete and the priest is now one of the most powerful leaders in West Africa. The priest is 11 years old. As prophesied, the boy priest grew up to become one of Liberia’s most notorious warlords: General Butt Naked….
It was the summer of 1996 and his clansmen were caught up in a ferocious battle. It was decided that a sacrifice was needed. As the rockets rained down, a mother brought her three-year-old daughter to him. Something about the child struck the pitiless General and for the first time in his life he hesitated. As he relives the moment with me, his face becomes contorted.
‘The child was very unusually beautiful and kind. Most of the children are brought to me by the elders, they’re crying, they’re fighting. This child was peaceful,’ he recalls. ‘I thought, “This child must not die.” I struggled.
‘Of all of the thousands that I killed, I wish I did not kill that little girl . . . ‘ his voice trails off. He is close to tears for the first and only time. ‘Right after killing her, I had my epiphany.’
He claims he saw a white light in the shape of a man. A voice told him, ‘repent and live or refuse and die’. He believes it was Christ.
The impact was immediate. From that day the killing, the sacrifices and cannibalism ended and Blahyi entered a period of turmoil that led his men to believe he had gone mad. Within months he had left the Butt Naked Brigade and by the end of September 1996 he was baptised in the sea near Monrovia.
Few in the West are conversant with the similarly hideous practices of the pagan Europeans that preceded their conversion to Christianity. From the flaming human sacrifices of the druids to the ritual rape-and-murders of the Viking funerals, Europeans have been historically prone to behavior that is no less abhorrent to modern sensibilities than the cannibalistic devil-worship of Africans today. There is no evidence whatsoever that a progressive secular society can survive for more than three generations; most of the evidence tends to indicate that it can’t even survive one.
The great irony is that the position of the scientific, anti-religious progressive is ultimately based on a non-scientific and religious foundation: an unshaken belief in the perfectability of Man and the inevitability of human progress towards religion-inspired behavior without religious belief.
Mailvox: Jesus and war
LJ has his doubts:
Read your bit on Jesus and war. It is hard to believe Jesus would support all the death that War brings to innocent children. What would he say about our inability to put money into education for the poor. You are fooling yourself.
I’m always a little taken aback when people begin with a reasonable, if mistaken, point, and then go on to make asses of themselves by making baseless declarative statements about me. How am I fooling myself? And with regards to what? While everyone is certainly welcome to disagree with me, you have to either know nothing about me or be almost completely unfamiliar with this blog to believe that my opinions are formed on the same basis of that amorphous collection of vaguely remembered elementary school classes, parental biases, college lectures, personal insecurities, peer pressures, and emotional reactions that go into forming most people’s opinions.
Now, as to the subject in question, Jesus doesn’t speak much on war, but it is clear that he doesn’t regard it as the be-all and end-all of evil that most people today seem to consider it, except when the media and the White House have whipped them up into a frenzy of support for another round of long-distance bombing.
First, God Himself wages war against men. “You fear the sword, and the sword is what I will bring against you, declares the Sovereign LORD.” – Ezekiel 11:8.
Second, Jesus did not come to bring peace. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” – Matthew 10:33
Third, Jesus intends to make serious war upon mankind in the future. “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.” – Revelation 19:11
Fourth, I’ve never seen any evidence that Jesus cares particularly about education, either for the poor or anyone else, to say nothing of any moral duty to pay for the education of poor children.
In conclusion, it would appear that LJ doesn’t know the Bible nor the first thing about what Jesus would say about anything. The efforts of the New Atheists notwithstanding, spouting an opinion in complete ignorance is unlikely to convince anyone of anything.
Brothel or burqah: the reality
You can’t say I didn’t warn you about the choice an increasing number of Western women are presently making:
Tony Blair’s sister-in-law announced her conversion to Islam last weekend. Journalist Lauren Booth embraced the faith after what she describes as a ‘holy experience’ in Iran. She is just one of a growing number of modern British career women to do so…. According to Kevin Brice from Swansea University, who has specialised in studying white conversion to Islam, these women are part of an intriguing trend. He explains: ‘They seek spirituality, a higher meaning, and tend to be deep thinkers. The other type of women who turn to Islam are what I call “converts of convenience”. They’ll assume the trappings of the religion to please their Muslim husband and his family, but won’t necessarily attend mosque, pray or fast.’…
For a significant amount of women, their first contact with Islam comes from dating a Muslim boyfriend.
Although this may be shocking to the typical half-sapient and maleducated secular mind, numbed as it is from between 12 and 27 years of unmitigated feminist and multicultural propaganda, it was entirely predictable. And was, in fact, predicted by numerous parties. The primary reason neither the Greeks nor America’s Founding Fathers permitted women to vote is because they are much more intellectually malleable than men. Even the most fervent feminist will enthusiastically embrace the submission of Islam if a man is able to inspire her rationalization hamster to spin in that direction.
Osama bin Laden was correct in stating that Islam is the strong horse in comparison with secular post-Christian America. Secular post-Christianity is both rootless and pointless; it has neither raison d’etre nor does it provide anyone with objectives beyond the momentary and the material. While the abstract thinkers of the cognitive elite can come up with higher purposes of their own, (most of which involve placing themselves in control of other people and wind up getting a lot of people killed), such self-serving intellectual ephemeralities are incapable of satisfying the spiritual hunger of the masses.
In turning away from its historical identity as Christendom, the West has created a vast spiritual void and already the weaker souls are drifting into the pagan madness that Chesterton, Lewis, and other Christian savants predicted in the previous century. There will never be an atheist society, because human society can no more abide a spiritual vaccuum than nature can abide a material one.
Mailvox: Game and the Christian man
AG asks for advice on dealing with the cold equations:
I’m a 22 years old Christian male. I’m by no means a natural alpha, but I’m a pretty bright guy and it is quite easy for me to make myself attractive to women. Social reticence becomes “aloofness”, not knowing what to say (and not saying anything) becomes “mysteriousness” — you get the idea. Maybe it’s not that simple, but from experience I know that attracting women is not tough for me. My dilemma is this: every Christian male I know seems to either be a reformed badboy (like you) or very beta. With the court system completed stacked against men, a failed marriage can completely destroy a guy. What’s a guy like me to do? Let out my inner badboy for the next 8 years and then beg God for mercy or just be the nice Christian beta and hope everything works out? Neither option seems appealing at all. You’re one of the few people I can think of that is a Christian and views women and modern America in a realistic way. I can’t figure out what to do and I would really love to hear your thoughts.
Paul is quite clear on sinning that grace might abound and it is no wiser to indulge in rampant sex for a few years with the idea that you’ll eventually set it aside than it is to decide to spend the next eight years in a coked-up state before getting clean. I remember one evening at the Digital Ghetto when the White Buffalo, Big Chilly, Horn, and Micron were all happily ensconced around Bongzilla. (I stayed very far away from the herb after an unpleasant experience with a PCP-laced joint at DV8.) Micron had cracked a joke about how they were all killing brain cells, but Horn protested that he had read a study reporting that it took ten years of regular marijuana usage to have a negative impact on one’s brain.
At which point, Big Chilly smiled – he had gone to high school with Horn – and said: “And how long have you been smoking?” At that point, he had three years left, but that was more than 15 years ago and he certainly hasn’t quit. So, the point is that you’re kidding yourself if you think you can simply dive into the corruption of the world and expect to come out clean on the other side according to your schedule.
But no one said you have to be the nice Christian beta either. Alpha isn’t the notches on the bedpost; they are merely the consequence of the attitude. If you are a leader, a woman will follow you anywhere, including to church. I have seen it happen. And a Christian man shouldn’t consider himself bound to act like a beta, let alone gamma, around women, in fact, he should be totally indifferent to the opinion of the scarlet women of the world, which is a fundamentally alpha quality.
I think you are confusing Churchianity for Christianity in equating betatude with faith. If you’re afraid to correct someone because it might hurt their feelings, if you can’t open your mouth without deprecating yourself, if you are more afraid to tell a woman not to gossip or stuff her face than tell an adulterer that his behavior is wrong, you are a Churchian using Christianity as an excuse for your inner gamma. You’ve already learned that you don’t have to be an arrogant bastard in order to get the girls’ hamsters spinning madly, trying to figure you out. Now you just need to take the next step and learn how to open your mouth without taking three steps back.
The reason Game works is that it is a pale, corrupted reflection of the truth. But what is its most central message? It sounds like one of Paul’s most important themes! For neither God nor Game have given you a spirit of fear. The Christian man should approach a woman to whom he is attracted with the same total lack of fear as the most hardened master of Game; if she’s not the one, then what do you care if she rejects you? The sooner she does, the better!
Take a look around
What we have here in this prediction of evangelical collapse is a very typically American failure to look beyond the cultural borders while attempting to contemplate global trends:
We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.
This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.
If the full extent of your cultural awareness is limited to Europe and the United States, as is the case with the New Atheist and most American Christians alike, this perspective makes an amount of sense as long as you ignore the demographic trends. But once you take into account the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa and Asia, the thesis falls apart.
From NPR, of all places: In The land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity
Official Chinese surveys now show that nearly one in three Chinese describe themselves as religious, an astonishing figure for an officially atheist country, where religion was banned until three decades ago. The last 30 years of economic reform have seen an explosion of religious belief. China’s government officially recognizes five religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Daoism. The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control….
Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.
I have no doubt that the increasingly “liberal” evangelical church will follow the lead of the old mainline denominations and decline into numerical irrelevance. Once cut off from the nurturing root of the Word of God, Christian churches always die. There are a number of signs, but easily the most reliable one is the establishment of women in the pulpit. An illuminating exercise is to count the number of “I” references in a female “sermon” versus a male one. I can recall one particularly egregious example at Woodland Hills where I finally gave up and stopped counting as the narcissistic monologue was more about this woman and her feelings than the average psychotherapy session.
Because the US government has been fairly successful in bringing the American church to heel through its establishment of federal licenses, it is interesting to note that while China is attempting to utilize the same tactic, the Chinese Christians are familiar enough with the costs of centralization to resist the state’s attempt to control them.
America is following Europe into a secular post-Christian period. But can be seen in Europe, secular post-Christianity is not sustainable and rapidly leads towards rampant paganism. And, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history, paganism is easily trumped by Christianity. It is an observable historical cycle. Unfortunately, History’s cycles are rinsed with blood.
Why church women don’t like church men
Aunt Haley explains how Churchianity hinders happy marriages:
I’ve noticed that it’s fairly common in evangelical circles for a man to more or less prostrate himself at the feet of his wife’s saintly goodness, proclaiming some mixture of the following:
* I don’t deserve my wife.
* I was a mess before I met my wife.
* If it weren’t for my wife, I don’t know where I’d be right now.
* I don’t know what she sees in me.
* I’m an idiot, but for some reason, she married me.Among Christian women, humility is an ENORMOUS turn-on and is considered an outward sign of inward maturity…. This “my wife is better than me” attitude is sad. It may be humble on the surface, but it’s really just a big fat ugly DLV.
Note that this is an indictment of Churchianity, not Christianity. There is an important difference. In Christianity, the husband is the head of the household. In Churchianity, the husband is the servant leader, by which it is actually meant that he is a servant rather than a leader. And no man who doesn’t know what he’d do without his wife possesses the confident and muscular faith that sustained the martyrs, crushed paganism, ended global slavery, and changed the world for the better.
Men and women are meant to complement each other. Women need men to help them improve themselves every bit as badly as men need women, if not more so. And yet, are the men of the church ever called upon to help their wives develop intellectually, to broaden their interests outside their personal relations, to maintain themselves physically, and to refrain from being caught up in the destructive spiderweb of gossip? Not that I’ve ever heard.
The abject pedestalization of wives in Churchianity doesn’t even make sense in conventionally omniderigent evangelical terms. If God gave you your wife, then who are you to assert you do not deserve her? Women want to be married to a man who is awesome, so it is an insult to her character, her intelligence, and her quality to claim that you’re some sort of lower being that she has kindly deigned to lift up out of pure altruism. And while it’s probably true that you’re an idiot, given MPAI, the fact of the matter is that she is almost certainly an idiot too. It’s no wonder many women of the church are discontent in their marriages, if their husbands can’t see anything of merit in themselves, how do they expect their wives to do so?
False modesty isn’t humility, it’s a deceitful facade presented by whiny and insecure bitches of both sexes and it has no place in a Christian marriage.
A good reason to change churches
The Blogger Blaster provides an excellent metric to determine whether your church is one worth attending or not:
Lets start by looking at Mothers Day. Now… Sermons on both days have formulas that are almost always followed… but in each case… are slightly different. On mothers day… women will be celebrated and praised to the point of near worship. Mary will be mentioned over and over again. Then… in the sermon… the minister will take some particular positive attribute of mothers… and use it as a lesson… and hold it up as something for everyone to aspire to.
Then Fathers Day comes along. its a whole different story. It often starts with a mens breakfast… where an old man will stand up and read a list of fatherly attributes… and its assumed of course that you don’t meet them… then you are chastised for not meeting them… and challenged to meet them in the future. Then the service rolls around… and everyone will lament the failures in society and blame them on who? Right. Dads. And then the formulaic sermon… of course there will be no mention of Joseph… no… instead the minister takes a negative attribute of males… this morning at my church it was pride… and complains about how it affects the family of fathers… and uses it as a negative example to show people something to avoid.
Let me be perfectly clear. I will never, ever, attend a church that makes a habit of putting women on a pedestal and celebrating female traits while repeatedly demonizing men and castigating male traits. That is the hallmark of a church which has abandoned the worship of God the Father in favor of elevating current societal norms to sacred writ.
Because men have their flaws and engage in sin, it is correct for a pastor to exhort them and hold them accountable. But if your pastor is not capable of holding both men and women to account for their behavior, he should be your ex-pastor.
Mailvox: give to Caesar
JB wonders when it applies:
Not sure if you’ve run into this, but I’ve noticed a pattern when debating a liberal (Christian or not) about taxes and big government. When they get to the point where they have lost the argument, they throw a grenade with the statement, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.
Now, I’m not one to take the words of Christ lightly. It is true, Jesus did not go out of His way to incite rebellion against Rome, and seemed to endorse the concept of taxation with that statement. However, something doesn’t sit right with the liberal’s logic when they resort to that statement.
I wonder if you or the Ilk have a solid response to the Render Unto Caesar argument.
I usually run into this with regards to taxes. My response is always the same as the response that preceded the advice. “Show me the coin used for paying the tax. Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?” In other words, show me Caesar! So, while you can reasonably use this verse to justify writing a check to assorted dead men or the Federal Reserve, it is a poor argument in support of state or Federal taxation.
Now, it is important to note that it is not any wiser to refuse to pay the tax money demanded by the IRS than it is to refuse to pay the protection money demanded by the Mafia. But it does mean that the Biblical justification doesn’t apply.
As for government, the liberal Christian’s logic breaks down because what applies to a divine Emperor manifestly does not apply to a democracy, not even a constitutional republic in which the democracy is strictly limited. Whereas the imperial subject owes the Emperor nothing but obedience, the citizen of the republic has a duty to ensure that his duly elected government acts legitimately according to the bounds of the republic’s constitution.
Mailvox: a humble request
PC has found the Common Sense dialogue to be of no little interest and has a few questions:
Love the blog and hope that you can answer a few questions for me. Your correspondence with Common Sense Atheism made me reconsider many of my thoughts on Christianity and God. Like him, I felt in command of the fundamentals of Christian theology when all I know are Bible stories and sermons from my youth. And it bothers me that I have neglected a large field of intellectual inquiry. However, many of the Christians I meet and evangelical literature I come across are just as inane as the childish arguments for atheism that are too common on the internet. I am glad to have found in you an intelligent advocate who can discuss these topics without nonsense.
How do I begin to erase this deficit? What are some books that I can read this summer to learn the doctrine of Christianity? Where can I find intelligent arguments for the existence of God? Are local priests and ministers generally good discussion partners?
I’m a mathematician, so I like my theory raw. Don’t be afraid to lay the good stuff on me.
On a different note, I am interested in your conversion to Christianity, how a self-proclaimed internet superintelligence discovered and accepted belief. Also, you mention occasionally that one of your reasons for faith is because you saw evil in the world. Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean by evil? What are some examples?
First, always remember that most people are inane. Most people are idiots no matter what they do or do not believe. If you find an honest and intelligent interlocutor in any area, then cherish him regardless of how similar or divergent your views happen to be. Synchronicity of perspective is not an intrinsic hallmark of intelligence.
Second, I must freely admit that I am overdue in writing my response to Luke’s last post. I’m not the least bit apologetic about my tardiness, mind you, as we just went gold on a year-long software project yesterday and I’m still in the process of gradually reanimating from development zombie mode. As will soon become clear, Luke and I are so far apart in philosophical areas that have absolutely nothing to do with religion that our differences of opinion with regards to Christianity almost pale in comparison. But it should take the discourse in an interesting and perhaps unexpected direction.
Third, I think it is absolutely refreshing whenever someone steps back to reconsider what they actually do and do not know, contra their previous assumptions. As much as I might brutally tear into Luke, or anyone else, for mistaking their half-remembered fragments of childhood knowledge for a comprehensive grasp of a subject, it’s actually an entirely normal failure to revisit the past. I remember being astounded when SB dryly asked me why I thought the crust was the healthiest part of the bread… the real reason was that someone had once told me that as a young child and I had never once bothered to actually stop and think about the matter. And the observable fact is that most people never stop and think about anything they have been told by their parents, their teachers, and their professors. So, it should come as no surprise at all that most atheists raised in a Christian tradition should belatedly discover that they really don’t know that much about the simple theological facts of the faith they are rejecting… in the unlikely event they ever stop long enough to seriously consider the matter.
This is why I tend to take an atheist who abandons a religious faith after the age of 30 much more seriously than the normal teenage deconvert. Think about this for a second: How many of your decisions made in your teen years do you still think were particularly wise or intelligent today? And every childhood deconvert I have ever questioned has simply had Daddy issues of one sort or another. You can usually identify the latter sort by their emotional reactions to religion.
As for learning about the Christian faith and theology, the two best books with which to begin are Letters From a Skeptic by Greg Boyd and Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I would follow that with Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton, and Cynic, Sage, or Son of God, also by Boyd. Then re-read the four Gospels. As for priests and ministers, well, I wouldn’t expect too much out of them other than a reasonably accurate summation of the theology. Remember, they are called to be shepherds of the flock, not providers of intellectual discourse to the highly intelligent. This isn’t to say that no priest or minister is capable of it, but it’s really somewhat of a category error to seek it from them.
Regarding evil, I simply mean behavior that is described as evil or wickedness in the Bible as well as the influences, autonomous or otherwise, that encourage that behavior. I see it in the world and I see it in myself. I have seen it in the transparent lies of an almost-innocent child, in the irrational fury of a hysterical woman, in the maddened glee of a violent man, and throughout the blood-soaked pages of history. I have seen it in the rich and the poor, in the brilliant and the dim, and in the beautiful and the ugly. Once, like many an arrogant non-believer before me, I thought I could construct my own valid moral code and live by it. And, like everyone but the nihilists, I failed. Not spectacularly, but worse, ludicrously and unneccessarily.
As for evil, you know what it is. It is everything from the first lie you tell your parents and that senseless momentary impulse to smash your fist into an unsuspecting person’s face as they walk by to the Ten Persecutions of Imperial Rome and the Killing Fields. I have no doubt that you have heard the little whispers in the back of your mind from time to time just like everyone else. There are two parts to evil, the temptation and the submission. When the submission finally comes, when the resistance finally fails, it feels absolutely liberating at first and it is only after a period of repeated acts of submission that one gradually discovers apparent how enslaving evil truly is. Hence the apparent theological dichotomy of finding freedom through bending the knee before the Lord Jesus Christ.
I think that unless one understands that evil is in some senses desirable to every man and woman, one cannot even begin to make sense of the Christian faith. Unfortunately, many if not most Christians take the admonition to hate evil and twist it into an erroneous dogma that insists evil is not and cannot be enjoyable. And yet, no matter how terrible the act, it always feels either good or necessary at the moment of action. This is just one of the many ways in which I find the Christian perspective to be more observably accurate than the current scientific ones.
I do not speak about my personal experience with anyone. This is for several reasons, but primarily because I understand that personal experiences are not an objective basis for rational argument. In addition, I know that atheists reject personal experience as a basis for belief even in the case of their own experiences, or at least they claim to do so. So, there is clearly no point in it. The atheist who queries, even sincerely and in good faith, about someone else’s experience is attempting to put himself in the position of prosecutor and judge and I have no interest in playing star witness and public defender.
I tend to doubt this response answered all of your questions, but at least it should suffice to give you a starting point on your investigation. And before you begin reading anything, I highly recommend contemplating the significance of John 20:24-31. I think many atheists who are conditioned to believe in the idea of a blind Christian faith and its supposed arrogance, would do well to become familiar with what is indubitably the genuine Christian attitude towards doubts and doubters.