Punching a Pimply Face

Contempt for Sharkey Law

Thursday, June 26, 2014
Douglas Wilson
Blog and Mablog

The difference between an unbelieving libertarian and an unbelieving leftist is quite simple to grasp. The unbelieving libertarian wants to go to Hell, and the unbelieving leftist wants to do the same thing, but wants me to pay for it.

Both need the gospel, and both present a problem for the evangelist. There is a spiritual problem in both instances. But the leftist, in addition to his spiritual problems, is also a public nuisance. He creates political and cultural problems, mostly having to do with various forms of coercion, compulsion, mandatory regulation, and forced labor for the pyramids. All these are covered by his all-purpose favorite euphemistic verb, which is “to ask.” We want to ask the well-off to pay their fair share. We want to ask small companies to provide health coverage they can’t afford. We want to ask the pyramid slaves to get their butts in gear.

They are the dyslexic party. They look at compulsion and read compassion.

Now none of this makes the libertine libertarian a fine fellow.
Pot-smokers are not going to build anything, much less the City of God. But while they may not be any help to us in what we are seeking to build, neither are they “asking” us to buy their pot for them. The problem they present — and it is one — can wait for another day.

But in the meantime, the idol of the state has a maw that can gulp down trillions of dollars at one go. It all began with disguised coercion, moved on to corruption and coercion, and it is now ending with open corruption and open coercion. We are rapidly approaching the point where the only reasonable response is open defiance.

The enlistment of the IRS as a partisan organization, designed to run interference against lawful political organization is an example of high wickedness. The president famously said there was “not a smidgen of corruption” with the IRS scandal. That’s right. It was not a smidgen, it was a smoking pile.

When the law shows open contempt for an honest citizenry, it is not long before that honest citizenry — in order to remain such — must show open contempt for what is being called “the law.” And for those Christians who are not well-read in the history of biblical civil disobedience, contempt for Sharkey-law is not the same thing as contempt for the rule of law. Just the reverse, actually.

“All right, all right!” said Sam. “That’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead” (The Return of the King, p. 977)

“What’s all this?” said Frodo, feeling inclined to laugh.
“This is what it is, Mr. Baggins,” said the leader of the Shirriffs, a two-feather hobbit: “You’re arrested for Gate-breaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gate-keepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food.”

And what else?” said Frodo.

“That’ll do to go on with,” said the Shirriff-leader.

“I can add some more, if you’d like it,” said Sam. “Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools” (p. 978).

Daily Devotional

June 30

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Festina lente (hasten slowly)

Here is a man [Psalm 73] suddenly tempted, tempted to say something, or… to do something. The force of the temptation is so great that he is almost thrown off his balance. He is on the point of falling to the temptation, and he tells us what it was that saved him. Here it is: ‘If I say”—he was on the point of saying something—”‘If I say, I will speak thus; behold, I should offend….’ What does he do? What is his method?

The first thing he does is to take himself in hand…. He just kept himself from saying what was on the tip of his tongue. It was there, but he did not say it. Now this is tremendously important. The Psalmist realized the importance of never speaking hurriedly, of never speaking on an impulse…. It is a perfectly good point for a man to make who is not a Christian at all …. there are things which we have to do in connection with this spiritual discipline that at first sight do not seem to be particularly Christian. But if they hold you, use them.

There are many people who are so anxious to be always on the mountain top in a spiritual sense that for that very reason they often find themselves falling down into the valley.
They disregard these ordinary methods. They do not avoid doing what the man who wrote Psalm 116 had done…. He makes a very honest confession. He says, “I said in my haste, All men are liars.”

He said that in his haste, and that was the mistake. This man in Psalm 73 had discovered, even when he was on the point of falling, the importance of not saying anything in haste. It is wrong for a Christian to say or do anything in haste . . . [see James 1:19]… is it not obvious that if only we all imple­mented this particular principle then life would be much more harmonious?… What a lot of pinpricks and irritations, what a lot of quarreling and backbiting and unhappiness would be avoided in every realm of life, if only we all heeded this injunc­tion !… Stop and think. If you can do nothing else, stop!

Faith on Trial, pp. 24-5

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Euro-Scepticism on the Rise in the UK

Euro-Philes a Vanishing Species

We have long been Euro-sceptics.  The wider arc of history had been showing the continent of Europe to be in terminal, irrevocable decline.  Getting together into a federation or union, we believed, would end up  exacerbating the decline, not reverse it. It is falling out as we expected. 

The basis for European comity once lay in  the shared Christian belief structures of the Continent.  But the wars of kings, and of religion, and of struggles over absolute versus limited constitutional government, together with the rapid rise of Enlightenment rationalism meant that the Europe of the twentieth century was as divided as it had ever been.  The French hated the English and vice versa.  The Germans and French maintained a reciprocal antipathy.  The Mediterranean belt was hopelessly servile to corruption.

Post-war European federalism was an elite-driven, top down attempt to paper over these realities to make Europe (that is, European elites) really important in a global sense.  Europe as an economic bloc would rival the United States, Japan, China and the emerging economies of Asia.  Its currency would become the default currency of trade for the European bloc, possibly even eclipsing the US dollar as the world default currency.  These millenarian utopian dreams required a real unity of culture, world-view, and purpose to have any hope of success, but it simply did not exist, and never has–at least in the modern period.

It seems almost inevitable now that the UK will move away from these European federal ambitions.
  Whilst euro-philes have pronounced great doom if this were to occur, the reality is likely to be very different.  It is highly likely that moving out of the EU will be the best thing for the UK by a country mile.  Daniel Hannan explains why, by fisking some of the standard arguments put forward to keep the UK in the European Union:

1. “We need to be in the EU to export”.
Ever noticed that you can buy Nescafé in the EU? Or a Swatch or a Rolex or a Toblerone? Switzerland manages to sell four-and-a-half times as much per head to the EU as Britain. Norway sells two-and-a-half times as much. Now that Ukraine is signing an Association Agreement with Brussels, there is only one state in Europe that does not enjoy free trade with the EU: Belarus.

The point Hannan is making is that non-EU states in Europe, such as Switzerland and Norway export huge volumes of goods and services to the EU.  Therefore, Britain’s exit will likely increase UK exports to the EU rather than the opposite.  

2. “Three million British jobs depend on our trade with Europe”
Right: on our trade with Europe, not on our membership of the EU. And absolutely no one in Brussels is suggesting that our withdrawal from the political aspects of membership – the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the European Arrest Warrant and so on – would prejudice our commercial links. We run a significant trade deficit with the EU (and, incidentally, a surplus with the rest of the world): salesmen generally don’t threaten their customers. Totting up the number of Britons who work in EU institutions, I reckon the actual number of job losses would be around 14,000 – mine included. Of course, releasing us into the private sector might stimulate the UK economy.

Hannan’s point is that were Britain to leave the union, EU exports to Britain are likely to continue because the EU cannot afford to do anything but continue to promote and support its member states exporting to one of its largest markets.
 

3. “The EU takes half our exports”
No it doesn’t. Even on the raw data, the proportion has fallen over the past eight years from 54 per cent to 46 per cent. But that figure is distorted by two factors. First, many UK exports to non-EU markets are routed through the massive ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp, and so show up in the statistics as exports to the EU. Second, goods from around the world that are destined for the Republic of Ireland are often shipped through Belfast, again showing up in the raw figures as UK exports to the EU.

The EU is simply not the global economic powerhouse that Euro-philes actually imagine it to be.  In fact, it is a languishing economic zone–a malaise not unrelated to the distortions caused by its conflicting monetary policies and its debt mountain, coupled with its congenital protectionist instincts, and its  bizarre bureaucratic regulation of all goods and services.  We are reminded of Reginald Perrin’s complaints about Euro-rhubarb– the product of European specification of rhubarb standards for the entire continent. 

4. “We’re part of the world’s biggest market”
Every continent in the world is now experiencing economic growth except Europe. More to the point, as a recent analysis of OECD data carried out by Civitas showed, there is absolutely no correlation between EU membership and sales to the EU.

5. “The EU-US trade deal will create an even bigger free trade area”
Outside the EU’s Common External Tariff, Britain would have signed a bilateral free trade agreement with the United States decades ago. And not only the United States. EFTA members, such as Iceland and Switzerland, have signed FTAs with China. As an EU member, Britain can’t. EFTA is currently negotiating an FTA with India, but the EU has shelved its trade talks with Delhi. Never mind our linguistic and legal ties, never mind the 1.4 million Britons of Indian origin, never mind that India is the fourth largest investor here – EU membership prevents us enjoying unrestricted commerce with that rising giant.

Globalists have long sought after universal treaties and conventions.  It’s part of the incipient utopianism of those who lust for a Babelesque heaven upon earth.  The World Trade Organization wants global trade agreements.  We are now in WTO negotiation round number 6034 and it’s as far away as ever.  Meanwhile, bi-lateral and tri-lateral agreements between nations are everywhere in place, and bringing the benefits to their respective signatory nations that free-trade inevitably produces.  Leaving the EU would allow the UK to negotiate bilateral agreements.

6. “Outside the EU, we’d have to obey rules over which we have no say”
Swiss companies must meet EU standards when exporting to the EU, just as they must meet Japanese standards when exporting to Japan. But they don’t have to apply those standards to their non-EU trade nor – except in a few special cases – to their domestic economy. The current deal may not be perfect, but 80 per cent of Swiss voters prefer it to EU membership.

Businesses realise that the costs of being part of the EU bloc outweigh the benefits of being a member.  Were Britain to pull out, expect a huge increase in investment and economic activity in the UK over the next ten years. 

7. “Businesses will disinvest if we pull out”
Nissan, for example, has said jobs might go if we leave the EU. Oops, sorry, my mistake: that was what it said about keeping the pound. We kept the pound and are now selling more cars than ever before. Business is not represented only the multi-nationals which pour money into lobbying Brussels for rules that advantage them at the expense of their smaller rivals. When businesses are neutrally polled, rather than selectively asked, most say that the costs of EU regulation outweigh the benefits of the single market.

Hannan’s final point is that the claim that the EU helps maintain continent wide peace is spurious also.  In reality, it has inflamed nationalist tensions.

8. “The EU keeps the peace in Europe”
The EU is not a cause, but a consequence, of a European peace based on the defeat of fascism, the spread of democracy and the Nato alliance. If anything, jamming disparate countries into common policies has served to stoke national antagonisms.

The upshot is that there is very little real downside, and lots of potential benefits to be exploited were the UK to leave the EU. 

Daniel Hannan blogs at The Telegraph

Letter From Australia (About Self-Loathing)

This self-loathing insults Australian values

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
June 26, 2014

THE Sydney Opera House is Australia’s most iconic building. And on its stage in August was to be a taxpayer-funded talk: “Honour killings are morally justified.”

Be clear: the title is not a question but a statement.  Yes, in the heart of Australia we are now to rationalise the strangling, stoning, burning, beating or shooting of daughters and wives for supposedly shaming their men. . . .

In this case, Uthman Badar was invited by Sydney Opera House and the St James Ethics Centre for their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and planned to attack critics of honour killings as the usual “secular (white) Westerner”, wickedly using these murders as a symbol of “everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture”. Note: honour killings are only “allegedly wrong”. 

Yes, to see Westerners criticise an “Oriental” woman-killer was to see “the powerful condemn the powerless”, according to the blurb approved by Badar. Pity those powerless murderers.

The Opera House has now cancelled Badar’s speech, but only on the grounds that his critics misunderstood the poor man. (Depressingly, not one critic was a prominent Muslim.)  As the Opera House put it, “a line has been crossed” by giving the lecture its “provocative” title, because “it is clear from the public reaction that the title has given the wrong impression of what Mr Badar intended to discuss”.

We are now asked to believe a talk entitled “Honour killings are morally justified” would say something different, although the organisers and Badar haven’t said what. The Opera House merely asserts neither Badar nor the organisers “in any way advocate honour killings” — and it cancels the talk it claims would have said the same.

How curious.

In fact, this blaming of the critics is terribly familiar. Our cultural elite doesn’t condone Islamic extremists; it just attacks those who condemn them. Example: when Dutch political leader Geert Wilders toured Australia last year to warn against the Islamist threat to our freedoms and safety, he was vilified even by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for allegedly “inciting hatred and animosity”. Example: when I criticised our leading Islamic apologist, ABC presenter Waleed Aly, for refusing to identify Nigeria’s Boko Haram as Islamist or blame it for kidnapping schoolgirls, I was damned by the ABC’s religious affairs editor as “mad”, “lunatic”, “maniacal” and “idolatrous”.

Or take Ann Mossop, co-curator of the festival that invited Badar. She has repeatedly tweeted support for an activist who defaced posters protesting against jihadist attacks on Israel with the slogan: “In any war between the civilised and the savage, support the civilised man.”

Indeed, in this cultural war, the support too often is for the savage and our will to resist is white-anted by a self-loathing of one of the richest, safest and most free societies the world has seen.

“We have a reputation at the moment as being one of the nastiest countries in the world,” feminist Eva Cox declared on the ABC’s Q&A this week. Australia has a “racist” Constitution and a “very dark past, a brutal history of dispossession, theft and slaughter”, claims Australian of the Year Adam Goodes.

Our Anzac dead were just “killed or wounded while their country engaged them in the business of killing”, Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood reproached Dawn Service mourners this year.

Yes, we have such rotten values that we should be more open to imported ones.
Honour killings, anyone? For a cultural elite with a death wish, it almost makes sense.

Daily Devotional

June 28

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

God knows: God undertakes

We cannot do better than remind ourselves again of… the faith of God’s people throughout the centuries. That is the faith and teaching to be found, for example, in the hymns of Philip Doddridge. A typical example is found in his great hymn:

O God of Bethel, by whose hand
Thy people still are fed;
Who through this weary pilgrimage
Hast all our fathers led.

That is his great argument, based ultimately upon the sover­eignty of God, that God is the Ruler of the Universe, and we are known to Him one by one, and are in a personal relation­ship to Him. It was the faith of all the great heroes of the faith described in Hebrews 11.
That is what kept those men going. Quite frequently they did not understand but they said, “God knows and God undertakes.” They had this final confidence that He who had brought them into being, and who had a purpose for them, would not leave them nor forsake them. He would surely sustain and lead them all the journey through, until their purpose in this world has been completed, and He would receive them into their heavenly habitation where they would spend their eternity in His glorious presence.

“Be not anxious about your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor about your body, wherewithal it shall be clothed. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” Argue it out, start with first principles and draw the inevitable deduction. The moment you do so, care and worry and anxiety will vanish, and as a child of your heavenly Father you will walk with peace and serenity in the direction of your everlasting home.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, p. 116

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Madness Replacing Reason

Indictments From the Common Lawyers

What does a Christian society look like?  What might be some of the key features of the Second Christendom when it emerges in redemptive history?  There are many.  One central feature will be the grounding of civil and criminal law upon the higher law of God.  This, of course, is not novel.  It is the way it used to be in the First Christendom.

F E Dowrick describes how biblical law (both written and inscribed in the creation itself) was deeply embedded in the English legal tradition.  He writes:

The basic assumptions in this doctrine [of natural justice] are that God exists and that immanent in all creation is God’s eternal law.  St. Germain’s Doctor defines [in the early sixteenth century] the eternal law as:

the reason of the wisdom of God, moving all things by wisdom made to a good end.

The eternal law is not wholly known to men.  It is known in part through revelation, as recorded in the New and Old Testaments, that part being called the law of God or positive divine law; and it is known further through reason, that part being called the law of nature or the law of reason.  So, natural law is unequivocally established on a divine basis.  Since it is part of God’s will or plan for mankind natural law is neither parochial or temporary.  According to the Doctor of Divinity

This law ought to be kept as well among Jews and Gentils, as among Christian men . . . it is never changeable by no diversity of place, ne time (sic).

F.E. Dowrick [Justice According to the English Common Lawyers (London: Butterworths, 1960), p.49]

The divine law provided the primary or fundamental precepts.  Reason assisted in applying those precepts (by means of subordinate premises and the rules and laws of logic) to situations and circumstances.  The fundamental principles laid down in the law of God included:

1. Good is to be loved and evil is to be fled.
2. Do to another that thou wouldst another should do to thee.
3. Do nothing against truth.
4. A man must live peacefully with others.
5. Men should live in society.
6. Actions by which a human life is to be preserved are to be pursued.
7. Male and female should join together and children be educated.  (Ibid., p. 50)

By the nineteenth century, the First Christendom was in terminal decline.  The hearts of the people and their rulers and teachers decided they had a better idea.  The law of God as the foundation of all human law and justice was gradually, yet ineluctably, replaced by the mind of man as the ultimate lawgiver.  We see the fruits on every hand today.  “Reason” now dictates that an unborn child can be killed at will.  It has “discovered” eternal and irrevocable rights to homosexuality, homosexual “marriage”, and no-fault divorce.  It has declared, on the grounds of its own recognizance, that the state must impose “equality” upon its citizens, thereby sanctifying and glorifying envy and covetousness.

All these, and many other perversions, the common lawyers of Christendom would have called madness, not reason.  They would have been right.  They testify against us and the resulting indictment leaves us without excuse.  

Nevertheless, the “reason” and “laws” of autonomous man will inevitably run their course, to produce their fruit, and to bring their self-immolating sentence of death and destruction, before a generation will arise, by God’s grace, to toss this ghastly human idolatry into the lake of fire, and to repent, and to replace it with the principles and doctrines of the First Christendom, thereby building the Second Christendom. 

The Giants

Foundational Literature of Western Civilization

June 24, 2014

Justin Taylor

 

 

In his book The Case for Classic Christian Education (Crossway, 2003), Doug Wilson offers a list of “foundational” books for Western Civilization (some of which, but not all, would make their way onto his desert-island reading list.)
I’ve reproduced his list below, along with my own parenthetical recommendations on some translations, editions for kids, etc.

The Scriptures
Of course, the Scriptures are not included in the list of twenty-five books. The Bible is necessarily in a class by itself and forms the center of every class a student takes. But at the same time, the Bible is an important part of our broader literary heritage, particularly in the Authorized Version, popularly known as the King James. . . .

The Iliad
Written by Homer (c. 750 B.C.), this great work is about the fall of Hector in one sense, as well as the tragic fall of Achilles during the siege of Troy. The Trojan War is the setting, but this is not what The Iliad is about. Homer’s poetic gifts were great, but we should remember C. S. Lewis’s comment that it was his giftedness that made his granite despair shine as though it were marble.

[See Robert Fagles’s translation. For kids, see Rosemary Sutcliff’s retelling, The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of the Odyssey—or wait until July 2014 for a new edition of this retelling with illustrations by Alan Lee. For a Christian literary guide to the book, see Leland Ryken’s work.]

The Odyssey
Mark Twain once quipped that we now know that Homer was not the author of these works, but they were rather to be attributed to another blind Greek poet with the same name. The Odyssey, more accessible to many modern readers than The Iliad, is about the return of Odysseus from a life of freebooting to his home country and his adventures on the way.

[See Robert Fagles’s translation. For children, see Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of ‘The Iliad.’ Or wait till August 2014 to get her version with Alan Lee’s illustrations.]

The Oresteia
Aeschylus was the father of Greek tragedy (525-456 b.C.). The Oresteia is a trilogy of three plays (458 b.C.)—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers (Choephoroe), and The Kindly Ones (Eumenides). The apostle Paul’s language indicates his familiarity with these plays. The plays are about the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War, his murder by his wife, and the unraveling of his dynastic order followed by the rise of another, more balanced order.

[The link is to the Fagles translation.]

History of the Persian Wars
Herodotus (484-c. 424 B.C.) was a great storyteller. He was first called the father of history by Cicero, but the appellation has stuck. Modernist historians want to qualify this somewhat, thinking that he has insufficient quantified boredom in his footnotes to be called a true historian. Nonetheless, he is a lot of fun to read.

Oedipus Rex
Sophocles (c. 497-406 B.C.) wrote this play about a man fated to kill his own father and marry his mother. Aristotle used the play as his model for tragedy, and it has had a great influence on the definition of tragedy. Oedipus Rex also serves as a good springboard for discussions about fate and free will.

[The link is to the Fagles translation.]

The Republic
Plato (c. 428-c. 347 B.C.) was great because he raised great issues. Of course, he also answered them from within his pagan worldview. This book should be read because it is important in the history of ideas, not because the ideas therein represent anything that Christians would want to adopt. Karl Marx was an intellectual who suffered misfortune because people tried to put his ideas into practice. Had Plato suffered the same misfortune, the world would still be talking about that totalitarian hellhole.

[For serious study, see Alan Bloom‘s essentially literal translation and notes.]

Nicomachean Ethics
As Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) served as a tutor for Alexander the Great. His Nicomachean Ethics has had a major influence in Western moral philosophy, much of it problematic for the Christian. The pernicious influence comes more from the basis of the standard (reason versus revelation) than it does from what Aristotle praises or blames. When Paul asks, “Where is the wise man?” he is almost certainly talking about Aristotle. Man through all his knowing does not know God.

The Aeneid
Virgil (70-19 B.C.) was the court poet for Augustus, the Caesar when Jesus was born. He retold the story of the founding of Rome, connecting it to the fall of Troy. Trojan refugees fled after the fall of their city, and after many adventures, they settled in Italy. Aeneas, their leader, is a man in the first part of the Aeneid, but as the poem progresses, he becomes a personification of Rome itself.

On the Incarnation
Athanasius (A.D. 295-373), the bishop of Alexandria, was the orthodox champion against the heresies of Arius, who denied the deity of Christ. The testimony of C. S. Lewis on this point should be sufficient: “When I first opened his De Incarnatione, I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece.”

[You can read an online version, including Lewis’s introduction, here.]

The Confessions of St. Augustine
Augustine (A.D. 354-430) was one of the greatest thinkers the church has ever produced, and it would be hard to overstate his influence. His Confessions are autobiographical, devotional, philosophical, and everywhere rich. The Protestant Reformation should really be understood as Augustinian Christianity coming into its own, and Protestants would do well to get reacquainted with their spiritual father.

[See Tony Reinke’s translation comparison. Peter Kreeft says that F.J. Shedd’s translation opened up the book for him like no other. I usually use Maria Boulding’s translation. For more commendations of this book and why you should read it, go here.]

Beowulf
The author was an unknown Christian poet from the eighth century (c. A.D. 700-750). The story is of a great hero who slays the monsters Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and who at the end of the epic lays down his life for his people in a fight with a dragon. This is a wonderful poem.

[There are several recent publications of this classic. The best-known is probably the NYT bestseller by Seamus Heaney. Last year Douglas Wilson published a new alliterative verse rendering. And this year has seen J.R.R. Tolkien‘s translation and commentary. For younger readers, see Ian Serrailier‘s rendering in modern verse narrative (sixth grade and up).

The Divine Comedy
In this work many believe that Dante (A.D. 1265-1321) produced the supreme Christian literary work. Throughout the course of this “sacred poem,” Dante as pilgrim is escorted through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and comes finally to the Beatific Vision.

[See Anthony Esolen’s translation of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.]

The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (A.D. 1343-1400) belongs to the high medieval period. His greatness as a poet is generally recognized. Pilgrims on the way to Canterbury tell one another stories to pass the time, and the stories reveal many of the tensions and contradictions of medieval life—from sacred to profane, from holy to bawdy. With regard to the bawdy aspect, Chaucer himself believed that he sometimes got carried away, and much to the consternation of modern liberated scholars, he said he was sorry. Chaucer was almost certainly influenced by his contemporary, Wycliffe, and was probably numbered among the Lollards, followers of Wycliffe.

[For a retelling for children, see Geraldine McCaughrean’s version.]

Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare presents us with some difficulties. The first is the question of dates, which depend on who Shakespeare was. Since I follow Joseph Sobran’s arguments for the Oxfordian authorship of the plays, I simply refer you to him. The other difficulty is that of selecting which plays should represent his genius, whoever he was. The five above will have to do. Since they are plays, they were meant to be seen, not read. Good videos of some of these are available.

[For a critical complete set of Shakespeare’s works, see the Pelican edition. Leland Ryken has a guide on Macbeth and on Hamlet. For children, see Ten Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb.]

Institutes of the Christian Religion
John Calvin (1509-1564) was a strong personality who still evokes strong and sometimes passionate responses, both for and against. Nevertheless, the stubborn historical fact remains that he was the single greatest systematizer and organizer of the Protestant theology and faith. He was a truly great man, and this great work was published in its first form when Calvin was still a young man.

[The definitive two-volume edition is edited by John McNeill; unfortunately it seems to be currently in print only in paperback. For help, see A Reader’s Guide to Calvin’s Institutes, by Anthony N. S. Lane.]

Vindicae Contra Tyrannos
Junius Brutus is a pseudonym for an unknown Huguenot writer of the sixteenth century. This book represents a Protestant marriage of medieval and modern thinking about political civil order. The book was enormously influential in the American colonies prior to our War for Independence.

The Temple
George Herbert ( 1593-1633) was a devotional Anglican poet whose great theme was the authority of grace. Like his contemporary John Donne, he was a poetic craftsman of the first order. The catholicity of his writing has given him a broad appeal among Christians.

[See Leland Ryken’s guide to the devotional poetry of Herbert, along with Milton and Donne.]

Paradise Lost
John Milton (1608-1674) was a genius of the first rank. One astute observer said that the English language collapsed under the weight of that genius. Paradise Lost is an artistic monument, but it is not an easy one to apprehend at a first reading. Taking a class on it or reading some companion volumes would be very helpful.

[Here is a version for children. See also Leland Ryken’s Christian guide.]

Pilgrim’s Progress
John Bunyan (1628-1688) was an unlettered tinker turned preacher who wrote a book that continues to astonish the world. The allegory is straightforward, but the book nevertheless has depths that account for its incredible staying power. C. S. Lewis said of this work: “The greater part of it is enthralling narrative or genuinely dramatic dialogue. Bunyan stands with Malory and Trollope as a master of perfect naturalness in the mimesis of ordinary conversation. . . . In dialogue Bunyan catches not only the cadence of the speech but the tiny twists of thought.”

[If you like things in the original, I don’t know of anything better than Banner of Truth’s deluxe edition. See Leland Ryken’s literary guide. See also Derek Thomas’s Ligonier class, “The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Guided Tour.” For children, the two most famous versions are Dangerous Journey (an illustration-rich abridgment, using a lot of original wording) and Helen Taylor’s Little Pilgrim’s Progress, a full retelling with the characters as children.]

Pensees
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a Jansenist, part of a movement within the post-Reformation Roman Catholic Church trying to turn Rome back to an Augustinian foundation. The Jansenists are best understood as “Protestants” who never left the Church of Rome. Pascal was a great mathematical genius as well as a devotional mystic. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.”

[I have used Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees, which intersperses Pascal’s Pensees with Kreeft’s helpful commentary and application.]

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote one of the finest examples of a comedy of manners. Her writing displays an understanding of great psychological depths without becoming pathological about it, as more recent writers have done.

Faust
Johann Goethe (1749-1832) created in this drama a work that is archetypical of the great Romantic themes of his era. Many German legends told fantastic stories of the fifteenth-century magician Georg Faust, who sold his soul to the devil. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about Faust in the late sixteenth century, at the end of which the soul of Faustus is lost. Goethe ends the story differently, and in that difference we can see the desolations of our modern era. Instead of salvation by grace, we have salvation for free.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain published this book in 1885. The fact that just about every- one reads it in high school and that it is a really good story enjoyed on the surface tends to obscure for us just what a great book it is. Hemingway said that all modern literature descends from Huckleberry Finn. H. L. Mencken praised Twain to the heights.

The Brothers Karamazov
This novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is in the minds of many one of the contenders for the title of the greatest novel ever written. This is a strange way to talk about a novel, too reminiscent of People magazine’s tendency to declare someone or other the sexiest man alive. Nevertheless, this kind of praise does give some idea of the novel’s reputation, and it is fair to say that it represents “a consummate work of Christian imagination.”

[According to Joseph Frank of Princeton University, the 2002 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is “Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.”]

The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) wrote what is already being called the novel of the twentieth century. While it is far too early to make this judgment, it is certainly not too early to hope that the judgment proves correct. The story of the one ring, of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, and every other creature in Middle Earth will no doubt be read for centuries to come.

[If you like big one-volume editions, you can get it in paperback or hardcover.]

 

Daily Devotional

June 27

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Turn your eyes upon Jesus

If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him we should soon forget ourselves … stop looking at yourself and begin to enjoy Him.

What is the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian? Paul in the second Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 3, says it is this, that the non-Christian is a man who looks at Christ and God with a veil over his eyes and therefore cannot see. What is the Christian? This is his description (v. 18): “But we all”—every one of us as Christians—”we all with open face (the veil has gone), beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.” That is the Christian. He spends his time in looking at Christ, in gazing upon Him. He is so enraptured by the sight of Him that he has forgotten himself.

If you were to feel more interest in Christ you would be less interested in yourself. Begin to look at Him, gaze upon Him with this open, unveiled face. And then go on to learn that in His Kingdom what matters is not the length of service but your attitude towards Him, your desire to please Him…. He does not count service as other people do. He is interested in the heart. We are inter­ested in time, we all clock in and count the time we have spent, the work we have done.

Like the first men in the parable (Matthew 20:1-16) we claim to have done all, and boast of the time we have spent in the work. And if we are not among those who went in at the beginning we are concerned because we have not done this and that, and because we have missed all this time. Our Lord is not interested in our work in this way. It is the widow’s mite He is interested in.

It is not the amount of money, it is the woman’s heart…. That is also the case that Paul puts here (1 Corinthians 15:8-10). “Last of all he revealed himself unto me also.” But thank God that does not make any difference … He is not interested in time, He is interested in relationship.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 88-9

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Integration Into the Void

Forthcoming Reformation

In his important essay, The End of Courtship, Leon Kass makes the following observations about love, courtship, and marriage as it now plays out in college campuses and universities across the United States.  His observations would hold true, we believe, pretty much everywhere throughout the West. 

Below is a summary of excerpts to enable us to get the flavour.  (We will draw some implications for Christians, churches, and the Kingdom at the end.)

I:

Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage:
the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced (and in those born out of wedlock, who have never known their father); great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth and independence not as a transient stage en route to adulthood but as ‘the time of our lives,’ imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.

II:

The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control—the pill for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences. Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality—as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness. Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children. Female sexuality becomes, like male, unlinked to the future. The new woman’s anthem: Girls just want to have fun. Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning. 

III:

Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage. Taking for granted, and thereby ratifying, precocious sexual activity among teenagers (and even pre-teens), most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS. While some programs also encourage abstinence or noncoital sex, most are concerned with teaching techniques for ‘safe sex’; offspring (and disease) are thus treated as (equally) avoidable side effects of sexuality, whose true purpose is only individual pleasure. (This I myself did not learn until our younger daughter so enlightened me, after she learned it from her seventh-grade biology teacher.) The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral; in many cases, it explicitly opposes traditional morals while moralistically insisting on the equal acceptability of any and all forms of sexual expression provided only that they are not coerced. No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy.

We may add the latest devolution to this list: as the politics of sexual identity have taken hold, and one’s gender becomes whatever one wants, prefers, or declares it to be, the sexuality attached to such genders as bisexual, trans-gendered, bestial–recall Facebook’s fifty-six gender identity options, (see below)–secular sex education in schools is already moving not to discriminate against any sexual identity.  All gender identities will have to be included, so sex-education will move even more radically to focus upon sexual techniques and the technocratic aspects of sex. 

IV:

The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people try to argue, wishfully against the empirical evidence, that children of divorce will marry better than their parents because they know how important it is to choose well. But the deck is stacked against them. Not only are many of them frightened of marriage, in whose likely permanence they simply do not believe, but they are often maimed for love and intimacy. They have had no successful models to imitate; worse, their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents, to provide that durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world.

Countless students at the University of Chicago have told me and my wife that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives. They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively; for good reason, they believe that they must always be looking out for number one. Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another and, their own needs unmet, they are not generally eager for or partial to children. They are not good bets for promise keeping, and they haven’t enough margin for generous service. And many of the fatherless men are themselves unmanned for fatherhood, except in the purely biological sense. Even where they dream of meeting a true love, these children of divorce have a hard time finding, winning, and committing themselves to the right one.

The separation of sex from procreation achieved in this half century by contraception was worked out intellectually much earlier; and the implications for marriage were drawn in theory well before they were realized in practice. Immanuel Kant, modernity’s most demanding and most austere moralist, nonetheless gave marriage a heady push down the slippery slope: Seeing that some marriages were childless, and seeing that sex had no necessary link to procreation, Kant redefined marriage as ‘a life-long contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia.’ If this be marriage, the reason for its permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity vanishes.

V:

 But it would appear to require a revolution to restore the conditions most necessary for successful courtship: a desire in America’s youth for mature adulthood (which means for marriage and parenthood), an appreciation of the unique character of the marital bond, understood as linked to generation, and a restoration of sexual self-restraint generally and of female modesty in particular. Frankly, I do not see how this last, most crucial, prerequisite can be recovered, nor do I see how one can do sensibly without it. As Tocqueville rightly noted, it is women who are the teachers of mores; it is largely through the purity of her morals, self-regulated, that woman wields her influence, both before and after marriage. Men, as Rousseau put it, will always do what is pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their own considerable sexual power.

The collapse is so complete across Western society in general that we would argue that no government programme, no propaganda campaign, and no educational initiative will achieve anything like the reformation required. It’s too far gone.  The foundations have been destroyed; humanly nothing can be done now.

Only the Spirit of God, moving across the now formless, shapeless, inchoate mess of Western human relationships, has the power to reverse the evil we have put in play.  Nevertheless, we have a strong and sure hope that He will interdict and reverse the degradation, in the time and season of His pleasure.  Our hope, however, is most definitely in Him, not in Man.  As the Psalmist says,

³ Put not your trust in princes,
    in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
⁴ When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
    on that very day his plans perish.

⁵ Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord his God,
⁶ who made heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
⁷     who executes justice for the oppressed,
    who gives food to the hungry.
Psalm 146

But, let us keep in mind, His normal mode of operation is to allow evil to integrate into the void of self-destruction, and then, when despair is everywhere, to stretch forth His hand to save.  It was when Pharaoh began his programme of genocide against Israel that God heard the cries of His people, and stretched forth His mighty hand.  

Appendix:

Gender categories now available for self-choice on Facebook (as downloaded and catalogued by Slate)

• Agender
• Androgyne
• Androgynous
• Bigender
• Cis
• Cisgender
• Cis Female
• Cis Male
• Cis Man
• Cis Woman
• Cisgender Female
• Cisgender Male
• Cisgender Man
• Cisgender Woman
• Female to Male
• FTM
• Gender Fluid
• Gender Nonconforming
• Gender Questioning
• Gender Variant
• Genderqueer
• Intersex
• Male to Female
• MTF
• Neither
• Neutrois
• Non-binary
• Other
• Pangender
• Trans
• Trans*
• Trans Female
• Trans* Female
• Trans Male
• Trans* Male
• Trans Man
• Trans* Man
• Trans Person
• Trans* Person
• Trans Woman
• Trans* Woman
• Transfeminine
• Transgender
• Transgender Female
• Transgender Male
• Transgender Man
• Transgender Person
• Transgender Woman
• Transmasculine
• Transsexual
• Transsexual Female
• Transsexual Male
• Transsexual Man
• Transsexual Person
• Transsexual Woman
• Two-Spirit

Letter from the UK (About a Conscience Clause for Christians)

Judge Who Sided With Gay Couple over Christian B&B Owners Now Accepts Religious Rights

by Kit Eastwood 

21 Jun 2014

Breitbart London

The Supreme Court judge who ruled against a Christian couple who refused a room in their bed and breakfast established to a gay couple appears to have performed an about-face in her decision on the case.

Thought it is too late for these particular defendants, Baroness Hale’s recent comments claiming there should be a ‘conscience clause’ in law for religiously motivated breaches of anti-discrimination law may set an interesting precedent for the future.

The case erupted when in 2008, B&B owners Peter and Hazelmary Bull accepted a booking for a double room from Steven Preddy, believing him to be coming with his wife. When Preddy arrived at the Chymorvah House in Cornwall, to the surprise of the religious hoteliers, he was instead accompanied by his gay partner Martyn Hall. 

The proprietors made it clear they could not give Preddy and Hall a double room due to religious reasons and proceeded to turn them away. Subsequently, the gay couple was awarded £3,600 in compensation, after court proceedings which found the Bulls to be in breach of anti-discrimination law.

The Bulls appealed against the court’s verdict in a string of cases which ended up in the Supreme Court. There they finally lost their case after a panel of judges, led by the court’s deputy president Baroness Hale, ruled that the rights of the gay couple should take precedence over the conscience of the Christian couple.

But since then Lady Hale appears to have had second thoughts. In March she told a conference at Yale Law School that laws ignoring Christian perspectives were flawed: “I find it hard to believe that the hard line EU law approach to direct discrimination can be sustainable in the long run.”

And in a speech given to Irish lawyers earlier this week, she asked whether courts would do better to take a “more nuanced approach” in such cases, perhaps developing a ‘conscience clause’ for Christians.

Responding to complaints for Christians about “new forms of unfair treatment”, Lady Hale asked: “Should we be developing in both human rights and EU law an explicit requirement upon providers of employment, goods and services to make reasonable accommodation for the manifestation of religious beliefs?”

Significantly, Lady Hale last week made the unusual ruling that the Bulls should not be liable for the legal costs of their Supreme Court case – sparing them the Christian couple a huge bill which might otherwise have put them out of business.

Last year, the Bulls were nearly forced to sell their hotel. But they have managed to stay in business thanks to support from well-wishers.

Daily Devotional

June 26

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

God’s plan is sure

It is God Himself who gives us life, and the body in which we live it; and if He has done that we can draw this deduction, that His purpose with respect to us will be fulfilled. God never leaves unfinished any work He has begun…. And therefore we come back to this, that there is a plan for every life in the mind of God. We must never regard our lives in this world as acci­dental. No. “Are there not twelve hours in the day?” Christ said one day to His timorous and frightened disciples. And we need to say that to ourselves. We can be certain that God has a plan and a purpose for our lives, and it will be carried out.

So we must never be anxious about our life and about its sustenance and its support.
We must not be anxious if we find our­selves in a storm at sea, or in an airplane, and things seem to be going wrong, or if in a railway train we suddenly remember that there was an accident on that line the previous week. That sort of thing is abolished if we really get this right view about life itself and the body as gifts of God.

They are from Him and are given by Him. He does not just start a process like that and then allow it to continue anyhow, somehow. No; once He starts it He keeps it going. God who decreed all things at the beginning is carrying them out; and God’s purpose for man­kind and God’s purpose for the individual are certain and always sure.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 115-16

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Rules for the Plebs

Living Well Above the Herd

There are few things more likely to stir up cynicism and disgust than “leaders” who moralistically lecture everyone about their duties and responsibilities, whilst they themselves live irresponsibly (by their own declared rules).  Hypocrisy always has a nasty smell. 

We are all familiar with “celebrities” who hector the world about poverty, global warming, and a host of other fashionable causes, only to live ostentatious lifestyles which loudly proclaim they believe themselves to be above their particular set of moralistic rules for the rest of humanity.  We are familiar with the carbon footprint of one Al Gore–dedicated warrior against global warming–whose extravagant lifestyle and business dealings put the lie to his pontificating.  Gore is a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of chap. 

The Greens in general are notorious for this kind of dissembling.  Greenpeace has hit the news recently over just such hypocrisy.

Greenpeace’s carbon footprint in mouth

By Emily Gosden

NZ Herald

One of Greenpeace’s most senior executives commutes 400km each way to work by plane, the environmental group has admitted.

Pascal Husting, the programme director at Greenpeace International, said he began “commuting between Luxembourg and Amsterdam” when he took the job in 2012 and made the round trip about twice a month.
The flights, costing 250 ($390) return, are paid by Greenpeace, even though it campaigns to cut air travel, arguing the growth in flying “is ruining our chances of stopping dangerous climate change”.

One volunteer described the arrangement as “almost unbelievable”. Another was going to cancel their donation after a series of disclosures about financial mismanagement in documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper.  Greenpeace was forced to apologise for a “serious error of judgment” last week, after it emerged it had lost 3.75 million of public donations when a member of staff tried unauthorised currency dealing. KLM airline said each round trip Husting made would generate 142kg of carbon dioxide emissions – a carbon footprint equivalent over two years to consuming 17 barrels of oil, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. . . .

Richard Lancaster, who said he’d been involved with Greenpeace since the 1980s, responded: “I volunteer with Greenpeace but work in the commercial world and if I took a job in another country I’d expect to move to where the job is … I find Pascal’s travel arrangements almost unbelievable.” Another supporter wrote: “So disappointed. Hardly had 2 pennies to rub together but have supported GP for 35+ years. Cancelling [direct debit].”

Greenpeace has campaigned to curb air travel and end “needless” domestic flights. In a briefing on aviation the group said: “In terms of damage to the climate, flying is 10 times worse than taking the train.”

Here is another example, closer to home.  Auckland City Council has been hectoring everyone for years about the need for public transport and for the public to support it, both with ever-increasing city taxes, and with their patronage.  But now it has emerged the Council is funding a private shuttle service for its staff around town because the public transport options (buses, trains) are too slow.  Let everyone else travel the slow route.  We are far too important to be reduced to travelling on buses and trains.  Yet another case of “do as I say, not as I do”.  

First it was the mayor catching the train while being followed by his ratepayer-funded chauffeur-driven car.  Now, Len Brown’s staff have been riding in special shuttles zipping around Auckland – apparently because it’s faster than the public transport they provide to ratepayers.  Council-controlled Auckland Transport has started a shuttle bus service for its staff, surprising public transport watchers.

The Herald has discovered a second shuttle at Auckland Council and plans for a third in the works.  With Auckland Transport costing its shuttle at $122,000 for a six-month trial, it could set the bill for moving council staff around Auckland close to $700,000 a year.

What should a good citizen do?  Our advice is to Ignore the pontificating moralisers who are always trying to tell others how they should live their lives.  Step out and enjoy the free air.  Eschew hypocrisy.  Christians especially should heed such advice.  We are to be merry warriors.  We are to laugh at the foibles and hypocrisies of the world.  We are to focus, first on self-government, then on our families, and our church congregations and fellowships, then upon being a good servant to our employers, and then on our neighbours–seeking to do good to all men, but especially to those of the household of faith.  We would do well to ignore the fashionable, ephemeral moralities of the world and laugh loudly at its attempts to make us feel guilty.  In reality, “they”–the moralisers–don’t believe their own press.  More fool we if we believe it, or allow ourselves to be manipulated into complying. 

Letter From the UK (About Fiddled US Temperature Data)

The scandal of fiddled global warming data

The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record 

By Christopher Booker

21 Jun 2014

The Telegraph

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models.
The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

Daily Devotional

June 25

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

You are here!
(red arrow-label affixed to London Underground maps)

It is not the time of your entry into the Kingdom that matters but the fact that you are in the Kingdom. … How foolish it is to mourn the fact that we were not in earlier, and to allow that to rob us of the things we might be enjoying now. It is like a man going to a great exhibition and discovering that there is a long queue. He has come rather late. He arrives at the exhibition but he has to wait a long time, he is about the last to get in. What would you think of such a man if, having got in through the door he simply stands at the door and says, “What a shame I wasn’t the first to get in, what a pity I wasn’t in earlier” ? You laugh at that, and rightly so, but… you are probably laughing at yourself, for that is precisely what you are doing spiritually. “O that I have left it so late.” My friend, begin to enjoy the pictures, look at the sculpture, enjoy the treasures. What does the time of your entering matter?

The fact is that you are in, and the exhibition is there, all spread out before you….
Go back to the twentieth of Matthew again. Those men were the last to enter the vineyard, it was the eleventh hour, but they were in. That was the thing that counted. They had been taken hold of, they had been employed, they had been brought in. It is the being in that matters, not when you come in, or how you come in. … It is not the mode or manner of conversion that matters, what matters is the fact that you are saved. But people will sit down and worry about how they came, the time, the mode, the manner, the method. It does not matter at all; what matters is that you are in. And if you are in, rejoice in it, and forget you were ever out.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 86-7

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

The NewSpeak of Global Schooling

Behind Common Core

By Mary Jo Anderson
Crisis Magazine

The philosophy in the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of government in the next.  — Abraham Lincoln

 [A]t the request of educators I wrote the World Core Curriculum, the product of the United Nations, the meta-organism of human and planetary evolution.   — Robert Muller, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General

The education reform known as Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for grades K-12, adopted by forty plus states and more than half of the U.S. dioceses, is designed to produce a universal “work force ready” population prepared to self-identify as “global citizens.”  Many education professionals have been critical of CCSS. But even they may not know the philosophical reason why financiers like Bill Gates have bankrolled the Common Core system. The same sources of funding for Common Core in the United States are promoting similar methods and aligned texts world wide through the auspices of the United Nations.

In Crisis, readers learned that Common Core is financed with over $150 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The collaboration of the Gates Foundation and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been well publicized.  In addition, Gates, on behalf of his Microsoft Corporation, signed a 26-page Cooperation Agreement in 2004 between Microsoft and UNESCO to develop a “master curriculum” which included benchmarks and assessments.  The agreement stipulates that “UNESCO will explore how to facilitate content development.”

Some have decried Common Core as the nationalization of American education. Far more dangerous, however, is the globalism of Common Core that demotes American values, undermines American constitutional principles and detaches students from their families and faith. Common Core is simply the newest attempt in the decades-old battle (Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000) to impose a U.N. globalist worldview aimed at “peace,” sustainability and economic stability at the expense of freedom.

Briefly, the globalist philosophy calls for the establishment of a global culture based on a commitment to sustainable processes and humanistic ethics to ensure world peace and “fair” distribution of natural resources.  The U.N. serves as the hub for this globalist hope.  Adherents believe that some form of world congress and world citizenship is the end point of political evolution, and, therefore it is inevitable.  What is not certain, in their view, is the time of fulfilment.

Those who hold this philosophy are passionate—they fear that unless a form of world convergence of mind and political will arrives very soon, the planet may fail from wars, global warming and similar threats.  Pick up popular magazines and you’ll find “world leaders,” celebrities and pundits who espouse some version of globalism. How would globalism work at ground level?

A nation is permitted to keep its surface culture, such as language, music, and cuisine. But patriotism, religion, and individualism are anathema, as each competes with the globalist vision of world harmony. Moral codes that cannot be adapted to a multicultural vision, agreed upon in a world congress, must be jettisoned.
But back on the ground, it’s difficult to convince a people to abandon their country and culture, not to mention national resources; resistance would be too great. The quickest effective approach is to invest in education to ensure that the coming generation will embrace the principles of globalism as a natural consequence of their formation.   

Previous Crisis articles have detailed the lack of academic rigor of CCSS for both math and English Language Arts. Teachers have reported disturbing “aligned texts” that contain crude, sexually explicit reading selections for young teens. Parents have questioned multiple examples of anti-American sentiment (the Boston Tea Party as a terrorist attack, for example).  Despite this outcry, Common Core defenders insist that the standards are necessary, even though it only prepares students for admission to junior college.  If the standards are substandard, why are hundreds of millions of Gates and other foundation monies, as well as over a billion dollars in government carrots, being pumped into this ‘transformation” of education?  The goal is not academic excellence, but to reconstruct the nations of the world into a new, interdependent model. Their educational model is aimed at an economically stable world with “workforce ready” workers who share the same globalist vision.

UNESCO’s first Director-General was Sir Julian Huxley, who wrote, “The world today is in the process of becoming one … political unification in some sort of world government will be necessary…” UNESCO’s mission is to “construct” the U.N. model of peace “in the minds of men”:  “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

How do you enter the “minds of men” for this reconstruction?  The quickest route to a transformed society is through education.  The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, include universal education, under the auspices of UNESCO. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the primary public face of Common Core, prizes its partnership with UNESCO to insure global standards for educating tomorrow’s labor force via Education for All (EFA).

Another champion of CCSS and UNESCO is Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education.  Duncan addressed UNESCO in 2010 on “transformational education”:

And transformational reform especially takes time in the United States…. That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.

Duncan discussed Common Core as a means to reconstruct education in the United States, and noted the increased role of the federal government in education.   Duncan acknowledged the need for America to learn from other nations. He restated President Obama’s commitment to international cooperation for economic viability: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.”

As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results…. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes

Existing national models must be deconstructed for this global transformation to occur. UNESCO began the deconstruction of national education systems in 1949 with a pamphlet, “Towards a World Understanding, Vol.V: In the Classroom with Children Under Thirteen Years of Age” (Paris, 1949).  The pamphlet states, “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results…. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes…” (p. 54-5).

A similar sentiment permeates Common Core aligned texts, many developed by Pearson Education, an international education Goliath—that has also received funds from the Gates Foundation to develop Common Core material.  Pearson produces texts that promote “reconstructed” school practices for social justice.  An example of Pearson texts for Common Core that raised some eyebrows recently includes this grammar lesson on editing possessives: “[The president] makes sure the laws of the country are fair,” “The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation” and “The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.”

A similar sentiment permeates other Common Core aligned texts. Concepts found in grade school children’s textbooks such as justice and equality are given politically biased meanings. Justice is newly defined to mean the redistribution of wealth and resources. Equality is used to dismantle preference for one’s own culture, religion and social customs. “Predictive information,” data ostensibly gathered on each student to improve performance, is in truth a measurement of a student’s adjusted attitude and behavior—a Soviet style “managed outcome.”

The Russian model, in fact, is codified in the US agreement to the Moscow Declaration, which states: “Ministers recognized that the internationalization of education is a reality.”  The agreement U.S. officials signed calls for a program, “…implemented by education ministers of all the world countries and international organizations, including the World Bank, UNESCO, and UN” (ITAR-TASS, 6-2-2006). The U.S. Department of Education said the member delegates “pledged to share best practices across borders” to build “education systems that can allow people … to live and contribute to a global society, and to work in a global economy” (U.S. Dept. of Education, 6-2-2006).

U.N. affiliated organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank also reflect UNESCO’s vision.  Loans are made and trade preferences are granted to those nations or entities that promote “twenty-first century thinking.”   Most chilling is that UNESCO fronts the implementation of the U.N. plan known as Agenda 21.  Enacted in 1992, Agenda 21 strives to “reorient” the world’s education systems to achieve sustainable development: “Both formal and non-formal education are indispensable to changing people’s attitudes … and behaviour consistent with sustainable development” (# 36.2).

And now we arrive back at Gates’s agreement with UNESCO. EFA contains repeated units on collectivism, shared goals and sustainable development as does CCSS.  Note this passage from the EFA’s Global Monitoring Report:

It is crucial that education stakeholders are well positioned … in advancing a wide range of other development goals.  The GMR will provide Policymakers … stakeholders with powerful new evidence to show why it is crucial that equitable learning be given its rightful place at the centre of the post 2015 global development architecture. It will identify the types of reforms in teaching and learning that are needed to promote transformative change.

Sustainable development is the soft power structure intended to achieve manageable populations and absolute control of global resources, all in the name of “peace.”  It is ruled by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats—and certain philanthropic billionaires.
 
Academia, public policy institutes and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) promote this globalist vision. One particularly noteworthy recent example comes from Oxford University where the Oxford Martin School Commission released a report on October 16. The purpose of the Commission is to “anticipate the consequences of our collective actions, and influence policy and behaviour accordingly.”  A pre-publication statement by Commission chairman, Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the WTO, repeated the mantra, “The ability to address today’s global challenges is undermined by the absence of a collective vision for society. We urge leaders to establish shared global values….”

These lofty sentiments of transnational corporations and associations have influenced American school districts for years. For example, one can point to the 2008 Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents position paper, “Global Education: A Call to Action.” In it we read:

[M]obility of populations fuel renewed calls for mutual understanding and appreciation on a global scale … Global education, when seen through this lens, is more about understanding, cooperation, and world peace.  [Schools are to] [i]nclude expanded treatment of global concepts in the next revision of the curriculum frameworks in social studies [and] [p]rovide resources to educators to promote the integration of global concepts into the curriculum.

Common Core exemplars and aligned texts are designed to cause disorientation for the American child by de-emphasizing national cultural identity. At home he learned to be proud of his country, to respect the flag and the Constitution, but under CCSS the child will find few positive images of America.  Of the texts suggested for kindergarten and first grade none teach the concept of freedom, or offer a song (America the Beautiful?) or any story praising heroes of the American Revolution. Children of this age naturally want to love family and friends, discover a sense of belonging and develop an identity.  Common Core avoids “cultural bias” by discouraging the development of a patriotic attachment to the nation state.

IIt’s difficult to conceive of a student learning virtue, self-sacrifice, courage, perseverance, mercy, regret or triumph by reading maintenance manuals.

International student testing materials encourage this trend. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is administered to 15 year-old students every three years in most of the world’s developed nations.  The PISA standings drive text selection for reading literacy. To avoid cultural bias, PISA defines literacy as the ability to read the material required for workplace proficiency, rather than works of literature.

Therefore, utilitarian texts, such as EPA manuals and assembly instructions account for fifty percent of reading assignments under the CCSS.  Students are deprived of decent grounding in the great works of literature.  As a result, students are less likely to appreciate the cultural heritage of the West.  It’s difficult to conceive of a student learning virtue, self-sacrifice, courage, perseverance, mercy, regret or triumph by reading maintenance manuals.  There is more to good citizenship than “workplace proficiency.”

Yet, CCSS promoters insist that citizenship is addressed. For example, the New York State Common Core Social Studies Framework states:

The primary purpose of Social Studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.

This sounds reasonable enough to the casual reader.  A deeper examination must match this rationale with the actual content of texts and tests. Then it becomes clear that the language of the rationale holds different meanings to those who designed the texts and tests with an agenda in mind.

An iconic example of this tactic is at the United Nations where the stealth phrase “health and reproductive rights” seems to promise decent prenatal care. Nothing in the phrase suggests abortion and sterilization, but those are the intended “rights.”  Thus, in the New York framework, the word “informed” should prompt the question, “informed with what information?” And the phrase “public good” must answer “whose definition of public good?”  Is same-sex parenting a public good? And what of the phrase, “culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world?”  Should we be comfortable with a goal that fails to emphasize American cultural achievements, American citizenship, American constitutional principles and civic virtues?  Or do we realize that the “framework” reorients students toward the vision of a secular, globalist humanism?

It appears that few recognize this gambit under the guise of education for “job security” in the global economy. If it is a globalized world, the reasoning goes, then blurring the lines of culture and country must be achieved in order to insure a cooperative workforce with fewer cultural divisions or religious tensions. A tractable workforce asks no questions because it has no foundation of knowledge from which to form the questions.

Common Core is the latest blueprint for a techno-serfdom, workers managed for the global economy. Student and teacher are transformed indeed—into utilitarian tools of global commerce: The student is a product, schools are processing plants, and teachers are information delivery agents.  The socialist “workforce management” scheme is the inverse of American principles where free persons find their own vocation and pursue it according to their talents. The “workforce” model believes that the state can anticipate the workforce needs of the economy, then train workers “cradle to career.”

Common Core is part of the subterranean template in place to indoctrinate our society into accepting “workforce security” in exchange for a global public square where American values are a distant memory, and Christian, especially Catholic, practice is confined behind church doors.  Perhaps with an awareness of this abandonment of fidelity to particular national values in the face of globalizing pressures, Pope Francis this week warned against worldly “hegemonic uniformity”: “And this is the fruit of the devil, the prince of this world, who leads us forward with the spirit of worldliness…. They accepted the habits of the pagan … that all should be one people, and everyone would abandon their customs. A globalizing conformity of all nations is not beautiful” since “it is the hegemonic uniformity of globalization, the single line of thought” rather than a unity of nations each with its own unique customs and traditions that make up a particular civilization. If education is reduced to job training, the consequences will be tragic. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, “If education is beaten by training, civilization dies … civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.”

Mary Jo Anderson is a Catholic journalist and public speaker. She has been a frequent guest on “Abundant Life,” an EWTN television program, and her “Global Watch” radio program is heard on EWTN radio affiliates nationwide. She writes regularly for Crisis Magazine and is a contributing correspondent for WorldnetDaily.com. More articles and commentary can be found at Properly Scared and at Women for Faith and Family. Mary Jo is a board member of Women for Faith and Family and has served on the Legatus Board of Directors. With co-author Robin Bernhoft, she wrote “Male and Female He Made Them: Questions and Answers about Marriage and Same-Sex Unions,” published in 2005 by Catholic Answers. In 2003 Mary Jo was invited to the Czech Republic to address parliamentarians on the Impact of Radical Feminism on Emerging Democracies.

Daily Devotional

June 24

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Don’t cripple your present by thoughts of your past

[Some people] are crippled in the present as the result of looking back into the past … to the fact that they spent so much time outside the Kingdom and are so late in coming into it… to be miserable in the present because of some failure in the past is a sheer waste of time and energy. The past cannot be recalled and you can do nothing about it… The world in its wisdom tells us it is “no use crying over spilt milk.” Well, quote that to the devil! Why should a Christian be more foolish than anybody else? … We must never for a second worry about anything that cannot be affected or changed by us. It is a waste of energy…. But let us go further and realize that to dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present.

… It is always wrong to mortgage the present by the past, it is always wrong to allow the past to act as a brake upon the present. Let the dead past bury its dead. There is nothing that is more reprehensible, judged by common canons of thought, than to allow anything that belongs to the past to cause you to be a failure in the present…. The people I am describing are failing in the present. Instead of living in the present and getting on with the Christian life they are sitting down bemoaning the past. They are so sorry about the past that they do nothing in the present. How wrong it is!

Spiritual Depression, p. 80, pp. 82-3

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

The Christian Heritage of Justice

 Being Treated Fairly Before the Court

It is a great boon to live in a just society–and, no, we are not thinking of the faux “justice” of egalitarianism, now so very popular amongst the ignorant and those riddled with the canker of envy.  Rather, we have in view the system of justice which enables citizens to seek redress or get their actions judged properly and fairly.

Justice is often difficult to define. The traditions of English common law, however, have developed over many centuries the concept of a fair trial and the principles which undergird it.  F.E. Dowrick [Justice According to the English Common Lawyers (London: Butterworths, 1960)], courtesy of a series of lectures by Lord Denning, has provided a summary of the essential principles which make up a fair trial.

1. The judges should be absolutely independent of the Government.

It is of the essence of fair trial that the judge should be dependent on no man who can by any possibility become a party to a proceeding before him, so that he can adjudicate evenly between the parties–whether these are private citizens or whether a private citizen is opposed to a government official or to the government itself.  And in jury trials the absolute independence of the jury is no less important than the independence of the judge.

2. The judge must have no interest himself in any matter that he has to try.  He must be impartial.  No person can be a judge in his own cause. 

3. The judge, before he comes to a decision against a party, must hear and consider all that he has to say.  No-one ought to be condemned unheard . . . . (T)he only fair way of reaching a correct decision on any dispute is for the judge to hear all that is to be said on each side and then come to his conclusion. 

4. The judge must act only on the evidence and arguments properly before him and not on any information which he receives from the outside. 

5. The judge must give his reasons for his decision.

6.  A judge should in his own character be beyond reproach, or at any rate should have so disciplined himself that he is not himself a breaker of the law. 

7.  Each side should state its case as strongly as it can . . . (since) truth is best discovered by powerful statements on both sides of the question. 

The search for the truth of the matter before the court is of the essence of a fair trial but counsel must contain themselves within bounds: accordingly they “must never distort or suppress the truth”, and in criminal cases counsel for the prosecution should act “not as an advocate to to condemn the accused, but as a minister of justice to see that he is fairly treated. 

This list is not exhaustive, but it captures the essentials, such that if any of the seven be lacking, the centre of justice through a fair trial will not long hold.   

Letter From America (About Essential Truths)

10 Essential Economic Truths Liberals Need to Learn

Jeffrey Dorfman

Forbes

5th June 2014

Jeffrey Dorfman teaches economics at the University of Georgia.  In this article he presents ten economic principles or verities, which, he says, “liberals” need to learn.  Synonyms for “liberal” would be “left wing”, “progressive”, or, in the case of New Zealand, an apt synonym would be “general population”, such is our adulation of bad economic principles.

1) Government cannot create wealth, jobs, or income. Because government has to take money from somebody before it can spend it, there is no economic gain from anything the government does. Money collected in taxes or borrowed would have been either spent or invested in the private sector. Any jobs government claims to have created are only in place of other jobs the same money would have produced if people had been allowed to spend it themselves.

It is possible for government to own businesses which trade like any other company in the private sector.  These may make profits, can, therefore, grow in size and capital base and add jobs as a result.  These are truly exceptions to the general maxim that governments cannot create wealth, jobs or income.  And Dorfman’s general point remains true: government enterprise comes into existence by expropriating property from citizens in the first place.  Governments are unable to create wealth from nothing; in the first instance governments must appropriate property from tax payers.  

2) Income inequality does not affect the economy. Poor people do spend more (or all) of their income while people with higher earnings save some of their income. However, saving is as good for the economy as consumer spending (or better). The basic identity is that national income equals consumer spending plus investment plus government spending on goods and services plus net exports. To make investments, money first must be saved; so savings contribute to national income, too. In fact, savings that lead to increased capital (a company borrows it to build a factory, for example) will lead to higher national income in the long run because the capital can produce income year after year.

3) Low wages are not corporate exploitation. In a free country, people voluntarily accept employment, so all workers believe their current job to be the best choice from among their opportunity set. If a business paid its workers much less than they were worth, a competitor would offer more and hire them away. As consumers, when we go shopping, we are happy to find low prices. We certainly do not go out of our way to pay more than we need to for things. Businesses are the same when they are buying labor; they do not pay more than they need to pay. Businesses exist to make profit, so a business will not, and should not, pay its workers more just because it has the profits available to do so. Workers get paid more only when they become more productive or when the price of what they make goes up. 

Whilst this is generally true, it must be qualified.  Where labour is in plentiful supply a different dynamic may operate.  In such a case, a worker may become more productive, but if he can be easily replaced by  many more equally productive workers, he is unlikely to get paid more. In fact he may lose his job to those who are prepared to produce the same or more for even lower wages.  

Such an outcome would be very hard upon the sacked worker.  But this cannot be regarded as exploitation, provided the same principle applies throughout the company.  If the CEO, for example, could be replaced by someone equal or better for a lower salary, the owners must act to fire the CEO.  Recently the successful CEO of a large New Zealand company publicly stated that he considered himself overpaid.  If that is true, there should be equally competent people who would be prepared to do the job for less, in which case the present incumbent should receive a paycut or  he should be replaced.  The efficiency of the company requires it.

The reality, however, is often very different.  A productive employee may be replaced by an equally productive employer for less, but there are always risks, transition costs, and intangible realities to consider.  The existing worker, for example, may be punctual, loyal, and harmonious in his or her relationships with colleagues and other staff. Such realities, whilst not easily calibrated in dollars and cents can be extremely valuable and contribute greatly to the productivity and success of the firm. 

4) Environmental over-regulation is a regressive tax that falls hardest on the poor. When we reduce pollution more than we should, worry about climate change more than we should, or over-restrict access to natural resources, prices go up. Because the poor spend a higher percentage of their income, forcing up prices is a bigger penalty on the poor. Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of how environmental extremists are causing energy prices to be higher.

5) Education is not a public good. We provide publicly funded K-12 education to all (even to non-citizens), but the education provided produces human capital that is privately owned by each person. This human capital means more work skills, more developed talent, and more potential productivity. People with more human capital generally get paid more, collecting the returns from their education in the form of higher earnings. One common defense of education as a public good is worth refuting here. Yes, education helps people invent things that benefit society. However, they will expect to be paid for those inventions, not give them away for free in return for their education.

6) High CEO pay is no worse than high pay to athletes or movie stars. Yes, CEOs are paid a lot, maybe too much. The top professional athletes, television and movie stars, singers, lawyers, and hedge fund managers also all make lots of money. High CEO pay does not reduce the pay average workers get any more than high athlete pay means that the equipment manager gets paid less or the roadies on a Rolling Stones tour make less when the Rolling Stones make more. The high pay of CEOs, movie stars, and athletes all come out of the pockets of the owners of the business, movie studio, and team, respectively. Such pay reduces profits, but not the pay of other workers who are paid what they are worth in the marketplace. Shareholders have a right to complain about CEO pay, but other employees and labor activists do not.

7) Consumer spending is not what drives the economy. An extra dollar of investment, government spending, or net exports adds just as much to GDP as does a dollar of consumer spending. In fact, until recently, consumer spending was 65 percent of GDP (find an old economics textbook and look it up for yourself). Then, as savings fell beginning in the 1980s and consumer credit became more widely available and less expensive, consumer spending rose to 70 percent of the economy. This is actually a bad thing. Robert Solow, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, showed that nations are the wealthiest in the long run if they save a share of their income known as the Golden Rule Savings Rate. This is tricky to estimate, but all economists are sure that the U.S. is well below it. So if we save more and spend less of our income, our children and grandchildren will be better off.

8) When government provides things for free, they will end up being low quality, cost more than they should, and may disappear when most needed. Public education, free health care, welfare programs; does anybody think these programs are high quality, reliable, and have no waste in their budgets? Most states fund the majority of their technical and community college programs. Thus, in the recent recession, right when lots of people wanted to get some new job skills, technical and community colleges had to cut their budgets and offer fewer classes. The freebie disappeared at just the wrong time. The sad reality is: when the customer does not pay, the product is rarely any good.

The economic reality is that government owned and operated enterprises, whether schools, hospitals, or electricity generators, do not have customers to win, satisfy and retain, and usually face very little, if any, competition.  They thus lack the two key disciplines to force efficiency and excellence into the operation. 

9) Government cannot correct cosmic injustice. Esteemed economist Thomas Sowell wrote a fabulous book on this topic. Nobody likes to see cosmic injustice: kids with serious health problems through no fault of their own, families whose homes are destroyed in natural disasters, etc. However, when government steps in to correct a cosmic injustice, the price must be paid by someone else—a someone else who had nothing to do with causing the injustice being addressed. Thus, every time government fixes or eases a cosmic injustice, it creates a new one by sticking somebody with the bill—either a financial one or one measured in some other sort of cost. For example, each affirmative action college admission by definition mean some other applicant must be turned down. We may be willing, as a society, to bear an injustice in order to fix some cosmic injustices (e.g., many will willingly chip in to pay for a child’s medical care), but we cannot create a world free from all cosmic injustice.

10) There is no such thing as a free lunch. In America today the number of free lunches being served is at an all-time record high. People on food stamps, households receiving a government check of some kind, the number of people collecting disability, need-based financial aid for college expenses; all either hit highs recently or are at all time highs right now. Yet, somebody is paying that bill; no free lunch is really free. This is true more broadly about all regulations that promise to provide us with something good; the costs are lurking somewhere in the background. Raising the minimum wage does not just take money out of employers’ pockets, but also raises prices for all customers and will cost some low-wage workers their jobs. If we protect voting rights, we get more voter fraud. If we help underwater homeowners, it will be harder for future borrowers to get a mortgage. Sooner or later, those free lunches get paid for and often the bill lands in an unexpected or unintended place.

Liberals love to talk about their compassion. Compassion is great, but no amount of caring can repeal the simple facts of economics. It is fine to support raising the minimum wage, but understand that jobs will be lost and prices will rise. Protecting the environment is a wonderful thing, but it is also expensive and hurts the poor in particular. Politicians love to claim the government spending which they direct creates jobs, but it only moves jobs from one place to another. Greedy businesses cannot exploit workers because another greedy business would be happy to exploit them a little less until greed removed all the exploitation.

Daily Devotional

June 23

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

The need of Christian discipline

[The Psalmist] is very sorry for himself. There is nothing wrong with his life. He is a very good man. But he is being very hard pressed, he is being dealt with very unfairly, and even God seems to be unfair to him. That is how he thought about himself while he was outside the sanctuary. But inside the sanctuary all this is changed.”… So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee” [Psalm 73:22]. What a transfiguration! What an entirely different view of himself! And it is all the result of his thinking being put right, and made truly spiritual….

This man … not only reveals his honesty and his sincerity, and the truthfulness that was so essentially a part of his make­up, but also—and this is the thing I want to emphasize—he displays an understanding of the nature of the spiritual life.

In these two verses [21-22] we have this man’s account of his repentance.

We learn what he said to himself about himself and, in particular, about his recent conduct. It is, indeed, a classic example of honest self-examination.
I invite you to consider it with me because of its important bearing on Christian discipline. This repentance, this state in which a man pauses and looks at himself and talks to himself about himself, is one of the most essential and vital aspects of what is com­monly called the discipline of the Christian life. I do not apologize for emphasizing this again, because it is a matter which is being seriously neglected at the present. How often do we hear about the discipline of the Christian life these days? How often do we talk about it? How often is it really to be found at the heart of our evangelical living? There was a time in the Christian Church when this was at the very center, and it is, I profoundly believe, because of our neglect of this dis­cipline that the Church is in her present position. Indeed, I see no hope whatsoever of any true revival and reawakening until we return to it.

Faith on Trial, pp. 65-6

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Why the Fuss?

A Bit of Bribery and Corruption Makes the World Go Round

There has been a long tradition in the West against bribery, followed by the inevitable corruption of judges, rulers, and officials.  But billions of people in the world live in jurisdictions where bribery is simply the way things are done.  For centuries the Chinese have used “fragrant grease” to get officials and administrators to deliver what they are seeking.  Bribery and corruption are common in India, where it is regarded as “paying–or tipping–in advance”. 

Every so often a non-Westerner enters a Western jurisdiction and attempts the age-old practice of bribery and public wrath and condemnation is called down upon his head.  We have seen this very thing in New Zealand over recent days.  The opposition Labour Party has been fulminating against the government, accusing it of taking bribes to favour a certain Chinese investor who has become a New Zealand citizen.  Corruption, corruption, corruption has been the cry.  Well it may have been.  But, sadly for the Labour Party, it has now emerged that it too has apparently been equally corrupted by the same Chinese immigrant, who, in the past has given money to Labour, as well as the current administration.  Shame and red faces all around. Oh, dear.  Never mind.
 

Millionaire businessman Donghua Liu has confirmed for the first time that he donated to the Labour Party.  The 53-year-old has been at the centre of political scandals involving National and Labour for months but yesterday broke his silence to say he had given “equally to Governments of both colours”.

National declared a $22,000 donation in 2012, but Labour found no records of Liu donations after the Herald revealed that he paid $15,000 for a book at an auction fundraiser in 2007.  There is also a photograph of his partner receiving a bottle of wine from a Labour minister at an auction.  “Any political donations have always been given in good faith without any expectation. It is over to the politicians to make any appropriate declarations,” Liu said in a statement.

“However, because I’ve built relationships with politicians, made donations, because it’s election year and, dare I say, because I’m Chinese, I suppose I’ve been an easy target for some to gain some political mileage and score some points.”  Investigations by the Weekend Herald this year have shown that Liu forged links with MPs from both sides of the political spectrum.  [NZ Herald]

Now, Liu has good reason to be both disconsolate and discombobulated.  After all, he is doing nothing different from what is common amongst his countrymen–and has been for time immemorial.  What is all this fuss about in New Zealand?  Why is New Zealand (or the West) so puritanical on this matter?  After all, aren’t we all secular evolutionists?  New Zealand shares the same cosmological assumptions as China: we are all materialists.  If bribery works, what’s wrong with it?  Surely life and its operating principles must be grounded in pragmatism because that’s the root principle of materialism and evolutionism.  If it works, it’s OK.  

For our part, we think Liu has it dead to rights.  It’s New Zealand which is confused on the matter.  In reality it is the Bible which condemns bribery and the excision of bribery from Western culture is a peculiarly Christian contribution.  Remove the Christian faith, replace it with evolutionist materialism, and there is not reason why it should remain proscribed.  None at all. 

Here is a summary of relevant biblical passages:

Moses was to select judges over Israel.  The qualifications for a good judge were as follows:

Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens.  (Exodus 18:21)

The Lord has laid down standards for justices:

And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. (Exodus 23:8)

God Himself is not partial–but fair and just.  God does not take bribes.  Therefore, nor must we.

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. (Deuteronomy 10:17)

Bribery is inimical to justice. It perverts the cause of justice–and any society which tolerates it foments injustice against its own citizens.

You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. (Deuteronomy 16:19)

Therefore, what stands against the centuries of bribery in China and India and other non-Christian nations?  The Bible.  If the West continues to be embarrassed and too worldly to respect the Christian Scriptures, its present rejection of bribery will not withstand the relentless onslaught of amorality arising from materialism and evolutionism.