Unintended Consequences of Homosexual "Marriage"

Christian Self-Consciousness Rising

A positive, yet unintended consequence of the marriage wars is growing Christian epistemological self-consciousness.  Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know.  The endgame is that only Christians and the Christian faith have certain and solid foundations for knowing anything.  Only Christian epistemology is rational and coherent and true.  Everything else is sinking sand.  As the marriage wars play out in our secular society, Christians see what pagans do and how they actually think.  Pagan epistemology is now about as bankrupt as it can be.  In principle it has always been that way.  But what is different now is pagan epistemologies are now showing true-to-type fruit.

The Humanist Millennium

Dashed Hopes and Bitterness

God does not exist.  Evil is not intrinsic to the soul of man.  The cosmos is evolving.  Man can take control of his own evolution and perfect himself.  These were the doctrinal foundations upon which the West built its Tower of Babel at the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.  These same doctrines remain regnant in the West to this day.

Back in the day combating evil had two main fronts of engagement.  The first focused upon human conditions.  Improve the external conditions and mankind would be made more perfect.  The second front was an overt attempt to alter human beings themselves by means of psychology, eugenics and education.

The campaign to improve the external living conditions in order to perfect mankind had two main lines of attack.

Waking the Dead

I . . . Found Myself a Christian

The name of one Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (August 12, 1891 – April 9, 1953) lies in obscurity today.  The reasons are not hard to find.  Back in the day–the “day” of the twilight years between World Wars I and II–Joad was active in prosecuting socialist, pacifist, and eugenics causes.  He was a member of the intellectual elite in Britain that took the perfectibility of man seriously.  At the height of his public popularity he was as famous as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell.

But, he had one great lacunae–towards the end of his life he became a Christian. To an Unbelieving  generation this was unforgivable.  That one of their heroes, an uberman, should defalcate to the other side was an inexcusable betrayal.  Hence Joad now lies in obscurity.  Who ever now would mention him alongside Shaw or Russell?

Christians, however, should never forget such things.

Unfit for Motherhood

A Woman’s Right to Choose

The New Zealand government is considering granting the courts power to sentence a serial recidivist child abuser to permanent childlessness.  The proposal is that if such a person were to bear subsequent children they would automatically be removed from the mother at birth.

The Commentariat is affecting outrage over the idea.

Evil and wickedness stalk the heart of every human being.  Human hearts are hearts of darkness.  So believed Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Faulkner.  So declares the Bible itself–the very Word of the Living God.  The heart of man, says the Scripture, is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked.
 

It’s not surprising then to find human society riddled with lust, greed, envy, hatred, quarrels, jealousy, and murder.  Many folk spend their lives trying to ameliorate the influence of evil and wickedness upon society.  One tool deployed is the law.  By changing the law, passing new laws, regulating, restricting, and punishing every thing wrong many believe evil will be overcome.  Peoples’ lives will be turned around, redeemed.  It is a naive and forlorn hope.  The law can only deal with the outside of man: it cannot cleanse the heart–the thoughts, motives, intentions, and will.  Evil, the Bible tells us, springs from the heart of man, not from his circumstances. 

The law can only restrain evil.  It cannot remove guilt. It cannot cleanse the heart.  It cannot make a new man. 

Another tool deployed is the milk of human kindness.  The proposition is that if you treat people well, if you are kind to them–caring, attentive, encouraging, and positive–they will respond by turning away from wickedness and reforming their lives.  Overcome evil with good.  But likewise, this requires that the wicked seize upon something good done to them and use it to self-transform their inner man, making their thoughts, motives, intentions, and desires more pure and holy. 

A fundamental flaw of this approach is that doing good to someone risks increasing their guilt, their anger, their hatred, and their sense of hopelessness.  The expression “cold as charity” has not come into our cultural lexicon without good reason.  Doubtless we should do good to all people as much as we can, treating them with dignity and respect.  But for the wicked at heart this often only serves to increase their guilt, anger, and resentment.  Our love cannot change the heart of another.  We are neither redeemers or saviours, for we too, who do good, have eyes filled with our own evil logs. 

Society works best when it faces up to the realities of human unrighteousness and to the extreme limitations of actually effecting change.  In such a society the intent of the law is not to reform, but to punish justly, and to protect the innocent from being preyed upon by unconstrained wickedness. 

In this light, the government’s proposal to allow courts to sentence a recidivist child abuser and/or child murderer to being a perpetual non-mother seems perfectly reasonable and just.  It is undeniable that we now have in New Zealand a class of abusive mothers who perpetually have children, accept the State’s welfare payments for child care, but so neglect and abuse their children that they end up malnourished, broken in limb and mind, or dead.  To grant the courts the power to sentence such “mothers” to perpetual childlessness is both reasonable and necessary. 

Some have protested saying that it does not leave room for the “mother” to reform her life and effect change.  Not necessarily.  But it should be up to the mother to prove to a court that she indeed has changed, has reformed, before she would be allowed to keep her latest child.  At present, the situation is the reverse.  The burden of proof rests with state authorities to convince a court that a new child born to such a mother should be removed. 

We have one caveat to add: children forcibly removed from such depraved serial abusers at birth must be adopted, not kept in the incompetent, bureaucratic perpetual embrace of a government department as a ward of the state.  That merely replaces one form of child abuse by another.  State as mother and father is just another form of child neglect.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

That Seamy Chain of Syllogisms 

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
 Thursday, 17 May 2012

Marriage is a political act, and not an individual choice. How you marry is a way of testifying to what city you belong to. Who defines marriage? The difficulty we are having in our generation in answering this question shows how theology shapes and drives everything.

If God created the world, and put one man and one woman in it, married them to each other, and established that as a pattern for the rest of human history, then marriage should be defined in accordance with that reality. If He did nothing of the kind, and we actually evolved out of the primordial goo, then we get to shape and define it however we would like it to go.

One other item of Christian theology has to be taken into account, and that is the reality of the fall into sin.
The Christian approach to marriage in the context of mere Christendom deals with both of these realities — the creational given of male and female, and the sinful propensity we have to hump the world. Creational sexuality and sinful sexuality are both factors.

Our laws about marriage must therefore do two things, not just one. They must honor what God has established in the first place, and they must restrain (by not honoring with the recognition of marriage) any of the other forms of sexual congress that sinful men have come up with.

When Jesus taught on divorce, He appeals to the creation pattern.

“And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:4-6).

Reasoning by analogy from this, we can see other expressions of sexuality are excluded. A man should not be allowed to marry himself. It is not good that man should be alone (Gen. 2:18). A man should not be allowed to marry multiple wives. God said that He would make a helper suitable to him (Gen. 1:18). Bestiality is excluded. Adam did not find a helper suitable to him among the animals (Gen. 2:20).

Homosexuality is excluded because God brought Adam a woman, and not another man (Gen. 2:22). And divorce is excluded because God is the one who brought the man and woman together (Matt. 19:6).
But of course if none of this happened, and our ancestors climbed down out of the trees circa 15 million years ago, then evolutionary shape shifting is the order of the day, and there is absolutely no reason to not let people marry whoever or whatever they want.

The marriage debates are a prime illustration of why governmental neutrality on basic religious issues is an impossibility. He who says A must eventually say B, and now that we are getting to the end of this seamy chain of syllogisms, we are confronted with the demand to allow homosexuals to marry. But this is not the end of it, and shows why it is so important to get down to first principles.

The secularists want to say that in addition to straights, we have a range of options with the fetching label of GLBTQ. Anybody who thinks that list of letters won’t grow just isn’t paying attention. Pederasty, bestiality, hetero-polygamy, hetero-polyandry, and bisexual-polyoptions are all waiting in the wings.

The reason why homosexual marriage won’t end the debates (and the hate crimes of those who take up the wrong side of the debate) is that these marriage “reforms” clearly have not solved the problems of the bisexuals. With our arbitrary limitation of marital status to two and only two people, we are plainly telling the bisexual that he must choose between a heterosexual marriage or a homosexual marriage, but that he can’t do both. “But I am both!” he wails . . . suppose this poor little buster wants to express all of his sexual yearnings within the holy bonds of matrimony, and the clerk down at the county courthouse, just seething with hate, won’t give him a license with a place on it for three signatures. And then the Muslim guy, next in line, wants one with a place for four signatures.

This is all perfectly irrational, of course, but the real problem with rational consistency lies with those Christians who want to fight this latest onslaught without resorting to Genesis and the foundational authority of God’s Word (in short, without fighting for mere Christendom). What these secularists (or sexularists, that works too) are advocating is perfectly consistent with their premises, and with the sexual history of the human race (a sinful sexual history). This is why Christians can’t fight this on the basis of “traditional values.” The sexual traditions of humanity, considered apart from God’s Word, have contained way too many child brides, harems, serial polygamists, and concubines to provide us with the appropriate guidance here.

If you want a knock down argument for mere Christendom, look no further than a marriage referendum on a state ballot near you.

>Money Produces Righteousness–Apparently

>Why Are The Poor So Evil?

The other day we were driving home after a pleasant afternoon on the golf course. That day, publicity had just been accorded the now thoroughly discredited UN report on an allegedly very dim situation for children in New Zealand. Driving home we switched on “Larry William’s Drive” only to be assailed instead with the coruscating brilliance of stand in, Susan Wood.

Susie may not the brightest pin in the cushion, but she is very definitely representative of the fashionable chardonnay sipping set. She is duly outraged at child abuse, or human degradation of whatever sort. She thinks with her gut–which is to say, emotively. In all of this she represents the norm for the chattering classes or the commentariate.

In the ensuing discussion on the plight of children in New Zealand, Susie expressed her agreement with one of the allegations made in the UN report. The allegation was that 20% of children in New Zealand lived in “income poverty”. It was inferred that of course those families would be dysfunctional. Now it is patently obvious–beyond dispute–that the overwhelming majority of child abuse in this country occurs in homes (usually consisting of “blended families”) who are “poor” on the New Zealand scale. Child abuse is far less prevalent in families where not only are the parents decently educated, but they have jobs and don’t rely on social welfare benefits.

Now to Susie and her cohort colleagues it is axiomatic that poverty causes crime. The thing that was striking on the radio was the emphatic “of course” kind of claim that she (and by implication all educated and intelligent people) believe this to be self-evident.

Now, this is not self-evident at all. Why? Well, firstly it is logically inadequate. As has been observed many times, co-incidence does not mean, nor necessarily imply, causality. If I beat my drum at 6.00pm every night and then the sun goes down, the co-incidence of a drum beating and the sun setting does not necessarily imply that my drum caused the sun to set.

Secondly, in order for Susie’s proposition to be self-evident, suppressed assumptions upon which she and those in her cohort are drawing need to be truthful and right. These assumptions will be some sort of variant of economic determinism: the belief that money or wealth determines ethics, beliefs, and human behaviour. One form of economic determinism was and is Marxism. But the more trendy chardonnay-socialism draws upon the same assumptions. The tenets making up economic determinism are built, in turn, upon some permutation of evolutionary materialism: the assertion that matter is all that exists and matter determines human action.

Now, if Susie were a committed evolutionary materialist or an economic determinist we can understand why she would express the views that she did. But we suspect that she has never thought about it. If she had thought about it, she would know that the idea of material causality is highly contentious, and she would not have assumed it to be self-evident. Rather, we believe she was simply repeating the proposition that poverty causes child abuse because it is the shared view amongst her cohort, and it co-incides with emotive and paternalistic sentiments of pity towards those less well off than herself.

Thirdly, Susie has a lot of explaining to do. Since even the most desperately poor person in New Zealand lives like a king when compared to the greater majority of the world’s population, she needs to explain why poverty stricken and afflicted families in Africa and Asia do not abuse their children far worse than the way we in New Zealand do.

Fourthly, is Susie really asking us to believe that if only we gave poorer New Zealand families more money and lifted their standard of living, not only child abuse would disappear, but, by implication most crime in the country. That would appear to be the logical concomitant of her position.

Matter does not cause evil. Electrons do not produce wickedness, any more than a lamp-post is intrinsically evil. Malice, greed, pride, lust, envy, anger, selfishness, pride, self-indulgence–these produce outworkings of evil. These produce family breakdown, bitterness, hatred, and destructive human relationships. Moreover, once in a state of impoverishment, these sins and concupiscences of heart work to keep people poor.

This of course would turn Susie’s argument on its head: because some people hate their children and their de-facto spouses and their own lives, they languish in poverty. Now, of course this causality would need to be demonstrated. And like all societal research there will always be exceptions; we will only ever be talking about tendencies and averages. Moreover, there is the complicating factor of family conditioning: those who have been abused as children so often grow up to be abusive.

But the notion that human evil is caused by a lower relative standard of living is specious. Sin is not a socio-economic class construct.  The sooner we get rid of it, the better. But along with its passing, all the various “materialisms” will also have to be thrown out. And that would be an uncomfortable moment for us all. For if evil is not economically determined, whence its seat and source?

Might not the Living God actually have to be reckoned with, when He says through the mouth of His prophet: “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it”? (Jeremiah 17:10) “No, no, no!” would scream the modern sophisticate. Anything but that.

Then again, the heart of the modern sophisticate is likewise deceived and desperately wicked, and is not to be trusted for a moment in such things. Susie, the chattering classes, and the commentariate are hardly disinterested in the matter.

>Bureaucrats Pure as the Driven Snow

>A Great Guffaw Moment

The West believes passionately in the sinlessness and perfection of man as an article of faith. At least in an abstract sense. Mocking and sneering at the Bible’s declaration of universal human depravity, the West has turned from the worship of God and replaced it with a spurious reverence for man.

This deep and profound religious attachment to man, which is now the established religion of the West, is the ultimate and final expression of idolatry. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God and sinned, the Serpent acutely revealed what was the essence of the matter: in the day they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil man would become like God, knowing good and evil for themselves. (Genesis 3:5)

“Primitive” cultures and civilisations were steeped in idolatry. It was an intrinsic part of the world-view. Men speculated over and created deities; they made representations of them; they bowed down to them and sacrificed to them. The truth of the Serpent’s assertion lay hidden beneath the surface. Man bowing down to dumb idols does not much seem like man being as God. Yet it was. It was man who was determining for himself what gods existed, how they acted, what they were like, and how they were to be mollified and won over.

In the West, in the post-Enlightenment age, the veneer disguising the Serpent’s proposition has been stripped off and tossed aside. Man has come forth asserting boldly and without shame his prerogatives to determine good and evil for himself. No longer does the modern man feel the need to genuflect to a higher power or entity in pseudo-humility. No longer does he fear retribution if he fails to do obeisance. In the West, man has grown up. There is no truth, right, wrong, or reality higher than the ratiocinations of the Western human rationalist mind.

It has finally emerged–the truth of Satan’s observation about man as god. It has taken millennia, but eventually, in the West, the rebellion of man against God has reached its apogee. Man no longer feels the need to “hide” or disguise his assertion of supremacy and autonomy: he is confident enough to assert it outright. There is no entity or being higher than man. There is no god to be worshipped. There is only man. Idolatry has now reached its most consistent expression: it can go no further in terms of its overtness or the consistency of its outworking.

Another way of expressing this is to say that in the West idolatry has taken its most extreme form; the rebellion of man against God has matured to the point of succeeding in building a civilisation that is more or less consistently grounded upon the proposition that man is god. And this is a first in human history.

But just a few pesky problems remain. Whilst in the West man is now definitely in charge (at least in his own mind) Western civilization continues to be beset with a daunting array of problems ranging from disease to crime; poverty to illiteracy; credit crunches to obscene bonuses paid out to, in President Obama’s words, “Wall Street fat cats”. We could go on with an extensive litany of “sins” that remain part of modern experience. Man may be charge, but the old saw about lunatics running the asylum bites a bit too close to the bone.

Thus, human perfection and sinlessness must be seen as a relative concept. Some are more sinless and perfect than others it would seem. And here we come to one of the great guffaw moments of our age. In this most extreme form of idolatry, the West is forced to cast about for someone, some representation of humanity, that is more godlike who can be trusted to lead the race out of its remaining problems to its final perfect state.

In order for our extreme idolatry to maintain a veneer of credibility there must always be at least one class of human beings which has achieved a greater slice of divinity, which has risen above the petty and the petulant, which has achieved one of the key attributes of deity. This attribute is essential to lead other men in the West to their final perfected state, to an existence where manifold problems are solved once and for all. It is the attribute of absolute disinterest, of pure objectivity, which would lay aside self-interest, and act only in the interests of others, or for the good of man as a whole. Only such men and women are worthy of being trusted and believed in so as to lead all in the West to final perfection. When man is god, it will always turn out that some men are more divine than others. It is this deifying, not just of men in general, but of a specific type of man, or class of man, or individual as being more divine than others, and therefore worthy of our trust to bring man to perfection, which is the guffaw moment. It is the great joke of the age.

This uber-deifying of a certain man or class of men is so common and so intrinsic to the West that it no longer seems remarkable. It has achieved the status of being beyond debate, a truth to all intents and purposes self-evident.

Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal gives us a classic rendition of this psychosis and spiritual blindness. He is writing about John Kenneth Galbraith, about whom he says many interesting things, which we will hopefully get to discuss in another post. Galbraith, of course, is probably the most lauded economist in the US in the twentieth century, and Galbraith has some very definite views about which section of Western society has achieved absolute disinterest and is godlike enough to lead the rest of us.

Dalrymple points out that Galbraith had a deep disdain for private business corporations–a disdain which is coming back into vogue. He held that the bigger and more successful a private business became, the more its management developed a bureaucratic mindset and began to look after its own interests. Clearly business managers, as a class, have not yet achieved the levels of perfection that are required of those whom we can trust. Where, then, does Galbraith place his faith?

In Galbraith’s case, he places his faith firmly in government bureaucrats. Dalrymple takes up the narrative:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.

For example, the chapter entitled “The Bureaucratic Syndrome” in his book The Culture of Contentment refers only to bureaucracy in corporations (and in the one government department he despises, the military). Galbraith appears to believe in the absurd idea that bureaucrats administer tax revenues to produce socially desirable ends without friction, waste, or mistake. It is clearly beyond the range of his thought that government action can, even with the best intentions, produce harmful effects.

And later:

Galbraith explains resistance to higher taxation thus: “It is the nature of privileged position that it develops its own political justification and often the economic and social doctrine that serves it best.” In other words, men—except for Marx and Galbraith—believe what it is in their interest to believe. It is hardly surprising that Galbraith always writes as if what he says is revealed truth and counterarguments are the desperate, last-ditch efforts of the self-interested and corrupt.

Galbraith never solved, or even appeared to notice, the mystery of how he himself could see through self-interest and arrive at disinterested truth. In general, his self-knowledge was severely limited.

But in believing as he did, Galbraith reflects the most widely held “vote” in the West for the class of men who have achieved higher states of deity and who can be trusted to lead us lesser gods into nirvana. It is the gummint. It is the state bureaucrat who is the ultimate disinterested, self-denying, other-centric human being. All these are attributes of deity. It is this breathtaking folly which makes us split our sides with laughter.

But, we are careful not to make our mirth too public. To question the higher-being-status of government functionaries comes perilously close to blasphemy in our age. Is it not self-evident that some are more human (and thereby more divine) than others? Is it not self-evident that whatever problems remain, government functionaries will deliver us from them? It is not self-evident that the more problems that arise the more functionaries we need? These things are believed by all, and are beyond dispute.

In the West we have made ourselves to be gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves. Government bureaucrats got there first. Human civilization’s greatest tragic farce.

>A Sorrow That Leads to Death

>Humanists Always Get Christmas Wrong

The modern humanist’s version of Christmas is relentlessly secular. He manufacturers all sorts of work-arounds to re-interpret, re-frame, reconstitute Christmas so as to avoid its meaning and implications which are, after all, painful.

Christmas is painful because it reminds us that we need atonement. We are lost, cut off, and alienated from God. There is never a day in which we have not sinned in thought, word, or deed. It is not just that we do the odd, occasional wrong. It is that we are sinful and sin touches and perverts everything. We commit true moral evils by what we commit and omit. The joy of Christmas is that God has provided atonement for our sins and that the atoning One is the child born of Mary in Bethlehem.

This should be good news to all who realise their unworthiness and moral defalcation. Humbling news, but good news. But humanists have a thousand work-arounds to avoid this truth, to pass hurriedly by on the other side of the road. To accept Christ’s atonement on our behalf is the ultimate humiliation of man, whilst at the very same time it is his ultimate glory. The humanist always wants the glory, but not the other.

One Judy Lightfoot, an educator from Seattle, wrote a personal reflection about Christmas that involved her coming to understand she was sinful. Well, she did not put it in those terms–she did not believe she had true moral guilt as a sinner before a holy and angry God. But she came to a point in her life, she said, where she understood that although she was successful in the world’s eyes, she had done some truly evil things.

On the whole, I thought quite well of myself until several years ago, when one winter night I sat up in bed next to my sleeping husband with the sudden realization that I’d done terrible things. You know the kinds of regrets you periodically remember through your life, and the way they sting every time? That night I thought about how I’d cherished grudges against a difficult colleague — perhaps because news of her serious illness had arrived that day. Right on top of it came the thought that my marriage to the father of my children hadn’t lasted nearly as long as hers, and that I’d gotten divorced — more than once. Then the abortion I had in grad school came crowding in. And so on. The memories were old and familiar, but taken together they imposed a new and heavy weight. I’d cultivated my pleasure in someone else’s pain. I’d broken solemn promises to “love and honor until death do us part.” I’d even ended a human life. And so on.

Maybe it was because I’d been reading C. S. Lewis, but sitting there in the dark I realized that I had cut myself a lot of slack. My pride in being a pretty good person had rested on thinking like the Pharisee who plumed himself beside the tax collector: comparing myself with others I deemed less worthy (“Which one of you did it?” …“Not me!”). You know the drill: “I may be selfish and greedy sometimes, and I may cut corners on my tax returns, but I’m no Bernie Madoff.” My sense of virtue was merely comparative, and it had separated me from other people in ways I hadn’t been aware of. But with this recognition my blind pride began dissolving — leaving room for something new to be born as days went by. Was it merely a coincidence that this happened around Christmastime?

Now at this point, the interest of every Christian perks up. We have all heard hundreds of such personal accounts and we would all be able to add our personal “amen”. The conviction for sin, such that we own up to it for what it really is, without excuse, flattery, or equivocation is something all Christians know. It is those who mourn and weep who are blessed. Maybe Judy is going to tell us how, under this new realisation of who she really was, that she began to long for God and His Saviour.

But no. In this case, another great humanist work-around emerges.

I’m still excessively proud of my writing, my productivity, my good taste, my politics, and my résumé. Habits of mind hardened through my decades on this earth still tend to make me hypercritical, judgmental, and competitive with others to the point where I can sometimes actually be glad when they fail. But instead of shuddering when struck by my shortcomings I can smile (wryly) because my radical imperfection helps me. I don’t mean that I open an accounting business: “I’ve got some black marks, so I better earn some gold stars to balance the books.” I mean that a sense of my sinfulness is a bridge linking me with others who might otherwise seem unapproachably different.

So the sum of this darkened soul’s personal conviction for true moral guilt and evil is that it has made her more tolerant of the imperfections of others. It helps her live in amity with others she may not otherwise like. Well, clearly Judy is too good to need a Saviour. She will not be found in Church, beating her breast, crying, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

The Scriptures speak truly when they declare there is a sorrow that leads to death (II Corinthians 7:10). It is the sorrow for sin that leads to work-arounds to avoid the open hand of the Saviour.

>The Logic of Sanctioned Bloodshed

>Blood on the Trail

Every society sheds blood. Modern societies shed heaps of it. It’s a bloody, bloody world. We do not say this with disgust or protest–although there is plenty to be disgusted about over modern bloodletting. We do not say this because we wish to protest the killing of any human being–although there is much ground for godly protest. Neither do we say it because we are squeamish.

We simply want to drive the point home that every human society sheds blood, some more than others. Once we have understood this, the discussion can move on to whose blood is being shed at any one time, and whether it is moral, ethical, or lawful.

Why does every society shed lots of blood? The answer, of course, lies in what led Cain to kill his brother. Hatred possessed Cain, leading him to murder Abel. Cain hated because his father’s sin had been imputed to him, and his nature was corrupted by evil. Every human being, descending from Adam by ordinary generation, bears the guilt of Adam’s sin and his sinful nature. Hatred of others is an inescapable component of our evil natures. Thus, all societies experience murder and bloodshed. Every society sheds blood.

But, murder aside, why do all human societies officially sanction the killing of human beings? And every society does, regardless of whether it finds it impolite to discuss at dinner parties. In every society there is blood on the trail. Officially sanctioned blood. Approved, endorsed, sanctioned, bloodletting. Every society has a particular version of the death penalty in one way, shape, or form. Every society endorses and promulgates officially the shedding of blood and the taking of life. These are inescapable realities–and the only question or debate is over whether the blood being shed ought to be innocent blood, or the blood of the murderer.

God alone has authority over life and death. Only God can command life and command death. But when sinful man rejects God and rebels against Him, a palace revolution always takes place. The palace is not left vacant. Rejecting God means that man is attempting a coup: man, the usurper, is setting himself up as the determiner of good and evil for himself. Man is setting himself up as a god. And it is the inevitable and inescapable nature of deity that it commands life and death.

So, when society as a whole officially rejects God it takes the power of life and death to itself. All unbelieving societies wield this power relentlessly–determining who will live and who will die.

But there is something else–something far more sinister and depraved. When Unbelief conducts its “palace coup” it also rejects the statutes and laws of God, and replaces them with its own determinations of good and evil. The inevitable result is that good now becomes an official evil, and evil becomes an official and sanctioned good. Consequently, not only are the non-guilty killed, but they are killed in endless seried ranks for no just reason. The bloodletting becomes a ceaseless aroma of sacrifice to man, the god who claims authority to command life and death.

Thus, abortion–the bloodshed of innocent and defenceless human beings–is without doubt a religious sacrifice at the altar of man-as-god. The state officially sanctions the right and authority of one human being to take the life of another, because the one is considered more human that the other. Man is exercising the prerogatives of his claims to deity, calling and determining life and death for himself, as it seems fit to him.

Another prerogative of deity is providence–that is, providing and caring for subjects and creatures. Thus, man’s palace coup against the Living God, leads him to take over the prerogatives of providence: he begins to determine who shall be cared for and who shall be left exposed to die. Thus, the Romans used to throw unwanted children on to the town rubbish dumps, withdrawing providential care, having determined that the child was not sufficiently worthy to be granted care. The law granted this prerogative and authority to Roman fathers.

In our day, the modern equivalent of death by exposure, by the withdrawal of providential care, takes place at the instigation of the “plan” by which the state and its agencies decree that those outside the “plan” are to left to die. The Daily Mail reported the following case:

Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.

Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy – almost four months early.

They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.

Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.

She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit. . . .

A midwife said he was breathing and had a strong heartbeat, and described him as a “little fighter”.

I kept asking for the doctors but the midwife said, “They won’t come and help, sweetie. Make the best of the time you have with him”.’

She cuddled her child and took precious photos of him, but he died in her arms less than two hours after his birth.

The great bureaucratic plan marshals (extorts) resources, determines for itself where the lines of inclusion and exclusion fall, then sheds innocent blood when a person is defined as being beyond the pale or the line for providential sustenance and care.

Unbelief is a bloodthirsty god; the streets of Athens are an open trench of sacrificial blood; it is a bloody and bloodthirsty city. It can be nothing else: it is the inevitable logical outcome when man demands the right to be a god, determining good and evil for himself.

There is blood on the trail. Lots of it. And there will be more. Unbelief has to have its altar of blood sacrifice.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.
The troubles of my heart are enlarged; bring me out of my distresses.
Look upon me in my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.
Psalm 25: 16—18

The Kingdom of God is surely not of this world. We do not mean to imply by this some platonic heresy which sees the Kingdom as an ethereal, other-worldly, cosmic abstraction. Rather, we mean that the Kingdom of God is utterly unlike anything which the fallen world of sinful man could conceive, let alone create.

The kingdoms, the principalities and powers of this world—to the extent they refuse to kiss the feet of the exalted Son of God—are of this world in the ethical and spiritual sense. They are of sin and evil. The Kingdom of God, whilst in this world, is instituted and established and ruled by the Son of God, and is not of this world and its systems. Consequently, the Kingdom is unlike anything else the world has ever seen.

One of the distinctives of the Kingdom is portrayed in our text. Its subjects and people are lowly of heart, afflicted, weighed down. They are troubled and distressed. They are burdened with the consciousness of their sins and disobedience and unfaithfulness. In pronouncing the arrival of the Kingdom, the Son of God declared, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” In the Kingdom of the Son, this mourning is not just an affectation, a mere public mask of hypocritical humility; it is deeply and genuinely known and felt.

The kingdoms of this world of Unbelief are based on mana, power, and gravitas. The Kingdom of the Son is one where its subjects—even those holding high office—know and confess themselves in truth to be lowly, humbled, and wretched. Their hope is in God Who saves and forgives their sin for the sake of the Son who was punished in their place. They do not look to the mana or power of men.

So, David, in this Psalm—one of the greatest kings of all time, one of the few whom Christ honoured by acknowledging that He was and is David’s son—confesses his weakness and affliction. He was far from the man he ought to be.

In his life, David suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at the hands of wicked men. Even Michal, his own wife, despised him. Some of his sons hated him so much they sought to kill him. But His enemies had “just” cause to conspire against him. They had grounds for slander, ridicule, and calumny against him. For his sin and shortcomings were not mere foibles or slips: they were extreme and gross. David was the ultimate hypocrite, non?

Here is where the Kingdom is utterly unlike the principalities and powers of this world. The Kingdom of God is made up only of gross sinners. It is a Kingdom made up of the vilest of characters, the most evil of men. It is also a Kingdom of men who know this to be true for a fact. It is a Kingdom full of ashamed and broken people, without exception.

But, in confessing this truth about themselves to God, and in looking to Christ alone as the satisfaction for their evil thoughts, words, and deeds, God declares them holy, sinless, and righteous. God declares them to be a people of mana and power. They become the holy and righteous ones, in whom He delights. Since God is now for them, for Christ’s sake, who can prevail against them? Nothing and no-one, says He.

John Bunyan, in his peerless Pilgrim’s Progress, introduces several characters to us who have determined to enter the Kingdom by “another way” than the wicket gate. But that narrow way is the only way. Only those afflicted by their sinfulness can enter. That is what makes the gate so narrow. And the gate is low. To enter, one is forced to bow down. Those who wanted the Kingdom to be different or who sought to negotiate via another entrance were lost.

This is what makes the Kingdom utterly unlike any power or principality of this world.

>Don’t Confuse Us With Facts, Part #3

>The European Heart of Darkness

We have been addressing the myth-making revisionism about Maori that is pervasive throughout the liberal-academic complex. There has been a deliberate attempt to recast pre-European Maori as noble savage rather than degenerate primitive. Many in the liberal-academic complex have “gone along for the ride.” They have just accepted the mythology and perpetuated it when opportunity arose.

Cultures are never totally static. They are often very dynamic—none more so when people are uprooted from their ancestral homes or the “places” of their forefathers. We do not know whether the ancestors of Maori were advanced, both technically and ethically. It may well be that they were. Earlier Maori clearly had sophisticated ocean-going navigational skills. However, it is not uncommon for a culture to decline rapidly, once isolated from ancestral connections. We suspect that this indeed did occur in the case of the Maori invaders. Whether they brought practices like slavery, cannibalism, and farming humans for food to New Zealand is not clear. What is clear, however, is that these degenerate practices were pervasive throughout New Zealand by the time Europeans arrived.

What is also very clear is that many Europeans rapidly degenerated when they came into contact with Maori and lived among them. The pakeha-maori—that is, those Europeans who lived amongst Maori as maori, were predominantly male; they were also predominantly seamen and/or escaped or released convicts. They were thus isolated males, not part of family groupings. They were removed from their ancestral and their cultural traditions. In many cases rapid cultural degeneration followed.

One example is the quick adoption of polygamy by some pakeha-maori. In the decades of the 1820’s and 30’s, with the escalation of inter-tribal wars, Maori chiefs came to place a high value on having resident pakeha in the tribe. Such pakeha-maori were used as a conduit for European trade goods into the tribe, particularly muskets. Having a trader-pakeha under one’s protection came to be regarded as a status symbol. One way to recruit pakeha-maori men was to give them a wife as soon as possible. In some cases, this soon led to multiple wives.

Trevor Bentley records:

. . . several pakeha-maori chose a life of polygamy. The tattooed pakeha-maori seen by George Angas on the Mokau River in 1834 had “at least six wives.” Jacky Marmon claimed to have had four wives at the Hokianga after 1924 and five wives from his previous residency in the Bay of Islands after 1817. . . .

Elsewhere, pakeha-maori replaced their wives as they improved their status or shifted their residence. The Spanish pakeha-maori Jose Manual had five wives at Poverty Bay during the 1830’s, each of whom bore him one child. The descendants of these marriages are know today as the Paniora (Spaniards) of Ngati Porou and number several thousand. In the same district the trader-whaler Thomas Halbert, known as Tame Poto (Tommy Short) secured his commercial enterprises through successive alliances with six Maori women from three East Coast tribes. Halbert’s six marriages made him famous locally and he was nicknamed Henry VII by the resident Europeans. Eleven of Halbert’s children survived and founded families well known in Poverty Bay today.
Bentley, p. 199,200

For many pakeha-maori, their marriages to Maori women turned out to be little more than dalliances. Bentley again:

As the political and economic influence of the pakeha-maori declined after 1840, their Maori wives and mistresses did not fare well. At harbours, river mouths and in the interior, pakeha-maori dissolved their unions and rejoined European society. . . . Women with half-caste children accompanied their lords; childless women returned to their own race.
Bentley, p.204

Another example of rapid degeneration by many pakeha-maori was their becoming cannibals. This fact has also suffered from revisionism, this time from the European record-keepers of the day, who found great difficulty acknowledging the truth. Most pakeha cannibalism took place not in isolation, but as part of participating in intertribal battles.

Bentley writes:

Any study of the fighting pakeha-maori is limited by the reluctance of contemporary and late nineteenth century New Zealand writers to accept that civilised Europeans would deliberately choose to live as Maori and be equally savage, or more so. Regarded by missionaries and early settlers as the worst type of cultural renegade, Pakeha toa (warriors) are acknowledged reluctantly in the literature, and as we will see in at least one case, their stories were deliberately expunged from the historical record. The difficulties in researching this group have been compounded by fugitive pakeha-maori who deliberately distorted their personal histories. Others, re-entering the European world, denied combatant roles in intertribal battles where victories were invariably followed by the massacre of civilian populations and cannibal feasts.
Bentley, p.77

The reality is that many pakeha-maori participated in tribal warfare. This participation in most cases was pretty much complete: they not only engaged in the fighting, but shared in the eating of “farmed” slaves on the longer expeditions, partook in the slaughter of defeated non-combatants, the rape, and the cannibal feasting upon the vanquished—usually committed to the oven when dead, but not always so. Most became tattooed; many with the distinctive patterns indicating they were “veterans” of rape and other atrocities.

The notorious Jacky Marmon, who became both rangatira and tohunga, was first seen by Captain Herd’s settlers at the Hokianga in 1826 travelling along the beach with a war party and a full kit of human flesh upon his back (ibid., p. 66). Another Hokianga settler, John Webster described how during a feast, Marmon brought in a basket of human flesh which had been cooked in a hangi and offered it around. When it was refused, Marmon told them they had no idea how good it tasted (ibid., p. 176).

New Zealand needs to take a good long honest look at its past. It is clear that Maori culture manifested extreme elements of human depravity. It is also clear that many of those Europeans who became long term, assimilated pakeha-maori adopted the same practices and performed the same evil deeds.

This is important for it underscores how depravity is not a function of race, but is a condition common to the human heart. Culture is but a corporate expression of common beliefs: where a people are separated from their culture and its intrinsic restraints, degeneracy into evil can follow quickly. Civilization is skin deep. Underneath lurks Conrad’s heart of darkness.

Without the gracious restraining hand of the Living God, the veneer of civilization is quickly peeled away. What lurks beneath in the darker caverns of the human heart is a Balrog indeed, which emerges rapidly—far more quickly than our smug moderns would ever care to admit.

>Georgina Beyers–a Parable of Our Times

>Symptoms of the Body Politic

The media today carry the maudlin story of Georgina Beyers, who, since leaving Parliament has been unable to find work, and is contemplating a move to Australia. “She” complains that, although “she” has not been able to forge a new career in “her” first-choice direction of show business, “she” had expected that at the least “she” would be appointed to various state boards, quangos, or other regulatory or advisory bodies funded by tax.

Beyers, of course, claims to be the world’s first transsexual in the world to be elected mayor, and the first transsexual in the world to be elected to Parliament. These claims are found on “her” website. We are not clear whether these claims have been recognised by the Guinness Book of Records.

The website also contains the de rigueur self-congratulatory and self-promoting eulogy to “her” political career.

I have retired from Parliament after serving more than seven years as an MP. Achieving everything I set out to do, including ensuring the survival and strengthening of Masterton’s hospital, bringing government services back to heartland Wairarapa and the passing of the Prostitution Reform and Civil Unions Acts, has meant I can now look for fresh challenges. I’d like to thank everyone for their support over the years, especially the people of Carterton and Wairarapa.

Beyer has been one of the trophies of Athenian secular humanism. “Her” career to date has been such that she has served as a “poster boy/girl” for pretty much all that Athens stands for. “She” writes:

I was born in 1957, as I grew up I realised I was a woman trapped inside a male body. My book follows my rebirth, the time I worked as a stripper and prostitute in Wellington and Sydney before undergoing a full sex change operation in 1984. Since then my life has changed remarkably, I have worked as an actor, publicist and broadcaster, I was elected to the Carterton District Council in 1993, and became the first transsexual Mayor in the world in 1995.

What are the chances that a former prostitute could be elected a Member of Parliament, or of any parliament in the world, and what if that person were also a transsexual, the odds may seem insurmountable, but I am reported to be the world’s first transsexual to hold such a position.
As a result of my election and intense media focus, I have had some unexpected and wonderful opportunities, much of this has come about from the filming and production of my documentary Georgie Girl, produced by Annie Goldson and Peter Wells.

Georgie Girl has been screened on POV in America to an audience of 15 million (potential audience of 250 million), on CBC Canada, Channel 4 in the UK, Scotland, Ireland and SBS in Australia.

Georgie Girl won 5 International Awards:
– Sydney International Film Festival – Audience Award Best Documentary
– San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival – Stu & Dave’s Excellent Documentary Award
– Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil (France) – Audience Award
– Queer Doc Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film Festival – Audience Award
– Madrid Gay and Lesbian Film Festival – Best Documentary Public Award
– The Peace Foundation – Media Peace Award

“Her” parliamentary career was not particularly stellar, but “she” records the following:

1999 – 2002 served on the following Select Committees:
Law & Order Select Committee
Local Government & Environment Select Committee
MMP Review Select Committee – now disbanded with its work complete
Primary Production Select Committee
Also served on the following Labour caucus committees:
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade
Māori Caucus
Primary Production & Rural Affairs
Local Government, Environment, Broadcasting and Conservation
Arts Culture and Heritage
Rainbow Caucus Committee
Social Services, Justice Cultural Caucus Committee

Resigned as Mayor of Carterton in March 2000.
2002 re-elected Member of Parliament for Wairarapa with a majority of 6372.

2002 – 2005 served on the following Select Committees:
Law & Order Select Committee
Social Services Select Committee – As Chairperson
Also served on a variety of Labour caucus committees.

2005 re-entered Parliament as Labour Government Member of Parliament (list position 35).

2005 – 2006 served on the following Select Committees:
Chairperson of Social Services Select Committee
Member of Local Government and Environment Select Committee

Resigned from Parliament in February 2007

Now the trophy-”girl” has fallen on hard times. “Her” former colleagues apparently no longer want to know “her”. “She” has been used and tossed out. Not one of “her” former colleagues can find one little quango or tax payer funded perk to toss out as a sinecure or thank you.

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. If one were to laugh, it would be a kind of jeering, cynical affair along the lines of “welcome to the real world.” When the use-by date of a poster “girl” has passed, tough-luck. Join most of the rest of humanity having to struggle to make ends meet—although we are aware that Beyer could not really join most of the rest of humanity. They are busy bearing and caring for children, making a truly serious commitment to mankind. Their economic struggle is likely ten times greater than Beyer’s will ever be. The hardest part of their lot is to make do in the face of an insatiable rapacious taxation system required to fund an ever burgeoning bludging state apparatus and its perpetual dependants–a system that Beyer happily endorsed and extended.

But if one were to cry, it would be a kind of tragic painful gasp. Here is a person whose life to this point has represented being given over to one’s desires and being dominated by them. The world of Athens cheered and danced—for “she” was living out, like a saint, the very essence of Athenian religion: the idolisation of self, the actualisation of anomie, the very reification of sovereign individualism. And “she” was devoting “herself” to “public service” to prove that when one lives under the dominion of self, success will follow. But it turned out to be all an illusion. “She” has served “her” purposes to Athens; no-one wants a used up sacrifice to the gods. The grave mouth yawns; it will not be denied.

So, Georgina Beyers has become a tragic comedy. In tragic comedies, it is always the tragedy which dominates. The comedic aspects are cynical and bitter. The words of our Lord return to haunt: for what has it profited you, Georgina, if for a moment you gained the whole world, but in the gaining you lost your soul?

In the end, there is no laughter. Only deep sadness and mourning. For does not the Scripture say that the Lord Himself has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. “Turn to Me, turn to Me, for why would you die, O house of Israel?”

>ChnMind 1.21 There’s Poison in the Well

>The Pathology of the Unbelieving Mind

Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the toughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Genesis 6:5

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God”.
They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds;
There is no-one who does good.
The Lord looked down from heaven upon the sons of men,
To see if there are any who understand
Who seek after God.
They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
There is no-one who does good, not even one.
Psalm 14: 1—3

In these series of studies on The Christian Mind: Foundations in Genesis we are seeking to understand the basic structures and orientations of the Christian Mind, as well as something of the fundamental conceptual furniture of that Mind. We need to do this because we have a duty to “take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” (II Corinthians 10:5) A second reason is that if we Christians do not self-consciously root out the ideas and concepts of Unbelief within ourselves―ideas which are sinfully natural to us―we will end up continuing to be guided by the principles of Unbelief, and consequently do harm and damage to God’s Kingdom.

One of the mental components furnishing God’s House is believing in the God Who created all things of nothing in the space of six days and all very good. Another item of mental furniture is to understand that man’s uniqueness amongst all creatures is his being in the image of God. These basic elements provide the fundamental principles and truths within which the Believing Mind operates. They, also, are elements which are fundamentally and infallibly true.

Prior to Adam’s sin the basic structures and orientations of his mind were completely aligned to God and His truth. Adam’s mind naturally thought and operated consistently with God and in perfect harmony with the good world He had created. As we say in modern parlance, Adam was mentally “in the zone”.

With the Fall, Adam’s mind was radically changed to a mind of Unbelief. Now, he naturally and instinctively thought in unbelieving terms, in opposition to God, and, consequently, in a mode of lying and self-deceit. He had taken off the crystal clear, pure glasses of Creation and had put on a new set of glasses which coloured and tinted everything he saw, thought, and did. We see clear evidence of this in the text (Genesis 3: 7―13) immediately after Adam’s sin:

1. Adam and Eve were conscious of shame (verses 7 & 10); the furniture of their minds and hearts had altered radically, such that they knew that things were fundamentally wrong.

2. They instinctively sought to hide their shame from themselves and one another (verse 7). This is the first act of denial of the truth within the human race—it occurred instantaneously and immediately after the Fall. It has governed and ruled fallen (non-redeemed) humanity ever since. From this point on a willing conspiracy to deny the truth has dominated the Unbelieving Mind. It was already walking after its new father—the Father of Lies.

3. They sought to hide from God (verse 8). Already they were naturally and instinctively thinking of God as a god, not the Living True Omniscient God before Whom all things like bare and exposed and nothing can ever be hidden. Adam would not have so distorted and misconstrued the truth prior to the Fall.

4. Adam now naturally and instinctively sought to elide away from responsibility for his actions, and pass accountability and responsibility on to his wife: “the woman Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” (verse 12) But even more sinister was the implication that it was God’s fault―after all, it was God who had provided the woman as Adam’s companion. Adam’s thought patterns had now completely reinterpreted the world and its data according to the principles of unbelief and sin. He had a new set of “shades” with which he was interpreting all reality.

5. Eve shows that she too had undergone a fundamental mind shift: she also seeks to elide away from responsibility and blame the serpent: “the serpent deceived me and I ate.” (verse 13)

Adam and Eve were clearly the same creatures, but fundamentally altered. They were radically different from the creatures they were a few short hours previously. The difference shows up in their minds! How they thought about God, the world, and themselves in relation to one another and to God and the rest of the creation had radically changed.

The Bible makes clear that all mankind inherits from Adam an Unbelieving Mind. The basic furniture and contitutive frame of the mind of every man, woman, and child (apart from the One) when they come into the world is blighted with sin and unbelief. It is not a whole mind, but a pathogenic mind of lies and errors, instinctively thinking of God and everything else sinfully, deceitfully, and wrongly. That which is instinctive and natural to that mind is wrong. The curse of sin falls upon the mind insofar as it falls upon man in the totality of his being. Theologians call this the noetic effects of sin, from the Greek, “nous” meaning mind.

This truth, so clearly revealed in Genesis and elsewhere repeatedly in Scripture, is of such vital importance that it is hard to overstate it. The times when Jerusalem has neglected to face up to it has led it into all kinds of error, idolatry and sin. In the history of Jerusalem there have been traditions—which exist to this day—that have sought to argue that the mind of man escaped the influence of Adam’s sin, so that it was possible for fallen man to think truthfully and correctly and rightly about the world and about God. These traditions have caused much harm and damage in the Holy City. They must be exposed and rejected wherever found, for they set the mind of man up as an authority over God and His holy Word. They insinuate filthy idols into God’s City.

As a result of sin, the following features characterise the way all human minds think, apart from the regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit, when a man is born again from above and becomes a new creation:

1. Man is the ultimate authority in the universe. We call this doctrine humanism―the ultimacy of man.

2. Man’s mind can determine truth for itself. We call this doctrine rationalism―the supposed ability not just to discover, but actually to establish truth by means of rational processes, where the human mind determines truth for itself, without prior submission to God.

3. Reality is not pre-interpreted. It is objective and independent. The data of the universe will provide the furniture and truth for man. Knowledge, meaning and interpretation is intrinsic to the universe; it does not come from outside the universe.

4. The human mind is not pre-conditioned in any way, but is a blank slate, open and neutral towards the objective data of the universe.

5. If any god or “higher power” does exist it does so only in frame consistent with the four fundamental principles above: that is, gods may exist, but only as determined, verified, authenticated, and established by man. All gods thus ultimately exist only by the good pleasure of man.

6. The God of the Bible is excluded from the bounds of possibility from the outset, since His existence would make a nonsense of the five fundamental principles above.

These six principles represent the fundamental doctrines of Unbelief. These six principles represent the fundamental constitution of Athens. These six principles all hang together and they represent the indelible frame of all human minds and souls―apart from the regenerating grace of God. These are the presuppositions of unbelief. They cannot be argued for or established by reasoning or evidence or argument without presupposing them as you commence. In other words, they must be assumed to be true even to argue for them or try to justify them.

All unbelieving thought is circular, and turns upon man, the creature. Consequently, the circle of all unbelieving thought operates in a vicious and destructive way, and is at root fundamentally contradictory, irrational and foolish. It is the fool, after all, who says in his heart that God does not exist.

What do we mean when we say that irrationality and foolishness are bound up in the heart of Unbelief? Well, consider some of the internal contradictions that rack the idolatry of Unbelief―and this is but a sample:

1. The Unbelieving Mind presupposes the objectivity of reality―the objective existence of the facts―which means that the Unbelieving Mind imposes objectivity on the universe as a pre-condition for human thought. But if the universe and the facts were truly objective nothing could ever be asserted about them in advance. Even the presupposition of the objectivity of the facts is a denial of the possibility of objectivity. But if nothing can be asserted about anything in advance, it is impossible and contradictory to assert their objectivity in the first place. It is both stupid and meaningless self-contradiction. Rather, if the universe were finally objective, it would be impossible to assert it to be the case. If it can be asserted, it cannot possibly be true.

2. The Unbelieving mind presupposes that the mind of man can discover and establish the truth of all things, and therefore there is no ultimate conditioning Being. Yet if the universe is not conditioned, it can only ultimately be random. Consequently, the world must be ultimately unknowable. A non-conditioned―a non-ruled universe―is a universe which cannot possibly be described, studied, researched or known. All appearances of regularity and order are just that: appearances which cannot possibly be true. They are a cosmic joke. Truth, verities and certainties are therefore impossible. Rationalism can only exist by trading on a universe it must also assert is ultimately irrational and unknowable. That is why the Bible declares unbelief to be foolishness at root.

3. If the mind of man is truly a blank slate, without any pre-conditioning, the mere assertion of that doctrine to self or another in a same breath equally asserts that my mind maintains a continuous conceptual frame that is common to all. Or still further, the concept of a universal tabula rasa (blank slate) mind is a contradiction in terms for that condition in itself represents a universal character, a mental pre-conditioning. But you cannot hold both to universal mental pre-conditioning, on the one hand, and assert no conditioning on the other. It is an irrational contradiction in terms. Once again, if you assert that man has no mental pre-conditioning, but that his mind is autonomous, neutral, and detatched, by that very proposition you deny that it can possibly be true.

We could go on, but these examples serve to illustrate that the Unbelieving Mind is only evil in its operation, self-deceitful in its mode, and self-contradictory and destructive in its procession. This is what the Bible means when it says that the Unbeliever suppresses the truth in unrighteousness and prefers the lie (Romans 1: 18―25). This, indeed, is the pathology of the Unbelieving Mind.

If we go back to the six fundamental propositions of the Unbelieving Mind, we can only conclude that by those propositions the Unbeliever evidences infallibly his bias, his conditioning, and the glasses which colour everything he thinks, says and does.

The citizens of Jerusalem used to live, move, and have their being in exactly the same frame. But, by God’s grace they were transformed. They were born again from above. They were given a new heart and a new mind, so that for the first time they could think truthfully and in principle according to the way that Adam was able to think before the Fall.

But the citizen of Jerusalem is also conscious that many of the old habits of thought still remain, and old habits die hard. Therefore, Christians, when they realise that sin has noetic effects, that sin corrupts the mind, come to be self-conscious and highly self-critical of their innate and natural conceptions. They don’t trust themselves. They feel the need―correctly so―to take nothing for granted, but test everything by the Word of God. As this process takes place, they progressively cast down every empty speculation and lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and learn to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (II Corinthians 10: 5).

Between the Unbelieving and the Believing Mind is a great gulf. They have nothing in common in principle. They operate with irreconcilable world views. The Unbelieving Mind has a pathology of sin which asserts from the very outset its independence of God, which is also to assert in the same breath, that God does not, and cannot exist. For if God be true, then it is impossible that any mind, or atom, could be independent of Him. The Unbelieving Mind can no more comprehend the God of the Scriptures than it can deny itself. It is conditioned by Adam’s sin to unbelief. It is dead in its trespasses and sins.

But, the pathology of the Unbelieving Mind goes deeper. Not only must it hold its independence amidst a sea of internal self-contradiction and irrationality, the Unbelieving Mind depends upon, draws upon the truth of God and His world in order to assert its unbelief. It presupposes order, structure, rationality, truth etc―it presupposes God and His creation of the universe in order to deny Him and His creation of the universe. It presupposes universal truth, in order to assert that universal truth does not exist. It presupposes the pre-interpretation and pre-conditioning of all reality when it asserts that all reality is objective and carries truth in itself.

It presupposes the non-randomness of the world, in order to assert the ultimacy of chance. But is also presupposes the ultimacy of chance in order to assert that the man is not pre-conditioned and that he can discover meaning and truth for himself. It presupposes that there is a correspondence between the mind of man and the external world, yet at the same time, denies that such things could ever possibly be proven or established.

These characteristics of all Unbelieving Minds makes the Unbelieving Mind not just wrong or mistaken, but wicked. This is what the Bible means when it declares that the unbeliever suppresses the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1: 18).

This is why Jerusalem and Athens are engaged in an irreconcilable conflict. The Unbeliever is dead in his trespasses and sins. His mind is corrupted. Like Adam and Eve after the Fall his enmity toward God means that he can see and reason only in ways which deny the possibility of God existing in the first place. Just as Adam in his deadness could only think of God after the Fall as if He were a god―and that change was both radical and swift―so all his descendants can only proceed on sinful lines with respect to God. The very action of claiming or asserting or proceeding as if one were independent of God means that they must recraft and reinterpret God to be a mere idol.

Thus, when the Unbelieving Mind uses the three letter word “god” both the connotation and denotation of that word is not what the Bible reveals concerning the true and living God. Accordingly Believers and Unbelievers have no common ground to engage in debates and discussions about God. If we stand on the ground of the Unbelieving Mind to discuss God, we have already agreed with the Unbeliever that the God of scripture does not exist, and there are only a god—which is to say, there are gods. (A finite, limited god must contend with what limits it—which means that whatever limits it is equally entitled to be regarded as a god.) But, on the other hand, the Unbeliever will not, and cannot, stand on Jerusalem’s ground when he discusses God. The pathology of his mind, his spiritual deadness, prevents it.

Our task as citizens of Jerusalem is not to seek to serve God by lies. We must not deny God, and agree with Unbelievers that we will only discuss gods, when we are speaking with them. We must always be faithful to the truth.

Must we ever then, Believer and Unbeliever, pass like ships in the night? No. For despite the deadness of the Unbeliever, the God revealed in Scripture is true. He alone makes meaning possible. The very fact of being able to think and communicate meaningfully about anything is an infallible ineradicable testimony to the Living God. Therefore, no man, woman, or child is beyond His reach. Every man, woman, and child already knows deep down, truly, that the God of Scripture is true and that they are lying to themselves. But there is no blindness so dark that He cannot remove. As we call all men to come, God is able to bring life, so that the deadness of heart ceases, and that no longer suppresses the truth about God. God is able to change the mind of dead Unbelief to one of Belief. He is able to remove and heal the pathology of the Unbelieving Mind―so that the new citizen of Jerusalem is able to declare, “Once I was blind, but now I see.”

God is able. But will He? Emphatically, yes. He has sent His Son into the world and raised Him from the dead that He might be made Lord of both the living and the dead―so that all creatures might be taught to walk in His commandments. (Matthew 28: 18―20) To God alone be the glory.

>Impeaching gods

>The “Problem” of Evil

There are many in the vortex of unbelief, which Contra Celsum refers to as Athens—the City of Unbelief—who appeal to the existence of evil as a reason why they do not worship and serve a god. There are many variants to the arguments and objections. Some are more philosophical. How could you love a god who has allowed evil to come to pass? If god is both good and omnipotent then god must be morally culpable for the existence of evil. If god were god why does he not get rid of evil? If evil exists then either god must not be omnipotent, although possibly good; or he must be omnipotent but not good. Either way god is not worth our regard or worship.

Other Athenians express the problem on a more personal and visceral level. There are accounts of people who survived the Nazi concentration camps, who, having entered a camp as professing Christians or Jews emerged as bitter atheists, denying that any god could possibly exist in the light of the evil they had witnessed and endured.

Still others are exponents of “armchair affliction” where they profess themselves to be deeply troubled and disturbed by evil in general and cite this as a reason for their unbelief.

Jerusalem, God’s city, looks on these arguments with a kind of detached quizzical curiosity. On the one hand they are amusing in the same way that we find a three year old child’s protestations against injustice to be amusing. There is something strange and incongruous in the protest. On the other hand, arguments using evil to “prove” the disreputable nature of any god are an Athenian in-house debate—something that “those people over there do” as a result of their spiritual blindness and foolishness.

The Believing Mind knows that arguments within Athens about evil ultimately have no meaning within that city. They end up being nothing more than idle babbling; all too often the occupation of the chattering, chardonnay drinking classes. Of course, the apostasizing survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and others who have been sorely afflicted in this life are not to be included in this group. The heart of Jerusalem goes out to those in Athens who have genuinely suffered evil and are troubled by it. But for the most part, Athens’ attitudes to evil are fundamentally self-deceitful and are not to be taken seriously.

In the first place, it turns out that Athenian chattering about evil disproving a god or disqualifying a god from holding office in Athens is really a smokescreen. Ever since the Garden of Eden, Athens has had its god—and that god is Man. Arguments using evil to impeach any god from holding office are really a pantomime to underscore that Man is the one really in charge here. Truth and reality is what Man says it is. This spiritual reality—where the heart and mind of man determines the existence, being, character and attributes of god for himself—is the abiding animus of Athens. That is why, when we are analyzing the Unbelieving Mind of Athens, “god” is always to be written in lower case. “Man”, in Athens, is always regarded as being in upper case.

Secondly, arguments about evil within Athens have no meaning. Evil and good are not meaningful constructs. They are, as Shakespeare would say, much ado about nothing. Within Athens there is no standard, there is no canon, no measuring stick to define good and evil. The best that Athens can do is speak of good in terms of preferences, wishes, or longings; evil is merely that which is not liked or preferred. Concepts and standards of good and evil within Athens are no more than self serving prejudices—whether derived from custom, culture, rationalist speculation, or a ballot box.

When Athens argues from within its own world-view about the existence of evil it can only be referring to things which it happens to dislike at the time. But, one man’s rubbish is another’s treasure. What any current Athenian community may find objectionable, other (equally valid) Athenian communities may lionise as good. While it embarrasses Athens to face up to it, the fact remains that Hitler’s Ultimate Solution and Stalin’s Pogroms were deemed to be morally right, justifiable, and ethical by their perpetrators—and who are any in Athens to gainsay. The notion that Hitler went around perpetrating genocide while saying to himself, “I am evil,” is a laughable naivety. Yet that is precisely what Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Mao Tse Teng are seen by many as doing. No, these monsters were Athenians through and through. They were their own gods. They had determined that certain classes of people were sub-human. Or, that they represented wickedness that justified their “termination”. Or there was a higher principle that made their continued existence inconvenient at the time.

Athens, to be true to itself, has to defend the right of Hitler and Stalin and other perpetrators of horrendous evil to define good and evil for themselves. It is the essence of Unbelief. It is the fundamental charter of Athens. The best, then, that the chardonnay drinkers can do to criticise such horrors is to demur—“Well, that’s not what I would do” or, “That’s not my preference.” Big bickies. Give that man a DB.

Because good and evil to the Unbelieving Mind has no reference point outside the mind of Man, anything that Man does is possible and defensible—every kind of evil has been and will be seen in the future. In the end, Athens has to embrace it all. Athens does not have a problem with evil. In Athens, evil is a meaningless construct. Evil does not exist. Evil must always be written in inverted commas. Which is to say that Athens is riddled with evil through and through.

In Jerusalem, citizens have been delivered from the empty vanities of Athenian unbelief. They have come to believe once again in the Living God who, Himself, is the ground of all meaning and existence. Evil is real. Evil has its definition and standard in God. Evil is any thought, word, or deed that does not conform to His laws and commands. Such evil has been, and will be punished. Athens, the City of Unbelief, is intrinsically and totally evil, insofar as its entire existence is predicated upon denying the Living God.

It is God who declares what is good. It is God who defines what is evil. Because He has created all things of nothing the entire universe depends completely upon Him for its being and existence; there is nothing to gainsay or contradict Him. Therefore good and evil are meaningful constructs only in Jerusalem. We are entitled to speak of good and evil having an absolute reference point: we can speak meaningfully of ultimate good and evil. Good and evil actually do exist and they exist absolutely and not merely relatively.

Face to face with the infinite and eternal God, we, His creatures, must bow in humble submission and adoration. Not to do so is the height of stupidity, arrogance and folly. Thus, being creatures, a comprehensive understanding of God’s purposes in allowing evil to exist are ultimately beyond us, in the same way an exhaustive understanding of why the creation came into existence in the first place are beyond us. The finite creature cannot judge, understand, or question the infinite God. It is precisely this attitude—the respectful attitude of deep humility before the Living God—that Paul enjoins in Romans 9 as he is discussing God’s sovereign purposes in the world.

“You will say to me, then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who resists His will?’ On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this,’ will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use?”

Romans 9:20,21

Does not the Potter indeed have the right! John Calvin, a great rabbi in Jerusalem, expressed the same principle of humility before God when we are confronted with questions about which God has not spoken nor revealed His mind. When asked once by an Athenian interloper what God was doing before He created the world, Calvin answered: “He was creating Hell for people who ask such foolish questions.” Indeed.

But we do know some things about why evil is allowed to exist. Scripture does give us one hint, one glorious insight with respect to God’s present tolerance of evil in the world. Paul goes on to write immediately following the passage cited above:

“What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He has called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.”

Romans 9: 22,23.

God’s apparent tolerance of evil is for a time only. It will one day face His full wrath and power when His patience is ended. But the longsuffering of God serves an additional purpose—that He might magnify and glorify His own Name in pouring forth mercy upon those whom He has chosen—when the harvest is fully in, and a great and innumerable multitude from all nations and tribes and tongues and peoples are found before His holy throne in His holy City.

The “problem” of the patience of God towards evil evaporates. It is subsumed in a higher purpose and glory. Evil will be dealt with fully, finally, and completely in time. But meanwhile the day of reckoning is put off and delayed so that mercy might indeed triumph over judgment.

Finally, we must make an appeal to those in Athens who indeed have suffered and witnessed great evils and whose spirits are broken. They are bitter towards the Living God and towards His people. Their bitterness has become an expression of pride that erects a barrier against their leaving the City of Death. To go over to Jerusalem will somehow trivialise their suffering and betray the monument they wish to erect to it.

But, listen, in your City of Unbelief your fellow citizens believe in their heart of hearts that your suffering was not really suffering. It was not evil. Athens may pity you because you got caught, but in the end Athens cannot agree or confirm that what has happened to you was evil. “Bad luck” is the sum and substance of Athens’ comfort—and even then, the “bad” is questionable.

It is only in Jerusalem that evil is regarded as truly evil and monstrous. Only in Jerusalem is there an ineradicable conviction that Hitler and Stalin and their ilk were, and are, demonic. Only in Jerusalem is there a certain belief that eternal justice will be administered and evil will be punished forever. Only in Jerusalem is your suffering taken seriously. Within the walls of this City you will find much comfort and consolation. But to come over you must trust God, that He will make all things right, that He who created all things will punish evil and will wipe away every tear in His own time and in His own way.

Wherefore come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord
And do not touch what is unclean;
And I will welcome you.
And I will be a Father to you
And you shall be sons and daughters to Me
Says the Lord Almighty.

II Corinthians 6: 17, 18

But if you will not trust Him, despite what He says and promises to you, the only alternative left will be truly demonic and beyond your worst nightmares.

>ChnMind 1.19 The Entrance of Unbelief into Human History

>A Snake in the Grass

A mind operating “independently” of God. Musings presuming to operate outside God’s pre-interpreting Word. To mankind now, this is “deja-vu all over again”, to quote Yogi Berra. Thinking neutrally, or in a way that presupposes from the outset that God and His Word is external to, and outside of me, is Athens stock-in-trade―now. It happens everywhere, on every hand, in every place. But universality is not an evidence of truth―regardless of how “natural” it may seem.
In Genesis 3, we are confronted with evil. Sin―which is “every want of conformity unto, or transgression of the Law of God”―(Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 15) enters into the world and human history. How it enters is most critical, most instructive. Mind and thought preceeded action. Before disobedience of God acted, it thought. In Genesis 3 we are confronted, for the first time, with the Unbelieving Mind―a Mind which is now both universal and “normal.” So universal is Unbelief that it has become normative. To recover the Christian Mind, we have to lay aside thought frames and patterns that have become normative―the lie―and return to the original―the truth.
The serpent comes to Adam and Eve as a creature―one of the creatures created on the sixth day. While the text is not explicit, subsequent scriptural revelation confirms that the serpent was animated by Satan, a created heavenly being who, shortly after his creation, had rebelled against God. Satan comes to enlist man, the one creature made in God’s image, to his ranks. But Satan is incredibly clever. He does not come directly, but obliquely. He chooses the most subtle or clever animal as his emissary. His sole objective is to encourage the man to think “for himself” outside of God, as if he were an independent being. Therefore, the temptation comes “from below” which plays to Adam through the position of authority which Adam held.
How often we have seen this satanic and demonic pattern repeated. Satan will ever take our strengths, play to them, magnify them, exalt them―until they pervert us and lead us into evil.
If Satan had come to Adam in all his malignant demonic power and confronted him as an enemy, demanding his fealty, Adam would immediately have sought security in God. Instead he comes obliquely, indirectly, and seeks to insinuate himself subtly into the mind of man. Adam’s defences were down. So the serpent speaks, not directly to Adam, but indirectly. He speaks to Eve.
We can assume that Adam knew that the serpent was acting beyond his created abilities and that he was being animated by another, external being. The assumption rests upon Adam’s already demonstrated and confirmed ability to discern the true nature of all the creatures on the earth, and name them accordingly. Further, the text confirms that Adam was present throughout the interchange. Adam was “with her” when Eve took the fruit and ate (Genesis 3:6).
In order to enter into this interchange, Adam had to tolerate a perversion of the structures and order of creation itself. Both Adam and Eve had to allow themselves to be led by an animal. Adam relinquished his God-given duty to exercise dominion and rule over all other creatures upon earth. Secondly, Adam allowed himself to be led by his wife. Tolerating and acting within this perverted order was already to be outside the pre-interpreting Word of God. At the very commencement of the interchange with the serpent, Adam was thinking sinfully.
The serpent leads the woman and the man to a position where they are exercising judgement over God’s Word. God had commanded that, whereas they could eat freely from every tree in the garden, there was one from which they were not to eat―the one designated the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:17). Firstly, the serpent asserts a rule that is more restricting than God’s command and attributes the more restrictive rule to God. “Has God really said you should not eat from any tree in the garden?” Satan has always delighted to entice God’s people to add to God’s Word―to make its commands more high, more restrictive, more exacting than God has actually commanded―because that very action makes man the lawgiver, the lawmaker, and implicitly over God. Man’s word is thereby more important than God’s and carries higher authority. The generation that sets itself up to be stricter than God’s Word will be followed by a generation that denies the authority of God and His Word totally.
Next the serpent openly denies the truth of God’s Word: “you shall not die!” (Genesis 3:4) God is lying. Neither God nor His Word is true. As Adam and Eve entertained that hypothesis as a possibility, they sinned in their mind, in their thoughts. But to strengthen the proposition, the serpent attributed a motive of envy to God. His explanation as to why God might lie and deceive the woman lay in God’s envy of man. In other words, God did not have Adam’s best interests at heart. The fallacy of attacking the “man” not the proposition was present right from the first entrance of evil into the world. He also appealed to human pride: if they ate, they would be divine, equal with God. They would know good and evil for themselves. They would be able to determine their own law, independently of, and equal to, God.
Here, then, is the essence of sin and evil. Man, the creature, arrogates to himself the position (the “right”) to work things out for himself, independently of God. Neutrality towards God is actually a position of enmity toward, or rejection of, God. The Unbelieving Mind―for by the stage Eve had gone over to the Dark Side―began to consider two conflicting propositions: either God was true or the serpent was true. Mmm. Let me see now, which is right? That frame of mind is the mind of Unbelief. It is the very essence of Athens. It is when Athens first appeared in human history.
Then Eve engaged in a bit of neutral empirical research. She “saw” that the tree was good for food. That is, she formed the view, contrary to God’s command. Her empirical research led her to the conclusion that the tree was a delight to the eyes―it was indeed beautiful. She had forgotten that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that by now her eye was well and truly corrupted. She was no longer seeing things as they were, but was seeing things as she wanted them or constructed to be. Similarly, the tree would make her wise. All of that empirical research on the tree was not neutral; it was informed by and animated by a growing rebellion against God.
So she and Adam ate.
Rationalism and humanism began in the Garden of Eden. Rationalism is the belief that human reason is sovereign over life. By means of reason, man can discover and determine truth for himself. Man can determine truth independently of God. Man can determine God’s existence, God’s commands on his own authority. Man can verify the Word of God. This belief isas innate to fallen man now, and as unconscious to mankind, as breathing. It only changes when someone is born again from above, by God. When we are born again, when we are subsequently converted from unbelief to belief in God and His Christ, then we are able to stop being rationalists. In principle we move back to the position of Adam before God, before the Fall. We are able, once again, to think God’s thoughts after Him. We are able, once again, to see the world truly and truthfully―as it really is. We are able to see and know the world as pre-interpreted by God and His Word.
Humanism is the belief that the ultimate being in the universe is man. Man is the measure and standard of all things. Man is god. All citizens of Athens, all unbelievers, are both rationalists and humanists―regardless of whatever denominational stripe they may adopt. Of course, rationalism and humanism are in themselves idolatries, and, like any and every idolatry, will be ultimately destroyed. Pity the unbeliever who clings to his idols.
But―and here is where Jerusalem needs to grow up―the currency of the realm of rationalism and humanism is neutrality. Athens both presupposes and asserts that data and truth have an objective reality―a meaning that is of itself and from within itself. When Eve conducted her empirical investigation on the tree, deciding that it was desireable and so forth, she was framing reality according to her (already) sinful mind. But the assumption, the presupposition upon which she proceeded was that these supposed characteristics of the tree existed independently of God and had reality apart from God. She could investigate, learn, prove, and conclude these things whether God existed or not. (Which is to say that Eve had already decided that God did not exist. She was already replacing Him mentally with a false god―one who was envious and evil.) Man, likewise independent of, neutral toward, and objective over the data can discover and determine truth for himself. Man can prove God, or disprove God. It matters not.
To assert that man can prove or establish God, is to assert that the God revealed in the Scriptures cannot possibly be true. In “proving” God, the rationalist by that action or proof disbelieves the God of Scripture. There is no other possibility. There is no neutral, middle ground. Either God establishes and pre-interprets man, or man establishes and pre-interprets one or more gods.
When Christians―no doubt with all the best intentions in the world―seek to clothe themselves with the garb of rational neutrality so they can go down to the Athenian market place and seek to discuss the “facts” with Unbelievers in an effort to get them to believe, they regress to the lying attitudes adopted by the serpent and Adam. They have compromised the truth of God and His world before they start. They have again put on the smelly rags of Unbelief. God, as Calvin says so acutely, is not served by our lies.
Or, to approach the issue in another way: the Believing Mind knows that there is not one atom or sub-atomic particle in the universe that does not depend for its existence utterly and completely upon God. To enter a discussion where man is invited to consider, determine, or confirm for himself whether that might be the case is to take the form and shape of the serpent. It is to make man the measure of all things, including God.
Athens is idolatry. Everything it is and does is idolatrous. Jerusalem has been delivered from Athenian idolatry, but like our fathers in the desert who longed to return to Egypt, many citizens of Jerusalem employ rationalist and humanist modes of life. Nowhere is this more evident than at the point of interchange between believers and unbelivers. Many Christians think the only way they can appeal to unbelievers successfully is to go and stand with unbelievers on their fields of idolatry and lead them step by step to the Christian faith.
A favorite approach has been to argue the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If we reasonably consider the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection it becomes clear that overwhelming evidence is attached to the event. As we work through the evidence and the rational arguments arising out of the evidence, unbelievers will be confronted by the truth and will be lead to faith―or so it is claimed.
This leads us to ask whether the problem that confronted Adam and Eve in the garden was a lack of evidence. Adam had the facts, the truth, all around him. The problem was not the facts or the obscrurity of the evidence. The problem lay in Adam filtering the evidence through mind of Unbelief―the mind of sin. How could that happen? It happened as soon as he asserted a “right” to examine the evidence “neutrally”, outside of God, for himself.
Thus, to return to the issue of leading people into the Kingdom by means of objective, neutral, “just the facts, ma’am” consideration of the resurrection or any other Christian doctrine, the rationalist will say, in heart, “Even if I am persuaded that the facts indicate that Jesus did actually rise from the dead, they are utterly uncompelling in convincing me to become a Christian. For if I can establish such truth for myself, why do I need God at all? If I can establish that Jesus rose from the dead, I can un-establish it. After all, in a random world, such things as resurrections may actually occur. But the significance and meaning of that random event, I will determine for myself.”
God is not well served by our lies. If we stand with Unbelievers in the field of Unbelief and join with them in their lies agreeing with them that they we can verify and establish God as it seems good to them, we are promulgating a lie. We are entering into the age-old Satanic deceit. There is a snake in the grass.
God alone is true. Every man, apart from the One, is a liar. And Satan is the father of lies, from the beginning. So entered sin into the heart and mind of man.