The Lord of Heaven and Earth

The Days of our Service

The Bible makes clear that when Christ ascended, all power and authority was given to Him in the heavens and the earth.  When Christ sat down at the right hand of God, He sat down upon the Throne of heaven not to rest, but to rule over all things. 

On earth there are two kinds of human beings: those who know that Christ rules everything, and those who refuse to know it.  Those who don’t acknowledge nor believe that Christ is their Lord nevertheless remain subject to His command and do His bidding–as Unbelievers–even whilst they remain ignorant of His dominion over them. 

Oscar Cullmann puts it this way:

On the one hand, the Church is the body of Christ himself, the highest possible reality on earth; on the other hand, the Church is subjected to Christ its Head just as are all other parts of creation included under his lordship.  [Oscar Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1963), p.229.]

Describing the Church as the “highest possible reality on earth” is quite startling, yet true to Scripture.  After all, the Apostle Paul makes marriage and family relations patterned after the higher reality of the relationship between Christ and the Church.  (Ephesians 5: 32)  When Unbelief mocks the Church, as if frequently does, it is mocking the only hope for the world, the very body of Christ in the world, notwithstanding the Church’s many sins, imperfections, and weaknesses.  The mocker is just as much a subject of the Lord Christ as the Church, but for the latter it is a subjection of joy, life, blessedness, and ultimately, glory; for the mocker, it is a subjection that will culminate in the wrath of the Lord being poured out upon his or her head. 

In order really to understand the relationship between the two realms of lordship, we must speak of the distinction between the members of the Church and the members of the total lordship of Christ.  The members of the Church know about that lordship; the other members belong to it unconsciously. . . .

The members of this Church must participate in his lordship in a special way.  To be a member of a “lordship” always means both to be ruled and to share in that rule, despite subjection to the head.  Here we encounter the major distinction between the lordship of Christ and of the Church.  We have seen that all creatures in heaven, on the earth, and under the earth belong to that lordship.  Thus all invisible powers and authorities together with their empirical organs (the earthly state, for example) are also members of his lordship.  They are placed completely within it, and, for this reason, the very people who understand the nature of the lordship, the members of the Church, owe obedience to the powers and authorities (Romans 13:1ff) [Ibid., p. 229f.]

For this reason, Christians and the Church are not revolutionaries.  Christians are compliant, obedient servants of the powers that be, because we self-consciously recognize that they too are servants of our Lord. 

Nevertheless, all the powers outside the Church are members of the lordship of Christ only in a very indirect way, for they do not necessarily know the role assigned to them within his lordship.  Everything that is said by Paul, and before him by Jesus, about subjection to Caesar and the state refers to a non-Christian state which knows neither Christ and his kingdom nor God the Father of Christ.  Even a pagan state like the Roman empire, therefore, can thoroughly fulfil the task assigned it by God in the lordship of Christ when it limits itself to its own quite definite role and allows the Church, the place where Christ’s rule has such great significance, to “lead a quiet and peaceable life” (I Timothy 2:2).  A pagan state can play a role in Christ’s lordship even though it does not know itself that it belongs to that lordship.  (Ibid. p.230)

Christians and the Church, however, are to be most jealous and concerned when the pagan state starts arrogating to itself authorities and powers not granted to it by our Lord. 

Because only the Christian knows of this subjection of the state to Christ’s lordship, precisely in this sense the state has paradoxically a greater significance for him than for any other citizen.  On the other hand, when a state transgresses its limits, the Christian feels this much more strongly than anyone else, although also non-Christians can also notice the fact itself.  The Christian sees especially that the state has denied the lordship of Christ, that a demonic power has freed itself, that the “beast” has appeared. (Ibid. p. 230f)

We in the West live in a time of an ever growing arrogation of state power, with the state asserting and claiming authority and competency far beyond that appointed by Christ.  The despotism may be soft, initially, but it is becoming increasingly hard and bloody.  A demonic power has temporarily freed itself; the “beast” has re-appeared.  Such things are at the direction of the Lord and occur as a judgment upon our civilization.  Blood that is shed always returns to the land and people that shed it.  What we sow, we reap.  The people who refuse the Christ and choose Barrabas instead will eventually fall to the siege. 

The Christian knows this and feels it more keenly than any other.  But we do not despair for these days, too, are at His command and direction and they are the days in which He has called us to serve and in which we were meant to be.  And that, as Gandalf said, is an encouraging thought. 

Politicians and the Gods

Frenetic Carmelite Dervishes

The limitations of political parties and politicians is both diverting and entertaining, if you are one who find such things amusing. 

We never fail to be cynically amused by politicians who testify that their god is government every time they bless us with public utterance.  It conjures up the image of the priests of Baal dancing around the altar on Mount Carmel, hissing, shouting, cutting themselves and wailing in frenzied despair.  “Hurry up and do something, Baal,” is the general sentiment. 

The god of such simpletons is a weak, over-extended, incompetent, bumbling, greasy Jabba the Hutt.  Those politicians constantly invoking their god, who call out to Jabba for help are like the idol they worship–weak, over-extended, out of their depth, incompetent, and no doubt greasy. 

Here is a classic in the genre of Mount Carmel dervishes:

More Evidence Of Rent Gouging In Christchurch

Wednesday, 21 November 2012, 11:04 am
Press Release: New Zealand First Party
Denis O’Rourke MP
Spokesperson for Christchurch Earthquake Issues
21 November 2012
More Evidence Of Rent Gouging In Christchurch
New Zealand First says more evidence of rent gouging has emerged with a Christchurch family with nine young children landed with a rent increase of $100 a week to take their weekly rental from $460 to $560.
Christchurch Earthquake Issues spokesperson Denis O’Rourke says this vindicates repeated calls from New Zealand First for a short term rent freeze in the city.

“This is irrefutable evidence that rent gouging is continuing as a result of the housing shortage in Christchurch in the aftermath of the earthquakes.  “The family concerned will struggle to afford such an unconscionable hike in their rent.  “They say they’ve had ‘two years of hell with earthquake after earthquake and now the profiteers seem to be allowed to run rampant’.
 

“It is high time that Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee abandoned the pretence that the market will control home rents in Christchurch, and take overdue action to impose a short term rent freeze,” says Mr O’Rourke.

Good one, Denis.  That’ll stir up Jabba to action.

But hold on.  Why limit what you are asking your god to do?  Surely the gummint is all powerful, omni-competent, and great in every way.  Great Baal of Wellington can do anything, right?  Surely calling for a stupid little rent freeze–a temporary one at that–is beneath your god’s dignity.  There are plenty of other ways more honouring to your idol, more befitting his greatness that you could invoke your god to perform. 

A temporary rent freeze is so petty.  What about forced relocation to other cities?  We all know the reason rents in earthquake afflicted Christchurch are so high is that there are too few rental properties and too many people wanting to rent.  Ergo, reduce the number of people wanting to rent by forced relocation to other cities and the problem is solved.  This would be a far better demonstration of the power and authority of your god. 

Moreover, a bit of vengeance would not go amiss.  Denis invokes a family with nine children–a family already being paid out lots of moolah from Baal, no doubt way beyond what the average family in the country gets paid.  After all that Baal, has done for them, they are still whining.  Nobody loves whiners and moaners. Take a few of the children away and give them to the care of CYF.  They will enjoy having Jabba’s tongue slurp all over them.  The downsized family could then rent a smaller house.  Less rent.  Problem solved.  Maybe next time they would not moan so much and complain against your god. 

We could go on.  What about deploying forced labour on Christchurch housebuilding?  We have thousands upon thousands of people unemployed in New Zealand.  Surely your god could invoke a bit of command economy magic more worthy of his power.  Deport them to a vast tent city on the Canterbury plains and put them to work making bricks and building houses.  If productivity falters, employ whips.  It has worked in the past.  A piddling little rent freeze–a temporary one at that–hardly befits the greatness of your god, Denis.  Think Pharaoh and the pyramids.  That’s a real god in action. 

Get the point, Denis?  If you are going to invoke the government as your Baal, your Jabba, as your omni-competent solver of all problems and the balm of all hurts, please think big.  Give him plenty of options, lots of potential solutions and alternative ways to demonstrate his glory.  A piddling little rent freeze.  How is that worthy of the glory of the great god, Baal? 

Politicians can be so small minded. 

Atheists and Your Children, Part III

 Propaganda, Child Abuse and the Gun

We have been considering a “reasonable proposition” put forward by distinguished psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey–to the effect that Christian parents who raise their children to know, understand, and believe the Christian faith are committing a form of child abuse.  He puts it in the same category as parents performing clitorectomy upon daughters.

Children have a right not to be taught myths and lies, he averred to his audience at Amnesty International.  The right to the truth overrides all parental and child rights.  It overrides all free speech rights.  He will defend free speech rights strenuously, but not in the home, unless children are being taught his particular world-view–which happens to be the dominant world view of our age.  Children must be taught and trained in the world-view of scientism, which to materialist and atheist Humphrey is the only truth.

We can see how purblind he has become in his own ideology and secular religion in the following quotation:

Belief systems in general flourish or die out according to how good they are at reproduction and competition. The better a system is at creating copies of itself, and the better at keeping other rival belief systems at bay, the greater its own chances of evolving and holding its own. So we should expect that it will be characteristic of successful belief systems—especially those that survive when everything else seems to be against them—that their devotees will be obsessed with education and with discipline: insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others. We should expect, moreover, that they will make a special point of targeting children in the home, while they are still available, impressionable and vulnerable. For, as the Jesuit master wisely noted, “If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life.”

In Humphrey’s evolutionist world-view the mark of a successful belief system is that it gains adherents.  It survives.  It is fitter than other belief systems.  The key ingredient to survival of dangerous myths like Jesus Christ and His Father, the Living God, according to Humphrey, is that the devotees are obsessed with education and with discipline: “insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others.”

The self-serving hypocrisy of this argument is worthy of note in passing.  OK, so the success of a belief system has nothing to do with truth, but everything to do with inculcation.  Apparently.  So how has atheistic, materialistic scientism been doing, then?  How successful has it been?  For over one hundred years schooling in the United States and Great Britain and in the West generally has been thoroughly committed to inculcating Darwinian evolutionism into the hearts and minds of students.  How has that inculcation gone?  Humphrey tells us (although he misses the deadly indictment to his own position and of his argument):

A survey published last year showed that half the American people do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution—if it has occurred—can have taken place without some kind of external intervention. Not only do people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2% realised it involves putting theories to the test, 34% vaguely knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66% didn’t have a clue.

The belief systems of scientism and materialism and evolutionism and atheism are not doing too well, since they are failing to produce a universal population of committed disciples, despite controlling state funded education at every turn.  But rather than face up to the implications of the signal failure of atheistic evolution to gain universal traction–which is evidence that his own belief system is inadequate at best, riddled with contradictions and irrationality at worst–Humphrey wants to shift blame to someone else–the parents of children whose households overtly and deliberately reject his belief system of secular atheism.  This gets to the nub of Humphrey’s case: public education is failing because parental influence is so strong.  Therefore,  parents need to be attacked, neutered and controlled.

The first obstacle to be obliterated is home-schooling.  The state–get this–the State must outlaw it. 

All sects that are serious about their own survival do indeed make every attempt to flood the child’s mind with their own propaganda, and to deny the child access to any alternative viewpoints. In the United States this kind of restricted education has continually received the blessing of the law. Parents have the legal right, if they wish to, to educate their children entirely at home, and nearly one million families do so.

Then, secondly, there are private schools and colleges which must be neutered as well:

But many more who wish to limit what their children learn can rely on the thousands of sectarian schools that are permitted to function subject to only minimal state supervision. A US court did recently insist that teachers at a Baptist school should at least hold teaching certificates; but at the same time it recognised that “the whole purpose of such a school is to foster the development of their children’s minds in a religious environment” and therefore that the school should be allowed to teach all subjects “in its own way”—which meant, as it happened, presenting all subjects only from a biblical point of view, and requiring all teachers, supervisors, and assistants to agree with the church’s doctrinal position.

So the State has to shut them down as well.  But it gets worse.  Humphrey acknowledges even then–even if home schooling were made illegal (as it is in Germany), and even if all faith-based schools were shut down– it would not be enough to ensure the successful inculcation of his religion of atheism.  Parents can influence their children informally, even if they are now restricted to secular atheistic schools to impart the “Faith”.

Yet, parents hardly need the support of the law to achieve such a baleful hegemony over their children’s minds. For there are, unfortunately, many ways of isolating children from external influences without actually physically removing them or controlling what they hear in class. Dress a little boy in the uniform of the Hasidim, curl his side-locks, subject him to strange dietary taboos, make him spend all weekend reading the Torah, tell him that gentiles are dirty, and you could send him to any school in the world and he’d still be a child of the Hasidim. The same—just change the terms a bit—for a child of the Muslims, or the Roman Catholics, or followers of the Maharishi Yogi.

So, its control of parents that Humphrey is after.  In the Soviet Union, parents were forbidden to mention anything about the God of the Scriptures to their children.  They could not include them in any Christian celebrations or ceremonies.  Their children were taken into indoctrination services, such as the Young Pioneers.  Children were encouraged to inform on their parents if they conducted any religious practices in the home.

Priests and their families were subject to severe persecution.  A priest’s children were barred from middle or higher schools or from state employment unless they renounced and broke off all connections with their fathers.  Priests were disenfranchised along with criminals and the insane.  They were also denied ration cards, often necessary for survival in periods of shortage. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 180f.] 

Why would one connect Soviet totalitarianism and ruthless persecution of Christians with today’s secular materialists?  Both alike were and are militantly atheistic.  It should come as no surprise, then, that well respected scholars, such as Humphrey openly advocate state control over parents to ensure that all speech in the home conforms to secular materialist atheism.  That is why Peter Hitchens speaks of the “totalitarian intolerance of the new atheists”.  It is a fair representation. 

We are certain of this: materialist, evolutionist atheism can only succeed in human history by the power of the gun.  It is an inane, conflicted and barren ideology.  It is ultimately irrational.  Unable to win and maintain control of hearts and minds by peaceful means it must turn inevitably to the gun and to the power of a totalitarian state to gain and continue control.  Dawkins and Humphrey are channelling Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.  It is one of the great ironies of the decade that Humphrey first gave this speech to Amnesty International–a group ostensibly dedicated to fighting against state oppression everywhere.  The fact that Humphrey’s propositions were not publicly repudiated on the spot tells us that they have lots of fellow travellers–in place where one would not expect them.

The course to violent overthrow and seizure of power tends to follow a well-trodden path: demonise something as oppressive, cruel, and destructive.  Promise that if the demons were removed, all our problems would dissipate or dissolve into facile solutions. Then, for the sake of peace, the sake of truth, and for the love of fellow men all the principled and courageous must stand up to fight.  Right now, the demon is Jesus Christ and His people are the enemy.  They are the pathological child abusers of our time . . . or so the propaganda runs.
 

Libertarian Vacuity

Demons Will Return to the Empty House

What are the building blocks of civilisation?  The libertarian answer is straightforward, if simplistic: civilisation will be built upon free contracts entered into by individuals, once the state is dismantled.  Roll the state back to a minimalist entity and you are left with a free people.  These free people, acting out of self interest, will enter into formal and informal contractual arrangements for their own (and mutual) benefit.

But what if the “free” people were universally enslaved to lusts and self-indulgence?
  Self-interest would be interpreted and applied in a thoroughly destructive manner.  Imagine a society, for example, where the consensus was that sexuality was an animalistic passion to be indulged in at random with multiple partners and that relentless promiscuity and homosexuality were in one’s free self-interest.  In principle libertarians would endorse such freedom and license as entirely acceptable and righteous-in-itself.  But upon such a foundation one could not a civilization make. 

The Kingdom of God, as we have often observed, is exceedingly thick.  It covers all human life and experience.  It ultimately governs the goals, motives and standards of all human action in all spheres and aspect of human life.  Every thought is to be brought captive to it.  Only Christ can accomplish such a work and progressively bring it into reality in human history.  Whilst Christians may agree with libertarians on the need to roll back the soft-despotic, ever-expanding, omni-competent state, we disagree entirely on what should fill the vacuum.

Another way to put this is to focus upon how the state ought to be rolled back.  For the libertarian the focus is upon electing a libertarian administration then dismantling the apparatus of intrusive government to make men free.  For the Christian, the focus is upon the growing self-government and responsibility of free men disciplined under the Word of God that leads to the inevitable withering away of the state from within. 

The libertarian argues the necessity of contractual law, of keeping one’s contractual obligations.  But what happens if society as a whole does not accept the importance and integrity of contractual obligations?  What if it interprets freedom as maximal license?  Secular libertarians have no answer.  There is no moral grounding in the conscience for contract, for truth-telling, for integrity in the libertarian world-view.  Oaths, for example, are without force or significance, and therefore contracts are not worth the paper they are written on. 

Without a belief in God and the soul, where is the oath?  Without the oath, where is the obligation or pressure to fulfill it?  Where is the law that even kings must obey?  Where is Magna Carta, habeas Corpus, or the Bill of Rights, all of which arose out of attempts to rule by lawless tyranny?  Where is the lifelong fidelity of husband and wife?  Where is the safety of the innocent child growing in the womb?  Where, in the end, is the safety of any of us from those currently bigger and stronger than we are? 

And how striking it is that such oaths wee used to make us better, not worse, and that the higher power, the magnetic north of moral truth, found an invariable answer in the urgings of conscience.  These things are far higher than the mutuality and “human solidarity” on which atheists must rely for morality–because they specifically deny the existence of any other origin for it.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 147.]

Without the growing influence of the Kingdom of God in the lives, consciences and relations of men, civilizations can neither be built nor maintained.  Libertarians may eject the state, but the demons will come back into the empty house seven-fold stronger.

Surprise

Progressive Groupthink

The New York Times has endorsed Barack Obama for president.  As a child might say, “No surprises there.”  But why?  Why was this endorsement entirely predictable?  We could have confidently pronounced four years ago, even eight or twelve years ago that in 2012 the Times would endorse the Democratic candidate for the presidency.  How come? 

Firstly, empirical historical evidence is overwhelming.  The Times has endorsed the Democratic candidate for over fifty years.  In fact, it has even provided an interactive graphic of its record so that there can be no doubt. 
You can peruse it here. So, let’s get this straight.  The Times believes that for sixty years in every presidential election the Republican candidate was inadequate and the Democratic candidate was better for the hour, the nation, the needs of the day, and so forth.  This tells an irrefutable story: the Times is a politically partisan newspaper. 

This would be fair enough.  There is no problem whatsoever with a newspaper or other public media being ideologically committed and in the tank for candidates that reflect its ideological grid.  What is utterly intolerable is that said news medium would also argue that it is objective, neutral, and even-handed, without pre-commitment and bias. 

Here is how group think works at the Times:  “the editorial board consists of superior people whose intelligence and perspicuity is beyond question.  As superior minds, better educated than the average bear, we arrive at a common view about the well-being and the best future for the nation.  We all agree that the state should grow in power and authority in every area of life as the essential tool for progress in every field of human endeavour.  We believe in redemption and salvation by law.  We believe in progressive shaping of society by government.  We believe in these things because all fair-minded, educated, and rational people agree that such principles reflect justice, human rights, and progress. Consequently, we will always endorse Democrats over Republicans because at any given time Democratic candidates will be more committed to an expanded role for government and government enforced egalitarianism than will Republican candidates.” 

In the ideologically blinkered world of the Times all reasonable and objective men think as they think.  So, the Times is neither biased nor prejudiced.  It is objective, rigorous and balanced.  It is not ideological or biased to believe the sky on a fine day will be blue.  That is just fact.  It is not ideology that calls for an expanded role of the state at all times and in all circumstances.  It is just brute fact that any and every expansion of the power and role of the state will bring progress. 

It is the same kind of mindset that led Soviet politicians, intellectuals, and scientists to proclaim they were merely acting according to the dictates of rational science and evidence as they herded millions to their deaths in mass starvation camps.  No ideological bias there. 

Fodder for Fascism

Afraid of Little People

A public brouhaha is under way in New Zealand over the merits and demerits of charter schools.  A list of horrible things that charter schools will allegedly do is being trumpeted by the teacher unions.  They are absolutely certain that charter schools would be evil and wicked and do immeasurable harm.

A similar propaganda campaign is being waged in Britain–except there charter schools have been in operation for some time.  As a result the rhetoric has ratcheted up a few degrees.  Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Telegraph looks at some of the latest allegations.  Apparently free (that is, charter) schools are going to spread fascism.  If charter schools go ahead we predict that it is only a matter of time before we see similar allegations surfacing in New Zealand.

What’s really driving the Left’s loathing of free schools

 

Brendan O’Neill
Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.

In his bid to win the hotly contested prize for the most hilariously fallacious argument against free schools, Patrick Roach of the teaching union NASUWT has claimed that they will spread fascism. Apparently, because these schools are not under the direct control of the state, all sorts of vile ideologies could take hold in them, warping the minds and frying the values of future generations.

In a speech at a Unite Against Fascism fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference last week, Roach said that deregulated schools could become incubators of fascistic thinking and behaviour, since schools that aren’t absolutely beholden to the state will no longer be obliged to “engage young people in learning and education around citizenship and values in terms of multiculturalism”. In short, if we take the state out of the picture, and let teachers and parents do their own thing, we’ll end up with schools staffed by Blackshirts and attended by horrible little Hitlers.

Roach’s bunkum doesn’t only expose the increasing desperation of teaching trade unions as they scrabble about for scare stories to try to turn the public off free schools. It also reveals a lot about the modern Left’s unthinking devotion to the state, and its corresponding distrust of anything that exists outside of the state.

What Roach is effectively saying is that if the all-knowing, all-caring, super-multicultural state isn’t on hand to tell children to be racially respectful, then those children will drift towards hateful thinking. He seems so enamoured of the state that he cannot conceive of the possibility that non-state actors – whether it’s parents, neighbours, teachers not tied to state-style diktats – just might be able to inculcate children with some pretty decent moral values. In the modern Left’s worldview, if the state isn’t permanently on standby with its ready-made list of values, bucketloads of welfare cash, parenting advice and whatnot, then ordinary people will starve, go mad, turn racist and end up as fodder for fascism.

This is fast becoming the key argument against free schools – the idea that deregulation in the education system will inevitably lead to the corruption of the next generation. So we’ve also been told horror stories about some free schools selling “junk foods” that are banned in state-maintained schools. Alarmingly, some schools have been found selling chocolate and Red Bull!

St Jamie Oliver, defeater of the Turkey Twizzler, says “children’s health will suffer [if] the standards that apply to maintained schools have been relaxed for academies and free schools”. There have also been scare stories about creationists setting up free schools and potentially unleashing in Britain the kind of “Christian fundamentalist” thinking that is more widespread in the US. To this litany of terrible things that will happen if the state isn’t invited to control every single aspect of children’s learning, we can now add the claim that free schools will foster fascistic hysteria.

In summary, then, if free schools become widespread, we can expect to see more fat, chocolate-smeared creationists and fascists spreading to all and sundry their school-learnt nonsense about the beginnings of the world or the inferiority of ethnic minorities.

This nightmare vision of the prejudiced lumps that will be churned out by free schools reveals far more about the prejudices of the Left than it does about the real world inhabited by parents, teachers and kids. It is a testament to the modern Left’s fear of the blob of unpredictable folk . . . that  it believes people will become sick in both body and mind if they aren’t constantly cared for by the state and inculcated with its values.

Make no mistake – their disdain for free schools is driven by their panic over what will become of the little people if the authorities aren’t on hand to control them.

 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Froward 

Money, Love, Desire – The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 08 October 2012

I have written many times that free markets are for a free people, and that only a free people can sustain them. But slaves to sin cannot be a free people. And the only way to be liberated from slavery to sin is through the gospel that brings new life.

Another problem is that when slaves to sin spiral down into the civic slavery that is their natural civic condition, their masters will also be slaves to sin, albeit usually somewhat shrewder — at least for a short while. At some point the whole thing blows up for everybody, but the bottom line is that sin is the fundamental set of chains. You cannot hope to be enslaved by them, and yet be free in any sense that matters anywhere else.

Hayek, Friedman, and von Mises cannot keep people loving the freedom of markets any more than the wisest geologist who ever lived could have kept Cain from hitting Abel with that rock. Knowledge of the world is not the same thing as knowledge of the human heart.

Other foolish observers within the Christian tradition have seen that this is true, and concluded that the problem lies with Hayek, et al. “We need to have values other than free market values, etc.” This is to say that since sinners cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit, we need to haul out the chains of compassionate statism. Make ’em do compassionate stuff and everything. And at the top of this atrocious pile is someone with a brightly doctored O on their Froward bumper sticker. But that campaign theme just makes me think of Prov. 3:32, and I don’t know why Obama picked it.

There is no salvation without a savior, and Jesus is the only savior. And how will they hear without a preacher? What we need is the gospel, what we need is a reformation, what we need is revival.

But in the meantime, Christian statists need to stop telling us that since unbelievers cannot manifest love, joy, peace, patience, etc. in their lives, that this must mean that love, joy, peace, patience, etc. are optional. “Let’s work around not having them.” What kind of sense does that make? Preach the gospel. Free markets are a fruit of the gospel, and you cannot praise free markets without praising the work of the Holy Spirit of God.
Someone once said that real capitalism is easy to defend, but hard to praise. I understand where that sentiment comes from, but I want to lean against it, hard. Adam Smith’s invisible hand (whether he knew it or not) was and is the right hand of the Lord Jesus, and marvelous are all His works.

If we preach the gospel in power and truth, the result will be a free people. And when we have a free people, we will have free markets. Only a free people will be able to trust the hand of God in their financial affairs and market choices, which is what the free market is — people trusting God. That is the only way we can have free markets for any length of time.

What we have now, crony capitalism, or what I call crapitalism, is how sinners try to cheat the system. But you don’t blame football when someone cheats at football. You don’t blame math when people get their sums wrong. You don’t blame gravity when you trip and fall on your nose. Or at least you shouldn’t.

Every form of Christian statism, regardless of how it is packaged and sold, is a sly attempt to arrange for the cheaters to be given control of the game. And the only way we can stop that — you guessed it — is to preach Christ crucified and risen.

How Did that Stimulus Work Out?

False Messiahs Struck Down Yet Again

Unbelievers are always looking for messianic saviours.  Rejecting the Messiah of God, the Lord Jesus Christ they frantically cast around for a substitute.  Then when times get tough, the demand can rise to the level of panic.  Almost inevitably–virtually without exception–the saviour is some organ or act of government.  Funny that.   “In government we trust” is the religious mania of the day. 

When the United States led us into the global financial crisis the people bowed and prayed for a saviour they had made.  Enter the Federal Government.  It would expropriate an extra one trillion dollars of its citizen’s money which it did not have (“no worries, mate–we will borrow it so your children and grandchildren can pay it off”).  It would then spend this borrowed money on grand schemes to create lots and lots of  jobs. 

The problem is that in God’s world, that is, the real world, false saviours get exploded and struck down.
The Living God is a jealous God and will not tolerate idols and pretenders in His presence and in His world.  Not only has the Big Spend Up failed, it has left the US worse off than before.  This from Michelle Malkin who reports on an ex-post analysis by an economist at the Ohio State University:

The Democrats’ trillion-dollar “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” however, keeps piling up waste, failure, fraud and debt. Who benefited most? Big government cronies. 

According to Investor’s Business Daily this week, a new analysis by Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that “(m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by President Obama’s economic stimulus in the first year were in government.”

Dupor and another colleague had earlier concluded that the porkulus was a predictable jobs-killer that crowded out non-government jobs with make-work public jobs and programs. Indeed, the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.” . . . 

Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider.  Remember: Obama’s Ivy League eggheads behind the stimulus promised that “(m)ore than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.” These are the same feckless economic advisers who infamously vowed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent — and that unemployment would drop below 6 percent sometime this year.

The Uber Parent

 Beware Government “Help”

New Zealand, we are told,  has a high incidence of child abuse.  It was, therefore, entirely predictable that eventually the government would move to establish a national database of children of some sort.  The governmental authorities have a demonstrated record of incompetence in the area.  A most frequent failing is the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.  Too many children being “helped” by too many government agencies who are unaware of what others agencies are doing.

To address the “information gap” the Minister of Social Development is proposing a national database of at risk kids be set up.  It is estimated that 30,000 children will eventually be on electronic record.

Whenever Big Brother proposes something like this the issue of official abuse percolates to the surface.
  We have lots of databases about people in New Zealand.  We also have plenty of incidents of abuse and misuse by people authorised to access such databases.  Will the checks and balances be sufficiently robust and real to disincline abusers of the new proposed system?

We have been told that there will be protections such as access by passwords and monitoring of use.  That is positive.  What, however, will be the sanctions if someone accesses another person’s record in bad faith?  The only credible sanction is instant suspension leading to dismissal (if misuse is proven) and initiation of  procedures to strike off professional registers if found guilty of misuse.  If such sanctions are not up front in large typeface, we predict that abuse will occur–probably on a regular basis.

Private corporations which maintain lots of personal data about clients (such as banks) have extremely strict codes of conduct about staff access and use of client information.  Penalties are usually summary.  Everyone knows the score.   Banks employ investigative staff to monitor employee behaviour and access of client information.  Consequently, compliance is high.

Will the state set up similar compliance regimes for those accessing the at risk kids database?  We hope so.  We also expect to be disappointed.  As reported in the NZ Herald, the whole project at first glance appears to be too big, too broad, with too many government agencies and quango staff given access:

Teachers, doctors, community organisations, Child, Youth and Family workers and others will have access to the database and be able to add to individual children’s records. High-risk adults will also be added to the database so they can be tracked and an alert given if a child moves into their household.

Parents and caregivers will be “profiled”–which is a bit embarrassing since profiling is not PC is lots of quarters:

A “risk assessment tool” developed at the University of Auckland will identify the most vulnerable children based on data in this system such as previous findings of abuse or neglect, behavioural problems, single-parent families, parental ages and education, intervals between babies and multiple-birth children.

Such tools are always blunt and crude.  To be fair and just they need qualification and review; checks and balances are essential.  That leads to the second major problem–secrecy and lack of informed consent.

Social workers will be able to log information into a new centralised system described as “not a new database on children but a mechanism for extracting and combining relevant information on children (and their caregivers) from existing databases”.  “Information will only be pulled into the platform when a child reaches a certain threshold of concern,” the documents say.

Parents will not be told if their children are being put on the database and when they are “pulled on to the platform”.  This is unconscionable.  Apparently, parents can find out only by requesting the records under the Privacy Act, after their children have been put on the database.  But this would potentially be open to abuse of the worst kind by overzealous do-gooders.  If there were a protocol which required that parents or caregivers be notified when a child is being first put on the database it would help stop casual expansion of the records without due process.  And why ought not parents be informed?  If they are neglectful informing them would put the parents on notice.  The idea of a semi-secret database able to accessed by thousands of government and quango and private sector functionaries without notice is a scary thought.

Without doubt one unintended consequence will be a further weakening of the institution of the family.  Take, for example, the issue of parental discipline.  There are many parents now who fear to speak out against the current stupid, inconsistent and draconian practice for fear they would fall under the attention of Nazi-like government bureaucrats who are authorised to operate on a “guilty until proven innocent” mode, with the first intervention and sanction being the removal of children from the home.

Now another sanction will loom: if  you come to the attention of the authorities you risk your children being put on a national snooping database which identifies them as being at risk because you happen to be their parents.

As soon as a child is entered on the database you, the parents, are suspected of nascent child neglect and abuse–by definition.  Imagine your child falling down and breaking an arm.  You take them to the doctor who looks the child up on the “at risk child” database and you are identified as someone who puts their own children at risk.  Suddenly the broken arm can be seen as probable evidence of child abuse–and so it goes on.  The child protection agency may be called.  Would they be waiting for you when you return from the doctor’s.  Would they demand access to the home to ensure that your child is not being abused by you, the suspect parent.  Will there be protections against such abuse, misuse, overreach, and browbeating?  We doubt it.

Ironically, the extensive consultation has apparently made it clear to the government that the draconian approach used by CYFS has proved counter productive.

CYFS already refers less urgent cases to community social services, but many people are scared to ring CYFS because of its statutory power to take children off parents judged to be abusive or neglectful.

No surprises there.

Thirdly, if your children are put on the database, what will be the procedures and protocols for getting them removed?  We expect there aren’t any, or if there are they will be so difficult and costly to apply and action that they will be beyond the reach of any but the wealthy.

Fourthly, expect this database and intervention approach to produce a mammoth new initiative in government bureaucrats planning for your lives.  Each child “on the platform” will have a plan developed by the government for it and its parents or caregivers.

Each child and family referred to these teams will have a “whole-of-child” assessment of their physical and mental health, safety, housing and other material needs, cultural wellbeing, caregiving, family relationships and support systems, behaviour, learning and development. . . .

Regional directors will ensure that each vulnerable child has a “lead professional” who will be “responsible for developing a plan and ensuring the plan stays on track and is delivered” by all the agencies involved.

So, if you get on the list the implication here is that you will be showered with state help and state intervention all co-ordinated by your personal “plan”.  There will doubtless be thousands upon thousands of parents and caregivers who will do all they can to get on that database.  The prospect of more government help is a huge driver of behaviour.  Within a nano-second the underground network will be buzzing about the best ways to get on the list in order to get more help and money.  A bit more neglect of your children would do the trick quite nicely.

Such initiatives are always well meaning.  The actual outcome and the real-life fruits are often as bad or even worse than the problems they ostensibly seek to address.  Be warned.

Orwellian Newspeak in France

 “Father” and “Mother” To Be Expunged

We have published comment recently on the wider, deeper implications of homosexual “marriage”.  The argument was that when a society recognises two things follow: the state intrudes into and regulates more and more of human activity, trying to make it conform to its degenerate, regressive, secular religion; and secondly, the family and its structural relationships face a full frontal assault. 

Now, as if  to illustrate the point, France has announced that it is moving to “Orwellise” the national language and discourse about families–all as a result of legalising homosexual “marriage”.  This from The Telegraph:

France set to ban the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from official documents

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.

France’s Justice Minister Christiane Taubira

The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word “parents” would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples. The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender”. It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”. The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told France’s Catholic newspaper La Croix: “Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child’s development?” 

Who is to say, indeed?  The government will say, that’s inevitable.  The government is going to step in as uber parent, assuming the role of ultimate father and mother of all children.  The Justice Minister adds:

“What is certain is that the interest of the child is a major preoccupation for the government.” 

 The head of the French Catholic Church Cardinal Philippe Barbarin warned followers last week that gay marriage could lead to legalised incest and polygamy in society. He told the Christian’s RFC radio station: “Gay marriage would herald a complete breakdown in society.”This could have innumerable consequences. Afterward they will want to create couples with three or four members. And after that, perhaps one day the taboo of incest will fall.” 

So there is the nexus of the connection on display.  To legalise homosexual “marriage” the family must be redefined.  Parenting becomes gender irrelevant.  Roles recognised in law for centuries, such as the role of father and mother are to be wiped away and no longer recognised by law.  Parenting alone remains, which has no reference to gender.  The hubris and pretensions are Napoleonic in their scope and folly.

Since homosexuals cannot reproduce they must seek children for parenting from others.  In their quest they will now look to the state to reify their desires.  Children will have to be granted them by law, since nature will not.  Natural parents will no longer have pre-emptive and higher rights with respect to their children.  The state will not arrogate to itself a higher right.  The rights of natural fathers and mothers are to be no longer recognised in law–which is fine until someone else–a homosexual–makes a claim for their children.  Only the rights of parents remain–and “parent” has nothing to do with who bore the child, or the genetic heritage of the child. Children are to be made conquest trophies on the altar of perverted adult sexual passions.

Leading French Catholics have also published a ‘Prayer for France’, which says: “Children should not be subjected to adults’ desires and conflicts, so they can fully benefit from the love of their mother and father.”  And Pope Benedict XVI invited 30 French bishops to Italy to urge them to fight against the new law. He told them: “We have there a true challenge to take on.  The family that is the foundation of social life is threatened in many places, following a concept of human nature that has proven defective.” President Francois Hollande pledged in his manifesto to legalise gay marriage. The draft law will be presented to his cabinet for approval on October 31.

This revolutionary madness–long a French tradition of course–will fail.  But in the process it will refine and purify the Church.  It will eventually lead to the reassertion of the truth about marriage and family.  It will reawaken interest in the Gospel and the reign of the Lord.  It will also mean much pain and suffering as people learn what it means when God gives a nation or a culture up to its own madness. 

When Christians pray, “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done upon earth as in heaven” this humbling, purifying, winnowing work is what we seek. 

Letter From France (About Homosexual Marriage)

Bruce Logan: Same-sex marriage threatens civil liberty

NZ Herald
Wednesday Aug 29, 2012
Bruce Logan is a former Auckland schoolteacher now living in France.

Same sex marriage is not an issue of equality nor the success of any couple’s marriage. It is not about the value or validity of homosexuality. The issue is about the link between the state and marriage in civil society. Who decides what marriage is and what it’s for?

Marriage is neither essentially religious nor a product of tradition. It is not the child of the state. Neither is marriage what Lynne Featherstone the British Equalities Minister claims. “Marriage is a right of passage for couples who want to show they are in a committed relationship, for people who want to show they have found love and wish to remain together until death do them part.” Her historical vision is limited; her logic is deficient and her fusion of the Anglican Prayer Book with modern idiom disingenuous.

Marriage is the consequence of who we are.
We do not make it; it makes us. Marriage would not exist if there were not two complementary sexes. And that’s why it does exist.  We are male and female. In the simple and hopeful business of being alive we have children in a union of consenting responsibility, love and thankfulness.  It is the fusing of two opposite halves of the human being through which new life may be created.  That some couples decide not to get married does not change the biology. That some cannot have children or decide not to is beside the point.

The so-called conservative case for same-sex marriage favoured by the British Prime Minister (and apparently by our own Prime Minister) tumbles out of a category error. “Marriage is a good thing. It stabilises the lives of those who participate; especially men. Therefore they should be able to marry each other if they are committed.” 

But as soon as same-sex marriage is granted, marriage has been changed to something profoundly different; from an institution prior to the state to one determined by the state.  Of course the state has had regulations around marriage for a very long time. But with the advent of same-sex marriage we have given the state a role it never had.  If the state defines marriage the family is no longer an independent institution of civil society declaring daily to the state its limitations. While we are a long way from Stalinism in New Zealand this was the kind of power Stalin wanted.

If the state passes a law that changes the nature of marriage, and consequently family, then every citizen’s liberty is endangered. Why? That area of most intimate human life that was once outside the power of the state to control will be watered down. In becoming the author of marriage the state must eventually erode religious freedom and then freedom of speech.

The ‘new marriage’ will become an institution that the state must enforce. Any exemption given initially to the church will be temporary and dependent only on threatened moral sensitivities. It will not be enough for the church to be good or even right when all the social forces are moving against it. 

Human rights were once seen as a cornerstone of liberty because they were the consequence of a free society aware of state limits. They protected the independent spheres of authority in civil society (marriage, family and religion and others).  If marriage becomes what the state determines citizens will no longer have any legal, or ultimately moral framework independent of the state to argue their case about family form.  Families will become what the state decides. In France this is probably the pivotal constitutional issue around which the same sex marriage debate spins.

It is doubtful there is any society known to history or anthropology where social order has not been based on marriage between a man and a woman.  It has always been an historical and universal understanding of a binding contract to enhance social order and encourage responsible child care. Societies that fail to understand this devalue their children. We should know that. We have plenty of evidence.

We have never had such a plethora of data pointing out the fundamental economic, social and psychological benefits of vigorous and enduring married families. Marriage is pivotal to intergenerational order. Without it we have a shambles and increasing poverty.

Cannibalism Alive and Well Amongst the Left

Succeeding to Self-Destruction

A few commentators have called attention to the bare-knuckle contest underway in Australia.  Sections of the Labour Party have decided that their coalition partner, the Greens are the enemy.

Labour has gone into a governing coalition with the Greens.  In order to maintain the coalition, Labour has had to cede policy leadership to the Greens.  Extremist policies have been pushed through that are out of kilter with the wider, broader electorate.  Upshot: Labour has plummeted in the polls.  As things stand it is facing electoral decimation next year.

There is a reflexive kinship between Labour and Green political parties.  We see the same thing working in New Zealand.  Both Greens and Labour belong to the same ideological world-view.  The Greens just happen to be more consistent.

Defining Moments

The Peace of Augsburg and Its Aftermath

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) proved to be an archimedean point in the subsequent development of Western Europe.  It institutionalised the principle of state religious establishment.  The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, tenuous heir to the empire of  Charlemagne (the First Reich), was trying to exert control over the various principalities and powers in his dominion.  A number of religious wars resulted–ending in the Peace of Augsburg which established in imperial law the principle that the “faith of the prince is the faith of the people”.

So it came about that North-West Europe was divided into either Lutheran or Roman Catholic fiefdoms and principalities.  But the Christian faith cannot prosper in a religious establishment where both Church and personal Christian faith is established by the civil state. Christ alone is Head of the Church and Lord of the conscience.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Three Coyotes and a Sheep 

Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 03 July 2012

When I say that the Bible requires limited government — because a claim to unlimited government by mortals is a spurious claim to Deity — I do not mean that Christians may not find themselves living under despotic regimes from time to time. Our understanding of these things (given by grace) does not automatically transfer to those despots who do not know and understand that God is the only God.

What I do mean to say is that believers and despots are always, necessarily, on a collision course.

Letter From America

Idiots Aplenty

Science Demands Big Government
A Harvard biologist makes a silly, dangerous comment.

 

By Dennis Prager

National Review Online  

June 12, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Harvard professor Daniel E. Lieberman

The quotation of the week goes to Harvard professor Daniel E. Lieberman, for a statement he made in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Mr. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology, was among those who publicly defended New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to ban the sale of sugared soft drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. And he did so using, of all things, evolution.

Now, we all know that humans have always needed — or evolved to need — carbohydrates for energy. So how could evolution argue for Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on sugar, a pure carbohydrate? “We have evolved,” the professor concluded his piece, “to need coercion.”

In order to understand both how silly and how dangerous this comment is, one must first understand the role evolutionary explanations play in academic life — and in left-wing life generally. The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior. It was originally economics. Man was Homo economicus. Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one’s moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

Recently, however, the economic explanation for human behavior has lost some of its appeal. Even many liberal professors and editorial writers have had to grapple with the “surprising” fact that violent crime has declined, not increased, in the current recession. In the words of Scientific American, “Homo economicus is extinct.”

But the biggest reason for the declining popularity of economic man is that science has displaced economics — which is not widely regarded as a science — as the Left’s real religion. Increasingly, therefore, something held to be indisputably scientific — evolution — is offered as the Left’s explanation for virtually everything.

Evolution explains love, altruism, morality, economic behavior, God, religion, intelligence. Indeed, it explains everything but music. For some reason, the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

Now, along comes Professor Lieberman not merely to use evolution to explain human behavior, but to justify coercive left-wing social policy. In other words, not only is the Left progressive when it coerces citizens to act in ways the Left deems appropriate, science itself — through evolution — inexorably leads to government coercion on behalf of such policies. Whereas until now the democratic Left has attempted to persuade humanity that left-wing policies are inherently progressive, this Harvard professor has gone a huge step farther. Left-wing policies are scientifically based.

This is exactly how the Soviet Communists defended their totalitarian system. Everything they advocated was naoochni, “scientific.” To differ with the Left is not only definitionally sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and bigoted (SIXHIRB, as I have labeled it) — it is now against science itself.

Those who oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s law in the name of liberty are therefore missing the point. Not only does another left-wing god — health — demand government coercion, so does evolution itself. Those Americans who place liberty above other considerations and oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to ban large sodas might as well argue against the Earth’s tilt because they don’t like winter. That is the logical upshot of Professor Lieberman’s position.

But there is an even more foolish and dangerous upshot to “we have evolved to need coercion.” If we take this claim seriously and use evolution to guide social policy, little that is truly decent will survive. Is there anything less prescribed by evolution than, let us say, hospices? Professor Lieberman writes that humans have evolved to cooperate with one another. But he cannot deny that the basic evolutionary proposition is survival of the fittest. How, then, can an evolutionary perspective demand the expending of energy and resources to take care of those who are dying?

And if evolution demands the survival of the species, wouldn’t evolution call for other “coercion” — against abortion, for example? Which all proves that what the professor really means to say — and more and more college graduates will be taught — is this: “We have evolved to vote Democrat.”

 — Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated columnist and radio talk-show host.

In Government We Trust

Puncture Wounds

Bureaucracies, it is universally believed, are costly, inefficient boondoggles.  Nevertheless, hope does spring eternal in the human breast.  Equally universal is the belief that a bureaucracy can be reformed, made better.  A tweak here, a personnel change there, a reform or two and hey presto, a new bright shiny efficient common-sense bureaucracy will emerge. 

We believe the idiocy of bureaucracy is an inevitable result when governments exceed the mandate given them by the Almighty.  Breaking divinely appointed bounds inevitably means that bad consequences will follow.  Costly, inefficient, stupid boondoggles are the consequence of expansionist government. 

New Zealand has a socialist accident compensation system.
  All accidents are paid for by the state–that is, the taxpayer.  This requires that the government regulate and administer the funding, the treatment, and the rehabilitation of everyone who suffers an accident.  It is a no-fault system, so one can be suffer an accident as a result of extremely foolish behaviour–but the government pays out.  No questions asked. 

Socialist zealots tell us that our Accident Compensation system is the best in the world.  It is pretty close to nirvana.  Its “glory” is that it is universal.  Everyone gets compensated.  Everyone gets treated. 

But if you peel back the bedcovers, beneath lies a putrid mess.  A bureaucratic mess.  An inevitable bureaucratic mess.  When civil government sets out to get bigger than the Almighty, bad consequences follow. 

Here is a little expose in the NZ Herald. 

A grazed knee, insect bites, a splinter in a finger – the Accident Compensation Corporation is paying out for the most minor of injuries, even if parents don’t ask for it.  While ACC is required by law to cover all physical injuries resulting from an accident, some Herald readers have been startled to find out what has been deemed worthy of taxpayers’ money.  In many cases, claims are not lodged by claimants, but by doctors who must ensure the paper trail starts on the right track should an injury worsen.

ACC has assigned case managers to a 4-year-old who went to the doctor to have a splinter removed from an infected finger, and a 3-year-old who was bitten by insects. Another woman, who asked not to be named, received a letter from ACC after her 17-year-old daughter scraped her knees at Auckland’s Macleans College. The school nurse gave her a couple of bandages – and lodged a claim with ACC. “The people cost involved in doing all of that,” the mother said. “For a plaster … I don’t think we will be requiring any follow-up treatment at the taxpayer’s expense.  How many stubbed toes can you put through, just in case one day it turns out to be something?”

Clearly there is something wrong here.  The ACC needs reforming.  Get rid of the stupid wasteful bureaucratic idiots running the system.  Not so fast.

But ACC, doctors and schools say that although such bureaucracy can seem over the top, lodging a claim creates an essential paper trail should an injury worsen.  Secondary Principals’ Association president Patrick Walsh said schools reported all injuries to ACC after being stung for not doing so.

“The classic examples are sprained ankles … it gets treated, no ACC form is filled out and subsequently you find out there is quite a serious fracture in the ankle.  “It requires extensive and expensive treatment. And then you get the parents wanting the original form … and the doctors, and ACC.”

What is over the top is the attempt by civil government to take over the role of God Himself and become the one who providentially superintends and takes care of mankind.  When perverse statists attempt such a utopian project, bad consequences follow.  Inevitably. 

But Aucklander Gillian Richards said she was still bemused her 4-year-old son Daniel has an ACC file after going to the doctor to have a splinter removed from his finger which had become infected.  “It just seemed a bit over the top. He’s in a kindergarten, and every scraped knee and banged elbow is documented, and we get a letter at home.”

Alasdair McIntosh said he and his wife were baffled when they received a letter from ACC early this month saying their 3-year-old daughter Danielle’s injury was covered.  “The wife and I are looking at each other going, ‘What injury has she had?”‘  Mr McIntosh phoned ACC, and was told his daughter’s injuries were insect bites for which the family doctor had prescribed an ointment after a visit last month.  “We sort of laughed about because insect bites hardly rate as an accident …”

 Oh, no.  Insect bites are serious accidents.  Why?  Well, they are wounds.  All it takes is for one to go septic and forever after the treatment of all insect bites falls under the providential care of the divinised state. 

An ACC spokesman said because insect bites were classified as “puncture wounds” they were deemed an injury.

Insect bites a “puncture wound”.  Such idiocy is inevitable when civil governments rebel against the Living God and overreach themselves.  Rebellion against God has inevitable consequences–bad consequences.  Idiotic, inept bureaucracy is one of them. 

Stories Society Tells Itself

Christendom’s Blood

A dominant narrative, propagated by secular humanists and the Commentariat, is that the historical Christian church has been a notoriously bloody institution.  Moreover, it took the Age of Enlightenment to push the church back into cultural irrelevance so that the blood-letting would stop.

Swirls of cynicism should be layered upon this narrative, since it was the Enlightenment’s Voltaire himself who declaimed history as “a trick the living play upon the dead”.  In other words, modern narratives of the past inevitably serve the end of contemporary propaganda.  It’s how one becomes accredited and a celebrated historian after all.It’s for this reason, since we live in a world dominated by the Modern and Post-Modern Commentariat, that we tend to have a more-then-passing interest in iconoclastic historians that challenge the prevailing narratives of our day.

Clearly there have been times in the history of the West where the Christian church was guilty of shedding blood, bearing the power of the sword illegitimately and evilly.  But the question begged is whether such behaviour was characteristic or uncharacteristic, intrinsic to the history of the Christian church or an aberration.

David Bentley Hart argues that whilst such blood-letting did occur at the hands of the church, it was uncharacteristic.  It only occurred at such times as when the state, civil governments, were increasing and centralising their power.

It was perfectly natural for pagan Roman society to regard piety toward the gods and loyalty of the empire as essentially inseparable, and for Roman courts to institute extraordinary inquisitions and to execute atheists as traitors.  But when, in 385, a Roman emperor (or pretender, really) executed the Spanish bishop Priscillian for heresy, Christians as eminent as St. Martin of Tour and St. Ambrose of Milan protested, recognizing in such an act the triumph of a pagan value and of a special kind of pagan brutality; and none of the church fathers ever promoted or approved of such measures. 

During the so-called Dark Ages, in fact, the only penalty for obdurate heresy was excommunication.  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however–when the liaison between the church and temporal power was unbreakable, and the papacy was a state unto itself, and the Holy Roman Empire was asserting its claims to the prerogatives of the old imperial order . . . heresy once again became a capital crime throughout Western Europe.  To its credit, perhaps, the (Roman) Catholic Church did not actually lead the way in this matter . . . . To its everlasting discredit, however, the church did soon follow the fashion.  When the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) passed laws dictating the surrender of all convicted heretics to the secular arm, for burning at the stake, the institutional church’s compliance was encumbered by no obvious signs of unquiet conscience. . . .

The long history of Christendom . . . . has also been a history of a constant struggle between the power of the gospel to alter and shape society and the power of the state to absorb every useful institution unto itself. . . . (W)e see that violence increased in proportion to the degree of sovereignty claimed by the state, and that whenever the medieval church surrendered moral authority to secular power, injustice and cruelty flourished.

We also find that early medieval society, for all its privations, inequities, and deficiencies, was in most ways far more just, charitable, and (ultimately) peaceful than the imperial culture it succeeded, and, immeasurably more peaceful and even more charitable . . . than the society created by the early modern triumph of the nation state.  David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 86ff.

Letter From America

The Church of Obama

The president his issued his own Act of Supremacy.
February 11, 2012 5:00
By Mark Steyn

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’s edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

Welcome to Obamacare.

The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of “women’s health,” their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain, and amend their heresies. One wouldn’t wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs’ ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-à-vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where’d all the pandering get them? In essence President Obama has embarked on the same usurpation of church authority as Henry VIII: As his Friday morning faux-compromise confirms, the continued existence of a “faith-based institution” depends on submission to the doctrinal supremacy of the state.

“We will soon learn,” wrote Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “just how much faith is left in faith-based institutions.” Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s vicar on earth, has sportingly offered to maintain religious liberty for those institutions engaged in explicit religious instruction to a largely believing clientele. So we’re not talking about mandatory condom dispensers next to the pulpit at St. Pat’s — not yet.

But that is not what it means to be a Christian: The mission of a Catholic hospital is to minister to the sick. When a guy shows up in Emergency bleeding all over the floor, the nurse does not first establish whether he is Episcopalian or Muslim; when an indigent is in line at the soup kitchen the volunteer does not pause the ladle until she has determined whether he is a card-carrying papist. The government has redefined religion as equivalent to your Sunday best: You can take it out for an hour to go to church, but you gotta mothball it in the closet the rest of the week. So Catholic institutions cannot comply with Commissar Sebelius and still be in any meaningful sense Catholic.

If you’re an atheist or one of America’s ever more lapsed Catholics, you’re probably shrugging: What’s the big deal? But the new Act of Supremacy doesn’t stop with religious institutions. As Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, put it: “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by this mandate.” And so would any of his burrito boys who object to being forced to make “health care” arrangements at odds with their conscience.

None of this should come as a surprise. As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator two years ago, the Obamacare bill contained 700 references to the secretary “shall,” another 200 to the secretary “may,” and 139 to the secretary “determines.” So the secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants, as the Obamaphile rubes among the Catholic hierarchy are belatedly discovering. His Majesty King Barack “shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities whatsoever they be.” In my latest book, I cite my personal favorite among the epic sweep of Commissar Sebelius’s jurisdictional authority:

“The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.”
Before Obama’s Act of Supremacy did the English language ever have need for such a phrase? “Tooth-level surveillance”: from the Declaration of Independence to dentured servitude in a mere quarter-millennium.
Henry VIII lacked the technological wherewithal to conduct tooth-level surveillance. In my friskier days, I dated a girl from an eminent English Catholic family whose ancestral home, like many of the period, had a priest’s hiding hole built into the wall behind an upstairs fireplace. These were a last desperate refuge for clerics who declined to subordinate their conscience to state authority. In my time, we liked to go in there and make out. Bit of a squeeze, but it all adds to the fun — as long as you don’t have to spend weeks, months, and years back there. In an age of tooth-level surveillance, tyranny is subtler, incremental but eminently enforceable: regulatory penalties, denial of licenses, frozen bank accounts. Will the Church muster the will to resist? Or (as Archbishop Dolan’s pitifully naïve remarks suggest) will this merely be one more faint bleat lost in what Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith?

In England, those who dissented from the strictures of the state church came to be known as Nonconformists. That’s a good way of looking at it: The English Parliament passed various “Acts of Uniformity.” Why?

Because they could. Obamacare, which governmentalizes one-sixth of the U.S. economy and micro-regulates both body and conscience, is the ultimate Act of Uniformity. Is there anyone who needs contraception who can’t get it? Taxpayers give half a billion dollars to Planned Parenthood, who shovel out IUDs like aspirin. Colleges hand out free condoms, and the Washington Post quotes middle-aged student “T Squalls, 30” approving his university’s decision to upgrade to the Trojan “super-size Magnum.”

But there’s still one or two Nonconformists out there, and they have to be forced into ideological compliance. “Maybe the Founders were wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First Amendment,” Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post offered to Chris Matthews on MSNBC. At the National Press Club, young Catholics argued that the overwhelming majority of their coreligionists disregard the Church’s teachings on contraception, so let’s bring the vox Dei into alignment with the vox populi. Get with the program, get with the Act of Uniformity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: First, other pillars of civil society are crowded out of the public space; then, the individual gets crowded out, even in his most private, tooth-level space. President Obama, Commissar Sebelius, and many others believe in one-size-fits-all national government — uniformity, conformity, supremacy from Maine to Hawaii, for all but favored cronies. It is a doomed experiment — and on the morning after it will take a lot more than a morning-after pill to make it all go away.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Selling Our Souls Down the River

State Control of Stools and Urine

The electronic communication zone is running hot over some inane comments by some “researchers in public health”.  These illuminati were interviewed on national radio and had the temerity to utter the following inanity:

Obesity, she said, was “not a problem with individual choice and self-discipline, which we’ve proved successfully doesn’t work”.  Instead it’s the fault of “big institutions and the market”.

Most of the criticism rightly points out that for 99 percent of the obese population their condition is caused by three things–what they ingest, how much, and what is not done to burn the calories off.  It is a completely self-inflicted condition.  Quite right.
  Naturally, the “researchers in public health”  have alternative predictable solutions: more rules, regulations, restriction, and government controls over what you eat.  In the end, the government will have to ration our food and ban lots of nasty things.  We will end up clinging to Mother’s skirts in a perpetual, malingering second childhood. 

Naturally enough this sort of nannying (incidentally, both researchers are females) is offensive.  At this point in history most New Zealanders resent a government telling them how to act, what to think, and above all, what to eat.  Sadly almost no-one amongst the objectors is prepared to acknowledge that the fight was lost almost eighty years ago. 

When our forebears, in their myopic wisdom, decided that government had a duty to provide state funded health-care, and voted for politicians who would give them their lusts,  it was all over, rover.  For, as a perceptive sage pointed out, if you cede to government the duty and responsibility to take care of your health, you have implicitly given over total control of  your physical being.  A government that is responsible for your healthcare, is responsible for your health, period; such a government will inevitably extend its reach to control what you eat and what is allowed to come out the rear end–and how often. 

It will all be done under the cloak of cost containment, of course.  We have got to control what people eat, because if we don’t the rampant costs of treating the obesity epidemic will squash us all flat.  It’s a matter of survival of our species as we know it.  Toss in a dose of guilt and another generous helping of pious pity and who can resist–with principled consistency, that is?

Most of those railing against the two nannies who “research” public health do so with a fair dose of inconsistent hypocrisy.  We do not doubt that these objectors would at the same time argue for the reasonableness of a publicly funded health system per se.  Getting rid of the entire nannying edifice would be as offensive to them as the stupid observations of our elite health researchers.

We repeat: if you are going to look to government to fund your doctors’ visits, health procedures, subsidize your medicine, and provide you with hospitals you have already, in principle, ceded to the state control over your body.  Such a Leviathan will eventually move to control the food you ingest, the air that you breathe, the hours you must sleep, the length and temperature of your showers, and the “quality” of your stools and urine.

Whilst we remain gratified that there are still people in this country who will stand up to intrusive government controls, another part of us want to say, “Stop your whining.  You sold your souls to the Devil a long, long time ago.  Now Old Nick has come to collect.”   

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Just Me Being Silly

Culture and Politics – A Second Battle of Tours
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, December 15, 2011

[We have often observed that most of the worst egregious statist overreaches ever inflicted upon  New Zealand have come from the National Party–the “right of centre” party.  Think Occupational Health and Safety, Resource Management Act, Children and Young Persons Service, and the Emissions Trading Scheme.  Partisan fools are somehow less aggrieved when “our people” are the ones putting us under the cosh.  This betrayal and folly is not restricted to New Zealand.  Doug Wilson reflects on just such a stupid move by Republicans in the United States. Ed.]

Yesterday the House approved the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Senate is likely to do the same today. There is a possibility that the president will sign it, but he might veto it, and things have come to a pretty pass when I am hoping that Obama will protect us from the Republicans.

What the bill does is grant the government indefinite detention powers over someone accused of terrorist activity, even if that person is an American citizen and the whole thing went down on American soil. Correction — we know the accused is an American citizen. What we don’t know is whether anything actually went down on American soil. All we have is the government’s word that it did, and on the strength of that word, somebody can be whisked away, locked up, and nobody needs to prove anything. Ever.

Now let me be reasonable here. I understand the tangled legal issues when an American citizen heads over to Yemen in order to start his DeathtotheGreatSatan.com. I understand the legal issues when an American tries to light the fuse on his sneakers mid-flight while yelling inspirational phrases from the Koran. I get the fact that there is a difference between true enemy combatants and a shoplifter at the mall. So I do believe that the libertarians falsely underestimate the threat that bona fide Islamic terrorism poses to us.

But I do not believe that the libertarians underestimate the threat that our overweening government represents to us. Scale of 1 to 10, how concerned am I that Muslim terrorists are going to successfully do something really bad to me or to my family? Oh, 1 or 2. Same scale, how concerned am I that the federal government is going to do something really bad to me or to my family? More like a 6 or 7, and I am not counting the bad things they are engaged in doing right this minute.

Surely the government will use this power responsibly and wisely, right? Right . . . who would oversee this whole thing? What department would be responsible? Ah . . . the same guys who came up with Fast and Furious? No problem then. I drop my objections. I can see now that I was just being silly.