On Fairness, Equality, and Father Christmas

Snow now covers the mountains around me, my Christmas tree gleams and sparkles, and eleven stockings hang expectantly up my staircase. I’ve been knitting and sewing and shopping, trying to find fun and suitable gifts for everyone. I try my best to be fair, but that’s a tall order. Despite old lump-of-coal traditions, I believe Christmas is a time to commemorate God’s gifts to us.

In fact, twice each year we celebrate the overwhelming fairness of God – at Christmas when we remember His grace in sending His son into this fallen and hopeless world and at Easter when we celebrate the resurrection and its signal that all our debt has been paid.  Such amazing justice – by one man all sin came into the world, and by one man all sin can be forgiven. It doesn’t get much fairer than that.

(Though we must also remember that what happened to Jesus Christ on that fateful Passover was not fair; He was perfect, yet He went to the cross and took the punishment that was ours – the greatest unfairness ever buying the greatest grace ever – an odd and amazing balance.)

Fairness is a balancing act; we must weigh evidence, measure effort, make ourselves aware of mitigating circumstances, and erase all of our pre-conceived notions. Look at Lady Justice holding her scales high, insisting on perfect equilibrium. Of course, for God, perfect justice is possible because, in His omniscience, He has all the facts – He knows what happened in Benghazi; He knows how the Koch brothers and Warren Buffet acquired their wealth. He is as aware of motivations as He is of actions. We don’t have that luxury, so our fairness is never perfect.

And lately it’s been quite clear to me that we suffer from a national confusion about what fairness entails even in its simplest form. Amidst all the holiday excitement there lurks in my soul a terminal annoyance with the infantile drum beat about the successful and their “fair share.”  What does it mean to be fair?

Fairness is not equality.  Fairness has nothing to do with amounts. Only 5-year-olds think that. Picture a fat, trembling lower lip and crocodile tears, “Johnny got 5 and I only got 3. That’s not fair.” It’s not equal. It may be fair. Maybe Johnny worked longer or harder or is older. Fairness is connected to balance – we want to balance the work with the wage agreed upon, the crime with the appropriate punishment, the reward with the results. Equality is just a mathematical term and is, in its literal sense, only about numbers and things that can be counted – money, percentages, lollipops. When we conflate the two ideas we rob justice of its soul, reducing it to some merely material substance that can be stacked up and tallied. We use the term fairness sloppily when we make it about equality: we use the term equality dishonestly when we make it about race or gender or wealth. 

No Book in History

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“Why do you think the Bible is a good determiner of moral standards?” challenged one of my Facebook friends recently. That’s a surprising question for those of us who’ve been alive long enough to remember a culture that took the book at its word. We didn’t always follow the directions, but we saw that as our own error, not the Bible’s.  One of my most loved family members once explained his disdain for the Bible by pointing out that it was just written by a “bunch of old men 2,000 years ago” and therefore couldn’t possibly bear any relevance for today. Really?

Under these two objections lies the assumption that the nature of man is markedly improved, that we’ve got everything under control and no longer need to follow the instructions. I do function like that under some circumstances – I’ve been sewing for over half a century and rarely read the pattern instructions. I take a glance at a recipe and then I’m off on my own. I get the attitude. But there’s a big difference – the evidence shows that I need neither; I’m an excellent seamstress and a good cook, if I do say so myself.

But let’s look at the larger assumption – where can we find evidence that mankind has improved morally? Intellectually? Socially? We’re still having wars, torturing our enemies – now we even kill the innocent unborn. People still break their marriage vows, abuse their children, and steal from each other.  We continue to gossip, lie, and practice terminal arrogance. Nothing indicates that we’ve become good at being good.  Perhaps it’s time to ask for directions.

But why assume that this ancient book produced by a foreign culture and written in foreign, paleolithic languages would be of any help? Simple logic. Now, granted, if you have really bought into the idea that the universe is just a product of three kinds of nothing getting together and exploding, then the rational approach may not work for you. But if we start with the concept of God, the only useful explanation for our awareness of good and evil, then we can find answers to both concerns. Follow my thinking:

  

If God is good, fair, unchanging, rational, and truthful (read this as a 1^st class condition in the Greek – “and He is.”) and He made us and put us here, then He must

1)    have a reason, a purpose for doing so,

2)    have found a way to let us know what that is.

Wrath, Reality, and the Grace of God

 

I often have conversations in which my faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and in the Bible is either called into question, or treated like one of those quaint little idiosyncrasies old ladies are prone to. I’d like to speak to that.

 

Today we consider religious belief a kind of random selection made on the whim of personal preference, like choosing a flavor of ice cream. The attitude – the meme, if you must have trendy terminology – is that nothing non-material is real. Those in the fashionable “know” see the atheist as the brave realist able to look life in the eye and get on with his purposeless, short existence. But they see believers as poor weak souls L people who need to lean on a fairytale, and who will be barely, and condescendingly tolerated.

It occurs to few that a religious belief can be based on reality. I’m not sure most Christians even see their faith as based on fact, on history, on ontological truth, yet it is. In fact the Judeo-Christian worldview is the only world religion that can make that claim. Over and over again archeological information surfaces that bears out the accuracy of the biblical account (but that’s another post).

Because he is at the center of it all,  I begin with the historical actuality of a man named Jesus.

In fact, Jesus Christ, whose lineage can be traced back through David (king of Israel from 1010 to 970 B.C.) to, and beyond, Abraham ( 2^nd millennium B.C.) is more thoroughly documented as having been a real person than his contemporary Julius Caesar.  Not only do we have thousands of biblical manuscripts that attest to his existence, but we also have dozens of contemporaneous, extra-biblical sources that mention him – Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Thallas, Celsus, just to name a few. Many of these historians were antagonistic toward Christus and spoke ill of him, but no one thought he was a myth, and as they argued against the Christian claims, they inadvertently justified the biblical accounts.

From Now On

We knew he could win, would stop at nothing to win; a “level playing field” is for dreamers, it’s for politicians to use to buy votes. We are resigned, we biblical Christians, we who read history, we who understand economics. We are resigned.

You see, we know what is coming and I, for one, just want to get it over with – like having a root canal. We had one last thread of hope in this election, but deep in our bones we knew that the problem was much deeper than anything an election could solve. We knew that as long as our fellow Americans lack the integrity to see immorality as a problem, as long as they trust government rather than God, as long as life is just about how much you can scam from somebody else, then we are doomed. We know that it’s not possible to run a country on wishing, on lying. This is not pretend.

And we knew that we were fighting a dishonest, biased media and that we were working with a citizenry that has been systematically taught not to think, not to be curious, not to face facts, not to love this country. After more than a dozen years of institutionalized misinformation – both from our churches and our schools -- and a constant drivel of Hollywood/television propaganda, the resulting mass delusion is hard to overcome. We knew that. Hope, however, is always struggling up through the mire, and we occasionally indulged in imagining our friends and relatives waking some day, pre-election, slapping palm to furrowed brow, and saying, “Boy, was I an idiot! I understand now.” We hoped, but the lure of free phones evidently out-weighed the lure of truth.

And there will be hell to pay. I don’t mind my liberal friends gloating a bit right now. That will stop soon enough. Let them enjoy themselves while they still can for their fairytale is drawing to an ugly, witchy close, and we all need to brace ourselves.

What we will see now will be a mixture of economic inevitability and biblical prophecy.

Soon war will erupt in the Middle East. Israel will win. Of that I am sure, not just because the prophecies say so, but Israel has made it this far – a God-proving miracle in itself. She has made it back to her land, against all odds, just as the prophecies foretold, and she still has a huge part to play in the rest of human history. She’s not going anywhere yet.

What will happen to us in that war, I don’t know. According to Genesis 12:3 God has promised to “bless them that bless you and curse them that curse you.” So far that has proven true. If this war breaks out as soon as I think it will, and Obama is still in power, we will be in the “cursing” category, a place we’ve never been before and it won’t be pretty. Name a nation that has hurt Israel and you will be naming a nation that has met with mega disaster – from the plagues of Egypt, to the dead army of Sennacherib, to the defeat of the Spanish Armada it’s a terrifying picture. I don’t want to be in one of those shots, but it is coming.

Voting Blocks and the Nature of Man

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As vile as this election cycle has been, it has also been a blessing. Through hundreds of Facebook and e-mail conversations in the last year I’ve learned so much about what makes us all tick, and I want to thank all those friends (and those who aren’t anymore J) for the education they’ve provided me. It has been an adventure.

ΩΩΩ

November, always the toughest month, adds to its repertoire of general gloom and threatening winter by entertaining elections. This November will either make us or break us in ways no election has ever done before, however, I don’t see us dealing with the issues at hand very intelligently. For one thing pundits and politicians alike are analyzing the American voter in misleading and unrealistic terms. They have us all divided up into ridiculous groups of voters as if no individuals existed, as if America is no longer a country of real, unique people, as if our gender and our skin color somehow control the way we see this nation.

One true thing about human nature is that we work to make order out of chaos (evidence that we were created in God’s image) by categorizing ideas, things, people. “There are 2 kinds people: those who divide people into 2 groups and those who don’t.” OK, often I’m one of the ones who do, but I contend that very few folks avoid it altogether. And I contend that dividing people into groups has nothing to do with race, gender, ethnicity, or income. It has to do with temperament and worldview. The process tends to produce more of a venn diagram than it does an outline – too many overlaps, but this is how I’d arrange the voting blocks for this election:

v Me-voters – the hand-out people, the free birth-control gals, the gay marriage voters, the abortion folk, the pay-for-my-college people.  Some are just too young to know better, to understand that a government that will do those things for you will not stay solvent for long, and will use people’s dependence as an excuse to take their liberty. Me-voters are willing to part with freedom and to take freedom from others in order to fulfill whatever personal whims they harbor. Their ability to pursue a master’s degree in Tunisian carpet weaving and a life of promiscuous sex without having to earn the money to pay for either is more important than the safety of the nation, or the prosperity of anyone else.

Being Dead – or Not – That is the Question

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 “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”   

                                                                          Stage Manager, Our Town

                                                                          Thornton Wilder

                                                                                                                                                             

I am eternal – so are you. I don’t mean eternal in God’s way – no beginning and no end. We’re just creatures and we had a beginning.

I began in the hallway of the Catholic hospital in Norfolk, Nebraska. That’s where my soul met up with my body. My father was still in the Philippines – it was 1945 – and the nuns thought my mother was bringing a bastard into the world and treated her accordingly. She was still angry when she filled out the birth certificate – mad at being left in the breezeway to give birth, and mad because she had just received a letter from my dad demanding that she name me Deanna – no explanation. She had planned on Karin after my Danish great grandmother, so she took the anger out on my name, misspelling it on purpose. I’ve been correcting people about it for over 60 years --- 67 years, to be exact and the older I get the surer I am that the real me will always exist. I have evidence:

Some days my right hip feels like a gravel-filled mortar and pestle. My face leaks – eyes water, nose runs. I’m well aware that my occasional efforts with a box of Nice n’ Easy only covers the grey, not the wrinkles.  But, I don’t feel old.  Wise, sometimes cranky, but not old. I loved teaching in a high school because it never occurred to me that I wasn’t 17. It seemed perfectly natural that I’d never left 11^th grade. Some part of me hadn’t.

Shopping for God

-->“We live in a nation where we can believe anything we want to believe as long as we don’t actually think it’s true.” 

Ravi Zacharias

Our beloved and much attacked 1^st Amendment reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. That statement is the wisest, most remarkable statement ever made outside of Scripture, and it’s not very far outside -- its wisdom is extracted from the Word of God. Freedom of religious belief goes to the very heart of why human beings exist in the first place, without freedom to choose for or against God our purpose starts to crumble, and without purpose our society fractures and finally collapses.  Our Constitutional freedoms aren’t just for making life pleasant – they are to ensure that we can live purposeful, eternally productive lives.

This freedom allows us to make the most important decision any human ever gets to make unhindered by our government – only we ourselves are accountable, nothing else is in the way. This freedom allows us to make the most of every breath we take.

Unfortunately, America has misunderstood the 1^st Amendment. We’ve come to think that because the government doesn’t have any religious beliefs to force upon us, no one – not even God -- cares what we believe. We’ve even taken that supposition so far as to assume that therefore our God-view doesn’t matter and that all the available choices are 1) merely fairytales and we can cook up whatever stew of philosophies we want to –none of it is true anyway, so who cares? Or 2) all religions are equally true at the same time, which gets us back to point 1.

Christianity and the Facebook Crank

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I have a confession to make: I’ve been cranky on Facebook. Yes, it’s true. I am occasionally vociferous and curt with some of my really smart and adorable FB friends. Perhaps I’m growing tired of the 47%-of-Big-Bird nonsense. It is true that years ago a friend and colleague told me that I “didn’t suffer fools gladly.” She has since un-friended me; I guess she didn’t like it when she became one of the fools I didn’t suffer, but I suspect she was right.

In this most contentious election year one of the attitudes that I find the most off-putting and the most likely to stir up my ire is the allegation that Christians, since we’re supposed to be charitable, should vote liberal. Evidently we’re not fulfilling our obligations as believers if we have concerns about the national debt or the property rights of those who make more money than we do. The implication is that you have to be a quasi-Marxist to be a good Christian.

Really? Well, some defining is in order here. What’s a Christian?  That’s a tough one, not because it’s hard to define, but because many non-Christian ideas use that term in spite of their non-biblical origins. Anyone can hop on the Christian bandwagon and everyone pretty much has -- every major religion claims Christ as either a teacher, a prophet, or a leader. Only biblical Christianity sees Jesus as the literal Son of God and Savior of mankind.

Christianity, in its purely biblical sense, is merely (if I can borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase) the certitude that:

What’s Right about the Right?

I’ve been hard on my liberal friends lately  -- not personally, mind you, but more and more the term “liberal thinking” has become an oxymoron. This week I’d like to look at the positive side of things and explore all the many ways that the conservative agenda is -- pardon the pun -- right.

Let’s start with the obvious assumption that most conservatives make: God Is. We differ – sometimes mightily – in our understanding of God, but the vast majority of us are sure He is our creator, and we’re sure because He is manifest in the careful, artistic patterning and intricate engineering of nature. We see evidence of His perfections as they came together on the cross to provide humanity with both purpose and possibility. We recognize the divine worth of every human being and, at the same time, the flawed essence of human nature and its need for divine guidance.  A handful of conservative atheists can be found – S.E. Cupp at Glenn Beck’s station, novelist Ayn Rand, for instance, but most of us stand on the solid, defensible ground of Christianity, as did the majority of our founding fathers.

Standing on that foundation gives us a natural advantage – we see human nature for what it is – flawed and unlikely to improve on its own. History backs us up on that, but the evolutionary approach leaves one with the unsupportable assertion that man keeps getting better and better. However, the 20^th century, instead of demonstrating how far man and society had evolved, turned out to be the bloodiest in human history.  The conservative was not surprised – check out G.K. Chesterton’s writings from the beginning of last century and it all sounds like he’s talking about today.

How Cool It Is -- a Pre-Election Rant

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I used to see politics as just a matter of brand names. Republicans were more interested in the economy and Democrats in social issues. The two sides balanced each other like the ends of a teeter-totter and the ups and downs felt like the proper rhythm of life.

And, serving for close to 30 years as a public school teacher, I spent my days working closely with wonderful people, mostly Democrats, and though we would occasionally have testy discussions, mostly our political opinions seemed distant and unimportant amidst the immediacy of our daily high school drama.

Then the outrages began – Clinton’s finger-pointing lies, the fuss over the Bush election, 9/11, -- little by little it became harder and harder for me to see the liberal point of view as having any merit at all. If you support women’s rights and are horrified at the way working women are treated, how do you support Slick Willy’s use of cigars? If you can get your Fruit-of-the-Looms in a wad over election inconsistencies then why was it OK to only double check the Florida counties where you thought you could slant the recount? When they began to accuse Bush of lying about the weapons of mass destruction, which everyone knew had been shipped to Syria, I’d had enough.

Historically speaking, the transition started with Woodrow Wilson a hundred years ago; the Democrats began edging slowly left, and the Republicans, not to be outdone at stupidity, edged with them. Calvin Coolidge effectively reversed the trend, but the 1929 stock market crash and FDR’s socialist response dragged us left again. WWII yanked us back to reality and prosperity (those two go hand in hand), but by the 60’s we’d started smoking dope and indulging in riots (those things go hand in hand). By the late 70’s most of us were ashamed of our foreign policy and horrified about the economy – I know it was most of us because in 1980 Ronald Reagan beat Carter in a landslide and once again conservative principles proved effective. But we hit that peak, had a spasm of sensibility in ’94, but since then headed downhill at breakneck speed.

Anita Dunn

Now I’m just plain puzzled -- the Dems have sidled so far left that they not only embrace socialism openly – many proudly claim Marx and Mao as their heroes – quite a few in close contact with, or actually in our current administration.

Into the Darkening Woods – an Open-ended Fairytale

We’ve been exploring problems with leftist thinking and I’d like to continue with that discussion, but I’m going to do so by telling you a story.

Part 4 – What is Wrong with Liberal Thinking

Once upon a meme* -- which is itself a meme, which has become so trendy it’s gone from pseudo-intellectual to rancidly cheesy in under 40 years, turning up, as it did, on college campuses in the late 70’s where it was useful only under the influence of whatever was available. The word was used at first by professors trying to impress their students, and then by students attempting to impress their professors. Now it’s found in use amongst graduates who still lean college-left and want to impress each other.  But I digress. 

Back to the story. Once there was a country where all the fathers were risk-takers, all the mothers were mothers (which made them risk-takers extraordinaire) and all the children were wildly and joyfully suicidal. The country was blessed with broad open spaces, wide rivers, deep forests and oceans to keep dangerous people away. The people moved about, built farms and factories and cities and roads and cars to drive on the roads. Then they moved around more. Eventually they built airplanes and moved around more quickly. They invented many things, worked very hard, took huge risks and became the wealthiest nation the world had ever seen.

As they did all this they tried to follow the rules they believed in – tried because, like all people they weren’t perfect. Their energy and ambition sometimes got them in trouble. But through it all they remembered God, who had created them and all the blessings their country provided. They were grateful for the power they discovered all over the land – the wood, coal, oil, gas, and raging rivers. They planted crops, cut down trees, built fences, and they mined gold and silver and iron and copper. They prospered and they were grateful. 

Smoke, Mirrors, and Layers of Varnish

 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1^st Corinthians 13:12.

Part 3 – What’s Wrong with Liberal Thinking

Well – let’s make sense of the world today, shall we? I’ll start picking at the tangled wad of yarns at this end and you start teasing at it on your end and we’ll have it unknotted in no time. Not.

Things are in quite a muddle; the Prince of Lies (not our president, but Lucifer) is hard at work and it’s the human tendency to gloss over details, call a spade a terrain relocation device, and slather every uncomfortable truth with coat after coat of varnish, so the job of putting all the puzzle pieces together in logical order is a challenge.

We’ve been talking about the faulty assumptions at the base of liberal thinking. This week I’d like to explore one of the secondary premises that fog our national bandwidth. If one starts with the self-refuting statement that there is no absolute truth and you add to that an evolutionary mindset, one comes to a third premise – that God is just a human idea – some fanciful conceit we developed to soften the edges of reality, some elaborate means mankind invented in order to tackle the vagaries of human misbehavior.

The evolutionist explanation for religious belief is a bottom-up account. From paramecium to fish to tadpole to lizard to bird to horse to ape to Neanderthal to Christian – just a natural progression. (Why they assume that Christian thought is suddenly a turn for the worst is beyond me.)

Monkey-men and Unicorns

Part 2 -- What's Wrong with Liberal Thinking

Last week we discussed the first foundation stone in the dysfunction of liberal thought. Let’s move on to the next – evolution. (I speak here not of the usual change we see within species as they react to the environment; I speak of macro-evolution only.) I’m not going to address all the scientific evidence that is accumulating against Darwinism; I haven’t space here. Instead I’d like to look at the dangerous conclusions one arrives at when one’s starting place is “random mutation” or “survival of the fittest.” The damage that has been done to our national psyche via this “theory” is incalculable and yet most of us rumble through our days oblivious to the devastation, or at least unaware of its genesis.

At the core of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (published in 1859) is the idea that, as a species moves through time, its weaker specimens die off, leaving only the genetics of the survivors to move into the future. As the eons pass by each species becomes better and better having sloughed off the bad genes in favor of the good ones and having experienced along the way random, enhancing, genetic mutations.

He even posited that all species started from a single “simple” cell (we know now that there is no such thing) and through random happy accidents (which, by the way, are almost never happy) added to the survival impetus, and gradually produced us. (I find it odd that nature kept pushing toward human existence, given the fact that it could have stopped with the cockroach. Cockroaches have survival down pat.)

So, what’s wrong with those ideas? Several important things:

Never Assume a G-D Thing – What’s Wrong with Liberal Thinking

Here we are mid-river and we can hear the rumble of approaching rapids. The river drops fast as we skim over an occasional sub-surface boulder. We know if we stay on this course, we’ll tumble over the falls, but if we can veer to the right and take it down through the slough we’ll be OK, but to do that we need every hand to paddle and paddle hard in unison. 

Let’s talk about how we do that – how do we discuss clearly, quickly and powerfully the necessity of making that hard right? It can’t be done by shouting or making wild accusations or by attacking people personally. It has to be done with logic and with love.

Logic is God’s way of thinking, for He is not the author of confusion. He is a rational God and if we are, as Paul tells us, to “take every thought into captivity for Christ,” they have to be logical thoughts. And here’s where our national problem lies – the thought patterns on the left, the thought patterns that got us into this mess – are not logical, are not rational and the approaching rapids are proof.

So is the anger and irrationality coming from the left. Think Chris Matthews. I can’t imagine the pain of hearing that impending torrent of doom and having to choose between saying, “You know, Marx was an idiot,” or trying to convince yourself that plummeting to your death is what you always wanted to do. That’s bound to make people testy and we’re starting to see some folks in the public eye crumbling around the edges. We have to reach across the rapids and grab as many as we can and pull them to safety. We’ll be better off with their help paddling and they’ll have a chance of living and living well.

Let’s do a crash course in what is wrong with leftist thinking:

Directing the Impossible Play

paulrademacher.com

Today the Republican Convention was to begin in Tampa, but the approach of hurricane Isaac has postponed it. Who knows what effect that will have on history.

On April 20^th 2010 an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 men.  As a result U.S. oil production has dropped precipitously and dependence on foreign oil is now up to 66%.

In 715 B.C. Sennacherib, King of Assyria laid siege to Jerusalem, but they were unsuccessful – the Jewish accounts say that an Angel of the Lord killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. Some historians think it was cholera that killed them, but Sennacherib withdrew and Jerusalem – and therefore Israel – was preserved.

Jesus Christ controls history. Jesus Christ, as the Second Person of the Godhead, manages all the stories of all our lives so that history will come out in the end just as He wants it to, just as it has been prophesied. He is directing this play, this impossibly complicated play.

Yes, but don’t we have free will? Can God control history if He is not controlling each of us? Isn’t history merely the record of human decisions? So how is it possible then for these two ideas – individual human free will and God’s collective plan to coexist? 

News flash: human free will is not all there is. We don’t like to admit that, but it’s true. We don’t get to choose everything that happens in our lives – I didn’t choose to have my baby grandson die. I did not choose to have my new car run off the road at 70 miles an hour. I did not want my husband’s body to develop cancer cells. But those things happened nevertheless. I could still choose how to react to each situation, true, but the situations themselves I didn’t choose.