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.

An Open Letter to our President

Dear Sir:

I have a question: which came first – the goose or the egg? Don’t wrinkle your brow and glance at your teleprompter -- this is not a difficult question – eggs don’t hatch without a goose to sit on them.

Let’s try another one. -- which came first – the taxers or the taxees? That’s evidently a more difficult question because you, the most powerful man in the world, recently got it wrong. Very wrong.

Recently you made quite a speech in Roanoke, Virginia, in which you figuratively addressed small businessmen saying, “You didn’t build that.” You went on to explain that without public works, “roads and bridges,” a business couldn’t exist. Your implication was that government agencies and activities are the foundation on which industry rests, that without public policy there would be no private enterprise.

Ruins in Detroit -- seedetroit.com

P-a-l-e-e-z-e, Mr. Obama, that statement is almost as offensive as your ignorant proclamation that this country is not a Christian nation, and don’t give me that “out of context” palaver. It is the context of your entire presidency that makes this so objectionable.

Obviously, Sir, you haven’t thought very hard or very long about this country and what it’s all about, or you would know better. The truth is that without private, moneymaking endeavors, the government would have nothing, would be nothing. I realized that yesterday when I ran across a news tidbit about California’ sales tax revenues dropping by 33.5%. No. Really?!

Scoring a Perfect Ten

Yesterday at the gym I was “biking” to nowhere, grateful that the TV in front of me was set on the Olympics and that the Olympics was set on rhythmic gymnastics. I know, I know, not everyone’s favorite sport, but I was entranced. I peddled and peddled and watched young, agile bodies perform almost impossible movements – wrapping spines around soccer-sized balls, spinning hula hoops with one over-head foot, twisting and rolling and never losing sight of the props, always graceful and fluid and elegant. It was enough to make you think that maybe humans could be perfect. It was enough to make me realize why our Christian gospel often falls on deaf ears.

Human beings are amazing. That’s why we all love the Olympics – it’s a chance to see our fellow humans achieving astounding things – running ever faster, jumping higher, performing ever more challenging dives. We are all impressed with ourselves – the proof is right there on the TV; human beings are amazing.

So what’s with this “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” thing? Isn’t the glory of the Olympics enough? Look at what people can do, what awful conditions they can overcome, what remarkable beauty they can produce, what mind-boggling skills they can develop. And they all seem like such nice, good people; they train 24-7 – they don’t have time to get into any trouble. Original sin? Total depravity? Surely you jest.