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Conservatives who can’t connect the dots

28-Jan-13

A few months ago while the electioneering was in full-throated roar, a “conservative” writer lamented that liberal voters seem unable to connect the dots.  One quoted a low-info voter who expressed unconcern about a property tax hike because, said the voter, “I rent an apartment, so property taxes don’t affect me.”  How do you connect intelligently with people this thick?

And then today, I was listening to talk radio “conservative” Mark Larsen explaining to a caller that he ‘d have no problem with the Boy Scouts changing their stance on homosexuality to go with the PeeCee flow and start accepting it.  The caller wondered why the institution must change to accommodate the individual rather than the other way around, noting that the Boy Scouts have always required young men to be morally straight.

“What is morality?” wondered the blind Mr. Larsen aloud.  After all, Christian denominations have differed over this or that detail.  And whatever would we say to the Metropolitan churches who are openly homosexual?  (Tacit premise in the question: Until you get everything perfect, you’re not allowed to say they’re wrong.)

This is a conservative, low-info talk show host who cannot connect the dots.  Well, actually, Larsen says he’s libertarian, but he’s still dense on this topic and unable to connect dots, and here’s why.

Morality of any and every sort is an assertion of authority.  The moment you say “ought” or “ought not,” somebody else demands, “Says who?”  Morality requires an anchor.  The Author, the Anchor, is God.  And even though the church admittedly has quibbles a-plenty, we’re all together in relaying to you His judgment that sodomy isn’t okay.

Mr. Larsen, apparently unwilling to consider a reliable message from a capable though fallible messenger, has no anchor.  How else can you even ask such a question as, “What is morality?”

And once you pull up the anchor, everything tied to it will drift away.  The current debate over homosexuality didn’t spring upon America like a bolt from the sky.  It started way back when Americans grew discontented with the God who insists we should keep our word.  Not long thence, easy-breezy divorce became socially acceptable.  A few years later, pornography began to proliferate.  And then came the sexual revolution with its promiscuity, the shack-ups, the meteoric rise in illegitimacy, the loss of shame as the entertainer class breeds without commitment.

First thing you know, many major cities had whole sections of their towns devoted to sodomy, and before you can adjust to that, they’ve got us voting on whether homosexuals have a right to marry one another.

And at that point, people like Mr. Larsen cannot render a reason as to what could possibly be bad about that.

Prediction: Sometime soon our society will be debating polygamy, pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia, and those who (for whatever reason) disapprove of such things but who have no anchor will find themselves as tongue tied as the hapless Mr. Larsen was.  Who’s to say what’s wrong, after all?

Without God as the anchor for morals, you will have no morals.  He made the world where it can’t be any other way.  And yes, He did that on purpose.  Morals, like the rights stated in the Declaration of Independence, are derived.  And just as God created us equal and endowed us with rights, so he also created us with the social, civic, and religious obligations we refer to as morality.

When you pull up the anchor, you don’t just lose your morals.  You’ll start losing your rights, too.  Same anchor, same God.  Say good-bye to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Godless men cannot comprehend, let alone respect, the Bill of Rights.  They have no clue where such things came from, no idea of what makes them special, and no sense of a higher Authority to whom all earthly authorities must give account.  You can no more have rights without morality than you can have a stream without water.  Both flow from the same spring, the Eternal God.

God deliver us from leaders who do not know their Maker, or even that they are made.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Lance and Oprah

20-Jan-13

The embarrassing spectacle of Lance Armstrong confessing to Oprah has failed to capture the popular imagination. For one thing, Lance is not a sympathetic character.  Americans are not prone to soaring eloquence, so people call him a jerk.  British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft said of him, “Mr. Armstrong has “a voice like ice cubes,” as one French journalist puts it, and I have to admit that he reminds me of what Daniel O’Connell said about Sir Robert Peel: He has a smile like moonlight playing on a gravestone.”

Another thing is that Lance’s confession came too late.  And it was lame.  And it was tacky.  But it fits the pattern now so familiar in no-fault America in which a famous person commits a sin, gets caught, lies about it till the lie becomes ridiculous, then finally stages a theatrical confession.  The staging is usually in proportion to the fame and ego of the perpetrator.  Thus, Lance. Scroll through the mental list of publicly groveling miscreants from Lance back through Anthony Weiner, Bill Clinton, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, gay/doping preacher Ted Haggard, and a host of others.

The spiritual man can see what this is all about.  Adam remains banished from Eden.  The occasional rite of public humiliation is just a couple of the exiles passing by the gate and wishing for a way back in.  But the gate is shut.  The cherub with the flaming sword still bars the road to paradise.

A final thing about Lance’s confession is that we can all see it does no good.  The public, momentarily curious, watches the ritual confessions and is vaguely aware of the hopelessness of it all.  To confess seems required.  A wrong was done.  To admit it is demanded.  We all feel the pressure of the demand.  Some of us help exert it.  At the same time, it’s inadequate.  It’s watering a dead tree, and all the same to the tree whether it’s water or tears.

The Secular Man, two-dimensional being that he is, confesses to himself and to his peers.  Who else is there?  To the carnal mind, what is paradise but the pleasure he felt before his sin was found out?  A degrading confession seems to be how you shake up the Etch-A-Sketch and redraw the picture.

The confession has to feature humiliation and suffering.  Part of the suffering involves the rest of us smirking at the poor dumb schmuck locked in the pillory.  But even when we humiliate ourselves as Lance did, the sin remains.  And even if you suffer to the point of death, you’re just dead and guilty.  Whether you’re confessing to Oprah or CNN, it’s still just praying to a god that cannot save. (Isa 45:20)

The riddle is solved at the cross.  It is Christ’s humiliation, not ours, and His suffering and death, that brings remission of sins.  It is our confession to Him, not to Oprah nor to a public filled with critics and voyeurs, that brings peace.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

 

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Mr. Obama’s terrifying nutjob gambit

16-Jan-13

No tool of modern totalitarianism is as frightening as the left’s weaponizing of mental health, with enthusiastic support from the Party of Stupid.  It’s not that hard to imagine who the leftists will see as insane and in need of a miracle of government healing that will cure them of their bitter clinging.  And of course all this will be decided by the same guys who pioneered primal scream therapy and, a generation ago, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder yet now claim it’s just fine.

The Soviets had a special gulag for political dissidents who were deemed “insane” by the Kremlin establishment.  They specialized in ghastly treatments that make Torquemada seem tame — lobotomizing people by running a wire cutting tool under the eyelids and into the brain.  Instant zombies without even having to shave the head.

Seriously, it’s hard to picture anything worse than the government creating lists of who’s Officially Crazy.  The implications are chilling.  People in sensitive industries (airlines, utilities, defense aerospace, etc.) typically have to get a psychological exam as a precondition to being hired.  Imagine some helpful Democrats schooled in the Chicago Way gaining control of the mental health bureaucracy.  I’m thinking it could become very challenging to keep sane enough to stay employed.

Oh, and you think they wouldn’t dare?  C’mon.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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It’s got me wondering…

09-Jan-13

The current push by the left on gun control is the latest application of Rahm Emanuel’s dictum, never let a crisis go to waste.  My biggest concern is that they’ll overreach again.  Politicians are talking openly about confiscation of firearms.

This isn’t Australia.  Multitudes of people in the United States would push back hard.

At this point, I don’t think either side knows how far it’s willing to go.  It’s one thing to talk about giving up your guns out of your cold, dead hands.  It’s another to actually fight to the death over it.

As for the leftists, if I could reach out to them and be heard with a moment of sincerity, I’d ask them if they’re truly willing to see their neighbors killed over this.  Because that’s what government does.  It orders everyone to do something, in this case to surrender their guns and ammo, and if people don’t obey,  armed agents come to enforce the order.

And at that point, it becomes force against force.  I have no idea who might blink first.  I really don’t.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Gun Control, Root Cause and Corrective Action

30-Dec-12

I’ve spent much of my career in the power business doing what we call “root cause” investigations.  Suppose something bad happens in the power plant such as the plant tripping off line or a major piece of equipment failing.  Guys like me come to the scene and determine all the reasons for the event and then devise methods to prevent it from happening again.

The first test of a proposed corrective action is see whether it could prevent what just happened.  It’s always easy to tell management to revise this or that procedure.  It’s a cheap fix; management likes it, so amateurs all too often suggest it.  But sometimes you need other solutions.

In the current haggling about gun control in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, politicians propose to limit the size of new ammo magazines, ban the sale of certain guns, do various background and fingerprint checks, do mental health checks for gun buyers, register and fingerprint all gun owners, and make more gun-free zones.

Even if all of these these were done, the Sandy Hook massacre would have taken place all the same.  Therefore, all these proposals are a bust.

Adam Lanza was not the gun purchaser.  His mother was.  She could have passed any background check you’d care to name, and her fingerprints would have been dutifully on file.  Her son stole the murder weapon, killed her with it, then went to a gun-free zone to start shooting little people.  The ammo and magazines were already lawfully purchased.  And Sandy Hook was already a gun-free zone, which is why it was perfectly safe for Lanza to go there and start shooting.

Consequently, none of the politicians’ suggestions should be implemented.  They would not prevent the event we just had, not even if we implemented all of them.  It is no service to the dead, nor is it any comfort to the survivors, to pass a bunch of laws which we know will do no good.

Wayne LaPierre, president of the National Rifle Association, is the only person of national stature (so far) to recommend an action which might actually have reduced the body count at Sandy Hook.  His proposal to place armed guards in the schools would certainly reduce the frequency and severity of such attacks.  For this, LaPierre has been thoroughly execrated by the leftstream media.

If the concern is how to protect yourself and your family from the next madman looking to glorify his suicide with a big news story, the first thing I’d recommend is to stay out of gun-free zones.  Those are where virtually all shooters go.  They are looking for large numbers of easy victims because they want to make sure they draw lots of attention their suicides.  If you abide by this one rule, your chance of being involved in a massacre would drop to almost zero.  If Congress wants a cheap, fast way to reduce the death rate, they should abolish all gun-free zones from sea to shining sea.

The next thing I’d suggest is that the news media wise up to the role they’re playing.  A madman’s motive for a massacre is media attention.  Therefore, the name of the shooter should go under a total news blackout.  No pictures.  No cover stories.  No leads.  No names.  Nothing.  Let the families grieve without the media circus, and by all means deprive future shooters of the media incentive.

And dare I suggest that leftist media people, who thoroughly loathe the second amendment to the Constitution, might also be allowing themselves to be used by killers like Lanza and Loughner?  Such stories are too compelling.  The headlines are too gripping.  The tragedy is too deep to just walk off and leave it.  There are ads to be sold and political goals to be achieved.  Expecting the media to be wise and self-controlled is futile.

So some lefty-feely, hopey-changey legislation will likely be passed in the next few months.  The Democrats will propose nothing intelligent, and the GOP will resist nothing stupid.  So it will come.  And the massacre rate in gun-free zones, which has been around one a year, will stay about the same.  Sometime in the next year or two, expect another.  Because the root causes of these massacres are not being addressed.  Like a foolish manager who doesn’t understand his own business but thinks he does, Congress will succumb to the urge to do something, and that something will do nothing.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

 

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Regret to bring up an uncomfortable subject

23-Dec-12

Slaying the little ones has a long, ugly history.  Usually it’s about killing off hope, which was certainly true when the Egyptians killed the firstborn of Israel or when Herod slew the innocents near Bethlehem.  Sometimes it’s about greed, as when the Canaanite cults sacrificed their children in a vain attempt to improve the harvest.

Sometimes it’s just sheer selfishness, as when the Romans left unwanted infants lying by the seashore waiting for the tide to make the problem disappear.  What’s your motive, America?

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otherbrothersteve@gmail.com
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Best article on Newtown tragedy

22-Dec-12

Mark Steyn’s article on the Newtown massacre is the best I’ve seen so far.  He connects it with the loss of a moral consensus and the resulting deep narcissism of Our Time.  With the institutional Left calling for everyone in America to be under 24/7 psychiatric watch from government minders, Steyn asks,

In a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who’s to say what’s odd? On 9/11, the agent at the check-in desk reckoned Mohammed Atta and his chums were a bit strange but banished the thought as shameful and discriminatory. In a politically correct world, vigilance is a fool’s errand. The US Airways cabin crew who got the “flying imams” bounced from a Minneapolis plane for flamboyantly, intimidatingly wacky behavior (praying loudly, fanning out to occupy all the exit rows, asking for seatbelt extenders they didn’t need) wound up in sensitivity-training hell. If a lesbian thinks dragging your wife around in a head-to-toe body-bag is kinda weird, she’s being “Islamophobic.” If a Muslim thinks taking breast hormones and amputating your penis is a little off, he’s “transphobic.” These very terms make the point that, in our society, finding somebody else odd is itself a form of mental illness. In an unmoored age, what’s not odd?

Very good question indeed.  When Christianity was the basic moral framework for the West, we at least had some public standard for evaluating behavior.  It’s likely that our government minders will, at some point in the future, institute a Continuous Behavior Observation Program for the entire population.  What sort of standards will they reach for in determining who needs to be preemptively locked up?

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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The gun control debate

17-Dec-12

The predictable result of every crime involving guns is the left’s spasmodic lurch to repress the rights of all the people who didn’t do it.  While I understand the public’s desire to do something, I don’t understand how anyone could believe gun control laws could have any beneficial effect.  In fact, the more I think about it, it’s clear that not even gun control advocates believe this.  It’s just a reaction, like scratching an itch.

It’s simply a fact that government cannot protect you from crime.  Government, at its best and if it’s effective, can deter crime by aggressively avenging criminal acts.  But we don’t even do that in America.  The perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre, Army Maj. Nidal Hassan, still hasn’t even been brought to trial for his 2009 shooting of 42 people in which 13 died and 29 more were wounded.  In fact, the trial judge has just been dismissed for insisting that Hassan shave his beard per Army regulation.  You could not imagine a more outrageously limp, effete response to a massacre.  The administration, like Gallio, cares nothing for crimes committed in full view of its judgment seat (Acts 18:17).  One cannot help but ask whether this is because the perpetrator is from a protected class (Moslem) and the 13 dead were all from unprotected classes (10 were white, two Hispanic white, one Asian).

By the way, the Hasan episode shows the truth of one of the gun lobby’s favorite slogans: The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.  Hasan’s rampage stopped when he was felled by shots fired from the service weapon of Sergeant Mark Todd.

In another testament to the effectiveness of government, consider this.  My parked car got hit at the mall a couple of days ago.  When I discovered it, I called the police at 12:53 p.m.  While I was waiting on a response, two patrol cars glided by at a liesurely pace.  At 1:58 p.m., a sheriff’s deputy finally drove up, took down my information, and told me helpfully that since the incident had occurred on private property, he couldn’t do a thing, couldn’t even charge the perpetrator for leaving the scene.  I’m proposing we reword the slogan to say, “When seconds count, the cops are only an hour and five minutes away from not doing a flippin’ thing.”

And liberals expect this to provide protection against gun crime?  I am driven to say that no, not even the deepest blue liberal is dumb enough to expect protection from this outfit.  If you fear being victimized and want real protection, either hire a bodyguard or else tote some protection yourself.  And it so happens that our county is in the midst of a tax dispute with the power company and the sheriff has responded by saying that if he doesn’t get all his budget requests, then he may have to curtail “public safety” or “delay officer response times.”  With all due respect toward our brave law officers, the sheriff’s budget could be reduced to zero and I would have gotten the same result.

Furthermore, gun control measures cannot get illegal guns out of criminal hands, and in the case of the Ft. Hood massacre (or the equally abhorrent massacre of Afghan civilians by Sgt. Robert Bales), nobody’s even suggesting we keep guns out of military hands.

So where does this leave us?  Given the appallingly craven condition of the Republican party in the Congress, I frankly expect them to capitulate to some meaningless feel-good legislation to restrict gun ownership.  They’ll increase waiting periods, restrict clip sizes, outlaw black paint or pistol grips on shotguns… whatever.  It will do nothing because it can do nothing.  There are hundreds of millions of guns already circulating in America.  It is impossible to confiscate them, and a criminal who wants one will just get one of those.  And then another horror will occur just the same, because guns are not the basic problem.  Our morally sick society is the problem, and you may be certain government cannot fix that, either.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Like a mushroom

16-Dec-12

A friend of mine was describing an electrical grounding problem at a power plant.  With his Indian accent he said, “Steef, eese like beeg mushroom.”  He meant that it is a gigantic problem that lives underground and pops up with occasional symptoms that seem unrelated but actually spring from the same cause.  For my non-biologist friends, the world’s largest living thing is a mushroom.  You just have to know what you’re looking for to see the evidence of it coming to the surface here and there.

I’m reminded of that description each time America experiences a violent tragedy such as the one in Newtown, Connecticut.  This massacre is but one more sprout from a vast underground “mushroom” of a desperately sick culture.

Doug Wilson, normally one of the internet’s most judicious writers, says this:  “it is certainly not the time to be drawing ham-fisted comparisons to the abortion carnage.”  I believe Bro. Wilson is mistaken in this.  In fact, it’s the perfect time for the church to fulfill her prophetic office and point out that our Christless culture is bleeding with brutality and grief on every side.

It’s not just abortion, but crime of every sort.  It’s the stupendous murder rate in cities like New Orleans which ranks among the top five most dangerous cities on Earth.  It’s a sick Hollywood culture that sells murder for entertainment.  It’s our ever-grinding war machine that President Eisenhower warned against.  And yes, it’s an abortion industry that every day slays a hundredfold more than the precious lives lost in Newtown.  It’s a multitude of other things that make our civilization grow hourly more coarse, perverse, dangerous, bloody.

In the very moment when the nation is either asking why such things happen or else clamoring to seize the moment for political gain, the church must find the voice to say to grieving America, to angry America, to blame-shifting America, “This is why such things happen.  This crime did not erupt like a stroke from the pit with no warning of what was to come.  We, all of us, have been building a godless, Christless, amoral culture of death where such things are inevitable!”

America is such a needy nation.  We need wisdom.  We need self control.  We need a return of courtesy and manners.  We need faithfulness and loyalty.  We need homes where parents take responsibility for their children and, in turn, raise sons and daughters who shoulder the responsibilities of a great nation.  We need a knowledge of virtue and a passion for it.  We need to be a people that loves what is right and fights bravely against what is wrong.

But above all these things, we need a Savior.  Our nation hides within its bosom a slaughter of innocents blacker than the atrocities of King Herod.  Nothing of this world can wash away such a stain.  No reformation, no revival of good morals, no tears shed over the graves of the dead can cleanse us.  Nothing indeed but the blood of Jesus can satisfy at once the outcry for justice and our need for mercy.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Missing the point by a few parsecs

07-Dec-12

The guys over at Powerlineblog are pretty good conservative commentators.  And because they’re usually pretty good, they serve as the perfect example of how conservatives are twaddling about teensy details while giving away practically everything to liberals.

In today’s offering, Paul Mirengoff laments an effort by federal educrats to replace great literature with statist propaganda.  Lamentable thing, yes, and woe betide.  Everlasting fie upon that propaganda.

Meanwhile, government school is a total immersion in established, entrenched, boots-on-the-ground statism.  Kids under government compulsion ride a government bus to a government building to study government-mandated subjects taught by a government worker.  At lunch they eat government food, and even if they bring their own brown bag, a government diet agent may confiscate it and give them government chicken squish nuggets instead.  The message is tacit, but it’s hammered into their heads by every aspect of their situation: We own you, and you don’t even eat your own mama’s cooking without our say-so.

This is statism on steroids and jackboots.  Every educational experience of their young lives is government, government, and more government, state control, rules, regulations and myriads of hyperactive nannybots minding everything they do, watching with cameras and tracking kids’ RFID badges and helping with the occasional strip search or (if they’re being nice) merely lining up the kids in the hall so armed men can bring drug dogs to come snuffling up their crotches.

God have mercy on the poor kid who says “Merry Christmas” or wants to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas special.  Maybe it’s better if we forget Almighty God and just teach kids the Obama song, “Mmm, Mmm, Mmm.”

And we’re worried about Great Expectations getting replaced by “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management”?  I’m at a loss to express how vanishingly small this is in comparison to the mere existence of a government school system operating on a perfectly normal day.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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The GOP Jellyfish

06-Dec-12

Here she is, the GOP Jellyfish Girl, complete with pink tie, no spine, and no brain.  If you copy the artwork, you must give credit to Carrie S. Reed.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Life on the left

05-Dec-12

If you’re wondering what life will be like as our Democrat overlords get comfy with their 2012 “mandate,” look no further than the Belly of the Blue, New York City, where victims of Hurricane Sandy are being cited for failure to clean up their property.  In one case cited at this link, a tree from city owned property had fallen across private property.  The private property owners requested the city remove the tree, and while they were waiting, the city ticketed them!

As Cobra Bubbles said, “Aliens are all about rules.”

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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May not need to disband GOP

05-Dec-12

They may do it on their own.  You probably know by now that John Boehner has dumped conservatives from some key committee assignments.  Tea Party voters, never big fans of the GOP to start with, have even more reason to walk away.  If I were an artist, which I’m not, I’d replace the GOP elephant with a giant jellyfish wearing a pink tie.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Color me pessimillennial

02-Dec-12

Our friends who believe in the postmillennial view of the end times disparagingly refer to the premillennial view as “pessimillennialism.”  Har, har.

True enough, the premillennial believer thinks this present world will die ugly.  We don’t think the Gospel is going to win everyone.  Since most postmillennial guys are also Calvinists, you’d think that would make sense to them.

But when the inspired writer says that “evil men and seducers shall grow worse and worse,” (2 Ti 3:13) I take that as God’s face-value description of how things will turn out.

Now, God is the one who is writing the story of the world, not me.  But if I were going to take a stab at the theme of His story, it’d be this: “You people need Me.”  Nothing works without Him.  The Bible shows us various views of man, and this is the theme that summarizes each view.  In Eden, perfect people in a perfect world were seduced by Satan when God was not immediately present.

This dismal scene gets repeated in every successive era and condition of history with every race and variety of human.  In the first era after the Fall, the world grew so evil that God stopped the decline by the Flood.  After this followed the ages we read about in ancient history in which despots set themselves up as gods and afflicted their subjects with centuries of almost unbelievable misery.

And speaking of that, maybe things haven’t changed so much after all.  While the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans all had some form of emperor worship, it didn’t look all that much different from Jamie Foxx calling Barack Obama “our Lord and Savior.”  Two thousand years of Gospel influence haven’t enlightened the West sufficiently for the general public to recoil from that as a shocking act of depravity.  It’s scary to think of the general observation about history that what’s morally permitted so often becomes somehow required.

I suspect we’ll get better acquainted with this notion as ObamaCare marches forward.  I’d really, really hate to be in the medical profession when the abortion issue reaches front and center, because there, what is permitted now will certainly become required then.  People without God lack “natural affection” (Ro 1:31), so they start killing their own young.  Given time, they start ordering their neighbors to kill their young.

And speaking of developing trends, a CBS poll finds a majority of Americans thinks homosexual marriage should be legal.  I mention this in case you entertained some doubts about how far the paganization of the American mind has progressed.  Meanwhile in San Francisco, the city council risks the wrath of the populace by requiring people to wear clothes in certain areas such as restaurants.  Seriously.  In America, you can totally stump people on moral questions which were blazingly obvious to everyone just ten years ago.

The explanation for this is simple: Moral questions cannot be answered unless God is explicitly in the picture as the basis for it all.  To generalize about America, for now, she has God shut out of the picture as resolutely as possible.  The theme once again, “You people need Me.”  At least as far as America is concerned, color me pessimillennial.

Okay, that’s America.  If there’s evidence that the rest of the world is very much different, I’m not seeing it.  In the past 30 years, the Islamic world has become highly radicalized.  Islam has never been anything but ancient Canaanite paganism upgraded and localized to seventh century Arabia.  Now this barbaric philosophy has experienced a resurgence of its grim energy.  Nation after nation is regressing into a more radical stance under the baleful influence of the Moslem Brotherhood.  Where this stops, nobody knows.  If any population in world history ever needed a clear vision of the true God, it’s the poor souls living under the darkness of Islam.

If there’s a bright spot in the world for the postmillennial guy, it would have to be China.  A sizeable minority of China is now Christian in some form or other.  The extent of Chinese Christianity is roughly the size of the entire population of America, if that gives you some sense of scale, while the total population of China is five times as large.  So the Chinese church is big, and anything that big must eventually be influential.  But the jury’s still out on the question of whether China can be as extensively Christianized as Europe and America once were, and further still, whether the Chinese brethren can resist the apostasizing influences that are ruining us.

The story that I see developing around the world is the same one we saw in Eden: “You people need Me.”  Not everyone is going to become a Christian.  Jesus compared the proportions of saved and lost in this rather somber text,

Matt 7:13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat : 14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

If this passage has any significance for the outworking of world history — and I think it does — then places and times when Christianity is culturally ascendent are out of the norm.  We thank God for them, and we rejoice that we’re blessed with the fruit of them.  But the general trend of history will remain that God calls out his elect from among the great mass of men who ignore the Gospel to the destruction of their souls and ultimately their world.  Only the intervention of the returning Lord Jesus will undo this by supplying man’s one, ultimate need: Jesus Himself.  When He is here where every eye shall see him, then shall the knowledge of the glory of the Lord cover the earth like the waters cover the sea.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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The Mexican civil war

01-Dec-12

Providence directed that I be in Mexico in 1982 at the height of that nation’s ruinous episode of hyperinflation.  Just before I arrived, the old peso was replaced with the “mil,” or 1,000 pesos.  It was their basic currency, something like our dollar bill. To put this in perspective, let’s say you had 401k savings worth $100,000.  At the end of their hyperinflationary period, it was worth $100.  A lifetime of savings would buy your wife a dress.  People were ruined, literally unable to put food on the table.

Mexicans were desperate for stable currency so they could buy the necessities of life.  Dollars were accepted everywhere, and I didn’t need to swap money.  The old one-peso notes and coins were worth 1/8000 of a dollar — worthless.  Street beggars would not even bother to pick up discarded cash.  Many armloads of cash would not buy a meal.

It was out of this situation that Mexico’s narcotics civil war grew.  People who were desperate for money could get it by servicing people who were desperate for drugs.  Once lawlessness gains a sturdy foothold, as we now know, it’s awfully hard to get rid of it.  Mexico finds itself with a significant subculture that has lived outside the law for a generation and is willing to commit ghastly crimes against people who resist them.  Nothing will stop the drug lords short of killing them, and they’re famously targeting non-corrupted public officials for assassination, kidnapping, beheadings of their children, and so on.

And this got started because the Mexican government made promises it could not keep, then tried to fund its obligations by printing quadrillions in fiat money.  The end result was a serious subversion of their social order.  Recent headlines put the death toll at 60,000 in Mexico’s drug civil war, and the pace is only increasing.

This has portents for America.  A potential hyperinflationary period in America is a grave threat.  It’s not just the end of Social Security and Medicare.  It’s the end of America as you’ve always known it, and the policies of the Democrats virtually guarantee this will happen.  There are many conservative commentators who have begun to argue that Mr. Obama actually wants this to occur.  I don’t know what his intentions are, and it actually doesn’t matter.  What matters is the direction of the ship, and that’s not good.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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