You gotta love it! The gentle, soft-spoken, former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, is revealing way more than this Administration would prefer; and already, Mr. Karl Rove is denouncing McClellan for sounding like a "left-wing blogger." Ah yes, no evidence from Mr. Rove, just good ol' character assassination.
McClellan says that the Iraq war was sold to Americans via a "political propaganda campaign manipulating sources of public opinion," and confirms what we all knew: Cheney--who he refers to as the "magic man"--was steering policy from the shadows. McClellan says "the Iraq was not necessary," but that "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war."
In my opinion, McClellan is certainly not revealing everything. Where there's smoke, there's usually an inferno, if you investigate further. Still, this is an important step in the right direction.
Will it awaken the brainwashed Republicans? I doubt it. They'll believe anything Rove, Limbaugh, and FOXNews tells them. Hopefully, we won't see any more books like this from those loosely connected to theonomy.
I posted this back in November of last year when gas was averaging $3 per gallon. Now that we're hitting $4, and the oil heads recently appeared before the Senate, I thought I'd show it again. As I noted last year, pay attention to the CEO's solution. If the American people can find an interim solution in domestic drilling (bringing the price down) until alternative fuels can be brought online, I do believe the environmentalists will up the creek without a paddle. What do you say?
Franky Schaeffer loves to make a fool of himself--he'll do anything for an audience, I assume. If you observe his capricious path, his recent move into the loving arms of the sodomite Left makes perfect sense. He is reinventing himself into an expert on all things Christian Conservative, and a desperate group of anti-theocrats think they've found an insider.
An interesting comparison emerges. Senator Obama shows authentic respect for Jews and Israel in word and deed. McCain is looking for votes from a huge group of evangelicals who hold -- as a Calvinistic theological absolute truth -- that God is "sovereign" and has "predestined" everything, including the Holocaust, and that the Holocaust was "God's will" in order to "restore Israel," not for the good of the Jews but so that Jesus might return to earth, thus fulfilling biblical prophecy (as understood by most evangelicals).
Talk about getting your doctrines mixed up. My goodness, if I had known "evangelicals" were such devout Calvinists, I would've called Gary DeMar and told him to stop trampling them in eschatology debates!
Franky, of course, is writing to a theologically illiterate audience, so I doubt any of the caretakers at Talk2Action will correct his fumbling in this instance. They need guys like Franky. But implying there's a "huge group of evangelicals"--including men like John Hagee--are Calvinists is the grossest distortion. I simply cannot believe that Franky is that ignorant. His misconstruing must be intentional.
Premillennial dispenstationalists (Hagee, Parsley, et al.) are rarely predestinarian. Their concept of the future is that God actually consults it and then writes out the necessary prophecies. These guys deem the label "Calvinist" as worse than being called "liberal." Once again, real Calvinists are being tarnished with misinformation from the ill-informed and the deceptive. Franky abides in the category of the latter.
"To say two men who live together and engage in sex can be married renders the idea and ideal of marriage meaningless. The court may declare it, but it cannot redefine an institution that nature and nature’s God have already defined. As they say in Texas, you can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, and call her Peggy Sue, but it’s still a pig."
Mark Driscoll, the chest-thumping, LA-dressing, pastor of Mars Hill Church must be feeling the heat from the current of criticism that's warming his backside. Blogging about the recent Dwell Conference in New York City for urban church planting he bemoaned:
"The conference went very well and in my opinion was a gathering of pastors who are reformed by conviction and missional by contextualization. It seems to me that this tribe is growing as more and more young pastors in general, and church planters in particular, want to be both faithful to the text of Scripture and fruitful in the context of culture. Sadly, there are some more fundamental and sectarian reformed folks who are resistant to the idea that a church should adapt its practice (though not doctrine) to best fit its cultural context. Yet, I do believe that, with love and patience, more bridges of understanding and partnership are being built, which only benefits the cause of Jesus, especially through church planting."
Goodness gracious, I feel like the proverbial mosquito at the nudest colony. Where do I begin? Adapting to culture is by no means commanded by God. As any astute Reformed believer knows, culture is--as Henry Van Til stated--religion externalized. Therefore, adapting to culture equates to adapting to another religion, since most cultural expressions arise from some form of paganism or humanism.
Also, has Mark taken the time to consider WHERE some of this cultural expression came from? How about its fashion? As is often the case, much of the trendy dress for men develops first in the homosexual community before it becomes mainstream. The disco regalia of the 1970s, the leather and studs of the heavy metal 80s, and the "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" look of today are all manifestations of gay culture. Driscoll sees no problem with adapting to them. In that sense, Driscoll is quite accurate to describe what he's doing as being "FRUITFUL in the context of culture."
The Scripture assumes an antagonism on man's part to living in service to God. In fact, he's quite adept at developing philosophical justification for both questioning the veracity of Christianity and justifying his alleged neutrality. Scripture says he's actually engaging in truth suppression (Rom. 1:18), and we are to see man for what he is--not a lost postmodern soul, but "filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affections, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" (Rom. 1:29-32).
I grow weary of the postmodern discussion. I'm amazed Bible-believing church leaders are that consumed with it. Why dignify with serious discourse the latest "fig leaves as aprons" philosophical convolution that man is using to cover his sin? I double-dog guarantee you he's not postmodern when he runs his checkbook. No, postmodernity is only an issue when he's trying to cast off the metanarrative of God's providential history. Otherwise, he's modernist to the core.
Driscoll wants churches that conform in their praxis to pagan culture. I'm not sure what Scriptural admonition drives him in that pursuit. He claims a church should "adapt its practice (though not doctrine) to best fit its cultural context," but the obvious implication is that doctrine is somehow divorced from praxis. How far do you take that? What aspects of culture are "neutral" enough for a Christian church to practice?
I was radically saved during the early 80s from sheer atheism. I had long hair and played in a heavy metal band. I looked the part of the subculture of those days. Long story short, I gave it all to Christ on a chilly November evening and attended my Christian service in a Baptist church in Dallas, Texas. I looked like a freak. My hair was nearly to my stomach, teased out, and I had nothing but "rock" clothes to wear. Guess what? NOBODY in that Southern Baptist Church looked like me.
I got there early, and the first man that greeted me was an older deacon with a pot belly named Bennie Bell. He came right over to me, gave me a hearty greeting--which surprised me--and then guided me to the front pew of the sanctuary. I had planned to sit in the back, for obvious reasons. I was bombarded with Baptist blessings as nearly every person came to see this strange sight.
Well, after the service, I had a long talk with the pastor and several church members. I was full of questions and wrote down as much as I could on whatever I could. I wanted to know everything that day. If someone mentioned a word I didn't know--like redemption--I asked them what it meant and then wrote it down. I knew already that it was MY responsibility to conform to the community of faith, not them to me.
I was there until after 3 pm, and one precious family stayed with me as long as they could. They even walked out the front door to try and make their way to their car while I stood holding open the door of the church with one foot still in the vestibule. I told them my car was parked in the back and they suggested I cut through the sanctuary instead of walking around the campus. They said, "Chris, just close the door and pull the handle from the inside to make sure it's locked. God bless you, and we'll see you later." I was standing alone in the church. I had worn everyone out. I was the last one to leave. I've never looked back since then.
Folks, the power of God is in the faithful preaching of the gospel, not in hair gel and contemporary praise bands. I loved my first pastor. He was a Ph.D, and somewhere in his late 50s, but I hung on his every word. He looked nothing like me. Outside of Christ and His Word, we had nothing in common.
In conclusion, Driscoll and Co. could learn a great deal from leaders like Ron Paul. Here's a conservative, suit-wearing, grey-haired, wrinkled, soft-spoken politician, but he's all the rage with young people of every ilk. Dr. Paul isn't trying to conform to culture. He isn't sporting sunglasses and playing the saxophone on Late Night television. When he's not campaigning, he's in Washington taking on the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or making his case at a freedom rally. Ron Paul lives by conviction, not conformity, and young postmoderns love him for it. Driscoll should quit whining about criticism and do likewise. Maybe, just maybe, those fundamentalist, Reformed, sectarians are God's means of trying reach him.
I don't know who this Kevin James is, but it's obvious they'll let anyone on the radio. The neoconservative rage seethes even more because it's been embarrassed by the progress of the war, rising energy prices, and a failing economy. When things get that bad, all you can do is yell.
James declares that pure religion is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction (James 1:27), but we're spending untold billions of dollars to determine whether there might be a piece of fungus on the red planet. This is the clearest indication that we're not religiously controlled as a people. To waste money on such ventures in light of our social plights demonstrates that our priorities have long been in the wrong place.
But, who's to say it was ever about science anyway? Sure, the cogs in the machine may have pure motives, but let's face it, there is definitely an astronomic-industrial complex that has routinely made a fortune in the space racket. Space exploration still retains a veneer of purity and respectability that hides an overpriced industry of wasted enterprises.
Because we are citizens of a kingdom "which cannot be moved," we must cling to grace whereby we stand, in order to "serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear" (v. 29). History will not spare those who equivocate and who avoid an unqualified stand. Because history is of God's ordination, it moves to eliminate all that is against Him, and all that is not clearly for Him. ~ R. J. Rushdoony, Hebrews, James, and Jude, p. 133.
If this phrase appear to any reader paradoxical, a very little reflection will convince him that it is only so in appearance. For, the greatest organized wrongs which the civilized world has seen perpetrated in modern times, upon the well-being of mankind, have been committed under the amiable name of humanity. No despotic government now avows the ruthless purpose of self-aggrandizement and of the gratification of hatred and the lust of power; but its pretense is always the good of society, and the welfare of the governed. The wars of "Holy Alliance," which dreamed Europe in blood at the beginning of this century were all undertaken nominally for the peace and liberties of Europe. No demagogue confesses, in popular governments, the greedy ambition or avarice which proves to be his secret motive: but he seeks only the good of the "dear people," while he betrays them into mischievous anarchy or legislative atrocities. ~ Robert Lewis Dabney
The popular Christian financial adviser, Dave Ramsey, recommends that if parents cannot afford sending their kids to a private Christian school, they should place them in public school. After all, he did, and he claims his kids are fine. Our own Andrea Schwartz addresses the multitude of errors in Ramsey's "wisdom," and shows the more excellent way.
P.S. I don't mention Andrea's blog enough. Her posts should be a staple of your blog diet, if you're interested in homeschooling. I encourage to not only regularly read Andrea, but take the time to forward her blog to five people that could benefit from it.
"You can't be open to everything, if you believe in identity, and the preservation of identity. So that if a people, or a nation, or a culture, wanted to survive there has to pass on its tradition to its children and has to marry within that tradition... All men are united by virtue of their humanity, but yet we seek to preserve our uniqueness as nations, cultures, races, and peoples." ~ Rabbi Mayer Shiller
A most interesting Rabbi lays assault on the technocratic materialistic West, and places his finger squarely on the central issues that plague our time.
Here's just a foretaste of what's soon to come in the great theocratic conspiracy. Secular journalist, Jeff Sharlet, is soon to release his book (The Family) on the secretive Washington-based group, The Fellowship (see video below). Doug Coe, longtime leader of The Fellowship, apparently had no communications director, because Coe often cited history's most infamous leaders as models for power and cultivating commitment. This has brought the religious political group significant criticism. Sharlet had spent some time with the group and actually "lived" to tell about it.
Let me be clear that Jeff Sharlet himself is not the conspiracy theorist. His investigation of The Fellowship focused exclusively on the internal operations of the secret group. However, Sharlet is a highly respected journalist, and no doubt his book will throw fuel on a fire we've been laboring to put out. I've had some communications with Mr. Sharlet, and he has made it clear to me that he does not hold to the conspiracy theorists of the far Left critics.
I've already read a few articles that attempt to tie Doug Coe to Rushdoony, so I'm not sure how this will play out. I was just starting to relax, and Sharlet comes out with an explosive book that's sure to be misused by those more dead set against Christian Reconstruction.
The Democratic Party has long prided itself in living above the racism allegedly so prevalent among the pasty GOP. It's now becoming laughable to watch them discuss the obvious racial issues surrounding the Obama vs Hillary contest. It's like they're disco dancing while juggling an egg.
What have we learned, America? Well, we've learned that we've learned nothing in 100 years. Race remains the elephant in the room and the Obama campaign has lifted the American dialectic back to the surface.
Sometimes I do wonder about what has happened to some of our colleagues. For example, I cannot comprehend some of the blogging going on at American Vision. This recent post by Mr. Jerry Bowyer on the new film Iron Man left me puzzled as to why such a militaristic tenor would be permitted by a Christian organization. Here's a few snippets:
"Yes, I loved it. I’ve got a Y-chromosome, what do you expect? He is a man wrapped in a robot, wrapped in a missile. Oh, and he shoots lightning. He kills terrorists. He saves children. According to CNBC, Americans paid over one hundred million dollars in one weekend to see Iron Man do all that stuff."
"We’ll probably see it again. I liked the politics of it..."
"The first half of the movie is an uncensored love note to U.S. soldiery and capitalistic engineering ingenuity."
"Yes, Iron Man, an arms manufacturer, does make a public announcement about walking away from the missile business, but only so he can build the ultimate missile and then wear it like a suit. Like Bruce Wayne before him, Iron Man is a billionaire. He gives some of it away, but he keeps most of it himself, and uses it to make things, including the kinds of things that kill Jihadi terrorists."
"In fact Iron Man is the moral clarity guy, no winking and nodding at bad guys around the world. The bad guys have stubble, turbans and heavy Arabic accents. They torture people, including our hero. They slaughter families."
Iron Man is the moral clarity guy? For anyone to make that type of judgment demonstrates how little moral clarity they have. This is not moral clarity. This is propaganda--war propaganda of the worst form, because it's streaming from a Christian mouth. And to read this on a reconstructionist web site is especially disturbing.
And who exactly slaughters families, Mr. Bowyer? How many Iraqi "families" have we slaughtered? Far more than any bad guys with heavy Arabic accents, I can assure you of that.
I would expect to read such dribble from John Hagee, not the likes of American Vision.
Mr. Bowyer loves Iron Man because he bombs the bad guys. I'm afraid, Mr. Bowyer, that our missiles are not so accurate. In fact, some of our "Iron Men" enjoy a good joy ride of shooting innocent civilians as they drive down their streets:
By R. J. Rushdoony The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol. II, No. 2 Winter 1975-76
In Matt. 22:15–22, we read of a challenge to our Lord to give grounds to justify a tax revolt. In view of the fact that this episode is sometimes cited by contemporary tax revolt advocates, it is important to examine it closely to see what its meaning is.
We are told that its purpose was to “entangle” Jesus, i.e., to place Him in an intolerable predicament. Paying taxes to Caesar, a foreign ruler, was highly unpopular with many; to deny the validity of a tax revolt would cost Jesus, the Pharisees reasoned, popular support. The populace in disgust would regard Him as an appeaser, an ally of an unpopular and hated regime. However, to favor the tax revolt would invite reprisals against Jesus by Roman authorities. The question, then, was carefully designed to be deadly in its consequences to Jesus, and it was asked with flattering guile, asking Him to tell the truth without fear of consequences:
Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man; for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us, therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? (Matt. 22:16–17)
Jesus, after condemning the Pharisees as hypocrites, went directly to the heart of the matter. To understand His answer, we must appreciate the distinction made then and now by tax revolt advocates. They were not anarchists. They were ready to pay taxes to a legitimate civil government, but not to an illegal one, i.e., one illegal in their eyes. Similarly, contemporary tax revolt advocates are able to document at length the unconstitutional aspects of the federal government of the United States and to give a lengthy analysis of legal justification for denying taxes to an unconstitutional regime.
The distinction made by the Judeans then was one which we still have with us in Latin form, common to our dictionaries now as good English. It is the distinction between a de facto civil government and a de jure one. A de jure civil government is one which rules rightfully and legally, by right of law; modern Americans would say that it is a truly constitutional civil government. A de facto order is one which actually exists and is in command and is not necessarily or at all legal. Thus, to cite an extreme case, the communist rule over Poland is a de facto one, not de jure. Rome was an outsider in Palestine, a foreign invader and conqueror; its rule was plainly de facto. Although Rome was trying to give good administration and to win over the people to its rule, its rule was all the same de facto, not de jure, and there were many among the Jews who argued that taxes paid to a de facto ruler were not legal and hence should not be paid. Hence the framing of the question in terms of the tax revolt theory of the day: “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” The argument was that it was an unlawful tax. The reasoning was identical with what we encounter today. The de jure argument is used, by the way, by radicals and conservatives alike. It is an easy argument. History is so rife with illegality and evil, that there is little that cannot be nullified by an appeal to a de jure argument. One man once argued with me that, because white Americans had no legal title to America but seized from the Indians, the Indians should be compensated at current value for it. I pointed out, first, that the current value was a product of the white settlers’ work, and, second, the Indians themselves had seized the continent and killed off entirely a previous dweller, a pygmy people. Should we out both Indian and white, and locate pygmies to compensate, or to use to resettle America? Such arguments end in absurdity, and they begin by idolizing or deifying a particular model as the de jure factor. I believe that I regard the U.S. Constitution with equal or more respect than the tax revolt advocates, but its framing was de facto act. The so-called Constitutional Convention had no authority given it to frame a constitution. Should we therefore call for its abolition until a de jure status can be given it?
Our Lord’s answer was unequivocally grounded on the de facto aspect:
Shew me the tribute money. And they brought him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matt. 22:19–21)
Caesar was the de facto ruler; he provided the coinage, the military protection, the courts, the civil government, and the basic civil authority. This de facto status was a reality which could not be ignored. They were duty bound, not only by Caesar’s demands, but by Christ’s, to render to Caesar the things which by a de facto state belonged to Caesar. A de jure argument can be used to deny virtually all authority, civil, parental, religious, vocational, etc., in a fallen world. A fallen world is itself a de facto world, not a de jure world; it is the reality, but it is not a lawful reality.
Does this mean that we content ourselves with evil? Do we relax and accept all things as inevitably de facto in a fallen world, and therefore beyond remedy? Far from it: what our Lord ruled out was the tax revolt, revolution as the way, rather than regeneration. Sinful man cannot create a truly de jure state; he is by nature doomed to go from one de facto evil to another.
The key is to “render unto God the things that are God’s.” We render ourselves, our homes, our schools, churches, states, vocations, all things to God. We make Biblical law our standard, and we recognize in all things the primacy of regeneration. Only as man, by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, is made de jure, made right in his relationship to God by God’s law of justice, can man, guided by God’s law, begin to create a de jure society.
A tax revolt is exactly what Karl Marx in 1848 hoped it would be: a short-cut to anarchy and therefore revolution. In his articles of November 12, 1848, “We Refuse to Pay Taxes”; on November 17, 1848, “The Ministry Under Indictment”; and on November 17, 1848, “No More Taxes,” he called upon Germans to break the state by refusing to pay taxes. While much earlier he had argued against the legality of taxation without proper representation, on December 9, 1848, he said plainly, “Our ground is not the ground of legality; it is the ground of revolution.” Marx believed, as Gary North has shown in Marx’s Religion of Revolution, in the regenerating power of chaos, anarchy, and revolution.
Those who render unto God the things which are God’s, believe rather in regeneration through Jesus Christ and the reconstruction of all things in terms of God’s law. In such a perspective, a tax revolt is a futile thing, a dead end, and a departure from Biblical requirements.
It's one thing when "Rainman," savant Kim Peek, is able to rattle off any obscure fact from virtually any period of history, but it's quite another when it's the guy the working in the cubicle next to you. With anomalies like Kim Peek, you can dismiss them as having some strange quirk related to their other debilitating mental condition. You just can't say that with this guy!
This is a lecture you must hear. Most Americans are not aware of the system of the power elite and what this man refers to as the world superclass.
He states that 30-50% of all traded stocks is controlled by hedge funds--of which there are only 10,000 on earth. But the top 300 hedge funds, control something in the neighborhood of 80 to 85% of all the trading--they hold all the assets. The top 100 control 60 or 65% of the assets. In other words, a tiny group of world investors control the CEOs of virtually every major corporation who in turn control the fate of the rest of the world. The top 1% of wealthiest people on earth have the same wealth as the bottom 2.5 billion people, and the number of financial, political, and social leadership of this superclass only numbers 6,000 people.
Of this 6,000, 94.7% are men of anglo descent and are typically 60+ years in age and reside in America and Europe. 30% attended one of only twenty colleges. He admits that they meet regularly at such notorious secret forums as the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove.
