Good News: Aaron Dean, Police, and God’s Law

It is depressingly predictable that a white, theonomic, Christian Reformed police officer apparently shot and killed a black woman in her own home at 2 am in the morning.

What is surprising and heartening is that there was a large number of white, theonomic people warned said policeman that he was on the wrong path, before he put his thoughts into action.

Progress is being made, slow but sure.

Lesson learned: Brothers in the spirit are a joy to see, regardless of genetic relatedness or proximity or language.

Go forth and prosper, with God’s light shining upon you!

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THE 140,000 IN REVELATION

God loves His people. It is depressing, when His people don’t love Him.

Postmillennial Worldview

PMW 2019-080 by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr.

I have been giving a brief survey of Revelation beginning in Rev. 4. Now we must note that as the wrath of the Lamb against the Jews builds, we will witness a surprising pause in the horrifying drama. Four angels hold back the wind from “the land,” i.e., Israel (Rev. 7:1-3). This act is symbolic imagery, relating what Robert Thomas calls (at another place) “picturesque apocalyptic.” The angels are not holding back literal winds, but the winds of destruction (cp. Jer. 49:36-37; 51:1-2). The first six seals represent the early stage of the Jewish War wherein Vespasian fights his way through Galilee toward Jerusalem. But before he has an opportunity to besiege Jerusalem the action pauses as these angels seal the 144,000 from the twelve tribes of Israel (Rev. 7:3).

The number 144,000, as most commentators agree, is surely symbolic. In fact, in…

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Our Bodies and Ourselves

I checked out Becky’s post on We Are Not Our Bodies, Our Bodies Are Ours. An interesting view of our bodies, ourselves, and the greater society.

Women have a difficult relationship with their bodies: I think that this has always been so — “unclean menstruating woman!” — and the over-sexualised culture of today doesn’t help matters.

Men have a somewhat different problem, tending to see their bodies as just a tool or a billboard, to get what they want from others. Women may be seduced into focusing on building the perfect external image, but men just abuse themselves into an early grave.

Not good, and not what God wants.

There is no shortage of parallels; the eye is the lamp of our body, the tongue is the rudder of the ship. 1 Corinthians says that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit- just let that sink in for a moment. You are the image of God. Your body is where He lives and breathes, in the same way that he formed the waters of the world and hovered over them in the very beginning. It talks about how we are not our own, we were bought at a price; therefore, honor God with your body. Our bodies are not separate from us; they are not the culture where sin breeds and is spread; Jesus said that sin begins in our hearts, He said that it isn’t what goes into your body but what comes out of it that makes it unclean. these incredible, strong, capable vessels are GOOD. So why are we taught to hate them? 

Becky Robinson, We Are Not Our Bodies, Our Bodies Are Ours

Fortunately, Christ has come, so uncleanness does not come from menstruating, and there is no need for men to abuse themselves as some kind of penance.

Respect the Temple of the Holy Spirit, your body. It’s fine to enjoy it in moderation — with good drink and (non-cancerous) smokes. It pleases God when you use your body in an excellent fashion — as determined by you and the Holy Spirit, not society at large — but respect and care for it well!

It’s a long walk, and there’s a lot of trash to burn off, but there will come a time when the People of God will be at ease in their temples.

Women, as well as men.

Science as Power Tool

A direct copy/paste from the sci-fi blog. Just read “Imperial Nobility” as your local ruling class, and “Imperial” as the local political framework.

---

The demonstration and application, in the Imperial context.

From Gender studies prof admits fraud in writings about sex and gender

He is a gender historian in Canada, the author The Manly Modern: Masculinity in the Postwar Years. For the last 20 years he attempted to prove there was no such thing as sex, that sexual identity was only a social construction based on power, leading to oppression and inequality.

Now he admits he got it all wrong and much of his academic writings were “made up.”

“If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic,” writes Christopher Dummitt on the website Quillette.

[The studious Imperial Scion, his eye focused on the family throne, scribbles notes on the usefulness of buying the Voices of Priestly Scientific Authority.

“Establishing well-funded academic positions have its place, but it is indispensable to shape the spirit of the intellectual environment. BOTH tools are needed to insure the security and the power of the Household, as well as it’s Corporate and Military wings.

Note especially that the truthfulness of the position is irrelevant, in the scientific context. Only the popularity of the position is important. Nobles need not worry too much about the data: only who interprets the results, and what the goal of that interpretation is.

As always, the Noble focus must be on the people in the position: the priest, the scientist, the officer, the official. All other considerations — “victory”, “truth”, “justice” — are beside the point!”]

He describes how gender studies took over history departments across North America in the 1990s. “Each of these fields shared the same worldview as I did—that just about every identity was a social construction. And, that identity was all about power,” he notes.

[“Intellectuals talk about power. Nobles use it.

One way to use power is to purchase intellectuals, religious or secular, that make certain that the masses don’t start getting unruly and disobedient. Traditional Imperial policy is to insure stasis, to keep things the same… and the Right Sort at the top.

However, when the Imperial Noble need to break the spirit of an independent people, it can be useful to promote chaos and change: the more destructive, the better. Invariably, the masses then turn to a Great Leader for protection, which is when His Grace can steps in.

Or, perhaps, the old culture is totally destroyed, which means that a new culture needs to be born… and its rules enforced. Again, His Grace can now rest on the throne He has made.”]

“To reiterate: The problem was, and is, that I was making it all up. These were educated guesses I was offering. They were hypotheses. Maybe I was right. But neither I, nor anyone else, ever thought to scrutinize what I wrote.”

Was gender really about power? To prove his points in his writings he cited other scholars who said it was. “It helped if their names were French and they were philosophers. The work of an Australian sociologist, R. W. Connell, helped, too. He’d argued that masculinity was primarily about power… In reality, his work didn’t prove this; it just plausibly extrapolated from small case studies, just like I had done. So I cited Connell. And others cited me. And that’s how you “prove” that gender is a social construct and all about power.”

The fraudulent scholarship developed in the academic environment and promoted by Hollywood is now finding its way into the legal, political framework. “My flawed reasoning, and other scholarship using the same defective thinking, now is being taken up by activists and governments to legislate a new moral code of conduct.

[“One hand washes the other.”]

“Until we have seriously critical and ideologically divergent scholarship on sex and gender—until peer review can be something more than a form of ideological in-group screening—then we ought to be very skeptical indeed about much of what counts as “expertise” on the social construction of sex and gender.”

[“Fortunately, legislation is well on its way to insure that such disgraceful and uncontrolled research is illegal, to be punished to the full extent of the law.

Thus, the return of stasis, stability, and unquestioned Imperial Rule. But, this time, without any whining about some Higher Law, limiting the power and authority of the Throne.”]

So, what do you know?

It really was all about power, after all!

The Thirst For More: Why it Exists, and How to Harness It

[The original post is on my sci-fi blog: only a few sci-fi terms have beem modified/deleted below.]

MORE

Exactly why do these merchants, these pirates, these wealthy elites, these Dear Leaders, always want more?

More money.

More power.

More control.

More freedom.

More women… more followers… more worlds to own and control… more friends… more beautiful things… more guns… more!

Let’s dig in with North, and find out not only why they want more, but how free markets harness this drive for more for the improvement of all.

First, the enemy of the religion of More… contentment.

Paul wrote about contentment. “Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we have brought nothing into the world. Neither are we able to take out anything. Instead, let us be satisfied with food and clothing. Now those who want to become wealthy fall into temptation, into a trap. They fall into many foolish and harmful passions, and into whatever else makes people sink into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people who desire it have been mislead away from the faith and have pierced themselves with much grief” (I Timothy 6:6–10). With respect to ownership, we are be content with very little. This takes great spiritual maturity. It takes courage. So, with respect to how most men are motivated, Mises was correct. Most men are discontented. They strive to improve their conditions by becoming wealthier. This is the religion of mammon: more for me in history. The religion of “more” is inherently insatiable. Mises would have admitted this. That is because he based all human action on the concept of insatiability. That is to say, built his theory of human action on a theory of finitude striving to be infinite.

There are people who live this way: very cool characters! But not big wheels in most sci-fi stories.

More interesting, storywise, are the lunatics who break all sorts of laws in order to get anything and everything they want. Who fell for the original God Delusion, “to become as God.”

I single out Mises, not because he was unique in his outlook on human motivation, but because he was uniquely forthright. All humanistic economists begin with the contrast between the individual’s supposedly infinite desires in relation to a finite number of resources: infinite ends vs. limited means. They see ends and means in terms of the categories of infinite vs. finite. They are implicitly comparing man with God. This is the Adamic mistake: the original Adam and also Adam Smith. This is the desire to become God. This is manifested in economic theory in the concept of equilibrium, a conceptual model that rests on the idea of man’s action in a world without uncertainty. In other words, it is a world in which man is omniscient. This model is ultimately self-contradictory. It is therefore irrational. I have explained why in Chapter 54 of the Teacher’s Edition.

A “world without uncertainty” is the pagan dream. A dead dream now, as even they would admit… sorrowfully.

Covenant-breaking man does act from a sense of discontent. He is always pursuing more. He never has enough. This is the religion of mammon. It is insatiable. This is not to be the economic model for Christian economics. The fact that we are finite should not bother any Christian. The fact that the dominion covenant is eternal should also not bother any Christian. It was eternal for Adam and Eve. There will always be an unbridgeable discrepancy between man’s knowledge, power, and wealth when compared with God’s. This did not bother Adam until he recognized the meaning of the boundary around the forbidden tree. This boundary announced that he was not God. He did not understand good and evil in the way that God did. This bothered him. It was not supposed to bother him. It still bothers covenant-breaking man. It should not bother covenant-keeping man.

Human finitude has bothered more than one Emperor, as well.

Therefore, when we come to the question of purpose, the purpose is always theocentric. Covenant-keeping man’s purpose is to build the kingdom of God. This kingdom is corporate.

Our purpose is to build the kingdom of God.

NOT

Whine and bleat that things aren’t what we like them to be!

Adam Smith Steps into the Room

B. Individual Purposes and Corporate Benefits

Jesus made this clear: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33). He also made this clear: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24, King James Version). Other translations translate mammon as money or wealth. The word came into the Greek language by way of the Hebrew cognate language, Aramaic. From the context of Jesus’ words, this was a form of service that bordered on the religious. Jesus was speaking of mammon as if this were another god. I think the best assessment of the meaning of the word is this: more for me in history.

There is now competition in the world for dominion. Covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers have rival purposes. They serve rival kingdoms. Yet they both are driven by the desire to expand their dominion in history. Karl Marx said that the world is driven by class competition. He was incorrect. The world is driven by covenantal competition. This is the biblical worldview.

Marx was wrong in more than one way.

The great insight of Adam Smith was this: when acting to improve their individual conditions, people serve each other in the market. This mutual service increases a nation’s wealth, yet this was not the purpose of competing individuals in the marketplace. The purpose that drives an individual is the desire to improve his personal circumstances, not increase national wealth. Nevertheless, individual purpose and individual striving after personal goals have the beneficial result of increasing per capita wealth for other participants in the marketplace. Smith titled his book The Wealth of Nations, and it was correctly titled. The word “nations” was plural. It is not just that individual striving after wealth increases the wealth of those inside the geographical boundaries of one nation. Where there is free trade across national borders, individual striving after wealth increases wealth in more than one nation. All free market economists argue along these lines.

“The magic of the market.”

It’s why I can spend time blogging, instead of plowing a field somewhere for a feudal lord, a powerful cleric, or for the Good of the People.

Smith’s insight was one of the most important intellectual breakthroughs in the history of man. For millennia, ethical leaders had disparaged the pursuit of individual gain. But Smith showed that, because of the effects of competition in the marketplace, many individuals are benefited. Competition within the framework of the market process is not destructive of the social order. On the contrary, it improves the wealth, knowledge, and way of life available to the masses as never before in history. This was done initially through mass production and price competition. Poor people who could never have afforded the luxury of several changes of clothes could now afford to buy mass-produced cotton clothing that could be easily washed and ironed. The mass production of cotton clothing was the first great breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution. It began in earnest in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. It transformed Great Britain and the North American English-speaking colonies, and then it soon transformed Western Europe.

A change of clothes, as the first core benefit. Gotta remember that!

The end of religious collectivism is probably the greater gain, though!

[…a little snippo, that I hope you will read at the original link anyways…]

Curses and Blessings

God imposed boundaries on men’s productivity that did not exist before the fall. These boundaries can be overcome by covenant-keeping. By honoring the ethical boundaries imposed by biblical law, mankind can roll back much of the curse that was imposed on mankind as a result of Adam’s violation of the ethical and judicial boundary around the forbidden tree. God imposed boundaries on man’s productivity because Adam and Eve had violated the judicial boundary that God had placed around His private property.

Don’t steal.

Okay? Okay!

Pirates and thieves, in space and elsewhere, will disagree. And since they will not hear and obey, other means of education will be used.

It is therefore legitimate for people to adopt a purpose of gaining increased individual and family wealth. Because a God-honoring society establishes laws protecting property, men who live in such a society have valid ways of cooperating with each other in productive ventures. By seeking their personal self-interest through voluntary exchange, including the exchange of labor, they benefit society as a whole. They benefit other individuals by means of their own increased productivity. This is why the boundaries associated with the curse of the ground are not entirely curses. They promote cooperation, capital investment, and greater output per unit of resource input.

Wealthy families would like to focus on the phrase, “family wealth”.

The Strange, Yet Profitable, Peace Between Enemies

D. The Lawful Pursuit of Profit

I have written that there are two kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of mammon. They are the kingdoms, respectively, of covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers.

Because of the free market social order, it is lawful for dedicated members of both kingdoms to pursue their own individual purposes of increasing their wealth. They do this through voluntary exchange. A small percentage of them do it by becoming entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are skilled at forecasting the future economic state of affairs, and then devising plans that may enable them to profit in the future by selling consumers what consumers want to buy at prices consumers are willing to pay. Profit is the positive sanction that paying consumers provide to those producers who have met consumer demand at prices consumers are willing to pay. Losses are the negative sanctions that customers impose on producers who have not met their specifications at prices they are willing to pay. They impose these sanctions simply by not purchasing the output of entrepreneurs who have failed to meet the standards required by paying customers.

When members of both kingdoms are successful in their pursuit of profit, this benefits the members of both kingdoms. I do not mean that the productive enterprises of members of one kingdom benefits only members of their own kingdoms. On the contrary, the increased productivity of members of one kingdom benefits members of the other kingdom. This is the great benefit of voluntary exchange. Adam Smith understood this in 1776. This was why he was an advocate of international free trade. He understood that citizens on each side of a national border benefit from the productivity of citizens on the other side of the border. Citizens on both sides of the border have an increased range of choice. There are more goods and services available because of the productivity of people on the other side of the border.

When murder is prohibited and theft is punished, both God’s people and (the smarter set of) God’s enemies benefit.

When there is a stable, predictable, and somewhat just legal order, Believing Christians and Fake Christians and Muslims and Jews and Atheists all benefit.

And the wealth, markets, and tax base of the entire society grows and grows. Something a large number of Ruling Families and Corporate Executives have noticed.

Same deal with the right to bear arms… the right to speak freely… to own your own land, that you use as you please… sound money and 100% reserve banking… more and cheaper technological tools… limited police authority and restricted government powers.

Interesting.

The Ability to Reason, as Our “Divinity Sense Organs”

The Quote….

if a god wanted to make himself known to humans, he would have given them the sense organs to detect divinity.

– Jerry Coyne

And the response, from Michael Egnor, at Evolution News

A Breathtaking Ignorance

My goodness. In this one assertion, Coyne (culpably) and Attenborough (more innocently) betray a breathtaking ignorance. 

God is not a physical thing. It is only physical things that can be sensed by sense organs. If God could be sensed via an organ, He would not be God. What would be sensed would be a part of creation, not the Creator. God is not in nature. He is prior to nature. He is the Source of nature. 

And, contra Coyne and Attenborough, God did endow us with an organ by which we may know Him. He endowed us with reason. Alone among animals, human beings have the power of abstract thought — to contemplate ideas separated from concrete particular (sensible) objects. We have intellect, by which we can understand immaterial knowledge and will by which we act on our abstract knowledge. 

Reason and Will

Our capacity for reason is the “organ” God gave us to know Him, and our will is the “organ” God gave us to love Him. 

Reason is our divine “sense organ.” It is perfectly adapted to its task — it allows us to know and love our Creator. In this sense we are created in His image: we have the capacity to know immaterial reality and to act on our knowledge. 

Atheists ask where is our “divine sense organ?”, when the very capacity by which they ask the question — their capacity for reason — is the “sense organ” they seek.  This utter atheist idiocy helped lead me to God. What I found, when I looked at the arguments for and against His existence, is that the arguments against His existence were vapid nonsense. 

In this sense, I owe Coyne and Attenborough a debt of sorts. Through arguments of this kind — “Where is our divine sense organ?” — the irrationality of atheism, and the rationality of belief in God, is made even more clear. 

One hopes that others are not misled by this manifest atheist nonsense, and that even Coyne and Attenborough may come in time to understand (not “sense”) the existence of the Source of their capacity for reason.

For the Record: Evolutionary Ethics

From Evolution News:

–[Quote on]–

Thoughtful reader Paul, a university freshman in the U.K., asks about Michael Egnor’s article from last year, “From the Annals of Evolutionary Ethics.” 

I have recently been studying the topic of morality, specifically whether or not objective moral values and duties exist. I have found many sources favouring the view of relative morality, but few supporting the existence of objective moral values and duties.

“A Simple Issue”

Per the reader’s request, I asked Michael Egnor to “defend the reality of objectively real morals.” Dr. Egnor’s answer:

I see it as a very simple issue. If there is objective moral law, then acts are right or wrong in themselves.

If there is no objective moral law, then moral law is just individual opinion. Of course, an individual may have the opinion that all people ought to do X, but that’s just one opinion out of 7 billion opinions. Who is to say what opinions ”ought” to be done? We could vote, but there’s no reason to apply democratic reasoning to moral law (the Holocaust was fairly popular in Berlin in the early 1940s and would undoubtedly have prevailed in a referendum).

Since there is no rational way to adjudicate moral law if it is merely individual opinions, moral relativism always boils down to power. “X is right” because I, who believe X is right, am stronger than you, who believe X is wrong. If you disagree, I’ll beat you up.

If objective moral law is not real, then nothing is right or wrong in itself. Killing innocent people, raping babies, torturing puppies is merely a matter of taste, like preference in ice cream. “I hate genocide!” has the same probity as “I hate pistachio!”

If you don’t believe in objective moral law, a law outside of human opinion, that’s fine. But then you are forced to acknowledge that your opinion on genocide/puppy assault/rape, etc., has the same moral standing as your opinion on art or ice cream. Opinion is opinion, and if you want to decide whose opinion wins, let’s arm wrestle.

If moral law is real, then genocide and rape are really wrong, in themselves, no matter what anyone thinks. But if 1) moral law is real, then there must be 2) a lawgiver.

That’s the problem for moral relativists. They don’t want to admit 2, so they deny 1.

It’s a simple matter. The literature may be interesting, but it’s just simple logic really.

By the way, if you don’t think that genocide would have been popular if put to a vote in Germany, read Daniel Goldhagen’s eye-opening book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

–[Quote off]–

With Relativistic “law” demoted to what it always was – “whatever powerful men want” – we can now focus on Actual Law, as determined by God.