This post by Doug Wilson is directly relevant to one of the concerns I have with the way Rick Warren speaks of faith in this post. I wish Rick Warren would replace words like faith and church, with Christ.
Warren
“The third leg of the stool is the churches. There’s a public sector role, there’s a private sector role and there’s a faith sector role.”
Wilson
We are on the threshold of the establishment of an unbelieving American empire. This by itself does not exclude our involvement—think of Daniel, Joseph, the faithful centurion, and Erastus. The problem is caused by the fact that this is a militantly secularist and pragmatic empire and, as such, the pressure is already being applied to the Christian church to abandon its exclusivist claims concerning the Faith. The logic of such empires always insists upon joint worship of various gods in the pantheon. This, above all else, places us at odds with the current religious and political climate.
So from this point out, every Lord’s Day, as you worship the triune God only, remind yourself, remind your family, that we worship as exclusivist Trinitarians. We pledge allegiance to one nation under Christ. We pledge allegiance to nothing under any idol, or under any generic and undefined deity. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
My kids love these video shorts at Vision Forum called “Everyday News”. For those that are tech savvy you can download the all of them in one shot using the Firefox plug-in called “DownThemAll” from the RSS feed. This allows you to watch them in full screen and queue them up in itunes. Our kids are interested in putting together a few of their own also.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to accommodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Although the ADA was meant to increase the employment of the disabled, the net theoretical effects are ambiguous. For men of all working ages and women under 40, Current Population Survey data show a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers after the ADA went into effect. Although the number of disabled individuals receiving disability transfers increased at the same time, the decline in employment of the disabled does not appear to be explained by increasing transfers alone, leaving the ADA as a likely cause. Consistent with this view, the effects of the ADA appear larger in medium-size firms, possibly because small firms were exempt from the ADA. The effects are also larger in states with more ADA-related discrimination charges.
I was excited about the movie Children of Men (released this week), however this review from First Things has me thinking I will save my money and read the book.
Grant Cuarón the license to make a film about current events as he pleases, whether about the war in Iraq or immigration policy. What’s insufferable is his pressing into service someone else’s vision as a commercial vehicle for a personal political screed. Children of Men wants to be a grown-ups’ Brazil but never transcends a student-film political sensibility (“They’re all fascists, man!”), despite hat tips to the cinema-vérité street-fighting styles of Saving Private Ryan and Full Metal Jacket. Cuarón pulls off the battles between the terrorists and the government troops with deft and disquieting verisimilitude, obviously attempting to approximate American soldiers’ battling of insurgents in Baghdad, even leaving the splatter of the Kayo syrup that is Hollywood blood on the lens of his camera for a little extra grit. He’s learned much from Spielberg and Kubrick. It’s a shame he’s learned nothing from P.D. James.
Updated: 4/29/2008
For some reason this post is getting a lot of traffic today. “Tearing Down Strongholds” by Dr. R.C. Sproul Jr. is a good read if want to learn about the fallacies of behaviorism.
Marvin Olasky interviews Arthur C. Brooks about his new book ‘Who Really Cares: the Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism’.
“households headed by a conservative donate, on average, 30 percent more dollars than households headed by a liberal”
“liberal families earn an average of 6 percent more per year than conservative families, and conservative families give more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich”
“In 2002, conservative Americans were more likely to donate blood each year, and did so more often, than liberals.”
“religious conservatives are 28 percentage points more likely to give than secular conservatives, give nearly four times more dollars per year, and volunteer more than twice as frequently.”
“A person who goes to church every week and strongly rejects the idea that it is the government’s responsibility to redistribute income will give, on average, 100 times more money to charity each year than a person who never attends a house of worship, and strongly believes that the government should reduce income differences between people.”
“If a cashier accidentally gives a churchgoer too much change, the odds are better than half that he or she will return it, while the odds are more than six in 10 that a secularist will choose not to give it back.”
“a dollar in government spending on nonprofit activities directly displaces between 25 and 50 cents in private giving”
“per-capita amount given by Americans to human service charities was 14 percent higher in 2004 than it was in 1960″
“In per capita private charity, Americans give three and a half times as much as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians.”
I use Google Reader to keep up with various RSS feeds. Mostly blogs and news sites. You can add RSS feeds for Google news searches. I set one up last week for the term “Global Warming” and I am getting a kick out of some of the headlines.
The thesis I venture to submit to you is as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the schools and colleges have, therefore, been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live; That deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization; That the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it.
I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe the indictment is justified and here is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.
— Walter Lippmann, speaking before the Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1940
The other day I posted a link to a video featuring Joel Salatin in which he discusses his methodology of farming. Today I found and read this article by Joel. There is a lot of wisdom and cause for concern in it.
Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.
And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.
But at its core, Apocalypto is a story of Bicycle Thief simplicity. Jaguar Paw refuses to be enslaved—not by the empire, not by fate. He will get back home. He will reclaim his wife, his children, and his place in the world. In short, he will not be afraid. Link
This quote really struck me. I am currently studying the philosophical underpinnings of agrarianism. This quote really states what a big part of it is all about. I am also reading ‘Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology’. The quote below is from that book. You can buy it for a whopping $5 at Cumberland Books.
What I had taken to be a homogeneous Amish collective was actually an aggregation of Amish, Mennonites and mainstream Americans from all corners of the country, joined by one converging aim: to reclaim their lives from machines.
“Global warming” is little more than the latest excuse for the expansion of central government power. It has been cooked up to replace the dead concept of Marxism and the dying concept of Keynesian economics.
Vox makes an accurate observation about this story from the UK. It is a mistake to think we are that far off here in the US.
This is a powerful demonstration of the way that Western government are increasingly taking positions which not only attack traditional morality, but do so in a manner that demonstrates their intrinsic opposition to the very rights which they are supposedly protecting.
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There is something deeper here. The pattern that reveals the pernicious spiritual element at works is the way in which that which is sin is increasingly protected by the force of government, whereas that which imposes any of the natural costs of sin upon itself is increasingly attacked.
This post from Stand To Reason is also worth reading. Steve links to a speech suppression story out of Canada (Carleton University Crushes Dissent on Abortion) and discusses whether Huxley or Orwell won the day. The post also references “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. I think about 90% of the blogs I read make mention of this book at some point so I will have to get a copy soon.
Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. – Winston Churchill
This sermon byJohn Piper is a great encouragement to mothers. You can read it or download the audio. If you don’t have the time to get the whole thing, skip down about half way and read the section titled “A Tribute to Ruth Piper”. This got me laughing.
Fifth, she took right and wrong very seriously and held me
accountable to the highest standards so that I knew in all the conflict
I mattered a lot to my mother. I wrote:
And I seldom felt worse than when mama cried:
I got a speedin’ ticket one night
and mama wept like I’d shot somebody.
All the way to the station at midnight she cried
and made me pay it off right then and there.
One thing was for sure:
I mattered a lot to mama.
Growing up I spent my summers working on my grandfather’s (then uncle’s) farm (pictured below). I might like to farm again someday. If Joel doesn’t get you excited about farmin, I don’t know what will. I need a steak.
Updated: I am listening to the Q/A now and many of Joel’s points reiterate the need for smaller government and less intervention in the food to market process. I was amazed to hear the cost added to a single head of beef to get it butchered by a certified agent.
Smaller government now…please. You probably live in a state which will look the other way if your 12 year old daughter’s 25 year old boyfriend takes her out of state for a major surgical procedure (take a guess). Well he better not buy any raw-milk while he is there.
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