006 – Reading Good Books (Basement Tape – Notes)

Download the conversion here.

An important conversion regarding the need to read…a lot. Numerous book recommends and I concur on those I am familiar with and trust the ones I am not are also worth reading. Plenty of thoughts but I will save them for another time. I did learn one important thing about myself. I realized that my opinion of other men is frequently tied to the books they read and their opinion of those books. Sometimes just knowing a man’s views on  something like pop-culture is enough to know he has either not read a certain book or read it and rejected it’s thesis and as a result there is a tension. If the matter is important enough (and not all are) that tension may eventually have to surface.

Higher resolution images for the notes below can be viewed here.

005- Building The Kingdom (Basement Tape – Notes)

Download the conversion here.

Here are my notes on Basement Tape #5. I decided to jot them down on paper tonight. They are less useful for you but they are more useful for me. I also enjoy the process of taking notes this way better than doing it on the computer.  Besides you need to listen for yourself.

Certainly a lot to think about. R.C. puts a high priority on the Kingdom of God and I concur. It isn’t as if I haven’t heard a dozen or more sermons with a strong emphasis on Kingdom but I seem to always walk away feeling like I have only been told part of the story, perhaps this tape tells us the rest.

A few takeaways.

• What is my family doing now? Later? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Can we “walk”  from these activities to the Kingdom of God and fulfillment of the Dominion Mandate?
• We pursue living simply, separately and deliberately in order to remove things that hinder us from our pursuit of the Kingdom.
• Stepping Heavenward is suppose to be a good book. You can buy it for a penny plus shipping.
• There are many questions regarding the Kingdom of God which I can think of. It is important that we think very carefully about what we believe the answers to be. Here are a few, I am sure there are many more. Is the Kingdom of God visible or invisible or both? To what extent? Is it progressing? Will it be made known? What is our responsibility to make it known? How are we to make it known? Is that the only way? Is the Kingdom limited to individuals? Families? Cities? States? Nations? Could a history of Christ’s Kingdom be written? If so would it include actual historical events? Is Satan’s Kingdom more apparent than Christ’s?
• Some of these questions are a result of thoughts I have had while reading Christian Reconstruction – What It Is, What It Isn’t, you can download it for free here. It is an easy and concise read.

Higher resolution images for the notes below can be viewed here.

Why You Can’t Start a Moving Company in Oregon

Short video.

Must Watch TV: Ron Paul

A lot of Ron Paul videos out there, but every 10 minutes of this one is priceless.

Source: LRC

Covenant

Funny.

“Everyone talks about the covenant, but nobody does anything about it.” – Source

Monday Morning Headlines

Caterpillar Moves to Cut 20,000 Jobs

Sprint job cuts to total 8,000

Philips Halts Buyback, Slashes 6,000 Jobs After Loss

Home Depot Says It Will Exit Expo Unit, Cut 7,000 Jobs

More layoffs expected at Starbucks

Update:
I recieved an email at work to inform me that some cuts were being made within our group. TIt seemed to suggest there are more to come.

Putting the economic blow up back together.

We live in interesting times. We are in the midst of quite a blow up at the moment.

“when things blow up politically, new people pick up the pieces, and then other bright new people start rethinking the proper arrangement of the theoretical puzzle of politics and government. The theoretical puzzle gets put back together very differently, just as the various institutional puzzles get put back together differently, and new words and concepts are developed that help justify (and even actively promote) the new arrangements. In short, some groups win, while others lose.” – Christian Reconstruction – What It Is, What It Isn’t by Gary North and Gary DeMar

A series of triumphs disguised as disasters.

In that last post I noted that Jamie Soles has a blog. Well I read his latest entry and he has a few remarks worth repeating here because they really hit home.

If we go thru any particular day and ask ourselves at the end of it what we accomplished in terms of character development today, our usual answer may range from “Not much…” down to “Nothing”. But I read a saying a couple weeks ago that stuck in my mind, and it is worth thinking about… “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a day, and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.”

Someone once described the development of the kingdom of God as “A series of triumphs disguised as disasters.” It may appear that we are failing, but we keep on doing what we know God wants us to do, plugging away believing in His promises, and it seems to me that God will honor this kind of faith with children who are obedient to Jesus.

Here is a video of Jamie on youtube.

You can purchase mp3’s here, we own The Way My Story Goes, it is superb.

One more link, Jamie did an interview about some of his music at St. Annes Pub.

Kids love Nathan Clark George too.

Ditto on Kids Love Him, Too.

This morning my five year old grabbed one of our Nathan Clark George CD’s and took it into her room to listen to. Tonight one of our pastors lamented that his wife was very sad that it was time to return a Nathan Clark George CD he had borrowed.

Another favorite for us and the kids is Jamie Soles (looks like Jamie has a blog)

Good stuff. Buy some.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Address

Here are my notes on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s well known 1978 Harvard Address. My shortened summaries of each point are highlighted below in blue text. Many of the problems below in my mind can only be redressed through proper discipleship and an important step in that direction is to reject the state’s educational system. Please see this recent post quoting Eugen Rosenstock-Heuessy regarding the modern notion of polytheistic eduction.

1. Contemporary Worlds (There are cultures which are not understood by Western thinking.)
   1. “Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.”
2. Convergence (Our arrogance leads us on the path of imperialism and empire.)
   
   1. “But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.”
3. A Decline in Courage (We are in large part a nation of cowards.)
   
   1. Particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and intellectual elite.
   2. Policies are created based on weakness and cowardice.
   3. Courageous individuals have no determining influence on public life.
   4. Is a decline in courage the beginning of the end?
4. Well Being (Our emphasis on well being weakens us.)
   
   1. Our concern for well being has lead us to empty materialism and the welfare state.
   2. Guarantees of safety and well being are not always advantageous.
5. Legalistic Life (Our concepts of justice and law are in fact very low.)
   
   1. Western society worships the letter of the law. Law makes right.
   2. “a society without objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but a legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
6. The Direction of Freedom (We are failing at the task of reconciling law and liberty.)
   
   1. Humanistic thinking has lead to a type of “freedom” which rewards mediocrity and promotes evil.
   2. “The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”
7. The Direction of the Press (The press can not be trusted to reliably report the truth and inform us.)
   
   1. “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20′th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.”
   2. The press bears no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion.
8. A Fashion in Thinking (Our thoughts and ideas are censored by passive means.)
   1. “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.”
9. Socialism (We are Socialistic, whether we like to admit it or not.)
   1. Western society is leaning towards socialism, a false an dangerous current.
   2. Socialism leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
10. Not a Model (There are ample reason to think we are not the model for the rest of the world that we think we are.)
    1. The Western way of life is not a good model for the rest of the world.
    1. “But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.”
    1. “There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.”
11. Shortsightedness (We have been shortsighted in dealing with foreign threats.)
    1. “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.”
12. Loss of Willpower (We are a nation without will power.)
    1. “And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.”
13. Humanism and Its Consequences (Man is at the center of everything.)
    1. “This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.”
14. An Unexpected Kinship (Materialism, socialism, and communism all have roots in humanism.)
    1. “Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism.”
15. Before the Turn (We must reject humanism, materialism, show restraint and recognize the impact of the enlightenment and modernism.)
    
    1. “There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.”
    2. “We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.”
    3. “Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
    4. “If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.”

Polytheistic Education

Eugen Rosenstock-Heuessy, in The Multiformity of Man (1936), called attention to the fact that, in the old days, a bride went from her father’s house to a new house with a unity of faith and heritage. “She was not exposed to any other man’s doctrine or ideals or values.” This is now completely changed by public or statist education. The state imposes many fathers on a family’s sons and daughters; these teach creeds and values antagonistic to those of the pupils’ families. The result said Rosenstock-Huessy, is a polytheistic education. “Thus, a modern man is not marring one man’s daughter, but many men’s pupil,” and the same polytheistic education is true for the young man. – The Roots of Reconstruction, p.217, R.J. Rushdoony

The Multiformity of Man is available online here.

Socialism

“Igor Shafarevich, the Soviet Russian mathematician, has described socialism as the organized love of death. The socialist ideal is equality in death. It calls for the destruction of hierarchy, of private property, of religion, of the family, and, finally, of life itself (In Alexandr Solzhenitsin: From Under the Rubble).” – Roots of Reconstruction, p.212, R.J. Rushdoony

Download Igor’s book here, The Socialist Phenomenon.

Fascism

“Fascism is a form of socialism which maintains the facade of private ownership and the free market while controlling all things with regulations so as to socialize all things.” – The Roots of Reconstruction, p.202, R.J. Rushdoony

The goal of humanism.

“Every attempt is made to turn the whole of society and the political order into one in which responsibility is eliminated, guilt is abolished, and man as god enjoys a continual paradise. This is the goal of humanistic politics, education, religion, and science.” – R.J. Rushdoony, Revolt Against Maturity, p. 119.

004 – Living Life Deliberately (Basement Tapes – Notes 1 of 2)

I am not living my life deliberately but I am working on it and you should too. I have an outline of this discussion to post later but I wanted to add a few thoughts jotted down while I listened once more.

Download the conversation here.

Living deliberately (when based upon the Bible) will lead you to reject much conventional thought and many modern norms. You will soon realize important assumptions about your life are founded upon the baseless claims of the world and the traditions of men.

Being deliberate requires a significant investment of time reading good books (and listening to Basement Tapes of course).

Deliberate people are an oddity to the world. They frequently find themselves swimming upstream. Don’t frustrate yourself (and others) trying to be understood, it doesn’t work.

Shortcuts will not make you more deliberate, for long, usually. Instead of just reading “10 Things You Need To Know About Pascal”, read Pascal (the book is made up).

Living deliberately forces you to re-examine what the Bible says about many important things. Your views may change. This can be hard to deal with at times. Deliberate thinking frequently puts a stone in your shoe. A few of the stones you will have to keep, a few will need to be removed.

You will have to fight against your own cynicism. Optimism must prevail in your outlook.

An opinion…deliberate living leads to the “Simple Life”. The pursuit of the “Simple Life” is the fruit of this labor. Agrarian thought is not a fad, for many it is the most practical application of the simple life. There is much to learn from the agrarians, even if you your agrarianism is limited to a house or apartment in the city.

Deliberate thought will change your views on family, state, culture, work, community, children, discipleship, success, meaning, happiness, media, marriage, masculinity, femininity, good, evil, beauty, technology and so on. Your convictions grow broader and stronger. Now is a good time to ask God for humility and wisdom.

Change is inherent in the pursuit of living deliberately, even numerous seasons of change. Families must be brought along, not pushed along. It is not change for mere change sake, it is not change without end or without purpose, although that is what some might think. Make it fun. Make it joyful.

Your life will become less compartmentalized and you will discover a vast network of interconnectedness where you see none today.

If you liked this, here are more Basement Tape notes.

Homeschooling, Living Life Simply, Living Life Separately

“A man’s end reveals his purpose.” – Otto Scott

“A man’s end reveals his purpose.” – Otto Scott

Source

R.C. Sproul Jr. and the “democratic spirit in the church”

R.C. Sproul Jr. makes a great point near the beginning of Basement Tape #4 (Living Life Deliberately) that is worth some thought.

“It is the democratic spirit in the church, that anybody who aspires to anything other than the norm is guilty of arrogance.”

He is right about this of course.

Now read this from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (chapter four, The Ethics of Elfland) regarding the relationship between tradition and democracy.

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.“

It strikes me that even if I ascribe to the norms of my spiritual ancestors (and give them a vote) I would still be labeled arrogant according to the prevalent “democratic spirit of the church”. Now one might say that our ancestors did not have to deal with bikinis, public schools, the pill and modern media but isn’t it fair to deduce what they would have done had they faced these same challenges and live accordingly? I argue that most of the folks I know who are not following the norms of the modern church are in fact simply doing their best to follow the norms of their ancestors. In thinking them arrogant are we not also applying the same label to our spiritual ancestors?

My Notes on Easy Money, Easy Morals

Some notes on the effects of inflation after WWI in Germany. Taken from Easy Money, Easy Morals by Joseph T. Salerno from the Mises Institute.

• Cost of a German newspaper.
  • Jan. 1921 3/10′ths of a Mark
  • Oct. 1923 – 2,000 Marks
  • Oct. 29, 1923 – 1,000,000 Marks
  • Nov. 17, 1923 – 70,000,000 Marks
• Govt. created 2000 printing presses to print enough money to keep up with inflation.
• Destroyed bank deposits and pensions.
• Workers demanded to be paid three times a week, then soon three times a day!
• Workers who were paid monthly quit jobs, money would be worthless by the time they were paid.
• When woman would go to do laundry they would take laundry baskets filled with money. Thieves would dump the money out and steal the laundry baskets because they were worth more.
• People with access to the new money became rich buying up assets.
• Thrift was no longer a value.
• People did not carefully plan there investments. They no longer looked to the future.
• People spent a large amount of time hunting for bargains in order to get rid of their Marks.
• Dowries were wiped out, sexual mores changed, woman had “boyfriends”. The social function of dowries was destroyed.
• Gamblers and profiteers were looked up to instead of those who saved and planned for the future.

Youtube video documenting Germany’s hyperinflation.