The Leader-Gone-Awry

An item recently came to my attention.  (See the whole thing here.)  It is a very good study of the relationship of Christians to ‘the powers that be’ by David Berresford.  While I recommend you have a look, I want to use it to discuss something I have been considering for the last couple of years.

The author is concerned about how Christians should relate to governments – especially government which seem to have gone awry.  At one point he comments:

From a secular perspective, the Founding Fathers of this Nation, who, as a whole, were Godly men, had to wrestle with this matter of honoring the king who was in a position of delegated authority. Their appeal was to a higher authority. In the Declaration of Independence they noted that the rights of all men are unalienable. The Creator Himself was the source of these rights. Only the Creator had the authority to endow them and only the Creator has the authority to abrogate them. Their accurate assertion was that the king and the British government had usurped the authority of the Creator in the attempt to unlawfully subjugate them.

While there are several interesting things we could explore here, I will focus on only one.  The author is someone who sees that governments can come to be ‘out of control’ and he is trying to think through this matter from a Christian perspective.  He comments that

I never advocate doing wrong to accomplish right. The end does not justify the means. I cannot violate God’s law to facilitate a political goal, regardless of the correctness of that goal.

He takes a very circumspect route to his opposition to bad government by appealing to a higher authority:

Considering that civil authority in our Nation rests in the standard of the United States Constitution, my loyalty and obedience belong to that Constitution and those leaders who honor it in word and actions. To obey those who oppose that Constitution is to be disobedient to the very standard upon which this Nation is built.

While I take a very similar approach to this question, we must remember that constitutions are easily ignored by those who hold power.  If the immediate political authority of our governmental officials comes from the Constitution, it is possible that circumventions of the Constitution negate the authority of governing officials.  But the absence of authority does not mean an absence of power.  Governing officials without authority can and do still use (abuse) power to kill you, your family, and your friends.

I respect the genius of our Constitution and I deplore the fact that it is often ignored today.  But I have to admit that part of the reason this happens so easily is because our Constitution was framed with two important circumstances in the background:

1.  It was a quiet revolution against the government of the Articles of Confederation.  They were perceived to be ‘not working’ and, rather than revise them (which required the unanimous consent of the states) they were replaced.  It is an intriguing story which we can’t recount here.

2.  It was a compromise solution.  There were several, very different and conflicting, ideas about how to construct this new government.  Part of the solution to this problem was to make the Constitution somewhat ambiguous in some areas.  It was left for those who would implement it to ‘flesh out’ the details in many respects.

This means that, when implemented by good men who were in harmony with the compromise solution, we usually got good government.  (The epitome of these would have been Washington, and then Jefferson, in my opinion.)  But it also means that it is very easy for those elected under the provisions of the Constitution to ignore its requirements and do whatever they wish.

In short, appeals to the Constitution mean little to those who are not in sympathy with its spirit.

From this and other considerations I cannot recount here, I think Christians (and others, too, for that matter) need to think more about what authority is held by governing officials who have gone awry.

When the author of our article says (above) “the king and the British government had usurped the authority of the Creator in the attempt to unlawfully subjugate them” he doesn’t go on to say something that most if not all of those who signed the Declaration of Independence would have said:  since the king had usurped his authority, he has also abrogated it.

I think it is time for conservative Christians to admit this ‘out loud’ so to speak.  It solves what I call the ‘Hitler and Stalin’ problem:  what should Christians think of ‘leaders’ gone awry?  What we should think, stated very bluntly, is this – the leader gone awry has forfeited authority, even though he may retain power.  And this is important.

It means that we no longer owe such people respect.  Remember that, in Romans 13, those to whom we owe respect are those who ‘do good.’

It means that, whenever we have the power, such people should be removed from office.  Often we will not have that power, but when we do, we have a moral obligation to remove the ‘leader gone awry.’  (The ‘power’ of which I speak here is not necessarily physical power.  More often, it will be political, social, or perhaps economic power.)  We should speak out against and oppose the leader-gone-awry whenever we have the ability and opportunity.

But when Christians live under the regime of a ‘leader gone awry’ we have a moral duty to actively subvert, in any ways we can, the wrong-doing of such leaders.  Ministers should preach about this and  Christians should study it in Bible school classes – it is heavily theological!

We should all pray about it – we should pray that if the leader gone awry does not repent, that God will move against him in a mighty way.  (God is good at that, as my wife likes to remind me!)  We need to leave behind that syrupy idea of ‘praying for our officials’ as though that only means praying that all will go well with them.  For the leaders-gone-awry we need to pray that God will remove them, and the sooner the better.

It is long past time for silence and inaction on these matters by Christians and the church.

A Sad Little Story

A friend sent me this recently.  I do not know its ultimate origin.

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The financial crisis explained in simple terms:

Wendy is the proprietor of a bar in Washington.  In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed in a ledger, thereby granting the customers loans.

Word gets around, and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood into Wendy's bar.  Taking advantage of her customers' freedom from immediate payment constraints, Wendy increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Wendy's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral.
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed; nevertheless, their prices continuously climb, and the securities become top-selling items.

One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager of the bank (subsequently fired due to his negativity) decides that the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Wendy's bar.

But the drinkers cannot pay off their debts -- they're unemployed and they're alcoholics!  Wendy in turn can't fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy.

DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95%. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80%.
The suppliers of Wendy's bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities, are faced with a new situation: they must write off her accounts as uncollectable and suffer the loss of their investments. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor.

The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties. Wendy, her suppliers, and all the investors who bought DRINKBONDs, ALKBONDs and PUKEBONDs are left holding the bag.  The funds required for saving the bank - here's the good part! - are obtained by a tax levied on all non-drinkers.

Now do you understand?

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Kent comments:

It’s good as far as it goes.  But the story needs some additions.  The out-of-control-government needs to be mentioned, not just at the end of the story, but at the beginning and the middle also.  To make the allegory more complete and accurate, add these features:

First, government agencies decree that everyone has a right to come to Wendy’s place and get drunk.  They ‘lean’ on Wendy to ‘encourage’ her to run a tab with anyone who wants a drink.  Remember, according to the government, everyone has a right to a drink at Wendy’s bar.

Second, the government creates special agencies to ensure that bankers can and will float DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS, and PUKEBONDS.

Third, the government doesn’t just tax all current non-drinkers in order to ‘save the bank.’  The government borrows untold boatloads of money based on the government’s promise that many generations of future non-drinkers will pay, pay, and pay some more – plus interest.

Finally, add the little twist that two presidents from different parties are involved.  They both have somewhat unusual ears.  One can’t pronounce ‘nuclear.’  The other thinks he is a god.

This is becoming too complex for an allegory!

How About Silence?

 

I spent some time recently in a couple of waiting rooms.  Blaring away was the ubiquitous television.  One happened to be ‘The Price Is Right’ – annoying when watching, unbearable when used as a ‘background sound.’  In the other some nit-wit blabbered away while a camera was trained on the door of an airplane from which ‘Yo-Mamma Obama’ was supposed to appear at any moment.  As long as I could stand to look, nothing happened, and the voice stumbled around for time killing, thought mostly meaningless, words.

We live in a world full of constant media sounds.  Every restaurant must play music, often far too loudly.  Who just sits quietly any more?  It is a nearly lost art.

On the college campus many students walk around with ears always ‘budding’ and somewhere in there the mp3 player blasting.  Yesterday at the local grocery store the store manager was trying to tell the ‘cart collection’ boy something.  She had to shout while about two feet from him because his ear buds were in place and, apparently, his music was echoing around in his (empty?) head.  Help must be hard to get these days!

Even at church we suffer from this condition.  You might think Christians would at some point take to heart the admonition, “Let all the earth keep silence before Him!”  If we do, it’s not places I attend church.  There is always noise – on purpose.

We play music before the official ‘show’ begins.  Even during communion, we can’t just be quiet – we play ‘background’ music every and always.

I know this is not, perhaps, some great problem.  But I do often wonder why moderns cannot stand the sounds of silence – and I don’t mean the song by that title.  What goes on within us that we cannot tolerate being alone with our thoughts for even a short time?  Are we empty?  Do we hate what we find within?

I will now be silent so you can think about this for a while.  Try doing it without music playing.

Hot, Cold, or Inbetween – It’s Global Warming!

 

This AP story is making the rounds recently:

River Ice Jams Hard To Predict, Scientists Say
Mar 27, 2009 6:31 PM

[The story reports that]  Kate White, a civil engineer at the Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and one of the nation's leading experts on ice jams [said] climate change caused by global warming likely is changing ice conditions and adding to the unpredictability.

Kent comments:

This has been said before, but is worth repeating in light of a flood (take it as a pun if you wish) of this kind of reporting for the last far too many years.

First, a civil engineer is cited as though she is an expert on ‘global warming.’  The problems with that are obvious.  Even worse is the role the ‘global warming’ hypothesis is now expected to carry in the news culture.

On very hot days, global warming is always now the culprit.  It’s never just summer, when it is often hot in many places in the world.  Hot summer days confirm, it is always implied, the global warming hypothesis.

But, paradoxically, so do cold spells.  So does an ice jam in a river.  So does any storm of any kind.  So does some vegetation growing faster than usual.  So does EVERYTHING.

While that is all considered good reporting down at AP and their kin, it isn’t science.  An hypothesis which is confirmed by any evidence we might encounter is not much good as an hypothesis.  It’s as though the suspect in a who-done-it plot is shown to be guilty because she owned the gun or because she didn’t own the gun; because she was at the scene of the crime or because she had never been near the scene of the crime.  In other words, the evidence doesn’t matter, she’s just guilty.

If nothing can conceivably count against the hypothesis of global warming, nothing really counts for it, either.  We just know its a big, bad problem that must be solved by any means whatsoever.

All of which makes it a lot more like superstition than science.

Vote FOR LIGHT!

This just in from “Vote! Earth”

THIS IS THE WORLD’S FIRST GLOBAL ELECTION, BETWEEN EARTH AND GLOBAL WARMING.

On March 28 you can VOTE EARTH by switching off your lights for one hour.
Or you can vote global warming by leaving your lights on.

The results of the election are being presented at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009. We want one billion votes for Earth, to tell world leaders that we have to take action against global warming.

According to these people, ‘Your Light Switch Is Your Vote.’

I will not review the fallacies of environmental-mania here.  You can find some of that elsewhere.

But I do plan to vote.  I plan to vote for more light, more power generation, and fewer ‘environmental’ nitwits.  Here is what I plan to do.

This Saturday (March 28) at 8:30 pm we are going to light our house up until it glows.  When all is glowing, I am going to take a picture of a well-lighted house, and post it here and on Facebook.

And I am here also to campaign for your vote.  Vote for more power generation, more light, and fewer ‘environmental’ nitwits by lighting up your place on Saturday at 8:30 pm, taking your picture, and posting it on a Facebook group that I am going to create right now.

The environmental maniacs love darkness.  I urge you to love light.

This Saturday, VOTE FOR LIGHT!!!

Amen.

Everyone, Anyone, & Their Kin

‘Ain’t it the truth?’

Today we set aside theology and all that for another kind of complaint:  the way supposedly smart people use the English language.

Yes, yes, I know that not every occasion calls for formal English.  In conversations we often bend the rules.

But in public speaking, in written public announcements, and in related venues, I expect to see some attempt to use the language correctly.  We are in the midst of a severe pronoun misuse problem lately.

So, Americans, get this through your thick skulls:  the words ‘everyone’, ‘someone’, ‘anyone’ (and a few others related words) are singular, not plural, in number.

This means that if you want to connect any of these words to another pronoun, it too must be singular.

Here is the sort of mistake that has become common:  “Everyone can pick up their copy of the book at the door.”  It is clear to most people that ‘their’ is plural – plural possessive, in fact.  But it should also be clear that ‘everyone’ is not plural.  You can do a little experiment to convince yourself.

Would you say ‘Everyone is going to the store.’ or ‘Everyone are going to the store.’?  The second way sounds wrong, and it is, because ‘everyone’ is singular.

But, maddeningly, one constantly hears and reads in the public forum things like, “Anyone can can cash their check at our bank for free.”

Why is this mistake so common?  It has to do with the inane views of feminism.  What should be said is, “Anyone can cash his check at our bank for free.”  Sometime in the last twenty-five years feminists convinced us all that this is a sin, because ‘his’ is masculine in grammatical gender.  It was contorted into an insult to use good grammar in this way.

People tried things like ‘his or her’ and ‘his/her’ but these were too awkward.  So rather than rub the feminist sensibilities in the wrong way, we have resorted to perverting the English language.

Yes, this is yet another one of the many benefits of feminism:  bad grammar.

Real Communists Ought to Know

Just in case any doubt remains in your mind, you might want to check out the speech given by the chairman of the Communist Party USA upon the election of Barack Obama.  It concludes with this:

Let me finish by saying that it sure feels good to be on the winning side. I’m sure everyone feels the same way. At the same time, because of this historic victory, we – and the broader movement that we are a part of – have our work cut out for us in the coming years. It’s a big challenge, but we have met other challenges. So let’s go out there and do it with a sense of confidence that the best days for our country lay ahead of us. Yes we can! Si Se Puede! Thank you.

Before someone starts complaining that ‘you can’t blame Obama for what someone says about him’ I want to make it clear that this is not my point.

The point is that real communists think the election of Obama is a good thing.  They think he will in some way help move their agenda forward.

And real communists ought to be a credible source for what is good for communism.  The chairman of the Communist Party USA says, “Obama is.”