Non-Essential = Not Needed

 

Unless Congress passes a continuing resolution for spending, the national government will “shut down” on Friday this week.  But “shut down” is qualified.  If you have been paying attention, what will “shut down” are non-essential government services.

Supposedly, everyone on Capital Hill is working feverishly to avoid this tragedy.

But here is a question:  If the national treasury is trillions in arrears (and it is), and if something must be done to control our governments out-of-control spending (and it does), then why have we not shut down EVERYTHING that is non-essential years ago?

As I understand non-essential it means “not really needed.”  If it is not really needed, why was the government ever doing it in the first place?

I noticed that even the Republican Speaker of the House has been saying recently that he doesn’t want such a shut-down to happen.  I have to wonder what kind of fiscal conservative would be in favor of government doing non-essential things.  (And there are many things that are not officially in the non-essential category that are far from necessary.)

Non-essential = not needed.  They should have shut those down decades ago.  That this is even a matter of debate shows you what kind of nitwits, for the most part, inhabit the halls of Congress.

That’s No Christian!

Thanksgiving Question Nearly Deports Tortured Christian

An immigration judge was distressed that 'Li claimed that Thanksgiving was a Christian holiday.'

An immigration judge cannot quiz asylum seekers on religious doctrine to see if they are credible about their faith, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reiterated in a January ruling. . . The problem in the case of Chinese Christian Lei Li, the court said, was not only had he been tested on doctrine, but that his answers weren't wrong.

Li says he became a Christian while visiting Korea in December 1999 and hosted a house church when he returned to China. Authorities raided the church in 2001 and held Li for 19 days, repeatedly beating him. Li was fined about $900, lost his job because of the arrest, and left for the U.S. on a visitor visa. After he violated his visa by working, he applied for asylum.

Li's immigration judge said Li failed to prove that he was a Christian. He couldn't answer basic questions about Christianity, explained the immigration judge.

But in describing his faith, Li said he believed "Jesus came to save people from sin, that he willingly died on the cross, that he rose from the dead and … ascended into heaven," Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote for the Ninth Circuit that reversed the lower court's ruling.

Li also explained why he worshiped in a house church rather than an officially sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement church. Those churches, he said, "have a different Lord than we do …. [Th]eir Lord is the government, not God."

But the immigration judge was distressed that "Li claimed that Thanksgiving was a Christian holiday" and "knew little about the differences between the Old and New Testaments"—though Li noted that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.

Kent comments:

I hate to say it, but Li knows more about Christianity that many people I have met at churches.

Then there is the matter of this “immigration judge.”  You will notice that his name appears nowhere.  Perhaps it was withheld to protect the guilty, the stupid, or some combination of both.

Did this immigration judge just not like the idea of another foreigner coming here to “take our jobs”?  Does he think Christians deserve the wrath of a persecutorial Communist regime?  Or is he just an idiot?

If, according to this so-called judge, Li’s answers do not reflect some understanding of the Christian faith, I would like to know what the judge thinks his answers should have been.

So Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday?  Well, not for the Chinese Communist leaders, I suppose.  Perhaps not for immigration judges.  I suppose you could say that Christmas and Easter are not Christian holidays, but they tend to show up on most church calendars.

Do you suppose this judge has been to church lately?

I wonder how much the immigration judge is paid each year.  I hear the House of Representatives is looking to cut spending.  I know it wouldn’t be much in the big scheme of things, but there is a clear waste of taxpayer’s money.

If not that, we should at least send the immigration judge on an all-expense paid vacation to China for 19 days of beating.  I would be willing to pay a few extra tax dollars for that one.

Gone With the Musical Wind

I am never up on ‘the latest’ books, but I recently ran across a gem of a book, published last (2010) year:

Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns:  How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal by T. David Gordon

The link in the title will take you to The Book Depository.  I have no interest in that company, but I did notice that this is the lowest price I could find for a new copy, and shipping is free.  (It is not extremely fast, but it is free, and my copy came in excellent condition.)

Gordon is a sharp cookie, so to speak.  He is, in essence, pleading with the church not to jettison mindlessly our long, rich tradition of church music in favor of what is mistakenly (as he points out) called ‘contemporary’ music.

Like Gordon, I have been disturbed by this for a long time.  I can still vividly remember, back in the 1990s, being called into a young (and I am sorry to say, somewhat stupid) minister’s office for a chat.  He had not told me what the chat was to be about, so it was a bit awkward from the beginning.  He eventually came around to the point, which was that he did not want our church to sing any more “old” songs.

I was confused, because the songs we were singing mostly were not all that old.  In the course of the discussion he came around to the point:  he wanted everything we sang to have ‘the sound.’  I had no clue what ‘the sound’ was, and he was not very helpful as I asked about it.  Finally, he came up with this definition:  “I want our music to sound like the latest ‘Maranatha’ CD.”  That is, he wanted it to “sound contemporary.”

This struck me as bordering on idiotic.  Why would any congregation want to limit singing to any one ‘sound’?  How could the best music be only ‘contemporary’ – whatever that might mean?

Those were my initial impressions, but they were unstudied.  So shortly after that I began a quest to know more about all this.  What I did not realize was that I was observing in microcosm something that was burning its way through the ‘church world’ – and causing a lot of destruction in its path.

As my study of this matter continued, I realized that those who had succumbed to this fad had little good reason for what they were doing.  It was mostly just a musical whim, or something they had seen somewhere else and assumed they should imitate.  (This reminded me of that famous parental interrogation:  If everyone else jumps off the bridge, will you jump off too?)

So I began to compile, write, and rewrite what has become a never-ending study of this whole matter.  My thesis is that, for all sorts of very flimsy reasons, the church has generally adopted a “beauty is only in the eye of the beholder” attitude (aesthetic relativism).  The more I studied, the more I realized that this approach flies in the face of the Christian faith in many ways which I point out in the study.

So when I recently came across this little book I found – to my astonishment – that this fellow T. David Gordon had come to many of the same conclusions I had, and for the same reasons.  This surprised me because he seems to be an extensively educated (in the theological field) person, while I am whatever it is that I am – an amateur who likes to kick ideas around my mind.

If you think church music should be ‘contemporary’ (again, whatever that means), or if you have just never seriously considered this matter, I urge you to read Gordon’s little book.  I read it with an eye to writing a review of it sometime.  I began to mark what I thought were key passages.  The only problem was that almost every page had marks!

The church has inherited a great treasure of music.  It is a collection that has been reviewed and pruned untold numbers of times by untold numbers of people, so that the collection approaches only the most valuable pieces.  For the most trivial of reasons, many want to cast this great collection aside in favor of a tiny, accidental collection that happens to be recent.  Before you decide to do that – or be a part of doing that – you should read Gordon’s little book.  It won’t take more that a couple of hours of your life, and they will be two hours well spent.

BioLogos Nonsense

Recently my son and then some friends put me on to a great uproar over what Christianity Today called “Creation Museum Founder Disinvited from Homeschooling Conferences.”  Ken Ham, founder and president of Answers in Genesis, was the “disinvited” one here.  He lost the invitation because of his public attacks on Peter Enns, a senior fellow of biblical studies at the BioLogos Foundation.

I am not a “young earth” creationist in the sense that I am not convinced that we can be very sure about the age of the earth.  But I can see why anyone who takes the Christian faith seriously would have problems with what comes out of the BioLogos Foundation.

Consider one example, an essay found there that attempts to explain “At what point in the evolutionary process did humans attain the ‘Image of God’?” of which Peter Enns is a “consulted expert.”  Let’s peruse a few samples.

[T]he fundamental qualities of the image of God are characteristics of the mind and soul, however we understand those: the ability to love selflessly; engage in meaningful relationships; exercise rationality; maintain dominion over the Earth; and embrace moral responsibility.

From the BioLogos perspective, God planned for humans to evolve to the point of attaining these characteristics.

This implies, of course, that at some point “human beings” did not bear the image of God.  This is exactly what the Biologos people think.

Humans did not have a fully formed moral consciousness prior to the time of Adam and Eve. However, general consciousness must have already evolved so that a moral consciousness and the associated responsibility were possible.  When Adam and Eve received God’s image, they had evolved to where they could understand the difference between right and wrong.

When, then, did this happen?

We cannot know the exact time that humans attained God’s image. In fact, it may be that the image of God emerged gradually over a period of time.

According to Biologos, scripture even suggests this view.

Scriptural evidence supports the view that other humans existed during the time that God’s image was attained. Genesis makes this apparent when the writer makes reference to Cain’s fear of other people, when God cursed him. Likewise, Cain finds a wife among a nearby tribe (Genesis 4:13-17). In light of these references, it seems likely that Adam and Eve were not individual historical characters, but represented a larger population of first humans who bore the image of God.

Near the end of this essay, the authors wonder “What About the Soul?” and go on to at least hint that human beings may not have an identifiable non-physical component of their being.

You should browse the Biologos website to see more about the views of this group.  They are clearly a group who begins with a complete acceptance of some version of Darwinism.  They then attempt to stretch and re-shape the Christian faith in whatever ways are necessary to force it to fit over their Darwinism.

There is nothing wrong with a nuanced reading of Genesis.  But when this reading is done through colored glasses that screen out key points of the historic Christian faith, it might be time to take off those glasses.

So again I say that I can see why anyone who takes the Christian faith at all seriously would find the alternative worldview of the Biologos Foundation to be not an “explanation” of that faith, but a threat to it.  And it doesn’t require that you agree with the “young earthers” to share this concern.

Hard-Wired for Nonsense

from:

Sin in the Double Helix

Reports linking moral behavior to genetic traits actually prove Scripture's claims, not undermine them.
Karen Swallow Prior | posted 3/17/2011 10:38AM [at Christianity Today]

[excerpts]

For, despite some thinking to the contrary, these genetic discoveries do not negate biblical teaching. Instead, they illuminate the truths of Scripture in a new and powerful way. . . this only confirms the truth of the psalmist's prayer: "You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Ps. 139:13-14).

And what of Paul's lament? "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do. … As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me" (Rom. 7:15-17). Whether sin literally resides in the genes or not, Paul truthfully confesses that sin is living in him, as it is in all of us.

And in the middle of this passage from Romans are these words: "And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good." God's law is good, not only when we abide by it, but even when—especially when—we don't.

Are we predisposed to sin, genetically or otherwise? Absolutely. But God has determined a way to freedom, and that way originates not in the genes but in the Genesis.

Kent comments:

I don’t want to be too harsh, but Karen is an English professor.  This might be what you get when English professors try to tell us about theology!  (Just kidding, of course.)

But this “explanation” explains nothing, pious-sounding as it might seem to be.

If God “hard-wired” us to sin, we cannot be responsible for our sin.  Even if God only hard-wired a predisposition to sin into the first human pair, then God is at least partially responsible for sin.

So what is Karen trying to say here:  that being hard-wired for sin in some way illuminates the Psalmists description of our being “fearfully and wonderfully made”?  That sounds just a bit like non-sense.

What could it possibly mean that “God has determined a way to freedom” even if we are genetically wired for sin?  It seems to indicate that Karen the English Professor thinks that perhaps God hard-wired us for sin, and then, when we did what God hard-wired us to do, He “came to our rescue” by over-riding His original programming!

While it might sound very erudite to dismiss modern claims that our moral behavior stems from our genetic code, it is really more a display of air-headedness.  I wonder if that is the product of genetics?

Try Not to Step Into It

Lent Gets a 21st-Century Update

Jeffrey MacDonald

Religion News Service

March 2, 2011

(RNS) -- For Janis Galvin fasting for Lent has long meant saying no to candy for the 40 days before Easter. But when the season begins this year on March 9, it's apt to mean something more: walking when she'd rather drive, for instance, or turning the thermostat way down.

Galvin, an Episcopalian, will join with about 1,000 others who've signed up for the 2011 Ecumenical Lenten Carbon Fast, a daily regimen for reducing energy consumption and fighting global warming.

Lent is getting a makeover, especially in some Protestant traditions where it hasn't always drawn strong interest. The carbon fast is one of several initiatives aimed at reinvigorating Lent by linking themes of fasting and abstention to wider social causes. . . .

Fasting from anything is never an easy sell in a culture that values convenience, according to Jim Antal, who heads the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ.

But as a spiritual practice, he said, personal sacrifice can be a key driver in advancing larger movements.

"We're trying to deal with the mingling of individual Lenten disciplines with social change," said Antal, whose conference is spearheading the carbon fast. "And that is precisely what will save the Earth -- if individuals who begin to get it... begin to say, `Gosh, I need to change my life, and I need to become an activist."'

Kent comments:

This sort of thing come up every year lately.  It is the moral equivalent of a pile of the stuff that periodically falls out of the east end of a horse going west.

Whatever you might think of the church tradition of Lent, this nonsense has nothing to do with it.  It is, rather, simply a rather transparent way of co-opting ‘church’ things for the purposes of radical, leftist political causes.

Speaking in the very broadest use of the term, I am surprised intelligent people take the ‘church’ seriously anymore.  Salvation to these kinds of people means nothing more than ‘saving’ the earth from a harmless substance that is an integral part of the life-cycle as designed by God.

But there I go, talking about God ‘designing’ something.  We can’t have that, our course.  Instead, we have some idiot Episcopalian ‘turning the thermostat way down’ to ‘save the earth’ as a supposed act of worship.

There is so much of this kind of material piled here and there today in the religious landscape that it can be very difficult – as with that stuff that falls our of the west-bound house - not to step into it.

Easier Than I Used to Think

March 1, 2011

NEWS FEATURE

On evangelical campuses, rumblings of gay acceptance

By Cathleen Falsani

Some observers now wonder whether a major shift in opinions about homosexuality might be occurring among younger evangelicals.

The answer seems to be yes.

Last month, the student newspaper at Westmont College in California printed an open letter signed by 131 gay and gay-supportive alumni who said they had experienced “doubt, loneliness and fear due to the college’s stance on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues.”

Kent comments:

How can we determine if a moral position is correct?  That, of course, is a big question that could take us into the areas of meta- and normative ethics.  But now, with the help of some of the alumni of Westmont College in California, we at least know a sure way to determine if a moral position is wrong.  If a moral stance makes anyone ‘experience’ doubt, loneliness, or fear, then it is clearly wrong.

For example, I experience all these feelings whenever I think about the ‘you-must-accept-our-sexual-attitudes-and-practices’ stance of some homosexual advocacy groups.  So those stances must be wrong – which, presto! – makes me right!

Wasn’t that simple?  Just to broaden the perspective a bit, I have all those feelings about the Obama administration’s policies. Thus –bingo! – Obama is wrong, and I am right!

The news article goes on to say:

A 2010 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and Religion News Service found that a majority of young adults favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry and adopt children.

Well then, if a majority favor this, is must be right.  Moral reasoning is so much easier than I used to think!