You Have Been Assimilated!

Here is a nice bit of insight into the Boy Scouts recent decision regarding homosexuals in their organization:  Whither the Boy Scouts?  The author points out that homosexual advocacy groups and atheist groups are already dissatisfied with this decision because is allows local BSA groups to decide their policy on the admission of atheists and homosexuals.

According to these advocates, that simply will not do.  The BSA must not permit any “discrimination” in their groups at all, or the attacks will continue.  In other words, this ‘retreat’ did not end the war over this.  Apart from the details of this case, it illustrates the fact that behind most of the “anti-discrimination” advocacy groups, there is a collectivist mindset.

We live in a collectivist world, as anyone who pays attention knows.  You are not ultimately allowed to control anything as an individual – not even with the classic proviso that subjects such control to the equal enjoyment by others of the same right.  Once on this road, it was inevitable that no small groups of people would be allowed control of the affairs of their groups.

So private clubs, organizations, churches, businesses (fill in your favorite category here) are all subject to the will of the collective, at least as the will is expressed in the political system, including the courts.  The President’s recent “you didn’t make that” speech was nothing new.  We have lived in a collectivist society long, long before he came on the scene.

When you think carefully about this, you discover that it was one of the negative eventual consequences of slavery in this country.  Some of the Founders worried about what would come of slavery, and they were justified in doing so.  It led to a horrible war within our country, to the radical reconstruction punishment of the loosing area in that war, to the anti-negro (that’s what they would have said then, at least) discrimination society of the south (which was just as intense in most of the ‘north’ for that matter) to the “civil rights movement” of the mid-20th century.

That movement, which rightly insisted that government-owned entities be open to everyone, pushed that same idea into every part of society, even the private parts like clubs, businesses, and other private organizations.  In the end, the effect was to say that nothing is private.  As reprehensible as I find the idea, if the Elk’s Club can’t exclude anyone it wants from its group, the group has been collectivized – taken control of by the collective.  If the owner of the corner pub can’t decide who will and will not be served in his establishment, it has been collectivized – taken control of by the collective.  And, please note, so have the club members and the pub owner.

Now, extend this idea from blacks to any conceivable category of discriminated-against’ people and you have . . . our world.

Consider the irony of all this.  Slavery was the forced control of one person by another.  The effort to do away with that practice, and even that idea, led to our current situation in which no one is permitted to control himself.  In other words, the efforts to rid our society of slavery led to our current society in which everyone is ultimately controlled by the collective and is thus a slave.

I know that has been pointed out before, but I think that, now and then, it is worth remembering again.

First Off in 2013

This is from, of all things, a newspaper is Asheville, NC.  The fellow who wrote it, Mike Scruggs, must be my brain twin!  I will comment no more and simply link to it:

http://www.thetribunepapers.com/2013/01/03/the-principles-of-evanjellyfish-christianity/

Happy New Year to all,

Kent B. True

Science, Faith, and Trumping

There is a little thought-provoker of an article over at Christianity Today today.  (No, I’m not shuddering.)  A mom is talking about helping her older children think through questions about the Christian faith and science.  It is generally good, though things you have probably heard before.  The article concludes with:

We need kids who are unafraid to ask the sorts of tough and exciting theological, philosophical, and scientific questions you can only ask when you know that, however this world came to be, God did it.

Even this is a good point except that it doesn’t come to terms with this:  is the Christian faith truly compatible with any and every idea that comes out of the domain of science?

Here is a related question, one that I often ask:  when science and Christianity come into apparent conflict, are we for some reason compelled to amend our view of Christianity rather than our view of this particular conclusion from science?

I’m not thinking of any question in particular here.  I am not convinced that the Christian faith requires a very young earth, for example.  But I think we “need kids” who are not immediately ready to amend their theological views just because (another example) of something neo-Darwinists happen to think.  I am willing to consider anything that might have a bearing on my theological views.  But I can see no reason to adjust the Christian faith just because of the latest thought from the field of science.

I think there is an idea behind this tendency that reads something like this:  science is just reason looking at data, but Christianity is filled with prejudices and presuppositions.  Therefore, in case of conflict, science always trumps the Christian faith.

Of course, the ‘just because we want to believe it’ element is often over-played in Christianity.  And beyond that, the ‘science has no prejudices or presuppositions’ idea is beyond ridiculous.  I don’t want to end the science/faith dialogue, of course.  But it is only helpful when we conduct it on reasonable, and carefully examined, terms.

Politics Can’t Avoid Religion

There is a recent New Yorker article titled “Of Babies and Beans:  Paul Ryan on Abortion.”  The author, Adam Gopnik, is agitated over something said by Paul Ryan at the recent vice-presidential ‘debate’ (I still can’t bring myself to say that those things are really debates).  Here is what shocked Adam Gopnik:

Paul Ryan did not say, as John Kennedy had said before him, that faith was faith and public service, public service, each to be honored and kept separate from the other. No, he said instead “I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.” That’s a shocking answer—a mullah’s answer, what those scary Iranian “Ayatollahs” he kept referring to when talking about Iran would say as well. Ryan was rejecting secularism itself, casually insisting, as the Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan put it, that “the usual necessary distinction between politics and religion, between state and church, cannot and should not exist.”

Pause to note something significant in the sub-quote above from Andrew Sullivan:  the assumption that “politics and religion” is parallel to “state and church.”  State and church are institutions.  Politics and religion are (here at least) concepts.  The mere fact that we see wisdom in separating two institutions does not require that we agree that these two concepts can be separated.  Keep that in mind as we proceed.

Gopnik is especially disturbed with one place Ryan took this:  his opposition to abortion.  As Gopnik went on to say:

Ryan talked facilely of what “science” says in this case. But what real science has to tell us, of course, very different; it says that life has no neat on and off, that while life may in some sense begin at conception, the moment when the formed consciousness that distinguishes human life from bean life arises is a very different question, not reducible to a dogma or a simple claim. A bean isn’t a baby; a baby was once a bean, and between those two truths it is, or ought to be, every woman for herself.

Albert Mohler wrote a response to Gopnik.  I often like what Mohler has to say about such things.  Mohler emphasized Gopnik’s insistence that an early-stage baby is nothing more than a bean, and where such a view inevitably leads us.  But it was interesting that Mohler did not mention what is really a key point is this, and many related, debates.

Gopnik naively assumes that his assumptions and conclusions in this case are not religious.  By ‘religious’ here I obviously don’t necessarily mean ‘Christian’ (or any other religion in that sense).  What I do mean by ‘religious’ is something like this:  necessarily involving assumptions that cannot be directly empirically tested.

Secularists do this constantly, and they should just as frequently be called on it.  Science itself involves this kind of religious assumption.  Such assumptions, and the conclusions to which they lead, are not necessarily extra-rational.  But they are, in an important sense, religious.  The conclusion that there is no God, that there is a God but we can’t be too sure we know much about God, and all sorts of views like this, are religious.  Secularism itself is a religious idea in this important sense.

And very much so also is Gopnik’s idea that “consciousness distinguishes human life.”  This is an utterly religious idea, and Gopnik should know it, but seems oblivious to the obvious here.  When Gopnik brings this idea into his political views, he is guilty of exactly the same thing he condemns in Ryan.

I don’t begrudge Gopnik his religious ideas, nor do I think he can avoid bringing them into this kind of debate.  But he, like many secularists, need to realize that it is not a matter of mixing politics and religion – that is unavoidable.  The only real question is:  which religious ideas will you bring to your politics?

We get bad politics not because we rely on religious ideas to form our political ideas, but because we use the wrong religious ideas to form our political ideas.  Those dreaded ‘mullahs’ do not have horrible governments because they are religious.  They have horrible governments because they have wrong religious ideas.

This conclusion is exactly what a Gopnik-style secularist is desperately seeking to avoid.  But such avoidance is impossible – utterly impossible.  Religious views are everywhere, including every conceivable political position.  Everyone has them; no one can avoid them.  We need to make the Gopniks of the world face up to that.

‘Just Do It’ Faith

Michael S. Horton, professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California, said Christians appear to be creating future "nones" by failing to adequately pass the faith on to successive generations.

"We are about a generation away from a worshiping community that is rather small in terms of those who know what they believe, why they believe, and practice their faith with some real conviction," he said.

[from a Christianity Today article found here]

Kent comments:

In my now significant number of years teaching people the Christian faith, I have to agree with this assessment.  It has been coming for a long time now.  My analysis is that lack of knowing what we believe and why we believe it is a significant contributing cause of the lack of practicing the Christian faith with real conviction.

The article focuses on a recent Pew poll that showed Protestants losing majority status in the U.S.  As the article points out, most of this has come from the “mainline” Protestant denominational churches.  Given my analysis, this is not surprising.  For many years most mainline Protestant churches have been moving in the direction of deemphasizing what they believe and why.  Instead, they have focused on promoting a somewhat distorted version of “doing good” that is often defined by current cultural fads.

So it is no wonder that people eventually tire of doing that kind of so-called ‘good’ – there is no real reason to motivate anyone to do it.  But even among more conservative groups, including the now-popular no-brand ‘community’ style churches, I get the impression that the emphasis has now fallen on the “just do it” approach.  People in our culture generally have no patience with whats and whys – they just want to do it.  We are a culture of people who want to try to play the game without ever understand, or even reading. the rules.  You can sometimes do that to a point, but the game will fall apart in the end.

I am sometimes shocked at the ignorance of the Christian faith I find in those who claim the Christian faith.  Some of these people are very sincere.  Sincerity has some force, but I think that, in the end sincerity alone is dead.  It is no wonder that ‘we’ have been failing to pass our faith on to successive generations:  ‘we’ don’t really understand our faith.  It is very difficult to pass along something you don’t understand.

A Syllabus for the Kingdom of God

I recently received this from a fellow campus minister:

We're kicking off a long a wholesome gander at Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which is what folks calls Matthew chapters 5-7. Here's my thesis: Matthew 5:1-17 is like Jesus' syllabus for the rest of his teaching. So join us at Starbucks tomorrow (Friday) at noon, and let's figure out the syllabus for the Kingdom of God.

It is not uncommon to find this sort of thing, so we often think nothing of it.  What could be better than studying the Sermon on the Mount?  There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with studying the Sermon on the Mount.  It is, after all, part of the corpus of scripture which is the God-revealed content of that “faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

And yet, I fear that something like this might reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of scripture.  A syllabus should contain the main points of a course of study.  If this is the case, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be a syllabus of the Kingdom of God.  It is important ethical teaching for the Kingdom of God.  But it cannot be a syllabus for the Kingdom of God because it is limited and incomplete.

If the topics found in the Sermon on the Mount were the extent of the gospel, think of how very different the Kingdom of God would be.  The Sermon on the Mount does not mention sacrifice for sin.  It does not mention the Holy Spirit.  It does not mention many things that make the Kingdom of God the very distinctive kingdom that it is.  A kingdom of God limited to the topics introduced in the Sermon on the Mount would be a moralistic kingdom in which redemption went unexplained and even unmentioned.

And that is not the Kingdom of God.  In fact, it sounds a lot like the kingdom of 20th century Liberal Christendom.

I would never claim on my own that the teaching of Jesus found in the gospels is incomplete.  But I don’t have to be all that bold to make the claim, because Jesus said it was so.  Jesus made it very clear that during His very limited time among us, He did not tell us everything He wanted us to know about the Kingdom of God, as He made clear in John 16:12-13. He had much more to say, and He would say it through the Apostles.

If there is a syllabus for the kingdom of God in scripture, it is more likely something like the Book of Romans (though it is perhaps more of a textbook for the kingdom that a syllabus), where the Apostle restates much of what is found in the Sermon on the Mount, but adds some of the very important “much more to say to you” that Jesus promises in John 16.

Perhaps the note I received was just a bit of an attempt at hip marketing for a Bible study.  But if it was meant seriously, it was seriously wrong.

On Capital Gains Taxes and Other Boring Things

Thomas Sowell explains something important that I think many do not understand in “Capital Gains Taxes.”  This is not a review of the article.  It is rather short, and relatively easy to understand.  In it, Sowell explains why lower income tax rates for capital gains is a fair policy.  It is not just a fair policy.  It is a policy that makes us all wealthier.

This is, unfortunately, an example of an idea that is important, but which most people will not take the time to understand.  And in not understanding it, they will often damage their own interests in the candidates for whom they will vote and the policies those candidates will promote.

It is akin to discussions of corporate tax rates, which are relatively very high in the United States.  Because people will not take the time to understand the matter, it becomes easy for the demagogue to cry, “Those rich corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes!”  There is, of course, much more to the story.  Corporations attempt to make money for shareholders.  When shareholders receive it, they are taxed on it as income also.  So a good case can be made for not taxing corporations at all.  The shareholders will pay the tax when – and if – a profit is made.

There are a lot of things like this that people won’t bother to understand.  We are much like the Ray Barone character of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”  In one episode he has begun to handle the family checkbook and bill-paying.  He screws it up, of course.  When his friend tries to explain how to do it, all Ray gets is the word “accrued” (an in “accrued interest”).  The rest of it bores him, and he refuses to listen or learn.  As a result, his electricity is shut off.  He should have paid more attention.

I was once relaxing with a fine Christian gentleman who had been a hard-core union man before he retired.  As we chatted he launched into the evils of corporations making money.  I asked him, “What does your union pension fund invest in?”  The answer:  “Stocks and bonds.”  There was a pause.  Then he said, somewhat thoughtfully, “I suppose I really want corporations to make money, don’t I?”

And even beyond that, do you realize where we would be if there were no investors in companies?  We would be poor – and that is probably an understatement.  Most of us would not even be here to be poor.  Invested money buys the tools that make all the material things we like possible.  So it makes sense, and is in everyone’s interest, to encourage investment via tax policy.

In a better world, taxes would be so low no one would notice them because government would be so small most people would seldom notice them.  But even in our big-government “taxed enough already” world, let’s not be so stupid as to promote tax policies that will make us all poorer.