Tag: Miscellaneous
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Always Learning, Never Knowing
Most people who embark on a journey expect to arrive at their destination. Airports contain huge boards showing the status, gate number, and destination of all of its departing airplanes. All of the people boarding a flight for a particular destination fully expect to arrive at that destination. But this situation isn’t true of every pursuit. Our premise here is that there are those embarked on the abstract journey of “knowing” that don’t always want to succeed. They don’t want to “arrive”.
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Life in a Moral Cesspool
The US today is infected by a cancerous malignancy that has nearly completely destroyed the healthy portions of its host. The difference between a cultural malignancy and a biological one is that the cultural form has an attitude. It rejoices in its destruction. It celebrates the death of the healthy, unlike the biological which is simply a death-creation machine. Where did this disease start? In the classroom. A century ago, the education establishment was infiltrated by Marxists. Decade after decade, their influence in that establishment grew to the point that today, the majority of teachers in public education are if…
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Life in a Moral Cesspool
Introduction The US today is infected by a cancerous malignancy that has nearly completely destroyed the healthy portions of its host. The difference between a cultural malignancy and a biological one is that the cultural form has an attitude. It rejoices in its destruction. It celebrates the death of the healthy, unlike the biological which is simply a death-creation machine. Where did this disease start? In the classroom. A century ago, the education establishment was infiltrated by Marxists. Decade after decade, their influence in that establishment grew to the point that today, the majority of teachers in public education are…
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New Heavens and New Earth
What is the proper interpretation of the Bible’s passages describing the Eschaton — the end and resolution of the world? Most, for the last 1200 years or so, have believed that when they die, they will go to “heaven”, despite the paucity of biblical evidence for this view. But what happens at the end of all things? Surely it is a point in time beyond which all of God’s plans for His Creation are realized.
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New Heavens and New Earth
What is the proper interpretation of the Bible’s passages describing the Eschaton — the end and resolution of the world? Most, for the last 1200 years or so, have believed that when they die, they will go to “heaven”, despite the paucity of biblical evidence for this view. But what happens at the end of all things? Surely it is a point in time beyond which all of God’s plans for His Creation are realized.
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The New America
The New America could care less what their country is or represents. They’re only concerned with themselves. The New America is the product of failed public education, failed parenting, failed social policies, open borders, and not just resistance to achievement but disdain for any, ANY differentiation of one vs another on the basis of an individual’s achievement. This is the state of the union today.
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The Bible Explained
Do you know how the stories of the Bible fit neatly together into an integrated whole — the story of God’s interactions with His created humanity? If not, this may help.
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The Bible Explained
Do you know how the stories of the Bible fit neatly together into an integrated whole — the story of God’s interactions with His created humanity? If not, this may help.
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The Problem With Murder
We all have an instinctive revulsion of the wanton destruction of one of us by the hand of another. But why? If the victim is not one of our family or close relations, how is it that we feel the evil of his loss? How are we – the victim and I – connected? Where does our sense of the fact that his taking is evil come from? This piece is an exploration of a recent “revelation” I’ve been considering that points to a much more profound loss than the loss of just this one person.
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The Problem With Murder
We all have an instinctive revulsion of the wanton destruction of one of us by the hand of another. But why? If the victim is not one of our family or close relations, how is it that we feel the evil of his loss? How are we – the victim and I – connected? Where does our sense of the fact that his taking is evil come from? This piece is an exploration of a recent “revelation” I’ve been considering that points to a much more profound loss than the loss of just this one person.
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Christ’s Cultural Revolution
Most people including self-professed Christians have no inkling of the enormity of the transformation of their everyday existence Christ prescribed. His prescriptions so thoroughly upended the culture of first-century Jews that they concluded He had to be eliminated.
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The “X-Files” of the Tanakh
There is some very strange stuff going on, semantically, in the Tanakh – the Old Testament. Our English translations hide much of it, allowing us to blithely assume that unclear verses are either just poorly translated or, perhaps, intended to be purposefully obscure. But, what if their obscurity/ambiguity reveals some much deeper meaning than simply the literal texts in which they appear? And, if there is a deeper meaning, what could it be, and what is it likely to be?
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Abandoning the Love of Jesus
Modernity has gradually abandoned the love of Jesus as the key tenet of society with predictably disastrous effects. Ever since the Enlightenment (1650-1900)…
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Creating a New Nation
The stark differences between ideological factions in the United States are, to me, intractable. As factions, they will never again lock arms, sing Kumbaya, and collectively do what’s in the best interest of the nation as a whole, despite what they, individually, may need to give up to achieve that end. Why is this? I’ve written elsewhere (here and here) about the forces at work for the past sixty or so years to undermine the values of America for the prior 200 – things like civility, respect, honor, creativity, inquisitiveness, industry, and, perhaps most significant, community. “Community” I define as…
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A Call to a Radical Christian Revolution
The premise of this note is that in order to rescue this civilization, Christ Himself is going to have to “appear” in the world to demonstrate to its inhabitants that He is the way, the truth, and the life. And, since we Christians are the members of His body on earth, that job falls to us.
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Death by Selfie: Egotism as the Root of Our Troubles
In an article at The Daily Wire, Joseph Curl reports that a 23-year-old Chinese crane operator, Xiao Qiumei, who had 100,000 followers on social media, fell 160 feet to her death while filming herself on a giant crane. She was the second woman to die in China in July by way of a fall while recording herself on camera. This horrific death set me to thinking about selfies. I don’t mean the pictures we take of ourselves with our cameras and phones; rather, I am coining a new term, a noun for a certain type of self-obsessed people. Have we…
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Make Straight the Way of the LORD
Anyone who has spent any time in Israel knows that it is a land of hills, and therefore of constant elevation change from one location to another. From the cliffs overlooking the Rift Valley of the Dead Sea and Masada in the South, to Qumran, to the Central Highlands, to the Golan Heights and Mount Herman in the far north. (If you’ve been there you may have heard the saying: “Everything is uphill in Jerusalem”.) How did this topography influence the Biblical authors?
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Make Straight the Way of the LORD
[3] A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
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America is Not Greek
Our democratic institutions evolved out of those invented by the Greeks. The Greeks were intoxicated by the idea of rational speech – logos. Their principle was that logos was at the heart of the Greek-invention and revered culture of political discourse. And “discourse” only occurred when those involved shared in the same virtues and all sought after the same common good, setting aside their personal interests. To the Greeks, their edification came from striving together to achieve a common good for their citizens. To them, politics was the process of seeking the highest possible good for the people. Nothing could…
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America is Not Greek
People on the right side of the political divide in America think that the people on the left side are simply wrong on the issues. This is false. The source of the political divide is that the left side has completely abandoned all vestiges of traditional political activity and governance, not to mention its underlying principle of free speech, seriousness and virtue. Our democratic institutions evolved out of those invented by the Greeks. The Greeks were intoxicated by the idea of rational speech – logos. Their principle was that logos was at the heart of the Greek-invention and revered culture…
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Rejecting God
My purpose here is to raise awareness of the deep-seated origins of the civil unrest being played out today in the West. It’s just not as pat or as superficial as people in today’s media would have us believe. There’s much more going on here than simple protest.
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Rejecting God
The purpose of this note is to raise awareness of the deep-seated origins of the civil unrest being played out today in the West. It’s just not as pat or as superficial as people in today’s media would have us believe. There’s much more going on here than simple protest.
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Freedom from Disquiet
It’s interesting to me that today in the West, a substantial portion of the population apparently believes that they have an innate right to not be exposed to anything that upsets them – be it KAG hats, critical commentary (social media posts?) on their ideas, objective description of our real history, moral values… whatever. This is a prescription for disaster.
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Freedom from Disquiet
It’s interesting to me that today in the West, a substantial portion of the population apparently believes that they have an innate right to not be exposed to anything that upsets them – be it KAG hats, critical commentary (social media posts?) on their ideas, objective description of our real history, moral values… whatever.
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A Vision of Heaven
People who believe in life after death – Christians, mainly – have widely varying speculations as to just what “Heaven” is like. This is understandable given that we are told almost nothing concrete about it in the Bible.
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Dispelling Christianity as “Hate”
Christians today face sometimes virulent hatred from secularists. Why? We even have people who profess to be Christian demeaning their supposed brethren. What’s prompting all of this revulsion and disdain, if not outright hatred, and how should we respond (if at all)?
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Dispelling Christianity as “Hate”
Christians today face sometimes virulent hatred from secularists. Why? We even have people who profess to be Christian demeaning their supposed brethren. What’s prompting all of this revulsion and disdain, if not outright hatred, and how should we respond (if at all)[i]?
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Creation: A Design for Glory
Did God “know” the future “before the beginning”? Or did He simply design it?
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What About Reparations?
As the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign begins to take form, one of the issues we hear of increasingly is the need for the U.S. government to pay black people currently in the U.S. money in consideration of the slavery endured by their (possible) ancestors here in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The wrong was slavery; the wronged were negro race people forced into that role by slave traders, and the villain was the country in which that wrong took place.
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The Jewish and Christian God
Jews and Christians have almost nothing in common except their God. He is one and the same God. Jews believed they were chosen by God for special blessing, that this blessing was an inheritance due to their birthright, originating with their father Abraham if they would only faithfully live by His Law (discussed, below). They didn’t concern themselves with “going to heaven” (at least until the advent of their Pharisees in the first century BC), but were very concerned about their survival from hostile surrounding nations. And so, to them, God would “save” them, His chosen people, from these earthly…
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Escaping Christian Indolence
Multitudes of Christians today think that they have no obligation to serve their Lord. They seem to be content having, in their mind, obtained their “salvation”, to simply sit by, go through some motions, and wait to go to heaven. Why is this behavior so common today?
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A Conversation with God
What do you do when you’ve studied the Bible for a few decades, had a lifetime of Sunday morning messages, and you’ve still got a few questions? Well, I decided to go straight to the Source. Fortunately, God had a few minutes he could spare. So, he agreed to sit down and listen to my questions (he didn’t say he’d answer them all), to try to help me out. Here is the result. Me: First, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. God: Oh, sure, think nothing of it. Time…
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Thinking About the Trinity
Don’t make it hard. Don’t overthink it. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”
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The Rise and Fall of America
Introduction Democracies come and go. As some measure these things, the average life span of a democratic republic is about 200 years, and ours is about 250 years old. But they don’t simply die from old age. The pathology is present in their genes from the outset: the rule of the people. In 1787 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor in Edinburgh, made this observation about the Athenian civilization: “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” From that moment on, the majority always vote…
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The Rise and Fall of America
Democracies come and go. As some measure these things, the average life span of a democratic republic is about 200 years, and ours is 241 years old. But they don’t simply die from old age. The pathology is present in their genes from the outset: the rule of the people.
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Israel as Metaphor
Those familiar with the Jewish Bible — the Tanakh — or what Christians call the Old Testament, have puzzled for centuries over the meaning of the failed history of the Israelites, culminating in the destruction of their Temple and Jerusalem in 70AD, and their destruction or banishment from their homeland in 136 AD following the Bar Kokhba revolt. What exactly does it mean that God chose the Israelites from all the peoples of the world, led them, gave them a homeland and, for a time at least, heaped blessings on them only to have them nearly universally turn their backs…
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Scientific Evidence for God
From our earliest days, we have perceived God through His creation. From the majesty of the Universe to the delicacy of a hummingbird, or the simple beauty of an Orchid, we have equated the exquisite wonder of creation with its even more majestic Creator[1].
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Christianity in the Age of ‘Whatever’
Lots of people write blogs. Very few people actually read them. So why this one? Recently I’ve been absolutely stunned by the power of the delusion our society is suffering regarding truth, good and evil. In this perverse worldview, people who elect to strap on explosives and detonate them, or fire automatic weapons at unsuspecting innocents aren’t really “wrong”. In this worldview they are just reacting to our evil. What is also remarkable is the popularity of this view. We’re all familiar with the phenomena of ‘political correctness’, in which what most people once agreed was simple, honest, common sense…
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Scientific Evidence for God
From our earliest days, we have perceived God through His creation. From the majesty of the Universe to the delicacy of a hummingbird, or the simple beauty of an Orchid, we have equated the exquisite wonder of creation with its even more majestic Creator[1]. Today, however, the evidence science finds in God’s “Second Book” – Nature – for the creative signature of God himself is overwhelming. It is virtually beyond dispute today that the Universe had a beginning, and came from nothing (ex nihilo). This makes the Biblical story unique among all religions’ stories of the beginning.
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Christianity in the Age of ‘Whatever?’
Lots of people write blogs. Very few people actually read them. So why this one? Recently I’ve been absolutely stunned by the power of the delusion our society is suffering regarding truth, good and evil. In this perverse worldview, people who elect to strap on explosives and detonate them, or fire automatic weapons at unsuspecting innocents aren’t really “wrong”. In this worldview they are just reacting to our evil. What is also remarkable is the popularity of this view. We’re all familiar with the phenomena of ‘political correctness’, in which what most people once agreed was simple, honest, common sense…