The Future Is Muslim And There Isn't Much You Can Do About It

When you look at resources on fertility you see predominantly Muslim countries like Niger, Mali, Somalia and Afghanistan at the top of the lists where Western, "Christian" countries like Germany, Greece, Italy and Portugal are at the bottom. Even in African countries that are ostensibly Christian, there is a sizable Muslim population and pressure from immigrants. Compare the U.S. with an average of 12.49 births per thousand people (ranking in the bottom 30% at 158 out of 224) to Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world with something like 220,000,000 Muslim and a birth rate of 4 more children that the U.S. per thousand. Iran is at 17.99 and Iraq has a massive rate of 31.45. So for every child born in the U.S. there are around 2.5 born in Iraq. Other predominantly Muslim nations with unstable governments like Egypt (22.90), Syria (22.17) and Libya (18.03) far outpace America.

OK, that is a lot of demographic data but so what? There are two colliding factors at work here. One is simple numbers. People in developing countries, many of which are predominantly Muslim or at least have a prominent Muslim population, are simply having way more children than Western, non-majority Muslim countries. Many "first world" nations are far below the replacement rate, meaning that their population is shrinking by the year. The other major problem is that many of these first world nations don't have workers to replace those who retire and they desperately need workers for jobs that entitled dependents of the state won't do, not to mention needing tax revenue to fund the social promises like pensions and health care that continue to balloon in cost while revenue shrinks. Between existing national debt and unfunded mandates, most Western nations are facing a perfect storm of financial insolvency and demographic collapse. The people who are left are not going to be white, "Christian" Americans and Europeans.

One might point to stats that describe the Christian population similarly booming around the third world. Yet in the West the Christian population is not growing much at all, and in fact if you use the deeply flawed metric of church attendance the Christian population is shrinking, and at the same time the legions of retiring workers in the West are being replaced by immigrants, legal and more so illegal. The simple truth is that Muslims are out breeding Western nations by a huge margin as well as apparently being highly effective at proselytizing and eventually that increased population is going to be the dominant force in the world. The West, even in "Christian" countries has been engaged in demographic suicide for decades and there is no sign of that abating. In the 40 some odd years since Roe v. Wade we have killed off tens of millions of Americans who would now be back-filling jobs for the baby boomers. Instead those jobs sit vacant, are shipped overseas or filled by illegal aliens. There are already 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the number grows via conversion and birth at an incredible pace. What will the world look like when the United States is no longer the dominant force and power resides in the hands of the masses of the world, many of whom are poor and Muslim?

Meanwhile the West is focused on trying to combat ISIS and company using World War II/ Cold War style warfare. The talk of "containing" ISIS and claiming victories based on seizing territory exposes a continuance of the World War II mentality where holding territory is tantamount to winning the war even though the West is fighting a diffuse enemy. Why in the world would ISIS or the Taliban or Al Qaeda want to slug it out with the military of a nation that essentially outspends the rest of the world on its military? No one thinks that at this point that would result in anything but a one sided slaughter and so they refuse to line up like targets and get slaughtered. One the other hand when the extremist groups lose territory their soldiers just drop their weapons and blend in with the rest of the population. One would have thought we would have learned this lesson in Vietnam but apparently not and now the enemy is not restricted to Southeast Asia but is everywhere including within the borders of Western states.

It seems to me that the forces of jihad are playing the long game while we in America are reflexively swinging our fists in a blind rage like a drunk in a barroom brawl, indiscriminately swinging our fists and not caring much where the blow lands. We play whack-a-mole on group and another five spring up. Our leaders thump their chests about killing "Jihadi John" and they respond by the worst act of mass violence in Paris since World War II. What is incredible to me about the attacks in Paris is not that they were so "successful" but that they don't happen more often. We certainly spent millions of dollars and countless hours of intelligence to blow up one jihadi. Give me 8-10 fanatics and some guns and I can give you a death toll that exceeds Paris without driving more than a few hours. At the same time we see "civilization jihad" being waged with no one paying much attention.

For Christians the collapse of the West and the rise of Islam means persecution unlike any we have seen since the days of the Reformation and Inquisitions. We aren't going to "win" the war against nascent Islam by airstrikes that might hit the occasional hospital, oops! Nor are we going to guard against ISIS by "vetting" refugees. The truth is that the cultural struggle is already over and we lost, the only question left is how does that aftermath look and how we prepare. The world of social media is already infested with "conservatives" trying to shut the borders and "progressives" who are trying to turn a lack of hotel rooms into a refugee crisis for Joseph and Mary. Neither approach is serious and neither does anything to prepare the church for a very different future. The problem with our existence of comfort and prosperity in the West is that we are more concerned with preserving our goodies than we are about carrying out the actual mission of the church, a mission which cannot be boiled down to "go to church on Sunday". 

I have been sounding this warning for years and if anything we are even less prepared than before, terrified as we are about terrorists and the potential loss of unfettered religious liberty. When are we going to wake up and start taking our marching orders from Scripture and the example of the church under persecution throughout history rather than from social media and 24 hour news channels? 

Prevailing Against The Gates Of Hell Doesn't Equate To Being Populous, Prosperous Or Popular

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)

This is a pretty well known verse, among Christians because of the promise that God's church prevails in the end and among Catholics who misapply this sentence to create whole cloth the papacy. Yet I wonder if it means what we think it means. It is often referenced as requiring an unbroken line of the church existing at all times from Pentecost to today. I am not so sure that is what it means or that is what actually happened.

One of the most troubling and rarely talked about realities for Christians is that in the nearly 2000 years since the founding of the church the majority of the time there were likely very few Christians, based on what the Bible teaches us about how a man is justified. I would not say it was a stretch that for large periods of time there were no Christians and of course no visible expression of the church that the gates of hell are not going to prevail against.

Do you find that sobering and discomforting? I certainly do. I don't subscribe to the "trail of blood" theory nor do I think it likely that an awful lot of Christians believed in Roman dogma but were saved anyway. So it is likely that for decades or even centuries there was no sign of anything resembling the Biblical description of the church. Did whole generations come and go, even in "Christian" Europe without once being exposed to the Gospel? It certainly seems that is possible or even probable.

Even today, in spite of the popularity of the "health, wealth and prosperity gospel" teaching and the comfortable perch the church occupies in America, it does not follow that the promise of Jesus in Matthew 16:18 means that the church will inherently be numerically large, powerful in a worldly sense and prosperous compared to the surrounding people. That idea probably rubs some people the wrong way, it goes against the common religious wisdom of the day but I think that what we see in Scripture and church history is that the true church has always been on the margins, a distinct and often persecuted minority. 

How does that jive with your understanding of the verse in question? Does it require a substantive presence in every time or were there periods when God had His church absent from the world? I don't have a ton of answers on this one, it is just something that has been disquieting to me.

Book Review: It Is About Islam

It is bitterly ironic that I finished Glenn Beck's book It Is About Islam last night amid the worldwide coverage of the coordinated terrorist attacks that struck Paris on November 13th, 2015. If there is ever a time since 9/11 when the Western world needs to understand the massive cultural struggle taking place, it is right now.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I pretty much loathe Glenn Beck. As a Christian I freely place him in the category of a wolf among the sheep, a popular false teacher who wiggles his way into a place of trust with Christians because of alleged common values we share. I say alleged because for all his emotional ranting on a slew of issues that changes with the cultural winds, Beck admitted in an interview with Forbes in 2010 that he is first and foremost an entertainer:

"With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: “I could give a flying crap about the political process.” Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. “We’re an entertainment company,” Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth."

So basically his whole shtick is just a means to make money.  I am all in favor of people making money, I just want to remind any Christian or conservative reading this that Beck is not "one of us". He is out for himself. Nevertheless the book was an interesting premise and I was able to get it for free from library because I refuse to financially support Beck in any way.

On to the book. On the positive end it is very accessible and a light read. Reading about Islam can be daunting because of the unfamiliar terminology and confusing names that make it easy to lose track of who you are talking about. Beck quotes a scattering of Muslim leaders that espouse jihad and sharia but it doesn't bog the book down. He does a decent job of laying out the landscape between Sunni and Shia, something that is often confusing for Westerners. If anything the book encouraged me to do more studying on my own to understand the culture of Islam that is at enmity with the culture of the West. I don't see this as a clash between Islam and Christianity but rather a clash between Islam and the culture of the West because very little in Western culture is reflective of Christianity

The negatives largely outweigh the positives.  Right at the outset Beck does not properly cite the works he references. In place of numbers or letters in the text, the lumps what he is referencing into a jumbled mess sorted by chapter in the back. There is no bibliography. In his epilogue he writes: "I want you to be among the righteous too, You may not know what to do but just sharing his book and doing your own research to verify the truth of it will help you do your part." I agree with that and mention it as a strength but he makes it very difficult for someone to independently research his book. I get that this is in no way an academic book but if you are going to ask readers to research what he writes for themselves and you base your book in large part on the quotes you provide, it behooves you to take the time to properly document it. Beck makes millions a year, he could afford to pay a lackey to footnote the book.

Further Beck's entire book is a polemic designed to reinforce and provide ammo for those who are already sold out to the "War On Terror" narrative. He regularly slips into hopping on a soapbox and does an admirable job of finding combinations of invectives that leave no doubt that Beck doesn't much like Islam. After the first few chapters I was saying to myself "OK I get it, Islam is bad." It would have served the reader far better to dig a little deeper instead of ranting about Muslims. Most of the book is barely scratching the surface of what motivates radicalized Muslims like those who slaughtered over 100 people in Paris last night. Instead of formulating a cogent explanation Beck relies on out of context quotes of Muslim scripture and teachers. It struck me as being very similar to the methods of those who critique Christianity by yanking Old Testament quotes out of context and lumping all Christians in with the anti-Christian kooks like Westboro Baptist.

Overall a disappointing treatment of an intriguing concept. I didn't expect much from Beck and he still managed to underwhelm. 

Governing By Torches and Pitchforks

In the least surprising news story of the day, the president of the university of Missouri was forced to step down after what can only be described as adults acting like toddlers, kicking their feet and holding their breath. His crime? Apparently not being sufficiently obsequious to suit black students on campus after a couple of alleged incidents that made the padded room safety of a modern university campus "unsafe".

The protests began after the student government president, who is black, said in September that people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him. In early October, members of a black student organization said slurs were hurled at them by an apparently drunken white student. Recently, a swastika drawn in human feces was found in a dormitory bathroom.

More recently, two trucks flying Confederate flags drove past a site where 150 students had gathered to protest on Sunday, a move some saw as an attempt at intimidation. One of the participants, Abigail Hollis, a black undergraduate, said the campus is "unhealthy and unsafe for us."

"The way white students are treated is in stark contrast to the way black students and other marginalized students are treated, and it's time to stop that," Hollis said. "It's 2015."

So a couple of people in separate incidents used a racial slur, one being a student who is apparently no longer at Mizzou. The response from university President Tom Wolfe was considered insufficiently fawning and students began to protest by raising a ruckus, players on the football team threatening to sit out (which given the awful record of said team in 2015 isn't much of a threat) and even one winner of the Overreaction Of The Year Award, a hunger strike. Wolfe resigned in the face of, in his words and I believe correct ones, shouting and intimidation from a small, vocal group.

The incidents described, which seem pretty random and unrelated to a wielder of white privilege like myself, are unfortunate and ugly but in the real world you have to deal with people who are jerks. You can't shut down society every time your wittle feelings get bruised. Instead of teaching university students to survive and thrive in the real world, the constant coddling of students to the point of giving them places to hide to avoid having the leftist ideology they are fed being challenged. I don't know much about now former President Wolfe but he made two big mistakes. The first was being born a white male. The second was not throwing himself at the feet of the students immediately and opening the school wallet as soon as anything happened.

This absolutely stupid situation which will no doubt be seen as some sort of societal victory by the self-imposed elites of our society is a microcosm of the greater problem that is destroying the credibility and usefulness of the university system. It is well documented that our nation's colleges and university are becoming a very expensive day-care for supposed adults that does little to either educate or prepare students for the real world. In fact it is often doing just the opposite. In a bitterly ironic twist this is especially true for minority students, at least black and Latino students, who are given every ounce of preferential treatment possible that doesn't reflect the real world in any way and in essence insults them by assuming that they are not able to compete with white and Asian students without massive hand-holding. I seem to recall back to my university days where essentially every instructor I had was some sort of leftist ideologue. I somehow managed to make it through the system and even was a regular columnist for our school paper my last year, a token conservative voice. Having to face a wall of opinion from my teachers that I thought was wrong and dangerous didn't throw me into paroxysms of fear. In fact it helped me to hone my rhetorical and reasoning skills, something I have used to my advantage throughout my career.

Since our educational system is geared to shove as many students into 4 year degree programs as possible, regardless of whether they are academically up for it or if it will provide them any benefit in the future, it would at least behoove the university system to give students some useful skills, like coping with people you disagree with without a tantrum or turning into quivering jelly at the slightest provocation, especially since that system saddles many students with a heap of debt they have no chance of paying back. Instead many college students seem to be actually regressing into early childhood at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year. A man loses his job and likely ends up being unable to work in his chosen field in the future, all because of a couple of random incidents that he failed to exhibit the proper level of outrage and guilty white self-flagellation. I don't know if he was a good university President or a poor one, only that his actual performance was rendered moot by a mob of over-sized children.

Take a good look America. These are the people who are going to run this country in a few decades. Heaven help us.

The Object Of Faith Rather Than The Example Of It

This is a powerful, profound and simple summation by J. Gresham Machen that is every bit as valid today when looking at so-called "progressive" forms of Christianity (emphasis mine).

The truth is, the witness of the New Testament, with regard to Jesus as the object of faith, is an absolutely unitary witness. The thing is rooted far too deep in the records of primitive Christianity ever to be removed by any critical process. The Jesus spoken of in the New Testament was no mere teacher of righteousness, no mere pioneer in a new type of religious life, but One who was regarded, and regarded Himself, as the Savior whom men could trust. But by modern liberalism He is regarded in a totally different way. Christians stand in a religious relation to Jesus; liberals do not stand in a religious relation to Jesus – what difference could be more profound than that? The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But he does not stand in a religious relation to Jesus. Jesus for him is an example for faith, not the object of faith. The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus.

J. Gresham Machen. Christianity & Liberalism (Kindle Locations 1164-1172). 

I think the mindset of Jesus as an example (loving the poor, self-sacrifice, associating with sinners, etc.) is very common among  the "red letter Christians". the Jesus versus the Bible and the Jesus versus doctrine people. Of course the example of Christ for what He did in common, everyday life situations is important but more important, infinitely more important is who He is, what He came to do and what He accomplished via the cross and empty tomb. If Jesus had ignored the poor or the leper but still died and rose again, He would be just as worthy of praise. Conversely if He had done wonders for the sick and the lame but didn't go to the cross or having gone didn't rise again, who He is revealed to be is very different. He would be an example that is helpful to emulate but mankind would still be lost and hopeless.

Jesus without the cross is just Jesus regardless of how nice He was to people. Jesus risen from the dead after the seeming defeat of the cross is Jesus the Christ, the Son of God. I've said it before and I will keep saying it: doctrine matters. What you believe about Jesus and who you believe Him to be is quite literally the difference between eternal death and eternal life.

A Free Book You Should Grab

As of this morning, Preston Sprinkle's book Fight is free for Kindle devices and the Kindle reading app. I absolutely loved Fight and wrote a review that you can check out here. One of the very best things about Preston is that he is a solid teacher on a variety of subjects, which is often not the case when you are talking about non-resistance. I wrote:

Unlike many modern advocates of non-violence, Sprinkle has a largely orthodox set of beliefs. He recognizes the reality of hell (he co-authored the book Erasing Hell with Francis Chan, see my review here) and speaks without apology of God's wrath. I fear that it is too easy to dismiss many writers as leftist cranks without genuine interaction with their concerns. Unfortunately a lot of the literature on non-violence is muddied by authors who subscribe to heterodox positions like open theism. This makes their argument convenient to dismiss out of hand. After all if someone can get those kinds of issues wrong why would anyone give credence to much more complex questions.

So if you are at all interested in this topic grab this e-book for free. You won't be disappointed!

Knowing Jesus Means Knowing Doctrine

I wrote recently about the danger of pitting Jesus against the Bible and diminishing both in the process. It seems to have struck a few nerves and resonated with others and I am glad for that.. But that isn't the only dangerous teaching that plagues the church under the guise of being wise and clever. A close cousin to the diminishing of Scripture is the dismissal of the importance of theology and doctrine. Many take pride in denouncing as egg-headed and irrelevant the deeper study of God: "I am just going to love my neighbor and not worry about all that doctrine stuff, it just divides us anyway!". Even though statements like "God is love" are inherently doctrinal statements, albeit simplistic ones, the reality is that whenever you create a framework for understanding or explaining God you are engaged in the process of theology.

Where the problem arises is in not recognizing that one is engaged in the work of theology when in fact you are, which can lead to some pretty squirrely doctrinal positions. This is often the result of either a) creating a doctrinal position in a vacuum or b) failing to see the doctrine you are formulating in the bigger picture of Scripture. Those sound similar and they are.

What is partly to blame here is the commonplace phenomena on social media where "either-or" replaces "both-and". In other words we think that the Christian must choose between loving their neighbor and studying theology. That is foolish. The two are inescapably intertwined. We only know that we are called to love our neighbor because the witness of Scripture tells us so and even that brief exposition is a work of theology. "God is love" is a three word doctrinal statement that no one will ever fully grasp no matter how long they live. On the flip side, we cannot study theology properly if it remains a strictly academic exercise. Theology must happen in community and it must be lived out. There are absolutely egg-heads in academia that huddle behind piles of books and debate whether God can make a rock so big, even He can't lift it. I think that is what most people who speak against the study of theology are really concerned about but in doing so they end up denigrating the entire work of theology and the church and individual Christians end up less faithful and less equipped to minister to others as a result. We are in an era where we need more theology, not less, but we need to do it the right way. We need a theology with hands and feet, a theology that is done for the service of the local church and in turn for the benefit of the lost in that locality, not for presentations at scholarly conventions, although there is a place for that. 

For me, theology is done locally and communally. It shouldn't be restricted to the clergyman who has been to seminary but it is rather the vocation of every Christian as they grow in Christ. I have written in the past about the need for a community hermeneutic and that same idea applies to the work of theology. It needs to draw from all of the brethren, even the less mature who contribute by asking questions. What it ought not be is a restricted area where the pastor of each church decides which aspects of theology he will share with the rest of the body.

We cannot be ambassadors for a King we know nothing about.  As the picture from Together forthe Gospel states, when we get God wrong we invariably get everything else wrong. That truth is why people presume to dictate to God what He may be and what He may not be rather than bending the knee to our Sovereign without the hubris of preconditions to our worship. You can look back at all of the errors in history and see that failing to give God His due is at the heart of nearly all of them. Being willfully ignorant of theology isn't a sign of maturity, it is a sign of someone who is intellectually lazy.

There is a very stark division forming in the church between those who are largely disinterested in what the Bible teaches apart from a handful of ethical issues, as well as wearing their lack of theological study as a badge of honor, and on the other hand those who take the increasingly unpopular stance that God is competent enough to preserve His revelation for His people and that He didn't preserve said revelation for it to sit on a shelf getting dusty but actually intended for His people to search and study what He has preserved. We stand on the brink of a truly disruptive seismic shift in the church and going into the days to come willfully disarmed is the height of foolishness. 

On A Lighter Note For Reformation Day...

Happy Reformation Day

Today is October 31st and in many circles of the Protestant world it is Reformation Day. On this day 498 years ago a nobody named Martin Luther posted a series of questions known as his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, What followed is known as the Protestant Reformation and depending on where your loyalties lay it is either a date for celebrating as the Gospel was reclaimed or an infamous date when the supposed unity of the church was forever shattered.

For me it is a day of mixed emotions. On the one hand this marks the days of Post Tenebras Lux, after darkness, light. The Biblical gospel of justification by faith alone was recovered and spread like a wildfire. In spite of the tragic violence that sprang in part from the Reformation, on balance the saving Gospel was worth all the strife and division. What value is there in peace when it comes at the cost of men's souls? On the other hand, the Reformation left much un-reformed, specifically the church. Protestantism retains much of the structure and organization of Rome: a professional clerical class, a tendency toward institutional self-preservation, a largely passive laity, ritual and tradition. On and on. So it was at best an incomplete reformation. I don't accuse the Reformers of being too radical but not being radical enough. Thus my affinity for the Anabaptists who suffered from persecution and murder at the hands of those who allegedly were their brothers in Christ.

Today? Is the Reformation complete and over? Not hardly. Within the church there are as many false teachers and false teachings as at any point in church history. The church needs bold men to shout from  the rooftops the Gospel of Jesus Christ and at the same time calling to account the flase teachers and the wolves among the sheep for they are plentiful. As we near the half century mark there are still many Christians who seek an unequal partnership with Rome based on politics, especially now that Jorge Bergoglio has become the religious equivalent of the Beatles for many on the left of the religious spectrum. Many on the political right seek to minimize the differences with Rome in order to secure a partner in worldly battles. Now more than any time in my life or the life of anyone reading this we need to reclaim the godly heritage and the boldness of the great Reformers, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Menno Simons. Remembering that they were men with feet of clay just like us but blessed by God with a powerful boldness that stands in stark contrast to the weak and flaccid faith of so many today,

God send reformation on your church in these days of growing darkness and great turmoil. We need reformers for our day who will not preach compromise and capitulation but who will stand firmly on the Gospel of your Son revealed and preserved for us in the Bible. Let that written Word be the only place we stand and let the teachings therein be boldly and without apology be declared.

Watch the video below of John Piper talking about Post Tenebras Lux and have a happy Reformation!

Soli Deo Gloria!

Hard Work Has No Intrinsic Value

It is one of our cultural truths that if you work hard, you get ahead. That mantra is as American as mamma and apple pie. While it is certainly true that working hard in your profession is usually rewarded, hard work has no value by itself apart from the labor market. Let me elaborate.

I can go outside and dig a huge hole in my yard and work really hard doing it but if no one wants me to dig that hole, they won't pay me for it. No one deserves a particular wage just because they think they should, it only matters if what they do has economic value to someone else. What I do for a living has a value to the people I provide services for. If it didn't, they wouldn't pay me and I in turn wouldn't do it and I would find something else to do. How hard one works is also typically irrelevant to the wage they receive, what instead determines the wage is the relative value of that job to the person paying you to do it because they are unable or unwilling to do it themselves. A major component of this is scarcity. The more scarce and specialized the skills required to do a job are, the more people in general are willing to pay for it. That is why doctors, CEOs, biochemists, etc. make more money than someone who works at McDonald's, even if that person flipping burgers is working really hard. Anyone can work at McDs flipping burgers but very few people have the skill set to run an organization like McDonald's in the CEO suite with nearly half a million employees, tens of thousands of locations and billions in revenue. There are a lot of factors in determining what work is worth to an employer but hard work is only one of them.

This shouldn't dissuade anyone from working hard at their job, it simply is a reminder that work in  the labor market is only worth what someone will pay you for it. Teachers work for 9 months of the year and by all accounts they work pretty hard during those months but the local school board decides what that work is worth. It has no intrinsic value. If the school district thinks it is only worth $20,000/year to be a school teacher then qualified prospective teachers have to decide if they will teach for that amount. If not enough of them sign up for $20,000 the school board has to decide if they will run the school short-handed or raise the salary to attract more teachers. That is how the labor market works, or at least it is how it is supposed to work when artificial means like collective bargaining and minimum wage laws don't interfere. 

Here is another example. My wife and I drove together into town today and passed a garbage truck. It used to be that garbage trucks had guys hanging off the back who picked up the cans and dumped them into the back of the truck. Kind of a stinky job but it probably paid decently. Now many garbage trucks have a mechanical arm that picks up the dumpster and angles it just right to pour the trash in the top of the truck. That arm was probably really expensive to install plus the need for dumpsters the right size and configuration for customers but the owners of trash hauling services have decided that a one time investment and on-going maintenance of the mechanical arm is more cost effective than paying a guy or two to hang on the back of the truck. That means that every garbage truck with one guy driving and a mechanical arm picking up is replacing a crew of 2 or 3 workers. Actions have consequences.

This is pretty basic stuff but in a Twitter and Facebook world many people seem unable to grasp that every economic action causes a ripple effect. ATM machines replace human tellers. Centralized order takers replace a kid in a window at McDonald's. Automated garbage can picker-uppers (that is an industry term) replace workers picking up cans. Manufacturers find ways to make stuff with automation instead of relying on expensive and often undependable workers. On and on. When we think about economics looking only at the immediate impact, we often make disastrous decisions. 

So remember, work hard at your job but remember also that your job is only worth what someone else will pay you for it.

The Command To Mission Not The Call To Mission

Check out this brief video from Dave Black on missions. I love what he said, if I can paraphrase, that even though Dr. Black has been on many a mission trip he never was called to mission but he was commanded to mission as we all are.


"Every Christian a full-time minister of the Gospel"

Yes and amen.

Talking About Morality In The Most Immoral Of Acts

As someone who has listened cautiously to the news on NPR since my college days, I have to admit that it is becoming increasingly difficult to filter out the nonsense. It is a rare NPR story that doesn't focus on abortion, "climate change" or homosexuality. Today I heard a blurb leading to a story on Fresh Air interviewing Gloria Steinem. She is 81 years old and apparently has a new book coming out, a book is dedicated to the abortionist who murdered her child way back before the blood-letting under Roe v. Wade became so commonplace. So at 81 years old one of the most important people in her life, someone worthy of a book dedication, was the man who killed her child. What a sad, tragic commentary on her life. There was no way I was going to listen to that entire interview, I would rather wade in a septic tank, but I did read the transcript and saw this little gem:

On the morality of abortion

It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in. I think we need a legal principle called something like "bodily integrity" which recognizes that though the state may jail us, they can't insist on injections or tests or pressuring us for organ transplants. Our skin needs to be the line of defense between our own dignity and will and any outside force. ...

The definition of patriarchy is to be able to control reproduction, and that means you have to control women's bodies.

So only children that will be adequately "loved" and "wanted" have a right to be born and women control anything "from the skin in", so even though a unique human being is dwelling in her womb, she has absolute control over that life until it is outside of her skin, where ironically the same people calling for abortion on demand are mistrustful of those same parents raising their own children. If she really wants to talk about bodily integrity she could maybe talk to young women about sleeping around and getting pregnant is they don't want to get pregnant at this particular juncture in their lives. Since the overwhelming majority of abortions are, like Ms. Steinem's, electively done after a voluntary sexual act it would seem to me that the time to talk about "bodily integrity" is before a woman has sex without taking the commonplace and cheap methods provided by modern "progress" to prevent pregnancy. Even still those methods have a failure rate so it might just be wise to abstain from having sex during the window of fertility if you absolutely don't want to get pregnant. It would be swell to see a feminist give women a little credit and assume that they can exhibit some self-control for a few days a month. That one can even speak of "the morality of abortion" as if there is a moral position to be found in the extinguishing of a human life should be baffling but unfortunately I have lived long enough to hear this sort of sub-human nonsense for much of my life.

The last line killed me. I have never heard patriarchy defined that way but I guess when getting an abortion is the most important day in your life it sort of makes sense. Again the idea of "controlling women's bodies" assumes that women are uncontrollable sex machines who can't abstain for sex or take readily available measures that they have been taught to use in our public school system to avoid pregnancy. I guess I have a higher view of women and think that women can be trusted to control their bodies before they hop in the sack with someone who is not capable of being a father. 

One more item jumped out at me. Apparently women can't even be trusted to be in the same house with a man (emphasis mine)...

If you add up all the forms of violence, whether it's domestic violence in this country, which is at an enormously high rate — I mean, the most dangerous place for a woman in this country is her own home, and she's most likely to be beaten or killed by a man she knows...

Let me state unequivocally that there is no place in the world that my wife is less likely to be struck by a man than in our house. That is true for every other family I know. But for Ms. Steinem all men are just potential rapists, woman beaters and deadbeat dads. With that sort of attitude toward men it is a wonder any women get impregnated and need an abortion in the first place. 

This poisonous mindset is being force-fed to women throughout the "educational" system. It is little wonder that the relationship between men and women has never been worse in our society in spite of all of the wonderful "progress" we keep hearing about. It is a worldview like the one Ms. Steinem is selling that the church needs to respond to with God honoring Kingdom families. The world needs to know that there has to be a better way than  the bleak and blood soaked worldview that the Gloria Steinem's of the world live in.