Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for May, 2016

Book Review: Answering Sodom

Posted in Politics, Theology, tagged , on May 29, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Answering SodomAnswering Sodom by Ralph Ovadal (Madison, Wisconsin: Heart of the Matter Publications, 1998, 252 pages).

It has come as a bit of a surprise to this author just how much space has been dedicated on this blog to various aspects of the aggressive and unbiblical Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) agenda. This was not something that was planned. Rather, the alacrity the LGBTQ victories and the ominous implications they portend both for the well-being of America in general, and the welfare of American Christians in particular, cry out for sound Biblical analysis.

It was in the course of researching a recent article on Transgenderism that I discovered the book that is the subject of this review. Written in 1998, it appears that this title is no longer in print. But with tremendous resources available on the internet, it was not hard to find a copy for a reasonable price. In my case, I purchased the book on ABE.com for about $13.00, shipping included.

One may suppose that a book on the subject of the homosexual movement that was written 18 years ago may come off a dated. But this is far from the case. The issue at hand – the push by LGBTQ activists to gain legal sanction for, and societal approval of, their lifestyle – remains largely the same. And not only this, but the arguments used to justify the normalization of homosexuality have not changed much over the past two decades. Add to this Ovadal’s sound exegesis and application of the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, and you have a book that not only is as relevant today as when it was first written, but perhaps one that is even more so.

Ovadal begins chapter one with the words, “The evening of April 12, 1996 was beautiful and calm in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, at least the weather was calm. By seven o’clock, the night air in front of Trinity Evangelical Fellowship Church was rent with curses, blasphemous invectives, and chants such as “Crush the Christians! Bring back the lions!” and “Queer mob rule!” All this, the author explains, as a result of a joint speaking appearance that included him and Scott Lively, the author of another book titled The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Transgenderism in the Light of Scripture: Dispelling Some Popular Fallacies

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 22, 2016| Leave a Comment »

transgender restroomIt seems almost impossible to have any contact with day to day events in this country without soon coming across some discussion about the issue of transgender persons, those individuals, “whose gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth” (Answers to Your Questions About Transgender People, Gender Identity and Gender Expression, APA).

In early 2015, the suicide of a young man from the Cincinnati are who identified as female garnered national and international attention. The case of Olympic champion Bruce Jenner has been an even more high-profile case of transgenderism. Now, the state of North Carolina is grabbing headlines for its so-called “bathroom bill” which requires all persons to use the public restroom that corresponds to the sex assigned to them on their birth certificate.

Since transgenderism has become such a high profile issue, it is important for Christians to think through matter carefully. Below are a few common intellectual fallacies related to transgenderism that Christians ought to avoid, in order to speak effectively to aggressive and unbiblical transgender movement.

The Bible is not a textbook on transgenderism

Many individuals, perhaps even some believers, labor under the assertion that the Bible has nothing to say about transgenderism. This then becomes an excuse for seeking truth about transgenderism, not from the Word of God, but from secularists of one sort or another.

Many people believe that modern science furnishes us with truth about transgenderism. But science is not a source of truth. Any truth.

At its best, science can provide useful opinion on this or that topic. But it can never provide truth in the sense of giving us final, once and for all objectively factual statements.

There are two main reasons for this. First, science relies on observation. That is to say, science is empirical. But empiricism is deeply flawed. “Seeing is believing,” is a common empirical expression. But probably all of us have had our eyes play tricks on us. Observation is not so reliable as we would like to think.

Second, the scientific process of experimentation relies on the logical fallacy of asserting the consequent to reach its conclusions. To steal an everyday example John Robbins has used, consider the statement: If my battery is dead, my car won’t start. Most of us would agree with this proposition. But then we decide to do an experiment and try to start our car. We turn the key and, lo and behold, our car won’t start. Therefore, we conclude, our battery must be dead.

Now any good mechanic could spot the problem here: there are other reasons that a car won’t start that have nothing to do with the battery being dead. Jumping to the conclusion that the battery must be dead is an example of asserting the consequent. This is a logical fallacy. And it is the same logical fallacy that underlies the entire enterprise of scientific experimentation.

And because science is based on a logical fallacy, it can never furnish us with truth. The most science can do is provide us with useful opinion. Nothing more.

By contrast, the Bible is a complete system of revealed truth.

To cite just one passage from Scripture that makes this claim, “All Scripture is inspired by God (God breathed) and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16, 17). This includes the good work of Christian commentary on current events, even the issue of transgenderism.

To quote John Robbins, “The Bible is a textbook – or rather, the Bible is the textbook. Let all other books conform. And let us, as Christians, reject the sophistry of those who devalue the Scriptures by making them inadequate for all our intellectual needs” (Robbins, Is the Bible a Textbook?).

(more…)

Read Full Post »

This ‘n That, 5/20/16

Posted in This 'n That, Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 20, 2016| 2 Comments »

brexitIn the US, reports about the presidential elections continue to dominate the new. No surprise there. It’s the world’s longest running reality show, and people just can’t seem to get enough. Or, at least, the people who run the news networks can’t seem to get enough.

At any rate, there are important events going on around the world. And one of the most important and underreported – at least in the US – stories out there is, to paraphrase that most profound question asked by the Clash…

Should they stay or should they go?

I’m referring here to the so-called Brexit, short for British Exit, the June 23rd referendum in Great Britain in which voters will decide whether the nation will remain a part of the European Union (EU) or not.

All the meddling, globalist, master of the universe types, Barak Obama being a prime example of this noxious genus, are urging the British public to vote to stay in the EU. That right there is reason enough for Britain to make a bee line for the EU exit. But there’s more to it than that.

Quick, name a prominent EU official. My guess is that hardly anyone outside of Europe could do so. But according to Brexit the Movie,the same could be said for most who live under the baleful influence of the EU.

Apparently it’s very difficult to determine who’s in charge of the many tentacled Byzantine bureaucracy that is the EU superstate. This lack of transparency is surely intentional, creating a relationship between the rulers and the ruled that resembles more that of feudal Europe than that which exists in a modern constitutional republic.

One striking result of this lack of governmental accountability is that, at least according to the video, there are an estimated 10,000 elite EU bureaucrats who make more than the Prime Minister of the UK.

As Richard Bennett and Michael de Semlyn pointed out in Papal Rome and the European Union, the Roman Catholic Church-State has long been one of the EU’s biggest supporters. Here’s hoping there’s enough bulldog left in the British to tell the EU to take its stifling, top-down regulatory statism and get lost.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Another Tough Week to be a Christian – More Transgender Nonsense

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on May 15, 2016| 10 Comments »

Obama at White House .png

President Obama during a news conference at the White House

It’s been another tough week to be a Christian in America. Lately, there seem to be more and more such weeks. It gets to be a bit tiresome. But more than that, it can get to be downright depressing.

I’m referring, as you may have guessed, to the latest example of our federal government calling good evil and evil good, this time in the form of “guidance” to educational institutions about how to handle issues concerning transgender students.

The guidance was released on Friday, 5/13 in a letter signed by officials from not one, but two cabinet level departments, the Department of Justice and Department of Education. You can read the full text of the letter here.

The practical result of the guidance from the Obama administration, if it is applied, is, among other things, to open to open what are currently women’s only restrooms, locker rooms and sports teams to transgender women (a transgender woman is a person born male but who identifies as a female, a so-called woman trapped in a man’s body).

To put it more bluntly, the Obama administration believes that men should be able to use the women’s restroom.

Obama, it would seem, is willing to pay any price and bear any burden in the unrelenting pursuit of dumping as much moral filth on America as possible before his term expires.

And from all appearances, he’s succeeding admirably.

But how did it come to this? How is it possible for something so manifestly wrong to seem like the very height of wisdom to many in our society?

Philosophically, it would seem that the groundwork for this was laid in the 19th century. Soren Kierkegaard famously located truth in the “infinite passion” of the individual believer rather than in any objective standard outside of him. From this we get the popular notion that it matters not what a man believes, so long as he is sincere.

Twentieth century existentialists bear some responsibility here as well.  According to existentialist  Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”  In other words, what we are is not a matter of how God created us, which is the Christian view, but instead a result of the choices we make.

This is a prescription for madness. It’s also complete nonsense.

In our sinful, fallen world, it is an easy thing to find people who sincerely believe all manner of nonsense. One man imagines he’s Julius Caesar, another that he’s Napoleon Bonaparte. But so what? There’s no great movement to accommodate such individuals. We may humor them. We may pray for them. If they’re a danger to themselves or to others, we may commit them to an institution. But there is no reason to take their claims seriously. And almost no one does.

But there’s an even better tool for refuting the claims of those unfortunates under the sway of the erroneous notions of contemporary gender studies.

The Word of God tells us plainly that God created man male and female. Further it states in plain language that homosexual and transgender behavior is sinful. It doesn’t take a Luther or a Calvin to understand this. Any ordinary, honest Christian with a Bible can prove it.

The Bible alone is the Word of God and it has a monopoly on truth. And all the incessant talk about the supposed civil rights of men trapped in women’s’ bodies or women trapped in men’s bodies is, to borrow a Biblical turn of phrase, imagining a vain thing. There are no such persons.

I doubt not but that there are those in the transgender community who sincerely believe their own rhetoric. As Christians and fellow sinners, we ought to pray for them. We ought to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them. Perhaps God in his grace will save some. But there is no compelling reason to listen to them, or to those in government who seek further to push the ungodly transgender agenda on our nation.


Read Full Post »

This ‘n That: 5/12/2016

Posted in This 'n That, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2016| 2 Comments »

Crooked Hillary

Hillary Clinton

Eventful times these are. So much so that there’s far more to write about than I could ever hope to adequately address. But hey, there’s no harm in trying. So, let’s get started…

 

Crooked Hillary

I hardly know where to begin when it comes to Mrs. Clinton. She’s an obvious felon. And the best any normal person with her legal baggage could hope for would be a not-too-harsh plea bargain. But when it comes to the preternaturally impervious Hillary Clinton, well, that’s a different story.

One of the most offensive aspects of contemporary American society is the two-tiered justice system. Ordinary Americans can have their lives ruined by a single drug-related felony, while the masters of the universe – or perhaps in Hillary’s case I should say mistress of the universe – can commit all manner of crimes and be rewarded with the highest office in the land.

And almost as if she were going out of the way to rub people’s noses in it, we get a report this past week that four years worth of emails between Hillary and her chief of IT Bryan Pagliano have turned up…..drum roll please…missing! Oh, what a shock!

If you haven’t followed the Clinton email scandal closely, Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s chief of IT while she was Secretary of State, was the guy who set up the unsecured server on which Hillary stored highly sensitive State Department emails, an act that she undoubtedly knew was illegal. And emails aside, just the act of setting up the server was a felony. As former CIA Officer Scott Uehlinger put it, “The fact that she set up a private server, in and of itself, means she is guilty of a felony right there.”

Nixon only had an 18 minute gap, and that was enough to bring him down. Hillary? She’s got a four year gap. But hardly anyone in the mainstream press cares. As Investors Business Daily reported, “This kind of behavior would normally light a fire under law enforcement – and the press – since these things usually smack of a cover-up. But the mainstream press is asleep at the switch…” Former Department of Justice official Dan Metcalfe commented, “The whole thing stinks to high heavens.”

It’s a good thing that I’m not one of those tinfoil hat wearing wackadoos. Because if I were, I might just begin to think that the Deep State was behind the push for our first woman president…and now that I mention it…

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Discrimination and Liberty: Colorado’s Ongoing Persecution of Jack Phillips

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on May 8, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Minding your own business is getting more dangerous all the time for ordinary Americans. Perhaps especially if they’re Christians. And if you don’t believe it, just consider the ongoing case of Jack Phillips, a baker from Lakewood, Colorado who’s found himself embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the State of Colorado over his refusal to make a wedding cake in celebration of a same-sex marriage.

Phillips, a Christian, refused to make a wedding cake for Dave Mullins and Charlie Craig, a homosexual couple married in Massachusetts, during their visit to his bakery in the summer of 2012. Phillip’s refusal of service has set in motion a Kafkaesque series of legal battles in which Phillips was ordered to make wedding cakes for gay couples by administrative law judge Robert Spencer or risk facing fines, was likened to the Nazis by a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and was forced to submit quarterly reports about whom he refuses to serve and provide anti-discrimination training to his employees.

In the latest legal twist, Phillips was refused service by the Colorado Supreme Court, which elected not to hear his case. Apparently Colorado judges have the right to discriminate without suffering any consequences, but bakers who do so are in a world of hurt.

At bottom, this and other cases of this same ilk, are not, as many people suppose, matters of free speech or religious liberty. At its most basic level, this is a battle over property rights.

John Robbins has called private property, “the central economic institution of civilized societies” (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 30). And if he’s right in his assessment, and he is, this says something deeply disturbing about a society that subjects a man who, quite literally, was minding his own business to the sort of legal nightmare Colorado has put Jack Phillips through.

The idea that business owners do not have the right to determine their clientele entered into American law through Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited privately owned businesses from refusing to serve customers on the basis of “race, color, religion, or national origin” While much of the Civil Rights Act is sound, Title II represents a disaster for property rights. Not only is it unconstitutional for the federal government to prohibit discrimination by private entities- and discrimination, as Walter Williams explains in the video at the top of this post, is simply another work for choice – but Title II set the precedent for states to pass laws punishing Christians who seek to conduct their business according to the Word of God and the dictates of their own consciences.

Phillips ordeal is nothing but a legal mugging in broad daylight. And not only do the ACLU thugs who have helped carry it out feel no shame, but they actually boast about their activities. Ria Tabacco Mar, the attorney who argued the case against Phillips on behalf of the ACLU is quoted as saying, “We all have a right to our personal beliefs, but we do not have a right to impose those beliefs on others and harm them. We hope today’s win will serve as a lesson for others that equality and fairness should be our guiding principles and that discrimination has no place at the table, or the bakery as the case may be.”

Now one would suppose that Mar, a trained attorney, would be bright enough to see the irony in her remark about not having the right to impose our personal beliefs on others. But apparently that’s not the case. For what is it that both she and her clients did but impose their belief about the goodness and rightness of gay marriage on a man whose Christian faith led him to a different conclusion?

Social Justice Warriors of Mar’s ilk, the ones who claim to oppose hate and intolerance, never seem to realize that they are the biggest purveyors of the very things they claim to stand against.

In the end, a business owner’s right to refuse service to anyone for any reason is rooted in the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” We may not like the businessman’s reason for discriminating, and in fact his reasoning may be sinful, but it is not for the state to impose criminal sanctions on him. This respect for free association is a major test of a free society. And as things stand, America isn’t doing so well these days.


Read Full Post »

What’s an Evangelical?

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology, tagged on May 1, 2016| 2 Comments »

EvangelicalSo what is an evangelical anyway? It’s common term, and not just in church circles either. Now that the US presidential elections are well underway, one often hears the word evangelical in connection with politics, as in such and such a candidate is attempting to garner the evangelical vote. But who are these people whose votes the politicians want?

From stories that appear in the media, one gets the distinct sense that evangelical has come to anyone who’s a non-Roman Catholic, non- mainline liberal Protestant church goer. The popular image of which could be described as a mega-church attending, TBN watching, pre-trib rapture awaiting Christian Zionist.

In his 2007 study concerning who qualifies as an Evangelical, George Barna found that 38% of the US population described themselves as such.

As part of the same survey, Barna used a nine-point definition of Evangelical to identify individuals who belonged to this group. Judged by Barna’s criteria, only about 8% of the US population can be described as Evangelical.

Historically speaking, the definition of Evangelical has encompassed two criteria: justification by faith alone (JBFA) and the authority of Scripture alone. Gordon Clark makes this point in Chapter 4 of God’s Hammer, writing, “The term evangelical, an inheritance from the Reformation, reminds us of the so-called material principle of the origin of Protestantism. Justification by faith alone was the material principle…”

Clark continues, “[T]he so-called formal principle of the Reformation [is] the Scripture itself. No one can rightly appropriate the term evangelical who rejects the one or the other.”

Belief in the twin towers of the Reformation, Scripture alone and Justification by Faith alone, is required of anyone who wishes to be considered an evangelical, at least in the historical sense of the term.

(more…)

Read Full Post »