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The Deep State Strikes Back: Clinton “Wins” Nomination

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 6, 2016| Leave a Comment »

This just in, “Clinton Hits “Magic Number’ of Delegates to Clinch Nomination,” according to CNBC.

In sports, a team that loses but still makes the postseason is said to “back into the playoffs.” But what do we call what Mrs. Clinton just did?

On a night when no primary was held, mirabile dictu!, somehow she just magically accumulated “over a dozen new superdelegates” to help put her over the top. And this the night before the big California primary, a race, which much to her embarrassment, she very well may lose.

Doubtless the timing of this new superdelegate surge was purely coincidental. And thank goodness there’s no reason to suspect any election rigging by the Deep State.

As they say, move along, nothing to see here…


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Biblical Economics: The Siege of Samaria, Part 1

Posted in Economics, Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 5, 2016| 7 Comments »

Elisha Prophesies the End of Samaria's Siege.jpg

Elisha Prophesies the End of Samaria’s Siege by Nicolas Fontaine, 1625-1709.

The Bible has a monopoly on truth. This simple idea is basic to the entire Scripturalist enterprise. Yet while the idea itself is simple and ought to be taught and understood by every Christian, it’s one that often is denied.

 

Speaking for myself, many times I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that the Bible is good for learning about God and salvation, but it’s not a textbook on economics, or politics or history. Revelation alone is the source of all knowledge, but my belief that Bible is not a textbook on fill-in-the-blank was a sinful denial of this premise.

I mention this by way of introduction to today’s post on Biblical economics. and for today’s lesson, I’d like to look at the siege of Samaria as related in 2 Kings 6:24-7:20.

The Siege of Samaria

Samaria was the capital of the Northern Kingdom and had come under attack by Ben-Hadad, king of Syria. Sieges in the ancient world were horrific events, and doubtless left survivors deeply scarred both physically and emotionally. For example, when the Assyrians were threatening to besiege Jerusalem, the commander of their army told Hezekiah’s representatives and all the people who were assembled on the city wall, “Has my master sent me to your master and to you to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, who will eat and drink their own waste [during the coming siege of Jerusalem] with you” (Isaiah 36:12). And this leaves unsaid the lack of sanitation, disease, stench and death that would all be part of the package deal.

Regarding the siege of Samaria, the Bible tells us, “And there was a great famine in Samaria; and indeed they [the Syrians] besieged it until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and one-fourth of a kab of dove droppings for five shekels of silver” (2 Kings 6:25).

There are a number of important economic ideas packed into this verse. Let’s take a look at them.

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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?).

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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.

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American Oligarchy

Posted in Economics, Politics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 24, 2016| 2 Comments »

Pat McCrory

Pat McCrory, embattled governor of North Carolina.

Oligarchy:  Government by the few; a form of government in which the power is confined to a few persons or families; also, the body of persons composing such a government.

 

American oligarchy. What a strange term it is. In the years immediately following the cold war, it was common to hear about the Russian oligarchs. These were unscrupulous men who were alleged to have acquired great power and wealth after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and to have done so in a dishonest fashion. But back then, no one ever spoke of an American oligarchy.

But now, more and more it is common to hear people speak of about an American oligarchy. And it would seem they are onto something. Consider:

  • Gay Marriage: In June 2015, a body of nine lawyers on the Supreme Court found that the US Constitution guarantees homosexual couples the right to marry. And this in spite of the fact that 1) the Constitution says nothing about marriage, that 2) large numbers of the American people oppose gay marriage and that 3) many states, including Ohio where I live, had laws prohibiting gay marriage that were put there as a reflection of the will of the people. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, any attempt by states to offer some measure of protection to those who oppose the encroachments of the aggressive, unbiblical homosexual lobby are met with the strictest denunciations from oligarchs in both business and culture.
  • Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid: Some politicians come with baggage. Hillary comes with a whole baggage train. That Mrs. Clinton is a felon is almost a certain. For her guilt has nothing to do with the content of the emails she had on her private server. 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. Obviously, by having a private server, she was conspiring to evade her signed sworn statements that she would uphold secrecy agreements. The fact that simply established that (private server) regardless of what was on it, she intended to go around and circumvent the law.” Any ordinary American would long ago have found himself rotting in a cell in Leavenworth for committing just a fraction of the violations Hillary almost certainly has committed, and yet not only does she not suffer the legal consequences for her actions, but she is allowed to run for the nation’s highest office with nary a peep from the national press.

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Bernie and Bergoglio, Part 2

Posted in Politics, Roman Catholicism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on April 16, 2016| 4 Comments »

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Bernie Sanders

Last week we reported that democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was off to see the wizard. And sure enough, he got his audience. According to this report from the Daily Beast, Sanders, in Rome for a conference celebrating Centesimus Annus – Centesimus Annus, a papal encyclical by John Paul II, is a semi-Marxist celebration of an earlier papal encyclical by the 19th century socialist pope Leo XIII; pope Leo’s encyclical, titled Rerum Novarum, is a strident, socialist attack on constitutional capitalism, the economic and political system of the Bible – received his hoped for meeting with the pope during the senator’s stay in the Vatican.

 

The article quotes the pope as saying, “This morning as I was leaving [Rome], Senator Sanders was there. He knew I was coming out at that time, and he had the kindness to greet me. When I came down, he introduced himself, I greeted him with a handshake, and nothing more. It’s common courtesy, this is called common courtesy.”

The pope is further added, “If someone thinks that greeting someone is getting involved in politics, I recommend that they find a psychiatrist.”

In that case, I’d better schedule some couch time next week, because by all means I believe that the pope’s decision to meet with Sanders was political.

I’m not sure what is more offensive about this meeting. The fact that the pope is clearly attempting to influence the American presidential election, or the fact that he’s lying about it. The Roman Catholic Church-State is perhaps the most political organization on earth. And this pope may well be the most openly political man to hold the office in some time. For Francis I to dissimulate about his political meddling is insulting, but not unexpected coming from a Jesuit.

Of course, Sanders is not the only current presidential candidate to cozy up to the current occupant of the seat of Antichrist. Shortly before the pope’s visit to the US in September 2015, Hillary Clinton had this to say about Francis I,

I am not a Catholic, but I am a great admirer of the pope. I think that what he’s trying to do is take this venerable institution, the Roman Catholic Church, and really, once again, place it on a firm foundation of scriptures of Christ’s words.”

A few weeks later, still in September 2015, she penned an article for the National Catholic Reporter, in which she opined,

His Holiness Pope Francis calls Earth “our common home.” “Our common home requires our striving for the common good,” Social Service Sr. Simone Campbell, one of the Nuns on the Bus, wrote earlier this year.

In one short paragraph, Clinton used the blasphemous title favored by the popes, His Holiness, flacked for the socialist environmentalist movement, and for good measure threw in one of Rome’s favorite, antichristian economic buzz words, “the common good.” Quite an achievement that, and in a mere thirty-five words to boot.

At the same time Hillary went pandering in the National Catholic Reporter, Ted Cruz decided he wanted a piece of the papal action as well. In an article appearing in the Federalist, Cruz gushed about Pope Francis, writing,

Pope Francis has spoken to the world, proclaiming the inherent truth and goodness of life, marriage, and religious liberty. I am grateful for his leadership on these central issues. In an era when many global leaders are descending to relativism, his courageous defense of the dignity of the human person, the beauty in the sacrament of marriage[as a Baptist, Cruz is well aware that Evangelicals do not consider marriage a sacrament; here, he adopts the language of Rome, apparently to score political points with Romanists; it is this sort of subtle pandering that casts Cruz as a political opportunist rather than a man of principle], and the duty to speak for those who are persecuted is a light to the world of the scriptural truths that are ever-present in our lives.

So, Ted Cruz believes that the Man of Sin can too speak the truths of Scripture. Given the abject failure of the Protestant pulpit to warn people about the true nature of the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church-State, we now are treated to the spectacle of a an Evangelical Senator from Texas falling all over himself to praise Antichrist. A strange sight indeed.

The only candidate who thus far has not kissed the Bishop of Rome’s ring is Donald Trump, who called the pope “disgraceful” for questioning his Christian faith. From what this writer has been able to observe, Donald Trump is no Christian. But when it comes to assessing the pope, I’d say he’s right on target.


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Noah: History’s Preeminent Prepper Part 2

Posted in Prepper, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 31, 2016| 3 Comments »

Hurricane Ike.JPG

A decimated ash tree in my backyard, courtesy of Hurricane Ike.  September, 2008.

 

“For this afternoon, a high wind warning is in effect,” said the radio announcer. “Whatever,” I thought to myself and soon forgot the comment as I drove to church that Sunday morning. The date was September 14, 2008, and I was about to get a lesson in preparedness that I have not forgotten in over seven years since that time.

Driving home, it was a pretty typical late summer/early fall day in Cincinnati. I seem to recall that it was partly sunny and generally fairly pleasant outside. When I arrived home, my family and I ate lunch. And then things got interesting. Seemingly out of nowhere, strong winds began gusting from the south. As the gusts turned into sustained high winds and the tops of the trees in my back yard bent over so as to almost touch the ground, I remembered the high wind warning on the radio from that morning. Whatever indeed. After several minutes of this, the winds vanished just as rapidly as they had appeared. It was as if a hurricane had just blown through the area, which, as I later found out, is pretty much what actually what happened.

Now if you know anything about where Cincinnati is located – we’re about 550 miles inland from the Atlantic coast – you’d know that folks in this part of the country don’t really expect to see hurricanes. Ever. And yet the sustained winds that came through the area that day were over 70 miles an hour, meeting the definition of a hurricane. As it turned out, the high winds were the remnants of Hurricane Ike, a category 4 hurricane, which had struck the gulf coast of Texas a day before. After making landfall, the remnants of the storm headed northeast. Aided by what the meteorologists call a “shortwave trough,” the winds intensified, once again reaching hurricane levels as they roared through the Ohio Valley, causing massive damage to many major metropolitan areas in the region.

At my house, the winds knocked out power almost immediately. Power outages themselves aren’t uncommon as a result of storms. But this outage was to last four days, they longest by far such outage I’ve personally experienced. A large Ash tree in our back yard was snapped in two and had to be taken down. Just up the street, a neighbor was severely injured when a tree fell on her. I drove around in my car to see what things looked like, and was shocked to find out that the power was out for miles in every direction. Much to the surprise of everyone, all of greater Cincinnati was effectively was shut down by this one windstorm.

I realize that compared to natural disasters some people have endured, my story doesn’t rank as particularly noteworthy. The house didn’t sustain any damage. And the biggest inconvenience was having to stumble around at night by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. That, and the food in the freezer going bad. But all this it did get me to thinking. I came to realize that many of the things that I took for granted – the so-called “grid,” items such as electric power, phone service, running water, readily available food and fuel – could disappear in a moment.

At the same time and about 600 miles to the east, another disaster was unfolding. The 2008 financial crisis was in full swing that fall. I remember it quite well as at the time I was working as a telephone representative for a large, nationally known financial services company. Every day I’d get panicked calls from 401(k) investors asking about their balances. I’ll never forget one call. After quoting an account balance to a lady, I was greeted with stunned silence. Finally she said, “I just lost $30,000.” Tough times those.

That fall was quite a wake-up call to me. Almost simultaneously I had witnessed the failure of both the “grid” and the financial system. Perhaps my latent assumptions that things would always work the way they were supposed to were not really warranted.

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The Year in Review, 2015

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2016| 5 Comments »

2015 year in reviewAnother year of blogging has come and gone. And since New Year’s Day represents a convenient opportunity to reflect on the year past as well as look forward to the one ahead, it seemed good to me to summarize 2015’s postings as well as consider where this blog may be headed in 2016.

But before I get to that, thanks are in order. In the first place, I would like to thank the Lord my God. I have written Lux Lucet since 2009, but it has only been since November 2014 that I committed to a regular weekly writing schedule. Writing takes work. And in truth, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to maintain the frequency and quality of writing that I had in mind. But God has been gracious. He has provided me an abundance of interesting and relevant topics to discuss, the necessary time to research and write, and the stamina to make it happen. If there be anything about this blog at all praiseworthy, truly I must say with the reformers, Soli Deo Gloria.

Second, I would like to that the late Dr. John W. Robbins of the Trinity Foundation. It was eight years ago this month that John proposed to me a writing project that would eventually turn into a book titled Imagining A Vain Thing: The Decline and Fall of Knox Seminary. Up until that time, the biggest writing projects I had undertaken were high school and college term papers. But thanks to John’s help as well as the help of current Trinity Foundation president Tom Juodaitis, I was able to see the project through to its completion. This blog is an outgrowth of my experience working with John. You might even say it’s an extended thank you to him, the man whose work has done so much to inspire me.

Third, I would be remiss if I did not extend a sincere thank you to my readers for their support. Were you to ask me why I blog, habitual joker that I am, I’d probably tell you I’m in it for the money. It has always been my prayer that this blog would be used by God to edify his church. But the nature of blogging is such that it can be quite lonely. You sit at your computer and write and publish, but the question remains, What good is any of this doing? In light of that, it is tremendously encouraging to see that my posts are read. Please know that your clicks, comments and likes are greatly appreciated.

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Antichrist on the Border

Posted in Economics, Immigration, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 20, 2015| 2 Comments »

 

Pope Francis_Unholy MixNot content with parading around the nation’s capital, New York City and Philadelphia, Pope Francis I, the current occupant of the office of Antichrist, has big plans for the U.S. Mexican border. According to a recent report,

The Vatican has announced the program for Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to Mexico, which will include a visit to the U.S.-Mexican border with the celebration of a “cross-border” Mass.

The focus of the pope’s border visit, which is to take place during his February 12-17 tour of Mexico, will be to press for immigration reform, which is code for flooding the U.S. with taxpayer subsidized third-world Roman Catholics. According to a statement by El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz,

During Mass, Pope Francis will undoubtedly call attention to many realities that are lived on both sides of our U.S.-Mexico border, particularly the plight of so many migrants and refugees fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, in search of better lives for themselves and their children.

As the Breitbart article notes, the pope’s visit will take place, “just as voters are heading to the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire, where immigration policy is a major issue.” The timing of the papal visit almost certainly is no coincidence. Rome has long sought to turn the U.S. into a majority Roman Catholic country. To date, its efforts have failed, as the Roman Catholic population of America is about 65 million in a nation of over 300 million. But with a virtually bottomless supply of potential immigrants from Latin America at its disposal, the Church hopes to finally realize its goal of a majority Roman Catholic America. What are American Evangelicals to make of this latest push by Antichrist?

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ISIS, America’s Ally

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized, tagged , on November 29, 2015| 4 Comments »

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ISIS fighters

 

As the war in Syria heats up and greater attention is focused on events there, a disturbing fact has come to light from several credible sources. The terrorist organization known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), rather than being a foe of the United States and the West, is actually their agent, acting to carry out the West’s stated agenda of ousting Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad.

Ron Paul talked about the alliance between ISIS and the US in a recent video posted on his YouTube channel titled Does ISIS Exist?. A transcript of this video can be read here. At about the 1:38 mark in the video Paul comments,

But the question is raised, Where did ISIS come from? And there are so many questions: how did it pop up, and gained so much favor and have financing putting out magazines and you know where do they get their weapons and it’s pretty easy to put some of these pieces together and find out that they probably were working to some degrees with some of the people in the West like the United States and maybe some others and got some advantages rather than it being a spontaneous small group of people that all of the sudden took over a large swath of land in Syria and in Iraq. That is probably not true.

As supporting evidence for US involvement with ISIS, Paul’s co-host Daniel McAdams paraphrases a report released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which calls for the establishment of a, “Salafist [Sunni extremist] principality…in eastern Syria,” which is exactly what ISIS is. Paul gives the reason why he believes the US has elected this course of action, explaining,

I think their [the US government] goal probably was to use ISIS to do our battles, because we are the ones who declared war against Assad, to go in there and get rid of Assad and then they think this is a cheap way. We don’t have to put boots on the ground, we get them to do the fighting and American people will think they are fighting radical Islam and will win the victory, will have this victory in a short period of time, but that’s where things go wrong, because no victory arrives.

And not only does no victory arrive, but to horror of the US foreign policy establishment, Vladimir Putin has involved Russia in the war in support of Syria’s government, the very government they are attempting to oust.

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