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Posts Tagged ‘John Robbins’

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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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.


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A Shave, a Haircut, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Posted in Economics, Politics, tagged , , on April 2, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The latest LGBTQ attack on property rights comes to us courtesy of Rose Trevis, a transgender man – i.e. a woman posing as a man – who has filed suit against Hawleywood’s barbershop in Long Beach, California.

The suit was prompted when Trevis was refused service by the barbershop that has a policy of serving men only. “I felt very upset, I guess discriminated against,” Trevis said. Trevis has retained famed attorney Gloria Allred to represent her.

The last few years have seen an explosion of such suits. Florists, bakers, photographers and bed and breakfast owners, all going about their own business, have found themselves the targets of an aggressive, fascist, unbiblical homosexual rights movement that seeks to use the power of the state to force its agenda on everyone.

In many cases, the business owner’s Christian beliefs were the basis of the refusal of service. In others, such as the barbershop in Long Beach, no religious objection was put forth, only company policy was cited.

Some who support a business owner’s decision to refuse service to homosexual or transgender customers attempt to defend this decision on the basis of free speech, while others do so on the basis of religious liberty. Both defenses, well intentioned as they are, fail for the same reason: the issue is not one of free speech or religious liberty. This issue at hand is one of property rights. Does a business owner reserve the right to refuse service for any reason, or may a customer force him to perform a service against his will?

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Just Choose From What Works

Posted in Economics, Politics, Scripturalism, tagged on March 30, 2016| 2 Comments »

Obama_Young Leaders .jpg

President Barak Obama addresses the Young Leaders of the Americas Town Hall in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 23, 2016.   

“So often in the past,” said president Barak Obama to a group of Argentinian youth, “there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate.” The president continued, “Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it really fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works.”

 

Obama’s remarks have drawn a good deal of fire from conservatives, and rightly so. To downplay the division between communism and capitalism betrays a profound ignorance of economics and of history. Capitalism, the economic system of the Bible with its emphasis on private property, has lifted millions out of poverty and produced relatively free and just societies in the nations where it has been practiced; communism, the collectivist economic system of Karl Marx that places ownership of the means production with the state, has produced untold suffering and death for millions.

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Book Review: The Atonement

Posted in Book Review, Scripturalism, Theology, tagged , on March 27, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Atonement_ClarkThe Atonement by Gordon H. Clark (Jefferson, MD: The Trinity Foundation, 1987, 163 pages), $8.95.

Chapters Include: Introduction on Method; The Doctrine in its Simplicity; The Covenant of Redemption; The Covenant of Grace; The Incarnation; The Virgin Birth; The Human Nature of Christ; The Purpose of the Incarnation; Active Obedience; The Covenant of Works; The Vicarious Sacrifice; Expiation; Propitiation; Satisfaction; Federal Headship; Absolute Necessity; Traducianism; The Sovereignty of God; The Extent of the Atonement.

A few years back, American Express ran a television advertisement that featured the story of a man who visited Norway thinking he was going to see the land of his ancestors only to find upon arrival that he actually was of Swedish descent. Or perhaps it was the other way around. At any rate, he wasn’t who he thought he was.

I had a similar experience when I first began to study theology. As I worked through a book on systematic theology with a very generous and learned reformed Baptist pastor, I found, much to my surprise, I was an Arminian. This was particularly shocking to me, as I had never so much as heard the word before, let alone realized I was one. In truth, my experience wasn’t so unusual. Such is the dominance of Arminian theology in American Evangelical churches that Arminians generally are unaware of their Arminianism. It’s taken for granted that Christ died for all men, and little or no serious thought is given to an alternative. When the doctrines of grace, what we would call Calvinism, are discussed, many folks raised in the broad evangelical church are shocked and offended that someone actually could believe that God does not love all men, that some are in fact reprobate and fitted for destruction, and that this is the historic teaching of the Reformation.

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Antichrist on the Border, Part 2

Posted in Economics, Immigration, Politics, Roman Catholicism, tagged , , , on February 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »

 

Pope Francis_Juarez

Pope Francis speaks at the Bachilleres College in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on February 17, 2016. Background image is Our Lady of Guadalupe.  Gabriel Bouys, AFP

 

 

“The Romanists have very cleverly built three wall around themselves,” observed Martin Luther in his treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. “Hitherto,” he continues, “they have protected themselves by these walls in such a way that no one has been able to reform them. As a result, the whole of Christendom has fallen abominably.

In the first place, when pressed by the temporal powers they have made decrees and declared that the temporal power had no jurisdiction over them, but that on the contrary, the spiritual power is above the temporal. In the second place, when the attempt is made to reprove them with the Scriptures, they raise the objection that only the pope may interpret the Scriptures. In the third place, if threatened with a council, their story is that no one may summon a council but the pope.”

In this way they have cunningly stolen our three rods from us, that they may go unpunished. They have ensconced themselves within the safe stronghold of these three walls so that they can practice all the knavery and wickedness which we see today.” Thus Luther.

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Noah, History’s Preeminent Prepper Part 4

Posted in Prepper, tagged , , , on February 14, 2016| 3 Comments »

The Building of Noah's Ark_1675

The Building of Noah’s Ark, c. 1675.

Prepping has interested me for several years, but it has been only recently that I felt compelled to write on the subject. Prepping – I would define prepping as, in light of God’s Word, foreseeing possible political, economic and social crises and taking precautions to protect oneself against them – is seen by some as a bit negative, a bit antisocial. After all, if you’re building an ark, you must be rooting for a flood. Because if nothing happens, you’re just going to look foolish.

But while it may be common for people to look down on prepping and those who practice it, preppers actually have a good Biblical basis for doing what they do. As Proverbs tells us, “A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished” (22:3). When one considers the massive and unpayable debts of the Western nations, the geopolitical tensions that seem to be growing all the time, and the spiritual and moral decline seen all around us, it is hard to believe that the current decrepit system can long continue. It has been the position of this author in this series 1) that serious shocks to the West’s political and economic systems are coming in the near future, 2) that most people – and even most Christians – are unprepared materially, physically and spiritually to deal with them, and 3) that the Bible provides an almost embarrassment of riches on the subject of how to get ready for and endure extreme economic, social and political crises.

This series on prepping is not about finding the best type of food to store or how to protect your savings in the event of large scale bank runs. These are important subjects. I do not deny that. But there are other who are better positioned to talk about them. It has been my aim in writing these posts to make the Biblical case for prepping. To show from the pages of Scripture that not only is prepping consistent with the Christian faith, but that it is actually a Biblical imperative.

In particular, this study has looked at the case of Noah, a man faced with a quite literal end-of-the-world-as-he-knew-it scenario. Last week, we looked at the basis of Noah’s salvation from destruction: God’s grace. Noah was not a perfect man. He was a sinner, just like all the others on the earth in his day. But God purposed to save him. Not for anything in Noah or because God was under any obligation to save him, but because the Lord freely, sovereignly elected to do so. This week, I would like to take a closer look at Noah and consider just what sort of man he was.

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The Fed, Fiat Currency and Feckless Keynesian Economics

Posted in Economics, Scripturalism, tagged , , , on January 17, 2016| 4 Comments »

Obama_2016 SOTU

President Barak Obama delivers his State of the Union address to Congress, January 12, 2016.

“Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” or at least that’s what President Obama would have Americans believe based on his remarks in his State of the Union address last week. Yes, according to the president, everything is awesome. And anyone who thinks otherwise is simply, to quote a Vice President from a few decades back, a nattering nabob of negativism.

 

But is everything as rosy as Obama would have us believe? The following points would suggest otherwise:

  • The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) just experienced the worst opening week in its history. During the first two weeks of trading in 2016, the market has declined by 4%.
  • The Labor Force Participation Rate – this the total number of people who are either employed or actively looking for work divided by the total working age population – is at lows not seen in nearly 40 years, going back to a time when women were just entering the workforce in large numbers.
  • The Baltic Dry Index – a shipping and trade index measuring the changes in the cost to transport raw materials by – is at record low levels and continuing to sink rapidly. These low and rapidly declining readings – the index has dropped 19% just since the first of the year – indicate a sharp drop in international shipping, implying a significant drop in international trade and a global economic slow-down. According to this article, the index has hit new record lows for the past nine days straight.
  • According to FactCheck.org, the number of Food Stamp recipients grew by 45% for the period from 1/9/2009 – 1/9/2015.
  • Breitbart reports that, “American’s middle class has shrunk by almost 20% since the 1970s and is now a minority of the population in the United States.”
  • In connection with a shrinking middle class, income distribution has become significantly skewed toward the top of society. This video give a good breakdown of just how unequal incomes have become in the US. Among its findings: 40% of the wealth of the country is held by 1% of the population, those in the top 1% own 50% of value of the stock and bonds markets. Taken together with a shrinking middle class, it appears that the US is coming to resemble more a feudal society than the healthy middle class nation most of us grew up in.
  • US federal government debt has exploded in recent years. When Obama entered office in January 2009, the debt stood at a frightening $10.6 trillion. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the debt was $18.1 trillion in January 2015 and is projected to grow to $19.1 trillion a year from now when Obama leaves office. To put it another way, it took the US 236 years to amass $10.6 trillion of debt, but by the time he leaves office next year, Obama will have presided over a near doubling of this amount. According to Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, “Our country is broke. It’s not broke in 75 years of 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today.”

Considering only the bullet points above, it would appear that precarious is about the kindest word one could use to describe the economic condition of the US. To say we’re headed off an economic cliff likely would be closer to the mark.

So how did we get here? How did a nation founded by the Puritans and committed to the principles of civil and economic liberty end up a bloated, socialist over extended empire suffocating under the largest debt edifice in the history of mankind? Although a full answer to that question is beyond the scope of a single blog post, the short answer is that the American people have, to borrow what Isaiah said about the people of Judah, turned away backwards from God and from his law. We have rejected the truth and embraced the lie, and now the chickens are coming how to roost.

In this post, I would like to look specifically at three economic lies that are held by nearly all academic economists, politicians and their enablers in the media: central banking, fiat currency and Keynesian economics. Any one of these by itself is dangerous to the health of a nation. Taken together, they are a sort of perfect storm, guaranteed to bring economic destruction to any nation whose leaders embrace them.

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Book Review: God and Evil: The Problem Solved

Posted in Book Review, Scripturalism, Theology, tagged , , on January 10, 2016| 5 Comments »

God and Evil_2

God and Evil: The Problem Solved by Gordon H. Clark (Unicoi, Tennessee: The Trinity Foundation, 91 pages, 2004) $5.00.

Responding to president Bush’s proposal to allow public schools to teach intelligent design along with Darwinism, veteran political commentator Daniel Schorr remarked, “[Bush] might well have reflected that, if this [Hurricane Katrina] was the result of intelligent design, then the designer has something to answer for.” From a Christian perspective, this comment is a bit off the mark. For Christians do no not, or at least ought not, argue for intelligent design. Creationism – the doctrine that God created all things of nothing, by the Word or his power, in the space of six literal days, and all very good – is the proper Biblical stance. Nevertheless, Schorr’s statement certainly does apply to creationism. In fact, Schorr’s argument is really more of a problem of the creationist than it is for the proponent of intelligent design.

Writing in his 2006 book Letter to a Christian Nation, atheist evangelist Sam Harris was even more pointed in his criticism of Christians than was Schorr.

Examples of God’s failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen. The city of New Orleans, for instance, was recently destroyed by a hurricane. More than a thousand people dies; tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions; and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Do you have the courage to admit the obvious? These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend (52).

From the start, Christians have found themselves confronted with arguments similar to those above and have handled them with various degrees of success. Far too often they have come off as the proverbial fellow who made the mistake of brining a knife to a gun fight. They are unprepared and overmatched. In the opinion of this reviewer, a Christian who and understands and believes Clark’s argument in God and Evil: The Problem Solved (hereafter God and Evil)
will find himself in the happier position of the man who brought a gun to a knife fight. The opposition won’t have a chance.

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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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