Donald Trump's Declaration

US President Donald Trump has announced to the world that the entirety of Jerusalem is the capital of the nation of Israel, thus endorsing the claims of Zionism.

This declaration has enraged many and it does confirm to me that that man is not given to thought or any kind of self reflection. But that is another question, beyond the purview of this piece.

The Holy Land, as they call it, raises all manner of passions, usually warlike and thus idoltrous , and this by its mere designation as Holy  .

But speaking from my own christian perspective I will say clearly that this thinking is of the Old Covenant. Although I may in fact get to see Jerusalem from the air when I meet the Lord in the air as part of his visible and public escort at the time of His returning - this is the Rapture-  where the Lord of Hosts walked during the days of his earthly ministry are of no real interest to me.

For if I had no relationship with His Holy Spirit then such an interest would be idolatrous, and could moroever be only idolatrous,  and I would already be lost, for it is by abiding in Christ - ie staying with Him in person in one on one relationship via His Spriit, that we are saved at all.

I mus reiterate that it is the relationship with the Lord God through the Spirit of His Son Jesus Christ is what saves us, and this maintained in personal interaction.  This has been the one issue that absolutely everything hinges on as regards christain living and no less than the Holy Spirit Himself has seen to it over decades that this is clear to me. To forsake this relationship  even while venerating the sites where He once walked and worked, without even thinking of denying that He did indeed do things there,  or to venerate the whole Land itself   as part of His promise this is still to forsake the Lord for mere trappings and appurtenances

I could just as well say that the spot on my bedroom flooor where I met the Living God that night onow over 39 years ago, was holy ground.

But to venerate the spot would be the height of folly.

After all who lovingly looks at one's wedding photos to the exclusion of the spouse in the very room who would speak to you? Only a couple on the way to de facto if not de jure dicovrce where the memory was beter than the daily relationship. But such a relationship is in deep trouble.

In other words, to conciude this train of thought,  if I have a relationship with the Spirit of Christ then all this concern over ancient Bible lands is not necessary except for providing a basic theological grounding  in certain issues. Of a truth I can testify that a personal conversation with someone as wise, witty wonderful but HOLY,  and which conversation has continued over 30 years now is infinitely more interesting than any religion anyone could offer without it

We christians are not citizens of this world, but are strangers and sojourners on this earth. We serve  no rational or spiritual purpose embroiling ourselves in pointless  disputes about holy places, or even in carnal wrangling over the Land of Israel itself.

Holiness, that absolutely necessary component to salvation whereby without it no one will see the Lord, is found where the Lord is, not in the empty place where He was. And if you are born again the Lord is with you. Wherever you are

Thus we have no business stirring the pot as regards tensions in the Middle East just because of our emotional infatuation with the Lands He walked in millennia ago. and neither do we have the right to cynically pretend to love Israel simply because we  regard them as a pawn of prophecy and a marker for the ever approaching Second Coming of Our Dread and Sovereign Lord. And let us not pretend that we do in fact love them. Cheap floods of sentimentality never proved love and I am quite sure that a little introspection not to mention conviction of Sin by the Holy Spirit will reveal emotional anti semitism  in our gushing hearts thus invalidating all our zionist action and rhetoric

Does He walk with you now? well and good. That is a far greater gift than any spot of land, even if He did indeed say he would give it to Israel and His people in the future.  And let me add that I firmly believe that God will do this as He will not let it be said by anyone that He does not keep is Promises, and He did indeed make promises of that Land to Abraham and his progeny. But even so, presumptuous inference with the will of God, whether by Jew or Christian,  is still flesh and it can cause disastert, as Abraham found out when he rashly agreed to sire the promised son off a concubine

We do not walk a tightrope. But we do walk a narrow road, and that road is relationship with the Lord. Forsake that  such that He ceases to speak to us calling us back as we will have blasphemed the Spirit. We may be devout, religious even, passionately working for some cause, any cause, but without the Spirit who such have rejected, they are still lost

Let us actually pay attention to scripture. remembering, if we ever paid sufficient attention to it to recognize the context in the first place, that the passage immediately preceeding that describing the Rapture in I Thessalonians 4:17 was this: 4:11 : "live quite lives, mind your own business and do your own jobs with your own hands."

Conerning Israel we should back off. It is not our business and let us not inflame matters by presumptuous involvement. Some may be called to Israel, and well and good if they are, but I am not, and let those who think themselves called be entrely sure that they are not presumptuous hotheads, that they have the fruit, maturity in christ and the temperance to even handle being in such a cauldron of rage as the Land has become.

Or else get out of there

Moral Accounting

If you see me speaking of some evil as regards ideology or social trend I am not offering a solution to these. That is not my job. Oh, there is a solution. But that is to seek Christ and repent of the sins that make our lives miserable to varying degrees as well as being  unfit for God and in alienation and defiance to Him.

No. I speak of such and such - and my latest target is feminism which I now see as idolatry - out of merely what I call moral accounting: to see some thing as sin that God may lead me to repent of it in my own personal quest.

But Man will not repent. That is a given. therefore, because there is no other alternative, Man is doomed, as is society at large.

Thus I have no interest in advocacy. I see posts on blogs and websites speaking about such evils as  for example, post modernism where they seek to offer some alternative, some practical solution that Man, in defiance of God and without His counsel, can seek to initiate in the vain hope of producing  something other than merely the opposite error, which quest will merely be rinsed and repeated as sociey at large continues to lurch like a drunkard from one error to its opposite error.

Repent or not. Believe or not. It is none of my business which you do, but it comes down to either one of these. Or not.

But I offer no solution as I am increasingly convinced that clear eyed vision requires the stark acknowlegement that there is no solution other than, of course, the God we humans will routinely refuse or only pretend to acknowledge.

For moral law, which is all men can try to push on one another, and ultimately this is all it is, even when watered down and rewritten according to fancy of  who ever is peddling it solved nothing ,as St Paul clearly said yet such is the way that seems right to men and which leads to death.

I learn what to repent of. But not even that means i can repent but the Lord the Spirit lead me in one on one counsel.

For example, I believe I completed the case against legalism year ago. But I am still an ingrained legalist. I was taught moral self effort with my mother's milk so to speak, and I have made it my life, even when the effort is literally killing me - and you may be sure that as I am striving with all the brute force I was taught to  use according to my insight of my own sin, the effort will kill me if i do not give it up.

So I await the continuing grace of God, even to the point of arguing against it to Him. And in his one on one answered to me I shall repent of even my own righteousness eventually.

I know no no other solution for me, and would not dream of offering any to any other.

Let those who seek olitics seek to polish the brasses on a sinking ship. My moral accounting of things precludes this in biblical logic just as my moral accounting for my own proud struggle in defiance of my own insight shows my own struggle is also sin.

And His grace continues . There is literally nothing else

Antisocial Media

I was on one of the well known social media platforms for some eight years.

I need not name the platform.

I left it forever, having it not suspended but deleted, a permament and irreversible operation, some two weeks ago

Why do i call such anti social media rather than social?

I found they are corrosive of true friendships and offer nothing but the empty "friends" who may "like" a post of mine and ask to be my "friend."

I realized that such friendships are totally worthless some years ago when one "friend" of mine who "liked" a post of mine about a book on some literary site became my "friend" but then, being a Right Wing Republican, a Patriot who believed in the US Military, discovered I was in fact a pacifist who regards patriotism as the sin of idolatry and so unfriended me, presumably in disgust.

So for the last two or three years i have only had real life friends in my friends list, and that list was therefore necesariuly sall, about 40 people including family members.

But this solved little,. In fact it made the wounds from being abused all the worse for they were real life friends not faceless strangers

The thing is when typing into a keyboard people are far freer in saying what they would not dare to say to a real life friend face to face.

I did this and nearly lost a best friend of nearly thirty years standing.

And another  real life friend of mine lost her temper over my posts about political correctness.

Others, real life friendes, mark you, got vicious over the election of Trump. As I was less than enthusiastic over either candidate this meant I got anger form both sides

In the end of was self censoring in fear of raising the ire of my real life friends.

And of course I must admit I did my share of strident anger. I am not so saintly as to have been able to ride above this cesspool. I dumped my own foul loads in it myself

This position  of  aforementioned self censoring  I found intolerable so I deleted the utility two weeks ago.

The platform was an antisocial platform. and I strongly suspect that all the others are as well,

Whoever thought that mass and instant commnications would "bring people together" was a naive dreamer.  I see firestorms of self righteous rage which are only informing this culture of outrage; and this in outrage over absolute trivia. Just this morning ny news utility told me of a firestorm of such rage over a joke made by someone about  a baby's name.

And of course political discourse has gone to the dogs. It is reduced to a short  tweet or a  longer  rant. The instant expression of emotion is all that matters and considered opinion is not sought and is usually not given.

Then  of course there is cyber bullying. Just this last week my work mates and I were talking about someone who killed herself over cyberbullying a couple of years ago. It was it seems the anniversary of this piece of despair inducing vicousness and must have been mentioned somewhere.

Then of course some poor fools are so addicted to their social media that they will be gazing into their cell phones to check for the latest "like" or tweet  or whatever even in the presence of spouses and partners, who are understandably irritated by such rejection of them.  This is further justification as to why I flatly refuse to have a cell phone

They are all antisocial media for the quarrelsome, the arrogant nd the bullies to get their daily fix of gratuitous virtue signalling threougth outrage, or some piece of nastiness

And yet the owners and operaors of these platforms will disingenuously tell us that they are not encouraging the descent into the mindlessness of instant graitification, replacing the expressed idea with an emoticon.

This is cynical in the extreme and I hold it to be manifestly untrue. Thought not causing such things  the trash that fills cyber space shows that they certainly encourage it. And of course they make fortunes out of it so it will not be goiung way any time soon

But people, all too few,  have been leaving the socal media platforms.

Finally having done so myself I warmly recomend it.

There is a real world out there with real people.  We have forgotten this.

I will admit that social media have some uses. I could easily set up a party at my house by contacting my friends in a matter of seconds.

But when I was a sprightly young lad in my thirties we had none of these, and our social lives  did not feel the lack ofwhat we had never at that point known .

The disadvantages far outweigh the benefits  and I am  glad to be shut of my own antisocial media platform

The Tsar of Heaven

https://youtu.be/6dc0l9tkQPU

Can a mighty and stern Emperor be a devoted family man? Alexander III whose coronation this march celebrates was very fierce in repressing dissent. But he was indeed a devoted husband and father. What is this to me? Can the God of Heaven, Tsar and Autocrat, Terrible Judge of All, be love itself? His Imperium, his monarchic rule and his judgements are non negotiable for me. Is love compatible with this? Yes, and this is how I first saw this: Alexander III, called the Peacemaker ( in Russian  the name is Mirodvoryets) is a picture of this, in his own small way, and believing this, that One can be a stern monarch and a loving father, is a goal of mine.

Why do I call God Almighty Tsar of Heaven? The Tsars of Russia were absolute monarchs. autocrats. They owned all the land and everyone and everything  in it. They were answerable to none but God Hinself.

God is all these things but answerable to none as there is of course no God above Hin that he should account to this one.

Of course there are differences. God's rule, like that of  the Tsars, is personal but in the hands of a madman like Ivan Grozni - Ivan the Terrible - this is corruption and disaster. But the difference is not the constitution of his rule but his character.

Ferocious in His judgements yet His word offers free amnesty to all who seek Him personally and His motication for doing so is something I have never been able to believe in the nearly 40 years of being a christian, whihc motivation is named in John 3:16.

But He gives images to aid, and this image of Alexander III is part of His personalized aid to me

A Working Holiday Weekend

If you will picture the scene. It was either 1979 or 1980  - I can't remember which - making me  an early twenties something. I was a music student at university studying composition back in the days when I wanted to compose symphonies. I was madly in love, my very first adult love, with a fellow music student. But of course the answer was no. It always has been  no.

One of our lecturers asked our class out to a holiday home of his, a bach in New Zealand parlance,  to do some gardening and help out around the place one weekend in return for some good company - i always liked this man -  one Graham Hollobon, and bed and board.

Heartbroken due to being love lorn I went and did some hard labour hoping to drown my sorrows in work. After all, and I am being ironical here," Arbeit" does "macht frei." But of course the slavery here was of my own imposition, not that of my friend and lecturer nor any staff member of student of Canterbury University in my salad days.

But the thing I remembered most from this distant working weekend was that in his lounge one day I opened a Time magazine and of course went to the religion section, and read some piece of heretical trash and of course was angry. What it was totally escapes me. It may have been about the papacy given that John Paul II,  who I, rejecting the imposture of bishops of Rome adopting what amounts to throne names,  still call Karol Woytila, was only recently elected. But it may not have been.

Mr H said something the essence of which I never forgot, and the point of my posting this here, namely that religious fanatics - but i don't recall his using such a hurtful word as fanatic though it was true -  will look forsomething to be angry at, and will go to, as in this instance,  religious articles in magazines with the intention of being angry at it.

He was absolutely right. I do not know if I ever thanked hin for this insight .  I don't even know if he is still alive, it being some 37 or 38 years ago whereby I could thank him for it now.

Biut I never forgot it.

Loving nothing in any truly spiritual fashion - my love for the young woman I mention here, given my maturity of lack thereof in christ,  was not spiritual - I could only signal my virtue, if only to myself, by finding something to hate. I could only fill the emptiness of a life already backslidden from Christ with in a year or two of my conversion, with ungodly anger at something to hate

And something to hate is to be found  in superabundance.

This I see time and time again among all manner of social justice activists and unfortunately among Christians. Secular haters may have no alternative, but we who profess Christ do and it shows our backsliding or immaturity that we Christians are no different for all our lies, and in telling lies about ourselves we are past masters, about our live for the lost

How's This For a Paradox?

Indeed, and as I grow more and more convinced that paradox is God's calling card I place this one before you.

If I am to ever love my neighbour there is one belief I must be rid of.

And that is?

Belief in Man. Note the capitalization. Believing in Man is not to love Man,  nor men, that is to say individual persons, nor even your neighbour. It is the worship of an image,  which is of course idealized and thus idolatrous, both for this idealization  and for it being worshipped at all. After all how many do you know who profess great love for the human race  but cannot get on with the people they live with on a  day to day basis? 


Moreover, in fact, this belief in Man is such that  various stripe of humanists  hold that for the Utopia to come mass murder is the necessary order of the day. And all because they believe in Man and want to improve the race. After all what else is to be done with those who cannot or will not agree with the Utopian vision of the fantic who wasnts to impose it?  And even in those not so extreme, well, for example, in  ordinary politics, all of which professes to believ in this very thing, centuries of effort  has got nowhere. The human experiment has failed. Only die hards who refuse to face cold hard evidence refuse to face this.

Of course there is a belief in Man that is far less high minded or presumptuous. It is called having faith in human nature. It is deemed necessary for all civility and a decent life, and loss of it is bemonaned often enough. But as one who has trusted in men all my life and who has the scars of betrayal, usually inadvertent but often enough deliberately vicious, I can only say that trusting in human nature is disastrous. Of course most people think it necessary as it is, to be sure, all they have. As for misanthropism, that bitterness comes from a continuing trust held in the face of the evidence that it is not trustworthy, despite, I submit, all angry disclaimers to the contrary. True freedom is not mistrust in men, but a cheerful realization that they are not overall any real help when the chips are down. Of course all people need to thrust something or some One. We are made that way. Enter the Holy Spirit of Christ, but the most trustwothy is not trusted by us and this  out of our own fear of his holy warath against sin or in proud belief we can or should save ourselves, or even, sometimes, if we are mad enough, and I was. we mistrust Him for both reasons

As for loving my neighbour, well who is my neighbour?

This question was answered in scripture where Jesus, being asked this selfsame question, told the story of the Samaritan. The neighbour was an ememy of his own people, for Jews and Samaritans loathed each other.


Now of course I have been opposed to humanisam in principle for decades. But what I speak of is  here is the lurking emotional reality in the core of my own sinful heart.

This has always been resistant to such small things as words, and it is this inner reality that makes hypocrites of all of us who determine to find out and do the right thing

This inner state  cannot be rooted out by human determination and God will certainly not aid us in our efforts so to do, for if he really did aid us  thus  He would owe an apology to the Phariaees and every serious monk who broke his health in a futile endeavour

I do not love my neighbour for I do not love God; and I do not love God, as seen in my spontaneous actions and careless words - not in anything i ever forced, the which was only hypocrisy - because my hearts is full of idols, including belief in, well,  what I mentioned at the cery start of this little vignette::  Man

As in absolutely everything else in the christian life this comes down to the individual's personal relationship with the Holy Spirit of Christ for I can and do assert with increasing confidence that there is no life changing repentance, such as the New Covenant offers and indeed commmands, without it

The Greens and I

This is a facebook post from a yeart ago, a sketch of my position which i may elaborate on if I see fit:

Given that global warming has ceased and was not caused by men, and given that the science saying so is valid despite the cries of those opposed to it, given all these things I have lost all respect for the so called Greens. Green does not mean a party that respects human life or people because after all the Nazis were green. They were even anti smoking long before anyone else .

Green is an agrarian fantasy which conveniently overlooks the lives of those who lived in pre industrial societies which were nasty, brutal and short. Indeed the earth can only support the population it now has because of industrial and post industrial technology. This Malthus was dimly aware of when he predicted doom without knowing what industry and science could do. Agrarians must necessarily want to reduce the population by 90 percent, back to a level that is "sustainable" in agrarian terms.

So, as one critic said, they are melons: green on the outside red on the inside, or they are green as they are too yellow to call themselves red. Naturally I deplore any political party, in my country the the NZ Labour party, wanting to get into bed with such dangerous dreamers just as I deplore the self righteousness of the Green saying that those who care for the environment must therefore green.

Why do I take them to be genocidal as well as fantasists? The technologies touted by them are inefficient. They deplore fracking and despise nuclear technology, which is , like it or not the only way to produce cheap energy in abundance. And note: the increase in lifespan cm can be directly linked to the increase in energy production. So they must therefore want to reduce he population by a great amount. Think about it. Do you want to return to the medieval period. a peasant in a mud hut dead before the age of 40?

I find it very revealing that the founder of Greenpeaces, one of the few Patrick Moore's to achieve prominence - and not to be confiused with the astronomer, left the  movement in disgust  as it had become anti human, regarding man as a plague on the earth.

As to why I hold that Global Warming is not man made and has in fact stopped there is a host of evidence out there on the net for any who cares to google the subject .

I have come to the conclusion that any movement which has become mainstream enough to be noticed by politicians and religious people is already debased. I have sympathy with those who fear pollution. But carbon dioxide is plant food, not a pollutant. And Global Warming is a separate issue fmro pollution. Thus the conservationist message has become mainstream and given its full embrace of the absurdity which is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, it is debased.

Do you want to be taxed into the stone age, to dutifully cut carbon dioxide emissions in the devout superstition that it is a poillutant, only to have a volcanic eruption spew forth more CO2 than man has ever produced in his entire history?

By all means tackle environmental issues, but let us not be sidetracked by pseudoscience and what amounts to bad faith religion which  relies on fallacuious appeals to authority and seeks to defy science itself by silencing dissent rather than rationally refuting it and subjecting itself to skeptical scrutiny.

Those who hold that globsal warming continues and was man made show all the hallmarks of bad faith

Reflections of NZ's National War Memorial Day

In my country today, 25th April, is our national war memorial day. Much patriotic claptrap will be spouted which I wil studiously ignore if I notice any at all. Below are some of my reflections on it all

;
When footsoldiers in a gangland turf war are killed no one thinks to honour them. But when the gangs are nations though the quarrels between them are no less absurd than the former  and moreover the violence is infinitely greater we are expected to roll over and call these dead heroes. Not me. It is blasphemy to liken the death of those engaged in the criminal enterprise which is war to the sacrifice of Christ; and it is idolatry to subscribe to that empowering vice of war, patriotism. The nations will be done away with on the return of Christ but each individual will still exist, either with Him or in some other realm. As C S Lewis said. when human souls outlive nations which is more valuable? And until then they are, as Isaiah the Prophet said, merely drops in the bucket. Indeed nations were created after the Tower of Babl incidient as ameans to keep human energies dissipated  lest in uniting real evil walk the world, which will happen in the days of the Antichrist

I am a good citizen only because my God, Jesus Christ, would have me refrain from discrediting His ongoing work by bad behaviour on my part. No nation has the right to claim my heart and mind and as nations have become a religion substitute I hold that the giving of my heart and mind to a nation is the sin of idolatry. The nation that I am merely a member of my accident of birth - my citizenshup is in heaven and  I am a foreigner on this earth (scripture reference to be offered..)  the world will only receive my outward conformity, until they require that I openly defy the Law of God and then they have  a problem. But not me. So l will not be partaking in orgy of self congratulation which is Anzac Day. The fact is when they say "lest we forget," in investing the whole event with an air of sacred sacrifice, honour and loyaliy they have already forgotten the true lessons of war - the squalor, the filth, the obscenity, the utter stupidity and the waste. Thus having not ony forgotten but wilfully ignored the true lessons of war they will of course happen again

My Political Progress

I started life as a Leftist and continued as such for the bulk of my life.

I recently came across as Black American conservative by name of Thomas Sowell. He made a lot of sense but of course what was unsaid, as with all political pundits, is what shows his error - and this on both sides. That is to say each side is very good at pointing out the errors and abuses of the other, but nary a word about their own. Yet I am a generous man: when two sides call the other names I will agree with everyone so see both as being as bad as the other.

But I must agree with Sowell that the function of government is to enforce contracts and maintain civil order. In parenthesis I would add that I at this time regard Welfare as a device for maintaining order. Starving people do riot. Let us not be so deluded as to think that Governments act out of compassion.  Bread and Circuses was always the means and the motive. Nanny State is really Big Brother in drag.

Yet I hold that  anything more  than the above listed as functions of government, being social engineering, is coercive, verges on totalitarianism and is arrogant as well as presumptuous insofar as such measures were decreed by the Left and not the people at large. For in trying to make Man good the Left can only corece Man into being - ie pretending to be - what he is not.

So my enchantment with the Left is breaking down. This video of Sowell did not cause this, but only aided it. I have come to the conclusion after decades of religious legalism that law does not work, indeed excessive legislation is a symptom, not the cure, of the lawlessness it covers

So before any think I am becoming a Rightist, to either condemn or applaud,  let me assure you, the enchantment with Sowell broke when I saw a video of him saying Obama was a Leftist. Being Bush-lite the self styled Great White Hope was nothing of the sort.

And even if I see the Left as Looney - increasingly so - I am not about to join the opposite faction that is bent on imposing its will. I will move to what I increasingly view as the proper christian line- apolitical, the Church standing outside the process and rebuking it prophetically - both side - if the Holy Spirits leads

The Problem of Evil

Some time ago I responded to the question of the problem of evil  by rebuking the implicit self righteous of  the very raising of it. This position I still hold. But the implication may have been gotten that I had no answer to the problem of evil itself, or that I was avoiding the question. This is not the case, so I give an answer here, from a previous post elsewhere.

FWD

the question of why a good God allows evil like the Holocaust came up on an Arts and Letters Daily web page. This was my reply

I will answer the question as to why a good God allows the evil. But the answer is not acceptable to modern man. Man is evil and in rebellion to God. Therefore if necessary God will let man drink the cup of his own rebellion to the bitter dregs. God allows us freedom, and in our depravity we abuse it to promulgate holocausts and the vile like thereof. Most questionings arise, in my opinion from self righteousness. When the Biblical answer is that evil people abuse each other constantly, and respond with hatred to such, or feign forgiveness, and when we are all evil, we cannot blame God for our refusing to seek Him and repent of the very evil he will permit us to enact to its bitter endpoint as a means of showing to us who refuse all other rebuke what we are really made of. With the Holocaust the genie of human nature as it really is was let out of the bottle. This is Man at his most naked. We are this way for we are in rebellion to Him. Do we complain about the freedom we abuse? Do we expect him to magically stop us every time we break his Law even down to the smallest flickering of lust after my neighbour's wife? Or do we seek Him to acknowledge that we abuse the freedom that is intrinsic to His purpose.

We want to reject God, so he will let us go to the endpoint of this that some may see the vileness for what it is and cry to Him for mercy

Some truths hurt not because they are painful in themselves , but because we absolutely refuse them.

END FWD

I will amplify here further

This  above speaks of evil that men ourselves do. As to natural disasters and the general decay and fallenness of the earth, where they are not direct judgements  (itself a notion that modern man finds offensive) I hold them to be indicators that something is amiss and that man should seek for answers. For were the earth still a paradise  we would take this state as some kind of divine endorsement of our behaviour. So we long for peace and have stress and decay. Our inner discontent - for what greedy person is ever content? - is mirrored by decay in the creation, that we may know that our inner discontent is of some real basis.

Thus where evil is disaster or calamity, or even the fact that the gloss is taken off the creation, this God is the author of, as it says in Isaiah 45 - for he is the author of this kind of evil, and He does it to spur men to seek Him. Where we would rest in ungodly rest He would allow discomfort to prompt us to seek them, but he only tears to heal and would amplify our restlessness  that we seek the Sabbath rest of Christ.

Evil is not a problem which disproves the God of Israel. It is the sins of men let to go to their bitter fullness that some might repent, or it is the cursing of the earth that we may know something is amiss  where depraved consciences might think otherwise.

Thus it is only a depraved conscience that blames God for evil for it refuses the freedom of will He hold in such deep esteem that he would damn those who in freedom refuse his grace for the final time  rather than force a phony repentance

Creation Science and Heresy

First off let me say that I am absolutely not saying that Young Earth Creation Science is heresy. Although some people I respect are convinced that the Earth is millions of years old and that this proposition is compatible with a literal scripture I am not one of them and never was able to be.

But time and time again I have seen creation scientists, in arguing for a young earth, slip into rank heresy

For example, one scientist here is speaking of his atheistic youth

"I did not need a creator so I did not need to obey his laws," he said

 I was aghast, for  with this opening  statement he shows that though his science may be brilliant his theology is not. This is so  for NO ONE OBEYS the Law of God. And why is this? In the letter of James in the New Testament  it says that  he who breaks one commandment breaks all, so only the sinlessly perfect obeys the Law. So he is claiming to be sinless and perfect?  Clearly not. Scripture denies this also. It says that if any claim to be without sin he is a liar and the truth is not in him. The letter to the Romans says in plain language that no one is justified by works of law. I submit that the letter to the Galatians, by St Paul the Apostle, the same author as that to the Romans says that by works of Law no flesh is sanctified either, but not in exactly the same form of  words.

The Law shows we are dead. It does not impart life. So a creationist scientist tells is he needs to obey God's laws?

If this man needs to obey God's Laws to be saved, or even to only live the Christian life  he risks being irretrievably damned for no one does or can obey the Law. And to attempt to do so is to deny Christ, forsaking Him for  for the Law - an error so egregious that Paul rebuked the Galatians as fools  where he actually praised the Corinthians for their gifts when members  of that assembly were given to drunkenness  at communion dinners and even worse, there was one case  incest with his step mother.

Another example of this kind of heresy was when a man lecturing in creationism was speaking of driving down a coastal road in my own home country. The sea was on one side, snow capped mountains on the other.  He spoke of the glorious beauty of a clear and wonderful summer's day. But did he thank God for this sheer delight? He did not. He had to stop himself, he had  to tell himself that the creation is fallen. What is this if it is not ingratitude for the gift of God? There is evidence of fallenness all around. To ignore the testimony of the love of the Father in the beauty of  Creation is to downgrade matter and the Creation which I hold is part and parcel of the mind set that formed the gnostic heresy.

Another example is when a creationist, at the end of a brilliant lecture about how genetic entropy demolishes  the very posssibility  of evolution,  gave his own account of the cursedness of creation because of Adam's sin. He said that as Adam had sinned he had lost his dominion over the earth which passed (note the passive language) to Satan, and so Satan it was who cursed the earth. But the psalms make it perfectly clear that the Earth is the Lord's and every thing in it,  and not only that  but that it always has been so.  It was God who cursed the earth because of our sin.

When a creationist berates theist evolutionists for not taking the words of Genesis literally as to the age and sequence of creation it is rather rich when he denies that it was God who cursed the earth when that is plainly and literally said

To deny this is to show that they cannot believe in a God who is both love and  the author of calamity or judgement. And I have seen this time and time again. We carnal minds hold one or the other, were we to be honest about what we really believe, something else we disincline to. So such a  faith in God's love, love as indulgence logically sidstepping the wrath and the cursing God does is a straw man, for Isiaah 45 makes it clear that God is the author of both good and evil, though in this instance evil means calamity and judgement, not the moral evil we now call sin. Such a view, which is common in pentecostal circles for i saw it there with my very eyes many times,  is also gnostic in that it gives too much power to Satan, over playing the fact that he is the god of this earth. This  kind of thinking tends to dualist heresy.

The final example I would cite is a website and ministry I no longer support for though I agree with it science I find its tending to the errors aforementioned troubling but even worse its arrogance. They show by this that thy are puffed up by their knowledge. Creationism is not a stick to beat evolutionists with. It is even worse when they claim that what is in fact quarrelling over words, something At Paul rebuked and forbade,  is a godly means of responding to challenge. They can call it challenge/riposte model all they like. To respond with ridicule and sarcasm is always sin except one is led prophetically to do it, but to be in a position to claim such a leading is to have repented of an immense amount of sin, so much so as to be able to claim to be dead and buried with Christ. No one I know has such fruit as to rightly dare to claim this, and I certainly would not dare to. Moreover such is what common sense says it is, minus a leading by the spirit they cannot claim: tt is ego competition from boys of all ages who refuse to back down from a fight. Thus it is pride, idolatry and sin

Let us not be too excited by creation science. At best it returns us to the level of the Pharisees who were, it must be remembered,  the closest to Christ in terms of doctrine at that time. But they earned the greatest rebuke. Although I agree with creationists that Genesis is the logical core of what follows, and that without it  the gospel is compromised, what is built on genesis is not the same things as a literal genesis itself. We are saved b y our faith in a real and living person, not by our doctrine of origins

It troubles me that Creation Scientists pay so much attention to proving evolution false that they show an ignorance of what the Bible actually says about other matters. I have seen this quite often - heresy from creationist scientists -  and  hope to have demonstrated it by example here,

But it  does prove to me that even creationism can  and has become an idol. For what good is the most solid creation science  if as a legalist one has fallen into the heresy of the Galatians or if in over emphasizing the fall one falls into a gnostic like attitude to creation?

There is more to Christianity than creationism. They forget this at their peril

The Most Astute Commentary

Many years ago, long before there was an Internet and we got our magazines in bookshops or news stands. I saw a cartoon of a man in a line of people queuing up to kiss the backside of a statue. And he was saying to his fellow next in line "you know, this is the part of paganism I really hate.

This is one of the most astute commentaries of paganism I have ever seen.

For regardless of whatever licentiousness pagans might think they can get away with there is a humiliating consequence - hence kissing the backside of an idol

I wish I had thought of it, but as I had not so I can dare entitle this piece as I have, for I am not speaking of anything I invented

Of course when Christians churches treat God Almighty like a pagan godling they show themselves as pagans so come under the rubric of this cartoon. What is even sadder is that insofar as they think they cannot  get away with sin, namely the legalists, they have the misery without the licentiousness, the bondage without even the false liberty, so, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, they are worse than the harlot and the money lender for they are further from the Kingdom of heaven than these

They do this when they think that God is corrupt enough to be brought off by our bribes or stupid enough to fall for our deliberate flattery. Moreover our gifts and praises  become bribes and flattery when done under compulsion for fear of loss or punishment. So we who do or have done this are pagans.

It makes no difference as to the name of the pagan idol we do these things to, but be assured be blasphemy is enormously enhanced when we worship Jesus Christ as said idol.

Considerations on the Dynamic of Belief

I said something online and was accused of historical revisionism, this by a revisionist, and also arrogantly and abusively.

I have been pondering what it means to believe something for some considerable time now. I now see the belief is a matter of choice, that people do in fact choose what to believe and the idea that men are so honest as to be constrained by facts and evidence is naïve nonsense.

It is as if a switch clicks in the head of someone and when it does they have chosen to believe. The thing is it is only after this that evidence is marshalled. However if the belief is false  such a person, now deluded, will not let the paucity of facts, or the abundance of facts refuting his stance get in the way. So these are denied  with al the passion. What matters is the personal sense of safety and security  insofar as it pertains to worldview.

Thus the facts that the Signers of the US Declaration of Independence despised the mass of people and designed the Electoral College to exclude them, that they were Deists not Christians, and founded a State resolutely not based on the Christian faith. as the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli clearly stated, and for all their empty rhetoric about the evils of slavery they were slave owners - invoking these plain facts is to bring down unholy fire from those, usually of the Religious Right, who accuse us of being historical revisionists when they themselves have breached the  ninth commandment and tell lies about American history.

Thus it is as personal considerations rule the issue that when something is believed all too often any matters of fact that might refute the belief are themselves denied without observation.

Given this there is absolutely no point in even attempting reasoned discourse for there is nothing on which to reason when matters of fact have already been selected not on the basis of evidence or observation but according to their usefulness in confirming the prejudice, for prejudice it is when it comes before observation and indeed  trumps it.

Education systems have not overcome this because this is a moral issue and education is powerless to deal with moral issues. Yet Man calls himself Homo Sapiens - man the Wise. This last is the biggest misnomer in history when reason is rejected for shibboleth and facts do not judge the belief but are judged by the belief.

There is no almost intellectual integrity to speak of. So there is no point in seeking to appeal to it. Moreover if we cannot see that this is in part why we are doomed then our doom is utterly certain. Man may enjoy his empty tribalisms and superstitions - and this modern age has its own superstitions. Indeed man must enjoy them for he has forsaken anything else.

What distresses me deeply is that even with my best and oldest friends some issues are now no go zones .  I know that there is not enough love on this  woeful and  fallen world to agree to differ in a civilized manner. All that phrase means is "treat the issue as a  no go  zone. . .

And when I realize that I am not necessarily immune to these things I can only fall into blank despair.

Or cry to the Lord knowing that this is merely another example of the carnal mind, sunk in lies.  I am also forced to concede that except for those very few who will acknowledge this and repent of it, for scripture said if any would be wise let him become a fool - ie acknowledge he is a fool, that this will only get worse.

For it is this darkening of the mind whereby Man will be primed and ready to accept the reign of Antichrist when he comes that is so necessary to this malign and prophesied event.

God have mercy on us who know we are carnal minded, and alos on those who think they are not

An Early Marriage. A Messy Divorce

I was married very young. In my teens, in fact.

She was pretty. Still is. But I never even liked her very much. She was and still is,  selfish, vain and demanding. What really swamped my own better judgement was that she  could really tart herself up to look absolutely ravishing in some lights; and she knew how to thrill me.

With my twenties looming I was terrified of being alone, so we tied the not.

There was no love on my part, only lust. And the ecstasy she could give really only addled my adolescent brain

It has been over forty years. And she is as gorgeous as ever.  . . . .

But then came the endless demands and the resulting endless guilt.

We cut a fine appearance as a couple. My dinner suit, which she soon demanded I wear every time we went out, set her off with an air or studied and refined elegance.

And she gave me the air of the young master. It looked to all and sundry as if the world were at our feet

We achieved the praise of many, but I soon learned that I was not respected for myself, only for being her husband. Of course I bitterly resented it. She  of course  regarded it as no more than her due, and I was churlish not to give it to her. As a matter of course.  Of course

The demands never ceased. She insisted on day and night attention. again as her due. Had I given her her  way on this I would never have had any friends other than those few in the same predicament as me, and would never have even gone out except that she required it. So, no, I did manage to stand up for myself to some extent. But the constant nagging and the endless guilt was never going to end.

It was all too much.

It was endless work, or should have been, with her as my goddess. But I was no longer a teen and worshiping such was no longer to my taste.

But still she could give me thrills, from time to time, however with ever decreasing frequency. It would be crass to call such sex but it was definitely analogous.

We separated just on eleven years ago.

But now I can only hate her all the more, for though separated we are not truly divorced for I am having difficulty letting  her go. I kept hovering around our mutual haunts, and kept seeing  those friends of us both. I even kept talking of returning to her. And these people were delighted to hear this for they only saw the appearance, what a fine couple we made, we belonged to each other. They only smiled indulgently when I spoke of the abuse the nagging and the guilt. We were too good together for this to be anything other than a talk of a depressed person. They thought, if they did not say, that I was mentally ill. Or they said that she was so stunning - were their marriages as bad as mine?  that any price was worth it. Anyone who appreciated her would put up and pay up . . .

But my heart was and still is in agony.

I gave up the token of my servitude some three years. ago. It got destroyed while in transit to the dealer who was to sell it. This was an exquisite irony, a blessing in fact. Even, I would go so far as to say, a sign.

The thing is the pain is not over. This is not because we belong together. There is enough objective evidence that this is not the case. But I am dogged by the conviction, nagging and guilt empowered, that we do belong together. After all we did make some wonderful music together. . . . . .

So my orbit, so to speak,  around her and her domain has not ceased even though it is now broader than it was and so much slower -  more like Pluto's orbit about the sun rather than Mercury's.

I need a true divorce, to let this go completely, and stop hanging around, to stop clinging to the empty husk of a dead relationship. . No it is not stalking. And I will tell you why.

Who is this woman who obsesses me so much?

It is no woman. I have more respect for women than that

This was the music profession, or music for short.

The token of my servitude was not a wedding ring but my musical instrument, my double bass, destroyed in transit to the dealer who was going to sell it some three years ago

For so it is, as I wrote here before, that if one is to serve music, which is no less than what being a professional demands  - to marry it so to speak - one is either crazy or adores her totally. Being neither, or rather recovering from the craziness that kept me a musician for so long after knowing it was all in vain. I know clearly that  I am not suited to being a musician of any kind.

Yet dogged by guilt engendered by the high praise of my former colleagues, some of whom still want me back even after all these years, the pain continues. But the objective evidence, namely  - not the performances they heard -  but the total lack of dedication to the trade as shown by my refusal to do any private practice, this speaks for itself, though they of course never saw this.

The Lord has granted me liberty to do my own heart on this matter, which is to reject the music trade, and that includes amateur playing for the very word amateur means a lover of something, something I never was, forever.

And when I realize that I viewed the entire living of life as analogous to my being a musician, namely guilt driven brute force against my own heart - what they falsely call discipline - and when I  repudiate this, I shall be free

Free indeed, as the Son of God promises me

A Small Matter

This is a small matter, but to me it has ominous portents

My local city council now want to put tags on our rubbish bins. Because mine were not tagged as they were not out when the taggers  came round of foot to tag them , and this as I am very frugal in my production of trash, I got a note informing me of the necessity of said electronic tag - no tag no rubbish pickup.

Affronted by this I phoned the  number offered number on the flyer stuck in my mail box. The reason, as the appointed bureaucrat informed me on the phone, is to save money, and the excuse is the dislocation due to the earthquakes in my town whereby people have moved house and the council owned rubbish bins are being abandoned or taken with those shifting, thus doubling up their numbers in places people have moved to.  Or remaining unused.

This is all very plausible,  of course, for government infringement on liberty is always plausible and health safety security or fiscal responsibility are always the reasons.

 But to my knowledge none of us were told beforehand and it is heavy handed. Thus an electronic tag was attached to an appurtenance of my household without my consent, nor to that of my neighbours.

It smacks of surveillance to me. You see when surveillance is done this does not increase security.

It destroys trust. Those doing it do not trust the populace. And those surveilled if they know it, cease to trust the authorities. All in all it is an exercise in control simply because they can. Of course they regard their reasons as invincibly sound, for bureaucrats have destroyed their consciences in order to obey orders - the Nuremberg defence which, if their behaviour were valid  is  only ever specious when the other fellow invokes it.

Of course this is a small thing, tagging trash bins. I know this

But it is a step on the way to a total surveillance society and there is no good faith reason for it.

Needless to say there is no point in complaining, for there is nothing so invincibly arrogant as a petty bureaucrat, who thinks he is God in his or her own sphere

And when the time comes we will be expected to submit to being tagged with the mark of the Beast as meekly

Now that is what chills me to the bone.

At my age, 58 I have a reasonable hope of being dead before it happens. But one never knows