Deep Logic

C S Lewis spoke of a "Deep Magic" in his Narnia stories. I speak of a Deep Logic. The atheist account of scripture is that it is a tissue of priestly lies to control and exploit a gullible population of peasants - and this is true insofar as this has been done for millennia.

But this is abuse, not use, and abuse does not detract from proper use. For digging into the text of the Bible I see this cannot be so as pertaining to the scriptures themselves. The logic of it is something that cannot have been dreamed up by men. It is both beautiful, almost terrifying and awe inspiring. A super intelligence and wisdom lurks within the pages.

As such I have a growing conviction, not yet clear enough to really articulate properly. that the Bible itself is proof of God's being and character, that the Bible is logically self authenticating.

And the only of this is that I only became eligible to even begin to see this after repenting of Protestant Bible worship which abuses the truth of Verbal  Plenary Inspiration of the text to read it with rigidity incapable of drawing logical links within it.

However this conviction of mine is not clear enough for me to be able to articulate further than I have here at this time

Reflections on the subversion of democracy

Every one is commenting on the most recent US presidential election. This is a small part of what I could say on it

Because I never supported either Candidate in the US election (a brief flutter of hope  on the night as it became clear Trump had won notwithstanding) I did not have to justify my emotional conviction by making myself believe that my choice (for I never had one) was in any way a good person, and because I did not have such a choice I did not have to justify to others said choice by presenting the corollaries of my emotional convictions as evidence for my convictions.

To do such is to assume the truth of what one tries to prove which is to argue in a logical circle , the fallacy of "petitio principii" - lit to appeal to the principle, or begging the question. Of course such argument proves absolutely nothing. What stuns me is that intelligent people on both sides, those with degrees and university education, have argued in exactly this way subverting all rules of logic and evidential observation for the sake of emotional passion. Does anyone else see that the hysteria on both  sides, the refusal to rationally consider from the basis of what both candidates said, that THIS is more damaging to the democratic ideal than anything else?

The double standard beggars belief. Clinton supporters denied her gloating, "We came we saw HE DIED," called it opposition propaganda or out of context because they knew full well that as it clearly demonstrated that this woman is a war monger as did her destruction of Libya and her consistently hawkish record., all of which are matters of public record yet which they were too lazy to consult. But while denying her words in this manner they  insisted on  focussing on Trump's "grabbing pussy" talk or his "Mexicans are rapists" talk, or his inciting of violence talk, his offering to pay the legal fees of any who assaulted anyone who dared protest at his rallies.


But Trumpists did the same thing. The Don was "joking" "using rhetoric'- but they all call rhetoric like this  lies  when the other candidate does it -  or he was "taken out of context."  His obscene talk about women  was "locker room talk" etc and more egregiously, they insist that the media spread lies. Not when Trump is  on video saying these things. He did not mean it? This is no defence of the man, for if he really did not mean what he said  his speeches were  a cynical pandering to the redneck vote who clearly believed that Mexicans were rapists  on his cue and voted accordingly

Integrity, intelligence, reason, evidence? Even a consistent application of the standard that "the mouth speaks the fullness of the heart"'and that what a candidate might say would therefore indicate their evil? Forget it.  Even if those who argue such are Christians who profess to believe the quote from the gospels  I just gave, they have thrown away even the attempt to apply the scripture properly and instead will come up with half baked notions that Clinton was the Queen of the Witches or that Trump was chosen of God as Cyrus the Great was chosen for the Jews , forgetting that the promises of the New Covenant are more excellent than such and national protection only really applied to the Jews who have always been under the Old Covenant.

So much for belief in the gospel, when Old Covenant thought is appealed to on one hand, or rank superstition justified by blasphemous appeals to divine revelation on the other.

In the passion of this moment even the highly intelligent became part of the mindless mob. I fear for Western civilization when this becomes the nature of political discourse.

And why do professing Christians do this? Clearly they do not believe  that we are strangers and sojourners on this earth. They do not believe that heaven is our home and that the Kingdom of heaven is not of this world. So they fear like unbelievers  because ultimately they, and I insofar as I still do so, think like unbelievers. These are scriptural quotes, and if any reader calling himself a Christian does not know them he demonstrates my point.

We Christians are the salt of the earth? Not when we surrender to such hysteria as this. We have lost our savour, as well as rejected our Saviour, and risk being thrown out to be trampled  by men

 

A Retort

Some time ago I posted somewhere on some issue that really is not relevant to the point I seek to make here. But one of the replies was pure legalism. My interlocuter said that we do not get to cherry pick which commands to obey as Christianity is not a smorgasbord.

I saw no point in replying to him in the forum is question, but I think a valid point is to be made.

It says in James 2:10  that he who breaks one commandment has broken them all. It thus follows that only the perfectly sinless obey the Law, by which I mean the Moral law, for everyone else, namely sinners like us, simply do not and have not ever obeyed the Law of God.

And if anyone tries to claim that he is sufficiently free of sin to actually do so, well that is to claim perfection where there is none possible, as I John 1:10 says any who says he has no sin is a liar

Indeed Paul the Apostle also said this was the impossible  thing of the Law, and he tried hard enough to fail with specular agony. I also did and failed with years of real torment,

So, if a person does not obey the Law at all either he has cherry picked those commandments  he actually attempts to try - and failed of course - , or he has failed manifestly in all and his consistent legalistic approach  is useless.

Moreover I  assert that even trying to hold the entire Law in conscious thought to attempt to obey any of it is impossible anyway,  for the sheer strain is too much for any carnal mind.

As regards the question of legalism they ask should Christian keep the moral Law. This is a loaded question for the answer is apparently self evident. But to ask the proper question is to get a totally different answer.

This question is do any of us actually in point of fact obey the Law? The answer is NO.

This renders all our talk and all our efforts pointless.

There can only remain the personal relationship with the Spirit of Christ

My safety in Christ as it is now

I now know that I have never believed that God loved anyone, or that if He did it was only conditional on one's keeping of the Law, which I cannot do, so therefore I am excluded.

There is not the slightest value in my asserting propositions just because they are true. Such is not faith but hypocrisy  and it is an effort I can no longer endure let alone practice.  This effort is not holding fast to sound doctrine  as St Paul commands but is in fact a refusal. a self righteous one to boot, to acknowledge the sin of unbelief  whereby we have already forsaken said sound doctrine.

Thus the primacy of the intellect, a doctrine the Puritans built their lives on, is part of the hypocrite's mandate. In repressing my unbelieving heart I stirred up my unbelief to  an unmanageable extent. It is better to confess unbelief than pretend faith, and C S Lewis notwithstanding, pretending to faith is a blasphemous absurdity.

How can I be a Christian then? Not by what I believe but by Who I met that dark night now just over 38 years ago. Indeed without such encounter I hold that no one is a Christian at all, though what the encounter is, the nature of it,  is to be determined by what God knows is needful in every individual person.

And how does the Lord keep me safe, for my sense of safety in Him is slowly but genuinely growing?

He gives me ecstasy in my meditations of the Mysterium Tremendum, the tremendous mystery of His unutterable holiness.

Some 5 years  after I was converted he gave me a revelation of this, as I previously shared here earlier.

Although at this time my terror is coming out, He leads me in one on one counsel to confess to Him that I am in fact terrified - no "confessions of faith" here. Then He leads me to repent of some aspect of the unbelief behind the fear, whatever it suits His purpose to lead me in at that time. This is pure personal relationship between a terrified child and his daddy, or a patient and his counsellor - but God the Spirit is the only counsellor I will ever accept now - and it is  nothing else. I am totally helpless and reliant on His leading in cleansing.

My safety is that He is Holy and Terrible. This is not fear but Awe. And if I must tell Him that the notion that loving Him is utter nonsense or that He loves anything  but Himself is pure wishful thinking, so be it. Such as this must be confessed, for if not, and it is in you, it will destroy your faith as it nearly destroyed mine.

But I am drawn by the Tremendous Mystery  of the Holy and Terrible. the one thing I have always listened to. If I could admit to it I have discovered  by experience and relationship  His gentleness  patience and kindness, but that I cannot bring my self to do. Not yet, at least.

So though unbelieving I am relatively safe.

This work, though provisional, being a stepping stone to a further goal, is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in my eyes

Subverted Scriptures 4

"Be angry but do not sin"  Ephesians 4:26 is subverted by being taken out of context, which in this instance is the broader context of scripture as a whole  given that other passages on the subject of wrath are scattered throughout the Bible.

The implication taken from this verse read alone, and I have been told this  by those subverting the verse in the very manner I am writing about here, is that anger is not sin.

This is usually untrue. The Sermon on the Mount is most clear

He who is angry at his brother is a murderer, and elsewhere it is written that the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God. Likewise is wrath listed as one of the fruits of the flesh.

Of course they are keen to subvert the scripture here in order to justify their own anger. But it is not an anger in love for it is not an anger for those who do evil such that they earnestly long for their reconciliation to God and their restoration, even though many will tell bare faced lies concerning their own motive here. For the anger of man requires vengeance first, while for the wrath of God, longsuffering, that is to say patient, anger is the last resort.

Indeed even when as an unbeliever I was under wrath of God  the Holy Spirit himself reached down in love  to save me one dark night almost exactly 38 years ago. This is not the anger of men

There is righteous anger but one must be spiritual to be righteously angry.

And the fruit of the Spirit I have never seen in any living person, Oh, I know some Christian who would count as commonly decent, but as Jesus said if you love those who love you, which is te basic meaning of the term common decency,  there is no merit in it.

(I will return later to provide biblical references for the quotes made here)

Being a good person: the unplatable truth of human nature

The way it goes and I have seen certain questions become litmus tests for this very thing, is that if one wants to show oneself to be a good person then one either seeks to love something, which is difficult for it requires commitment, a love in fact, and effort and even what may be called sacrifice; or one finds something evil to hate. This latter is much easier and I see it time and time again, I have even done it myself. But as scripture says our righteousness is filthy rags, in other words it simply does not count, for it is self righteousness. Righteous anger is not what evil you are angry at but how you are angry at it, otherwise the destructive raping and murdering anger of the Soviet armies as they plunged into Germany at the end of World War II was righteous. Think so? I assuredly do not, and feel it necessary to regard the view I hold here as the only  alternative to such I can find.

When Social Justice Warriors go berserk at an evil, even a real and manifest evil, and riot, throw tantrums, or a preacher rants about executing homosexuals simply because of an out of context misuse of a  verse in the Law of God, we see, independent of any objective truth about the evil, an evil response.

Righteous anger, I assert, is angry not  at the evil doer so much as is  angry for them, deeply desiring their restoration, where human anger simply wants heads to roll in order to make the bad go away for the convenience of the angry person. Hence virtually all the demonstrations against evil I have witnessed over the years, from those against football matches with an apartheid nation, as in 1981, one of which I saw as  a student then, to those for or against homosexuality or abortion are all the anger of men which does not work the righteousness of God (James 1:20), for   even when the issue has no personal connection with the protester, it has become a litmus test for goodness  but it is pointless, being a shibboleth to identify friend from foe not an expression of loving one's enemies

It is a bitter irony that the only people who say that man is evil are great saints, and I know none, or misanthropes, which I have been. However I suspect that misanthropes are embittered because they see perhaps only dimly, but it seems to me clearer than most, what they cannot accept

But as the Spirit leads me to repent of further man pleasing and idolatry I will come to accept what I begin to see, namely that as I am evil I do not need to conjure up a hatred of evil which is self righteousness, nor hold certain positions on certainly litmus questions in order to be seen as good by pothers, nor force good works which are invalidated as good works by their motives (see I Corinthians 13).

That my righteous is filthy rags is unpalatable to all of us. But being honest about it as well as seeking the Lord the Spirit concerning it makes for a much easier life and will contribute to gaining the peace  which surpasses all understanding

Greens and Global Warming

I used to be mildly sympathetic to the ideas of the Green party. But no longer.

I researched Global Warming, now called Climate Change in tacit acknowledgement that the climate has stopped warming for if it were still warming the term global warming would still suffice. I came to the  conclusion that climate operates according to its own immutable laws and human activity is not connected to it in any significant way.

Indeed, for example, in the Medieval Warm period, which was warmer than today, CO2 levels were much lower. In fact you may not have heard of this period of history as the warmists have committed the contemptible fraud of denying it ever happened. But I know it is real  from my reading of history not from gazing at tree ring proxies. Why, I might add, would they have to propound this lie, for a lie it is, if they were speaking the truth? For that alone I might reject their claims as being based on lies. But the fact of the Medieval Warm Period destroys the connection on which the hysteria, and it is hysteria, is based.

Science is a human activity and as such is not immune form politics and fashion. Indeed I totally deplore the fact that too many people get their convictions on this matter from their politics and not from the science, with, in general,  leftists believing in Global Warming and rightists denying it.

I am an exception, and there are a few of us. I am a life long leftist who rejects the claim of man made global warming because of the science and evidence, both historical and empirical, and not from  my politics or any vague sense of leftist guilt

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.

And now to what  moved me to post this. In my own country  the Labour Party, which I have supported with carrying degrees of commitment all my life, has made an alliance with the NZ Green Party. I deplore 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. I deplore the big polluters as much as they do but their "solution " is ham fisted

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 noted over the last two centuries can be directly linked to the increase in energy production. So they must therefore, if at all consistent or well thought out - though to be fair they probably are neither of these things-  want to reduce the 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 like our ancestors who lived green?

Diverting resources from real need to solve a bogus problem will itself kill people, just as I hear that the price of food has skyrocketed as farmers are rushing to grow bio fuels.

Sense must prevail otherwise seeking to avoid an imaginary disaster may produce a real disaster albeit it of as different kind.