Politics and the abuse of Good Ideas

If evil people get hold of a good idea does it not stand to reason that they will abuse and distort it to their own selfish purposes?

Before I answer who the evil people in question are  or might be i will talk about some good ideas that  are or may be subject to such abuse.

The Left have the good idea that people should care for one another and help each other, for no man is an island.

The Right  believe that individuals should take responsibility for themselves.

I would say that both are good ideas, but as selected by both wings of the political spectrum they are forced into a false dichotomy which is simply not logically required.

So who are the evil people that would abuse such ideas?

Scripture is clear. There is none righteous, no not one. Jesus, by way of a casual throw away line, while talking about the gift of God said to his disciples "if you being evil, can give good gifts to your children . . . . " Matthew 7:11

He took the evil of men for granted.

As regards politics what do we see?

That men should look out for one another became a license for mass murder under Marxism. For what was to be done with those deemed unwilling to do so? And now people foolishly want the State to do everything for them, not only keep then fed and sheltered, a requirement I, as a former Leftist might still find valid, but to give their empty lives meaning and happiness, and if the government cannot do this they expect the governments of the Left these days to punish  those who dare afflict their feelings, hence the madness which is Political Correctness. And they think that the nature of Man can be remade, re educated, to change man into something better. Such Utopian fantasies are always totalitarian

That men should be responsible for their own welfare morphed into "I'm OK, to hell with you ,mate."
Any kind of justice in the cried of the poor  is written off as the politics of envy, as Jim Bolger, former New Zealand Prime Minister did back in the 1990's after the welfare state was severely cut in this country. He either had no clue as to the plight of the poor, or did not want to have any clue of such. Scripture calls this the deceitfulness of riches where by a rich man  thinks he got rich by his own moral merit and thus his wealth is a sign of his own righteousness. There is very little in this world which is more foul than such an attitude. and of course the purpose of preaching individual responsibility is to keep the workers at their benches

Now I am a generous man, when both sides  of the spectrum hurl accusations to each other I agree with them all, except where logic render them contradictory.

Because all are evil and all abuse  everything in some way or another - even if only by means of  making an idol out of it to ignore God the Spirit - it follows that it is empty self righteousness for a political party or wing to accuse the other side of being evil while trumpeting either by word or attitude that they themselves are not, for all are evil.

Thus political factionalism is always self righteous, arrogant and just plain foolish

some parties are more evil than others perhaps?

Well, perhaps indeed. But do we vote for the lesser evil?

that empowers the lesser evil if they win the election, and as power corrupts they become a greater evil than previously.

It might in the short term be saner to have a lesser evil in power, but only in the short term, and the debasement of all political parties, to be met by the self righteous naivete of new parties who think they will be different - truly there is nothing new under the sun!  will indeed continue

Of course the corruption might only be a conceit and arrogance of a Prime Minister who has been in office for too long - and be assured I myself have seen this in my own country of New Zealand, but would that we could be so lucky as to have evils only come singly instead of clusters, as they always do

So what is the solution?

The Age of Reform, as I might call it, starting in the 18th century, is coming to an end as the reforms themselves unravel. and they unravel because or  giving you neighbour a fair break is contrary to human nature and humans can only pretend against their own selves for so long.

My parents' generation were lucky enough to live under the humane reforms of this Age of Reform at its very peak. My parents were too young for world War II and had a lifetime of prosperity  previously undreamed of until their deaths in 2007 and 2009 respectively. And they were not wealthy, but working class all their lives

This state of affairs is now unravelling and I need point to no evidence for what is plainly visible.

It is said, often by those who really should know better, that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

If true then evil will triumph. And indeed it will. For there are no good people. I like to say that if I ever met a good person I would kick his backside and tell him to get moving, he has a world to save. But I speak in ironic jest, for there really are none.

God Himself will let Man drink the cup of his rebellion to the bitter dregs, and at some point He will remove or allow to be removed whatever it is that restrains (2 Thessalonians 2:1-4)  Man from  the full viciousness of his own nature.

And when in this instance all hell is let loose this will be the Great Tribulation and Christ will return only at the end of it.

Get involved in politics and be corrupted by it? Ignore politics and suffer at the hand of those  contemptible or naive people who still enter it? Try to fight a rearguard action as the engineers in the Titanic did whose effort at the pumps kept the ship afloat for some 2 and a half hours?
Well this last assumes that Law is the solution to man's predicament, which it never was. To demonstrate this  fact so deeply denied by men, all ,men, for i a m convinced that legalism it is which is the way that leads to death , (Proverbs 14:12) this was the very reason God gave the Law in the first place. And of course there is still the price of corruption to be paid. Is it to be said that no greater love had a man, or woman,  for his nation that he gave his life to the political process that he be corrupted by it all while holding back great evil?

As the saying goes, damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is no solution whatsoever not when the solutions - liberal democracy - are falling apart before our very eyes

So what remains?

the classic gospel,

Repent and believe and be led by the Spirit

PC Demands for Native Pronunciation

Political correctness in my home land is going to the extent of now demanding correct pronuncation of Maori - our indigenous people - place names. A voice artist hit local headlines just today for refusing to pronounce such names as Waimate "the white way" calling such racist. We say Why Mat ee. The Maori way is something i cannot produce here though I am , I believe competent enopugh to say it as they require, if I saw the point

So I wrote to our country's Maori language comission, an august body set up to oversee the development  of Te Reo Maori  - the Maori Language

Sirs,

well might i approve your support of the voice artist refusing to pronounce the name waimate the white way as appeared on todays MSN news feed.

But i would encourage you to apply this fine principle consistently. If it is low level racism to mispronounce Waimate or Hauraki it is surely by the same principle racism to mispronounce Paris . It is Paree with the r slightly rolled. Moscow is Mosk va – stress  on the second syllable. Berlin is Bare Leen, Nuremberg is Nourn berg – very very careful attention being paid to the umlaut, which my computer cannot  produce, over the u in the name. Rome is Roma. Warsaw is Varshawa  and don’t get me started on names really out of the European comfort zone like the proper form of Jerusalem – Yaru Shalayim.  And perhaps if we were to listen to native Cockneys then London is Lunnin

Let us not confine ourselves to being Politically Correct over  local Maori place names, lest that be seen to be selectively racist in its own light. You want a sacrifice of effort over Maori place names? then be prepared to make it over other place names

Of course you see the irony here.

Demands to pronounce place names are in fact coerced speech; and coerced speech is tyranny.

If you as native English speakers cannot master the correct pronunciation of Paris etc  you grasp my point. Not only that but you manifest it. Native English speakers cannot get Maori place names either and your demand that they do, being inconsistent, is mere petulant

You do not get a genuine sense of national identity by coercion and your petulant demands will alienate many

By the way, lest you think me a racist, the common mispronunciation of Maori as Mari bothers me. I like to say I have in fact met a Mari person. She came from the autonomous republic of Mari El, one of the regions of Russia, properly called Rossiya, some 300 miles east of Moskva. But then i have no intention of forcing this on anyone

in  celebration of my own European roots i beg the honour or remaining your most obedient and humble servant

Stephen Meikle  ( that would be Stefanos to you for the name is Greek)

I do have some Maori ancestry but do you think i would rejoice in that when you want to foist by force of law Maori culture on people. Consider it

Christchurch

28 04 2018

END EMAIL

These are of coure first world problems from people in enough luxury  and wealth to now demand that their feelings be regarded as sacred by our viewing things sacred that they do. Of course they regard white culture with contempt and loathe christianity, but flatly refuse to see the racism in their own demands, for they define racism as only  white hating - or only didsagreeing with, for to them that is hatred -  black

I will some time soon, as the mood takes me, do a piece on why i am not politically correct

How Do I Know that I Believe

I have always been given to philosophic rumination, so the question of what is belief, as opposed to knowledge,  and how do I know I believe something, given the nature of the sin of unbelief,  has worried me for a long time.

But it now occurs to me that I will  know that I believe something  when  it becomes to my mind simply the way things are, almost  - but perhaps only almost - something to be taken for granted as regards it s propositional truth.

I hold this to be the case with any belief, this, I submit,  by being  the nature of belief, for I am not considering the TRUTH of any belief in this instance. Just the nature of it.

But as regards true christian belief, a different matter, I agree,  it will be something that I no longer have to pick at, worry about, be quick to defend, or even talk about very often. Unless it fills me with joy, of course.

It will be my life  but not my obsession, no longer driven by the guilt ridden awareness of my own deep seated unbelief.

I contend that  I see this in many preachers and even apologists. It is a waste of both time and effort for if they are to grow in Christ they will have to acknowledge the unbelief and thus their wasted efforts to reach honest belief and the peace that comes from it

Of course as regards spiritual things I get there by being  convicted of the sins of my own resistance to the thing in question and then by His grace as my counsellor, one on one, to repent of them.

I have found this a process over time, for it is a quarrel between God and me which I must  engage in and indeed go through lest I hide my sin and perish.

In this instance it is a particular idol that has ruled my life so strongly that  prefer it to the love of the Father.

As I repent as led by the Spirit my thinking will be changed, as I now suspect  is the nature of  belief  itself  as I have described it above.

Intellectual assent to a proposition, what so many Christians call faith, is nothing of the sort. it is the bare beginning.

But the goal is to be transformed by the renewal of the mind

The Most Hated Sin

There is an old dictum that the sin most hated by a preacher is the one he is most beset with

I know a preacher who is obsessed with homosexuality and atheism. Why would he be if he were not busily repressing these things  in himself out of  his own guilt and fear?  He is also so afraid of the occult that he forces himself to bypass the daily horoscope he told me he sees in the daily newspaper. That is to say he takes such nonsense seriously, so is in fact some kind of occultist.

He is also very cruel,. a bully who thinks he has the right to terrorize people into conversion.  He has said so while preaching in my own hearing. But he does not believe his cruelty is sin, so he does not hate it

The point is that if one hates a sin one does not have to practice that sin to be a sinner in that area. To repress it is to still be it.

How do I know these things  to be true?

I have hated hypocrisy all my life. But I am a legalist.

Therefore I am a master hypocrite.

And I have hated cruelty all my life. But I nurse the most vicious vengeance fantasies  against those who have wronged me. So I know myslf to have a very, very nasty cruel streak, to in fact be a cruel person. I am repressed, of course, and so  a hypocrite, for that is what repression is, and I have been doing it for over 50 years now.

However I am terrified but have no regard for what is called courage, it being a species of legalist hypocrisy. So cowardice does not really bother me.

It might be retorted that scripture requires hatred of sin. I fully agree. So it does.  But carnal men cannot produce this. Our hatred of sin is not righteous, for our righteousness is filthy rags  even as regrads our hatred of evil.

God is having mercy on me for these but he is not aiding and never has nor will aid my efforts in dealing with it.

But that is for another post

Brevity the Soul of Wit

Years ago I  knew my subject, or thought i did, sufficiently that i could talk for hours on it.

Now it is my hope or at least my prayer and aspiration that I understand my subject sufficiently well that I only need talk for minutes

I came to this conclusion after seeing a video of a world famous apologist answering a question during a Q&A period . I thought of that famous quote  to Mozart by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II, one of the few things the movie Amadeus actually got right.

His Imperial and Apostolic Majesty said to Mozart,  "very good, sir but far too many notes."

I would say to this apologist  if firstly I could contact him and secondly if I thought he would heed it

"very good sir, but far too many words."

Brevity is still the soul of wit and many words mask incomprehension of the sdubject all too often, or mask the arrogance of loquacity

Removed to draft.

Yesterday i wrote a post  as another summary on what legalism is. But i was full of fury in writing it, so i feel it requires  editing. I do not change my mind on what I said but my expressoin thereof leaves much to be desired. So I have removed it from my published posts, an option this blog site offers.

It will be up again in a revised form at some time in the future

The [Political] Honeymoon is Over

Last year the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party was a colourless nonentity by the name of Andrew Little. Before the last election he and his associates knew this and Labour's pollings were very low.

 So he stepped down and gave  eleadership to his deputy, a strikingly pretty woman named Jacinda Ardern.

The figures immediately surged.

I was not impresed at the time, late last year. It was clear that her policies were not in play  as regards the popularity surge, only either  that she had a pretty face or those irrationally addicted to Identity Politics thought a woman as PM made a  difference when the rule of female Prime Ministers the world over has shown that it does not.

Then came the election.

Incidentally I was not going to vote, having posted on this blog that I am moving to an apolitical stance  as politics is about the art of the possible as, by my amendation of Bismarck's famous quote to this effect,   practised by the contemptible. Politics is a filthy game and to call its practitoners "honourable" as is done in my country is an insult to language

For  some years I supported our new electoral system, Mixed Member Proportional Representation. The reader can google the term to find out how it works. I now hold that it was widely popular as the antics of politicainas were getting on everyone's nerves and it was an irrational reaction to dump the system rather than dump the clowns who were so acting. But at the time, in the early to mid 90's, I was a Labour party activist,  an actively  canvassing door knocker, believe it or not, highly, for me at least, politicized; and I insisted that if it were not proportional it was not representative. My older self would retort to that young fool  if such could be done that none of it is representative, proportional or othertwise, as democracy is merely a fiction as politicians obey their paymsters not their constitutents.

The thing is our right wing party got more votes than the Labour party - our notionally left wing party which has still not repented of its total betrayal of its own principles back in 1984.

But under MMP one of the minor parties  held the balance of power and was able to , or rather its leader, Winston Peters of New Zealand First, was able to select the government by choosing which of the two major parties he would ally himself to. Rather than doing what one would expect to be the decent thing and ally with the biggest party on election night, the right Wwng National Party, he chose, after weeks of holding the country to ramsome, the Labour Party. Some 20 years ago he had allied with the National Party  under the results of the first MMP election,  after a simlar long delay, but I suspect that bad blood lingers there between  the two of them now.

Thus, while I have loathed Right Wing politics all my life, it leaves a sour  taste in my mouth that  the right wing party was excluded  not by populart vote but by whoring and horsetrading  behind closed doors in what are now smoke free rooms . I do not rejoice that a party I loathe is ousted by such dirty means; and I do not approve those who approve said dirty means as long as by them  the Nats are out  of power. If the Left is no better than the Right what difference does it make? They only peddle different forms of filth

So a person whose pretty face caused Labour's  popularity to surge, for it was an immediate surge, not the result of a carefully considered study of her personal record, policy acts or decisions, was selected as our prime minister, by the grace of a minor player who fancies hmself a Kingmaker, and this because of the vagaries of a system itself chosen in reaction to the corruption and stupidity of politicians over 20 years ago.

As a historical aside I ask should I at least hanker for the return of the fate of failed King makers? Google the name Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick,  The King Maker and read of his  end

Now I have no idea whether Jacinda Ardern is capable or not,  but I stand by my reasons as to why I think she caused a populartity surge and was selected - not elected - as  PM.

And now for my purpose in posting here. A recent scandal has broken whereby the honeynmoon between the country and her - and then, I venture,  her party - is now over.

It seems it is not only church groups that have rural youth camps. The Labour Party had one some time ago. Alcohol was freely available to its teenage particicants - itself a criminal offence in my country. If the allegations are to be taken at face value some drunk teen girls were indecently assaulted by a predatory young male of 20.  It is not my purpose here to wonder if the allegations should be taken at face value, rather to comment on the political response to the whole issue

The incident was not reported to police, though as we are not a rape culture such things are indeed illegal here, neither  was it reported to the partents of the children so assaulted  - and they were children, let us not pretend otherwise; and to all appearances, the nub of the scandal, they tried to hush it up, or in a darker term for the same thing  they instituted a a coverup.

Of course the news got out. The honeymoon is over. The Party has taken a hit.

And Ardern's response?

full politlcal speak, saying nithing but appearingt to acknowlewge real responsiblity,

She said among other things "mistakes were made"

note the impersonal and passive voice.

Not "we messed up" or some active  personal use of words whereby I or we did something,  but the passive voice,  as if mistakes simply fall from the skies.

She is distancing herself by her very use of words.

She has learned the poltical game well and is on the way to becoming as filthy as her predecessors.
She may never take a bribe in her career. She may never outright lie to the House. But this shows corruption in the proper sense whereby it should be viewed, that is to say in the broadest possible sense.

It is absurd to join a corrupt sytem to attempt to reform it from within, for as the Bible says bad company corrupts good morals. And I value what little integrity that remains to me at my age after a lifetime of sin to want to throw it away by trying

So my move to an apolitical stance continues as my contempt for the Left grows to equal that I have always had for the Right.

"You follow Me," He said, "Let the dead vote for the dead or quarrel with the dead"

Always this is the best advice ever offered