Yes, BUT . . . .

 A conservative commentator posed a two part quiz, consisting of a yes or no answer to this one  question:

Do traditional gender roles generally make for better relationships?

I voted yes and commented as below

YES

 BUT spiritual gender roles  (I will coin the term for convenience sake, no more, and mean by it the trad role cleansed of sin in Christ)  would make for even better.

in this world even the trad role is FALLEN and therefore  corrupt.

this is something the conservative almost always forgets

I suspect that the Left saw this corruption and like undisciplined thinkers everywhere  did not distinguish use from abuse in this matter  and rejected the lot.

and the resulting mayhem is history

Free speech and hate speech

 The Left these days want to ban speech that may or may not be expressive of hate and therefore violence ; and the Right want to narrow the definitions  of speech as violence so they can rail with impugnity and call it free speech

As the Right, particularly in the USA think they are christians  they would be expected to believe the Bible is the word of God andat least consider its commandments.

I posted this on a conservative channel on a video platform:

Can speech be violent, IOW can it build up, encourage, or demoralize, wound or drive to despair?

Well, is anyone denying this  ever been verbally abused?

to any Christian or religious Jew the answer, believe it or not, is in the Bible itself.

 "life and death are in the power of the tongue" Proverbs 18:1.    If the words life and death mean anything at al then this means words can wound and so speech can be violence.

This is also confirmed in the NT. Jesus said "the mouth speaks the fullnes of the heart" Luke 6:45 - so speech CAN be evil  -  and He also said "out of the heart comes evil thoughts"  Matthew 12:34-36 and mathew 15:18-19, whereby our evil words defile us, not the foods we eat (in response to jewish food law)

this is summarised best in the letter of James  3:5 and quoted here 3:6 "And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.

and to cap it all off  no one can control the tongue, James 3:8.

Conservatives \can call themselves christians if they like but they  are bound to adhere to the word of God, or stop pretending to believe  in it

as is often he case even conservatives ask the wrong questions:  the right quesetion is can   even hate speech be controlled by LAW  and is there any utility in the effort. and the answer is essentially NO. and thios because of JAmes 3:8

to call hate speech free speech  is to skirt this issue and actually agree with the Left that speech can and ought to be controled by LAW,  just differning on what speech should be controlled by law. but then LAW is the way that seems right to men but whicleads to death, for legalsim is never obedience. If legalism were obedience the  Pharisees would not have been hypocrites

the error of the right is to deny that such speech is evil, the error if the left  is to think that evil speech can and ought to be coerced into silence by LAW

The  rightists, invokingfree speech,  want to insult and  verbally rail  with impugnity?

very well but they  WILL account to God if not men for it

Ardern Resigns, my theory

 I now have a theory as to why Jacinda resigned.

I dont know this is true but it rings true to me.

I saw a comment on one of the many videos I saw about this matter, from a fellow NZer.

It says that Ardern was on holiday over the christmas break (our summer holiday here downunder) in a small town here in NZ  known for its hospitality.

and people were crossing the road to avoid her, and some were  giving her a piece of their minds.

So it has finally penetrated her pretty empty little head that she is hated.

and to a little girl with all the maturity of a 16 year old  - see her inveterate  grandstanding, the fuss she made on giving birth to a child while in  office  etc etc etc ad nauseum for evidence of this -  to such an infantile mind such knowledge  is SHATTERING

she is not loved, and now she knows it.  But she had to be on her summer holiday away from her acolytes handlers and hangers on, away from her bubble of self involvement and political isolation from reality  to even hear this. So of course she would be  on the verge of tears at the knowledge and has to run away.

So no, i  do not really believe that this is a calculated measure done in sober and cynical  awareness  of the situation. in order to escape criminal charges, as some sites theorise. They may be right but in my opinion  she is far  too naive for that.

she is a silly little girl way  out of her depth and this was compounded by her corruption as seen in her immense wealth ( 25 million on a PM's salary to a girl who grew up in a country towns fish and chip shop) and also seen in how quickly her power went to her head

So  i see no reason to think she was pushed out by anything other than her own wounded childish vanity

AS I said i do not know this, but it rings true to me

BTW i also heard that the rejoicing here in NZ was so great that one pub (drinking establishment, bar, tavern  to my american friends )  is offering cheap jugs of beer in celebration.

a pity i am not a beer drinker . . . .

What is the hope in us

 The following was written by me as a comment on a video by a creation scientist. Given the point i am making it does not matter who this scientist was, nor teparticular subject he  was speaking on 

The validity of the arguments of the creation scientists is why i am satisfied that the secular cosmologist among others are DEEPLY dishonest and that therefore there is no point in tryng to argue or reason with them. IMO apologetic work is best reserved to persuade christians that we have not believed in vain. it is essentially wasted on unbelievers who are too invested in their dishonesty. Which, I contend, is exactly what Romans chapter 1 says and has said all along I am not satisfied that the scripture, "be prepared to offer an account of the hope in you" justifies what we call apologetics. My conviction is slowly growing that the hope in us is our joy and way of life, In other words it is our fruit. and the account for it is the gospel itself. if we have no fruit we do not hope in any real or honest sense, so all our talk about the truth of the gospel is hot air as our lives show we ourselves do not believe it it is as a christian who was not converted by the clever reasonings of men (mine was a smaller scale Damascus Road event now 44 years ago) that i am grateful for thework of the creation scientists for their work

But, to conclude, if arguments do not convert what does?

I do regard it as an indictment on us that these two things are two things we do not have as christians.

They are the kind of unity which shows we truly love one another as referred to in Jesus' prayer ot make them (his discples) one

and the others is power, for St Paul said that the kingdom is not words but power

So we prefer to talk

Grave Soakng

Bil Johnson's  Bethel Church, in Reading Clalifornia  preaches a phenomenon (though it tries to deny it does, but that is beyond my scope) they call Grave Soaking.

In it they claim that by laying on the graves of famous dead Christians they can pick up "the anointing"  or the "power"  that was atttached to these dead saints  and that the can reclaim it for themselves

Grave soaking is utterly irrational.

It regards the power of God as a THING  ( the technical  word for turning an aspect into a THING is reification). and this is pure superstition.

For example: Though I might love someone  - a name does spring to mind  - though you might find a token of said affection, a gift a note you will never find the love itself laying on the ground or floating in the ethr. It is not an entity, but an attitude. It is therefore NOT a thing. It is real but not materially so

So clearly any emotional experience the feel at said gravesite is of no significance. People feel all manner of things all the time. They mean nothing. Truth was never based on feeling

For a church that professes to be protestant  it is rather odd that they should treat the appurtenances of the dead  as if having reified power attached to them. Incidentally they misuse the word "anointing" to justify this.  In medieval  catholic Europe  it was the bones or clothing etc of dead saints that was believed to have this power, with Bethel it is the  graves of them)

and even if this power were an existing entity rather than their  memory of an ability that some  person now dead  was given by God  why would they seek to go to IT directly rather than to God Himself?

This is idolatry. It makes the corpses or gravesites of dead belivers a mediator between God and Man. and there is none bar Christ Himself.

I distinguish power from ability. I have the ability to play a musical instrument to a professional level. but this did not happen by anything other than inborn talent and  much work. it did NOT result from me being imbued with a reified energy -  that which charismatics all too often call "power".

So I, who really was once a musician,  (my logon on some social media outlets) have the ability to perform on the classical upright bass but I  not have , as they define the term, the power to do such.

I end by repeating to reify power into an essence, a THING,   like electricity is irrational; and idolatrous. for the power whereby they misdefine  the ability of God as being a reiftied essence,  DOES NOT EXIST.

in terms of the biblical text to turn God's power into a thing that they may seek in itself  is pure eisegesis (bringing to the text what is NOT in it). and they  got there by liking his power to electricity and then twisting scripure to fit.

Even though Samson was embued with strength and the first christians with the  power to preach these are not entities in their own right separate form God Himsel. Rather they were God Himself in action.

But as always they seek  the power of God rather that the God of, among a huge host of other things, of  power

The Ride of a Lifetime

 I saw a video, it does not matter which, in which a preacher was denouncing heretics.

That I agree with who he said  the heretics  were  is beside the point

But I wrote in the comments:

Why is it always only ever the OTHER fellow who misrepresents the gospel of Christ?

Have none of you ever been taken on the Grand Tour of your own sinful hearts, with  no less than the Holy Spirit as your Tour Guide,  to see your own unbelief, heresies ( ie misrepresentations of Christ) and outright pretence at belief,  hiding your own real belief - whatever it is -  beind a legalistic commitment to truth?

Then you have missed the ride of a lifetime and have also refused the only way to ever come to an honest maturity whereby any of us have even the  ability  let alone the  right to contend with those in error.

After all the dictum "logs and splinters " also apples to us all. we have NO right to contend   with an error our hostility to which indicates that we are likely embued with it ourselves

And i know from my own bitter experience that the most zealous for truth are in fact the deepest hypocrites as regards it who are riddled with the most heresy. IOW, as they say, "been there done that." So heresy hunting no longer impresses me

Except for the barest minimum requirement of belief  (namely that Jesus is God and that He rose from the dead)  I am a christian because of my  one on one relationship with the Holy Spirit, not my  honest doctrinal orthodoxy - for of the latter i have very little.

So my days of pretending (as opposed to genuine belief) to orthodoxy are over.

When and if I ever come to full orthodoxy this will show by a radiance of life, the Fruit of the Spirit, without which i know that I am full of unbelief and which unbelif i see in other preachers

Science, Politics, Religion: The Odd One Out??

I am considering the notion that there are three main phenomena when it comes to judging human affairs.

These are politics science and [human] religion. 

I consider Biblical  Christianity to be outside of this equation for I am speaking of the world, not the truth

So I might ask which two go together and which is the odd man out?

I venture that science is the odd man out, for in its pure form it is about skepticism debate and evidence whereas politics and man made - carnal - religion are about kowtowing to authority and obeying it without question.

Time and time again our govts are acting like cults - demanding compliance and not offering any evidence but only the oracular pronouncements of authorities

but they have forgotten that appeals to authority are logically fallacious even when the authority is a world renowned expert

in the true spirit of science they the expert should show their work and the submit it to debate. but this has not been done. Science without skepticism is cult religion

And when this submission of reasoned evidence to open debate is not done what we have is not science but scientism, a  view that regards science as yet another religion  and operates the same way

We are not a scientific society but a religious one and where our faith was once  counterfeit church Christianity now it is scientism.

Of course God always has his elect in there somewhere, but we the few are the few and it is only luck and indifference  from the authorities whereby we are not yet persecuted as believers. But that is clearly changing -

Politics and man made religion are acting true to form and science has forsaken its own basis to become as I said scientism, namely a religion . The rot is contributed to by post modernism  which rejects notions of truth outright leaving men with nothing but feelings which  matter more than facts

It really does not matter which issue is being trotted out to feed scientism and post modernist cultism. An observant reader can notice a few on his own.

If and when these fall into the dustbin of history some other madnesses of crowds will emerge