"The ONS has found that being married is 20 times more important to a person’s well-being than their earnings, and 13 times more important than owning a home."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10090130/Marriage-makes-people-happier-than-six-figure-salaries-and-religion.html
Friday, 31 May 2013
There's nothing there
A certain "there's nothing there" quote came to my mind whilst I was last preaching as an illustration of the point I was making at the time. I had no idea who said it. Apparently, this paragraph contains the answer:
"Do you know the author Jack Higgins? He’s a world-famous author and one of the leading novelists of our time. I know him because he was born in Belfast. Go to Amazon.com and put in Jack Collins, and you’ll see 90 or 100 references to books he has written—he’s a multi millionaire. He lives on one of these channel islands; I think its Guernsey, a tax haven. Jack Higgins is not his name; it’s a pseudonym. He was asked just fairly recently what he wished that someone had told him when he was younger. Here’s a man who has everything and lives on an island off shore to keep the money that he has because he’s got so much of it. And do you know what he said? He said, “I wish someone had told me that when you get to the top, there’s nothing there.” "But if you get to the top, then there's everything there; there's Christ there.
http://www.fpcjackson.org/resources/sermons/Derek's_SERMONS/John/John%20vol%201/07bJohn.htm
Wednesday, 29 May 2013
How can a God of love create killer jellyfish?
The existence of killer jellyfish is actually a problem for materialists rather than for creationists:
http://creation.com/skeptics-challenge-a-god-of-love-created-a-killer-jellyfish
http://creation.com/skeptics-challenge-a-god-of-love-created-a-killer-jellyfish
Monday, 27 May 2013
The floundering West
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/10081928/By-standing-united-we-can-isolate-the-virus-of-Islamism.html
The West's ultimate problem is that its leaders are trying to oppose a coherent, internally-consistent (whilst also evil and wrong) philosophy with mere will-power. In the long term, to "immunise" people against those strains of Islam, you need a replacement which is also coherent. Merely decreeing that (paraphrasing) 'we will stand united', 'we must not give up our resolve', etc., is not a potent long-term strategy. You need a foundation to erect a building that has hopes of lasting.
As a historical fact, the origins of Islam do not support the idea that Islam was intended by its founder to be a peaceful philosophy. There is a real historical difference between a Jesus who died on the cross for the sins of his enemies, and a Muhammad who raised an army to slay them. The idea that these two historical foundations can ultimately and consistently lead to the same outcome - followers who reject the idea of slaying their enemies - is wishful thinking. We wish it wasn't so, but wishing won't prevent real-world beheadings in future any more than it has in the past.
This is an unsolvable problem for secularists like the author of the above article. It's an unsolvable problem for the British nation as a whole. Without a change of heart and a work of the Holy Spirit, all such problems are unsolvable. Sin makes a huge, tangled mess. The ultimate untangling can only be through a work of God's grace in Jesus Christ. Unless God gracious restrains it, there is much more to come of not only these intellectual dead-ends, but of the horrible events seen in the streets of Woolwich when their inner contradictions work out in practice. Let us who know the true God pray that he will have mercy on us, because he is full of mercy.
The West's ultimate problem is that its leaders are trying to oppose a coherent, internally-consistent (whilst also evil and wrong) philosophy with mere will-power. In the long term, to "immunise" people against those strains of Islam, you need a replacement which is also coherent. Merely decreeing that (paraphrasing) 'we will stand united', 'we must not give up our resolve', etc., is not a potent long-term strategy. You need a foundation to erect a building that has hopes of lasting.
As a historical fact, the origins of Islam do not support the idea that Islam was intended by its founder to be a peaceful philosophy. There is a real historical difference between a Jesus who died on the cross for the sins of his enemies, and a Muhammad who raised an army to slay them. The idea that these two historical foundations can ultimately and consistently lead to the same outcome - followers who reject the idea of slaying their enemies - is wishful thinking. We wish it wasn't so, but wishing won't prevent real-world beheadings in future any more than it has in the past.
This is an unsolvable problem for secularists like the author of the above article. It's an unsolvable problem for the British nation as a whole. Without a change of heart and a work of the Holy Spirit, all such problems are unsolvable. Sin makes a huge, tangled mess. The ultimate untangling can only be through a work of God's grace in Jesus Christ. Unless God gracious restrains it, there is much more to come of not only these intellectual dead-ends, but of the horrible events seen in the streets of Woolwich when their inner contradictions work out in practice. Let us who know the true God pray that he will have mercy on us, because he is full of mercy.
Sunday, 26 May 2013
A reply to an atheist correspondent
An atheist took the time to drop by my skeptical exposure of the non-existence of Richard Dawkins. He raised some questions, which I thought were at the wrong level - if he wanted to be a consistent atheist. I share my reply here:
(Introduction snipped).
I'd want to raise some more fundamental questions than these ones. Some questions behind these questions.
Lots of these statements presuppose ideas that have a good grounding in Christian belief. I am reminded that Dawkins himself confesses to being a "Christian atheist". But what grounding do they have if you jettison recognition of a personal, all-powerful divine being? What I mean is that talk about the value of life, or life being too short, about what people have interest in or don't have interest in, ideas about logic, discussion about burdens of proof (all assuming that such things must be binding on all of us equally) - this all has some grounding if we presuppose that there is an objective order of reality, and values which have intrinsic value beyond the material existence of your or my brain or body. It makes sense if we are willing to acknowledge values greater than ourselves, and the objective reality of our personal existence and that our self-consciousness experience is actually grounded in something.
But, if we presuppose atheism, then what basis is there for any of these things? If we accept materialism, then all our discussion is *ultimately* just a temporary new arrangement of matter - soon to be replaced by a different one. Who cares?
Apparently not only do I care, but you care too. And so you should. I'm glad you do. But this is just one more testimony, not simply of the mere "existence" of our Maker, but of his all-importance, and of the fact that we know he is there and are rebelling against him. i.e. Of the objective reality too of your and my sin against him.
Saturday, 25 May 2013
The writings of Charles Alexander
You've probably never heard of Charles Alexander. I was lent his series of booklets on the Song of Songs a few years ago.
Based on that experience, I am pleased that someone is making his Christ-centred and Christ-exalting writings more widely available:
http://www.allbygrace.com/chasalexander.html
Based on that experience, I am pleased that someone is making his Christ-centred and Christ-exalting writings more widely available:
http://www.allbygrace.com/chasalexander.html
Friday, 24 May 2013
The abiding relevance of marriage to stable societies
"93 per cent of couples whose relationships are still intact by the time their child is a teenager are married."
More here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/10074614/Almost-no-couples-with-children-who-stay-unmarried-stay-together-study-claims.html
More here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/10074614/Almost-no-couples-with-children-who-stay-unmarried-stay-together-study-claims.html
Thursday, 23 May 2013
A free dialogue on "gay Christianity"
I have not yet listened to the following audio MP3 download.
However, I have listened to other debates involving James White, and know that his work is excellent. He always thoroughly researches and fairly represents the "other side" of any debate he is in. He does that because he can - whether representing the Reformed Baptist position against Roman Catholicism, Islam, infant baptism, Mormonism or any one of the other topics he has chosen to address, he believes that the other side is wrong. He belives that holding it up to the light will expose it as wrong, so the best thing to do is hold it up to the light.
On that basis I can recommend the free download in this link to you as one likely to helpfully clarify the issues involved:
http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=5452
However, I have listened to other debates involving James White, and know that his work is excellent. He always thoroughly researches and fairly represents the "other side" of any debate he is in. He does that because he can - whether representing the Reformed Baptist position against Roman Catholicism, Islam, infant baptism, Mormonism or any one of the other topics he has chosen to address, he believes that the other side is wrong. He belives that holding it up to the light will expose it as wrong, so the best thing to do is hold it up to the light.
On that basis I can recommend the free download in this link to you as one likely to helpfully clarify the issues involved:
http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=5452
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Monday, 13 May 2013
Reaping what you sow
These lines are absolutely dead-on, regarding the effects of the "sexual revolution" and feminism:
In a Guardian article last week, Kira Cochrane, while careful to say most men abhor male violence, nevertheless claimed that the root problem was ‘the threat of male aggression we all live under’.You can't teach the world that sex is merely a self-centred recreational sport, and then hope to avoid the results of people looking at it that way.
This is all staggeringly perverse. Man-bashing feminism has much to answer for in creating a climate that came to tolerate the abuse of women and children.
Demonising men as at worst violent and at best irrelevant, it told women they could and should go it alone.
Men took them at their word and started routinely playing the field — thus treating women and children increasingly as objects to be used and discarded.
So why are people now shocked by the debauchery that has been unleashed?
If you remove constraints on sexual behaviour, this is precisely what you get. Permissiveness and sexual abuse are two sides of the same coin. We are now merely reaping what we have sown.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2323554/Why-Left-blind-link-todays-sex-scandals-cult-permissiveness.html
Hard and soft tyranny
"Hard tyranny" is when the state makes it explicitly illegal for citizens to exercise God-given rights.
"Soft tyranny" is when those rights remain formally legal, but the state "regulates" them to an excessive degree, or selectively regulates you based upon other criteria, such that it becomes increasingly impractical to exercise those rights in practice.
As an example of that phenomena, here's a recent news story alleging "soft tyranny" against one arm of the US state - http://www.jewishpress.com/news/irs-punished-conservative-non-profits-perhaps-also-pro-israel-groups/2013/05/11/0/?print.
In the UK "gay marriage" debate, the state promises not to exercise hard tyranny. They promise not to force churches to perform gay marriage ceremonies, and that individuals' right to believe what they wish about marriage will not be violated.
This promise is disingenuous, because "soft tyranny" is already in full flow. Those who have principled disagreements with the homosexualist agenda are already increasingly marginalised. All arms of the state treat homosexuality as equivalent to hetrosexuality. In recent widely publicised cases (see www.christian.org.uk), owners of a bed and breakfast in their own home were punished for refusing to treat homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality; a council worker was demoted for expressing in very mild terms the opinion that homosexuals could not marry; an old man peacefully displaying a banner was assaulted by angry homosexuals and was himself arrested for breaching the peace whilst his attackers walked free. Adoption agencies that don't accept the Sodomite agenda have already been forced to close down.
Furthermore, existing law already defines a seven-fold equality agenda, and requires all arms of the state to enforce it in all their practices. Included amongst the seven is "sexual orientation". Presently, the state itself legally distinguishes between homosexual "civil partnerships" and heterosexual "marriages". However, once both of these entities are folded into a single "marriage", there will be no legal distinctions between them. It will be illegal for anyone else to make distinctions on that basis either. This will have an enormous effect, and hand a very large club to those seeking to enforce the new revisionist ideas of sexuality, to beat their foes with. This will apply to councils, schools and churches everywhere.
Moreover, it will create a massive internal inconsistency in the law. Different laws on the statute book will both forbid discrimination on the basis of sexuality (so that all "marriages" must be considered equal), but also allow the same discrimination (the government's so-called "quadruple lock" to prevent churches from being forced to carry out "gay marriages"). That discrepancy will immediately be challenged in court, and will only be resolved in one direction. (There is also the point that European courts will ultimately decide the question, and so the UK government's promises that the lock is secure are worthless - it is not within their power to keep the promise that they are making). This is widely accepted - which is why you don't hear any outrage from the homosexualists about the "quadruple lock"; they believe that it's worthless and will fall in short order so see little need to get too worked up about it.
For all these reasons, the voices telling us to chill out, and not make a fuss about "gay marriage" ("It won't affect you, since you're not gay! So why not live and let live?") are dead wrong, even within the terms of their own argument (leaving outside all other concerns). This is admitted not just by Christians, but by atheists too - see http://www.christian.org.uk/news/commentator-people-forced-to-agree-with-gay-marriage/.
When MPs are being frank about the "gay marriage" law, they admit that they believe that eventually the opponents will pipe down, go away, and forget all about it. They hope to ram the law through quickly, and then wait for the passage of time to soften the opposition, and have it all forgotten by the time another election is due.
It is the responsibility of Christians now to keep making clear to their law-makers that this will not work. Time is short, but the point can - and must - still be made. Have you emailed and written to your MP, the prime minister and his deputy, and their parties, and the House of Lords? Consistently law-makers have been receiving more letters on this issue than any other. We need to keep the pressure up.
It is also our responsibility to pray. There is a ruler in heaven, who is higher than all, and in whose hands the king's heart is (Proverbs 21:1). Moreover, it is the duty at such a time of Christian pastors to teach their flocks how to respond to this approaching triumph of the sexual revolutionaries, and to prepare Christians as we increasingly move from a society where the default assumptions are Christian to one where they are radically anti-Christian. The climate around us is changing - are the flock ready to be faithful to Christ in the new situations arising; to know when to silently weep and pray, and when and how to also publicly resist?
"Soft tyranny" is when those rights remain formally legal, but the state "regulates" them to an excessive degree, or selectively regulates you based upon other criteria, such that it becomes increasingly impractical to exercise those rights in practice.
As an example of that phenomena, here's a recent news story alleging "soft tyranny" against one arm of the US state - http://www.jewishpress.com/news/irs-punished-conservative-non-profits-perhaps-also-pro-israel-groups/2013/05/11/0/?print.
In the UK "gay marriage" debate, the state promises not to exercise hard tyranny. They promise not to force churches to perform gay marriage ceremonies, and that individuals' right to believe what they wish about marriage will not be violated.
This promise is disingenuous, because "soft tyranny" is already in full flow. Those who have principled disagreements with the homosexualist agenda are already increasingly marginalised. All arms of the state treat homosexuality as equivalent to hetrosexuality. In recent widely publicised cases (see www.christian.org.uk), owners of a bed and breakfast in their own home were punished for refusing to treat homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality; a council worker was demoted for expressing in very mild terms the opinion that homosexuals could not marry; an old man peacefully displaying a banner was assaulted by angry homosexuals and was himself arrested for breaching the peace whilst his attackers walked free. Adoption agencies that don't accept the Sodomite agenda have already been forced to close down.
Furthermore, existing law already defines a seven-fold equality agenda, and requires all arms of the state to enforce it in all their practices. Included amongst the seven is "sexual orientation". Presently, the state itself legally distinguishes between homosexual "civil partnerships" and heterosexual "marriages". However, once both of these entities are folded into a single "marriage", there will be no legal distinctions between them. It will be illegal for anyone else to make distinctions on that basis either. This will have an enormous effect, and hand a very large club to those seeking to enforce the new revisionist ideas of sexuality, to beat their foes with. This will apply to councils, schools and churches everywhere.
Moreover, it will create a massive internal inconsistency in the law. Different laws on the statute book will both forbid discrimination on the basis of sexuality (so that all "marriages" must be considered equal), but also allow the same discrimination (the government's so-called "quadruple lock" to prevent churches from being forced to carry out "gay marriages"). That discrepancy will immediately be challenged in court, and will only be resolved in one direction. (There is also the point that European courts will ultimately decide the question, and so the UK government's promises that the lock is secure are worthless - it is not within their power to keep the promise that they are making). This is widely accepted - which is why you don't hear any outrage from the homosexualists about the "quadruple lock"; they believe that it's worthless and will fall in short order so see little need to get too worked up about it.
For all these reasons, the voices telling us to chill out, and not make a fuss about "gay marriage" ("It won't affect you, since you're not gay! So why not live and let live?") are dead wrong, even within the terms of their own argument (leaving outside all other concerns). This is admitted not just by Christians, but by atheists too - see http://www.christian.org.uk/news/commentator-people-forced-to-agree-with-gay-marriage/.
When MPs are being frank about the "gay marriage" law, they admit that they believe that eventually the opponents will pipe down, go away, and forget all about it. They hope to ram the law through quickly, and then wait for the passage of time to soften the opposition, and have it all forgotten by the time another election is due.
It is the responsibility of Christians now to keep making clear to their law-makers that this will not work. Time is short, but the point can - and must - still be made. Have you emailed and written to your MP, the prime minister and his deputy, and their parties, and the House of Lords? Consistently law-makers have been receiving more letters on this issue than any other. We need to keep the pressure up.
It is also our responsibility to pray. There is a ruler in heaven, who is higher than all, and in whose hands the king's heart is (Proverbs 21:1). Moreover, it is the duty at such a time of Christian pastors to teach their flocks how to respond to this approaching triumph of the sexual revolutionaries, and to prepare Christians as we increasingly move from a society where the default assumptions are Christian to one where they are radically anti-Christian. The climate around us is changing - are the flock ready to be faithful to Christ in the new situations arising; to know when to silently weep and pray, and when and how to also publicly resist?
Monday, 6 May 2013
Ending the church's bigotry against cannibals
In this blog post, Steve Hays copies-and-pastes a typical call for the church to abandon the Bible's teaching on human sexuality: http://triablogue.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/christian-cannibals.html. As ever, the call is in the name of "love". And as ever, that "love" is not defined in terms of God's law (which is how the Bible explains boundaries of love, e.g. John 14:15, Romans 13:9). Hays, without comment, points out that by redefining "love" to mean whatever the sin-du-jour is, we can literally endorse any sin we please and call on the church to repent of its lack of "love" for not doing so before (whilst praising ourselves for being so wonderfully loving).
Thursday, 2 May 2013
Secularists vs. creativity
Christian educators believe in creativity. Within appropriate boundaries, of course - our Creator God is also a God of order. Sometimes those boundaries are breached, and correction is needed.
Secularists and statists who are being consistent don't embrace creativity. They have a counterfeit, which they call "diversity", which when translated out of Newspeak means "perversity, which is compulsory for everyone to embrace or at least shut up about". But as far as actual, genuine diversity and creativity go - those things don't really fit in the statist and secularist view of society.
So, when appropriate boundaries are breached, for the secularist/statist it's time to be expelled, go to the juvenile correction centre, and be charged with crime. Pity the person who is nearing adult years and who still has a child's natural, God-given love of creativity, not having yet had it stamped out of them.
Read and weep: http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/04/florida_teen_girl_charged_with.php?print=true.
When the end of time comes, this one will surely be contending for the all-time prize: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/05/second-grader-playing-rescue-the-world-at-recess-suspended-after-throwing-pretend-grenade-at-evil-forces-with-adorable-interview/# (and look at the "Related" links down the bottom).
Secularists and statists who are being consistent don't embrace creativity. They have a counterfeit, which they call "diversity", which when translated out of Newspeak means "perversity, which is compulsory for everyone to embrace or at least shut up about". But as far as actual, genuine diversity and creativity go - those things don't really fit in the statist and secularist view of society.
So, when appropriate boundaries are breached, for the secularist/statist it's time to be expelled, go to the juvenile correction centre, and be charged with crime. Pity the person who is nearing adult years and who still has a child's natural, God-given love of creativity, not having yet had it stamped out of them.
Read and weep: http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/04/florida_teen_girl_charged_with.php?print=true.
When the end of time comes, this one will surely be contending for the all-time prize: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/05/second-grader-playing-rescue-the-world-at-recess-suspended-after-throwing-pretend-grenade-at-evil-forces-with-adorable-interview/# (and look at the "Related" links down the bottom).