Essential Oils

As many of my readers know, I occasionally enjoy writing articles about health (for example, see my article about health food myths and my articles about health freedom.)

Recently I have begun researching the benefits of essential oils after seeing a Fox News report about a hospital that transformed itself through utilizing essential oils. Since then our family has been enjoying many of the invigorating and healing benefits inherent in these oils. From Peppermint Oil, which acts as an amazing Caffeine substitute and headache cure, to Thieves, which is a proprietary essential oil blend known for supporting the immune system, these oils are truly a God-send.

Why I am not Converting to Roman Catholicism

Last year I wrote a post explaining why I am not converting to Roman Catholicism. I took the post down after some Roman catholic kindly pointed out some errors and misrepresentations in it. I have finally got round to fixing the factual mistakes (thanks to incredibly patient feedback from Roman Catholic friends), and today have put the post back online. It can be read at the following link:

Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic

What is Postmodernism?

Postmodernity refers to a time period (roughly the mid to late 20th century to the present day), whereas Postmodernism refers to a way of thinking characteristic during that time period.

Postmodernism is an umbrella term to describe a number of different orientations, sub-movements and ways of thinking characterized by a self-conscious reaction to Modernism. It is the ripening of trends set in motion by the romantics and existentialists, particularly as regards the rejection of objective truth.
 

George Lukacs and the Reversal of Ethics

In an article I wrote last year for the Chuck Colson Center, I talked about Peter Hitchens' book The Rage Against God and how Hitchens used his observations of life in the Soviet Union as a springboard for showing that ideas have consequences. 

One of the most chilling parts of Hitchen's narrative is when he shows that many Soviet thinkers were prepared to reverse the moral continuum, believing that under certain circumstances evil could be transformed into good. He quotes George Lukacs, a Commissar for Culture and Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, who said. “Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to accept the necessity of acting wickedly. This is the greatest sacrifice the revolution asks from us. The conviction of the true Communist is that evil transforms itself into good through the dialectic of historical evolution.”

To read my article article about this, click on the following link:

Transforming Evil into Good

Miscegenation and the Book of Galatians

Living in Northern Idaho, I occasionally run into people who are against 'Miscegenation' (the fancy way of talking about mixed race marriages). This view is often part of a larger race-based theology known as Kenism. In 2009 I wrote an article showing that the book of Galatians refutes such notions and actually supports the idea of mixed-race marriages. To read my article click here.

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Ron Paul on Abortion

Let all power on earth be limited

Since I have written before about the tendency for government to act as mother, assuming control over every aspect of our life, the words of the American Puritan, John Cotton, resonated with me when I read them today:

Let all the world learn to give mortall men no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will....It is necessary...that all power that is on earth be limited, church-power or other....It is counted a matter of danger to the state to limit prerogatives, but it is a further danger not to have them limited. They will be like a Tempest if they be not limited. A Prince himselfe can not tell where he will confine himself, nor can the people tell....It is therefore fit for every man to be studious of the bounds which the Lord hath set; and for the People, in whom fundamentally all power lyes, to give as much power as God in his word gives to men.

Health Freedom Articles

I have always been interested in issues relating to health, but recently I have taken an interest in the politics of health freedom.

In my article Totalitarianism in Nationalized Health and 'The well worn path from socialized health to totalitarianism', I used my experiences in Britain as a springboard for exploring how nationalized healthcare changes how citizens relate to each other, as the entire populace begins to have economic incentives for policing each others' diets and health.

This type of Nanny State mentality is already well under way in America, as evidenced from the material in an interview I conducted with Ryan Close titled 'Freedom of Health: Does Uncle Sam Own Your Body?'

Building on this, my article Totalitarian Creep looked at some of the specific ways our freedom is being threatened by Obamacare.

I am also fascinated by the historical dimensions to the question of the relationship between the state and our health, and I have explored some of these in my article An Historical Perspective to the Health Care Debate.

My interest in health extends beyond the political and historical aspects, as I have also tried to debunk some of the myths about health food and about raw milk.

Finally, I have also given considerably attention to the theological dimensions of health, particularly when it comes to the Bible's teaching about healthy eating. I have explored these aspects in the following articles:

• A Theology of Health
• Blessings You Can Chew
• God Cares What's in the Pot (Part 1)
• God Cares What's in the Pot (Part 2)

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Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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Normalizing Sex

In the latest edition of Salvo Magazine (which you can subscribe to by clicking here), I pointed out that one of the subversive features of the over-sexualized environment our children are growing up in is that they are becoming desensitized. In a society where sex is used to sell everything from shoes to vegetables, the danger is that children become so used to it that they cease to consider things to be sexual which clearly are.
 
This struck me when the BBC did a documentary on the sexualization of children and Sophie Raworth visited 13-year old Chloe. Dressed skimpily and imitating the erotic dancers she had seen on television, Chloe’s dream is to go all over world as a dancer. Raworth asked Chloe if she was trying to be sexual. Chloe confessed that there was nothing sexual in her mind when she was dancing. Moreover, she said, as long as she kept her clothes on, there was nothing inappropriate about her moves.

Certainly the self-evaluation of a 13-year old girl should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. Yet as I point out in my Salvo article 'Sex & the Kiddies: The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains', I think there is an important lesson to be learned from the fact that Chloe failed to acknowledge the obvious eroticism of her behaviour. As our children are bombarded with more and more sexual stimuli, one effect is that they cease to even see certain things as sexual, with the consequence that important barriers are lowered.
 

Chloe found this out in a rather disturbing way when she was eleven. A stranger who had seen some of the dance moves Chloe posted online contacted her to tell her how sexy she was. Chloe panicked and immediately removed all the videos.

Yet the question remains: how have young people like Chloe managed to convince themselves that all but the most explicit displays (in Chloe’s case, taking off her clothes) are non-sexual and benign? And do the products and media that girls like her are able to so easily access have anything to do with this?
 

The answer to this question may lay in the thought of one of the early pioneers of the sex education movement. In his book The Sexual Revolution, Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) described the means for achieving a society that would not put any obstacles in the path of sexual gratification. I have discussed Reich in my Salvo article, in which I point out that

For all his moral anarchism, Reich was perceptive. He realized that in order to achieve the type of sexual utopia he desired, he must first move society away from the shyness and embarrassment surrounding sex. In particular, he argued, people must lose their reluctance to expose erotically important parts of their bodies. Reich attempted to facilitate this by having psychotherapy sessions in which he would require his clients to remove all their clothes.
    

Reich would be pleased if he could see a European summer today, which is more in keeping with his ideal than what we find in brothels. In a brothel, women have overcome the natural shyness surrounding erotically important parts of their bodies in order to advertise sex; on a sunny beach, scores of women can be seen who have overcome this natural shyness with no thought of sex at all. Indeed, by refusing to explicitly acknowledge the erotic implications of minimalistic attire, we are fast approaching Reich’s goal of a society in which shyness has been overcome and sex is flattened of its inherent potency. “Profane” best describes Reich’s ideal and its realization in the contemporary situation, given that the term originally meant “to treat as common.”
 

The current debate about the sexualization of children needs to be charted within this same rubric. Certainly when low-cut blouses are marketed for 13-year olds, when music videos for children are saturated with sexual imagery and when sex is constantly used to sell products to young teens, the result is going to be that many girls will become hyper-sexualized. However, such saturation can equally have a desensitizing effect since it unconsciously orients youth to treat their sexuality as something trivial, benign and commonplace. Either way, it primes girls for perverts like Reich: the former because hyper-sexualized girls will want to have sex; the latter because girls are less likely to guard and protect that which they have been oriented to treat as being merely common.

To read more about this, subscribe to Salvo magazine and turn to my article, 'Sex & the Kiddies.'

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Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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More than the sum of the parts

In my article 'Tears in Things' I point out that throughout history, art has had a powerful pull on human emotion. Art can reduce seasoned warriors like Aeneas and Odysseus to tears, but it can also lift us to heights of joy and happiness. Certain types of art can even blur the distinction between joy and sadness, evoking a type of bittersweet longing that is hard to put into words. 

 

There is a certain paradox here. How can something purely physical, like the drawings on a wall or the sound-waves produced by a musical instrument or the human voice, have such a profound effect on the non-physical world of our psyche and emotions? Though we may not be able to answer this question with metaphysical precision, it is clear that when human creativity brings inanimate matter together in a certain way, the resulting configuration is often more than merely the sum of the parts.

Christian theology is full of similar examples. When Christ meets us in the blessed Eucharist, something is happening that goes beyond the mere physicality of the properties being presented to us. Though different Christian traditions have debated what actually happens when God’s people gather to receive the sacrament of communion, most would agree that in this event God somehow meets with man.

When I receive and partake of the sacraments in faith, there is more going on than merely one person eating bread and wine, just as there was more to the mural in Carthage than mere paint.

In the world God created, things have significance.

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