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Friday, September 30, 2011

The world was all before them

John Milton
In my article "Recovering the Protestant Affirmation of Life", which was published last October at the Alfred the Great Society, I tried to strip away some of the stereotypes about the Calvinist movement in general and Puritanism in particular. Although the Puritans were not immune to a certain type of Gnosticism, they were quite 'worldly' in a positive way. The psychology of self-confidence implicated – and indeed, mandated - by the Calvinist project (a point I have dealt with in my article "Calvinist Self-Confidence") found expression in an inversion of the paradigm prevalent within medieval Monastics: these Christians proved their salvation and gained assurance, not by withdrawing from the world, but by confidently engaging with it.

The result was an affirmative approach to life that was not overlooked by Abraham Kuyper, who noted that “in every instance [Calvinism] exhibited the same characteristic: viz., strong Assurance of eternal Salvation...”  The posture of self-confident assurance was by no means limited to soteriology but may go a long way towards explaining the pulse of productive energy that became characteristic of Northern Europe in the 17th century onward.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Birthpangs of the modern state

I've been reading a fascinating little book by William Cavanaugh titled Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism. One of the intriguing things about the book is the way he debunks some of the popular myths about the, so called, 'Wars of Religion':
The 'Wars of Religion', were not the events that necessitated te birth of the modern state; they were in fact themselves the birthpangs of the state. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between 'Protestantism' and 'Catholicism,' but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging state over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order. It is not merely that political and economic factors played a central role in these wards, nor are we justified in making a facile reduction of religion to more mundane concerns. Rather, to call these conflicts 'Wars of Religion' is an anachronosim, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance. The creation of religion was necessitated by the new state's need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.... What is at issue behind these wars is the creation of 'religion' as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one's public loyalty to the state. The creation of religion, and thus the privitization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the state. It is important therefore to see that the principal promoters of the wars in France and Germany were in fact not pastors and peasants, but kings and nobles with a stake in the outcome of the movement towards the centralized hegemonic state."


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Friday, September 23, 2011

Arakaki Responds to Robin Phillips


In April this year I published  some questions about the doctrine of Sola Scriptura on this blog. Since then Robert K. Arakaki has kindly used his Orthodox-Reformed Bridge website to address my questions from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. To read his response to my questions, and the lively discussion the followed it (which included replies from me), click on the following link:


You can also read Arakaki more recent posts specifically trying to answer my replies to his comments by clicking on the following links:




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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

To see things as a poet sees

"To see things as a poet sees them the reader must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn around to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles: in fine... I must enjoy him and not contemplate him." C S Lewis

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Debunking 4 Health Food Myths

One of the reasons that health food so often gets a bad wrap is that healthy eating is associated with yucky food. A common narrative that I have often encountered (though rarely stated so explicitly) runs like this:

1)    God wants his people to enjoy their food.
2)    Health food doesn’t taste nice.
3)    If we eat food that doesn’t taste nice, we will not enjoy our food.
4)    Therefore, we shouldn’t try to eat healthy.

The problem with this argument is premise 2. Usually if a person thinks healthy food doesn’t taste nice it is because they have been brainwashed by the media to accept certain myths. This is not the place to explain the political and economic reasons that the media has for perpetuating these myths, although I have touched on that elsewhere. Suffice to say that these myths have arisen because of the unholy alliance between Big Government, Big Pharmaceutical, the junk food lobby and the media.

Among the various health food myths, there are four that have been particularly damaging in cementing the idea that to be healthy means eating food that doesn't taste nice.

Myth #1: low-fat = healthy

A low-fat diet does not equal a healthy diet, despite what commercials and advertisers try to make us think. In fact, given the ingredients that typically go into low-fat products, the reverse is most often the case.

There is a reason that God designed human beings to crave fatty foods. The reason is simple: fat is good for us.

Well, let me qualify that: the right sort of fats are good for us. The bad sort of fats are trans-fats and those fats which have been processed like all vegetable oil.

So what are the right sorts of fats? There are five: butter, coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, animal fats (that's right, you heard me correctly), and cod liver oil. We need these fats to function properly, to regulate our hormones and to feed our brain (did you know our brain is made up of approximately 60% fat?).

One can hardly overstress the importance of this. Getting the right fat is even more important than eating organic.

To read more about this, see the article Five Fats You MUST Have in Your Kitchen.

Myth #2: eating fatty foods causes weight gain

Everything you have been told about weight gain is wrong. Eating the essential fats does not make you fat; eating refined foods does. Refined flour and refined sugars are the main culprits in weight gain. Ironically, these refined foods are often packaged as low-fat and targeted to those who are trying to lose weight. This locks many obese people into a cycle of frustration: they are doing everything the 'experts' are telling them yet they continue to gain weight. What they really need to do is to cut out white flour and sugar.
 
To read more about this, see Patrick Holford’s excellent article ‘Fat doesn’t make you fat’ or Donald W. Miller, Jr's article 'Enjoy Saturated Fats, They're Good For You!'


Myth #3: high-cholesterol = bad

I know you’ve heard it time and again that foods high in cholesterol cause, or at least increase the risk of heart disease. This is actually a myth propagated by the pharmisitical companies. The reality is that human beings need plenty of cholesterol (at least, the right sort) for our bodies to produce the right hormones. Cholesterol is used in thousands of bodily functions from helping our bodies to produce cell membranes to covering our nerve sheets.

The real culprit in heart disease is refined sugurs.

To learn more about this, watch Dr. Mark Hyman’s fascinating video ‘Why Having High Cholesterol isn’t Always Bad.’

Myth #4: calories are bad

Foods that are high in calories are not bad for you, nor do they necessarily help you to lose weight. In fact, low-calorie products are often the most unhealthy things a person can eat.

What the low-calorie industry hasn’t told you is that the real distinction isn’t between low-calorie products vs. high calorie products, but between good calories and bad calories.

To learn more about this, get Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease or watch the video Fathead (available through Netflicks and incredibly entertaining).


Further Reading

Chewing at God's Blessings


The Benefits of Drinking Raw Milk

God Cares What's in the Pot (Part 1)

Freedom of Health: Does Uncle Sam Own Your Body?

Does God Care? Christian Liberty and Food

Health for Godly Generations

Government Hates Good Health


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Monday, September 19, 2011

What the Church Can Learn from the Mall

If you’re anything like me, you probably find it distasteful when churches try to model their worship after the latest trends in contemporary society. Matt Guerino expressed this frustration earlier in the year in his excellent ChangePoint article, “We’ve Been Here Before.” Mr. Guerino described a church that advertised its services with a promotional flier of a lady dressed up as the “church lady” from Saturday Night Live. She was posing next to the words “We’re not you’re grandma’s church!”
 
It is certainly appropriate to object to the way many churches have tried to model themselves around the latest fads of contemporary culture. The consumerist, me-centered mentality that is the essence of pop culture has little point of contact with the worship of God as laid out in scripture. Though it partly depends on how you define the terms, a “seeker-sensitive church” will normally always be a compromised church.
 
Nevertheless, there may be one area where it is appropriate for the church to learn from popular culture in general and the mall in particular. At least, that is what I argue in my monthly worldview column at the Chuck Colson Center. To read my thoughts on what the church can learn form the mall, click on the link below:




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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Libya Again

After writing an article about the war in Libya, I was heartened to find my friend Brad Littlejohn making many of the same concerns on his blog. Littlejohn wrote:
It’s sadly ironic that this intervention is being done in the name of freedom and democracy, when a crucial pillar of democracy is the ability of citizens to take part in key decision-making, such as the declaration of war, and that democratic process has been entirely bypassed in this situation. We have effectively declared war on Libya, and yet the American people were in no way consulted, nor the British. This decision was made by politicians and diplomats behind closed doors, and authorized by a body that cannot boast a shred of democratic election. Who are the real dictators in this story?... 
The claim that Gaddafi was targeting and killing civilians has been repeated over and over, more and more shrilly and dramatically, until we’ve heard rhetoric like “Gaddafi is exterminating his own people.”  But the evidence for it has remained quite slim indeed.  Very little has even been brought forward, much less verified.  The key allegation that the West has made has centered on Gaddafi’s use of aircraft to bomb the opposition--even this is not clearly an attack on “civilians,” since the opposition are very much armed.  But Russian sources contested even this claim, insisting that they had no evidence for the airstrikes alleged.  The International Institute for Strategic Studies have acknowledged that Gaddafi is in fact probably taking careful pains not to kill civilians.  He may well be--don’t get me wrong.  I’d just like to see some much more careful and objective documentation....

Why intervene in Libya, specfically?


Let’s assume the worst--a tyrannical regime, determined to cling to power, massacring unarmed civilians. Hm...you mean like the one in Bahrain, where they’ve called in military assistance from neighboring countries to use against their own people? Or the one in Yemen, where they massacred dozens of unarmed protesters on Friday? What’s so different about those two countries, that they get off scot-free, and Libya becomes the focus of a non-stop international outcry, followed by a bombing campaign? The main difference seems to be that Bahrain and Yemen are crucial US allies, while Gaddafi has been a thorn in the West’s side for years (and not always as the bad guy, either).


Or how about the massacres going on in the Ivory Coast over the past couple weeks? Or did you even know they happened? For whatever reason, the Western media doesn’t care about the Ivory Coast. And that’s because Western leaders don’t care about the Ivory Coast. Or to push it back, how about the Congo or Rwanda? Millions of innocent civilians were raped and murdered, and we stood by and did nothing, and did our best to turn a blind eye to it all? If all we care about is really protecting civilians, how come only civilians on top of oil fields owned by US enemies seem valuable enough to protect? Again, perhaps this is necessary, but I'd like a clear explanation of why such a double-standard is appropriate.


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Friday, September 16, 2011

George Soros and American Foreign Policy

George Soros
It is sometimes hard to keep up with all of America’s wars. But while it may be hard to keep up with all of America’s wars-that-are-not-officially-wars, it is even harder to keep up with the constantly shifting justification given for these engagements.

For President Woodrow Wilson, the justification for foreign intervention was to make the world “safe for democracy.” For Bush, it was the “war against terror” that legitimized America’s role in policing the world. For President Obama, the ideology of foreign intervention seems to be underpinned, at least in part, from a new political doctrine championed by the billionaire George Soros, known as “responsibility to protect.”

At least, that is what I have argued in a recent Examiner article. To read the article, click on the link below


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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

America's Wars

In June last year I wrote an article for the Spokane Libertarian Examiner titled Obama at War in which I noted the unprecedented expansion of the American military since Obama took power and why this directly threatens America's national security. A little over a year later I am returning to the foreign policy scene to report that, unfortunately, little has improved since last June.

In fact, America's foreign military commitments are almost mind-boggling. America is now spending more money on defense than it did at the height of the cold war, even after adjustments are made for inflation. Just to put this in perspective, America’s military budget (financed largely by debt-spending) is greater than the planet’s remaining countries put together. Just the recent order of 2,443 supersonic fighter jets alone is greater than Australia’s entire GDP.

Last month the United States began drone missile strikes against Somalia, making it the sixth nation this year to fall victim to attack from America’s arsenal of lethal drones.
 
The other five nations are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Last year Pakistan alone suffered over a thousand fatalities, including many of civilians, from this campaign of persistent bombing.
 
Then there is the action on the ground. We all know about the 7,000 American special forces currently in Afghanistan and the 3,000 in Iraq. But the Pentagon has also sent nearly $45 million in military supplies to Uganda and Burundi to finance the US’s proxy war against Somalia.
 
Let’s not forget that America is also involved in armed conflicts in Somalia (indirectly and unofficially), and as “Peacekeepers” in Sinai and East Timor.
 
Meanwhile, the Pentagon plans to establish a new air base in the Persian Gulf from which to more easily attack Yemen with lethal drones.
 
What's wrong with this picture? To find out, visit my recent article on America's foreign policy which I wrote for the Spokane Libertarian Examiner by clicking on the link below:

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Dispensationalism and the problem of multi-generational parenting

An army which is told that it must suffer defeat, that any sign of victory is an illusion or else a lure into a subsequent defeat, that victory must be the Devil’s, will be a defeated army....

Those who view God’s history as a giant scythe which will cut down all the works of Christians on the final day (or rapture) except for internal, “spiritual” works, cannot plant cultural. seeds with the same confidence, and therefore the same enthusiasm, as those who view themselves as future corpses whose work is long-term capital that can survive. On the day of judgment, the garden produced at last by Christian discipline and Christian capital will not experience a silent spring.
” Gary North


IU I used to think there was little or no point in thinking about the spiritual health of the next generation. Believing that Jesus was about to come back soon, I thought there was no point in thinking about future. Moreover, I thought, God deals with individuals, not with families, nations and cultures. Ergo, the idea behind these "birthday walks" was a throwback to the Old covenant, where God still dealt corporately with tribes, nations and cultures.

How wrong I was.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Neuroscience Supports Bible

A few years ago the Charles Colson Center published an article of mine titled, 'Neuroscience and the Power of Speech.' In the article I refer to some of the latest developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology - developments which support the premium that the Biblical writers place on the power of speech. What scientists are only just discovering is that the way someone speaks has a subliminal and unconscious effect in how they perceive the world and other people.

Put another way, our speech acts do not simply describe how we see the world; rather, in an important sense, how we see the world is determined by the way we choose to speak about it. To read the fascinating examples of this, and the implications this has for a theology of language, click on the link to the article below:



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