Laigle’s Forum

In our country, there is a general feeling that only positions backed by actual fact should drive public policy.  ‘Religion’ is perceived to be the realm of personal opinion.   Even Christians tend to accept the view that people are allowed to have their opinion, but they aren’t allowed to impose that opinion on others.   The result is that many Christians refrain from acting ‘politically’ because they see their own beliefs as nothing more than ‘mere opinion.’

Secularists tend to be people who have dispensed with ‘religion’ altogether, and like to think that they are entirely ‘fact driven.’

When these ideas collide, we observe something very curious:  secular humanists conclude that they can advocate for anything that they want in the public sphere, because nothing they believe is ‘religious, ‘ while distinctly Christian viewpoints are forbidden from entering the public domain, since those will be, by definition, ‘religious.’  And again, even Christians gravitate to that view.

This tends to lead to debates and discussions and policy proposals that take the ‘facts’ of the secularists as the starting points.  We are expected to proceed on their terms.  And why not?  Surely without the ‘religious’ component, those ‘facts’ are as close to actually being real descriptions of the world as one could get, right?

But what if ‘religion’ and ‘fact’ are not opposites? Read the rest of this entry »

by Don Hank

The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so…

The scientific method, while still used in scientific experiments in the laboratory and clinic, has long been abandoned in the persuasive arts, notably journalism, but also in politics. Any journalist analyzing facts based on logic and science instead of accepting the interpretation of our universe handed down from above would soon lose their job. We have long lived in an anti-scientific, and hence, an anti-natural, world and are now reaping the inevitable rewards of our denial of truth.

If we were to be honest with ourselves for just a brief moment, we would admit that Western society is deeply sinful (or in secular terms, unwholesome) and even worships sin, celebrating it with carnivals and gay parades, and teaching young children how to perform sex acts in schools. And of course, the Western world routinely commits infanticide. Romans 1:25 describes the Western world to a “t” (Paul uses homosexuals as an example but this issue ranges far wider than that):

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator…

The end of that discourse on sinners describes the outcome.

…men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

A graphic depiction of some of that recompense for this particular group of sinners can be found here. I referenced that site in my commentary “The recompence of their error.”

So why do people deliberately engage in self-destructive practices that our otherwise superior intelligence should be telling us to avoid for the purposes of self preservation? Or for that matter, why do they pursue Keynesian economics amassing mountains of debt that no one could ever repay in a headlong rush to destroy our economy, our means of survival? No animal species would do that.

The answer is right there in Paul’s discourse, and this is the part Christians need to focus on when analyzing the causes of Western society’s failure to manage its laws, its immigration, its social ills, its fruitless wars, its finances and economy, its moral code, etc:

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.

And several verses later:

God gave them over to a reprobate mind.

Did you ever consider what that means?

GOD facilitates the destruction of the disobedient and the ungrateful by abandoning the disobedient to their own sinful desires. Paul is talking about people who worship nature instead of the Creator because they were ungrateful to Him for the blessings of life. Why would people who once worshipped nature turn around and do something unnatural, as Paul calls this behavior in this same passage? A person analyzing this without spiritual discernment might say this incongruence makes no sense and would be at a loss to explain it in rational terms. Some spiritually blind (but otherwise intelligent) analysts say that for this reason, Paul couldn’t really have meant “unnatural” when describing this behavior, and they therefore tweak the translation from the original Greek to make it say something else. (They forget that in the 4^th Century, Jerome, a fluent speaker of koine Greek, rendered this term as “contra naturam” in his translation  of the Vulgate Latin Bible).

The fact is, God routinely allows people to do the unnatural—committing acts outside the laws of nature that can’t be explained by any scientific (e.g., psychological) laws. Once you turn your back on God, He abandons you and you fall into a behavior pattern designed by Satan. There is nothing natural about sinful behavior because it was not designed by God.

So if it is not natural, then is it supernatural?

No, it is not. Since God performs supernatural works—that is, works that are above nature—then Satan’s works and the works of humans gone over to the dark side might best be considered as infranatural, or beneath nature. An animal would not destroy its own economy – its food stores, for example – the way Westerner “leaders” are now doing, most notablyin the Euro Zone and the US through irrational banking practices and eradication of home industry and cheap energy by legal and regulatory means (even as they encourage other nations, notably China, to use cheap energy and high carbon combustion in competing with the West). Nor would an animal devote itself almost solely to the pursuit of sex, especially homosex, the way many humans do (although bisexuality is known in the animal kingdom, there are no known strictly homosexual animal individuals that eschew all individuals of the opposite sex).

Such infranatural phenomena are exactly why we face an imminent worldwide economic collapse. Economists, supposedly specialists in math, no longer use mathematics in their convoluted Keynesian calculations. Likewise, otherwise educated people who understand human anatomy deliberately and routinely utilize as an inlet a bodily organ designed as an outlet, a lifestyle that often leads to horrific diseases and death (see here).

But as Paul says, amazingly, GOD facilitates this mindlessness by abandoning those who abandon God — including His scientific laws. Because people stopped trusting in Him and thought they could come up with their own answers. Look around you. How do you like the results of Western secularist, humanist political, diplomatic, economic, social, military, etc, behavior? Vote for either candidate and you will get more of the same. Look at Europe. An entire continent that thinks it is smarter than God is now drowning in debt and fighting for its economic life. If this is not sufficient evidence of the God that Paul describes, i.e., a God who deprives disobedient humans of their cognitive faculties, then I can’t imagine what is.

This is why the West does not need more laws or a better government.

It needs a spiritual revival. And that revival will not happen without Westerners accepting the love, forgiveness and righteousness that Jesus taught, making a sincere attempt to do what is morally right as dictated by our God-given conscience. Americans, including the best and otherwise most civil and decent of us, are beating each other up because we think this is about people or the lack of wisdom of individuals or leaders. If people do this or that, or if we make this or that law or elect this or that politician, then we can get back on track. “How can this group or that group be so stupid?” they say of those who disagree with them.

But again, they ignore Paul’s teachings, as recorded in another letter of his:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

If you think this is too lofty and ethereal to relate to your life and the world around you, consider the antithesis, for example, in this article on John Maynard Keynes, a homosexual and pedophile who authored our current failed economic system (bailouts rewarding bad business and banking practices and other government interventions that kill free enterprise were his brain child):

http://www.keynesatharvard.org/book/KeynesatHarvard-ch09.html

If we take to heart Paul’s message in Romans 1:25-27, we can easily see it was no coincidence that Keynes was both a sexual deviant (pedophile, homosexual, etc) and the author of the most perverted economic system known to humankind.

There can be no logical or scientific explanation for Keynes’ self-destructive lifestyle and destructive teachings, or of an entire civilization deliberately patterning itself after him, destroying itself economically and morally with no apparent justification. These examples of a West deliberately weakening and sabotaging itself are the best examples of unqestionably infranatural phenomena.

As incredible as it may seem to those imbued with the rigid doctrinaire humanism that is foisted on Western society by an incessant drumbeat in media, schools and universities, in cinema and on the street, Paul’s brief discourse on a God having given people up to a reprobate mind is emerging as the default explanation of a civilization marching resolutely to its utter economic and moral ruin.

So why is this explanation for Western civilization’s failure never raised in the churches of our nation?

Perhaps because God is giving our clergy over to the very same reprobate mind that Paul spoke of. They interpret the scriptures as though they were hopelessly outdated when  in fact, these ancient writings offer the only glimpse of sanity–and hope–that is left in our reprobate world.

Quote:

Prime Minister, Ted Heath when he said in a Government White Paper of July 1971, “There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty”. (On a TV current affairs programme in 1990, he was asked if he had known that this statement was untrue. His answer was “Of course, yes”.)

There is a bit of history to this idea of politicians lying to the public to achieve what is supposed to be a noble end, a phenomenon we see on both sides of the pond. In the 1880s a group of wealthy English met in a private home in London to discuss how best to implement socialism and eliminate Christianity (which stands in the way). The group included Karl Marx’s sister, just to give you an idea of the ideology they represented.

They met later a number of times and eventually settled on a name for themselves: The Fabian Society, after a Roman general who had successfully used stealth to gain victory, thereby saving lives. They would do likewise, preferring stealth to usurp power over the violence used later in Russia.

But is stealth necessarily harmless?

Suppose you stop your car and ask me directions to a place. I direct you over a bridge, which happens to have collapsed in a recent hurricane. I tell you that it is narrow, so in order to avoid meeting another vehicle, you should speed up as you approach it. You do so and plunge to your death in the canyon below.

I didn’t harm you directly. But I caused you great violence through my stealthy and false directions.

So it is with the EU. It was sold as a community of states that would contribute to economic stability and greater harmony in Europe. No sovereignty would be lost and there would be a net gain for all.

But this community is now called a union and is a de facto empire with central control and almost no participation of the populace, with formidable power, ever-expanding boundaries (see Sonya Porter’s article below), a court, one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, and a growing military, and its economic policies are leading, by socialist wealth redistribution, to what is expected by many economists to be the greatest economic crisis of our age.

The Soviet Union has been reborn.

Don Hank

Sonya Jay Porter on the ever-expanding, rarely-asking EU

The creation of a European union of states was considered a noble aspiration following the destruction of the continent in two world wars. First proposed in the Schuman Declaration of 1950 by the then-French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, it aimed to transform Europe through a “step-by-step” process, leading to the unification of Europe and so ensuring that the individual nations of Europe should never go to war with one other again. But although senior politicians may have been aware of the gradual subsuming of their countries into a Federal Europe, most of their populations were not.

In Britain, for instance FCO 30/1048 which was written in 1971 by civil servants at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but only brought to light in 2001 under the 30 year rule, shows that the FCO was definitely aware of the gradual loss of Britain’s sovereignty that entry into the Common Market would entail. However, introducing the 1972 Bill, Geoffrey Rippon, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said “there would be no essential surrender of sovereignty” and this was echoed by the Prime Minister, Ted Heath when he said in a Government White Paper of July 1971, “There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty”. (On a TV current affairs programme in 1990, he was asked if he had known that this statement was untrue. His answer was “Of course, yes”.) So it would be unwise to take what the EU authorities say at face value, including the fact that it is a strictly European union of nations or that any other countries brought into its fold would be there simply as trading partners.

Turkey is not a member of the European Union, and may never be. Yet on 30^th March 2012, the members of the European Commission (who are appointed by the governments of member states rather than elected) quietly decided to grant Turkish citizens the same residency and labour rights as full members of the Union.

This accord will apply to Turkish workers who are or have been legally employed in the territory of a member state and who are or who have been subject to the legislation of one or more member states, and their survivors; to the members of the family of workers referred to above, provided that these family members are or have been legally resident with the worker concerned while the worker is employed in a member state. The text reads:

“It follows from Article 12 of the Agreement establishing an association between the European Economic Community and Turkey (the Ankara Agreement) and Article 36 of the Additional Protocol to the Ankara Agreement (the Additional Protocol) that freedom of movement for workers between the Union and Turkey is to be secured by progressive stages.”

It adds,

“This proposal is part of a package of proposals which includes similar proposals with regard to the Agreements with Albania, Montenegro and San Marino. A first package with similar proposals in respect of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Israel was adopted by the Council in October 2010.”

As a mark of their devotion to openness and transparency, the following laconic note appears under the heading “Consultation of interested parties” –

“There was no need for external expertise.”

Later still, the following difficult-to-believe statement appears:

“The proposal has no implications for the Union budget.”

Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Israel are not in the EU but many of their citizens will now be allowed to live in, and benefit from, EU countries – which could cause many problems, not least that of how the EU is going to cope with yet more unemployed at a time when the Union’s financial situation is so parlous.

Read more:

http://www.quarterly-review.org/?p=919

Don Hank

The news of Greece’s poll results, widely construed as a decision not to immediately exit the euro, is all over the foreign cable news programs, and Brussels is shouting for joy. They fail to see what’s coming! The markets responded favorably for a little over an hour, than plunged again when people woke up to reality: Endless bailouts for Greece until Germany and the others go bust.

To give you some perspective, here are some figures on the contributions of the various member countries to the EU, and hence to the bailouts:

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=7925

Briefly, at the time of that report, Belgium’s Flanders paid top euro per capita, 282.6 euros per Flemish person, for a total of 1 billion 780 thousand euros.

But it is widely believed that Belgium will soon need a bailout of its own. That’s a double whammy for the EU. Not only would it lose the net contribution from Belgium but it would also have to take more from the remaining countries that are just barely above water to pay the Belgians. A net loss instead of the current net contribution.

Italy contributed 2 billion 938 million at the time of that writing, or about 49.7 euros per capita.

But Italy will eventually need a bailout, despite the phony optimism of Super Mario Monti.

That is another loss of a contributor, which becomes a net liability for the EU.

Spain will also need another bailout, and so will Greece.

And the more needy countries line up at the trough and stop being net contributors, the harder it will be for those few economically sound nations to pull their weight. Further, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the German powerhouse, is demanding — and will eventually get — full-scale “green” energy to replace all of the traditional cheap nuclear and fossil fuel plants that have so far made Germany the no. 2 exporter in the world. Once this transformation is complete, Germany too will line up at the trough, but the trough will be empty by then.

It may seem as if the EU has spun out of control. But the founders of the EU were men imbued with the socialist vision. Their idea from the start was that the rich nations should pull the weight of the poor, ignoring the vast difference in work ethic between them that drives some to work while others consume the fruits of their labor. This is socialism in drag, since in traditional socialism, there is roughly a wealth transfer of rich individuals to poor individuals, while in the more sophisticated version, the transfer is from rich nations to poor nations. You’d think Europe would have noticed, after all these years of being duped, that the EU is just a sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, but it is as if someone had taped their eyes shut. As time goes on it becomes increasingly clear that this transfer was never intended to be temporary. It has been a de facto systemic state of wealth transfer, always propped up with a new crisis and hence a new pretext to prolong the outright daylight robbery.

Thus, as long as the EU’s power masters can continue to strike fear in the hearts of the serfs who do their bidding, they will continue to steal the wealth of the rich nations, whose workers work longer hours with less pay, and send it to the “poor” nations, whose workers work less, retire earlier and demand — and get — more of everything. Meanwhile, the only win-win group is the bankers. Italy, for example, recently paid a handsome 7% for its credit. Good money for folks who sit like vultures at a carrion feast.

Socialism hasn’t changed one iota in its gross unfairness to the productive. But it has changed its guise and has trained its propaganda machines full tilt against the working men and women of nations unfortunate enough to be “rich,” warning that if their plan is not followed, there will be chaos, tanks in the streets, starvation, rioting, war, etc. So keep your noses to the grindstone. Arbeit macht frei.

Yet, these dread social phenomena are precisely what the EU and its policies are leading to. But they are the unintended consequences, and as stealthy and crafty as the EU power masters are, they have no good moves left for this end game, because the final outcome belongs to God, not to them.

Just as the populace didn’t see their machinations, the power masters didn’t see Him at work.

Don Hank

The commandment is:  “Thou shalt not steal.”

Most people believe that this commandment represents sound morality, even if they are not Christians.  Nonetheless, it seems that this moral precept is forgotten once we start talking politics.  And no wonder:  Americans have been making up ‘right and wrong’ for themselves for quite a while.   Obviously it was only a matter of time before it seeped into our national mindset.

A good example of this in action is the current attempt by the Democrats to extend the payroll tax cut, ‘paying for it’ by having the ‘rich’ pay their ‘fair share.’

That we are talking about theft becomes clearer when one considers exactly what the ‘payroll tax’ is.  We are talking about the portion of one’s income that goes directly into Social Security.  Your contributions, in turn, ensure that when you retire, you will be able to draw a steady check.

Now, the liberals tend to target the rich to fund a variety of their favorite programs, and many of those times there ostensibly is some ‘public’ benefit of them.  For example, we might put public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, in this category.  Usually, though, the program favors smaller, special interest, populations.  The appearance of a socialistic transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor becomes more profound the more targeted the program.

But the funding of the payroll tax cut by the rich really takes the cake.  It is one of those few instances of a government service where the individual directly benefiting from the service is also the one funding it.  Heck, it might be the only example of such a thing.

To have the rich pay for the payroll tax cut is to ask them to directly fund the retirements of the rest of the population, in a direct and transparent manner.  The ‘99%’ are demanding that the ‘1%’ pay for a service that only the ‘99%’ will benefit from, without themselves contributing a dime.  There is no ‘public’ benefit; the ‘special interest’ group just turns out to be exceptionally large.

This is stealing.

Stealing is wrong.

Therefore, this is wrong.

The real kick in the pants here is that while the ‘poor’ and ‘middle class’ are getting behind the highway robbery of their ‘richer’ countrymen, they are actually robbing their future selves.  Since the amount of your contribution is correlated with how much you receive in your retirement account, by continuing to not pay the payroll tax, you are decreasing the amount you will ultimately receive. Read the rest of this entry »