Category: Life

I’m currently reading Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin, which is not what I expected. It’s much, much better than I expected, and smaller too. The tone is not angry (so far) in the least, but remarkably reserved. The author succinctly captures the essence of my own concerns, and also educates on aspects of which I had not been aware. Theme: statism is nearly finished transforming the government founded in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution into a soft tyranny. Statists will continue eliminating the individual freedoms that have uniquely blessed this nation, unless those who appreciate the Constitution actively reform American governance to exist within the limits prescribed therein.

Not long ago, I listened to an Issues, Etc. show about the theology of Rush Limbaugh. The chief criticism was that Limbaugh seems to hold a somewhat utopian view of the free market. Levin corrects that impression. I haven’t heard whether Limbaugh disagrees with Levin on the free market, but I suspect he does not. Levin acknowledges that there are injustices and passing inefficiencies in the free market, as well as creative destruction. However, he points out that the free market is nevertheless the most efficient possible environment for the creation of wealth and the overall improvement of living conditions. I strongly suspect that most specific counter-examples of corporate pollution or abuse of workers can be linked to governmental limits placed upon the free market, such as legislation, rules or practices favoring certain enterprises, or even favoring those who pay big bucks for political access.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun listening to a free audio book from Project Gutenberg by Bishop Ambrose of Milan. It’s called “On the Duties of the Clergy,” and though the readers seem to have a soft, monkish quality, the book is edifying. Ambrose was the chief theological influence upon Augustine, and lived only shortly after Christianity became a legal religion in the Roman Empire.

Food stamps can be a blessing. If I recall correctly, my family qualified for a food program when our first child was born. The food was great, and better in general than we usually bought for ourselves. I know some whose lives are improved by food stamps too.

But.

One in nine Americans uses food stamps to buy groceries, a record number due to recession and job losses, and more than 30 million children count on USDA-funded school programs for lunch.

So out of nine people, eight are paying taxes so that the last one can get help with food. And those USDA funds for school programs (in which I also participated)? Yep, they also come from taxes.

Now, you might disagree. It’s not tax money that pays for these things any more, but borrowed federal money. OK, but isn’t that just another kind of tax? It’s like saying “I didn’t really pay for that big screen TV; I put it on my credit card!” Somebody will pay.

But here’s my question. That tax money now spent for food stamps and lunch programs — what would have been done with it had it not been taxed in the first place?

The claim is made that some rich guy would have just kept it moldering in his massive bank account. (Because really, only one or two of those eight people are paying nearly all the bill.) But that claim doesn’t make sense. Savings accounts are only federally insured through something like $250k, and their interest rate is abysmal. If you’ve got many millions to look after, you’ve got to find better places than that. You’ve got to invest it in various ways.

So business owners grow their businesses. Investors grow the businesses of others. Growing businesses hire workers. Workers do something with their time that benefits other people, and they take home a paycheck. Their paycheck is used to buy things like groceries and school lunches.

It’s a great system. A free economy is really God’s gift, as wealth is generated and distributed according to the biblical maxim: “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.” Those who do work benefit from their own labor, and they also have the opportunity to help others. God doesn’t need our help, but all our neighbors do. When we work together and help one another, we become God’s blessings to each other.

Now inject food stamps and USDA lunch programs into the free economy. It saps vigor from the overall economy in the form of taxes, and it encourages a few to eat without working. Or seen another way, it encourages a few to buy that essential big-screen TV or those custom chrome wheels first, and then let their uptown neighbors pay the grocery bill.

Understand, I have no problem with charity. Gifts of charity are a good thing, a natural and beneficial outgrowth of the Christian faith. Just don’t confuse charity with taxes, which simply can’t do nearly as much good for anyone. They are not given voluntarily; they are taken. Then they are used in ways that undermine the economy that generated the tax money in the first place. Perhaps not intentionally. Perhaps.

I think I’ll have some tea now.

HT: The Mom

About the Tiller murder. He himself was a mass-murderer, of which there are many in the world. Some of them conduct their grisly business legally, some above the law, and some illegally. Tiller was the first sort.

Yet for all the killing that he did, all the unjust taking of human life, it does not justify a private citizen taking his. Private citizens are not responsible to curb the evil in the world by transgressing the rule of law. On the contrary, it’s the governments that are responsible to curb the evil in the world through the rule of law. In the case of mass-murderers like Tiller, our government is failing miserably, just as King George was failing miserably to provide justice for his subjects in the American colonies. That does not justify vigilantism either.

Murder is murder, and will be answered for. When government fails to demand an answer, the murderer will certainly be required to give an answer to God, when repentance is no longer possible. I regret that such must now be the case for Tiller. His murderer, on the other hand, must also repent, or face everlasting punishment. However, his repentance is still possible, because he is still living. If he does repent, he will still face temporal punishment, but his guilt before God will have been washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ, who gave His holy life in atonement for every murder — even those committed by the likes of Tiller.

As Christians process the news of Tiller’s murder, we should recognize that each of us carries the same guilt before God as that mass-murderer, for Jesus said (Matthew 5:20–22): “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire.”

Tiller’s murder should remind us all that we have a limited, and unknown amount of time to repent of our own damning guilt, but that when we sin, we have a Savior who has paid the highest price to provide forgiveness for everyone who repents.

I was speaking with a friend today about the way our society has lost appreciation for the role and responsibilities that a father and a mother have in raising the next generation within their own household. In that context, I mentioned something that I’ve known but never quite expressed. You probably know it already too, but I think it’s rather important, so I’ll try to articulate it here.

The special purpose of the United States in the world, as adopted by its founders, is to safeguard liberty — at least within our borders. That’s personal liberty, not the liberty of arbitrary groupings of people. Inasmuch as laws and regulations needed for our peaceful coexistence impinge upon our personal liberty, they are to be recognized as bad things. Let me emphasize that last part: bad things. Only their proven necessity can really justify their existence.

That’s how important liberty should be for Americans. The fact that many Americans would have no idea what I mean only underscores my main point, the simple insight I stumbled upon.

We also have this liberty: that we may be wrong, think wrongly, and say things that are wrong. Ideally, nobody can take that liberty away from me, because I am an American citizen. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people on both the Left and the Right who apparently want to take it away. Yet they, too, are at full liberty as citizens to be absolutely wrong. And I, of course, am at liberty to point out their error.

Why is the freedom to be wrong so important? Because it’s the same as the freedom to be right.

I know what is right, because I am instructed by the Word of God. Because I am an American citizen, I (should) have full freedom to think, to say, and to act in accordance with what is right. In this case, it’s freedom of religion, but it can apply to any matter of conscience. I am free to be right, because we are all free to be wrong. It’s the same freedom, because you may think I’m wrong. You can tell me why, but you can’t force me against the dictates of my conscience. The only possible exception to this arises with the laws or regulations proven absolutely necessary for our peaceful coexistence.

Unfortunately, some today are saying that full acceptance of immorality is required for peaceful coexistence in our land. That’s not true. Morality is a matter of conscience. Those who choose an immoral lifestyle have the freedom to be wrong, at least to the point where they demand participation in their immorality from their parents and superiors. (Parents and employers have the natural responsibility to enforce discipline according to their own morality. If you disagree, try using the first half of each day at work to call your long-distance relatives.) Likewise, those who choose a moral lifestyle for themselves have the freedom to be right, and to think, speak, and act accordingly — including criticism of those who are wrong.

The problem with all this is that there are some who disagree. They may do so. It’s America. However, there may be enough of them to change the laws and take away our freedom to be wrong (or right). It has already happened, to some extent. Though it be implemented by a majority, a word for the removal of freedom is tyranny. Tyranny is not an American virtue.

I thank God for blessing us with freedom through those who have given their lives and shed their blood for it. May we all appreciate this blessing, and understand that it comes at a price for every generation. We can pay for our freedom with vigilance and when necessary, with blood, or we can bow the neck and exchange our hard-earned freedom for the politician’s promise of security and peace.

…. when I see this coming to every American city and town south of the Mason Dixon Line. Until then, it’s just a convenient crisis for advancing a political agenda. Even then, I’d like to see the data. The real data — not showing that the climate changes, but that our behavior causes it to change, and that the change is bad. I already believe it changes, because the Bible says so. Read Genesis chapters 6-8. Big change there.

HT: Evan at The By-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake

I have lots of these. Don’t you? I think the regular word for them is “friendship,” though there may be others.

A basic observation about the economy is that it seeks the most efficient shape of things. It’s like a bubble, which in the absence of outside forces, assumes the shape of a perfect sphere. The more outside forces are applied to the economy, the less efficient things will be. So when government is expected to accomplish something, it will be one of the most inefficient ways to get it done. First, the government must acquire the funds it needs, which will be many more dollars than competent, private citizens would need to accomplish the same thing. It acquires these dollars by taking them from those private citizens, so that they must do their own work with less. Then, government must process the project through its bureaucracy. Eventually, it sets to work on the project, perhaps even paying the same private citizens to do part of the work, who might have accomplished the whole process themselves to begin with. Thus, the outside force of government upon the economy imposes massive inefficiency. Furthermore, the original work of private citizens is able to create wealth within the economy, while the government is incapable of creating wealth; it can only use the wealth it takes away from its citizens.

Here is a striking example of the amazing difference between the natural efficiency of work accomplished by private citizens, versus the work accomplished (or not, in this case) by government.

People do things. People exist. Groups or classes of people don’t exist except in the mind of the classifier. Even race doesn’t really exist; our race is “human.” An example is so-called “gay marriage.” Who has ever prevented homosexuals from marriage? Plenty of homosexuals have actually been married. It’s evident by the fact that in many cases, their homosexual activities have become a cause for divorce.
Objectively speaking, there is no group or class of “gays,” just as there is no group or class of “straights.” There are only people who behave one way or another. (Those who push for “gay marriage” really only want approval for their individual behavior.)

The important thing is people. When government starts treating us as groups or classes, we are dehumanized. It’s a step in the direction of socialism. Marxist thought, for example, only conceives of “classes,” not individuals.

The human creature’s individual personhood is a small but important part of our distinctiveness from all other corporeal creatures. So when the church wants to say something to the world, it should be about people, not about groups or classes. God’s Law applies to individuals. Jesus (a person) died for individuals. The message of the Gospel is meant to be spoken to individuals.

If you had your eyes wide open, you may have noticed a little news blurb about a horrible, multiple killing in the United States. I don’t mean the murderous stand-off in Pittsburgh, in which a man entrapped police officers and shot them in the head. I don’t mean the murderous killing of immigrants in Binghamton, New York, either, in which most of the victims had multiple gunshot wounds, and the attacker began by blocking the rear exit with his car.

Those are deeply tragic attacks. I sympathize with the families of the slain. Nobody should have to endure such a thing. Unfortunately, these occurences, like the shooting murders last summer on a college campus, have always happened, despite the efforts of many to prevent them. In fact, that’s what the Pittsburgh officers were doing when they perished: maintaining peace and order.

Also unfortunately, these things are routinely politicized, along with everything else. According to Google News, the Philadelphia Inquirer posted an article about those murders 10 hours ago, and 8 hours ago, the Mayor published his desire for a ban on “assault-type weapons.” Blogs are already trying to smear everyone who defends gun rights as a dangerous “gun nut.” I don’t really have the time to read that kind of thing, much less write it.

The blurb I began writing about concerns a multiple killing that happened in Boston. Massachusetts, for those who don’t know, is about the least gun-friendly state there is. It’s a long-running experiment in the effectiveness of its position on firearms. But this killing apparently didn’t involve firearms, unless you count the ones used by the police. The murder weapon was a sharp piece of metal, a “kitchen knife.” (Many knives are also illegal in Massachusetts. Don’t tell anyone that I carried a pocket knife through High School there. Nobody knew because I didn’t hurt or threaten anyone with it. I did feel safer, though.)

You may want to skip the AP news blurb I quote below, as it’s a bit gruesome. I’m quoting it instead of linking, because I suspect that things like this won’t last as long in the news as gun-related violence. The press has an agenda, too, after all. That’s probably why this was harder to find than articles on the other killings.

BOSTON (AP) — Two Massachusetts girls and the brother who stabbed them to death are being mourned at a single funeral service.

Family and friends gathered Saturday morning at the Jubilee Christian Church in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood for a funeral for the siblings.

A week ago, 17-year-old Samantha Revelus and her 5-year-old sister, Bianca, were killed at their home in Milton. Police burst into the apartment and saw the girls’ brother, 23-year-old Kerby Revelus, decapitating Bianca with a kitchen knife.

Police say they shot Kerby Revelus dead as he tried to attack another sister.

A spokesman for the children’s parents said they are “in shock and disbelief” and have no explanation why their son would kill his sisters.

This is also a terrible tragedy.
I hope the surviving family members receive the comfort of the Gospel.

These three recent multiple-murder news stories, especially the one quoted above, illustrate things worth mentioning. For one, the murder weapons don’t make much difference. My house is full of potential murder weapons, but it’s no more dangerous than yours. Within sight right now are some large, heavy, blunt objects. I’m typing on a keyboard, a genuine IBM Model M. (Ever see Gattaca?) Electricity flows through the wires that power my light bulbs. The window to my right is filled with glass that can break into knife-sharp pieces. Behind me are a couple chairs and a telescope with tripod. My multimeter has long, strong, metal wires. There’s more in this room, but consider the kitchen, where we keep our Cutco knives, among other things. (Did you notice the article from Florida about the homeless man killed with a 7-inch Cutco knife? We’ve got one.) I distinctly remember Louis L’Amour characters saying that hot coffee can make a good weapon. Probably a defensive weapon, but still a weapon. What about the garage, where my workshop is? What about the tool shed outside?

I mention all of this not to demonstrate my own morbidity, nor to make you suspect I’m a sociopath myself. Actually, it’s taken some slight creativity for me to think of that list, though there’s some help in the Jason Bourne movies. I mention this to demonstrate that the particular weapon used in murder makes little to no difference. When someone is actually killed by an inanimate object, it’s almost always an accident of some kind, not a murder.

People murder people. This is what Jesus said about it, to those who sought to murder Him. “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him” (John 8:44).

The reason our society (news media, politicians, etc.) tries to curtail murder by banning weapons is because it refuses to admit that murder is done by sinful people, not by the weapons they happen to use. Weapons must be used by someone. There is a good, God-pleasing use, and there is an evil use. That’s true of just about everything, and just about anything can be used as a weapon.

You can see the lunacy of targetting weapons instead of the evil in people by imagining a ban on Cutco. Let “knife” become synonymous with “assault weapon,” and create a ban so that nobody but law enforcement personnel could have one any more. That ought to put a strangle-hold on the murder rate, right? Well, maybe not. Meanwhile, avid home cooks and law-abiding restaurants everywhere would be scrambling to find government-approved methods of cutting food without knives. The Boy Scouts would lose half its membership, and law-abiding outdoorsmen would spend most of their time chipping flakes from obsidian.

The target should be the evil in people. All people. Any of us is perfectly capable of doing evil things. Instead of handcuffing everyone, God has provided Law: moral laws that should constrain those who care about God’s judgment, and civil laws that can be enforced by the God-given power of civil government. They don’t eliminate the evil, but the laws we have are to limit its effects, especially in their enforcement.

Unfortunately, evildoers are enabled by a society that refuses to acknowledge the source of the evil. It’s the rebellion against God within every one of us. But our society has tried to give everything a naturalistic explanation, including the origin of human beings, and our morality. Children in schools are taught that they are an accidental product of random chance, rather than prized moral creatures created by God and redeemed from guilt by the sacrifice of His Son. If anyone believes those schools, it’s no wonder that they are willing to do evil. It’s no wonder that the limiting effect of morality has been diminished in our time. It’s no wonder that people like the young man in Boston can do what they do. Did you notice the statement from his parents? They have “no explanation why their son would kill his sisters.” One good explanation is no further than the nearest public-school biology textbook.

It’s not the guns. It’s the worldview, the naturalistic religion (or anti-religion) spoon-fed through public education, media, and even American culture. If you want to point to a single influence in this world most responsible for murders and sorrows like this, point to the evil in your own heart. If you want to point to something outside yourself, point to the worldview.

The Christian, biblical worldview says that human life is sacred. God made it that way. He alone has the power to begin it, and He alone has the authority to end it. Sometimes He uses that authority through government, as when the knife-wielding killer was shot in Boston, or when our soldiers carry out rightful orders that result in the death of an enemy — or even “collateral” deaths, if they are reasonably minimized. But as individuals, neither the police officer, nor the soldier, nor any citizen has the authority to take the life of another.

The only exception is self-defense, including the defense of your family. That exception has a long history as part of our law. Still, the life of an assailant is also sacred, and we should not kill unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Christians are constrained by morality, recognizing that it reflects God’s will, and that everyone will face His judgment in the end. That’s part of the biblical worldview, which has been a great boon to American society and culture. Increasingly, though, there are many who reject the idea of accountability to God. In fact, I think that many of the attacks on social conservatives come from exactly that difference. People who have thrown off the moral constraints of accountability to God think that people like them should not be criticized for transgressing the moral constraints of others. Hence, the press often allows liberal politicians to get away with murder (figuratively speaking, most of the time), while the same wrongdoings committed by their conservative counterparts are roundly criticized. The difference is that the conservatives (supposedly) have the moral constraints that make the criticism possible.

Instead of holding human life to be sacred, the naturalistic worldview holds the earth, or the “environment” (whatever that means) to be sacred. In that view, harm done to another human is not so bad anymore. You would do far worse by harming an animal belonging to a legally-protected species. I suppose that’s the reason why here in the Northwest, hydropower is not considered a legitimate, renewable source of energy. You see, some people accuse dams of damaging the environment. Meanwhile, they not only provide reliable electricity, but do this so abundantly that expensive, maniacal regulations meant to help fish are actually followed, but the increased cost of power is still quite affordable, and competitive with power from sources that do not supposedly “harm the environment.”

When a worldview becomes so skewed that a person’s conscience is more sensitive to harm he might be doing to animals than it is to harm he plans doing to humans, that worldview is evil.

For such evil in us all, Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, to suffer and die. He bore all the guilt this world accumulates before God, and He received the full punishment, all alone. Because He did this, we are forgiven. We are free, and can boldly live before Him in righteousness, as best we may. With His forgiveness, we are free of guilt to do our best in this world, knowing that our true, eternal home, is prepared and waiting for us. That’s the true solution to the evil within us. That’s what Jesus accomplished.

Debt is something owed that must be repayed. How can that be good? It’s a liability, not an asset. We just refinanced our mortgage, which is good, because we’ve lowered the interest rate and eliminated the evil of private mortgage insurance from our household. Now, our monthly payments will be lower, and without PMI, our lender will be motivated at least partly by our own best interests.

Yet debt is still debt. It’s still a bit scary to realize that you owe over a hundred thousand dollars. Within my short lifetime, home mortgages were less than the current price of a Corvette. Probably less than the going price of a Suburban. Now we can’t even get into home ownership without laying out well over $100 grand. So, mortgage debt must be tolerated. At least the interest is deductible on income taxes.

We could pay off our mortgage completely in about three years, if we had no other expenses. That amount of debt may be normal, but it’s still ominous. At least we don’t have other debts at the moment. What I don’t get, though, is why several people during our refinancing process encouraged us to borrow more than we needed to refinance the mortage. It might make sense for people whose poor judgment or legal circumstances have accumulated high-interest debt against them, but can that be so common? Have so many been brainwashed into thinking that carrying debt is a good thing?

If many people think carrying debt is good, that might explain why so many have little regard for the liability of their sins before God. Wrong beliefs about financial debt may spill over into wrong beliefs about spiritual debt. The use of debt as a picture of sin may be rather ineffective in a day when so many are looking for salvation in the form of government bailouts.

When I lived in Wisconsin, I enjoyed hearing news about a congressman from another district, Paul Ryan. (My own was Tammy Baldwin, an embarassment to Wisconsin.) Ryan was just getting started back then, but now is the ranking Republican on the House’s budget committee. Today he presented an alternative budget, summarized here, which will be studiously ignored by the mainstream media. I see good things in there, definite improvements over the one from the White House. For example: not raising taxes. I see that as a good thing, considering that it was the Bush tax cuts that ended the last recession, and it was the Reagan tax cuts that began and encouraged the era of general prosperity lasting into the 1990’s.

Yet as I looked at a comparison table, I noticed how huge the debt remains, even under this alternative budget. Since the numbers are so huge, it may be helpful to see the debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. As I understand it, the GDP is an estimate of our economy’s total production of wealth for a given year. Since the United States is such a large (the largest?) world economy, it’s a vast number. The debt our government would carry, as a percentage of GDP, is 82.4% under the White House budget. So to pay off that debt completely, the government would have to confiscate 82.4% of the wealth produced in America in a single year. Ominous barely covers it, especially when we notice how much of that debt is held in communist China. Under the alternative budget, it’s “only” 65.1%.

I suppose that much debt is “necessary” because the government is trying to be “responsible” to its commitments, like Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements. But meeting those responsibilities by incurring massive debts doesn’t seem so responsible. Wouldn’t it make more sense to end those entitlements altogether? Yet I think I see the problem: an entitlement exists not only in the budget, but in the minds of American voters. They want to cheat death and hardship through governmental power, as long as possible. Until that changes, it’s full speed ahead.

How can the attitude of voters be changed, so that they care about more than their own comforts; so that they consider the future of the United States as a greater good than illusory social “security?” If it can’t be done, then the American democratic republic will devolve into a kind of tyranny, or topple altogether. If it can’t, then the capitalist engine of American prosperity will be replaced with the sort of economy that brought the Soviet empire to its knees.

My simple suggestion is that state and federal governments budget to spend only what they expect to receive in tax revenue, every single year. To make that possible, they should read their constitutions and commit to do only the things enumerated there. The people should reform their sense of entitlement, and realize that suffering and death are inevitable in this fallen world. Yet (and here’s the key) there is another, perfect world prepared for us, and to which we are all invited.
Faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is magnificently practical. When we are certain that we will have paradise in the life to come, we can cope and flourish much better in the imperfect here-and-now.

The answer to this problem, then, is bigger than the government. It’s time for Christians to appreciate what we believe not only for its eternal value, but also for its present value. Let today be lived responsibly in faith, both personally and in cooperation with our neighbors. Let heaven be heaven, and until then, live here on earth, with certainty of God’s favor through the death of Jesus Christ.

Then, I think, we could budget more sensibly.