While I’ve tried to veer away from politics per se, it’s important to stare our culture in the face from time to time and think about who we are as a nation. The impact of decades of teaching that all truth is relative is showing in our rhetoric and leadership.
This first video shows just how little has changed in three years under Obama. The question that should occur in your mind while watching this is: If progressivism really changes things, then why haven’t things changed? Where is the “hope” we were promised?
The second one is Glenn Beck on Obama’s broken promises. The point to remember is that the promises progressives make are broken simply because they can’t be kept.
You can’t promise people “hope,” because hope isn’t yours to give.
No, we cannot make the oceans start to fall. No, we cannot make everyone happy and fulfilled. No, we cannot give everyone “free” medical care, or “free” housing, or “free’ food,” simply because these things aren’t free.
Yes we can! founders on the shoals of reality because reality always votes last. We would be wise to show a little humility in our dealings with nature and politics.
(And ironically, right now there’s a “promoted video” on YouTube called, “Get Answers from Obama.” No politician can answer life’s questions. None. Not one. Zilch. Zero. Why do we continue to think they can?)
Liberals scream “right to privacy,” but seem to throw that euphemism out the window when they demand that taxpayers pay for their birth control (Obama announced this week that we’d all been drafted into the War on Unprotected Sex) and abortion (Planned Parenthood is government-funded), and sanctify any sexual relationship they choose to engage in that day. Liberals suggest that they aren’t pro-abortion — they just want it to be “safe, legal and rare.” If they want it to be safe and legal, they clearly don’t want it to be rare, and the numbers show it: nearly 55 million abortions since Roe. If liberals hadn’t been quite so concerned about keeping abortion safe and legal, they’d have an entire generation of youngsters ready to support their enormous entitlement state. Instead, they have millions of morally-scarred young women justifying the mass murder of the unborn. -Patriot Post
“Whither is humanity? cried the Madman. I will tell you. We have killed it. We are its murderers! But how could we do this? Are we not plunging continually? How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” … And what if the Madman were to survey the world today? Would he not would cry out, “Humanity is dead!” Yes, and he would ask, “Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying humanity? Do we smell nothing as yet of the human decomposition?” And he might again conclude that his time is not yet. … To be human is to be rational and aware, to have at least a measure of freedom, to be more than an animal, more than a machine. Your naturalism would deny that. Your naturalism seeks to disown free will in humans, without which humanness is less than a shell of itself, and genuine humanity is eliminated. -Thinking Christian
I was doing everything I could, everything I knew how to do. But it wasn’t enough. It seemed so easy for others. As far as I could tell, they were teaching the same lessons, singing the same songs, and planning the same events. But their ministries were so much more effective: packed meetings, thriving small groups, huge mission trips, changed lives. They were getting it done. … We live in a five-talent world. Bigger is better. And the person (or church) with “more” has greater value or significance. If you doubt, just look at the list of Christian best-sellers and the lineup of speakers at the next big conference. How many of them pastor churches with fewer than 100 members? (Which, by the way, would describe more than half the churches in America.) No, we want to hear from five-talent pastors, those who have been blessed with more. That can be very frustrating if you’re a two-talent Christian. -Transformed
Suppose you were in a garden, and a snake ambled up to you and start talking. Would you freak out? Of course you would.
So why doesn’t Eve freak out? Let’s go back through the interaction between Eve and Satan to see if we can figure out why Eve didn’t freak out.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” … For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. -Genesis 3:1, 5
How does Eve see Satan right this moment? As an arch enemy of God? As some demonic creature out to destroy her? As some supernatural creature?
No, no, and no. Eve sees Satan as a snake. A common “garden variety” creature, one of God’s creations, something God put there for her to have dominion over. There is no fear here, no surprise as Satan talks to her, no concern that she might be keeping bad company.
The snake is a creature, like her. The snake can speak, like her. The snake needs food, and rest, and acceptance, like her. She and the snake are a lot alike.
Satan’s question, Satan’s words, take on a different meaning, a deeper meaning, when we view things in this light. What Satan is saying makes sense.
Aren’t you a creature like me?
Don’t you need to eat?
Don’t you need to know things? To have knowledge?
Don’t you need to feel loved, a part of the crowd?
What crowd is there but us animals? Don’t want to be loved by God’s creation?
The effect is insidious, of course, playing on Eve’s desires to be accepted, to be liked, to fit in, to be smart, to be fed. Satan is, actually, following a well known psychological principle —separating needs, and working from the least to the greatest. You might have seen this chart someplace in school.
It’s called the hierarchy of needs. Notice how the bottom tier is physical, the second is social, and the third is self actualization? Does anything here look familiar in terms of the temptation of Eve?
Don’t you need to eat?
Don’t you need friends?
Don’t you want to be smart and wise?
These question echo down through the ages, for we are confronted with the same questions, and the same problem, today.
Will we trust God, that his way is best to fill physical needs, social needs, and the ultimate end of our lives? Or will we try and take a shortcut through Satan’s way? Will we reach out for these things in our own power?
Christians often think about sin, avoiding sin, what sin does in their lives, etc. But we rarely think about the process of sin —how does temptation work? In this series of posts on reading Genesis 3:17 I’m going to talk about four different possible ways to see the process of Eve’s acceptance of Satan’s invitation to sin: obedience/disobedience,challenge to God,need/fulfillment, and the dialectic process.
We get what we vote for. When we go to the polls, when we vote for politicians, and when we spend our time and our money; we vote for goods and services, including news and entertainment. So will John King, that elite media spider, stop asking inappropriate questions? That depends upon us.
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The Commercial News Media is only one institution within the constellation that seeks to dominate and control the information we receive. The Commercial News Media is not even the principal institution; it is only the most flamboyant. Because it indoctrinates us when we are young, instilling within us many of the assumptions we use in our daily lives, the Public School System provides the principal danger.
So long as we allow our children to be indoctrinated by a system run by politicians, politicians will use that system to help their special interests instill their values, their beliefs and their ideas within our nation’s children. So long as we allow children to be indoctrinated by a system run by politicians, as adults they will remain susceptible to the misinformation provided by the Commercial News Media.
Hayek said: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
You might think people have begun to understand this. Opinion polls show Americans are very dissatisfied with government. Congress has only a 12 percent approval rating. Good. People should be suspicious of what Congress would design. Central planners failed in the Soviet Union and Cuba and America’s public schools and at the post office.
Despite all that failure, however, whenever a crisis hits, the natural instinct is to say, “Government must do something.”
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“A lot of bad policies … pass by popular demand,” Caplan told me. “In order to do the right thing, you have to know something.”
The “informed citizen” is the ideal of democratic societies, but Caplan points out that average citizens have no incentive to become informed, while special interests do. The rest of us have lives. We are busy with things other than politics. That’s why our democratic government inflates the price of sugar through trade restrictions, even though American sugar consumers far outnumber American sugar producers.
Caplan has a radical proposal for citizens: Be honest. If you know nothing about a subject, don’t have an opinion about it. “And don’t reward or penalize candidates for their position on an issue you don’t understand.”
The trailer of a new movie being released around Darwinism.
One of the most renowned biologists of the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace shares credit with Charles Darwin for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet one part of Wallace’s remarkable life and career has been completely ignored: His eventual embrace of intelligent design. … For more information visit alfredwallace.org.
Lifeway Research recently released the results of a poll asking pastors across the US what they believe about Adam and Eve. The results are encouraging. [...]
Liberals scream “right to privacy,” but seem to throw that euphemism out the window when they demand that taxpayers pay for their birth control (Obama announced this week that we’d all been drafted into the War on Unprotected Sex) and abortion (Planned Parenthood is government-funded), and sanctify any sexual relationship they choose to engage in that day. Liberals suggest that they aren’t pro-abortion — they just want it to be “safe, legal and rare.” If they want it to be safe and legal, they clearly don’t want it to be rare, and the numbers show it: nearly 55 million abortions since Roe. If liberals hadn’t been quite so concerned about keeping abortion safe and legal, they’d have an entire generation of youngsters ready to support their enormous entitlement state. Instead, they have millions of morally-scarred young women justifying the mass murder of the unborn. -
